Outliers

I love Malcolm Gladwell. Maybe even really. I checked out his website, and he's pretty cute. Blink and The Tipping Point, his previous two books, are my go-to recs for pretty much anyone. He's very easy to read, has a smart but conversational style, and tells stories very, very well. I think he's especially fantastic on any kind of mass transit and a safe bet for "guys who don't read" aka the "undatable." Sorry, boys. But hey, you can replace me with a few hours spent with the scholarly but entertaining Mr. Gladwell, who as I mentioned above, is also quite the looker. In case you're interested.

Outliers is all about things that at first appear genuinely unusual (eg. sports stars, multimillionaires, successful law firms, first generation college goers, etc.) but that are actually not quite as unlikely as they seem. Gladwell's opening example deals with the months in which elite Canadian hockey players are most likely to have been born. Turns out being bigger then everyone else makes you look good when you're six, which gets you onto the advanced team, so you want to be just on the right side of the cutoff - in this case, January 1st. He explains this much better, so if I'm confusing you, go the matresses. In this case, the mattresses can be read as the library or the bookstore or your friend's bookshelf. If you don't recognize the original quote, watch The Godfather. Like now. If nothing else, the movie will make a lot of seeming non sequiturs make sense.

Reading Gladwell also makes a lot of apparently inscrutable things suddenly scrutable (this is a "neglected positive" and will be discussed in the review for The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, and is really all P.G. Wodehouse's fault). Gladwell's careful and masterful blending of the technical and the human makes his books a joy to read.

5/5 Swallows

P.S. Please don't use "scrutable" in public, it's not a real word, and people will think you're an idiot.

If you liked Outliers, try Gladwell's other books, Levitt's Freakonomics, and Glibert's Stumbling on Happiness.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

I am not the hugest fan of Kingsolver's fiction novels. When I was out in NYC last weekend, and waxing poetic about how much I was enjoying Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I mentioned this, and since I have intelligent and inquisitive friends, I was immediately asked why I wasn't head over heels for The Poisonwood Bible or The Bean Trees. The best I could come up with, since I hadn't recently read either, was that I remembered feeling like they were written down, as in at an 8th grade level, and as in the plot was as unsurprising as an episode of Law and Order - I could see where we were headed three or four chapters ahead, and that just annoys me. Anyway, I will reread both of the above again and quantify and qualify all of this further then, or perhaps discover that I AM secretly in love with predictability.

But Kingsolver's nonfiction is something else entirely. Accessible? Yes. Written condescendingly? No. It's smart and human and funny and reveals interesting things about her, as a writer, and me, as a reader. For example, I am desperately happy that I do not live on a farm in Appalachia. Kingsolver loves it, and I see why she does, but I think after about three weeks on a farm I would run screaming to a large metropolis, like, for example, Tokyo, and find a nice bench with a view of traffic and neon signs and down a mocha, in spite of normally not drinking coffee. And then I'd have to decamp to the edge of suburbia or the wilderness after two weeks of that . . . anyway, I just can't imagine being happy day to day working and weeding and collecting eggs and cooking. My domestic gene has kicked in slightly, but mostly it's just manifesting as a desire to organize and decorate, which is basically just a small-scale incarnation of my desire to organize and beautify the entire world. Note: I'm pretty sure Martha Stewart feels the same way.

I recommend Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life to anyone who is interested in food. I don't think I have any friends who don't like food, so you should all read this. The commentary and sidebars on agribusiness and local food are eye-opening and actually not all that depressing or scary - this particular piece has a much more empowered and postive approach to the host of problems associated with how we currently eat (adult and child obesity, corn syrup, soy, monocultures, local farmers, organic, etc.) than most stuff you read. Since I'm already familar with a lot of the subject matter, it slotted right into what I know, but it also made me rethink shopping at gorcery stores in the summer - I'm going to make a serious effort to get to the Farmer's Market once or twice a week this growing season. Buying directly from the farmer makes organic and local affordable, and I don't actually approve of packaged foods. I'm trying not to buy them so much anymore. The labels and additives scare me.

There were a few things that bothered me about this book, so it's not getting my top ranking - I found Camille's little essays (Kingsolver's college-age daughter) preachy and naive, but then she was a college freshman at the time. And the daughter of an incredibly successful writer. And did I mention she was a college freshman? Being didactic comes with the territory. On the other hand, her recipes and menus look soooo grood. I also thought that Kingsolver occasionally lapsed into making excuses about her behaviors (eg. choosing to start eating meat again - that's fine, but the way she wrote so defensively about it made me think she actually wasn't at peace with her decision) and a certain air of superiority that, while exceptionally rare and subtle, was still there every now and then. Overall, though, a fantastic read and a timely and topical book. About food. Mmm, food.

4/5 Swallows