First things first

Today’s Booking through Thursday (and yes, the Marsha suggested therein is me!):

Suggested by Marsha:

Buy a Friend a Book Week is October 1-7 (as well as the first weeks of January, April, and July). During this week, you’re encouraged to buy a friend a book for no good reason. Not for their birthday, not because it’s a holiday, not to cheer them up–just because it’s a book.

What book would you choose to give to a friend and why?

There are three books that I’ve given to people with some regularity. One is The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I’ve read this one in the original French and in English, and I’m pleased to say that this lovely tale about innocence and imagination and love translates remarkably well.

Another is The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster. From the first sentence (”There was once a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself–not just sometimes, but always”) to the end, it’s filled with clever wordplay, memorable characters, imagination, and humor. I love this book.

Unlike the first two choices, the third is one that most people don’t know, I think, and therefore one that I’m most likely to give these days. (In fact, it’s in the prize package for the blog-birthday contest I’m running right now. My own responses are here, if you’re curious.) It’s The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jean Giono, the tale (some say it’s true, though Giono says it’s not–the public’s insistence that it must be true is, I think, testament to how eagerly people want to believe in something good) of a man in Provence, France, who pretty much singlehandedly reforested the region by planting acorns every day during the first half of the twentieth century.

I love this book because of its optimism about how much good a single person can do and because of its encouragement to fill one’s life with meaning. I also love this book because, well, I love trees. They’re central to my doctoral research (on the so-called timber wars of the U.S. Pacific Northwest), so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about them intellectually and professionally. And I’m reminded of them every day in my personal life: my husband (also a tree lover) and I named our daughter Sylvia.

Today’s Booking through Thursday:

Okay . . . picture this (really) worst-case scenario: It’s cold and raining, your boyfriend/girlfriend has just dumped you, you’ve just been fired, the pile of unpaid bills is sky-high, your beloved pet has recently died, and you think you’re coming down with a cold. All you want to do (other than hiding under the covers) is to curl up with a good book, something warm and comforting that will make you feel better.

What do you read?

(Funny that this turns up on Booking through Thursday just days after I posted about my blog-birthday contest, which has a similar “what would you pick when you can choose only a few things?” theme.)

For comfort reading, I would probably turn to The Fellowship of the Ring trilogy, which I’ve read a gazillion times. It’s a black-and-white world with no moral ambiguity. The good guys get to be heroes, and the bad guys get their just desserts. It’s a feel-good, happy ending. Well, until you get to the part where Frodo is miserable and still in pain years after the ring is destroyed. Maybe I’d just stop with the scourging of the Shire.

This reading would, of course, be accompanied by my favorite nonliterary comfort food: instant macaroni-and-cheese (yes, with the packet of cheese powder)–eaten straight out of the pot. (Because I know I’m going to eat all of it anyway, so why dirty up another dish that needs to be cleaned, right?)

I have never been to Korea. But I’ve had a fair amount of contact with Korean culture and food–notably through my friend Minjoo (for whose baby I recently knit two sweaters), my grad-school advisor (whose research is on social movements and social mobility in South Korea and the United States), and lots of Korean friends in grad school. So I’ve had many opportunities to eat Korean food–and I love it. Unfortunately, much Korean cuisine is not especially vegetarian friendly. Many dishes have beef or seafood, and even bibimbap, a rice-and-vegetable dish, traditionally has chunks of beef in it.

So I was thrilled when I found Flavors of Korea: Delicious Vegetarian Cuisine, by Deborah Coultrip-Davis and Young Sook Ramsay, several years ago. It’s published by the delightfully named Book Publishing Company, which is located on the Farm in Tennessee. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of this cookbook, as the many stains on its pages will attest, and I very much recommend it to anyone who wants to cook meatless (yet traditional–there is no “Americanizing” of ingredients, so you may have to visit an Asian market for some things) Korean food.

A few days ago I decided to prepare an all-Korean dinner (clockwise, starting on the left): vegetable pancakes (yachae jon), marinated black beans (kong jang), ginger tofu (sangkang tubu muchim), and cucumber pickle (oi kimchi). (The dipping sauce for the pancakes is in the center.) Everything turned out great, but I was a disappointed with the texture of the beans. The recipe calls for cooking dried black beans in two parts soy sauce to one part water–even using low-sodium soy sauce or tamari, the result is mouth-shrivelingly salty. So I tried partially precooking the beans in a pressure cooker and decreasing the amount of soy sauce they cooked in later, hoping the beans wouldn’t end up as salty. They didn’t, but they did end up mushier than I’d like. Ideally, they should be very firm, almost crunchy, but most of these had lost their structural integrity. Back to the drawing board…

When I heard that Tracey Ullman (yes, she who helped introduce the world to The Simpsons, years before it jumped the shark) had cowritten a knitting book, I thought it was a joke. “Now that knitting is trendy, the celebrities are jumping in with both feet,” I told myself. But when I spied the book on the shelf at my local library a couple of weeks ago and flipped through it, I realized it warranted a closer look and so brought it home.

Knit 2 Together is the joint project of Tracey Ullman (famous comedian) and Mel Clark (owner of a yarn shop in southern California). Its subtitle, Patterns and Stories for Serious Knitting Fun, is a good description: the book starts off with “how I started knitting and how I met the other person who wrote this book with me” tales by both authors, and little anecdotes are sprinkled throughout the book. They’re all nicely written, but Ullman’s are the funniest (naturally–after all, being funny is what she does for a living).

And the patterns are actually good. Well, many of them. (I’ve yet to encounter a “Yeah, I’d make every single thing in there” knitting book. Have any of you?) The “Saucy Apron,” for example, knit in CGH Soft Kid just seems like a bad idea. The “Linen Kilt” looks lovely in the photo…but that’s a lot of knitting on not-very-big needles (#5 and #4). (A quick Google search reveals that a few people have made this skirt and liked it–here’s one glimpse–so maybe it would be more fun than I thought…)

But there are several items in here that I will probably add to my “Future projects” list. The Rowena Cardigan, for example, is a long-sleeved, trim sweater with buttons down the front and a boatneck on top. And you can thread ribbons through the hem and cuffs to change the look. Two shrug-sweater thingies (Lacy Hug-Me-Tight and Pimlico Shrug) also caught my eye; they’re not unlike the Pinwheel Sweater I made in late spring, though they have a bit more shape to them.

The book goes back to the library tomorrow. My final assessment was “It’s well done, and there are some things in here I’d like to knit, but I really don’t want to pony up $27.50 for this thing.” And just a few minutes ago, while hunting down the Amazon link for this book, I found out that Amazon is selling it–in all its hardcover glory–for a mere $5.50. (Check it out.) Considering that individual patterns–when you can buy them that way–usually run about five bucks each, $5.50 makes this book a steal if there’s more than one thing in it that interests you.

When I first took up knitting, I began browsing the knitting books at my local bookstore, drooling over the possibilities they promised and resolving to own every single one of them one day. Well, almost every one. There were some exceptions, which included the books by Suss Cousins.

I quickly sussed (oh I am so clever) that she was one of the “name” people on the knitting scene–someone famous. But one of her claims to fame is designing sweaters for Bill Cosby, and, well, when you consider that his sweaters are actually the stuff of humor these days (Doctor Hibbert, anyone?), it’s hard for me to look at her work without giggling.

I was optimistic about her latest book, Home Knits, though. The horror that is the bubble-holed curtain in Mason-Dixon Knitting (which is an otherwise fine book) turned me away from houseware knitting for a while. But Cousins’ book was available for free from my local library, so I decided to check it out.

Apparently, she’s long past her days of designing multicolored, striped, gaudy garments for Bill Cosby: Home Knits is full of creams and browns. (Naturally, Cousins uses her own yarn for all the patterns. To her credit, though, she openly acknowledges that not everyone will use her stuff, and she helpfully provides information on substitutions.) That’s the good news. The bad news is that the patterns are…meh. A bed canopy? That’s way more knitting than anyone should ever do to end up with a giant rectangle; this is the equivalent of knitting a tent. An “art wall hanging”? This thing is supposed to resemble an animal skin stretched out between wooden poles. Are there people out there who actually want to knit this? Are there people out there who actually want to hang this on their walls at home? I have to wonder if, at any point during the book-production process, Cousins’ publisher said to her, “Um, Suss? Are you sure about some of these patterns?”

But all is not lost! There is some inspiration here! The kitchen curtain, for example, is quite charming (and, I am pleased to report, has no ghastly bubble holes). The seat cushions, too, are nice. My favorite pattern is the being lampshade cover with the green leaf motif. It’s something I might actually considering making one day.

To be honest, I’m not sure it’s possible to write a good book of patterns for handknit housewares. It seems a fairly limited category. Blankets have four sides (and, aside from baby blankets and throws, aren’t usually at the top of knitters’ to-do lists anyway, due to the commitment of time and yarn involved), curtains are usually easier/cheaper/faster to sew or purchase, and you can have only so many throw pillows and cushions around. (There’s a little-known fact that when the number of throw pillows and cushions present on one piece of furniture reaches a certain, undefined tipping point, they start to attack.) Sweaters and purses and socks have seemingly endless variety, whereas housewares have been done. Introducing an “art wall hanging” into the mix isn’t innovative. It’s just silly.

Today’s Booking through Thursday:

1. Okay, love him or loathe him, you’d have to live under a rock not to know that J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, comes out on Saturday. Are you going to read it?
2. If so, right away? Or just, you know, eventually, when you get around to it? Are you attending any of the midnight parties?
3. If you’re not going to read it, why not?
4. And, for the record… what do you think? Will Harry survive the series? What are you most looking forward to?

1. Nope.

2. I’ll be staying far, far away from the midnight-party venues.

3. I think Rowling’s work is unoriginal, poorly written (after the first book, I’m pretty sure the publisher just stopped hiring editors to trim/clean her text), filled with plot devices and cliches, and generally overrated. Yes, there are some charming moments in the books, and some very clever images. But the fantasy genre has been done a lot better by tons of other people. And I hardly think Harry is a role model: pretty much everything he goes through is stuff that happens to him–he is utterly passive. Is that heroic? Hardly. When he’s really in a bind, he’s usually saved by a deus ex machina, not by his own (active) devices.

4. Will Harry survive? I honestly have no idea, since I haven’t read anything after The Goblet of Fire. (Talk about a needlessly convoluted plot. Voldemort comes up with an elaborate plan to get Harry to touch the tournament cup so Harry will be transported to Voldemort-land? Give me a break. Voldemort could have made a chocolate mint into a portkey and left it on Harry’s pillow. “Hello there, what’s this?” BAM! Harry is in Voldemort-land. Scholastic should pay me to write this stuff…)

And what am I most looking forward to? The end of Harry-mania. It’s nice to see people get so excited about a book, but the ubiquitous marketing and product tie-ins—which, when the first book came out, Rowling swore she would never do (that promise lasted all of fifteen seconds)–have transformed whatever literary merit these books have into just another crass commercial venture.

The veggie-loving part of me loves this time of year, when farmer’s markets and roadside produce stands are teeming with red ripe tomatoes, fragrant basil, and all sorts of late-summer goodies. Today I was determined to take advantage of this bounty, and resolved to do sometime that involved both my home-grown green beans and basil (not my own, alas–my basil hasn’t flourished this year). Here’s the result.

“Spicy Tofu with Thai Basil and Coconut Rice Cakes,” from Vegetarian Suppers, by Deborah Madison.

• I used regular basil (which is what I had on hand) instead of Thai basil.
• I put no heat in the tofu (we do encourage Sylvia to try mildly spicy things every once in a while, but for this dish it was easy enough to offer sambal on the side).
• I did not let the coconut rice cool to room temperature, cut it into slabs, then pan fry the slabs. I’ve done that before–and it’s quite delicious,–but I didn’t have time for that today. Instead I used a tool that I bought several years ago yet hadn’t used until today: one of those metal rings to mold food. Pretty much every chef on the original (Japanese) Iron Chef series used a ring for at least one dish in each “battle”–that’s where I first saw them and thought, “I must have one of these things!” Well, I bought one, and it sat buried in a drawer of kitchen gadgets (e.g., melon ballers, can opener, tea egg, tiny ladles). I used it to mold the rice on the plate, and though I didn’t get the tidiest result (probably because I didn’t pack the rice in firmly enough), I think the result looks nice.

Green bean and carrots with walnuts, sunflower seeds, and dresssing

• The green beans are from my garden; the carrots are not. I blanched them for about four minutes.
• The dressing is “Asian Miracle Dressing,” from Vegan Lunch Box, by Jennifer McCann. I’ve been reading McCann’s Vegan Lunch Box blog for over a year now, and when she published a book of recipes recently I had to get it. It’s a terrific book, suitable for anyone regardless of his or her (non)vegetarian orientation. She’s published some recipes at the main blog and others at a recipe-specific blog, but most of them are available only in the book. This one is online, though, so you can try it yourself. I think it’s excellent and will probably be using it on most fresh vegetables and salads for the next several months.

The toy sheep was provided by Sylvia. She insisted that it go in that exact spot on the table, right next to the plate. Who am I to argue with that?

Today’s Booking through Thursday:

1. In your opinion, what is the best translation of a book to a movie?
2. The worst?
3. Had you read the book before seeing the movie, and did that make a difference? (Personally, all other things being equal, I usually prefer whichever I was introduced to first.)

Peter Jackson did an amazing job bringing the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the big screen. Making three films instead of cramming everything into one was a stroke of genius on his part and allowed him to tell the tale properly. Having read those books, oh, a gazillion times in my life, I was very worried about what the result would be. I followed the online forums for bits of news, and when the official website was launched–with a first look at the main characters–I was very pleased by the look of the film still in production.

I understand that, even with the space afforded by three extra-long movies, some trimming needed to be done. Tom Bombadil? His songs and rhymes are lovely, but they really don’t do anything to move the plot along. Replacing Glorfindel at the ford with Arwen? Um…well…I should ‘fess up and state that I generally did not like how much Arwen was in the films. I guess this was an attempt to take advantage of a famous actor in the film and perhaps to add a prominent female role (in the books, Arwen doesn’t do much except sit around and make a banner for Aragorn). That said, I’ve no doubt that Eowyn could kick Arwen’s ass any day.

There were a few more changes I didn’t like (such as not having Frodo rest his head in Sam’s lap when they’re in Mordor–rumor has it that this was changed out of fear that homophobic American audiences would be too skeeved), but for the most part I think Jackson got it right. His attention to detail was amazing. I loved all the little things he included (but didn’t necessarily explain, due to lack of time) as little “nods” to people who know the books well. When the great hall in Moria filled the theater screen, my first thought was, “Yes! That’s exactly how I imagined it!”

As for worst adaptations…well…The Scarlet Letter with Demi “What-the-Hell-Were-They-Thinking-When-They-Cast-Her?” Moore is up there. I’m sure there are more bad adaptations out there, but I’m having a hard time thinking of any. Maybe they were so bad that I’ve just repressed the memory.

There are two upcoming book-to-screen adaptions that I am both anticipating and dreading. One is The Golden Compass, which comes out in December. I read Pullman’s trilogy several years ago and was utterly amazed by it. Early in the production of the film, the director announced that he was excising religion from the movie (those of you who’ve read the books are probably saying “Are you serious?” to yourselves right now). I think it’s back in, though I’m not sure–I’ll have to see. The trailers look stunning, and Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman are perfectly cast for their roles. Let’s hope the final cut does the book justice.

The other upcoming film I’m worried about is Stardust, which is based on Neil Gaiman’s novel of the same name and comes out next month. Again, another amazing, fantastic tale (though this one–certainly not shallow mind-candy–does not have the heavy-hitting philosophical content of Pullman’s work). Gaiman wrote on his blog a while ago that he was pleased with what he’d seen so far, so that gives me hope. (Here is Gaiman reading the first chapter of the book, if you’re interested.)

Today’s Booking through Thursday:

What, in your opinion, is the (mythical) Great American Novel? At least to date. A “classic,” or a current one–either would be fine. Mark Twain? J.D. Salinger? F. Scott Fitzgerald? Stephen King? Laura Ingalls Wilder?

It doesn’t have to be your favorite book, mind you. “Citizen Kane” may be the “best” film, and I concede its merits, but it’s not my favorite. You don’t have to love something to know that it’s good.

Now, I know that not all of you are American–but you can play, too! What I want from you is to know what you consider to the best novel of YOUR country. It might be someone the rest of us haven’t heard of and, frankly, I think we’d all like to get some new authors to read.

In fact, while we’re at it–I’m curious about the geographical make-up of this meme. So, while you’re leaving your link to your post, tell us where in the world you are! (For the record, I’m in New Jersey, USA.)

The great American (I’m in Pennsylvania, USA) novel, eh? I think there are about a gazillion of them. A few that I think especially merit mention are:

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon. Love, war, friendship, class issues, the fantastic–this novel has them all and deftly explores not only what it is to be American but also what it is to be alive. When I finished this book I was genuinely sad–not because of the content of the ending, but because of the ending itself. I cared so much about the characters that I wanted to see what their futures held.

Empire Falls, by Richard Russo. More great characters, and a seemingly small-town story that is epic in its treatment of the issues and questions we all deal with.

Jasmine at the Worsted Witch just put up a post with what has to be one of the best titles ever: “The right bashes Rachel Carson on the anniversary of her birth, because they suxx0r and eat their own boogers.” (Leetspeak and boogers in the same sentence–nice.)

Rachel Carson wrote a book in 1962 called Silent Spring that argued that pesticide use was harmful to the environment, especially birds (hence the “silent spring”). It is considered one of the foundational works of the modern environmental movement, and though its original publication was surrounded by some controversy (namely in the form of attacks from the chemical industry) the scientific community (that is, the part of it not in the pocket of agribusiness and biochemical companies) generally agrees with Carson’s thesis.

The Worsted Witch links to an interesting piece in today’s Salon, “Rachel Carson’s birthday bashing,” that focuses on the debate over DDT use in malaria control.

Recent critics claim that Carson’s book led to the banning of DDT in the USA, which led to the spread of malaria in the Third World. Therefore, they say, all of those malaria deaths are her fault–and the fault of the environmental movement at large. (”[mutter] Bunch of goddam hippies…[mutter].”) The very best part is when they say that environmentalists are “worse than Hitler.” Yup.

Give me a break. The Salon article cites several experts–including the World Health Organization, which leads global efforts to eradicate malaria (so, um, yeah–I’d say those people know what they’re talking about)–who say that attempts to tie decreased DDT use to malaria deaths are ludicrous. In fact, death rates decreased at the same time treatment shifted from insecticides to medicine. DDT is still in use in many places today, and when used lightly and carefully, it can have some effectiveness. One important point–which Carson raised and which is still valid today–is that relying too strongly on only one solution, particularly one to which organisms can develop resistances, is a bad idea in the long run. DDT may be useful, but it can’t be the only option. And people who insist that it is and then blame Carson and all environmentalists for malaria deaths…well, they probably do eat their own boogers.

Oh, and it’s worth noting (thank you, Great Wik!) that the bastion of conservatism known as the National Review ranked Silent Spring #78 on its list of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Century. Even they weren’t idiots on this point.