…the life of an author was "awful'" and a "brutal existence."

"One of the first characters to appear in Inferno is a spike-haired, malevolent biker chick dressed in black leather. She looks like trouble in more ways than one. What is the girl with the dragon tattoo doing in Dan Brown’s new book?
     She’s scaring Robert Langdon, the tweedy symbologist who stars in Mr. Brown’s breakneck, brain-teasing capers. Reader, she will scare you too. The early sections of Inferno come so close to self-parody that Mr. Brown seems to have lost his bearings — as has Langdon, who begins the book in a hospital bed with a case of amnesia that dulls his showy wits. When Robert Langdon of The Da Vinci Code can’t tell what day of the week it is, the whole Dan Brown brainiac franchise appears to be in trouble.
     Langdon thought he was in Cambridge, Mass., teaching at Harvard. But instead he is in Florence, Italy, with his beloved Mickey Mouse watch (sigh) gone and his tweed jacket (bearing 'Harris Tweed’s iconic orb adorned with 13 buttonlike jewels and topped by a Maltese cross') in tatters.
     Sienna, the ponytailed doctor, happens to have an I.Q. of 208 and a neighbor whose locally tailored suit and loafers fit Langdon perfectly. So he’s looking very debonair as he dashes through the most famed and historically important sights in Florence, trying to figure out what a cylinder hidden inside a titanium tube with a biometric seal and a biohazard symbol is telling him."
— Janet Maslin, The New York Times
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From: Etsy

"Taking a moment to show his interviewer his gravity table, where he hangs upside down from metal stirrups when writer's block strikes, [Dan] Brown – who gets up at 4am every day to write – said the life of an author was 'awful' and a 'brutal existence.' 'I enjoy having written, past tense. I must enjoy it on some level but I find it very difficult. I feel like it's working out for an hour. You feel good at the end, but while you're doing it, you wish you were doing something else,' he said.
     He also revealed that he tries not to read his reviews, feeling partly that 'critics have such knowledge' of their field 'that I'm not sure that they always share the taste of the masses,' and also that he is 'writing for myself.'
     'It's funny to me that there are critics who say, "Oh, it's a lazy style." I believe that the purpose of language is to convey an idea and I personally don't like language getting in the way. I don't want to read things where I'm just drowning in the prose,' he told the Sunday Times."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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"Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better. Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International, and airline magazines are thin, and two-month-old Hollywood drivel on a small screen hanging two seats in front of my row did not appeal, that's why. And why did I keep the book instead of dropping it into a Heathrow trash bin? Because it seemed to me to be such a fund of lessons in how not to write."
— Geoffrey K. Pullum, Language Log
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Buy Dante Alighieri's 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy and all of Dan Brown's books here...

" […] eat whatever you want, as long as you’ve cooked it yourself."

"Michael Pollan’s seventh book will not substantially surprise readers of the first six. Mr. Pollan has often said that we lose touch with the basic facts of food production at our own peril, and that shared meals hold families and communities together. He has advocated fresh ingredients and sounded warning bells about why processed foods are barely worth digesting. And he is a major ingredient in his books’ blend of gastronomy, science and investigation, linking his own experiences to the lessons he imparts.

     But Mr. Pollan winds up broadly playing celebrity chef in Cooked, his four-quadrant book about fire (barbecue), water (stewing and braising), air (baking bread) and earth (fermentation). He was prompted to do this, he says, partly by what he calls the Cooking Paradox. There we sit on our sofas, watching cooking shows on television rather than preparing meals of our own. 'I don’t need to point out that the food you watch being cooked on television is not food you get to eat,' Mr. Pollan says."
— Janet Maslin, The New York Times
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Find out more about the health benefits of gardening and cooking at the Elora Writers' Festival on Sunday, May 26; where you can hear Sonia Day read from her award-winning books Incredible Edibles and The Untamed Garden.

Get more information about Sonia Day and the Festival here...

And buy all of Michael Pollan's easily digestible books here...

“The pie hole and the feed chute are mine.”

"We should have seen this coming. When Mary Roach wrote Packing for Mars, her 2010 book about the bodily experiences of astronauts in space, she seemed especially excited by the feeding, digestive and excremental issues with which NASA had to deal. She has now advanced from the exoticism of space-shuttle toilet training to the universality of the digestive tract. And at last Ms. Roach has a subject that doesn’t make her (insert constipation joke, possibly about Elvis Presley) strain.

     Gulp is far and away her funniest and most sparkling book, bringing Ms. Roach’s love of weird science to material that could not have more everyday relevance. Having graduated from corpses (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook) and sex (Bonk, full of stunts featuring Ms. Roach as guinea pig), she takes on a subject wholly mainstream. She explores it with unalloyed merriment. And she is fearless about the embarrassment that usually accompanies it."
— Janet Maslin, The New York Times
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Buy all of Mary Roach's books here...