Still reading

Reading’s a bit slow this month. I’ve only managed to finish reading one book so far in February – and we’re already a week in!

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: A Flavia de Luce Mystery by Alan Bradley was a cute, fun read which I just finished last night. Flavia was such a great character, and I especially loved her predilection for poisons.

I’m still reading Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World by Claudia Roth Pierpont.  It’s been a fascinating combination of biography and analysis. I’ve just finished with reading the bit on Anais Nin – unfortunately that’s only the third essay in this collection!

Similarly, I’m still dipping now and then into Mark Kurlansky’s The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food–Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation’s Food Was Seasonal. I’m about 3/4 of the way through, as I’ve now found myself in the ‘far west eats’, having just read about geoduck clams. And now I have fried beaver tails to chew on and wildcat parties to attend in the rest of the far west, and a ‘grunion fry’ and Suzi-Q pototoes among others in the southwest to go.

And later today, I’ll be done with Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching. It did take me a while to get into the book. There’s something quite eerie about this book and I made the mistake of reading it just before sleeping once – and the next day made sure to move it from my nightstand to the living room.

So much for trying to read just one book at a time. I hope you’ve been having a great reading weekend!

Read: Perfume by Patrick Suskind

It’s been all kinds of busy up here in the Bay Area, but I’m trying to stick to my blogging resolution of writing more reviews – ok so really I said that I’d try to write 3 a week. I’m not quite sure if I’ve managed that yet!

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer opens with an intriguing idea. A man who is “one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages”. A man who has been forgotten “because his gifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a domain that leaves no traces in history: to the fleeting realm of scent”.

We learn of his birth to his fishmonger mother, who gives birth right at her fish stall, and leaves the infant (later to be named Jean-Baptiste Grenuoille) under the gutting table. In accordance with the law, he is given to a wet nurse and the mother arrested. The baby goes from wet nurse to wet nurse who refused to keep him for more than a few days. For he has no smell of his own. And yet, he has such a keen sense of smell, that by the age of six, he had:

“gathered tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of specific smells and kept them so clearly, so randomly, at his disposal, that he could not only recall them when he smelled them again, but could also actually smell them simply upon recollection. And what was more, he even knew how by sheer imagination to arrange new combinations of them, to the point where he created odours that did not exist in the real world. It was as if an autodidact possessed of a huge vocabulary of odours that enabled him to form at will great numbers of smelled sentences – and at an age when other children stammer words so painfully drummed into them, to formulate their first very inadequate sentences describing the world”.

Hmm yes, Suskind (translated from the German by John E. Woods) is fond of the long sentences. But he does put them to pretty good use, especially when describing this world of scents and odours.

“The sea smelled like a sail whose billows had caught up water, salt and a cold sun. It had a simple smell, the sea, but at the same time it smelled immense and unique, so much so that Grenouille hesitated to dissect the odours into fishy, salty, watery, seaweedy, fresh-airy, and so on. He preferred to leave the smell of the sea blended together, preserving it as a unit of his memory, relishing it whole.”

Can you imagine living in a world where each scent, each odour is so distinctive, so intricate?

One day, he discovers an intoxicating smell:

“… this scent was the key for ordering all odours, one could understand nothing about odours if one did not understand this scent, and his whole life would be bungled if he, Grenouille, did not succeed in possessing it. He had to have it, not simply in order to possess it, but for his heart to be at peace.”

Years later, after he has apprenticed himself to a perfumer and mastered the secrets of blending perfumes, and living on a mountaintop, away from humanity, he comes across that intoxicating smell again. And it has terrible consequences.

Perfume was made into a movie in 2006, starring Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman, among others. And as I read the book, I couldn’t quite understand how this movie was to be even remotely successful. How can these intriguing insights into smell be conveyed on film? For that is what makes the book for me. I can imagine that the dark and possibly suspenseful storyline itself and perhaps the setting would make someone go, that would make a good film. But the essence of it, the nuances, the odours… maybe if there was Smell-O-Vision?

Musings on celluloid versions aside, Perfume was a good read. It kept me interested throughout, and made me think quite a bit about our sense of smell and the odours of everyday life.

Book provided by – my library

Listened while I wrote: Martha Wainwright – Martha Wainwright

Read: The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

So The Anthologist is a book about poetry. Then again it’s not really either. Ok, let me start over. Paul Chowder is a poet. A semi-successful one who’s been tasked to write an introduction to an anthology of poetry.  Oh I’ll let him tell you himself:

“Hello, this is Paul Chowder, and I’m going to try to tell you everything I know. Well, not everything I know, because a lot of what I know, you know. But everything I know about poetry. All my tips and tricks and woes and worries are going to come tumbling out before you. I’m going to divulge them. What a juicy word that is, ‘divulge’. Truth opening its petals. Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.

What is poetry? Poetry is prose in slow motion. Now, that isn’t true of rhymed poems. It’s not true of Sir Walter Scott. It’s not true of Longfellow, or Tennyson, or Swinburne, or Yeats. Rhymed poems are different. But the kind of free-verse poems that most poets write now – the kind that I write – is slow-motion prose.

My life is a lie. My career is a joke. I’m a study in failure. Obviously I’m up in a barn again – which sounds like a country song, except for the word ‘obviously’. I wonder how often the word ‘obviously’ has been used in a country song. Probably not much, but I hardly listen to country, although some of the folk music I like has a strong country tincture. Check out Slaid Cleaves, who lives in Texas now but grew up right near where I live.”

Chowder is a procrastinator, an overthinker – and most of us can relate to that. Instead of writing his introduction, he goes to the bookstore and picks up an anthology of Elizabethan verse, spends time on iTunes, buys some software. And at the end of two weeks, comes up empty. His girlfriend Roz has given up on him, and he is heartbroken.

Why should you read this book? Because of Paul Chowder. He’s  vulnerable, he’s likable, he’s funny, he’s kinda odd. He’s human. He sleeps with his books:

“Some of the books are thick and some are thin, some of the books are in hardcover and some in paperback. Sometimes they get rolled up with the pillows and the blankets. And I never make the bed. So it’s like a stew of books. The bed is the liquid medium. It’s a Campbell Chunky Soup of books. The bed you can eat with a fork.

I’m hoping that someday I’ll have to clean them out and that somebody will return. But for now, this is what I’ve got.”

I love how he muses on all kinds of things, so much so that there seems to be so much happening although in actual fact nothing much is going on as he procrastinates his time away.

“One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spokeness of it will perish and go black and crumbly-maybe-and it will become a language like Latin that learned people learn. And scholars will write studies of Larry Sanders and Friends and Will & Grace and Ellen and Designing Women and Mary Tyler Moore, and everyone will see that the sitcom is the great American art form. American poetry will perish with the language; the sitcoms, on the other hand, are new to human evolution and therefore will be less perishable. Some scholar will write, a thousand years from now:  Surprisingly very little is known of Monica Mcgowan Johnson and Marilyn Suzanne Miller, who wrote the ‘hair bump’ episode of Mary Tyler Moore. Or: Surprisingly little can be gleaned from the available record about Maya Forbes and Peter Tolan, who had so much to do with the greatness of Larry Sanders.

And even so, I want to lie in bed and just read poems sometimes and not watch TV. Regardless of what will or won’t perish.”

And of course, he talks about poetry, about the iambic pentameter, the invisible rest and so on. He makes up tunes for verses he likes. And tells us things like “poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing.”

I haven’t read anything from Nicholson Baker previously but after thoroughly enjoying The Anthologist, I feel like I ought to check out his other works. I’d have to say that this was one of my favourite reads of January 2010 (yeah, this review is a bit belated).

Book provided by – my library

Read in January 2010

Argh, where did the month go!

Here’s what I read in January 2010 for a total of 19 books.

Fiction (11)
1. Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw
2. Childhood’s End – Arthur C Clarke
3. Gourmet Rhapsody – Muriel Barbery
4. Herland -  Charlotte Perkins Gilman
5. Tell Me Something True – Leila Cobo
6. The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver’s Seat, The Only Problem -  Muriel Sparks
7. The Inheritance – Louisa May Alcott
8. The General in His Labyrinth – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9. Oyster – Janette Turner Hospital
10. The Anthologist – Nicholson Baker
11. Washington Square – Henry James
12. Perfume – Patrick Suskind

Graphic Novels (2)
13. The Sandman: A Game of You – Neil Gaiman
14. The Sandman: Dream Hunters – Neil Gaiman

Non-fiction (5)
15. Manhood for Amateurs – Michael Chabon
16. Other Colours – Orhan Pamuk
17. Hungry: A Mother and Daughter Fight Anorexia -  Sheila and Lisa Himmel
18. The Perfect Storm -  Sebastian Junger
19. Not Becoming My Mother – Ruth Reichl

Reading the World Challenge

Eva’s post - and awesome list of books – tempted me to join the Reading The World Challenge for the first time. Here’s what PaperTigers, who is hosting the challenge has to say about it:

“You can choose at what point between January and June your 7-month period begins, in order to have completed the Challenge by the end of the year. So here’s what we have to do:

Choose one book from/about/by or illustrated by someone from each of the seven continents – that’s:

Africa
Antarctica
Asia
Australasia
Europe
North America
South America”

I’m amending this slightly to two books from each continent. I think that’s quite manageable. So here are my choices and lists of books that I’ll choose from.

Africa – Morocco

Secret Son – Laila Lalami
In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams – Tahir Shah
Dreams Of Trespass: Tales Of A Harem Girlhood – Fatima Mernissi
Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail – Malika Oufkir
The Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles

Antarctica
Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica – Sara Wheeler
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage – Alfred Lansing
Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer – Lynne Cox

Asia – Sri Lanka
I’ve been reading Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End (and loved it), and was fascinated to learn that Clarke lived in Sri Lanka from 1956 till his death in 2008. And what better way to learn more about this country than by reading about it.

Mosquito – Roma Tearne
The Last Theorem – Arthur C Clarke and Frederik Pohl
Bringing Tony Home – Tissa Abēsēkara
The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon – Edie Meidav
Anil’s Ghost: A Novel – Michael Ondaatje
Reef – Romesh Gunesekera

Australasia – New Zealand
I really want  to read more about Katherine Mansfield so this is such a great  opportunity!
The Garden Party and Other Stories – Katherine Mansfield
The Bone People – Keri Hulme
Farther Than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook – Martin Dugard
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before – Tony Horwitz

Europe – Portugal
Death with Interruptions – Jose Saramago
Journey to Portugal: In Pursuit of Portugal’s History and Culture – Jose Saramago
Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe – Laurence Bergreen
Alentejo Blue – Monica Ali
The Inquisitors’ Manual – Antonio Lobo Antunes

North America – Canada
Fall On Your Knees – Ann-Marie MacDonald
Island: The Complete Stories – Alistair MacLeod
The End of East: A Novel – Jen Sookfong Lee
Through Black Spruce: A Novel – Joseph Boyden
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams: A Novel – Wayne Johnston

South America – Argentina
Collected Fictions – Jorge Luis Borges
Borges: Selected Non-Fictions – Jorge Luis Borges
Evita: In My Own Words – Eva Peron
The Tunnel – Ernesto Sabato
Leopoldina’s Dream – Silvina Ocampo

Let the reading begin!

Read: Sandman: Dream Hunters

Well the Sandman has grown on me the more I read this series written by Neil Gaiman (the latest I had read was The A Game of You, perhaps one of my favourites along with Dream Country).

This time though, being unable to find the next book in the collection, I picked up The Dream Hunters (Sandman, Book 11). It wasn’t quite what I had expected at first. This is more of a novella with illustrations (and what beautiful illustrations!) by Yoshitaka Amano, the designer of the Final Fantasy game series.

Apparently Gaiman was researching for his translation of Hayao Miyazaki’s film Princess Mononoke and discovered the world of Japanese fables. In his afterword, he writes that he was struck by the tale ‘The Fox, the Monk, and the Mikado of All Night’s Dreaming’ in Fairy Tales of Old Japan and its similarities with his Sandman series. Gaiman also mentions Y.T. Ozaki, in whose tale the onmyoji is a central character. Interestingly, in 2007, Gaiman wrote on his blog: ““I learned from Wikipedia that Sandman: The Dream Hunters was actually based on Pu Songling’s Strange Stories From A Chinese Studio, which I thought I ought to read. Will report back” Couldn’t find any other mention of that on his blog though. So is this a Japanese fable? A Chinese one? I haven’t a clue. Nevertheless, what a great adaptation.

His collaboration with Amano resulted in this novella, as Amano does not draw comics.

Dream Hunters begins with a wager between a badger and a fox, on who would be able to scare a monk away from his temple. The winner gets to keep the temple for its home. The fox takes on the form of a woman in its bid and falls in love with the monk. Meanwhile in Kyoto, onmyoji, Master of Yin-Yang sends his demons to take over the monk’s dreams, to kill him. The fox overhears and enters the dream world to save the man she loves.

Morpheus doesn’t feature as prominently here as in the other books in the series, but I loved that Gaiman got to describe the Sandman (at least more than the graphic novels allow):

“The King of Dreams had skin as pale as the winter moon and hair as black as a raven’s wing, and his eyes were pools of night inside which distant stars glittered and burned. His robe was the colour of night, and flames and faces appeared in the base of it and were gone. He began to speak, in a voice that was gentle, yet as strong as silk.”

Dream Hunters was a gorgeous read. The paintings and drawings were lush, dark, mesmerising and not merely an accompaniment to the text but that which told the story on their own. As Amano writes in the afterword: “It was almost destined that our paths would cross. This is only the beginning.”

Dream Hunters is also available in graphic novel form.

Book provided by – my library

It’s linkday (29 Jan 2010)

“I do not pretend that uploading or downloading unpurchased electronic books is morally correct, but I do think it is more of a grey area than some of your readers may.”

- The Millions interviews a book pirate

I’m loving these cute Helvetica cookie cutters!  (via Apartment Therapy)

Beautiful book jackets (via Apartment Therapy)

Jacket+Bookmarks. What a great idea! I especially like the Alice one. (vis swissmiss)

Read: Not Becoming My Mother by Ruth Reichl

“As I came to know this new person, I began to see how much I owe her. Mom may not have realised her dreams, but that did not make her bitter. She did not have a happy life, but she wanted one for me. And she made enormous emotional sacrifices to make sure that my life would not turn out like hers.”

You might know Reichl as the editor of the now-defunct (sad!) Gourmet magazine. She has also written three food-related memoirs Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise.

Not Becoming My Mother: and Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way, though, is less food-related (although it starts out with a fascinatingly gross concoction of chocolate pudding, prunes, pretzels, jam, marshmallows and peaches) and as I read on, I realised that it was very fitting for the Women Unbound Challenge, for her mother belonged to that generation who frowned on women who worked, and who were only respected when they were married with children. For instance, after her first child, her mother (Reichl’s grandmother) writes to her, “Now you are a real woman!” Yikes.

As Reichl goes through her mother’s collection of letters, notes and clippings she discovers who her mother really is, how she had spent her whole life trying to win her parents’ approval (getting married to the wrong man, leaving her bookstore behind, starting a family, but ending up “tempestuously unhappy”)  and how she fought to ensure that her own daughter wouldn’t end up that way.

I’m a bit conflicted about this book. It’s a touching little book, but which is far too short (although my copy has 112 pages, each page doesn’t hold that many of its widely-spaced, large-font paragraphs). It would have been fine to read it as a magazine article or perhaps an essay as part of a larger collection. I couldn’t help but wonder: doesn’t her mother deserve more? Early on in the book, Reichl talks about writing a book about her mother’s generation, and she had even begun interviewing other women and researching about emancipated women. And after reading Not Becoming My Mother, I wished that she had carried out what she had started, that we could have had more tales about that generation, or at the very least, more about her mother.

Book provided by – my library

This is my 7th read for the Women Unbound Challenge.

Library Loot (25 Jan 2010)

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva and Marg that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva and Marg that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva and Marg that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.

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Not Becoming My Mother: and Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way – Ruth Reichl

I’ve read all of Reichl’s previous books so am looking forward to this really short one.

In Not Becoming My Mother, bestselling author Ruth Reichl embarks on a clear-eyed, openhearted investigation of her mother’s life, piecing together the journey of a woman she comes to realize she never really knew. Looking to her mother’s letters and diaries, Reichl confronts the painful transition her mother made from a hopeful young woman to an increasingly unhappy older one and realizes the tremendous sacrifices she made to make sure her daughter’s life would not be as disappointing as her own.

Growing up in Cleveland, Miriam Brudno dreamed of becoming a doctor, like her father. But when she announced this, her parents said, “You’re no beauty, and it’s too bad you’re such an intellectual. But if you become a doctor, no man will ever marry you.” Instead, at twenty, Miriam opened a bookstore, a profession everyone agreed was suitably ladylike. She corresponded with authors all over the world, including philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, political figures such as Max Eastman, and novelists such as Christopher Marlowe. It was the happiest time of her life.

Nearly thirty when she finally married, she fulfilled expectations, settled down, left her bookstore behind, and started a family. But conformity came at a tremendous cost. With labor-saving devices to aid in household chores, there was simply not enough to do to fill the days. Miriam-and most of her friends-were smart, educated women who were often bored, miserable, and silently rebellious.

On what would have been Miriam’s one hundredth birthday Reichl opens up her mother’s diaries for the first time and encounters a whole new woman. This is a person she had never known. In this intimate study Reichl comes to understand the lessons of rebellion, independence, and self-acceptance that her mother-though unable to guide herself-succeeded in teaching her daughter.

White is for Witching: A Novel – Helen Oyeyemi

I actually saw this during my last trip to the library. My eyes paused on its spine as I scanned the ‘new arrivals’ shelves, but I never did pick it up (perhaps because I’d not heard of it before?). It was only after I read Eva’s thoughts on the book that I realised what a mistake that was. It definitely sounds like a book I’d read. Luckily it was still on the shelves when I hit the library this week.

Miranda is at home—homesick, home sick …”

As a child, Miranda Silver developed pica, a rare eating disorder that causes its victims to consume nonedible substances. The death of her mother when Miranda is sixteen exacerbates her condition; nothing, however, satisfies a strange hunger passed down through the women in her family. And then there’s the family house in Dover, England, converted to a bed-and-breakfast by Miranda’s father. Dover has long been known for its hostility toward outsiders. But the Silver House manifests a more conscious malice toward strangers, dispatching those visitors it despises. Enraged by the constant stream of foreign staff and guests, the house finally unleashes its most destructive power.

With distinct originality and grace, and an extraordinary gift for making the fantastic believable, Helen Oyeyemi spins the politics of family and nation into a riveting and unforgettable mystery.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer – Patrick Suskind

I’ve been wanting to get my hands on this for a while now. And was quite pleased that this library had a decent copy (the other branch – now closed for renovation – had a rather grimy one!)

In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift-an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille’s genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and frest-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the “ultimate perfume”-the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brillance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity

Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World – Claudia Roth Pierpont

Oh dear, I can’t remember where it was that I first heard of this book! It’s for the Women Unbound Challenge.

With a masterful ability to connect their social contexts to well-chosen and telling details of their personal lives, Claudia Roth Pierpont gives us portraits of twelve amazingly diverse and influential literary women of the twentieth century, women who remade themselves and the world through their art.

Gertrude Stein, Mae West, Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Ayn Rand, Doris Lessing, Anais Nin, Zora Neale Hurston, Marina Tsvetaeva, Hannah Arendt and Mary Mccarthy, and Olive Schreiner: Pierpont is clear-eyed in her examination of each member of this varied group, connectng her subjects firmly to the issues of sexual freedom, race, and politics that bound them to their times, even as she exposes the roots of their uniqueness.

The Anthologist: A Novel

The Anthologist is narrated by Paul Chowder — a once-in-a-while-published kind of poet who is writing the introduction to a new anthology of poetry. He’s having a hard time getting started because his career is floundering, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the great poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised to reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the introduction will be a little longer than he’d thought.

What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry: from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, Bogan, Merwin) to the staff of The New Yorker, what Paul reveals is astonishing and makes one realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives. At the same time, Paul barely manages to realize all of this himself, and the result is a tenderly romantic, hilarious, and inspired novel.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: A Flavia de Luce Mystery – Alan Bradley
I don’t usually read mystery/crime fiction, but everyone’s been blogging about this one, so I figured that I ought to see what all the fuss is about.

It is the summer of 1950–and at the once-grand mansion of Buckshaw, young Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, is intrigued by a series of inexplicable events: A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Then, hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath.

For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”

The Dream Hunters (Sandman, Book 11)
I was really looking for Fables and Reflections, the next book in the series, but that wasn’t on the shelf so I was about to walk away when this slim hardcover caught my eye. Dream Hunters is actually a novella, with some gorgeous illustrations.

From Amazon: Sandman fans should feel lucky that master fantasy writer Neil Gaiman discovered the mythical world of Japanese fables while researching his translation of Hayao Miyazaki’s film Princess Mononoke. At the same time, while preparing for the Sandman 10th anniversary, he met Yoshitaka Amano, his artist for the 11th Sandman book. Amano is the famed designer of the Final Fantasy game series. The product of Gaiman’s immersion in Japanese art, culture, and history, Sandman: Dream Hunters is a classic Japanese tale (adapted from “The Fox, the Monk, and the Mikado of All Night’s Dreaming”) that he has subtly morphed into his Sandman universe.

The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien

One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as “a work of fiction,” defying the conscientious reader’s need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the twenty-two short pieces is written with such care, emotional content, and prosaic precision that it could stand on its own.

The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O’Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the enemy), and occasionally each other. In their relationships we see their isolation and loneliness, their rage and fear. They miss their families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left back home. Yet they find sympathy and kindness for strangers (the old man who leads them unscathed through the mine field, the girl who grieves while she dances), and love for each other, because in Vietnam they are the only family they have. We hear the voices of the men and build images upon their dialogue. The way they tell stories about others, we hear them telling stories about themselves.

With the creative verve of the greatest fiction and the intimacy of a searing autobiography, The Things They Carried is a testament to the men who risked their lives in America’s most controversial war. It is also a mirror held up to the frailty of humanity. Ultimately The Things They Carried and its myriad protagonists call to order the courage, determination, and luck we all need to survive.

Washington Square – Henry James

My pick this week for a book older than me

When timid and plain Catherine Sloper acquires a dashing and determined suitor, her father, convinced that the young man is nothing more than a fortune-hunter, decides to put a stop to their romance. Torn between her desire to win her father’s love and approval and her passion for the first man who has ever declared his love for her, Catherine faces an agonising dilemma, and becomes all too aware of the restrictions that others seek to place on her freedom. James’ masterly novel deftly interweaves the public and private faces of nineteenth-century New York society; it is also a deeply moving study of innocence destroyed.

The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food–Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation’s Food Was Seasonal – Mark Kurlansky

Oops forgot to add this earlier. I’ve started reading it and it’s quite interesting so far!

Award-winning New York Times-bestselling author Mark Kurlansky takes us back to the food and eating habits of a younger America: Before the national highway system brought the country closer together; before chain restaurants imposed uniformity and low quality; and before the Frigidaire meant frozen food in mass quantities, the nation’s food was seasonal, regional, and traditional. It helped form the distinct character, attitudes, and customs of those who ate it.

In the 1930s, with the country gripped by the Great Depression and millions of Americans struggling to get by, FDR created the Federal Writers’ Project under the New Deal as a make-work program for artists and authors. A number of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Nelson Algren, were dispatched all across America to chronicle the eating habits, traditions, and struggles of local people. The project, called “America Eats,” was abandoned in the early 1940s because of the World War and never completed.

The Food of a Younger Land unearths this forgotten literary and historical treasure and brings it to exuberant life. Mark Kurlansky’s brilliant book captures these remarkable stories, and combined with authentic recipes, anecdotes, photos, and his own musings and analysis, evokes a bygone era when Americans had never heard of fast food and the grocery superstore was a thing of the future. Kurlansky serves as a guide to this hearty and poignant look at the country’s roots.

From New York automats to Georgia Coca-Cola parties, from Arkansas possum-eating clubs to Puget Sound salmon feasts, from Choctaw funerals to South Carolina barbecues, the WPA writers found Americans in their regional niches and eating an enormous diversity of meals. From Mississippi chittlins to Indiana persimmon puddings, Maine lobsters, and Montana beavertails, they recorded the curiosities, commonalities, and communities of American food.

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them?

What did you get from your library this week?

See more Library Loot here.

Read: Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbary

Much of the book world has been enamoured with Barbary’s other book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, but I haven’t been able to get my hands on that one yet. Instead, during one of my library treks, I ended up with what is her perhaps a bit less successful book, Gourmet Rhapsody*.

I entered Barbary’s world with no expectations or prior knowledge of the story, except guessing from the title that it was about food (I have to add that I’m one of those who like to at least have a vague idea of what the story/reception to the book is like). And I love food, I love books about food and I couldn’t wait to read this one.

And I wasn’t disappointed. Barbary’s main character, a rather pompous well-known food critic, waxes poetically about food. Essentially he’s on his death bed and trying to recall a certain taste, a particular memory that has been haunting him: “A forgotten flavor, lodged in my deepest self, and which has surfaced at the twilight of my life as the only truth ever told – or realized. I search, and cannot find.”

He’s quite a/an ________ (fill in the blanks with whatever curseworthy version of ‘jerk’ you’d like to use). He does not love his children (“I have never loved them, and I feel no remorse on that account”) and doesn’t really treat his wife all that well. He does kind of enjoy the company of his cat though.

But on to the food. And what absolutely gorgeous passages they are! Barbary’s prose is so seductive.  I especially enjoyed these delectable morsels:

“The resistance of the skin – slightly taught, just enough; the luscious yield of the tissues, their seed-filled liqueur oozing to the corners of one’s lips and that one wipes away without any fear of staining one’s fingers; this plump little globe unleashing a flood of nature inside us: a tomato, an adventure.”

“… sashimi is velvet dust, verging on silk, or a bit of both, and the extraordinary alchemy of its gossamer essence allows it to preserve a milky density unknown even by clouds.”

Oh, isn’t that just heavenly! And salivatory.

And this one, where his daughter reflects on being the offspring of a food critic:

“Just like him, I dissect each sensation in succession; like him I cloak them with adjectives, dilate them, stretch them over the length of a sentence, or a verbal melody, and I let nothing of the actual food remain, only these magician’s words, which will make the readers believe they have been eating as we did.”

I was quite charmed by this little book, despite its very flawed central character. Perhaps I am just a sucker for those ‘magician’s words’ that intrigue and tempt my tastebuds.

* Gourmet Rhapsody is actually her first book, although it was released in the US a year after The Elegance of the Hedgehog. The New Yorker said this was “rather like serving the amuse-bouche after the entrée“. So if you have yet to discover the talents of Barbary, might I suggest that you read Gourmet Rhapsody before The Elegance of the Hedgehog?