Violent gardeners and Amy Stewart’s Wicked Bugs

There is a violent gardener in my neighborhood. Call him Mister Green Fist. He put a defeatist sign up in front of his victory garden. The sign (which faces a busy thoroughfare) warns that he’ll “beat the crap” out of anyone who messes with his flowers. Will upload a photo of that sign when I work up the courage to take a snapshot. Speaking of wickedness and extreme gardening, I am eager to go see Amy Stewart, bestselling author of Wicked Plants, when she arrives in Capitola to read from her new book, Wicked Bugs, on Wednesday June 8 at the Book Cafe. The talk begins at 7:30 p.m. I didn’t realize that Ms. Stewart is a former Santa Cruzan. For the sake of this book, she tracked down 100 of our most horrifying bug enemies, from disease-vector flies to bugs that can turn entire libraries into mulch. Stewart’s books…

Cactuseaters Book Club part four: Read this one next: My Korean Deli

I’ve read so many memoirs that skirt around issues like race, class, family dynamics and the “prestige track,” the rut that can trap aspiring editors and authors into low-paying but impressive and privileged positions. Ben Ryder Howe’s My Korean Deli jumps into these issues right from the beginning. Here’s what happens when an author and editor refuses to get off the prestige track altogether (he refuses to abdicate his low-paying position at the Paris Review) even while taking an extreme step toward possible financial independence (he and various in-laws pool their resources to buy a delicatessen in Brooklyn.) As the book progresses, you can see the author struggling to maintain his footholds in the store and at the magazine — an increasingly difficult task, as you’ll see. I did not know that an author could extract so much narrative juice from store ownership. If you think it looks like a…