Now this is a book.

This book bespeaks passion. Why in the world would one write a book about dyeing with lichens if passionate curiosity did not drive you to do it?

I can just picture the author with a still damp handful of lichens, comparing them to some dusty old manual with completely inadequate illustrations. Is it Ochrolechia tartarea? Or perhaps Ochrolechia parella? Would it impart a royal purple hue? The book remains mute, and the library yields no further clues. "But I want to know!" she wails, then sets out determinedly with pencil, sketchbook, and the completely inadequate dusty old manual to do the research herself. After months of tramping through woodlands and rocky shores, sketchbooks filled with such treasures as "Hypogymnia physodes, underside of lobe showing the lower skin ruptured," cooking pots permanently colored odd hues of brown and purple, and reams of notes ("Cetraria glauca has been included as it will give a yellow to the wool with boiling water," and ""Found in Scotland only on trees"), she settles at the typewriter to share what she has found.

I want to be this person.

p.s. Thank you, Lysne, for lending me this book. It is absolutely amazing.

hang in there . . .

while the world reads Harry Potter. I just got my copy today but am saving it for vacation up north. We leave Monday morning -- I hope to be reading on the beach by mid afternoon.

flowers for you and seven random things

These flowers are for you, whether you read my blog regularly or are here on a momentary visit. I welcome all three of you! (or maybe four if net traffic is heavy!) The flowers are especially for those who have no garden of their own.

Peonies are perfect garden plants. Their blooms are enormous and showy, implying arcane knowledge and diligent care on the part of their brilliant gardener. The truth is that they have few pests or diseases, are extraordinarily long-lived, and need no maintenance. What could be better?

My friend Lysne has tagged me with a meme, my first: seven random things about myself. Well,
1. My one true talent is spelling. I can spell virtually any word. This amazes my children, who are geniuses in many areas, but can't spell their way out of a paper bag.

2. I notice little things, while the big ones breeze right on by. A tiny little bloom, a shaft of sunlight, a clever turn of phrase -- these capture my full attention while the enormous weed, coming thunderstorm, or main thesis might escape me entirely.

3. My house exists in my imagination far more strongly than it does in reality. I see my living room with its blue walls, taupe-colored furniture, bamboo flooring, intriguing art and objets d'art, and enormous coffee table for books and tea and feet. Others see the builder's white walls, mashed-down carpeting, ratty mismatched furniture, garage-sale bull's horns as the only decoration, and tiny little apartment-sized coffee table that really can't support more than one book and a small foot. Someday vision and reality will match.

4. I'm pretty good with gardens, but any vegetal matter in my house is a dead plant walking. Usually several months without water do them in. The few plants I've watered have usually drowned as thanks for my efforts.

5. In grade school, middle and high school, and even college I was one of the smartest students, earning awards and accolades and a disgustingly high grade point average. In graduate school, I was suddenly the dumb one. Even my closest friends called me the dumb one. I didn't mind it from them, but my self-esteem took a real beating during those years.

6. I'm fascinated by vampire lore, and read any vampire novels I can get my paws on. (There's a lot of dreck out there.) I want more than almost anything to write my own.

7. Number One on my lifelong want list has always been and continues to be a horse. I'm an awful rider -- I really want a horse as a pet and a friend.

Hey Harriet, what are seven random things about you?

Bad Joke and Fun Book

photo found on flickr, taken by Ron Richardson

What's the difference between a bad skydiver and a bad golfer?

A bad golfer goes, WHACK, "Damn!"

A bad skydiver goes, "Damn!" WHACK.

Is your Monday a little brighter now? (heh heh)

This is one of many bad (but very fun) jokes in Designed to Dieby Chloe Green. I just found this mystery series and am liking it very much. The protagonist is a fashion stylist, which provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of fashion with its delicious clothes, high price tags, and intriguing people. I wish Green would pack even more fashion detail into these books -- it's one of the best parts.

Also fun is the flirtation among characters, which provides sexual heat without explicit detail. After some of Laurell K. Hamilton's latest, this is a refreshing change. Not that I'm against sexual detail in books. (Mom, don't read this!) If it's hot, bring it on. But sometimes it's good just to have a hint.

The mystery aspect is fairly unbelievable, and I wished for more development of some of the characters, but I'd still recommend this book as a fun read, or even better, a fun listen. C. J. Critt does the audiobook, and she's absolutely perfect for it. Mom, see if you can get this for your trip. (I knew you were still reading!)

Let Us Now Praise Neil Gaiman

(with apologies to James Agee and Walker Evans)

I just finished Neil Gaiman's Coraline. What an odd little book. Gaiman wrote one of my favorite books, American Gods, and I just discovered his children's literature. While my first thought was that this man should not be writing for children, upon reflection I think that his horrifying stories are as necessary as fairy tales used to be, before they got all sanitized and pretty.

Just this morning, the kids and I were listening to Jonathan Stroud's second Bartimaeus book, The Golem's Eye, on the way to school. One of the characters is watching a play and thinks,

Show us a little of what we fear . . . only take away its teeth. . . . Make the demons frighten us, then let us watch them die.

That's rather what fairy tales do for our children, isn't it? They provide a way to confront our deepest, animal fears and deal with them rather than pushing them back into our psyches, ignored and ready to fester out when we are least prepared.

Back to Coraline. The little girl walks through a closed-off door into an alternate reality, one in which her parents give her the attention and presents she craves, but are creepy and have sewn-on black buttons on their faces in place of eyes. Which life she chooses, and how she fights for it, make up the story.

The story is terrific, and what keeps the chill factor under control is the quiet, stubborn strength of the heroine. If this unassuming little girl can hold herself together in the face of such terrors, so can the reader. My 11-year-old daughter read it before I did, and while she didn't proclaim it her favorite book (it would have had to have dragons in it for that), she did talk about it and wasn't frightened senseless.

As good as the story is the writing. I don't know how to describe Gaiman's craftmanship. It's a spare text, finely honed. His sense of timing, the rhthym of his sentences, his use of just the right words is, well, poetic.

The blurbs on the back cover are by Diana Wynne Jones (who compares it to Alice in Wonderland), Terry Pratchett (one of my favorite authors), and Lemony Snickett, who goes off on his own amusing riff:

This book tells a fascinating and disturbing story that frightened me nearly to death. Unless you want to find yourself hiding under your bed, with your thumb in your mouth, trembling with fear and making terrible noises, I suggest that you step very slowly away from this book and go find another source of amusement, such as investigating an unsolved crime or making a small animal out of yarn.

(Too bad I don't like the "Series of Unfortunate Events" books. I love his writing here.)

Pratchett notes,

This book will send a shiver down your spine, out through your shoes, and into a taxi to the airport. It has the delicate horror of the finest fairy tales, and it is a masterpiece. And you will never think about buttons in quite the same way again.

And the illustrations by Dave McKean are fantastically creepy. I hope Gaiman doesn't mind if I reproduce one here (I'm fairly certain he's not one of the 3 or 4 regular readers of this blog):

The pen-and-ink drawings are spare but detailed and evoke the text's atmosphere perfectly.

I can't wait to read more.

Going All Medieval

At middle school, my sixth-grade daughter took an exploratory class in medieval history. This fit in nicely with the book they're reading in language arts, Crispin: The Cross of Leadby Avi, which is set in the Middle Ages. (I used to live in Avi's attic. How weird is that?)

In class, the students worked in small groups to research different aspects of medieval life. Madaleine's group studied food. They made a nice poster detailing typical meals for nobles and peasants and set up a table with food models -- a plastic loaf of bread, crumpled purple paper grapes, a rubber chicken. All very well and good. But Madaleine decided, on her own, to find a recipe for and make a read medieval dish. What she chose was candied horseradish from a fourteenth century treatise on candymaking, Libre de Totes Maneres de Confits, translated from the Catalan by Vincent Cuenca and available on the Medieval Cookery website.

What a taste sensation! Candied horseradish is to modern candy what lapsang souchong is to tea: smoky. It doesn't have the sinus-clearing bite of fresh horseradish, but the heat remains in a taste reminiscent of campfires. (I can just imagine the castle cook looking at yet another knobby horseradish root and thinking, "What the hell am I going to make with it this time?" and then yelling at the scullery maid who knocked it into the vat of honey. "You got chocolate in my peanut butter!" "No, you got peanut butter in my chocolate!" Wait, wrong century.)

Tonight my daughter finished an extra credit project, making a board game out of Crispin. It was so much fun to watch her work. And here it is. Wanna play?

Cooking the Books

I want to be Julie Powell, who cooked her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, blogged about it, and then wrote a book about her transformative experience. Unfortunately, my cholesterol levels are too high to attempt anything like traditional French cooking. And my admittedly conservative tastes (in food only, mind you) would rule out whole chapters on sweetbreads, shellfish, and anything with really icky ingredients.

Perhaps The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook? A behemoth captured in a 3-ring binder, this tome is clearly intended to supplant the old standard Betty Crocker in the kitchen (although I've always been a Joy of Cooking follower myself). I love this book. Christopher Kimball and his minions are the ultimate food geeks, and their fanatic recipe testing practically guarantees wonderful results. Of course, with more than 1,200 recipes, it would take me at least four years of dedicated cooking to make my way through the whole book. And the cholesterol? These people focus on taste, not butter limits. There would probably be a whole lot of nights where my family would enjoy all their tasty recipes while I broke out a can of beans to go with my plate of brown rice.

Diana Shaw's Almost Vegetarian might be a good bet. It has some chicken and fish and, while nowhere near vegan, utilizes fresh vegetables and other plant foods while stressing health and good taste. It has about 150 recipes. Doable. Very doable. But this isn't a tome, a classic, a milestone of cookbooks the way the others are. As good as it probably is (and Diana Shaw is a well-known and respected cook and writer), Almost Vegetarian doesn't have the oomph of the others.

Then again, I don't have the oomph of Julie Powell. What a woman. She managed to track down odd and sometimes out-of-date ingredients (bought a marrow bone recently, anyone?), follow lengthy and difficult instructions (boning a duck), and eat stuff I wouldn't even be able to contemplate (brains, lobster). Every day. For a year.

She cooked through a terrible job, September 11th, and the massive East Coast power outage (she lives in New York City). Not only did she eat this stuff every night, but she served it to friends and intimidating people.

In the end, what she did wasn't really about cooking a whole book, but more about transforming her life, finding meaning and joy in a time of personal and national torment. This is what awes me about Julie Powell. I wonder if the irritation Julia Child apparently showed over Julie's efforts was simply a misunderstanding of what she was really doing, or if Julia unconsciously recognized a force perhaps greater than her own in this somewhat bad-tempered New York secretary.

I'm probably not going to find Julie's courage or focus in the kitchen. A little bit of joy, though, would be good.

Ambrosia

In ancient mythology, Ambrosia (Greek αμβροσία) is sometimes the food, sometimes the drink, of the gods. The word has generally been derived from Greek a- ("not") and mbrotos ("mortal"); hence the food or drink of the immortals . . . . The classical scholar Arthur Woollgar Verrall, however, denied that there is any clear example in which the word ambrosios necessarily means immortal, and preferred to explain it as "fragrant," a sense which is always suitable. If so, the word may be derived from the Semitic MBR ("amber", which when burned is resinously fragrant; compare "ambergris") to which Eastern nations attribute miraculous properties. In Europe, honey-colored amber, sometimes far from its natural source, was already a grave gift in Neolithic times and was still worn in the 7th century CE as a talisman by druidic Frisians, though St. Eligius warned "No woman should presume to hang amber from her neck." [I think I'm going to make a practice of wearing amber from now on -- Anne.] W. H. Roscher thinks that both nectar and ambrosia were kinds of honey, in which case their power of conferring immortality would be due to the supposed healing and cleansing power of honey, which is in fact aseptic, and because fermented honey (mead) preceded wine as an entheogen in the Aegean world: the Great Goddess of Crete on some Minoan seals had a bee face: compare Merope and Melissa. See also Ichor. . . .

Derivatively, the word Ambrosia (neuter plural) was given to certain festivals in honour of Dionysus, probably because of the predominance of feasting in connection with them.

from wikipedia

In summer, we feast on pesto. Basil is our fragrant food, so potent that I suppose it must have aseptic properties (and the garlic certainly does). Although we don't yet have a vegetable plot in our yard, we planted lots and lots of basil in pots on the deck. There is more than enough to make pesto on Saturdays and Sundays simply by pruning the plants. Pesto has the taste of summer to me. What could be more summery than masses of green leaves? And what better binder than Greek olive oil? Food of the gods, I dub thee pesto.

What puts me in mind of things Greek is the most marvelous book, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. This is his first book for young adults. Part American Gods and part Harry Potter, The Lightning Thief follows the uneasy growth of a teen troubled with ADHD, dyslexia, and social problems, which stem from his mixed parentage: part human, part god. My 10-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son both devoured it as voraciously as I did, and it is somewhat rare for our tastes to agree to such an extent. This book is (groan with me here) pure ambrosia.

little leopard

I've been reading Christine Feehan's Dark Challenge, which is full of leopards of both the natural and shapeshifter varieties. So what should appear in my yard than a leopard moth? This was exciting, as we found leopard moth caterpillars last year. What a cool wee beastie.

(By the way, enjoying but not loving the Feehan. Full of Everests and Death Valleys with not a lot of level terrain to even things out. Still and all, a really fun read.)

Fewer Calories, Less Taste

review continued from previous post
Micah, Hamilton's latest offering, promises the story of Blake's wereleopard partner. In a previous novel, Micah appeared more or less out of the blue and was instantly recognized by Blake as her soulmate. Micah is short, standing eye-to-eye with the petite necromancer. Notable for his size (short he ain't, if you catch my drift) and eyes (permanently in shape-shifted leopard form), Micah manages to insert himself into Blake's life and bed without greatly upsetting her other partners, a considerable feat. He has a mysterious past, hinted at but not explored until now.

But Micah's life story turns out not to be the mystery explored here, or at least not primarily. We get his past, which is interesting but not particularly noteworthy. Instead, the focus is on the pair's current relationship, put to the test by their first trip together without any of the other weres or vampires around. Micah makes the event into a luxurious honeymoon, with Blake having conniption fits over what this means about their relationship. We've come to expect this sort of introspection from Blake, but here, without any complications from other characters, there's not a lot to explore. Her discomfort with the situation quickly becomes old. Get over it, Anita. Micah means a lot to you. Quit throwing hissy fits and sleep with him!

Meanwhile, the central plot about a zombie-raising gone wrong is simple, again lacking the marvelous personal and political convolutions that make the other novels so messy and wonderful. And Blake herself is oddly powerless, finding the zombie too strong to control. I guess this is what bothers me the most. Throughout the novel, Blake seems adrift, along for the ride. Her "damn the torpedoes" attitude, so much a part of her person, is strangely missing here. In bed, she is tentative. (Will he fit? Yikes!) In power, she is bereft. C'mon, Anita, take control! Pull out that gun and blast that zombie into scummy little necrotic blobs!

The underlying problem seems to be Micah. As a character, he lacks the complexity to stand up to Blake. His psychological issues aren't as richly explored as those of Richard, the werewolf king, and his power can't stand up to Jean Claude's, the master vampire. His length and breadth, while greater, can't make up for his smaller stature overall. He is, in the end, just a little guy.