but if you'd like to join my book dictatorship, please let me know.
Dear Livejournal: I'm sorry I haven't written you in a while, it's that time of year when I get distracted making very important fake bingo card graphics about baseball.
Books I wish other people I know were reading so we could discuss them:
1. I keep meaning to say, I finished The Raw Shark Texts and I'm now 99% sure that it was The House of Leaves that was the other book in the other "If you like ______, you'll love ______" comparison. So if you liked The House of Leaves, you'd probably also really like The Raw Shark Texts. More importantly, if you tried to read The House of Leaves and wanted to like it but thought it was just too fucking meta-conceptual, you might also like The Raw Shark Texts, as it is a little more lucid and has a more satisfying conclusion.
2. I just read Mission Child by Maureen McHugh. If you haven't read it because you already read her short story with the same name, the plot of the book is actually very, very different (the short story is just the first chapter), so it's worth reading, it has lots of fascinating things to say about colonialism and gender identity. However, if by chance anyone who's reading this has read the book, one specific plot point really bugged me: the entire book, we see the off-worlders portrayed as ignorantly forcing their culture on the native population with various detrimental effects. And then, when the off-worlder physician discovers that Jan is biologically female, the doctor is all, "No, that's cool, you totally don't have to hide it from us, chosing your gender identity is your right, we can help you transition fully or we can just give you hormone therapy, whatever you want to do, blah blah blah." And this doctor isn't portrayed as this special, unique, understanding character, it's portrayed as just being standard off-worlder medical practice. I guess I don't understand how an Earth culture that could still be so obviously fucked up about colonialism could have somehow be so incredibly enlightened about transgender identity. I just thought it was completely unbelievable that this colonialist culture that had spent the entire book fucking up Jan's life would be the one that was the most accepting of Jan's gender identity.
3. Right now, I'm reading Cyberbad Days by Ian McDonald. It's a book of short stories all set in a mid-twenty-first century India that was apparently the setting of a novel he wrote previously that I haven't read, so you don't seem to need to read the novel to enjoy this book. I picked this book up because one of the short stories was mentioned in this blog post about population disparity in China. I was initially a little leery because it's a book about India written by a white British dude. I'm not saying that people shouldn't write about cultures other than their own, but British writers will sometimes write about India in this colonialist way where they just write about the parts of India that are really British and don't actually do any of the research necessary to write a story about someone else's culture, which is obviously not cool. I will admit upfront that I don't know enough about Hindism to know if he's getting it right, but he does seem to be cognizant of India as a country that is something other than a post-colonial stomping ground for his British whims. It's also, like I said, set 50 years in the future, so a lot of the cultural stuff is extrapolated.
Talking about these books without anyone to talk to (much like when I read Half Life and went from "this is awesome!" to "what the fuck?" in twenty pages) makes me think I should join a book club. But I don't actually want to join a book club, I want to read a book, decide I like it, and then have six other people I like be forced to read the book and talk to me about it. That's not really a book club, that's more of a book dictatorship.
(I had lunch with moireach & annakovsky in the middle of writing this entry and they pointed out that that's known as "being an English literature professor." Do you think it's too late to change my entire life plan, go back to school and get a PhD in English?)
Adventures in bread-making:
As previously discussed, I like to cook. I call myself a "quantity over quality" cook, and I don't even really mean that in a bad way. I don't make a lot of super-fancy, super-complicated dishes, I rarely cook something that has photogenic presentation, but I cook a lot. It's rare that I eat two meals in a week that I didn't cook myself, and also I cold brew my own coffee, make my own salad dressings, soak my beans from dried, roast and freeze my own vegetables blah blah blah you want to punch me in the face. But my Achilles heel has always been bread, I've always sucked at making bread and have never been able to eliminate the $5 ciabatta habit from my bourgetarded lifestyle.
But! My mom bought this book, Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day and started making their basic recipe, and then she taught me how to do it when I was visiting her last month, and then I taught Julia when I got home and now we are a well-oiled bread making machine, and there is always a loaf of bread on the counter and more dough in the fridge. That's the only problem with this recipe, is that you become addicted and you cannot stop making and eating bread. So, uh, don't try this if you're on the Atkins diet. But here is the recipe, it's so easy I could cry:
Combine:
1.5 tablespoons yeast
1 tablespoon kosher or sea salt
3 cups warm water (approx. 100 degrees, you can use a thermometer if you want but I just run the faucet until it feels body temperature)
6.5 cups unbleached flour (you can special high-gluten bread flour if you want, but you don't need it)
Mix until the dough comes together and is glossy. Obviously the easiest thing to do is to have a stand mixer with a dough hook, but if you have a hand mixer, apparently you can buy dough hook beaters? My mom has them, they are awesome. Or you can just mix it by hand.
Dough will be moist, don't worry. Dump it in a non-air-tight container. You'll need a BIG-ASS container for this. I tried to use the biggest tupperware we had and it was still too big, so I bought one of those shoe box sized plastic storage containers and that works well.
Let the container sit out at room temperature for two hours, then put in the fridge and let it sit at least overnight. (Dough doesn't appear to go bad, I've let it sit in the fridge for, like, a week and it's been fine.)
When you're ready to make the dough:
Get out a wooden cutting board (the book says to use a pizza peel, but whatever, a cutting board works fine) and sprinkle it with coarse corn meal.
sprinkle the area of the surface that you're going to pull from with flour. (I like to use half of a broken tea ball to do this, so I don't have uneven patches or lumps. We make this bread so often that I have a small jar of corn meal and a small jar of flour with a tea ball sitting next to the fridge.) Then pull (with your bare hands) out a hunk of dough that's approximately one pound/the size of a grapefruit. Cut the hunk away from the rest of the dough with a knife.
Now you've got a hunk of dough that's got a cut-off ragged edge. The edge is the bottom of your ball of dough, and you want to stretch the surface of the dough around until it meets at the bottom until all the flour is worked in. (This process is not like kneading, and should not take longer than a minute.) Plunk the ball down on the cornmeal, don't worry if the bottom is still all bunchy.
Let the dough rest for twenty minutes. Then pre-heat the oven at 450 degrees. The book really wants you to bake the bread on a pizza stone, but if you don't have one, I have had good results baking it on the bottom of an upside down cast iron skillet. Whatever you use, put it in the oven the same time that you turn it on. After another twenty minutes, slide the dough into the oven onto the baking surface.
At this point, the book says that you should place a baking dish with a cup of boiling water below the bread to create steam. You can do this, but it's kind of a hassle and Julia discovered that you can also just spray water using a spray bottle around the bottom and sides of your oven and achieve roughly the same result.
Bake the bread for thirty minutes or until it sounds hollow when you tap on the bottom.
THAT'S IT. No kneading, no rising in a warm place. And it's totally delicious and makes great sandwiches. One recipe makes three or four loaves, so we have to make another batch of dough ... about every three days. Yeah, we have a problem.
Books I wish other people I know were reading so we could discuss them:
1. I keep meaning to say, I finished The Raw Shark Texts and I'm now 99% sure that it was The House of Leaves that was the other book in the other "If you like ______, you'll love ______" comparison. So if you liked The House of Leaves, you'd probably also really like The Raw Shark Texts. More importantly, if you tried to read The House of Leaves and wanted to like it but thought it was just too fucking meta-conceptual, you might also like The Raw Shark Texts, as it is a little more lucid and has a more satisfying conclusion.
2. I just read Mission Child by Maureen McHugh. If you haven't read it because you already read her short story with the same name, the plot of the book is actually very, very different (the short story is just the first chapter), so it's worth reading, it has lots of fascinating things to say about colonialism and gender identity. However, if by chance anyone who's reading this has read the book, one specific plot point really bugged me: the entire book, we see the off-worlders portrayed as ignorantly forcing their culture on the native population with various detrimental effects. And then, when the off-worlder physician discovers that Jan is biologically female, the doctor is all, "No, that's cool, you totally don't have to hide it from us, chosing your gender identity is your right, we can help you transition fully or we can just give you hormone therapy, whatever you want to do, blah blah blah." And this doctor isn't portrayed as this special, unique, understanding character, it's portrayed as just being standard off-worlder medical practice. I guess I don't understand how an Earth culture that could still be so obviously fucked up about colonialism could have somehow be so incredibly enlightened about transgender identity. I just thought it was completely unbelievable that this colonialist culture that had spent the entire book fucking up Jan's life would be the one that was the most accepting of Jan's gender identity.
3. Right now, I'm reading Cyberbad Days by Ian McDonald. It's a book of short stories all set in a mid-twenty-first century India that was apparently the setting of a novel he wrote previously that I haven't read, so you don't seem to need to read the novel to enjoy this book. I picked this book up because one of the short stories was mentioned in this blog post about population disparity in China. I was initially a little leery because it's a book about India written by a white British dude. I'm not saying that people shouldn't write about cultures other than their own, but British writers will sometimes write about India in this colonialist way where they just write about the parts of India that are really British and don't actually do any of the research necessary to write a story about someone else's culture, which is obviously not cool. I will admit upfront that I don't know enough about Hindism to know if he's getting it right, but he does seem to be cognizant of India as a country that is something other than a post-colonial stomping ground for his British whims. It's also, like I said, set 50 years in the future, so a lot of the cultural stuff is extrapolated.
Talking about these books without anyone to talk to (much like when I read Half Life and went from "this is awesome!" to "what the fuck?" in twenty pages) makes me think I should join a book club. But I don't actually want to join a book club, I want to read a book, decide I like it, and then have six other people I like be forced to read the book and talk to me about it. That's not really a book club, that's more of a book dictatorship.
(I had lunch with moireach & annakovsky in the middle of writing this entry and they pointed out that that's known as "being an English literature professor." Do you think it's too late to change my entire life plan, go back to school and get a PhD in English?)
Adventures in bread-making:
As previously discussed, I like to cook. I call myself a "quantity over quality" cook, and I don't even really mean that in a bad way. I don't make a lot of super-fancy, super-complicated dishes, I rarely cook something that has photogenic presentation, but I cook a lot. It's rare that I eat two meals in a week that I didn't cook myself, and also I cold brew my own coffee, make my own salad dressings, soak my beans from dried, roast and freeze my own vegetables blah blah blah you want to punch me in the face. But my Achilles heel has always been bread, I've always sucked at making bread and have never been able to eliminate the $5 ciabatta habit from my bourgetarded lifestyle.
But! My mom bought this book, Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day and started making their basic recipe, and then she taught me how to do it when I was visiting her last month, and then I taught Julia when I got home and now we are a well-oiled bread making machine, and there is always a loaf of bread on the counter and more dough in the fridge. That's the only problem with this recipe, is that you become addicted and you cannot stop making and eating bread. So, uh, don't try this if you're on the Atkins diet. But here is the recipe, it's so easy I could cry:
Combine:
1.5 tablespoons yeast
1 tablespoon kosher or sea salt
3 cups warm water (approx. 100 degrees, you can use a thermometer if you want but I just run the faucet until it feels body temperature)
6.5 cups unbleached flour (you can special high-gluten bread flour if you want, but you don't need it)
Mix until the dough comes together and is glossy. Obviously the easiest thing to do is to have a stand mixer with a dough hook, but if you have a hand mixer, apparently you can buy dough hook beaters? My mom has them, they are awesome. Or you can just mix it by hand.
Dough will be moist, don't worry. Dump it in a non-air-tight container. You'll need a BIG-ASS container for this. I tried to use the biggest tupperware we had and it was still too big, so I bought one of those shoe box sized plastic storage containers and that works well.
Let the container sit out at room temperature for two hours, then put in the fridge and let it sit at least overnight. (Dough doesn't appear to go bad, I've let it sit in the fridge for, like, a week and it's been fine.)
When you're ready to make the dough:
Get out a wooden cutting board (the book says to use a pizza peel, but whatever, a cutting board works fine) and sprinkle it with coarse corn meal.
sprinkle the area of the surface that you're going to pull from with flour. (I like to use half of a broken tea ball to do this, so I don't have uneven patches or lumps. We make this bread so often that I have a small jar of corn meal and a small jar of flour with a tea ball sitting next to the fridge.) Then pull (with your bare hands) out a hunk of dough that's approximately one pound/the size of a grapefruit. Cut the hunk away from the rest of the dough with a knife.
Now you've got a hunk of dough that's got a cut-off ragged edge. The edge is the bottom of your ball of dough, and you want to stretch the surface of the dough around until it meets at the bottom until all the flour is worked in. (This process is not like kneading, and should not take longer than a minute.) Plunk the ball down on the cornmeal, don't worry if the bottom is still all bunchy.
Let the dough rest for twenty minutes. Then pre-heat the oven at 450 degrees. The book really wants you to bake the bread on a pizza stone, but if you don't have one, I have had good results baking it on the bottom of an upside down cast iron skillet. Whatever you use, put it in the oven the same time that you turn it on. After another twenty minutes, slide the dough into the oven onto the baking surface.
At this point, the book says that you should place a baking dish with a cup of boiling water below the bread to create steam. You can do this, but it's kind of a hassle and Julia discovered that you can also just spray water using a spray bottle around the bottom and sides of your oven and achieve roughly the same result.
Bake the bread for thirty minutes or until it sounds hollow when you tap on the bottom.
THAT'S IT. No kneading, no rising in a warm place. And it's totally delicious and makes great sandwiches. One recipe makes three or four loaves, so we have to make another batch of dough ... about every three days. Yeah, we have a problem.