Books #76 and 77: Persuasion and Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Like I said after reading Wives and Daughters, I started wanting to re-read all the Jane Austen novels, so these were the first two I picked up. I'm saving Pride and Prejudice for last, and I started with the two that I couldn't remember at all. And I realize WHY I didn't remember them, really--because the two main characters are SO BORING. I mean, the story is really good (in both novels), but Anne and Fanny are basically the same person--quiet and shy to the point of total silence around anyone else, 100% concerned with their duty and propriety, letting everyone walk all over them and say rude things to them without ever responding in any way. And I guess that's what the ideal was for women back then (or at least that's the way the books make it seem), but it kind of gets old. I wanted Fanny to tell Mrs. Norris to stop being rude, and wanted Anne to tell Mary to shut up. But of course they're too perfect to do that. But these books were great to read again! I do love Jane Austen's style--I think someone should write a book in her style but about modern people. I'm definitely not the person to do that, although I wish I were. Someone else get on that!

Book #75: Nemesis by Agatha Christie

We listened to this on our way to the Outer Banks. It was only two CDs long, but it was a perfect road trip mystery. It was a Miss Marple mystery, and since Miss Marple is my favorite Agatha Christie sleuth, it was very entertaining. She gets a posthumous letter from a deceased friend who asks for her help in an unnamed case, so she has to figure out what the case/problem is AND what the solution is, and she ends up clearing someone who had been wrongly accused of murder. Good times!

Book #74: Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

I don't know where I was for the majority of my life, because I'd never heard of Elizabeth Gaskell before last year. Tommy's sister Lindsay recommended Wives and Daughters and North and South (another Gaskell novel) to me and I read them last year and loved them. And just recently, Tommy and I found the miniseries on Netflix Instant Streaming and watched them both--and they were awesome! So awesome that it made me want to re-read at least this book, which I'd conveniently recently found at a used bookstore on my birthday (one of Tommy's bday presents to me). Even though this book is over 600 pages long, it's such a page-turner for me. I finished it in just a few days because I was so into it. The original novel had a subtitle of "An Every-day Story," which is just perfect as a description for the plot. There's nothing too fantastic or dramatic or climactic about this book--but there are such excellent characters and such realistic situations that you can't help wanting to see what's coming.

The most TERRIBLE thing about this book is that Gaskell actually died before she finished the book! At most, there are maybe one or two chapters left before all the loose ends would have been tied off, and Molly and Roger would have been happily married and everything would be made right in the world. As it is, the novel ends on a very abrupt note, which leaves you depressed and feeling gypped. It's SUCH a great book, though--and it's made me want to go back and re-read all of the Jane Austen books (I've already started Persuasion). So excited!

Book #73: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do by Tom Vanderbilt

This book was really, really fascinating. As you might expect from the title, it's an investigation into all things related to driving--how we drive, what we think about when we drive, how we react to traffic signs, how traffic norms differ from culture to culture, etc. This is something Tommy and I are always talking about (aren't we all, since we all drive all the time?) and it was really cool to learn more about why traffic lights are so obnoxious and how traffic jams happen. Vanderbilt researched tons of scholarly articles and compiled them here, in addition to interviewing traffic engineers in cities across the world. Several very interesting things that I remember off the top of my head:

-There are actually people who work as traffic engineers! Yes, I actually knew that, but it's amazing to imagine people actually plan and design the roads and intersections to be the way they are, and there are reasons for every little decision that is made about their design (or at least there should be): how much to curve the road, how long the light should last until it changes to yellow, how many lanes to add to the road.
-The intersection of the 405 and the 10 in Santa Monica is the most congested part of freeway in the country--and we lived about two miles from it this summer! No wonder it always took us 25 minutes or more to drive the 4.6 miles to the temple.
-People assume they're better drivers than they are. They also assume that the safer/newer/nicer their car is, the worse they can drive and get away with it without any serious problems, which basically just cancels out the advantages that new safety additions bring to your new, nice, safe car.
-The best way to make things safer may just be to make the roads more dangerous. People drive more cautiously and therefore get into fewer accidents on thin, windy roads than they do on wide, smooth highways.
-People think that the better way to get rid of traffic is to add more roads, or more lanes to the roads that exist, but even when you do that, they get filled up. It's a real-life equivalent to "If you build it, they will come"--there have to be other, better ways to fight congestion.

These are all just general facts that I remember from the book, but it's filled with really fascinating statistics and case studies that make these ideas much more meaningful. I'm going to get Tommy to read it because it's so interesting, and I think something that he'd really enjoy--he's always joking that his goal after he graduates is to fix the horrible algorithms that are used to organize traffic lights. He'll just have to fight the traffic engineers to do it first.

Book #72: Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink

As is probably obvious, I am a not-so-secret fan of nonfiction, particularly nonfiction that describes scholarly social science research in a popular way so anyone can understand it. I think it stems back to Freakonomics, which was the first-ever book of nonfiction I read when I was much younger, and which totally rocked my world. I found it so interesting because it was so applicable and describing things in real life--and I've continued to love books like that ever since. Mindless Eating focuses on research having to do with food and how we eat (as should be obvious from the subtitle of the book). Wansink is the head of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, where they basically do tons of studies about how our environment influences what and how much we eat. For example, the bigger your plate, the more you serve yourself, and the more you eat. The shorter and stouter your cup, the more you pour yourself, and the more you drink. The healthier a food bills itself to be ("Low fat! No Carbs! Gluten Free!"), the more you eat. When you eat while watching TV or with any type of distraction like reading or conversation, you eat more. The Food and Brand Lab have done a number of really fascinating studies where they bring people in and put them through an experiment, usually where they offer them food in a certain situation to see what they do with it, and the results are pretty consistent. We eat mindlessly, and we do so all the time.

One interesting thing about the book is that it doesn't bill itself as a diet book, but it does offer suggestions for takeaways for readers to improve their own eating habits now that they have the knowledge offered in the book. Lots of them are just small changes in habits that you can make, like serving out portion sizes in small bowls instead of eating chips straight from the bag. At the end of the book, he suggests making three small changes in your eating habits and keeping track of them for a month, instead of going on a big diet. I really like that idea--I feel like we've been doing a really great job at eating relatively healthy (particularly lately), but there are ALWAYS things we can do to improve. I want to be sure we eat at least some fruit and vegetable at both lunch and dinner as much as possible (even if it's just lettuce on the sandwich), so I think that's one goal we'll make. Of course, we are coming up on the holiday season, and we'll be visiting family for three weeks and won't have as much control over what we're eating, but it's never a bad time to start trying to be healthier.

Book #71: American Wasteland by Jonathan Bloom

I picked this book up at the library after reading The Kitchen Counter Cooking School because it was one of the books in the "Recommended Reading" section. In KCCS, one of the chapters (and one of the lessons for the students) was about how to use up your leftovers and not waste/throw out tons of food you paid good money for. I liked their ideas so much that I've been thinking a lot about using up ALL of the food we get, not just finishing half of the red onion we bought for a salad and then letting it rot until we throw it away. If you think about it, if you used the other half of the red onion that you weren't planning on using, it's like you got it for free. And I can definitely get behind that idea.

American Wasteland is like that whole concept, but on steroids. Bloom is a waste-obsessed blogger-turned-journalist/writer who goes around looking to see how much food is wasted in the U.S. (and according to some statistics, it's around 50% of the food produced) and what we can do to make that number smaller. Food is wasted at all points in the food distribution process--from food not harvested and left to rot in the fields, to food thrown out because it got to warm during transportation, to food thrown out from supermarkets because it's reached its sell-by date (even though it's still totally edible), to food wasted at restaurants, to food that we buy and ends up going bad. It's pretty impressive when you think about it, and Bloom shares some interesting anecdotes and experiences of massive amounts of food waste. He also provides a lot of great tips on how we can reduce our food waste at the end of the book as well. My only complaints about this book was that it got a bit repetitive (every chapter could have been titled: Food Is Being Wasted Unnecessarily--Do Something About It!) and his tone was a bit over the top. I mean, yes, I do think that food waste is not a great thing and that we should definitely do what we can to reduce it. He even provides some convincing arguments for why it is so bad. But he made it sound equivalent to real, serious human issues like human trafficking in the way he talked about it, which bugged me. But that's his THING, so I can see why he writes so seriously about it.

Bonus: He lives in Durham, North Carolina, so most of his research and most of the places he writes about are in the Triangle area! That was pretty neat to read about some local food waste efforts (and some of the not-so-great locations of really bad food waste).