chance find

A few days ago I found this book on the free shelf at a local cafe. 

Although it says it's for kids 10+ (and the writing does have a bit of a slant to it), it's a neat little volume about sustainability, consumption culture, localavorism, sweat shops, etc. For me it's even written by a local author (it's a signed copy too). Mostly, I'm keeping it for the resources - websites and organizations. And just in case there's some 10+ year old I find I need to convince to jump off the consumerism bandwagon.

reading, lately

I could wake up tomorrow morning and read from sun up til sun down. Even then the number of pages I have yet to transverse - for school and for pleasure - would seem no less daunting.

Over fall break I had the chance to peruse David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. I realized then that it's very seldom I read novels anymore. They used to be the bread and butter of my literary diet.

Now, these are the facts of my reading life:
1. I read mainly non-fiction.
2. I cannot seem to read only one book at a time.
3. The bottom of my "to read" list is unreachable.

Read lately: 

Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf

The Four-Fold Way

The Importance of Being Lazy

The Element

Greenhorns

The Unsettling of America
Naked Fashion: The New Sustainable Fashion Revolution

an everlasting meal

Admittedly, I'm not much for cookbooks. I'll peruse them when I'm at the library or in a bookstore, but there are very few I own and very few I want to own. You could blame it partly on my age: like many other things, I get most of my recipes from the interweb. But it also has something to do with my high expectations. A proper cookbook must have good pictures. It must use ingredients that I can actually buy. It must spell everything out clearly yet simply.

But An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler is even better than all. It isn't a cookbook, per se. It's a book about cooking, eating and living well. And it's beautiful. 

The subtitle explains it completely: Cooking with Economy and Grace. It's divided into chapters ("How to Stride Ahead," "How to Teach an Egg to Fly") that outline and address different aspects of cooking: working with eggs, with vegetables; creating salads; rescuing meals from what seems like ruin; how to make one meal fold into another. There are recipes scattered throughout (like the end-of-the-week vegetable curry on page 51) but it isn't just recipes. Because recipes aren't everything when it comes to cooking. 

Every part of it is delightful, especially the prose. Tamar Adler has more than just a gift for cooking; she has a gift for words. 

If I were only going to own three books about cooking, it would be these: Simply in Season, Good to the Grain and An Everlasting Meal. I cannot recommend it enough. 

Visit Tamar Adler's website for more about her and about the book. 

the someday house

I've been trying to make my way through Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space (it is, perhaps, somewhat over my head, being that it's French philosophy). In amongst all the references I didn't get and the wordiness and the gigantic concepts, I came across this paragraph:

These are a few pieces of my "someday house" - the little house I dream about.

And of course there is also an unruly garden wrapping all around the house. But I haven't yet found any images that make me think of it - the plan is all in my head. 

blue kitchen/purple dinning room/yellow beds/green door/dark wood/framed old letters

something new: summer reading list

Like I said before, this blog isn't going to be solely about my internship. There's too much else I love to do and want to share.

Firstly, reading. For the past couple years I've been keeping track of what I read - it reminds me of what I was thinking about at a particular time or what new ideas I was introduced to. So I'll continue to do that here, on this page. But I'd also like to share my thoughts about the books I read, since being away from school I don't really have anyone to discuss them with or papers to write.


To start...

You know those questionares that ask you all about your favorites? Your favorite color, season, food, etc? Well, this is what I put for my favorite book (if I really have to narrow it down to just one): To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.

The week after school ended I needed a novel to read and decided to pick up To the Lighthouse again. The first time I read it, about a year ago, it blew my mind. There's very little dialogue and the external action is secondary to the internal workings of the characters. So it's basically a novel of people's thoughts, feelings and reactions. In a way, it seems like a photographic negative.

There's one scene, a dinner scene, about in the middle of the first third of the book. The thing that drives the scene isn't what the characters are directly telling each other but how they're interpreting everyone's non-verbal communication and the way their thoughts are rambling, what connections they're making. It's very real and raw but - from what I've read - unusual in literature.

In short, To the Lighthouse is the story of a family and their company at a summer house on the Scottish Hebrides. But it's really much more than that.