Most True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball

I've just finished this book and it's delightful! In fact, I kept wanting to interrupt my reading to write up a blog post about it to share it with you all, but that would have meant I had to stop reading it--and the reading won out over the writing.

Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball by Molly O'Neill is a delightful combination of a look at a family, including some family history that had an impact and the roles that baseball and food played in creating bonds and a family story. Unlike most family stories this is a story that will have an impact beyond the immediate next generation of the O'Neill family though.

Molly's father, grandfather, and great grandfather played baseball. Her father pitched in the minor leagues and his desire to have a professional ball player or two and keep his boys out of trouble set the stage. Molly was the oldest child, followed by 5 boys, and she weaves the story of her growing up (and beyond) around baseball and food. Her mother cooked elaborate healthy meals and she would sneak around to cook the processed foods and other stuff that other families ate, of which she and her brothers were denied. Luckily for us, her passion for food led her to become a chef and the stories of her kitchen work and studying in France are as entertaining as the ones of her dressing her youngest brother in a dress, trying to fawn him off as the sister she desperately wanted.

It's interesting to me to see, with hindsight, the ways that all our supposed detours and apparently odd decisions lead us to, ultimately, work we love and enjoy. Molly spins tales in her diaries, which seem to be mostly not-true her first year of college but still send her mother spinning when she reads them, writes poetry, paints, and works two jobs to put herself through college--learning to cook on the jobs that supported her. She eventually becomes a chef and then a food writer. She's written three cookbooks so far (including New York Cookbook, which sounds fascinating) and was the food columnist for The New York Times Magazine.

I'm posting this in my food blog as well, Chronicles of a Curious Cook.

Banned Books

List of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Read more. Convince others to read some.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Kapital by Karl Marx
#37 Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner

I've just finished The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner by David Bach. I'd seen his books on the shelves but am always a bit leery of the "get rich" books. I liked this one though. It doesn't say "Make a million in a year doing nothing" or "buy and flip real estate" or "sell stuff to your friends via MLM." It says that over the years, home ownership is one of the best ways to increase your net worth. And he gives you some good ideas on how to get there, why it's worthwhile, and ideas on how to go beyond owning your initial starter home to owning either multiple homes or a bigger, better home, whichever most suits your needs.

The basic premise is to set things up automatically, along with the old "pay yourself first" rule. And yes, that usually means giving up something today to get something better tomorrow. Over the long-haul, real estate is one of the best investments you can make.

I really liked it that his final chapter was on "Make a Difference - Help Someone Else" and lists some national charities, like Habitat for Humanity, that help others become home owners. I have my own personal local favorite to help out, Operation Dignity, a veteran-run veteran-focused homeless shelter. But even if you don't have everything you want now, you have way more than some. Giving even just a little helps you feel rich, which changes your attitude in a very positive way.

Get Organized, Get Published

I'm reading Get Organized, Get Published!: 225 Ways to Make Time for Success. This is not a "how to write" book. It is, however, full of great ideas from a variety of different authors about how to organize the writing process, the research, your time, and more. The books is written by Don Aslett, a very prolific writer, and a co-author Carol Cartaino. The tips and stories come from a huge variety of writers, including fiction and non-fiction, article-writers and novel-writers.

The book is easy to read and the chapters are organized in ways so that you can jump into the middle if you want and instantly gain some useful knowledge. This is a not a "system" book, where they show you one way to do something and say it's the right way. There are ideas here for just about anyone who writes.