16 posts tagged “books”

We're taking a break from politics for today, because O!M!G! I have to tell you about my two new cookbooks.

For Christmas, we bought my son a copy of Mollie Katzen's Pretend Soup.  I had been checking it out in

Barnes&Noble one day and thought it seemed like a cool concept.  For every recipe, there are two versions given.  The first, for the adults, is the ingredients list and preparation written out, along with special guidelines about what preparation steps the adult needs to do before and during the kid's cooking.  The second is a set of pictures that demonstrate how to make the recipe with virtually no words, just numbers and pictures.  It was written for preschoolers after she saw her own child in his preschool class making applesauce from an illustrated recipe and how all the children were happily working away with the teacher guiding but not actually doing the work.  I wondered when I bought it if my son would really understand the pictorial instructions and if he would be interested in cooking.  And now I can positively answer yes to both.

The first recipe we made was "carrot pennies," sliced carrots in a slightly sweet, sesame glaze.  The adult slices and steams the carrots until just tender.  Then the picture recipe kicks in and has the kid put in a pat of butter, 3 shakes of salt, a tablespoon of sesame seeds, and so forth.  My son diligently looks at the pictures and does what he's supposed to do (although the last time we made it, he did go a little overboard with the salt--must have been some hefty shakes).  For that recipe, there is a period of time when you're just stirring (with a very long-handled spoon, of course) and waiting for the glaze to reduce, and sometimes he gets a little impatient with that, but otherwise, he does it all himself.  He has been extremely proud of the food he has made "all by myself!"  He even had to call grandma after successfully completing his first recipe, and the last time we made the carrot pennies, he took a plate of them to Papa and proudly offered "my carrots" to him.  And, of course, he eats them right up.

And that's the thing.  Though the recipes are very simple, the food is good.  It is not your run-of-the-mill "kid's food" but stuff that we like eating too.  The illustrated recipes are well planned and apparently really easy to understand for even an almost-3-year-old.  Now he pulls the book off the shelf every time I'm making dinner or he wants a snack to see what he can make now.  I am really, really pleased with this book.

 

Also, I recently bought Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.  Now, no one in my house is a vegetarian (my mom is, but she lives in a different house).  However, as must be obvious from the tales I have told of the garden, we eat a lot of vegetables.  We also eat a lot of whole grains and unusual grains and rather a lot of tofu.  And this book is amazing.  It is nothing short of mind-blowing, this book.  I am in love.

I have some of Bittman's other books, and I think he is worthy of kitchen-god status (right up there with Alton).  My copy of How to Cook Everything is a disaster--the thing has been used and used to the point of falling apart.  But the vegetarian one is even better.  It is now by far the most useful cookbook I own, with How to Cook Everything, Not Your Mother's Slow-Cooker Cookbook, and Barbara Kafka's excellent Vegetable Love.

Not only is there Bittman's characteristically straightforward style and comprehensive guide to ingredients and tools, this one is completely packed with charts showing you how to take a basic recipe (say, a vegetable gratin) and just make it with whatever vegetable you've got on hand.  The first recipe I made from it was a gratin of pearl barley and tomatoes, and it was delishusssss.  I've since made several others, and every one, just like he says, is simple and good. 

I am also loving the fact that he devotes space, and quite a lot of it, to cooking with alternative milks.  "Alternative milks?"  Did I just say that?  It sounds so freaky that way.  But you know what I mean--soy milk, almond milk, etc.  We don't drink milk (we do use butter and cream and we eat a lot of yogurt).  Milk is a big problem for me, and now we think T is lactose intolerant (I don't know why that explanation for his endless stomach issues didn't occur to us before, but he never drank milk in Japan, and then in America he did, and we couldn't figure out why his stomach hurt pretty much since we came to America, though we typically blamed it on Dick Cheney--anyway).  Butter and cream don't seem to affect us too much, probably because they get used in small-ish quantities.  Yogurt has the bacteria that render the milk digestible for all of us.  

Oh, anyway, I'm sure our dietary habits are fascinating, but the point is that for someone who is usually cooking with a nondairy milk, this advice is extremely helpful.  I've always just sort of winged it.  I even make sawmill gravy* with soymilk, because I'm freaky like that, but soy milk does usually require extra tweaking and sometimes extra care to cook up acceptably in recipes that call for regular milk. 

Anyway, these new cookbooks have just made my life so much easier.  I am so pleased.  It is so good to buy a cookbook and find something you actually want to cook and eat--something that you actually can cook because it is not difficult and uses the ingredients you have--on every page. 

*It's weird to me that recipes exist for sawmill gravy.  I have never used a recipe for it before and have no idea if that is a good one, but it is Alton Brown after all, and he knows Southern food, so I'm trusting him.  By the way, you can make an entirely vegetarian (possibly even vegan, but I'd have to look at the ingredients of the sausage) sawmill gravy.  My mom started doing it for me since I can't drink milk, and she's a vegetarian who doesn't eat sausage (for shame, not eating pork!).  Just use the frozen soy breakfast sausage patties and as they brown and cook, crumble them up.  You're going to need to use oil (or butter) to replace the meat fat that isn't there, as gravy is not gravy without fat, and you might want to check the seasonings on it more carefully because soy milk tastes different from cow milk (cow milk tastes like cows, man), but speaking as a lover of Southern food, I think the end result is really quite good.  And it doesn't make me sick, so hurrah!

I got tagged by the evilest of Evil Wombat Queens--or perhaps she is just the wombattiest.

Here are the rules

1. Grab your nearest book.

2. Open the book to page 123.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.

5. Tag 5 different people.

From Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, Edition 20:

"pontine [angle].  Cerebellopontine [angle].

pubic [angle].  The angle formed by the junction of the rami of the pubes.

[angle] of refraction.  The angle formed by a refracted ray of light with a line perpendicular to the surface at the refraction point."

Uh, yeah, so I'm at work, and this is the nearest book because it's the print reference I use most.  It's a great medical dictionary, really helpful, if any of you are looking for a good medical dictionary.

As far as pleasure reading goes, I just finished I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, and it was awesome.  Now, much as I love Will Smith, the movie will probably disappoint.  Vampires!  Too bad they're not vampirates.

OK, anyway, I guess I'll tag:  ::flowers & thorns, Janette, Kimura, The Greenhows, and kitty, but y'all are just going to do what you want anyway, no matter who I tag.  Bless your hearts.

This began life as a comment on mcco12's post about ebooks and books, though I tried to edit it to make it more freestanding.  But you might want to read his post first--it's a good post, anyway.

I had an argument a few years ago with a musician named Danny Barnes about putting more music online.  He made the point that putting it online takes it to a wider, less elite audience by making it more affordable, and I'm not sure that it has.  It can, if you have a computer and a reliable connection and the necessary memory and so on, of course (and especially if you pirate it, but I doubt that's what he had in mind!).  But we tend to forget here, on Vox because we're all online, that there are people who can't afford an iPod, can't afford a computer, can't afford an Internet connection.  I only have a computer and a DSL connection because I use them for work; otherwise, I probably couldn't afford them.  I bought a computer in college with student loans, loans I still haven't paid off, and I used it long enough that it was no longer compatible with anything and then kept using it because I couldn't afford a new one; I certainly couldn't have downloaded music on it with its 10 MB hard drive (yeah, I think it was bigger than 10 MB but not very big.  Floppies, man, it was all on floppies). 

I can, however, afford a dollar or less for a used book or 5 bucks or less for used CDs.  The equipment necessary to use those are cheap and basic (light, in the case of books; a cheapie CD player for the CDs).  If I spend a dollar on a book, it can just sit there peacefully until I'm ready to read it, requiring no further input from me--no upgrading, no extra memory, no check of its battery--and it will keep sitting there as long as I keep it for re-reading for the same dollar.  Not to mention that downloading books is probably going to require a credit card, and I fucking hate credit cards.  I hate the whole culture around credit cards.  Yes, I have one and I am forced to bow the great credit god in the sky to maintain my Blockbuster queue and a few other things, but we're cash people.  We want to use credit as little as possible, and, of course, there are many people for whom using credit cards is either impossible or just undesirable.

Now, I'm not opposed to ebooks--not at all.  I just doubt.  I'm a doubter.  I'm a doubting Thomas.  I doubt they will be less elitist in the end than books are now because they introduce another device that must be bought, maintained, upgraded, etc.  I doubt that most of the unpublished authors will be worth bothering about, particularly because blogs already provide a similar outlet, and I'm underwhelmed by the quality of most blogs.  I doubt that ebooks will ever be as enjoyable to me as book-books.

You're undoubtedly right about the value of portability and searchability.  It also *may* help some authors publish their work, and I think that's worth exploring, even if I'm not interested in their work (with music, I think this has been a pretty mixed bag).  But I can't see that a preference for real books is akin to being against the printing press.  I'm not against bringing the masses more information.  Quite the opposite, actually.  I just do not see that this is going to make books more affordable or accessible in the foreseeable future to people who can't currently access books.  Technology does tend to get cheaper over time, of course, so maybe someday. 

Also, the argument that third space makes in the comments about photos (which I agree with), I would make about books, too.  They do take on meaning and intimacy as physical objects.  They *can* be mere carriers of information, but they don't have to be.  When you're doing research and need the searchability functions, ebooks are perfect, but for some of us, they're just never going to be adequate to replace that intimacy with the book as its own signifier.  For people who don't care about that, fine, use ebooks.  I'll go buy up your used books when you get rid of them.

Gah, I'm sounding like Albert Borgmann.  The object can be just a device for carrying information, and electronic devices do that just as well as paper ones and maybe better.  But there's a loss there, too, of our relationship with the object, the human feeling of paper, the smells of books, the flipping of the pages (that does not give you trigger finger), the appearance of handwritten notes in the margins, the inscriptions from the person who gave it to you or who gave it to whomever sold it to the used bookstore, etc.  Maybe those things aren't important to you or to anyone else but me, I don't know.  But to me, books can tell a lot more stories from their histories than just the information the author consciously put there.  A notebook can, too, in the right context.  I love looking at my old notebooks from college with my sarcastic little notes about classmates and so forth.  The information--the lecture notes--is kind of boring now.  But there's just so much more in there. 

And, yeah, children's books...no, that's just not the same.  Yes, my son rips up his books sometimes and gets sticky syrup on them and so forth.  But I love watching him interact with them, and he loves it too.  The pictures!  The touch-and-feel books!  I don't see how an ebook would serve these purposes at all.

Also, while everything in contemporary society is supposedly towards more convenience, more accessibility, and more choice, life appears to be becoming more stressful, less convenient, more hectic, etc.  Why would the addition of one more "convenient" device be different? 

There is also the concern, that I see now someone else has brought up in comments, about our relationship to texts.  I used to work on texts that had been transcribed from a nonliterate culture for my grad school work, and it was interesting how writing things down made the texts different.  It made people quibble about little details that formerly could change from speaker to speaker, so that each storyteller could make his/her own mark on the text.  It made people quibble about accuracy and lose sight of the larger narrative thread.  I see this happen online already.  People read an article and pick up one tiny fact that is inaccurate and thus dismiss the writer and the article, losing sight of the larger picture of the article as a whole.  It's brought us greater attention to detail and less ability, as far as I can tell, to focus on the argument or history as a whole.  It is possible that the physical properties of the book and the human scale of it draw us into them and give them a human face, which is harder to summarily dismiss than the relatively inhuman presence of type on a screen.  I am not arguing against literacy and for a return to oral storytelling, mind.  I'm just wary of these changes to our interactions with the text and, via the text, with the author.  I similarly have concerns about the value of online, unedited texts.  Srsly, dood, have you seen the grammar and spelling, not to mention the narcissism and lack of logical coherence on a lot of blogs?  srsly.  Yes, yes, I do fear that ebooks are going to sound like the LOLcats.

Hmmm, I think my last paragraph there lacks clarity.  I'll work on it.  But, I'm supposed to be working, like, at a job.

What modern book do you think will be read in high school by the next generation of kids? 
Submitted by Tom.

This QotD has been under my skin for a few days now, because I keep thinking two things:  1)  Who says the next generation of kids will still read books or be capable of careful, difficult reading?  2)  The more interesting question is really what modern books should they be reading? 

Am I too grumpy?  I think I'm too grumpy. 

I am not one of these apocalyptic types who thinks that books and reading are bound to disappear from our lives.  There will always be bookhounds and bibliophiles around, I suspect, at least well into the foreseeable future, just like some people still enjoy their vinyl records.  Hell, I still have my old Duran Duran and Camper van Beethoven records on vinyl, and I like their scratchy analog-ness. 

But I can't help but think that serious literacy is on the decline (at least in America--I can in no way speak about literacy in other countries, not even Canada).  I don't mean that fewer people are able to read or capable of the kinds of thought that have to go into serious reading, although I think that both of those things are true, as well. 

Reading serious books, though, of the sort that I think one ought to read in school to learn something from requires sustained and focused mental activity.  It takes a kind of concentration and analytical thinking that no television show, video game, or web page is ever going to require. 

Listen--I've heard and read the arguments that shows like The Sopranos and whatnot and some role-playing games require focus and thought to keep storylines and characters straight.  That is likely true, although I would counter that it's not really different from keeping storylines and characters involved in neighborhood gossip straight, because it's more a feat of memory than sustained, focused concentration.  Video games and television and the Internet may be making people better at certain types of intelligence (in my admittedly pessimistic view, though, they are primarily making people smarter in ways that really only pertain to those same media), but that doesn't mean that people are getting all-around smarter or--to get back to the QotD--better at reading.

I taught college-level composition at a university for a while, and I hated it.  College freshman these days (I obviously can't speak about previous generations) are barely literate.  Their vocabularies are very limited, and they are way too lazy to look words up that they do not know--and when presented with an article from, say, The New Yorker, the vocabulary words they have never apparently seen before add up to 25% or more of the total word count.  They have no idea how to figure out what the thesis of an essay is--they have no idea what a thesis is or what the purpose of an essay is.  They are flummoxed by the rigors of complex sentences and baffled by the notion of lexical precision.  They complain loudly and make bitter scenes when they are told that it is not the fault of the author that they don't know what Plato thought or what 'inchoate' means, that finding these things out--that knowing things--is the responsibility of the reader.  They have no way to judge, when doing research, if a source is trustworthy or not, as they possess no critical thinking skills at all (and this skill, of judging the worth of a source, is particularly necessary when using the Internet--any gibbon can publish his opinion on the Internet, but that doesn't mean it's a useful or fact-based opinion and thus able to support your thesis when you're writing a research paper).

This makes assigning reading and writing homework a dicey business.  If it's difficult or serious, they just won't do it, and you will have a class full of students who cannot discuss the assigned reading because they have not read it.  If it's very difficult, though, then they are highly likely to take up the entire hour of your next scheduled class to list reasons why it's "unfair" to expect them to do college-level reading.

No, I'm not bitter--not at all.  Why do you ask?  This is why I fled to ESL teaching.  Foreign students were refreshingly prepared for adulthood and the rigors and unfairness of college life.  My ESL students only complained once, and that was when I had given them a New Yorker article to read, and then they were probably justified--it was a truly difficult article--and they all calmed down after I explained to them that I had not expected them to understand it fully on their own, that we were going to spend extensive class time breaking it down and figuring it out together.  Beautiful people, you Japanese and Malaysians and Finns and Russians.  How I adored you all.

So, what of that experience would make me suspect that the next generation of high school students will even be capable of reading books more difficult than Harry Potter.  I'm not knocking Harry Potter, because heaven knows I love them, too, but they aren't exactly on the same level of difficulty as a Don DeLillo novel or Cormac McCarthy.

I think I will save my defense of literacy and difficult reading for another time--it's a fraught question and persistently dogged by objections from people who think that reading books is just another among hobbies, when it isn't exactly.  Literacy is at the very core of what we usually think of as "being human" in a sense that differentiates us from other animals.  Reading is not just a hobby, although it is that, too; it's both root and sustenance for a complete way of thinking and being.  You think I jest?  I do not. 

Anyway.  Some modern/contemporary books I think high-school students should read, at least the ones who remain capable of doing so?

I guess I also have to assume that their parents and teachers would let them read these, as Americans are really fond of banning books.  It isn't just the Christians, either--Huck Finn, one of the greatest American books ever written, has been banned from time to time because of its use of the word 'nigger' for example.  Americans are very suspicious of books.  I suppose part of it is our Puritanical history--is that also why Americans tend to interpret books so literally, with no imagination?  Probably.  The Puritans had fabulous imaginations for ways to punish the nonbelievers, but not so much in other things.

Oh, right, a list.  Sure, here are some modern books I think are important enough that they should be read by future generations of American students:

White Noise by Don DeLillo.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (not contemporary, perhaps, but modern--and not difficult, perhaps, but very serious).

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

The Things they Carried by Tim O'Brien.

The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forche (warning:  this is poetry)

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh

Hmm, well, OK.  I don't know that those are going to be considered appropriate for high-school kids although none of them really deals with any themes or events that are necessarily more shocking, difficult, or adult than those of Hamlet--incest! suicide! murder! indecision! --and Hamlet is often considered appropriate for high schoolers.  It should also be noted that I'm purposely skewing the list to reflect issues that I think are important for contemporary American high schoolers to consider.  Thus, this is heavy American writers (and also regrettably heavy on war novels, but war does seem to be a continual fact of American life). 

Alright, then.  Happy reading, kids.

Book: Show us a great comic book.

*sigh* As so often before, I don't know if I can or would want to pick just one.  There are so many great comics out there--why limit yourself?  This does need a limit, though, so let's say 5.  I like 5.  I know De La Soul said 3 is the magic number, but I like 5. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And yeah, yeah V for Vendetta, Sin City, The Killing Joke, Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez, and so on and so forth.  I love comics. If you're one of these people who believes comics are for kids, I beg of you--try them.  That last one, though, isn't for the faint of heart; Suehiro Maruo is one disturbed man.

Oh, and I said 5, right?  That's because for me this next one is the Mother Superior of them all, but it's a sort of meta-comic.  For anyone interested in the genre, though, highly recommended.

 

via mcco12

total number of books owned:

A few hundred, I guess.  I cycle through them a lot, getting rid of ones that I won't read again and keeping only those that I doubt can be replaced or that I reread often.  Right now, there are a few hundred, and it is currently at a low point, as I haven't bought enough books in the past two years to make up for what I got rid of when I moved to Japan.  My mom buys a lot of books and generally has good taste, so I borrow a lot of books from her, and the library of course.

last book bought: 

Well, the last book I actually bought was a kid's book, and it was...hmmm, I don't remember.  I buy him a lot of books.  I buy more books for my son than I buy for myself.  The last book I bought for myself was Ian Rankin's Witch Hunt.  I am a major sucker for Ian Rankin.

last book read:

That would be Witch Hunt again.  I can't keep an Ian Rankin book lying around unread. 

 

And right now I'm reading a collection of short stories by Dashiell Hammett.  These days short stories and poems and magazine articles work out a lot better for me, as I have to get my reading done in small chunks throughout the day.  If I can cajole the kid into playing by himself (in a safe manner, of course) and there is no pressing business to attend to, I can read for 10-15 minutes, which makes it hard to get through a novel but perfect for a short story or magazine article.  I get a few of those chunks per day.

five books that mean a lot to you:

It's hard to pick just five, really, and I'm sure everyone says that.  But, here--I'll try.

The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Andrews Edwards (yes, Mary Poppins).  This was far and away my favorite book as a kid, and I've read it countless times.  This book was so important to me because there are two basic messages to it:  The first is that, using your mind, you can do anything, figure anything out, and travel

anywhere.  The second is a little harder to explain, but basically it suggests that objects and ideas that people ascribe power to through faith are just, well, crutches of a sort.  Really, you don't need them.  Really, you can do the things that need to be done without them.  People are frightened of believing in themselves, so they need these things (in the case of the book, it's a "magical" hat that they wear to get to the land of the whangdoodles, but it turns out that you don't need the hats at all--you can get there using just your mind if you believe in your own power, but the professor

who leads them to whangdoodle-land tells these kids that they need the caps because he thinks it will help them if they have an object to ascribe magical power to--damn, this is sounding stupid, but it is a kid's book, and it is much better done than I'm making it seem).  Anyway, this book was the first book I ever read that changed my world.  After every reading of it, the world literally and figuratively looked different.  All my senses would be sharper, more focused, more alive, and this is also the book that made me question the necessity of religion and so on and so forth.  So, yes, it's a corruptor.  And, yes, we will be giving my son his own copy any day now.

Next up:  A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin.  This book is so beautiful, so elegant.  The story is basically about (I'm going to leave out the framing device, despite the fact that it is a good one and very well incorporated into the story) a young Italian man whose near-perfect world gets torn apart by World War I, how he survives the many atrocities of the war, how he escapes being a prisoner of war in Germany and walks across the Alps, how he comes to have a new family and what they mean to him.  Oh, that is all so reductionist.  I love this book for the characters and the telling of the story, and also because it is a story, ultimately, of why love and beauty are the most important achievements and highest calling of mankind and what those things are worth.  I can't do it justice here.  It's just--no, I can't do it any justice at all.  Go read it, I urge you.  And many thanks to sgazzetti for introducing me to it.

 

Well, I don't think it would be wrong to put Being and Time here, by Martin Heidegger.  While it was not the first or last book of philosophy that was and is important to me, I think I'm going to choose instead a related book that really moved me, in a way that Heidegger's obfuscatory and prolix writing cannot.  And that book is I and Thou by Martin Buber.  You may be wondering, and rightly so, what an old Jewish theologian and I could have in common, but this book has become the foundation of my ethics.  As I've said before, much to Zack's irritation, I think Buber's basic point is revealed everywhere in poetry and art, but I never really got it until I got it.  I'm not sure I want to do as much injustice to I and Thou as I did to A Soldier of the Great War, but you can go read what Wikipedia says about it, or you could just read the book.  It really is a powerful book.

Lost Japan by Alex Kerr should certainly make this list, as this book made me feel less like a hypercritical, imperialist asshole and more like I actually knew what I was talking about.  Let me explain.  Alex Kerr is a white American like me who lived (and lives) in Japan, although he lived there much, much longer than I did, and he is absolutely fluent in Japanese, while I am not.  He knows more about Japanese history and culture than most Japanese people I know, and he deeply loves Japan.  I also deeply love Japan, or at least I thought I did until I moved there.  No, that's too harsh.  But it wasn't what I had hoped for it to be.  Japan is a country that, given its natural beauty and rich culture and history, could be almost perfect, and I had fallen in love with that, a love that remained through my first year there, when I was living way out in the boondocks by Mt. Fuji and soaking up all the culture I could handle.  Then, though, things started to niggle in the second year.  Like all the concrete everywhere--the beaches, the rivers, everywhere is concrete.  Like the fact that you go to Kyoto, a city with huge potential, and it's, bleh, another Japanese city until you actually get to a temple.  Kyoto shouldn't be another anonymous concrete jungle, I thought.  Anyway, thoughts like this made me feel like an asshole.  Was I just superimposing my own cultural values on Japan?  Was I just being a spoiled brat who wanted a certain kind of Japan all to myself?  Was I just suffering culture shock?  When I found Alex Kerr's little gem of a book, I suddenly felt that maybe it wasn't just me.  Maybe Japan was indeed betraying its own cultural values; maybe I wasn't all wrong.  Thank you, Alex Kerr.  Thank you so much.  I wish I had found the book sooner, as I might still be living in Japan if I had. 

And I think I'm going to fill out this list with Abe Kobo's The Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna).  I'm not going to even pretend to have read the original Japanese--no, I read it in English translation.  It reminds me a lot of Camus and Beckett, both writers that I cherish, but especially Camus with all the desert imagery.  I love this book, as the Mark Helprin book above, for both its elegance and imagery and its meaning, which is that there is no meaning--er, not exactly.  It's that you keep shoveling the sand off your house because if you do not, the house will collapse, and, yes, it is frustrating work that never finishes, but this is life, and it does no good to sit around complaining about it, so just get your ass up and get to work.  Abe says it much better.  I also love that the bug-collector, who has been waylaid in the dunes shoveling sand and searching for water, has a chance to escape and does not.  Is it because out here in the desert where his every day is a grapple to survive, the illusions are removed and what is real in life is exposed?  This is a book I keep close to me, a book I would like to have cast in gold.  I feel quite similarly about Tanizaki Junichiro's Some Prefer Nettles. 

Oh, and obviously, Fisher's Hornpipe by Todd McEwen, but I've pimped that book here quite a few times.

(and I'm going to add a new category, so that I can write about 5 books and 5 authors): 

five authors that mean a lot to you:

Oh, here again, there are many, and it will be difficult to choose, but persevere I must!

Albert Camus.  I think this should be pretty self-explanatory.  Like most college freshman, I first encountered him via The Stranger (damn, now I have The Cure song stuck in my head, too--"whichever I choose it amounts to the same, absolutely nothing--I'm alive, I'm dead...").  I have since read--hmm, I think all of his books.  La Chute (The Fall) is my favorite.  I have an especial fondness for the desert, having grown up in one, and I think this is something that bonded me to Camus. 

Jorge Amado.  Here, again, I won't pretend to have read them in Portuguese, though I wish I had.  He is a writer who, whenever I'm feeling especially black and hopeless, he will always restore my faith in humanity.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez does the same thing for me, and I love him, too, but there is an earthy quality, a homely (or homey, however you like it) quality to Amado that works its magic on me in no time.  His books focus heavily on the complexity of people, especially women (and his women characters are exceptionally well drawn) and the essential beauty of even their worst decisions and frailest moments.  Plus, his books are always filled with lavish descriptions of Bahian cooking, and they make me drool at the descriptions of spices and dende oil and all of it.  Damn, now I have a Cure song stuck in my head AND I'm starving.  Great.

Wallace Stevens.  Man, I'm starting to see a modernist theme.  That's me, modernist girl stuck in a postmodernist world.  Stevens, I think, would have hated so much of postmodernism, and I suppose so do I.  I think that that human project is to construct a worldview and a reality and an order from our imagination and reason.  And that is what Stevens is all about.  Heavens, could I be any more reductionist today?

Albert Borgmann.  And not just because he was my professor for several years, forcing me to suffer the indignities of Immanuel Kant and introducing me to the great glories of Charles Taylor.  His books are powerful and moving (and accessible) critiques of postmodern society, of technology, of our contemporary malaise.  They will convince you of the goodness of community, the need for old-fashioned human interaction, and the desirability of public spaces. 

And now I still can't decide between William Blake, Will Eisner, and Friedrich Nietzsche.  I'm quite certain that if Jesus was the son of God and was going to have a second coming, it was either Blake or Nietzsche (or both) and the Christians missed their chance.  Hmm, hmm, shall have to ponder.   

But for now, having dispatched my meme responsibility, I tag:  Itchy Dawg, Glamour Mama, Kimura, Zack, and --what the hell? --Shades_Of_Grey.  Get to work, kids. 

Book:  Show us a book everyone should read before they die. 
Submitted by Rob.

There are two, and you can take your pick:

 

 

If you have a strong desire to understand many of the allusions I make on this blog to amuse myself, you should add Fisher's Hornpipe by Todd McEwen--actually, the better reason to read it is that you will laugh so hard your septum will deviate.  Seriously.  Run out and read it, as it is far more entertaining than anything I have to say.

Book: Share a self-help book that meant a lot to you.

Yeah, for the rest of us dummies.

I really should just post this without comment, but I don't want people to think this of me.  So, here is comment:

My first year in Japan, my crazy roommate from Buffalo, New York, was reading this.  Actually he was working his way through it while contemplating cinnamon trees.  He was not a bad fellow, but he had so many...um, shall we say "quirks" that amused me highly.  This was one of them.  I simply could not get my head around the idea of referring to a "For Dummies" book to learn a spiritual art.  But, then, I am fairly grumpy about the whole "meditation as stress reliever" and "I'm so deep because I superficially embrace Buddhist ideals--oh, and see the 'Free Tibet' bumper sticker on my SUV?"  I mean, I don't know.  Whatever floats your boat, I guess.  But this book in particular meant a lot to me because I got so much mileage out of it while making fun of him in long emails to my friends.  In that sense, it really helped me.

Kevin had lived in Korea just prior to coming to Japan, and when I asked him how he liked it there, he said that Korea and Japan were the same.  That made me think that the help he actually needed was to meet my old friend Adam Sheridan, a Korean by birth, who would kick his ass so hard he would be unable to practice zazen for days.

Oh, Kevin.  Where are you?  I'm sure you've married a Japanese girl by now, because that seemed to be your primary goal.  And I'm sure you love her for her "clarity of thinking" that she cannot communicate to you because she cannot speak English.  Just like the good old days.  Sigh.  And I'm sure you have a cinnamon tree growing in your yard.

But, no.  I don't read self-help books.  Unless As I Lay Dying counts.

Book: Show us one of your favorite cookbooks.

One?  Have mercy.

This is the one I use the most.  Mine is battered and torn and very dirty.  It does not actually contain a recipe for every known dish; however, if you read it thoroughly and pay attention, it will teach you how to cook pretty much everything.  Not quite, but pretty close.

Currently, I am quite enamored of this next one.  I love my Crock-Pot.  I am especially loving the cakes.  You mix them up, put them in the pot to cook, and ignore them.  A couple hours later you have moist, pudding-y heaven.  Perfect.

 

I also love and use very, very often the Farmhouse series, especially the French Farmhouse Cookbook.  Good eats, there.  I also love to just peruse those and read the stories about each dish. 

And then there's my Frida Kahlo cookbook, a very aesthetically pleasing book.  I don't cook too many of the recipes, because they tend to be elaborate and require difficult-to-acquire ingredients, but I glory in its beauty.  Seriously.  It's gorgeous.

Book: Show us a book you started reading but never finished.

I know Pynchon is supposed to be great and all, but...this book was instant head-banging-on-concrete for me. 

 

Pseudohippy-ism has its own kind of pretension, and Tom Robbins is its god.  This book is akin to genital herpes (which I don't have, but I have seen the commercials on TV):  It goes away now and again and usually doesn't affect your life that much, but when it comes back around, watch out.  In this case it's not lesions that will break out in your groin, but you will feel significant itching and burning in your soul.