French Women Don't Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure
by Mireille Guiliano
This book lets the women of the world in on the French secret, how
French women manage to stay slim in a culture which loves to eat
butter and bread and meat and all those things which are forbidden
to erstwhile skinnies here in North America.
Clearly it was the subtitle which appealed to me; I love to eat.
I could stand to be slimmer, so I thought this book might give
me some good ideas, and indeed it did. Mostly, though, it gave
me a heartening impression of sanity. Guiliano loves to eat too;
great swaths of the book are dedicated to discussion of her favourite
foods and recipes, none of which contain sugar substitutes or
applesauce instead of fat. In fact, you would be hard pressed to
identify any of them as recipes from a diet book (with the
exception of the dubious leek soup recipe which she recommends
to kickstart your diet.)
One of the nice things about this book is that the author doesn't
talk down from atop a lofty pinnacle of genetic and cultural
superiority. She lives in the US and when she first moved here
she gained a bunch of weight, which is why she had to consciously
rediscover all the French secrets herself.
So what are the secrets? Nothing earth shattering; eat good food
with lots of flavours instead of crap -- if you eat crap, she says,
you have to eat more of it to satisfy yourself. Prepare your
own food -- most packaged food uses salt and fat to conceal the
fact that it doesn't really taste good. Have meals with multiple
courses -- a salad or soup, the main, and then a sensible dessert --
again to satiate yourself with variety and ceremony rather than
quantity. Don't eat standing up, and don't eat while you are
doing something else; set the table nicely and sit down with your
family and enjoy the ritual of eating. And of course, control your
portion sizes, probably the least fun and hardest of all her
recommendations.
She also says don't go to the gym. The gym, she says (and I
heartily agree) is a waste of time and money. Why pay to
sweat on a machine when you can burn calories by walking to the store,
biking to work, climbing stairs instead of taking the escalator,
kneading your own bread instead of getting a machine to
do it for you, and so on. There are countless opportunities to
burn calories every day, if you watch out for them.
The bottom line is to put a lot more consideration into what you
eat, respect the food and you will derive more value out of less
of it.
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
I got this out of the library because I needed to get the
Cordelia quote out of it, and because I hadn't read it for a while.
I don't remember Anne being so annoying, although when I was younger
I had less qualms about skipping over the annoying bits. The
big difference this reading was how I related to Marilla now that
I am a mother of girls. (There's an essay by Margaret Atwood at the end of
the book which says that the book is really about Marilla's journey
from being chilly and distant to being loving.)
It's funny, being a parent. You suddenly find yourself on the other
side of a glass wall, seeing the world from a slightly new angle.
Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork and the Myth of Total
Efficiency by Tom DeMarco
This is a book about how being super-efficient -- that is, cutting
out all the spare time and spare people -- screws over companies.
He argues that if every minute of a worker's day is spent doing
"work", tangible, billable,
write-it-in-your-weekly-log-for-your-pointy-headed-boss work, you
don't have any time left to think about how you could be doing
things better, nor do you have enough flexibility to respond when
your co-workers need you. It's a pretty compelling book.
Unfortunately it doesn't argue well for my version of "slack",
which is really just "screwing around".
Toilet Training without Tears or Trauma by
Penny Warner and Paula Kelly, MD and
Pee,
Poop and Potty Training by Alison Mackonochie
Of these two books, Pee, Poop is the more useful, because
it discusses all the issues relating to your child's rear end --
general information on how the digestive system works,
diapering, potential problems -- not only potty training. It
also details a few different approaches for potty training.
Toilet Training actually mocks books which provide
several different approaches, and purports to be less confusing
by describing only one method, presumably the definitive method.
Anyone who has been parenting long enough to be potty training
knows that there is no one method, for anything, which works for
all children. So my bullshit detector went off on page 4; never
a good sign.
I also like that the other book is colour with lots of pretty
photographs.
Cutting Your Family's Hair by Gloria Handel
I got this out because I ballsed up Delphine's last haircut and
wondered what I should do differently next time. I learned a
few handy techniques from this book, but unfortunately it seems
that executing a succesful haircut involves a subject who will
sit still for more than, oh, twenty-four seconds. So Delphine
is going to have to wait for her first decent haircut.
The haircuts in this book, as shown in the photographs, actually
look kind of cheap and amateurish. They look like the kind of
haircut you get at a ten dollar place out in the boonies. You
would think they would try harder to get the pictures in the book
to look good. The book is also badly edited. For example, she
starts off by describing how you cut guides -- basically a fringe
of hair around the head which you cut to the desired length and then
use as a template for the rest of the hair. But the steps given
for the first haircut in the book don't include cutting the guides --
are you just supposed to do them automatically? Is this a cut which
doesn't require guides, and if so, how many other cuts don't require
guides? I
don't know -- she doesn't say. It's confusing.
100 Best Books For Children by Anita Silvey
One of the best things about having kids is getting to revisit
children's literature. This book is a list of one hundred really
good kids' books, sorted by age and type. The fun thing is that
Silvey gives you lots of insider information about the authors
and illustrators, and what the books go through before and
after publishing. For example, did you know that Ezra Jack Keats's
The Snowy Day was greeted with controversy? Did you
know Ezra Jack Keats wasn't black? I didn't know that.
I think I might buy a copy of this book for reference. The
only issue I have with it is that it's American and so the books
she recommends tend to be American, but it balances nicely with
my favourite meta-book, Dorothy Butler's Babies Need Books
which is Australian and is satisfyingly Anglo-centric.
