Staff Picks
Check the blog every week for updates on what our staff is reading and watching and recommendations for our new and all-time favorite books and movies. What is your favorite book or movie? Post your answer in the comments section below. To see all previous Staff Picks posts, simply type "Staff Picks" in the search box at the top left of this blog and click the "search blog" button

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan - recommended by Megan
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These simple words go to the heart of food journalist Pollan's thesis. Humans used to know how to eat well, he argues, but the balanced dietary lessons that were once passed down through generations have been confused and distorted by food industry marketers, nutritional scientists, and journalists. As a result, we face today a complex culinary landscape dense with bad advice and foods that are not "real." Indeed, plain old eating is being replaced by an obsession with nutrition that is, paradoxically, ruining our health, not to mention our meals. Pollan's advice is: "Don't eat anything that your great-great grandmother would not recognize as food." Looking at what science does and does not know about diet and health, he proposes a new way to think about what to eat, informed by ecology and tradition rather than by the nutrient-by-nutrient approach

Bright of the Sky by Kay Kenyon - recommended by Thea

Kenyon has in this new series created her most vivid and compelling society, the Universe Entire. In a landlocked galaxy that tunnels through our own, the Entire is a bizarre mix of long-lived quasi-human and alien beings gathered under a sky of fire. Over all, the elegant and cruel Tarig rule supreme.

MOVIE WATCH:

Breaking Away - recommended by Megan
An idealistic young man and his friends and their pursuit to find jobs and a purpose to life in their hometown of Bloomington, Indiana.