Julie Powell’s writing strikes me as overly breezy and self-absorbed. Plus, you may know how I feel about stunt books. So I haven’t any great interest in reading Julie and Julia. I’m eager to see the film adaptation though. Take a look:

I’ll forgive Streep’s performance in Mamma Mia for nothing more than the first [...]

So, it’s not just food and farm books in which someone does something (or does without something) for a year. An
upcoming memoir about a father and son who watch three movies together each week as a condition of the son’s dropping out of school is also wrapped in the one year ribbon. I learned about [...]

Perhaps we are now at the end of the year of the year. Too many writers recently have taken on one-year projects of deprivation or exploration and learned about themselves and the direction and purpose of their lives. Often the products were interesting, but the trope itself has become a bore.
Are food and farm [...]

The Unsettling of America
I am motivated to create this journal as a means of capturing ideas and making connections between them. Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture is an apt starting place because it thoughtfully addresses many things I care about and coherently relates them. I begin with the hope that I can [...]