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Books by the bed

Books I'm listening to in the car

  • Sena Jeter Naslund: Abundance, A Novel of Marie Antoinette (P.S.)

    Sena Jeter Naslund: Abundance, A Novel of Marie Antoinette (P.S.)
    I don't like historical fiction. I have very little interest in the French monarchy. But Sena Jeter Nashland, whose first novel could not've been more different, is a brilliant writer, and has me utterly pulled into this world, time, and place, and given me sympathy towards a person to whom I had none. A novel like this reminds me of why I fall in love with fiction, over and over again. Transporting, tragic, and deeply fascinating. (****)

  • Markus Zusak: I Am the Messenger

    Markus Zusak: I Am the Messenger
    (***)

  • L.A. Meyer: Bloody Jack: Being an Account of the Curious Adventures of Mary 'Jacky' Faber, Ship's Boy (Bloody Jack Adventures)

    L.A. Meyer: Bloody Jack: Being an Account of the Curious Adventures of Mary 'Jacky' Faber, Ship's Boy (Bloody Jack Adventures)
    (***)

  • Robert Mnookin: Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight

    Robert Mnookin: Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight
    (*****)

  • Curtis Sittenfeld: American Wife: A Novel

    Curtis Sittenfeld: American Wife: A Novel
    Alice Lindgren Blackwell's normal-enough middle-class Wisconsin life goes through the windshield twice, once quickly and literally (a car wreck when she is in her early teens, in which she kills the young man who just may have been the love of her life) and once very slowly, and for a long, long time (when she marries Charlie, a super-wealthy, basically incompetent charmer with fierce political ambitions, who ends up --- somewhat to everyone's surprise --- in the White House). An imagining of a life loosely based on Laura Bush's, Sittenfield's writing is unshow-offy, as unobtrusive and accommodating as her careful protagonist, who tries to walk the impossible line of being "good wife" to a public figure with whose actions, public and private, she does not always agree, and cleaving to her own conscience, which may have gotten lost somewhere along the way. The book is inhabited by carefully drawn, detailed, dimensional characters: Alice's off-again-on-again best friend, her wise, quietly lesbian grandmother, the members of the dynasty into which she has married. An endless war, a weak wealthy husband saved from being a total wash-up by the embrace of a Christianity Alice herself does not understand, a bereaved parent whose son has died in the war, who attempts to meet the president ... all these echo the tragedy of the Bush years from an imagined perspective. Yet finally the novel rings true not because of this echo, but because Sittenfeld has created characters and a plot as complex, flawed, and mysterious as life itself. (****)

  • Nora Ephron: I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections (Vintage)

    Nora Ephron: I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections (Vintage)
    The wry, funny Nora Ephron, in her own words. She forgot more than many of us knew. Highly entertaining, and makes me grieve her recent death even more. (***)

Books in my (culinary) office

  • Mary Donovan: The Thirteen Colonies Cookbook: A Collection of Favourite Receipts from Thirteen Exemplary Eighteenth-Century Cooks With Proper Menus for Simple Fare
    Early American recipes and lots of good quotes from period source material, this is just the kind of thing that fascinates me. (***)
  • Kevin Young: The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink

    Kevin Young: The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink
    (***)

  • Michael Natkin: Herbivoracious: A Flavor Revolution with 150 Vibrant and Original Vegetarian Recipes

    Michael Natkin: Herbivoracious: A Flavor Revolution with 150 Vibrant and Original Vegetarian Recipes
    (****)

  • Ben Hewitt: The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food

    Ben Hewitt: The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food
    Hewitt raises more questions and hypotheses than he answer... one has the sense that he was grappling with issues that were too large for him, and the subject of the book, the food-centric (sort of) hardscrabble town of Hardwick, Vermont. I got frustrated with his asides and a certain precious town that occasionally crept in, but I couldn't help but find it enthralling. He tries to make peace with the fact that environmentally sound, home gardening, and incremental agricultural semi-self-sufficiency may be elitist and nay not be economically sustainable. But that our present-day food system is also frighteningly fragile and unhealthful in any way, and simply would work unsubsidized: 1 single fast-food mega-ag calorie on the plate takes an average of ***95*** calories of fossil fuel to get from seed to plate. A gardener himself, Ben Hewitt writes: "The scale on which my family and I grow food is arguably inefficient, in terms of economics, efficiency, and land use. We don't utilize chemical fertilizers, synthetic weed and pest control, or genetically modified seed; these things could probably boost production in the short run, but then, we don't farm for the short run. "I can buy a fine potato from any number of local farmers, but (not) the May afternoon I spent w/ Penny in the garden, sticking our hands deep into the cool soil. I can buy a head of lettuce, but (not) the pleasure & pride of my boys returning from the garden w/ a basket of greens & saying 'We picked it ourselves, Papa.' " And, in this Monsanto-fast food-fake-food world... being willing and able to feed yourself, even partially is a true "Occupy" act. Hewitt quotes a farmer named Eliot Coleman: "Small farmers are the last bastion protecting society from corporate industry. When we feed ourselves, we become unconquerable." I wish this book had been better edited: someone needed to keep Hewitt more on track and focused, with fewer asides. He needed to be less anecdotal and more fact-based, or more anecdotal and... Well. Still very much worth a read. (***)

  • Ayun Halliday: Dirty Sugar Cookies: Culinary Observations, Questionable Taste
    A feisty memoiristic series of vignettes, from growing up in Indiana and aspiring to Betty Crocker Enchanted Castle cakes with a mom who aspired to Julia Child and a fried-chicken-and-mashed-potato cooking grandmother to the author's own "postcoital breakfasts", labor, deliveries, and childrearing (one picky eater, one not). Categorized on the jacket as "FOOD / HUMOR" it is both, sort of. A recipe, written slap-dash but followable, and certainly with personal, um, zest, follows each chapter. It kept me somewhat amused; it kept me reading; and it did warn "questionable taste." The latter was over-the-top for me; a combination of TMI, reliance on gross-out, and a few too many gratuitous 'fucks' crossed the just-have-to-drop-the-#-of-stars line. Ayun's a good writer; a little less smart-assiness and a little more depth to the revelations, and I could be done for the cause with her. (**)

Books in my (writing/creativity/teaching) office

Charlotte, Aunt Dot & me

  • Cz_laughing_happy
    An elderly mother, her even older sister, their middle-aged daughter/niece ... and a small sheep.

National Cornbread Festival

  • Fashion to a T
    The apogee of all experiences for the true cornbread lover is the National Cornbread Festival, held annually the last full weekend of April in South Pittsburg, Tennessee.

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    « Playing Scrabble with the dead, feasting at the Brattleboro Farmers Market (with the very much alive) | Main | why every life should have a pugilistic 98-year old in it »

    May 30, 2008

    Comments

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    Rose-Anne

    Crescent, this essay is lovely. I think I learned something! I have wondered, on and off, about this thing we call "falling in love." I've wondered whether, despite the loving romantic relationships of my past, I had actually FALLEN in love, or if I just loved. Now I think perhaps because I was and am balanced and happy enough being by myself that the only choice I could make was to love, or to use your poetic description, to walk into love.

    And as for missing or not missing lovers when they are far away, your experience of it is very interesting. For me, it's true that in some sense, I always miss a certain Southerner when he's far away (which is most of the time), but aside from the day that he leaves, I'm surprisingly content with our relationship. It's a beautiful thing when you can enjoy the time with people and the time you spend by yourself.

    You and David are quite the handsome couple! Hurray for love!

    Suzette Haden Elgin

    Wisdom, and in abundance. Thank you, Crescent.

    Crescent Dragonwagon

    Oh, Rose-Anne and Suzanne ... thank you both so very much. Rose-Anne, I'm glad you could get a little maybe-insight about what it is you're already experiencing with your "certain Southerner." I think so much of this is around just growing up! I LOVE aging, truly and no BS. It's just so much happier a period of life, at least in this phase of it.

    Suzanne, your generosity and encouragement is flabbergasting. Thank you so much for your thoughts and support and introducing so many people to "Nothing is wasted". And I have great news about my okra, which I'll post shortly. Loved the word "flapdoodle" too...

    cathy

    C, your idea here about being unable to "fall" in love because you are older and more comfortable in your own life...

    It is a helpful way for me to reframe some of the other ways I've felt "deadened" by age and hard life experiences because I'm unable to recapture the drama and intensity I experienced when I was younger.

    I don't want that drama, but I have worried that *not* wanting it means that I'm settling for a less creative, more suburban life.

    Deep inside, I know I am not settling -- just experiencing life with different awareness. Your post here helped me articulate this to myself.

    Crescent Dragonwagon

    Cathy, sometimes I literally restate things to myself when I discover I have only a negative way to reference them.You know, when I catch myself saying "I don't want to..." I pause and ask myself, "Okay then, what DO I want to...?"

    So that might move what you describe as my "idea here about being unable to 'fall" in love' because you are older and more comfortable in your own life" to "able to love, out of fullness and self-content instead of emptiness and need." Or feeling " ' deadened' by age and hard life experiences ... unable to recapture the drama and intensity I experienced when I was younger,' becomes, maybe, "I am alive to life; I appreciate its inherent drama and intensity as I develop a new, wise form of creativity and loving."

    Just thinking out loud with you here.

    You say: "Deep inside, I know I am not settling -- just experiencing life with different awareness." True; and also true that there's a certain amount of homesickness that comes with shedding old skins and developing new ones, especially in the in-between times (and it's always, in one sphere or another, an in-between time... life is such a continual parade of transitions). It;s like that Rilke quote I love so much: "Be patient towards all that is unanswered in your heart, and learn to love the questions themselves." Easier said and cognized than done, especially in those in-between times, when the old you has fallen away and the new one has not completely emerged yet.

    I feel I can say this with personal conviction having walked through the loss of the old CD(with Ned's death towards the end of 2000) through the tentative and unformed no-woman's-land for some years until a clearer present-day CD emerged. Which was long, long after it looked to other people than she had. And which was long after I'd, in my heart of hearts, given up on life ever feeling "normal", and rich, and good, and exuberant, again.

    "Your post here helped me articulate this to myself." Thank you! As I say, I think we're all part of the narrative life tells itself about itself. My best guess is cozying up to the mystery, the unknowns in our hearts (and in life and our future in life).

    How can we do anything but help each other (even those "others" who are egregiously bad to us, and some are)? Relationship School is always, always in session.

    It's an honor, but one we all share as human beings (knowingly and knowingly) serving as conduits to wisdom for each other.

    Again, thank you.

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