A Feast of Reading

Cheers to xelgend.blogspot.com, where I found this awesome image!

Other than books and reading, one of my great interests is food. I like to eat, I like to cook, I like to watch cooking shows, learn how to cook new things, go to the restaurant, try new foods, and plan meals. It was only natural that, at some point, these two passions — reading, eating — would intersect. My literary-cum-culinary obsession has nothing to do with cookbooks or bibliophagy; rather, it’s an interest in food as described within books. I’m always intrigued, and sometimes fascinated, whenever food is mentioned in a novel or a story — even if only in passing — and I often feel a deep urge to taste whatever the food in question is.

Here’s an example. In the beginning of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s memoirs of Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway goes to a café to write. He orders a plate of oysters and a glass of white wine. He describes eating “the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture.” This wonderful passage is the reason why I began eating oysters. Hemingway is great on food, by the way. Among my favorite of his culinary passages is the description of the rabbit cooked with onions and red wine in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and raw tuna Santiago eats while he’s out on his boat in The Old Man and the Sea: “He picked up a piece and put in his mouth and chewed it slowly. It was not unpleasant. Chew it well, he thought, and get all the juices. It would not be bad to eat with a little lime or with lemon or with salt.”

"Still Life with Oysters", by Gustabe Caillebotte (1881).

My interest in food description in books began when I read Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events as a child. In one of the books, I think it was The Ersatz Elevator, something called salmon puffs are featured during a reception. Salmon puffs. They weren’t described in detail and they weren’t important to the plot, and yet the very name made my mouth water for flaky, fishy goodness. I moved on from there, longing, in Tolkien, for the seed-cakes Bilbo “had baked that afternoon for his after-supper morsel” in The Hobbit, and for Lembas bread in The Lord of the Rings (who hasn’t), and of course for the rabbit stew Sam makes with the coneys Gollum brings him in the chapter entitled “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”. Strange, I know, but then a lot of literary fetichism is.

Now I can’t help but notice when food is described (or even just mentioned) in fiction. One of my favourite writers on food is Ian McEwan, who mentions food in his books in a consistently interesting way. In Atonement, there’s the roast and potatoes served at the country house in the first section of the novel, which the cook has to turn into cold cuts and salad because the weather is too warm; in On Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence spend their first evening as a married couple eating “a slice of melon decorated by a single glazed cherry (…), slices of long-ago roasted beef in thickened gravy, soft boiled vegetables, and potatoes of a bluish hue.” The novel takes place in 1962, and McEwan adds that “this was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time, except visitors from abroad.” I also love (and, in some ways, abhor) the last few pages of Solar, in which the obese main character, traveling to New Mexico, wolfs down a strange dish (an invention of McEwan’s) made up of “four wedges of skinless chicken breast, interleaved with three minute steaks, the whole wrapped in bacon, with a honey and cheese topping, and served with twice-roasted potatoes already impregnated with butter and cream cheese.” However, the McEwan food reference I prefer is in Saturday, in which the protagonist, Dr. Perowne, cooks up a memorable fish stew, lovingly described in all the details of its making: “He has now, he reckons, about two and a half litres of bright orange stock which he’ll cook for another five minutes. Just before dinner, he’ll reheat it, and simmer the clams, monkfish, mussels and prawns in it for ten minutes. They’ll eat the stew with brown bread, salad and red wine.” (McEwan put the recipe up on his website, by the way.)

Dickens is another great author on food. It’s always mentioned in passing, but with Dickens’ usual passionate verve. I’ve always wished I could taste the punch that Mr. Micawber specializes in making in David Copperfield, or the “two prodigious lobsters”, the “enormous crab”, and the “large canvas bag of shrimps” that Mr Peggotty brings to David. Or how could anyone forget the pudding Mrs Cratchit makes in a A Christmas Carol, ”like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.” And then there are the pies, of course. It seems that in Dickens the word pie is like a burning brand, a miracle; he just needs to say the word and you can imagine the thick, golden pastry and the juicy meats inside, and the hot little pie-shops with their windows foggy with condensation. In David Copperfield there’s a “beefsteak pie (…) curiously flavoured (…) by a miscellaneous taste of tea, coffee, butter, bacon, cheese, new loaves, firewood, candles, and walnut ketchup, continually ascending from the shop”, and of course, how could I not mention the “beautiful round compact pork pie” Pip brings Magwich at the beginning of Great Expectations! I’m not sure how I would react to seeing the actual pie, but reading about it certainly makes my mouth water…

What about you? Have books every made you hungry for anything?

An illustration of Mr. Micawber mixing punch in Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield". Back then, punch was a drink of rum, lemon, and sugar, served warm.

Of Titles

Michel de Montaigne. His titles were bit repetitive, but at least they were straightforward.

Like a book, a blog needs a title — and preferably a good one.

A good title, of course, is a complicated thing. It has to reveal something about the content without saying too much, it has to be easily remembered without being obvious, and it has to sound smart without being obscure or pedantic. Titles for smaller works — a single blog post, an essay, a short story — are probably easier to find because they are headers for a more narrow field of inquiry. Influential essay writers like Montaigne or Francis Bacon solved the title by problem several centuries ago by taking the subject of their text and slapping the word “Of” before it: “Of Sleeping”, “Of Moderation”, “Of Fear”, “Of Travel”, “Of Drunkenness”, and so on.

Titles for longer pieces of writing or collections are trickier, because they have to encompass a sometimes very broad array of subject matters. Short story collections, like CDs, often reuse the title of one of the stories (or songs) comprised within it as the title of the whole. Alice Munro, for instance, has done this for virtually all of her short story collection; and since she has a knack for good titles, the result is usually excellent,

When a title's that good, you don't even need an image on the cover.

like Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage or The Moons of Jupiter. Or else, like Annie Proulx, they use a title that fits in some way with the general trend of all the stories, and add an ugly, literal subtitle underneath just to make sure you know exactly what the book is about: Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3.

Some books have really good titles. They make you want to read them, they make you feel connected to the book before you’ve even picked it up. Some of my favorites are Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Varieties of Exile by Mavis Gallant, Risky Business by Al Alvarez, Somewhere Towards the End (Like Alice Munro, Diana Athill always has beautiful titles for her books: Instead of a Letter, Stet, Yesterday Morning, Don’t Look at Me Like That)… Other books have not so good titles: Ian McEwan’s latest book Solar, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, 2666 (You can’t say this one without sounding like a you have a speech impediment), … I’m not entirely sure why I don’t like them, I just find they sound bland, or obvious. It has nothing to do with the books themselves; and to be fair, there are some much worse book titles out there. All genres considered, I think the worst is probably The Duchess, her Maid, The Groom, & Their Lover, an erotic novel by Victoria Janssen — although Carlton Mellick III’s The Haunted Vagina is definitely up there. Tangentially, I’d like to add that I tend not to like books that are entitled after their main characters. I really find it’s the least creative way to name your novel. For instance, Dickens’ working title for Little Dorrit was Nobody’s Fault — imagine how much better that would’ve been! Using a protagonist’s name as the title of a book also frustrates me because, unless your character becomes embedded in pop culture (like David Copperfield or Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn), then it’s sometimes very difficult to tell which name on the book cover is the author’s and which is the title — take the Pulitzer-winning Oliver Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout.

Probably the worst book title in history.

Hemingway, as the compulsive perfectionist that he was, unsurprisingly spent a long time deciding on the titles for his books. When he had finished writing something, he would sit down and come up with a list of possible titles, and the select the best one. His technique seemed to work well, since he came up with some of the most memorable titles of the 20th century, like The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. I inspired myself somewhat from Hemingway’s method in finding the title for this blog. I had a brainstorming session with my girlfriend in which we came up with some very bad ideas (Logophagist, Alphabetist, The Reading Lamp) and some rather good ones (Bibliology; or The Science of Book-Loving, I’d Rather Be Reading, BookLust). The title we finally chose, Book’s End, emerged as a world play on a “book end”, the staple of every bibliophile’s wall shelves (lest his books fall off and get damaged… and maybe also hurt someone).

I wanted this blog to be first and foremost a place, a kind of haven where readers and book lovers could go to, get informed, and participate in a conversation about literature and books in general. Book’s End is that place, like a dead end (except very much alive) for bibliophiles and bibliomaniacs and “bibliologists”, and casual readers too. Book’s End is also a specific reminder that books do, indeed, end. Luckily, you can always pick up a new one (or an old one) afterward and keep on reading. In a broader sense, the title is also a warning, in the age of Internet, Amazon, GoogleBooks, and E-Readers, that the “Book” as we know and define it — a concept and an object which so many of us still cherish very strongly — is changing very quickly indeed.

And so, let the book-blogging begin!