Words for the winter

>> Food manifestos, fish forefathers, a response
to atheists and a sprawling epic or two

by JULIET WATERS

It’s January, the traditional month of recovery, reckoning and resolution. It’s the month you’re mostly likely to diet, dump (or be dumped by) your loved one, and decide this is the year you’ll do more reading. Sure you will. To kick-start that noble resolution, here’s a list of books to keep an eye out for:

Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel may sound like a good post-holiday diet book, but the subtitle says different: “Market Choice and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System.” Patel is a California-based food activist who studied at Oxford and the London School of Economics. He’s also worked for the World Bank, interned with the WTO and consulted for the UN. His indictment of world food distribution policies is being touted as the No Logo of food.

For something a little easier to curl up with, In Defense of Food is Michael Pollan’s follow-up to his witty best-selling meditation on food ethics, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In this nutritional manifesto, Pollan defends whole foods while laying into nutrition Nazis (yes nutrition obsession, orthorexia, is an actual food disorder). Pollan carves out a simple path with some basic resolutions we can all follow “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Closer to home, Montreal’s Taras Grescoe looks at both the politics and the joys of fish as food in Bottomfeeder: A Seafood Lover’s Journey to the End of the Food Chain. Staring down fish dishes from Red Lobster to India, Grescoe wrestles with the ethics and the enjoyment of seafood in a book closer to travelogue than manifesto.

FROM THE DEPTHS

As if our food decisions weren’t complicated enough, consider Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. While in Montreal last November, Oliver Sacks mentioned this as the book he was most looking forward to in 2008. A Chicago-based paleontologist, Shubin’s evolutionary theory of how humans evolved from fish is reportedly both credible and entertaining. If true, however, this does bring up the issue of why we eat fish when we don’t eat monkeys. Either way, what’s a new evolutionary theory without a new round of atheists vs. believers? If you’re into this, consider two new installments. Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam by Michel Onfray. This is the French version of the recent polemic led by Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. For the other side, John F. Haught argues for a contemporary theology that embraces evolution and science in God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens.

FOR THE WEARY

It would be nice if we could have all these important issues resolved by spring, but unlikely. That’s one good reason to turn to fiction. The best literature thrives on the endless cycle of uncertainty, ignorance and suffering, thus the title of Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. With the Beijing Olympics on the horizon, what better time to discover China’s most influential contemporary writer. Sounding something like a cross between Animal Farm and Life of Pi, Yan’s novel fictionalizes 50 years of peasant life in China through the character of a man reincarnated as a donkey, a horse, a pig, a monkey and finally a farm boy.

Fans of James Meek (The People’s Act of Love) will be excited about a new novel We Are Now Beginning Our Descent told from the point of view of an Afghan correspondent trying to reintegrate into Western life. While A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam is a sprawling and timely debut set in Bangladesh.

If nothing else, January is a great month to discover new novelists. Like a pack of mostly doomed baby turtles, this is traditionally the month when the big publishers release them. Knopf Canada’s New Face of Fiction series is a good place to look for these. Last year they published Neil Smith’s Bang Crunch.

This year they release a translated version of Nicolas Dickner’s 2005 Quebec bestseller Nikolski. Also in the New Faces series, Edmonton native Padma Viswanathan releases her epic debut, The Toss of a Lemon, set in India. Keep an eye out for Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock by filmmaker Matt Bissonette (Looking for Leonard, Who Loves the Sun). Set in NDG, there’s a good chance Bissonette will be up from L.A. for a reading sometime this year. Meanwhile, Rawi Hage follows up De Niro’s Game with his second novel, Cockroach, sometime closer to the spring.