Ok, I'm supposed to list five books I've read in the last year (I hope it means LAST year, and not this one!  Not that I haven't read 5 books this year, but... I don't remember what they were!  For that matter, I'm having trouble remember five important-t0-me books I read last year...)

So maybe I'll do this in installments.

1.  The Ominvore's Dilemma.  

This is one of the nonfiction books I promised myself I would read to balance out all the fiction ones.  That is - not this specific book; I just told myself (sternly too) to get one interesting non-fiction book with each batch of other books.  This was one of them.  It had a nice shiny cover with pictures of food on it.

It ended up being absolutely fascinating.  The author decided to follow the line from the original food object to the meal it eventually became a part of.  He did this for a fast-food meal, an organic meal, and a hunter-gatherer meal.  It seems to me that there may have been another, but it apparently didn't register in my mind.  For the first - fast food - he bought a steer, sent it to a feed lot, visited the feed lot... etc.  For the second, he spent a week working on a farm in Virginia called Polyfarms.  It is an organic, self-sustainable farm.  For the third, he learned to hunt, gather wild mushrooms and cooked the meal himself.  Along the way, he tells you everything he learned.  Highly interesting.

2.  Harry Potter the Seventh.  

I am pleased.  All of my objections (and they were strenuous) at the end of #6 were resolved to my satisfaction.  I found a few new objections, but they are minor.  ;)

3.  Um.  I'm in the middle of reading something called Salt.  Does being in the middle count?  It's quite interesting also - a history of salt, basically.   How it was used and how it was made and all kinds of things about how important it was to ancient civilizations.  

still thinking on the others. 

(Jen, I found it!)