A Work in Progress

Prokofiev and a Story Told in Music

How is it possible to "know" things without actually Knowing them?  Just like the movies borrow heavily from books and stories, so TV and movies (and probably other media as well) borrow from music.  It seems I know a song or sound without realizing it is part of something more.  So, giving credit where credit is due--Sergey Prokofiev, did you know that your music was going to be borrowed and usurped and pulled into other works?  Would you mind?  Maybe you did, and you don't (mind that is)?  I know you without actually ever having been introduced.  And I have, in this case, Terry Tempest Williams, to thank.

I mentioned before that my friend Cath gave me a copy of her book of short essays When Woman Were Birds.  This is a collection of fifty-four variations on "voice" which I am reading slowly and with attention.  Her writing is beautiful and thoughtful and these are "variations" which should be savored slowly. 

Today she writes about the days when her father was away and she and her brother were alone with her mother.  She would settle the pair down to Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, a story told through music.  Do you know it?  I must have come across it somewhere at some point without knowing just what it was.  Williams tells of whole afternoons spent sitting listening to this tale in front of the phonograph.  They would listen and upon finishing move the record arm to the start and listen from the start all over again.  "Peter and the Wolf was . . . an early lesson on how the balance of nature could be articulated through story."  Each character's voice is presented by a different musical instrument.

"What I realize now is this: within those thirty minutes that took Prokofiev only four days to compose, I received my first tutorial on voice.  Each of us has one.  Each voice is distinct and has something to say.  Each voice deserves to be heard.  But it requires that act of listening."

***

"For my brother and me, the cycle of nature consciously or unconsciously was performed through the various voices of a symphony.  'And if one would listen very carefully, he could hear the duck quacking inside the wolf; because the wolf in his hurry had swallowed her alive."

"Listening over and over to the voices through a family of instruments allowed us to recognize and appreciate the dignity and uniqueness of each living thing in the meadow and forest."

I find this, the music, the way the story is told, those voices and more Williams's recognition of that fact, and now my own--pure magic.  And since I am always interested in what others have to say about the act of solitude--

"Each voice belongs to a place.  Solitude is a place.  Mother left us alone to enjoy our own company while she enjoyed hers and reclaimed precious time for herself.  When she wasn't living her solitude, she was contemplating it."

So much to reflect on in this book.  Variations to think about and let simmer in my mind and another to look forward to tomorrow.

Teaser Tuesday: The Clothing of Books

A couple of years back I read Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake and it was one of my best reads of the year.  I think she is a really fascinating person and an exceptional writer.  Her style of storytelling is so engaging.  Maybe it is in part that she has a different world view, one different than my own yet presented in a very relatable manner.  She was born in the UK to Bengali Indian parents and raised in the US.  In a sense she straddles more than one culture and is now adding yet another.  I imagine she must juggle her Bengali side with her American/English speaking side, but she has also learned Italian and has immersed herself into that culture as well.

I have been reading about her experiences learning to speak and read the Italian language, and now she has begun writing in Italian and translating Italian novels into English.  She even lives in Italy now as well.  I'm in the middle of two of her more recent books--In Other Words (a bilingual edition with the Italian and English side by side) about her love affair with and study of Italian and an essay called The Clothing of Books (which I am going to share a teaser from), which might be her first published work in Italian. 

It's interesting reading an author who is writing in a second language when you are familiar with their work in their native tongue.  Lahiri has also written about growing up American while being raised in a Bengali-Indian family.  In her essay about the design of book jackets, a clothing of sorts, it is her musings on a variety of things.  It's interesting in how the prose reads, too, since it was written in Italian and translated into English by her husband Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush.  I have just started reading, though I have skimmed a bit ahead so I will have more to say about this, but a few teasers to share now.

She begins by writing about clothes as we know them, the clothes we wear, which have a meaning all their own.  Growing up her mother always pressed Jhumpa to wear Bengali clothing to family gatherings, hoping that she would eventually fall into that culture permanently.

"As soon as I put on those clothes I felt like a different person, a foreigner like her.  I felt the weight of an imposed identity.  Those clothes, which had their own separate space in my closet, had a discordant, showy quality: colors that seemed too bright, material rooted in another land.  They were, actually, more elegant than my everyday clothes, but they discomfited me.  They tasted of a faraway place. They weighed almost nothings, and yet they weighed on me."

"Throughout this bitter struggle between my mother and myself, of long standing and with no clear resolution, I learned the hard way that  how we dress, like the language we speak and the food we eat, expresses our identity, our culture, our sense of belonging."

And then she begins to relate this idea to how publishers clothe the books they publish.

"When my books were first published, when I was thirty-two years old, I discovered that another part of me had to be dressed and presented to the world.  But what is wrapped around my words--my book covers--is not of my choosing."

And I think, like most authors, that she doesn't always like what ends up covering her books. 

It may be down to the translation, and I think she did rework this essay, but it doesn't exactly feel like it has been translated (her longer, bilingual book I am also reading has a different feel to it).  Her writing seems quite lyrical here to me.  I am enjoying comparing this shorter work to her longer book of essays/stories that has also been translated.  And I am sure I will have more to say about both of them later.

Yet am I in fact, a collector?

If I haven't already tempted you yet by this book, here is another teaser.  I was going to refrain from sharing more quotes (because most of Browse is worthy of quoting), but Michael Dirda's wonderful essay "Snow Day" just tickled my fancy and I have to share after all.  He writes about a visit to the used bookstore Second Story Books a few years back when his wife was on the east coast (always so much easier to bring home a stack of books when your spouse or significant other isn't there to see) on a snow day a few years back.  Dirda, in case you are not familiar, is a book critic for the Washington Post and has several books to his name . . . I own a few of them . . .).

"I've never counted how many books I own, but my attic is stuffed with genre fiction from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century--needed for a big project--and the basement is solidly packed with recent novels and non-fiction, some of it on industrial shelving but the bulk in boxes piled higgledy-piggledy.  It's really quite apalling.  There's also a rented storage unit, which has sucked a fortune out of me, probably more than its contents are worth.  I'd estimate that I own between 15,000 and 20,000 books, conceivably more.  From many quite reasonable points of view I have 'too many books', but to my mind I just need more bookshelves.  Or a bigger house."

That makes absolute sense to me.  I have nowhere near that many books, but I am sure that if Michael Dirda saw my bookroom, he might whistle in appreciation rather than shake his head in consternation.  (And I bet he would also not ask if I had read all those books . . .).

"Yet am I, in fact, a collector?"  Somewhere I read that if you couldn't lay your hands on any book you owned in five minutes, you were just an accumulator, a hoarder.  I couldn't lay my hands on some of my books if I had five days to search for me.  The great bibliographical scholar G. Thomas Tanselle contends that any true collection requires an overarching theme, a plan, defined limits.  My only plan is to keep books I might need in my work or that I hope to read some day for my own sweet pleasure.  That means Tarzan and the insidious Fu Manchu as well as Dickens and Proust.  The novelist and bookseller Larry McMurtry once observed that only those with basements or storage units like mine can enjoy the highly rarefied delight of scouting their own books: you never know what might be waiting at the bottom of the next box.  Of course, McMurtry used to buy entire bookshops to stock the used and rare shelves of Archer City, Texas, his American version of Hay-on-Wye."

I may not (yet?) have books in a storage unit and my basement will only give my poor books the odor of musty basement (hence it is not used for storage), but I very much enjoy that delight of scouting my own bookshelves and book piles and book bins.  Maybe I will do a little scouting tonight and share what I find tomorrow . . .  I always say I could "shop" from my own shelves--find books so long left unattended that I have forgotten I own them.  But there is still that thrill of finding something you didn't know you needed!  Definitely a worthy way of spending a (snowy in Dirda's case) weekend afternoon.

The Joys of (Brick & Mortar) Bookstores

In his essays "A Tale of Two Bookshops" from Browse: The World in Bookshops edited by Henry Hitchings Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez writes about his love of and history with two favorite bookshops in Bogotá.  They were places that helped form his reading and his writing, calling them a place of transformation.  I can appreciate his sentiments when it comes to the joys of brick and mortar bookstores and what we miss and lose when they cease to exist.  He was so familiar with the staff in one particular store that he could almost recognize them by their handwriting, something he was accustomed to seeing when he made a special order for a book not found on the shelves.  There is a pleasure to 'book hunting'.   Scanning shelves of various stores trying to locate a hard-to-find or out print book that you must have.

"These days of online shopping have robbed us of this as well: the peculiar pleasure of not finding the book, having to request it and wait for days or weeks or even months for it to arrive.  The immediate satisfaction of online buying is no fun for me.  Visiting several stores in search of a book, tracking it down and hunting for it like a difficult prey, continues to be one of the pleasures that is turning me, bit by bit, into an anachronistic bibliophile."

***

" . . . I remain in full admiration for this place, between the walls of which I've found so much happiness in print, and grateful that it is still in the hands of the Ungar family, seventy years on, instead of having sunk under the competition from the internet, which treats books as if they were hairdryers, or from so many contemporary readers, traffickers of electronic files for whim literature is so important, but so important that it doesn't seem fair to them to pay for it."

***

And this gives me little chills up my spine for the recognition of having the very same feeling.

"I can also think of the bookshop in Hay-on-Wye where I found a volume, gathering dust, that contained letters written from Colombia by an American Peace Corps volunteer.  That book--published privately and discovered on the unpredictable shelves of a second-hand bookshop--turned out to be a key document for me when I was writing The Sound of Things Falling.  The best bookshops are places where the principle of serendipity, which in broad strokes consists of finding the book you need when you don't yet know you need it, presents itself in all its splendor.  A reader's life is, among other things, the tissue of opportune coincidences."

I love this book.  Every new essay is another confirmation of how much I love reading, and while a solitary activity is still done among friends who (even if we all read very different books) understand the feelings a good book or good bookshop bring.

November Prompt: Giving Thanks

I'm not sad to see October pass into November.  Last month was not a good month for me for a variety of reasons, so despite cold weather and grey skies that have arrived, I am happy to turn the calendar over.  Why is it that a new month almost feels like a fresh start?  Once again (I do this at least once a month these days, it seems) time to reshuffle the books and think how I want to spend the last two months of the reading year. 

But first, (and this always helps to set the tone), time to give my November prompt a thought.  I had to go back and remind myself what I chose for this month, and was kind of disappointed to see I set myself the theme of "Giving Thanks".  It's not that I don't have much to give thanks for, but it just didn't seem to lend itself to inspiration on the book and reading front.  However, Buried in Print has given a few suggestions so I picked two that actually appeal quite a lot considering the time of year and the rocky previous month.  The first is being thankful for favorite books, and an excuse to pull out a few favorites and reread something comforting.  Just what I could use at the moment.  So I'll link to my original posts on these, so you can see how much I loved them the first (and in some cases second or third) time around:

Learning to Swim by Clare Chambers

The Bread and Butter Stories by Mary Norton (Loved these!)

The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice

The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart (This is one I 'like' more than loved by a favorite author, but I like the idea of doppelgangers and would love to give it another try).

Family Roundabout by Richmal Crompton

Every Eye by Isobel English

The other group of 'thankful' books are books about reading or books or libraries or bookstores (I have more but grabbed just a very few for now).  As extreme as this sounds, books and reading really do 'save me' sometimes.  I cannot imagine not having books in my life and spending time with them every day.  So, for a little bookish appreciation I have:

Howards End is On the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home by Susan Hill -- "Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again."

Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles -- "Former rare books librarian and Harvard MetaLAB visionary Matthew Battles takes us from Boston to Baghdad, from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries and on to the Information Age, to explore how libraries are built and how they are destroyed: from the scroll burnings in ancient China to the burning of libraries in Europe and Bosnia to the latest revolutionary upheavals of the digital age."

Browse: The World in Bookshops edited by Henry Hitchings -- "A cabinet of curiosities, a time machine, a treasure trove - we love bookshops because they possess a unique kind of magic. In Browse, Henry Hitchings asks fifteen writers from around the world to reveal their favourite bookshops, each conjuring a specific time and place."

I am starting with Browse and dipping into the story collection by Mary Norton and I'll see where my reading path takes me after.  I am good on comfort rereads, but if you have a favorite book about books, reading, libraries (or anything related), please do share.  (You can never have enough books about books).

May Prompt: How Does Your Garden Grow

Four months into the year and I have actually read one book (and on one occasion two) for each monthly prompt.  Finally a reading plan/goal I have actually managed to stick to and in the actual month (rather than starting the books and not finishing them for months).  I'll be writing about last month's book this week sometime.  My stack was a bit larger but I had to whittle it down a little.  I just want to read one book, but if I manage two or more that's even better.  I was surprised by how many gardening books I have on my shelves and left a number of nonfiction books in their places, or the pile would definitely get out of hand.  Always good to browse a little and see what I have for later, right?

Now to choose one to start with.  The prompt is "how does your garden grow" since May flowers is what we should be looking forward to (or the start of veggies maybe).  It has not felt at all like spring here.  I had to wear my winter coat against the lashing rain this weekend, and there were snowflakes in the air this morning.  We'll be optimistic and if nothing else I can at least read about warmth for the time being.  So from top to bottom, my choices this month:

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton -- I believe this is a reimagining of sorts of The Secret Garden.  This story begins in pre-WWI Australia and follows several generations of a family with a mystery at the heart of the story.  It opens in 1913, moves on to 1975 and then ends in 2005.  I have had this book on my pile since it came out in paperback.  I have read and enjoyed Kate Morton, so this one is very tempting indeed.

When I first read about The Forbidden Garden by Ellen Herrick it was the book I had in mind to pick up this month.  I hadn't really planned on shelf browsing, but I couldn't help myself in the end.I believe this is a contemporary story with overtones of magical realism to it.  Sorrel Sparrow is hired to restore the walled "Shakespeare Garden" at a great hall--a task others have tried to accomplish but failed at.  One of the blurbs reads "a romantic, bighearted novel that celebrates femininity in all its nurturing, resilient, and fearless power."  Doesn't that sound like a perfect combination?

Katherine S. White's Onward and Upward in the Garden is one of my NYRB subscription books from back in 2015!  It is a collection of New Yorker essays from the 1950s.  It is a little hefty (with somewhat smallish print) book though there are only fourteen essays in the volume.  I wonder if I could manage one essay a week and carry it over into summer?  Maybe I will try at least one and see how it goes.

Stephanie Barron writes a cozy mystery series featuring Jane Austen, but The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf is a standalone story.  This is another modern-ish day story about a woman who comes to Sissinghurst Castle (home of Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West) to study the famous White Garden.  It's a bit of a mystery as an unknown diary is found that sheds light onto Woolf's suicide. 

Deborah Lawrenson is another author who I have read and enjoyed, so I am sure I would like The Sea Garden.  This is another (obviously a theme writers like to work with) story set in both the present and past as a woman is hired to restore an abandoned garden on an island off the French coast in the Mediterranean.  A parallel story runs during WWII about the French Resistance.  A lush Mediterranean island sounds very, very inviting at the moment.

Last is another novel with parallel stories, but this is set in 1998 and all the way back in 912, Into the Heart of the Garden!  The contemporary story concerns a woman trying to decide whether to sell her cottage and ancient garden.  I'm not sure how the two stories connect, but there must be something to twines the two together.  "The rich and varied history of England is seen through the eyes of generations of women who have found sorrow and joy, inspiration and courage 'down the garden path'."

There is nothing for it but to dip in and see which story catches my interest first.  I'll let you know which one ends up in my reading pile!

Teaser Tuesday: At the Source (again!)

Yes,  here I am once again sharing something more that I read in Gillian Clarke's At the Source.  There is so much to love about this book.  So much that she writes resonates with me that I am constantly dog-earing pages and underlining or starring or otherwise noting all the interesting and worthy (and there is lots that is worthy here) bits that I would like to remember.  I think I need to resurrect my paper journal (but then this online space here is really my reading journal these days) so I can write down and remember more passages that catch my eye. 

I have finished the monthly essays and now just have a few general essays (am reading one on poetry at the moment!) to finish the book.  I read "December" yesterday and found myself mentally agreeing with everything she has to say about the holidays.

"I try to ignore Christmas.  It all starts too soon.  I hate the bling, the cheap glitter, the unremitting materialism, the waste, the flashing lights, the destruction of rural darkness by the spreading disease of giant Santas and snowmen, and God help us, flashing inflatable cribs.  I want an airgun for Christmas so that I can shoot Santa Claus and watch him deflate with a hiss.  Lights fidget on houses all the way from Ceredigion to Cardiff, eating the ozone layer and melting the Greenland glaciers.  Where is the romance of the one lit tree in the window we used to count on winter walks with the kids?  Bah!  Humbug!"

Oh, I thought I was just being curmudgeonly by feeling the same (and I think the same way when I pass my neighbor's inflatable snowman and Santa every morning--I can hear the 'whiz' of electricity and can only think how cheesy the display looks).  Apparently I am not only not alone but I suspect there are many more like us out there.  I actually would love the holidays if it weren't all so over-the-top and commercial like it is now.  It just feels staged and the pressure to buy and be merry quickly weighs me down.  Give me a little bit of Dickens and one small tree with plain white lights and very, very simple presents, quiet and peacefulness and the holidays would for me be far happier.

At the Source: Gillian Clarke on Poetry

One of my semi-reading-failures this year has been to read a book in monthly installments and then written about it over the course of the year.  I have come across some really fantastic books that lend themselves well to this sort of reading project.  There has been Roger Deakin and Anna Pavord.  Both books are written in perfect 'bite-size' chapters with essays and observations presented in a monthly format.  This year's book At the Source by Gillian Clarke is another perfect read for this kind of serial reading project.  It was a gift from my friend Cath with whom I have been (at least had been until I dropped the ball) reading along.  Somewhere along the line, early summer I think, I fell behind and now am just trying to finish reading the remaining chapters. It is presented in journal format by month with additional essays at the beginning of the book. 

Clarke is a Welsh poet and her writing is, unsurprisingly, very eloquent.  She is also a careful observer and reminds me of Roger Deakin at times.  To be honest I am not sure I will remember many details, little bits here and there only, but the act of reading her writing is a pleasure in itself.  I have all sorts of pencil markings so when I go back and dip into various chapters I can easily see the things that caught my eye.  There is just so much--it's such a lush sort of book, and even reading it very slowly (which her writing sort of demands) I mostly just let it all wash over me as i go.  It's like looking at paintings or sculpture in a museum--you can soak some of it in but when you leave you are mostly just left with impressions and images.   

So, at this point, I won't write about each chapter but as I was catching up on my reading I came across a section of wonderful bookishness.  I wish I could just share every bit with you here and now, but let me pick out a few especially tasty morsels.  Since she is a poet she writes a lot about her own work and that of others.  What she says is so spot on when it comes to reading in general.  And she makes me want to read and love poetry, which someday I hope to achieve (just like I have come to love short stories).  Here are a few snippets on poetry or reading or novels that I think every reader (of any type of literature) will appreciate.

"Good poetry is layered with secrets, observant, true, the best so simple it can stop your heart."

Then she goes on to name a few poets in particular--Yeats, Emily Dickinson, R.S. Thomas, Hughes and other living poets.  Must check some of these poets out--I know some of Emily's work, but in general I am woefully underread when it comes to poetry.

Do those of you who read poetry agree . . . she was at a literary conference and talking with other passionate poetry fans notes that "we rarely read a novel more than once, but the poetry-lovers all read favorite poems over and over, searching for the secret of their power, finding something new at every reading, yet never fathoming the mystery."  Even though I am not a poetry reader I can somehow see what she is saying.  The power of words to create strong images or a story maybe, and how the meaning might change depending on what the reader brings to the poems or interprets the words. 

And this is wonderful:

"Reading a novel and reading a poem are completely different ways of reading.  There is no comparison.  One drives you on, page after page.  The other stops you dead, stops your breath as if you saw the burning bush.  One is a journey, the other is a spell."

But this doesn't mean she doesn't appreciate good novels, too.  And I can easily concur with here here:

"When the novel is finished I close the book, and if it's any good it unfolds in my mind for hours, days, weeks, forever if it is a tryly great novel, by Tolstoy, Dickens, George Eliot."

And this actually gave me shivers--she was talking about an especially stunning poem and how she reacts to it:

"It's a spell, a magic trick, a key to your heart made by a man who doesn't even know you."

But it's so true.  A really good piece of writing is like a work of art.  It speaks to you across time and distance.  It is really quite a gift, and to think that someone somewhere had the ability to shake you up in some way, to give you a good memory, something you can take with you outside that particular moment and carry with you in your heart and mind.

This is what I love about good books (and good poems!).  It's for this moment (and they don't come as often as I would like) that I read!

July 15: Nonfiction Reading Notes

True to my word, I actually read a variety of nonfiction this week--an essay, a few chapters from an ongoing read and the first chapter of a new book.  Taken in small bites, it seems to work much better for me.  Essays are nice as they are usually not too long and you feel like you have been somewhere and learned something new perhaps.  My current nonfiction read is a slim volume and I am trying to read one chapter every day, so hopefully I should finish it in about a week.  And then something new that caught my eye and attention.

Gretel Ehrlich's The Solace of Open Spaces is quite a slim book and as it is not a straightforward narrative as she had envisioned it rather what seems to be a series of linked essays, it reads quite easily in small chunks and I didn't lose the thread by having let it sit for a while.  Now, however, I am well into it and quite enjoying myself.  Since I hope to finish it soon I will write about it in a proper post later, but I will share a couple of excerpts now as her writing is wonderfully descriptive.  I traveled to Wyoming as a child but have not been back since and do recall the wide open spaces, but I would love to return now.  I think it is the least populous state but the people Ehrlich writes about surely make up in personality what they lack in number!  The period she writes about is the late 1970s and early 1980s. 

I love her prose.  Especially at moments like this when she is describing one rancher's trailerhouse:

" . . . the trailer was set at an angle to the main and only paved street in a town so bland it might have been tipped on its side and all the life drained from it."

* * *

Wyoming women, ranching women, are truly formidable.  I think you have to be, to live a life so hard and challenging physically.

"One woman who ran a ranch by herself had trouble with a neighbor who let his cattle in on her pastures.  She rode out one morning to confront him.  When he laughed, she shot the hat off his head.  He promptly gathered his steers and departed.  'When you want your hat back, it'll be hanging over my mantel,' she yelled as he loped away."

Indeed!  Never mess with a woman who can shoot the hat off a man's head.

* * * * *

The essay I read is from The Best American Essays 2013 edited by Cheryl Strayed.  It was purely whim and chance that I pulled this particular year off the shelf.  Surely there would be some essay in it that would be of interest.  Flip through, read a few first paragraphs, study the table of contents.  "The Highway of Lost Girls" by Vanessa Veselka caught my eye.  It originally was published in GQ magazine. 

"In the summer of 1985, somewhere near Martinsburg, Pennsylvania, the body of a young woman was pulled from a truck-stop dumpster.  I had just hitched a ride and was sitting in a nearby truck waiting for the driver to pay for gas so we could leave."

What follows is a rather harrowing account of the author's experiences hitching rides in the mid-1980s when she was only fifteen or so.  She had left home with a boyfriend, but the two soon split.  It was easier to keep moving than to sleep on the streets--especially for a young woman alone like she was.  She writes what she knows and it had an immediacy to it through her 'storytelling' style.  As a matter of fact I had a hard time setting it down, which I had to do a few times over the course of yesterday when I read it. 

She moves back and forth between her experiences as a young woman, to the present and to stories of what happened to other women hitchhikers.  It was as much a sort of investigative piece as she looks back on the many women who had been murdered living this lifestyle (many of them prostitutes who plied their trade at and between truck stops) as a rumination on memory and recollection.  More than twenty years had passed between one particular encounter and the writing of this essay.  How much had really happened, as it was impressed in her memory, and how much had memory shaped reality differently?

Veselka took a ride from a man who was later jailed for a series of murders he committed.  She was lucky as he merely 'sported' with her and didn't attempt to kill her.  She moves so smoothly from her own experiences to the research she did later into the murders that occurred.  How much actually happened as she thinks happened, and how much was mere impressions? 

Hitching is a way of life that has, luckily, disappeared and you don't hear of serial killers preying on young women in the same way anymore.  But Veselka has some interesting things to say about the women who were murdered and how easy it was for lawmakers and everyone else for that matter to simply overlook or not care about these young women.  She writes about how hard it was for them to come forward and press charges against perpetrators, when most people assume they put themselves so carelessly into the situations.

"It seems our profound fascination with serial killers is matched only by an equally profound lack of interest in their victims."

It was a fascinating essay, well written and engrossing to read, though a little unsettling, too---in the way Joyce Carol Oates's Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been is unsettling.  I contemplated Googling some of the names she mentions, but I think it's better to be content simply with her essay and not have too clear a picture in my mind of some of these people and the things that happened.    What is sad is for some there was no justice and in some cases these women remain unnamed and no doubt largely forgotten.  I will keep an eye out for more of Veselka's writing.

I like the randomness of choosing just one essay and not feeling as though I have to read each essay in a collection.  So my randomness will continue.  I already have something picked out for next week, though if I get sidetracked with something else that is okay, too.

* * * * *

I have one more book I want to write about, but as this post has gotten a little too long already, I will split it into two.  Besides, the other book I have picked is one I plan on working my way through slowly and writing about chapter by chapter or in groups of two chapters (as there are twenty).  It is art related and I am quite excited about it.  More about it tomorrow!

Penguin Great Food Series Revisited

My, how time flies.  Remember this post?  Probably not and that's okay.  I am almost too embarrassed to mention it since I wrote it at the end of 2012.  Maybe we could almost call it 2013 and then it wouldn't seem as though so much time has passed.  I am always so full of plans, aren't I?

Since this year is supposed to be all about reading from my own shelves and this piles of lovely little Penguins happens to be sitting out and in my daily line of sight, I was thinking maybe it was time to revamp my plans to read through the Penguin Great Food series of books.  What initially prompted it all was reading Agnes Jekyll's A Little Dinner Before the Play, which is a series of columns she wrote for The Times in the 1920s.  I really liked it and knew I had to have the whole set, which I then set about acquiring.  And they have been sitting, waiting and staring at me ever since.

They are slender little volumes, gorgeously designed--usually selections from larger, longer works, so just the perfect length for a taste--literally and figuratively.  A taste of each author's writing and an (imagined) taste of various cuisines from different cultures and at different periods in history.  All in all a perfect sampling of writing for a perfect little reading project.

It sounded good at the time and it still sounds pretty good now.  I think my error was trying to put them in some sort of order and then read them in said order.  I was stuck on the first book--just wasn't quite what I wanted at the moment and so it languished, was set aside and sort of forgotten.  But I have decided to give it another go.  This time, however, I will choose the books on whim and desire--who cares which order.  And I have started with an author I hugely admire--M.F.K. Fisher. 

I read and loved her Gastronomical Me.  She is not only a most impressive author, but a woman of culture and panache.  And while my own palate is pretty unstudied and unsophisticated, I can still love her writing and the things she writes about.  I might not be tempted by all the dishes she writes about, but I certainly can appreciate how she writes about them.  Maybe I will even read more of her work this year (because after I read her I had to have as much of her other writing as I could get my hands on . . . you know how that goes).  But I am starting with the Penguin book, Love in a Dish and Other Pieces, which is a series of culinary essays. 

I've read the first essay and am into the second.  In it she writes about traveling by train with her uncle from California to Chicago in 1927.  I think she must have surely been influenced a little by him.  He was a seasoned train traveler and knew how to navigate the system, especially the dining car.  When presented with the choice of dishes, she responds with an "I don't really care" and is gently castigated.  He tells her she should never reply in such a manner since it is stupid, which she is not.

"It implies that the intentions of your host are basically wasted on you.  So make up your mind, before you open your mouth.  Let him believe, even if it is a lie, that you would infinitely prefer the exotic wild asparagus to the banal mushrooms, or vice versa.  Let him feel that it matter to you . . . and even that he does!" 

"'All this', my uncle added gently, 'may someday teach you about the art of seduction, as well as the more important art of knowing yourself'."

The other bit of wisdom from her uncle Evan--"The only test of a good breakfast place is its baked apple".  I wonder if you can use that test still these days?!

Other books in the series (and in no particular order to be read):

**The Well Kept Kitchen by Gervase Markham
**The Joys of Excess by Samuel Pepys (based on Pepys' diaries)
**Everlasting Syllabub and the Art of Carving by Hannah Glasse
**Recipes from the White Hart Inn by William Verrall
**The Pleasures of the Table by Brillat-Savarin
**The Elegant Economist by Eliza Acton
**The Chef at War by Alexis Soyer
**The Campaign for Domestic Happiness by Isabella Beeton
**From Absinthe to Zest by Alexandre Dumas
**Notes from Madras by Colonel Wyvern
**Buffalo Cake and Indian Pudding by Dr. A.W. Chase
**A Dissertation Upon Roasting a Pig and Other Essays by Charles Lamb
**Exciting Food for Southern Types by Pellegrino Artusi
**A Little Dinner Before the Play by Agnes Jekyll
**Love in a Dish and Other Pieces by M.F.K. Fisher
**A Taste of the Sun by Elizabeth David
**Murder in the Kitchen by Alice B. Toklas
**A Middle Eastern Feast by Claudia Roden
**Eating with the Pilgrims and Other Pieces by Calvin Trillin (essays appearing mostly in The New Yorker)
**Recipes & Lessons from A Delicious Cooking Revolution by Alice Water