but mainly I feel bad about never reading her before now

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
by Nora Ephron

I enjoyed every word. I'd gotten the impression it was going to be outrageously funny but I didn't find it so, however, chuckles were induced; along with smirks, giggles, and explosive grins. As a martini, this collection is perfectly dry.

Funny or not, it was delicious! As a woman getting on in years, I identified with every word. But that doesn't mean you have to be a middle-aged woman to love this stuff. Maybe I don't "feel bad about my neck" just yet, but I definitely feel bad about my ears--I swear they're bigger than they used to be. And my nose that sprouts hairs like a chia pet. And my upper lip has a permanent five-o-clock shadow.

A bit of the book isn't about aging at all. There's a funny story about working in the White House during the Kennedy years and another one about how she fell in and out of love with Bill Clinton.

I can't wait to get my hands on another book of her stories. I even bookmarked a search in the Huffington Post online. She's addictive.

It helps to have an cheering squad

 
Fourth day of jogging in a row was murder. I didn't feel so bad while I was doing it, other than a queasy stomach due to an early morning blowout. But afterwards all I wanted to do was sit down.

And NO RECIPES, thank dog

A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove
by Laura Schenone

 
I don't remember exactly why some of the reviewers diss'd this book. I saw some bellyaching about a limitation of scope, but I don't agree. It seemed properly scoped to me--It covered over a thousand years of cooking and eating in America, from fine cuisine for the rich politicians to down home eats of grits and greens. Maybe it skipped some of the interesting outliers--jambalaya from swamp country, beef brisket from Texas, cabbage stew from the poor folk in Maine with the compressed growing season--but it hit the mainstream right in the guts.

It filled me with deep sadness and loss as I recalled how housewives turned away from the food of their mother's and anxiously studied the nutritional guidelines that the government said would make their family strong. Spicy food was harmful; beans gassy. A well-balanced meal consisted of an overdone pot roast of beef, boiled potatoes, green beans seasoned with butter and a sprinkle of salt, a slice of clean, pure white bread, and a jello mold with canned fruit.  I suffered through "home economics" myself, and while I did learn how to preheat an oven and measure brown sugar, I never learned the really useful stuff--like how to chop an onion. There's a good way and a lot of bad ways to chop an onion and I didn't learn the good way until I was fifty years old. I had to find out for myself how to cook a pot of pinto beans seasoned with garlic,cumin and jalapenos. How to throw ears of corn in a 450-degree oven for 40 minutes and eat them with just a sprinkle of Kosher salt and cayenne pepper. How to saute collard greens with onion, garlic, bell pepper and vegetable broth, then season them with cider vinegar and a touch of sugar.

Okay, I didn't mean to go all Food Network on you. I should be blasting Home Ec classes for different reasons--not for the crimes they committed against taste, but the crimes against healthy. Even though we didn't know the true nature of milk, meat, white grains and cheese back then, we did know that fresh fruits and vegetables were good for you. We knew that oatmeal made a hearty breakfast and black-eye peas gave you good luck

I could go on and on, but back to the book. As I said, the most heart-breaking thing was the loss of the immigrant's skills and tastes as they homogenized into American culture. But the most warming thing was the story of how a generation of cooks were led by Julia Child, James Beard, Alice Waters and many others to start thinking of cooking as love, not duty; kitchen time as a privilege, not a pain to be avoided; and good taste as a joy, not a forbidden fruit. The story of how America learned to love cooking again.

. They never taught us future "frugal housewives" (aka single moms on food stamps) how to make nutritious, economical meals out of the stuff found at the A&P. We learned nothing about buying in bulk, canning, drying and freezing. Nothing about the staying power of a one pound bag of dried beans. Nothing about seasonal fruit....

Why the classics are classics

Journey to the Center of the Earth
by Jules Verne

Pronounce it "Jule" not "Jules". And get Mount Vesuvius out of your mental image--for some reason it was stuck in my head--every time I started wondering where they'd eventually turn up, I kept thinking Mount Vesuvius. I was so wrong.

I listened to the audiobook and I must say, it wasn't what I remembered from my childhood. I guess I must have seen a movie or a cartoon version of it at some point, but based on my vague memories it had gotten the true Hollywood treatment. All of the cool stuff in the book was brand new to me; the stuff I vaguely remembered was absent or only mentioned in passing.

I was a tad annoyed at having to continually wonder which bits of science were real, which were common beliefs back then but total nonsense now, and which were fanciful flights of a brilliant man's imagination.  (I didn't listen to it with an encyclopedia at hand.) But that's okay. There was enough that was real enough to keep me a rapt listener.

And one more thing: books written in the nineteenth century and earlier were almost invariably written to be read aloud. It gives them a certain presence that they can't always convey when you're skimming along the pages with eyes moving faster than a tongue can twist. I found this to be true for certain with Middlemarch and again with this. What other classics are there which I couldn't stand to read on paper but heartily enjoy in
the spoken voice?

I'm going looking for them right now!

Short book but slow going

A Fifty-Year Silence
by Miranda Richmond Mouillot

Miranda is a young woman growing up in America. Her grandparents are
Holocaust survivors--her grandmother has moved to America but her grandfather still lives in France.  Miranda's childhood was troubled, haunted by scary stories seldom told; frightful images of the destruction of her family and ancestral home.  Not that she heard much about these things from the people closest to her, but she knew they happened--she was a child of no small imagination.

Her grandparents are completely and bitterly estranged.  Just to hear the name of his wife would enrage her grandfather into bitter silence or hateful words. The grandmother also had no love spared for her husband, only invective. But at some point in Miranda's life she encouraged her to go visit him, meet him for herself. Miranda thought he wasn't so bad and was puzzled by their continued enmity.

Later Miranda become an unwitting mediator between them over an old house in the south of France that they still owned. He has been doing the upkeep of it but now wants to sell it, but her name is on the deed. Before she will consent, the grandmother decides to take a trip and look at it. Miranda is dragged along.

You have to live your life forward.  Go eat some lunch.

And that's all I am going to tell.  It's a lovely, lovely memoir.  I will hold back from the full five stars on account of how long it took me to finish it--it's not a long book, but once put down, a bit hard to pick up again. But I recommend it heartily with both hands.

Sci Fi to die for

The Infinite Sea
by Rick Yancey

Rick Yancy has done it right this time!  The first book nearly did it for me and I wasn't sure I could stomach another.  It had it's moments but they were few and far between--hours of teenage angst, self-doubt, and soul searching that reminded me of the first book in the Twilight series.  The characters in a science fiction book don't all have to be Han Solo but neither do they have to be Bella Swan.

This series is science fiction with a human focus--my favorite.  Alien ships are circling the earth, ready to move in once all the pesky little humans are gone.  And the aliens choose some very unusual methods for removing us.

The first book concentrated on 'how'--this one on 'why'...and I'm still guessing.  Answers lead to more questions and it left me in burning curiosity to find out what the real answers are. I'm hooked for the duration.

Wednesday

I am not  a scratching post. I am a human being!

SAD tidings

I ate the typical SAD last night. Green salad with too much dressing; barbequed chicken; potato salad and bread with butter.  This morning my sixty minute jog felt like a marathon.

Beans for lunch.

Molly's life, with recipes

I really need to learn to resist my affinity for memoirs with recipes.  Or at the least, I need to always purchase the electronic copy.  Once again, I've ended up at the end of one--A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg--with dozens of little bookmarks at recipes that need to be laboriously copied into my to-try file.

I master the technology to scan them into PDFs, but seldom bother to use it; instead convincing myself that if I really want to try a recipe, I'll take the time to copy it out by hand.

As to this one, I can say without reservations, that I enjoyed 95% of it. Toward the end the memoir got thinnish and the recipes came faster; I read a few of them but in general, I'm not into reading recipes for pleasure.  And this book gave a lot of pleasure.

Mostly vegetarian, too, but seldom vegan.  I don't blame her and her husband for loving a good cheese; I'm just trying to stay away from the stuff.  but if you're a cheese-lover, go for this book.  If not, go for it anyway.  It's fun.

cooking on the glorious 4th

 First rule of cooking--keep your workspace tidy.

The problem

The right tool

SOLUTION!