My Year of Meats

The penultimate book for my Environmental Lit. class is My Year of Meats, a book about Jane Takagi-Little, a documentarian who works on a show called My American Wife! for Japanese television. In the process, she learns a lot about the meat industry, and uncovers issues that no one is willing to talk about, but which have a huge impact on everyone's life--including hers.

There is some pretty fun stuff in this book, especially with the cross-cultural dialogue between America and Japan. But it's also rather depressing, since the facts of meat production are pretty darn scary. The characters are great (my favorite, by far, is Akiko), though there are some that aren't given enough time (such as Sloan, in my opinion). I was satisfied with the first half of the novel, but the second half wasn't as great.

It's pretty easy reading, and I was pretty disappointed by the discussions we had in class with this book. So that probably colored the way I felt about it. But I guess that it's a good thing for a message like this to be written so accessibly. While I didn't think so highly of it after finishing it, it definitely still is a good book to read.

Rating: 5.6