Books v. cigarettes

George Orwell's Books v. cigarettes is a recent volume in Penguin's "Great Ideas" series. I'm a fan of Orwell's essays and, between the eye-catching title and the old-style Penguin cover design, I couldn't resist this slim volume of them. It contains a couple of my favourites, including "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," which I've quoted from here in past posts, and some I'd never read before, such as the title essay, "Books v. cigarettes." In the latter, Orwell sets out to prove that the buying and reading of books is not "an expensive hobby" that is "beyond the reach of the average person." I don't think it will ruin the suspense to tell you that he succeeds, and that he makes many entertaining observations along the way. Here's a snippet:

It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them. 'Books' includes novels, poetry, textbooks, works of reference, sociological treatises and much else, and length and price do not correspond to one another, especially if one habitually buys books second-hand. You may spend ten shillings on a poem of 500 lines, and you may spend sixpence on a dictionary which you consult at odd moments over a period of twenty years. There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later: and the cost in terms of money, may be the same in each case.

That final bit would make a fine meme don't you think? List: 1. A book you read over and over again; 2. A book that has become part of the furniture of your mind and has altered your whole attitude to life; 3. A book that you dip into but never read through; and, 4. A book that you read at a single sitting and forgot a week later. I'll have to think a bit on which book or books I'd list under each category. In the meantime though, I recommend Orwell's Books v. cigarettes as a book for dipping into and reading all the way through (and I note that at $9.99 Canadian, it doesn't cost much more than a pack of cigarettes!).

A Food and Fiction Meme

I'm not quite done with Marion Nestle's What to Eat yet, so I'll save that review for next week, and this week offer up a meme tailored to my Friday food theme instead. Here goes:


Food from fiction that you'd like to sample:

I don't know if my childhood favourite books are more thoroughly laced with delicious food descriptions than more recent reads, or if those just stick in my head because of repeated readings. But I could happily eat my way through much of the food described in the Betsy-Tacy series (Maud Hart Lovelace), the Anne series (L.M. Montgomery), and the Little House books (Laura Ingalls Wilder). From the Betsy-Tacy books, for example: Mrs. Ray’s fried potatoes, cocoa cooked in a pail on the Big Hill, anything baked by Anna, the peach pie at the Taggart's farm, Joe's sour-milk pancakes, and Aunt Ruth's bread. And from the Anne series and the Little House books, see the passages I quoted in last Friday’s post.


A fictional meal you would like to have attended:

There are a lot of contenders for this one but for now, sticking with the Betsy-Tacy theme, I'll go with dinner on the S.S. Columbic, for the food and the conversation (Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy and the Great World).


A memorable work of fiction set in a restaurant or a café:

Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place".


Food you've tried that didn't live up to the expectations raised by a fictional account:

Turkish Delight from C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I figured it must be pretty spectacular for Edmund to be willing to sell out his siblings for a box of it, but I was sorely disappointed when I finally tasted some.

Or petit fours which sounded tantalizing in Elizabeth Enright's The Saturdays but turned out to be oddly generic and tasteless (albeit very pretty) when encountered in a bakery. But I gather that in France the term is not confined to the square pastel-coloured confections that I sampled in my youth, so perhaps there's still hope for me and petit fours.


Food from fiction that you couldn't help but want to try even though you knew you would hate it:

I was a very picky eater as a child and wouldn't have eaten sardines or pork pie at any time of the day or night. But when these items appeared on the menu of a midnight feast at St. Clare's or Malory Towers, I wanted nothing more than to join in:

"Golly! Pork-pie and chocolate cake, sardines and Nestlé's milk, chocolate and peppermint creams, tinned pineapple and ginger-beer!" said Janet. "Talk about a feast! I bet this beats the upper third’s feast hollow! Come on—let's begin. I'll cut the cake."

(From Enid Blyton, The Twins at St Clare's.)


An unappetizing food description from fiction:

I'm generally partial to a fry-up, but after enduring one of the most vivid hangovers in fiction, I didn't find this breakfast any more appetizing than Jim Dixon did:

There was a pause, while he noted with mild surprise how much and how quickly she was eating. The remains of a large pool of sauce were to be seen on her plate beside a diminishing mound of fried egg, bacon, and tomatoes. Even as he watched she replenished her stock of sauce with a fat scarlet gout from the bottle.

(From Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim).

Or, moving from the unappetizing to the downright traumatizing, there's the cake from Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman:

The spongy cake was pliable, easy to mould. She stuck all the separate members together with white icing, and used the rest of the icing to cover the shape she had constructed. It was bumpy in places and had too many crumbs in the skin, but it would do. She reinforced the feet and ankles with tooth-picks. Now she had a blank white body. It looked slightly obscene, lying there soft and sugary and featureless on the platter.

A recipe you've tried or a meal you've recreated from fiction:

I've read the odd novel that included recipes but I've never tried any of them out. I guess the closest that I've come to this is the meal made from Lucy Maud Montgomery's recipe book that was served at the last LMM conference that I attended. The main dishes were delicious on the whole, though a tad heavy for the modern palate. But the desserts were teeth-achingly sweet, too much even for me. Different times, different tastes.


Food you associate with reading:

When I was a kid I often snacked on popcorn or cinnamon toast while reading, and now I find myself craving those foods when rereading childhood favourites.


Your favourite food-focussed book/writer:

I don't have a ready answer for this one, but I'm keeping it in the meme as I'm hoping for recommendations!


Tag, you're it!

The Book You'll Never Write

Today, during a noon hour browse at my university bookstore, I bought a most intriguing book by George Steiner titled My Unwritten Books. Its arresting cover image prompted me to pick it up, and its premise, as revealed by a quick flip through, proved irresistible. The book is comprised of seven chapters, each of which describes a book that Steiner hoped to write but didn't. The reasons for not writing them are as diverse as the topics the unwritten books were to have addressed. The jacket copy catalogues some of those reasons as follows: "Because intimacies and indiscretions were too threatening. Because the topic brought too much pain. Because its emotional or intellectual challenges proved beyond his capacities."

I have no doubt that you'll hear more from me about this book as I read my way through it. But in the meantime, I invite you to think about the books you'll never write. There's been a meme circulating recently which calls on participants to list the identifying features of a book they would write ("10 signs a book has been written by me"). So how about something of a counter-meme? Tell me about the book you'll never write, the one you'd like to tackle but won't, and why not.

First Lines Meme

It's terribly lazy of me to do memes two days in a row. But I'm grading essays, and formulating exam questions, and finishing an article, so blogging of the sort that requires a sustained attention span is out of the question. Besides, I like this meme, which I've borrowed from Danielle, who in turn borrowed from Sylvia. It involves "posting the first sentence of each month from your blog," thereby creating a patchwork representation of your year in blogging. I've fudged it a bit, skipping to the second post of the month if the first began with a quotation rather than a sentence I penned myself.

January: In 2007, I plan to do the following… [I realize that’s only part of a sentence, but it leads to five detailed reading resolutions of which, nearly a year later, I must shamefacedly admit I have accomplished only one.]

February: I'm in Boston and Cambridge this weekend.

March: The 2007 Tournament of Books kicks off at The Morning News on Thursday.

April: I'm a born procrastinator.

May: This time last year I was in Scotland, and I'm feeling rather mournful about the fact that I'm not there now.

June: I acquired many new books on my recent travels.

July: I'm not planning any further actual travel this summer, and I'm a great fan of travel writing, so how could I resist the Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge?

August: Recent circumstances have propelled me into a spate of light reading and I've come across a few good books along the way.

September: I've been mulling over Litlove's meme about the joy of language.

October: I've been mulling over Grace Paley's "A Conversation with My Father" for weeks now.

November: I have long been familiar with the work of Scottish writer Edwin Muir, particularly with his poetry and his extraordinary travelogue Scottish Journey.

December: There's a lovely essay by Denise Hamilton in this weekend's Los Angeles Times on her enduring fondness for the books of Beverly Cleary.

If you're curious about where any one of those first sentences leads, click on the month to read the full post from whence it came. It sounds as though I'm forever travelling, thinking longingly of travel, and/or mulling over some book or other. An eerily accurate snapshot of my life…

Seven Things Meme

I've been tagged twice now (first by seachanges and then by Ella) for the seven things meme, so clearly it's time for me to give it a go. It's described by some memers as "seven weird things" and by others as "seven random things." Like Dorothy, I prefer the random formulation. It seems an odd enterprise to confide weird things about yourself to people who don't know many normal things about you. I suppose some things qualify as objectively weird, but for the most part, I think a bit of context is required to distinguish weird from normal. Without context, all you've got is random. Although, I suppose a collage of random could add up to weird. Anyway, enough preamble, and on to the seven things…


1. Every time I have a fever, I dream the same dream.

2. I love the prairies and the sea in equal measure but it makes me anxious to be amidst mountains.

3. As a teenage camp counsellor, I once succeeded in starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together.

4. I can throw back straight scotch or tequila like a pro, but just a few sips of a drink containing vodka makes me feel as if my limbs are not my own.

5. My lifetime coffee intake tops out at a single cup. I didn't like it, and never had another. (Funny how the scotch drinking didn't follow the same trajectory.) Lest you think that renders me caffeine-free, however, I have to confess that I drink many many cups of tea every day. I love tea.

6. I refuse to spend money on taxis if I can possibly avoid it. I'm extravagant in many respects but I believe extravagance should yield pleasure and, while I concede that they can be convenient, I get no pleasure from taxi rides. I'd rather walk or take public transit. In light of this, it will not surprise you to learn that I rarely wear high heels.

7. After a lifetime of being mostly indifferent to the fantasy genre, I have so enthusiastically embraced Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels that they comprise more than one-fifth of the 100 books I've read so far this year.

If you fancy undertaking the seven things meme, consider yourself tagged!