6 Days to Christmas

Foodie's Reading Challenge

Margot at Joyfully Retired is hosting a challenge for 2011 that I am very excited about: The Foodie's Reading Challenge!

I love reading books about food.  I often read cookbooks cover-to-cover, like a narrative book.  And there are several books sitting on my TBR shelves that focus on food.  This is going to be a lot of fun.

Definition of a Food Book 

Participants do not have to chose their books in advance, but here is a little guidance from Margot:

A food book is a book which is centered around food and/or drinks. That could be a cookbook, a food biography or memoir, a non-fiction book focused around a specific food, wine, chef or restaurant. Also allowed is a fictional story in which food plays a major role.

My Reviews

The Food of France by Waverley Root (reviewed here)

American Terroir: Savoring the Flavors of Our Woods, Waters, and Fields, Rowan Jacobsen (reviewed here)

Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front by Joel Salatin (reviewed here)

The Onmivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (which I didn't review, but discussed here)

With a Jug of Wine: An Unusual Collection of Cooking Recipes by Morrison Wood (reviewed here, with a recipe) 

I also read French Spirits: A House, a Village, and a Love Affair in Burgundy by Jeffrey Green, which I thought would be about food, but wasn't at all, so doesn't count as my sixth book. Drats.

Possibilities

I signed up at the "Bon Vivant" level to read four to six books.  My plan is to read books that are already on my TBR shelves.  Some of those in the running include (in no particular order):

The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America's Emerging Battle Over Food Rights by David E. Gumpert

James Beard on Food Delights and Prejudices by James Beard (I started this one on December 1)

On the Town in New York by Michael Batterberry

Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family by Patricia Volk

The Tuscan Year: Life and Food in an Italian Valley by Elizabeth Romer

Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table by Ruth Reichl

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse by Thomas McNamee

Epicurean Delight: The Life and Times of James Beard by Evan Jones

Vie De France: Sharing Food, Friendship and a Kitchen in the Lorie Valle by James Haller

A Cordiall Water by M. F. K. Fisher

The Feasting Season by Nancy Coons

Dumas on Food: Selections from Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine by Alexandre Dumas

And it might be a good idea to include this one:

French Women Don't Get Fat: The Secret of Eating For Pleasure by Mireille Guiliano

Other Ideas

This challenge reminds me of the Spice of Life Challenge, which was a favorite of mine in 2009. For that challenge, I read and reviewed these four books, three of which I loved. Can you guess which one I didn't?

1. Au Revoir to All That by Michael Steinberger (my non-fiction choice; reviewed here)
2. The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones (my fiction choice; reviewed here)
3. The Silver Palate Cookbook by Julee Rosso (my cookbook choice; reviewed here)
4. Julie & Julia by Julie Powell (my memoir/essay choice; reviewed here) 

NOTES: Updated December 3, 2011.

7 Days to Christmas

8 Days to Christmas

9 Days to Christmas

Scene and Be Seen

Cathy at Kittling: Books is featuring Rose City Reader in her entertaining Scene of the Blog event this week. Thanks, Cathy!

Scene of the Blog is a big favorite of mine.  It's the most voyeuristic event in the book corner of the blogosphere and I love it. Every week, Cathy spotlights a different blog, with pictures of where our favorite bloggers find inspiration, hit the laptops, and store their TBR stacks. 

Cathy herself is a fellow "list" reader, with a fondness for mysteries. Her reviews are sprightly and to the point -- just how I like them. Hers was one of the very first blogs I followed.  Please stop by for a visit and tell her I sent you!

Here's one of my Scene of the Blog pictures.  Click on it to go to the Scene of the Blog post to see the others, read the post, and visit Kittling Books.

10 Days to Christmas

Teaser Tuesday: The Human Stain

Now, most writers are brought to a standstill after rereading two year's work -- even one year's work, merely half a year's work -- and finding it hopelessly misguided and bringing down on it the critical guillotine are reduced to a state of suicidal despair from which it can take months to begin to recover.  Yet Coleman, by abandoning a draft of a book as bad as the draft he'd finished, had somehow managed to swim free not only from the wreck of the book but from the wreck of his life.

-- The Human Stain by Philip Roth.

I like this teaser. I like this book. As I read it, I hear in my head the voice of Ron Silver, who narrated the audio versions of several of Roth's books, including I Married a Communist, American Pastoral, and The Plot Against America.  Unfortunately, he did not narrate this one, or I would get it on audio, because he did a brilliant job on the others.

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

11 Days to Christmas

Mailbox Monday

Lady Q at Let Them Read Books is the December host of Mailbox Monday.

Several books came into my house last week, many through my mail slot.

because you might not remember by Don Colburn (a chapbook, a little book of 25 poems, which was a finalist for this year’s Finishing Line Press Poetry Prize)



One City's Wilderness: Portland's Forest Park by Marcy Cottrell Houle (published by the Oregon State University Press)



Heart to Heart: Considered Sentiments for Teatime by Earlene Grey (another wee slim volume of verse)



Just Enough Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse (including the novels, Joy in the Morning and Right Ho, Jeeves, and the short story collection, Very Good, Jeeves. From LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program)



Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell (from a friend who's name is also Sarrah, but with two Rs)

12 Days to Christmas

13 Days to Christmas

Opening Sentence of the Day: The Human Stain

It was the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk -- who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of faculty -- confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college.

-- The Human Stain by Philip Roth.

Wow! That's a whole novel in itself. What a terrific opening sentence! It reminds me of why I love Philip Roth.

This won the PEN/Faulkner Award, and would have counted as one of my books for the Book Awards Reading Challenge, if I hadn't messed up and failed to realize that the challenge ended on November 1, not the end of the year. Oh, well. Maybe the new challenge started on Nov. 1 and this will count for that one.

Book Beginnings on Friday is a weekly Opening Sentence event now hosted by Katy at A Few More Pages.  I'm a day late this week. 

14 Days to Christmas

15 Days to Christmas

Literary Blog Hop: How Irritating!

The Blue Bookcase has started a "Literary Blog Hop" for blogs "that primarily feature reviews of literary fiction, classic literature, and general literary discussion." It is a lot of fun and I have found several wonderful blogs through this event.

Each week, in addition to hopping around and visiting some terrific book blogs, participants answer a bookish question.  The Blue Bookcase team came up with this week's question:

What is one of your literary pet peeves? Is there something that writers do that really sets your teeth on edge? Be specific, and give examples if you can.

I try not to read books that set my teeth on edge, so I don't have a lot of literary pet peeves.  In fact, I am pretty tolerant once I commit to reading a book.  This is in complete contrast with the rest of my life, in which I suffer daily from a host of pet peeves too embedded and byzantine to even examine.

Christie at the Blue Bookcase already covered one p.p. I could come up with: long dialog with no identification of the speaker.  If you get to the point where you have to go back and count every other paragraph to figure out who's talking, it needs help!

I've recently become frustrated with authors using the same word over and over again, like it got stuck in the author's head and no editor caught it.  This seems to happen in mysteries a lot.  The author of The Club Dumas, which I am reading now, used "rictus" one too many times for me. And I can't remember now which book I recently read, but the author used "sanguine" at least a couple dozen times (I stopped counting at about 28) to describe different people in different situations.

Along the same lines, it really does bother me when authors use similar sounding names.  Things seldom are as bad as in Advise and Consent, Allen Drury’s 1959 Pulitzer winner, in which many characters have the same name. For instance, the nominee and the Senate Majority leader are both names Robert and both go by Bob. Context usually makes clear which one is under discussion, but it takes a while to pick it apart. There are also two Hals, two Toms, and two Johns (but no Mikes, Marks, or Daves). Maybe it is more like real life to duplicate names, but some literary customs are there for a reason.

More recently, George Pelacanos drove me a bit nuts with The Night Gardener when he used the following character names: Ramone, Romeo, Rhonda, Ramirez, Rudy, Red, Rogers, Randolph (aka Randy), Regina, Robert, Ronald, Richard, Richards, Raymond, Raynella, and Ray. I needed a diagram!

How about you?  I'm looking forward to some real rants on the hop this week. 

16 Days to Christmas

17 Days to Christmas

Teaser Tuesday: The Club Dumas

"As he struggled to his feet, fastening his belt, he saw Liana Taillefer stand up, pale and terrifying, unconcerned by her disheveled clothes, he magnificent thighs still exposed. She slapped him so hard, his left ear vibrated like a drum."

-- The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte. It's scenes like this, when the characters loom bigger than life, that you get the sense of adventure in the book.

 

It feels like I have been reading this forever. Even though it is a page turner, it took me a while to get into it and actually start turning those pages. Now I am halfway through and committed.  

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

18 Days to Christmas

Mailbox Monday

Lady Q at Let Them Read Books is the December host of Mailbox Monday.

Just when I was despairing of having no books to list in Mailbox Monday, I got a surprise present from my wonderful husband. He got me a present for becoming an equity partner at my law firm, O'Donnell Clark & Crew (and yes, Steve Crew is a person, "Crew" is not a hip designation for the other lawyers in the firm).

Hubby is really, really good about giving me book sets as gifts.  These are sets that I would not get for myself.  He doesn't mind going back to the same well, and has found me terrific sets of Dickens, Hawthorne, and Twain.

This time around, it is a small but lovely set of P. G. Wodehouse "Autograph Editions."  No, they are not really autographed by my favorite comic author.  But they are beautifully bound editions of some wonderful, very entertaining books.  I can't wait to read and re-read them.

19 Days to Christmas

Challenge: Battle of the Prizes, British Version

This challenge pits winners of the English Man Booker Prize against winners of the Scottish James Tait Black Memorial Prize in a British Version of the Battle of the Prizes. (Click here for the American Version.)

Does one prize have higher standards than the other? Pick better winners? Provide more reading entertainment or educational value? Maybe challenge participants will be able to answer these and more questions – maybe they will simply read three or four great books!

CHALLENGE ENDS JANUARY 31, 2011.  There is still time to join and plenty of time to finish if you are already participating. 

DETAILS

OPTION ONE: Chose three books that you have not read before:

1) One that won both the Booker and the James Tait Black prizes (here is the short list of double dippers);

2) One that won the Booker but not the James Tait Black (Booker winners are here); and

3) One that won the James Tait Black but not the Booker (James Tait Black winners are here).

OPTION TWO: For those who have already read all three of the double-dippers, or otherwise do not want to read one of those three, pick two Booker winners and two James Tait Black winners for a total of four books.

OFFICIAL RULES

• Read all books between February 1, 2010 and January 31, 2011.

• Overlap with other challenges is allowed -- and encouraged! The Complete Booker is a logical crossover. The great thing is, for those working on both these lists, completing the challenge means reading three books, but crossing four items off the lists.

• You do not have to commit to your choices now; you can change your mind about books at any time.

• Sign up here by leaving a link to your post in a comment, or the list of your three choices in the comment. I will add the links to the participant list in this post.

• As you progress, please let us know by leaving comments with links to progress reports and reviews. Reviews are not necessary, but encouraged. If you do not have a blog, put your reviews or reports in a comment on this post.
  

• You can copy and paste the button. Or, if you want me to send you the code, please leave a comment with an email and I will. I cannot figure out the fancy ways of giving directions. 
  

IDEAS

My three choices are:

1) G by John Berger for my double dipper choice;

2) The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch for my Booker winner; and

3) The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry for my James Tait Black winner.

I picked these three because they were all on my TBR shelf had been for a while.  As of December 1, I've finished The Secret Scripture and The Sea, the Sea.  The links to my reviews are in the list below.

PARTICIPANTS

Rose City Reader

chaotic compendiums 

Musings  (The first to complete the challenge -- congratulations!)

Oh, So Many Manias . . .  

Books in the City 

ExUrbanis

J.G. at Hotch Pot Cafe 

Birdie's Nest

REVIEWS

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel on chaotic compendiums 

G by John Berger on Musings 

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro on Birdie's Nest

Without My Cloak by Kate O'Brien on Musings

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry here on Rose City Reader

Something to Answer For by P. H. Newby on Musings

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch here on Rose City Reader

20 Days to Christmas

21 Days to Christmas

Review of the Day: The Sea, the Sea

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch is a novel about an aging theater icon who retires to the North Sea coast of England. It is a wonderful, fantastic story, about long-lasting attachments between people and the ideas that hold them together.

Murdoch is known as a philosophic writer and there is not a lot of action in this book. But she knows how to pace the story to keep it entertaining. She parses out what action there is, so just when it starts to seem too talky, something startling happens to capture the reader's attention.

Charles Arrowby was a famous playwright, actor, and director who, in retirement, seeks solitude in a funky, spooky old house perched on seaside cliffs. The story is told through his journal, which contains observations on his present as well as self-serving, only sometimes honest, reminiscences on his past.

While Charles seeks to put the theater life behind him, his life is theater. When former lovers, friends old and new, and even his Buddhist cousin turn up at his isolated retreat, Charles can’t help but manipulate and bully them into being a part of his one-man show. He treats the people in his life like he treated the audiences he mused on in this passage:

The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied.

In the end, things do not work out as Charles planned, which only shows that Murdoch was much wiser than her narrator.

This is a wonderful, engrossing book, well deserving of its Booker prize.

OTHER REVIEWS

(If you would like your review of this book, or any other Iris Murdoch book, listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

NOTES

The Sea, the Sea won the Booker prize in 1978. I am reading it for my  Battle of the Prizes, British Version challenge. It will also count as one of my Chunkster Challenge reads.

22 Days to Christmas

Literary Blog Hop: Pure Poetry!

The Blue Bookcase has started a "Literary Blog Hop" for blogs "that primarily feature reviews of literary fiction, classic literature, and general literary discussion."

Each week, in addition to hopping around and visiting some terrific book blogs, participants answer a bookish question.  This week's question comes from Gary at Parrish Lantern:

What is your favorite poem and why?

Lucia answers this question very well for the Blue Bookcase team, managing to tie in Alexander Pope, Roald Dahl, and metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, before settling on one of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Ah, well . . .

I can't really rise to that level, poetry troglodyte that I am. I did fancy John Dunne in my college days, but it didn't stick.  If my charming and omni-talented friend Kirsten Rian didn't email me a poem every Monday, I wouldn't recognize one if it jumped up and kissed me on the face.

I did read an epic poem this year. I read Seamus Heany's translation of Beowulf, but that was only because it was disguised as a story.  And even then, I would not have read it if it hadn't won a prize.

However, like Lucia, I'll pick a Shakespeare sonnet as my "favorite" because it is the only poem I ever managed to memorize.  It comes in handy at weddings. In fact, if you knew me in the late '80s or early '90s, check your wedding video, because after a few glasses of champagne, I was often likely to recite it for the bride and groom:

Shakespeare's 116th Sonnet

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

23 Days to Christmas

24 Days to Christmas

Time to start my blog advent calendar!

Teaser Tuesday: The Club Dumas

"For Dumas, the history of France was a rich source of material.  His was an extraordinary trick: he'd leave the frame alone but alter the picture, mercilessly plundering the treasure that was offered to him."

-- The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte. This is great fun already and I've only just started it. I can't wait to sink into the story.

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Mailbox Monday

 

Knitting and Sundries is hosting Mailbox Monday in November. Thanks Julie!

Nothing came for me in the mail last week, but I did pick up a stack of books at the Grant High School annual used book sale.  All of them were in very good condition, mostly hardbacks, and only $2 each (because I went when they first opened -- they would have been $1 if I had waited until the afternoon, but these books may have been gone by then).

It's quite a mixed up mix of books:

Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer (great cover!)



The Gate House by Nelson DeMille



A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion



Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy



Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (on the All-TIME 100 list)



In the Woods by Tana French (Edgar winner)