May (third week) 2017 Reads

Lots of online foodie stuff this week, then a few poems, a book of stories, and some journeys.
Whew! Unlike last week, the story this week is totally readable. And the card search was fun.

 “Deal Me In 2017!”

This week's story: Why I Can No Longer Look At A Picnic Blanket Without Laughing by Yukiko Motoya, translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda
What can a clerk in a trendy boutique do when a customer spends over twenty-four hours in a changing booth? a fun story that comes complete with diagram.

This week's card: the Three of Clubs  was a challenge--I wanted something innovative and possibly a little bit silly. It would have been a lot easier if it had been a face card or an ace. Maybe I could go with a pack design?


Here is one from Fashion Playing Cards by Connie Lim Pt. 3 but it's not right because there was only one customer in the changing room...so I looked some more..

...perhaps she was trying on these items
from Redbubble Ltd.




...but, then again, these are rather ordinary selections and by the end of the story...

... we aren't sure just who (or what) that customer was, but she certainly wasn't ordinary, so maybe this one from Hachimitsu Ink, which specialize in creating artwork featuring Djinns and Mermaids, will better illustrate the story.  

(Image is from PlayingCardCollector.net  I couldn't find the image on the Hachimitsu Ink site, but I had fun looking)


elsewhere online...

My current MOOC course: Food Security and Sustainability: Food Access  From Wageningen University & Research (The Netherlands); a collaboration between Wageningen University and the Wageningen Research foundation.
Course goals:

• understand the basic principles of food access
• understand actors’ choices influencing food access
• discern dilemmas at household, local, national and international levels get the big picture when the connections between levels and actors regarding access to food have been unraveled.

This article seemed to go along with the course goals. Dining in the Wilderness: The Restaurants in America’s National Parks by Amy McKeever
The regulations, guidelines, and traditions for providing food services at USA National Parks.  How concessionaires strive to create menus that appeal to diners tastes and use healthy and sustainable food.

and more foodie stuff...

The Global Feast: Writing about Food  in the May issue of Words Without Borders:
 "This month we welcome you to a banquet of international food writing.... Forced to cook in her father's dive restaurant, Ananda Devi's young girl finds revenge is a dish best served hot.  Argentine sensation Mariana Enriquez gets to the meat of the national dish. Jeon Sungtae meditates on meals turned sacramental. Greek cooking authority Diana Farr Louis reports on sustenance both figurative and literal in refugee camps. Kanako Nishi has a bone to pick with table manners. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán channels a gourmand Robinson Crusoe. In two nostalgic memoirs, Prasanta Mridha remembers that Bangla street food is right up his alley, and Moshe Sakal recalls one happy childhood in two culinary traditions"

Foods the Romans brought to Britain by Cindy Tomamichel. A brief survey of the changes in diet, agricultural practices, and food distribution that came with the Roman occupation of Britain.

How army rations helped shape food by Veronique Greenwood

not foodie, but fun...
The Fine Art of Cheating in Baseball : Remembering Red Faber, One of the Last Great Spitballers. An excerpt from Off Speed: Baseball, Pitching, and the Art of Deception by Terry McDermott.

from the library...

 
The Other Language by Francesca Marciano
Excellent collection of short stories, most featuring Italians in international settings.


Contents: The other language; Chanel; Big island, small island; The presence of men; An Indian soirée; The club; The Italian system; Quantum theory; Roman romance.


 



Wintering by Peter Geye 
A father/son family saga set in the northern borderlands of Minnesota. Quite an adventure, quite a read.

The cover, while appropriate,only tells a part of the story. The trip wasn't as tranquil as the photo suggests.




from my shelves...
Moving the Palace by Charif Majdalani, Edward Gauvin (Translation from the French)

A magnificent road trip! A Lebanese adventurer leaves his assignment with the British army to take over a perilous venture abandoned by another Lebanese adventurer. It's nothing less than moving an entire palace (in pieces) across deserts and seas from Tripoli to Beirut. By camel, mule, horse, and boat. In 1908. When the region is filled with unrest and feuding tribes. Not all is fighting--there are luscious banquets, merry story telling sessions, and a host of eccentric characters.
From my subscription to New Vessel Press.



Atlantic Hotel by João Gilberto Noll, Adam Morris (Translation)
In this short novel a man wanders around Brazil, sometimes by bus, sometimes by car, and sometimes by foot. He seems to encounter misfortune at every stop. Who is he? Why does he wander?

From my subscription to Two Lines Press.




The Last Days of Café Leila by Donia Bijan
When Noor was eighteen her father sent her and her brother out of Iran to the United States. He felt they weren't safe in the Islamic Republic. Thirty years later Noor, with her reluctant teenage daughter Lily, returns to Tehran for a visit. Noor's marriage has fallen apart and when she arrives at her childhood home, she finds her father is ill. Noor must cope with the changes in her homeland and her rebellious daughter. It's a difficult story,  well told but just a tad simplistic. It is a coming of age story for both Noor and Lily. Both make potentially disastrous decisions. At times Noor seems immature but she really doesn't seem to belong anywhere. The novels leaves us with that old question: Can you go home again?          Advance review copy via LibraryThing.
 
 
Can you go home again? For me, the answer has often been "No." But sometimes you can visit your childhood in someone else's poetry...

So Sweet Against Your Teeth: Poems from Childhood's Fall (Woman Song Book 1) by June Gillam (Kindle ed.)
"A chapbook of 15 poems looking back on struggles and joys of childhood." These certainly reached me. A step back in time to the house next door.

May (second week) 2017 Reads

This week's story:    The Ice Palace (in Flappers and Philosophers, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

 “Deal Me In 2017!”

"The sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified the rigor of the bath of light. The Butterworth and Larkin houses flanking were entrenched behind great stodgy trees; only the Happer house took the full sun, and all day long faced the dusty road-street with a tolerant kindly patience. This was the city of Tarleton in southernmost Georgia, September afternoon.

Up in her bedroom window Sally Carrol Happer rested her nineteen-year-old chin on a fifty-two-year-old sill and watched Clark Darrow's ancient Ford turn the corner. The car was hot—being partly metallic it retained all the heat it absorbed or evolved—and Clark Darrow sitting bolt upright at the wheel wore a pained, strained expression as though he considered himself a spare part, and rather likely to break. He laboriously crossed two dust ruts, the wheels squeaking indignantly at the encounter, and then with a terrifying expression he gave the steering-gear a final wrench and deposited self and car approximately in front of the Happer steps. There was a heaving sound, a death-rattle, followed by a short silence; and then the air was rent by a startling whistle."

And that, Folks, was as much as I could take. Well, I did skim enough to find that it seems to be that Sally is rumored to be engaged to a Yankee, but I just couldn't bring myself to read this story. "...her ninteen-year-old chin on a fifty-two-year old sill..." ????




This week's card: Eight of Diamonds. "Biba" Playing Card 

OK, so in the spirit of the story I didn't read, here is a girl resting her twenty-something-year-old-tush on a two-day-old stool.





from my "owned-but-unread" shelf...
 
Voroshilovgrad by Serhiy Zhadan; Reilly Costigan-Humes (Translation), Isaac Wheeler (Translation)
In trying to save his brother's business (a gas station) Herman encounters thugs, gypsies, refugees, smugglers, ghosts, and various kinds of fanatics.Life is not easy in post-USSR Ukraine.

From my subscription to Deep Vellum Publishing





from the library...



 The Woman on the Stairs by Bernhard Schlink, Bradley Schmidt (Translation)
The story starts in Germany with a painting, three obsessed men, and a woman (the model for the painting). The model's husband owns the painting, the artist steals the wife, and the third man is a lawyer representing the artist. The painting is stolen and they all--the painting, the woman, the three men--end up in Australia where the majority of the story takes place.

It's a strange "love" story, maybe more about self love, than romantic love since no one here is really able to relate to the other.



 Gutenberg find...


With a Camera in Majorca by Margaret D'Este (With Illustrations from Photographs by Mrs. R. M. King) Putnam, 1907
Not just pictures, there is a lot of prose description. It was fun to read and view this 1907 book about a place I frequently visited in the 1980s.
Also includes Ibiza and Minorca. The prose is typical of travel writing of the time and I probably would have skimmed more if I weren't so familiar with the terrain and curious about how they saw it.




online...


I finished  the MOOC   Antarctica: From Geology to Human History
This was really interesting and well organized. It's a place I'm curious about but not interested in visiting.

April (third week) 2017 Reads

From last week's trip to the library three great books and one dud. I also read one from my backlog. The story for the Deal Me In Challenge is the first story in the Library of America three volume set of Singer's Collected Stories. I won the set last year at The Mookse and the Gripes

 “Deal Me In 2017!”

 
This week's story: Gimpel the fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer (in Collected Stories I); translated from the Yiddish by Saul Bellow
Gimpel, a simple baker, is the butt of all the jokes in town but is he really a fool?

This week's card - the Eight of Spades - made me want to do a little Homage to Crazy Eights, a game I loved when I was a child.
On the left is a vintage pack like the one I remember using. It was published by Whitman in 1951. This and several other packs are on eBay. On the right is an electronic version of the game published by GASP Mobile Games Inc. It is available free from the Microsoft Store.

Three "great ones" from the library...
Vampire in Love and other stories by Enrique Vila-Matas; Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (Translation)
Nineteen delightful stories. As is often the case with me, the title story which is available online from Two Lines was not my favorite. Wish this could stay on my shelf forever...but it's a two-week loan.
Contents: A permanent home; Sea swell; Torre del Mirador; I never go to the movies; Rosa Schwarzer comes back to life; In search of the electrifying double act; Death by saudade; The hour of the tired and weary; They say I should say who I am; Greetings from Dante; Identifying marks; The boy on the swing; An idle soul; Invented memories; Vampire in love; Modesty; Nio; I'm not going to read any more e-mails; Vok's successors. (my favorites are highlighted, but they are all good.)
Cover design by Rodrigo Corral




Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller
This is both story of a marriage told from the point of view of a wronged wife and a story of a father/daughter relationship based on wrong assumptions and false memories. Wonderful writing. So very different from Fuller's debut novel Our Endless Numbered Days. Looking forward to what she does next.

Cover design by Diane Chonette
Pattern design by Ákos Néma




Turner: The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J. M. W. Turner by Franny Moyle
At times I got bogged down in detail, but overall it was a rewarding read. A number of plates are included in the book, but not all the ones that are discussed as Mayle traces Turner's artistic development over a long and prolific career. I did a lot of Googling to find the referenced paintings.

Jacket design by Gabriele Wilson
Jacket art: The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834; Joseph Mallord William Turner (at the Cleveland Museum of Art)


The "dud" from the library trip...
City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris by Holly Tucker
I know I shouldn't let one factual error early in a book put me off reading the book. Even though they bug me,  I often forgive geographical errors in fiction. When a book is non-fiction--especially history--such errors make me doubt everything else in the book. On page six: "On the Left Bank of the Seine sat the castle-like Châtelet compound..." (interesting error as the map in the book places it correctly on the Right Bank.) I became obsessive, fact checking everything. No fun at all, this book isn't worth the trouble; did not finish.

from my "owned-but-unread" shelf...
Go Away Home by Carol Bodensteiner
A pleasant, not particularly challenging story about a woman's life on a farm and in a small town in Iowa just before and during WW1.  Liddie faces the limited options available to women of the times. This book was from a 2014 (!) blog win at Let Them Read Books

online...

I started another online course; Antarctica: From Geology to Human History  This one is taught by Dr. Rebecca Priestley, Senior Lecturer Victoria University of Wellington, and Dr. Cliff Atkins, Senior Lecturer Victoria University of Wellington.

January (fourth week) 2017 Reads

This week I found time for a little net surfing, some Gutenberg browsing, more MOOC, and some real books too starting with...
                                                ...four goodies from my "owned-but-unread" shelf

The Death of Napoleon by Simon Leys, Patricia Clancy (Translation)
A delightful piece of alternative history as Napoleon escapes from exile in a plan carefully constructed by his loyalists. The plan goes awry and he must make his way alone. Once in Paris, he finds that he has changed so much that he is unrecognizable and he must improvise and try to accept that his days of glory are past.
My personal Copy.


 

The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam
This compelling story of  love and death among Tamil refugees during the Sri Lankan Civil War is told in a time defying style that makes the reader momentarily forget what a short period of time actually passes. Stunning.
Free copy from publisher through Goodreads First Reads program.







An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell by Deborah Levy
A completely different kind of love from the above book. A fun to read she said/he said dramatic poem. Sly, witty, sharp. Something to read and re-read.
My copy from a subscription to & other Stories Publishing.



The Madonna of Notre Dame (Père Kern et Clarie Kauffmann #1) by Alexis Ragougneau, Katherine Gregor (Translation)
There has been a murder in the great cathedral and in its aftermath a great cast of characters is introduced. The suspect, an angelic looking young pervert; Clair, a young deputy magistrate haunted by memory; a bad cop and his good cop colleague; a homeless drunk Pole; and a host more. I'm glad to see this is a series as Père Kern is both engaging and ill so it's good to see that he will have another adventure. The delightful cover is designed by Liana Finck. (See below in Online section for link to interview with her.)
My copy from my subscription to New Vessel Press.

Then a couple of library books...

We Live in Water by Jess Walter
Short stories set in the Pacific Northwest. There are tough/not-so-tough guys, cons, ex-cons, future cons, dealers, hustlers--a range of "fringe people." There is also gentleness in the people, especially in their dealings with children. Their stories are told with compassion and humor.
Library book.
Contents:  Anything helps -- We live in water -- Thief -- Can a corn -- Virgo -- Helpless little things -- Please -- Don't eat cat -- The new frontier -- The brakes -- The wolf and the wild -- Wheelbarrow kings -- Statistical abstract for my hometown of Spokane, Washington.

Image is table of contents page, not cover

 Grape, Olive, Pig: Deep Travels Through Spain's Food Culture by Matt Goulding
Matt Goulding's Spain barely resembles the Spain I saw in the late 1970's. Yes we saw great sights, ate fine meals, and thoroughly loved the place, but at that time it was not the gourmet paradise described in this book. Then again, only once did we have to have a reservation for a restaurant.


This is a beautiful book filled with pictures and descriptions of foods I will never eat (and a few, very few, that I wouldn't want to eat). What I liked as much as the descriptions of the meals, was the background of the foods, the way they are produced. Goulding is a sort of insider/outsider--a foreign food writer married to a Spaniard--so he has a lot of experiences not available to most tourists. A top notch food appreciation tour. Library book.

A Project Gutenberg discovery

Armenian Legends and Poems
Compiled, illustrated, and translated by Zabelle C. Boyajian.

(Illustration on right: The Wedding)
"It rained showers of gold when Artashes became a bridegroom.
It rained pearls when Satenik became a bride."

This book should keep me busy for a while--Not the sort of thing to read all at once. I confess to be drawn to the illustrated entries, there are about a dozen. Just delightful. Originally published in 1916, the book (with illustrations) is available several places on the Internet--Google the title or author to find.

 “Deal Me In 2017!”  This week's story

Train by Alice Munro (in The Best American Short Stories, 2013; Kindle ed.) First published in Harper's Magazine, April 2012, and included in Dear Life: Stories by Alice Munro. According to my records, I read Dear Life back in December of 2012. However, this story of a Canadian soldier returning from World War 2 jumping off a train before he reached his home stop seemed entirely fresh to me when I read it this week. Maybe I skipped it when I read the collection? Since it was a borrowed book I might not have had time to linger over, or even read, all the stories. Whatever the reason, I'm glad I found it. Now I can linger over it and ponder its meaning since it's in an anthology I own. (I haven't read all the stories in the anthology either since I tend to dip into the Kindle sporadically, mostly when I'm in waiting rooms.)


This week's card for Deal Me In 2017! is the Six of Hearts. This design is from  Jami Goddess Art. I selected it for several reasons:
  1. The elusiveness of Monro's protagonist--his inability to stay settled down--is like the flight of the birds on the card.
  2.  The card appears to be in rough shape like Belle's house was when Jackson first lit there.
  3. I really like Jami's art work. She hasn't posted on her blog recently (the card is from July, 2014) but she also has a Facebook page with more recent posts. Her photo section has a neat chess set among other fun artwork.

Online 

Finished auditing two online courses  Visualizing Postwar Tokyo, Part 1, and Visualizing Postwar Tokyo, Part 2. Lecturer: Shunya Yoshimi; Professor, Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, The University of Tokyo. A very interesting series. 

Started auditing Modern Japanese Architecture: From Meiji Restoration to Today. This course is from Tokyo Tech.

Interview with Liana Finck  by Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren See The Madonna of Notre Dame, above, for a little sample of Fink's work. See the interview for a discussion and some illustrations from her first book, a graphic novel,  A Bintel Brief.  I'm happy to see that my library has a copy because the interview makes me want to read it.

Portugal's Unexpectedly Heroic Custard Tarts: The Portuguese have twice turned to the humble pastry to solve economic problems. by Karla Pequenino

Essays from The Destruction of Cultural Heritage project
    Exhibition and Erasure/Art and Politics by Annabel Wharton
    Memento Mauri: The Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba by Michele Lamprakos
    DNA Damage: Violence Against Buildingsby Sussan Babaie
    Iconoclasm beyond Negation: Globalization and Image Production in Mosul by Thomas         Stubblefield

and now for something completely different...
                                                                        ....a couple of videos...
Manabu Himeda’s trippy animation takes us on a colourful car ride

Check out the first Eurovision entry to be performed in Belarusian

January (third week) 2017 Reads

Not as many entries this week as I had for the previous two weeks because I read one very long (880 page) book, did one MOOC course and half of another, and I finished all the Pushkin material I had on hand.

As much as I liked 4 3 2 1, I felt a real need to read something really different when I finished it. So I went for the delights of a foodie in Spain and a book of short stories. That's how Grape, Olive, Pig: Deep Travels Through Spain's Food Culture by Matt Goulding  and We Live in Water by Jess Walter jumped to the top of my reading stack for next week.

Finished!
 

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster
Superb! All 880 pages. Some of it was painful to read as it covers the unrest of the student and civil rights activities of the 1960's and Auster doesn't pull any punches. The structure of the book--taking one character and giving him four alternate lives to lead worked very well.
Advanced Reader Copy 




More Pushkin: (for a full list of the contents of the volumes I've been working with see my post Pushkin - Contents notes)
From: The works of Alexander Pushkin : lyrics, narrative poems, folk tales, plays, prose; selected and edited, with an introduction, by Avrahm Yarmolinsky.  (Random house, 1936)
   Kirejali (p 590-598) translated by T. Keane
  Folk Tales (p 315-329) The Tale of the Pope and of His Workman Balda, translated by Oliver Elton;  The Tale of the Golden Cockerel, translated by Babette Deutsch
  The Captain's Daughter (p 599-741) translated by Natalie Duddington
  Unfinished Stories p 745-891): The Negro of Peter the Great; Dubrovsky; Egyptian Nights, all three translated by T. Keane
  Boris Godunov (p 333-411) translated by Alfred Hayes
  Introduction  As I often do when reading classics, I read the introduction last. 

The Little Tragedies; by Alexander Pushkin; translated and with introduction and critical essays by Nancy K. Anderson.  (Yale University Press, 2008)
I originally pick this up because I wanted to read A Feast During the Plague which is not included in the Random House edition (above). However, after finishing the entire Random House book, I decided to read more in this volume to see how a different translator worked with the material. The opening essay The Little Tragedies in English: an Approach addresses this question and was an informative discussion. As to the plays themselves, at times I preferred this 2008 translation over Keane's 1936 translation, although in a few places I felt hers was a bit too modern. I'm glad I read both.
Her critical essays really added to my appreciation of the plays. I'm glad I went to the trouble of tracking down a copy of her book.




Auditing another online course Visualizing Japan (1850s-1930s): Westernization, Protest, Modernity 
This one is self-paced and I tried to avoid going too fast, but it was so interesting that I finished it in a week. It is part of a series so I moved on to Visualizing Postwar Tokyo, Part 1. I'm not moving as fast on this one, but I'm finding the material fascinating.

 “Deal Me In 2017!”

This week's story: Fish Spine by Santiago Nazarian
(in The Future Is Not Ours: New Latin American Fiction)
In this story  a young man who helps his parents in the market. tries to wash the smell of fish from his hands before spending an evening with his friends.



Online

This week's card for  “Deal Me In 2017!” is the Ace of Spades. I thought in honor of the story's setting I would try to find a Brazilian card. I found a brief illustrated essay on Playing Cards in Brazil one of their examples is this scenic Ace of Spades made by Azevedo, Recife, Brazil, c.1925.

This is part of a large web site, The World of Playing Cards, which has information on all kinds of cards and card collecting. They also sell cards.

13 of the Most Fascinating Public Sculptures This is from Architectural Digest and I'm not posting a picture--but they really are fascinating!

October (first half) 2016 Reads

One of my major projects for this month (and into mid-December) is an online course A Global History of Architecture.  It is taught by one of the authors of the text book (right) Mark Jarzombek, Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at MIT.

I'm now in week four of twelve. All materials are online and the class is free (I'm auditing, there is a fee for credit). It takes about six hours a week of video lectures and reading. So far we've made it from huts to Dorian Greece and I'm really liking it.

I still have time for plenty of other reading, most of it very good:

The Sacred Night by Jelloun Ben Tahar; Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan
Dreams? Nightmares? Fantasies?  Allegories? It was good. Library book.

The Girl from Venice by Martin Cruz Smith
This takes place near the end of World War 2 in Italy. Venetian fisherman helps a young escaped Jewish woman find her betrayer. A good read, nicely paced.  Free advanced reader copy from publisher.

Sylvanus Now by Donna Morrissey
Liked it, but not as much as Kit's Law. Library book.

The Chilbury Ladies' Choir by Jennifer Ryan 
I thoroughly enjoyed this multiple viewpoint story of the early days of the Battle of Britain.
Free advance review copy from the publisher through the Library Thing Early Reviewer
Program.

The Mothers by Brit Bennett
This one is also told from multiple points of view but more in a third person narrative style, with some collective first person plural as the older women in an African American church view the activities of the younger generation. Takes place in Oceanside, California and Ann Arbor Michigan.
Library book.

A couple of picture books

Mother Goose's Teddy Bears  Illustrated and adapted to Mother Goose by Frederick L. Cavally.
A delightful 1907 children's book with teddy bears acting out nursery rhymes. On Project Gutenberg.

Penguin Problems by Jory John, Lane Smith (Illustrations)
Nice whimsical pictures, with a  count-your-blessings- and-be-happy-where-you-are story line. Library book


A comic book 

Bloom County Episode XI: A New Hope
by Berkeley Breathed

Welcome back Opus. A finished copy won in a
publisher sponsored contest.





Online

"Architecture for Children" Explains Why We Should Teach Architecture to Kids by Ana Rodríguez; Translated by Amanda Pimenta

Zaha Hadid’s successor: my blueprint for the future "Patrik Schumacher preaches the gospel of ‘parametricism’, a system of architecture designed to cut out human error by valuing technology over art and intuition. But does it work?" Rowan Moore interviews Schumacher. They collide a bit and I found the comments as interesting as the interview. Someday I may figure out what they are talking about but my history of architecture class has barely reached the mud brick stage.

The untold story of Japanese war brides by Kathryn Tolbert

Fatherland. The Mountains of Iranian Kurdistan Photographs and a brief essay by Linda Dorigo.

Sagoromo, Co-Winner 2014 Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize  Background information and an excerpt from the translated work. Wonderful illustrations.

So Happy to See Cherry Blossoms: Haiku from the Year of the Great Earthquake and Tsunami by  by Madoka Mayuzumi; Hiro Sato and Nancy Sato (Translators)  excerpts from the other co-winner of the 2014 Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize. I am purchasing a copy from the publisher, Red Moon Press   Oops, just got an email from Red Moon--they no longer have any copies. Sigh...

The Dramatic Life and Mysterious Death of Theodosia Burr by Hadley Meares
"The fate of Aaron Burr's daughter remains a topic of contention."