Green and Fabulous

If you want to be green but can’t face wearing hemp, if you get frozen in the supermarket deciding whether to buy the organic Italian apples wrapped in plastic or the non-organic apples that are loose and local, and if you feel guilty every time you let the tap run but still have to bath now and again, then Christie Matheson’s book Green Chic: Saving the Earth in Style is the book for you.

As Matheson says in the introduction, ” … we need to embrace the fabulousness of green living. And it is fabulous. Being green can help you look gorgeous, have a killer wardrobe, feel amazing, travel in style, create a home that’s an oasis, host fun parties, eat incredible food, and drink phenomenal wine, all while feeling more connected to your friends, family and nature.” She says that while buying an eco-friendly cashmere jersey will not stop global warming, it is the change in mindset, in starting to become conscious consumers, that will help us to reduce our individual contributions and encourage systemic change.

This week I bought some clothes for my kid, who needed shorts and T-shirts for summer. I have heard that you should wash new clothes before wearing them because of the chemicals shops spray on them to make them hang nicely, but I had never believed it until now. He put on one of his new T-shirts and within an hour had a rash across his neck. Cue parental guilt and vows only to purchase organic cotton tees from now on. Green is clearly not only good for the planet, but good for our health too.

Matheson’s book is clearly divided into useful chapters, from being green at home, to eating and drinking green, beauty, fashion, transportation and travel. There’s even a chapter on how to throw a green party. When I read blogs on the environment, like the No Impact Man or wonderful books like Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, my main reaction - apart from being grateful that there are people out there who are actually doing something about the environment - is to be intimidated and then feel guilty. Although in many ways we are a fairly green household, there is still room for improvement: we run two cars, still sometimes buy food in plastic wrapping, drink bottled water, forget to switch our computers off, even (aargh, pains me to admit) use paper napkins sometimes. Once I feel guilty, I get overwhelmed and can’t imagine how I could even start to change these things that prey on my conscience.

What Matheson does so well is to praise the baby steps. She’s not saying we all need to get solar panels tomorrow, but she is saying that we should be aware and start to make small changes in our lives. Very kindly, like a lovely big sister, she points out the small changes we can make. Here are some that resonated with me:

* Time how long your standard shower takes and then challenge yourself to cut it down

* Keep a full fridge (if you don’t have a large family like mine, fill it with organic wine instead of food) and only run a full dishwasher

* Avoid PVC in any form - it is evil

* Choose local and non-organic over organic food that has travelled a long distance (but long-distance organic is better than long-distance non-organic)

* Eat more whole food - it puts less strain on the environment than processed food (bye-bye chilli rice cakes … sniff)

* Cut back on meat - it is also a strain on the environment

* Use chemical-free lipsticks - the chemical ones contain a long list of hideous ingredients which we eat since they are on our lips. Yuck!

* Edit your closet so that you only shop for clothes you need

* Buy organic rather than conventional cotton, which is the most pesticide-intensive farming in the world

* Drive smoothly (no abrupt braking) and stick to the speed limit

* Switch the car’s air conditioning off and open a window

* Use the car wash instead of washing it yourself (or you could leave it dirty, like mine)

I have cherry-picked (ahem, nature pun alert) the tips that I can actually imagine myself doing, but there are many more which might resonate with you in this excellent book. For US readers, Matheson includes a long list at the end of her favourite eco-friendly retailers, many of whom have websites.

To celebrate all that is green, I would like to offer Green Chic to one of my fabulous readers. Just put your name in the comments if you’re interested, and in the course of this week I will draw a winner.

Now I’m off to town (on foot) to return some books to the library (borrowing, not consuming)!

Confessing

Being back in the riches of my family life has meant my writing output has slowed down again. Having a monster migraine didn’t help either (have scheduled visit to Frauenarzt to talk about the headaches because, frankly, they are getting old). This week has not been so successful in terms of writing, but what I have managed is this:

1. I plugged the gap in Chapter 8, using some material I wrote three years ago. This new scene contains a character who might not make the second draft, because she’s kind of light and funny, but I like how her lightness contrasts with all the Sturm und Drang that the other characters are suffering. This character makes me think I should be writing chick lit, or farces, because her throwaway lines came easily to me.

2. I have acted on my idea for my second novel, which is going to be a historical novel set in Kimberley, South Africa, during the diamond rush, and wrote to some people about how to go about researching it. Both my contacts came back with brilliant ideas and I am suffused with energy for this second project. One of them suggested rereading The Story of An African Farm by Olive Schreiner, just to get a feel for the period, and this weekend I am going to brave the Keller (which is undergoing a renovation project, turning two storage rooms into two offices, one for me and one for my husband) and seek it out.

So my writing goals for this week are:

a. Get seriously stuck into Chapter 9.

b. Source and read the Olive Schreiner.

c. Do more sport! Sport = energy = creativity = words on the page. This week I ran 8kms for the first time. It took 65 minutes. As a non-sporty person who had asthma as a child and couldn’t run 300 metres without wheezing, this was a huge achievement for me. Any accolades you feel like sharing will be warmly welcomed, since my husband is getting tired of telling me how wonderful I am. My goal is to run 10kms in an hour so that I can participate in a local fun-run in October.

What are your writing goals for the week? (Feel free to share any exercise goals you may have too - I’m keen on those!)

Friday ‘Fessing

I went on a writing retreat and wrote 12,000 words.

But you already know that.

Instead of reflecting this Friday, I am going to state my goals for the coming week. These are:

1. Plug the gap in Chapter 8 and send it to the cheerleaders

2. Start Chapter 9

3. Refrain from indulging in negative thinking

4. Keep exercising

Simple isn’t it?

So while I don’t have anything more to say about the writing process, I do have something to say about reading. Writing fulltime (or as fulltime as a mother-of-three with freelance writing gigs and a gym habit can be) has turned me into a Very Intolerant Reader. A book that I would usually persevere with gets tossed aside if it doesn’t hit buttons in the first few paragraphs.

The books that have hit buttons this week:

1. The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam by Lauren Liebenberg

A poetically-told tale of two sisters growing up on a Rhodesian farm at the height of the bush war. Funny observations of adults by children. Ends with a dark twist. Beautiful.

2. The Chameleon’s Shadow by Minette Walters

A return to form from this writer of superb psychological thrillers. A soldier disfigured by a bomb in Iraq returns to London and is under suspicion for a number of violent rage-filled crimes.

3. The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy by Fiona Neill

Reading popcorn that provoked the question, am I a slummy mummy? Are any of my friends? And if so, do we care?

Books that have failed to push buttons:

1. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

This has been given to me twice by people whose reading tastes coincide with mine, and both times I couldn’t get beyond the first paragraph. For another day, no doubt.

2. Personality by Andrew O’Hagan

The story of a little Scottish girl with a big voice who goes on the talent circuit and finds fame. The premise doesn’t really interest me, but I picked it up at book-club and am persevering with it out of literary interest. O’Hagan uses a variety of perspectives to tell his story: first person, third person, letters, screenplay-style dialogue. It has not caught me emotionally and if the person I borrowed it from wanted it back tomorrow, I wouldn’t feel deprived, but I am studying his shifting perspectives to see if the novel works as a whole.

3. Teacher Man by Frank McCourt

I lasted about 40 pages. This is another exercise in ego from McCourt - his third book All About Himself, with frequent faux-modest references to his own fame. If you’d like to read the “Irish yokel done good in NYC thanks to naked talent” story all over again, then read this book. If you want insights into the teaching process and sensitive remarks on the making of teenage minds, then don’t.

Good luck with your writing week, dear writer friends. I will be trolling past, via the lovely Literate Kitten, to see how you have been doing.

2007 in Books

100: the number of books I fondly imagined I would read this year

81: the number of books I actually read

60: books of fiction

32: books by US writers

22: books by British writers

22: books that were new in 2007

21: books of non-fiction

8: memoirs

6: books by African writers or about Africa

6: books by Canadian writers

5: business books

3: sets of short stories

3: books by Indian writers

2: classic novels (one French, one Russian)

2: books by Afghani writers

1: book by a Libyan writer

1: book by Turkish writer

0: books by German writers

Books That Made Me Cry:

28 Stories of AIDS by Stephanie Nolen, Babylon’s Ark by Lawrence Anthony, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, A Special Relationship by Douglas Kennedy, Two Lives by Vikram Seth.

Books That Made Me Laugh:

Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the English at Table by Nigel Slater, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, Mother’s Milk by Edward St Aubyn, Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips, Darkmans by Nicola Barker, A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian by Marina Lewycka, everything by Janet Evanovich

Books That Scared Me:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy, In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar, A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walsh, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin, The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer, The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

Books That Left Me Gasping in Admiration and Thinking That’s There No Point Even Trying to Be a Writer:

Darkmans by Nicola Barker, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Empire Falls by Richard Russo, The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers, Runaway by Alice Munro

These five also constitute my favourites for the year. You might notice that I haven’t reviewed them either, because they all left me stunned, too stunned to feel I could say anything of meaning or add to the body of words already committed to their superlativeness. I loved and admired their vast sweep, their intimate characterisations, their humour, their compassion, their politics and the way each and every one reflected the truth of the human condition.

Reading Goals for 2008:

* Even out the imbalance between classics and contemporary

* Even out the imbalance between Anglo-American writers and everybody else

* Attempt to read a couple of books in German

* Focus less on the prize-winners, and more on books recommended by bloggers and friends whose opinions I respect

* Read more Alice Munro

* Read with a pencil

* Aim for 100!

I wish you all a happy reading 2008. I have my nose in Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie right now, and I know already it’s going to be on my favourites list for next year.

Birthday Books

Having hosted two birthday parties in two days - my daughter’s and my own - I am extremely relieved that our Christmas is going to be a relaxed one, celebrated mostly at other people’s houses. The best thing about not having to plan, shop for and cook a full Christmas meal (just our contributions) is that it leaves me with time to read my birthday books.

I’ve just finished Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, and am already deeply into Alice Munro’s Runaway. I’ve just read Munro’s memoir, so was thrilled when one of my clever party guests brought me some short stories of hers to try. The collection comes with an ecstatic introduction from Jonathan Franzen, who explains why he likes short stories so much:

I like stories because they leave the writer with no place to hide. There’s no yakking your way out of trouble; I’m going to be reaching the last page in a matter of minutes, and if you’ve got nothing to say I’m going to know it. I like stories because they’re usually set in the present or in living memory; the genre seems to resist the historical impulse that makes so many contemporary novels feel fugitive or cadaverous. I like stories because it takes the best kind of talent to invent fresh characters and situations while telling the same story over and over.

I’ve never been a fan of short stories, preferring rather to dive into a novel and luxuriate there, but I am loving the Munro book, as Nova predicted I would.

One of my friends gave me Bernhard Schlink’s Die Heimkehr. She told me as I unwrapped it that it might look like it’s written in German, but it’s really, really written in English. She was joking, of course, but perhaps this quiet down time between the years is a good moment to try reading in German again. I have resisted it, because it takes a level of concentration and effort that reading in English doesn’t. I loved The Reader, which is set right here where we live, so I’m sure to enjoy this new Schlink.

My friends seem to formed a united front, because my co-birthday girl has given me a German book that I can’t resist: Küchengeschichten: Die wunderbaren Rezepte meinen Freunde by Kristina Möller. In English that would be “Kitchen Stories: My friends’ wonderful recipes” - and it comprises a description of each of her friends, some of their favourite recipes and some wonderful art.

I love reading about food at this time of year. It’s about having the time to settle down in an armchair with a cup of coffee, or better still a glass of red wine, and dream about new foods to cook in the new year. A dear friend, who was unfortunately absent from the party, sent me Claudia Roden’s Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey & Lebanon, and I am entranced and delighted by the delicacies inside. I may have to take the Turkish yogurt cake to our Christmas Eve celebration with friends.

Other friends gave me wine, bath goodies, Christmas candles and jewellery, so I felt very spoilt. Thanks to all my further afield friends who phoned, emailed and sent messages on Facebook. I had a wonderful birthday. And I know that being 39 is going to be great: a year of reading, writing, cooking, travelling, loving and dreaming.

Mother’s Milk

I devoured Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk in one sitting yesterday, so brilliant and unputdownable it is. I knew from the opening paragraph that I was going to love it:

Why had they pretended to kill him when he was born? Keeping him awake for days, banging his head again and again against a closed cervix; twisting the cord around his throat and throttling him; chomping through his mother’s abdomen with cold shears; clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side; dragging him out of his home and hitting him; shining lights in his eyes and doing experiments; taking him away from his mother while she lay on the table, half-dead. Maybe the idea was to destroy his nostalgia for the old world. First the confinement to make him hungry for space, then pretending to kill him so that he would be grateful for the space when he got it, even this loud desert, with only the bandages of his mother’s arms to wrap around him, never the whole thing again, the whole warm things all around him, being everything.

What St Aubyn does here, and throughout the book, so brilliantly is see things from a baby’s and a child’s perspective. I have never read another book about families that inhabits everyone’s viewpoints so well: either you have the adults being well-represented and the children depicted at a distance, or vice versa, but St Aubyn gets into everyone’s heads so convincingly that as a reader you feel not only that you know everyone, but that they are your family too. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that does this so effectively, but also movingly and with humour. I snorted in recognition throughout, so that Lily, who was beading next to me, eventually asked me to stop.

The story takes a look at the Melrose family over a period of four Augusts, from 2000 to 2003. The family usually holiday in France at Patrick’s - the father’s - childhood home, which his mother Eleanor has recently ceded to a New Age foundation. The family now only have rights to spend August there, and they have to tolerate the presence of foundation director Seamus, who is aggressively touchy-feely, believes he is a shaman and prefers having rituals to conversations. Patrick, a London barrister, is filled with rage that his mother has given his home away, that it is now taken over by Seamus and he is a mere disinherited visitor. He mocks Seamus privately, and to his face:

“Did you know,” said Patrick, addressing Seamus again, “that among the caribou herdsmen of Lapland, the top shaman gets to drink the urine of the reindeer that has eaten the magic mushrooms, and his assistant drinks the urine of the top shaman, and so on, all the way down to the lowest of the low who scramble in the snow, pleading for a splash of twelfth-generation caribou piss?”
“I didn’t know that,” said Seamus, flatly.

Patrick’s rage not only stems from his feeling that his mother has taken away his birthright, but also that his wife Mary - offspring of the virulently self-regarding Kettle - is being consumed by their children. Having been emotionally cut off by her mother as a child, Mary is making it up to her children with a devotion that, while not martyrish, is slavish in its totality. Patrick, making the logical connection that so many men do, uses his feeling of being ousted from Mary’s affections to develop a violent depression, a major drinking habit and an affair with an old girlfriend. Mary, aware of the affair, grows colder to her husband and ever warmer towards her children until Patrick eventually accuses her of using Thomas, three, as a “lover”.

While the bare bones of the story may seem melodramatic at first telling, this is leavened by St Aubyn’s piercing sense of humour and his tenderness with all his main protagonists. Of all the books I’ve read this year, this would be the one I would most want to have written: it is funny, moving and insightful.

For Litlove, I would also like to point out that it has at its heart the question of motherhood. There is Mary, the ur-Mother, giving her all, at the expense of everything including her marriage, to her children; there is the dreadful Kettle (”a lonely martyr to her own high standards” - don’t we all know a few of these?); and the poor crippled Eleanor, who by selecting oily Seamus as the recipient of all her earthly possessions, has alienated her family and impoverished herself. The nature of all three is encapsulated here, an early part of the book before Patrick is eaten by his own rage:

As usual, Mary had gone to sleep with Thomas, leaving Patrick split between admiration and abandonment. Mary was such a devoted mother because she knew what it felt like not to have one. Patrick also knew what it felt like, and as a former beneficiary of Mary’s maternal overdrive, he sometimes had to remind himself that he wasn’t an infant anymore, to argue that there were real children in the house, not yet horror-trained; he sometimes had to give himself a good talking-to. Nevertheless he waited for the maturing effects of parenthood. Being surrounded by children brought him closer to his own childishness.

The last sentence, to me, says it all. Being a parent gives you the stark choice of having to grow up or regress. However, although you may choose to be the grown-up, you do also get given the wonderful opportunity to play with being the child. You can share childlike emotions, games and inhabit their world, but you also have to take yourself in hand and be the one on whose shoulders the responsibilties lie. That is the crux of St Aubyn’s book: how we all cope in our different ways with the terrifying choices that parenthood presents.

Memoirs

While sick, I’ve caught up on my reading, including two memoirs that are very different from each other. Both try to tease out the past, but one takes a journalistic approach and aims for veracity, while the other floats in and out of what I guess is creative non-fiction territory. In her foreword to The View From Castle Rock, a collection of stories about her family and herself, Alice Munro says:

I was doing something closer to what a memoir does - exploring a life, my own life, but not in an austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could. But the figures around this self took on their own life and color and did things they had not done in reality.

Her book is divided in two parts: one dealing with her Scottish ancestors and why they might have come to Canada, and the other with her own childhood and girlhood in Fifties Ontario. In the final section of the book, Messenger, she visits countryside near Chicago as an adult to seek out the cemeteries where family members who did not settle in Canada are buried. So she looks at her family’s past, her past and her present.

The book is beautiful; lively with attractive prose and depictions of settler life. I particularly enjoyed the part that dealt with the family’s sojourn on board ship - how fears of the youngest child’s being tossed overboard meant that they had to “tether” him at night (I think I would have done the same), the imagined relationship between an elderly and self-indulgent father-in-law and his matter-of-fact and acerbic daughter-in-law, hints of a love affair, dances and sightings of whales. While not wealthy or able to secure upper deck berths, the family are luckier than most and survive the journey intact and and well. It is only once they hit the shores of their new land, that their tragedies and dramas - possibly imagined by Munro, possibly not - unfold.

I also loved the section dealing with Munro’s childhood and girlhood in backwoods Ontario. The imagined and the real were threaded together imperceptibly, but I still desperately wanted to know which bits were fiction and which were true. While I enjoyed what she was doing, there was a part of me wanting clarification. She provides that in the foreword, saying that some characters “did things they did not do in reality”:

They joined the Salvation Army, they revealed they had once lived in Chicago. One of them got himself electrocuted and another fired off a gun in a barn full of horses. In fact, some of these characters have moved so far from their beginnings that I cannot remember who they were to start with.

Perhaps it is the journalist in me that wants to separate out fiction and non-fiction, or I must read more creative non-fiction and learn to go with the flow. As Munro asserts, they are just stories. Let me say, they are lovely stories, full of candid humour and insights into the oddness of the human condition. I’ve never read any Alice Munro short stories, but I guess they are full of the same.

I have also just finished reading another memoir, the craply titled Ja No, Man, by a young Canadian ex-South African called Richard Poplak. I sighed a little when I picked this book up. You know how movies set in the Eighties always have the same signifiers: someone playing with a Rubix Cube, people wearing day-glo clothing while Flock of Seagulls plays in the background? This book is covered with the same signifiers that shout Eighties South Africa to me, and its tag is A memoir of pop culture, girls, suburbia … and Apartheid. I thought it was going to be superficial, mindless and vaguely celebratory of what was really a horrible time to live in South Africa.

I’m glad to report that it isn’t. Poplak’s book is darkly funny, disturbing, and very well researched. He backs up his memories of growing up in Johannesburg in the Seventies and Eighties with acid offensives against the Apartheid state. He presents the eerie strangeness of being a child who only knows black people as servants, the indignities of Veldskool where he learnt about the immiment Communist threat and how to fold a flag, and the barbaric discipline of South African schools, where he was regularly sent for “six of the best”.

Poplak’s family left South Africa only a few weeks before Nelson Mandela was freed, so his book does not contain any reference to the miracle of the Rainbow Nation. While this might have eased his vituperative edge, it also means that the memoir is very specifically of its time and of its place. There is no sentiment, no schmaltz; Poplak addresses those two decades starkly. He makes no apology for not including black experience in the book - this is his experience and he presents it frankly, sometimes so frankly that I squirmed in uncomfortable recognition.

Towards the end of the book, he says:

It is a strange thing to be severed from the community of man - to be an island - as we were in South Africa. Isolation, both cultural and geographic, causes a certain kind of backwardness. The pastiche you create of the world, assembled from snippets of popular culture, hearsay, half-true news, and folkloric assumptions, is a patchwork quilt. Adrift, you create a world that only nominally hints at civilization. We were a quasi-democratic quasi-dictatorship, with a culture as anemic and as weirdly translucent as those deep-sea species of fish seen on the Discovery Channel. The flag Oom Piet raised with such reverence, the national anthems we sung with such forced gusto at assemblies - these were dead symbols for a dead country.

Richard Poplak and I and many millions of others are the products of Apartheid, and this dead culture. Thank goodness it is dead, and a new South Africa is rising from the ashes, but many are still paying the price of that cold grey time.

Poplak’s approach is very different from that of Munro. He says in his author’s note that it is both an act of memory and a work of journalism - if he remembered a certain tree as a jacaranda, he went back and checked that it was a jacaranda. He changes the names of teachers, certain schools and schoolfriends, and also clearly states that there are no composite characters, fictional places or made-up situations. His book is rigorous and factual, while Munro’s is swirling and exploratory.

It was an interesting experience reading these two different approaches to the memoir, neither better than the other, back-to-back. I would really appreciate any tips on good creative non-fiction, as it’s clearly a genre I want to explore more.

Italy Unplugged

(Written sometime in August …)

I’m writing this post on paper with the plan to transcribe it when I get home in - oh - a few days’ time. I’m not missing my computer or being permanently plugged in to the information tsunami, but I do miss the regular writing.

We are staying in a lovely campsite on the Italian coast, above Rome and below Pisa. The weather is mild - warm enough for beach and pool but not hot enough to require the air conditioning in our mobile home. It’s dry and dusty here - testament to the heatwave we have missed - but the campsite is situated in a lovely forest of parasol pines with tall trunks and gracious canopies that provide shade.

One of the many joys of being in Italy is the food. Why does everything taste better here? A salad of beautiful Tuscan tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella anointed in olive oil tastes like heaven, whereas in Germany it tastes like it’s trying too hard. We’ve enjoyed fine slices of Parma ham, chilled sweet melon, olives with a bite of chilli, olive paste on grissini, baby yellow tomatoes, succulent grapes the size of plums, spicy Tuscan sausages, calamari and daily doses of creamy icecream. Make mine a pistachio.

This part of Italy - Livorno - is supposed to be one of the centres of the Slow Food movement. I don’t have Google so I can’t check that for you, but it certainly feels that way. Aptly enough, while enjoying very slow food, I am also reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a wonderful book detailing her family’s attempt to spend a year eating both seasonally and locally. She defines local as within a 70 mile radius, but in the end the family grow and harvest most of their own food - even chickens and turkeys.

In the West, we have grown so distant from the source of our food, that just to witness Kingsolver’s attempt feels like watching a miracle. Not that I imagine for a second that I could “harvest” my own chicken or remember to water the vegetables that would feed my family for a year, but the work they do in conscious eating is inspiring.

Kingsolver is knowledgeable about the state of the protein production line and it does not make for easy reading, but it does make me want to never buy any factory farmed meat again. She is voiciferous on how farming corporations have undermined American farmers, forcing them to grow single crops in order to stay solvent. She decries non-seasonal eating, saying that food flown from China or other far-off lands merely to satisfy appetites costs not only the environment in terms of fossil fuels but also our bodies, because by the time it reaches our plates it is no longer nutrient-dense. She talks openly about how obesity is a function of capitalism:

No cashier ever held a gun to our heads and made us supersize it, true enough. But humans have an inbuilt weakness for fats and sugar. We evolved in lean environments where it was a big plus for survival to gorge on calorie-dense foods whenever we found them. Whether or not they understand the biology, food marketers know the weakness and have exploited it without mercy. Obesity is generally viewed as a failure of personal resolve, with no acknowledgment of the genuine conspiracy in this historical scheme. People actually did sit in strategy meetings discussing ways to get all those surplus calories into people who neither needed nor wished to consume them.

She makes an interesting point about the gap left in kitchens when women went out to work, and how corporations happily filled that gap with non-nutritious, calorific ready-meals. These full-time jobs that women now gladly have are:

… organized around the presumption that some wifely person is at home picking up the slack - filling the gap between school and workday’s end, doing errands only possible during business hours, meeting the expectation that we are hungry when we get home - but in fact June Cleaver has left the premises. Her income was needed to cover the mortgage and health insurance … Eating preprocessed or fast food can look like salvation in the short run, until we start losing what real mealtimes give to a family: civility, economy, and health.

Kingsolver says cooking is the great divide between good eating and bad. But the pressure to find the time to select (or as she does, grow) ingredients, plan a meal, cook it with joy and not under stress, and then eat it in a civilised and peaceable way with your family is great. I feel that pressure on a daily basis, and I do malign myself when I slap down another meal of fish fingers and peas in front of my sweetly uncomplaining children. However, what her book is doing for me is making me feel more committed to making better food choices for my family when I get home and continuing the journey of more conscious eating. I would recommend it for anyone who is interested in doing either or both, or who would like to witness one family’s bold attempt to go against the grain. There are also some great recipes, which I am going to try out. I may not actually make my own cheese, though.

Now where’s the buffalo mozzarella? I’m feeling peckish.

Recent Reading

Soon, we’ll be driving to Tuscany for a couple of weeks on the beach and the best thing, apart from sun, sand and Italian food, is that I can pack the boot of the car with as many books as I want to. I don’t have to worry about weight or select a few - I can take the whole damn lot. While I’m there I also intend to complete my novel outline for the first meeting of my writing group in September, flesh out some of my characters and maybe compose some offline posts about Tuscan beach culture (Are hoop earrings de rigeur?/ Is there such a thing as too little bikini?/Sandcastles I have known).

I realise I’ve been remiss about reviewing my recent reading. When I have big work projects on and house-guests, as I do now, I don’t stop reading but I don’t really have time to write in-depth reviews. While I await comment from my editor, and while my charming house-guests entertain my children, here’s an overview of the reading that’s been going on chez Charlotte recently.

Two Lives by Vikram Seth

I love Seth’s novels. He writes them big and fat and packed with characters, which is my favourite kind of book. Two Lives is a memoir and biography, and it is just as large and satisfying as one of his novels. It details the lives of Seth’s great-uncle Shanti and his wife Henny. Shanti moved to Berlin from India in the 1930s to study dentistry, and found rooms with Henny’s family. Henny managed to escape to England from Germany in 1939, but her mother and sister were unable to leave and eventually were murdered in a concentration camp. Seth researches the memoir after Henny’s death, so he pieces her story together through Shanti Uncle’s memories and Henny’s vivid correspondence. What was fascinating for me was the vibrant picture of Thirties Berlin, and Shanti and Henny’s glamorous and various group of friends. After the war, the group is of course shattered, with some members dead, others shamed by their Nazi connections and others trying to survive the depredations of postwar Germany. Henny’s Berlin friends were always deeply grateful for her care packages of chocolate, stockings and cigarettes. At one point, Seth travels to Israel to research state records of the Holocaust in order to find out how and where Henny’s family were killed, and is overcome with horror at the understated cruel efficiency of official German as it describes the removal of people from society. He writes, “I grew to hate the verbs”. That resonated so strongly with me. The German that I use every day is the same German that wiped out millions of people with its cruel deathly verbs. While parts of this book are difficult to read, Two Lives is written with sensitivity, affection and humour. I loved it.

The Memory-Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards. This is apparently a bestseller, but that hadn’t crossed my radar when I picked it up. I suspect I may have read about it on someone’s blog - my usual method of collecting recommendations. The storyline was intriguing: a couple have twins but when the husband, who is a doctor, sees that his daughter is a Downs baby, he hands her to a nurse with directions to remove her to a home. He then tells his wife that her daughter has died. The nurse takes the baby to the home, but when there, changes her mind and decides to raise the child herself in another city. The novel tells the parallel stories of these twins growing up in different circumstances. It was well-told and the characters were well-drawn and believable. I felt compassion for the wife who mourns her dead daughter, compassion for the husband living with his terrible secret, and admiration for the nurse who loves the little girl as her own. It’s a competent story and well-told. I think it would make a good beach book.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walsh. This is also a memoir and a gripping one. Walsh is one of four children raised by a pair of completely feckless parents. The father is a dreamer and and an alcoholic, and the mother is an artist who doesn’t see the point of cooking a meal, because it only lasts 15 minutes, while a painting lasts forever. Walsh’s first memory is of standing at the stove at the age of three cooking hotdogs because she is hungry. The boiling water spills on her, and she has to spend six weeks in hospital, from where her father “saves her” because he doesn’t want to pay the bills. This is only the beginning of a litany of stories about her parents which I read with my mouth hanging open. Despite neglect on a spectacular scale, three of the four children manage to survive relatively intact - Walsh herself becomes a successful journalist in New York. She writes of her childhood without bitterness and of her parents with affection. As a reader, I followed her trajectory of warmish feelings towards this astonishingly unconventional couple - until the scene where the children are picking through the bins at school for something to eat and when they get home, the mother dives under the comforter on her bed (where she spends most of the day) to take large bites of a chocolate bar she’s secreted there. I lost patience with the father even earlier. I think Walsh wants to present a non-judgmental picture of her parents, but merely by telling her story she does invite her readers to judge. I judged, and I found them guilty of extreme neglect.

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson. This is the second mystery story by the writer of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and the second featuring grizzled detective Jackson Brodie (the first was the acclaimed Case Histories). Atkinson is at the top of her game. One Good Turn is an excellent read, with a host of superbly-drawn characters, a great mystery and a wonderful twist at the end. If anyone’s looking for the perfect summer book, I’d say this is it. I seldom re-read, but I’m tempted to take this on holiday with me because I’d like to pay more attention to her style. She is so damn talented.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I’m not going to write too much about this book, as there are many acres of text on the Web already, but I loved it. It was beautiful. It’s terrifying portrait of a country, a poignant study of family and a testament to loyalty.

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody. I saw Ang Lee’s superb film a few years ago, so it was his images that were in my head when I read the book. Perhaps my slight disappointment stems from the disjunction between the film and the book, but I found the book’s preoccupation with male masturbation and overly knowing teenage girls a bit tiresome. It’s not intended to be comfortable reading, and it isn’t. Let’s just say that Moody draws a particularly unappealing portrait of the American male and his preoccupations, circa 1973.

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Right now, I’ve got two books going on. For fun, I’m reading Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder, a great thriller set in early twentieth-century New York. For intellectual challenge, I’m reading Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s a bold and fascinating book and it’s sure to spawn a blog post or two.

Reading in English

My husband and I are both bookworms. We have read to our kids since their babyhood in the hope that they would become readers too. They have grown up around books, watched us read books, slept with books in their beds. They know that books are a Good Thing. So with all this preparation, we have been keenly waiting for them to start reading books themselves.

While we are fairly - if ungrammatically - fluent in German, we both tend to choose to read in English. I have laboured over one or two German books, but seeing that reading is my main leisure activity, I didn’t really enjoy it being such hard work. For me, there is something special about reading in English. It brings me pure joy, relaxation and escape from the not always smooth or easy expatriate life. It’s my island in the sea of Germany, and it has a palm tree, white sands, a view of the sea, cool breezes and Pina Coladas. That’s how much fun it is.

When Lily started school last September, she knew her alphabet in English and could read and write a few English words. We had been loathe to teach her to read in English as the collective wisdom here is that that would confuse her when she started to read in German. We watched with pride as over the months she began to read fluently and without accent in German. She learnt to build words phonetically, as she was taught in school, and she started to bury her nose in German books.

We were thrilled, but also faintly anxious. When and how would she learn to read in English? Would we have to put in some effort and teach her? What would happen if we moved to an English-speaking country and she was behind in her reading? Should we arrange extra lessons?

Then, in May, she picked up an English book and read it with squeals of glee. “I can read! I’m reading in English! I really really am!” Cue huge, but disguised, parental sighs of relief. She really was reading, and began to read everything in sight, progressing quickly from storybooks with pictures to novels like The Magic Faraway Tree and the Secret Seven books.

Once it had dawned on me that my child really, really was reading in English, I asked her what had happened. It turns out that for the two weeks in May when our DVD player wasn’t behaving properly, all the movies that she watched were being shown with the subtitles turned on.

“Mummy, I would hear the words and then see them written on the screen,” she explained to me.

Yes, television taught my child to read. When I thought about it, it made perfect sense. I remember learning to read with flashcards back in 1970-whatever, and the subtitles had had exactly the same effect. We had primed her, made her ready for reading, but the flashcard effect of seeing the subtitles onscreen helped her to make the connections between letters and sounds.

So now when I meet earnest German mummies in the playground who like to say how bad telly is for their kids, I love explaining how Lily learnt to read in English and watching their faces drop.

I’m a bit naughty that way.