December 23, 2008
Dessert Trends Bistro
In the past week, I’ve eaten at Dessert Trends Bistro three times, and I think I’m going back for lunch tomorrow. This making clear that I go out for meals far too often, and that I’m a creature of habit, but I really must emphasize how good the restaurant is.
The restaurant is also around the corner from my house, which is convenient in a snowstorm (as has often been the case of late). Light and airy on even the greyest day, the first sight that greets you when you walk in the door is a feast of desserts that will blow your mind. (Pictured here are Berry Box, and Raspberry Chocolate Tarts, which are two tried tested favourites). The array of desserts making clear why one might want to come four times a week, to leave no selection untasted. I’ve never chosen a dessert that wasn’t delicious.
But the main-course selections are truly exquisite. I had lamb-shank with couscous and rapini last weekend, grilled vegetable sandwich (with wild mushroom soup on the side) when I was in for lunch, and braised short ribs with pasta when I had dinner last. Each meal really was an eye-rolling delight. Dinners come with bread and three kind of dips– white bean, hummus and jalapeno– that are quickly devoured. Service isn’t always quick, but I’m never in a hurry. That food can be this good is a treat, and consistently so is a miracle.
December 23, 2008
Holidays
I’m now on my holidays, so expect to get plenty of reading done over the next two weeks. I just finished reading Penelope Lively’s memoir Oleander, Jacaranda about her childhood in Egypt. More than a memoir, actually, it is an investigation into the dawning of consciousness ala Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood. I enjoyed it immensely, and not only for its endpapers. Now just beginning Rainforest by Jenny Diski, and The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth by Henci Goer. Now enjoying the lights on the zmas tree, one blizzard after another, and the ache of my muscles after this afternoon’s swim.
December 20, 2008
I prefer weak tea!
“Daisy turned to Winterbourne, beginning to smile again. He was still more perpelexed, for this inconsequent smile made nothing clear, though it seemed to prove, indeed, that she had a sweetness and softness that reverted instinctively to the pardon of offences. ‘It has never occurred to Mr. Winterbourne to offer me any tea,’ she said, with her little tormenting manner.
‘I have offered you advice,’ Winterbourne rejoined.
‘I prefer weak tea!’ cried Daisy, and she went off with the brilliant Giovanelli.” –Henry James, Daisy Miller
December 18, 2008
On Nicola Barker's Darkmans
I set out to read Nicola Barker’s Darkmans for fun, not for review, because it came out a year ago after all, generating its own sufficient buzz with a Booker nomination (losing out to Anne Enright’s The Gathering). And while I’m very glad I never intended a review (for a review requires more of a grasp than I can confess to here after 838 pages of much befuddlement), I really can’t leave my response here at nothing, because Darkmans is a book the likes of which I’ve never encountered before.
Dovegreyreader says it is Dickensian, explaining, “Any reader who chances upon Darkmans in a hundred years time will read it much as we may read Dickens, for a fictional snapshot of a section of society living in a particular time and place under particular circumstances.”And indeed Darkmans is massive in that way English novels used to be (in the nineteenth century, as opposed to American novels and how they’re massive now). But its concerns are strictly modern, concerning class, mental illness, drug peddling, dodgy builders, Germans, chiropody and the Chunnel. And also modernity too– grocery stores in ancient forests, and misplaced motorways.
Of course, the novel is haunted by a five hundred year old evil jester. (Have you ever before encountered a haunted novel?) And in any book with a trickster at the helm, what is ever what it seems? Which is nothing. Plot isn’t really quite the right word to describe what’s going on, and I’d even use “romp” if it weren’t so unsinister. The reader thrown into the action without any explanation, and has no place but to follow where the writer leads. (Where the trickster leads?) To encounter birds that might not exist, duplicate cats hung with bells, an incontinent spaniel, a Kurdish asylum seeker with a mortal fear of salad, and Kelly Broad (one of those Broads, with the brother in prison, the other in a glue-sniffing coma, and don’t even start on her sister Linda). She is fabulous, in her mini-skirt and moon boots, and when she finds God, watch out. Though from my experience with Kelly Broads (I spent two years working for Social Services in the Midlands; I know of what I speak), they’re ever so much less frightening to encounter on paper, and we don’t get to do that nearly often enough.
The precocious child who builds an ancient town out of matchsticks, the man whose daughter has been decapitated in Sudan, the tree-collar clipping waitress, bereaved mother, and the enigmatic woman with the birthmark on her nose. Beede and Kane, father and son in their upstairs/downstairs flats, and how they don’t know one another, but they don’t know that at all. And of course everything is actually something quite different.
Which doesn’t take me any closer to explaining the point, or even to me getting the point, but perhaps it has intrigued you. I’m still a-wonder. Here is a book that will leave you feeling like you’ve been hit by the most marvelous train.
December 18, 2008
Family Literacy Day: January 27
Though our baby is still very small, and is also translucent, we’ve been reading to it regularly ever since it acquired working ears. (This is a very bookish baby– it acquired its first book while still an embryo). And while there are plenty of sound scientific reasons why reading to our baby is a very good thing, I’ll admit that I like reading stories for the sake of reading stories, and even more so, I appreciate being read to too. So while I’m not sure that the baby really knows what’s going on, being so busy beating its tiny heart and turning somersaults, even if it’s more for us, I think this is the best kind of selfish.
For all of you lucky, lucky people out there, however, whose children have already left the womb, I would like to turn your attention towards Family Literacy Day. Created by ABC Canada, the tenth Family Literacy Day will be held on January 27, and planned events include the setting of a Guinness World Record for “Most Children Reading with an Adult in Multiple Locations”. (The record to break was set in 2006, with 78,791 kids.) The chosen book is Munschworks 2.
Find out more here about how to get involved, whether at home with your family, or at a local event.
December 18, 2008
A convenient mechanism
“‘The truth,’ Peta smiled, ‘is that there is no truth. Life is just a series of coincidences, accidents and random urges which we carefully forge– for our own sick reasons– into a convenient design. Everything is arbitrary. Only art exists to make the arbitrary congeal. No memory or God or love, even. Only art. The truth is simply am idea an idea, a structure which we employ– in very small doses– to render life bearable. It’s just a convenient mechanism, Kane, that’s all.” –from Darkmans by Nicola Barker
December 17, 2008
Thinking in circles, about big and small presses
As you might have been able to tell by my waffling tone, I was not altogether comfortable with my “Top Eleven Indie Picks of 2008”. Not with the books themselves, for the books are very good, but with the very fact that I made such a list at all. As though the books by independent publishers that I’d read this year were a sideshow, “a subspecies”, or do I even dare to say it, a ghetto? Because I don’t mean to imply any of these things. No, I don’t mean that at all.
The problem is this, I think. That my original Top Eleven Picks of 2008 was assembled in very vague terms. These were most certainly not “The Best Books of 2008”, but rather a list of the ones I liked best, and I am conscious enough know that what I like best and what is the best is not necessarily the very same thing. Particularly because I’m the sort to fall in love with a book because it contains a teapot, or references the postal system, and these are two of my favourite things.
I like fiction that innovates, I like books that challenge what I feel or believe, I admire a book that attacks me like a pipe to the head, but I’ve just got this thing about books I can curl up inside like a warm blanket. Or books that recreate the world and let me walk around easy in it, as opposed to one that makes a whole new world that I’ve got to think a lot to discover. Perhaps if I didn’t read corporate documents for eights hours every day, this would be different, but at the moment I like a book that grabs me and holds me, and even pushes me along. (If I only read books like this I would be in a coma, but I do require them on a regular basis.)
Which is to say that many (but certainly not all) of my Top Eleven books were old fashioned good reads, which is mostly what I talk about here at Pickle Me This. They may not have rewritten the book on how to write the book (though I’ll argue for a few) but I loved them true, and that was sort of my sole requirement.
But I did so enjoy my year of more intensive reading of independent publishers, and when I reflected that I’d missed them in my picks, I was more than a bit regretful. But I was hardly going to just slot them in between the lines, and hope that nobody noticed. I loved these books for different reasons than I loved the others, and it wasn’t so much that they couldn’t play with the big boys, but rather they were playing a whole other game. Which, of course, is as dubious a statement as any other– there is certainly nothing decidedly “Indie” to link each of these eleven books, but I couldn’t help but think of them differently. Why? I’m not sure.
But I am not sure I’m totally wrong about this– I’m still not comfortable, but I can’t help but acknowledge a difference between fiction from big publishers and small ones. Just like how, try as I might otherwise, I read a difference between fiction written by men and that by women (for example). Always, always, there will be exceptions (I’m waving at you, Ian McEwan!), but I am thinking in general terms. I am thinking of the Orange Prize, and how instead of a ghetto, I see it as a celebration of something uniquely itself. Similar with the small presses then, instead of just a sideshow, although to imply that small press books couldn’t make it on my main list is definitely offensive, and I see that now. Further, that these books were as good as they were but didn’t get on my list is making me reconsider how I evaluate what I read.
Anyway, I expect to make full sense of this around the same time I finally read Anna Karenina. So probably don’t hold your breath.
December 17, 2008
What Elephant? by Geneviève Côté
I’ve discerned that one key to successful children’s stories is to keep the kernel packed up tight. For example, by all means write a story about the elephant in the room, but really have that story be about poor George who comes home one day to find an elephant watching his TV and eating chocolate chip cookies. When George explains the problem to his friends, none of them believe him. Naturally– elephants don’t watch TV or eat chocolate chip cookies. So George has no choice but to go home again, and there he finds the elephant asleep on his bed, covered in newspapers, because the elephant has blown its nose on every single one of his bedsheets.
Geneviève Côté’s What Elephant? goes on to tell the story of George’s roommate from hell, who eats up all the food, lingers too long in the shower, takes up the entire (now broken) sofa, and steals the morning paper. Worse, George fears he’s going crazy because he knows elephants don’t actually do any of these obnoxious things, and he has nobody he can turn to. If his best friend Pip can see the elephant, he won’t admit, being just as conscious as George is about saving face.
Author/illustrator Côté has created a marvelous story with such wonder in its details– I was particularly struck by George’s prized collection of teapots, and George’s teddy bear clutched in the elephant’s trunk. The story’s resolution is sweet and surprising, complete with a trek off into the sunset, but of course the matter is far from resolved, as we’re left with the question of the talking pink poodle.
December 16, 2008
Postal Motherlode
Today we arrived home to a bundle on the doorstep– ten (10!) Christmas cards, all for us. It was as good as Christmas morning, really, and we opened them one-by-one, delighting. And then had to add a second string to our fireplace display, which is quite remarkable for one day’s pickings. Oh, for the love of December and perpetual post.
We are also happy this year to have a fireplace at all, though of course hanging our stockings on the bookcase was never a bad thing, but there is a certain authenticity here at the new house, even if the fireplace is a wee bit bricked up and a storage space for magazines. We trust Santa will find his way…
