Time to start writing again: books and food

Some of my fans have requested that I return to sharing my thoughts in a blog format. Most of these fans have the first initial M, and their birthday is today, funnily enough.

I realized that this is the perfect time to write about one of my regular thought areas: books + food.

I have a rule that any cookbook from which you get just one recipe that you use regularly has been a good investment. You can imagine that I therefore have quite a large collection. On the other hand, many cookbooks are simply wonderful coffee table books or dream fodder. Both are also categories that I adore. You can imagine that I therefore have quite a large collection of these as well. I also have a bit of depth in the historical food/cooking/recipe zone, from which I do not cook at all, but in a way that is similar to being an English-speaker and loving to feel proto-Indo-European behind English, I enjoy feeling the history behind the simple foods I actually prepare and enjoy best.

Here are a few books that already combine literature and historical food, just to get started:

On the other hand, I have pulled some ideas for eating from books that are definitely not about food. Let's begin with sandwiches, for today.

I have to say that my all-time favourite food from a book is sandwiches à la The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I really loved the series and I have written before (way back in 2009!) that I feel Steig Larsson busted open the Nordic procedural thriller genre with this series, and I believe it is currently one of the dominant genres out there in all culture. I might even say that its omnipresence has pushed it out beyond my ability to enjoy it. In any case, let's talk about the sandwiches. Maybe I'll talk about genre theory in another post, if you want.

Firstly, you should know that I LOVE SANDWICHES. They may be my favourite thing to eat. I have a Pinterest board dedicated to sandwich recipes. Perhaps it would be better to say sandwich ideas rather than than sandwich recipes. The recipe is simply bread + other. 

Mikael Blomkvist eats sandwiches thru-out the Dragon Tattoo series, but always using and combining just these ingredients: liverwurst, cheese and pickles. Total possible number of combos is a factorial of 3, therefore there are 6 possibilities. I use them all.  Well, I might not have tried plain pickles, but now I'm going to. And I ALWAYS remember HIM eating them, with black coffee on the side (a Swedish thing, but not at all my thing), at any hour of the day or night, deluxe or corner store ingredients, no matter.

I have (unoriginally) become a regular bread-baker here in COVID times. I usually use commercial liverwurst with sweet pickles–that has been my most favouritest combo–but I tried my hand at chopped liver using this recipe from Bon Appetit magazine. And I made chopped liver and pickles on homemade bread a few times out of it. Yes! 

photo by Alex Lau from Bon Apetit magazine

Thank-you. Next!

Recently, I made bread especially so that I can try a recipe from another book I love: The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. My little sister had this classic boxed set, and I ended up with them for my kids. I loved the stories and so did they. One of my kids will probably one day have a hedgehog pet, maybe because of Mrs Tiggywinkle. I used to snuggle with one of my kids in a way that I was the box bed and she was Mrs Tittlemouse in it. Those were some good times!

We watched this beautiful series, The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends, over and over. There is a lovely score by Colin Towns. I have an old CD somewhere, and I found a playlist on YouTube to share with you. He has had a long career in scoring and I see he scored the current series Doc Martin, and I have signed up for a trial of Acorn so I can definitely tune in to check out the music, altho it might be an interesting show, too.

And there is also the quite lovely movie Miss Potter, about Beatrix Potter herself, starring Renee Zellwegger. Perhaps not the greatest movie of all time, but inhabiting the same quiet dreamy space as the stories, and with gorgeous music by Colin Westlake. The movie is currently on Prime in Canada but I also found it on YouTube, and you can get the soundtrack on Apple Music or YouTube as well.

Yes, I hear you saying, but where are the sandwiches? Do you remember when Peter gets home wet and torn and exhausted and his mother sends him to bed with no supper? His sisters have a dinner that I have always (and by that I mean for about 80 years or so) longed to try.

Here is the passage and the illustration: I AM sorry to say that Peter was not very well during the evening. His mother put him to bed, and made some camomile tea; and she gave a dose of it to Peter! "One table-spoonful to be taken at bed-time." BUT Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper.

We have been getting very good blackberries lately and it came to my mind to give this old idea a try. Here is my bowl:

OK, it is a sandwich only by the loosest definition, bread + other. Or I could say it is a deconstructed sandwich. Or I could just say it was so delicious I will be having it again this morning for breakfast.

I must tell also tell you about one of my favourite Instagram accounts: Eating Their Words. Virginia is actually from Toronto and lives very near to my husband's hometown of Pesaro in Italy, of all things! She makes and serves all kinds of foods out of the books she reads, and posts beautiful pictures of the food and the cover together with the relevant quotation from the book. Check it out @eatingthierwords.

I guess that might be about it for sandwiches. The marigold is wondering nervously if it is still too early for lunch...

Best of 2014

Found this in my drafts after a long break, and decided I still wanted it recorded here.

This year was the opposite in reading to last year! I am looking over my entries in LibraryThing, and thinking "Oh! I have to mention this flight!" and  "Oh, that was a stand-out!" and "Wow! Still following this trail!" (Well, one of my friends said that is just me living my life: following things up and tracking them down. and Yeah! I like it! I love it!)

So, in just one weekend I read the best three books of the year:
Word Exchange, by Alena Graedon
More than this by Patrick Ness
Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea

My other huge adventure of reading, and I can't believe it's not front page news everywhere, is Shakespeare's Beehive, a $75 hardcover but a $10 EBOOK! And the dictionary itself is available FREE online. With a great Canadian connection - sold on eBay by an (anonymous) Canadian book dealer, known to a book expert of my acquaintance, no less.

And by coincidence–no serendipity–I also bought The Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. The beauty of reading them together is that both are indexed to English words. Every entry is an informative wide-ranging humorous essay. OMG. I bought it in E, than had to buy it on paper, too, all the better to rummage in, my dear.

And science fiction about time travel being defined by verb tenses! How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel by Charles Wu. Woo!

And a book called Nom de Plume by Carmela Ciuraru, which turned out to be a fascinating reading list itself, (not to mention movie watch list) and I actually found out I owned an unread Georges Simenon book, from his Inspector Maigret series, which I dug out and read for fun.

Had a bit of a crime wave:

Started with The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America's Coldest Cases by Deborah Halber, which got me fishing out of my pile
The Invention of Murder, Judith Flanders leading to the Victorian Scottish policeman James McLevy's memoir McLevy: The Edinburgh Detective and mystery fiction based on him: Shadow of the Serpent by David Ashton
and I always refer back to my hero Bill James and his book Popular Crime when I read other books that touch on...um...popular...crime...

New library assistant at the school library whose own passion is graphic works, (a MLIS with an undergrad in Fine Art, no less!) and following his suggestions has been a really great path: Brian Lee O'Malley, (author of Scott Pilgrim which is an amazing and favourite movie, but a little long and boring as a series of books) special shout-out for his Seconds, which was amazing: and the sweet and reliable Faith Larsen (his one-time partner); and Lucy Knisely did another memoir which I really liked: An Age of License.

And I received an adorable YR (Young Reader) book thru the LibraryThing Early Review Program: Rhyme schemer, by K A Holt. With a little schemer of a narrator who narrates in poetry, but poetry - not really rhyme or doggerel.

Read two Kate Atkinsons Life After Life first and OMG I loved it! Then Started Early, Took My Dog, from her series about the investigator Jackson Brodie, and I will continue reading everything I can get my hands on by her. And I read The Goldfinch, which I adored. A Brown graduate, like Graedon. They really produce interesting authors there.

Which reminds me that I bought a few books on a trip to Boston. (Oh wait, about, well, 20 or so.) Thoreau and Hawthorne in situ and a bunch about Isabella Stewart Gardner and the museum and her artists, but also Matthew Pearl's book about MIT (which was a block from our hotel) and the usual interesting historical thriller.

And I took out of my to-read pile (currently 438 or so books) a book for a trip that I thought would be disposable if I lost it, by a writer much loved by an Italian friend of mine, and it turned out to be FANTASTIC: Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things - dystopian and heart-breaking and so tender! And Auster also wrote and directed a movie I loved–Smoke– and wrote and directed other movies and wrote other books and series. Clearly more work to be done here.

I read Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence with one kid for school (never read it before) and I'm looking forward to watching the movie over the holidays. I read the F Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby,  (PS The Good Gatsby...The Large Gatsby...see also SH*T Rough Drafts by Paul Laudiero) for the first time, with the other kid, which she wanted to do after seeing the Robert Redford movie, which we quite liked for its much reviled quality of being too like the book and too slow for a movie.

A wonderful book about how to find the unexpected in reading, The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading by Phyllis Rose. Her effort was to get away from the sense of having her reading list mediated by awards committees and important reading lists and courses and received wisdom and even best seller lists, and she settled on reading thru a complete library shelf. How random! How fun randomness can be, if you can access it.

That's so random!

And I had a whole moment about Joseph Boyden's The Orenda, more about the moment than the book. Read it here.

So, what is that, 25 books?? Fully half of the books I actually recorded for this year.

2016: The year of reading Scottish

I realized that 2016 was my year of reading Scottish when I closed out the year reading an Inspector Rebus  by Ian Rankin, a writer I often find myself reading over Christmas break.

It was also the year that Shakespeare’s Macbeth was played at the Stratford Festival, so I read the play itself over the summer, in a couple of versions. Lady Macbeth by Susan Fraser King was suggested to me at a bookstore in Stratford, and altho it was a bit historical fiction (romance)-y it was a deeply researched work, which aimed to show Lady Macbeth according to the actual historical record, rather than as a figure in a story aimed at James I of England, the Scottish James VI, who inherited the English throne from his cousin Elizabeth I and who had reasons to support his succession with popular works. 

I watched Braveheart, because Mel Gibson used Polanski’s version of Macbeth to inspire his movie, and I am hoping to watch Polanski’s Macbeth before the new year resumes. 

I read both the first volume of the memoirs of James McLevy, McLevy: The Edinburgh Detective and David Ashton’s The Shadow of the Serpent, from the fictional Inspector McLevy Mystery  Series. McLevy was a real detective working in Edinburgh at the turn of the 20^th C, and is a lovely backgrounder to Ian Rankin, and these were the first books of the year. I read them in Kindle, and great hospital waiting room reading they were, too.

I also watched the Korean historical drama series  Moon Lovers/Scarlet Heart Ryeo, a succession story with many parallels to Macbeth in addition to the succession struggles, including the female use of soft power rather than legal or armed strength. It was a stunning window into a beautiful and ritualized world of Korea 1000 years ago.

That series connected thru to Margaret Drabble’s Red Queen, also based on a real person, a Korean queen whose real diaries exist in three original versions, and whose first English translators used Macbeth to illuminate the machinations she described. (That work is still on my to-read list.) This was my first Drabble. I tend to prefer the other sister, and I did also read an A.S. Byatt, The Game this year, and it was masterful, as expected. 

Shakespeare, if not specifically Macbeth, was also strong this year, starting with finally reading a book handed down to me by my mother, published in 1935, but still the ranking work on the subject: Caroline Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us, with lists and handmade charts, and beautiful essays connecting Shakespeare’s imagery with his life and comparing his imagery to the imagery of other writers of the period. I also read Michael Wood’s Shakespeare, which was written to accompany his BBC series In Search of Shakespeare that I watched a year or two ago, and which really gave me some updated ideas about Shakespeare around his likely crypto-Catholicism. It was especially effective in requiring a re-think of Romeo and Juliet, handy to re-watch because that is the tragedy at Stratford this coming year!

I also finally got to A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, which is a very satisfying mapping of King Lear onto an American prairie farm, a stunning book which I overlooked during my year of reading Lear. For the record I did also read another alternate Romeo and Juliet, but it was not a favourite.

And in keeping with the dark wintery feel of Scotland, I read a couple of mysteries from melancholy places like Sweden and Vermont, and a very dark summery mystery by Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark, which I am pretty sure is The Inferno. 

I reread Jane Eyre with one of my kids as mandatory summer reading, and was mightily impressed by the power of Jane as well as the power of Charlotte Bronte as a writer and moralist. I saw and felt why the book remains a generally-considered top 10 book in English. (Sadly, I did not actually read a first edition copy.)

The World’s Strongest Librarian by Josh Hanagarne was a huge favourite of the year. It is about a 6’7” weight-lifting Mormon librarian with Tourette’s. Oh and it’s a non-fiction memoir!

Dystopian fiction is still hanging in there with the Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 by Lionel Shriver. I read this in a reading group with a few of my high school classmates, and I preferred it to my own choice for that group, a book by Canadian writer Maggie Helwig, Girls Fall Down. 

Then there was my beautiful Slavic mermaid favourite by Michelle Tea, Girl at the Bottom of the Sea, the second in a series published by McSweeney's, and my other YA favourite of the year Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, a real piece of meta-fiction, the writer’s fan fiction version of the fan fiction created by a the main character in her book Fan Girl, who writes about a fictional piece of fiction…

The graphic non-fiction winner of the year is Alison Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, I book I often recommend to people looking to get into graphic. Bechdel is also the source of the fabulous Bechdel test, which is a bar of acceptability reached if two named women characters can be onscreen in a movie without talking about a man.

The total books read was 50 of which 19 are on this list, not the highest count ever, but many really great books. Additionally connected are a film, a play IRL and on video, and a TV series. Eight books were by Canadian writers, eleven were fiction, two were memoirs, two were about Shakespeare.

Best Reading of 2015

This post was delayed by the death of the small blog, but I decide my blog is still the place to keep track of certain things, such as the annual review of books, so I am going to publish the results from a couple of years now.


In the place of honour during 2015:

My beloved Instagram


The wonder of curating your own magazine of images, with the possibility of conversing directly with artists and photographers and dog-owners. and making actual friends that you might otherwise never encounter...it's a winning formula and I have enjoyed many happy hours looking at and reading Instagram posts. And posting.







And despite feeling like I read less because of the appeal of Instagram, I controlled my reading more carefully and got thru a lot of great books.

Luckily I still keep LibraryThing active so I can be reminded of books read and enjoyed over the past two years.

I enjoyed a mini-theme around the artist JMW Turner featured in an exhibition at the AGO. They were showing clips from, and I was able to see Mr Turner the movie. It was a great period piece and I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I reacquainted myself with Dark Clue by James Wilson, a lovely dark Victorian-style gothic novel around an investigation of Turner, altho she was born late in his life, so he is not really a Victorian character.

I read and shared with my kids the fantastic graphic memoir Pyong Yang by Guy Delisle, a French-Canadian artist and writer. It's a book we find ourselves returning to to from time to time, both for content and beauty.

Ghost Town, by Patrick McGrath is a set of three short stories about different periods of New York history. I was lucky enough to read it just after a trip there, and I was able to recollect those historic streets way downtown as the setting for the stories. Delicious.

Thug Notes: A Street-Smart Guide to Classic Literature by Sparky Sweets PhD was a laugh-aloud yet totally accurate review of...classic literature. Love it! And it looks great on your shelf.

I read a textbook for a class in Writers' Craft taken by one of my kids, which was also kind on an ultimate reading list of classics and undervalued books: Reading like a Writer by Francine Prose. This book will stay close as a great source of reading ideas, and ways to think about books.

Super Mutant Magic Academy by Canadian artist Jillian Tamaki is a brilliant wordless graphic novel, faintly Potteresque, illustrating the social life of current high school students. Outstanding!

I spent a little time in a kind of Edwardian trance, for some reason a state I adore. I read The Jinx by Théophile Gautier (which is actually a mid-19th C work, but feels impressionistic and pre-war) and
the novella Mortal Coils by a very young Aldous Huxley. Both were incomparably lovely.

I participated in the frenzy over My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. I quite enjoyed it, and I could feel it in relation to the stories of the youth of my Italian in-laws, but when it came time to read on, I just wasn't motivated. If the rest of the books fell in my lap, I might read them, but I didn't seek them out. There was a different kind of frenzy of comment when the real identity of the author was revealed, and I found it distasteful.

A favourite quirky read was The Mathematician's Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer, a novel about the mourning period for a Russian Jewish woman mathematician and a review of her life by one of her less-gifted children. Love a good piece of mathematical fiction.

I am always on about Shakespeare, and the book I studies and loved this year was Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt. As more and more original source material is digitized, many forms of historical research are able to move forward, not least of which is the study and tracking of the life of Shakespeare. There was also a new edition published of Shakespeare's Beehive by antiquarian booksellers George Koppelman and Daniel Wechsler. I really like to stay current with this story, and I really can't believe it isn't better known! The writers are coming to speak at Stratford in 2017, and I have already bought my tickets.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Australian Richard Flanagan was one of those books that sears your memory so that you can never contact something without seeing the images generated by the writer. This book deals with Australian POWs in Japan, and shortly after the book was published the Japanese had an exhibition of records supporting the truth of something that was spoken of in this novel. Scary. Awful. Brilliant.

I read a second Edith Wharton, House of Mirth and found it so much better than Age of Innocence, which seems to be the more popular book and movie. The story is much more brutal, and the characters are stronger. I'm not sure why it is eclipsed.

I started reading Michael Harris's The End of Absence in a library books, and ended up buying it on my Kindle so I could underline his pithy comments about our new world of connectivity.

Finally, I now keep a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo handy by my bed and on my kindle. It really is a revolution of simplicity, and super useful.

I should also note that after reading many references to the brilliant modernist writer Henry Green, of whom neither I nor any of my favourite and exalted reading friends had heard, that in a small group we ordered a set of his titles and shared them around. Final thoughts of all of us: not convinced he should be in the first rank.

I took a run at Johnathan Strange and Mr Norell which had long been on my list to read, and I found it boggy and overlong and abandoned it mid-way. Darn it. I hate when that happens.









Here are the stats
total books: 48
best books: 17 plus 2 alsos
fiction: 9
non-fiction: 7
short stories/novellas: 3
about books: 4
graphic: 2
memoir: 1
how-to: 1
films: 1

It was a good year!