Monday Tally is a weekly link round-up of some of my favorite posts discovered over the week. If you have suggestions for Monday Tally, please e-mail sophisticated [dot] dorkiness [at] gmail [dot] com. Enjoy!

If you read only one link this week, let it be this blog post by Linda Holmes (blogger at Monkey See from NPR) who writes in praise of cultural omnivores — “people who …  ‘are involved in both ‘highbrow’ and middle- or lowbrow activities.” I won’t say much more, just share this quote, which gives you a good sense of the tone and topic (emphasis mine):

This is where the study gets most interesting and the connection to omnivores most intriguing, because it echoes a broader cultural conversation I feel like I’ve been watching unfold with dismaying — and increasing — unpleasantness. And that conversation raises the possibility that it’s not that interest in arts or creativity is declining; it’s that there’s a wedge between people who enjoy different kinds of culture, and that once again, we are connecting social status and cultural tastes in a way that’s bad for the kind of experimentation that makes people omnivores in the first place.

Ted Conover, author of Newjack, is one of the fathers of participatory journalism. His new book, The Routes of Man looks at the role of pavement in an interconnected world. This interview in The Atlantic has a good take on travel writing and the changing genre.

I was having a bad day on Friday, so I asked Twitter for some things to cheer me up. And boy, did people come through with some pretty awesome videos:

• Where the Hell is Matt?
• Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
• Useful Dog Tricks, with a special bonus, the music of Josh Woodward

The Wisconsin State Journal featured an interview with Meg Hamel, the director of the Wisconsin Film Festival. I liked her response to the question, “What else do you look for in a movie?”:

I’m looking for a film that succeeds at what it sets out to do. With any movie, what was it the filmmakers wanted to accomplish and how well do I think they did that? Only in rare instances is a motion picture completed by one or two people, and if there are more people involved there are more variables about whether it succeeded. When I look at a film, I’m also aware of all the different parts that went into it.

And finally, a leprechaun trap cake. Oh man, delicious.

Books for My TBR

• The Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku, but I’m not sure where I found it.
• Radio Shangri-La by Lisa Napoli, after reading this great review at Helen’s Book Blog.
• Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott, after learning about the economics of prostitution while listening to Superfreakonomics.

I’m back in Minnesota this weekend to help celebrate my dad’s birthday. My sister, who goes to grad school in Iowa, is also home, so there’s a full house around here. Last night, we went out to dinner, then stayed up late playing a rousing game of Texas Hold ‘Em using Easter candy as money. That seems like a good idea, until you remember everyone in my family is stingy about chocolate because we love it so much. Oops.

And of course, because I am who I am, I had to check in with all of them about what they’re reading now.

Mom, a lover of legal thrillers and mysteries, just recently bought a Nook, so has been busy buying books for that. Right now, she’s in the middle of New York: The Novel by Edward Rutherfurd. Earlier this month she finished Sandra Brannan’s first mystery novel, In the Belly of Jonah, which she said was gruesome and creepy, but with a little bit of stilted dialogue. Overall, she liked it, and said she is looking forward to the second book, Lot’s Return to Sodom. She also just finished reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larson, which started out very slow, but picked up to be very good by the end. I think we have plans to watch the movie tomorrow night.

Brother, a 19-year-old avid gamer says the only thing he’s been reading is articles in his subscription of PC Gamer. He used to be a big fantasy reader — he’s the reason I picked up the Inheritance Cycle (Eragon, Eldest, Brisinger, and TBD) by Christoper Paolini. When he’s not killing zombies, he also likes to read Clive Cussler adventure novels.

Dad, an electrical engineer whom I rarely ever see reading isn”t reading anything right now. He says he isn’t really a reader, but he does like magazines. Two Christmases ago he was obsessed with watching TV shows about Mount Everest, so I convinced him to read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakuer, which I think he liked.

Sister, a grad student in architecture and lover of chick lit, also just finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which she borrowed from a friend. She also just started reading New York, as well. Sister is standing over my shoulder as I type this and wants me to emphasize that she is not, in fact, copying Mom’s reading choices — “She’s copying me, if anything.” She is also gloating about the fact that she got 27 out of 32 points in the first round of her NCAA bracket. “This is a big deal!” she keeps telling me.

And Kim (me!), a journalist and book blogger, just finished Blood Work by Holly Tucker, a narrative account of the beginnings of blood transfusion. If I get time today, I’m planning to start either Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth about Guilty Pleasure TV by Jennifer L. Pozner or Complications by Atul Gawande. It just sort of depends what my mood is — suggestions?

In fact, any suggestions for the rest of readers (and non-readers) in my life? Have any books that I can suggest to push them out of their comfort zones that they’ll also like?

Title: And Hell Followed With It: Life and Death in a Kansas Tornado
Author: Bonar Menninger
Genre: Literary Journalism
Year: 2011
Acquired: From the publisher for review.
Rating:

Two Sentence Summary: From the book jacket — “On June 8, 1966, an EF-5 tornado cut a 22-mile swath across eastern Kansas and straight through Topeka, Kansas’s capital city. When it was over, 16 people were dead, more than 500 were injured, and property damage had reached $100 million.”

One Sentence Review: The level of detail and strong use of visuals make this book an impressive and engrossing read.

Why I Read It: I love books by journalists about specific historical events, and a giant tornado sounds pretty terrifying.

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Between Andi’s beginning of the semester madness and my week with a cold that makes me want to hide under my covers, we’ve been a little slow about getting some discussions up about David Kamp’s The United States of Arugula, our most recent pick for BookClubSandwich.

To whet your appetite for the discussion post which should go up tomorrow, I pulled some of my favorite thought-provoking quotes from the book, which looks at the evolution of American food through the chefs and foodies that helped make it possible.

In the introduction, Kamp suggests that the shift in American food is more an evolution than a revolution, a growing connection between different food philosophies into a cultural obsession with what we eat:

In truth, the American food revolution has really been more of a food evolution, a series of overlapping movements and subtle shifts, punctuated by the occasional seismic jolt. If there’s a major difference between now and the sixties and seventies, it’s that the scale is so much larger; culinary sophisticated is no longer the province of a tiny gourmet elite. The historically unrivaled run of prosperity in the United States in the eighties and nineties, compounded by the culinary advances that had to excited Time and Newsweek in the previous decades, has led to the creation of an expanded leisure class that treats food as a a cultural pastime, something you can follow the way you follow sports or the movies.

Given that I live in Madison, Wisconsin, a place that reveres our weekly farmers market and is constantly open to new restaurants, I can’t say that I disagree with that statement. However, I sometimes think Madison is an anomaly, and the rest of the world acts differently.

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