Reading Wednesday, 8/28/13
What did you just finish reading?
Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything: Summer
When I decided to learn how to cook, I kind of went overboard buying cookbooks, most of which I didn't read. For now, I've narrowed it down to four: Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, a book on Jewish cooking because Bittman and Madison do not have the right recipes for matzoh brei, and The Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home, the first cookbook I got. I still have not read any of them straight through, which is why I checked out How to Cook Everything: Summer from my library. It is an ebook excerpt of recipes/techniques from the book -- Bittman tends to give a basic recipe and then suggest variations on it with other ingredients. It is only 35 pages, and therefore I read all of it.
Bittman's summer is clearly my summer (unsurprisingly, since we live in the same city); this is useful for me, but it might prove more frustrating for people whose local markets provide a greater variety of summer fruit. Many of recipes are based in Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean; there's a lot of tomatoes, corns, and beans. I made the corn and black bean salad, and then I made the corn, zucchini, and tomato soup from the full book, and now I am thinking about trying the savory tomato pie this weekend if I can pick up tomatoes at the farmers' market.
B. R. Collins, Love in Revolution
Early 20th-century in what I think is a Ruritanian country undergoing a revolution -- at first I thought it was the Spanish Civil War, but details don't match. Esteya, a schoolgirl in a repressive monarchy, falls in love with Skizi, a Zikindi (faux-gypsy) girl; sheltered initially by bourgeois antecedents and later by her brother's post-revolution position in the Communist Party, Esteya is slow to see the danger she and the people around her are in.
This shares many of the themes and tropes of Collins' earlier books -- people do terrible things to each other initially out of ignorance and later out of willful obliviousness and a desire for vengeance, the protagonist not excepted. In this case, the protagonist's tunnel vision feels too symptomatic of the narrative as a whole, even if the narrative criticizes it; while we see both the repressiveness that caused the revolution and the revolution's brutality toward outcasts, these are subordinated to a personal story in a balance that doesn't feel quite right to me. Maybe it's because Esteya's so determinedly apolitical, or maybe it's because the details of the country feel too insubstantial? Not sure. Both Esteya and Skizi feel weirdly isolated from their environments.
Kyoko Okazaki, Helter Skelter
Finally published, not just in scanlations! I still think it's as brilliant as I did when I first read it. Will try to write up a review, though it will recycle large chunks of my older comments. The translation is disappointing.
Moyoco Anno, Sakuran
Anno was Okazaki's assistant and protegee before she began her own career; they both have a certain sharp strong line and a focus on girl-on-girl violence and cultural policing. Like Helter Skelter, Sakuran is a single-volume story focused on the career of a strong-minded, vicious-tempered woman who is abusive to the people around her and who yet has some appeal, or at least fascination, because of her ferocious determination to survive. Kiyoha is a prostitute in the Yoshiwara in the Edo era, which means that she was brought into the quarter by a man who sold her to a brothel and she will not leave unless and until she marries; gates lock the prostitutes into the district. This doesn't stop Kiyoha from attempting to escape.
Difficult to follow because you don't most of the usual hair and costume cues to differentiate characters, and because the narrative is not chronological; it's more rewarding on rereading, but like all of Anno's work that I've read, it's loosely structured. This surprised me in a single volume more than it does in an open-ended series, and I was also comparing it to the tight focus of Helter Skelter. I still want way more Moyoco Anno in English.
Keiko Suenobu, The Limit: 1
Shojo melodrama about schoolgirls in a Lord of the Flies survivalist situation after their schoolbus crashes on a trip to a mountain retreat, killing most of their classmates. Not impressed by the fat, socially maladept class outcast who goes crazy and violent the day after the crash.
What are you currently reading?
I'm still reading Kate Elliott's Spirit Gate, which improved vastly once it switched to another culture/set of POV characters. Unfortunately, it has just switched back to the POV character who annoyed me so much.
John Klima, Lynne M. Thomas, and Michael Damian Thomas, Glitter and Mayhem - I just got my Kickstarter contributor copy. I'm not sure if I'll read all the stories; I am reading the writers I'm interested in first and won't necessarily bother with all the others. Unsurprisingly, I like Sofia Samatar's "Bess, the Landlord's Daughter, Goes for Drinks with the Green Girl" a lot. It covers some of the same territory as Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox.
Free book-question-shaped space
Purchased/received this week: Helter Skelter and Glitter and Mayhem, above; also Hawkeye: Little Hits by Matt Fraction and David Aja; the latest volumes of Kimi ni Todoke and Natsume's Book of Friends; the final volume of the X reprint from Viz with the unflipped art. (I need to get rid of the old copies, damn it.)
cups brewed at DW
Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything: Summer
When I decided to learn how to cook, I kind of went overboard buying cookbooks, most of which I didn't read. For now, I've narrowed it down to four: Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, a book on Jewish cooking because Bittman and Madison do not have the right recipes for matzoh brei, and The Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home, the first cookbook I got. I still have not read any of them straight through, which is why I checked out How to Cook Everything: Summer from my library. It is an ebook excerpt of recipes/techniques from the book -- Bittman tends to give a basic recipe and then suggest variations on it with other ingredients. It is only 35 pages, and therefore I read all of it.
Bittman's summer is clearly my summer (unsurprisingly, since we live in the same city); this is useful for me, but it might prove more frustrating for people whose local markets provide a greater variety of summer fruit. Many of recipes are based in Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean; there's a lot of tomatoes, corns, and beans. I made the corn and black bean salad, and then I made the corn, zucchini, and tomato soup from the full book, and now I am thinking about trying the savory tomato pie this weekend if I can pick up tomatoes at the farmers' market.
B. R. Collins, Love in Revolution
Early 20th-century in what I think is a Ruritanian country undergoing a revolution -- at first I thought it was the Spanish Civil War, but details don't match. Esteya, a schoolgirl in a repressive monarchy, falls in love with Skizi, a Zikindi (faux-gypsy) girl; sheltered initially by bourgeois antecedents and later by her brother's post-revolution position in the Communist Party, Esteya is slow to see the danger she and the people around her are in.
This shares many of the themes and tropes of Collins' earlier books -- people do terrible things to each other initially out of ignorance and later out of willful obliviousness and a desire for vengeance, the protagonist not excepted. In this case, the protagonist's tunnel vision feels too symptomatic of the narrative as a whole, even if the narrative criticizes it; while we see both the repressiveness that caused the revolution and the revolution's brutality toward outcasts, these are subordinated to a personal story in a balance that doesn't feel quite right to me. Maybe it's because Esteya's so determinedly apolitical, or maybe it's because the details of the country feel too insubstantial? Not sure. Both Esteya and Skizi feel weirdly isolated from their environments.
Kyoko Okazaki, Helter Skelter
Finally published, not just in scanlations! I still think it's as brilliant as I did when I first read it. Will try to write up a review, though it will recycle large chunks of my older comments. The translation is disappointing.
Moyoco Anno, Sakuran
Anno was Okazaki's assistant and protegee before she began her own career; they both have a certain sharp strong line and a focus on girl-on-girl violence and cultural policing. Like Helter Skelter, Sakuran is a single-volume story focused on the career of a strong-minded, vicious-tempered woman who is abusive to the people around her and who yet has some appeal, or at least fascination, because of her ferocious determination to survive. Kiyoha is a prostitute in the Yoshiwara in the Edo era, which means that she was brought into the quarter by a man who sold her to a brothel and she will not leave unless and until she marries; gates lock the prostitutes into the district. This doesn't stop Kiyoha from attempting to escape.
Difficult to follow because you don't most of the usual hair and costume cues to differentiate characters, and because the narrative is not chronological; it's more rewarding on rereading, but like all of Anno's work that I've read, it's loosely structured. This surprised me in a single volume more than it does in an open-ended series, and I was also comparing it to the tight focus of Helter Skelter. I still want way more Moyoco Anno in English.
Keiko Suenobu, The Limit: 1
Shojo melodrama about schoolgirls in a Lord of the Flies survivalist situation after their schoolbus crashes on a trip to a mountain retreat, killing most of their classmates. Not impressed by the fat, socially maladept class outcast who goes crazy and violent the day after the crash.
What are you currently reading?
I'm still reading Kate Elliott's Spirit Gate, which improved vastly once it switched to another culture/set of POV characters. Unfortunately, it has just switched back to the POV character who annoyed me so much.
John Klima, Lynne M. Thomas, and Michael Damian Thomas, Glitter and Mayhem - I just got my Kickstarter contributor copy. I'm not sure if I'll read all the stories; I am reading the writers I'm interested in first and won't necessarily bother with all the others. Unsurprisingly, I like Sofia Samatar's "Bess, the Landlord's Daughter, Goes for Drinks with the Green Girl" a lot. It covers some of the same territory as Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox.
Free book-question-shaped space
Purchased/received this week: Helter Skelter and Glitter and Mayhem, above; also Hawkeye: Little Hits by Matt Fraction and David Aja; the latest volumes of Kimi ni Todoke and Natsume's Book of Friends; the final volume of the X reprint from Viz with the unflipped art. (I need to get rid of the old copies, damn it.)
cups brewed at DW