Books in the Bathtub

Day 22.

One wonderful benefit to this fast has been all the long, hot baths I’ve been taking lately and all the books I’ve been able to read as a result.

I LOVE to read. But life gets in the way, and there are only so many nights you can go to bed at midnight and read until two before you need pharmaceuticals to get through the next day. (Or reading glasses. As much as I HATE to admit it, that time is inching nearer. Rapidly.)

Or maybe I just need a better reading lamp.

All this time on the cardio machines at the gym helps, too. But it’s a LOT harder to read bouncing up and down on the elliptical than it was on the old lady bike.

Sigh.

In the past week or two I’ve read, among other things:

P.D. James “The Private Patient” about a well-known investigative journalist who is murdered in a plastic surgery clinic outside of London. I like and respect P.D. James, but this is not one of her better ones. It started out slow and never got any better. It’ll be nice when the new Elizabeth George novel comes out. In May, I think. Hers books are incredibly tragic, incredibly gruesome murder mysteries, but she’s a phenomenal writer and one I hope to learn from. She was an English and writing teacher for years and has also written a great writing book  “Write Away” that I think is one of the best—regardless of genre.

“Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven” by Fannie Flagg, she of “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.” This dragged a bit at the beginning, but is really a sweet book with a nice message. It’s been on my pile for a while: I was searching for a caramel cake recipe last spring and read somewhere that this book has a great recipe for caramel cake with caramel frosting in the back, so I bought it. It does—and a couple of other recipes that sound fun—and I’ll bake it sometime when I’m eating again.

And about half of  “A Dirty Job” by Christopher Moore–a really strange book about a thrift-store owner in San Francisco, but I’m still reading.

I read pretty fast—it’s very rare that I dislike a book so much that I don’t finish. I can only recall two off-hand: One was “She’s Come Undone” by Wally Lamb, and the other was “The Lovely Bones.” Yes, I realize that I’m only one of seven people on the planet that didn’t like that one, but I don’t care. I hated it. Didn’t even finish reading it, just scanned the rest and threw it far away. Not going to the movie, either.

Ick.

But back to the bathtub. There have, predictably, been some unfortunate incidents. An old Agatha Christie: “Poirot Loses a Client,” I think it was, and at least one or two other books have been the victims of accidental dippings. Only one book—a particularly thick one—actually got dropped all the way in.

Ooops.

I now have a new only-paperbacks-in-the-bathtub rule.

And a whole stack of books, still waiting to be read.

Cooking with Books

When my cousin was here a few weeks ago, she’d just seen the movie “Julie and Julia.” She loved it—and thought I would, too—and wanted to see my copy of that first, original Julia Child cookbook, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”

It’s not unreasonable for her to assume that I would have it. I’ve been collecting cookbooks since before I could read and have a pretty good collection.

The majority of them are here:

A couple of key volumes are in the kitchen, here,

 

and here,

-including a Simone Beck! (That one was a gift—I’ve never actually used it.)

The rest are in two mis-matched bookcases in the living room; some are stacked with the Christmas  and Easter books (I love Easter); and some absolute favorites, plus all the recipes I tear out of magazines or get from friends and can’t wait to try, are in two big drawers in the kitchen.

But I didn’t have that one.

It took me almost two years in the last house to get all my books organized. And I mean ALL my books: the classics, the books on natural history, the children’s books, the writing books, the photography books, the sci-fi and fantasy books, etc.  And they were REALLY organized: for the first time, maybe ever, I had almost enough room, and had made the time to sort them all. A lot of them were shelved two deep, but for a brief, glorious moment in time I knew where every single one was.

And then I moved again.

I tried really, really hard to keep them organized as I was packing. How does that saying go? “We plan, God laughs.”

So now I don’t know (yet) exactly where all my books are, I still don’t have enough bookcases (is there such a thing?), and even the categories that are more or less all in one place, like my cookbooks, still aren’t sorted properly.

Which is why I couldn’t find the Julia Child book when my cousin asked for it. I didn’t even think I had it—I’ve never been big on French cooking, and couldn’t remember ever using it. And I hate to admit it—but for a while there, Julia Child was a little bit of a joke. I knew someone in college who worked for her for a while, and there were some stories….

Anyway, we did manage to find another book of hers, which, after paging through it for maybe half a minute, my ‘cooking-is-so-NOT-my-favorite-thing’ cousin handed it back with a “well, the movie was really good. I think you should go see it.”

So I finally did.

And I did love it. It’s nice to know that a movie like that can still get made.

And it turns out that I have every single one of the cookbooks they showed in the movie (except for the one with the ‘Marshmallow Fluff”).  And so I started stressing a little, thinking maybe I should get a copy of  “Mastering…” after all, and thinking that all the good, old, copies are probably expensive by now, and consoling myself that a new one would do just as well, when, near the end of the movie, they show Julia receiving her first copy of that first book.

And I realized that, of course I had it. And I knew exactly where it was. I came straight home, went straight to the bookcase, and pulled it out. (I’m a very visual person. I just didn’t remember what it looked like.) And since my cookbooks still aren’t sorted properly, it wasn’t where it should have been.

It’s right there, in that first photo of the green bookcases, just a scootch southwest of dead center: the (slightly torn) paper cover is kind of a teal green with white spots, and it has a soft orange box around the title. It’s on the wrong shelf—that’s the shelf where the baking/chocolate/candy making books are. Or should be. It’s a 1969 edition. Just eight years after it was first published, they were already on the eighteenth printing.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could say that about one of my books someday?

But Julia’s still on the shelf for now. There’s a recipe for a scrumptious-sounding dessert I’ve been wanting to try in that pile in the kitchen drawer…and I’m going to make it tonight, so it’ll be ready for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow.

I’m grateful for so many things. Being able to read is one of them. Scrumptious desserts are another. And having family and friends to share them with, most important of all.

Bon Appétit!