Mr. Chef & Ms. Librarian - by Melissa Yi

Can a white-bread librarian on the rebound find true love with a Pakistani chef who promised his parents he'd find himself a nice Muslim girl?

Ivy Appleford is new to her job as a public librarian, as well as new in town and has recently been dumped by her boyfriend. She signs up for some cooking classes and falls for the sexy chef/instructor, Tariq, who is equally taken with her. It doesn't take long for the two to become swept up in a hot, and spicy romance. True to romance novel genre there are some ups and downs in the relationship, but all is well in the end.

The author played around a bit with some librarian stereotypes and fantasies. Even as Ivy notes that being a librarian no one ever expected her to be "a wild party" readers see someone who finds it thrilling to have sex outside, where anyone could have come by, and when Ivy surprises Tariq by deftly opening a condom and sliding it down on him she simply shrugs and says "I should be good at this stuff. I'm a librarian." Neither does she hesitate when her swarthy lover suggests that they have sex on the circulation desk. When Tariq shows up unannounced at Ivy's house late one night and sees her in red flannel pajamas for the first time, his mind, of course, goes right to the uptight librarian fantasy.

He grinned. "You look adorable." To his surprise, he meant it. The tortoiseshell glasses reminded him of a cat. Or, better yet, the Tina Fey, take off your glasses and let down your hair, buttoned-up sexiness."

Ivy's ex-boyfriend, Stephen, is a professor, and apparently she was not completely at ease with him because of it. With Tariq

She didn't have to prove that librarians were as smart as academics. She didn't have to pretend to like his friends. She could just hang out.

I thought about this passage a lot, not so much because I think I need to prove anything to my professor husband (he knows how smart I am, after all) but more because I am an academic librarian. I suppose that I sometimes feel that I have to prove that I'm as smart as my colleagues. This can be especially frustrating when I'm dealing with faculty members (or administrators) who may not, in fact, be as smart as I am! Librarians do know everything, after all.

Early in their relationship, when Ivy isn't so sure she should be getting involved with anyone, she tells Tariq that what she needs is more of a friend "an avuncular type". She specifically suggests that my favorite fictitious librarian - Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer would be a good person for her "someone who won't take advantage of me - or tempt me." Really, Giles wouldn't tempt her? Has she not seen the show, especially the episode called "Band Candy"?!

I must say that Ivy is as much of a multi-dimensional character as one can expect in a romance novel. She has a variety of interests, and cares about her community, plus she is smart, sexy, and witty. This was a fun read for Read-a-Romance month.

Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks her way through Great Books - by Cara Nicoletti

This lovely memoir brings together my two favorite hobbies: reading and cooking. Nicoletti is not only an avid reader, she is also a chef. In each of these self-contained chapters the author reflects on a book and what it meant to her, and also provides an appropriate recipe. The work is divided into three sections: Childhood; Adolescence and College Years; and Adulthood so there are chapters about well-known children's favorites as well as darker adult-themed books. I read this one aloud to my husband. We very much enjoyed it and liked that the chapters were short enough that we could read two or three at a time and not be tired afterwards. I read many of the books she writes about which made this even more fun for me. The recipes run the gamut of fairly easy (Perfect Soft-Boiled Egg from Jane Austen's Emma) to rather complex (Chocolate Éclairs from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dolloway). Many of the recipes (including the éclairs) called for mixing something in an electric mixer using a paddle (or some other kind of) attachment. Much as we love to cook, we are not prepared to invest in some of the equipment needed to make some of these recipes, although we will be trying some of them out, which we will most certainly post on our Nueva Receta blog. Stay tuned.

Of course no book memoir would be complete without at least a few libraries sprinkled in. One of Nicoletti's early library memories is of watching the 1978 movie Puff the Magic Dragon in her school library in first grade each time it rained too hard for the children to have recess outside. She really hated this movie

Not only did the entire premise of it terrify me, but it gave me the saddest most anxious feeling deep in my gut...with those dulled psychedelic colors and Peter, Paul, and Mary's eerie crooning creeping into my nightmares.

After many viewings of the film her intense dislike for it finally caused her to ask her teacher, Miss Walker, if she might perhaps read a book in the library instead of screening the movie yet again. To which Miss Walker replied "Pick a book and you can read quietly until the movie is over." Nicoletti reports that this memory is "one of the happiest of [her] childhood-not only because [she] escaped Puff, but because of Miss Walker's infinite and quiet understanding, and her gift...of thirty minutes surrounded by books." The book she chose "that day, and for many many days afterward was the first installment of the Boxcar Children series..."

I never read any of the Boxcar Children myself. And honestly, much as I love books I imagine given the choice, I would have watched "Puff" for the umteenth time over reading a book as many times as I could as a child. I really love Peter, Paul, and Mary. And I truly dig that '70s animation. Although I must say, this film fails the Bechdel test horribly. There aren't even two women in the film, much less two that have a conversation.

The author also makes note of the fact that the Boxcar Children series "caused quite a stir at first. Parents objected to the children's happy, adult-free world and the tragic backdrop of their story-all very real, scary stuff". She also points out that perennial children's favorite Charlotte's Web has had its share of censors as well.

...it's been banned in Kansas for including talking animals, which some educators deemed 'unnatural', and avoided by others who think the themes of death and sacrifice are too heavy for its young audience. It has also been challenged in England by teachers worried that the discussion of eating pork would be offensive to Muslims.

Nicoletti has a few other places in which she specifically mentions getting books from the library. She biked to the library in fourth grade to find out about Sylvia Plath, and "spent hours on the floor of the library that day, trying to make sense of just one line of Plath's poetry, but...left with only a vague sense of dread that [she] would never be happy again once [she] turned ten.

In her discussion of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice she makes note of the library within the book itself, as well she discusses the fact that she found the book's "lack of food description excruciating" (emphasis in original). She was particularly frustrated by the fact that there is no information about what, exactly, white soup was. So much so that that "one scene...had [her] searching for Regency-era cookbooks whenever [she] went to the library."

And, finally she describes sobbing "ugly, messy cries in [her college] library" following the break-up with her long-time boyfriend while translating The Aeneid for Latin class.

This fun book is based on Nicoletti's Yummy Books blog.

Delicious! - by Ruth Reichl

A long-locked library at a food magazine (Delicious!) provides a treasure hunt for Billie Breslin, the only employee left at the publication after its shut down. Left to field calls from subscribers who are  either taking advantage of the magazine's money-back guarantee on any recipe that doesn't satisfy, or needing to find an old recipe, Billie discovers a secret room in the unused archives. The files in the hidden space contain letters written during World War II from a young girl (Lulu Swan) to legendary chef James Beard. Billie discovers that a complicated cryptography on color-coded cards in the old wooden card catalog was developed by former librarian, Bertie. The cards contain to clues as to where more letters can be found.  I was baffled by this at first - wondering why a librarian would make finding information so difficult, but all is made clear by the end of the book. Billie also does some research at the Cleveland Public Library in hopes finding out what happened to Lulu. The libraries in the book are safe, welcoming places, as they should be.

Seedfolks - by Paul Fleishman

Seedfolks tells the story of the growth of a community garden in Cleveland, Ohio through a series of thirteen vignettes, each from the point of view of a different character. Over the course of a growing season the neighborhood comes together to build the garden, which is started in a vacant lot with a handful of lima bean seeds by a young vietnamese girl. The neighbors overcome language and cultural barriers in order to empty the lot of trash, solve the problem of getting water to the plants, fight crime, and to teach each other how to garden. The final vignette, told by Florence, serves as an epilogue as it is made clear that she is remembering the "seedfolks" who started the garden, "before there were spigots and hoses, and the toolshed, and new soil. And before landlords started charging more for apartments that look on the garden." Florence, as it turns out, is a retired librarian! Library was also used as a metaphor in the story of  Virgil, a pre-teen whose father has a plan to grow baby lettuce and sell it to up-scale restaurants. When the two find their lettuce wilting, the father (a taxi driver) starts asking all of his fares for their advice - "[h]is cab was like a library for him".

While the message of the book is positive overall, the author does not pretend that everything is perfect inside the garden. One gardener, Sam, notices that even while the garden helps to bring people together, the neighborhood has recreated itself inside its walls "the blacks on one side, the whites on the other, the Central Americans and Asians toward the back...Each group kept to itself". A homeless man who used the lot to sleep in is displaced, and as people start to worry about others stealing their crops chicken wire and "Keep Out" signs go up.

This this was a rather short book (69 pages) so I read it in both English and Spanish (Semillas) and I learned some new Spanish vocabulary including "bieldo" (pitchfork). Both library references were retained in the Spanish version as well.

The Town that Food Saved - by Ben Hewitt

is Bridgewater's One Book One Community Read for the Spring 2012. It is the story of Harwick, Vermont and the "agrepreneurs" (Hewitt's term) who lead the town's successful local food movement.

The author does not live in Harwick, but lives near it, in Cabot - a mere seven miles away as the crow flies, according to How Far is It? He demonstrates his understaning of the value of a public library by mentioning the Cabot Public Library twice on the same page. He explains that his town has "a fantastic hardware store, a wonderful library, a garage, a post office, a diner, and a well-stocked village grocery, but not much more" so he and his family venture into Hardwick for things such as sporting goods, tractor supplies, and medicine, "and every so often, [to] buy a book at the Galaxy Bookshop, thought mostly...visit the Cabot library for...literary excursions."

Hewitt will be speaking at Bridgewater State University on April 24 at 7:30 in the Horace Mann Auditorium. For more information, and to find out about other "One Book" programs visit the One Book One Community webpage.

The Town that Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food

52 Loaves - by William Alexander

As a foodie, and a librarian, I have kept several blogs. My first foray into blogging was a year-long project called My Year of Reading "Year Of" books  in which I commented on books that came from projects such as Alexander's: a one year memoir, or "stunt lit". In this work Alexander documents his efforts in baking one loaf of bread a week for one year. Since my own year-of stunt, er, project  is over, though, (having taken place in 2009) I could not write about this work on that blog. I think when I requested this book from interlibrary loan, I intended to review it on my food blog: "Una Nueva Receta Cada Semana (One New Recipe a Week)" but it lost its spot there as soon as I saw the word "library" used for the first time, which was in the Prologue, on page 2! Alexander describes explaining to a TSA official why he is bringing a sourdough starter, which looks suspiciously like a plastic explosive, onto a plane to Paris. "A thirteen-hundred-year-old monastery in France is expecting this...[t]hey managed to keep science, religion, and the arts alive during the Dark Ages, even risking their lives to protect their library (emphasis mine) from the barbarians who burned everything else in sight. After thirteen centuries, though, they've forgotten how to make bread." Well, there we have it. Libraries are more important than bread. I always knew as much, as clearly the monks did as well. This of course made any other mention of libraries in the work anti-climactic, but in the interest of being complete I include them all here.

It was a good 130 pages later that libraries were mentioned for the second time (to be honest I was beginning to despair that I'd see them again in this work). I was pleased though to see that the author thoughtfully brought a loaf of bread to the librarian at his research institute along with "a long list of interlibrary loan requests" - a nice gesture to someone who is, undoubtedly, underpaid. I did not have to wait nearly as long to find the next mention of libraries: a mere 12 pages later Alexander explains that although he really tried to like one of my favorite books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which he was listening to on CD, he found it "stilted, pedantic, and preachy" and "with genunie horror" realized that his writing was becoming too much like Persig's (at which point he "slammed the lid on the CD case and returned it to the library"). It is a bit ironic, then, that one of the pull quotes on the back of the edition I read says "[w]hat Zen and the Art of Motorcycle  Maintenance did for, well, motorcycles, William Alexander's 52 Loaves will do for bread...." The monastery's library makes a reprise when Alexander finds himself there, and again, explains the importance of preservation of knowledge, and once more when one of the monks informs Alexander that the monastery's library has a signed copy of Patrick Leigh Fermor's memoir A Time to Keep Silence.

These few, though thoughtfully chosen, references to libraries demonstrate yet again the importance of these hallowed institutions in our lives.

I cannot close this post without writing about one other very important thing: coffee. I almost gagged when I read that the monastery used instant coffee, and worse, that our hero was prepared to drink it except that the hot water dispenser "hadn't yet been switched on." Please folks, don't try this at home. See my husband's "Caring for Coffee" page if you want a cup of joe. Perhaps what Alexander did for the monks with bread, James can do with coffee. I don't think I'd mind a trip to Normandy.

  

Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California by Jonah Raskin

In 2009 I wrote a blog called "My Year of Reading 'Year of' Books" in which I read and wrote about books that were part of the stunt lit genre where authors spent a year making some change in their lives, and documenting it. For the most part, I really liked those books, and although my own "year of" project is over, I still look for books in this category. In the case of Field Days, the theme actually cross pollinates on three of my blogs. In addition to this one, my husband James wrote a post about it on our food blog "Una Nueva Receta Cada Semana". James and I read this one out loud to each other, we had started back in January and finally finished last night.

Raskin spent a year visitng farms, farmer's markets, wineries, and restaurants, mostly in Northern California, and spoke, and worked, with farmers, vintners, migrant workers, chefs and others who were part of the local/organic/slow food movement. He worked retail at the Red Barn Store at the Oak Hill Farm and also harvested crops. The pace of the book is slow, as it should be, and probably why we took so long to read it. We found reading this to be soothing.

Author Jack London figures in this book throughout and it is through him that we find our first library mention when we learn from "...Kevin Starr the California historian and for many years the California State Librarian [that] 'the Sonoma chapter of Jack London's life, his last chapter, dramatized a modality of California madness'". (p. 60).

The importance of libraries for research is highlighted in a passage about agribusiness in which Raskin writes of Carey McWilliams classic 1939 work Factories in the Field which "went so far as to denouce 'the rise of farm fascism'". The book was based on "his own observations of the horrendous labor conditions in the San Joaquin Valley in 1935 and on extensive library research". (p. 195)

Two mentions of "personal" libraries appear. One in the body of the work where Raskin describes the connection between food and sex in the books Consider the Oyster and The Gastronomical Me, both by M.F.K. Fisher which he says are "now a permanent part of [his] library" (p.154). The other personal library is noted in the acknowledgements "Don Emblem looked through his vast library and found books for me to read on the subject of farming and nature..."

Even with only these four brief notes about libraries Raskin shows that books (and librarians!) really are our friends.

More about the author at http://www.sonoma.edu/users/r/raskin/index.htm.