by Ursula Parrott

Extra-marital sex. Abortion. Substance abuse. Skepticism about the sexual revolution, and how it sure seems to just screw over women.

Is it the 1960s? The 1970s? No – it’s 1925.

Definitely a fascinating look at sex and the (newly) single girl and the city back in your grandmother’s day. It starts with our protagonist’s husband’s exit, and has a very nice twist of an ending, but the middle was too long and made me very impatient with Patricia’s endless, mindless promiscuity. And I wish the heroine could have been given a bit more going for her besides her looks – that got very tiring to read about too. I was super sick of hearing about her “creamy” shoulders, and super sick of every man she met gushing over her beauty.

Good lines:

“New York’s a jail to which, once committed, the sentence is for life; but it is such a well-furnished jail, one does not mind much.”

“Great Lovers – men who’ve known a hundred women, and boast of it – they remind me of the man who wanted to be a musician and so took one lesson on each instrument in the orchestra… He couldn’t play a tune on any of them in the end.”

by Michael Lewis

This book is getting a lot of flack for being fawning and credulous, because Lewis doesn’t tell a story of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) as villain, It’s very interesting that parts 1 and 2 of this book were hashed out before the FTX collapse, when Lewis was merely shadowing SBF and trying to gather material for a possible book. He got his book. He unwittingly got a front-row seat to the “implosion.” But as the NYT review stated, you can see the original book peeking through.

I don’t mind any of this. I take it for what it is: Lewis’ real-time impressions of SBF and his crew.

The impressions are: Yes, SBF is… different. Caroline Ellison is an egoless spineless character without the foggiest idea how to run Alameda research. It’s painful seeing the personal memos she and SBF write to each other about basically whether or not they should fuck each other. (Answer: No, No, neither one of you should be sleeping with the other one.) The other characters were not as nailed down for me. Oh, except the therapist. There’s an actual therapist on the FTX campus who treats just about everyone. Other than that, there are a lot of people from the old Hong Kong office who moved to the Bahamas, and then there are the horde of faceless “effective altruists” who share SBF’s penthouse.

As an aside, the effective altruists sure are a weird lot. I was and am interested in EA as well as crypto, which makes me so into the SBF story. But at first my impression was that EA was basically about rating charities, so you can figure out which ones are really the most effective ones to donate to – and this is an unmitigated good, for sure! And maybe also about figuring out which interventions in the world are most effective at truly alleviating human suffering and saving lives, e.g. anti-malaria bed nets – also indubitably a very good thing! But now the EA crew as a whole has turned their attention to “existential risks” – climate change, asteroids, AI, and nuclear war – because the calculations state, an intervention that could potentially save ALL of humanity from extinction, protecting all those future lives, must trump anything you can possibly do here in the present for these measly 6-7 billion. I part company here.

But I digress, as is my wont. I loved having a book to read on the FTX collapse – I’m sure there will be many more to come.

by Ashley Audrain

Why did I pick this up? I’m drawn to Bad Mother books. And this book has got a doozy!

Whitney, the Bad Mother, is something of a Disney villainess. There are a couple of mysteries at the heart of the book: How did her son fall from a third-story window? And who is secretly screwing whom?

Much of the reading time, however, was taken up with concerns that don’t interest me. Is my husband having an affair? Horrors. Waah I can’t have a baby. I’m nonplussed. Give me more Bad Mother plot!

by Martin Walker

I guess it was a good mystery. I didn’t see the twist coming. But then I don’t see anything coming in books because I don’t try very hard. The problem is that I hate mysteries, because they are SUCH BAD NOVELS. I’m not sure how people who like the puzzle aspect of mysteries can stand all the cheesiness and awful writing and paper-thin characterization that always goes along with it. Ugh. I cracked up when the love interest turned out to be a martial arts expert, saving our hero’s neck in the middle of a riot with some karate chops! And I know the author is trying to whet our appetites with all the food descriptions, but they were over the top. Enough pate to choke a goose. A picnic where he (perfectly) cooks two fish which of course were caught just hours before – and strawberries – what the hell time of year is it anyway? Please, please, book club, no more mysteries.

by Stephan Pastis

“I woke up this morning and the maintenance light on my life was blinking.”

by Rumer Godden

Tremendous. I loved this book. I was so sorry when I finished it. It was an old-fashioned exciting novel. I guess it’s something of a classic (1958) young adult coming-of-age novel, but I had never heard of it – I came across a mini-review, I think in the NYT, which intrigued me and lent me to borrow it.

Five siblings and their mom take a trip to France, from Britain; but mom gets sick on the way and has to be hospitalized. The four sisters and one brother range in age from 16 to 4. They find themselves on their own in a hotel seemingly filled with enemies, and one ally, a mysterious Englishman who takes responsibility for them, but hides deep dark secrets.

by Chris Van Tulleken

(Sorry about that awful image, it was hard to find a picture of the book cover.)

I’ve certainly been reading plenty lately about how bad processed food is for you. Problem is, “processed food” has always been so weakly defined. Beer, bread, cheese, tofu? Very processed. But evil? No, but hot dogs, Doritos, baloney – processed and OBVIOUSLY evil. Why? They don’t define the difference.

And then there’s all the talk about feeding your “gut biome.” I even read a study recently that tried to tell me it was healthier to eat a steak than ground beef. Come on! After I chew it, it’s all the same, isn’t it?!

What we have here is a much more in-depth treatment than those attention-grabbing media articles, and I am thankful. Here we get definnitions – and they come from the “NOVA” system of classification. (I don’t think he ever tells us what the acronym stands for, and I think that might be because it’s not English – I think this system came out of Brazil.) Foods fall into four groups: unprocessed; processed culinary ingredients; processed foods; and ultra-processed foods.

A decade ago, everyone’s rule of thumb came from Michael Pollan – don’t eat anything with more than 5 ingredients. Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. Van Tulleken’s got a similar heuristic to offer – don’t eat anything with ingredients that don’t represent things you can find in your kitchen.

HA! Joke’s on him. My kitchen’s got xantham gum (which he hates).

There you have it. Yes, cheese, beer, and bread are processed. But they are not “ultra-processed.” You could make them in your kitchen (granted they take a little bit of talent and ingredients you can’t get at the convenience store). But you know very well you couldn’t make hot dogs in your kitchen. Or Doritos. You KNOW what ultra-processed food (UPF) is.

A lot of the book was pulling every conceivable threat out of the air that could be associated with UPF – decays tooth enamel and makes your jaw smaller! Seriously! I didn’t care so much for that aspect of the book. Focus. You can convince me very well to avoid UPF without all the threats of Crohn’s disease and mental illness and autoimmune disease and everything else you can throw at the wall.

Funny quote about how he can’t fathom people who aren’t interested in food (ditto). “I still find indifference to food hard to understand. I plan dinner at breakfast. When I’m at a wedding, my whole focus is on the canapes. My holiday itineraries are just lists of restaurants and markets.” I’d say I identify with this 110% except for one thing. You plan dinner at breakfast? Breakfast on the SAME DAY? Amateur.

by Stephan Pastis

I’m a fan.

I love rat.

I don’t like the long shaggy-dog pun ones, though. Puns only work if they are at least *kind of* a surprise.

I found a pair of these used during the South End Art Hop… They had a load of Peanuts books too, but they wanted $9 for skinny paperbacks. These big Pearls compendia were only $10 each, much more giggle for the buck.

by Will Grant

This guy rode horseback across the original Pony Express Trail, maybe 2000 miles, over 142 days, with two horses, one for riding and one for carrying gear. It was amazing – and what’s truly unbelievable, the point he drove home, is that Pony Express riders used to complete the route in TEN DAYS.

The road goes from St. Joseph, MO, on the Missouri River, to Sacramento. The Midwest did not interest him. The west did. Cities gave him the heebie-jeebies; the biggest one standing in his way was Salt Lake City, and he opted to have the horses trailered around it.

He had LOTS of assistance. His girlfriend mailed him supplies. He used a smartphone. When it came time to cross the dessert, he hired someone to drop off hay and water along the route at given intervals. The desert crossing was scary to consider. There were long stretches with no water sources. If something went amiss with the hay and water dropoffs, well, I was about to say he’d be up shit’s creek, but shit’s creek would have been an improvement – at least it would have had water.

Color photos in the middle made me glad I didn’t read it on Kindle. The picture of the two horses standing utterly alone in the middle of the alkali flat in western Nevada was worth the price. One horse looks at the camera, the other “looks east from where we’d come.” I wonder what is going through that horse’s mind. Something along the lines of, “What the hell are we doing here and can we go back soon?”

They do not go back, they go forward! After the desert, which was obviously the biggest challenge, near the Nevada/California border, Grant got the heebie-jeebies again at Carson City, and just wanted the trip to be over. He did not want to subject his horses to the big city of Sacramento, he knew the hard part was over, so he had the horses trailered to the endpoint. I thought it was a fine decision.

His lesson is that the real heroes of the Pony Express were the unsung heroes: “the station keepers and stock tenders”, the people hauling water out to those waterless spots in the desert, enough to keep ten or so horses in fine condition at all times at each relay station. Astonishing. Astonishing too to think what the whole thing cost. It is very little wonder the enterprise survived for so little time. What in the world piece of mail could have been THAT important?

by Catherine Chidgey

I’m not sure, but this might be what they call a “thriller”? Kind of a mysterious shocking story about a creepy teacher. I was drawn to it because it takes place in a Catholic school in the 80s. It’s New Zealand, so it was fun to learn a few of their slang words and a bit of their culture. I had never heard of a “winceyette” or “abseiling”, for example.

Anyway, a beautiful teacher comes to town and makes various girls her “pets.” She drives a wedge between two old friends. Shocking mysterious things happen which I shouldn’t divulge.

I loved how they got Catholic school spot-on! The dwindling number of aging nuns, who “taught” special subjects like singing. The way, if the principal or priest or anyone would walk into the classroom, everyone had to stand up and say in a sing-song voice, “Good afterno-on, Sister So-and-So!” And, “You couldn’t receive Holy Communion if you had eaten in the last hour; you couldn’t allow the body of Christ to slosh around in your stomach with the cornflakes and bacon.” Nobody else seems to have remembered that rule. And how it was easy to follow because it was at least a half hour in church before communion even started, so you really only had to ‘fast’ the last half hour before leaving.