The Book Shelf

The Matronly book shelf has been prime real estate since the Matron was just a Wee Miss and read these two books, back to back, during a single summer. The Matron knows she mentioned this before, but, Wee Miss was just 9 and one great big sophisticated half years old when she pulled off this literary feat.



Search inside? Indeed, she did--for precise definition of S-E-X. Regular readers may remember that Grandma Mary referred Wee Miss to Gone with the Wind as the all encompassing authoritative guide to sex.

Her current book shelf is more sobering. First, she's dabbling through a memoir that she taught the past year, looking for new angles. This is BodyToxic: An Environmental Memoir.


Antonetta is a poet, first, and the language here slows down the Matron, she must stop and gasp at its complexity and beauty, all the damn time. This is where the Matron got the phrase "infected with audience" to describe what it feels like to be writing for readers, rather than one's own self.

Check out this line describing the crotchety, judgmental grandfather: "Because he existed mostly to dislike things--a fulcrum into which ideas or things or people wandered and were expelled---his corner of creation became defined by its exclusions, a kind of ontological vacuum."

Go, Grandpa! Because that's more what the Matron would've said. Fulcrum? Wow.

Even better, Antonetta maps the impact of chemicals on her body. She had the great good whooping American fun of growing up in the Jersey sludges, the Superfund playground where companies dropped their chemicals. Her ovaries? Like one billion baby chambers. Liver? Actually, hers turned into a massive tumor. Thyroid? Forget about it. Then there's the brain, and how DET in your milk source makes you bipolar.

All in lush, extravagant drop-your-jaw language, linked to politics and family dysfunction. It's superb.

But. The Matron is weary of superb. She's looking for something fresh next fall, something to wow her students, while serving as guide and model for kick-ass writing. To that end, these are the next two books she will be reading -- The Botany of Desire and Guns, Germs and Steel. They're on the shelf, unopened.





Last week, she finished this.



The pain was nearly too much to bear. The downfall, the love, the randomness, the sacred connections of a family. This isn't so much a 21st century novel as a Universal Tragedy, as timeless as Shakespeare. Don't miss it. But bring tissue and a sinewy heart.

On Friday, July 11 at 9:22 a.m., and with a full day of children and work and cleaning and Satan's Familiar (oh -- he hate two pounds of candy from Candyland yesterday and left the results throughout the house and yard this morning), the Matron started reading this:


She read while loading the dishwasher, on the phone, blogging, checking email, walking the pooping dog, and vacuuming. She finished at 12:47 a.m on Saturday. The book is about a father and son, walking across the destroyed, scarred earth, in search of -- what? People? Food? Hope?

Here's a paragraph from the father's point of view. Mostly, he's wondering if he can kill his son if that unique need (oh my God LOTS of reasons why to) arises.

"He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the wood. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everying uncoupling from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone."

Hands down, one of the most beautiful books she's read in decades. Strangely, optimistic. But in the way that makes you realize human goodness is both miraculous (and therefore not taken lightly) and ordinary.


Going hand-in-hand with all this destruction would be In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. The Matron mentioned him before (thanks for reminding her, Cheri) after she heard a radio interview about this book.



But the book?

The Matron will never, ever approach a carrot the same way again.

Think fertilizer. All those chemicals in the soil mean carrots grow (because Industry needs them) without bugs, or mold or muck and fast, fast, fast. The end result? USDA studies show that carrots have oh - -and she's going from memory here, so correct her -- about 20% of the nutrients they had in the early 20th century.

So the carrot or apple or corn you're eating? That's giving you about 20% of the nutrients it should be. Your body? Wants to keep eating!! Wants more food, more nutrients, anything. Your weight? You know that story. You're overweight, if you're the average American.

There's so much more, about the introduction of Nutrition Sciences during World War II and how food became reduced to a nutrient -- (I need protein! am I getting even beta-carotene? calcium?) -- as opposed to the more relationally-oriented world of whole foods. As in, I would like an apple. I'm craving a piece of meat. Oh, here's the cow I know and am right now feeding. Is that a corn tortilla? Sounds right. Here's where the corn came from.

The Matron fully embraced the barren, broken earth in The Road alongside In Defense of Food.

We don't eat food. We eat chemical compounds. How will that end? Pollan is pretty grim. The Matron thinks he was a consultant for The Road. But he does affirm that the informed can get off the grid and do better. She is!! (oh, and are those children angry!)

Feeling fiesty? Check out your cupboard and see how much is real food and how much chemical. The Matron considers herself sort of health-oriented and hippy-dippy, and she was shocked.