You know those authors and books you are “familiar with” but have never really read?  Pssst . . . .that is my relationship with Michael Pollan and most of his work. But thanks to the fine people at NPR and Book TV as well as his bookstore signings on YouTube I’ve always felt fairly conversant in “Pollanynesian.” But this week I am going native!  Michael Pollan has a new book coming out and I want to feel reasonably versed in his major works so I am starting with The Botany of Desire.

My first impression is really structural.  Remember how I said if I had to teach a course on the memoir I would use Wild as an instructive example.  Well, this would be my instructive example of how to write a really compelling well structured tight nonfiction book.  It’s a smart compelling read.

I have one quibble. I think he might be wrong about the term “hard cider” which he says is a 20th-century term.  I offer this because I just finished that book on Louisa May Alcott which contains the following bit from her personal journals:

“Another turn at “ Moods,” which I remodelled. From the 2d to the 25th I sat writing, with a run at dusk; could not sleep, and for three days was so full of it I could not stop to get up. Mother made me a green silk cap with a red bow, to match the old green and red party wrap, which I wore as a “ glory cloak.” Thus arrayed I sat in groves of manuscripts, “ living for immortality,” as May said. Mother wandered in and out with cordial cups of tea, worried because I could n’t eat. Father thought it fine, and brought his reddest apples and hardest cider for my Pegasus to feed upon. All sorts of fun was going on; but I didn’t care if the world returned to chaos if I and my inkstand only “lit” in the same place.”

I felt the need to do one more book in my accidental chick-lit series.  Many of these books have been in all or part memoir.  And in that sense, they all owe a debt to the mighty LMA!   I love Louisa May Alcott.  Now some of you may be thinking that’s just because Winona Ryder played Jo March in Little Women.  But that is not true. OK, that’s not entirely true. Let’s just agree that it is only a factor and move on.  I love her because she is amazing, brilliant, passionate, prolific and a saint.  The woman is a freaking saint!  Fun fact, since their initial publication all of Louisa May Alcott’s juvenile fiction, the March books, has ever been out of print.   Walden was initially a failure.  Moby Dick was initially a failure.  Mark Twain only wrote Tom Sawyer after how well he saw how well Little Women sold.  All and this and you can learn from this book.

I know it looks like I am on a “chic lit” binge at the moment, but I actually read this book a few years ago.  At that time I was binging on books about people sojourning in the woods.  This is the book that severed as dessert for that binge.  If by some seriously strange turn of events, I ever found myself responsible for teaching a course on memoir writing I would use this book. I found it all powerfully staged.  I have one major complaint about this book.  It was published six years after Eat Pray Love, and I am personally convinced her editor or somebody had the chapter added.  It’s a rather pointless chapter. But I really love this book.  I also joke every time this book is discussed that a better subtitle would be “Cheryl Makes Questionable Choices.”  Rock on oh Queen of the PCT.

Oh, after finishing Big Magic I had to read this.  I have to confess that I preferred Big Magic.  I think in part that is due to Big Magic being about ideas and ways of being and this more of sentimental a memoir.  I want to go have a beverage with Richard from Texas.  I could totally hang with that guy.  I feel bad for Jose — though maybe I shouldn’t.  Maybe he got the better end of the deal.  Elizabeth — she’s complicated.