Back in the Swing of Things

I know I haven’t posted in a while, but that probably has something to do with the fact that I hadn’t read a book since the end of the 52 books in 52 weeks series. Yes, I said “hadn’t.” I finished a book, two books actually. I started reading one and got sidetracked by the other — and finished them both within a day of each other.

Are they significant choices? Maybe. The first I finished was Nora Robert’s The Hollow, the follow up to book 21 of 52. I picked it up while food shopping at the Jersey shore. I’d brought half a dozen books with me, hoping to jarr my reading mind back open while spending six days away from home. But when I saw that book in the supermarket isle, I couldn’t say no. It was an easy (and sometimes silly) way to get back into things.

The second is Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. My food education is progressing since reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, book 40 of 52. I’m more conscious of what’s in my food and where it came from. Last night, my aunt asked me how much peppers were at the farmer’s market. I said I didn’t know — the peppers had been shipped in from North Carolina, so I didn’t buy them. “Why?” The look on her face was almost horror. I’ve had to temper myself in spreading ‘the good word.’ People have been used to having nutritionism shoved down their throats, and information based on now unproven studies (e.g. ‘fat is bad,’ which is nonsense) that it’s hard to do a wake up call in one conversation. I’ve gotten into food debates with folks who get angry for suggeting that things they’ve known all their lives are wrong. If it’s wrong, then why is this country so overweight?

If you need a good rule of thumb, remember this: If your great grandmother would not recognize it as food, don’t eat it. And, yes, that knocks skim milk and any kind of Weight Watcher’s engineered food off the list.

Anyway…enough of my high horse. I’m glad to be back into reading. I still don’t know what’ll happen with this blog. But thank you to everyone who requested an e-copy of it. I hope you got some summer reading suggestion. I don’t have a to-read list yet outside of what I have due to review next week. So we’ll see where this reading thing takes me.

On another note, click here to read my article on Amy Hill Hearth, which ran in today’s St. Pete Times. She wrote books 30 and 31 of this series.