Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Teresa Lust’s A Blissful Feast: Culinary Adventures in Italy’s Piedmont, Maremma, and Le Marche, an enchanting culinary memoir about Lust’s journeys to Italy to learn about the food and the language. (Lust also has family connections in the Piedmont, so there are aspects of family memoir here, too.) The book was published in 2020, but most of the events took place in the 1990s, which gives it a pleasantly nostalgic effect, and the descriptions of food are delicious. Highly recommended if you enjoy food memoirs.

Also Elizabeth Enright’s picture book Zeee, in which Zeee (a fairy the size of a bumblebee) keeps finding lovely new homes (a tent of burdock leaves, an empty wasp nest, an abandoned sand pail), only to have them destroyed by humans. Until at last she befriends a human, and the human gives her a dollhouse! Loved all the little homes and the descriptions of Zeee’s tiny fairy furniture.

What I’m Reading Now

James Herriot’s The Lord God Made Them All, his fourth book of memoirs about practice as a rural vet in mid-twentieth century Yorkshire, except this time there are also a few chapters about his trip to the Soviet Union in 1961 as ship’s vet on a ship delivering a cargo of sheep! As you can imagine I am SO excited about the Soviet angle in this one.

Mostly, however, the book takes place in the waning years of World War II, after Herriot returns from his stint in the RAF. He mentions that many prisoners of war were billeted on Yorkshire farms, and in many cases this situation created such lasting friendships that the Yorkshire families would visit their prisoner-friends in Germany or Italy for decades after the war. (There were Russian prisoners too, apparently, but when they made it back to the USSR they were either imprisoned or shot.)

What I Plan to Read Next

Lensey Namioka’s Den of the White Fox, the secret final book of the Zenta & Matsuzo series! For reasons that are obscure to me, it doesn’t show up on a lot of internet lists of Zenta & Matsuzo books. (I also found a list that includes The Phantom of Tiger Mountain as a Zenta & Matsuzo book, but as further research indicates The Phantom of Tiger Mountain takes place in 10th century China I believe this is an error.)

Comments

[asakiyume]

Wow, Zeee sounds charming! I love houses made in other things. In fact, nowadays I'd probably enjoy Zeee's other houses to her final house--which is, after all, just a house (but small). But as a kid, I would have been delighted to have her safely housed in a doll's house--I would have loved the miniatureness of it.

Your mention that the Russian ex-POWs ended up imprisoned or shot is just, whoa, terrible.
...Actually, wait. I feel terribly ignorant, but: if the Soviet Union was one of the allies, how were there Russian prisoners of war in Yorkshire?

[sholio]

I didn't know about the Yorkshire POW thing (however, I'm glad I know about it now, because it's adorable) but I have also heard something similar about Canada, specifically the Canadian prairie states, where POWs were held. Evidently some of the former POWs liked it so much that they moved back to Canada after the war, married locals, and settled down.

Edit: Also, I read all the Herriot books as a (pretty young) kid but had absolutely zero knowledge of the surrounding social and political milieu, so I presumably just skipped that completely and read about the animals instead, as I remember exactly zero about WWII or the RAF. It would be interesting to reread them now with a lot more historical awareness.

[troisoiseaux]

Loved all the little homes and the descriptions of Zeee’s tiny fairy furniture.

How charming!!

[lokifan]

He mentions that many prisoners of war were billeted on Yorkshire farms, and in many cases this situation created such lasting friendships that the Yorkshire families would visit their prisoner-friends in Germany or Italy for decades after the war.

That's rather lovely.