Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness (Bryan Lee O'Malley)

Paperback

No surprises here (though it contains some of the first big departures from the film...but that's not really surprising, so my initial statement holds).

Still fun, still a great way to pass the time, but I'm starting to wonder why there are so many of these volumes. Is this how all comic books go? Establish a premise and then keep doing the same thing over and over? I guess it makes sense. After all, comics seem to be cartoons on paper and that's pretty much what Scooby, Bugs Bunny, etc did for years and I ate it up.

I'll keep swallowing this too.

B

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Bryan Lee O'Malley)

Paperback

More of the same, which is to say: lots of fun and I'll be reading the 3rd, 4th, and on to the end of the series.

I did again have trouble keeping the people apart, but it was usually only for a page or two and it was easy enough to keep up. I giggled aloud a few times -- partly from recognizing bits of the movie in the graphic novel (I'd made time to watch it between the last book and this one) and partly just from the sheer cleverness and familiarity of being a bit aimless and young.

B+

The Wrong Man (John Katzenbach)

Audiobook/Hardcover

The book grabbed me from the start -- a father finds a "love" note in his college-age daughter's bureau and something about it feels off to him. Turns out his instincts were right on. Ashley has a stalker and he's not just interested in her, but in destroying anyone who gets in the way of his being with her...even if it's Ashley herself.

As I said, it started out strong. But we hear EVERYone's internal monologue (including the stalker's) and they're remarkably similar and banal. The decisions and actions of the "good" guys are often either inept or over-the-top and the villain of the piece was boring. Actually, all of the characters were boring and the story itself gets the boring label as well because you see what's going to happen way before the author stops talking about it and puts the plot into some forward motion but, even then, Katzenbach refuses to stop interrupting the plot to talk about the plot and go over the same details again and again. It was interminable.

Things got slightly better once I switched from the super-slow and bored-sounding audio-book narrator, but that's only because I was able to get through it faster. Boo.

D

In Defense of Food (Michael Pollan)

Hardcover/Audiobook

Gary and I recently watched Food, Inc. right before doing The Master Cleanse and the timing of the two events got us interested in 1) organic food production and 2) organic food consumption. Neither of us has ever been very food snobby, but in the last couple of years we've begun cooking more adventurously -- in a way that probably would sound very tame for many cooks/eaters -- but we've tried kale, brussel sprouts, mangoes, and several other fruits and veggies for the first time during this period. We feel like fools for having so limited ourselves to such a meager selection of whole foods while shoveling mass-produced fake foods into our mouths willy-nilly. I haven't given up Coke or Snickers, but I'm not nearly so ignorant as I was.

This book gives a few clear-cut rules for moving toward a more natural and healthy diet (e.g. Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food and try not to eat alone) as well as an interesting look at how nutritionism has been trying to fix the damage that food processing has done to our bodies rather than rejecting the ingestion of processed foods...it's completely frustrating to think about this stuff too much. Better to take myself into my own hands and do what I can in my home.

This book does get a bit self-righteous every so often and the reader on the audiobook sounded like the drone of a filmstrip narrator, but the bulk of the text was eye-opening. I'm glad I read it and can't imagine that we can go back to mindless gobbling. At least I hope we can't.

B+