On Sunday, the 7th of July, 2013, I launched this blog as a successor to my previous book blog Deborama's Book Reviews and Store. I am moving most of the stuff from the old blog to here, with its original publication dates (mostly). But the reason I need a new blog is that the old one was an Amazon Affiliate, but it was a UK Amazon Affiliate. It hasn't earned any money in several years, and I no longer have access to the email address the Amazon Associates account was linked to.
Just a navigational point and a style point : below this launch post are my copied blogposts from Deborama's Book Reviews and Store, but without the graphics of the books or the monetized links. Just above this post will be one or more posts with loads of book links if you want to buy the books from whatever US store is my new affiliate. That's the navigational point. The style point has to do with English spelling. The posts I wrote in England have all British spellings. The ones I wrote after repatriating to America have all American spellings. That's just how it has to be; deal with it.
Another style point, but blogging style rather than writing style is that the relaunch blog will be more closely tied into Bookcrossing, Goodreads, Facebook and other social media. Also the Hennepin County Library system, my position on Friends of the Roosevelt Library, the Little Free Libraries that cover my neighborhood, and my condominium-based book club and writing club. Follow me if you love reading.
Showing posts with label Blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blogging. Show all posts
2013-07-07
2003-10-12
Too Posh to Pluck - the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire's Cookery Book
(Blog editor note - when I wrote this review in 2003, she was still the Duchess of Devonshire, residing in the big house called Chatsworth. Since then, her husband the Duke passed on and their son inherited, and she now lives in the small dower house. She is now in her 90s and a bit of a recluse, after having had to fend off an enamored stalker when she was a late-80-something widow! One of the things not mentioned here, because most Brits either know this or don't give a toss, is that she was Deborah Mitford, the youngest of the famous Mitford girls. By the way, she has also since becoming the Dowager Duchess written a very charming autobiography.)
I really shouldn't have this in my book reviews at all; for one thing, it's more of a tourist attraction than a book, and for another, I haven't read it. But I just read Lynn Barber's very amusing review of it, and interview with the Duchess, in the Observer Food Monthly, and it made me want to look into it. The first paragraph will give you a flavour:
"It is quite thrilling for me to meet someone who knows even less about cooking than I do - especially when she is publishing her very own cookery book. The Duchess of Devonshire - for it is she - actually begins her Chatsworth Cookery Book with the words 'I haven't cooked since the war'. She says she would have liked to make that the title, but the publishers wouldn't agree. Her friend, the hairdresser in Chesterfield, told her that her writing a cookery book was 'a bit rich!' but of course it will be - being by the Duchess, it will sell like hot cakes."
There is a recipe in the book for Oeufs Mollet which the Duchess, when pressed, chooses as her personal favourite. It is a dish she was "brought up on". (Her mother, Lady Readesdale, was an avid cook and an early health food advocate, and this was one of her mother's standards.) The dish is very simple, poached eggs with fried capers and parsley, basically, but here is what Her Grace has to say about it:
"Well it's soft, you know.' What? 'Like a hard-boiled egg only soft, and you take the shell off - quite tricky sometimes. I don't think you or I could do it! And then you put butter and fried capers." Ah, bless. Is it really possible that an 80-something year old woman, who raises prize chickens and has dined in all the best houses of the world, whose own house is one of the best in the world, and who went to the Cordon Bleu (admittedly sixty years ago) does not recognise and know the term for a poached egg?
By the way, I stole the above title from the Observer review.
But even though the Duchess got most of these recipes from her cook or in some cases, her friends' cooks or the cooks for her wildly successful farm shop at Chatsworth, I think this is a good cookbook for those who like really posh food (that would be me too, reverse snob though I am) or for those who just like reading about really posh food (also me.)
I really shouldn't have this in my book reviews at all; for one thing, it's more of a tourist attraction than a book, and for another, I haven't read it. But I just read Lynn Barber's very amusing review of it, and interview with the Duchess, in the Observer Food Monthly, and it made me want to look into it. The first paragraph will give you a flavour:
"It is quite thrilling for me to meet someone who knows even less about cooking than I do - especially when she is publishing her very own cookery book. The Duchess of Devonshire - for it is she - actually begins her Chatsworth Cookery Book with the words 'I haven't cooked since the war'. She says she would have liked to make that the title, but the publishers wouldn't agree. Her friend, the hairdresser in Chesterfield, told her that her writing a cookery book was 'a bit rich!' but of course it will be - being by the Duchess, it will sell like hot cakes."
There is a recipe in the book for Oeufs Mollet which the Duchess, when pressed, chooses as her personal favourite. It is a dish she was "brought up on". (Her mother, Lady Readesdale, was an avid cook and an early health food advocate, and this was one of her mother's standards.) The dish is very simple, poached eggs with fried capers and parsley, basically, but here is what Her Grace has to say about it:
"Well it's soft, you know.' What? 'Like a hard-boiled egg only soft, and you take the shell off - quite tricky sometimes. I don't think you or I could do it! And then you put butter and fried capers." Ah, bless. Is it really possible that an 80-something year old woman, who raises prize chickens and has dined in all the best houses of the world, whose own house is one of the best in the world, and who went to the Cordon Bleu (admittedly sixty years ago) does not recognise and know the term for a poached egg?
By the way, I stole the above title from the Observer review.
But even though the Duchess got most of these recipes from her cook or in some cases, her friends' cooks or the cooks for her wildly successful farm shop at Chatsworth, I think this is a good cookbook for those who like really posh food (that would be me too, reverse snob though I am) or for those who just like reading about really posh food (also me.)
2003-10-04
Bringing Out the Dead, by Joe Connelly
Let me make it clear that this is not a movie review; in fact, I haven't seen the movie. (Well, I hadn't when I wrote this review back in 2003, but I did see it about seven years later on TV.) But I did picture it in my head as a movie (with Nicholas Cage, indeed) all the time I was reading it. In fact, this is an almost autobiographical novel, and the author, from his picture on the back, looks enough like Nicholas Cage to make it all plausible. The writing is in some ways very cinematographic, but I doubt that quite all the inner action - the fantasies, hallucinations, bizarre metaphors for the way the first-person narrator/protagonist was feeling - would have been portrayed in the film.
I found this book to be like the bastard son of The Crying of Lot 49 (the mother) and Naked Lunch (the father). Which is high praise, coming from me. Yet the romantic in me, the old-fashioned romantic who shouldn't like Burroughs and Pynchon as much as I do, wanted Frank to get the girl. And I almost didn't care which girl, whether it was Mona (recently departed wife) or Mary (ex-junkie daughter of the man who takes the whole book to die from a heart-attack) or even Rose (deceased asthma patient who haunts Frank's night-shift days.) But, you know, he didn't. Or maybe he did.
I found this book to be like the bastard son of The Crying of Lot 49 (the mother) and Naked Lunch (the father). Which is high praise, coming from me. Yet the romantic in me, the old-fashioned romantic who shouldn't like Burroughs and Pynchon as much as I do, wanted Frank to get the girl. And I almost didn't care which girl, whether it was Mona (recently departed wife) or Mary (ex-junkie daughter of the man who takes the whole book to die from a heart-attack) or even Rose (deceased asthma patient who haunts Frank's night-shift days.) But, you know, he didn't. Or maybe he did.
2003-09-21
Two obscure British mysteries
For some reason I ended up reading two little-known British detective stories, both from the Nottingham Public Library, both set in the late Victorian period. [rant mode on] It annoys me no end that books like these are not available in ordinary bookstores, at least not if you don't already know about them and want them enough to order them. All the bookstores in the UK seem to be clones of one horrible bookstore, with five hundred copies of the latest Harry Potter, and lots of books about sports that I care nothing about, and loads of celebrity chef cookbooks. (And in fact I like celebrity chef cookbooks, but I don't like depressing bookstores with nothing of interest to browse.) In other words, I rarely go into even a large "good" bookstore in the UK (like Waterstones) and FIND SOMETHING, as in something that I haven't heard of before but that I am compelled to buy and read. In some ways that's good - I spend less money impulse buying, but, look, I am going to read the same amount anyway, I am just enjoying it less. [rant mode off]
The Detective Wore Silk Drawers (Peter Lovesey) refers to boxing shorts (I thought it was going to have some erotic element to it, but any that it has is only incidental to the plot.) It is quite interesting though, and you learn a lot about the sport of bare-knuckle fighting which was made illegal in the UK in the 1870s but persisted for a long time after. You also learn the origins of such expressions as "come up to scratch" and "throw in the sponge" and "throw his hat in the ring".
I didn't realise that An Orkney Murder, by Alanna Knight, was also set in late Victorian times until I started reading it. It features a way-ahead-of-her-time Scottish female private investigator. It also features an archaeological dig in the Orkneys and dark domestic secrets in a Scottish family. In the end, I got rather irritated at this book, for a reason that often applies when I am reading novels by contemporary writers set in the Victorian period. They just sound far too contemporary and therefore anachronistic. It is always a problem when writing a story set in the past to know how the people would sound, their diction, their colloquialisms, their social markers, all that. The bigger problem with a Victorian setting is that there are so many wonderful extant Victorian writers. I have read so much Conan Doyle, Dickens, Trollope and the like, not to mention my favourite childhood novels Little Women and Black Beauty, which I must have read 100 times each, that it is a very rare historical novel from that period that doesn't sound horribly false to me. But this one was egregiously so. But if you don't have my problem, you may be able to enjoy it, if only for the plot (which was only pretty good) and the main character.
The Lovesey book was, for me, a far better read, even though I have little interest in the Victorian London underworld and bare-knuckle fighting, and lots of interest in Victorian Orkney and archaeology and women private detectives. Just goes to show what a huge difference writing style, careful research and natural talent can make.
Update from 2013: I just finished another Peter Lovesey book featuring the same detectives. It's called Wobble To Death and centers around the sport of marathon walking. These bizarre sporting events featured men getting around a track as fast as they could for as many hours per day as they could in a period of six continuous days. They all start at the same time and finish at the same time, and whoever finishes and has the most total miles logged wins.
The Detective Wore Silk Drawers (Peter Lovesey) refers to boxing shorts (I thought it was going to have some erotic element to it, but any that it has is only incidental to the plot.) It is quite interesting though, and you learn a lot about the sport of bare-knuckle fighting which was made illegal in the UK in the 1870s but persisted for a long time after. You also learn the origins of such expressions as "come up to scratch" and "throw in the sponge" and "throw his hat in the ring".
I didn't realise that An Orkney Murder, by Alanna Knight, was also set in late Victorian times until I started reading it. It features a way-ahead-of-her-time Scottish female private investigator. It also features an archaeological dig in the Orkneys and dark domestic secrets in a Scottish family. In the end, I got rather irritated at this book, for a reason that often applies when I am reading novels by contemporary writers set in the Victorian period. They just sound far too contemporary and therefore anachronistic. It is always a problem when writing a story set in the past to know how the people would sound, their diction, their colloquialisms, their social markers, all that. The bigger problem with a Victorian setting is that there are so many wonderful extant Victorian writers. I have read so much Conan Doyle, Dickens, Trollope and the like, not to mention my favourite childhood novels Little Women and Black Beauty, which I must have read 100 times each, that it is a very rare historical novel from that period that doesn't sound horribly false to me. But this one was egregiously so. But if you don't have my problem, you may be able to enjoy it, if only for the plot (which was only pretty good) and the main character.
The Lovesey book was, for me, a far better read, even though I have little interest in the Victorian London underworld and bare-knuckle fighting, and lots of interest in Victorian Orkney and archaeology and women private detectives. Just goes to show what a huge difference writing style, careful research and natural talent can make.
Update from 2013: I just finished another Peter Lovesey book featuring the same detectives. It's called Wobble To Death and centers around the sport of marathon walking. These bizarre sporting events featured men getting around a track as fast as they could for as many hours per day as they could in a period of six continuous days. They all start at the same time and finish at the same time, and whoever finishes and has the most total miles logged wins.
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