Plot-it-yourself

If you are of a certain age, you may have ravenously devoured a series of children's mystery/adventure novels called "Choose Your Own Adventure". At the end of each short chapter, you are given a decision to make, and the action you choose determines the direction the story takes. And when you finish the first run, you go back and make different choices and get a different story, and you keep replaying your options until you have read every possible combination. I loved those books.
So imagine my delight at finding Pretty Little Mistakes, by NPR regular Heather McElhatton. Just like the kids' books, you are asked to make a choice at the end of each little chapter. The choices are a little different, however, as I find myself becoming the discarded mistress of a sixty-something Italian. Whoops, lets redo that. Now I'm getting shot in the parking lot of an Arby's . Bummer. Try again. Well, actually, none of the endings are really cheery. But I guess that's part of being an adult too. Regardless of the dearth of happy endings, it is so much fun to travel through your imaginary life making irresponsible, outrageous, dangerous choices that I enjoyed every story I conjured up in this book. It seems so easy to live a life when there are no real consequences.

Conscientious dining

One of the hottest discussion topics lately seems to be the concept of 'food miles' - the distance that an ingredient has to travel from harvest site to table. More and more people are embracing the idea of eating locally, cooking only with ingredients that originated within a certain distance of their house (100 miles is a common choice). Novelist Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees) has penned a nonfiction account of her own family's experience with eating locally: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: a year of food life. She and her family raised their own poultry, grew their own vegetables, even made their own cheese (with milk from local cows and goats). They ate food when it was in natural season, rather than dining on 'fresh' strawberries in November. She describes their efforts in a very readable way, with her usual skill with prose. The book also contains some recipes and some short essays by her daughter - a student at Duke University. For anyone who is interested in this new drive to return to a simpler, more ecologically-sensitive table, this is an enjoyable way to start. [Personally, I wouldn't have any problem eating locally if I was living in Washington or Oregon, but I'm not. I live here, and I don't relish the idea of living without flour, sugar, or milk. Or beef, pork, corn, tomatoes, chocolate, oranges, apples, rice, etc. etc. etc.]

Subterranean secrets

It's always fascinating to find out how things work, or are built, or operate. Even when you don't really want to know (think sausages and legislation - thank you, Otto von Bismarck). So believe me when I tell you that Beneath the Metropolis: the secret lives of cities is an absolute page-turner. So, what is below the streets of some of the most famous cities in the world? Well, water and sewer lines, obviously - even we have those - and often some sort of public transportation. (It's amazing to think of the work involved in retrofitting a centuries-old major metropolis with a subway, but that's another story). But what else is below the surface?

• Catacombs


• Torture chambers


• Libraries


• Abandoned ships


• Shopping malls


• Ancient ruins


• And lots of polluted aquifers

Surprisingly, New York - always good for an impressive story - is actually a very boring city underground. No rubble from earthquakes or firebombings, no abandoned civil defense tunnels, no secret cult chambers. What a disappointment. One of the most interesting tidbits of information in this book is that the refuse of Cairo has been building up for so many centuries that the doorways in the oldest sections of town are a few feet below street level.

Back to the Badlands

Not being an author myself, I don’t usually read books where authors talk about their craft. And since I don’t read gritty American crime novels, you would think an entire book of interviews with famous crime writers would not be my cup of tea. But I was enthralled with Back to the Badlands by John Williams. In 1989 the Welsh journalist and writer traveled around America talking with a number of famous authors - Carl Hiaasen, Sara Paretsky, Tony Hillerman - about their crime novels, and about the settings in which the stories took place - Miami, Chicago, Arizona/New Mexico. The product of this journey was Into the Badlands (1993). He’s repeated his journey, visiting newer writers on the crime scene: George Pelecanos, Kinky Freidman, and Daniel Woodrell, among others. This new book reads like a collection of Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone articles: well-written, with Williams a strong presence in the narrative, and a lot of descriptive touches. The nice thing about the new book is that it not only includes his interviews from 2005, but also some of the chapters from his original 1993 book. And if you really like his work, and would like to read more, then the interviews omitted from Back to the Badlands are available at his website: http://fivepubs.googlepages.com/ Fabulous.

Biblical cheat sheet

Confession time – I have never read the entire Bible. Cover to cover, it can be a bit of a slog (especially the begats in Matthew), and most people cherry-pick the sections they read. But it is very difficult to experience Western culture (books, movies, poetry, music or art) without knowing the Bible. If you don’t have time to read the entire thing, then Everday Biblical Literacy: the essential guide to biblical allusions in art, literature, and life can help you truly appreciate your favorite Renaissance painting, or get the background on Ahab before you read Moby Dick (another light classic). Some of the entries are a little obvious (hello, who hasn’t heard the story of Moses?), but the etymological entries are pretty interesting. The word ‘patter’, for instance, arose from the common prayer "Our Father", which used to said in Latin: "Pater Noster". Even the corny marketing phrase “Go the extra mile” has a biblical origin (Matthew 5:41-42). So gird up your loins (page 400) dust off your old set of Harvard Classics and reread the great works of Western Literature with a new appreciation.

Mediterranean Modern

I’ll be totally upfront here – I hate modern architecture. That being said, Mediterranean Modern, by Dominic Bradbury is a great book to page through. And even though I find the majority of the houses themselves to be appallingly ugly and jarring in their natural setting, some of their elements are just beautiful. The infinity pool of the Fontpineda House (pg 42) makes it appear as if you will swim off the edge of the cliff. The bathtub (bathing pool, really) in the Tsirigakis House (pg 118) is inviting, romantic and exotic while at the same time being very plain and austere. That house in its entirety is actually quite nice, with just enough traditional elements to avoid the blocky, modern look. It also blends magnificently into its setting. My favorite house in this book, if I had millions and millions of dollars, is Can Helena in the Balearic Islands (I confess, I had to look them up in an atlas – they’re off the east coast of Spain, and Majorica is the largest island in the group). The house is a series of levels carved into the hillside, overlooking the Mediterranean, with multiple pools and water features. Lovely. Although, looking at all these houses, I can’t help but wonder if the bank of windows that are so necessary in our gloomy climate wouldn’t just bake you like an ant under a magnifying glass in the heat and sun of the Mediterranean. If any of the homeowners in this book would like to invite me for the summer, I’ll report back to you.

Face: the new photographic portrait

260 images – some candid, some posed, some digitally altered. Portraits of the dead, pictures of babies just delivered from the birth canal. Grainy, blurry, overexposed, beautiful. Faces without eyes or mouths, male and female blended together, eyes held open, eyes sewn shut. The images in Face: the new photographic portrait, by William Ewing, are always compelling and often disturbing – especially the digitally altered images. They appear real and your eye accepts them, but there is something just wrong enough to make you uneasy. As a society (and a species) we rely so heavily on the evidence of our eyes and the way things look that when that visual reality is altered in any way it’s very unsettling. The entire book is fascinating, and it’s hard not to look at every single photograph and image multiple times in one sitting.