Lily's Blog

John arrived home late on Sunday night for a few days – spring break from college. He opened his rucksack and said ‘I have something you’ll enjoy but you have to have it read by Friday because it’s a college library book’. He’d read it on the plane and had found it very interesting.

The book was ‘In Defence of Food’ by Michael Pollan, author of ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’. A New York Times Review is here

The book opens with three sentences; Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. He uses these three as headings for a set of policies to guide us in our eating choices.

Under Eat food

Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother would not recognise as food
Depending on your age, you may need to go back further. He quotes one British nutritionist who advised, ‘Just don’t eat anything your Neolithic ancestors wouldn’t have recognised and you’ll be okay.’

Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup.
He states that none of these characteristics, not even the last one, is necessarily harmful but all are indicators of foods that have been highly processed. He quotes the example of yeast bread containing four ingredients, flour, yeast, water and a pinch of salt. Yet an example of a loaf of bread contained forty one ingredients, including additives to make it ‘cottony soft, snowy white and exceptionally sweet on the tongue’, with a label showing the latest in nutritional wisdom. Because this loaf of bread failed the great-grandmother rule above, he added this rule.

Avoid food products that make health claims
For a food to make a health claim, it must have a package, therefore it’s more likely to be a processed food than a whole food. He believes that health claims have become hopelessly corrupt. I love his line, ‘Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing to say about health.’

Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle
The logic being, though not fool-proof, that most processed foods are in the centre aisles.

Get out of the supermarket whenever possible
And into the farmers markets. He says the surest way to escape the western diet is to run from the realm it rules – the supermarket, the convenience store and the fast-food outlet. He reckons it’s hard to eat badly from the farmers market, a vegetable box or your garden. He uses the adage, ’shake the hand that feeds you’.

Under Mostly plants

Eat mostly plants especially leaves
And as many different types of plants as possible as they have different antioxidants which eliminate different kinds of toxins. He states that in countries where people eat a pound or more of fruits and vegetables a day, the rate of cancer is half that in the US. Plants being less energy dense, you will consume far fewer calories which in itself is protective against many chronic diseases. We don’t need to eat meat, though he doesn’t seem to be totally against meat. He seems to be more of a flexitarian. He quoted Thomas Jefferson – treat meat as “a condiment for the vegetables”

You are what what you eat eats too
You need to read that one twice! The diet of the animals we eat has a bearing on the nutritional quality and healthfulness of the meat, milk or eggs we eat.

If you have space, buy a freezer
Buy quality in quantity

Eat like an omnivore
Biodiversity in the diet means biodiversity in the fields which means less pesticides, less fertilisers used, which would mean healthier plants and animals which in turn leads to healthier people.

Eat well-grown food from healthy soils
He reckons organic is important but organic farmers aren’t the only ones who grow things well. Organic does not equal health. He cites the example that organic coke may be good for the environment but not for our health. The ideal is organic and local.

Eat wild food when you can
He includes plants, animals and fish. Now where did I put that shotgun? It’s okay, I don’t need it as he later says forget about the animals and fish as there wouldn’t be enough.

Be the kind of person who takes supplements
You need to read that one carefully. Be the kind of … He reckons supplement takers are healthier for reasons having nothing to do with the pills. They’re typically more health conscious, better educated, and more affluent. So to the extent you can, be the kind of person who would take supplements and then … save your money. He’s not adverse to multivitamins/multimineral and a fish oil supplement, if you don’t eat much fish. He recommends them particularly after our child bearing years are past as to put it bluntly, nature doesn’t seem to care about us then. Our bodies’ need for and ability to absorb antioxidants from food declines after we’ve done our bit for the human race. Now I’m really feeling wanted!

Eat more like the French. Or the Italians. Or the Japanese. Or the Indians. Or the Greeks.
Not limited to the above but basically people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture rather than a western diet. He named a few others. Ireland was not mentioned, needless to say. We’re in the pot with the US and UK. Basically he thinks most traditional diets are okay. If they weren’t, their followers wouldn’t have lasted. He reckons there are two dimensions to a traditional diet – the foods a culture eats and how they eat them. Traditions in food reflect long experience and embody a nutritional logic that shouldn’t be easily ignored.

Regard non-traditional foods with skepticism
He reckons that if diets are the product of evolutionary improvement, then a novel food or culinary innovation resembles a mutation, which may or not be an improvement.

Don’t look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet
Dietary patterns seem to be more than the sum of the foods that comprise them.

Have a glass of wine with dinner
I like this one. Red wine. One glass for a woman and two for a man. I’ve always thought the world was badly divided.

Under Not too much

Pay more. Eat less
There’s trade-off between quantity and quality. He advises eat less, whether you are overweight or not. Calorie reduction has been shown to slow aging and prolong lifespan in animals. He quotes ‘Eat until you are 80% full’.

Eat meals
Yes he had to put this in because he reckons we are snacking more and eating fewer meals together. Eating while watching TV. Eating in the car. I loved the line ‘It is at the dinner table that we socialise and civilise our children, teaching them manners and the art of conversation.’ I hope I’ve done my bit for civilisation To counter the risk of the snack and restore the meal to its rightful place, he suggests:
- Do all your eating at the table
- Don’t get fuel from the same place as your car does
- Try not to eat alone
- Consult your gut
- Eat slowly
- Cook and, if you can, plant a garden
That’s one of the plans Denis and I have for this spring – to sow a garden.

So they’re his policies. I included them above as much for myself as for you the reader.

What did I think?
There’s a lot of common sense in what he says. He seems to be a lot less fundamentalist than some writers in this arena. His policies are good ‘rules of thumb’. He doesn’t single out any foods as wonder foods. He leaves plenty of scope to choose different foods. There’s loads more common sense in the book which I haven’t included. But that’s really why I liked the book. I like common sense, even though it’s not always common.

I’ve always been interested in healthy foods. Did I learn anything new? Both yes and no. Some I knew already but some was certainly new. What he did do for me was to put me back on the straight and narrow, so to speak. Reading this book was a good wake-up call for me.

This morning I said goodbye to John at the airport. I’m glad he said to me that I must read this book by Friday.

I’m also glad I’m such an obedient mother!

Has anyone else read this book? What do you think of Pollan’s food policies?

I finished the last book in the trilogy but am only getting around to writing a review on it now. Having finished it, I would certainly recommend the trilogy … but for marathon readers not sprinters. Overall I felt the three books could have done with some serious editing. Notwithstanding that, they are still a very good read. The main characters, though each very different are all likable which helps in these lengthy books. Just thinking, International Women’s Day was this week, Larsson certainly wove a feminist argument through the the books with enormous skill.

I was amused by the descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life throughout. Did we really need to know the full shopping list when a character went shopping? Or exactly what someone wears; She dressed in black trousers, a white polo neck, and a muted brick-red jacket. Or eats for their breakfast; She made two slices of toast with cheese, orange marmalade and a sliced avocado … After all the street detail, I’m expecting to know my way around Stockholm, if I ever go there.

Detail like this helps get the reader into the everyday lives of the characters but when word count is already a challenge, less might just have been better.

I was intrigued by Erika Berger’s relationship with Mickael Blomkvist with her husband’s full knowledge and approval! It’s the approval bit that intrigued me.

Here’s a typical passage; Berger wakes at 7am having spent the night with Blomkvist. She turns on her phone and finds eleven missed calls from her husband. Her reaction is “Shit. I forgot to call”. She phones him and explains where she was and why she had not come home. Apparently she normally called her husband in advance if she was staying over with Blomkvist.

His reaction; “Erika, don’t do that again. It has nothing to do with Mickael, but I’ve been worried sick all night. I was terrified that something had happened …”

He’s one patient man!

Mind you two men in one’s life could be useful sometimes. Berger’s house had been broken into and she ended up at the hospital. Berger cursed the whole time she was at the hospital, and she kept trying to call her husband or Blomkvist.

I’m thinking of times I’m stuck and can’t reach Denis on his phone …

I’ve started following Liz’s blog. Liz is Irish, living here with her Swedish husband and children. Her blog is very interesting, written partly in English and partly in Swedish. I commented to Liz that from reading Larsson, it seems to me, Swedish people are always drinking coffee. She confirmed this is so.

Whilst I know Sweden is liberal, I’ll have to check the ‘normality’ of Berger’s set up with her.

I loved the line describing Salander in hospital. After a period of computer celibacy, she was suffering from massive cyber-abstinence. I know others close to me who in similar circumstances would suffer from this condition.

I thought the description of a character’s death extremely poignant. He had no family, and none of his friends came to his sickbed. His last contact with life was an Eritrean night nurse by the name of Sara Kitama, who kept watch at his bedside and held his hand as he died.

The film of the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo is just going on release here in Ireland. It premiered in Skellefteå, Stieg Larsson’s old home town early last year. I for one will be going to see it.

Finally, there’s a rumour of a fourth book having been on Larsson’s laptop when he died. Will it ever get published …

Yes our new BBC, our Blog Book Club is up and running.

So far we have seven members, Marian, Treasa, Cathy, Marie, Lorna, Val and yours truly.

Our first book has been selected ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’, the 2007 novel by Afghan author Khaled Hosseini, as suggested by Marian.

We will all be busy reading, ready to post our reviews midday, Easter Sunday.

Who knows, maybe this time next year our fledgling online book club might be celebrating its first birthday at the Ennis Book Festival with all the other book clubs

Update to above. We are now at nine members, Edie and Jenn have just joined.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Mark Twain

Today is World Book Day, the biggest annual celebration of books and reading in the UK and Ireland.

Ennis Book Club Festival is on this weekend with readings/talks by authors such as Lionel Shriver, Joseph O’Connor, Paul Durcan, Tim Pat Coogan, Diarmaid Ferriter and David McWilliams to name a few. More information here. I have something else on so can’t go to the events I would have been interested in. Pity. I read the quotation above on their brochure.

With all the talk of books, it’s such a pity to hear that Hughes & Hughes, one of the Ireland’s largest bookshop chains, has just gone into receivership. I met Derek Hughes a few times and he seemed to be a very nice, hard-working man. I hate to see yet another company go … 225 jobs just like that.

Now to the idea I mentioned. Would any blog readers be interested in forming a ‘BBC’, a ‘Blog Book Club’?

What I suggest is if a group of bloggers were to read the same book each month, write a review of it and post it on their blog. The book to be read each month would be selected by the members. We could agree that we would simultaneously post on a particular day/time each month, say midday on the first Sunday or some such time. It would be very interesting to read different people’s review of the same book.

It’s much along the lines of a traditional book club except this is done through blogging.

What do you think? If you are interested, please leave a comment below.

I did very little last weekend except read this second book in the trilogy.

The three of the books together add up to 1704 pages, 1.6kg in weight. (And they’re only paperback).

Just some light reading!

I really loved but also complained about this second book.

Though the story continues from the first book, it took a while to get started into the second book’s plot. Having finished it, I’m not sure the real relevance of the first section of the book – Salander’s time in Grenada. The book is long. I felt it could have been edited a bit more.

Another quibble is there was a little too much coincidence for my liking. Examples. Though not in contact, Blomkvist just happens to be outside Lisbeth’s apartment at 2am just when Lisbeth emerges and just happens to be attacked. Lisbeth and Blomkvitz, both just happen to independently visit an apartment (visiting people whom they weren’t in a habit of visiting) on the exact night before (Lisbeth) and after (Blomkvitz), a murder is committed.

One would want a strong constitution for some of the detail. Graphic description of rape, murder are all normal copy. No shrinking violets need apply read. I’m no shrinking violet but found myself beginning to shrink. I found myself saying to myself sometimes, ’spare me the detail please’.

By comparison, Scarpetta seems almost a romantic novelist.

Sometimes I felt I needed a pen and paper beside me when reading to keep track of all the characters. Blomkvist, Salander, Björck, Sandström, Zala, Bublanski, Bjurman, Nesser, Modig, Erkström, Svensson, Wu, Andersson, Faste, Bohman, Hedström, Roberto, Lundin, Nieminen. Nineteen and counting. Try keeping track of all them and that’s a very incomplete list!

My children used accuse me that if I ever went shopping, the first thing I had to do was ‘have a cup of coffee’. I think Sweden would suit me. They always seemed to be drinking coffee.

I finished this book late Sunday night. Despite all my protestations above, there was nothing I would have liked better than if Monday didn’t follow Sunday and that I could have stayed in bed all day and read the third book. Sadly work beckoned.

Today is Wednesday. I still haven’t started the third book but am guessing that once I do, there again won’t be much else done.

Husband and youngest mouse look out!

I’d thoroughly recommend ‘The Girl Who Played with Fire’

This book is the first of the Millenium trilogy written by Stieg Larsson. The trilogy was part of D’s Christmas present from moi. He has read the three books and enjoyed them.

Sadly, Stieg Larsson died in 2004, aged 50 before the trilogy was published. I read the wikipedia article on him after I had read this book. It gave interesting background information.

I liked the book but almost expected to like it more from all I had heard about it from a number of people who have read it.

There are three main characters; Michael Blomkvist, a journalist, Lisbeth Salander, an angry, young computer hacker, after whom the book is named and Henrik Vanger, a wealthy, Swedish Industrialist.

Forty years earlier, Harriet Vanger, a niece of Henrik’s, disappeared from the family’s island. Nobody could tell what happened to her and no corpse was ever found. Henrik Vanger, now elderly, has been tormented all his life by her loss and is convinced that a family member murdered her.

The journalist Blomkvist has recently lost a libel case concerning his reportage of a financial scandal, and is now ‘lying low’. Vanger commissions him to research this unsolved mystery. Early on, Blomkvitst sees a link with a number of other murders committed around the same time. Blomkvist seeks the assistance of Salander, this genius hacker. Blomkvitst and Salander, though an unlikely pairing, work well together to eventually solve the mystery. The book is somewhat a love story.

I read with interest an article in last Saturday’s Irish Times that the Larsson’s authorship of these books is questioned.

Quoting from the article:

Lately, however, most talk of Larsson’s work in Sweden has centred on public criticism of his reporting methods and his talent as a writer, as well as allegations that his life partner of 32 years could actually have written much of the trilogy … Hellberg, now a journalist for Sweden’s top-selling morning paper, wrote that while Larsson was a masterful researcher … he was an awkward writer who had probably called on his partner, Eva Gabrielsson, to do much of the writing for the trilogy.

This is interesting because Wikipedia’s article on Larsson states:

In May 2008 it was announced that Larsson’s 1977 will, found soon after his death, declared his wish to leave his assets to the Umeå branch of the Communist Workers League (now the Socialist Party). As the will was unwitnessed, it was not valid under Swedish law, with the result that all of Larsson’s estate, including future royalties from book sales, went to his father and brother. His long term partner Eva Gabrielsson, who found the will, has no legal right to the inheritance, sparking controversy between her and his father and brother. The two never married because, under Swedish law, couples entering into marriage are to make their addresses (at the time) publicly available; marrying would have been a security risk. Owing to his reporting on extremist groups and the death threats he had received, the couple had sought and been granted masking of their addresses, personal data and identity numbers from public records, to make it harder for e.g. stalkers to trace them; this kind of “identity cover” was integral to his work as a journalist and would have been difficult to bypass if the two had married or become registered partners.

It further states Gabrielsson claims the author had little contact with his father and brother and requests the rights to control his work so it may be presented in the way he would have wanted.

Ouch!

This is the second book I have read by Hungarian author, Sándor Márai. This book, written in 1939 was first published in English in November 2008. It was translated by English/Hungarian poet George Szirtes, who writes an interesting blog. Esther’s Inheritance is really a long short story, only 148 pages in all. It’s such an engaging read that I actually started and finished it in a night. Frances O’Rourke reviewed this book very recently in the Irish Times. Eileen Battersby in an article in the same paper, listed Esther’s Inheritance as one of her top 25 (actually 26!) reads of 2009.

Esther, an unmarried woman in her forties has been living a quiet life when one day, she receives a telegram from Lajos, the great love of her life. Lajos abandoned Esther twenty years previously, and married her sister, Vilma, now deceased. The telegram tells that he is coming to visit the next day. Esther tells Nunu, with whom she lives. Nunu’s amusing reply was “Good … I will lock away the silver”. Esther has not forgotten that Lajos is a fantasist and a liar, nor has she forgotten that he caused her a lot of hurt, yet he still has a strange hold over her. The book tells of family secrets, love and betrayal.

Esther’s Inheritance is now also a film.

I was interested to read the Guardians review of this book which concluded with a broader interpretation of the story. Throughout the war, Márai opposed the Nazis and their fascist allies in Hungary’s authoritarian regime (his wife was Jewish). In his heroine’s trance-like capitulation, it is tempting to see a larger drama of mesmerised masses, swindled of their inheritance by charismatic fraudsters with false promises, sleepwalking into disaster. “Wake up, Esther!” Nunu scolds her for refusing to accept that Lajos swapped her mother’s jewelled heirloom for a fake ring. At the close, a dozing Esther, who has neglected to install electric lighting, finds an “end-of-September wind” tearing open the window and snuffing out the candle. The world is engulfed by darkness. But Esther sleeps on.

Márai committed suicide in 1989, so he never witnessed the collapse of communism. He also died before his large collections of books started to be translated and available to a much wider audience. I previously reviewed his book Embers here.

Kati who works with Denis in Hungary sent me this book for Christmas. It was a very enjoyable read – the only book I managed to get read over Christmas.

Set in the autumn of 1899, this is a portrait of provincial life in the Austro-Hungarian empire at the turn of the nineteenth century.
The book describes one week in the uneventful life of an elderly retired Hungarian couple. Their unattractive, (my word, the book uses the word ugly), spinster daughter, nicknamed Skylark has left them for an unprecedented week’s holiday with relatives. At first the couple, whose entire existence revolves around their daughter, are devastated by her absence. Slowly they rediscover a life in their small-town society doing things they normally didn’t do when their daughter was there; eating out in the local restaurant, going to the theatre. The husband, Ákos, meets up with the members of his old club, who despite their advancing years, meet weekly for a lively session of drinking, dinner and card playing. The night before Skylark returns, the elderly couple reach the shocking conclusion that their daughter is a burden to them.

The beauty of this book is in its descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life, in its character descriptions, in its pace. From this vignette of Mr and Mrs Vajkays’ life, we get a great glimpse of life in this provincial town, all those years ago.

The Times described the book The most original, economical and painful novel I have read in a long time

Kosztolányi was born in 1885 in Szabadka, a town which today belongs to Serbia. Sárszeg, the fictional town in which this book is set is based on his hometown. He studied at the University of Budapest and then for a short time in Vienna before quitting to become a journalist, a profession he stayed with for the rest of his life. In 1908, he became a reporter for a Budapest paper. In 1910, his first volume of poems brought him nationwide success and marked the beginning of a prolific period in which he published a book nearly every year. He died from cancer at the age of fifty one.

His last finished novel Anna Édes is also available in English. I’ll add that to others by Hungarian author Sándor Márai to read.

Now all I need is time, lots of time!

Denis, Tommy, Work … do ye want to go on unprecedented week’s holiday?

Thank you Kati for introducing me to two great Hungarian authors.

This is Anita Shreve’s fifteenth book. I previously read and liked all her other books and reviewed Testimony here.

I like Anita Shreve as a writer however this is the first book, I really didn’t care much for. Whilst I read it to the end and was very interested to see how it would actually end, it’s not one of her better ones.

The story is of Margaret and Patrick, newlyweds who set off for a year in Kenya. The year is 1977, with Kenyatta still in power. Margaret realises that there is a lot that she doesn’t know about the culture of this new country, nor indeed about her new husband.

Though with little climbing experience, they eagerly take part in a climbing expedition with friends to the summit of Mount Kenya. During the ascent a horrific accident occurs. The remainder of the book is really the story of Margaret trying to make some sense of the accident which has major repercussions for her and her marriage.

I didn’t like this book because I thought it meandered without any great plot. I felt the story after the incident on the mountain was somewhat disjointed from the earlier part.

My reading of this book wasn’t helped because I actually thought the main character, Margaret was a bit daft, her husband unlikeable, the journalist … whatever.

My ‘rule of thumb’ is to give any book one hundred pages, before I’ll give up on it, if I don’t like it. I was more than happy to read this book to the end, but I wouldn’t be racing to recommend it. Having liked fourteen out of fifteen Anita Shreve books though, I will still be reading her next one, whenever it’s published.

If you haven’t read any of her earlier books, I would recommend them.

This is really an enjoyable book and I easily read it in a few hours, last weekend.

It’s easily read because it’s beautifully written and hard to put down. And because of the awful weather outside.

At least there’s something to be said in favour of unrelenting rain!

The story takes place during the course of a single evening in a Lahore cafe, where a Pakistani man called Changez tells a nervous American stranger about his love affair with, and eventual abandonment of America. It was really a monologue by Changez over the course of that one evening. Reading this book was like reading a play.

Here is the publisher, Penguin’s synopsis of the story:

… Among the brightest and best of his graduating class at Princeton, Changez is snapped up by an elite firm and thrives on New York and the intensity of his work. And his infatuation with fragile Erica promises entree into Manhattan society on the exalted footing his own family once held back in Lahore. For a time, it seems as though nothing will stand in the way of Changez’s meteoric rise to personal and professional success: the fulfilment of the immigrant’s dream. But in the wake of September 11, he finds his position in the city he loves suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love.

Interestingly although this book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007, the Guardian gave it a mixed review here, concluding:
There’s undoubtedly a great novel waiting to be written out of the anguished material of these kinds of east/west encounters. This book may not be it, but its author … certainly has the potential to write it …

While we are waiting for THE book, let me just say, I enjoyed this book immensely and would certainly recommend it!