Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

Lara Prior Palmer was not just the first woman to win the cross-Mongolia horse race, she was also the youngest, capturing first place at the age of 18. It seems anyone can enter, and on a whim, without training, but a general knowledge of horses, Prior Palmer entered the race as a better post-high school adventure than entering college. Racers traverse 1,000 km of Mongolian steppe by riding one semi-wild pony after another. Chafing, blisters, sunburn, falls, diarrhea, drunk Mongolians, injuries, and exhaustion overtake more than half the competitors every year. And yet, as they say, she persisted, enduring all those calamities.  What emerges in this memoir is a woman who can communicate with horses in ways I did not know were possible, probably a compensation for her relative inability to interact with people. Prior Palmer's internal dialogue appears on paper with the wisdom of a woman double her age and craft of a writer with four times her experience. Her ability t

Professor Chandra was born in India and almost lived up to his parent's expectations for success. Now, approaching his 70th birthday he is a distinguished, and hilariously pompous, professor of economics at Cambridge University. This might even be the year he wins a Nobel in economics so he practices his nonchalance and indifference in preparation for meeting the King of Sweden. Not only does Professor Chandra fail to win again this year, but now that he has been run over by a student on a bicycle while he absentmindedly crossed the street without looking, he has time to recognize that one daughter stopped speaking with him two years ago, another daughter is not going to college (a blasphemy!), and his son has moved to Hong Kong and barely has time to call. Not that Chandra has really mastered his cell phone, anyway. On a visit to his ex-wife and her husband in Colorado, Professor Chandra is persuaded, rather forcefully, to attend the Esalen Institute in California setting u