Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Remember that time I was going to post every day for 30 days? Yeah, right...

Well, I am currently working on Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver.

I am really enjoying A, V, M because it is a wealth of information composed by an author known for her fiction-writing. What that equates to is beautiful, sensational thoughts like this:

"The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint- virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively; browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. "Blah, blah, blah," hears the teenager: words issue from a mouth that can't even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We're raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires. (emphasis mine) 

Waiting for the quality experience seems to be the constitutional article that has slipped from the American food custom. If we mean to reclaim it, asparagus (the first spring vegetable) seems like a place to start. And if the object of our delayed gratification is a suspected aphrodisiac? That's the sublime paradox of a food culture: restraint equals indulgence." (Kingsolver 31)

#2: Give Me a Pencil

I love the library. We are total library rats. I take my children to the library every Tuesday, and sometimes more frequently than that.  But do you know the worst part of borrowing books from the library? You can't underline the good parts.  You can't write }yes! in the margins. You can't tab the bottom of the pages that you like the best. All the good chunks are forgotten.

So, in the great act of discipline, I am tuning into this blog, on day 2 of the great 31 day challenge, after watching my favorite show (Parenthood) to convey to you the awesomeness that is Cutting for Stone. If you are looking for a rich, complex read, this is the book for you. Verghese is simultaneously eloquent and technical.  For example:

"When he operated late into the night and into the morning, she was across from him, more constant than his own shadow, dutiful, competent, uncomplaining, and never absent. Until, that is, the day when my brother and I announced our presence in her womb and our unstoppable desire to trade the nourishment of the placenta for the succor of her breasts." (Verghese 30)

I am taking my time with this book. Partially because of the rhythms of daily life with small children, but also because of how dense and rich this book is.  I am only five chapters in, though the story is compelling and I am drawn in; however, I worry I might not finish it and pick up something else that reads more quickly instead...

Have you read this book? Without spoiling anything for me, what did you like best about it? What didn't you like? 

Motivation

I stay at home with my children, day in and day out.  I mean, we go places together, but I don't work outside the home.  Not right now anyway.  The house is always messy. I don't need to tell you. You and I have both read all the articles on HuffPost Parents about how this is Normal and OK.  And it totally is.  And even though I have literally, physically created two human beings and am daily creating their worldview, at the end of the day, I feel like I haven't produced much.  I haven't even cleaned up much. 

Also, I love to read.  Love it. I am a consumer of books. I just eat them up.  I shirk all responsibility when I am in the middle of a good book.  You don't even want to see my house when I am re-reading the entire Anne of Green Gables series for the umpteenth time.  But after a while, I kind of start to feel like a loser.  I mean, there are people my age of who written and published books. Lots of books. And I just read them.  

Then there is the fact that I love to share with others what I've read about.  Whether it's a novel or a magazine article or a spiritual book or a cookbook, I am excited to share what I've read, but 9 times out of ten the fact that I have mommy brain and am constantly keeping tabs on my two children prevents me from having any sort of coherent thought when I am amongst friends, whether at the playground, the dinner table or church.  

Therefore, this is my attempt to synthesize what I am reading and share it with others. I have been contemplating such a blog for some time now and then this 31 days thing happened- so that is my final incentive.  The straw that broke the camel's back. The kick in the pants.  Here we go.