1. The Real Paleolithic Diet

    June 17, 2011 by ChiaLynn

    I’ve been reading a lot over the past year about paleo and primal diets, and one of the things that’s bothered me about most of it is the assumption that our paleolithic ancestors ate meat. Lots, and lots, and lots of meat. So much meat, in fact, that some paleo types eat almost nothing else (and, according to the New York Times, eat most of it raw. While fasting, running miles with no water, and donating lots of blood to simulate paleolithic bar brawls.). I’d wondered about that for some time, because while meat provides a lot of calories, hunting it takes a lot of calories, while plants just sit there and wait for you to eat them (even if some do require more intensive processing to make them edible).

    A few months ago, I came across an article discussing Neanderthal veggie consumption that took such a tone of amazement that there’s archaeological evidence for such a thing that I wanted to do some research on it – especially since I had to admit that most of my knoweldge of the Neanderthal diet came from reading Clan of the Cave Bear. (My knowledge of early human diets is somewhat more academic – I didn’t study archaeology in undergrad, but I did study cultural anthropology, including modern forager societies.)

    Anyway, this isn’t meant to be an extensive rundown of all of the evidence for and against the consumption of game meat, seafood, legumes, tubers, fruit, nuts, and/or wild grains by our pre-agrarian ancestors. But the more I read, the more I see that: A) Many archaeologists seem to have been more interested in what kind of meat our early ancestors ate than in what kind of veggies, which betrays the same bias that leads to the over-emphasis on hunting implicit in the term “hunter-gatherer”; B) As I suspected, there is no “typical” paleolithic diet. Humans are adaptable and omnivorous. We (like the cave bears we once worshiped) ate what we could find, kill or gather. That certainly included meat, but it included a variety of other foods, as well – something I think a lot of modern paleo enthusiasts have overlooked.

    Diet and Archeology in Health and Fitness / (chialynn)

    Category Eat, Drink & Be Merry | Tags: , , , , | 8 Comments

  2. A very personal introduction to The Wheel of Time

    April 14, 2011 by ChiaLynn

    In the early ’90s, I had two requirements for my fiction purchases.

    They (nearly always) had to be fantasy, and they (always always) had to be heavy.

    I was a fast reader without a lot of money, and I never seemed to be near an open library when I needed something new to read. (Besides which, I’d long-since learned that my tendency to keep library books well past their due dates sometimes resulted in them costing more than they would have if I’d just bought them in the first place.) I bought used when I could, but for the most part, I gravitated toward fantasy epics available at the Waldenbooks in the Foothills Mall. 

    That was where I first met Robert Jordan.

    This was not a case of love at first sight. How could it be, with Darryl Sweet’s notorious cover art? (Who could ever forget the “dwarf Moiraine on a pony” problem?) But as the series grew, and I began to run out of really large books to read, I softened, and finally one day I agreed to take just one volume home.

    I was hooked. I tore through Eye of the World and quickly moved on to The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn. The books were still coming out once a year at this point, so in between I’d re-read the previous novels and lurk on the various websites that were already springing up to discuss them. 

    To tell you how much the series meant to me, my very first tattoo (since covered by my very second tattoo) was an Avendesora leaf. 

    But then the publication schedule started slowing down. It was two years between Lord of Chaos and A Crown of Swords, and very little happened in Crown of Swords. Another two years passed before The Path of Daggers, and by then there were seven books to be re-read before I started into the next one. When I heard from a friend that not much more happened in Path than had happened in Crown, I decided that I’d wait for the final book, then start over at the beginning.

    I never expected it to take another 14 years. 

    When the news came out last year that Brandon Sanderson would finish the series in November 2011 (since pushed to March 2012), I got ready for the re-read. I started it in November, figuring I could read one book a month at that rate and be ready when A Memory of Light was released. I finished Crown of Swords last month and stepped back a bit. There are other things I’d like to read, and I don’t want to finish the series too soon, especially now that Memory will be slightly delayed. 

    It’s been interesting to revisit books I read so long ago, not only because I’ve forgotten so much, but also because I don’t read the same way I did then. As I intimated in my last post, I’ve learned to read like a writer – a skill I’ll keep developing for the rest of my life – and while I admire the way Jordan does some things, there are others I find almost painful. I’ve also discovered that some fantasy tropes that didn’t faze me 20 years ago bug the shit out of me now.

    So, tomorrow’s post will be about characterization, and sometime later we’ll talk about blood.

    Right now, I’m going to go read some more Lawrence Block, and think about the things I learned at Viable Paradise. 

    Category Writing | Tags: , , , | 3 Comments

  3. Oh, so it’s not just me!

    April 14, 2011 by ChiaLynn

    This morning, I went looking for a certain passage in Lawrence Block’s Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, which is one of the best books on writing I’ve ever read, and which I haven’t re-read in 10 or 15 years.

    On my way to the passage I wanted (which I’ll share with y’all presently), I found this:

    While I’ve always read voraciously, the nature of my reading has changed considerably over the years. In my college years I went through books like bluefish through a school of menhaden, chewing up and bolting down everything that came within my reach. In a sense, I read a great many books with the determination of a smoker breaking in a new pipe, as if each book I read would somehow season and improve me. When I didn’t like a book I simply lowered my head and bulled my through it anyway, as if setting it aside half-finished would be somehow immoral. 

    Alas, no more. I don’t finish half the books I start nowadays, and a good many get hurled across the room after a couple of chapters. Part of this, I’m sure, stems from the self-confidence of middle age. The narrator of Toby Stein’s All the Time There Is confides that she vowed on turning thirty-five never to finish a book merely because she had started it, and I submit that that’s a good vow to make and a reasonable time in life to make it.

    I think, though, that an increasing ability to discriminate between good and bad writing has had at least as much to do with my changed attitude toward what I read. The writing I do, day in and day out (whatever that means), has served to make me perhaps excessively aware of the technique of other writers. When I read the work of someone lacking in craft, I know it. This knowledge, this acute awareness, interferes with the voluntary suspension of disbelief upon which fiction depends for its effectiveness.

    If my writer’s ear tells me the dialogue I am reading is unnatural and clumsy, how am I to make myself believe in the existence of the characters who are speaking it? If my writer’s perceptions force me to notice that I am reading lumpish prose, how can I lost myself tin the story?

    As a result, any number of bestsellers with considerable popular appeal leave me colder than an editor’s smile. They may tell a good story, but if I can’t get past the writing I can’t enjoy the story. 

    I don’t mean to imply that people who do enjoy such books are to be condemned for their enjoyment. More often than not, I envy them. They are having a good time, while I, a lifelong reader, am having an increasingly difficult time finding something to read.

    While I haven’t yet hurled a book across the room after just a few chapters – in fact, I’ve hurled only one book, and that at the end – and my increasing collection of e-books means that hurling a book would require hurling either my netbook or my phone, neither of which I’m likely to do – I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one who’s stopped reading (almost) every book I started.

    Category Writing | Tags: , , | 6 Comments

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