Book Beginnings: Wild Delicate Seconds

Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.  Please remember to include the title of the book and the author.

I am posting early this week -- just because.

Leave a link to your post.  If you don't have a blog, but want to participate, please leave a comment with your Book Beginning.

MY BOOK BEGINNING

What follows are twenty-nine nonfiction micro-essays, each one a description of a chance encounter I had with a member (or members) of the fraternity of wildlife that call the pacific Northwest home.  

 -- from the author's Preface to Wild Delicate Seconds: 29 Wildlife Encounters by Charles Finn, published by OSU Press.

"Micro-essays" is a great term and a great format for presenting the flitting, ephemeral encounters Finn writes about in this charming book.

Review: The Finkler Question

Howard Jacobson won the Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, his hilarious, pitch perfect story of Jewish sensibilities in contemporary London.

In what reads like a Woody Allen adaptation of a Saul Bellow novel, two old school friends, Julian Treslove and Sam Finkler, maintain their rivalrous camaraderie mostly through a shared affection for their former professor, Libor Sevcik. Both Libor and Sam are recent widowers, struggling in different ways through the loss of their wives. Julian is a never-married father of two grown boys who, in a fumbling search for meaning and purpose in his life, becomes fascinated by Jewish culture.

The story loops around through a tangle of family ties, Jewish holidays, Holocaust deniers, Gaza politics, marriage, adultery, fatherhood, hate crimes against Jews, racial crimes by Jews, Finkler's popular philosophy books, Julian's failed career, classical music, and avant-garde theater.

While it gets a little shaggy and the ending is confusingly ambivalent, The Finkler Question is sparklingly witty, heartwarming in important ways, and will leave you pondering.

OTHER REVIEWS

If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.

NOTES 

The audio version is particularly entertaining because the reader, Steven Crossley, is excellent. It counts as one of my books for the Audio-Book Challenge.

This was one of my Booker choices for the 2012 Battle of the Prizes, British Version. 

Teaser Tuesday: The Secrets of Mary Bowser

We in the house were always decently dressed, while some Richmond slaves didn't even have shoes to wear on the City's unpaved streets. Though Old Master Van Lew's family held slaves, including Mama and Old Sam, when he lived in New York, neither Old Master Van Lew nor his Philadelphia-born bride could quite abide the way human chattel were treated in Virginia.

The Secrets of Mary Bowser by Lois Leveen.

See my interview of Lois, here, with links to event information, reviews, and more.

Mailbox Monday

Thanks for joining me for Mailbox Monday! MM was created by Marcia at A girl and her books (fka The Printed Page), who graciously hosted it for a long, long time, before turning it into a touring meme (details here).

This month, Mailbox Monday is hosted by Martha's Bookshelf.  Please take the time to visit her wonderfully eclectic blog.

Last week, I was down in Salem to give a CLE on Oregon's rules for mandatory child abuse reporters to a group of attorneys. Whenever I am in a different town, I try to swing by the local library to see what it's like and check out the Friends' sale shelf.

I lucked out in Salem.  They have a Friends' store, not just a shelf, and it had an impressive stock of used -- but not ex-library -- books at very good prices. I got a nice little stack of books.




Independent People by Halldor Laxness (Nobel Prize winner and an Iceland choice for the European Reading Challenge)



The Field of Vision by Wright Morris (1957 National Book Award winner and possible choice for the Battle of the Prizes, American Version, Challenge)



Longshot and For Kicks by Dick Francis (always my favorite)



The Vintage Caper by Peter Mayle (I can't resist)



Rumpole and the Reign of Terror and The Summer of a Dormouse (a memoir) by John Mortimer (I keep buying his books because they sound good to me, but I haven't read any of them yet -- hope I like them!)



A Good Hanging by Ian Rankin (a short story collection from the John Rebus series)

Also, not from the library store, I got my copy of Jim Harrison's latest. He is an all-time favorite of mine -- so much that I am willing to buy a new hardback.



The Great Leader by Jim Harrison

Review: Vie de France

 

Vie de France differs from other expatriate fantasy memoirs in that James Haller didn't pick up and move to an adorable French village – he just rented a house in an adorable French Village for a one-month vacation with friends. In a precursor to the blog-to-book idea, he kept notes about their daily activities and turned those notes into a book, descriptively subtitled "Sharing Food, Friendship, and a Kitchen in the Loire Valley."

Haller is a self-taught chef who owned the popular Blue Strawbery restaurant in Portsmouth, New Hampshire for over 16 years. In the late 1990s, when Haller turned 60, he and a group of friends started planning their dream trip to France. The resulting book focuses on the food the group enjoyed, some in cafes and fancy restaurants, but mostly what they bought, cooked, and ate together in their 17th Century country house.

Because Haller is not a haute cuisine chef (his cookbooks are both subtitled "Cooking (Brilliantly) Without Recipes"), his recipes are replicable as well as tasty sounding. He was inspired by traditional French cuisine and the fresh, local ingredients they found, but he cooked up easy dishes and, refreshingly, even included his creative use of leftovers. For example, after giving the instructions for his simplified version of cassoulet, he described using the leftovers to stuff a roasted chicken the next day.

The day-to-day details get a little repetitive, but for the most part Haller does a good job of bringing the reader into the party to share the group's enthusiasm. The relatively modest scope of their enterprise brings the armchair travel fantasies down to inspirational levels, leaving readers planning their own month-long visits to France.

JIM HALLER'S APRICOT LAVENDER TART

Line a tart pan with a circle of pre-made puff pastry dough.  Put a layer of pitted, but not peeled, fresh apricot halves on the dough.  Beat together one cup of sugar, six eggs, and a "little" vanilla, and pour over the apricots.  Lay three perfect strands of lavender across the top. Bake at 325 for about one hour.

NOTES

A custard made with just sugar and eggs but no cream sounds odd to me, but according to Haller, "The eggs combined with the juice from the apricots formed a custard gently flavored with the lavender."  I haven't made this yet, but I am willing to give it a try.

It counts as one of my books for the Foodie Reading Challenge, hosted by Margot at Joyfully Retired, and for the Memorable Memoirs Challenge, hosted by Melissa at The Betty and Boo Chronicles. It is also another book scratched off my French Connections list.

WEEKEND COOKING

Hosted by Beth Fish Reads