The French Ingredient

I feel somewhat ambivalent about this memoir. I very much enjoyed the cooking lessons and market tour I took through La Cuisine Paris, the business run by the author. The memoir is ostensibly about her move to Paris for a different job and eventually opening La Cuisine. And yet it felt a little…elementary, maybe? Very much about her mid-western “can do” ethos vs French culture, and less about the specifics of building the business. The French culture was mostly things I already knew from reading and school and basic research in advance of being a tourist there, so maybe I wasn’t the right audience for the memoir or had misplaced expectations. I will say that the tour of the king’s kitchen garden at Versailles was absolutely a highlight of my trip to Paris a decade ago, although I’m not sure it is offered any longer. The macaron lesson was fun, too, though, would recommend.

Finished watching Black Sails. I found the change in costuming for Flint to be fascinating. And the morphing of Silver, both the legend of Long John Silver and who he became and how he manipulated basically everyone. Same for Billy Bones. The pacing was a little slow for my taste but the cinematography was lovely. I am fascinated by how fandom (including academia) has interpreted the various sexual relationships – poly, queer, hetero. I’m kind of curious about whether there is word of god on them, but I haven’t gone looking.

Happy Stab Caesar Day

If you celebrate it. Or belated Pi Day.

I have not seen all of the Oscar nominees or winners still. But I did see American Fiction, which I liked very much. And The Taste of Things, which was absolutely gorgeous: the lighting, the setting, the acting, the food. I may need to find a copy of The Passionate Epicure.

Reading-wise, I just finished Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide by Rupert Holmes. The writing was fine and I liked the concept, but I didn’t particularly care for or about any of the narrators. I liked it enough to finish it, but I’m not sure I would pick up a sequel, which seemed to be signaled by the afterword. Before that I read the newest Penric and Desdemona novella: if read as a book end to the series (which I have no idea if it is), it’s a little predictable, but I enjoyed revisiting that fantasy world.

Next up is the new book by Juan Gomez Jurado, Black Wolf, the second in a series. I’d read the first, Red Queen, in translation. But I’ve also borrowed the original Spanish version from the library. I guess I’ll see how terrible my reading comprehension has become.

More from the library

I’m on a little bit of a reading roll. (knock on wood!)

I finished Rosalind Franklin The Dark Lady of DNA, a biography of the scientist whose unpublished data and photograph of DNA was used/seen by Crick and Watson in their discovery of the structure of DNA. She died young and did a lot of other research and science, and DNA wasn’t even her focus. But their misogyny and lack of attribution is pretty galling to read even today.

Liked the new Murderbot installment, System Collapse.

Enjoyed Patrick Stewart’s autobiography or memoir, Making It So. He’s my favorite Star Trek captain based almost entirely on age of introduction to the series, and I was fortunate enough to see him and Ian McKellen on Broadway a decade ago. There’s always a danger that an autobiography will reveal feet of clay, and there are some less than admirable episodes, which is to be expected in an 80+ year life. But it was a relief to read of his pro-union, anti-Thatcher, anti-Reagan stances, even as they were just casual asides among anecdotes. (As ever, I remain perplexed by affection expressed for royals, although I would not presume to speculate on his opinion about the monarchy generally.)

Started watching Only Murders in the Building while visiting my sister and brother-in-law over Turkey Day, so I’m going to have to investigate a subscription for that. Others have recommended The Bear as well, so…

There was no turkey on Turkey Day – brother-in-law made cassoulet, and it was delightful. We went to a hockey game (another NHL city/arena checked off the list) and watched football and hockey and were couch potatoes. Or I was; they both went running, while I loafed.

Borrowed from the library

When I was in Cape Cod in August, I stopped at The Mystery Bookstop in West Dennis. It has a lot of mysteries (as one might expect) along with a fair amount of new young adult fiction and some beachy-type reads. I bought two books (Winspear mystery and a ~meh~ romance or chicklit type), and made note of two YA authors whose books looked interesting – Namina Forna and Jasmine Wargo. My local library had one of the books (Forna’s The Gilded Ones) and a different book by the other (Here We Are Now by Jasmine Warga). I could appreciate the craft and narrative style in both books, but didn’t really love either: it’s me, not them.

Next book up is a biography of Rosalind Franklin.

Watched The Fall of the House of Usher online. Now I need to go back and re-read Edgar Allan Poe.

Went to a bunch of open houses. Two possibles…I’m just cringing at interest rates right now. But I’m balancing that against having fewer immediate neighbors, which would be a relief.

Flu shot and Covid booster scheduled for next week. Had delayed it due to a potential labor strike at my HCP.

Wondering if there will be a government shutdown in November. I’ve got travel planned and selfishly wonder about TSA agents and FAA controllers, especially over Turkey Day. (Based on other shutdowns, I would likely be excepted and have to work, too, but can do so online.)

Don’t really know what to say (or do to help) with things going on in the world. Have so many things been so bad all the time, or was I just not paying close enough attention?

Rained out

ArtScape returned this year after a three year hiatus. Lots of drama and conflict behind the scenes: changing dates (from July to September) drove out other, smaller festivals usually schedule for then; some of the venues relied on for staging weren’t available due to scheduling; there were performance problems; and Tropical Storm Ophelia caused Saturday’s events to be canceled.

Usually I go out of my way NOT to be in town for ArtScape, but I waited too late to book and what I wanted to do (Lost Evenings in Anaheim) was $$$$$ for travel arrangements. So I figured I’d just deal with the people and noise and massive amounts of debris (seriously, the refuse is enormous) and also the honks of people who are angry about gridlock due to street closures. I feel sort of guilty that the cancellation on Saturday meant my neighborhood was quiet.

Live hockey is back! The first preseason games started this weekend. As I tap away, the third period of the Blue Jackets vs. Penguins is streaming in the background. And the Orioles are playing, with the post-season on the horizon 🙂

Just finished reading Juan Gomez-Jurado’s Red Queen. I saw a review of it in Financial Times – or rather of its translation to English – and borrowed it from the library. Really enjoyed it, but now I want to read it in the original. And the rest of the series, which is not (yet) available in English; need to see if I can find it in Spanish.

Recent reads?

Eh, not much.

I borrowed an edition of selected prose of Fernando Pessoa from the library, along with a collection of poetry by Luis Camoes (there’s a tilde over the o and an acute accent over the i but I don’t know how to do them using my keyboard). I enjoyed the poetry, which had the English next to the Portuguese, but really struggled with the metaphors in translation; my Portuguese is still extremely rudimentary. For the Pessoa, some of the prose intrigued me but other was just nah. I struggle in part with the heteronym idea – fundamentally, are they just a bunch of pseudonyms like Mark Twain and Samuel Clements? Were they indicators of mental illness and multiple personalities? (The introduction alluded to this possibility for Pessoa based on some of his behavior.) It doesn’t really matter in the end. I can appreciate some of the work, enough that I’ve put his Book of Disquiet on my to read list.

Ilona Andrews is another former autobuy that I’m slowly letting go of. I still read the books, but not as autobuys and from the library if possible. Magic Claims was fine, I guess.

Picked up a couple of books of Mary Oliver’s poetry at the library yesterday.

In terms of watching things…not much there either. I finally watched the new season of Ted Lasso. It was disappointing overall. It felt like several possible interesting threads were abandoned, and like a bunch of storylines regressed or were wasted.

Just started watching Good Omens, in part because of the uproar that GO fans are in following the end of season 2.

Haven’t seen Barbie or Oppenheimer, mostly because I feel like everyone I know who has seen them has told me enough about them that I don’t feel like I’m missing much. Also, Nolan’s films seldom work for me.

Recent simple pleasure is the maritozzi from Doppio Pasticceria . They use chocolate cream and the brioche is faintly orange blossom flavored. (I love orange blossom, which I did not know until I had it in several dishes in Sevilla and Granada, including the Flor de Azafran gelato at La Fiorentina in Sevilla.)

Summer is half over and I have not gone to the beach. It’s scheduled for the end of the month. I’m tired of people and want to run away. I won’t, because the bank stubbornly requires that I pay my mortgage and I need a job for that. But if I win the $1.5 billion lottery, that could change. 😛

Little things

Sometimes the littlest things knock me out of a book. It happened this week with Ben Aaronovitch’s new novella, Winter’s Gift. The narrator is an American woman – an FBI agent from Oklahoma, who in an earlier book had never left the United States until a trip to the UK for work.

Aaronovitch has her use British English words in her internal monologue in several places that were just…off. Roads in Minnesota and Wisconsin get salted, not gritted. Drivers do not overtake, they pass. Soy, not soya.

Could the rest of the book be excellent? Maybe. Those three used early on made me side-eye the set up and wonder if the author had any Americans proof read for things like this. I also have Opinions about the FBI office at Quantico, vs HQ vs DC field office, but that’s easy to let go of as an authorial choice. The vocab is just sloppy IMO.

Am I jaded?

Or maybe just old?

I don’t know.

I’ve read or DNF’d a handful of books lately that I would have loved 15 years ago. Today, meh.

Encore in Death – guessed who dunnit after reading the first page.

A Montague sibling book and novella by Mackenzi Lee – these are well-reviewed and also award-winning, but I spent my time feeling like the author wrote a queer romance-ish series with modern characters but wanted an adventure so just plunked everyone down in a randomly chosen historical period. There were giant plot holes and inconsistencies.

The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo – another author/series that have been pretty universally praised but which I found to be kind of meh. Wow, another Yale-set young adult series in which privilege wins and the Outsider Girl Who Is the Most Special Exception is the heroine. How original.

The Bardugo and Lee series were recommended at a local bookstore I browsed a few weeks ago. I’ve got Bardugo’s Six of Crows TBR from the library, but I haven’t started it yet. I’ve gotten mixed messages about how it relates to Shadow & Bone (Netflix series) and some of the scathing criticism I read of the linguistic and cultural appropriation makes me wonder if reading it will make my inner linguistic cringe with every page.

Caste

I finally finished Caste. Reading it while reading news reports about the massacre of Black people in Buffalo and the murderer’s apparent belief in the bullshit replacement theory pedaled by that gross news channel was quite the parallel.

I had highlighted one passage before the shooting that made the hair on my neck stand up, because it was about Hitler but you could substitute that fucking guy’s name and it would still be true.

“…[C]onservative elites agreed [] only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims….Hitler saw himself as the voice of the Volk, of their grievances and fears, especially those in the rural districts, as a god-chosen savior, running on instinct. He had never held elected office before.”

The book is very good, very readable, and I would recommend it.

Recently read

Has Bujold’s Knot of Shadows been out long? I haven’t been paying attention to release schedules, but it popped up as a recommended read. So. It was fine? The fantasy equivalent of a cosy procedural, I guess. It just felt sort of blah; it didn’t engage me, and I didn’t care about anyone in the narrative. There was no larger issue or mystery at hand.

Am about half way through Game Misconduct, which was written before the release of the Jenner & Block report about the Chicago Blackhawks’ failure to take any steps to investigate sexual assault. I love hockey as a spectator, but I think the league and all its feeders should be burned to the ground.

Went to watch live hockey in Pittsburgh. Almost no one was wearing masks. Even in places that asked people to wear masks and social distance – people didn’t. At one point I had to get off an elevator on the wrong floor because people either couldn’t read or didn’t care – that sign that said no more than 2 people per elevator, please social distance and wear a mask – did not mean them. We really are too stupid and selfish to live, aren’t we?

On the drive west, there’s a sign for that fucking guy, hand painted, that includes the admonition “no socialism”. Up the road from another sign painted telling drivers to “drink milk”. I’m guessing the landowners are okay with agrarian socialism propping up the dairy industry, since it is for dairy farmers (them) and thus for the right people who deserve government support, while the general population does not? I don’t know. People make my head hurt.