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

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...

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...

Reading in Reykjavík

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