The Orchard Keeper

This book, the long-ago debut of legendary modern American novelist Cormac McCarthy, was not at all done justice my attempt to read it. I read the first half of it during the return coach journey from Sheffield to Berlin, and the coach being full of progressively inebriated economics students was probably not the best reading environment - then I had a solid two weeks of trying (and failing) to get elected, so did no reading and kind of forgot everything that I'd already read of it, and upon returning to the poor neglected book a few days ago was completely lost, but decided to slog apologetically through the remainder and promised myself that I'd just read it again properly someday.
   Even given my terrible approach to this probably-excellent novel, it's not that easy to read. McCarthy's writing style is poetic, verbose, verdant, densely descriptive; it resembles painting more than prose. With a deft turn of phrase he can thrust deeply resonant and specific visions of place and person and deed into the reader's head - which he does most shockingly when narrating acts of meticulous violence. I'd prior read his haunting post-apocalyptic work The Road, and it's probably one of the best novels I ever have. His style pulls you in, fills your head with stark atmospheric landscapes and sad solitary animals and humans observed from a distance, never felt, only seen, settings and figures and actions and descriptions and memories and speech all woven together almost indistinguishable from each other but for the larger collected result of a piercing scene. This style in The Road is pure magic, because there are only two real characters and they're nameless, and the plot is fairly linear and progressive. When I found this book in a second-hand shop the day before I was to leave for Berlin I thought, hey, Cormac's a great writer, I'll get that to read on the 22-hour-each-way journey - bleh. The barely-distinct characters in their inexorably-poignant plots get called 'the man' or 'the boy' or 'the old man', similar to The Road, but here rather than just one everyman and his son going on a walk there are several dozen characters living in a range of time periods with complex relational hinges between all of them.
   The style, the being-on-a-noisy-coach; I got very confused and sort of gave up trying to understand the story. I gathered that there was an outlawed bootlegger called Marion Sylder who befriends a boy called John Wesley Rattner, there was a bar called the Green Fly Inn built suspended over a ravine which unsurprisingly collapses one day, there is an old guy called Arthur Ownby who for reasons I failed to apprehend had a shootout with the police one day before running off to scrape a living selling ginseng roots, there's several wildcats who are the protagonists of their own little scenes and more than a few dogs who pop up all over the place, there's an orchard of bitter apples planted around a burnt-out pit in which is buried a car and the rotting corpse of John Wesley Rattner's father who was beaten to death by someone (maybe Marion but I didn't think he was that old). The story takes decades and hops around a lot, with blurry effectively-anonymous characters acting out sketchy ephemeral passages through the collective history of the lawless godless Tennessee countryside they all populate.
   I honestly couldn't tell you a quarter of what actually happened in the novel. Maybe I'm not supposed to be able to? Maybe it's simply a lengthy experiment in description and scene-setting, which McCarthy is incomparably beautifully good at, coupled with an overall wistful dry recognition of the odd suspensions between a continuous place and an ever-changing set of mortal creatures which occasionally commit murderous actions. Maybe it's that and the actual story doesn't matter so much? I feel that might be right. Maybe it's just a bad novel? No, absolutely not, I just read it very badly indeed.
   Sorry Cormac McCarthy, and sorry to my followers - I can't legitimately recommend this book as a novel, though hopefully I will be able to next time I attempt it. Regardless, I can vouch for it as a painting of words, for which it is truly beautiful. Even my distracted disengaged self was swept along by the torrents and droughts of detail that make up the real weight of the book.

Food Rules

This book, a condensation of wisdom and myth-busting on how and what we eat from wise myth-buster on that same topic Michael Pollan, was an easy, interesting and enjoyable read. Several others of his books are on my extensive 'to-read list', and I came across this small volume at a friend's house, coincidentally found a second-hand copy very cheaply the next day, and breezed through it in a spare ninety minutes this morning.

   Please note, I am not concentrating very hard on doing a great post here, as I am running for one of the elected positions in our Students' Union, and voting closes tomorrow, so while I can spare a few minutes to read and write, I do so with laconic urgency before rushing back to brief my campaign team about tomorrow's endeavours and schedule facebook posts about how great I'd be at making stuff sustainable. Wish me luck.

   Anyway. The book.

   It's written as an antidote to America's relationship with food. The typical western diet (he aims it at the USA but here in England much of it rings true too) is horrendously unhealthy for human beings, and so enormous profitable industries have grown up both feeding us this filth (McDonalds et al) and trying to help cure us of it (pseudoscientific nutritional studies, food products with made up benefits, stupid diet fads, etc). Pollan has spent years researching the actual truth of what we know about our food's impact on our wellbeing, and it's actually quite simple. He boils it down into three broad strokes; eat food, mostly plants, not too much. Building on his extensive depth of knowledge and on less-grounded but surprisingly helpful and relevant scraps of folk-wisdom, he works these principles out in 64 easily-digestible apothegms to help reshape our attitudes to food and make us healthier, happier eaters. Some of these smack true ("Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry"), hit hard ("It's not food if it's called by the same name in every language"), narrowing our options ("Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself") but inarguably for our best interests ("Try not to eat alone"). Basically, buy raw ingredients yourself, mostly plant-based, cook proper meals and eat sensibly. I already do* these things so grand.

   As a compact, concise, clear little book, I hope it will be something of a silver bullet in tackling the west's horrific relationship with our foodstuffs. It has the potential to sell extremely widely and be hugely influential in reforming attitudes to the edible, with potentially enormous implications for public health.

   My one gripe with it is the lack of focus on food sustainability, which is a gigantic issue relating at many points to what he discusses. He advocates substantial reduction in meat and dairy, and trying to buy non-processed local produce, which is great as it aids the cause of our ecosystem, but he doesn't directly endorse aiming for veganism, vegetarianism (or even 'ish'). He even takes a stand against meat substitutes,** on the grounds that they are processed and 'fake'. These are things I'd quarrel with him about to some degree but given that his book is aimed at food health, not food sustainability, I can forgive him these.

   It's overall a great little book. Buy one for every person you know whose diet is terrible. Saying that sounds insensitive but if they take heed they may well be able to form new habits and escape a lifetime of miserable obese slavery to America's fourth most revered and third least benevolent god, Junk Food.

* Rule 64, "Break the rules once in a while", I am glad to have, as it allows me to retain the indispensable suffix 'ish' on my status as a herbivore.

** Not all of them. Quorn is literally grown in vats, so while I'd still argue it's far better than meat and should for that reason be encouraged, fair enough. Tofu, tempeh and other such ancient soy-based protein-lumps he allows. I'd like to think the wholly-plant-derived products of certain modern innovators would count too.