Books for a New Year

It’s a new year and as good of a time as ever to breathe some life into this Battered Women blog. Let’s get literary.

I compiled a list of ten books I want to read this year. They aren’t all recent, nor are they all about food. Many of them are waiting on my shelf right now, becoming fully exasperated with my endless blogging.

Books I Want to Read in 2012

1. Welcome to Higby by Mark Dunn – I started this one on the train today. The story centers on a small town of eccentrics and religious fanatics. Mark Dunn writes really fantastic dialogue – a man preaching the gospel to a cat and a woman taking budgeting advice from her sassy, black guardian angel.

2. The Master and Margarita by Mikail Bulgakov – From what I gather, Satan ambles into Moscow like he owns the place, the relationship between Soviet society and artists is explored, and an enormous talking cat imbues a great deal of vodka. There’s also a story within a story about Jesus.

3. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender – A girl goes through life tasting the emotions of other’s through the food they cook. Liza enjoyed this book immensely and now it’s gracing the shelf of borrowed books in my enormous bookcase. (You might remember a previous post long, long ago about The Girl with the Flammable Skirt.)

4. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell – I loved the observant and precocious child narrators in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Swamplandia! appears to expand on one of my favorite short stories from the collection, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator.”

5. Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link –.One might mistake this for a Nancy Drew mystery based on the cover art. It’s a short story collection drawing from fairy tales, Greek mythology, and famous acts of cannibalism.

6. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino – Marco Polo tells stories about cities he has seen while traveling to Kublai Khan as his empire crumbles. Sounds magical.

7. Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski – Two starry-eyed teenagers embark on a metaphoric road trip through history. I need to tackle this now because Danielewski’s 27 volume project about cats will probably take a great deal of time to read.

8. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke – This historical account of wizardry in England during the Napoleonic Wars told in witty British prose and footnotes was recommended to me by a friend. Totaling in at one thousand and twenty-four pages, it will likely take three months of the year on its own. It still pales in comparison to Danielewski’s cat saga.

9. Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting - From what I’ve read, it’s a collection of stories about women who hold unglamorous, unlikely jobs. The cover of this book features a woman holding a fish and reminds me a lot of Leonor Fini's painting "Le Bout Du Monde."

10. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov – Not having read Lolita feels kind of like not having seen Planet of the Apes. Not that the two have anything to do with each other but for the fact that I also haven’t seen Planet of the Apes.

What are you excited to read this year?

Girl With the Flammable Pumpkin- Pumpkin Bread

"I think about that girl I read about in the paper- the one with the flammable skirt...She wore it to a party and was dancing, too close to the vanilla-smelling candles, and suddenly she lit up like a pine needle torch...But what I keep wondering is this: That first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was the candles, did she think she'd done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?" The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender

I love this paragraph. I do. It's even more satisfying in the original context. I neglected to put some key sentences in the quote, because it is my personal opinion that this paragraph alone is so perfect that it could stand along as a piece of flash fiction and I don't feel right about copying an entire piece of work. Or the shorter version- go read this.

I carved the above pumpkin. And then I realized I had recreated this scene. The girl in the skirt. And her passion had arrived...

Anything worth doing takes passion. Something that makes you thrum with excitement as you realize that this was something you were meant to do. That this is something you want to do- that you can do- and the marriage of the two is so perfect that you can't help but be gleeful. It doesn't matter how long or hard the task is, you have the patience to see it through. To make things is my passion. I love to make things that weren't there before, to piece different things together to see them in a new light. I want to carve a pumpkin, to bake a batch of cookies, to write a perfect sentence. You don't have to love only one thing, but if you find a single thing to love, it will see you through anything. 

Even pumpkin carving...

There's something satisfying about gutting a pumpkin. The seeds are cold to the touch and covered in orange goop. They resist leaving the squash, hanging on by fibrous threads, until with a good yank they come free. And yet no matter how disgusting they feel on your skin, you still love scrapping the carcass clean of all seeds. Then comes to scalpel.

Insert Evil Grin Here.

The cut up carcass is then hoisted onto the porch and has a hot candle shoved inside of it. Very kid friendly, no? What are we teaching our children? How to be sadistic pumpkin murderers? Probably.

So tonight, let's burn some pumpkins! Who's with me! I'll get the torch...

...Or we could just make some pumpkin bread. Fine. Be like that.

Pumpkin Bread

(Recipe from: Jane Brody's Good Food Book)

1/2 cup of sugar

1/2 cup vegetable oil

3/4 cup pumpkin puree

2 eggs

1 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup chopped walnuts

1/2 cup blueberries

1/4 cup chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9 by 5 by 3-inch loaf pan.

Beat together sugar, oil, pumpkin, and eggs. 

In a separate bowl, stir together the flours, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt. Fold into pumpkin mixture, just enough to combine. Do not over mix.

Stir in remaining ingredients. Pour batter into pan.

Bake for an hour or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let the bread cool in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes. Remove bread from pan and cool completely.

What do you love?