100 Million Years of Food: What Our Ancestors Ate and Why It Matters Now by Stephen Le

More informative and entertaining than your average “I traveled here to learn this and had this adventure, then I traveled there and had that adventure” books that are more travelogue than honest attempts to teach you what you thought you were there to learn… Click here for more of this, and two more Tytania book reviews!

Becoming by Michelle Obama

Takeaways:
– She really didn’t want it – the presidency, and its impact on her family.
– She is so, so, so devoted to her daughters.
– She loves Barack.
– Barack is a great guy, and so, so, so devoted to his daughters.

Extraordinary parenting under extraordinary circumstances.

And the other major takeaway is the humility.  She gets it from her mother (a great character), who always brushed aside over-glowing compliments on the accomplishments of her two kids, Craig and Michelle, with: they’re not special.  “The South Side is full of kids like that.”  Michelle repeats it – thinking of her grade school classmates, “I wasn’t any better than them.”  She was just lucky, lucky to have an advocate in her mother, who yanked her out of a bad classroom; and lucky not to get randomly shot in a drive-by, like kids in her old neighborhood need to fear today.

Quibbles?  Maybe Barack comes across as a little TOO perfect here, but, see point three.  She is – they are – obviously still in love.  She mentions the little “fist bump” she once gave him during some nationally televised appearance, and I remember it – such an intimate little moment.

And hey, maybe he IS perfect.  Sure holding up as pretty well, as a president, in hindsight, and in comparison.

Best fiction book:

Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck

Best non-fiction book:

10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier