First, a book for all of us bloggers.
Could we be doing it better?
Doing what? Blogging, of course. We are all busy putting out stuff, reblogging other people’s stunning pictures or quotes, but are we reaching the audience we want?
Arianna Stasinopoulos is an author and columnist, best known now as co-founder of the news website The Huffington Post. (Huffington was her married name, presumably more pronounceable than her original Greek name). In 2009 she was named as number 12 in Forbes’ first ever list of the Most Influential Women in Media. So it makes sense to take note of what she says.
She starts by questioning whether blogging is as big a revolution as the one created by the printer Johannes Gutenberg in mid 15th century Germany. She asks professors, actors and film makers why they blog and has come up with a guide to getting started and getting noticed.
Her advice can be condensed into 8 rules:
1. Blog often
2. Perfect is the enemy of done
3. Write like you speak
4. Focus on specific details
5. Own your topic
6. Know your audience
7. Write short
8. Become part of the conversation with like-minded blogs
What are we waiting for? To buy the book, click on the link below. To join the 2,000 bloggers writing for the Huffington Post check out the US or UK website.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Huffington-Post-Complete-Guide-Blogging/dp/1439105006
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Weevily biscuits and rotten meat?
When we learned history in school we were taught the dry facts of Admiral Nelson’s naval battles. No-one thought to tell us what it was like for the sailors on board the ships. Now Janet Macdonald has come up with a book that brings to life those month-long voyages and the vast amounts of food kept in the hold without refrigeration. They were feeding over 150,000 men, providing each with 5000 calories a day.
Far from the poor diet we might imagine, the men were served hot meat meals (often salt pork or beef) with additional rations of biscuit, cheese and peas. Meat was preserved in casks filled to the brim with melted butter.
It’s hard to believe that a ship might have had 200 pigs on board - ready to be slaughtered to provide fresh meat for the hungry crew. Goats too were tethered in the hold to provide milk. There were cows as well, but these were thrown overboard before an imminent battle. We are left to imagine what happened when bad weather or enemy action prevented the lighting of fires for weeks and assume the bland diet of cold, preserved meats was served day after day. The officers were luckier, often having supplies of mushroom ketchup, spices, pickled onions or anchovies. There are even accounts detailing the purchase of olives, parmesan cheese and oil. The men had to make do with a keg of butter with occasional hairs in it. When they finally got to the bottom - finding more and more hairs - they would discover a bald dead mouse.
In spite of all this they were healthy; provided with enough protein to deal with the rigorous work of sailing the ship and firing the guns. Fruits and vegetables were occasionally purchased from far off islands, with one commander reputed to have delayed sailing in order to coincide with the mango harvest on the Indian Malabar coast. Once the cause of scurvy was discovered, the sailors were given limes or lemon juice to prevent the disease.
Macdonald’s book is a scholarly work, detailing not only what the navy ate, but how it was procured and distributed. She ends with some practical recipes, explaining how to make salt beef and biscuits (the forerunner of the Carr’s Table Water Biscuit which has been produced in England since 1831).
She must also have a sense of humour because she gives details of how to make Portable Soup. This turns out to be a soup bouillon cube. Next time we tear the foil off a cube of concentrated beef stock, we should perhaps consider Macdonald’s tried and tested method of cooking shin of beef for 13 hours, straining the broth and then reducing it to a jelly which is then dried in the oven for a further few hours before it is cut into squares.
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Mutiny on the Bounty - the real story
The story of Fletcher Christian and Captain Bligh has been told in print and in 3 films. The mutineer has been played by Clark Gable (1935) Marlon Brando (1962) and Mel Gibson (1984).
Now a new story emerges of those extraordinary events that took place in the South Seas in 1789 - and who better to tell the tale than the great, great, great grandson of the mutineer and his Tahitian wife. Glynn Christian, intrigued by the story of his namesake Fletcher, has spent years getting into the mind of an 18th century Tahitian woman, Mauatua. While the original films had a male perspective, Glynn’s book tells the truth, from a woman’s point of view.
The bloodless mutiny was just the beginning. When the women came on board, they brought with them lust and pagan traditions, but when it came to establishing a society on the uninhabited island of Pitcairn, they imposed order and fairness, based on votes and education for women which were both unheard of in the rest of the world.
Mrs. Christian is the story of passion and perseverance. It tells how the men on Pitcairn built houses and got drunk, while the women, finally freed from the male dominance of their home in Tahiti, made decisions for themselves about partnerships and children. The book is eye-opening. Idyllic South Sea islands hide secrets - a sun-soaked setting for heart-rending family feuds.
Glynn Christian is an award-winning food writer and TV chef. Here he has turned his hand to crafting a story of fascinating detail with insights into a far off society that make the reader shudder. Click on the picture to buy a copy of the book and settle down for a good read.
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Daniel Deronda
This novel is intriguing on many levels. It was written by Mary Anne Evans - better known as George Eliot, a male pen name she chose to avoid being stereotyped as a ‘romantic woman novelist’.
The story focuses on two characters: Daniel Deronda, an orphan, who has been brought up in upper class society and Gwendolen, a selfish, self-absorbed beauty who is married to the aristocratic Grandcourt, even though she knows he has a mistress and children. Daniel and Gwendolen have a simmering attraction, carried out more in dialogue than in deeds. Their paths only cross occasionally.
Daniel rescues a poor Jewess from suicide and in search of his own unknown parentage, gets drawn into a poor Jewish community. This was Eliot’s chance to put her views on contemporary Victorian society and in particular the derogatory view of Jews held by the middle and upper classes.
Unlike Dickens who wrote in instalments for the mass market, George Eliot assumed that her readers were well educated. She sprinkled her narrative with references to classical myths and art; she included poetry of Keats and Wordsworth and quoted, without translation, from texts in German, French and Italian.
For me the long monologues and moralizing were a bit tedious, but I was absorbed by the exploration of Gwendolen and Grandcourt’s marriage where both partners appear outwardly content, while inwardly conducting a stony relationship that is steadily and silently destroying them.
Daniel Deronda was Eliot’s last novel, written when she was 57. The mixture of social satire and moral searching is as controversial today as it was in 1876.
It also happens to be a ripping story, which is why it has been filmed several times. Click on the picture to read a more detailed review of the book.
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What’s new in the world of cooking?
This is the cover of a 600-page book in Italian. Why should I feature it on a blog going mainly to English speakers? Because it is a definitive work on the origins of good food. Pellegrino Artusi wrote “Science in the Kitchen and The Art of Eating Well” in 1891. Beginning with a history of food from Roman times, he documents Italian recipes in a warm and readable style: giving instructions and explanations that any modern cook will happily follow.You want to know how to make biscotti, panettone, zabaione and fried zucchini? You’ll find them all here, as well as what we think of as modern dishes like Black Risotto with squid ink or crostini.
A master cook, Artusi also wrote about foreign food: English plum pudding, Roast beef (‘a dish for mainly male diners’), German Kugelhopf, French brioches and rum babas. He tells how a minestrone soup served to him in the 1850s in Livorno made him ill and left him fearing that he had contracted cholera. He distinguishes between ‘fine cooking’ and a chicken stuffed with sausage and chestnut which he says is ‘for a family’. He devotes 5 lines to the cooking of duck and 2 pages to goose, which he had hardly ever eaten since it wasn’t available in the markets in Florence.
He ponders the purpose of life; wondering why art or music lovers are considered superior to food lovers. He concludes that “you can live if you are blind or deaf, but not without a sense of taste”.
The good news is that this masterpiece has been translated into English. Click on the picture to find out more.
(For more on Artusi and his influence on modern cooking, please scroll down and click on the flower picture to go to my blog in The Huffington Post). * * * * *
A great first novel
Imagine waking up every morning with no knowledge of who or where you are. Your ‘husband’ is a stranger, your past is non-existent. This is the story of Christine, a married woman who has had an accident that wiped out her memory.
So far this seems an ordinary account of amnesia, but the intrigue grows as it transpires Christine’s husband is not telling her the truth; concealing the existence of her son and pretending her best friend has left for New Zealand. A therapist tells Christine to begin keeping a notebook, writing down what she can piece together of her life, so that each day she can re-read it. The novel is well written, with mounting excitement as we learn the real cause of the memory loss and explore the ways family members deal with such a damaged mind.
The author SJ Watson describes the pain of losing one’s identity: ‘a hot stab of sadness’; ‘it’s only my grief that is fresh every day.’ He delves into the misery of being reminded of a death or a disaster: ‘I carry the jagged shards of memory with me always…. like tiny bombs… at any moment one might pierce the surface and force me to go through the pain as if for the first time.’
Before I Go to Sleep is billed as ‘Quite simply the best debut novel I’ve ever read.’ For a more in-depth review, please click on the picture.
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Why not say what happened?
This is the title of Ivana Lowell’s memoirs: a sordid tale of the rich and their abominable behaviour. Cloaked in the guise of ‘true stories’ Ivana writes about the drunken exploits of the Guinness family, their promiscuity and the arrogance of the aristocracy.
Reviewers praise the ‘wonderfully terrible secrets writers seldom have the guts to tell.’ and ‘a dazzling new literary voice’. But far from a ‘fascinating story of a tragic and remarkable family’ I found the book poorly written and full of cliches.
Lowell dredges up the rich and famous who flitted across the lives of her mother and grandmother: Lucien Freud (one of her three stepfathers), Francis Bacon, The Duke of Devonshire, the Queen Mother. At one stage the book descends to the level of the plotline of the Abba musical Mamma Mia where the heroine is trying to work out which of three men is her father.
She revels in her own and her mother’s drink-fuelled outbursts: ‘I must have stormed out of every fashionable restaurant and nightclub in London.’ ‘At the time I thought we were behaving so glamourously - a modern day Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald.’
Perhaps her editor was getting bored with these tabloid-type revelations and encouraged her to go a step further. Ivana gives an account of how she was sexually abused by her nanny’s husband when she was a child. She would have us believe that ‘on the nights he didn’t visit I was disappointed’ and ‘perhaps I didn’t want it to end’. Oral sex at the age of six? Are we meant to go along with her memories of a feeling of power over an adult?
Near the end her dying grandmother returns to her flat in fashionable Hans Crescent to be welcomed by her maid, chauffeur and secretary. Ivana, in typical unfeeling mode, ‘left them all to it, grabbed my bag and walked home alone to my flat in Sloane street’.
Take out the name dropping and the luxury apartments and what is left? A self-centred alcoholic struggling with rehab and relationships. If this memoir had been sent to a publisher by an unknown writer, it would have ended up in the slush pile.
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Blink - the art of instant decisions
An art expert sees a 10-million dollar sculpture and in a flash realizes it’s a fake. A marriage analyst studies a 15-minute video of a couple and accurately predicts whether they will stay together.
Blink is about those moments when we ‘know’ something without really knowing why. The author Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote Outliers and The Tipping Point, believes a snap judgment, made very quickly, can actually be more effective than one made deliberately and cautiously. He thinks we can train ourselves to make better decisions, in other words, ‘educating our unconscious reactions.’
The book is full of examples: how salesmen ‘manipulate’ their clients, how our perceptions of a successful person may be based on false ideas: he tells how a mediocre politician, Warren Harding, made it to the White House as President simply because he was tall and good looking. Gladwell reveals how a food company rebranded its white margarine by colouring it yellow, wrapping it in foil and renaming it Imperial Margarine. Sales rocketed.
One of my favourite stories is of the female French horn player who was auditioning for a place in an orchestra. She insisted on playing behind a screen so the judges couldn’t see her. They unanimously agreed that this was a first class musician. If they’d known she was a woman, they’d have assumed she couldn’t play the horn and would have passed her over.
Click on the picture to read more about the book.
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Instant culture
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens was first published in weekly instalments in 1859 and eventually sold 200 million copies. It’s a page turning story about the French Revolution. For anyone who hasn’t read ‘the classics’ it might come as a surprise that Dickens’ language is so readable. I chose this as the first book I read on my new Kindle. It’s light enough to take with me wherever I go so I dipped into it for short periods over a week or so. A Tale of Two Cities is enthralling, shocking and touching.
Nicholas Sarkozy has been told to improve his image and become more cultured. With this in mind he is now reading Balzac and watching, back to back, all the films of Alfred Hitchcock. There is serious doubt about whether anyone can acquire ‘culture’ in a matter of months, but a slightly more serious worry: shouldn’t the President of France have his mind on other matters, rather than watching endless films and reading novels.
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Barbecue summer
Here’s a book that will keep you busy for the next ten summers! It’s bursting with information about marinades, rubs, equipment and every possible kind of grilled meat or seafood.
I love the author’s Acknowledgments Page. After his wife he lists 3 pages of people from 30 countries who helped him create this ‘bible’.
When it gets down to the basics, he tells us that true barbecuing is a long, slow, indirect cooking method using smouldering logs or charcoal. He’s talking about cooking whole pigs and turkeys for more than 12 hours. Now that might come as news to those of us who slap a steak on to a high heat grill.
To get down to the recipes, there’s a lot! Persian Beef Kebabs, Turkish Lamb on Skewers, Malaysian Chicken Satay and a reminder of something I used to make: sweet and sticky Boston Baked Beans. Those will keep me going for starters.
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Magic and the brain
Two neuroscientists have infiltrated the world of magic and studied the connection between what we see and what we think we see. This exciting book explores what magic and illusions can teach us about the human mind. It won’t just change the way you view magicians, it will also change how you think.
Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde have worked with illusionists, mentalists and card experts. They’ve studied their methods and used that knowledge to discover more about how our brains work.
What makes this book unique are the revelations of how tricks are done, linked to websites that actually show us how the magic is created. So, long after we’ve closed the book, we can enjoy watching amazing feats of skill and deception. But if you think revealing the secrets spoils the magic, it’s the reverse. The more you are told about how a trick works, the more you want to see it again, to try to spot the moment where our minds are deceived.
One lesson is that multitasking is a myth: the idea that we can do two or more activities simultaneously is false. We may think we are dealing with texts or emails while sitting at a meeting, but the fact is that our brains can only deal efficiently with one process at a time. Magicians exploit our weakness by splitting our attention so we can’t fully concentrate on any part of the stage at a given time.
They also know that memory is fallible; the more time elapses between the acquisition and recovery of that memory, the less accurate it is. This knowledge fools us when watching stage magicians but it should also remind us to keep records of important information or conversations immediately after they happen.
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Far from perfect
Introducing her book of short fiction, the author quotes Leonard Cohen saying “….. there is no perfection, this is a broken world and we live with broken hearts and broken lives.”
The eleven stories are linked: they feature various characters in the same town in a narrative daisy chain that allows the reader to know Samson’s characters better perhaps than they know themselves.
A failed pianist - now a piano tuner - visits several homes. Their owners are revealed to be troubled by childhood memories, an unfaithful husband, an unwanted baby. At times we lose track of how the characters are linked but each tale is complete in itself, an “exquisitely crafted miniature” according to the Financial Times reviewer.
The outwardly perfect lives of Samson’s characters are threatened with collapse and disruption. Apparently prosperous, well-organised and contented, these men and women are holding on by a thread. How true this is of most of the people we all know: they seem calm and able to cope yet beneath the facade they are probably struggling with quarrelsome families or fears of inadequacy.
To read more about these characters and a fuller review (from The Guardian) please click on the cover picture. Incidentally, the author is married to David Gilmour of Pink Floyd - though that has nothing to do with her prose.
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Prize winning novelist
Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth, has come up with another winner. On Beauty is set mainly in New England, and partly in London. It’s about a pair of feuding families and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high ideals and asks searching questions about what life does to love.
The book has had dazzling reviews: “Ambitious, hugely impressive, beautifully observed” The Guardian; “Astonishing… much Smith’s best book” Evening Standard; and “Glorious, wonderfully engaging, wonderfully observed” New York Times.
For me, she scores on drawing out scenes of tension, leading up to the reading of a will or an argument. Zadie Smith writes with a wisdom not expected for her age (36): “When people get married, there is often a battle to see which family - the husband’s or the wife’s - will prevail.” She details Mozart’s Requiem in a page of brilliance and can turn her descriptive eye to the mundane: “his ears are not noticeable, which is all one can ask of ears.” She writes of family life - black mixed with white, rich with poor - and exposes the mismatch of hopes and expectations.
A book I was sorry to close - one that deserves the accolades it won when it first came out in 2005.
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A long read - Anthony Trollope
The beauty of a Kindle is that it’s so light you can take it anywhere. I’ve been reading one of Anthony Trollope’s novels on my thin little gadget for a couple of weeks and I’m still only 80% through it. And that’s the trouble with a Kindle. You have no idea how many pages there are - only what percentage of the book you have read. So midway through Can She Forgive Him I went to find the real book which we have on the shelves. I’d forgotten it was there, but the man in the Armchair Kitchen has read all forty something of Trollope’s novels and has been advising me for ages to put aside some of the modern stuff that’s been recommended in favour of 19th century humour and insight.
The recent judging of the Man Booker Prize caused controversy when the head of the panel claimed they had to go for something that is ‘readable’ - bringing a torrent of complaints that it’s not only airport blockbusters that make you turn the page.So I continue to click through what turns out to be about 850 pages. Coming up soon, a short review of a long and brilliant book.
