Space Station Mir

64. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams "It seems like that guy is everybody's best friend," my dad said when I told him I had picked up the first book of Douglas Adams' other series. It's not hard to see why. Adams' talent, wit, and bright though sarcastic personality shine through all of his books I've read so far. He was clearly intellectually engaged, which this book's extensive (and unfortunately, largely impermeable to me) discussion of the relationship between music, mathematics, and computer software shows. I'm in no place to judge whether he's accurate or completely making stuff up, but it sounds complicated enough to me. Adams has a gift for amusing one-liners that shows up here as well as in all of his hitchhiker books. Unlike the hitchhiker books, this book even ties up neatly in the end. However, the getting there is so confusing and frustrating that I admit I had no patience for it. The Dirk Gently of the ...

63. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel Tita is a kitchen prodigy from the moment she is born. Her thwarted love story is told in monthly installments of recipes. I give Esquivel credit for an interesting format, and the interweaving of food and fiction is well done. The plot is simple, though strange. Tita's formidable Mama Elena perpetuates a family tradition where the youngest daughter, that is, Tita, must never marry and must care for her mother until her mother's death. As a result of this baffling tradition, Tita's lover marries her older sister, just to be near her. Mishaps ensue. Esquivel is clearly a member of the Latin American magical realism trend. Ghosts are sighted and encounters with the supernatural occur. The simplicity of the story, however, causes it to lack the significance of, say, House of the Spirits , and while the phenomena fits, it just contributes to an overall strange feeling. Read it for the food, the plot is mundane at best, and at worst...

61. Edward II by Christopher Marlowe The last read for Sixteenth Century was intriguing when discussed, but relatively disappointing in reading. Other than a bit of Dr. Faustus and Hero and Leander , this is the first Marlowe I've read. I've heard such favorable comparisons with Shakespeare, but this play at least did not exemplify half the wit or character depth of the Bard's oeuvre. I find the actual history of Edward II riveting. He was a blatant homosexual, who gave his beloved, Piers Gaveston, all the titles and money he wished for, arousing the ire of his barons. The "noble peers" overthrew the king, killed Gaveston, his ignored and ill-treated queen, Isabella, turned against him in exchange for the love of the usurper Mortimer, and the king was ultimately executed with a red-hot poker thrust through his bowels. When his son, Edward III, came of age, Mortimer was executed and Isabella imprisoned for life. This much is TRUE. What could you do with this as a ...

60. A Year in the World by Frances Mayes I don't know if it took me a while to warm up to her writing style, or if it took her a while to warm up while writing this book, but I definitely appreciated A Year in the World more and more as I read it, and it formed a thoughtful, personal, lyrical perspective on place and the meaning of place in a person's life. I picked up this book that my mother had been reading because the first section is on the author's visit to the Andalucia region in Spain. I am particularly interested in all things Spain at the moment, as I will be studying abroad there next semester. I will be in the Valencia region (yes, as in oranges), but I would like to visit as much of the country as I can. Andalucia is a southern region, where Spanish Visigoth culture collided with Moorish-Arabic culture for hundreds of years. Mayes describes the iconic azuelejos tiles found everywhere, as well as the Moorish half-arches and latticed architecture. While there i...

59. A Taste of Adventure by Anik See Finally! Finally! I got in some pleasure reading! Anik See is a Canadian journalist who travels around the world on her bicycle and writes about her travels, the people she meets, and especially the food she eats. The book includes recipes for every place she writes about, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Patagonia (a region in southern Argentina/Chile), northern Argentina, Georgia, Iran, Turkey, Armenia, and Mexico. She seems to favor southeast Asia and South America and eschews traditional Europe. The language is simple, and the book is a fun and easy read. For me, the book's biggest asset was See's choice of particularly exotic and unusual locations, and I naturally enjoyed the emphasis on food. I intend to make time to try out some of her recipes, particularly the curries from Malaysia and Indonesia, and her descriptions of Argentina and Chile gave me a yearning for dulce de leche and yerba mate. Unfortunately, See uses...

58. The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht We learned about Brecht's theories and the epic theatre movement in my Theatre and Society class, and then we read The Caucasian Chalk Circle and watched the current production of it at my school. The plot of the story is about a kitchen maid, Grusha, in the 1940s Soviet Union. The Governor, whom she works for, is killed in a revolution, and his wife flees, leaving their infant son behind. Grusha decides to save the boy and care for him as her own. When a counter-revolution occurs, the Governor's wife comes back and accuses Grusha of kidnapping her son. The judge Azdek, notorious for drunkenness and judgments in favor of the poor, decides on the case. The story is a parable, meant to illustrate the Communist-type idea that whoever puts effort into a piece of land or raising a child, deserves ownership, rather than the one who merely 'owns' the thing in a capitalistic sense. While it's a benign message now that we kno...

This weekend, Fri. Nov. 13-Sun. Nov. 15 is the 33rd annual Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair. Hours are listed on the web site. I went last year, and had a fantastic time. In particular, I noticed a LOT of Mark Twain as well as Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Alcott, Melville-the usual New England suspects. It's amazing just to see these works up close and think about who bought them and read them and owned them, and how they're a part of history and literature. There were also quite a few bookshops from overseas, particularly Britain, but also France, and some of the Scandinavian countries. I don't think I'll make it this year, since $8 just to see isn't worth it when I've probably already seen most of it and unfortunately can't afford to buy. But if you're a book lover in Boston, and haven't been, definitely go!

I was much comforted to have some responses to my last post! I agree that it is important to re-evaluate why I chose to be an English major, even if I had negative feelings associated with it. I have not been able to do any reading outside of class in the past few weeks, but I decided to list some of my in-class readings, though none of them are novels. That is about to change actually, I'm on schedule to start reading Gargantua and Pantagruel for Sixteenth Century tomorrow. In Sixteenth Century, we've covered: The Defence of Poesie by Sir Philip Sidney, which I greatly enjoyed, even though poetry isn't always my cup of tea. Sidney, one of Elizabeth I's best known courtiers (also Leicester's nephew), wrote this essay defending the occupation of poetry that he has fallen into, first, because, obviously, his occupation must be the best, and then a host of other reasons including that all learning (philosophy, math, science), originally stemmed from the writing of poet...