Review: I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti by Giulia Melucci

From time to time, I like a good "foodie" book.  There is this comfort factor that goes along with reading about someone who not only makes lovely food, but has TIME to make lovely food.  I like to cook on the weekends and often put up food for the week, but rarely cook more than simple throw-it-together meals midweek, or grab something on my way home.  Listen, I think I've given up on trying to keep salad fixings from going bad.  When you're single and cooking for one, salad goes bad too fast.  I've decided that I'll splurge on the weekly Cafe Zupas salad rather than keep throwing out the stuff I bought at the store!  Having said that, I ran across Giulia Melucci's book, I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti.

Synopsis:  From Goodreads, "In the early '90s, Giulia Melucci moved out of the Brooklyn home where she was raised full of romantic hopes and her mother’s excellent Italian cooking. She dreamed of finding the perfect guy, but fresh ingredients were scarce. After nearly twenty years of New York City dating she had nothing more than a slew of broken relationships under her belt. Well, that and a heap of delicious recipes, which she shares along with stories of her doomed amorous adventures.
 
An affectionate alcoholic, a classic New York City commitment-phobe, a hipster aged well past his sell date, and not one but two novelists with Peter Pan complexes no matter what their fatal flaw, Giulia has cooked for them. She suffers each disappointment with resolute cheer (after a good cry) and a bowl of pasta (recipe included), and has lived to tell the tale so that other women may find a better recipe for love or at least go to bed with something good to eat.

You will laugh along with Giulia as she manages to find the lighter side of each disappointment as you swoon over her irresistible culinary creations. Mix one part humor, a dash of sarcasm, and lots of heart then devour this story of a woman looking everywhere for love . . . and finding it on the stove."

Review:  With a witty way of telling a life story and a book full of great recipes, Melucci's story was not only fun to read, but also yummy to devour! Yes, this is very much a single gals journey through relationships and good food, mainly at the same time.  Not one of the men that she dated ever seemed to complain about the fact that she could cook.  Really, what human being would ever complain about a really good cook? With her Italian heritage and her appreciation for good products, the meals she created didn't just please her men, but will easily please her readers as well.

One recipe I jumped on was her angel hair with asparagus.  With a quick saute in olive oil and garlic, the asparagus takes only minutes to cook.  Toss in a bit of angel hair, and top with Parmesan, and what could be better?  What's not to love?  Other recipes in the book included a variety of pasta dishes, breakfast foods, and roasted meats.  Intermingled with Melucci's stories of the men she dated, loved, and lost, you come to believe there will be a giant epiphany at the end of the book, but it's not there, and that feels all right.  In a surprising sense, there isn't really a great arrival point in the book, but more a series of experiences that came into her life.  On the whole, this was a great "journey" story, filled with great food, recipes, and characters who all work together to create an engaging recipe for a book.  Now, if only I could find the energy to cook like she does!

Check out this fun YouTube video with the author where she describes her own book:

How Do I Love Thee?

Here I am looking at Valentine's Day and seeing how differently we all approach love.  Love is not an easily described emotion and can range from the sweetest friendship to the most passionate love affair.  Love can point to love for self, but is best expressed in love for others on a day like today. 

Realizing that Valentine's is usually a day for candy and flowers to reign supreme in the high school I teach at, I prepared to teach sonnets.  Here's a quick reminder about sonnets:

• Sonnets are 14 lines of poetry
• Written in iambic pentameter (stressed syllable followed by an unstressed)  
• There are two main types of sonnets, the Italian (or the Petrarchan) and the Shakespearean (or English).  
• Sonnets tend to be about themes like love, religion, or politics. 

Together, we read Elizabeth Barrett Browning's famous "How Do I Love Thee?"--Sonnet 43, addressing things like tone, literary devices, etc.  We then followed it with Shakespeare's beautiful Sonnet 116 that has been immortalized in the 1995 film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. In searching out the clip on YouTube, I also ran across a beautiful montage that has been adapted from this same sonnet.  Both are beautiful and now have me thinking more about types of love.  While most expressions of love seem to be aimed at "romance," I do think that both of these sonnets speak about lovely ideals that make love lasting, to endure the challenges life bears.

The first clip is the scene from Sense and Sensibility, and the second is that lovely montage that includes Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and North and South.  Enjoy!

This was actually a very nice Valentine's Day.  How was your day?

Review: Pemberley Ranch by Jack Caldwell

Gone With the Wind? Love.  Westerns.  Love (for the most part).  All things Pride and Prejudice.  REALLY love.  Somehow, Jack Caldwell's novel Pemberley Ranch managed to capture all three of these elements in the pages of one book for a great, fun read!

Synopsis:  From Goodreads, "In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Bennet family has just moved from Ohio to the town of Rosings, Texas, set on creating a fresh start. But their daughter Beth still prefers the familiarity of Ohio to the plains of Texas-that is, until she encounters Will Darcy, the reclusive owner of Pemberley Ranch. Will and Beth are instantly smitten, but pride, prejudice, and a gang of villains determined to take over Rosings threaten to keep them apart. This fresh idea in the world of Jane Austen retellings brings together the world of Pride and Prejudice with the struggles of the antebellum South."

Review:  Can I just say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel and call it good?  There are books that you just have too much fun reading, and that's it!  Honestly though, I think I wasn't expecting to be charmed by a western sort of retelling of Pride and Prejudice, regardless of how much I love the book.  Funny thing was, I really was charmed.  Elizabeth, as Beth Bennet, was saucy and able to stand up for herself.  Mr. Darcy, or Will in this case, found Beth's sauciness unabashedly charming.  Other minor characters from P&P are also present in the novel, along with a few from Austen's other novels.  In fact, I laughed whenever the author threw in these alternate characters from novels such as Emma, because you wouldn't notice if you weren't a true fan of Austen's works. Captain Wentworth actually seemed more dastardly than he did in P&P, as he had been a cruel taskmaster during the Civil War who had abused Rebel soldiers that were imprisoned.  He also had his thumb on every double-crossing land deal around in our Rosings, Texas.  In short, had he grown a little waxy moustache that he could have twisted the ends of while he spoke, I wouldn't have been surprised!

The story was fun to follow and just different enough to keep you on your toes.  Had it been more exact in the way it kept to the original tale, it might have been boring, but I didn't think this was boring at all.    There are a couple of "swimming hole" scenes that would leave a reader from Austen's day scandalized and blushing, but they seem a little funny under these hot Texas, western conditions.  Yes, the novel still showed restraint, but threw in a lot more western-brand scandal and language.  I thoroughly enjoyed Pemberley Ranch, and was so thankful to Jack Caldwell for entertaining me enough to drag me away from the stacks of essays I was laboring through at the time!  I'm just sad now that I didn't take Sourcebooks up on this great offer to read this one sooner, since it turned out to be a great time.

Upcoming Book Release: Final Book in the Children of the Earth Series

Back in November of this last year, it was announced to the public that Jean Auel would be publishing the final book in her Children of the Earth Series, The Land of Painted Caves.  This last book has been long anticipated, as many of her novels have taken over a decade to publish.  Honestly, I didn't think we would ever get this last novel.  (Who could ever tackle this series and finish it as a ghost writer?)  The story is mainly about  a beautiful young woman who was raised by a group of Neanderthals, who later goes in search of "others" like herself.  Through her story, we trace the movements of human activity across Europe and how cultures and practices came to be.  In short, Auel's novels are an intriguing idea of what it might have been like for earth's earliest people.

Filled with archaeological information about land, animals, and people who lived over 25,000 years ago, we get to see a time that I can't say many other authors have tackled.  Although there is a lot of great information in her novels (enough so that Auel was awarded four honorary degrees), each book is driven by a solid storyline, with characters that stick with you and feel like people you know.  For reserved readers, I would point out that there is a good deal of graphic content, which although is understandable for a time and culture outside our own (limited in inhibitions), is often very detailed.  This is my simple disclaimer and warning to some of my readers.

Introduced to me by a co-worker back in the early 90's, I have often thought about these characters and what happened to them.  Currently, I'm re-reading them and am still intrigued by the culture of prehistoric peoples.  Listen, I know I wouldn't survive if I'd lived then, but I love the information about survival and the tools they learned to make that made for easier living.  If you enjoy historical fiction, this is a unique and intriguing series to read.  Coming in at 700+ pages per book, these take a real commitment to read, but so worth it!

The Land of the Painted Caves comes out on March 29, 2011.

I know I'm not alone in my fascination with Jean Auel's work.  If you've read this series, what are your thoughts? 

Review: The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer

Nobel Prize winning authors can be intimidating; their novels are often loaded with weighty issues and problems that are nowhere near tackled in the space of a story.  In fact, I'm coming to learn that some novels pose questions without answers and simply ask that we consider.  From whatever place in a writer that asks questions, South African author Nadine Gordimer tapped into that space in her novel The Pickup.

Synopsis:  A white South African woman, Julie Summers, one day finds herself in an auto shop to get her car fixed after an unexpected breakdown.  There she meets Abdu, a Muslim Arab man who comes from a world apart from her own privileged upbringing.  The two easily slip into a relationship that is built on common threads of interconnection, ignoring social ideals centered on race.  However, after moving in together and building a casual life without interruptions in Julie's Johannesburg apartment, they find that Adbu's citizenship has been recalled.  Without citizenship, Abdu must return home and Julie decides to return with him.  To his home, Adbu finds that what he easily accepted in Julie in South Africa becomes more difficult once they return home.  Rather than money and status, Abdu has brought home a white wife who knows or understands little of the hardships his family and people go through to survive on the edge of the desert.

Touted as a Romeo and Juliet love story, The Pickup aptly brings together two culturally different people in love.  As with Shakespeare's play, can love be enough to pull two people through a world that asks them to be apart.

Review:  The Pickup was an easily accessible story to fall into.  In little to no time, I found that Julie became a character that I felt familiar and at home with.  Although engaged in a love story with an Arab Muslim man who grew up worlds apart in social standing, Julie somehow easily overlooked the structures put in place to separate them.  Not once did I look at the couple and think, "Wow, this is odd," or "I wonder if Julie or Abdu feel out of place."  In fact, I found Julie's complete lack of tension towards their relationship very interesting.  The author really seemed to create a character that responded to her world the way we have idealized; Julie seemed to be unaffected by the judgments of society.

Although I sometimes thought the quirky non-tension of the first half of the book to be odd, I enjoyed the suspension of conflict for our characters.  There were observations made by Julie that showed that she recognized that Abdu was "different" for her, but not that she ever judged him or herself for those differences.  It wasn't until they moved back to his desert home that an unseen tension crept in.  This time, it seemed to be Abdu judging what they had together, fearing how Julie would face his harsh life and seeing it through her eyes.

Racial and social tensions are present in The Pickup, but not in the explicit ways one would normally expect. There is a subtlety and softness in the stress that builds in the relationship between upper-class Julie and the immigrant Abdu, indicative of a control over language by the author.  It is obvious that the two characters love one another, but not in an outrageous, over-the-top passionate way.  The steady treading forward movement of the novel was delightful and one that was intriguing to explore with our two characters.   Love was present and pressing forward,  challenged as in all relationships, but by different forces.

*FTC Disclosure:  This review was based on a library copy of the novel.

If You Liked Downton Abbey...

If you find yourself wanting more Edwardian fare since Downton Abbey concluded last Sunday (2nd season is still to come), then you might try out the PBS reality series Manor House.  I know I've mentioned these PBS House series before, but really can't begin to say how much I enjoy them!  While they are not scripted dramas, but rather follow a group of modern day folks who agree to live the culture of the day, they are extremely engaging and full of historical information.

In Manor House we follow the people who play staff and aristocrats at Manderston, a grand Edwardian house located near the Scottish-English border.  While the "downstairs" help slave away seven days a week for upwards of 16 to 18 hours a day, their "upstairs" nouveau-rich aristocratic family learn to deal with the subtleties of standings and titles (not to mention doing absolutely nothing, including putting on their own socks and underwear).

The docu-drama series is highly entertaining and engaging.  There are maids who think they see ghosts, a rotating door of scullery maids who quit after a couple of days, footmen who get drunk and can't wake for work the next morning, a crazy-mad French chef who insists on authenticity, and a little bit of fancy loving going on behind the scenes.  Honestly, this is a highly entertaining series and a great follow-up to Downton Abbey if you are feeling a bit down now that its over!

If you think you might enjoy Manor House, you might check out the following PBS series that are also set in England:

Regency House Party (which also appeared on PBS) for an interesting romp into Regency romance.

The 1900s House for its look at the average urban lifestyle at the turn of the century in London during the Victorian Era.

The 1940s House set in London around the time of WWII with its food rations, bomb raids, and blackout curtains.

Check them out!  They are fantastic and do a great job of mixing the drama of reality television with the history of a great period drama or documentary.   (There are also three set in the United States, if you are interested:  Frontier House, Texas Ranch House, and Colonial House.)

Free E-Book Weekend!

This weekend, starting today and ending Sunday, three e-books are being offered for free:

 

Lydia Bennet's Story by Jane Odiwe

Love at First Flight by Marie Force

The Greatest Knight by Elizabeth Chadwick

If you're interested in learning about other great e-book deals as they become available, go to the Sourcebooks web page and enter your name and email address in the upper right hand corner.

Happy reading and HAPPY WEEKEND!