What Happened in July 2014

 

Reviews:

The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund De Waal

Edmund De Waal is a famous twenty-first century potter (did you know that there was one?) who I first read about in this NYT article.  Although the article was intended to be about De Waal's new exhibit, the reporter talked enough about De Waal's family memoir, The Hare With Amber Eyes that I had to add it to my TBR list. 

What is amazing about Hare is that while it could have been the epitome of vanity publishing, instead it is a really great book, without bragging or pouting.  De Waal's family first made its fortune in Odessa through grain trading.  His great-great grandfather pushed the family into Europe, where they established banks in Paris and Vienna.  De Waal's great uncle was Charles Ephrussi, whose name was familiar to me, but for a while I didn't know why. Charles was the third son, and was able to avoid the family business and do things that were more interesting, like collect art.  He lived in Paris in the time of the Impressionists, and his collection included works by Pissaro, Monet, Renior, Cassatt, and Degas, all in one room of his home.  When De Waal discussed his uncle's relationship with Renoir, I knew why I knew Charles.  Charles Ephrussi is the man in the top hat in Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party.  Susan Vreeland's Luncheon of the Boating Party is a book that I loved reading, and is on my list of books that I would like to re-read this year.  Unfortunately (fortunately?) I lent my copy to my friend, Kim, so I couldn't take a detour into fiction while reading Hare.

That's OK, because in Hare, the truth is better than the fiction could have been.   When Paris became obsessed with Japanese art in the 1800s, Charles jumped in, and amassed a collection of netsuke.  Netsuke are small, intricately carved objects, made sometimes from stone, ivory, or even wood.  Time passed, and the netsuke went out of style.  Charles sent his valuable collection to a nephew, De Waal's grandfather, as a wedding gift.  De Waal's grandfather went on to live in Vienna, where he ran the family owned bank.  According to De Waal, his grandfather's pre-World War II wealth, in today's dollars, was $400 million.  Unfortunately for the De Waal family, they were Jewish, and living in a Nazi state.  By the end of the war, most of the wealth was gone, but amazingly, the netsuke survived and passed through another generation, before landing in De Waal's capable hands.

While billed as the story of the netsuke, this is really a story of a family living in an incredible time.  It somehow doesn't read as a memoir, so much as a telling of historical events in a new and interesting light.  Definitely worth the read. 

Challenges: I love library books

Tags:  Memoir, Non-Fiction, WWII Civilian Stories, Paris

McSweeney's 44

McSweeney's is a quarterly something that generally includes short stories and articles, and was created by Dave Eggers.  I say that it is a quarterly "something" rather than magazine or journal or book, because it is really none of these.  Sometimes it comes with the stories loose in a box, sometimes it looks more like a magazine.  Usually, it looks a lot like novel, which is the case with 44.  The main contributors to 44 were Joe Meno, Rebecca Curtis, Tom Barbash, Jim Shepard, Stuart Dybek, and Wells Tower.  There was also a 82 page tribute to Lawrence (Ren) Weschler, to which many others contributed.

One of my favorite parts of 44 were the letters to the editor, which were all witty and quirky, and generally what one would expect from McSweeney's readers who are hoping to get published themselves. 

Jim Shepard wrote a particularly un-McSweeny-ish story that I liked called "The Ocean of Air", about the Montgolfier brothers who were the first to invent a hot air balloon safe for human travel.  I also liked Stuart Dybek's piece, "Happy Ending" which tells the story of a man, Gil, attending a party thrown by a mogul who claimed to be unhappy.  Gil shows the mogul how happy he is by inventing a scenario which would make his life much worse.  Another interesting story was "Birthday Girl" by Tom Barbash, where a driver who is possibly (almost surely) drunk hits a young girl, and then tries to make things right.

The story by Wells Tower, "The Dance Contest" is well written and interesting, but also strange.  It is about a man named Osmund Tower, the fictional father to Wells, who finds himself imprisoned in the luxury wing of the Theb Moob Mens' Prison in Thailand, due primarily to his naivete.  While he may be in the best possible part of the prison, it is a prison none the less.  The Captain in charge comes up with the idea of rewarding the prisoners with prizes, based on their performance in a dance contest, as judged by Internet viewers.  Cruel and unusual?  You decide.  What I didn't get about this piece is why Tower wanted to make it seem like his character was his father.  Why not just name him Tom Sutherland or Osmund Miller?

Although I, personally, didn't need such a long, funereal, tribute to Ren Weschler, he seems to be a person I should know more about.   I would recommend starting with the Errol Morris conversation with Weschler, and then skipping ahead to Jonathan Lethem's tribute.   If they leave you wanting more, 44 is well stocked.  As always, I finished McSweeney's feeling a little smarter (and maybe a little more smug) than when I started.

Challenges:  Rewind

Tags:  Keeping it Short, Historical Fiction, Non Fiction

MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood

MaddAddam is the third book in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy.  The first book, Oryx and Crake, focused on Jimmy, a guy in his early 20s who survived some sort of a plague, and wonders if he is the only human who made it.  He lives among people he calls "Crakers" because they were developed in a lab by his friend, Crake.  Much of that book was told through flashbacks about Crake and their shared love, Oryx.  The second book, The Year of the Flood, was told mostly by Toby and Ren.  They are members of a group, The God's Gardeners, who try to live in a more simple way among the corporations and criminals of the modern world.  MaddAddam again focuses on Toby, but this time the story is more about two other God's Gardeners, Zeb and Adam. 

MaddAddam takes place after the waterless flood of the plague, and begins right where The Year of the Flood ended.  Toby, Ren, Amanda and Jimmy are all in a confrontation with dangerous painballers, who are criminals who have fought to the death and survived.  Toby is happy to be reunited with her old crush, Zeb, and much of the book is Zeb telling about his life as a boy with his brother, Adam.  Adam and Zeb had to flee from their abusive but powerful father, the Rev.  Zeb found adventure slaying bears and impersonating big foot, while Adam went on to recruit like-minded people to become MaddAddams and God's Gardeners.

While MaddAddam brought resolution to the series, I found it a little lacking compared to the earlier two books.  Ren and Jimmy were marginalized and treated like children here, when they had much stronger roles in the earlier books.  At the end of the trilogy, I still don't know what the point of the MaddAddams was.  Was it just to be a  group of people gathering information about the bad things the corporations were doing?  The MaddAddamers don't seem to do anything, although they investigate a lot, and know a lot.  Also I'm totally lost about Adam.  Was he really into his Adam 1 God's Gardeners persona, or did he establish the God's Gardeners just as a front to hide corporate escapees and further the MaddAddam cause?  Much of the plot was also redundant, with Zeb telling his story to Toby, and then Toby telling the same story to the Crakers.

My favorite part of MaddAddam was the Crakers.  When Crake invented them, he intended them to be post-religion, and had no idea that they would come to worship him and Oryx as deities.  He also didn't anticipate Toby teaching one of them, Blackbeard, to read, or the creation of a Craker bible, the Book of Toby.  Atwell was also incredibly timely in describing how the religion of corporations can lead to the destruction of mankind.  In light of the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision, the world as she predicts it is all the more likely.  In MaddAddam, Adam and Zeb's dad was the leader of the Church of PetrOleum.  As he preaches, the "Petr" is from the apostle, Peter, and the "oleum" is because of all the references to oil in the Bible.  Clearly, God created oil for our use, and any government attempt to regulate the drilling or sale of oil is a violation of the religious beliefs of the Church.  Maybe, just maybe, we could learn from the mistakes that Atwood's characters make in the name of a self serving religious belief.

MaddAddam was a NYT Notable Book for 2013.

Challenges:  I Love Library Books and AudioBook

Tags:  NYT Notables, Sci-Fi-Ish, Questioning Religions

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

During the early days of  the siege of Sarajevo, in 1992, a cellist with the Sarajevo Opera named Vedran Smailovic, played his cello in ruined buildings and at funerals which were frequently targeted by snipers.  In The Cellist of Sarajevo, Steven Galloway takes Smailovic's story, and sets it to fiction.  In Galloway's Sarajevo, a young woman who calls herself Arrow is working as a sniper defending the city.  A man with a young family, Kenan, walks from one side of the city to the other in order to fill water bottles for himself and his neighbor.  An older man, Dragan, tries to get to the bakery where he works and where he knows bread is waiting for him.  Each of these characters faces the possibility at every intersection that he or she may be shot by a sniper or hit by a shell.  All of  them are eventually drawn to the cellist.

Sarajevo fell from being the host of the Olympics in 1984, to being a place where a person could expect to get shot while walking down the street just eight years later.  Galloway's characters face their new reality while not quite believing that it could be true.  Each of them refuses to be that person, living in that city.  They believe that if they can hold on to their integrity and standards, Sarajevo has hope of being restored.  Unfortunately the siege and the war waged on for years after this story ends, and after Smailovic left the city.

The Cellist of Sarajevo is the story of life in a war zone, where no one is coming to help.  It tries to be a story of hope, but the reader is left with the feeling that if Arrow, Kenan and Dragan aren't killed on one day, they may be the next.

There was some controversy about Galloway's use of Smailovic's actions in this book.  Galloway defends his story as being fictional but inspired by Smailovic's public acts.  Smailovic apparently was not told about the book before it was published and felt exploited by it.  However the story came to be told, it is worth knowing.  

Challenges:  Rewind, I Love Library Books, Audiobook

Book Group Reports

The Neighborhood Book Group

The Neighborhood Book Group met in June to discuss This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper.  I was a lame book-grouper, and had to leave after only half an hour to go play bunco instead.  Life in suburbia!  Luckily, this book group is all business, so I actually got to do some book discussing before I left.  With the movie coming out this fall, we talked a lot about the characters and the stars who will play them.  Although I love Tina Fey, I just can't see her as Judd's sister, Wendy.  Like 90% of the characters in this book (Am I underestimating?  Is it 100%?), Wendy is having an affair, and her life is just basically  sad.  Maybe Tina will make her situation seem less pathetic.  We also talked about who was the most dysfunctional.  This discussion could last hours.  Most of the group sided with the mom, Hillary, or the younger brother, Phillip.  And, this is where I left them, so I'm not sure where the conversation went from there. 

Next month they (we?) will discuss The Vacationers by Emma Straub.  I'm so bogged down in The Typical Book Group's summer BFB, that I don't think I'll have time to get to this one.

 The Typical Book Group

The Typical Book Group never meets in July, but in June we pick a Big Fat Book (BFB) to read all summer long.  This year we picked . . . And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer.  Talk about a BFB.  My copy is 1184 pages, and it's actually a little uncomfortable to hold. After two weeks of reading, I am only 200 pages in.  I'll have to pick up my pace if I'm ever going to make it through this!

Tags:  Book Group Reports, Big Fat Books

In Other News:

Local Libraries

Are these cute neighborhood libraries popping up near you? 

My friend, Debby's father-in-law installed one in his front yard.  There's another one in the park at the end of my street.  They are the cutest things.  The idea is, you can pick a book to take, and leave a book for someone else to read.  No sign out slips, no late fees.  It's the honor system at its best.  Debby's F-I-L lives in a bit of a hoity-toity neighborhood, but in an area where lots of people walk, so I think his library will get lots of action.  Doing my best to convert young future Republicans to a more reasonable party, I deposited a copy of The Believer, which is a book review magazine by the McSweeney's people, as well as a cookbook, and my copy of Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks.  In exchange, I took a copy of Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, which has been on my TBR list since it became a NYT Notable.  Score!

Winner, Winner, Goldfinch Dinner

Guess what?  I won a copy of The Goldfinch audiobook by Donna Tartt.  Remember way back when when I was giving away a copy?  No, I didn't enter and win my own contest.  Because The Goldfinch won two Audies, there were two copies to give away, and I entered the giveaway on Wholly Books.  And I won!  I can't wait to get it and start listening!

Loss of a Legend

On July 3, we lost Louis Zamperini.  The real story here is not that a 97 year old man died, because really, what more could we expect?  What is remarkable is that Zamperini was still alive.  Zamperini was a former Olympic athlete who was shot down over the Pacific during World War II, and then taken as a prisoner of war by the Japanese.  His story is told in Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, which Angelina Jolie has turned into a soon to be released movie.  Here is a link to the NYT Obituary.

Man Bookered

On July 23, the Man Booker Prize Longlist was announced.  This was the first year that authors from everywhere around the world were eligible, rather than just authors from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth.  So, with Americans now eligible, 5 made the list.  The only author who made it this year who I have read is Joshua Ferris, and the reviews of his recent book, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour have been pretty mixed.  Some might have expected The Goldfinch, which already won the Pulitzer, to edge out a few of the lesser known picks.  However, it was no surprise that Lost for Words by Edward St. Aubyn didn't make the cut.  Lost for Words is a thinly veiled satire of the Man Booker Prize, and it would have been a shock if the Man Booker judges were thick skinned enough to select it.  The Shortlist will be announced on September 9.  My money is on David Mitchell's new book, The Bone Clocks, even though it hasn't been released or reviewed on this side of the pond yet.

Tags:  Man Booker Listed

August Preview:

In August, I hope to review the following books:

Audios

The Circle by Dave Eggers

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt - I'll only get started on this one - it's 32 hours!

Traditional or EBooks

. . . And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer

Safe Haven by Nicholas Sparks (IF I make it through Ladies)

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson  (OK - this will be a stretch!)

Keep the Secret

Tatiana de Rosnay knows a thing or two about secrets.  In her first book, Sarah's Key, Sarah locks her brother in a closet just when French police appear to take the family away, eventually leading them to a concentration camp.  Sarah has to make a quick choice.  Should she tell the police about her brother, or keep him safely locked away?  In the closet, he has no water, no food and no light, but also no Nazis.  I'm not giving anything away by telling you that Sarah decides to keep the secret, and hope that the family will quickly return to the apartment or that a neighbor will find her brother and save him.  Now that's a secret.

In her next novel, A Secret Kept, I am sure that there must be a secret, because the title tells me that, but after a third of the book, no one has mentioned it.  My hunch is that the main characters' mother, who supposedly died when they were children, is really still alive.  But the thing is, there is nothing about these characters that makes me care.  I'm supposed to believe that the staff in a resort town recognizes these people when they revisit after 30+ years?  Even though they were children when they were last there and are now in their 40s? 

What sealed the deal for me though was this line, delivered by a woman who had just slept with the main male character about 10 minutes after meeting him:  "I handle dead people all day long.  With the same hands that were stroking your dick a few moments ago."  Yes, she's a mortician, but still, no, no, no.  I'm done.  I've got too many books waiting for me to read them to waste time on this one. 

On the bright side, since I listened to this book on CDs that I checked out from the library, it counts for the Rewind, the Audiobook, and the I Love Library Books challenges.

Next up on CD:  The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Still Reading:  This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

The Face of a Model

In The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan, the author attempts to add dimensions to one of Degas' models, Marie van Goethem.  In fact, Degas also attempted to give Marie three dimensions, in his most famous sculpture, Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen, which is pictured below.

In her book, Buchanan appears to have invented sisters and a mom for Marie, and given a full back story to the dancer's life.  What surprised me was when I got to the Afterward, and found that Marie's life actually is well known, and that Buchanan, for the most part, stuck to the facts.  At the time that Degas was creating his art, Paris was the center of the art world, and many of the artists of the time were well known.  His contemporaries included Van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Pissaro, Cezanne, Gauguin, Cassatt, and Renoir, most of whom were working in Paris at the same time.  The artists of that period must have been like our celebrities today, so much so that a fourteen year old model's name would be known now, more than 100 years later.  Buchanan is not even the first to write about Marie.  From what I have seen, she has at least three other books written about her and a BBC special.  This is not to mention the Marie doll and snow globe, which I would assume could be purchased at the gift shop of the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, or in any of the museums where the brass castings of the original wax sculpture are on display.

Nor is Buchanan the first to write about the subjects of famous works of art.  A similar book that I reviewed a few years ago is Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Harriett Scott Chessman.  The best known recent book about the subject of a painting is The Girl With the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier.  My favorite is Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland.  Luncheon tells the story of the making of the famous painting primarily from the point of view of the painter.  Buchanan takes an entirely different approach, and one more similar to Chevalier's, by focusing on the subject of the art instead of the artist.  The interesting thing about Painted Girls is that it attempts to explore Degas' motives, especially in regard to a theory about whether the shape of a person's face can predict their future, but that it does so without Degas' voice.

Marie's life is made for a novel.  As a parent who has paid the "pay to play" fees for the last 15 years, I was surprised that the ballerinas of Paris in the late 1800s started as poor children who were paid to attend the classes.  The pressures on the 14 year old Marie were astonishing.  That the ballet would pay her enough to survive, but expect her to find a sponsor to help her put food on her table was pure exploitation.  Even Degas' treatment of her would now land him on a sex offenders registry.  Buchanan takes some liberties in tying Marie's story together with that of another of Degas' subjects, but she does so in a way that seems possible.

I read this book for The Typical Book Group, and I will write more about it when we get together to discuss it in November.  We are sure to talk about Marie's relationship with her sister, Antoinette, about a choice Marie made, and a certain lie Antoinette told her.  I'll fill you in soon.

Next Up on CD:  Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.  I'm not so sure about this one . . . I'll give it a few discs to decide.

Still Reading:  The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

An American in Paris

So, you might remember that when the new Books A Million store opened in my neighborhood, I rushed right in and bought The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz.  This book had been on my radar for a while, because I seem to be drawn to books written by cooking bloggers, like Black Heels to Tractor Wheels by Ree Drummond, and My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss.  And this one is set in my favorite city, Paris.

I have to say, it wasn't quite what I expected.  David Lebovitz tells his tales about what it is like for an American to move to Paris.  Many of the stories are exactly what you would think - the shop keepers are surly, the stores have unpredictable hours - that kind of a thing.  But David Lebovitz is a cookbook author, who has written books about desserts, chocolate, and ice cream.  So when he promises a "sweet life in Paris", that's what I expected.  The thing is,  I think he told the truth and didn't sugar coat it, as much as he may have been inclined to do, and as much as his consumers may have hoped.

This book is full of recipes, which is one of the reasons that I bought it.  Generally, when a book has a lot of good recipes in it, it is sort of pointless for me to borrow it from the library, because I know that I'll buy it sooner or later anyway.  But there weren't a lot of corners that I turned down with the intention of trying them myself. 

Truth be told, I like his blog better.  Here is a link to it.  In his blog, when he discusses a new recipe, he tells the story of where he found the ingredients, or why he wanted to try it.  In his book, the recipes are sort of just things to put after the vignettes about his life.  For instance, there's the recipe for Chocolate Spice Bread, that immediately follows a discussion about whether it is better for a man who needs to be hairless "from belly to toe" for a surgery to shave or use a hair removal cream.  How could I eat that bread?

Given that I was unlikely to make many of the recipes, I was sort of regretting my decision to purchase this one.   Then we came to the end (as Joshua Ferris might say).  At the end of the book, Lebovitz, gives us two things that are pretty great.  The first is a resource list for where Americans can find French ingredients.  This is what was missing from My Berlin Kitchen, and I was so glad to find it here.  The second is the list of Lebovitz's favorite French addresses.  You should probably buy the book just for this.  He lists great restaurants, chocolate shops, hot chocolate stops, and department stores.  I trust him completely, and want to go to every place that he mentions.  If only I could go back to Paris now.

Next up:  Well, it's kind of a funny story. . . no, it's not all that funny actually.  I still haven't gotten Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt from my library, even though I am first on the list for both the audio and paper versions.  So, now I am listening to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet by David Mitchell, and tonight I'll start reading it on paper too.  That way, it doesn't matter if I get Wolves in audio or paper version.  I'll continue with Jacob DeZoet in one form, and start Wolves in the other.

The Anti-Julia

This month, The Typical Book Group is reading My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss.  Luisa describes herself as someone with a US passport and Italian citizenship, who lives in Berlin.  In fact, she was living in West Berlin while the wall was still standing, when her parents divorced.  Her father, an American, moved back to Boston with Luisa, while her mom stayed in Germany.  Luisa became a person divided, shuttling between the US, Germany, and her mother's family in Italy.  So, she did what any reasonable person would do after graduating from college, and moved to Paris.

Luisa first became known to the world as a cooking blogger.  She has a blog still, called "TheWednesdayChef", which you can get to by clicking on those words.  Knowing her history, I was expecting MBK to be a sort of Julie and Julia meets Eat Pray Love.  In Julie and Julia, a young woman living in New York, Julia Powell, tries to cook every dish in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in a tiny kitchen in 2002, and she blogs about her results.  In Eat Pray Love, a young travel writer, Elizabeth Gilbert, tries to recover from her divorce by travelling to Italy, India, and Indonesia.  The Typical Book Group has read both of these memoirs, and MBK seemed like it might be the perfect combination of the two, with a woman traveling the world, and giving us recipes.

In the early pages of MBK, I was really hooked.  I know a young woman who is living in Paris now, and blogging about it at La Jeune Fille Au Pair.  When I read the chapter called "Depression Stew", I couldn't decide if I should photocopy and mail that chapter to The Young Au Pair right away (so she would get real mail!) or if I should wait to finish the book and mail her the whole thing.  But before I sent it, I would, of course, photocopy the delicious recipes, like the Omelette Confiture and the Tomato Sauce with Carrots and Onions.  I was even excited to give the Sour Cherry Quarkauflauf a try, since Luisa told me where I could find Quark.  But then, Luisa turned into The Anti-Julia.

In the 1950s and 60s, when Julia Child was writing her masterpiece, she had a problem.  She was living in Paris, and writing a cookbook for busy American women.  She wanted to be sure that the recipes that she included would work in the US and that her readers would be able to find her ingredients.  She also wanted to try to make French cooking simple, even fool proof, so that American women could feel confident giving it a try.  Enter Avis DeVoto.  Avis lived in America, and Julia could ask her about the availability of ingredients, differences in appliances, and the utensils and equipment that she should expect an American woman to own. 

I first realized that Luisa was not following in Julia's footsteps when I read the recipe for Poppy Seed Whiligig Buns.  In the introduction, Luisa assures me that "they're actually quite simple to make", but then she tells me, twice, that I should eat these buns the morning that they are made.  Well of course, right?  But then I read the recipe.  It requires me to let the dough rise for an hour, mix in some more ingredients then freeze it for an hour, let it rise for another 45 minutes, and then bake it for 30 minutes.  So, by my calculations, if I am going to eat these buns the same day that I make them, I either have to get up at 4 am, or eat breakfast for dinner.

I should have realized that Luisa had something up her sleeve when she insisted that I use a "spotlessly clean" bowl for the Quarkauflauf.  Spotlessly clean.  Why would she think that my bowls aren't spotlessly clean?  Are my bowls spotlessly clean?  How does one get a bowl spotlessly clean anyway?  And then she insisted (in several recipes) that I use organic lemons.  Not organic milk, not organic eggs, not organic berries, but the lemons must be organic.  Huh.  Has she had bad experiences with genetically modified citrus?

Then we come to the Elderflower Syrup.  When a recipe begins by telling me that the greatest challenge may be finding the main ingredient, and suggests that I should try looking "in the wild" in the Pacific Northwest or mid-Atlantic region, I can be pretty sure that I will never try that recipe.  Julia Child was so concerned that American women wouldn't be able to find the proper ingredients that she changed some of her recipes.  Luisa, on the other hand, tells us to go look outside.  In another state.  Really?  Once I find the elderflowers (20-25 large sprays), I should combine them with some other ingredients in my 5 quart earthenware crock.  Could I borrow yours?

While there are other examples that I could give of recipes with obscure ingredients, there are also lots that I want to try.  I will definitely make the Tomato Bread Soup, using Jim Lahey's No-Knead Bread recipe, as Luisa recommends.  I also need to make the Meatballs in Tomato-Chipotle Sauce.  My husband is always anxious to go over to one of our neighbor's houses during football games, since she makes meatballs just for him.  Now I can compete!  Of course, my neighbor is in The Typical Book Group, so she read this one too, but maybe she'll get frustrated by the elderflowers, skip a few chapters, and miss it.  And finally, I can't wait to try the Apple Tart.  I've made The Pioneer Woman's version, which she calls a "flat apple pie", a bunch of times, but it's never turned out for me.  Hopefully Luisa has the trick.

As for the story, it is a good one, and I might have even read it without the recipes!  Luisa  lives an interesting life with her nontraditional family and her lost and found love life.  She also acts as an unofficial ambassador to Berlin, making it sound like we all should go, if only for the elderflowers.  I am adding a link to Luisa's blog to the column to the right, so we can check in and see what she is up to.  It looks good to me!

Next up:  Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Still Listening to:  Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

Life After 40

A few years back, when my friend, Kim, turned 40, I bought her a copy of Julie and Julia by Julie Powell.  In that book, a girl living in New York, Julie, decides that she will spend a year cooking every recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the cookbook which made Julia Child famous.  Julie blogs about her culinary adventure, and eventually her blog became a book.  I thought this was a great book for me to give to Kim, because we had just finished editing a cookbook for our kids' elementary school.  After Kim read it, she passed it on to me, and thus began my relationship with Julia Child.

After reading Julie and Juila, I wanted more Julia, and read My Life In France by Juila herself.  MLIF (no, not "MILF") is Julia's story of not knowing what to do with her time while her husband, Paul, was stationed in France for his job, and taking up French cooking.  Julia loved French cooking so much, that she moved on to teaching cooking lessons with two of her friends.  The three of them then began writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  One thing that I love about Julia is that she didn't take her first French cooking class until she was in her late 30s, and she was well into her 40s when Mastering the Art was published and she really knew what she wanted to do with her life.

The movie, "Julie and Julia" came out a couple of years ago, and I have to say that it is great.  In fact, it is the only movie that I can think of that is actually better than the book.  The movie is a combination of the books, Julie and Julia and My Life in France, and is focused much more on Julia Child than Powell's original book.

When I went to Paris last year, I looked up Julia Child's apartment, which she called "the Rue de Loo", but which is actually at 81 Rue de L'Universite.  Here is a picture of me outside.  I also went to the cooking store which she loved and raved about in MLIF, E. Dehillerin, on Rue Coquilliere.  I had figured that E. Dehillerin would have been overwhelmed with tourists since the movie had been released, but when I went there, that seemed not to have been the case.  At first the staff was a little standoffish, and I was surprised, after talking with a salesperson, that he wanted to know about Detroit.  He asked about the music from Detroit, and I assumed that he was referencing the Motown songs.  Actually, he wanted to talk about the Techno music fests, which are apparently better known in Europe than they are in Beverly Hills, just 5 miles north of The D.

This brings us to As Always, Julia:  The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto, as edited  by Joan Reardon.  MLIF tells the story of Julia's struggles with getting her cookbook published, and this is echoed in As Always.  As Always is not really a story at all, but a collection of letters exchanged between Julia and Avis.   Their relationship started when Avis' husband wrote an article about how inferior American knives were in the 1950s.  Julia read the article and wrote to its author, enclosing one of her favorite French knives.  Avis wrote Julia a thank you note, since her husband, Bernard, was too busy.  From there, Avis and Julia established a pen pal relationship that spanned the Atlantic.

Mastering the Art was intended by Julia to be a fool proof book allowing busy American wives to successfully cook French dishes which they probably thought were too difficult for them.  Julia painstakingly cooked and re-cooked every dish until she had the instructions just right.  The problem was that Julia was cooking in France, and writing a book for Americans.  Julia consulted with Avis regarding what ingredients may be hard to find, how cooking times may vary, and how certain instructions may be interpreted.  Without Avis, Mastering the Art would never have worked.  Without Avis' publishing connections, it probably would not have made it to print.

Frequently, while reading As Always, I drifted off to sleep.  Several times I told myself that if the book was so boring, I should quit reading it.  But it was not boring.  It was just so soothing to be reading letters between two strong women who established their relationship in paper and pen, that sometimes I did find myself startled awake with the book still in my hand.  As Always tells the stories of the election gossip of the 1950s, of the McCarthy hearings, and of the battles with Child's co-authors.  Details about recipes are worked out, including one of Child's most famous, scalloped potatoes.  But I did take the full three weeks of my library loan to read the book, which is unusually slow for me.

My mom gave me back MLIF, without finishing it.  To my dismay, she found it boring.  As Always, Julia, is not going to be the book for her either.  However, if you loved MLIF, and can't get enough Julia, then As Always is worth the read.

Next up:  Bitter is the New Black by Jen Lancaster

Almost Done Listening to:  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.  In fact, I have passed the part where the reader said "The End" and am now listening to the 12th and last disc which Eggers says one should only listen to if one does not have anything else available.  That is exactly my situation!  I tried to get Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami in book form at my library and was surprised to find a lead on it in CD form first.  My library doesn't own it in either form, so I had to order it.  I placed my order 4 days ago, but sometimes these things take a while, and I don't want to start something new while I wait.  I'm hoping Eggers makes this 12th disc last.

The Friends Book Report - 3

Tonight the Friends Book Group (or a portion thereof) met to discuss The Paris Wife by Paula McLain.  There were only 3 of us there!  I guess people weren't excited about reading this book.  Of the three of us, two thought the book was so-so, and the third really liked it. 

We all agreed that although the book was all about Hadley Hemingway, it was really a very shallow portrayal of her.  We would have liked to have known more about Hadley herself, and what made her so attractive to Ernest Hemingway, and her many friends in Paris.  Several topics, such as Ernest's depression, were mentioned in passing, but not really shown to the reader.  The many suicides in Hadley's family and Ernest's family were not mentioned until the end of the book. Knowing more about their shared history of family tragedy earlier in the story may have helped explain the Hemingways' relationship and its many complications.

Although it doesn't directly relate to her time in Paris, a little during-book-group-Googling told us that Hadley and Ernest's grandchildren are Mariel and Margaux Hemingway.  It seems like this might be something that Hadley would have bragged about, or at least hinted at.

All told, we found the story interesting, but wanted more.

Next up:  State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Still Reading:  Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

Still Listening to:  The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman.  I am really not liking this book, but don't really have time to get to the library to get another.  I'm on disc 3 now, and I'm having a hard time looking forward to another 10 discs.  Either it will pick up and I'll be back raving about it, or it will drive me crazy enough to give up on it, in which case I will be sure to tell you why.

The Wife Life

Back in 1999, when I was pregnant with my daughter, my husband's friend, Dave, and I were discussing baby names.  Although Dave was single at the time, and didn't have plans to have a child any time soon, he told me that if he ever had a daughter, he was going to name her Brett, after the character in Hemmingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises.  I hadn't read The Sun at the time, but I decided that if there was a character in it who was worth naming one's daughter for, I should.  After reading The Sun, I had no idea what Dave (or for that matter, Jake Barnes) saw in Brett. 

Earlier this year, Paula McLain's book The Paris Wife came out, and I knew that I wanted to read it.  I had heard about Hemmingway's wife, Hadley, over the years, and wanted to read about what had happened that led to her destroying one of Hemmingway's novels.  The Paris Wife dispels the myth of a hysterical wife tearing apart a great work of literature, and tries to shed light on Hadley's role in shaping Hemmingway's early works.

Unfortunately, The Paris Wife was not a page turner.  I guess that when a person is well known only for being someone's wife, there may not be a lot to tell.  Curtis Sittenfeld did a better job in telling a fictionalized version of Laura Bush's life in American Wife, and Nancy Horan took the lessor known figure of Mamah Cheney and made her story interesting in her book, Loving Frank.  To be fair, Sittenfeld's book is pure fiction, and she doesn't even name the characters George and Laura Bush, and Nancy Horan had a great and forgotten true story to work with, but I was hoping for more from McLain. 

What the reader does learn is that Hadley was Hemmingway's wife when he wrote The Sun Also Rises, and that he based the story on real events that happened to them, changing only the names, and telling it in his voice.  Hadley is not the character of Brett, and is somehow absent from the story, even though she was very much there when the events happened in Hemmingway's life which he attributes to Jake Barnes.  The woman who inspired the character of Brett, Lady Duff Twysden, seems to have been much like the character.

Many years later, Dave had a daughter, and named her Avery.  But his idea must have stuck with me with me subconsciously.  My daughter's name is Hadley.

Next up:  Exhaust The Limits:  The Life and Times of a Global Peace Builder by Charles Dambach

Still Listening to:  Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

We Interrupt This Blog

I know that this blog is supposed to be about reading, but I have to call your attention to the movie, "Midnight in Paris".  This is a Woody Allen film, which I wasn't all that excited about seeing.  As far as I could tell though, Woody Allen did not make an appearance. 

You may have noticed that for the last few posts, I have ended by saying "Still Reading:  The Paris Wife by Paula McLain"  without further comment.  I was really excited about reading The Paris Wife, because I had heard that it was about Ernest's first wife, Hadley.  I have been interested in Hadley since I first heard the rumors that she burnt a great Hemingway novel, so I really wanted to read a novel from her perspective. 

However, so far, and I admit that I am only about 100 pages into it, The Paris Wife has not  been all that exciting.  But, after seeing "Midnight in Paris", I am rejuvenated, and want to dive back into it.  "Midnight in Paris" is a movie about a man from 2010 who is vacationing in Paris with his fiance and her parents.  He is a budding novelist who has a nostalgic longing to be in Paris in the 1920s, with Fitzgerald, Zelda, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein.  His finance does not understand this, and discord soon follows.  Our novelist explores the Paris of the 1920s, and finds that in the '20s, people were longing for a "golden era" even earlier. 

Seeing Hemingway, Stein, and the other characters who also star in The Paris Wife has me ready to read more!  So, here we go again:

Still Reading:  The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

Still Listening to:  The Lost City of Z by David Grann

Cutting Through the Pages

I finished Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese!  All told, this was a good book, but not one that I am likely to recommend to friends.  For me, I think that there were two problems:  first it should have been a 300 page book instead of 536 pages, and second, I heard about the end at The Typical Book Group meeting, so I wasn't surprised.

Know that I am not opposed to long books.  In fact, I love books that are long enough to sink into my thoughts so that I dream about them.  But this book really didn't have enough story to justify the 500+ pages.  My friend, Romy, sent me a message saying that her jaw dropped on page 509.  I later realized that she was reading the paperback, and that in the hardcover, my jaw should have dropped on page 415.  It did not.  It took a long time to get to know and like the characters, but eventually it did happen.  I also liked reading about Africa again, and was oddly pleased that the characters in Cutting felt the same way about Khartoum as Achak Deng felt about it in What is the What.  At the end though, Marion, the main character, does things that are entirely inconsistent with the person who we have read that he is. 

If I hadn't heard about the end of the book at my book group, I probably would have found it more powerful.  This has to have jaded my opinion to some extent, so forgive me for being too harsh on this book if you loved it.

Next up:  After Dark by Haruki Murakami.  I've had Norwegian Wood  by Murakami on my TBR list since last June when I was only reading books set in Paris to prepare for my trip.  What does Norwegian Wood have to do with Paris?  Funny you should ask.  One of the books that I read was The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barberry.  Elegance is the story of a woman who is a concierge for an exclusive apartment building in Paris.  When an apartment opens up, a Japanese businessman, Kakuro Ozu, moves in and takes an interest in our concierge.  As I was reading, I couldn't help imagining that Kakuro Ozu was really Haruki Murakami.  So while my more MILF-y friends were fantacizing about Edward from Twilight, I was dreaming about a Japanese writer who is my father's age, and who likes running so much that he actually writes about it.  Huh.  Anyhow, Norwegian Wood was checked out of my library, so I will be satisifying my Murakami craving with After Dark. 

Still listening to:  Three Junes by Julia Glass

O.K. By Me in America

While I was listening to Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey, I read a review of the book that went something like this:  "Parrot and Olivier in America is the story of an aristocrat and a servant who travel to America together and become friends."  To summarize Parrot  in that way is to compare it to Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel.  It is true that Olivier is a French aristocrat, Parrot is his British born servant, and they do, in fact, travel to America together, but the story is so much more and so much better than that.

The tale starts with Parrot in England, and Olivier in France, as children.  Both are invested in the outcome of the French Revolution. Olivier cares most obviously because of his noble lineage, and his desire to continue his way of life.  Parrot could not care less about the Bourbons, but does care about how he and his father will eat.  They find work with a printer in England, who has a hand in the Revolution himself.  Fast forward 20 years, to Olivier still a Royalist but questioning the cause, and Parrot working for his master, Monsieur Tilbot.  Tilbot orders Parrot to escort Olivier to America, where Olivier's mother thinks that he will be safer. 

Although neither of them knew it, even while they were in Paris both Parrot and Olivier were living in the past.  Olivier felt that as an aristocrat, he was entitled to certain privileges, and had certain duties which others had forgotten.  Although the Revolution should have altered Parrot's opportunities, he chose to live as a servant.  It is only when they get to America that they are forced to live the lives that the French Revolution was supposed to have brought to them in France.  Both are shocked at the informality and the opportunities for the common person, but both cling to their roles as master and servant fervently.  Grudgingly, each recognizes that the other has become his friend, and that America does have some good qualities.

While listening to this book, I felt a dorky sense of patriotism.  Don't get me wrong, patriotism isn't always dorky, but I was feeling a strange pride in the surprises that greeted Parrot and Olivier.  Carey made it easy to see that the object of the French Revolution was obtained in America years before it was realized in France.  Additionally, the characters were the first to admit that things that were just not possible in Europe were every day occurrences in America. 

A few months ago, I questioned whether Sarah Hall should have bragged on the cover of The Electric Michelangelo that it was "Short Listed for the Man Booker Prize." Like The Electric Michelangelo, Parrot was also short listed. I realize now, that being short listed for that prize is in fact quite a big deal, as there actually is a published short list, and if you are interested, a long list as well.

Next up:  The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant

Still reading:  Sunnyside by Glen David Gold.  Around page 350 of this 650+ page book, I was questioning my commitment to it.  Specifically, while the kids were in bed, and my husband was playing wii, I had over an hour of uninterrupted time, and instead of reading Sunnyside, I chose to watch three back to back reruns of That 70s Show.  How great can a book be if I prefer watching reruns to reading it?  However, by the time I got to page 400 I was having a hard time putting the book down again.  Now I'm somewhere around page 525, and am really looking forward to reading more.

The Story Behind the Painting

In Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk, the main character, Kemal, travels the world in an effort to learn how to make the best possible museum to honor his love, Fuson.  One of the museums that he visits is the Musee Gustave Moreau, where he is inspired by the fact that Gustave Moreau turned his own home into a museum, just as Kemal planned to turn Fuson's home into her museum.  When Kemal visited that museum, I felt a twinge of regret, and a wish to go back to Paris.  The Musee Gustave Moreau was the one place that I wanted to visit in Paris that we just didn't get a chance to see.

I first read about Gustave Moreau in Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland.  Moreau was a painter, and a collector of art, during the time when the impressionists were making their mark in Paris. Reading Museum of Innocence, with Kemal mentioning the Musee Gustave Moreau, put me in the mood to read more books about the stories behind impressionist paintings.  When I stumbled upon Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Harriet Scott Chessman at a used book sale, I knew that it would not sit in my nightstand unread for long.

Lydia Cassatt reminded me less of Luncheon of the Boating Party, however, than it did Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier.  It has been a few years since I read GWTPE, but as I remember it, the story there was told by the model, instead of the artist.  The story was also told by the model in Lydia Cassatt.  I think that I liked Luncheon of the Boating Party better, because it was told from varying perspectives, focusing on Renoir's struggles with the painting, but also telling the stories of the models. 

I also prefer Renoir's painting to those of Cassatt and Vermeer, although I didn't get to see it in Paris, since it is kept in Washington D.C.  The painting, Luncheon of the Boating Party (pictured at left)  is itself more active than the paintings by Mary Cassatt which were the subject of Lydia Cassatt (one is included at the top of this post), and the painting, Girl with the Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer.  There may just be more to tell about an active painting than a lone model. 

I enjoy this mini-genre of stories behind the paintings, and think that I will continue to seek them out.  Actually, Alice I Have Been, by Melanie Benjamin, is basically of the same genre, with the only difference being that the art on which that story is based is a photo instead of a painting.  I have Girl in Hyacinth Blue  by Susan Vreeland on my TBR list, which will give me the chance to see if I like her handling of the subject of Vermeer better than Chevalier's.

Next Up:  The Hidden by Tobias Hill

Still Listening to:  The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Sarah's Key

When I first met my sister's (now ex) husband, we were talking about his childhood growing up in the Netherlands.  After an embarrassingly long amount of time, it occurred to me that his parents had lived just outside of Amsterdam at the time that Anne Frank was living there.  I said something to him about how crazy it was that his parents had lived there during the Holocaust.  He said that instead of "the Holocaust", they refer to it as "World War II".  At first, I was a little freaked out that my sister had married a Holocaust denier, but that was not the case.  As he kept talking, I learned that while the Holocaust itself did not directly affect his family, World War II did.  His mom stayed alive by eating tulip bulbs.  His dad was forced to work in Germany, and survived the bombing of Dresden.  Ever since that conversation, I have been drawn like a moth to flame to any book about the civilians of World War II. 

The first half of Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay had me entranced.  I had thought about the story of an old apartment in Paris, and was thrilled to find it.  This also fit right in as a book that I would love from World War II.  Amazon even recommended it to me.  But somewhere around page 150,  Sarah's Key went from being a book that I loved and planned to tell all of my friends to read, to a book that is good, and that I will keep, but that I will probably only recommend to certain friends who are also interested in books from that era, or who are interested in books set in Paris. 

From the beginning, Sarah's Key is the story of the lives of people who lived in a certain apartment in Paris, including the family that lived there prior to July of 1942, the family who moved in in July of 1942, and the family who planned to move in in 2002.  In July of 1942, an event took place, which the Parisian author seems to believe has been largely forgotten, even by the people who live in Paris.  I had never heard about it, but of course, our American education regarding World War II consists of Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, and Normandy.  This forgotten event was a rounding up of Jewish men, women and children by the French police.  Adults without children were generally sent directly  to Auschwitz.  The Nazis did not ask the French police to round up children, however the police did not know what to do if they were supposed to round up adults, and some of those adults happened to have children.  Thinking it would be best, they kept the kids with the adults.  At this point, the Nazis were trying to keep up the appearance that the Jewish adults were going to work camps and not to certain death.  They thought that sending children to work camps would raise questions, so they did not want children.  The French police found themselves in a bind, with hundreds of Jewish families, and no where to send them, so they put them all in a sports arena called the Velodrome d'Hiver.  There were no provisions for the families at the Velodrome, and the families suffered there without food, water, or bathroom facilities until the families were eventually sent to a camp in France, and from there to concentration camps.  This event is referred to as the Vel' d'Hiv', pronounced "the veldeef".

The book starts out with alternating chapters, the first about a ten year old girl in 1942, and the next about and told by a forty-something woman named Julia in 2002. The Vel' d'Hiv' changes both of their lives.  The alternating story pattern continues for several chapters, but about half way through, the chapters about the girl end, and the story is told only by Julia.  We do still learn more about the girl, but we stop learning as much.  While this is obviously deliberate, and I think that I can guess at the reason that the author did this, (sorry - I don't want to give too much away here and I will tell you that it's not why you probably think- read the book - it is worth the read)  I wish that girl's story had continued, even if it was told through journal entries, notes on scrap paper, letters, or friends.  I also wish that I had read this book before I went to Paris so that I could have checked out some of the places that this book features.

Next up:  Painting Below Zero by James Rosenquist.

The Previous Owners

In June, my husband, Bob, and I visited friends who live just outside of Paris in Courbevoie, France.  Courbevoie is so close to Paris that Napoleon's funeral procession actually started there, and ended at the Hotel des Invalides, where his tomb remains.  Our friends had recently purchased a new apartment, and it was fantastic, with high ceilings, huge, screen less windows, fireplaces, and crown molding everywhere.  Bob caught his first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower from their sons' bedroom windows.  The apartment is in a very old building, with a tiny elevator and creaky hallway stairs with a worn runner down the center.  It felt like home instantly, and I wanted to move in.

I was talking with the wife of the couple, Sev, about the apartment and how cool it was that it was so old.  I wondered aloud about who had lived there before, and who lived there during the German occupation of Paris in World War II.  Being so elegant, and on the top floor of their building, it seemed likely to me that important people had lived there in the past.  I was secretly thinking that maybe this was where Irene Nemirovsky had lived while she was hoping to survive and writing Suite Francaise, but of course, I knew that was very unlikely.  Sev had no idea who had lived there before, but we talked about where her grandparents lived during the war and how they survived. 

Tatiana de Rosnay must have visited old apartments in Paris, and wondered the same things, because 110 pages in, Sarah's Key is the story of an apartment in Paris, and the people who lived there before the war began, during the war, and in modern times.  This story has captured me.  I have to force myself to put the book down so that the story will last longer.

Parent Rant

OK, so here we are, 9 months later, and I am absolutely not a runner. I am NOT training for the Chicago Marathon. It took me a month to recover from the Detroit 10 K Turkey Trot, and that's enough of that. My daughter wants me to run the 5 K Turkey Trot with her this year, primarily so that she is allowed to wear the race shirt during Thanksgiving dinner, and I probably will.

As for reading, I'm still going strong. I have spent the past two months reading books based in France, as I just got back from a trip to Paris and London. Of the books that I read, I most strongly recommend Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland. Currently, I am reading Waiter Rant by Steve Dublanica. It is ok, but not nearly as good as Service Included by Phoebe Damrosch.

Speaking of ranting, however, I have one that I have to get out of my system. Why do teachers lie? It drives me crazy. As a parent we have to depend on them to give us advice about what is best for our kids. Of course, we also rely upon doctors and other professionals, but the ones who see our child every day and know him or her best are the teachers, so I tend to give their advice a lot of respect. This year we had a great teacher for our daughter who is learning disabled. We had an opportunity to send her to a school for learning disabled kids, for free, and we really struggled with the decision. Her current teacher asked us not to switch schools, and to "give him one more year" with her. We trusted him, and so we agreed. Then he decided that the best thing for all of the learning disabled kids in the 5th grade, was to have them in one class, together, with him "co-teaching". Although that sounds like seclusion to me, which I am opposed to with my super popular and secure child, I agreed to the placement because he recommended it so strongly, and he would be the co-teacher. Yesterday, July 7, when all of the buildings in my district are closed for the summer, he told me that he had decided to take a job at a different building. This was not an involuntary budget driven transfer, but apparently he had interviewed for another job and gotten it. Now I feel like the worst parent ever for making decisions that affect my child's future based on the recommendations of someone who clearly sees her as just another cog in his machine. UGH! I feel like sending him a seething email, but haven't got it composed properly in my head just yet. I would also like to send the principal a similar email for allowing this to happen, but really, he probably could not have stopped it.

So maybe Waiter Rant is an appropriate book for me right now after all. If anyone can teach me to properly rant and to compose the perfect guilt inducing hate filled email it will probably be Steve Dublanica.

Next Up, Eating Animals, by one of my favorite authors, Jonathan Safran Foer.