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.

Comfort Lit

When you're not feeling too well, slipping into a hot bath with a good book can do miracles. The hard part is choosing what book to read.

It’s good to remember that sometimes, when things aren’t going so well or your feeling a bit under the weather, books are there to offer comfort. Not any book, mind you. Novels are usually good, although it’s important to make sure the that subject matter isn’t closely related to what’s bothering you, and you wouldn’t want to pull something too hefty or difficult off the shelf. Ulysses is a great read in some contexts, but when you need to bundle up with a blanket, a cuppa, and a good book, I don’t think it offers the right kind of escapism. Mind you, I usually go for particularly light — or at least highly readable, which isn’t quite the same thing — books when I need comfort lit because I usually seek these books out as a break from school work, in which my principal task is reading fiction (yes, these are the woes of an English major). 

The excellent Sarah Crown, from The Guardian, recently posted an article on her blog on sick lit, or the kind of literature she goes to when she’s ill (apparently, she has years of experience). The number one rule, according to her, is never to read something for the first time. I agree. Your mind, confounded by disease or simply troubled with other things, won’t have the capacity to cope with anything new to read, or at least it won’t be able to appreciate it. A visit from an old friend can do a lot of good when you’re not feeling well, but having to make the effort of conversing with someone new most certainly won’t. Revisits are therefore ideal, and Sarah Crown adds that revisiting anything is not necessarily the best idea either (once again, Ulysses comes to mind). As she puts it: “A crucial balance of familiarity, likeability and narrative propulsion must be struck.”

For readability and escapism, one of the most satisfying types of books I fall back on is of course YA or fantasy novels (I know G. would agree — how many times have I seen her reach for The Lord of the Rings after a stressful day of studying during exam periods). The Harry Potter books have changed my mind off dreary thoughts many times and invariably color sick days in bed with more fun and excitement than the TV ever could, and I’ve always told myself that my next bad cold would be the perfect opportunity to plunge once again into Philip Pullman’s engrossing His Dark Materials. 

Non-fiction of the most confessional and charming kind also features prominently on my list of Comfort Lit. As already mentioned on this blog, Diana Athill’s memoir Yesterday Morning and a hot bath once saved me from a dreadful November flu. In the same vein, I revisit Anne Fadiman’s brilliant, funny, moving “confessional essays” — collected in Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader and At Large and at Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist — whenever I need to quiet down and cheer up. Speaking of Anne Fadiman, a bibliophile if there ever was one (her husband once offered her 19 pounds of used books for her birthday, to her delight) my preferred Comfort Lit is books about books — those rare, wonderful volumes that treat of literature and reading. I am always enchanted by their eccentricity, their passion, and their inevitably charming prose. The best writer on the subject is certainly Alberto Manguel, whose History of Reading and The Library at Night — readable, magical — are bibles for bibliophiles. 

So that’s what I pull out when I need some Comfort Lit. What about you?

Gardening and Bathroom Lit

You spend so much of your life in bathroom, it's only logical to have decent stash of books to keep yourself distracted.

In a recent article in The Atlantic Wire, Margaret Atwood shared her usual media diet — that is, a complete report of where and when she gets her information during the day. The article had Atwood’s telltale humor and usual sense of derision (“there’s nothing except food and drink that I can’t live without,” she remarks casually, “I take these questions literally”), but what I found interesting is what she had to say about a particular kind of reading we all take part in, but rarely talk about — the one we do in the bathroom. As Atwood defines it, “[b]athroom reading is a certain kind of reading–episodic, but encouraging first thing in the morning. The bathroom is a place where you can go in and pretend to be doing one thing while actually you’re reading. Nobody can interrupt you.”

As Margaret Atwood suggests, I usually keep something episodic or anthologized to read in the bathroom, like a magazine or a short story collection, so that I can savour it a few pages at a time without loosing the thread (unless I’m reading something particularly gripping, or that I need to finish quickly, in which case that follows goes into the bathroom with me). I’ve found Lapham’s Quarterly has done that job wonderfully in the past, because it’s basically a collection of quotations from various sources about a certain subject. By picking up the issue on Celebrity (Winter 2011), for instance, you could be reading a passage from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (“Et tu, Brute?”) during one visit to the loo, and an extract from Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (“Stars are ageless, aren’t they?”) on another.

Recently, however, I’ve been keeping a very special volume at hand: Our Life in Gardens, by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd. The book is halfway between a gardening handbook and a memoir; each chapter is concerned with a particular plant (with beautiful accompanying illustrations by Bobbi Angel) and describes its characteristics and and specific needs, but it also explores any special attachment the authors have to it, like when they started growing it, where they keep it in their garden, and who gave them their first plant. It’s a treasure trove of fascinating trivia about gardening and flowers — especially for someone as poorly versed in the arts of horticulture as I am. For instance, it’s interesting to know that when you eat artichokes (also broccoli and cauliflower), you’re eating the plant’s immature flower buds, or that a biennal is not a plant that flowers every other year, but an annual that takes two years to build up enough root and leaf in order to flower once.

I’ve always found something oddly poetic about botanicals. Maybe it’s the names — both in common and latinized form they sound so beautiful. For example, there’s the “floxglove”, the most common of which is the digitalis purperea, called that way because you will find you finger fits perfectly in one of its cupped flowers. You just have to think of the opening lines of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King to find an example of a list of plant names used to create mesmerizing lyricism and simple precision. There’s definitely something vague and majestic that relates literature to gardening. Robin Lane Fox, classicist and author of such well-respected books as The Classical World and Travelling Heroes, seems to embody that relation; he has also been the gardening columnist for the Financial Times for the last 40 years. “A thoughtful gardener,” Fox explains in a video tour of his Oxfordshire gardens, “thinks carefully about which plant to choose. She then thinks, where shall I put it? What will it go well with? And she thinks above all: What will it like when its in the garden? And as it develops, she looks at it and thinks of a range of associations; maybe it’s come from a great friend, passed down through the family, maybe it’s connected with paintings, art, poetry that one knows. The plant takes on quite a different dimension to your eye.” For instance, the orange flowers tumbling down the gardens steps aren’t just orange flowers for Mr. Fox; they’re hellenium, the hair of Helen of Troy, who started the Trojan war, and, as a classical scholar, he has to have them there in honour of Homer. Talk about living with poetry.

So you now you see the range of wonderful associations and discoveries opened up by a complete embracing of the art of bathroom lit. Who would’ve thought I could skip from Margaret Atwood’s media diet to great book on gardening? That’s why I highly encourage you to live dangerously and try reading something new and exciting next time you lock yourself in the bathroom. A word of warning, however: you may find yourself staying in it for longer than you wanted to.

Reading with Intent

Reading with purpose? Don't just pick up any old book; you've got to choose it carefully.

While it is true that I always know what book I’m going to read next (as if having some kind of hole between books could open up a chasm of non-reading out of which I could never emerge), my choice of books has generally been whimsical. Except for school books, I read what I like, what I think will interest me, what I expect will be good for me, and what trusted friends or reviews recommend. However, I always admire readers who read book with intent, according to some kind of plan, which they set up for themselves and follow carefully, sometimes in the hope that some kind of literary (or other) illumination will ensue. These long-term literary cures seem to be all the rave these days, and countless blogs detail the lives of readers as they lumber through lists of must-read books or calculate the average number of pages per hour (reminding me of A. J. “The Know-It-All” Jacobs, who spent a year reading all 32 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica) in order to… well what exactly? Why would you read according to a plan? In order to learn something about yourself by implementing restrictions on what books you read? In an effort to gain sovereignty over your reading habits by setting your own limits? So that you are forced to read stuff you know you should but never get around to? Let’s take a look at a few people who read or have read by design, and see what they’ve gotten out of the experience.

The first type of intentional reading I encountered was Susan Hill’s memoir Howard’s End is on the Landing, in which the author recounts her year of reading “from home” (you can read the introduction here). Hill explains that she has a country home full of books, many of which she hasn’t read, while she has always wanted to reread many others. The solution: Hill locked herself up in her dusty old home for a year and read, refusing to buy new books and minimizing her use of the internet during that time, as a way to get to know her library again, “to repossess [her] books, to explore what [she] had accumulated over a lifetime of reading, and to map [her] house of many volumes”. The idea is interesting, but the memoir she wrote as a result — although I was a very excited about it at first — turned out to be rather uninteresting. Indeed, Hill’s perusing of her bookshelves is a way to recall her past, and to revel in some poorly dissimulated name dropping. The book could by a bibliophile’s dream, a charming account of the pleasures of reading and rereading; it turns out to be the wild fancy of a frustrated old English lady with something to prove. I’m being harsh, but then, I’ve had something against Susan Hill every since her unnecessary rant from last year about being asked to display a short story she wrote anonymously beside stories by other writers, some of them — God forbid! — amateurs.

At least the cover is nice.

On a more human (and certainly less self-indulgent) note, last week saw the long-awaited publication of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading, by Nina Sankovitch. As a way to recover from her sister’s death, Sankovitch, after three hectic years, decided to stop and sit and read — one book a day for a year. She is living proof that bibliotherapy works, that there is something fundamentally human and helpful in literature. For Sankovitch, turning to reading allowed her to slow down, to pace her life and find a new center, and, in her own words, “not a way to rid myself of sorrow but a way to absorb it.” The phenomenon of intentional reading is also greatly aided by the internet, whose new platforms urges people to constantly update, to always keep everyone out there posted. Nina Sankovitch therefore decided to blog about her year of reading, writing a review for all 365 of them on her website Read All Day. She’s also very active on Twitter and now writes book reviews for The Huffington Post. I haven’t read Tolstoy and the Purple Chair yet, but it sounds very promising, and since I’m incapable of not getting books about books I will no doubt be reading it soon.

Sankovitch's highly praised grief memoir cum reading diary.

The final reader I wanted to talk about is a recent discovery of mine; I found out about her blog by seeing a picture of her library on a “my bookshelves” picture group on Flickr. This picture immediately caught my attention (and the attention of many other bookshelf-savvy commenters) as, with its rows and rows of glistening, faded penguin covers (orange, blue, green, and the unifying beige stripes), this woman’s bookcase is simply stunning. Her blog is called A Penguin a week, her goal is to collect all 3,000 penguin titles published before 1970 (they’re numbered from 1-3,000, which facilitates the collecting part) and to read and review one of the books each week (she now owns about 1,500 of them). The rationale behind the project is that the only interest nowadays in these old penguin titles is purely aesthetic, for the book design and the history of publishing paperbacks, and while many of these titles are certainly good books, they remain unread because many of them aren’t in print anymore. The blog seeks to give these books a new life and rediscover a number of long-lost, really good books — saving them from the abyss of time. It’s a highly intriguing, laudable project.

Ample proof that books do, indeed, furnish a room (or two).

At the heart of all these purposeful readings is an urge to discover, or rediscover, something that was lost — either in the reader or in what is being read. Perhaps the intentional reader feels that his or her relationship with books has become too whimsical and fleeting. You read a book, and then you put the book down and read another one. For all the time and energy you spent reading and thinking about the first book, once you’ve turned the last page, you move on quickly to something else. What remains? In truth, very little. Perhaps giving a purpose to one’s readings is a way to fit all the books one reads within something more vast, and more lasting. It’s a way to implement order upon the act of reading, a way to keep track and leave traces. As for the blogs and memoirs that emerge from these (apparently life changing) reading experiences, they are definitely a way to break the boundary of solitude which usually rules upon the act of reading; it’s a way of reaching out to the community of readers. That, maybe, is the wider purpose of these journeys: to communicate and instigate more widely an interest in books.