Je ne regrette rien

I am rather embarrassed to admit this, but I just read a book about a women who spends a year in Paris, and discovers a sense of belonging and joie de vivre through food. I know, I know, Cliche City. But it didn't feel like a cliche when I as reading it, it felt like a great book with some honest writing, local colour, and interesting observations on people, place and relationships. And a fair bit about cheese which I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy.

So, what was the book? Mastering The Art of French Eating by Ann Mah. In true bookie-foodie style, I am going to roast test a few of the recipes. The one that appealed the most was something I have never heard of called aligot which looks to be essentially mashed potato with a lot of cheese folded through it (see below). I am also quite tempted to hunt down a kitschy vintage fondue set in a bid to eat cheese in yet another fashion.

The verdict? Five cheese wheels out of five.

I Eat Everyday

I love the promise of bounty that a cookbook provides. Sometimes just flicking through the pages is enough, although ultimately it's all about eating as much deliciousness as you can. I get very excited whenever a new cookbook joins it's fellows on my jolly yellow shelf, but I don't tend to blog about them all that often. I suppose because I am too busy cooking and then eating.

Today, however, I am inspired to write! A couple of months ago my lovely friend Ashleigh gave me a copy of Karen Martini's Everyday. There is a lot to love about this book. I was sold on the roasted winter vegetables recipe very early on, and have made it on a number of occasions, usually tweaking it a bit depending on what ingredients are to hand and it has been completely scrumptious each time. Last weekend the book got a serious workout, providing us with food for several meals. I made a fresh tomato and lime chutney, and dahl. The dahl quantity was so huge it didn't all fit in the pot I was using, so I omitted the can of kidney beans. This meant the dish was rather watery so I made a soup from the liquidy leftovers.

A few weeks ago I made the completely sensational tasting Coriander and Black Pepper Roast Chicken. It was before Christmas but I can still remember what a beautiful, tasty meal it made; incredibly tender chicken with wonderfully balanced flavours. This means I have broken that rule that says people only cook an average of three recipes from each cookbook. In theory, I have just beaten averageness, and need never cook from the book again. In reality, I will OF COURSE be going back for more. A number of the roasted meats and stews in particular look sensational, so coming in to winter I will be calling on Karen to provide us with some dinner delicacies. I took some food porn shots along the way but none of the pictures looked nearly as good as the food tasted, so my suggestion is just grab a copy of the book and cook it for yourself.

Cheers, Darlin'

Despite the massive amount of shelf space given over to self help and fad diets in bookshops, it's not very often that reading a book can change your life.  So it is with a great deal of enthusiasm that I write this post, because I have a very strong feeling that High Sobriety will turn out to be one such book. It actually made me look at my life and patterns of behaviour, and think about how and why I might change them for the better. To be more precise, it did more than make me think about change, it gave me the tools and the courage to enact change, and that is something that doesn't happen very often.

So what's it all about? Interspersed with vats of facts and figures about alcohol consumption, High Sobriety is the story of Jill Stark's year without drinking. Some of the information is confronting, and some is horrifying.  If you are perfectly happy in the knowledge that you drink a bit too much and are utterly disinterested in changing that then I strongly recommend you DO NOT READ THIS BOOK.

As well as the health issues which - worryingly - are more real on a  far lower level of alcohol consumption than I had previously imagined, the book looks at how and why our society normalises excessive drinking. It made me really think about how often I unthinkingly drink because it is the default position. Many of Stark's most difficult moments during the year are when people pressure her to drink because they are uncomfortable with her sober state.

Despite being rather horrified and freaked out at times while reading the book, I generally really enjoyed it. It is such a pleasure to read something well written AND interesting, and boy was it well written. I found myself swept along for the journey, wanting to know what happened next, happy to read for long stretched of time. It was a beautifully crafted book about a fascinating taboo and I cannot recommend it highly enough except to say I give it five lemon, lime and bitters out of five.

Triple Bill

A little over a year ago, I joined The Classics Club reading challenge. At the current rate, the only way I’ll even get close to finishing all 52 books on my list within the allotted five years is if I am sent to  live in exile somewhere with no access to people, TV or new books.  The challenge is Not Happening. The challenge and I are like two strangers set up on a blind date where one of us is waiting at the wrong venue. It’s not that I’m not reading, I’m just not reading anything from the list. I have a pile of three or four newly acquired books on my desk at work. The reason for this is that they do not fit on the shelf with the other 20.  There is a slim chance that I will leave the book industry and go to work on an oil rig, in which case I’ll pack a suitcase full of classics and some spare undies, and be able to finish the challenge. In the meantime, here’s a little run through of what I have been reading.

The Tea Chest

This is a debut novel from Queenslander Josephine Moon and I loved it. If books were food this would be a fairy cake - sweet but not cloying, nostalgic, a little whimsical and something you want to simultaneously gobble up and save for later. It was a book about tea so how could I not love it when my two favourite things in the world are books and tea?!

The Goldfinch

Mag-fucking-nificent. (Brona, please direct your readers to this page if they want an opposing opinion from your own!!). There were moments where I struggled (like Bron) to keep going but it was SO WORTH IT. It was juicy, compelling, exciting, melancholy, disturbing, evocative, thought provoking and thrilling. In a review in Kill Your Darlings journal, Margot McGovern references a BBC interview with Donna Tartt, where she mentions the desire “to give her readers that childhood feeling of breathlessly turning page after page, greedy to learn what happens next while still awarding each sentence the weight it deserves”. She achieves the aim to perfection, making The Goldfinch practically the definition of "unputdownable".

Colour

This book by Victoria Finlay has been sitting on my bookshelf, patiently waiting to be read for at least two years. I finally ran out of excuses not to read it, and took it down the other day to begin. I am so glad I did. A small part of me wishes I had read it sooner but I am enjoying it so much right now (haven’t quite finished it yet!) that I cannot begrudge my present self the pleasure it is currently bringing me. It is bursting with fascinating little stories and anecdotes and I keep wanting to share the fascinating facts as I discover them.  It's books like this one that make me realise there is nothing better than some well written non-fiction to inspire and enthuse.

Sometimes I Judge A Book By Its Cover

I looked forward to reading The Signature Of All Things, I think mostly because I am a sucker for a gorgeous cover. I read it a few weeks ago and originally wasn't going to blog about it, but I changed my mind.

I don't tend to post about books unless I really liked them, and my feelings towards this book changed a number of times. I never disliked it, but it was a question of whether or not I liked it enough to blog about. In the days after having read it, I began to retrospectively enjoy it more and more. In many ways it is a quiet book, and it took a little space for me to fully appreciate that.

Elizabeth Gilbert has been branded, for better or worse, as the author of Eat, Pray Love. I am sure there are plenty of people out there who will snobbishly never read this book because of that fact. And I am almost as sure that those same people would be horrified to hear that Gilbert's writing  reminded me of A. S. Byatt at times. It was a lighter read than Byatt,  but the sense of the world created, the pace of that world and the people who populate it was similar to The Children's Book or Morpho Eugenia. It was really nice to sink into that world each time I opened up the book.

I thought this was a really lovely book. It said some things about women and society and ideas in a subtle way which I liked, and overall it was a nice read. It was uite well paced and skillfully written, and has a beautiful cover.

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?

The last book I posted about here was Lolita. A book all about cleverness and mental dexterity and quite proudly not about emotion, sentiment or meaning. In comparison,  The Lowland made me feel so deeply that I am struggling to find the words to explain it. I can say that I am sure the power of the book lies in Lahiri's ability to manipulate a reader's feelings, just as Nabokov's genius is in his ability to manipulate language. I read a lot of it while traveling to and from work, and there were several occasions when I almost cried on the train. It was so sad but it was so beautiful that I couldn't put it out of my thoughts, I had to keep reading.

Another book I found myself comparing The Lowland to was Barracuda. Both books are, among other things,  about a character who has done a terrible thing. Something that some may find unforgivable. Both characters try to live with this new, terrible version of themselves, and this forms a large part of our understanding of their respective natures. What I found so striking about this parallel is that the two characters in question take divergent paths from this point - one to healing and a sense of peace and self worth, the other to the brink of suicide. I found both responses utterly believable, which only made the question "what would you do if it were you" all the more urgent.

Since this is a post of comparisons I will add a final one: Edith Wharton. Lahiri's  and Wharton's characters seem bound equally by fate and social conventions in the decisions they make and the paths they choose. This, in my opinion makes everything even more tragic. As a modern reader, it is possible to see another way, another choice. To see this and know the protagonist cannot adds a piquancy and a sadness to the experience. So in summing up I suppose I can only reiterate how beautiful The Lowland is, and how much it gave me to think about. It was an absolute treasure of a book.

Five melancholy teardrops out of five.

Not THAT Sort of Girl

When I first read Lolita, over 10 years ago, I loved it so much that I declared it to be my favourite book.  I added it to my Classics Club list because I was curious to see whether or not I'd still feel the same way about it almost a decade and a half later.

The verdict is in: I don't. I had a lot of fun re-reading Lolita  and I think it's fantastic. I still appreciate all the things I originally loved about it but I'm after a different reading experience these days. Lolita is a book of tricks and games. The sounds of the language and the rhythm of the words are truly brilliant. It's like every word is edible, delicious, delectable.

What Lolita lacks, however, is a sense of purpose beyond the play. As Nabokov explains in his afterword, there isn't supposed to be one, but that didn't stop me wanting it. I think the book could have been truly spectacular if Nabokov had decided to add yet another layer to it. At times I grew a little tired of the trickery and wanted something I could ponder, or something I could feel besides wry appreciation.

Tampa has been touted as the new Lolita. The only thing they have in common is that the narrator is a paedophile. Which might sound striking if you haven't read them, but in an odd way, this is almost irrelevant. I could go on a big discussion comparing them but the more I think about it, the more they are trying to do completely different things as works of literature. So I will conclude by saying that I liked them both for totally different reasons, and I'm not sure I could say which I preferred.