More Winter Reading

I enjoyed Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky so much that I was sure to pick up Fire in the Blood as soon as I saw it at the library.  It's a really lovely book and did not disappoint.   It's a love story, or more aptly put, a story of passions.  Her style is so easy and engaging, that I'm sure you will enjoy this book as much as I did.

After that it was time for a little sci-fi.  If you haven't read the Mars trilogy, I highly recommend it!  I read Red Mars several years ago and enjoyed it very much, but never found a used copy of Green Mars until recently.  (Now to find a copy of Blue Mars!)  So, I just re-read Red Mars and I'm a good ways into Green Mars.  Both are just incredible, but don't take my word for it.  Red Mars won the Nebula Award and both Green Mars and Blue Mars won the Hugo.  Quite impressive.

So, what are these books about?  Well, they are mostly speculative fiction about the colonization of Mars -- including questions of science, ethics and social structures.  Really well thought out and beautifully executed.  If you like sci-fi -- give these books a try.  (And if you don't know if you like sci-fi -- give it a chance.)

Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma was up next.  I've been looking forward to reading this book and it was even better than I thought it would be.  Of course there were some passages where it seemed that he could have used some editing -- he had a tendency to restate things a bit too much -- but parts of the book really were fascinating.  The section on fast food was informative and disturbing (all that corn!), the pastoral section gave me hope, and the "big organic" section was eye-opening, but the hunter-gatherer part of the book was my favorite.  It gives you a whole new appreciation for our genetic predisposition to this form of eating. 

If you are at all interested in knowing where your food really comes from (or could come from with some effort), or just in finding out what alternatives are out there, read this book.  I guarantee you'll learn something you didn't previously know about food.

Right now I'm working my way through Green Mars and looking forward to reading Pollan's next book -- In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto -- which is sitting on my shelf waiting for me.