Ask a Book Question: The 46th in a Series (The Third Ford First)

Brian sent me an email asking if we could recommend some books:I’ve been wanting to read some science books lately, anything from pop-science Oliver Sacks type stuff, to the more esoteric… from astronomy to geology to bird-watching to physics, etc… I just don’t know where to start. You have any suggestions?Oliver Sacks is a good author to start with, but there are a lot of other readable science books out there. One of my favorites is Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, which shows how the earth’s geography can explain why civilizations arose where they did. Diamond’s brand new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is getting good reviews, too. John McPhee also has some books that might work for you. Annals of the Former World is a 700 page layman’s guide to the geology of the United States and The Control of Nature is a collection of essays about man’s attempts to tame and make use of natural resources. Brian Greene’s bestseller about string theory, The Elegant Universe rather painlessly delivers complex physics, and Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire explains how plants have evolved to use us as much as we use them creating a counter-intuitive symbiotic relationship. Beyond those you can’t go wrong with Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, and Edward O. Wilson. If please anyone else has suggestions, leave a comment.

Michael wrote in with this question:For some reason (an end of summer shortening of attention span, perhaps) I’m in the mood for poetry, so I was wondering if, in the interest of discussing that other form of literature, the crew at The Millions could suggest some favorite poems, poets or poetry collections (the latter would be especially helpful, its the easiest way to carry around a dozen great mind in your pocket). Anyway, thanks for any suggestions.A trio of Millions contibutors chimed in on this one:Andrew: Full disclosure: my experience with poetry has been minimal, and for the most part it is my obsession with song and music that has led me to certain poets. In this context, then, I have been stirred most by the poetic voice of Leonard Cohen. The very fact that I know his voice intimately from his songs means that I hear his poems, too, spoken in my ear in that same voice. And while he’s often labeled as a darkly intense romantic, in fact some of his finest poems have a light, playful quality. The one that first caught my attention is a little thing called “I Wonder How Many People In This City”, from The Spice-Box of Earth, his second collection of poems from 1961. Here it is in its entirety:I wonder how many people in this citylive in furnished rooms.Late at night when I look out at the buildingsI swear I see a face in every windowlooking back at meand when I turn awayI wonder how many go back to their desksand write this down.All his collections are great, and his first one Let Us Compare Mythologies, from 1956, has recently been reissued. Additionally, many of his poems (including the one cited) and song lyrics can be found within the pages of the massive Stranger Music.Garth: Inspired by Craig Finn of the Hold Steady, I’ve been working my way through John Berryman’s Dream Songs this year. Even for someone like me, who enjoys the fragmentary and fractal poetry of, say, John Ashbery, the Dream Songs were an adjustment, in that point-of-view and syntax are ever-shifting. For the first ten poems, I found myself searching for a way in. But this seems to be one of those great books that teaches you how to read it; I latched on to the rhythm, started reading the poems aloud to myself, and was off and running. One of the pleasures of reading this book is that so many of my friends turn out to have read it, and everyone has different favorites. Dream Songs Week at The Millions, anyone?Emily: If you don’t have a preexisting taste for a particular kind of poetry and you like browsing, there’s really nothing like The Norton Anthology of Poetry – then you’ve got everything from Beowulf to Billy Collins (our former poet laureate, whom I loathe, but many people seem to like) in chronological order, along with brief bios of all the poets, and a bit of a reader’s guide on versification (rhyme, meter, forms) and poetic syntax. But it’s not cheap and with 1828 poems by 334 poets, it’s not a pocket book either.For price and selection – oh, most beloved of American publishers! – you cannot beat Dover paperbacks for poetry collections (where, right now, you can also get Obama and McCain paperdolls). All of their books are between a dollar and $10 and they have both single author collections (Yeats, Rochester – one of my favorites – a dirty, disillusioned Restoration poet, Browning, most wonderful Keats, Blake, Christina Rosetti, Tennyson, Sandburg), and multi-author collections. Favorite American Poems and 101 Best Loved Poems both looked good, but they have historical collections as well, like English Romantic Poetry, if you want to be more methodical in your reading.I also highly recommend the Academy of American Poets. They have an extensive online collection of poetry by American and English poets – more poets than the Norton – and they also have recordings of many of the poets reading their work. I highly recommend listening to Gwendolyn Brooks reading “We Real Cool” or Langston Hughes reading “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” It’s a very user-friendly site and in addition to better biographical sketches than the Norton, they have an index of occasional poems for those so inclined (wedding, funeral, etc).As for individual favorite poems: I love Christopher Smart’s crazy “Jubilate Agno” – it’s a long poem, but a small portion of it gets anthologized and excerpted a lot as “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry” or just “My Cat Jeoffry.” I also love Ogden Nash’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man” (also, if you can find the recording of this, it’s delightful). Robert Herrick’s short poems: “The Night Piece, to Julia,” “Upon Julia’s Clothes,” “Upon Prue, His Maid,” “Delight in Disorder,” and also his pastoral poems like “The Hock Cart” and “Corinna’s Going A-Maying.” Milton is great but he’s a workout – his syntax can be a bit like taking part in WWF Smackdown for some readers. And Marvell’s “The Garden,” his “Mower” poems, and “Bermudas.” Others to try: Gerrard Manly Hopkins, Christina Rosetti’s “Goblin Market,” Dorothy Parker’s “Resume,” Robert Graves, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes’ “The Thought Fox” …There are so many more, but I think I’ve probably already said too much.As a final note: I recommend you begin by reading William Carlos Williams’ “This is just to say” and then read Kenneth Koch’s “Variations on a theme by William Carlos Williams.”

Ms. Millions writes in with this culinary question:I came across this article in the NYTimes Dining + Wine section with a book mention, Know anything about it? Got any other great cookbook recommendations? I know Edan does..;] PS- Happy Birthday to me ;]As Ms. Millions certainly knows, I am no master of haute cuisine — I once made gazpacho from scratch, but it took me six hours — but I do have a sweet tooth for food writing. And it is in this capacity that I first encountered the inspiration for the article mentioned above, Ferran Adria. If memory serves, there is an essay in one of the two Jeffrey Steingarten books, The Man Who Ate Everything or It Must’ve Been Something I Ate, in which Steingarten makes a pilgrimage to Adria’s outlandish restaurant, El Bulli, outside Barcelona. Or maybe it was Calvin Trillin in his book, Feeding a Yen; I can’t remember (I’m a glutton for food books). At any rate, Adria is a fascinating character, part mad scientist part celebrity chef. He spends six months out of the year in a lab in Barcelona devising new technologies to push the limits of cooking. He creates foams and gelatins using unexpected ingredients and he layers flavors and temperatures in his dishes in disconcerting ways. In the book Chef’s Night Out, in which celebrity chefs visit one another’s restaurants, Todd English (whose latest restaurant is on the Queen Mary 2) compares Adria to Willy Wonka, and Nancy Silverton of LA’s own Campanile describes eating at El Bulli as “more of an artistic encounter.” Adria is so out there that even the most adventurous eaters find themselves bewildered by his creations. Nonetheless, Matt Lee and Ted Lee of the Times decided to throw a dinner party using Adria’s techniques. As a guide, they use the El Bulli cookbook, a book that sounds remarkable but appears to be very difficult to get a hold of. After searching around, it doesn’t seem as though there are any books that delve into Adria’s techniques, but I was able to find a couple of books that appear to blend traditional Spanish ingredients with contemporary methods. In The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen Paula Wolfert applies the recent “slow food” trend to Spanish cooking, as well as other Mediterranean cuisines. And El Farol is a book full of contemporary and traditional Spanish recipes from a restaurant of the same name in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Hope this helped. Happy birthday Ms. Millions! (If any cookbook mavens out there have a hot cookbook recommendation, don’t hesitate to leave a comment)

Sara wrote in looking for a specific Hollywood-related novel:I found a link to your site about books relating to Hollywood. I need to buy a gift and can’t remember the title of a recently published fiction book about screenwriting and Hollywood… wondered if you could steer me in the right direction. Interesting site; glad to have found it through google.Glad you found The Millions, Sara. After I received Sara’s question, I immediately thought of a new novel by David Freeman called It’s All True (an exchange of emails confirmed that this was correct) because the book store where I work had just hosted a signing of his new book. Freeman is a “reformed screenwriter,” and his novel about an aging world-weary scribe has been better received than most novels that use Hollywood as a backdrop. The question made me wonder if there are any other notable novels with screenwriter protagonists. I feel like I’m probably missing some notable titles, but I was able to find a couple that sound interesting. Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood. Here’s the description: “Originally published in 1945, Prater Violet is a stingingly satirical novel about the film industry. It centers around the production of the vacuous fictional melodrama Prater Violet, set in nineteenth-century Vienna, providing ironic counterpoint to tragic events as Hitler annexes the real Vienna of the 1930s. The novel features the vivid portraits of imperious, passionate, and witty Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann and his disciple, a genial young screenwriter — the fictionalized Christopher Isherwood.” The other one that caught my eye is a later work by Ray Bradbury called Death Is a Lonely Business. It is an interesting foray into noir with a supernatural twist. I also, in thinking about this question, couldn’t help but recall one of my all time favorite movies, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard about a struggling screenwriter who becomes the kept man of an aging, and increasingly delusional, Hollywood starlet.