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...

Batch Early Review E-books from LibraryThing, together with some thoughts about the future of publishing, and how cultural icons are rehabilitated, etc.

You may remember me writing about e-books way back in the summer of 2011, (here) that it was like over-indulging in junk food. I found that it was too true, and I was already past the point of satiation. Without the trap of time, spent with only a phone to read from (first travelling and then waiting around in a hospital waiting room), my appetite went down for reading indie e-books. However, I requested some ARCs of e-books from LibraryThing before I really realized it, and here are the reviews:

Things Falling Apart
by JW Schnarr

This one is OK - deft enough, but didn't make me desperate to get back to the stories. Dark, Canadian, random, fragmentary...not bad, but not that special.

Craving
by Kristina Meister

The premise is cool, the voice seemed believable, but I couldn't quite stay with it long enough to find out where it was going. I may be able to get back to this and fill out my impressions.

Twice Shy
by Patrick Freivald

The cover resembles my fashion look-book on Pinterest, funnily enough. Cute idea of zombies masked to pass as humans. Readable enough, but not something I find myself choosing when I have a choice of books.


I have stopped requesting new indie e-books to review. However...


ON the other hand, there is something which has driven me back to the world of public-domain classics that are available thru the miracle of the internet.

By this I mainly mean the BBC show SHERLOCK–I sort of feel like I'm part of the fandom, can't get enough, regularly rewatch episodes, getting excited by the approach of the 3rd season in November, and got REALLY excited by the announcement of a 4th season to come– but also including the two Guy Ritchie movies of the more historic Sherlock Holmes, breathe...

I happened upon a short group of Sherlock Holmes stories on my iPad. When I first went "i-" I naturally checked out all the reading resources. I have, and use, and regularly buy for, mainly Kindle, but I also have iBooks, Stanza, and Audiobooks which I hardly use, except to try their free classics, plus an app called Classics, plus a free+ app called Sherlock Holmes. For free it has only a small selection of 12 short stories, but how thrilling to go to the original text when teasing apart episodes of SHERLOCK, to find actual quotations that appear in one or the other, and I even found one of the title episodes.

It also got me wondering. Was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle a kind of genius or a popular phenomenon, a gifted hack or...what is the critical opinion, exactly? I recently heard of the rehabilitation of the composer Rachmaninoff and I am there with that. My childhood ears were filled with Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff and Puccini and, there but less so, Beethoven and my own first discovery, Dvorak. All super-easy superstars, sort of somewhat denigrated for their very ease of their popularity. I have always LOVED all of them, but as my music theory improved, I wondered if I loved them only for their childhood familiarity, if the music was simplistic. Needless to say, I was very pleased to hear, from Tom Allen on CBC 2 no less (see the link for his twitter feed on the sidebar) that Rach is being reconsidered as a composer, and shifted up somewhat from his lightweight class.

So, back to Conan Doyle, I am thinking of Adam Gopnik writing about Moby Dick in the The New Yorker in 2007, here, with the idea that works that would nowadays be "..., by conventional contemporary standards of good editing and critical judgment, improved..." are, in fact, hailed as genius because of their ideosyncratic irregularity.

Certainly merits some additional thought.

The marigold is wondering somewhat nervously about how one's reputation fares when one admits to liking the popular. What strength of character and reputation is required to be part of the movement towards critical acceptance rather than popular?

Thumbnails of the hot Young Adult book series: A Primer for Grown-Ups

OK - I have been reading the hot kids' series along with my kids, and I realized I could help other parents at Christmas time by providing an easy-to-use reading list covering the biggest book series that everyone is talking about, and answering questions such as what are their strengths and weaknesses? will it be good for you? and what about the movie? Plus, you will be able to "Talk About Books You Haven't Read" in an appropriate way. (See my post on Pierre Bayard's fantastic How-To book by that name here.)

In more-or-less chronological order of the first book published in the series:


Harry Potter by JK Rowling (1998)
            Read: 4/7 (so far)   We began reading these because we had started watching the movies, and after reading some of the books, and seeing all of the movies, I find that although the books are naturally more complete, the movies don't miss much that is essential. We periodically reviewed the movies, when it was time to watch a new one, and we always enjoyed noticing something new, which is a good sign.
                            The Harry Potter books are excellently plotted, strong on character, but not so literary, although I can proudly say my 10-year old pointed out a Macbeth-like feeling to Voldemort. I am still reading thru the series with my younger kid. My older one read about half the books, but in reverse order, to the annoyance (or fury, apparently) of enthusiast-friends. I am an admirer of Snape, so I can't wait to get to book six, The Half-Blood Prince, to catch up on his back-story.We have also bought a couple of the books about Harry Potter which we all rummage around in. The books in this series are worth the time they take. Good enough for anyone to enjoy reading. (Duh!)


A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snickett   (1999)
             Read: 2/13   Loved the movie - it really allowed Jim Carrey to maximize his abilities. I wish there had been more outtakes, as he riffed on the uncle, Count Olaf, a character he was born to play.
            The books were fun at first, the language and voice are very interesting, and this was one of the first of the huge hit series, but it got old fast. Neither of my kids took them up. The series is now old and weak, but it helped establish the category, and I felt it ought to be here.



Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan  (2006)
            Read: 1/5   LOVED the movie, which we saw before trying the books, and it is one of my kids' all-time favourites. It's charming, and the actors are cute.
           I wanted to like the books a lot, as I love the idea of extending Greek mythology into our era, (grown-ups: you must read American Gods by Neil Gaiman if you like this idea) but I couldn't be roused to read past the first one. Somehow, I FOUND THE BOOKS BORING! Older kid also liked, no loved, reading PJ,and read them all. My 10-year old would like to, but isn't quite there yet.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins   (2008)
             Read: 3/3   The movie is being made now. I believe the trailer for this movie to be the most anticipated and most watched trailer of all time. I thought it was pretty much kids, but many of my adult friends SENT ME A LINK to the trailer to make sure I saw it, too. And it looks pretty good, I must say.
            In my opinion, this is the best of all the series, not only for plot and character, but it is literate and literary, too. It had been MANY years since I finished a book one night and HAD TO GET the next book the next morning to find out what happened. That was fun. They are such a perfect read for any adult as well that I never hesitate to recommend them. My then-12-year old was obsessed, for half a year, and I think they qualify as a first book-love.

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer (2008)
            Read: 1/4    The first book was at least 50% too long, repetitive and unnecessarily wordy. Get to the point already. The movie helped by cutting the action down to 1-1/2 hours of real time. I have managed to see the second movie, but I haven't bothered since, but I guess if I turned on the TV and one was on, I would watch. My then-12-year old felt the same in all respects.
                           On the other hand, and thanks Christabel, I recently read a review of Bella's character, Our Bella, Ourselves, written by Sarah Blackwell on a blog called The Hairpin which got me re-thinking my response.

Gone by Michael Grant (2008)
             Read: 1/4 published, fifth to be released soon, a sixth in the works. Surprisingly, no movie talk, but I imagine it is just a question of time.
             I wasn't too crazy about this when I read it, but it is my 13-year old's current obsession, so I promised to re-read Gone, then read the rest of the series. In fact, I also promised I would update my opinion on this list once I get going with them. So...Whip Hand, Fearless Leader, Little Pete, special powers, a place with no adults. Conclusion: must try Lord of the Flies (Golding) again.

City of Bones by Cassandra Clare  (2008) and Clockwork Angel (2011)
            Read: 4/4 and 1/2 (second book to be released in a couple of days!)
I really powered thru the first series, and then read the first one of the prequel series, too. Lots of fun. The characters are cute, and the New York City setting of our day is pretty cool and relates to our trips there. My now-13-year old was enthusiastic, and we will be trying to be in the store on Dec 6 for the release of the second book of the second series.

Maze Runner by James Dashner  (2010)
            Read: 1/3
Twilight for boys, oddly high emotional pitch, except the action is the manly withstanding of danger rather than crushing on vampire boys. Like Twilight, the book is way too repetitive and much longer than it ought to be. Movie is being shopped, natch. My kid was put off by my review.



Matched by Ally Condie (2011)
             Read 1/3, but only the first two are currently available.
I liked it because instead of a brutal, deadly, dystopian future, Matched cleverly shows our current social trends projected into an extremely benevolent future. Central planning is working perfectly, beautifully minding the health and happiness of all citizens, but individuals are left with virtually no choice at all. Even their healthful meals are delivered in perfectly controlled portions. The result is still dystopia. My kid didn't want to read yet another book in the category at this point, but I was convincing enough that it was worth it, that it got read, and we agreed.

Divergent by Veronica Roth  (2011)
             Read: 1/3
Only first book is available so far, with the second in the pipeline for pre-orders, and the third as yet un-named. I liked this book, even though I was at first expecting to be bored by another entry in the future dystopia category. The writer is notably young. The heroine is a Katniss*-style power-house, and the boys are quite interesting. My kid and I both grew to like it as we read on thru it.


These two are both graphic, and for younger kids:

Amulet by Kazu Kibuishi (2008)
            Read: 3/4 so far
For the younger set - very beautiful, very sad and dark, much MUCH more interesting than Bone, which was the first huge graphic novel series for kids. My younger kid loved this series so much, it got me reading them, too, but the older kid read them too.

Bone by Jeff Smith (originally 1995, re-issued in book form 2005)
            Read 2/9:
Its success with the under-10 set is inexplicable to me. The look is deliberately like Pogo, a comic of 50 years ago, the characters are mean, and their world is unfathomable. I didn't like it or get it, and I still don't understand if my kids did, how my kids did if they did and what they got or what they liked. And not just my kids read it and said they loved it. All kids read it and said they loved it, reluctant readers even. Go figure.

I do have to admit that there are a couple of big ones that my kids haven't picked up (possibly yet), but that if they do, I will want to share them, too:

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer (2001)

Eragon by Christopher Paolini (2002)
There is a movie, but, strangely, I haven't seen it either.

The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Johnathan Stroud (2003)






As I prepared this list, I realized that the first two series are pretty old, but only one has held up (and made the author AND HER AGENT) reportedly richer than the queen. 2008 seems to have been a banner year, and some kind of category shift happened so that since then all books are tried as a start to a series, and 2011 seems to have been a strong year, too.

The marigold is wondering nervously if there are other series I should have mentioned...of course there are tons of other series, but are there some I should have known about, should have been reading? Just started The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness - not that big, but quite good...fret...fret...

Bonus question: Is Cassandra Clare is a real person? There are some clues that make it seem as though she is actually the pen-name of a collective of writers who are pals in a writing group (including Libba Bray, Kelly Link, Holly Black...) Anyone got any ideas?

*Katniss, in case you have been in a dark cave and did not yet see the trailer, is the amazing female protagonist of The Hunger Games. Trailer is here.

OK - This just in: Knife of Never Letting Go was really terrific, a cut above, another whole category of original. Up-twinkles! Clockwork Prince is good, glad to be still following it.

Even later update: Now I have started reading Leviathan, by Scott Westerfield - Steampunk for boys, OK so far, and he has another set that goes, like ... Uglies ... Pretties ... I dunno ... Crazies? ... Zombies? I'll keep you posted.

Later still: My younger kid just started Magyk from the Septimus Heap series by Angie Sage, so I guess I'll be reading that pretty soon, too. Yay!

Rereading Hallowe'en

I recently felt the urge to re-read The Picture of Dorian Gray, probably because I wanted Oscar Wilde's story topmost in my mind before the irresistible onslaught of movie promo. I was surprised to discover that it was his only long prose fiction. I was further surprised to find so many of the aphorisms which I thought Wilde himself had delivered at parties and such, to be delivered by one of the main characters in this book, a man whose relentlessly aphoristic style sounds affected to a modern ear. Nonetheless, the sayings which have stood the test of time...uh... stand the test of time: I cannot accept your invitation due to a subsequent engagement, and so on.

So, I remembered the book being thrilling, un-put-down-able. This time it took a long while for me to reach that feeling, but then when it started it literally left me breathless. How many BOOKS can really do that? Am I even talking about reading? The story is so awesome, that I think it quite possible that translated into the modern vernacular in every way (by this I even mean from book to movie) that it will be quite artistically successful. I hope so.

Then, I started free-associating over to Edgar Allan Poe. Hmmm. Not really contemporaries, but still...a couple of stories to re-read there too, in light of (my) current scholarship. Murder in the Rue Morgue, (and The Purloined Letter for that matter): Poe was acknowledged by Arthur Conan Doyle to have created the prototype of a detective before the word existed. Plus, somehow, I had a must-read recommendation for The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. I can't remember who, and I can't figure it out, either. The first two thirds are a horror/sailing story (an unusual but not unknown category). However, the final third is science fiction - also a prototype. Jules Verne and and HG Wells feel to us like the pioneers of explorer science fiction. Yet Verne was born 20 years later than Poe, and actually wrote a sequel to Gordon Pym (!), and Wells wasn't born until 1866, more than 15 years after Poe's death and likewise credited him with the invention of the category.

Here the observation seems to be that Poe is quite under-rated. He is taken as a novelty act, but he was truly creative and courageous. I even saw, when I was confirming his dates on Wikipedia, that he was the first American writer to try to live on the income from his writing alone. The guy was full of ideas. I have to say that when I come across his poetry now, I put it in the special category with Dr Seuss and Shel Silverstein - producers of poetry with both distinctively creative rhymes and yet also natural-sounding scansion. I think these writers offer the best possible way to learn the intricacies of English pronunciation when it is not your mother tongue. I love them all for it.

(Note to self: send a suggestion to the BadAss guy about Poe. I'm pretty sure he was one. Meanwhile, gentle reader: run, don't walk, to http://www.badassoftheweek.com. There you will find a mixture of real historical figures, fictional characters, writers, scientists, etc, etc, whose bad-ass-iness is meticulously and HILARIOUSLY documented. I am actually going to subscribe to the RSS feed, so I don't miss out.)

I also must send a shout-out to Adam Rex here, who brilliantly spoofed The Raven, without any disrespect at all, apart from the obvious, ironic and rhyming disrespect in his version. It is a part of a poetry collection for kids - no that sounds all wrong, like, very, like, smarmy - it is a part of a kids' book, in rhyme, so funny that is almost wasted on kids. That book is called Frankenstein takes the Cake and it is actually a sequel to Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich, which we have never seen. My kids and I love his The True Meaning of Smekday, too. See link to his homepage under "writers"

And...big news! In case you were wondering, I discovered, with a couple of Grade 2 kids, that there actually are stories about women were-wolves! In fact there doesn't seem to be an actual term for them and most of the sites about them won't open because of the school's internet filters! Anyway, who but a Grade 2 kid and/or a poster of R-rated internet material would ever have asked such a question? Lets you know who is capable of thinking outside the box these days.

Should I also mention spooky, scary, Coraline? Loved Neil Gaiman's original book. LOVED Henry Selick's movie - a separate and original work of art (especially the opening title sequence, which is one of the most beautiful pieces of animation ever). LOVED the soundtrack, by composer Bruno Coulais in an imaginary language (how perfect is that?) and bought it and use one song as a ring tone on my mobile. And loved the graphic version by P Craig Russell (whom I already love for his graphic versions of opera. Actually - maybe I should check his work for female wolf-men - no term, remember? - as he is capable of thinking outside the box). See link under "fun, cool funny".

The marigold wonders nervously: Did you see how re-reading intersected with Hallowe'en just now? Were you wondering? Is it kewl?

Ermione at the Rossini Opera Festival

What a thrill!

At first, the look of this year’s production of Ermione at the Rossini Opera Festival reminded me of a couture fashion show – distressed white set, stark black, red or white costumes, in the form of uniforms with boots and evening gowns. Not, however, the usual fascist reworking, but abstracted and symbolic. As I thought about it, it came to me that this story is a tiny sliver of Greek myth, which, if not completely unknown in our time, is just about.* In a way, an attempt to show the story as history would be unnecessarily confusing. It reminded me of looking at history paintings: sure we can identify that there are people with well-known names in life-like settings, but we have no context, and we can attach no meaning. In fact, the natural language of our time is comic-book-style abstraction. We can make sense of black, red and white used to indicate good versus evil, rage versus control, confusion versus order, and most importantly in this case, manipulators versus manipulated.

This opera was not performed for 150 years because it was considered too dark! Maybe so, until now, but darkness is the natural tenor of our times. Ermione, especially treated in this way, is contextualized perfectly within the world of Sin City, 300 and Batman, not to mention real-life terrorism, torture and ethnic cleansing.

Then, there was the music and the singing. As with Il Turco in Italia that I saw at last year’s Rossini Opera Festival, the music was delicious: spellbinding for hours. I think my favourite moment was the end of the first act with everyone on stage, screaming their power and rage and disappointment and fear, beautifully, at full volume. I felt my hair blowing back with the sheer power of it, like in the old Maxell ad.

To be complete I have to say that the performances were awesome, and the audience went wild several times. For me it was especially exciting as I have come to know one of the performers a little, and to see his everyday gestures forming part of his characterization was a kind of like having an extra-sensory experience.

At the end, I am left asking why these operas are so obscure, so far from the standard repertoire? Step aside La Bohéme; step aside Madama Butterfly; you old-fashioned weaklings. Ermione – time for you to step up to the plate! You can bring the 21st century crowd to the opera!

*Funnily enough, this sliver of the story is linked to that of Idomeneo which I saw performed by the Opera Atelier earlier this year. Each features a Greek returning with a slave from the Trojan war, plus Idomeneo has Elettra (Electra) while Ermione (Hermione) involves her brother, Oreste (Orestes). Love those Greek myths. I like to say that I would rather be offended than bored, and this material never fails to qualify.

New York with kids

We took our two kids to New York for a long weekend. We reviewed all the books and movies we could remember about New York, and watched a couple of videos. As a consequence, their trip had a feeling of resonance and they felt familiar and comfortable with the BIG city.

Funnily, our 6-year old loved to say "Let's grab a cab," and both kids adored hailing them, something we don't do at home.

Here are some of the materials we enjoyed and the experiences to which they lead us:

movie: Ghostbusters - particularly for the New York Public Library. We all loved the library (and Bryant Park, right behind it). The original toys from Winnie-the-Pooh are displayed in one of their galleries. The reading rooms are awesome, and their shows are sensational. And it's free! The movie also got us looking up at the decorations on so many of the tall buildings.

book: Seen Art? by Jon Scieszka- created for the opening of the renovated Museum of Modern Art - funny and arty. Made for a kind of scavenger hunt through the museum for works we recognized from the book.

movie: Night at the Museum - for the American Museum of Natural History. This museum is the perfect fulfillment of the dream of a museum. Big, beautiful and romantic.

book: The Most Amazing Dinosaur, by James Stevenson - works for both the Metropolitan Museum and the Natural History Museum. Adorable book by a fabulous author/illustrator/New Yorker cartoonist (a wonderful category that also includes William Steig).

movie: Madagascar - for Grand Central Station (where we all enjoyed eating at the Oyster Bar) and for Central Park Zoo.

book and movie: Eloise by Kay Thompson - for the hotel experience, and Central Park

movie: Home Alone 2, Lost in New York - also for hotel experience and Central Park, and for Rockefeller Center

movie: Fantasia 2000 - for the city streets and for skating at Rockefeller Center

As we catch up with more suggestions, I'll add the good ones to this list, with comments.

Extra ideas:

movie: Enchanted - we dialed it up in the hotel room in New York, and were delighted to see New York as a "character" in this cute film

book: I am Pangoo the Penguin by Satomi Ichikawa - an adorable story featuring the penguins in the Central Park Zoo. This is now a family favourite.

Not New York enough despite our expectations:
book and movie: Harriet the Spy - a kid in the city.

The marigold asks nervously:

How long will I need to do this?

So I am adding to this list a year later with ideas that have come up:

1) movie: Desperately Seeking Susan - I have not seen it recently, and it may not be suitable for young kids. I'll have to watch it again and report back.

2) movie: Annie - I have not seen this recently either. It is OK for kids, but may be too dated to be useful.

3) movie: Crocodile Dundee - Definitely New York, not for the littlest kids.

4) movie: The Muppets Take Manhattan - perfect for the littlest kids.

5) book: The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler - by E.L. Konigsburg, kids, New York, a museum, a mystery. All good.

6) book and movie: Stuart Little - fabulous book, by an icon of New York writing, E.B. White. So-so movie(s) but Central Park with it's pond features strongly.

7) Both Madagascar movies, but especially the first one, show New York scenes, with a focus on the Central Park zoo.

Some other ideas I have been given but have not checked out myself:
movies: The Fantastic Four and Antz