![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wednesday Reading Meme
Apr. 22nd, 2020 09:14 amWhat 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.
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.
