February reading round-up

This is one of my favorite series. I went to buy the latest one and realized I somehow missed this one being published (it was while I was in the throws of grad school...). I love this series - the premise is that there is the Real World and the Book world, a world within books - with actors acting in books and there being a back story to those actors. I won't go into all the gory details about the series, but if you have a love of books and are well read this series is a blast because you catch the jokes Fforde plays with literary figures and themes. This book focuses on peace talks between genres in the Book World, and the main character Thursday Next is stuck in the middle - the Real World Thursday is missing and the Book World Thursday is left to find her, deal with her own slew of issues, and keep the book world from falling apart, again. I just love this series and this book was another stellar showing in the series!

After reading a Jasper Fforde book, I always need to go to non-fiction to let my imagination come back to "normal" - so I knew the newest Michael Pollan book was the one to read. I am a huge fan of his books - they make you think about what you eat, how it grew, what it does to your body, and I always learn a ton. In this book he looks at the four classical ways in which we change food to make it edible: fire, water, air, and earth. I actually found this his least "preachy" book - and I learned so much. Pollan explains the history and science and reasoning behind why we cook and what it actually does to our food. Granted, the first two sections dealt largely with how meat is cooked (and why) - but it was interesting. The third and fourth sections were the most fascinating to me. In the air section, he closely looked at how bread is made. Granted he talked about gluten so much it's a miracle I didn't get sick (ha!), but it was interesting to really understand how good bread it made. In his educating, Pollan showed how in today's hurried times we've largely lost that communal idea of cooking and talks about some of the fallout from that. I highly recommend!

Okay, only two books this month, but Cooked is a hefty read and it's a "short" month...? Either way, total books in 2014: Five and a half! On I read...