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What do western Europeans do with all of their free time? The last twenty-fourhours of my life have been filled with calls to doctors, and insurance companies trying to get my insurance company to authorize pay for a non-invasive diagnostic screening in lieu of an invasive, expensive one that I’d rather avoid. Needless to say, in our fee-for-service medical marketplace, the doctor (I hesitate to call him my doctor – let’s just say he’s the only specialist available to request the proper authorization) preferred the more expensive one, at, oddly, the potential expense of my personal health.

Read the rest . . . .

I read Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food because it seemed like a good way to round out my survey of currently popular books about food.  I say, skip this and move right on to Nina Planck’s Real Food, Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calfories, The Untold Story of Milk, or any number of other books that critically address our nation’s food supply and ‘nutrition’ based diet.

This book is no more than a lengthened magazine article. It lacks depth, and moreover, passion. The book lacks the investigative journalism of Pollan’s previous Omnivore’s Dilemma, and falls down in the interpretation of science. He criticizes Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories), but without conviction. This pamphlet may have some merit, but Pollan lost credibility when he failed to acknowledge that lactose intolerance is a scientific invention. Unpasteurized milk has plenty of lactase which make lactose digestible. Our country’s insistence on processes that ostensibly protect our food supply by destroying essential enzymes and nutrients is completely ignored.

A Rendezvous to Remember has been lingering on my bookshelf for over a year.  In fact, I must have met the author, Geri Krotow at some point because there is a personal inscription in the book, and I use her personalized pen to make shopping lists in the kitchen.  The book, however, just wasn’t for me.  I found the theme kind of charming: heroine discovers true meaning of love by witnessesing (through her grandparents’ journals) tests of real love during one of life’s greatest trials – the Second World War.

My biggest issue with the book was the lack of authenticity with the voices of the heroine’s grandparents.  We’re reading journals of first, her grandmother in Nazi occupied Belgium for whom English is her second language.  But the book is peppered with American English jargon and colloquialisms pulling me out of the story.  When the heroine’s grandmother mentioned her desire to move to the ’suburbs’ in a 1946 entry, I almost gave up just then.  First, suburbs as they are now perceived as havens from cities, crime, and blacks didn’t come into existence until the 1950s.  Second, it seemed an unrealistic goal for a character where survival had been paramount for much of her adult life.

Then there was the romance.  Divorcing couple disover they still love each other, and to top it off there’s an epilogue filled with baby love.

Everyday I move farther and farther from category romances.  They read like the McDonald’s of their genre: processed, non-nutritional bites of homogenized sameness.  But, then again, don’t take my word for it – other romance readers loved it.

I don’t know how many more Grant County books are out there, but Indelible will be my last.  While the plot of Indelible was quite clever – intervweaving events in the past and present – it still strains disbelief.  Grant County is at the heart of yet ANOTHER tragedy, first a gang of child molestors/pornographers, then multiple murders, and now a violent rampage in police headquarters leading to many deaths (and this doesn’t even count the books I haven’t read – but I imagine there are more bodies piled up around the area).  Before this series is over, there wont be anyone left in Grant County to tell the tale – other than our intrepid Lena of course.

For more than twenty years, Maeve Binchy has been an auto-read for me. (And I think I’ve even shelled out for a hardcover or two). I loved her earlier books filled with tales of small Irish towns, petty, and not so petty grievances, and wonderfully complicated relationships.

In 1996, however, with the book, Evening Class, I felt Ms. Binchy had made a left turn in her writing. Instead of writing novels, it seemed her books were more like short story collections. And with Whitethorn Woods, and this book Heart and Soul, I feel that Binchy is really giving us more a book of vignettes than a fully developed novel.

In Heart and Soul we meet a few new characters who come together to create and staff and cardiac rehabilitation clinic. And the new characters were touching, Ania and her tragic background from Poland, and Clara Casey and her family. However, I felt this book spent far too much time trying to tie up loose ends from past books including Evening Class and Whitethorn Woods. Unfortunately, unlike Binchy, I have not kept this grand running list of characters in my head. Instead, the reintroduction of Nora O’Donahue, Cathy Scarlet, Brenda Brennan, and the twins Simon and Maud niggled the brain.

I couldn’t relax and let the story unfold.  Instead,  I kept shaking my head trying to remember these characters’ backstory and consider whether it was relevant to what was going on in the present tale. For true Binchy fans with an encyclopedic knowledge of her past work, it will be nice to have a visit. For the rest of us, where hundreds of books may have passed between her last and this latest . . . it will be a bumpy ride down memory lane, albeit with a satisfying ending.