A Short Guide to a Long Life

I saw Dr. David Agus on Fareed Zakaria GPS, and he made sense to me, so I picked up his Nook book for $9 on Barnes and Noble. It's a nice book, a very quick read with mostly common sense health recommendations. This is, I think, a great book for young people and obese people, but most healthy people probably are doing or at least know they should be doing the stuff he recommends.

Most of this stuff is a no brainer - drink lots of water, exercise, practice good hygiene, eat real food. Some of it is controversial, like avoiding vitamin supplements and taking preventative baby aspirin and statins. I honestly already do a lot of what he recommends, and I don't do most of what he says not to do. But I don't think my One-A-Day is going to kill me.

A Short Guide to a Long Life

A Spear of Summer Grass

This is an absolutely beautiful novel of 1920's Kenya, where the African savannah is almost as much a character as any human.

Delilah Drummond is a 20-something-socialite whose latest scandal has even her mother in a tizzy. So she ships Delilah off to her stepfather's Kenyan estates, Fairlight, to wait for things to die down and maybe grow up a little. Delilah and her cousin, Dora, find that Fairlight has been left to fall apart, and set about doing what they can to make the place livable and working with the natives to improve the living situation for everyone. They also find a community of British ex-pats who are all a little too involved in each other's lives, among them tracker/hunter/know-it-all Ryder White, who has an immediate attraction with Delilah.

Yes, there are similarities to Out of Africa, but those are superficial. Author Deanna Raybourn has created a wonderful heroine in Delilah - she's smart, beautiful, charming, loyal, and worldly. Ryder is the perfect foil for her, and they have fabulous chemistry. And the story just drives you right along - I really couldn't put it down. This is one of the best novels I've read in a while.

A Spear of Summer Grass

Someone

This latest novel by prize winner Alice McDermott is just a lovely little novel. It's actually sort of a study in novel writing, kind of like writing the way the brain works, if that makes any sense. The main character is Marie Commeford, a young girl growing up in Brooklyn in the days between the World Wars. She's 7-years-old with thick glasses, and she's waiting for her dad to come home from the train. So begins an ordinary life told with extraordinary charm.

Marie tells her story through a series of vignettes, memories really, of the blind WWI vet who's the go-to umpire for the neighborhood stickball games; the girl down the street who dies from falling down the stairs; her brother Gabe's recitations after dinner, his attending seminar, and his abrupt departure from the priesthood for reasons unknown. And Marie remembers the important milestones in her own life: the death of her father; the first boy who loved her; and the birth of her first child. Ordinary moments that most of us experience, but told with such charm, and humor, and gentle wit, and in a seemingly haphazard pattern, that actually makes total sense.

This is just a lovely story about someone who worries she won't find someone to love, and who winds up beloved by so many.


Someone