Monday Book Blogging: Double Trouble edition

Well, I guess I'm kind of trying to hoist myself back on the book-a-week wagon. Now I'm not even pretending to stick to the schedule -- I'll be happy as long as I have read 52 books by the end of the year. Which means I have some catching up to do.

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
Odious and illogical as his personal beliefs are, that Orson Scott Card sure can write. I think Speaker for the Dead is a superior work compared to Ender's Game, which tends to hog most of the attention. It's more fully imagined, less episodic and repetitive. It doesn't help, though, that I somehow got stuck visualizing Ender as a kind of McGuyver clone and the pequininos as a troupe of ALF like creatures. Not terribly menacing.


The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
This is kind of like Fast Food Nation for the New Yorker crowd. So well-written I think it should come with a warning label -- "Caution: consumers of this product might experience crippling fear of High Fructose Corn Syrup and an irresistable desire to join an organic food co-op." If you are at all curious about what's going on lower down on the American food chain, you'll enjoy this book. Don't expect easy answers from Pollan, though. This is a guy who can agonize about just about anything.

On the one hand, this book has just awakened the little bud of desire that has mostly lain dormant since my childhood years to live in the country and grow my own veggies and raise my own chickens. On the other, ther is this cartoon...