A Day with the Glass Family
Title: Franny and Zooey
Author: J.D. Salinger
As much as I disliked Catcher in the Rye, I loved Franny and Zooey. Apparently a short story combined with an intertwining novella, it reads like a full length novel just fine, and it’s pretty intriguing, unlike Salinger’s more famous work CitR.
Franny and Zooey are the youngest children of the rather large Glass family, and the baby (Franny) starts the book off as a twenty year old histrionic having a bit of a meltdown while out to eat with her boyfriend. Her brother, Zooey, spends a large portion of his story in the bath tub talking to his intrusive mother about the meltdown that has migrated to the family’s living room.
Surprised that Zooey is a boy? I was. Apparently it used to be used as a nick name for Zachary and Zachariah. I spent all of Franny wondering how this mysterious Zooey was going to fit into the story, which at that point revolved around a girl freaking out about Bohemians and Academia the way people in their mid to late twenties today lament the so-called Hipsters. There’s not much of a plot, more of a theme of self-discovery, religion, and philosophy, and what that all really means. But I like that sort of thing, and I loved Zooey and his smart ass attitude.
It was actually pretty cold today, completely out of nowhere, so the kiddo and I spent most the day snuggled up and bundled in sweaters while reading and writing. Basically, the perfect recipe for reading a quick book like Franny and Zooey between lunches and writing sessions and nap times. I picked it up around noon and after reading tidbits here and there all day, finally wrapped it up around kiddo’s bed time. I like having books like that around, especially as I finish up my year round Les Miserables Read-A-Long. It is the kind of book I hope to publish a few of here and there before I die, not in topic and theme, but in mood. I like getting to know characters in a specific moment of their life, like Virgina Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
I’ve been reading a lot of books from blogs lately, and I just finished Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade Life. I thought this blogger’s review, sentiments, and photographs were worth the reblog. Enjoy.
A Homemade Christmas
Title: A Homemade Life
Author: Molly Wizenberg
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Length: 313 pages
It was the cover that got me first. I saw a stack of these books and thought, those little white mugs look so lovely against that sage green. Those crystal glasses look so clean. I want my life to look like that; I need my life to look like that.
Of course, my kitchen life looks a little more like someone’s rummage sale: hodge-podge glasses; mugs of all shapes, sizes, and colors; I never have any idea what kind of utensils are in the kitchen as they have all been gifts, hand-me-downs, or left behind by various room mates. (I couldn’t possibly imagine where my waffle iron came from, but it’s ancient, difficult to clean, and I love it.) I say my ‘kitchen life’ as though it is only my kitchen that suffers from this unfashionably eclectic manner of acquiring my belongings, the truth is my whole life is this way. The library is not the gorgeous leather bound, gold embossed on mahogany shelves thing of Beauty and the Beast or the Bodleian… instead it’s got some of those and a lot more ratty hard backs and tired old paperbacks, stacks, piles, a thousand different wood grains and colors, and pretty much a hot mess forgiven merely because it is a hot mess of books. Even my cozy blankets have no continuity: quilts, afghans, fuzzy God-knows what kind; some made by old ladies, some by family, some just picked up at a thrift store, some from my childhood.
But it’s ok. The cover is lovely and it gives us something to aspire to. Even better than that, it isn’t fancy, it’s simple. Molly Wizenberg may have a neat and organized life of homemade goodness, but it’s simple and easily attainable. Her book isn’t about being the next Martha Stewart, and it isn’t about being a project obsessed Julie Powell, it’s just a cozy little recipe driven memoir – more than a memoir, actually. Her book reads like little life essays, not life lessons, just life in the ‘and then I fell in love with coconut’ sort of way. I like knowing these kinds of things about people… I don’t care about your degrees, your successes, your battle for this or for that, tell me how it was you fell in love with coconut. Tell me your thoughts on white chocolate and all the memories those thoughts unleash. Talk to me about rotten bananas and french toast, and what your parents were like in the kitchen. Molly does. And I love her for it.
Of course, if you bother to tell someone how you fell in love with coconut, your memories of the 80’s and white chocolate, your dad’s insights to making the best french toast on the planet, the moment you decided raw cabbage wasn’t half bad if prepared by the love of your life… you end up telling them about more than your food experiences, you basically tell them all the high and low points of your life, the parts that are way more personal than what degree you got in college.
Molly grew up in Oklahoma, being from Houston, TX, I don’t exactly consider that the south, but if you were from Montana I guess you probably would. Nevertheless, reading something written by an Oklahoman during an 80 degree December feels a little more weather-mood appropriate than reading something written by, let’s say, a Canadian. For a warm, southern winter, A Homemade Life perfectly fits the bill as it is all about the warmth of family in the kitchen, making a cozy way for yourself, and fabulous but mostly simple recipes… great for the holidays. But only if those holidays are warmish, because there are several summer and spring recipes that would totally throw me off my game if it was snowing outside. I’m a mood reader. For me to enjoy a book to the max, the weather, the house, the book, and the stars all have to align. Not entirely, I’m pretty good at getting completely lost in a book with absolutely no awareness of what is going on around me, but let’s face it, not everyone can write a 5 star book that doesn’t need ambiance guidance, and not every book is supposed to be read void of ambiance.
A Homemade Life is well-written, and thoroughly enjoyable, but it was written with the kitchen in mind. I’ve read much of it at the kitchen table over coffee or soup. Not every book is a coffee and soup at the kitchen table kind of book, but this one is. This book has made me greatly long for a window seat in my kitchen. The window seat would have a little garden box attached on the outside for all my kitchen herbs, I could open the pane and inhale the glorious scents of rosemary and green onions. I don’t have that. Instead, I read this sitting on a 30 year old, uneven chair with a rip in the leather, looking out the nearby window to my deck and tree. It’s a great view, but when I open the pane I get a strong whiff of dog, ancient wood, moss, and whatever smell is coming from the water treatment plant in the back of my neighborhood that day. My good days are in April when my jasmine masks all of that with vengeance.
But in my kitchen, I’m not just in my kitchen, I’m in Molly’s kitchen too. I’m falling in love with her character of a father, lovingly referred to as Burg. I’m living his grand moments, his love for breakfast and dinner, his love for his daughter, and his legacy after death. In Molly’s kitchen I am introduced to her husband, their friends, and their exciting life together. She shares all of this simply, eloquently, and with recipes.
In the spirit of recipe sharing, which in addition to being a lovely writer, is Molly’s forte, I will share a recent one of my own. I used to do this more often, but lately I’ve been hoarding my recipes to myself and a few friends, not intentionally, my blog is just book driven and my facebook page is picture driven. This recipe was birthed from a strong desire for Greek Chicken Orzo Soup and a simultaneous urge to hop in the car and get some Potato Soup from Panera Bread. I can see your eyebrows raised in suspicion as I type, but I assure you, it came out pretty fabulously and I’ve since made about four variations of it. I’m pretty lazy in the kitchen and this was all dumped in a crock pot…
Andi’s Greek/Potato Soup-ness:
1 can of cream style corn
1 can of whole kernal corn (optional, depending on the size of your pot)
1 can of water (I use the corn can and fill it with water)
1 chicken bullion cube
(in a vegetarian version we skipped the can of water and the chicken b. cube and used one can’s worth of vegetable broth)
a bit of milk (anywhere from a quarter cup to a whole can, depending on you and your pot)
mushrooms if you like, I’ve done it with and without
lots of chopped potato, just fill that pot up with as much as you can fit
celery, chopped… include the leafy bits, this is a must
and the part that makes it what it is… wait for it… ALL PURPOSE GREEK SEASONING, just shower it in over all those potatoes floating to the top, stir it up and shower some more. Greek Seasoning is absolutely the most awesome ‘secret’ ingredient to a soup ever. If you have an aversion to peppery flavors hold back, there’s a lot of black pepper in the flavor, but I have a black pepper allergy and it didn’t cause me problems so that made me happy
Because I’m from Texas, I put Tobasco in everything
The first time I made this was shortly after Thanksgiving and I added left over chunks of Thanksgiving ham to it, it was heavenly.
After a few years of sitting on my shelf (this is pretty typical unless the book is sent to me by an author or publisher to review), I picked the book up for the HPB Humble Book Club, we will be discussing it in January. I’m hoping the other members of the group enjoyed it as much as I have and maybe even tried out some of the recipes. I still can’t decide which concoction to bring on the first Monday in January, but I plan to make something of Molly’s to celebrate the joy of a life homemade.
Don’t forget to check out Molly’s blog, the Orangette.
Happy Homey Holidays
I am currently reading A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg, I thought it would be a nice holiday book that has nothing to do with the holidays. Instead, it’s about the warmth of family and the joys of a well-used kitchen. However, I’m not very far into it, and that’s not really what this post is about.
I adore homey, cozy things. A thick homemade quilt, a pie, a dog, a cup of coffee, a good book (like the one mentioned above), these are all things that make my home feel like the kind of home I want people to remember. A big part of my home, too, is Scentsy.
I adore Scentsy mostly because candles got way too expensive for how quickly I go through them, and a wickless candle lasts much, much longer. There’s all the familiar smells: Hazelnut Latte, Baked Apple Pie, the usual suspects in my candle purchases, but instead of a $5 candle that lasts a few days, I can get a $5 bar of wax that lasts months.
I’m sharing this with you for several reasons:
1. It has truly helped me maintain an affordable good smelling home. Glade plugins and candles were becoming way too much in this economy, and my house smelling good is too high of a priority (for me with 3 dogs and a kid) to just stop buying those kinds of things that help me feel relaxed. Although those old school gel cones from Wally World are awesome, I also like being able to have my things out in sight of visitors, something that produces ambiance.
2. It is Christmas and they make great gifts. Order online and get it shipped straight to the intended person.
3. Money is much tighter than usual, and being a stay at home Mom/ part time Event Coordinator/ Writer/ Scentsy Consultant /Kung Fu Instructor without a solid and dependable source of income of my own, I could really use the cash. Ha! There, I said it, this post is in part a ploy to get you to open your wallet.
So all pride aside, I present in a link My Scentsy Site and offer a heartfelt thank you to my followers for reading my blog, whether you are a Scentsy shopper or not, I truly appreciate you all and hope you’ll forgive my groveling.
Oh Book Love Art! I haven’t posted or reblogged any ‘book love art’ in awhile. I love this little blog by the way. She doesn’t seem to post all that frequently, but every post is from the heart.
I Like Old Clothes, too!
Title: I Like Old Clothes
Author: Mary Ann Hoberman
Illustrations: Patrice Barton
Publisher: Knopf
Genre: Children’s Picture Book
I Like Old Clothes is genius. Growing up with hand-me-downs from my sister who is 6 years older and rarely more than 6 months ahead of me in size, hand-me-downs were a pretty exciting part of life. As an adult, I’m a huge fan of thrift stores and passing things amongst friends. I like the worn in feel, I like the faded colors, I like the history.
I Like Old Clothes is a great book to have on hand to help indoctrinate your child with that appreciation. Indoctrinate may be a scary word that doesn’t really say what I mean… Instead, let me say, I Like Old Clothes is a great book to unveil the magic of used things that is usually shrouded in distaste by consumerism, greed, and the false ideals of what is cool.
Clearly, I was not cool growing up. But for the most part, I didn’t really care.
I still wear my dad’s 1960’s sweaters, I get compliments on them all the time, although it wasn’t so awesome to wear them when I was 14. I grew up wearing t-shirts, shorts, and skirts of my sister’s. Among other sisterly items, I wore her prom dress for a show choir performance in 8th grade and I remember feeling so bold and empowered knowing that I was in my sister’s dress. A girl I grew up with used to pass me all her old jeans, as she was six inches too tall for them by the time I needed them, it was a perfect arrangement.
I think it’s important for kids to grow up knowing that 1. They aren’t the only one wearing hand-me-downs and 2. Enjoy them! They’re awesome, not shameful.
This book is absolutely a must have. On top of the fabulous poetry singing the praises of used clothes are the beautiful illustrations. In the spirit of the content, the pictures have a soft, cozy feel. There’s kind of a Holly Hobby look to Barton’s work that I love, like a 20 year old patchwork quilt gone through the wash too many times. You look at the page and see the softness of a really soft t-shirt circa 1975, organic cotton, or even a fuzzy flannel. I want to wrap myself in the images, the little button flowers and all.
I checked this book out from the Harris County Public Library, but I can’t wait to purchase a copy of our very own.
A Bride’s Veil
Title: All Our Worldly Goods
Author: Irene Nemirovsky
Publisher: Vintage International
Length: 264 pages
Sometimes you pick up a book with too much expectation. I find I do that with all Irene Nemirovsky’s books. The whimsical 1940’s images, the promise of a love story and a certain level of French-ness, the heartbreaking knowledge that the author didn’t survive the holocaust… of course all her work immediately sounds enticing. You get a warm fuzzy and desperate feeling just looking at the cover (kudos to the marketing department), but those warm fuzzies are so intense, how could an author possibly live up to that? (Unless you’re Audrey Niffenegger, who lives up to all her book covers.)
I had a hard time getting into Suite Francaise, but its saving grace was listening to the symphony the novel was modeled after. In that light, the work became amazing, but only for the writing itself not because of the story. I say this years after reading the book with certainty because I cannot remember the story or any of the characters. If I can’t remember them, they surely could not have moved me that much.
I got the overwhelming desperate sensation to read All Our Worldly Goods at the library a few weeks ago, but like Suite Francaise, I picked it up to read and was only moderately interested. The characters seem riveting in theory, but a few paragraphs into chapter five I realize that I kind of want to know what happens but am not that moved by the people. It doesn’t help that I don’t feel well and Nemirovsky is NOT good home with the flu reading. To be fair with her work, I feel as though I need to be at a coffee shop tucked away in a dark corner without the presence of my two-year old. Maybe it’s because of sentences like: “It was a November day; the skies wept softly; the wind danced in a bride’s veil; the carriage crushed the last reddish leaves.”
I probably won’t be finishing this particular book. I have to turn it into the library tomorrow or face fines and I cannot renew it because it’s on a waiting list. I’m not disappointed about not being able to finish it, though, and I have no desire to rush to the store and find a copy for myself. Instead, I want to find out who that person is and have a conversation with them once they hit chapter five. How do you feel? Is it living up to your expectations? Or does her work leave you a little bit depressed and unsatisfied?
Funny that the sentence, of all sentences, that I plucked off the page to use in this post as I was writing it was one metaphorically using a bride’s veil. My husband and I were just talking about bride’s veils – and their purpose – the other day. I didn’t wear a veil. I’m not too keen on veils. “Veils were for arranged marriages when the groom had never seen the bride before and was restricted from seeing how ugly she was until after he was stuck,” my husband laughed. We can’t remember why this topic came up: a commercial? a Doctor Who episode? Pinterest images? Who knows? The point is, that’s how I feel about Nemirovsky’s work. The book is laced in the most beautiful veil ever to be seen, intricate and finely placed descriptions and pictures on the dust jacket. Then you start reading the book and realize, the bride is not ugly per se, but she’s just not as beautiful as I was led to believe. She’s nice, she’s alright, but she’s no super model. And I’m a groom who feels stuck with something of little interest when I expected and wanted something amazing.
HPB Humble Spring Book Club Picks!
The Series I Couldn’t Finish
I genuinely enjoyed Wicked. I read it a few years ago when there were about a hundred copies floating around in the fiction section I was running. As a bookseller, if I see a dozen of something, I take it home and read it so I can tell my customers about it. You can’t sell a book you know nothing about, right? And Wicked was neat. I thought it was so neat, I added it to the list of things to do with my daughter when she’s older… a month of Oz: Read the original Wizard of Oz, watch Judy Garland sing and be awesome in the old movie, read Wicked together, go see the musical, and so on.
I pumped the series during an Earth Day event too: Go Green with the Wicked Witch of the West! I thought I was being cute, most of my co-workers just thought I was being weird. I’m ok with that.
Then, I read book two: Son of a Witch. I struggled, plodded, and pulled hair through it. Three quarters of the way through the book I realized that I didn’t really care for the story, Maguire’s intricate world no longer resembled Oz in any way except in name, and frankly I was bored. I was reading for the sake of the series.
I bought Lion Among Men off a clearance table at Barnes & Noble when it was still a current publication. I had the first two in hardback, it only seemed appropriate to be complete. Besides, a lot of series have a saggy middle and then perk up quite nicely in the end. I was under the false impression that this was going to be a nice little wrap up for a trilogy. Still, I was unmotivated to read it. It sat on my shelf for a couple of years, all crisp, shiny, and new. I read the first 5 pages about a half-dozen times and put it back.
At the beginning of 2012 I set some reading goals for myself. I do this every year. I typically decide that I should read anywhere between 60 and 80 books a year, but steadily hit in the 70 to 75 range (except for the year I was pregnant). This year, I was overzealous and was shooting for 80 or more, I am currently reading my 70th title if you don’t include children’s picture books, which I don’t, and clearly not going to read 10 books by the end of the month. With these goals, come little notes to read through x amount of already owned titles, or to finish such and such series. Lion Among Men fell into both of these notes, so creeping on December I gave myself the final push and said, “It’s now or never.”
I checked it out from the library on audio, thinking it would be an easy thing to listen to while doing chores. Kill multiple birds with one stone and all that.
Despite John McDonough’s excellent reading voice, ah I could die listening to that wonderful voice, I have yet to finish the book. And, I will be turning the audio book back into the library having listened to the first disc in the course of a month.
Sadly, The Wicked Years is just not for me. I don’t feel it in my bones, I am not enraptured in its essence and all those other over the top feelings I get when I am enthralled with a series. Simply put, if I were to ever finish this series (which, by the way, has a 4th book too!), it would be by the sheer force of my insane will to get things done. I don’t care about it that much to be that willful.
This is a series that shall remain unfinished.
Do you have a series of books like that in your life? Talk to me.
What series have you read lately that you simply could not have lived without?
A Review of Michael Grant’s Gone
Title: GONE
Author: Michael Grant
Publisher: HarperTeen
Genre: Young Adult/ Science Fiction
Length: 558 pages
Take the horror of Golding’s Lord of the Flies
My niece handed me this book, she’s in the third volume of the series, and loving it. She’s into the dark and twisty books these days, I remember being into them at that age too. And though I’m hooked on these as an adult as well, I find these a little too dark and twisty from the perspective of a parent.
Kids killing kids, babies starving to death trapped in homes without care, fires, dark demon-like creatures on the hunt, it’s a little too much when I think of it with my own kiddo in mind. It puts my obsessive crazy brain on a mission to ensure my child is a self-sufficient survivor with some mad Kung Fu skills under her belt as soon as possible. It reminds me the value of teaching my kid about God, love, and the makings of good leaders; how to recognize right from wrong and good from bad without having an adult there to tell you. In case of crisis, this is the plan…
When it comes down to it, Grant is a great writer for this genre. He is dark and twisty, but he does limit his descriptions as to leave plenty of room for the imagination. So although there is a dead baby that’s needs taken care of, a twelve-year-old is less likely to visualize the entire process of a baby being alone for eight days and then found dead. Grant addresses the smell of the house, the fact that the main character has to clean it up and take care of the child, and the emotional trauma of the situation, but he doesn’t go into a gross CSI style detail that would move me to guide a twelve-year-old away from the series. That’s what keeps the book so intriguing rather than nauseating.
Well, that and the fact that I’m a sucker for dystopian societies and coming of age stories.
My recommendation if your kid picks this up: Read it WITH them, and be ready to discuss.
Anakalian Whims 