On love and kitchens and moving

First and foremost, this wisdom from Elizabeth Bennet:

"Is not general incivility the very essence of love?"

Ha! My reading of Pride and Prejudice continues apace. I remain occasionally surprised by how little I remember of the book (and how many of my "memories of the book" are really memories of movies and various adaptations, among them Bridget Jones' Diary and the Lizzie Bennet Diaries). Lizzie is rather crueler than I remember, as is Mr. Bennet (I still like them. And I still identify with their general misanthropy).

So, once again, I am moving. The last time I moved (only a year ago), I thought a lot about the trials and tribulations of moving a sizable library (really, mine never seems particularly large until the time comes to pack it up) and considered the possibility of writing about particular sections of said library (which, of course, I never did - maybe this time). This year, the packing up of my books went smoothly, and I'm hopeful that between the elevator and the two-wheeler I plan on employing, the moving won't be so difficult. Actually, packing boxes has mostly led my thoughts back to Consider the Fork and Wilson's final chapter about kitchens. She talked about the age of kitchens and suggested that a showplace kitchen, where everything is the same age, is kind of dishonest. Anyway, as I packed up my own cobbled together kitchen, I kept coming back to that and to the memories that various pieces brought back.

My own kitchen is a hodgepodge of cheap stuff I've purchased on my own, things I've stolen from my parents, and things I inherited (mostly from my grandma Mabel and my mom's friend Chris, after they passed away). I can't use these things without being reminded of their former owners. The kitchen scale, still in its original box, was pulled from Mabel's kitchen, as was the set of Pyrex bowls (harvest orange, with stalks of wheat), and a full set of silverware (there was a second set that wound up in my sister's kitchen). Pots and pans, an adorably tiny whisk, an equally adorable biscuit cutter, a nut grinder, and a motley collection of lovely china tea cups all came from her as well. When I use these, I think about my grandma's peerless donuts and lefse and flatbread, about weekends at my grandparents' farm and the bedroom I shared with my sister there. I think about one of my earliest memories - spending some days there during beet harvest, when my dad drove a beet truck, and going out to ride with him, carrying a peanut butter and honey sandwich made for me by my grandma. From Chris, a set of wood salad spoons with elephants on the handle, a white tray rimmed with sea shells, and a mug with a tuxedo on it. When I use these things, I think about the Christmas Eves we spent with Chris and Tom and their cats and the summer nights we spent at their lake place. My kitchen seems paltry - I have no KitchenAid mixer, no Le Creuset dutch ovens - but it is rich in history. I'm grateful to Wilson for reminding me of this.

Pride & Prejudice

"She had dressed with more than usual care, and prepared in the highest spirits for the conquest of all that remained unsubdued of his heart, trusting that it was not more than might be won in the course of an evening."

It's been a long time since the last time I read Pride and Prejudice - most of my ideas about it are really from adaptations (the movies, Lizzie Bennet Diaries), not the book. The adaptations take a more charitable approach to Elizabeth - she might be judgmental, but you never really get the sense that she's prideful. Austen makes this much clearer (see the above quote). She's still a lovable character, but far more human than the spunky proto-feminist I remembered (and by "remembered," I suppose I mean "cobbled together from multiple sources").

I also tend to forget how downright disdainful Austen is toward so many of her characters. And not the wicked ones. The stupid ones and the silly ones seem to be the prime targets of her disdain. I think it's easy for people who haven't really given Austen a chance to write her books off as fluffy romances, but they're much darker than they seem at first glance. There are moments in her books that resemble, more than anything, modern cringe comedy, where the way she presents characters is funny in an uncomfortable way, a way that makes you question, as you laugh, exactly what kind of person laughs at such nastiness.

Reading differently

I am still reading Consider the Fork. I think when I say it like that, it could come off as frustration, and I really don't mean for that to happen. It is a slower book than the last few I've read, and a different kind of book, and the experience of reading it is different. Not just that it takes longer, although clearly it does. I said last time that it was the kind of book I kept wanting to share tidbits from, and I still feel this way (and I do share tidbits every chance I get). It is also the kind of book I could and would like to dip in and out of. A book I should be reading along with another book (I can't - there isn't time). It's very engaging, but I'm not invested in it.

It's kind of amazing, the vastly different effects that books can have on you. Just comparing this one with Lovely, Dark and Deep, for instance. Consider the Fork has, thus far, made my thoughts spin off into considerations about having a minimalist kitchen, wishes to cook more in the hopes of becoming a more intuitive cook, and dreams of buying new pots and pans. It has also made me feel a little lonely in the sense that I don't always have someone around to recount interesting factoids to. Reading Lovely, Dark and Deep took me in some very different directions indeed (I think what little I wrote about it should make that apparent). It made me consider my own past, lost relationships that I have grieved (may still be grieving), and it made me frustrated because I did and did not want to let all that out. Or something. Reading a book like that is visceral - parts of it are so raw it hurts to read them and it hurts to deal with the mental spaces they rub up against.

I keep thinking about Lovely, Dark and Deep. Much as I'm enjoying Consider the Fork, and despite the high probability that I will be regaling friends and family with trivia from it for years to come, it's not going to stick with me in the same way. And that's okay. It doesn't need to. In fact, it might be good - having every book cling to you in such a persistent, gnawing way would be unbearably heavy. These moments of levity, these palate-cleansers, are crucial.

Consider the Fork

I didn't actually mean to be quite so depressing with that last post. It was the book, and a week of being mostly on my own, and a very terrible sleep schedule - they ganged up on me. Really, Lovely, Dark and Deep was fantastic. Poetry. Complex, with no easy resolutions (my biggest problem with Jepp was the too-tidy ending), but still deeply satisfying. And with such a distinct sense of place, something I'm always over-the-moon to find in books.

And now I've moved on. Bee Wilson's Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat. Non-fiction seemed like a good idea.

I'm still reading the introduction, but it is already the kind of book I want to share, the kind of book where you want someone around who is willing to listen to you read particularly interesting passages aloud because they simply must be shared. For instance:

Open hearths were a major cause of death in Europe, too, for centuries. Women were particularly at risk, on account of the terrible combination of billowing skirts, trailing sleeves, and open fires with bubbling cauldrons hung over them. Professional chefs in rich households until the seventeenth century were almost universally men, and they often worked naked or just in undergarments on account of the scorching heat. Women were confined to the dairy and scullery, where their skirts didn't pose such a problem.

Hilarious! From the mental image of the naked chefs to the absurdity of women continuing to wear billowing skirts, despite the obvious risk. This, I think, is precisely the book I needed. I'm glad to have found it.

Lovely, Dark and Deep

Turns out I don't have much else to say about Jepp, Who Defied the Stars. I certainly enjoyed it, and I love that it deals with the question of fate versus free will and I can recommend it, but I just don't have much else to offer.

And I'm not sure how much I can say about my next selection, Amy McNamara's Lovely, Dark and Deep. To be honest, I'm a little worried about reading this book. I've plowed through the first 80 pages already and the language is gorgeous and affecting. But the story deals with grief and depression and it plunges you into that so deeply that...yeah, I worry. I can't empathize with Wren's crushing grief, but I'm finding her story to be a little too resonant for this rather lonely girl and I just don't know how smart it is to willingly dig myself into melancholy like this.

Let's be honest, though. I'm not going to stop reading. I just wanted to say out loud-ish that this might be a tough book for me to deal with. And maybe a tough book for other people to deal with, which is maybe an important thing to acknowledge if I'm going to talk about it and/or recommend it.