Books Purchased:
Alice, Let’s Eat by Calvin Trillin
Another Marvelous Thing by Laurie Colwin
A Big Storm Knocked it Over by Laurie Colwin
The Lone Pilgrim by Laurie Colwin
A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Dairies and Letters by Barbara Pym
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Best American Short Stories 2008 edited by Salman Rushdie
Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine
American Food Writing edited by Molly O’Neill
Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler
I Love You More Than You Know by Jonathan Ames
A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenburg
Food With the Famous by Jane Grigson
The Art of Eating by M. F. K. Fisher
The Best American Non-Required Reading 2002 edited by Dave Eggers
Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart
The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton
The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen
Shanghai Girls by Lisa See
A Mess of Everything by Miss Lasko-Gross
A lot of books this month – due mainly to trips to Michigan and Milwaukee that involved a lot of book shopping. I won’t write about every book on the list, but I will comment on some of my best finds this month:
-I picked up three of Laurie Colwin’s fiction books from Strand, for about $5 each. Very excited to try her fiction after loving her two collections of food writing essays.
-I was extremely excited to find a hardcover copy of The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks for $3.98 at the Milwaukee Borders. Emma and I both got ourselves a copy.
–Food with the Famous is a book I had never heard of until I found it in the food section of Renaissance Books in Milwaukee. (I had heard of Jane Grigson, the author, before – Laurie Colwin writes affectionately about her books.) In this book, Grigson explores the culinary lives of famous women and men. It contains recipes and the social history of the food mentioned in classic literature and that famous figures ate. The featured people include: John Evelyn, Parson James Woodforde, Jane Austen, Thomas Jefferson, Rev. Sydney Smith, Lord & Lady Shaftesbury, Alexandre Dumas, Emile Zola, Claude Monet, and Marcel Proust. For example – one of the foods in the Jane Austen section is White Soup – what it is, how it originated, and how to make it yourself. This book is out of print now, but there are used copies on Amazon Marketplace that are reasonably priced.
Books Read:
Betsy and the Great World by Maud Hart Lovelace (re-read)
Betsy and Joe by Maud Hart Lovelace (re-read)
A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenburg
Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine
Lucky by Gabrielle Bell (library)
Escape from “Special” by Miss Lasko-Gross (library)
When I’m Old and Other Stories by Gabrielle Bell (library)
The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen
The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright (library)
Shanghai Girls by Lisa See
A Mess of Everything by Miss Lasko-Gross
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
I talked about the Betsy-Tacy series last month, and here are links to my reviews of A Homemade Life, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, and Shanghai Girls. I’m planning a separate post about Mrs. Dalloway, since it’s one of my summer reading list books.
I read a lot of graphic novels this month. It helped me to read a decent number of books even though this month was incredibly busy. :) I read several graphic novels by Gabrielle Bell and Miss Lasko Gross before their event at Strand. It’s hard to pick a favorite of the five graphic novels I read this month – I enjoyed them all in different ways, and the three artists are very different. It was fun to discover Miss Lasko-Gross, I hadn’t heard of her until I saw she’d be with Gabrielle Bell at Strand. Her books are memoirs, and her style is very different then most of the graphic novels I’ve read. She uses very deep, rich artwork with a lot of shading, and the effect is gorgeous and moody. A Mess of Everything is the sequel to Escape from “Special” – and I’d recommend starting in order if you’d like to read them yourself.
I also read the first book of the Melendy Quartet by Elizabeth Enright, The Saturdays. This was a fantastic children’s novel, and I can’t believe I hadn’t read it before now. The Melendy family includes four kids (two girls and two boys), their father, and their lovable live-in housekeeper, Cuffy. Of course the children have all kinds of adventures, and get into the occasional mischief. In The Saturdays, they decide to pool their allowance each week so that one of the four can go out in the city on a Saturday and have their own adventure: going to a museum, opera, etc. Reading The Saturdays was great fun, and I’m looking forward to the other books in the quartet; I currently have the next two checked out from the library.
May Book Events:
I went to three great book events in May:
Neil Gaiman (Part of the Pen World Voices festival) 5.2.09
Gabrielle Bell & Miss Lasko-Gross (Strand) 5.19.09
Lisa See (Barnes and Noble on 82nd Street) 5.27.09
As always, my complete Polysyllabic Spree can be found here.
(This post was brought over from emilyw.vox.com. Click here for the original post and comments.)
