Books #39 and #40

The Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire Mystery series made a great summer distraction to take me through July. Like caramel popcorn, delicious and easy to get though. It made it a little harder to focus on less shallow books right afterwards but luckily the next two that followed were quick and good reads.

39. Food Matters. Mark Bittman writes for the New York Times and is the author of my favorite cookbook, 'How to Cook Everything'. 'Food Matters' is similar to the Michael Pollen books out now about sustainable and healthy eating and Bittman includes a host of delicious recipes in the back. There are some new ways to cook quinoa and beans which I found pretty useful and prompted me to go through some of the bags of dried beans and grains bought long ago. Inspired by a friend's facebook status, I'm actually using a Bittman technique to cook dried black beans for the first time today...to be used in tonight's black bean chipotle enchiladas.

40. The Places in Between. A Scot walks through Afghanistan right after the 2001 invasion. The story is compelling and particularly relevent to me - it's the first Afghan-centric book I've read since my assignment to Kabul. I'm not going to lie, some parts were a little nerve-wracking since I put a bit too much empathy into his predicaments but I just had to keep reminding myself that my travels will NOT be on foot from Herat to Kabul. The excavation and sale of thousands of precious artifacts from the Silk Road were almost as heart-breaking to read about as the bleak lives of some (though not all) of the villages that Stewart interacted with. I kept going back to an Afghan picture/travel book to cross-reference stops like the Minaret of Jam and the Buddhas of Bamiyan, dynamited by the Taliban in 1999. In a 30 day walk, Stewart runs into a diverse population of Afghanis and paints fascinating descriptions of the differences between the various villages and tribes. This was just one man's view but it was an entertaining introduction to Afghanistan that I look forward to following up on.