
Cooking is full-body immersion: the rich contemplation of the beauty of food; the feel of it in my hands; the sound as it splutters or bubbles in the pan; the smell of it all.
Nigella Lawson, Cook, eat, Repeat
I’m making a valiant effort to thin out my very thick personal library. Like any parting, there is grief, but I’m choosing instead to grip the joy and gratitude I’ve garnered from my books. When I picked up this 1232 page brick I faced the glacial reality that I would never read all the words again.
The next best thing was to read the bits I’d underlined in neat pencil.
Because I’m a wee bit obsessive about my books, I knew I had to copy those adored sentences into my commonplace book.
Two long road trips, several shorter drives, the odd minutes gleaned here and there… and I’ve added 30 pages to my journal of quotes from Les Misérables. All the joy, people. All the joy/grief/delight/disgust/admiration of this magnum opus comes flooding back.
It was the next best thing to reading every word. And so many quotes!
One thing remains. Giving this book a good home. A place where it can sit on a shelf, get a few loving glances with the whispered promise to read it sometime.
If my penciled copy of Hugo’s masterpiece sounds like something you want (free), leave a comment. In a week I’ll make a decision where it goes and mail/hand it to that person. Otherwise I’ll donate it.
Morton Arboretum, the closest photo I had to landscape architecture
I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future. In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years. — Frederick Law Olmsted
So many surprises in A Clearing In the Distance. Olmsted was an autodidact. A slow starter, a dabbler in disparate enterprises, he kept afloat with his father’s loans. He himself was his father’s ‘Central Park’, the long investment whose glories would become apparent in the future. Fame first came as a journalist. He sailed to China; he bought a farm; he traveled to Europe; he started a magazine; he managed the largest gold mine in California.
It is the breadth of Olmsted’s curiosity that makes his writing compelling.
Other reading intersections: Erik Larson’s The Devil in White City made me thirsty to know more about FLO. Michael Pollan referenced Olmsted’s ideas in Second Nature. By chance, I’ve landed in books set in the late-19th century. The wider I read, the greater my familiarity grows and the joy of recognition sparks.
Finally, I believe growing up in Lombard, IL, walking through our own Lilacia Park, designed by Jens Jensen, and nearby Morton Arboretum, a 1700-acre tree museum, predisposed me to love this book.
Here are this year’s favorite books in quirky categories, along with sample quotes.
Hello, Again (the second time together)
Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. ATGiB
I love mankind, he said, but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular. TBK
Think Tanks (books that made me pause and ponder)
We’re happiest when we’re absorbed in a difficult task, a task that has clear goals and that challenges us not only to exercise our talents but to stretch them. tGC
Work is necessarily toilsome and serves someone else’s interest. That’s why you get paid. SCaS
Franklin could never see chaos without thinking of order. BF
Waiting is the primary recreation of Russia. You could try getting used to it. tFT
Where Have You Been All My Life? (a book I wish was available years ago)
We spent that midsummer reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the backyard, and I will always remember my surprise when the children laughed in the right places. MM
Sweet Comfort (sure, they’re about food, but the prose is delicious)
And, please—enough with the supposed health concerns. I mean, it’s not as though the obesity epidemic was caused by overconsumption of duck legs. NK
It is my most religious belief that a recipe is just a story that ends with a good meal. tPCC
But cooking is a way of paying attention, of really being in this world. When you look closely at a mango and inhale its scent, everything else stops. Life feels rich and easy. G-FG&tC
Cover Story (the cover drew me in)
In Scotland, one does not ‘mend’ anything or ‘fix’ it in any way. One ‘sorts’ it. CtN
Core Strengthening (soul-building books)
Over and Over we hear the dissonance of pain resolve into the consonance of joy. MOC
The opposite of a slave is not a free man. It’s a worshiper. TRoG
Upper Story (two memoirs and a history a cut above )
Rome is a broken mirror, the falling strap of a dress, a puzzle of astonishing complexity. It is an iceberg floating below our terrace, all its ballast hidden beneath the surface. FSiR
At Yale, many of my friends had never spent time with a veteran. In other words, I was an anomaly. HE
Fear settled over the men like silt in a tide. DW
For the Children (for me, too…my husband & I are reading HP series for the first time)
If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals. HPG0F
Books can ignite fires in your mind, because they carry ideas for kindling, and art for matches. LB&BB
Whatever it means to be friends, taking a black eye for someone has to be in it. WW
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Judging by the cover, this looked self-published (it’s not); my expectations were minimal. I was pleasantly surprised by the writing, and found the story of Everett De Boer’s family’s work with the Dutch Resistance compelling. Journey Through the Night is four volumes (written in Dutch 1951-1958, translated in 1960) published as one.
The De Boer family is likeable. The architect father has pluck, the mother is kind-hearted, oldest son John is capable but inclined to hesitate, and impetuous Fritz can’t keep out of trouble; the other siblings have cameo roles. They are Christian — the winsome kind whose faith is more acted upon than spoken of, not off-putting.
What impressed me most in a world of checkpoints, false IDs, and fascist occupation was the advantage of being relaxed and calm, casual and nonchalant. Terror is perilous.
The De Boers had recently read Isaiah 16:3 Hide the outcast, don’t betray the fugitive, when a young man knocks on their door, seeking refuge. A procession of Jewish families and resistance fighters are hidden and helped. Such a small thing, and yet it changed the course of war: simple courageous people opening their homes and risking their lives for all kinds of strangers.
What I discovered while reading this book:
DKW cars (Dampf-Kraft-Wagen = steam-driven car) photo courtesy of Wikipedia
The Dutch National Anthem —another example of music bolstering courage
“OSO!” (Orange Shall Overcome) the slogan of the Dutch Resistance (here’s a link to learn more about the Dutch Resistance)
The Dutch writer Anne de Vries is a male. (Rainer Maria Rilke comes to mind as another writer with a conventionally female name.)
Favorite quotes:
Don’t let impatience make life miserable for you.
I highly recommend this to readers who liked Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place and Anne Frank’s Diary.
One time my brother gave me ten years of old Cook’s Illustrated magazines. Reading through them was like reliving Dan’s culinary phases. Oh, yeah, remember when he was making sausage? There’s the artisan bread recipe! Here’s where he learned to make risotto! Adding nutmeg to stroganoff might not have been an original idea…
I used to think my brother was a genius. (Ha ha, bro!) Then I realized he was merely an amazing reader who followed fantastic recipes.
The first thing I did with the magazines was cut out the Flemish-ish art and frame it.
Because I admire Christopher Kimball’s voice, I recently read through ten years of essays to assay his writing. I immersed myself in them in one week. A very few were ‘meh;’ most had a phrase or thought I copied into my journal.
His overarching theme is one of my own soap boxes, the importance of families eating together, a concept he encapsulates in the word familiar. Here are ten quotes I gleaned.
After I read the last essay, I read a few articles about Christopher Kimball, the man. I was saddened by his divorce, and laughed out loud at this sentence by Alex Halberstadt: “His real difficulty as an evangelist, however, is the one afflicting most multimillionaires who expound publicly on the virtues of simple living.”
As it happens, Kimball has left Cook’s Illustrated to begin a new magazine called Milk Street. Clever name, I thought, wrongly guessing it was an idiom like in tall cotton. Turns out it’s the street where Kimball’s offices are located.
Last night I started a biography of Benjamin Franklin that a friend wants me to read. When I read that Benjamin was born in a house on Milk Street in Boston, I just laughed. Once again, my reading life has synchronicity, serendipity and sweetness.
I enjoy persuading adult readers to read well-written young adult books. Gary Schmidt’s book is one I recommend, perhaps even more for older readers than for a middle schooler. It made me snort with laughter and it turned me into a sobbing, sniffing mess.
Doug Swieteck has a lying, blustering, bullying, abusive father. His mom tries to compensate, neutralizing her husband’s venom to the best of her ability within the strictures of 1960’s mores. Doug’s older brothers are plain mean.
I tried to talk to my father about it. But it was a wrong day. Most days are wrong days.
So convincing is Doug’s voice that I could hear it. “Terrific.” “I hate stupid Marysville.” “You know how that felt?” and Doug’s trademark phrase, “I’m not lying.”
Perhaps we’ve all grown up with someone like Doug, a mixture of bravado and vulnerable. Someone outside the family takes an interest and tries to pull that kid up above his/her circumstances. Doug had his share of tormentors, but also four mentors who invested in him.
There are some things in this world that we cannot fix, and they happen, and it is not our fault, though we still might have to deal with them. There are other things that happen in this world that we can fix. And that is what good teachers like me are for. — Miss Cowper, English teacher
A few things seduced me. One brother is only identified as “my jerk brother.” He is changed by a horrific situation — converted (not religious) — and Doug begins calling him by his name. It is a subtle but significant clue. The smile motif captured me. Pay attention to the smiles.
I listened to the audio version (5 stars for Lincoln Hoppe’s narration–except he mispronounced Cowper— it’s Cooper), but was compelled to read the words.
And see the pictures. Doug Swieteck’s doorway to a better life comes through John James Audubon’s bird pictures. (The hefty Birds of America was the first gift I gave my husband after we married.) Each chapter is named after an Audubon bird; the audio experienced is diminished without seeing the prints.
There is a broad ranged of interests represented in this book: Audubon, Apollo 11, the Vietnam War, Jane Eyre, Periodic Table, baseball, and Aaron Copland. There is drama, devastation, and unexpected grace. I loved the book. Would a young teen love it?