JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

Through a Christmas letter sent by the Fedor family (including Katherine), listing everyone’s favorite books of the year, I discovered French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork and Corkscrew by Peter Mayle. This read is a foodie’s dream and anyone’s delight. Traveling around France sampling culinary adventures from frogs to snails to chickens to truffles to wine to spas – what could be more fun?! I learned a lot about food, about frogs, about France and about human nature.

A few favorite quotes:

…I was going to attend the annual messe des truffes in Richerenches, a village northeast of Orange. Thsi was to be a sacred event, under the patronage of Saint Antoine, at which thanks would be given for the aromatic, mysterious and breathtakingly expensive black truffle. What’s more, such are the blessings that reward the devout, there would be lunch after the service. A lunch that included truffles. page 24

Greeks and Romans are often given the credit for making gastronomic discoveries, but perhaps this time it was a prehistoric entrepreneur from farther east. Maybe that was it: the early, tentative stirrings of the Chinese Connection. An honorable ancestor of Mr. Chan or Mr. Wu, having sampled his firt juicy dozen somwehre in the snail-rich fields of coastal China and finding them delicious, might have sensed an export opportunity: Escargots de Shanghai…Alas, we shall never know. page 124

(from time in a French Spa)
But here, my daily responsibilities were limited to turning up on time at the thermal farm and raising an eager knife and fork twice a day in the restaurant. I was doing absolutely nothing and enjoying it, something that had never happened to me before. p 200

As a short story connoisseur, I’ve sampled a few of Joyce Carol Oates’ smaller pieces but I think The Falls is the first novel of hers I have read. Gender always plays a prominent role in her stories. I don’t mind if an author chooses to write pieces that have a political or social bent; all writing is political. But I had a hard time with the telegraphing that took place in the first part of the book. Tell me a story, please, not a lecture, and let me see it for myself in a subtle way. I did learn from this book which is set near Niagara Falls at the time of Love Canal. Curiously, the way the story unfolds, I found myself relating the male characters and feeling sympathy for them. The female ones seemed demonized by fears, bizarre, irrational, living nightmares of isolation, undesirable. I kept reading though because I wanted to find out what happened to this family in the end. Also I recognized some experiences from my own life, emotions and situations, lived in the novel; this fascinated me. So I was captured. Isn’t that what good writing does?

Quotes:

Dirk saw that she cultivated woundedness as if it were a spiritual value; she’d become a martyr to her own vanity, which she interpreted as the cruelty of others in withholding their adulation of her, which she’d long taken for granted. She said, incensed, “I envy plain women. ‘Pretty’ women who were only just that – ‘pretty’ – and anything special. They don’t know what they’ve missed and I do. page 92

Of course, what had he expected? He was an adult, he knew the ways of the world. The male world of power, intrigue, threat. page 376

Last November as I was finishing Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code I noticed Anita Sharpe’s piece in Worthwhile describing the demise of Krispy Kreme’s appeal:

People don’t crave convenience; we crave magic, romance and stories.

Magic, romance and stories. What The Da Vinci Code and Krispy Kremes have in common.

Perhaps there is some truth in the story somewhere but it is poorly written, attempting to appeal to women who subsist on entertainment tv, those who are fascinated by Harrison Ford in tweeds or who associate the title of “Sir” with “Elton John”.

Reading the book has a simliar effect as eating a donut: it may go down easy but afterwards you’ll wonder why you did it.

Anita Rowland in her post Failure of Trust linked to Fred First’s story of book loan and loss Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be.

Today I pulled a scrap of paper from the pocket of a pair of pants I hadn’t worn since mid-December. My heart sank. The registrar’s information printout reminded me that I had been a poor judge of character and probably deserved to never see my loaned books again.

It’s hard to say goodbye to a beloved book.

The other day we thought we had lost a library book. I spent half an hour searching for it myself, thinking it had slipped off of the refrigerator top where I sometimes store large stacks of books, or disappeared in one of my daughter’s desk drawers. Then Abigail told me she had read it and put it on her shelf. Later she discovered the book had slipped off the back of the shelf through a gap. I threw a little party to celebrate.

I don’t like to lose books. It was a day overdue already. So while it was still lost, I did what a librarian showed me to do – renew it to buy myself more time to find it!

I used to return library books on time all the time. But then I started down a slippery slope. I figured that returning a book later that night, when the library was closed, was the same as returning it that day. But the library wouldn’t process it until the next morning. So returning a book the next morning was probably the same as returning it the previous day.

One time I was a few days late bringing a book back. As I stood before the librarian awaiting my rebuke and anticipating a fine, she told me that there was a two week grace period for returning a book. Two week grace period?!

Curiously, since I discovered the grace, I’ve taken more slippery slopes and become more sloppy. Now if I get the book back to the library within two or three days of the due date I feel I’ve made it on time. My excuse this week was that I was ill. But I have become more relaxed about returning books.

Funny, I never imagined myself being someone who was late and sloppy or who took her time returning things. Perhaps, one could argue, it takes punishment to reinforce a rule. Knowing that I can keep a book later without consequence has changed my behavior. Maybe I need to institute a negative reward for myself, so I won’t be tempted to push the rules. Who knows why I’ve slipped. I drive the speed limit. In many other areas of life I play by the rules. I like to live by laws. I just don’t know why I won’t return books to the library on time. Why is it, when given grace, I abuse it?

Writing this post has reminded me that I have something we borrowed from Anita – guess we should try to make it to one of the East Side Weblogger Meetups to return it to her….