Reading Report January-March 2024

I haven't read very many books in the first three months of this year, and I'm not sure exactly why. I've been reading, but mostly I've been reading books that I didn't finish (life's too short to read a book you're not enjoying), or that I've read before-- and I don't usually count re-reads in my tally. So I don't really have that much to report. Here are a few: 

Circe by Madeline Miller. I know. Everybody else read this five years ago. I just finally picked it up a couple of weeks ago. It's really good, but you probably don't need me to tell you that because you probably already read it yourself. 

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman, #2 in the Thursday Murder Club series. I enjoyed the first one in this series, but not enough to prioritize reading the sequels. I'm sorry I waited so long, because this one was much more interesting. Really enjoyed it. 

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. We listened to this on our road trip, because we're in a couples book club and this was our March selection. At the beginning of the trip, we called it our homework because it was pretty dry--we made ourselves listen to 30 minutes a day before we could listen to anything else. But once we got about a third of the way through, it became much more interesting, and before long we were listening to an hour or two a day. We finished it well before we made it back home. Whether or not you agree with any of his conclusions about mind-altering substances, it is a great book to discuss-- both for the two of us on our trip, and for our book club when we finally met up a couple of weeks ago. Also, Pollan is a great reader of his own work.

All My Knotted-Up Life by Beth Moore-- if you're an "exvangelical" like me (someone who was raised evangelical but no longer shares those beliefs), this is a must listen. In the 1990s-2000s, Beth Moore represented a lot of things about being a Christian woman that I did not appreciate (to put it mildly). I was a judgy snob about her work, even though I'm not sure I ever read any of it. But she is so candid in this memoir, and so clearly trying to do the right thing in the face of enormous opposition-- by the end, she had won me over. I went back and forth between the print version and the audio and she is also a good reader. There have been some complaints about her accent, but I went to Jr High and High School in East Texas, about three hours away from her hometown, and I can verify that people really talk like that, especially when they're telling stories. Not everybody has that much twang, but enough do that it didn't seem exaggerated to me. 

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin-- I loved this at first. A young woman named Greta works as a transcriptionist for a sex therapist who might not actually be a licensed therapist. In the small town where she lives, it is almost impossible to maintain clients' confidentiality, even when she tries--and sometimes she doesn't try very hard. It is darkly comic, painful, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes crude, a bit absurd. But after about the first third, it got to be a bit too .... much for me. I skimmed through the middle and then started reading again about 50 pages before the end. It's sad and hilarious and profound, and not always easy to read. Sort of recommended. 

I was super disappointed in Tim O'Brien's new book. Maybe I'll write more about that another time. Super disappointed. I think the religion of progressive intellectuals is cynicism. They cling to it with fanatical devotion. It is profoundly boring to me. Just watch while I smack down your juvenile efforts to be sincere or hopeful or kind. Hmmm. That got a little preachy. Sorry not sorry.

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Have we ever talked about reading cookbooks? Even though I'm not much of a cook-- I'm not terrible, but I'm not very good, either-- I love to read cookbooks. I almost always have at least one going.  

Reading cookbooks is a different thing than cooking from a cookbook. A cookbook with great recipes might not be interesting to read, and the reverse is also true. I'm particularly fond of Mark Bittman, Deb Perelman, Ina Garten, the Cooks' Illustrated people, and a bunch more. Normally I don't tell you about the cookbooks I read because I'm not a good enough cook to be able to recommend the recipes, and I don't know that there are all that many other people who read cookbooks for fun. But just in case, here's one: The Essential New York Times Cookbook by Amanda Hesser, "lovingly revised and exceedingly cookable," published in 2021. 

What made it so interesting to me is that it ends up being a history of cooking in the US. There's a recipe for Clam Chowder from 1881, Fried Green Tomatoes from 1897, Brownies from 1943, Mocha Cheesecake from 1976. There are recipes from Julia Child, Barbara Kafka (who wrote the famous roasting cookbook back in the 90s), Marian Burros (including her famous plum cake that is apparently the most requested recipe ever published in the NYT), and a zillion from Craig Claiborne. Each section opens with a brief essay by Hesser about food trends over the past 140 years. It's a thousand pages long, so it took me about a year to read it, a little bit at a time, but I thought it was thoroughly intriguing. 

I haven't cooked from it, though, because NYT Cooking recipes are not usually the kind of thing that I cook. Not because I wouldn't like to but because they often call for ingredients that we just can't get here, or if we can get them, they're past their prime or dusty and out of date. Then this week I tried a recipe-- Garden Minestrone, first published in 1973-- that was so good I'm rethinking that. Maybe I will try some others. 

The reason I tried it is because it was so different-- you slice/prepare all the vegetables (a mandoline makes it less onerous) and then layer them in a dutch oven, cover, and cook without adding any liquid. The veggies release their liquid as they cook and make the broth. I used a drained 28 oz can of canned whole tomatoes (no fresh this time of year in MT), frozen peas, and garbanzos instead of limas, and it was still delicious. I can't find a version of it online or I'd link to it. Maybe if I have time this weekend I'll type up the way I did it (which has enough changes that it probably wouldn't be a copyright violation)(I did it in the oven, for one thing) and put it in the comments.

Wow. Just discovered that the ebook version is currently on sale for $2.99. The print version is $40. But who wants to cook from their iPad? Not me. They probably have it at your library. The Garden Minestrone is on page 118.

Well, this got long. Here's hoping for better reading soon. Have a nice weekend.