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This is the definitive textbook on salt.  That should be a good thing but the keyword is textbook.  I loved the first three chapters of this book.  I really enjoyed learning how man discovered salt, how people quickly learned how to adapt salt to preserve food.  I found it fascinating learning how the Chinese discovered that they could use natural gas to boil brine from wells deep in the earth to make salt.

Then my love of learning about salt started to fade.  I learned how caviar was discovered and every single detail of the four common kinds of sturgeon.  I learned how the Swedes make salt packed sausage.  I learned how cheese progresses from being ricotta to formaggio to finally being parmigiano.  Fascinating stuff but once you’ve read 450 pages in tiny type about salt you’re totally worn out on the stuff.  By the time refrigeration and chemical salts come to save the day making salt cheap for everyone I never wanted to see a tiny white grain again.  I literally fell asleep at the table one night while reading it, that’s something that hasn’t happened since I undertook the Thomas Paine marathon last spring.

The book was packed full of recipes though, if nothing else if the apocalypse comes, signs of which have been seen already today with a Republican winning Ted Kennedy’s seat, I’m your man to preserve your fish and game for the long harsh nuclear winter.  My specialty will be Chinese pickled frogs.

Take a bucket full of frogs, a barrel of brine and a slew of wooden chips.  I suggest beechwood for it’s mild flavor.  Dump the frogs into the brine, let them swim to the top and perch on a chunk of wood, then cover the barrel.  In three months open and enjoy.  Serve frogs as is, pickled on top of their salt encrusted beechwood chip.  Flavor with pepper sauce for Schezwan style.

So if you want to read this book, try to find a readers digest edition, but if the end of the age of electricity comes, you’ll want a copy of this book to get you through.

So originally I was going to read 52 books in 52 weeks, by my count I read 28.  That however is probably more than I would have read if I hadn’t started picking up the reading habit again. Oh yes I read plenty outside the printed page, but books grabbed me in a way that they haven’t in a while.  In Bookmark Now one of the writers says that what makes a successful writer is fidelity and I would say that the experience of fidelity that a book provides changes the reading experience as well.  Reading online lets me skip over the boring parts and read what I think is interesting, however the very nature of the linked up article makes some forms of writing completely unworkable online.  The carefully crafted Common Sense would have been a miserable failure if it were a blog instead of a book.  By the time a reader read a few lines of the English budged they would have clicked off to TMZ.  I wonder if a revolution can happen in a wired up society?  Lucky for me for now I live in a country where my every material want is provided for with a minimal amount of work.  But what about people who live now and in the future under brutal regimes?  Will they take TMZ as s substitute for hard reading and hard fighting when the time comes that they won’t live another day in chains?  Will we see another Ghandi or will the next one just be an interesting two minute on You tube with derogatory comments filling the bottom of the page?

So yes I’m glad that I read, from real books, I’m glad that I remember the smell of new pages.  I’m glad that my library expanded by four times as many books as I read.

Now on to the lists:

Best poem of the year:

The Most Careless Girl in the Class Had the Most Exquisite Body

Best word:

Rime-used in “In the Mosque of Imam Ali”

Worst word:

Cloying-used everywhere, It’s like last years visceral and 2007’s vicarious (followed by the redundant “through you” which proves that the user is an idiot trying to inflate his vocabulary).   Cloying wins though because now I can say that using the word cloying has become cloying.

Work that changed my life the most:

Believe it or not Solution Selling.  It not only helped me learn how to sell it also taught me how to negotiate and get along better with people.  Good stuff.

Worst book I read:

You would think from the reviews that it was Bob Dancer’s catastrophe of an autobiography but it was actually The Five Temptations of a CEO.  I wish someone would finally put an end to the motivational business book.  If I didn’t already have motivation to succeed in business I wouldn’t be picking up a business book right?  Stop motivating me and teach me something practical.

So failure it was but it was also a spectacular experience to try to read 52 books in 52 weeks.

Here it is, the last book of the year.  Unless I read one more just to read one, I don’t see myself reading one this week for pleasure, it would be like a school assignment if I did.  I would just be hoop jumping.  I have one more post to make on the project but for now let’s look at another work of non-fiction, the best American essays of 2007.

The book starts out with a punch to the teeth with an essay called Werner.  A man is caught in a fire and does what it takes to try to save himself and his cat.  I cried.

The book includes three essays on the conduct of the Bush administration during the Iraq war and the “war on terror”, Iraq: The war of the imagination is an indictment of the incompetence of the buildup to war and the execution of the post war period, An Orgy of Power is a good overview of the dangers of a society that is willing to engage in torture, and Rules of Engagement is an overview of the ways that the Bush administration broke the laws of war, engaged in wholesale perfidy and has now put us on a path where the rules of warfare no longer apply.

Afternoon of the Sex Children was the hardest piece.  It started out like an essay that you find in a college english textbook. I half expected the author to go into a long lecture on semiotics but it pulled right around.  The article was about how the sexual revolution isn’t about liberation, it’s about how we have sexualized  every aspect of society and about how the sexual revolution won’t be complete until people are free to be asexual. Not overtly straight, bisexual or gay.  Why couldn’t Brittany, Christina, the Jonas brothers and the Twilight crew be talented kids?  Why do we need to project an oversexed identity onto teens?  It started out obscure but ended up looping into quite the thought provoking piece.

Operation Gommorrah is another WWII memoir.  But can we ever get enough?  Highlights include screaming Germans kicking Jews out of bomb shelters and mothers wading through asphalt that has turned to liquid because of firebombs trying to save their babies.  Nothing makes you appreciate a nice peaceful day like a WWII story.

All this is topped off by essays on how much a billionare should give to charity, why California sucks (and this was written in boom times), why actors suffer stage-fright and a like the cherry on top of a delicious sundae the story of an English woman who 200 years ago cut up little bits of paper to make collages of flowers so accurate and intricate that botanists today still use them.

With all that I would say that this book is one of the best reads I have ever had.

So this was the last of the Sedaris Trilogy, I wish I would have read it second as it bridges the gap between Naked and When You Are Engulfed in Flames pretty well.  It starts out with stories of David’s family and the last half is about moving to France and his time there.  The title bridges the gap between the two, there is an essay about him being in speech therapy in the first half and the last half has him spending a lot of time in French classes.

This one I had heard about when it was first published.  It was one that was on the front page of Amazon for about a year and even spent some time on my wishlist.  I did like it but I don’t think it was an experience I would call memorable or revelatory.  Maybe you shouldn’t read three Sedaris books in a row.  Reading 50 Sedaris essays in a row was like eating egg rolls as a meal.  It tasted good but I’m not so sure that I’ve been filled up.  I imagine that when someone writes short stories or essays they expect them to be taken in small bites.

This was the second David Sedaris book that I read.  I’m glad I finished Naked first or I would have wondered what the big deal with this Sedaris guy is and why am I reading this,  fortunately I reached for the other book first and this book made all the more sense.

This book is the most recent of his books, it’s about a mature David Sedaris’  life and hobbies and spending time walking around Paris and Normandy with his boyfriend Hugh.  It’s not as gut splitting as Naked was, I’d almost say it’s slightly inferior.  It doesn’t quite ring the same bells as Naked does and I think the reason why could be that I’m a slight bit younger than Sedaris.  Maybe I just enjoyed Naked more because I had a similar misspent youth but in our adulthood our differences shine a bit brighter.  For some reason it didn’t seem as universal but without talking to more people who have read both books I fear that what I actually mean is that When you are Engulfed in Flames is in a much more different land than I inhabit.

One great feature of the book was his trip to Japan to quit smoking.  Strangely enough even though I quit smoking regularly a few years ago the parts of the story I loved the most were the cultural differences between here and Japan, not the smoking stories.

I did like this book, I do remember laughing at parts and I do remember not putting it down, but I don’t remember the experience being one that evolved me and therefore I can’t call this book one of the greats.

Since Fyodor Dostoevsky there hasn’t been anything written about gambling that can be called literature with a straight face.  This book is no exception.  I have a fairly large collection of gambling books, most of them are about Poker, there was a time in my life when being a professional gambler was my dream job, now I’m old enough to appreciate the benefits of health insurance and the kind of company my corporate job provides, I haven’t ruled out playing poker as a serious hobby but overtime when it’s available is just much more profitable.

Bob Dancer is a pseudonym, many gambling books are written by people who are fully in kayfabe.  The reasons they describe are firstly because they play a dangerous game with the casinos, they don’t want to play with a winning player, and also other players, who don’t want to talk to you about how they win if their name is going to be mentioned.  Because of this though the writing falls below any kind of journalistic standard.  This book includes gems like “When I asked several High-Limit players if they were surprised that the Venetian rigged drawings every one of them said they were not suprised at all.”  As you can see the writing offered is well below the standards that would be acceptable for publishing outside the gambling world, Bob alludes to having a Phd in economics, or at least he says he did Phd work, but his writing doesn’t seem to meet even a minimum community college writing 101 standard.

Now I’m not being tough on Bob, he’s published and I’m not, and he’s writing in a genre where the bar is set by people who come up with “systems” to beat roulette and craps.  Besides the fact that he’s not pouring on the punch you in the face vocabulary of Palahniuk or the careful sourcing of a journalist doesn’t mean I hated this book.  All I’m saying is that if you read it be prepared to snicker at time to time at some of the more outrageous statements and the clunky pacing.

So “Bob” tells the story of how he moved to Vegas with $6000 and with a combination of coupon hustling, low stakes blackjack counting and perfect video poker play because the best known video poker writer in Vegas.  He loved and lost, loved and lost and loved again, and all the time kept his bankroll under tight control.  It’s a thrilling tale and one of those Las Vegas stories that I love, however it’s probably the one that’s turned me off of any kind of desire to be a casino gambler on a pro level.  Basically it appears that the best odds and slot clubs are usually found in casinos that need the business, and places that need the business are not the places that you want to take your kids.  My kids love going to Vegas more than anywhere else but now that they’re old enough to ask why that man is puking in the garbage can I’m probably past the days when I can stay off the strip and call it a family vacation.

So Bob, thanks for the read and the wake up call, I guess I’ll go back to work in my cubicle where I feel like a high roller.