today’s assignment provides a timely way to note–with sadness–the sudden job change of one of my favorite food writers, ruth reichl, who was most recently editor of the now defunct gourmet magazine.

this past year i discovered a book series that made me laugh, made me cry and almost made me gain ten pounds just from the reading of it.

tender at the bone

comfort me with apples

garlic and sapphires

these are not cookbooks, but rather a memoir. however, each book in the series happens to include recipes. it is one of my personal beliefs that a book that describes good food so well it makes your mouth water should most definitely include the recipes for said food.

reichl does not disappoint.

one of these days my friend becky and i are going to go through the series and try the recipes, one by one.

shall i call you for a taste test?

today’s assignment

i’m more inclined to find heroes in everyday people than in characters in a book. so when asked to write about a particular war hero from literature, i kind of drew a blank. in so many war stories, just possessing the will to survive becomes a heroic act in and of itself. even in present day, i can think of a number of people i know who are my heroes simply for their will to survive the mortar rounds mortal life has thrown in their respective paths.

however, when i think of literature about war, two pieces of fiction and one memoir stand out in my mind:

man’s search for meaning, by victor frankl

i was still pretty much a kid when i read it, but this one thought struck me and has stayed with me ever since:

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms–to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

words to live by.

the two works of fiction that come to mind impacted my life for another reason.

all quiet on the western front, by erich maria remarque

cold mountain, by charles frazier

i didn’t fully understand the power of fiction and what it is i love most about reading fiction until i contemplated on how these two books taught me to walk a mile in the shoes of someone else–someone different from me. someone i likely would have considered my enemy or a character whom i may have judged harshly or despised because their choices were different from what i believe. by seeing the world through the eyes of these characters and getting a glimpse into their hearts, i learned how to find common ground. i felt sympathy, compassion and empathy.

the world, then–during the respective time periods represented by these books–and now, definitely needs more common ground. more sympathy, compassion and empathy.

and that is the beauty of fiction–it has the power to inspire such within those who will read and step out of themselves long enough to consider the world from another point of view.

today’s assignment

my favorite childhood book:

i read it to myself. perhaps a hundred times.

perhaps another time i’ll write a post about why books about characters who are desperately seeking someone to love them and a place to belong appeal so much to children and young adults. or why they might have appealed to me.

because as a young girl, my favorite book was

the one i owned had this exact same cover. i lost it at some point in my growing up. the copy i own now is different, but what i wouldn’t give to own one like the one i read at least a dozen times as a child

perhaps another time i will write a post about how as an adult i lent it to a friend and she gave it back telling me i should reconsider it because it really wasn’t that good and thus i learned an important lesson about judging the past with through the eyes of the present.

current favorites i discovered and read to my own kids and would love to give to a grandchild include

and

simply because i embrace color and imagination. and i love word play.

seuss is a master of word play.

And I would read him in a boat!
And I would read him with a goat…
And I will read him in the rain.
And in the dark. And on a train.

today’s assignment:

Books You (and by “you” I mean “I”) Needn’t Read
Twilight (don’t be a hater now)
Baby books
Self-help books

Books You Mean To Read
Whatever is on the list for book club this month
Note: It’s a little late for this month. I was supposed to read Jane Eyre. I had good intentions of reading it until a friend called with an emergency over the weekend. She needed me to read Catching Fire STAT so she would have someone to discuss it with (I know, don’t end a subject with a preposition–but do you really want to hear me write “with whom she could discuss?”). I’m a good friend and I’m in more of a mood to read The Eyre Affair than the actual Jane Eyre, so there! I obliged and now I will be AWOL from book club tonight. My apologies, peeps.

Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You’ve Read Them
Any Oprah book that I hadn’t already read before she told everybody to read it

Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time To Reread
(sometimes by “books” I mean more than one book from the same author)
Dostoevsky
Camus
Cather
Anne Tyler
The Riddlemaster of Hed Series
Poe
Hemmingway
Jane Eyre

Books You’ve Always Pretended to Have Read And Now It’s Time To Really Read Them:
Proust

Speaking of Proust, here’s a couple of lists I stole from La Yen:

Books That Make Me Cry:
Unless
Harry Potter
The Riddlemaster of Hed
The Mistborn series
Because it is Bitter Because it is My Heart

Books That Make Me Laugh Out Loud:
Jasper Fforde Tuesday Next (series)
Jasper Fforde Nursery Crimes (series)
Peter Mayle
Funny in Farsi

Books I Must Reread at Least Once a Year:
Skipping Christmas
Don’t Bite Me I’m Santa Claus

And a couple of my own:

Books I Chose For Book Club That Were Totally Panned:
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Hamlet (not a book, actually, but panned nonetheless)

Books Over Which I Became Ostracized Because I Panned Them Publicly (perhaps in a meeting such as the one formerly known as Homemaking, or even book club
The Christmas Box
Jodi Picoult

Books That Make Me Gain 10 Pounds Just By Reading Them:
Peter Mayle Provence series
Tender At The Bone
Comfort Me With Apples
Garlic and Sapphires

Now you tell me: What’s on your shelf?

One of my favorite books by Anne Tyler is “Ladder of Years.” When I read it the first time I didn’t get the main character at all. In fact, I was outraged. Her name is Delia and at the beginning of the book (spoiler alert) she does something that was completely incomprehensible to me. While spending a week at the beach with her family she goes for a walk and just keeps on walking. She walks away from her life and starts up a completely new life.

Huh?

Then I had teenagers.

And I got Delia.

One of favorite parts of the book is when–probably about dinner time (of course)–the rest of the family finally notices Delia is missing. The police are called and the first thing they ask for is a description. Her family isn’t any help. They’re not really certain about her hair. They have no idea what she was wearing. They don’t even know what color her eyes are.

It’s like she was invisible.

*********

Last weekend I took a couple of my kids to Wal-Mart (hey–desperate times call for desperate measures). We decided to divide and conquer and eventually I found myself staring at rows of vitamins looking for the best calcium supplement for my weary bones. At one point during my quest I looked up to find my two teenagers standing about 10 feet away, staring at me intently. Finally Z~ asks, “Mom, did you get your hair cut?”

Um yeah.

Over a week ago.

Apparently they had been debating about whether or not the nondescript woman standing at the vitamin counter contemplating the differences between calcium citrate and calcium carbonate was their mother.

So I told them the story of Delia.

“But Mom. You’re not like a person. You’re an entity.”

(This from the child I made swear fealty to me because I labored over and delivered him even though he weighed 10 lb. 5 oz. at birth.)

* sigh *

From the BBC via La Yen…

X means I’ve read it even though apparently the BBC presumes most people have only read 6 of 100.

O means I’m putting it on my to-read list thanks to La Yen’s recommendation.

(La Yen, next time I want something from La Yen via the BBC. And do you think it’s cheating that we are English majors and all?)

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6 The Bible (the WHOLE Bible) X (I did it for a steak dinner)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Do I get points for at least owning them–I’ve read most?)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy X
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy X (La Yen: So lame. That is how you know I am not a natural geek.) (Dalene: Same here.)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky X (Russians are brilliant.)
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy X
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X
34 Emma – Jane Austen (Love the movie. Not a huge fan of Austen in print. There. I said it.)
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (Possibly the only person on the planet.)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden X (I thought it was a real memoir.)
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X (I had a crush on CR.)
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown X (I was the last person on the planet.)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez O
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins X
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel X
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon O
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (I read a book about reading it in Tehran.)
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas X
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X (Finally, after about 20 times giving up by page 25)
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce X
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray O
80 Possession – AS Byatt O
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X (Every last one.)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (Does it count if I saw it as a midnight movie?)
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery X (in French no less.)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare X (At least 100 times.)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo X

So that last post contained both politics and earnestness, which could have been the death knell of my blog as we know it. Thank goodness I’ve been charged with spreading the word about a great cause I was blessed to be able to contribute to in a small (but meaningful to me) way. So we can move on.

Buy the book already! It includes a post from yours truly (and earnestly in every way).

Thanks to Sue for seeing through my earnestness and finding something funny. Thanks, too for giving me something to do and allowing me to collaborate with some of my favorite bloggers and help out just a little for a great cause.

It was a pleasure.

(Although Sue, seriously, we have to talk. How is it I’m not on the short list of “celebrity bloggers”? I mean, TAMN herself has commented on my blog. You and I have broken bread together at least twice. That should count for something, no? Am I even on the B-list? What’s it gonna take?)

And in case any of you have been avoiding all the cold and the haze and have been hibernating under a rock this January and you haven’t heard, tomorrow is the big day.

I’d like to add my voice to that of the masses and say:

Welcome back Nie Nie and best wishes for your continued recovery!

(All proceeds from Something Cleverish and Enjoy It!–see my sidebar–go to support the Nie Recovery fund–also on my sidebar. Also keep your eye over at ~j’s where I will be auctioning a few items–sour cream lemon pie, anyone?–during a fundraising event to be held in conjunction with the Mindy Gledhill Benefit Concert.)

…wish you could find the little girl you once were and pull her close to you? Maybe give her a big hug and sit her down on your old plaid sofa right next to you so you could tuck her small self right under your arm, both of you snuggling under your favorite log cabin quilt while you read her favorite book to her?

In my case the book would have been Corduroy at one point

And this would be the little girl.

I almost forgot about her, but I just found the e-mail in which my little brother sent her long lost picture to me. And now I remember…

(Thanks Sue for the great idea in your comment.) If you’d like to join in the fun, post a picture of your little girl self along with one of her/your favorite books at that age. If you do, let me know in the comments and I’ll post a link to your blog.

I’d like you to meet…
little girl cabesh
mommom
b.
suedonym
mrs. organic
jillybean
cari

…I’m reading.

My second-born says I sold out.

I say if you catch me reading *Twilight then you’ll know I’ve sold out.

I’ll come up for air sometime tomorrow.

*No offense to the legion of you who love it. It’s just the way I am. I have a hard time making myself jump on the bandwagon for anything. I didn’t read The Da Vinci Code until the week before the movie came out and then only because I really love Tom Hanks and France (you see–I’m certainly not on the bandwagon there) and I made myself read the book before I would allow myself to see the movie. If I get a hankering to see a vampire movie I think I’ll save myself some trouble and simply watch Van Helsing again.

In case you haven’t noticed lately, I’ve been doing quite a bit of campaigning this election year.

I’ve endorsed my friend’s new quilt shop. Vote for Shop at Just Sew!

I’ve been a volunteer coordinator womaning the phones for Deon Turley. (If you live in District 61) Vote for Deon Turley!

And I’m going to remind you one more time to rock the vote for the Lo Down. Vote for Lorien (HERE)!

But here’s where I get to tell you I’m also stumping for C Jane (If you live in District 63) Vote for Steve Clark!

No (I mean YES, vote for all of the above–including Steve Clark–but what this post is really about is…), seriously, I had the honor and pleasure of lending my heart and hand to her latest memoir.

It’s more of a greatest hits album, really. And I love it! It made me laugh and it made me cry. (And all I was doing was a teeny wee bit of compiling and formatting.) So please go check it out. (Vote for Buy the book!)

All royalties will benefit Stephanie Nielson.

cover designed by Maralise Photo Design

The book is called Enjoy It!

And I did!