What I'm reading

 Some people have told me I should read the latest diet book craze, particularly since I am skeptical, but having read dozens of diet books for the purpose of reviewing them, I rarely derive any pleasure from them. It's also rare that I actually learn anything new from them and in fact they often infuriate me with their emphasis on weight loss and tendency to play fast and loose with science. I think that all you need to know about eating healthy can be found on the internet and reading should be something more intellectually illuminating. 

One book I've been absolutely enamored with is 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. I knew about some of the ideas in this book already from courses I had taken in archeology and environmental science, but Charles C. Mann does a fantastic job using them to tantalize and shift pre-conceived notions about what the Americans were like in the past. It also touches on two of my favorite subjects: agricultural regression and agroforestry. Much like The Art of Not Being Governed, it challenges linear models of development, as well as Romantic ideals of the "noble savage" and "wilderness." I hope to do a full review of this. 

I've also been re-reading Heart and Blood, one of my favorites, because I'd like to give it a full review as a more scientific and humanistic alternative to The Vegetarian Myth. I also have some pipe dreams about joining the hunting season, but they are pipe dreams since I haven't had much time for target practice and by the time I'm in the Midwest it will be rather late in the season. I've picked up a copy of my old hunting teacher Jackson Lander's Deer Hunting For Food. 

I've also been reading The Lights in The Tunnel, which imagines a future in which most jobs are automated. It's available for free as a PDF.  And The Last Child in the Woods, which is about the human need for nature and why our children's growing alienation from it is a huge problem. And The Tribal Imagination by Robin Fox. I'm probably also reading five million other books, but such is the burden of ADD. I just finished the complete stories of HP Lovecraft and most of Flannery O' Connor's short stories, which makes me sad, but I will find new short story collections to read.