Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I read Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone: Growing up at the Table on a whim, and I liked it so much that I’ve whipped through her memoirs Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, and Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir. All of these are delightful books about adventures in eating - not just restaurant reviewing but also cooking, and going to foreign lands to try new foods. (For instance, Reichl was one of the very early western visitors to China after it opened.) The books are like strings of mini-vacations and I found them completely perfect for the current situation.

I also read Reichl’s book For You, Mom, Finally (also published as Not Becoming My Mother: And Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way), a much shorter memoir that is not about food at all. Instead, the book is about Reichl’s mother and many other women like her in that generation, who gave up work to be housewives just at the moment when labor-saving devices meant that housewife was no longer a full-time job unless you had small children - which meant that many of them spent the rest of their lives bored and frustrated, without a useful outlet for their excess energy.

What I’m Reading Now

Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, not so much a novel as a series of interlinked portraits of the inhabitants of a fictional (but presumably representative) seaside Maine town in the 1890s. The narrator is just about to head out to an island off the coast of the town to meet her landlady’s mother. A gentle, pleasant, picturesque read so far.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m considering whether to read Reichl’s novel Delicious!. I’ve loved her memoirs, but novel-writing is such a different beast… Has anyone read her novel? What did you think?

Possibly I should give some other author a chance, anyway, after a straight week of Reichl. (Or maybe I should focus some energy on actually copyediting The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball, which has lain by the wayside as I devoured literary lobes of foie gras.) I can always come back to Delicious! later.

Comments

[oracne]

One of these days I need to read Reichl. I read the Jewett in college, and liked it so much I gave it to my sister, who had always wanted to visit Maine.

[asakiyume]

You read such a great variety of stuff. I feel like if our minds are gardens, yours is a very beautifully *full* one, with all sorts of flowers and fruit trees and vegetables and ornamental mosses and water plants and all sorts.

I have an irrational and unfair sense of antagonism toward those women who had no children and labor saving devices and therefore had not enough to do and couldn't manage to think up things or turn their minds toward problems that needed solving....you can see the antagonism coming out in this comment. I can sort of make myself feel more sympathy when I think of it as a more existential thing: like if they're wondering how to make their life have meaning. I can feel empathy for people having that feeling whatever their situation in life and however they're addressing it. But when it gets down to the particulars of those women's situation, impatience comes creeping in. Boredom in particular I find hard to sympathize/empathize with.

[osprey_archer]

Reichl spent a long time on my "one day I should read this" list, and when I finally got around to her books, they were worth the wait!

[osprey_archer]

I suppose we all have these irrational pet peeves about certain kinds of people.

It seems to me that if it were as easy as thinking up something to do or turning their minds to a problem to solve, it wouldn't have been a generational problem, you know? There would have been a few individual bored unhappy women (as there are individual bored unhappy people in every generation), but the fact that The Feminine Mystique took the nation by storm showed that its message resonated with a lot of women - they had been blaming themselves for not being able to solve this problem on their own as individuals, and the book helped them realize that it was a societal problem.

[asakiyume]

Intellectually, I understand what you're saying, but somehow it just doesn't stick. It's like I can do lip-service understanding but I'm not *really* understanding.

This generation is only one generation (or so?) removed from my own--my mom's? Or maybe women, say, 15 years older than my mom. How can I not have a better sense of them? But we're not talking about all women of that generation, only those who were in that postwar housewife situation... Maybe I should read The Feminine Mystique rather than simply supposing and wondering, pointlessly.