TheBookJeanie

COOKIN' WITH THEBOOKJEANIE   It seems appropriate on this Mother's Day to feature books about food, namely cookbooks, since many of our fondest memories of our mothers are associated with favorite meals or special desserts that she made for us.  Even as a fifth grader, my younger daughter was upset when I went back to work full time and did not have chocolate chip cookies fresh out of the oven for her when she got home from school.  My own mother did not like to spend too much time in the kitchen but I remember that she would give me dough to roll up with cinammon and sugar and bake beside her pies and they were the most delicious treats.  My older daughter gave me a cookbook today: Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone edited by Jenni-Ferrari-Adler, a collection of essays by food obsessed writers including my favorites Laurie Colwin, Ann Patchett, and Nora Ephron.  Reading that will be a real treat - p...

CHILL OUT WITH THEBOOKJEANIE Spring is a great time to head outdoors with a good book.  And what better place to be than a piazza in Italy, with the warm sun on your back and a cup of espresso.  The next best thing to being in Italy is reading about it and here are a few suggestions.  Buena lettura! The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga.  The year is 1966 and flood waters have devastated the city of Florence. Margot Harringgton, a twenty-nine year old book conservator, impulsively leaves her job in Chicago and flies to Italy, "to save whatever I could save, including myself."  Feeling her life has reached a dead end, our narrator returns to the city where she spent a year with her mother when she was a teenager, with no real plan in mind.  After a brief stint with a conservation team from Harvard who looked down upon her skills,  Margot volunteers to repair and restore numerous damages manuscripts at a cloistered convent.  The ...

TIME TO PACK AWAY THOSE FAVORITE BOOKS? RECONSIDER SAYS THEBOOKJEANIE Several friends sent me the recent article in the New York Times "Critic's Notebook" series titled, Memories of a Bedtime Book Club by staff literary critic Dwight Garner,   wanting to know if I approved of packing away the picture books and other readaloud favorites when the children have moved on to texting and YouTube to make connections and satisfy their curiosity about the world.  Reluctantly but determinedly, Garner had boxed up the final stack of his children's most cherished titles for retirement to the attic, awaiting perhaps a new generation of readers in the years to come - or not.  What does that say about the value of the stories that were read over and over again, night after night, whose characters became almost family members (e.g. Curious George ), and whose favorite lines would pop up as part of a shared family vocabulary (e.g. "Back to bed!" yelled Fre...

SOARING HIGH WITH THEBOOKJEANIE Kite flying is one of the most exciting activities for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Every spring, children fly their kites, often on flat rooftops,  and especially during a festival called Besant.  During Besant, competitions are held where the kite strings are coated in fiberglass and each contestant tries to break the string of his opponent's kite to the sound of beating drums and blaring trumpets.  In Lahore, Pakistan this festival is  particularly special and the old city is strung with lights to illuminate the spectacular array of colorful kites bobbing above the old buildings.  Both of the featured books this week are closely connected to Afghanistan and Pakistan and provide a bridge to understanding the people and cultures of those little known countries. As Mary Anne Schwalbe begins treatment for pancreatic cancer, her son Will decides to engage her in an ongoing book discussio...

Wander the Labyrinth of Literature  with THEBOOKJEANIE On exhibit last summer at the Royal Festival Hall on the Southbank in London, this vast maze of books was created by Brazilian artists Marcos Sabaya and Gualter Pupos and assembled by an army of volunteers.  Titled aMAZEme , this unique installation was designed as a tribute to Argentian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges -  in the shape of his fingerprint.  Discover your local public library - an amazing free resource!  Most of the books that I review for this blog have been obtained at my neighborhood library. I usually reserve a book online once I hear about it and the library requests it from another branch in the county if it is not part of the local collection.  The Pima County Library buys more that 100 DVDs each month, including British TV series and foreign language films.  I have recently been watching Kingdom , a current British series about a country lawyer an...

DRESS FOR   LITERARY SUCCESS WITH THEBOOKJEANIE Spring is the time for new beginnings and every book you open takes you on an adventure, somewhere that you have never been before.  Get out your hammocks and settle into a lazy day of reading. The House Girl by Tara Conklin.   Every now and then you come across a book that makes you catch your breath and stop, go back and reread a passage, and then just marvel at the beauty of the language and the strength of the imagery.  This amazing first novel weaves the stories of a two young women:  a "house girl" who attends to the mistress of a once-grand but failing tobacco farm in Virginia, and an ambitious first year litigation associate in a prestigous Manhattan law firm.  But it is with Josephine, who has spent her seventeen years of life in slavery and degradation, that Conklin gets it so right.  With her cheek still stinging from her master's sudden blow, " someth...

WELCOME  TO THE BOOKJEANIIE After a week's break due to lack of internet service during my move, I am back with more book news and reviews. Take time on this beautiful Easter spring day to enjoy a good book or perhaps this lovely poem by Billy Collins, former  U.S. Poet Laureate.  Today BY  BILLY COLLINS If ever there were a spring day so perfect, so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze that it made you want to throw open all the windows in the house and unlatch the door to the canary's cage, indeed, rip the little door from its jamb, a day when the cool brick paths and the garden bursting with peonies seemed so etched in sunlight that you felt like taking a hammer to the glass paperweight on the living room end table, releasing the inhabitants from their snow-covered cottage so they could walk out, holding hands and squinting into this larger dome of blue and white, well, today is just that kind...