Brain food

Durign the five years that I was in college, I never had much time for my hobbies. In May, after I graduated, I finally had the opportunity to begin cooking on a regular basis, and I've written a little about my experiences here. It was not until Novembe,r however, that I took the time to take up my favorite past time of all - reading good books. I started a small section in the side matter here where I commented on the books that I'd been reading. I think I'll get rid of that, and just leave posts when I finish something, as I've been reading about as many books as recipes I've been making lately:

10/26/05 - Memories of My Melancholy Whores (4 stars)

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Review: "It is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things," Garcia Marquez writes, "Though memory does not often fail with regard to things that are of real interest to us."

_Memories of my Melancholy Whores_ begins on the eve of the 90th birthday of the narrator, a journalist and columnist for a local newspaper. Feeling close to death, his birthday present to himself, which will (initially) cost him one month's wages, is a night in the arms of a virgin prostitute, in this case a fourteen-year-old girl he christens Delgadina.

He arrives at the brothel, where the girl has been drugged to calm her nerves. The narrator climbs into bed with her, and falls asleep. From here, he begins a year-long affair with a young woman that he has never spoken to, whose eyes he has never seen. He looks for her in the streets during the day, and then realizes that he would never recognize her awake or dressed. Yet, a change has come over him. Though his trists and the lavish gifts he has bestowed upon his Sleeping Beauty have made him destitute, and he is forgetting the names of his friends, for the first time in his life, he is in love, and happier than he has ever been.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores tells the story of an old man who has never loved anyone, never had a true friend, who has never made love to a woman that he hasn't paid. It is at once a novel about finding love at old age, after a long life ill-spent, and about coming to terms with the ghosts of one's past. What seperates this novel from others that cover these well-worn themes is that it is also about the state of being old itself. We do not waste away with time, Garcia Marquez seems to be saying; time is a tool that carves away our excess, like a chisel chips away marble to reveal a work of art.

Time has been good in this way for the author, as well. The novella, in my opinion, has always been Garcia Marquez's best form (e.g. A Chronicle of a Death Fortold) , and with MMMW he displays all of the qualities that made his past novellas great - playful language and imagery and few narrative excesses. Also like his past novellas, it is not the main characters that give the story depth - the professor is an admittedly shallow man, which is why his first love affair at the age of 90 comes as such a shock - but the minor parts: the brothel owner, the ex-fiance, the aging prostitute.

This was a great read.

11/23/05 - Getting Mother's Body (3.5 stars)

by Suzan-Lori Parks

GMB is Pulitzer-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks' first novel. It tells the story of Billy Beade, 16 years old, single and pregnant, and her quest to retrieve some valuable jewelry buried with her mother in Arizona. She has three problems: 1) she's not the only one after the jewels, 2) she has no way of getting to Arizona, and 3) her mother was quite a liar, and the jewels may or may not have been real.

This was a fun novel; can't wait to read her next one.

11/26/05 - Julie and Julia:365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen (0.5 stars)

by Julie Powell

I read Powell's blog, "The Julie/Julia Project", before she signed her book deal, and I was waiting impatiently for the book to arrive. I read it in two nights, and ended up angry and dissappointed. I tried to be nice on my review on Amazon, because after reading her blog, I really felt like I knew this woman, but given another month to think about the fac thta tI paid full price for this book has drained me of all of the good will I have toward this book.

Powell can't write. At all.

Now, I guess, it is a little hypocritical of me, having my own sloppily edited blog, to complain about the writing skills of another blogger. Blogs are rarely well written, mostly because it is the immediacy of the medium that makes them so attractive to read. I can check in on my favorite blogs once every hour or so [I won't mention them, as they are mostly celebrity gossip blogs, and I'm embarrassed] and usually one of them will have an update. It isn't like reading the New York Times, or anything - it's hardly likely that a writer with a blog can churn out an article or post of even moderate length that has been properly edited with all spelling and grammar mistakes fixed and any invalid or poorly written statements rewritten or excised in the time that they have every day to write and post. I tried editing my posts when I first started, but it took forever. So I've stopped.

Now, if I were writing a book for fans of From Eggs to Apples to read [hi, grandma!], and that they would have to pay approximately $26 for, I would bother with the thorough edit. Powell seems to have not thought of this, and so her book reads, well, like a blog.

It's also not at all about food. At all. The first half of the book is about how boring her life was before her husband came up with the idea of her starting a blog, and the second half was about how somewhat-more exciting her life was after she started her blog. So, the title of the book should read Julie and Julia: Woman has boring life, starts blog, leads somewhat-less-boring life.

Julie Powell is now a professional food writer [not a secretary, as she was a the time of the blog], and I've read some of her free-lance magazine articles on the web. They are much better. [See this cool piece in Archaeology Magazine: "The Trouble with Blood."] So, its not that she can't write well, or say anything interesting, its just that she's can't write anything interesting about herself well. And that's what this book is all about: Julie Powell.

To be fair, I did read it all the way through. I'm not mourning the three or four hours it took me to read it, and there are some cute anecdotes - hence the half a star.

More later.