Parenthood, it turns out is not only a recurring topic of contemporary fiction, but our very ambivalence about parenting—like so many other writerly anxieties—has become the subject of our books.
In the Japanese city of Wakayama, a stone’s throw away from ancient castle ruins and the Kumano river, a 74-year-old restaurant called Toho Chaya specializes in an ancient form of sushi. To make narezushi, the restaurant packs rice inside salty fish carcasses and ages them for months. Toho Chaya has always done things the old-fashioned way, from making narezushi to conducting an interview by fax machine. “Since it is made by fermentation, it tastes similar to cheese or yogurt,” writes chef and owner Ikuo Matsubara via fax.
The English writer Eley Williams’s spirited first novel, “The Liar’s Dictionary,” is about lexicography. It’s a celebration of the people who compile dictionaries, even if they’re driven out of their minds in the process.
This book wisely does not answer the question of how he did it. Instead, it integrates the appeal of magic with the desperate attempts of poor immigrants to escape the chains of poverty. Houdini became a great escapologist, but escaping those chains was, perhaps, among his biggest feats.
An irresistible aspect of Exercised is Lieberman's firm stance that no shame or stigma be attached to those who find it challenging to sustain an exercise program: "So if, as you read these words, you are seated in a chair or lounging in bed and feeling guilty about your indolence, take solace in knowing that your current state of physical inactivity is an ancient, fundamental strategy to allocate scarce energy sensibly."
Indolence is not good for us, of course. Sitting for long hours, for instance, encourages inflammation throughout the body and is associated with chronic disease. This is especially true of the way we tend to sit in our culture — on a chair — compared to cultural traditions of squatting, kneeling, or sitting on the ground which causes the muscles to be more highly active. Yet if you're attached, literally, to your chair or couch, all is not lost: In one study, when participants interrupted their sitting with just 100 seconds of movement every half hour, the result was lower blood levels of sugar, fat, and bad cholesterol.
Books about exercise are nothing new — especially not at this time of year. But “Exercised” is different from the usual scrum, in that its objective is not to sell a diet or fitness plan. Lieberman is a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, and he comes to the material as a reluctant exerciser himself. In first grade, he writes, he once hid in the closet during gym. He ran and hiked in college but he didn’t do much of it because he was “largely ignorant and anxious about what kinds of exercise to do, how often, how vigorously, and how to improve.”
It’s January. A swan’s wing overhead
reminds you of his Fifth