The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

This book has been on every “Best of 2006” list I’ve seen, and it’s worth all the hype it’s getting. It’s fantastic. The book is about 4 meals and the food chains that supply those meals. The 4 meals are from McDonalds, from Whole Foods, from a local, “sustainable organic” farm, and a meal that the author hunted & gathered himself. Parts of this book are astounding – like the extent to which corn and petrochemicals create the foundation for most of the US’s food supply, (Yup – you read that right) incentivized, of course, by inane government policies lobbied for by big agribusiness, the petrochemical industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the soft drink industry, and others. (You read that right, too.) And in today’s news, the FDA gave preliminary approval for meat and milk from cloned animals – and is ‘unlikely’ to require labelling of these foods (I kid you not. See FDA OK's food from cloned animals.)
The book also offers interesting insights into the complexities of sustainable farming and the interactions between various aspects of the farm (and the natural world in general). There’s a fascinating section about mushrooms – about which we know surprisingly little.
This book is very well-written and engaging. I guarantee you’ll think about food differently after reading it. (And you’ll find me at the local farmer’s market when I do my shopping on saturday morning :-)

To Conquer the Air by James Tobin

About the race to fly. Everyone knows the Wright Brothers won, but the story is fantastic. The brothers took a very meticulous approach and were competing against contemporary luminaries like the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (who spent >$70k on his attempts vs. the Wright Brothers’ expenses of <$1k), and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as a bunch of French competitors. Even after the Wright Bros’ successful flights at Kitty Hawk, it was years before they got the recognition they deserved. Really great story.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Set in the 1950's, the narrator is a 77-year-old small-town pastor, whose health is failing, so he writes an extended letter to his 6-year-old son - about life, faith, and relationships between fathers and sons. The writing is quiet, insightful and often lyrical. After all the hype about this book, I was skeptical, but I really enjoyed it.

Raid on the Sun by Rodger Claire

Fantastic true account of Israel’s 1981 audacious and successful bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. This was the first mission of Israel’s new F-16s, and the required distance to fly and the weights of the planes were way beyond design specs – yet the mission was a total success and the reactor was completely destroyed. We can all be thankful that this mission destroyed Saddam Hussein’s ability to produce weapons-grade plutonium in 1981. Written with the cooperation of the Israeli Air Force, including interviews with the pilots who flew the mission, this reads like fiction. Great story.

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

Like anyone not living under a rock for the last few years, I’d heard the rave reviews about Angela’s Ashes (pulitzer prize winner in 1997) – but wasn’t particularly interested in reading about what McCourt calls in the third line of the book a “miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” But despite what was absolutely a miserable childhood (abject poverty, constant hunger, alcoholic father, etc.), McCourt tells the story through his eyes as a child, and his spirit and humor shine through. Everything the rave reviews said about this book are true. This is an amazing book that McCourt didn’t write till he was 66 years old(!)

Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray & Catherine Bly Cox

This book is the amazing story of the people who actually made Apollo happen. While most books about Apollo focus on the astronauts and high-level figures at NASA, this book (based on interviews and documents,) tells the story of the managers and engineers who achieved fantastic feats of systems engineering and technological development and integration to make Apollo possible. Fantastic book.

Wolf Willow by Wallace Stegner

Part history, part memoir and part fiction about the plains of southern Saskatchewan, where Stegner grew up. As always, Stegner’s writing is amazing and his descriptions of this harsh frontier are beautiful. And as much as I like almost everything of Stegner's I've read, this is one of my favorites. A couple of paragraphs that particularly struck me – from The Whitemud River Range, a story about cowboys rounding up cattle during the brutal winter of 1906-07:

On those miraculously beautiful and murderously cold nights glittering with the green and blue darts from a sky like polished dark metal, when the moon had gone down, leaving the hollow heaven to the stars and the overflowing cold light of the Aurora, he thought he had moments of the clearest vision and saw himself plain in a universe simple, callous, and magnificent. In every direction from their pallid soapbubble of shelter the snow spread; here and there the implacable plain glinted back a spark – the beam of a cold star reflected in a crystal of ice.” (p.163)

Nothing between them and the stars, nothing between them and the North Pole, nothing between them and the wolves, except a twelve by sixteen house of cloth so thin that every wind moved it and light showed through it and the shadows of men hulked angling along its slope, its roof so peppered with spark holes that lying in their beds they caught squinting glimpses of the stars. The silence gulped their little disturbances, their little tinklings and snorings and sighs and the muffled noises of discomfort and weariness. The earth and the sky gaped for them like opened jaws; they lay there like lozenges on a tongue, ready to be swallowed. (p.165)

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

This is an incredibly disturbing book - but the writing is absolutely fantastic! The writing and the insight into Humbert Humbert are so good that by the end of the book, I didn’t hate him (as I’d fully expected to do); I just felt sorry for him. This writing is even more amazing given that English was Nabokov’s third (!) language. Gotta read more of his.