The Sod-House Frontier 1854-1890, by Everett Dick (1937)
I first read this book for a college history class I hated. We had to do a book report, and I was searching futilely for any history book I felt I could possibly read without fainting from boredom, and lucky me the book that fit those requirements was well over 500 pages long, three times the required length. I spent a whole weekend reading in my dorm room, and then tried to buy a copy of the book from the college bookstore. No go, as it turned out---it's way too old. Still, it clearly wooed me and won me, and now I've returned for a second fling. What I love about the book is that you won't find anything even vaguely like a history textbook. Everything's in a big hodge-podge, and though I'm sure there's some kind of rhyme and reason, there isn't a subject heading over each paragraph. Most of the book is anecdotes, quotes, and little tidbits the author dug up who knows where. An aspect to the book you need to be warned about is one you probably heard in history class: a history book tells you almost as much about the time when it was written as it tells you about the time it was written about. This book was published in 1937 by a man born in 1898, so the occasional unacceptable word or attitude comes through---"darky" is a notable example. Aside from that, the whole thing is a wonderful read.
Compatibility Test: Even---no, especially---if you hate history.
What To Eat When You're Expecting, by Arlene Eisenberg, Heidi E. Murkoff, and Sandee E. Hathaway (1986)
I had never associated sugar with the Antichrist, but no doubt it's that kind of ignorance that's sending our society straight to Nutritional Hell. White bread, as it turns out, is also among the Legions of the Damned. This is a book that takes healthy eating to a new level of paranoia, then invites as its dinner-guest the subgroup mostly likely to buy into the panic: pregnant women. However, if you're pregnant and reasonable and you want someone to tell you what you should be eating, this is the book that can show you the way. The most helpful part of the book lists what counts as what. This is where you learn, if you didn't know already, that you can get your vitamin C from blueberries or your calcium from almonds; and you can read with open mouth and incredulous eyes how many servings of each kind of nutrient you should be forcing into your puffy nauseated body. Much of the book is exceptionally helpful and instructive; it lost me only when it told me that I could "cheat" once per week by eating a single white dinner roll. The authors also champion the dubious argument that fructose is nutritionally superior to sucrose, a view not backed by any of the reputable doctors I know. I would have enjoyed the book more if it had allowed room for human fallibility, perhaps by including an anecdote from each author telling about the time she ate an entire pan of frosted brownies while sitting on the kitchen floor. I'm sure it happened, but the total insistence on the standard of unmarred sinless Purity of Eating made me feel rebellious. At one point I was reading the book while eating from a bag of double-dipped chocolate-covered peanuts, a snack I hadn't even wanted until I got to the sticking-my-tongue-out stage with the over-the-top stern lecturing. I recommend the book highly as a guide but not as a Bible: read it for assistance and motivation and reference, but leave it alone if the guilt of eating two white dinner rolls is going to put you over the edge.
A note: Since writing this review I've heard (always second-hand) that some OBs and nutritionists feel that the book is inaccurate on many points. Consult a doctor you trust before launching full-force into any eating plan, especially while pregnant.
Compatibility Test: Pregnancy, or the intention to get pregnant.
Ever Since Eve: Personal Reflections on Childbirth, by Nancy Caldwell Sorel (1985)
This is the best pregnancy book I've read so far. It's a series of stories about famous people and people from other times, and how they felt about pregnancy and childbirth. A few names you might recognize: Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, Queen Victoria, Sigmund Freud, Pablo Picasso, Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, Ingrid Bergman, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, Napoleon Bonaparte, Sophia Loren, and Margaret Mead. Despite the occasional sad story, the whole outlook of the book is "Women have been doing this from the beginning of time and so can you." By the end of it I felt that I could deliver my own baby by myself in the kitchen and then mop up the floor, take a shower, bake a pie, and hostess a dinner party that evening to celebrate.
Compatibility Test: Pregnancy.
Coping With Being Pregnant, by Adrienne Kurland (1988)
She has got to be kidding. "Don't eat too many vegetables, girls, they'll make you fat"? "Let's not get carried away with those glasses of skim milk, ladies"? A story about the girl who didn't go to the doctor regularly and so died from toxemia? Jesus.
The text of the book is in "Now We Learn To Read" style: "When Tracy was a little girl, her mother was always after her to brush her teeth and go to the dentist. Now she was a big girl and didn't have her mother to nag her anymore. She hated the dentist and hardly ever went for visits. She also hated to brush her teeth. All through her pregnancy so far, she had no problems with her teeth. One morning she awoke with a toothache." And so on. Chapters are called "Can't I Even Blow Some Grass?" and "Can We Still Do It?" What kind of audience is this book aimed at? The pregnant, drug-addicted, mentally-impaired, 6-year-old?
The author has an "R.N." after her name, but by the end of the book I didn't care if she were Goddess of All Medicine, she doesn't know what she's doing. It is insane to tell young girls (or anyone who's pregnant) to limit intake of vegetables and skim milk so they won't "get fat," or to suggest that ignoring the author's advice leads to immediate, painful death. Sometimes people believe what they read, especially if they are too young to yet possess important critical thinking skills.
The Genesis Files, by Bob Biderman (1991)
Many books serve as vehicles for the author to get across not only a story but also a certain subtly presented political or social viewpoint. Some take this a little farther and hit you over the head with it. This book transcends even that, heading for the knee-to-the-groin approach. In fact, the book has so little plot, such lowbrow-TV-show dialogue, such boring characters, such poor quality writing, and such an unsatisfactory ending, I'm tempted to think it was written only for the purpose of preaching the author's paranoid feelings about the United States As Great White Satan. Furthermore, can anyone explain to me why people keep using the word "Genesis" in book titles to mean that the book deals with issues of ominous biological experiments? It's so overused that now it means to me only that the author never reads any books himself.
Compatibility Test: I can't bear to think about the kind of person who would like this book.
Madeleine's Ghost, by Robert Girardi (1995)
I can't tell from the about-the-author, but it seems to me that this book is less a novel than it is Literature, written by an English major who would wear turtlenecks and tweed jackets with suede elbows. It's nice, every so often, to read a book that probably took a little education and effort to write. Too bad he had to blow it by having unlikely sex scenes every few pages, marring the landscape of what was otherwise, for the most part, absorbing and almost classical writing. The author's photograph shows a man in his 20s or early 30s---perhaps we can expect more from him in a decade or so. Ned Conti, the main character, lives in New York, in an apartment haunted by a ghost. The ghost becomes more and more violent and destructive until Ned overcomes a lifelong platform of cynicism to seek help. At around the same time, he gets involved in a priest's project to prove that a local nun was a saint and he gets re-involved with a crazy rich girlfriend who has so many problems she has to alternate between telling about them and having sex up against walls after taking drugs. Gradually the mystery of the ghost is revealed, a mystery that, as it happens, is intertwined with the history of the nun and the history of the crazy depressed druggie nympho.
Compatibility Test: Please don't read this book just because I mentioned the sex scenes---you can pick up a Harold Robbins book to get the same thing. Read this book if the other plot lines interested you more.
Three and a Half Husbands, by Dorothy Fuldheim (1976)
The author's Aunt Molly was far from being a liberated woman if you take into account only her career aspirations and courting philosophies, but she had a strong will and a strong mind that brought her beyond the ranks of women who run themselves ragged as slaves of work and family to prove how independent they are. Aunt Molly marries and is widowed three times within five years. Each husband leaves behind sons from previous families, and Aunt Molly becomes mother to all nine of them. Molly's family is Jewish, so there's a heavy measure of Jewish dialect humor throughout. The author over-summarizes what the reader already knows, and some of the historical bridges between sections get singsong and idealistic ("They wanted passionately to be completely American, to learn the language, to succeed. For this they labored twelve hours a day, never dreaming that they were the forebears of generations that would see the highest standard of living in the world. America and its promises sang like a litany in the hearts of the oppressed throughout Europe and Asia. Intoxicated by the song of freedom and the melody of hope and fortune, they...."), but you can skim those and get back to the good stuff about Aunt Molly.
Compatibility Test: Appreciation for Jewish dialect humor; no feminist chip on your shoulder.
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (1994)
There's this baby named Adam and he's the Antichrist, and he's supposed to be switched at birth with the baby born to the wife of the Satan-worshiping American Cultural Attache who intends to name him "Warlock," but there's a mix-up and he's given instead to a perfectly normal never-seen-the-inside-of-a-pentagram small-town couple. Other supernatural beings on Earth at this time include Aziraphale, an angel who prefers collecting rare first editions to enforcing the "You see a wile, you thwart" policy; Crowley, "an angel who did not so much fall as saunter vaguely downwards" whose immaculately maintained antique Bentley turns all cassettes into Best of Queen after a fortnight; and The Four Motorcyclists of the Apocalypse. Everything that ensues has been predicted by Agnes Nutter in the only prophetic book ever written that contains accurate information. It's difficult to imagine the authors looking church in the eye after this book was published. This is high comedy, totally irreverent.
Compatibility Test: If you've never read a book by Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett (I don't know about Neil Gaiman, but apparently he has the same sense of humor), this would be a fine time to start.
The Solitaire Mystery: A Novel About Family and Destiny, by Jostein Gaarder (1996)
This beautiful book is for anyone who was entranced by Lewis Carroll's Alice books but felt that many of the characters and situations were just a little too disturbing and scary. In The Solitaire Mystery, a little boy named Hans Thomas is traveling by car across Europe with his father to try to fetch home his mother who ran away to find herself 8 years ago. On the way, a stranger gives Hans Thomas a magnifying glass, and then, in another town, another stranger gives him a tiny book with letters too small to see without it. The story he reads involves an island not found on any map, where everything is oversized and a pack of cards comes to life as the result of a shipwrecked sailor's loneliness. As he reads more and more of the book, he begins to be startled by some of the similarities between what's happening in the book and what's happening in his own life. Mysteries in his own family---What happened to his grandfather, a soldier who disappeared after romancing Hans Thomas's grandmother so many years ago? Why did Hans Thomas's mother run off without an explanation?---slowly solve themselves, and the solutions are in the care of a 12-year-old boy with his decades-old book. I was deeply suspicious of this book when I chose it because it was translated from Norwegian and the author is a philosopher, but it's an honest-to-goodness grown-up fairy tale and not a watered-down Disney-style one, either.
Compatibility Test: If you're still intrigued by Alice's giant games of chess and cards, but wish that you'd never heard the "Speak harshly to your little boy / And beat him when he sneezes" poem.
Having Babies: Nine Months Inside an Obstetrical Practice, by Thomas Congdon (1994)
Imagine allowing a writer to sit in on your ultrasounds and perhaps even on the birth of your baby. A surprising number of patients allowed it so that this book could be written. The author spent nine months interviewing the doctors, staff, and patients in a real obstetrical practice, then wrote it into a book. The most interesting part of the book to me was learning what the staff thought about the patients behind their backs. This is a good way to research what jokes and complaints they've heard a million times before; it's also a good way to give yourself a complex worrying about what they'll think of you. I felt a little annoyed the tenth time a staff member bitched about the way a patient's concerns were interfering with her workday. Parts of the book are difficult to take: there are several birth defects and infant deaths, and the husband of one of the patients dies during her pregnancy. If you're pregnant and weepy and worried, perhaps it would be better to choose a happier book. Otherwise, the book is fabulous for anyone who keeps switching jobs because they're so interested to know what different businesses are like behind the scenes. There is also a lot of interesting information on the different procedures involved with pregnancy and delivery, and on the inner workings of hospital hierarchy. I hate to mention the one thing I had a major problem with because this comes up so often I'm beginning to feel like a broken record, but I feel strongly that the emphasis on gaining as little weight as possible is a bad, bad idea. A woman who gained only a quarter pound in a month was praised by the staff, celebrated by her husband, and admired by the author, who calls her "the ideal pregnant woman." A woman who gained 30 pounds (well within the recommended 25-35 pound doctors supposedly recommend) was chastised for gaining too much weight.
Compatibility Test: You nosy thing, you---you'll love it.