Feeding the future

There's been a lot of interest over the last little while in food security - knowing we all have enough to eat and that what we do have is safe to eat. The slow food and local food movements are growing worldwide, and questions about altered food (genetically or chemically) are getting louder and more frequent.

For many of us, it's hard to know who to believe when we hear food safety and food supply discussions. Some of those discussions are quite heated and few of us have the training necessary to follow all the arguments. At times we're not even sure we know what all the questions are, let alone who's got the (believable/reliable/responsible/realistic) answers.

Feeding the future is a collection of expert opinions on a variety of food security issues including tainted beef, over-fishing, genetically modified foods, the obesity epidemic, and worldwide food distribution. Each author gets one chapter and the various authors don't necessarily agree with one another, but that makes the book more useful for the reader. Footnotes provide references to continue research on subjects that catch your interest or verify points you find hard to accept.

Editors Andrew Heintzman and Evan Solomon have done a good job of pulling such disparate voices together into a cohesive whole. They begin each chapter with a brief author/subject introduction that I found tremendously useful. They are also responsible for additional content added as sidebars to the main text.

Although the subtitle of this book (from fat to famine, how to solve the world's food crises) promises solutions, I would liken this book to a survey course. Solutions are certainly proposed but if resolving the issues were that simple, we would already be there. Instead, I would call this an excellent starting point for a self-directed study, or, at the very least, enough information to get you through a number of earnest conversations.

Feeding the future : from fat to famine, how to solve the world's food crises edited by Andrew Heintzman and Evan Solomon. Published in 2004 by Anansi. ISBN: 978-0-88784-744-8

Elantris

I enjoyed Alcatraz versus the evil librarians so much that I had to see what else Brandon Sanderson has written. That's how I ended up with his 622 page first novel, Elantris.

Elantris entered the fantasy market in 2005 with wonderful reviews. Sci-fi/fantasy veterans like Orson Scott Card and Simon R. Green are quoted as saying this far surpassed their expectations. Independent reviewers like Publishers Weekly called it "outstanding" and "refreshing." All of this gave me hope because I don't generally like fantasy, I like science fiction even less, and here I was with a whopper.

I think what discourages me most about sci-fi/fantasy is that so much needs to be defined at the beginning. Instead of setting the scene as Paris, 1933, or backwoods Canada, 19th century, the author has to spend pages and pages on description. It's not just the details of setting and characters, it's everything. Who and what are the characters? What is the landscape? Is it on Earth? Is it in our version of time or completely separate? How do creatures relate? Does Earth exist? How do communities work? Who holds power and why? How are right and wrong determined and judged? Is there history that characters (and reader) know about? The questions go on and on and all of them need to be settled before much of the story can happen.

Not only is that a lot of description to get out of the way right at the beginning, but it's a lot for the reader to keep track of. Add to that names that look unpronounceable and secrets that are revealed as the story develops, and it's a lot of work to keep the story straight.

I kept that in mind as I waded into the first 125 pages. I was introduced to characters, settings, social, political, and religious history, and secrets on all sides. It was a steep learning curve but the storyline caught my interest. I read in short bursts until I got about 200 pages into the book. By then, I was hooked and ended up finishing the rest in just two evenings.

So what do I think? As I said the story caught my interest but that's not all I enjoyed. Elantris doesn't consist of one story but of several, all intertwined. I was often surprised at how situations turned and how the resolution of one issue would affect another part of the story. I was also impressed by how the characters change and grow through the course of the novel. Not only did I learn new things about them, but they learned new things about themselves.

This is a story that examines lots of deep questions without feeling like an introspective tale. It asks questions like "What is faith?" and "What makes a person good or evil?" and "How should power be allocated and used?" and "What does a person truly need to be happy?" and "Where does pain come from?" and "What does dead mean?" If it weren't 622 pages long, it would be wonderful for a novel study. Its very length makes it hard to become familiar enough with the text to facilitate active discussion but the discussion would be fascinating.

If you liked Lord of the rings and would like to see a strong female protagonist, you might want to give this one a try. I still wouldn't call myself a fantasy fan but I'm considering reading the sequel. In case you're interested, it's called Mistborn and it came out in 2006.)

Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. Published in 2005 by Tor. ISBN: 0-765-35037-8.