Wednesday reading experience #30

Read one of the great foodie books. I recommend Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Taste.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) was a famous French gastronome and his book on the subject, Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste), is still in print. Here he is discussing the effects of digestion on men of literature (translation by Anne Drayton, from the Penguin edition):

"I believe that men of letters, for the most part, owe their choice of genre to their stomach.
According to my theory, comic poets will be found among the regular, tragic poets among the constipated, and pastoral and elegaic poets among the lax; whence it follows that the most lachrymose of poets is only removed from the most comic of poets by a degree of digestionary concoction."

The book covers all kinds of subjects and their relation to food, eating and digestion, and is a must-read for true foodies.

Other good food reads I can recommend are:

The Book of Tea by Anthony Burgess and Alain Stella – a brilliant coverage of the history of tea, tea-drinking traditions, tea natural history and tea varieties, full of gorgeous photos and illustrations.
The True History of Chocolate by Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe. Although some of the history chapters are a little dry, this is a great read for those who wish to know where that heavenly substance comes from, how it came to be known to the world and how it’s made.
Unfortunately I have not come across a really good book about coffee, so I can’t recommend one.
Tender at the Bone and Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl. The first is a wonderful memoir that describes the making of a foodie, and the second is a memoir and collection of her food articles and restaurant reviews from the New York Times.
A Cook’s Tour in search of the perfect meal by Anthony Bourdain. Combines two of my favourite hobbies: travel and food. If you're wondering why I am not recommending Kitchen Confidential, it’s because while it’s an interesting read, it is uneven and sometimes just plain gross.
The Man Who Ate Everything and It Must Have Been Something I Ate by Jeffrey Steingarten. Two great collections of food essays and articles by an obsessive gastronome.
Salt: A world history and Cod: A biography of the fish that changed the world by Mark Kurlansky.
For a food porn fix: any of the Culinaria books. Gorgeous and heavy coffee-table books about food culture in different countries, rich in recipes and photographs.

I have avoided cookbooks, but many of these books have recipes in them as well.

And, just for fun, some of the foodie books on my TBR list:

The Art of Eating and The Gastronomical Me by M.F.K. Fisher
Comfort Me With Apples by Ruth Reichl

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

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