October 2011

Lindsay, Anne. Lighthearted at Home: the Very Best of Anne Lindsay. Mississauga, Ontario: Wiley, 2010. Print.

I’m not really a cookbook reader, since I have cooking routines I’m happy with, and when I want to find something specific I generally go to the internet.  However, related to previous
books, I needed some help to figure out how to eat a diet with only 20% calories from fat.  I thought that having a book like this with nutritional analysis for the recipes would be helpful.

Turns out it wasn’t that helpful for me at this time, so I leafed through it and sent it back to the library.  I think this is a reasonably good cookbook; it’s a compendium of the best of Anne Lindsay’s work over the long time she has been a Canadian healthy eating guru.  It’s a huge book, with at least 500 recipes, so you could do a lot worse for an all-in-one cookbook.

Dahl, Roald. Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life: Stories. New York: Knopf, 1990. Print.

A friend dropped this off for us to read; she had picked Danny the Champion of the World as our next book club book, and thought we’d be interested to read the final short story in this book, which is an early version called simply The Champion of the World.

This is not a children’s book, as my 13-year-old emphatically told me after reading the first story.  The stories usually share the same protagonist, an unnamed man with a friend, Claude, who generally also figures in the stories.  These two grown men often act like adolescents, making it somewhat hard for me to sympathize with them.  Changing The Champion of the World to have a boy as its hero in the book form, rather than Claude, makes a huge shift in my enjoyment of the story, especially as it adds on the whole layer of Danny’s relationship with his father.

These stories have definitely stayed with me.  One story, “Parson’s Pleasure”, I’m almost convinced I read once before, a long time ago.  An antique dealer finds a piece of furniture in a farmhouse, called a commode – which confused me mightily as a child since he seemed to be describing a dresser, where I thought a commode was a piece of furniture that holds a chamber-pot.  There’s a story about a rat catcher, one about racing greyhounds, and the title story about mating cows and bulls.  If you like Roald Dahl and want to explore his other stories, this is fine, but possibly not the right place to start.  His book Skin and other stories got a better rating from the 13-year-old in my house as a transition book from Dahl’s children’s works to adults.

Calloway, Stephen, Elizabeth C. Cromley, and Alan Powers. The Elements of Style: an Encyclopedia of Domestic Architectural Detail. Buffalo, NY: Firefly, 2005. Print.

An amazing, and huge, book.  Not to be confused with Strunk and White’s Elements of Style when writing, these elements were used in building and architecture.

The various chapters take on different periods, from “Tudor and Jacobean (1485-1625)” to “Contemporary Era (1975 – Present Day).  It is primarily an English book, but some chapters are specifically on American styles, such as “Colonial”, “American Victorian”, separate from “British Victorian”.  It really is elements that are portrayed; windows, doors, walls, ceilings, fireplaces, etc.  Each element has a coloured tab on the side of the page that allows you to flip through and look at a single element, like fireplaces, through time and see the stylistic changes.

Each chapter is written by a different expert in the time period, so there is a bit of unevenness in how things are done.  That tradeoff is probably worth it to have someone immersed in the era.  For my personal projects, I was looking at the “Edwardian” chapter (1901-1914).  It wasn’t clear to me whether I could transfer the British Edwardian style to Canada, but it gives me a solid starting point, and I can cross-reference the pictures in this book with other resources.  This will definitely go on my list of “best books for houses” when I finally get around to assembling one.

Wilson, Ethel. Swamp Angel. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996. Print.

This book was a LibraryThing recommendation that was spot on for me.  The main character, Maggie Lloyd, quietly and secretly walks out on her husband (during dinner, no less) and travels to the interior of BC to work at a fishing lodge.  The story was set in the 1950s, I would say (published 1954), and reading it was like stepping into another world.  The title refers to a pearl-handled revolver that Maggie receives from a friend of hers, named after a type of cannon, apparently.

The bulk of the book deals with Maggie’s dealings with the owners of the lodge and their son; effectively living with them means the usual difficulties in getting along and coming to understand each other.

The foreword by Elizabeth Thompson was helpful to put the novel into context and explain the literary symbolism of the book.  My high-school English classes are far enough behind me that I can appreciate having pointed out to me the importance of the repeated water motifs, for instance, and the Christ-like parallels, which never would have occurred to me on my own.  I’ll definitely seek out more Ethel Wilson.

Maslow, Abraham H. Toward a Psychology of Being. CNew York: J. Wiley & Sons, 1999. Print.

I only got as far as parts 1 and 2, which is about halfway through the book, before I had to return it to the library.  Part of the point of recording is to know what books I looked at, though, whether I finish them or not.

Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” was touched on in my B. Ed. program, and came up again recently while I was reading Moolala.  I was curious about the levels, and put this book on hold.  Not surprisingly, I found it difficult to read, but not for the reasons I expected.  It’s a little bit dry and academic, but he’s a passionate writer so that isn’t a major detraction.  Each chapter turned out to be a lightly edited transcript of a speech or lecture he’d given, so they didn’t necessarily flow together well.

What I need, unfortunately, is some kind of “guide to Maslow” written for laypeople.  I’m not sure yet how to find one that isn’t a total pop psychology/self-help nightmare, but I’ll keep an eye out.

Peikin, Steven R. Gastrointestinal Health: a Self-help Nutritional Program to Prevent, Cure, or Alleviate Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Ulcers, Heartburn, Gas, Constipation, and Many Other Digestive Disorders. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1991. Print.

Despite the long names with similar words in them, this book is quite different from the last.  This is the one with “nutritional program” in the title, which made all the difference.  What I needed when I got home from the hospital, still in considerable pain and afraid to eat any mouthful of any food at all, was a sense of control.  This book gave me comfort and a plan.

I can’t say that I really tried many recipes in the book, but they gave me a framework to work within as I started eating regularly again.  I would recommend it for anyone suffering from GI issues who wants more advice than just “eat healthy”.  In some cases, like heartburn, what you eat directly affects your disease – so it’s worth your while to have a detailed

Miskovitz, Paul F., and Marian Betancourt. The Doctor’s Guide to Gastrointestinal Health: Preventing and Treating Acid Reflux, Ulcers, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Diverticulitis, Celiac Disease, Colon Cancer, Pancreatitis, Cirrhosis, Hernias and More. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005. Print.

It’s, uh, embarrassing sometimes to write about what you read, I guess.  I think I’m probably more embarrassed still about the Suzanne Somers diet book I once read, but this is the first time I’ve noticed the sensation while recording.

So, yes, I had a gallbladder attack in August, and this book (and one to be recorded later) came handily to my library hold shelf a few days later.  I love the Toronto Public Library.

This is a good overall guide.  If you’ve got GI “issues” but don’t quite know what’s wrong, this will help you pinpoint the area you need to research further.  I think it’s good to read before going to see your family doctor or surgeon, which is how I used it.  I needed a crash course on internal plumbing, and this gave it to me, but if you’ve read anything on this topic before, you likely won’t find anything new.

Alcott, Louisa May. Jack and Jill. Boston: Little, Brown, 1928. Print.

This was another LibraryThing recommendation, and I was surprised to see that there was a Louisa May Alcott story that I had never read.  Little Women was not really a childhood favourite of mine – I might not have had a copy – but I had well-loved and well-worn copies of Eight Cousins and Under the Lilacs that I read regularly.

I don’t know whether it’s the fault of this book, or the fault of encountering it when I’m 42 instead of 12, but I found myself quite cynical about the book.  Everything in it is a total Alcott cliché, from the sledding accident that starts the plot moving, to the wholesome and loving friendships between the boys and girls, the bad boy who isn’t really bad, but just needs help to keep on the right track… I could go on and on.  In fact, I think I could cut-and-paste this book together out of bits of her others, and that just makes me sad because it starts to ruin the others too.

Oh well.  If you’re a complete-ist like me and love Alcott, go ahead and read it – you may be in a better mood for it than I was!

Mizushiro, Setona. After School Nightmare. [S.l.]: Go! Comi, 2007. Print.

I found this on a list of the American Library Association’s website, of “best graphic novels of 2008”.  I probably should have noticed and been warned by the fact that there are about a hundred books listed – surely not that many “Best” were published in 2008?  I thought the premise of this one – about a high school student who has a male upper body and female lower body – was interesting.

The book, however, was confusing and disturbing.  I thought I might recommend it either to my son (who is 13) or on my general ‘fiction for boys’ lists, but it’s too gratuitously violent for me to want to recommend.  As one Amazon reviewer noted, “I recommend this book to people who like manga that deals with love, drama and secerts. ”  I need a little more than that in a story to keep me interested.

It’s quite possible, though, that I will remember this story in a year or two and wonder about the next volume.  That’s why these records exist!

Laurence, Margaret. The Fire Dwellers. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969. Print.

Sometime in September I realized that I had accidentally stopped reading fiction, and that I didn’t like not having a book by my bedside table to pick up at night.  (Non-fiction is no good for bedtime reading for me).  This was somewhere in my recommendations from LibraryThing, and I liked the idea of working my way through Laurence again.

I don’t know why I didn’t start at the beginning of her works, but perhaps I just took what was recommended.  In any case I think it’s quite possible that I had not read this book before.  Stacey MacAindra is a married mother of four in the 1960s, with a nice house and family and a hard-working husband.  Once I got used to the style of the book, where Laurence uses different formatting to interweave Stacey’s thoughts and flashbacks into the narration and conversation, I was drawn in to her life.  Once when I put the book down to turn out the light I commented to my husband that it was making me grateful for my life; Laurence so accurately and powerfully portrays the pain of the tiny, almost invisible hurts of a mid-century housewife.

Although there is drama on the periphery of the story, it’s not the focus.  What’s left unexplained didn’t bother me the way it does in other books; I think that’s Laurence’s genius.  The afterword of this edition, by Sylvia Fraser, is also excellent and worth reading.  Fraser quotes reviews of the book from when it came out (a particular unflattering one from a male CBC reviewer) and compares his predictions of the life of the book to its actual history.  Although it may have been denigrated by some for not having bigger or weightier subject matter, I agree with Fraser that the interior life of ordinary people is worthwhile material.