eat, pray, love

elizabeth gilbert (2006)

i'd heard a lot of buzz surrounding this book. i love books about food (check) and travel (check) so i knew i'd like this one. it is a #1 NY times bestseller afterall. while i don't normally read things that are very recent and have been wanting to read a lot of classics on my list, this one fell into my hands. once i started, it was practically over.

many of the issues in this book i cannot relate to: marriage, divorce, life at 35, and meditation. this is not to say i've never meditated or wanted to, i've just never been successful at it. after reading this book i realized i've never worked at it. so the story, liz is a writer. this is a non-fiction/memoir/travel book. she was married and at 30 was supposed to want children, but she did not. she had a breakdown, got divorced, got a lover, ruined that and so became depressed. really depressed. eventually she decides she needs to take this journey. a yearlong journey to find herself in three different places: italy (eating and pleasure), india (prayer, meditation and devotion), and bali (looks to find balance but finds love!).

i was immediately in love with the way she writes. i enjoy reading spiritual books and love learning about culture and religion. they are important to me even if i don't practice anything. right now i am too lazy/busy. that is my excuse and someday when i honestly and truly want to search within myself for deeper meaning or become one with myself/god/whatever, i will. for now - i'm busy.

i feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby - i just don't care what it puts me through. because i adore it. because it's mine.

travel is something that you experience. it changes you. you can go on vacation and you can be a tourist but to travel is something totally different. it is about getting to know locals, customs, ideas and non-stop learning. i want to travel, a lot.

this book was about travel as much as it was her personal life. she went through these travels talking about her relationships, troubles, sex, and love.

i disappear into the person i love. i am the permeable membrane. if i love you, you can have everything. you can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog's money, my dog's time - everything.

it is interesting to get into the head of a divorced 35 year old writer, falling in love, trying to decide whether or not to have sex with her new boyfriend.

yet the whole time, while falling in love and eating for pleasure, her spiritual quest was ever-present. she had gone to india to live and study at the ashram of her Guru. at first she spent days fighting herself (and relationship/life demons) while trying to meditate or pray.

there's a reason they call God a presence - because God is right here, right now. in the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.

of course i'm not going to divulge the secrets of the books or the deep spiritual ideas, but it's there.

lastly she traveled to bali to learn from a balinese medicine man. he's a smallish brown yoda-like character who was very entertaining. while she kept practicing her indian yogic meditation, he offered up a different type of meditation.

why they always look so serious in yoga? you make serious face like this, you scare away good energy. to meditate, only you must smile. smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. even smile in your liver.

it is a great book that is worth all the attention and praise. it's written well (even though i don't really know what that means) and is funny. i think anyone can relate to her stories, even if you don't like food, travel, praying or love stories. it's about meeting people, relationships, enjoying life and figuring things out. these are things everyone deals with.

a cook's tour: in search of the perfect meal

anthony bourdain (2001)

okay so maybe i'm a little obsessed but the man writes some interesting things. he keeps me reading. after kitchen confidential i had to have more. trust me, there is still more to come!

this one is about finding the perfect meal...in the world! so two of my favorite things put together: food and travel. how can you go wrong? well you really cannot. he goes to the ends of the earth to find interesting meals and ones he'll remember forever. i tend to read a lot at night too when i'm really hungry, doesn't help the hunger. he wrote this while filming for a series on the food network so some of the places he visits and things he eats, he does it for television. and he's not too excited about it. take the bird's nest for example. after having one of the best seafood meals of his life in vietnam, they make him eat it:

bird's nest soup is made by hacking up a whole rock dove (pidgeon), putting the meat, bones and all, into a drained coconut, and then cooking it with the soaked nest, an assortment of Chinese medicinal herbs, dates, scallions, ginger, and the swallow's eggs. the coconut milk is poured back in and the whole thing is steamed for four hours. it's disgusting.

i just love reading about food, i can just taste the flavors. he has about thirty different stories and some are amazingly perfect meals while others are "for television". i guess he has to get the trip paid for somehow! he goes to cambodia to a "gun club" where he shoots .45s, AK-47s, M16 and whatever he wants really. there is a sign that says:

please don't point your weapon at anything you do not intend to shoot.

how awesome. it's part-travel adventure, part-food adventure. he goes to portugal to the family of his boss. they fatten a pig for him for months. then while he's there they kill it.

i learned, for the first time, that i could indeed look my food in the eyes before eating it - and i came away from the experience, i hope, with considerably more respect for what we call "the ingredient." i am more confirmed than ever in my love for pork, pork fat, and cured pork. and i am less likely to waste it.

the thing about people eating meat in many other countries is that they do not waste anything. they used everything. had the blood, every organ, head, snout, and even used the bladder (blown up) as a ball for the kids to kick around! there are a few instances where he describes eating those parts of an animal i would never consider food or have any desire in trying. i'm all for trying anything once but some of those things make me want to vomit. my favorite chapter is probably the one on tokyo, of course. japanese love their food. one of the craziest and best movies on food is tampopo, a movie about making ramen (among other things). so when tony goes to tokyo and basically just eats great food, i can just imagine. i don't even eat fish but reading this made me want to. i should appreciate my culture more. eating sushi and drinking sake for lunch. then going and eating yakitori with a bunch of sarari-man. then he goes to experience the ryokan. now i've had the good fortune of staying at one of these places and it is truly amazing.

no experience is more guaranteed to make you feel like a nine-hundred-pound ape than a kaiseki dinner for which you are inadequately briefed. i was very jittery.

especially for a tall (6'4") guy, japanese eating on the floor is uncomfortable if you are not used to it. now kaiseki are meals meant to reflect the region and season. it's a multi-course meal with many colors, textures, flavors and yet very simple. each dish is served in a different plate to accentuate flavor/idea of the dish. he had too many dishes to count and it all sounded so good i could taste and smell it.

you know you're having one of the meals of your life but are no longer intimidated by it. consciousness of time and expense go out the window...you become a happy passenger, completely submitting to whatever happens next, confident that somehow the whole universe is in particularly benevolent alignment, that nothing could possibly distract or detract from the wonderfulness of the moment.

wow! sounds so good to me. he also goes to mexico where all his cooks are from and eats everything and has a great time with his buddies in their element, with their families. but of course is forced to eat iguana, for the sake of television. yuck.

next to natto, it was maybe the worst thing i'd ever had between my teeth...the texture was like chewing on GI joe - if joe had been resting at the bottom of a long-neglected turtle tank.

he goes to california and visits vegans. he hates vegetarians and doesn't mind mentioning it often. but he went and had vegan food, bad vegan food. i totally understand his take on vegetarians now, especially since i have been one from time to time. i just love meat too much. but what he said about the extreme of veganism was even more true.

i'd recently returned from cambodia, where a chicken can be the difference between life and death...to look down on entire cultures that've based everything on the gathering of fish and rice seemed arrogant in the extreme...and the hypocrisy of it all pissed me off.

i've come to realize in the past couple months that even though i know i could be a vegetarian and not eat another piece of animal ever...i don't want to. i enjoy eating it. since i am privileged enough to be able to make that very decision, i will. i am very lucky to be born here and not have to fight for my next meal. i don't go to bed hungry every night (well i do but it's not because i don't have food but because i'm always hungry!!) and i don't have to kill my own pigs. while there are many exotic foods out there to be tasted, the perfect meal is a combination of things. smell, flavor, ambiance, experience, people, and taste. you could have the perfect meal here with friends and family or thousands of miles away with strangers who become friends over a couple beers (or vodka). when i travel it's to experience these things. i can't wait!

february update

well i've read 7 books so far this year. my goal of reading 50 in 2008 is still far off but i am making progress. the only thing is i have read a couple books not on my 50 books to read list. i am more interested in reading any 50 books this year but hope to read all on the list, eventually.

so while i'll still be knocking off books from the list, i will also be reading others as i come across them. certainly more anthony bourdain books, as kitchen confidential was so interesting. i have read a few that i really liked and others that weren't very interesting to me. overall i'm finding this goal to be very satisfying. if only there were more time to enjoy reading. right now i'm in maui doing nothing so i have much time to read. once i get back to portland in a few days it's back to work and my busy schedule.

dracula

bram stoker (1897)

i could really honestly say i LOVED this book! it was like reading a grown up harry potter. i just could not put the damn thing down. when i think about dracula, all i can say is "i vant to suck yo blooood". everyone around me was like "YIKES isn't that a scary book?" well it was and it wasn't. it was good though.

the book is composed of a series of diary/journal entries, letters and memos. there are many characters in the book, starting with jonathan harker who goes to transylvania to meet with count dracula. at the count's castle he experiences many strange things. the count is most noticeably nocturnal, doesn't eat anything and is described as such:

His face was a strong, a very strong, aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth. These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.

mr harker realizes that he is a prisoner in this castle without a way out. meanwhile, his fiancee mina murray and her friend lucy westerna spend time together. mina is worried when she doesn't hear about jonathan for awhile. lucy meanwhile had 3 marriage proposals in one day: arthur holmwood (later lord godalming) who she marries, quincey morris and dr john seward (a psychiarist in an insane asylum with an interesting patient renfield, who eats flies and spiders).

i sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats. -seward

lucy becomes sick, weak and pale without any reason. dr seward calls on his friend professor van helsing to check her out. he is immediately suspicious (especially since she has two little holes in her neck) but does not tell anyone of what, at first. they resort to giving lucy blood transfusions, which works for awhile by giving her strength. then next thing they know she is weak again. eventually she dies from a wolf bite and is buried. not soon after there are stories of attacks on children who are found to have holes in their necks. van helsing, along with dr seward & co figure out lucy's become a vampire by visiting her grave at night and day. they drive a stake through her heart and behead her to release her soul.

jonathan made it out of the castle, only to end up crazy. he is recovering and mina gets words eventually that he is in budapest. she goes to him, they marry and return, only to join forces with the rest. they all realize that his stories from the castle and all the going-ons in london were related. so together they seek out to destroy dracula.

i don't know why reading about wolves, vampires and bats did not scare me. neither did the awesome manga-style pictures by jae lee. it was suspenseful but somehow i knew how it would end up. i kept waiting to see who would turn into vampires and how they would figure out where dracula was, since he could take the form of animals and fog. it was pretty cool.

For life be, after all, only a waitin' for somethin' else than what we're doin', and death be all that we can rightly depend on.

beloved

toni morrison (1987)

this is a story about sethe, a runaway slave. she ran to her mother-in-law baby suggs in ohio, sending first her three children. on her way a whitewoman named amy denver helps her deliver the baby and shows her the way to ohio. she names her baby denver and arrives at baby suggs. they live there for a month before something bad happened. you are never quite sure what happened till later in the book. it is not presented or told in chronological order so it's a little confusing but towards the end you find out more through flashbacks.

a man named paul D shows up on sethe's doorstep, this is after her two sons run away, her unnamed daughter and baby suggs dies. paul D is one of the "last men of sweet home" where they were slaves to mr. and mrs. garner. the garners were decent towards their slaves and treated them ok. halle (sethe's husband) bought his mother's freedom by working. he was supposed to escape with sethe but never made it. he is presumed dead. life is not good for sethe, just her and denver there with a ghost of the baby daughter they call beloved.

beloved is so called because at her funeral the preacher said "dearly beloved" and so on her tombstone, sethe got the word "beloved" engraved.

it's a story about slave life and freedom, love for your children and making tough choices. paul D came and gave sethe a little bit of light in a dark world. despite her having "freedom" she was not totally free, with her daughter's death haunting her deeply. he had his emotions "locked in a tin can" where his heart was supposed to be, but upon arriving at 124, found some love to share. sethe and paul D went way back to the days when they were slaves together, 18 years previous but she was "halle's girl" back then.

sethe, if i'm here with you, with denver, you can go anywhere you want. jump, if you want to, 'cause i'll catch you, girl. i'll catch you 'fore you fall.

she is a friend of my mind. she gather me, man. the pieces i am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. it's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

sethe, me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. we need some kind of tomorrow.

i had not read many stories about slavery before but this one is loosely based on a true story about a slave who killed a child so it would not have to live the life of slavery. anything would be better than that, even death. it's hard to imagine a life in those days, especially as a slave. to think that it was considered okay is just crazy. they were not people.

to get to a place where you could love anything you chose - not to need permission for desire - well now, that was freedom.

what do i know about freedom? that i take it for granted everyday. unless you've lived this sort of life or had to really struggle in growing up, you cannot imagine anything close to this hard life.

kitchen confidential

anthony bourdain (2001)

okay, so this book isn't on my list of 50. i cheated. i had a book that i was reading (beloved) but was at powell's at the airport waiting for my flight. it's so hard to get out of there without buying a book! so this is what i picked up and read it on my 6 hour flight, only stopping for about an hour to sleep a bit. it was a great read, very interesting and exciting. it was about food, cooking, kitchens, and lots of insight into that world which i really had little idea about.

if you don't know who this guy is, he is a chef in new york and also has a tv show called "no reservations" on the travel channel. he gets to travel the world and eat, MY DREAM JOB!!! too bad that job is taken. he tries all kinds of foods from faraway places. good stuff.

in the book he talks about his workers and what he's experienced and so what he expects. different parts of the kitchen, the craziness behind it all.

send me another Mexican dishwasher anytime. i can teach him to cook. i can't teach character. show up at work on time six months in a row and we'll talk about red curry paste and lemongrass. until then, i have four words for you: "shut the fuck up."

and little tidbits about what to eat and what not to eat at restaurants. for example:

you walk into a nice two-star place in tribeca on a sleepy monday evening and you see they're running a delicious-sounding special of yellowfin tuna, braised fennel, confit tomatoes and a saffron sauce. why not go for it? here are the two words that should leap out at you when you navigate the menu: "monday" and "special."

and of course his opinions on vegetarians, which i just found hilarious, even being a former vegetarian myself.

vegetarians, and their hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. to me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all i stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.

eating out is so exciting and you wonder what happens behind those doors. well what you don't know, may be better.

any magic i'd imagined about a big-time fancy new york kitchen was replaced by a grim pride in creative expediency and the technical satisfaction of being fast enough to keep up, getting away with trickery, deception and disguise. "an ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins," as we used to say.

so i finished the book in a day, it was great, kept me interested. had lots of crude humor and stories of sex and drugs. whenever i'm hungry i tend to read about and think about food. go figure.

ficciones

jorge luis borges (1962)

this is a collection of short stories by the argentine author. it contains two parts -
part one: the garden of forking paths
part two: artifices

i will be reviewing a couple stories without regard to the reader's having read this book. so if you want to read it and don't want to know how these stories end...don't read on. it is a good collection though, very different from anything i've read. the stories are so short they have to be rich with imagination and description. they are.

each story is quite different, some non-fiction-type, comedy, adventure and others more fantasy. the stories are pretty short. in tlön, uqbar, orbis tertius the writer talks of a country called uqbar. it is an entirely mysterious country as it is included in a certain volume of the encyclopedia but not others.

one of the heresiarchs of uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man.

while not entirely important to the story i thought it was a funny and true statement. a quote found in the article on uqbar of course.

in pierre menard, author of the quixote, the author writes a critique of a made up author by the name of pierre menard, who is writing a book to

produce pages which would coincide - word for word and line for line - with those of miguel de cervantes.

i find this very amusing. especially since it was his aim "never to produce a mechanical transcription of the original" but merely coincide with the story. it would be the perfect book to re-write without changing. don quixote is definitely a great book, very entertaining to say the least!

the circular ruins was one of my favorite stories in this collection. it is basically about a wizard who dreams into being another person. it is in these dreams that he creates this being. at first he dreamt a heart.

every night he perceived it more clearly. he did not touch it; he only permitted himself to witness it, to observe it, and occasionally to rectify it with a glance

slowly, every night of dreaming he did more work on his "son". it took years to painstakingly imagine every little detail. sometimes he had to re-dream a part. finally he was ready to be introduced in the world, but was forced to send him off to a faraway temple. curious, the wizard seeks to find his creation, only to find the sanctuary up in flames. he walked into the flames but they did not hurt him.

they did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. with relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.

i've always felt that maybe i was a part of someone's dream. or that all my life was me dreaming and that when i was sleeping, it was my real life.

the secret miracle was about a writer named hladik during the war who is arrested for being jewish and sentenced to death. he is working through his unfinished book, writing and rewriting parts of it.

hladik had never asked himself whether this tragicomedy of errors was preposterous or admirable, deliberate or casual.

he then asks god for a year to finish his book. he wakes the next morning and is taken out to the firing squad. shots are about to be fired when all stops. everyone and everything freezes, including hladik. he is conscious and is granted his year but cannot move. he meticulously goes through each and ever part of the book, editing and writing. he is finished except for one part, which he finally figures out then time starts again. he is killed by the firing squad.