Category Archives: Hunger Games

How Much Booking Does a Bookseller Book if a Bookseller Books with Books?

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Our friends Wes and Rachael were here for the annual New Year’s party, and when I mentioned that I wanted to track calories for health reasons, they downloaded Myfitnesspal for me on my iPhone.

Yeah, thanks.

It tells me I need to eat a 1200-calorie diet if I want to lose a pound a week for a goal of 20 pounds.

I told my iPhone that seemed unreasonable. In fact, I told it I didn’t appreciate it judging me. But there was no entry button for actually imputing that data.

C’mon, I live in a bookstore with one of the best cafes in the world in it, where stuff is made from scratch, not cream of soup bases. It’s WHOLESOME food.

“Wholesome’s just another word for triple left to lose,” sang Jack. (We listened to that Kris Kristofferson special on NPR last week.)

But wait, says Wes, there’s a bracelet you can wear, and it tells you how much you’re walking or running or rowing or skipping or whatever. And whatever you do for exercise earns you extra calories you can eat. Nice system, eh?

Yeah. Finding time to exercise…. I said, “Does the bracelet know when you’re carrying 12 hardbacks through the shop to the farthest points so you can shelve one in each section?”

“Hmm, let’s put that under weight lifting,” Wes said.

So we tried it. Not only does it know, but apparently that’s worth a fourth-cup of Kelley’s chicken and dumplings.

Things are looking up. Booksellers do a lot of booking when we’re booking books.

I’ll be able to eat after all.

 

The Monday Book: PEACE MEALS by Anna Badkhen

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This book drifted into our shop and I read it on and off throughout our recent Chilean travels. It was a great choice for travel reading because it is easy to dip into, chapter by chapter. Badkhen writes in newspaper articles, each chapter complete in itself and pretty self-contained. People looking for a start-to-finish story may not enjoy that so much.

I liked that it was basically a series of short stories themed around food: how hard it can be to get it in war zones; how different getting it is depending on your nationality, ethnicity, and place of eating at the time; how differently mindful of food people are in different countries; how good or bad it tastes depending on why you’re eating it, with whom. Psychology meets food in her thoughtful writing, but she is rarely sentimental. There’s a chapter in which she fights with herself after lambasting her son for wasting food growing in their garden, trying to decide how much of the world she wants him to understand at a young age, trying to figure out whether other people’s food needs influencing her behavior really makes a difference, or is just a feel-good sop.

Recipes accompany each chapter, but I’m not a cook and skipped them. If you enjoy trying to make different types of food, the recipes include where in the US you can get hard-to-find ingredients, or good substitutes for them, which I imagine real cooks would appreciate. Me, I stick to devouring words and ideas, and this book is replete with both. It’s not just that she wrote about her pizza in Iraq, or the hospitality of those with nothing handing out half of it to guests (her favorite meal of all time was a handful of dusty green raisins shared with a man who poured half of his supper into her palm). It’s that between those descriptions she does some thoughtful investigation of her own mind and comparison to other experiences.

In other words, this is an insightful and often analytical book about the emotions and experiences that surround food, in places ranging from overstocked to seriously shortaged. If that sounds interesting to you, you’ll love this book.