books

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.

– Arnold Lobel

I am currently reading The Book of Revelation by Rupert Thomson. The jacket and reviews on Amazon.COM make it sound like an interesting, off-beat book, so I am curious to see how it develops. The first several chapters have captured my attention already. I hope the rest of the book is as engaging.

I recently started reading Charcuterie & French Pork Cookery by Jane Grigson, originally published in 1967. It is both an interesting historical document and an excellent introduction to charcuterie. The recipes are classics and, while rather uncomplicated by today’s standards, still yield excellent results.

I am reading it because a chef-friend of mine is opening a new place this year, and she’s very interested in preparing charcuterie in-house and has invited me to assist them in getting up and running.

I am currently reading THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEAD by Kevin Brockmeier. The Publisher’s Weekly describes it as:

Starred Review. A deadly virus has spread rapidly across Earth, effectively cutting off wildlife specialist Laura Byrd at her crippled Antarctica research station from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the planet’s dead populate “the city,” located on a surreal Earth-like alternate plane, but their afterlives depend on the memories of the living, such as Laura, back on home turf. Forced to cross the frozen tundra, Laura free-associates to keep herself alert; her random memories work to sustain a plethora of people in the city, including her best friend from childhood, a blind man she’d met in the street, her former journalism professor and her parents. Brockmeier (The Truth About Celia) follows all of them with sympathy, from their initial, bewildered arrival in the city to their attempts to construct new lives. He meditates throughout on memory’s power and resilience, and gives vivid shape to the city, a place where a giraffe’s spots might detach and hover about a street conversation among denizens. He simultaneously keeps the stakes of Laura’s struggle high: as she fights for survival, her parents find a second chance for love—but only if Laura can keep them afloat. Other subplots are equally convincing and reflect on relationships in a beautiful, delicate manner; the book seems to say that, in a way, the virus has already arrived. (Feb.)
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It’s very interesting so far, but I am admittedly not very deep into the book yet.

I am reading THE SUPPER OF THE LAMB by Robert Farrar Capon. My friend Mary W suggested it to me, and I trust her taste in books so much that I ordered the book (and somehow ended up with two copies) sight-unseen. If the first 15 pages are any indication, I am going to enjoy this book very much! The author’s gentle tone and easy sense of humor left me wishing I had more time to read it this afternoon! Here are some excerpts from reviews posted on Amazon.COM:

It is a book about food, spirituality, ferial and festial cooking (ferial being cooking done with leftovers; festial being the type of cooking that creates leftovers), and reflections on life and reality. Worth buying simply for his devotional reflection on the beauties of an onion. There is obviously tongue-in-cheek here, but there is also great spiritual depth. The theme of ferial cooking is transferred to a kind of manifesto on ferial living. Capon sees food, and life as well, through a lens of wonder. Capon’s book is really a recipe for living life more fully. To read this fine book is like sitting on a stool in Capon’s kitchen, listening to this old-school master talk (as he slow-cooks) on subjects as diverse as onions, knives, wine, love, dinner parties, and baking soda.

It thrills me to know that Capon has several other books about food as well, so if this turns out as well as I am hoping, I have more of his works to enjoy!

I am reading Andrew Todhunter’s A MEAL OBSERVED. It’s a magazine-length idea that he’s turned into an amusing little book, combining history and experience with a sheaf of helpful culinary notes. The book recounts their meal at Paris’s Taillevent, “a Michelin three-star restaurant considered by many critics to be the finest in France and thus the world”.

Interestingly, Todhunter is not a ‘foodie’ — indeed, his first couple books were about extreme sports – though I think he downplays his ignorance of the food world for the purpose of the book. The first few chapters of this book irritated me because Todhunter would provide a bit of information about the restaurant and then launch into a recollection of dining with his father as a child or other nostalgic claptrap that I feel is unnecessary and misplaced in this book. Happily, the latest chapters I’ve been reading have gotten away from this indulgent approach; I hope this trend continues.