Nonfiction November:Week 4- Mind Openers

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

Throughout the month of November, bloggers Liz, Frances, Heather,  Rebekah and Deb invite you to celebrate Nonfiction November with us.

Week 4 (11/18-11/22) Mind Openers: One of the greatest things about reading nonfiction is the way it can open your eyes to the world around you—no plane ticket required. What nonfiction book or books have impacted the way you see the world in a powerful way? Is there one book that made you rethink everything? Is there a book that, if everyone read it, you think the world would be a better place? (Rebekah)

Ultra Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … And Why Can’t We Stop? by Chris van Tulleken, who has impressed me on numerous TV programmes on diet and nutrition.

About the Author: ‘He is an infectious diseases doctor at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London. He trained at Oxford and has a PhD in molecular virology from University College London where he is an Associate Professor. His research focuses on how corporations affect human health, especially in the context of child nutrition, and he works with UNICEF and the World Health Organization in this area. As one of the BBC’s leading broadcasters, his work has won two BAFTAs. He lives in London with his wife and two children.’

I kept hearing about ultra processed food (UPF), but had little idea what exactly it is, so when I saw this book I thought it would be ideal – and it is! It is absolutely fascinating, a real eye opener, and it has changed what I think about what I eat! For a long time I have checked the labels on food packaging without actually realising what all those additives are, nor how the food has been processed. For example it has definitely put me off eating crisps and Pringles. It is shocking!

But it’s not easy to give a simple definition of what UPF is! A very short definition is that ‘if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t usually find in a standard home kitchen, it’s UPF.’ (page 5) It’s the processing that is the problem and the additives that are used - such as emulsifiers, flavour enhancers and sweeteners – and it is addictive.

Description from Amazon: An eye-opening investigation into the science, economics, history and production of ultra-processed food.

It’s not you, it’s the food.

We have entered a new ‘age of eating’ where most of our calories come from an entirely novel set of substances called Ultra-Processed Food, food which is industrially processed and designed and marketed to be addictive. But do we really know what it’s doing to our bodies?

Join Chris in his travels through the world of food science and a UPF diet to discover what’s really going on. Find out why exercise and willpower can’t save us, and what UPF is really doing to our bodies, our health, our weight, and the planet (hint: nothing good).

For too long we’ve been told we just need to make different choices, when really we’re living in a food environment that makes it nigh-on impossible. So this is a book about our rights. The right to know what we eat and what it does to our bodies and the right to good, affordable food.

There are chapters on such subjects as why we can’t control what we eat, how our bodies really manage calories and about will power, how UPF hacks our brains, destroys traditional diets and how it is addictive.

I highlighted so much in this book and I think the simplest way of writing about it is to post some of those passages to give you an idea what is in the book that convinced me to cut out eating ultra-processed food (UPF) as much as possible. It’s not easy as so much is now ultra-processed!

Page 5: UPF now (2023) makes up as much as 60% of the average diet in the UK and the USA.

Page 6: a vast body of data has emerged in support of the hypothesis that UPF damages the human body and increases rates of cancer, metabolic disease and mental illness, that it damages human societies by displacing food cultures and driving inequality, poverty and early death, and that it damages the planet.

Page 153 – 154: most UPF is reconstructed from whole food that has been reduced to its basic molecular constituents which are then modified and re-assembled into food-like shapes and textures and then heavily salted, sweetened, coloured and flavoured. … without additives these base industrial ingredients would probably not be recognisable as food by your tongue and brain: ‘It would be almost like eating dirt’.

Page 189: the basic construction materials of UPF are industrially modified carbs, fats and proteins, and the processes they are put through remove all the chemical complexity. The intensity of ultra-processing means that vitamins are destroyed (or deliberately removed in the case of bleaching), fibre is reduced, and there’s a loss of functional molecules like polyphenols. The result is lots of calories but very little other nutrition. … we may be eating more food to compensate for becoming increasingly deficient in micronutrients. … modern diets lead to malnutrition even as they cause obesity.

I could go on and on, but read this book and see for yourself if it makes you think about what you are actually eating. It is a brilliant book!

Top Ten Tuesday: Books on my TBR list with the Earliest Publishing Dates

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

This week’s topic is Books on my TBR list with the earliest publishing dates.

The IIiad by Homer – in the 8th century B.C., around 750 B.C, telling the story of the Trojan War

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra – 1605 and 1615

Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe – 1722

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift – 1726

Waverley by Sir Walter Scott – 1814

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens – 1837

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell – 1848

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell – 1855

The House by the Churchyard by Sheridan Le Fanu – 1861

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky – 1869

Nonfiction November:Week 3 – Book Pairings

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Throughout the month of November, bloggers Liz, Frances, Heather,  Rebekah and Deb invite you to celebrate Nonfiction November with us.

Week 3 (11/11-11/15) Book Pairings: This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or two books on two different areas have chimed and have a link. You can be as creative as you like! (Liz)

Liz further clarifies in her Pairings post:  ‘I offer a mix of fiction/nonfiction pairs, fiction/nonfiction/memoir sets and nonfiction/nonfiction.’

After the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 I decided I needed to know more about what had led up to it. And I found lots of books, including these:

Nonfiction/Fiction – I’m aiming to write more about these books in due course.

Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs And Jews In Palestine And Israel, 1917-2017 by Ian Black (nonfiction)

This is an extremely detailed chronological account of events in this conflict from the years from 1882 preceding the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to 2017. Ian Black was a British journalist who worked for The Guardian holding the posts of diplomatic editor and Europe editor as well as Middle East editor. I’m quoting from his obituary in January 2023: ‘he embodied the correspondent’s duty to show fairness to both parties. That refusal to reinforce the narrative of one side alone informed his writing on the Israel-Palestine conflict from the start.’ So I thought this could be a good place to start. And as far as I can tell it is an unbiased and factual account,with many references to Black’s sources, and it took me a long time to read it. In the Preface Black states:

It tries to tell the story of, and from both sides, and of the fateful interactions between them. … This book is intended for the general reader … It is based on a synthesis of existing scholarship and secondary sources: primary research covering the entire 135-year history is far beyond the capability of any one author. Specialised publications like the Journal of Palestine Studies, Israel Studies, and the Jerusalem Quarterly are vital resources.

I learnt a lot that I hadn’t known before, but I decided I still needed to know more and next I bought:

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know by Dov Waxman (nonfiction), which I’m still reading.

Dov Waxman is the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair of Israel Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and the director of the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. His research focuses on the conflict over Israel-Palestine, Israeli politics and foreign policy, U.S.-Israel relations, American Jewry’s relationship with Israel, Jewish politics, and contemporary antisemitism. He frequently gives media interviews and public talks on these topics. (Taken from his website).

This book is more readable than Black’s and is written as a series of questions and answers covering the conflict from its nineteenth-century origins up to the present day (2019). It explains the key events, examines the core issues, and presents the competing claims and narratives of both sides. In the Preface Waxman states he has tried

to present the different perspectives and narratives of Israelis and Palestinians and avoid ‘playing the blame game’. … Neither side is wholly innocent or completely guilty, and both have legitimate rights and needs.

Out of It: a novel about Israel, Palestine and Family by Selma Dabbagh, fiction.

Selma Dabbagh is a British-Palestinian writer and lawyer. Her 2011 debut novel, Out of It was nominated for a Guardian Book of the Year award in 2011 and 2012 and is one of The Guardian’s list of five best books to explain the Israel-Palestine conflict.

I haven’t read this. I saw it reviewed in The Guardian. It’s set in Gaza City during the Second Intifada in the 2000s. It’s about the Mujahed family, chronicling their hopes and dreams as well as their suffering.

Blurb from Amazon:

Gaza is being bombed. Rashid – an unemployed twenty-seven year

old who has stayed up smoking grass watching it happen – wakes to hear that he’s got the escape route he’s been waiting for: a scholarship to London. His twin sister, Iman – frustrated by the atrocities and inaction around her – has also been up all night, in a meeting that offers her nothing but more disappointment. Grabbing recklessly at an opportunity to make a difference, she finds herself being followed by an unknown fighter.

Meanwhile Sabri, the oldest brother of this disparate family, works on a history of Palestine from his wheelchair as their mother pickles vegetables and feuds with the neighbours.

Written with extraordinary humanity and humour, and moving between Gaza, London and the Gulf, Out of It is a tale that redefines Palestine and its people. It follows the lives of Rashid and Iman as they try to forge paths for themselves in the midst of occupation, religious fundamentalism and the divisions between Palestinian factions. It tells of family secrets, unlikely love stories and unburied tragedies as it captures the frustrations and energies of the modern Arab world.

To the End of the Land by David Grossman, translated by Jessica Cohen (fiction) – another book I haven’t read.

David Grossman is one of the leading Israeli writers of his generation, and the author of numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, and children’s literature. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, and been translated into twenty-five languages around the world. He lives on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

Description from Fantastic Fiction:

Ora is about to celebrate her son Ofer’s release from Israeli army service when he voluntarily rejoins. In a fit of magical thinking, she takes off to hike in the Galilee, leaving no forwarding information for the ‘notifiers’ who might deliver the worst news a parent can hear. Recently estranged from her husband, she drags along an unlikely companion: their once best friend Avram, who was tortured as a POW during the Yom Kippur War and, in his brokenness, refused to ever know the boy or even to keep in touch with them.

Now, as they hike, Ora unfurls the story of her motherhood and initiates the lonely Avram in the drama of the human family – a telling that keeps Ofer alive for both his mother and the reader. Her story places the most hideous trials of war alongside the daily joys and anguish of raising children: never have we seen so clearly the reality and surreality of daily life in Israel, the currents of ambivalence about war within one household, the burdens that fall on each generation anew.

Grossman’s rich imagining of a family in love and crisis makes for one of the great antiwar novels of our time.

Top 5:Books on my TBR that intimidate me

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. For details of all of the latest prompts for October to December, see Meeghan’s post here.

Do you have a pile of books on your TBR that you were “going to read soon” but now it’s been like 5 years and you don’t know how to start that book any more? Maybe it’s 600 pages long. Or maybe you’ve seen some not-so-great reviews that pushed it down a bit. What books on your TBR intimidate you?

These are books I want to read but each time that I look at them I think ‘not now’ because they are so long AND as these are all either hardbacks or paperbacks they’re heavy, unwieldy and in small print!

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens (860 pages) – Nicholas Nickleby, is left penniless after his father’s death and forced to make his own way in the world. There’s an extraordinary gallery of rogues and eccentrics: Wackford Squeers, the tyrannical headmaster of Dotheboys Hall; the tragic orphan Smike, rescued by Nicholas; and the gloriously theatrical Mr and Mrs Crummle and their daughter, the ‘infant phenomenon’. Nicholas Nickleby is characterized by Dickens’s outrage at social injustice, but it also reveals his comic genius at its most unerring.

Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowship (528 pages) described on the back cover as a story that takes us back to the Debutante Season of 1968 – ‘Poignant, funny, fascinating and moving’ . Wishing to track down a past girlfriend who claims he had fathered her child, the rich and dying Damian Baxter contacts an old friend from his days at Cambridge. The search takes the narrator back to 1960s London, where everything is changing–just not always quite as expected.

The Women’s Room by Marilyn French (544 pages), described as ‘one of the most influential novels of the modern feminist movement.’ It was first published in 1977 to a barrage of criticism. This is the story of Mira Ward, a wife of the Fifties who becomes a woman of the Seventies. From the shallow excitements of suburban cocktail parties and casual affairs through the varied nightmares of rape, madness and loneliness to the dawning awareness of the exhilaration of liberation, the experiences of Mira and her friends crystallize those of a generation of modern women.

The Wine of Angels by Phil Rickman (623 pages) – the first Merrily Watkins novel, in which the Rev Merrily Watkins tries to be accepted as the vicar (or priest-in-charge as she insists she ought to be called) in the country parish of Ledwardine in Herefordshire, steeped as it is in cider and secrets and echoes of the poet Thomas Traherne who was once based in the area.

This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson (750 pages) – In 1831 Charles Darwin set off in HMS Beagle under the command of Captain Robert Fitzroy on a voyage that would change the world. This is the story of a deep friendship between two men, and the twin obsessions that tear them apart, leading one to triumph, and the other to disaster.

The Stars Look Down: Book Beginnings & The Friday 56

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

I’m featuring The Stars Look Down by A J Cronin. It’s my current Classics Club Spin book – the rules of the Spin are that this is the book for me to read by 18th December, 2024. So, as it has 712 pages I thought I’d better start reading it now.

Chapter One:

When Martha awoke it was still dark and bitter cold. The wind, pouring across the North Sea, struck freezingly through the cracks which old subsidences had opened in the two-roomed house. Waves pounded distantly. The rest was silence.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. You grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

‘It had come upon her then, while her husband was in prison, the last indignity. And before her grown sons. Inscrutable as the darkness which layabout her, she thought rapidly. She would not have Dr. Scott, nor Mrs Reedy, the midwife , either.

Description from Goodreads

The Stars Look Down was A. J. Cronin’s fourth novel, published in 1935, and this tale of a North country mining family was a great favourite with his readers. Robert Fenwick is a miner, and so are his three sons. His wife is proud that all her four men go down the mines. But David, the youngest, is determined that somehow he will educate himself and work to ameliorate the lives of his comrades who ruin their health to dig the nation’s coal. It is, perhaps, a typical tale of the era in which it was written – there were many novels about coal mining, but Cronin, a doctor turned author, had a gift for storytelling, and in his time wrote several very popular and successful novels.

In the magnificent narrative tradition of The Citadel, Hatter’s Castle and Cronin’s other novels, The Stars Look Down is deservedly remembered as a classic of its age.

What do you think, does this book appeal to you? What are you currently reading?

Top Ten Tuesday: Book Covers with a House/s on the Cover

Published on by Margaret21 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

This week’s topic is Books with [Item] on the Cover. This means you choose the item! I’ve chosen Covers with House/s on the Cover.

The Blackhouse by Peter May – Detective Inspector Fin Macleod investigates a murder on the remote Scottish Isle of Lewis shrouded in secrets.

The House of Silence by Linda Gillard –  a novel about families and their secrets – in particular one family, the Donovans, setting in an old Elizabethan manor house, Creake Hall.

The Flower Arranger at All Saints by Lis Howell – a murder mystery set in a Cumbrian village where the Phyllis the church flower arranger is found dead before the big Easter service.

Autumn Chills by Agatha Christie, a collection of autumn-themed mysteries. Twelve supernatural mysteries and murderous plots featuring Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and Agatha Christie’s other favourite detectives.

Road Ends by Mary Lawson – a novel set in Canada and Britain about a family in crisis.

The Hog’s Back Mystery by Freeman Wills Croft – an Inspector French murder mystery novel a Golden Age police procedural. When Dr Earle disappears from his cottage, Inspector French is called in to investigate.

The Brontes by Juliet Barker – a biography of the Bronte family containing a wealth of information, with illustrations, copious notes and an index.

The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard – the first in the Cazelet Chronicles. In 1937, the coming war is only a distant cloud on Britain’s horizon. The Cazalet households prepare for their summer pilgrimage to the family estate in Sussex.

Corduroy Mansions by Alexander McCall Smith – set  in a London mansion block, telling the stories of its residents. 

Agatha Christie at Home by Hilary Macaskill – this lovely book explores and illustrates the significance of Devon in Christie’s work, and of Greenway, her house in Devon in particular, —its magnificent gardens and its beautiful setting.