will read for food

“Why is breakfast different from all other things, so that the Greeks called it the best thing in the world, and so that each of us in a vague way knows that he would eat at breakfast nothing but one special kind of food, and that he could not imagine breakfast at any other hour in the day?” —Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome

I am a morning person; one of those annoying people that wakes instantly and completely the moment they open their eyes, able to play chess, fix computer errors and write review columns even before having a cup of coffee. Not that this is my favorite way to spend a morning, but I can rise to the occasion if required. (“Only dull people,” says Oscar Wilde, “are brilliant at breakfast.”) It is a result of early childhood indoctrination. Dad would get up every morning at 5 am to go running, and Mom would be up shortly after to make us breakfast before trundling us off to school. I walked to school, so I was often out the door before seven, and at my desk for morning chorus practice before eight.

Mom never let us out the door without eating something, and to give her credit, breakfast was always a “meal” in the fullest sense of the word—meaning, something that required dishes, silverware, glasses of juice and at least twenty minutes to consume. Looking back now, I remember “healthy” cereals without frosting or bright colors, French toast, bagels, pancakes, and as a rare treat, eggs and Canadian bacon. (Mom didn’t believe in sugar or cholesterol). I remember rejecting oatmeal and yogurt, but liking granola and cinnamon toast.

It was in college—that terrible era when so many bad eating habits are adopted–that I learned to accept yogurt into my pantheon of acceptable breakfasts, and at a particularly low point in my life, cold pizza. College was the era of the granola bar and the cup of yogurt, the sausage biscuit and the breakfast that didn’t require a plate or a fork. Those were busy, dark days. But even then, if asked about my “ideal” breakfast, I would have said cereal, eggs and bacon, bagels and toast.

Where this intractable stubbornness with regards to breakfast comes from, I can’t guess, but I’m not alone. Belloc’s observation above on the nature of breakfast comes during a morning spent drinking wine and eating bread and cheese—all of which had tasted delicious to him the night before, but were absolutely dreadful things to contemplate upon waking. “…In the harsh light of dawn [the wine] turned out to be nothing but a bitter and intolerable vinegar.” One suspects that the taste of the wine in the morning was very much dependent on how much of it he had drunk the night before. I love bacon and eggs in the morning, but like Belloc and his wine, simply can’t imagine having them at any other time of the day. Likewise, there are foods I just never want to see on a breakfast plate, something I discovered after moving South and eating at diners known for their “country” breakfasts.

I can’t tolerate sliced tomatoes on my plate with my eggs, for example—it brings up all sorts of bad associations involving this one cigarette-infested roadside diner and a waitress who chewed tobacco. The slick feel of a slice of beefsteak tomato—perfectly appetizing on a plate with some fresh mozzarella or in a spinach salad, is just revolting when it is sitting, cold and slimy, in the grease puddle made by my under-done eggs. I have learned, since moving to North Carolina, to simply tolerate things like grits and hash browns, and chocolate chip pancakes. I can admit that buttermilk biscuits are an acceptable substitute for toast. I no longer immediately retch when the guy at the next table orders fried pork chops AND steak with his eggs over easy. I’ve learned, after a few crash courses in the Cracker Barrel, to deal with the fact that some people put that thick gooey white “gravy” all over their biscuits and potatoes. I have even learned to like Texas Pete hot sauce on my eggs almost as much as Tabasco. If that doesn’t show I’ve acclimated, then I don’t know what would.

I don’t mean to sound intractable or fussy—I’ve eaten a lot of different breakfast foods over the last ten years as a food critic, from sausage burritos to “garden” omelets, to fancy pancakes in ridiculous shapes, to crepes filled with things that belong more on a dinner menu than a morning meal. I’ve liked most everything I’ve eaten, but—and here is the caveat—as food, not as “breakfast.” I can’t imagine starting my day with a seafood-filled crepe in garlic-lemon sauce on a regular basis. When I get up in the morning I do not, and never will think first of sausage burrito. Breakfast, at least at home, is a way to start your day out right. And “right,” in my case, will always be the prosaic eggs and bacon. The most decadent crabmeat-filled crepe with a side of strawberries and champagne would never make me feel as happy, as satisfied, as a plate of scrambled eggs, toast, bacon, juice and a cup of strong black coffee. As life philosophies go, I’m with the journalist John Gunther, who said:

“All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.”

Rosa’s Decadent Scrambled Eggs
[this recipe is slightly modified from one I heard on Lynne Rossetto Kaspar’s radio show, The Splendid Table]
Serves 2
• 1 large scallion, thinly sliced
• 1/2 tightly packed tablespoon curly parsley leaves, chopped
• 1/2 tightly packed tablespoon fresh basil or tarragon leaves, chopped
• 6 large eggs (think 3 per person)
• 3 ounces cream cheese, cut into about 3/4-inch pieces (can substitute goat cheese, sharp cheddar, brie, or even port salut)
• Salt and freshly ground pepper as needed
• 2 tablespoons butter
1. Combine the chopped herbs. In a medium bowl use a fork beat all the eggs until well mixed. Stir in the herbs, and a little salt and pepper.
2. In a 10-inch heavy non-stick skillet melt the butter over medium heat. Add the eggs and allow to cook gently for several minutes without stirring. Sprinkle cheese pieces uniformly on one half of the eggs, and after another minute, use a wide spatula to flip the empty half over, like an omelet. Allow half a minute more and then flip the whole thing again.
3. Lower heat to medium low and flip once more, scraping up any egg sticking to the pan, for 3 minutes, or until the eggs are as dry as you like and the cheese is melted or melting. I like mine wet, but this recipe works very well for people who like well-cooked eggs, since the oils in the cheese keep them from getting too dry.

“The first time your mother ever baked a loaf of bread,” my Dad used to tell me with fondness, “it was so hard it put a hole through the drywall in our apartment.” I’ve always had a hard time believing this story, because my mother is one of those people who ends up being very good at whatever she decides to do—from gardening to cooking to raising kids to drawing to decorating Easter eggs to being completely prepared for any eventuality that might occur on a family camping trip with three small children. So the idea that she could decide to bake a loaf of bread and have it NOT turn out perfectly stretches the imagination a bit. Still, I have to admit that when I think of my mother and baking, what I remember was an endless series of cookies, pies and desserts; cranberry bread and carrot cake and date pinwheels and banana nut bread. I don’t remember bread—as in sourdough or sandwich, although I suppose she must have made it because otherwise why would my father and I be having that conversation?

Still, it wasn’t until I was out of college and in my own apartment that I started to pay attention to bread, buying my first loaf of non-white, non-presliced, artisan-crafted sourdough from a crunchy-granola supermarket down the street called “Bread and Circus.” I had to buy a bread knife to slice it. At that point in my life, bread—and eating—was an act of resistance. I shopped at food coops for organic produce and bought herbs and spices in little plastic ziploc bags that would have surely made a cop’s eyebrows climb if he happened to peer into my back pack on grocery day. And because I was very poor, and buying organic was rather expensive, I ate a lot of bread, which at least had the virtue of being filling even if it wasn’t all that cheap.

I experimented a little bit with baking my own bread in those days, but I was too easily intimidated by the counter-cooking-culture to really feel comfortable with it. Back then, my friends were the type to build their own wood-fired stone bread ovens in their back yards, and use 100-year-old sour dough cultures they had preserved from immigrant great great grandmothers. They ordered stone ground organic flour off of cheaply printed order forms from special coop farms. They let their breads rise in hand-made bowls and baked them on special stones and tiles they found in little artisan shops in Italy and France. A loaf of their bread probably cost about twenty-five bucks when you took into account all the extra time spent procuring pure ingredients and special equipment, and I could eat for a week on $25 if I didn’t mind the taste of Ramen pride too much. Besides, I lived in a tiny apartment with an oven whose thermostat was…eccentric. It made baking difficult.

So it wasn’t until I came South, moved into a house with a little more space than your average walk-in closet, and installed an oven that meant what it said when it showed the tempurature to be 400 F, that I tried once again to learn how to bake bread. It was a different experience this time around. I was in a brand new kitchen, a brand new house in a brand new city. I didn’t know anyone, and had no one to impress but myself (and my mother, who I still called regularly once a week). I had five pounds of flour in the cupboard and nothing else to do with it but bake. I had one large glass bowl, two regular sized glass bread loaf pans, and one fairly sturdy wooden spoon. I had a baker’s dozen books on the art of baking bread “from scratch.” I had no job and a lot of time.

As it turned out, all my bread baking books, while fascinating to read, were rather more complicated than I was willing to attempt as a nascent bread baker, so after a bit of searching I found what looked like a simple recipe in the back of one of my cookbooks that was actually devoted to soups and stews. “Good soup deserves good bread.” said author Bernard Clayton, who then proceeds to give a simple recipe for “A Peasant Loaf” using only flour, water, yeast and salt. It turned out so well, I have been using the same recipe ever since.

Oh, I’ve wandered. I’ve tried more elaborate doughs, added other ingredients, used other kinds of flour and other types of starters. I have gone through whole grain phases and challah phases and flatbread phases. I even once had the freezer full of naan—a kind of Indian bread made with yogurt that is cooked in a frying pan stuck in an oven. That was educational, but ultimately wasteful since even I couldn’t eat that much naan. But on the whole, Clayton’s original peasant loaf has proved so reliable that I come back to it again and again, the rhythm of it so ingrained in my hands that I haven’t needed to look at the recipe for years. In fact, when a friend asked me for my bread recipe, I had to actually think my way through the steps to give it to her—like the way you can only tell someone the lyrics of a song if you sing it to yourself in your head.

Baking bread became a kind of ritual for me. I often give the loaves away (one person can only eat so much bread) but I used the process as a way to relax. Some people do yoga, I knead dough. The smell of loaves baking in the oven is more therapeutic than aromatherapy. And far more satisfying. It took a few months before I learned—by feel—when the dough had been kneaded to that perfect, silky elasticity, and when I had over done it. It took awhile before I had figured out when the water was too hot or too cold for the yeast. And there was one fateful and sad day when I forgot I had left the dough rising, and it did far more than double in size—spilling over the lip of the bowl and dripping down over the edges of the counter tops.

Now, I use the recipe below—tweaked slightly to accommodate the use of some sourdough starter my mother gave me–and bake bread about once every other week—unless it has been a very stressful week, in which case I might go through a good five pounds of flour baking bread for the neighborhood.
As decompression techniques go kneading bread dough is pretty harmless. I could be out drinking.

A Peasant Loaf
Inspired by The Complete Book of Soups and Stews by Bernard Clayton (Fireside Books, 1984)

Ingredients:

2 packages dry yeast
1 cup sourdough starter
2 cups of water (70 F)
6 cups of bread flour, approximately
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons water
Butter or shortening

1. Sprinkle the yeast over the 2 cups of water in a mixing bowl. Let stand for a moment or two, then stir to dissolve the yeast particles.
2. Add starter, stir until mixed, then add 3 cups of flour and stir into a thick batter. This is the point where you can add seasonings as well—rosemary, or cracked peppercorns, or caraway seeds. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let stand for 4 to 6 hours, until size doubles.
3. Mix the salt with two teaspoons of water and pour into the batter. Add flour, ½ cup at a time, stirring first with a wooden spatula or spoon and then working by hand as it gets less sticky. When the dough is shaggy but a solid ball, turn out onto a work table. Begi kneading aggresively—psuh down with the fingers of both hands, turn the dough a quarter turn and fold over—continue this rhythm. Sprinkle on more flour as neeeded to give the dough additional body—it should not slump when formed into a ball. Occasionally slam the dough down hard against the work surface to speed the formation of the gluten. Dough should be elastic, firm but not hard.
4. Lightly film a bowl with butter or shortening and place the lump of dough in it. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and leave at room temperature for about 1.5 hours—until it more than doubles in volume.
5. Punch down the puffy dough and put it on a lightly floured work surface. Shape into one large loaf or divide the ball into as many pieces as you want loaves or rolls.. For round loaves (boules) shape the pieces into blls and place them on a greased baking sheet (you can sprinkly a little cornmeal on the sheet if you like). For baguettes, roll the dough under your palms to extend out 16 to 20 inches and place on a baking sheet.
6. Cover the loaves with wax paper and leave at room teperature until they have risen to more than double in volume.
7. Place 1 cup of hot water in a shallow pan in the bottom of the oven to provide steam during the first few minutes of baking. Preheat the oven to 450 F.
8. With a razor blade or VERY sharp knife, make diagonal cuts across the loaves. Place the loaves on the middle shelf of the over. Bake for 25-35 minutes. Loaves are done when they are a golden brown in color and hard on the bottom, and sound hollow when thumped.
9. Place on a rack to cool.

I have an endless fascination with cookbooks from far away countries, of unfamiliar cuisines. Which would explain why I own cookbooks—note the plural—devoted to the cooking of Eritrea and why I felt inclined once to buy an entire volume devoted to traditional recipes of Kenya. But as fascinating as these books are, they can rarely be found cracked open on my kitchen counter before dinner. The problem with books devoted to exotic dishes is that they usually require rather exotic ingredients. The local Hampstead Food Lion, my current supermarket, is a very wonderful place but has not, as yet, taken to stocking things like kaffir lime leaves or “taff” (a small, specialized eastern African grain). Usually these books are for dreaming, not for using.

But occasionally, they aren’t. Sometimes, you come across a cookbook that is as fun to use as it is to read, and I think that King’s My Bombay Kitchen may well be one of this rarified group. The subtitle of the book is “Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking” which is why I picked up the book in the first place. Although I like to talk about my Italian grandmother and her endless attempts to force us to eat swimming pool-sized helpings of lasagna, in truth I happen to come from a family that –thanks to several rather adventurous aunts—is a little more international. I have some cousins who are Arab, and one who is African American. One especially adventurous aunt married a Parsi—his family lives in India although his ethnicity is actually Persian. (My mother says that our family portraits look like a little United Nations gathering.) Dinners at my aunt’s house were always exciting.

Parsi cooking is a complex amalgam of rich Middle Eastern cuisine and high-caste Indian cooking. Recipes tend to have lots of ingredients, and especially lots of spices. It is…a joyous cuisine, I guess, where every dish seems to have an exuberance and extravagance that I normally associate with special holiday dinners. King’s book—written as part family memoir and part culinary exploration of a cultural foodway—is a testament to this joyousness, this delight. This is a cuisine, one realizes, for people who love to eat.
Not that there aren’t a few oddities that I’ll probably never try making in my kitchen. I could do without the “kharia” which is a very short, innocuous word for “trotters with black-eyed peas.” King claims she has been “hopelessly and gluttonously fond of it since childhood” but most readers and cooks are no doubt willing to take her at her word. Nor was I immediately enamored of King’s recipe for “Brain Cutlets” –a dish, she says, of “brains for people who don’t like brains.” Which would be pretty much everyone, would it not.
But organ meat oddities aside, My Bombay Kitchen is packed from start to finish with recipes that bring new meaning to the phrase “mouth watering”. Her seafood ragout (“patia”) takes a full two and a half pages to describe (no pictures), will leave your kitchen redolent in the scent of chilies and turmeric and the tang of tamarind, and is absolutely exquisite when it is finally, finally finished. Most of the recipes are like this—requiring time and attention but immensely rewarding for the effort. They are also full of surprises. The crab salad includes mango. The coleslaw includes lime and mint. The “Thanksgiving Turkey”, the kind of modern adaptation one might expect of a family that had migrated from Mumbai to San Francisco, is made with ginger and pomegranate molasses.

King is careful to include extensive descriptions of each dish—sometimes culled from her own experiences and family memories, and sometimes showing the evidence of diligent research. This makes My Bombay Kitchen read like an intricate combination of memoir, history, and cooking class. But despite the sometimes overwhelming amount of information, it remains a fundamentally useful volume for a home cook. Even if that home cook does not, like the author, have the good fortune to live in a city like San Francisco. I found myself impressed with how many recipes could be made with a little garlic-chili paste, some turmeric, and a few fresh garden vegetables. The quick-cooked greens, what the author calls “express bhaji”, are delicious with the addition of a little ginger and chili. I made them with kale, which tastes sharp and spicy, and again with collards (I can hear my southern mama-in-law is tut-tutting up there in heaven). And I was very much impressed with King’s “Get-Well Soup”, which I really could have used back in January when I was shivering with a low-grade fever for weeks on end. This is not your average chicken soup. One reviewer called it “the first real cure for the common cold” and frankly, he had a point.

In the end, My Bombay Kitchen stayed open on my kitchen counter for over a week, during which the scents of ginger, garlic, chili and sautéing vegetables and chicken wafted out of the kitchen window nearly the entire time. I could see my next-door neighbors turn and look towards the house with something like wonder, or envy. As interesting as the book is to read, My Bombay Kitchen is really a book for people who love to cook. And all of their friends, who must love to eat.

Get Well Soup

1 small chicken (about 2 pounds), all visible fat removed
6 to 8 slices peeled fresh ginger
6 to 8 slices fresh turmeric
4 cloves garlic, crushed
6 whole cloves
12 (or more) black peppercorns
1 stick cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
2.5 quarts of water
lime or lemon halves
freshly ground black pepper

Put the chicken in a deep pot with the ginger, turmeric, garlic, cloves, peppercorns, cinnamon, and about 1 teaspoon of salt. Cover with the water. Bring to a boil; reduce heat, cover, and simmer gently until the chicken is falling off the bones.

The education of T.C. MITS : what modern mathematics means to you

This is a particularly beguiling “math for the masses” book, but it is really more about how ideas make life better. It is a little funny how the authors’ moral derived from the calculation of the circumference of a circle is that “your head CAN go farther than your feet!”

The book covers everything from statistics to finite algebra and non-Euclidian geometry, (from which we learn we must “Pull your mind out of those muddy old ruts and adapt yourself to a continually CHANGING world!”) But what really gets me about the book, aside from its light, irreverent tone, is that it was first published in 1942 in a special, super-sturdy G.I. edition. Apparently for soldiers to cart around in their back pockets and read. I am trying, and failing, to imagine a publisher with a math book conceiving of such a marketing strategy today.

Really, I find myself utterly charmed.

The great idea behind Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series is that what happens in fiction is real. This is something we’ve all suspected at some gut level. There is just no way, once we’ve closed the book, that Jane and Mr. Rochester ceased to exist. They are too solid, they live, they breathe. We may not be looking, but we have no doubt that their lives go on, off the page.

So what is a library, then but a waystation for traveling from reality to reality? What would such a way station look like?

I closed the book and carefully placed it in my pocket and looked around. I was in a long, dark, wood-paneled corridor lined with bookshelves that reached from teh richly carpeted floor to the vaulted ceiling. The carpet was elegantly patterened with geometric designed and the ceiling was decorated with sculpted reliefs that depicted scenes from the classics, each cornice supporting the marble bust of an author. High above me, spaced at regular intervals, were finely decorated circular apertures through which light gained entry and reflected off the polished wood, reinforcing the serious mood of the library. running down the center of the corridor was a long row of reading tables, each with a green-shaded brass lamp. The library appeared endless; in both directions the corridor banished into darkness with no definable end. But this wasn’t important. Describing the library would be like going to see a Turner and commenting on the frame. On all of the walls, end after end, shelf after shelf, were books. Hundreds, thousands, millions of books. Hardbacks, paperbacks, leather-bound, uncorrected proofs, handwritten manuscripts, everything. I stepped closed and rested my fingertips lightly against the pristine volumes. They felt warm to the touch, so I leaned closer and pressed my ear to the spines. I could hear a distant hum, the rumble of machinery, people talking, traffic, seagulls, laughter, waves on rocks, wind in the winter branches of trees, disant thunder, heavy rain, children playing, a blacksmith’s hammer–a million sounds all happening together. And then, in a revelatory moment, the clouds slid back from my mind and a crystal-clear understanding of the very nature of books shone upon me. They weren’t just collections of words arranged neatly on a page to give the impression of reality–each of these volumes was reality. The similarity of these books to the copies I had read back home was no more than the similarity a photograph has to its subject. These books were alive!

–Thursday Next, Lost in a Good Book

When a little book called “The Chess Set in the Mirror” came into my hands, I was thinking about chess, not mirrors.The story will sound a little familiar. A small boy who has been misbehaving is locked in a room by his parents, and warned not to touch the mirror! The door is closed (presumably locked) and the boy, naturally, can’t keep away from the mirror, which is sitting up high on a mantle. The only other things in the room, oddly, are a chess set upon a small table, in the middle of the room, and hence reflected in the mirror. The boy is not, because he is too short to see himself.

For several moments he devotes his energies towards trying to see his own reflection, and it is no surprise that after awhile he finds that he has ended up in the mirror, on the other side.The White King, we are given to understand, is the culprit responsible for this sudden change in existence.

As fantasia goes (the author, both the back of the book and Wikipedia assures, was the first to coin the term “magical realism”) it is more allegorical than most—more so even than Alice and her Looking Glass adventures. And the narrator—who, let us remember, was the kind of child a parent felt obligated to lock away in a room—is more than usually judgemental about the place he finds himself, and the people he meets there.

But the book is eerie and haunting (and as such doesn’t feel much like a children’s story).  I wrote a more complete review here

Have you ever run your hands along the spines of the books on a shelf and wished that just by touching them, you could absorb everything in them? This has been a common fantasy of mine since I first realized I would never be able to read all the books in the world–in other words, since about the age of five. I don’t think I’d ever bargain away anything important for money or fame, but I might well sign a Faustian agreement for the sake of a glove like the one in Delany’s Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand:

She made a gesture with her chin over her shoulder. “Back there I’ve got a carton of catalog cubes from the Inter-Sector Broadcast Library.” She laid two fingers on his gloved hand. “Thanks to that, you’re tuned into the compressed textual band. Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

She snorted. “What are the four largest geosectors on this world?”

“Abned, Rhyon, Cogonak.” He paused to question why she wanted to know. “And Emenog. . .?”

“. . .You see, in terms of data at hand, right now you’re on a par with the Skahadi Library itself–,” which, when her tongue lifted for the initial sibilant, he had never heard of before, but which, by the time it fell from the final vowel, he knew had been founded in ’12 in Lower Cogonak, back when it had still been officially a part of Abned, before the Severence Decision of ’80–which was when the Yellows had won their first major electoral victory. “You’re in touch,” she explained, “at this point, with a good deal more information than I am. . .Anyway, I figured we’d put all that to some use. Like I said, the carton’s filled with catalog cubes–about five hundred of them. They’re not there at random: they’re all texts I’ve wanted to read but never got around to. There’re more than a few in it I’ve discussed in great detail with various people, just as though I had read them. There’re a whole lot that I’ve read the first chapters of and have meant to read the rest for years. And there’re lots I read when I was much too young and have been intending to reread. Oh yes, and there’re about ten or fifteen I’ve read and reread a lot and just like a lot. Anyway. The instructions of the box your glove came in say that I–ordinary mortal that I am–can only absorb texts from the broadcast band at about one every ten minutes. But, as you may have figured out by now, I’m a lazy bitch. It says that if you’ve been through Radical Anxiety Termination, you can absorb them about one every point-thirty-two seconds; that’s without turning your mind into wet sand. You see, what I want to do is talk to somebody who’s read everything I should have read. I want to control such a man, make him lie down in the sand and lick my toes.” She grinned in the dark. “The glove will give you the texts verbatim. On hot, hazy nights, I’ll let you recite choice passages to me so that I can pick and choose. I can always get them myself with the glove later. But I think this way is more useful, more interesting.” She pushed another pedal. “Don’t you?”

–Samuel Delany, Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand

Because it has been so hot here, I’ve been taking my dog for his walk in the evening, at dusk, rather than in the afternoon has we had been wont to do over the winter and spring. And although having a bouncing, energetic retriever pulling you along isn’t really the quietest way to travel, I have noticed the silence of dusk, and I have noticed the birds—the herons flying inland from the sound, the bluebirds and swallows, winging their way to their nests. The dog has flushed out doves, brown thrashers and an endless number of cardinals.

Perhaps the birds were always here and I just wasn’t looking, but in the evenings they are more easily noticed, as the background noise of human activity dies away. Most of the houses are lit with the flickering, uncertain light of televisions as we walk by—the dog, with his nose to the ground seeing nothing, and I, with my eyes peering into the trees, feeling as though I were seeing everything for the first time.

Sometimes life seems oddly serendipitous. It wasn’t long after Ray (the dog) and I started our evening walks that I was given a copy of Joyce Hinnefeld’s debut novel, In Hovering Flight. It is the kind of book designed to appeal to me—about poetry and painting and birds and artists. But I long ago decided that subject was not as important to me as style—interesting tidbits of information no longer excuses uncertain and mediocre writing. So while I was interested in learning, for example, the proper way to write in a field notebook if you are a bird watcher, or that John James Audubon may have invented the Cuvier’s Kinglet he describes in one of his many journals, it would not have been enough to capture my attention—even with the mention of Audubon, a person I am interested in for many reasons, one of which is actually hanging on the wall behind my head. The style of the section called “field notebooks” however? Oh, that captured my attention immediately. It was quite as beautiful as the walks I took with my dog. Reading it makes me feel just like as if I’m standing on the small sandy rise down the street(soon to be a housing development but it was once a Civil War bunker, so it is a place that knows about battles) —looking down towards the sound, enjoying the wind and resisting the tugging of the dog and just watching the sky for flying creatures:

“Scarlet loved even the great blue herons, which became increasingly common in that protected area nea the Delaware as she grew into her teens, their harsh, ugly screeches piercing their mornings and evenings on the screened porch where they ate their meals. She would never forget the sight of one rising from the creek each morning, the spring when she was twelve, as she let the screen door slam behind her on her way to catch the bus to school. That rush of wins and then the silent, massive span above her head, darkening the sky—every time, it made her catch her breath. And she tried to find a way to describe its rising each day on the bus, playing with words in her head: “giant, silent feathered airplane,” blue-gray cloud with wings.” Tom, to her ongoing embarrassment, kept her spiral-bound notebooks from those years—notebooks full of phrases like these but rather lacking in homework assignments.

“Herons make you reach for words, she told her father…”

In Hovering Flight is a novel about mothers and daughters, poets and painters, and passion—the kind of passion that in an earlier era would have been named a “calling.” Addie is an artist and poet who paints birds. Ted is her biologist husband who thinks teaches science using poetry. Scarlet is their daughter, named for the one bird her mother never managed to capture on canvas. (If she had been a boy, she would have been named Tanager).

A library should reflect the personality of its owner. Theodore’s study–one of the few bookish scenes in the whole of Gerald Durrell’s ouevre, reflects the eccentricities of its owner perfectly.

During the last days of the dying summer, and throughout the warm, wet winter that followed, tea with Theodore became a weekly affair. Every Thursday I would set out, my pockets bulging with match-boxes and test-tubes full of specimens, to be driven into the town by Spiro. It was an appointment that I would not have missed for anything.

Theodore would welcome me in his study, a room that met with my full approval. It was, in my opinion, just what a room should be. The walls were lined with tall bookshelves filled with volumes on freshwater biology, botany, astronomy, medicine, folklore and similar fascinating and sensible subjects. Interspersed with these were selections of ghost and crime stories. Thus Sherlock Holmes rubbed shoulders with Darwin, and Le Fanu with Fabre, in what I considered to be a thoroughly well-balanced library.  At one window of the room stood Theodore’s telescope, its nose to the sky like a howling dog, while the sills of every window bore a parade of jars and bottles containing minute freshwater fauna, whirling and twitching among the delicate fronds of green weed. On one side of the room was a massive desk, piled high with scrapbooks, micro-photographs, X-ray plates, diaries, and notebooks. On the opposite side of the room was the microscope table, with its powerful lamp on the jointed stem leaning like a lily over the flat boxes that housed Theodore’s collection of slides. The microscopes themselves, gleaming like magpies, were housed under a series of beehive-like domes of glass.

–Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

This was my favorite of the Narnia series, and the Dufflepuds possibly my favorite creatures in the book:

It was a large room with three big windows and it was lined from floor to ceiling with books; more books than Lucy had ever seen before, tiny little books, fat dumpy books, and books bigger than any church Bible you have seen, all bound in leather and smelling old and learned and magical. But she knew from her instructions that she need not bother about any of these. For the Book, the Magic Book, was laying on a reading desk in the very middle of the room. She saw she would have to read it standing (and anyway there were no chairs) and also that she would have to stand with her back to the door while she read it. So at once she turned to shut the door.

It wouldn’t shut.

-C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader