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© Katy Kramp and alibrarymama.com, 2004-2024. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Katy Kramp and alibrarymama.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
How to Eat Supper
Oh, noes! I haven’t mentioned cooking recently! Quick, time for another cookbook.
The Splendid Table’s How to Eat Supper by Lynne Rosetto Kasper and Sally Swift There is this thing that happens with supper, which is that it’s easy to get into a rut. And the rut will either be cooking the same few dishes over and over again or else giving up cooking altogether for microwaving boxes or “fixing food” (as a former roommate used to call it. Here we have a noble offering by NPR’s The Splendid Table’s host and producer to make supper both interesting and easy. That means a lot of dishes that are either quick or long-simmering but low effort. Cooking is a lot of technique plus flavor, they say, so they offer many very different flavor variations on a basic recipe to help things taste different but still have the ease of a familiar recipe. There are discussions on things like what kinds of tomatoes to use where, how to improve store-bought broth, and which pots should be the expensive ones (the ones that are always dirty in your sink). There are both veggie and meat recipes, for those who care about such things. There are lots of glossy, full-color photos, making this a book to drool over. Alongside recipes of different cuisines, there are sidebars of seminal cookbooks exploring those cuisines, along with an excellent idea for a New Year’s resolution: pick a good cookbook and cook your way through it. We’ve renewed this cookbook to give us a little more time to play with it ourselves. Go ye and do likewise.
The Arrival
The Arrival by Shaun Tan A man leaves his wife and daughter, traveling along streets shadowed with the wings and tails of giant monsters. He sails across the sea in a huge boat, arriving in a strange land to try to find work and save enough to bring his family over. The setting is mostly early twentieth century but with strong elements of the bizarre. The drawing style looks like a series of old sepia photographs. It’s told entirely without words – even the signs on the buildings are in a script that neither we nor our immigrant understands. This was all over the comics blogs Best of 2007 lists (it took me a while to get to it.) Somebody in one of the blogs I read then – I wish I could remember who – pointed out the nifty way Tan notes the passage of time. On one page, all we see is one little square after another of clouds, as we watch out the window of the steamer with the immigrant. I loved reading books about immigrants as a child, but there’s a level of being in the experience that this has that a book where I can understand the language just can’t.
The Alabama Stitch Book by Natalie Chanin This is a craft book for a kind of craft that isn’t one of the ones I regularly do. But I picked it up and it was so beautiful that I brought it home and now I will tell you about it. This book is written about an ongoing fashion project, meant to revive the dying textile industry and retain the fading knowledge of traditional techniques to make “contemporary sustainable style.” These are beautiful, appealing projects made from cotton jersey, mostly recycled t-shirts. They are decorated with stencils, appliqué, reverse appliqué and embroidery. There are decorated t-shirts, bandanas, skirts, tablecloths and even a couple of corsets – which she claims are comfortably supportive and universally flattering. That I wish I could try before making. The basic technique for appliqué or reverse appliqué involves stenciling the design on both fabrics, hand-embroidering them together, and cutting away the fabric – the order of the last two steps depending on whether you’re doing regular or reverse appliqué. Because it’s done with cotton jersey and she’s going for a home-made look, she doesn’t finish or turn under the edges. I’d wondered about stabilization, since cotton jersey is tough to machine sew in my experience. It turns out that everything is just done by hand. Patterns and stencils are included for all the projects in the book, but the craft store is also full of stencils and the technique could as happily be used for putting skulls and crossbones on Mr. FP’s shirts as roses on mine.
The Sugar Queen
The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen 28-year-old Josey Cirrini will never be the southern belle her mother was, or the beloved civic figure her father was before his death. She’s resigned herself to a life dedicated to caring for her domineering mother, comforting herself with a secret closet full of candy and snack cakes. (Every chapter is also named for a thematically appropriate sweet.) And then one day a trashy, outspoken woman turns up in the closet and refuses to leave. Josey recognizes Della Lee, who is clearly on the run from someone. At Della Lee’s prompting, Josey leaves the house without her mother to get a sandwich from a small sandwich shop. Chloe, the owner, is only a couple of years older than Josey. She’s just kicked out her boyfriend, Jake, who revealed that he cheated on her. Here is where we start noticing that the book isn’t your average chick lit. Chloe and Josey become friends, of course, but eggs cook hard and coffee boils in the pot when Jake and Chloe are in the room together. And Chloe has a book problem. They just show up when they think she needs them, and follow her around until she reads them. Usually she likes them, but not when the books seem to be telling her something she doesn’t want to hear. The only magic around Josey seems to be the unpleasant kind that pulls in her stomach and lets her know whenever the mail man, Adam, is getting close. Josey finds that there’s more to herself and her family than she knew in this bewitching story. As with Addison’s Garden Spells, this was one I found myself sneaking away to read.
Chalice
Chalice by Robin McKinley Once upon a time and quite unexpectedly, a young beekeeper named Mirasol was chosen to be the new Chalice for her demesne, the Willowlands. She is the first Chalice ever to hold her Chalice in honey rather than the standard wine or water. The previous Master and his Chalice both died in an irresponsible accident, the Master without an Heir and the Chalice without an Apprentice. Now the Master’s younger brother has been called back to serve as Master – but he is a Third Level Priest of Elemental Fire, mostly fire now with only vague memories of being human. Even so, Mirasol can tell that he has a better understanding of what the Willowlands needs than his brother did. Neither Mirasol nor the reader knows very much about what the job of Chalice involves, besides giving the ritual chalices at the Circle’s ceremonies, and being able to feel and hopefully mend Willowland’s fraying earthlines. Things are not necessarily going well, but might get better as she and the new Master have more time to learn their roles. But there isn’t more time. Some members of the Circle have sent to the Overlord for a new, outblood Heir. And Mirasol knows that Willowlands will fall apart if it is forced to accept yet another new Master after the devastation left by the old one.
Well, none of my regular readers should be surprised that I love this book. Robin McKinley is one of my top five authors for a reason. The world system in this one felt complex, but since our main character understood only a little more about it than the reader, this gave it a dreamy, Enya-like feel rather than a “you must memorize the whole world to enjoy this book” feel. There is quite a bit here about honey and bees. I’ve only tried making mead once or twice, but honey has always felt magical to me and I’ve never seen a fantasy book where the bees were as magic as they feel in real life. I could only wish that the land in our world would tell someone as clearly when it needed to be fixed – though the scale of wrongness on troubled earthlines is of course far worse. But underneath all of these beautiful details is a straightforward but powerful story of the transformative power of love. It’s Beauty and the Beast again, McKinley said on her blog. Every story she writes is Beauty and the Beast. I wouldn’t have noticed without her saying so, but of course she’s right. And she has come up with yet another stunningly beautiful way to retell the story.
New Graphic Novels
The graphic novels I ordered in September finally came in. Here they are:
AGENCY
AGENTS OF ATLAS PREMIERE
BAREFOOT GEN 4 VOL
Beowulf by Neil Gaiman
BLACK HOLE COLLECTED
Crécy
CROSSING MIDNIGHT
CURSES HC
DER STRUWWELMAAKIES
ELKS RUN COLLECTED ED VOL 1
ENO AND PLUM TP
Fables: March of the Wooden Soldiers (4)
Fables: The Mean Season (5)
FAIR WEATHER SC
FELL VOL TP
FILTH TP
GANGES VOL
GHOST IN THE SHELL VOL 2 (How did I miss Vol 1? I don’t know.)
He Done Her Wrong
Incognegro
KABUKI 5 vols
Killer Princesses
Lady Snowblood 4 vol
MCSWEENEYS QUARTERLY CONCERN
MOME 7 vol
PECULIA
QUITTER
RED STAR 3 VOLs
REMAINS
SCANNER DARKLY
Homeschool Bunny
We’re trying some home school preschool with a couple of friends, in addition to the Montessori he gets while I’m at work. The friend who did the research chose a Waldorf curriculum from Oak Meadows. It involves lots of stories – about the letter or number of the week, or something going on outside – followed by art or craft projects and pretend play. This week we focused on the letter E and Ears. We were supposed to make bunny ear headbands and pretend to be bunnies. Mr. FP put on the bunny headband he’d made at Easter, and decided that I should be the predator. After successfully using his long bunny ears to hear my approach and get to a safe place several times, he invited me to his birthday party. There he told me to ask before borrowing his toys. He also gave me a large bag of dead bunnies and made me promise not to eat live bunnies again.
Nation
Nation by Terry Pratchett Once upon a time, perhaps a two hundred years ago or so, in a world very but not quite like ours, a young boy left his boy soul on the Island of Boys and prepared to go back to the Nation in the canoe he had made. Back at home, there would be a feast. He would be given the tattoo that said he was a man and he would have the soul of a man. At the same time, a ship with an exceptionally devout captain and a mutinous first mate sailed to the remote Mothering Sunday islands to take a girl to her father. And then there was a wave, which left Mau and Ermintrude the only survivors on what the boy called Sunrise Island. Mau is thrust into new doubt – how could Imo have let this happen to his people? But even though he now believes that people invented the gods, he hears the voice of Locaha, the god of death, talking to him, and the Grandfathers telling him to put back the god anchors and start bringing them their offering of beer again. Ermintrude, meeting Mau, decides to introduce herself as Daphne. She starts hearing voices too – and both Mau and Daphne find reason to stay alive helping the other. But they are not alone for long, as Sunrise Island was the biggest of a tiny chain, and the straggling survivors from all the islands start coming, looking for refuge. Mau might be possessed by a demon, since he left his boy soul behind and never got his man soul. Daphne is just a trouserman girl, too pale to look normal. Still, the demon boy and the ghost girl, struggling to learn each others languages, are the ones rebuilding the new, tiny Nation. My one frustration with the book, really, was that it was clear that they were speaking different languages to start with and gradually learning to understand each other – but there was no difference in language or typeface to tell you which language was being used at any given point. In the hands of anyone but Terry Pratchett, this story could have been depressing, preachy, or worse. But the compelling action and the thinky questions never really answered keep it from being preachy, while Pratchett’s signature humor keeps it from being depressing. This is a great book about the meeting of cultures and the meaning of religion. While it’s written with teen protagonists, there’s a lot here for adults as well.
