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23 August 2004
end-of-the-summer reading
The fall semester of my 3L year begins today, the syllabi and reading assignments for my classes are already in hand, so before I turn my attention to evidence, copyright, art law, and questions of professional responsibility... a few notes about the books I've been finishing this last week:
Stiff by Mary Roach has been a hoot, but perhaps I feel this way because I had seriously considered applying for a position with the San Francisco coroner's office when it seemed like my publishing career would not be resuscitated. Terrence, who tolerates hearing about so many of my peculiar interests, made it clear that his tolerance would not extend to hearing about my day if my day was spent examining dead bodies. So... no surprise, perhaps, that all these years later I found this book so intriguing. Roach has a witty, sometimes outrageous style, but I find the questions she asks are the very ones I'd like answered, so she's been a great tour guide through the world of cadavers.
Grace and Power by Sally Bedell Smith reads like a giant Vanity Fair article, but that's not necessarily a bad thing in biography, and made this large (~640 pages) book much easier to digest. Makes one a little sad, too, particularly during an election season in which one seems to think more about whom one wants out of office, instead of whom to elect. (But that's nothing new, is it? I mean, when I was very young--six years old or so--my neighbor informed me that elections are more about someone being booted out of office than someone being elected in a positive spirit to a public office.) Anyway, this was an interesting view of the Kennedy White House, and not a bad summer biography.
In the week since Julia Child's death I've found myself reading once again through the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and enjoying some of the pieces and profiles that have appeared over the years and which are now available online, including the mini-biography in The New Yorker by Calvin Tomkins (whose work I've enjoyed since reading Living Well is the Best Revenge, his biograph of Gerald and Sara Murphy). The Tomkins piece is available in the New Yorker's now online archives and also here as a pdf, if the link doesn't work. I also found myself rereading Julie Powell's Julie/Julia blog, chuckling and smiling, and was pleased to see a memorial piece written by Powell for the Times.