Ok, soo...

I suck at blogging. Clearly. Bursts of energy followed by prolonged periods of lassitude pretty much define me, which is why I feel a lot of sorry for whatever child I eventually end up raising. Hopefully it learns to forage for food early on. Anyway. In happier news, my boss got me a kindle for Christmas! This is awesome because it means I get my favorite thing in the world: instant gratification. I want a book? I have a book! Immediately. (Along with a $9.99 credit charge. Alas, the model is not yet perfect.) Over Christmas break I read two that you must go out and read right away, even if it means you have to go to a Barnes and Noble and sit in the cafe and page through a real book like a sucker. Enjoy your paper cuts, plebe. (NOTE: I AM JUST KIDDING. I LOVE REAL BOOKS. LIKE, I LOVE THEM. AND THE WAY THEY SMELL.)

The first one was Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer which sort of turned the world of food upside down for me. Did you know factory farming is the number one contributor to global warming? And that some pig farms create pits of manure the size of small lakes that can make surrounding regions literally uninhabitable, sickening nearby residents and poisoning the air? Foer manages to get across the absolute evil of the factory farming industry without making you feel like he's lecturing. Instead, he experiences each new revelation alongside the reader, examining each new fact from a variety of angles and bringing up the same arguments you'll probably think to yourself ("but meat is so tasty/such a major part of community and friendship/I'll just eat free range chickens") and systematically defeating them. I read this book on the flight home to Texas a few days before Christmas which turned out to be a mistake. ("Sarah, just eat the Turkey. Come on. It's not really meat. What's wrong with you?"- my grandmother)

The second was called Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Despite the author's inability to form a non-prosaic sentence, the story behind the collapse of the American financial system is pretty fascinating, and also really, really scary. It's also really complex, so I won't try to summarize it here, but I feel like everybody affected in any way by the current recession owes it to themselves to read this book.