The Botany of Desire

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

I admit that this is the first book I've read about gardening/plants/botany.

I think the main theme of the book is best summed up in this quote, "We automatically think of domestication as something we do to other species, but it makes just as much sense to think of it as something certain plants and animals have done to us, a clever evolutionary strategy for advancing their own interests." The book is divided into four sections--Apple, Tulip, Marijuana, and Potato--with each section tracing the evolutionary history and the story of these plants. As in Monkeyluv, the later sections were better than the first; in the "apple" section, I felt the author was rehashing the same points over and over. However, I did find amusing that Johnny Appleseed's (Chapman's) seeds produce apples suitable only for making hard cider, and that the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was probably a pomegranate! I did enjoy the book immensely, and will probably want my own copy. (One caveat--reading about all the pesticides the potato crop receives, I will be buying more organic produce from now on!)

Some more favorite quotes/ideas:

"But the fact remains that, because of people's idiosyncratic notion of tulip beauty, for several hundred years tulips were selected for a trait that would sicken and eventually kill them." (Based on a virus which changes tulips to "break," making them more beautiful to the Dutch.)

"Far more than a rose, say, or a peony, an actual, specific tulip closely resembles our preconceived idea of a tulip."

"The Greeks believed that true beauty (as opposed to mere prettiness) was the offspring of these two opposing tendencies [symmetry and chaos], which they personified in Apollo and Dionysus, their two gods of art."

meme, "a unit of memorable cultural information... Hell is a meme; so are the Pythagorean theorem, A Hard Day's Night, the wheel, Hamlet, pragmatism, harmony...and of course the notion of the meme itself."

A quote from Huxley, "In one way or another, all our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely 'spiritual,' purely 'intellectual,' purely 'aesthetic,' it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence."

The Last Empress

The Last Empress by Anchee Min

Unfortunately, I was not impressed by this book. Though the story was compelling, I thought the book was poorly written. The narration did not flow smoothly; there were even several points in the novel where I was confused about the timeline. I only read about half the book, and then decided to move on to something else.

In Her Shoes

In her Shoes, Weiner

A fun candy book I read through in one day.