Back to the Books

While I was away not blogging, I read Company by Max Baz, and it was a spiffy little read. I thought of it as sortof an 'idea' in book form, a fun idea, and well executed. His blurb at the end of the book, thanking his editor for taking the book he liked and making into a book he loved made me curious what the different versions looked like, whether the author's writing was really less palatable. I'm not saying that it was hard to be less palatable because the book was bad, far from it, but I'm reflecting more on my view of the authorship process, that of taking ideas and putting them on to paper, and how the editor comes into play as part of that process. Since I'll enter that process provided I don't die first, I'll probably come into first hand association, but until then it's something of a mystery.

Speaking of myself becoming a writer, I was reading this rant, having navigated there randomly, and was heartened that this person who appears to be so successful is still eating, as she put it, 'fridge bottom salad.'

Next topic, I'm now reading The Omnivore's Dilemma at the suggestion of a friend, and it's just amazing! I brought up the cattle being force fed corn to my wife and she's like, "oh yeah, you didn't know that?" and I realized she must have seen a PBS special on it. But this book is really neat to read because it's not overly liberal/preachy and it just presents this author's pursuit of what you think would be a simple question: What do we have for dinner?