One Girl's Books

The Blind Side

Haven't been reading as much as in days past, but today I finished The Blind Side by Michael Lewis.

The Blind Side is the improbable and inspiring story of Michael Oher, a young man poised for NFL greatness after an early life of bleakness in the worst part of Memphis.

Lewis has written a number of sports-themed books and this is the first I've read. The book blends the story of how Oher is taken in by the wealthy, white, sports-mad Tuohy family with the rise of the left tackle position in pro football. Non-sports fans will appreciate the book for the finely drawn portrait of race relations, what it means to be a family and the up from the ashes tale of Oher.

Sports fans will appreciate Lewis' insight into the NFL. The first chapter alone is worth the price of the book. Here.

Book-Related...

Trolling through my now rapidly multiplying subscriptions on Google reader (the Google Labs folks have developed a great blog aggregator http://www.google.com/reader/view/) I stumbled on two interesting book-related posts I thought I would share.

The first can be found here. This is a post on the ephemera blog all about inscriptions found in books. I've found some good ones in used books and this post made me remember some of the good ones I've run across in old paperbacks.

The second post is here and really is more of an "art" posting, rather than a "book" post, but I thought the visuals were pretty cool. There are a number of illustrations from the Codex Seraphinianus which is a strange and magical book that I keep reading about, but have never actually seen. An excellent article about the bizarre book is here. The Wikipedia entry is also enlightening here.

Delicious reads

Two of the best non-fiction books I've read recently are about food. I think food writing is vastly underrated, but seems to be gaining momentum thanks to some popular recent books.

Heat, by Bill Buford and Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain are gripping forays into the hot, sweaty, grimy and fascinating world of high-end kitchens.

Kitchen Confidential will change your entire perception of the restaurant business. You certainly will never order fish on a Monday again. Bourdain is an amazing writer - funny, articulate, foul-mouthed and full of delicious tidbits of insider information. Here.

Heat by Bill Buford is a different sort of book. Buford, a writer for The New Yorker is an amateur chef drawn in to the restaurant scene by the brash and amazing Mario Batali. Buford interns at one of Batali's New York restaurants and becomes so engrossed in the meaning and history of food that he drags his wife off to Italy where he works as an apprentice butcher in the hills of Tuscany. His obsessions - how eggs made their way into pasta and how certain cuts of meat became popular are interesting historical diversions, but the real story is how Buford goes from a "foodie" to a true chef. Here.