Hot House Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire

I like my reading to match my cooking, that is, it should be seasonally appropriate. Sure, you can splurge and buy a $6 pint of strawberries mid-winter but you'll eat a grainy and tasteless strawberry shortcake. And somehow an oven roasted acorn squash tastes completely out of place mid-July. Likewise, why would you read Dr. Zhivago in the summer? It's cold weather reading! You have to be under a blanket with a cup of hot tea.

Hot House Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire by Margot Berwin was just in season for this summer. It was cool and rainy early summer, just like the New York March weather when Lila Nova buys her first tropical flower from David Exley at the Union Square Green Market. She soon notices a mystical laundromat owned by Armand, who is also a collector of tropical flowers. Entering the laundromat is like entering a tropical paradise, and soon Lila is intoxicated by rare plants and sexy vendors.

Just as the Boston heat and humidity set in, Lila headed off with a one way ticket to the Yucatan jungle to find the mythical nine plants of desire and, yes, herself (this is summer reading, after all!).

This book was smart and contemporary and offered just enough escapism to (nearly) make me forget that it was 63 F and drizzly. 5/5 netflix stars.

Recommended eating: tropical fruit salad, even if the fruit's not grown locally.

Alone In The Kitchen With An Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone

Everyone has some experience eating alone. Perhaps you were a BU student and sat in the G.S.U. during a break in your afternoon classes and ate a BK chicken sandwich. Or perhaps you travel for business and order room service. Maybe you just moved to a new city and go out to eat regardless if you have friends yet who will join you.

In Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant, Jenni Ferrari-Adler compiles essays by such noted writers as M.F.K. Fischer, Amanda Hesser, Steve Almond, Ann Patchett and Laurie Colwin, about cooking and dining alone (or in one case, the desire to cook and dine alone!). Each essay provides a glimpse into a personal life and often, a recipe.

I picked up this book book because most evenings I eat alone so I wanted to find out how other people did it. Did they overcook like I tend to? Do they snack their way through a box of crackers and a bottle of wine? Did they forego any pretense of nutrition and instead devour a pint of ice cream?

Far from being a sad book on lonliness, nearly all the contributors looked upon their eating alone days as some of the best in their lives. Each essay made me smile and at least half had me laughing out loud.

What do I eat when I eat alone? I'm not a take-out kind of girl and prefer my own lunches to those of the hospital cafeteria where I work. So I cook on Sundays-- lots of quiches and gratins, soups, stews and things that can last a week or live awhile in the freezer. And the nice thing about eating alone IS that I can eat when and what I want. A few summers back I craved a BLT made with one of the juicy heirlooms I'd just picked up from the farmer's market. But rather than buy bread, I decided to make my own. Nearing midnight, my bread hot out of the oven, I made myself the best BLT I've ever had. And reading this book reminded me why, in part, that was. We are our own best company.

Netflix stars 5/5.

Gilead

I grew up attending church. We went to a Presbyterian Church in Wichita, or, when in Oklahoma City, went to the church my grandparents and parents went to. As a kid, I almost always went to Sunday School-- an hour of songs, crafts, snacks and a Bible story. On occassions I'd have to go to the "adult" service and it would seriously try my patience. In my mind, the sermon was always 45 minutes, with the remaining 15 minutes song singing, prayer and offering collection. This was all followed by donuts in the fellowship hall. It was a time to try to avoid fidgeting and maybe a time to try to understand the sermon, which didn't seem to have anything to do the Bible stories and miracles we learned about in Sunday School. By the time I got to high school, I didn't really have to go to church any longer, so I didn't.

Twenty some odd years later I've decided to give church another try. I wanted a spirit of community, a calmness and a reason to wake up on Sunday mornings. Most suprising is that the sermons are maybe just 15 minutes and are also totally understandable now!

This is all a long way of saying that reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson was a little like attending a church service as a kid-- kind of tedious and sleep inducing, but poetic-- and a little like attending a church service as an adult-- thought provoking, relaxing and at times even entertaining.

Robinson composes the novel as a letter from Pastor Ames, a man in his 70s, to his young son. It's a loving and detailed journal and at times, it was all I could do to remember that Robinson is in fact a novelist and Ames is a fictional character. The letter/journal is part observation-- detailing what his son is wearing (a favorite red shirt), part philosophical and religious musing and part family history-- from finding and visiting a grandfather's grave in Kansas, to admitting his jealousy and confusion over his best friend's family, with special focus on young Boughton.

I started this book months ago and had a lot of trouble getting into it. I'd read some, then start another book...so I was continually reading it but while I had other books going. It wasn't until about half way through the book that a plot/storyline took hold. There's no doubt that Robinson is an amazing writer. Housekeeping remains one of my all time favorite books. But I can't in good faith recommend this book fully. It was worth the effort in the end, and I'm glad I read it, but it was a tough journey. Thus I'm giving it 3/5 netflix stars.

In The Skin of a Lion

I chose to check out Michael Ondaatje's book, In The Skin of a Lion for two reasons. First, I had just recently rewatched The English Patient and was reminded what a fantastic story teller Ondaatje is. The second reason was a recommendation from an NPR series, "You Must Read This." Kamila Shamsie recommends it so thoroughly that she almost doesn't recommend it, for fear of anyone not loving it as much as she does.

In The Skin of a Lion is a dreamy story of Patrick, the son of a Canadian logger, his life, loves and friends. The narrative skirts between fiction and magical realism; a nun falling off a bridge is miraculously saved, but has a chance to change her identity and become an actress. Caravaggio (the thief from The English Patient) escapes jail by being painted blue. Patrick helps build a waterworks, and then subsequently swims through the plumbing with the aim of destroying it with dynamite. The lives of all the characters intersect and then pass. Like yarn on a loom, they are separate, but complete a whole.

I read most of this book on a rainy bus home from New York and was transported. I thought about books that I have loved and implored friends "they must read": The Living, by Annie Dillard, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence. I think it would be safe to add this book to that list as well.

Netflix rating, 5/5.

Flower Children

A few weeks ago, in a post dentist high, I bought a bagfull of books at the Booksmith. It's been a dreary spring and early summer and I was craving some beach reading, even if it's too rainy to go to the beach. The cover of Flower Children, by Maxine Swann, showed a 70s era photo of kids romping in a field of flowers. A small volume, it looked promising, and in fact, it was light and if not completely engaging, at least harmless.

The "children" in questions are the offspring of a pair of hippies, living in a ramshackle old country home. The book is comprised of related short stories taking place over the children's lives. The children go on ski and road trips with their father, divorced from their mother, and generally make life difficult for his girlfriends. They go to their grandma's and swim in the pool while the adults have cocktails. They ride ponies with the neighborhood boys and have their first kisses.

But this book lacked the magic the glowing cover seemed to offer. There was no hook and the characters lacked depth. In all, though, it wasn't terrible. If you were to find it on the bookshelf of your beach house on a rainy afternoon, it would suffice.

3/5 netflix stars.

Crazy Love

While reading Crazy Love by Leslie Morgan Steiner, I wanted more than anything for the book to be fiction. I wanted this in part because Leslie's story was sad and difficult and I wouldn't want anyone to suffer the injustices she described. But I also wanted it because the memoir was just so sloppily written that I wanted to just read it as a throwaway book.

Leslie writes about her first marriage in her early 20s to a man who first hit her five days before their wedding. She describes the violence inflicted on her during their honeymoon and also her isolation when they moved away from her friends and family to Vermont. Conor meets many hallmarks of an abuser-- he came from a family where he was abused and slowly controls Leslie, even though she doesn't think of herself as a "typical" battered wife. And in many ways, she's not what we think. She comes from an old, rich family, went to a prestigious college, interned at Seventeen magazine, went to business school. Not to be picky, but these are the exact reasons I wanted the book to be better written! The chronology was confusing, her's and Conor's characters were not multi-dimensional and there were some many inaccuracies (ie, Bostonians do not say "pop" for a Coke-- a detail, but if you're going to throw it in, it better be correct!).

I've read a couple memoirs in the past year or so. The best was An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination and the so-so was Trail of Crumbs. This leans more to the latter-- a need to get the story out.

I admire Leslie for telling her story and for the ultimate "happy ending" even though it wasn't as sophisticated as I would have liked. I'm giving it 3/5 netflix stars.

Those Who Save Us

About five years ago I mentored a 10 year old boy. We spent nearly every Saturday together for two years and had to come up with a lot of creative ways to spend our time in Boston. More than once we went ice skating on the Frog Pond and spent many mornings rollerblading along the Esplanade. We trekked parts of the Freedom Trail with stops along the way for treats (Mike's Pastry and Faneuil Hall). Anyone who has spent time with kids aged 7-12 knows this: endless questions and arguments that are oddly more logical than should be fair.

J: Will you buy me those Pokeman Cards?

Me: No, sorry!

J: Why not?

Me: Because...

J: But I know you have money and they are only $2.

Or...

Me: I'm going slow rollerblading because I don't know how to stop.

J: But what if you were coming to the end of the dock and the river was in front of you?

Me: I'd fall to the side first.

J: What if you were rollerblading down a mountain and a bear was chasing after you?

Me: What??

Or...

(At the Holocaust Memorial in Boston by Faneuil Hall)

J: Why? I don't understand?

Me: Me neither.

So it really wasn't a surprise that Steph's pick for book club this month, Those Who Save Us, by Jenna Blum, raised a lot of questions and generated more discussion than most books we read.

Anna and Trudie are a mother and daughter of German descent currently living in Minnesota. Trudie doesn't know much about her early childhood during WWII in Weimar and Anna refuses to talk about it. But Trudie harbors guilt that her father was a high ranking SS official based on a small photo in a cigarette case her mom has held onto. Because her own mother won't discuss what she did to survive during the war, Trudie starts interviewing other Germans living in Minnesota, capturing their stories on video.

In the meantime, the story flashes back to Anna's life during the war, and we realize that everyone's decisions on everything were colored by fear and the desire to just survive.

In a speech today, President Obama recognized survivors of the Holocaust and remarked, "We are awed by your acts of courage and conscience. And your presence today compels each of us to ask ourselves whether we would have done what you did. We can only hope that the answer is yes," he said.

Ms. Blum's book asks the same questions and comes up with some difficult answers.

5/5 netflix stars