Comfort Reading

As I come closer to the end of the summer and the beginning of graduate school, I am finding myself getting more and more apprehensive about my future. And, like many others, when I get nervous, I eat. Or at least cook – sometimes the only cure for a bad case of nerves is to pound a cup of toasted slivered almonds into crumbs for a batch of Almond Cookies. It’s amazing what fifteen minutes with a rolling pin and a Ziploc bag full of nuts can do for your sanity.

But I can’t cook all the time, and I’d rather not gain the freshman fifteen before I become a first-year again, so sometimes I have to replace the rolling pin with a book. Here are my “comfort foods” of literature, some chicken noodle soup for your soul, if you will, but a little more literally (and a little less annoyingly – does anyone else hate those books like I do?):

The Fourth Star by Lisa Brenner
This book follows the staff of Daniel, a formerly four-star New York restaurant that was bumped down to three stars when a new food critic came to the New York Times. The staff tries desperately over the course of a year to gain back that last star, and reporter Lisa Brenner shadows them in all aspects, from front of the house service to back of the house food preparation.

It really impresses me how much Ms Brenner manages to cram into this book, and how much real dialogue she is able to capture. I felt as though maybe this book could have been more like a movie or a TV show, what with all of the drama and action in there. It’s one of my favorites, and a definite must-read.

Julie and Julia by Julie Powell
Julie and Julia is the story of Julie Powell, who comes to a crisis when she is told she has a hormonal imbalance that will make it hard for her to have children if she doesn’t do it soon. This, of course, in typical Sex and the City fashion, makes Ms Powell feel as though she has done nothing useful with her life. Her husband suggests she go to culinary school, and Ms Powell retorts that if she wanted to learn to cook, she would just work her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

And the rest is history. A copy of the book is procured, a blog is started, and ingredients like beef marrow and squab start appearing in the Powell kitchen. The book is well-written; Ms Powell is kind of abrasive at times, but her redeeming factor is that she is aware of her tendency to overreact and there is generally a little undertone of either amusement or shame when she recounts her more dramatic episodes. I didn’t think the pieces of Julia Child’s life that punctuate the book were strictly necessary, but I also didn’t think there was anything really wrong with them – I just found Julie’s life more interesting than Julia’s.

Waiting by Debra Ginsberg
I think everyone should read one book on waitressing or restaurants in the course of their lives, and preferably sooner than later. Though it’s nearly impossible to fully understand the things servers have to put up with from clients and back of house staff alike without actually ever working as one, reading one book like this will convince you that servers work a lot harder than most of us give them credit for.

I have read a few blogs by servers that are amusing and enlightening, and one thing that seems common to all of them is the lament that people simply don’t know how to behave when they go out to eat. Poor tipping, over-the-top demands and the inability of parents to control their children are the main topics that get these servers steamed up.

Debra Ginsberg also gets rather angry throughout the course of the book, but since she breaks up her rants with stories about working in a diner and a few bars, as well as statistics on tipping and other matters, she’s much more readable than many of the server blogs out there. She also clearly defines characters, as if writing a novel, which many bloggers don’t. However, if you’re still interested, check out Waiter Rant, The Insane Waiter and I Serve Idiots (I know he tells you to go to a different URL, but that address is defunct).

French Lessons by Peter Mayle
I am pretty sure this is the first food book I ever read, so it’s on here for the purpose of nostalgia, if nothing else. How can I neglect the author who taught me that truffles are mushrooms, not just little balls of chocolate, and yes, people really do eat and enjoy snails?

Mr Mayle begins the book with a story about traveling to France for the first time and sampling their version of the British classic, fish and chips. This first meal is like a revelation to him, as British food is notoriously bad, and French food is notoriously awesome.

The Gourmet Cookbook, edited by Ruth Reichel
It is impossible for me to resist a bargain, which is how I ended up taking this book home with me from a discount store. I used to read Gourmet magazine, and having read Ms Reichel’s Garlic and Sapphires and Tender at the Bone, I knew at least the preface of this cookbook would be worth reading.

It was, of course, but the rest of the book proved just as amazing. As promised on the back of the dust jacket, this is, in fact, the only cookbook I think I will ever need. Short of pulling a Julie and Julia-type cooking marathon with Gourmet, I know I will never work my way through everything it has to offer. Still, I can try...red wine risotto, anyone?

Summer Lovin'

It’s August, and suddenly the carefree “summer will last forever!” attitude I had all through July is completely gone. Far from amassing fun summer reads that I pile in corners of my shared room and imagine myself absorbed in on a beach somewhere, I find myself buying school books on Amazon and looking at John Steinbeck in used bookstores. Yuck.

So, as a last hurrah, I bring you three books from my “summer smut” reading list:

The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant

Actually a fairly decent novel, both plot-wise and…otherwise. Not overly smutty, but not really lacking it ether. The basic idea here is that Alessandra falls in love with a young painter who is working on the frescos for her family’s chapel. In order to keep herself out of a convent, she agrees to marry a much older man who turns out to be her older brother’s lover. Awkward.

I think we can all see what’s going to happen with the painter here. While he is straight out of a marginal romance novel, he also has enough quirks too keep his character interesting. And since Alessandra and he only meet a few times, there’s enough plot in between to keep this novel a novel, and not a romance. Nice work, Ms. Dunant.

A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies by Ellen Cooney

Charlotte, who is recently recovered from a form of polio, discovers that her husband is having an affair and finds herself in a hotel where the male employees are mainly employed to “service” the clientele. Yep. That’s it.

The main problem with this book is that Cooney feels the need to burst into flashbacks in the middle of very exciting scenes. I could barely keep track of it all, and the flashbacks weren’t even interesting. It got to the point where I would scream in frustration when I saw one coming. Also, there is something about a stolen identity involving the main male character, and something else involving a police chief that was, in my mind, never really resolved. Not even worth borrowing, and certainly not worth the 99 cents I paid for it at a thrift store.

The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller

Okay, according to a review that was tucked into the pages of this book, I was supposed to be sobbing my eyes out by the end. I didn’t even well up -- and keep in mind that I burst into tears during the season finale of So You Think You Can Dance the other night.

While I may have speed-read it, and I can certainly understand that is really quite tragic to fall in love with a free-wheeling photographer who you only know for a week when your family is at the Iowa State Fair, only to have to sacrifice what could be the world’s greatest love affair to remain in Iowa with aforesaid family, it’s kind of…eh. I had a very hard time believing it, to be honest.

Sure, it’s sad that this woman will never have mind-blowing sex again, and had I not been distracted I might have cried somewhere near the end-slash-middle region (you’ll see if you read it), it’s sadder to me that this woman ever left Italy in the first place than that now she’s stuck in Iowa. She made her choice long ago, and it shouldn’t be such a great tragedy now that she’s being forced to live it.

Though, to give Mr. Waller his due, the thing with the bathtub was a nice touch.

Chick Lit: The books, not the gum

Sophie Kinsella is one of those authors whose prose you can spot a mile away. She’s undeniably British, her characters are humorously self-effacing, and her stories generally start with a crazy situation and end with a kind of fairy tale satisfaction. Here, because they’ve been sitting on my floor for weeks as I put off writing this post, are two of her works that prove my point:

The Undomestic Goddess

Samantha Sweeting, despite her crazy name, is quite possibly my favorite chic lit protagonist, and here’s why: she’s a high-powered lawyer with a huge firm in London, with an amazing work ethic, a drive to be the best, and a potential offer for partner in her firm. Unfortunately, as these things go, she finds an overdue memo on her desk, loses a client 50 million pounds (approximately 100 million dollars), and finds herself working as a housekeeper in the Cotswolds.

That premise was enough to make me spring the 75 cents at my local Goodwill for a decent secondhand copy. And okay, so the end was a little cutesy and you know from the second he walks into the kitchen and smells the burning chickpeas that the handsome gardener will fall for Samantha. But it was also pretty gutsy, in its own small way.

Samantha is pulled between menial but satisfying work as a housekeeper, and her glittering career as a corporate attorney. And as a rule, books like this leave me cheering for the protagonist as she undergoes her spiritual journey or whatever and realizes that she deserves to be an attorney because she’s smart, damn it, and she should use her Ivy League education.

Not this time – and while I think that probably a more satisfying ending could have worked out, I do admire the emotional realism of the one Kinsella used (if not realism regarding the odds of a handsome, college-educated, pub-owning, lawyer-hating gardener coming to London to search for his lady love, who he has recently realized has been lying to him about her identity for several months).

Cocktails for Three (as Madeline Wickham)

My first impression of the book was that a soon-to-be-mother should not be drinking cocktails at all, let alone three, and that apparently that is not as taboo in Britain as it is here. Wow.

The main plot is that Candice is reunited with a girl from high school whose father was ruined by Candice’s father’s shady business dealings. Candice makes an attempt to make up with this girl by getting her a job, moving her into her apartment, and generally letting herself be taken advantage of in every way. She is egged on by her across-the-hall neighbor, while her friends, Maggie and Roxanne, deal with a baby and the death of a long-term clandestine lover, respectively.

It’s safe to say that this is an earlier book of Kinsella’s (who writes under the name Wickham for this book). The protagonists aren’t as sparkly as Becky Bloomwood and Samantha Sweeting, and though they all (with the exception of Candice) seem to have their feet firmly planted in reality, that’s not really what I’m looking for in a book like this. I didn’t find them as endearing as Kinsella’s other characters, sadly, though Maggie was passable.

For more books by Sophie Kinsella, try Can You Keep a Secret? which is about a girl who spills her secrets to a man next to her on a plane who turns out to be her new boss. Really good, actually, and much better than the entire Shopaholic series (though try Shopaholic Takes Manhattan if you’re determined to read something from the set).