18 - The Botany of Desire

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
Random House, 2002
304 pages
Date completed: December 14, 2009


This was an interesting read! It was for my botany class last term, and I have to say I didn't mind reading it at all! Pollan's writing is engaging, and it's full of anecdotes as well as historical notes, so it doesn't get boring. It's actually great to know what exactly is going into certain foods.

For instance...ever hear of a NewLeaf potato? It's a genetically modified potato in which every single cell contains herbicidal DNA to combat a specific beetle. Therefore, the potatoes wouldn't need to be sprayed with herbicides. This potato was never tested by the FDA, nor was it labeled as a GMO so that the public could be aware of it. Luckily it was discontinued, because it literally wasn't even tested on lab rats or anything. Gross.

So there were a lot of useful things in this book, focusing on four different plants and how they correspond to human desires: apples/sweetness, tulips/beauty, marijuana/intoxication, and potatoes/control. Really interesting stuff.

17 - The Magician's Nephew

The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis
HarperCollins, 1955
96 pages
Date completed: December 10, 2009

So the Narnia series always bored me to death in elementary school, which is when I should have been reading it. Around the holiday season in 2005 I found a collection of the entire Chronicles of Narnia on sale at the bookstore for about $10, so I bought it because I feel like these books are a staple I missed out on. In fourth grade, my teacher read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe aloud and I remember loving it, but then I read The Horse and His Boy and loathed it and could never even make it all the way through The Magician's Nephew or Prince Caspian.

Which brings me to 2009. The week before finals. Stressed as hell. But I need something to read before bed. So I look at my bookshelf, which is half full of school books and half full of more complicated/longer novels, and my eyes rest on The Chronicles of Narnia. Bingo. The stories are about 100 pages apiece, so I can easily read them in a night (or a night and 30 minutes of a morning, which is how I read The Magician's Nephew). Also, they don't require much thought.

So The Magician's Nephew was still a little hard to get into for me, but since every 10 pages I could be like "only 90 left, only 80 left, only 70 left" et cetera, it wasn't bad at all. And once I got farther into the story, I actually really liked it. Especially the part about Aslan creating Narnia, and the lamppost/toffee tree growing, and the description of the scenery while Digory and Polly were flying to the tree of life.

Religious allegory aside, I liked it. Religious allegory included, it was cool to relate aspects of the story to Biblical stories. Really really blatantly obvious connections to the Garden of Eden and Jesus and evil temptation, but it's a children's story so I'll let that slide.

I probably won't be blogging about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe unless my opinion of it drastically changes or something, since I've already read it. So you'll probably see me in a few days with The Horse and His Boy. Since the copy I just read is part of one giant book (pictured in the "currently reading" section), I've used an image of the copy of The Magician's Nephew I have at home and received as a child.

16 - Le Morte D'Arthur

Le Morte D'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory
Oxford University Press, 1971
811 pages
Date completed: November 15, 2009

So I finished this a long time ago and just forgot to write it down! So technically I should have blogged about it a few weeks ago but oh well. Here we have Malory's Works, which is just a fancy name for Le Morte D'Arthur, which is all he wrote. It is comprised of the following books:

The Tale of King Arthur
The Tale of the Noble King Arthur that was Emperor Himself through Dignity of his Hands
A Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake
The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney that was Called Bewmaynes
The Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones and Iseult the Fair
The Tale of the Sankgreal (the Holy Grail)
The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere
The Most Piteous Tale of the Morte Arthur

I loved basically every minute of this hulking tale of adventure, knights errant, scandal, and, ultimately, destruction. Although some of the tournament and battle chapters were a little dull because they just describe who fought with who, even those weren't bad!

Having finished this entire work, I find it strange that King Arthur and the Round Table are so glorified everywhere. The first time I read some of the tales of King Arthur (in modern English, of course) was in third grade, because I was absolutely enthralled with the idea of Camelot already, at the age of eight! So somehow the legend of Arthur embeds itself into us at a very young age, and from then on (for me, at least), I romanticized the idea and thought Arthur was this great fictional king who did all sorts of amazing things.

In reality, there's a lot of seediness under the surface in Camelot. Right now I'm writing a paper about how withdrawn Arthur was from Britain throughout the last 650ish pages of the book, and how that caused the destruction of the Round Table. Because yes, my friends, the Round Table/Camelot/Arthur all meet their end in this book. It's prophecized by Merlin within the first 15 pages or so, so I don't think that spoils the book for anyone. But again, this is an idea that doesn't really come into pop culture along with the lauding. I think people need to know. Arthur was a great king at first, but he was never, ever the greatest. He was a great warrior and leader, but he was always overshadowed by his knights on the battlefield. He eventually stops taking part in domesticating the kingdom and exploring, preferring to let his knights do all the dirty work while he sits in Camelot on his ass.

Then there's the scandalous affair of Launcelot and Guinevere, the corruption of Gawain and his brothers, and the fact that basically none of the knights of the Round Table (barring Launcelot and a few others) really follow the code of chivalry that has been set before them.

So rather than this mythical, fantasy-esque book about magic and this amazing king and his amazing knights, the real Morte D'Arthur is even better! There is actual human vulnerability exposed all the time! There are conflicts that run much deeper than a clash of swords or lances. There are subplots full of treachery, love stories, kidnappings, the quest for the frickin Holy Grail (which is achieved by Galahad the Boring as well as Bors and Percival), and a ton of humor! Knights wearing dresses over their armor, Lady Hallews with her "poisoned lip gloss" (as my professor calls it), a song written by Dynaden about how crappy King Mark of Cornwall is (Mark = the king from the Tristram and Iseult story who is Tristram's uncle and Iseult's husband. He's probably the seediest, most disgusting character in the whole book), the time Launcelot is sleeping and a knight comes in thinking Launce is his paramour and starts making out with Launce...oh man. I could go on forever.

What I'm trying to say is that this story has it all. It was really written under the pretense of relaying a religious lesson, and in the last 7 pages or so everyone gives up the world and enters nunneries/monasteries and goes to heaven, but the book itself isn't like that at all. It's about the journey: adventurous, thrilling, funny, interesting, and full of characters who are dimensional, vulnerable, and likeable. It's literally a classic (hehe, from the fourteenth century), and reading it in the original early English was a real treat.

And so "he drewe his swerd Excalibur, but it was so bryght in his enemyes eyen that it gaf light lyke thirty torchys, and therwith he put hem on bak and slewe moche people." The epitome of medieval badass right there.