A surprise?

A couple of years ago, British author Ian McEwan conducted an admittedly unscientific experiment. He and his son waded into the lunch-time crowds at a London park and began handing out free books. Within a few minutes, they had given away 30 novels. Nearly all of the takers were women, who were “eager and grateful” for the freebies while the men “frowned in suspicion, or distaste.” The inevitable conclusion, wrote McEwan in The Guardian newspaper: “When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”

Is this a surprise?  Surveys consistently find that women read more books than men, especially fiction. Explanations abound, from the biological differences between the male and female brains, to the way that boys and girls are introduced to reading at a young age.

What about blogs? Are there more women tumbling than men? Are men more or less interested in reading about food?

Tell me what you think. I’d love to hear from you.  Click on the Ask me Anything button and let me know your views.

The research in this post is reblogged from wordpainting:

Find more details by clicking on the picture.

The road ahead

“I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.”

John Updike (via tobeshelved)

The Armchair Kitchen started with many strands: mainly food, but also book reviews, quotes and general thoughts about writing. As so many bloggers are creative I believe they are interested in comments from famous people and writers in particular.

The food aspect is now dominant but on Sundays you can expect to find a quotation - something to make you think and hopefully, make you smile.

Here (below) is today’s thought - with a picture that links it to food!

Magic and persuasion

Would you trust a man looking like this to manipulate your mind into making you thin? Look at the glitzy watch, the cool black shirt and designer suit and glasses.  This is a hypnotist. He wants to reprogram your brain to help you ‘change your behaviour, eat better, speed up your metabolism’.

Paul McKenna starts by revealing the secrets of naturally thin people. He then tells you some Golden Rules:

When you think you’re full - stop eating
When you are hungry - eat
Eat what you want - not what you think you should

How brilliant is that? Don’t we all know this?  And if all the diet and lifestyle books worked, wouldn’t we all be thin and contented?

McKenna doesn’t talk about exercising, but he offers a ‘powerful exercise to train your unconscious mind to help you lose weight’: You have to imagine you’re watching a movie of a thin, happy, confident YOU. Make any changes you need and then step into that person.

To stop cravings he suggests a mumbo jumbo of tapping various body parts and humming while you try to forget about the food.
 
Need I go on? the book is a con. If it really worked there would be no fat people out there.  Everyone would be training their mind and watching their inner video.

Most of us are eager to get a grip on our lives. My first step towards achieving this is to keep away from the areas in bookstores devoted to self-help. Go and read a novel instead.

Kitchen stuff

Roam through the kitchen departments of large stores and you’ll find an overwhelming choice of saucepans, mixers and blenders. The sales staff will say you can’t do without a food processor or a slow cooker. Your friends will tell you to buy a deep fat fryer or a steamer.

The truth is you need very few of these.  To do the work of basic food preparation you need 5 or 6 items:

a fork, some spoons, some sharp knives, stacking ovenproof glass bowls, a grater, a sieve and a non-stick frying pan.

Then there are two small electrical machines that are really essential. I’m not going to tell you here what they are. But if you’re tempted you can buy the book that gives you the low-down, in a chapter called Those Wonderful Machines.

The book is A Feast in Fifteen Stories - a new start for hesitant cooks. It’s available from Amazon for just one penny!  Really.  What have you got to lose?

Scroll down, then click on the picture to order one. Be prepared for a good read and a huge dose of encouragement.

A giveaway

Here’s a chance to buy an exciting cookbook for just one penny. There’s no catch - it’s on Amazon and that’s what it costs.

This is a book for anyone who is even slightly nervous in the kitchen.  It’s full of humour and gets to the heart of what cooking is about.

A Feast in Fifteen Stories has changed the way thousands of people look at making meals and taken the worry and hassle out of entertaining.

Click on the photo to buy a copy.

An expensive and unnecessary makeover

James Daunt, the Managing Director of the Waterstone’s book chain, has decided to dump the apostrophe to make it more ‘versatile and practical’. Practical for who? Those who want to buy online?  I think Google can cope with the old spelling and this move is hardly likely to recapture the trade lost to Amazon. Daunt went on to talk of introducing ‘a font that reflects authority and confidence.’ Now we’re getting nearer to his thinking: design and lettering are a subtle way of influencing purchasers.

A study was done showing that students who submitted the same work in different fonts got better grades if they used, say, Times Roman, than Georgia.
Changing the Waterstone’s lettering and ditching the apostrophe will cost the company plenty: just think of employing all those sign writers and buying thousands of new bags for a start.  It had better be worth it - in the end it’s the customers who will be paying.

(The photo was taken at the O2 Centre in Finchley Road, London. I wonder if the book chain owner would like to get the cafe renamed too!)

Sifting

Ever wondered why recipes suggest that you should sift the flour?  The answer is to get rid of any lumps. Equally important, sifting makes it lighter as more air is incorporated into an otherwise heavy mass. In the past rice or flour might have contained pieces of stone that you’d want to separate.

Last week I wrote about Pierre Blot’s 19th century book (A Pile of Cooking Know-How). It was written as a manual for Ladies and their Professional Cooks and contained ‘the whole science and art of preparing human food.’

I’ve done a bit of sifting and if you scroll down you can see some of his more
outrageous comments and those that still hold good today.

(Photo by Ilian.  Click on the picture to go to his website.)

The Lady with the Little Dog

I have seen plays by Chekhov, but never read his short stories.  On a recommendation I downloaded a collection of these to my Kindle. (Remember that many works by long dead writers are free).

Chekhov was at his best writing about peasants and the harshness of life in the Russian countryside. But The Lady with the Little Dog, first published in 1899, could almost be a modern tale - a story of love, deception and unresolved adultery.

To find out more, please click on the picture (which of course is a very different lady).

Getting older is better than the alternative

If you look at the photo of Nora Ephron inside the back cover of her book, you’d think she was….. 50, maybe 60. She looks like Jane Fonda - a woman in her 70s who has had the benefits of physical fitness, hair dye and plastic surgery. Ephron was a hugely successful screen writer (When Harry Met Sally was her most famous film). She has written with wit and emotion about her divorce in Heartburn and now comes to the subject of ageing in I remember Nothing.

The book starts with thoughts about memory loss but quickly moves on to 22 short pieces about modern life, told with wisdom and humour. She writes:
“These are some of the things I know, and they’re entirely useless, and take up way too much space in my brain.” Because they are things we want to know too, we get the pleasure of her thoughts on egg white omelettes, intrusive waiters pushing yet another bottle of mineral water, and the six stages of email, going from the first infatuation, through disenchantment to finally giving up on it.

She ends with a recipe (see below) and 2 lists: “What I won’t miss”  and “What I will miss” (presumably when she is dead.) We might all spare some thought to what we really want to be doing. Ephron puts it well: “If this is one of the last days of my life, am I doing exactly what I want to be doing?”

(The quotation “Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative” is from Maurice Chevalier, a French actor and singer who died in 1972.

Just found out that four of my books are on sale at eBay: my novel The Camel Trail, and three books on food. If any of you want to pick up a book for 99p - £6, it’s a bargain. Just google Judy Jackson eBay and you’ll find the details.

By the way, authors get nothing from sales like this, but that’s not the point. Last week someone came by my house and looked through my collection of hundreds of cookbooks, looking for a present for a young friend. I ended up showing her a copy of my step-by-step picture cookbook which came out some time ago.  Instead of ordering one of the others (by more famous writers) she ended up choosing that. The two hour chat and her final choice gave me more pleasure than the few pounds I made from it.

Truth and fiction

I like to read about places I know - and places I’ve never been to. I want to learn more about the past (I was useless at history as a child), yet I’m drawn particularly to stories about the Second World War.  I tell myself this must be because I often think ‘but for an accident of my birthplace (London) I too might have been caught up in Nazi Europe.’

Julie Orringer’s story of a young Hungarian begins in 1937. Andras leaves Budapest and arrives in Paris, bringing with him a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver. But when he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter’s recipient, he learns a secret that will alter the course of his - and his family’s - life. The tension builds as the war begins and Andras is forced to leave Paris and return to Hungary, where he is sent to work in labor camps. He survives the unimaginable hardships and the cold - yet many of his friends and family are not so lucky.

The book has no easy ending. One small criticism: the author tries to tie up the loose ends and tell the final stories of Andras’ wife, brothers and parents in the last 50 pages. Each of these characters deserves more. But Orringer has done a huge amount of research and clearly learned from people who had been through what she describes. In the acknowledgements she mentions her grandparents, who have strangely similar names to her fictional characters. Is it possible that the whole book is based on true personal histories?