Literary Treats

I love to read about food. I check out cookbooks ravenously, & have a copious collection of recipes that have caught my fancy (though I am less likely to actually cook than I am to drool over the pictures). As a sideline to my cookbook hobby, I like to read books by food writers, from restaurant critics to celebrity chefs, about their lives in & out of the kitchen. Some of these are biographies, some memoirs, some memoirs with recipes, & a couple are cookbooks with memoirs on the side.

No list would be complete without Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Bourdain is, of course, the star of No Reservations, the food travel show. Then there's the ubiquitous Gordon Ramsay, who has written Roasting in Hell's Kitchen: Temper Tantrums, F Words, and the Pursuit of Perfection; Sandra Lee, whose memoir is called Made from Scratch ; New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table; & Marcella Hazan's Amarcord: Marcella Remembers. Bloggers will also have their say-I really enjoyed Molly Wizenberg's A Homemade Life, & there's also Chocolate & Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen by Clotilde Dusoulier & The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl by Ree Drummond.

Less well known in the U.S. are Marco Pierre White (The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef), Alexis Soyer (The People's Chef: The Culinary Revolutions of Alexis Soyer), Niloufer Ichaporia King (My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking), Bernard Loiseau (The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine), Madhur Jaffrey (Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India); & Nigel Slater (Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger).

Finally, consider: My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals: Portraits, Interviews, and Recipes , edited by Melanie Dunea; How I Learned to Cook: Culinary Educations from the World's Greatest Chefs, edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Peter Meehan; Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone, edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler; What We Eat When We Eat Alone by Deborah Madison and Patrick McFarlin; & A Chef's Story: 27 Chefs Talk about What Got Them into the Kitchen, edited by Dorothy Hamilton and Patric Kuh, for more lip-smacking entertainment.

Searching with the keywords "food anecdotes", "cookery history", or "cooks biography" will bring up more selections in the same vein. Or, just check out any book by Julia Child or M F. K. Fisher-always a winner. Frances Mayes & Peter Mayle are also recommended.

This post was inspired by an article on the Guardian website called "A Taste for Chefs' Memoirs".

An Australian in New York

Two-time Booker winner Peter Carey, a New York resident since 1990, has written his first book set in the United States, Parrot and Olivier in America. It got a starred review in Booklist, Library Journal said "this engaging book will be particularly appreciated by readers interested in early 19th-century American history, the French aristocracy, and emerging democracy", & Publisher's Weekly enthused "Richly atmospheric, this wonderful novel is picaresque and Dickensian, with humor and insight injected into an accurately rendered period of French and American history". Carey was also recently interviewed by the New York Times.

Peter Carey is the author of several works of fiction, including Theft: A Love Story (the book on CD, read by Simon Vance, was very good) & Oscar & Lucinda (which was also made into a movie). He is also the author of non-fiction, including Wrong about Japan: A Father's Journey with His Son, the story of their trip to Japan to meet manga artists and anime directors, including Yoshiyuki Tomino (Mobile Suit Gundam). At publisher Kodansha, they learned of manga's history, and touring Studio Ghibli, they encountered the "most famous anime director in the world," Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away).

Celebrate Poetry!

Greetings, poetry mavens! National Poetry Month is winding to a close, but did you know that today is Poem in Your Pocket Day? The idea is simple: select a poem you love, then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends today. The website Poets.org has many examples that you can print out!

Additionally, the library catalog has several new poetry books for adults, young adults, & children, including Poetry in Person: Twenty-Five Years of Conversation with America's Poets. This book received a starred review from Booklist magazine, which said

"From 1970 to 1998, Pearl London conducted a 'Works in Progress' poetry course
at the New School in Greenwich Village, inviting poets to bring manuscripts of
poems they were struggling with and offer them up for dissection and
discussion.These remarkably candid and inspiring conversations about aesthetic
and moral matters would have faded from memory if a stash of forgotten cassette
tapes hadn't been found after London's death in 2003. Writer and former New
Schooler Neubauer selected and judiciously edited 23 exciting interviews, which,
accompanied by photographs of the poets and reproductions of their manuscripts,
reveal what poets do and why they do it. Maxine Kumin and Robert Hass have
opposite views about abstraction in poetry. June Jordan speaks of poetry and
politics. Galway Kinnell calls for a new form of nature poems. Derek Walcott
speaks of the "honesty of the line." Extraordinary moments with Frank Bidart,
Amy Clampitt, Lucille Clifton, Edward Hirsch, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, and
James Merrill create a treasury of passionate and enlightening exchanges that
illuminate the very life force of poetry."

Other new titles include: The Firefly Letters: A Suffragette's Journey to Cuba by Margarita Engle, a verse novel based on the letters and diaries of Fredrika Bremer, a mid-nineteenth-century Swedish feminist and traveler; Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty by Tony Hoagland (his fourth poetry collection); &, for younger readers, Ubiquitous: Poetry & Science about Nature's Survivors by Joyce Sidman. For more poetry books, try a subject or keyword search using the word 'poetry'.

Behind the Scenes @ Your Library

This machine lives in Long Island City, Queens, in a renovated warehouse two-thirds the length of a football field. It sorts the books for the 132 branches of the New York Public Library. The New York Times has an article about this tremendous piece of machinery, the envy of library systems everywhere.

In contrast, our system involves sorting by hand into bins (see below), which travel by truck to the 17 branches. Not quite as high tech, but suitable for our needs. Now when you place a book on hold you can imagine its journey across town in one of these bins!

Literary Tours

Planning a vacation? How about visiting some of the hotspots from your favorite works of literature? Here are some suggested itineraries!

Walking in Holden Caulfield's footsteps through Manhattan

Maud Hart Lovelace Deep Valley Tour (for fans of the Betsy-Tacy children's books, which are set in Mankato, Minnesota)

Literary Landmarks of Santa Fe

Anne's Passport (tour Prince Edward Island, Canada, home of Anne of Green Gables)

The website Literary Traveler has many more suggestions!

Have you recently visited a literary landmark? Let us know about your trip!

Getting the Most from Your Library: Interlibrary Loan

Local author Phyllis Morgan, an ABC Libraries customer, has written a new book called N. Scott Momaday: Remembering Ancestors, Earth, and Traditions: An Annotated Bio-Bibliography (while this book is not yet in the catalog, we do have some of her other books). In the acknowledgements, Ms. Morgan very kindly notes that "Without the concerted efforts of librarians and archivists, this type of work would be virtually impossible. I greatly appreciate the help of librarians and staffs of the...libraries and archives where I conducted research." We are delighted to note that the list includes the Albuquerque-Bernalillo County Library System!

ABC Libraries is happy to be part of the equation, but we couldn't have done it without Interlibrary Loan. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, Interlibrary Loan (ILL) is a fantastic service available to those of you in possession of a valid library card for the price of one small dollar. Looking for an item that doesn't show up in our catalog? Through ILL, these items can be requested from other libraries around the country, ordered, and shipped by mail to your local library.

It is a pretty easy process-just stop by the Information Desk at any branch to ask about getting an item through Interlibrary Loan. Or, check out our website for ILL FAQs-there you'll find a list of items not available for ILL, an explanation of loan periods, & you can even print out request forms! Whether you have research to do or are just looking for something else to read, ILL is a wonderful service offered by the library. I use it myself!

Nightingales

Wow! Has it really been February since my last Victorian read? Well, this latest one was a doozy. Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale by Gillian Gill is a book I picked up at random-I read last fall (& enjoyed) another of her books, We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals-which turned out to also be the right period! I guess I should have known the Crimean War was during Victoria's reign, but I'm not very knowledgeable about military history.

Nightingales was an engaging read. Not to be too much of a spoiler, but 3/4 of the action occurs before Florence Nightingale is 40 years old-though she lived to be 90, she spent 30 years as a near-recluse, suffering from what was probably chronic brucellosis. Gillian Gill wants her biography to be the biography of the Nightingale family, so there's a significant amount about her family history & her immediate family in the beginning of the book. Her immediately family-father WEN, mother Fanny, & sister Parthe-did play a large part in forming Florence's unique character. Florence Nightingale was a study in contradictions-passionate yet able to cut friends ruthlessly out of her life for a single infraction; energetic & hardworking for her cause, yet sickly & prone to depression;& as 'the Lady of the Lamp', she tirelessly toured hospital wars & charmed her patients, but then chose to remove herself from social life entirely in later years. Her story seems very Victorian in that, in many ways, her life's work almost didn't happen as circumstance, social conditions & family thwarted her at almost every turn. Nightingale should have married, taken care of her parents & plain, invalid sister, & lived out a quiet life in comfort. But she didn't, as we know.

Many pages-at least 5 chapters-are devoted to Nightingale's time in Crimea, which was actually just 21 months. These wartime experiences are the heart of the book, & Gill reaches to try & include Nightingale's family in this part of her story, but not very successfully. Her wrangles with the military, politicians, & other women sent to nurse (since nursing wasn't a profession yet, people's definitions of it varied greatly) are eye-openers. Alcohol is considered medicinal, some of the nurses are religious sisters bent on saving souls rather than healing bodies, & hygiene is not considered at all until Nightingale's arrival-soldiers lie in their own filth, covered by stinking linen & teeming with lice, in their hospital beds, before she takes over.

Nightingales' flaws lie in Gill's writing style. I found her style down to earth & engaging at times (she refers to Nightingale as 'Flo' for most of the book), but at other times choppy & confusing, as she introduces characters & plotlines in one section & then explains them fully 5 or 10 pages later, bouncing back & forth on the timeline she knows by heart but which the casual reader does not.

Despite its flaws, I would recommend this book as an introduction to the life of Florence Nightingale. It is witty, informative & you will not be bored!