Tom & Alissa

I did manage to get some books read in between the hundreds of pages I’m reading for school.

Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste - Herbert Gans
This was actually for class. It’s apparently a classic in the academic study of popular culture; it was originally published in the 1970s and then updated via postscript around the turn of the millenium. Gans tackled the idea of popular culture in a time when nobody was talking about it in the academy. He surveys different “taste cultures”, from high culture to middle cultures to low cultures and the different entertainment/art-related choices that they make, and then makes some nebulous policy proposals for funding popular culture. Unfortunately, I (along with my classmates) found the book a bit patronizing and realized that the arguments had become woefully dated with the advent of the internet, but unfortunately, the “updates” didn’t sufficiently address the changes. [2/5]

Love, Work, Children - Cheryl Mendelson
The second in Mendelson’s “Morningside Heights” trilogy, this is a comedy/drama of manners and hearkens back to Dickens and (especially) Austen in its language. The catch is that it’s set in present-day upper Manhattan. As with most books that try to get inside the heads of lots of protagonists (The Corrections, so far, being the grand exception), the book ends up lurching around a bit and doing too much “telling” instead of showing. However, something keeps drawing me back to Mendelson’s books. I think I just enjoy reading about the intelligentsia of my town. I don’t think it will be abiding literature, but it was enjoyable, and despite its length, a quick read. [3/5]

Slow Food: The Case for Taste - Carlo Petrini
Yes, at long last, I’ve finished it. Petrini is the founder of the “slow food” movement in Italy and the book is his extended essay outlining the founding of the movement and the many ways it has manifested itself, from educational outreaches to “convivia” to publications to the “ark” concept, which seeks to preserve dying (think “endangered”) forms of regional food. The first part of the book would be a great starting place for people trying to get a grasp on what slow food is all about. A bit pedantic at times, but still thought-provoking and very short (despite how long it took me to read it). [3/5]

Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading - Eugene Peterson
This took a while, too, but it’s not Peterson’s fault. He’s a wonderfully engaging writer. The book takes the reader through a comprehensive (but still short and not drawn-out) overview of reading the Bible, from where it came from, to the ways we’ve subtly bent the Bible to fit what we want it to mean, to what we mean by “inspired”, to lectio divina, to a historical explanation of how we got the text we have now from the Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek. Peterson concludes with an explanation of why he embarked on “translating” The Message, which should help those who are dubious to see it in a new light. Definitely recommended to anyone who’s spent their life reading the Bible and are finding it a bit stale, or who find the Scripture explanations they’ve always been given to be less than intellectually rigorous. [4/5]

My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro - Jeffrey Eugenides (ed.)
This was probably the best Valentine’s present ever. Almost 600 pages of classic and not-so-classic love stories, carefully edited by Eugenides, who is officially the best short-story anthology editor I’ve ever encountered (and not a half-bad novelist, either). The stories deal with “love” in all its forms, from lust to infatuation to romance to real true commitment, in marriage and outside marriage, old, young, beautiful and wince-inducing. Recommended to the married folks mostly. (Probably not a book to hand to your teenager, either.) [5/5]

With probably-moving and writing a big research paper this month, I don’t think I’ll get much read in April, but who knows.