The Woman who Can't Forget by Jill Price

I had high hopes for this book. Jill Price is a woman with a really unusual memory - given any event, she can tell you the date of it, and given any date, she can tell you in complete detail what she did - for the past thirty years. I expected this book to be about the neuroscience experiments she was involved in at various labs, and perhaps about how she developed coping mechanisms over time. Well boo on me for wanting a scientific book. Because this is a whiny memoir.

Price spends some of the book detailing her sessions with scientists at UCal to better understand her disorder, but the majority of the book is about how difficult her life is because of her memory. Something about the tone of the book and her voice made it difficult for me to muster up any empathy towards her. I did feel like she probably had other developmental problems other than just her extreme memory, and that the people in her life should have protected her better from writing this book. I felt disgusted when she met a man online (who she later married) who called her "hun" in their first IM - so weird.

Most importantly, I didn't think that many of the issues she recounted were attributable to her disorder, and thus she was just another person wanting to self-importantly write about how hard her life is. Her social anxiety and issues with attachment were no different from other memoirists' depictions, certainly not enough to justify a book about her.

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by John Wood

I absolutely loved reading this book, so much so that I even read a couple pages one day during an incredibly boring conference call. John Wood writes a fascinating memoir of leaving his high-power job at Microsoft in favor of starting a non-profit organization. He founded the non-profit Room to Read after a visit to Nepal, and several years later it is thriving with millions of dollars of grants and programs in several countries.

Room to Read's purpose is to set up libraries and schools in underserved countries. John Wood is courageous, bright, and a great combination of dreamer and executor. Early in the book, he starts with a grass-roots effort to get books to Nepal. As time goes on, he uses all his skills and all his connections to make Room to Read a successful business, and it is as interesting to read as an entrepreneurial book as it is a humanitarian one. I finished this book feeling both ashamed and inspired.

Plague of Doves by Louise Erdich

I admit, I read a review of this book on Slate and it looked good. But I read this book in its entirety because it was about Native Americans, based on a true story, and I felt guilty stopping. I am glad I finished it but I did find second 20% of it or so a little hard to follow and kind of boring.

The story follows a set of Ojibwe Indians and caucasians in North Dakota over several generations as their reservation and town become more and more intertwined. The central story in the book is of a violent crime that results in several Indians being lynched. The book tells the story out of order, so as time goes on, relationships and occurences take on different meaning with different background.

The writing was pretty good, although the voice of one particular character, the grandfather, was hard for me to follow. I enjoyed learning about Native American life in modern times which I am woefully undereducated about. The story that Erdrich waves, if you can work through the parts that are tricky to read, is sad, surprising, and rewarding to finish.

Wall St. Journal Summer Reading

Thanks to Dave who saved the Weekend Journal section, I have the Wall Street Journal's Summer Reading Guide. This year's list is heavily bent on foreign stories, which I'm sure I'll like.

The paper is easier to read, but here is the link to the electronic version: http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/info-flash08.html?project=SUMMERBOOKS08

The Girls by Lori Lansens

I read about the book on Slate and got it from the library during a "had-too-much-Diet-Coke-at-a-Red-Sox-game-am-up-late-let's-binge-on-book-requests-from-the-library's-electronic-database-at-3-in-the-morning" episode. It has an ambitious premise: it's about two girls in their late twenties who are craniopagus twins - joined at the head. The girls have unique identities and personalities and one of them sets out to write her autobiography.

The book was well-written, and the two girls' voices sufficiently different to be interesting. I had a hard time remembering they were attached sometimes because their parents would reward one with a trip somewhere or punish one with a grounding and both girls were subjected to the event. However, the characters were likable, the story had many surprises throughout the narrative, and the overall effect was a book I looked forward to reading each night before bed.

The only thing I did not like was the ending. There is an inevitable ending the story suggests early on, but the execution of the climax and denouement was poor. Too bad, since it was a memorable book overall.

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

Not since Caroline Knapp's Appetites has a nonfiction book changed my point of view about something so strongly. Since they are both about food I think that tells me something about myself. This book, by the author of Omnivore's Dilemma (which I have not read yet), is summarized on its cover: Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants.

Pollan says that what gets complicated is what it means to eat "food". Is what is in our supermarkets today food? Or is it food-like substances, bloated by corn syrup and soybean oil? He gives a history of the FDA and discusses what basis they have for recommending different nutrients.

His rhetoric borders on being a little conspiracy-theory at times, faulting the government with providing bad information to us about food based on lobbyist groups, but his message overall is smart. The micronutrients that we fortify our white bread with are not necessarily effective independent of their complementary nutrients naturally occurring in foods. Our foods are filled with soy and corn because we can get the most calories per acre of those foods. We eat far too much meat for a healthy diet. Low-fat foods are tricking America into eating 20% more calories per day than we did in the 1980's

To deal with this, he makes some suggestions of varying simplicity to incorporate into our lives. For example, shop the perimeter of the grocery store, that's where the fresh foods are; don't eat anything that does not spoil eventually; don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize. (He also says to eat every meal at a table, (not a desk), but I'm not ready for that one yet.)

While I'm not giving my Snickers addiction up just yet, I believe that Pollan is right: food has gotten too complicated. I've already had a few extra bananas this week because of this book.

The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond

Lisa recommended this to me, and since we've only had really divergent opinions on one book (Corelli's Mandolin) in our entire friendship, I moved it to the top of my list. (I almost accidentally took out a book called Year of Frog which I must admit to now being incredibly curious about.)

I could not put this book down. I was totally entranced by the story of Abby, a photographer in her early thirties whose fiance's daughter disappears when she is watching her one day. The story takes place (mostly) in San Francisco, and Richmond's descriptions of the neighborhoods and beaches are quite good.

Now, the book was not perfect -- Richmond kept interrupting the story to present information on memory and hypnosis and other topics that were keeping Abby up at night when the little girl went missing. Sometimes I thought these interludes were interesting, sometimes they just broke the flow of the book. There was also about fifty pages in the middle that seemed to drag a little. I was scratching my head saying, "ok, the girl's still missing, Abby's relationship is falling apart, what now?" The other problem I had with the book which may be my fault, not Richmond's, was that I kept skimming paragraphs and pages of description to get to the more plot-oriented parts.

But in the end, Richmond presented a complete plot: beginning, middle, end, denouement. The writing is well-done, Abby is complex and familiar, and the story is compelling.