Bean Books 1 and 2: Wonderous Wisteria

My first "bean book" was one I happened to have on hand, Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees. I first read The Bean Trees in college and while I did not love it the way I had loved Kingsolver's Animal Dreams, I loved it enough. Kingsolver illustrated for me that one could be a biologist and a novelist, that one could write books with interesting plots and characters that one cares about and that social issues can have a place in fiction. I clearly wanted to be her (sans the insomnia, messy divorce and rural Kentucky childhood). Sometime later I fell out of my infatuation. I enjoyed both Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer, but unlike one friend who thought they represented Kingsolver's transition into literature, I thought they were substantially less fun than her earlier works, and a good bit longer. The time I spent defending Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and the locavore movement (both to family members who did and did not read the book) exhausted me with the side effect of making me annoyed with Barbara. All told, it had been many years since I had last read The Bean Trees when I picked it up a few weeks ago, and I was expecting a disappointment.

The disappointment never came. The Bean Trees is still a wonderful book. True, the flaws are more apparent to me than they were the first time I read it: some characters are way too folksy, the plot wraps up a little too easily, there are individual bits that could be considered outlandish, outdated, preachy or downright silly. However, as whole, it works for me. Beyond that, the bean references, while only a passing part of the story, are fabulously accurate. Dead vines in a scary urban park erupt one day into a profusion of wisteria flowers. Several weeks later another conversation takes place in the park.

Turtle was staring up at the wisteria flowers. "Beans," she said, pointing.

"Bees," I said. "Those things that buzz are bees."

"They sting," Lou Ann pointed out.

But Turtle shook her head. "Bean trees," she said, as plainly as if she had been thinking about it all day. We looked where she was pointing. Some of the wisteria flowers had gone to seed, and all these wonderful long green pods hung down from the branches. The looked as much like beans as anything you'd ever care to eat.

"Will you look at that," I said. It was another miracle. The flower trees were turning into bean trees, (pg 143-144).

Immediately upon finishing The Bean Trees, I unknowingly began reading another wisteria book, The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. One of the "fun thoughtful books" from my SiL, The Enchanted April was the one I was least looking forward to, largely because I've seen the movie and remember only that it wasn't memorable. Imagine my surprise to find the book, following exactly the same plot, to be strikingly memorable. Yes, it is the story of four English women who travel to Italy to sit in a garden for the month of April (written and set just post World War I). Yes, April, Italy and gardens enchant them, and yes, very little else happens. Yet von Arnim makes things happen. As women are sitting alone admiring the freesias, conflict is broiling. It is never loud, it is never action packed, yet things definitely are happening. Von Arnim's particular skill is taking a very sweet plot and making it tart in places. Everybody is transformed by the enchanted April, but everyone remains the same. The self-absorbed twit is still a twit, the crank is still a crank. They will all return to London and still be miserable. Yet somehow it's believable that they will all be better, too. Highly recommended for those intrigued by the romance of the garden, the romance of Italy or the romance of someplace, anyplace, where it is spring in profusion.

Garden plants of all sorts play a role in The Enchanted April, but three legumes are featured: the wisteria whose promise draws them to Italy, the Judas Tree (a red-bud) that defines the a private garden and the acacias (probably black locust, Robinia pseudo-acacia) that perfumes the air and snows petals as they leave.

Apology to Three Elizabeths

I have not read Eat, Pray, Love.  About this I have been foolishly proud.  And I should apologize.

I must first apologize to Elizabeth Gilbert.  Somehow I've been okay with mocking Elizabeth Gilbert for some time.  Based on premise, I absolutely could not stomach Eat, Pray, Love (and honestly, if you say that the book is a memoir of a woman getting over a bad divorce by eating her way through Italy until she finds herself and falls in love with a Brazilian man in Bali, it does sound repulsively entitled and simplistic).  But I've long known that Elizabeth Gilbert is not all Eat, Pray, Love.  Among other things, she wrote one of my favorite novels of the last few years (Signature of All Things, which I discuss here) and I've read some of her political commentary and find her spot on.  Yet somehow, I was smugly not a fan.

I should have noticed some sort of cognitive dissonance when I discussed Signature with my sister-in-law.  When I mentioned that Signature was great in spite of the author, and SiL asked if she'd given up her perfect life on a farm or not.  Once I realized that SiL was talking about Barbara Kingsolver and was still annoyed with Barbara Kingsolver because Kingsolver seemed to enjoy preserving food, I became defensive; Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams, The Lacuna, The Bean Trees . . . among my very favorite authors) is so different than Elizabeth Gilbert ("just run away and, meet the new right man and everything will be okay!"). But SiL had actually read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Pigs in Heaven so was basing her opinion on something.  I'm not sure where mine came from.

Which brings us to Elizabeth Hagan. Rev. Hagan (a.k.a. pastor Elizabeth) was an interim preacher at my church in Oklahoma.  I always thought she was great for our church, but I was unsure if I liked her, perhaps because I was unsure if she liked me.  I'm older than she is, but in the context of the church we fell into the same (small) demographic group.  We were the only two young (humor me), blonde (humor both of us), smiley, professional women in the congregation, and we may have been uncharacteristically stiff with each other.

After Elizabeth moved on from our church, we became facebook friends, and I have started following her blog and her writing. She's great!  As I was recommending her thoughts on something recently (why Mother's Day and Independence Day shouldn't be celebrated as church holidays), it occurred to me that I may have missed out on a deeper friendship because of petty envy.  As if there isn't always more room for thoughtful smiley women in the world. [Rev. Hagan has a newborn and is working on a new book, so probably will never read this, but if she does: Elizabeth, I'm sorry that I was surprised to find your writing so good and if my insecurities prevented us from becoming better friends.]  

So, assuming she would never have any knowledge of it, I recently checked out Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage because Elizabeth Hagan recommended it, as a sort of compensatory act.

Committed is wonderful (more on that in a moment).  Which made me think that I should apologize to the aforementioned Elizabeths, and also to my best friend E, who not only stood in line to get me to a signed copy of Signature, but who also told me, years ago, that I would enjoy Eat, Pray, Love.  E, I'm sorry I didn't listen to you the first time.  You know me quite well and I should know that.

About Committed: For about a week and a half, I spoke to anyone who would listen (mostly the Mister and my Mother) about Committed.  It is the most thoughtful discussion of marriage I have encountered, and fun reading as well.  Like Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions, I think everyone should read it, but like Operating Instructions, I have no idea to whom I would recommend it (a happily married woman has no place giving a book about a happily [if very reluctantly] married woman to a single or unhappily married friend and the recently engaged probably don't want to hear it, just like the recently pregnant don't want to know about the struggles of having a newborn and parents of a newborns are too sleep deprived to get just how funny Operating Instructions is).

Eleven years, two hours and 6 miles from
the official point of  public commitment

Within the period of two weeks, I read both Anne Lamott's Some Assembly Required: A Journey of My Son's First Son and Committed.  Both authors have a core subject, and both take some rather lengthy tangents (Lamott considerably more so).  In each case, I wondered, "Does anyone really want to read about your travels in the middle of a book about . . . " and in both cases, the writing is so good that the answer is, "Yes!"  Yes, I wanted to know about Lamott's insecurities and weird trip to India and Gilbert's bad times in Cambodia, just because they are so skillful with words.  I hope to someday be like that.  I need to practice. Thanks for putting up with my practice,

And, as for a personally committed, the Mister and I recently celebrated our eleventh anniversary (steel and fashion jewelry!) by attending a wedding and going shopping together for spatulas.  As you can see from the image, we even color coordinated. It was shockingly much commented upon.

Apology to Three Elizabeths, Third Try

I have not read Eat, Pray, Love,  About this I have been foolishly proud,  And I should apologize.

I must first apologize to Elizabeth Gilbert. Somehow I've been okay with mocking Elizabeth Gilbert for some time.  I absolutely could not stomach the premise of Eat, Pray, Love (and honestly, when described as a memoir of a woman getting over a bad divorce by eating her way through Italy until she finds herself by falling in love with a Brazilian in Bali, it does sound repulsively entitled and simplistic).  But I should have learned long ago that people are more than a plot synopsis, and in this case, not only was the book recommended by one of my best friends, but I've also had ample evidence that Elizabeth Gilbert was more than Eat, Pray, Love.  Among other things, she wrote one of my favorite adult novels of the last few years (Signature of All Things, which I discussed here) and I found her political commentary spot on.  Yet I was smugly not a fan,

I should have noticed some cognitive dissonance when I discussed Signature with my sister-in-law.  When I mentioned that Signature was great in spite of the author, SiL asked if she'd given up her perfect life on the farm.  Once I realized that SiL was talking about Barbara Kingsolver and was still annoyed with Barbara Kingsolver seemed to be enjoying preserving food, I became defensive.  Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams, The Lacuna, The Bean Trees . . . among my very favorite authors) was so different than Elizabeth Gilbert ("just run away and meet the right new man and everything will be okay!"). But SiL had actually read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Pigs in Heaven while I was basing my disdain on what?  The fact that the book sold well?

Which brings us to Elizabeth Hagan.  Rev, Hagan (a.k.a Pastor Elizabeth) was an interim preacher at my church in Oklahoma.  I always thought that she was great for our church, but I was unsure if I liked her, perhaps because I was unsure if she liked me.  I'm older than she is, but in the context of the church we fell into the same small demographic group. We were the only two young (humor me), blonde (humor both of us), smiley, professional women in the congregation, and we may have been uncharacteristically stiff with each other,

After Elizabeth moved on from our church, we became Facebook friends and I started following her blog and her writing.  She's great!  I'm ashamed that that surprised me.  As I was recommending her thoughts on something recently (why Mother's Day and Independence Day shouldn't be celebrated as church holidays), it occurred to me that I may have missed out on a deeper friendship because of petty envy.  As if there isn't always room for more thoughtful smiling women in the world. [Rev, Hagan has a newborn and is working on a new book, so probably will never read this, but if she does: Elizabeth, I'm sorry I that I was surprised to find your writing so good and I'm sorry if my insecurities prevented us from becoming better friends,]

So as part of some compensatory act, penance for judging women harshly for being able to fun things that I'm not (in other words, for doing just what I wrote against doing here), I paid extra close attention to Elizabeth Hagan's recent book suggestions and checked out Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage (keep humoring me, somehow this makes sense in my mind).

Committed is wonderful (more on that in a moment).  Which made me think that I should apologize to the aforementioned Elizabeths and also to my best friend E, who not only stood in line to get me a signed copy of Signature of All Things, but who also told me, years ago, that I would enjoy Eat, Pray, Love.  E, I'm sorry I didn't listen to you the first time.  You know me quite well and I should know that.

About Committed:  For about a week and a half, I spoke to anyone who would listen (mostly The Mister and My Mother) about Committed.  It is the most thoughtful discussion of marriage I have encountered, and fun reading as well.  Like Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions, I think everyone should read it, but like Operating Instructions, I have no idea to whom I would recommend it.  A happily married woman has no place giving a book about a happily [if reluctantly] married woman to a single or less-than-happily married friend, and the recently engages probably don't want to hear it, just like the recently pregnant don't want to about the the struggles of having a newborn and actual parents of newborns are too sleep deprived to read Operating Instructions and recognize it for the humorous masterpiece it is.

Eleven years two hours and six miles from
the point of public commitment. 

Withing a period of two weeks, I read both Anne Lamott's Some Assembly Required: A Journey of My Son't First Son and Committed,  Both authors have a core subject and both take some rather lengthy tangents (Lamott considerably more so).  In each case, I wondered, "Does anyone really want to read about your travels in the middle of a book about . . . ?" and in both cases, the writing is so good that my answer is "Yes!"  Yes, I wanted to know about Lamott's insecurities and weird trip to India and Gilbert's bad times in Cambodia*, just because they are so skillful with words.  I hope someday to be so skillful.  I need to practice.  Thanks for putting up with my practice.

And, as far as personally committed goes, The Mister and I recently celebrated our eleventh anniversary (steel and fashion jewelry!) by attending a wedding and going shopping together for spatulas.  As you can see from the image, we even color coordinated.  This fact was shockingly much commented upon.

*Okay, not only does Liz (we are suddenly on a first-name basis) have great skill with words and fun taste in subject matter, she is the sister of Catherine Gilbert Murdock, author of the fabulous Dairy Queen YA novel.  I would be embarrassed by how much that raises E. Gilbert in my esteem, if I didn't think it happened the other way more often.

Last of the Luck Books

Ojo the Unlucky becomes Ojo the Lucky because he learns to choose his own fortune as he travels through Oz on a great quest. This, largely, is the point of The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Thematically, it would work much better, if, after The Tin Woodman's rousing speech to Ojo, who has just listed reasons he is unlucky: "Every reason you have given is absurd. But I have noticed that those who continually dread ill luck and fear it will overtake them, have no time to take advantage of any good fortune that comes their way. Make up your mind to be Ojo the Lucky," the quest did not utterly fail and Ozma did not laugh at Ojo while her magicians set everything right without any effort on his part. However, the fact that a children's book with such a glaring plot and theme problem could be readable by an adult 96 years after its first publication speaks volumes about the crafting of the crazy set of characters (I want to know what a woozy is and how the glass cat will interact with the pink kitten, I care about Ojo's adventure even when I know they will all come to naught) or nostalgia (this is the first book I remember being given from my grandfather. As a second grader, at 342 pages is was far too long for me, but I struggled through because grandpa obviously thought I could read it).

Not the best children's fantasy book available by a long shot, but certainly not the worst, and lovers of fantasy all owe a great debt to L. Frank Baum for opening up fantasy lands to book length stories.

Like The Patchwork Girl of Oz , Barbara Kingsolver's Pigs in Heaven wraps up a bit too neatly. Unlike Ojo, however, all of the characters in Pigs in Heaven must do their own transforming in order to reach any resolution. As with my recent re-reading of The Bean Trees, I was expecting Pigs in Heaven not to live up to my memory, and, as with The Bean Trees, was pleasantly surprised to find I still love the book. The Kentucky and Okie accents don't bother me the way they did when I first read it , probably because I've met more people who really do speak the ways the characters do-- maybe they aren't there just for cutesy "local color." The tension about what it takes to be a good mother matters all the more to me, and I've never been particularly bothered by plots that hang on unlikely coincidences (of course the character's lives are going to intersect, that's why we've been learning about them in the first place). In this reading I did pick up my SiL's issue with the rain in Seattle: Barbara, in Seattle it is wet but it does not rain hard all the time, it is not like living in a car wash. It's amazing how one detail wrong can really throw the experience of a whole book. In this reading I also didn't see any compelling explanation for why I had to move to Scotland without fully discussing it with my college boyfriend, which I somehow did in 1994, when I instructed said boyfriend to read both The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven in order to understand me. With those caveats being made, like my on-line kindred spirit Marieke, I'm happy to report that Kingsolver's novels feel different with age, but no worse for wear.

You can't think too much about luck, good or bad. Taylor has decided
this before, and at this moment renews her vow. Lucky Buster is lucky
to be alive and unlucky to have been born with the small wits that led him
to disaster in the first place. Or lucky, too, for small wits, that allow
him so little inspection of the big picture. In the ambulance on the way to
the hospital, he wanted to go to McDonald's. (pg. 32)

That Local Diet That Everyone's Doing

Dirtdog, my dear friend of 21 years (ack! We're getting old. People born on the day I first saw Dirtdog walking into my freshman physical science class and thought "Please don't sit with me, nerdy boy with the strange hat," can now legally buy alcohol in all 50 states.) mentioned something about that "local diet that everyone seems to be doing" as we were drinking New Glarus, WI beer, grilling Waunakee, WI brats with Waunakee, WI mustard sitting in on a deck in Waunakee, WI. Certainly there are signs that locavore lifestyles are proliferating among people of my acquaintance. One sibling's family belongs to a CSA, the other buys wondrous arsenal cheeses from an organic farmer's market. Then mention the 100 mile diet website in on-line conversations. Both sets of parents grow vegetables, although this is nothing new. The Mister is finding sources of WV pasture raised lamb. Slow Food and Heritage Food articles are reaching the Salina, KS newspaper. The Gorgeous Biologist Knitters left in Lawrence run into each other at the farmer's market every week, and those removed from Lawrence moan about the lack of a new local equivalent. People may be starting to take where their food comes from seriously.

If I thought this was entirely true, I wouldn't promote Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable Miracle about a year of eating locally, so heartily. My experience, however, is that my friends and family are a pretty non-random sample of the American population (I believe the most recent studies suggest that the median number of books read last year was 1 and the mean 4 for adult Americans. This is not true of my friends and family). Beyond that, people of my acquaintance may talk about eating locally but I'm not sure how much we do it. The Mister and I, for instance, have bagged spinach from California in our refrigerator, bananas on the counter and coffee in the pot as we speak. So, while Barbara and I may be preaching to the choir, the choir still needs the message, not just to hear their voices.

As previously mentioned, like every other biologist wanna-be novelist I know, I want to be Barbara Kingsolver. I could do without the failed marriage and horrible insomnia that led to her earlier novels, but still I want to be her. So this is not an objective review, but I suppose it says something that after writing my book, (food, family and environment being my domain [Barbara can have single motherhood, Arizona and African missionaries in the '60s]) I still want to be her, because she wrote my book as well as I would have, perhaps better, because I don't think that there is anyway I'd venture into turkey sex.

Whether Barbara, myself, or many other authors write it*, the case for eating locally is strong. I was planning on expounding on the many benefits, but I find that my blogging time is well-past used up, and I am interfering with far too much of my entomology learning time as I write. So I will limit myself to two points. One: there are compelling environmental, social, and taste benefits from eating locally in season. If you cannot think of them, I would be happy to expound in conversation (or would direct you to the 100 mile diet web site if you don't want to read Barbara's book). Two: I know that vegetables at the farmers market cost more (at least sometimes), that most of us don't live near any source of chocolate, coffee, or tea and might not make it without them, that your local grocery store is hideous (couldn't be much worse than ours as far as local produce goes), that you don't have space for a garden, that convenience foods are convenient . . . I know and I'm not asking you to become an exclusive locavore.

I am asking that you

1. buy (or grow) more locally in season


2. "put away" some local produce for the winter. Among people I know this ranges from drying apples to canning tomato sauce. Like many of you, I am not up for canning, but I am going to buy a bushel of chili peppers at the market next week and freeze most of them (sticking them in the freezer whole because the mister and I are too lazy to prep them). I am going out this afternoon to pick basil to make pesto to freeze and I hope to dry some tomatoes.


3. If you live anywhere where you can purchase a large box of good Colorado peaches, do it now. Eat them, two a day and think of me. Or make a cobbler or a pie. Or freeze some.


4. find local apples this fall. I have been shocked to find WV apples are as much better than grocery stores (WA and New Zealand) apples as garden tomatoes are from store tomatoes. Scrumptious.

Thanks

*One criticism I've heard of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is that the idea is not novel. This is definitely true. Ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan writes regularly on the subject, most notably with his 2001 Coming Home to Eat chronicling a year of eating locally (moderately recommended; good points, tiresome reading). His involvement with RAFT (Renewing America's Food Traditions) helps ensure that Slow Food USA is an ecological as well as gastronomic movement, and I can support his Buffalo Nation treatise because it cites two of my local eating mentors, Kelly Kindscher and Alma Hogan Snell. Without at any point telling readers they should eat locally, Michael Pollan does an excellent job of explaining where our food does (and can) come from in Omnivore's Dilemma (very highly recommended). Jay Weinstein takes the opposite approach: little explanation, many directives, in The Ethical Gourmet (mildly recommended, a bit too much "Tell your cook not to buy bottled water" and "here's how to source coffee at high end stores in Manhattan" for my budget or location, but very clear priority lists for eating ethically). Vandana Shiva, Wendell Berry and to a lesser extent Wes Jackson have all written about the social and economic consequences of different agricultural systems. I haven't read the 100-Mile Diet (Plenty is the American title) yet. I will someday, but when I picked it up in Toronto, I was a bit displeased with the commentary on the back stating that Smith and McKinnon were introducing us to the idea of a food shed. It's petty on my part, since the authors themselves didn't make this claim, but as I have been reading and discussing foodsheds since my fabulous 2000 Geography of American Foodways class (and then it wasn't a new concept, just new to me), I was annoyed at anyone so disrespecting the vast foodshed literature : - )

A little acid to brighten up STIR

The thing about acid is that, in the right dose, it can brighten up any dish.

My summer reading needs a bit of brightening.  I carried One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,  the May/June STIR book around for weeks.  I finally sat down to read it.  I managed five pages before deciding it was too depressing for me now (that statement may cause my  Brother in Law to shake his head sadly and wonder just how "lite" I need my reading to be, and many others of you to shake your heads because it is a great book*). So I picked up The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.  My Mother had given it to me for my birthday and, to me, it has the title of a quirky book (and a star one at that).  I was two pages in before I fully realized I had traded cruel treatment in a mental institution for teenagers with terminal cancer.  Terminal cancer won.
The Fault in Our Stars suffers a bit from a Juno complex (the teenagers are way too witty for their own good), but is generally fabulous-- if you are into romantic comedies about teenagers about to die.  I highly recommend it for a lot of my reading audience.  There's also a fabulous champagne scene tying stars to sparkling wine (using the alleged Dom Perignon quote, "Come quickly! I am drinking the stars!"), a few sucker punches plot-wise, and a lot to think about (teenage cancer patients being more worried about their what happens to their parents after they die than about their own fates, for instance).
In any case, Janet, was here over the weekend (hooray for friends who visit!) and we decided I needed an "acid" book this year.  Janet and I like to read "recent classics" (Graham Greene last year, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Faulkner were under consideration for this year).  So, even though it is officially off-limits for being officially non-fiction, the July STIR selection is The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.  Acid! Classic! and with references to the author of the book I didn't read.  Join us if you'd like.

Speaking of STIR books, I realized two from last fall were mostly overlooked during the Juno's Daughters craziness.  I still highly recommend, and would still like to more discuss The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  The former is a short novel with a masterful building of tension, the latter an account of where cells we research really came from.

Other books I've recently read (recently being the first half of the year):  The Lacuna: Barbara Kingsolver's latest novel I found super-engrossing for the first half (Mom needs to read it) and good for the second half.  The first was one of the best half of a book I've read in a long time.   What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell which was perhaps a bit more entertaining than Outliers because, as a collection of articles, it has less of a point and a more interesting range.  NutureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman: a scary evidence-based book about child behavior that explains how we are doing it all wrong.    Highland Fling: a romantic comedy by Katie Fforde. I enjoy Fforde because her characters are always not-gorgeous, working, and more often than not, gardening and that was true of this one as well, but I liked Wild Designs and Second Thyme Around.  Toss the Bride by Jennifer Manske Fenske: fun, but not as well-written as those by Fforde or Jennifer Crusie.  Bet Me: one of my new favorites from the aforementioned Crusie.

*If you read One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, let me know and I'll try to set up a discussion with Debbie, the book's selector. And maybe me. Someday,

Book Catch-up

Desperately needing to get away from non-fiction and food books, I picked up Andrea Camilleri's Sicilian murder mystery Excursion to Tindari in the guest bedroom of the siblings-in-law. It was a great read while waiting for the train and escaping from Economic Botany. Despite my stated desire of avoiding food books, I salivated at the detailed descriptions of the detective's meals and thought they added to the passions portrayed in the book. I was also pleasantly amused by the constant digs at the Italians. Altogether highly recommended for those who enjoy a character centered mysteries.

I bought my mother Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for her birthday. I then decided that, even though the book was for my mother, and I wasn't reading food books, I needed to read it before handing it over. After all, it isn't every day that one of my favorite novelists writes a book on my favorite subject. Like many such books, it dismayed me, "This is the book that I was supposed to write," yet I still very highly recommend it. It will receive a complete review and discussion of ideas here one of these times.

While still in Canada, I scored a Canadian copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I read it completely as a fan and not a critic, and, not surprisingly, adored it. I was actually overall very impressed with some characters ended, and look forward to discussing with other fans. The Canadian, lay-out, by the way, is not as nice as the American.

Last week I hit the library looking for the two of the seven Harry Potter books I don't own so I could sit down to a true H.P. marathon. Instead of H.P., I decided to pick some featured unheard-of-by-me new novels. From the juvenile fiction section, I pulled Before the Lark by Irene Bennet Brown. The heroine is a 12-year-old in Kansas City with a harelip who decides to take on farming in Kansas in 1888. Despite a conclusion that is far too tidy, I enjoyed it and would lightly recommend it for Prairie Quilter, Sunflower Spinner, Lindsey, and others who liked young-adult prairie fiction. If you happen to read it and find the same version I had, do not be turned off by the glaring error in the book jacket: "It is 1888, and Kansas, just to the north of them, is still pioneer country" (my emphasis). The author's geography is very detailed (and they clearly head west from Kansas City), and given that I felt a flaw of the book was how much the author wanted to inform readers, including characters thrown in just to inform about immigration or Kaw people or cleft-palate surgery, I assume the glaring error is from someone at the publishing house.

In the adult section I found Twentieth Wife by Indu Sundaresan. Like most good historical fiction, this book left me feeling completely ignorant and amazed. I began the book knowing absolutely nothing about the Mughal Empire. Upon completion, I looked up a few characters (on wikipedia, of course) and found that the characters were real people and the major events have been well-recorded. I know more for having read the book, and I want to know more: Sundaresan was definitely successful. Given an outline of recorded history, the story is the motivation: how and why these characters behaved this way. I think it is here that Sundaresan shines. She did make the characters believable with plausible motivations for irrational acts. The book is not perfect-- something is amiss with the pacing, and there is an issue that the hero and heroine are not particularly sympathetic. Still I would highly recommend it for Moonbeam, Janet, Sunflower Spinner and those fond of novels like The Red Tent. If I owned my own copy I would give it to my seattle-sister-in-law for her birthday.

Heirloom, Hellion, Earthman and Buster Midnight: Book Update

In my reading memoirs, this season might go down as "the fall I read Pride and Prejudice for two weeks straight" (which is saying something, because I re-read all the good parts in one evening). If I try harder, I can recall more of the books I've read recently, but by next year they will largely be forgotten, with the exception of The Professor's House, which received its own post earlier.

The Essential Earthman by Henry Mitchell is a collection of gardening essays for the D.C. area. It's fabulous because it is specific, opinionated and the gardening advice is spot on. It's also frustrating for the same reasons, as well as being 25 years out-of-date. I found myself wondering what good is it to read a witty comparison of rose varieties for D.C. gardens when I desire no more roses and could not acquire the listed cultivars if I did. And then I'd encounter gems like this:

If I may venture one suggestion to the May-struck gardener it is this: do not
allow the total space occupied by irises, peonies, roses, poppies,
forget-me-nots, violas, clematis and other glories of late May to occupy more
than 63 percent of the space. Unless, at an absolute maximum, they are allowed
to occupy 76 percent. It is unthinkable that they should in any case hog so much
as 94 percent of the arable area. Usually.

and know that I was listening to a kindred gardening spirit* and read on. Mitchell reminds me, in many ways, of the Scottish gardeners I worked with at Threave. That is mostly, although not unequivocally, a good thing. The book is highly recommended for Molly and any lurkers who garden in the mid-Atlantic region.

Tim Stark is a gardener as opinionated as Henry Mitchell, and perhaps as good a storyteller, but I had problems with Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer. I could never figure out just what Stark was trying to do. He might be trying to serve as the Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential) of the truck farming world, or the Amanda Hesser (Cooking for Mr. Latte). He might be trying to catch the "my parents made me crazy and now I'm a name-dropping foodie" wave or take full advantage of the locavore moment. If he's trying to do those things, he largely failed. I'd far rather read Bourdain, Hesser, Reischl, Pollan or Kingsolver. Still, he's succeeding at something. I read the bulk of the 227 page book in one sitting and while I only left with two concrete thoughts ( 1) I will never be a commercial farmer at any scale and 2) there are now five more restaurants on my fictitious list of the places I must eat at in New York City when I have unlimited money for a food trip there), I enjoyed it far more than that. Maybe I just wanted more about the tomatoes and fewer disjunct but overlapping "This American Life" pieces. I'd like you to read it and tell me your thoughts, but I'm not sending you out to buy it.

I had the feeling that Stark assumed his readers were provincial New Yorkers and he was out to shatter our stereotypes by suggesting that the people who drive tomatoes in from Pennsylvania are people too. A very very different book, Christine Flynn's Hannah and the Hellion suffers from a similar problem. The author of the Silhouette Special Edition from 1998 seems to want to shatter stereotypes of small towns (one can find romance in a small town! not everyone in a small town is nice!) through a story which relies on more stereotypes (in a small town everyone knows everyone and opinions cannot change). Still, it was fun reading for an afternoon and if any of my readers is near a library sale at which they could buy a bag of assorted trash romance for a buck, I'd be grateful as my supply of such pulp is running low.

Stereotyping of the audience seems to be a common problem in my recent reading. The narrator of Sandra Dallas's Buster Midnight's Cafe starts out the book mocking reporters who come to Butte, MT to interview the locals, "then they go back and write us up like we're cuter than a bug in lace pants. Local color, it's called." At the end of the first chapter, when it became clear that Sandra Dallas (who lives in Denver) was going to use a down-homey cuter than a bug in lace pants narrator to add local color to the whole book, even when the narrator mocked the practice, I cast the book aside for a few weeks. I returned to read it quickly and found it overall charming with an interesting unresolved plot twist and an unexpected punch at the ending. I've read several of Dallas's other books (Persian Pickle Club, Alice's Tulips, Diary of Mattie Spencer) and liked them all more, perhaps because of the quilting connection. Still I'd recommend Buster Midnight for my mother, Prairie Quilter, and Lindsey and I'll read Tallgrass someday.

"He think someone might mistake him for a cowboy. But anybody who knows cowboys knows yellow scarves are bad luck," (pg. 5)

*If anyone has digital photos of my peony parties, I would love them. Such an image was supposed to go here, but I appear not to have any.