Redlead Roundhead

More mushrooms in our backyard, this one with a common name, Redlead Roundhead. The Latin name is Leratiomyces ceres.
It was not easy for me to identify this one. I began with my one slim mushroom guide, which has a simple key to identify fungi. It told me I had to take a spore print to discover what color the spores were. It also identified the parts of the mushroom and told me how to make a spore print. Here's my spore print:
I decided these were purplish brown. Then I had to look closely at the gills and stem to decide if the gills were waxy, free, adnate, adnexed, decurrent, or a mixture of several of these. I had to examine the stipe (stem) to see if it had an annulus or a volva (don't ask). It was very interesting to look closely at a mushroom but all this examination did not lead me to anything that looked like these mushrooms. I finally ended up online at mykoweb, clicking through all the photos of mushrooms with purplish-brown spores. Finally I ended up at Leratiomyces ceres (which likes to grow on wood chips).
One thing I learned from my mushroom research is that quite a few genera have been split into two or more genera in recent years, due to microscopic differences. So my 1971 mushroom guide is quite outdated, but I am fond of it for sentimental reasons and so I'll keep it anyway. It was published by University California Press as part of the original California Natural History Guides series. When new, it cost $1.85. I think it looks pretty good for a nearly 40-year-old paperback.
This book belonged to my in-laws. When they were cleaning out books they gave us a boxful and all the original natural history guides from this series focusing on the S.F. Bay region were in it. I nabbed them, since I really love to read natural history guides. They are a very special kind of book that reveals both what is known and what is not known about the natural world. They are written for those of us who are walking along contentedly one day and suddenly come upon an amazing butterfly, or wildflower, or rock, or mushroom, and cannot rest until we find out more about it. The original California Natural History Guide series included books on butterflies, rocks and minerals, mushrooms, seashells, early uses of plants, evolution of the landscape, a classic on weather by Harold Gilliam, and more. They are mostly under 75 pages and very clearly and succinctly written.
Now the California Natural History Guides have been reissued, mostly completely rewritten by other authors, although Harold Gilliam did the weather one. I am a big fan of the new ones and have three of them: butterflies, trees and shrubs, and spring wildflowers. (I have written about the butterfly one, which I particularly adore, in this post.) But at 300+ pages, they are a whole different undertaking. I find myself turning to the older guides if I come back from a walk and have a burning need to read about, say, seashore plants of Northern California, before I tackle the bigger, newer one.

I Finally Finished It!

While we were waiting in the Denver Airport for three hours, and on the two-hour flight, I got a huge chunk read of Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, and I finished it just yesterday. It felt like I had been reading the 900-page novel for months, away on a trip to India. I think I developed my biceps just lugging this book around the house. While I was reading it, I found myself absently repeating the Hindi swear words like maderchod and bhenchod (apologies to anyone who speaks Hindi) to myself since much of the dialogue is peppered with them (they mean pretty much what you think they mean). I found myself perking up at hearing any Indian-accented voice on the radio, and humming the songs from "Monsoon Wedding" to myself.
This is one of those books with a two-page list of characters at the beginning and a 16-page glossary at the end, as Chandra casually uses many Hindi, Punjabi, and other Indian language words throughout. But since half the words I looked up in the glossary weren't even included, I realized he wasn't really concerned with defining everything for non-Indian readers. In an interview with him on amazon.com, he says he wanted to create the experience of being in a different culture, where you are surrounded by cultural references and brand names and slang you don't understand. Maybe this is why I really did feel immersed in the sounds, sights, smells, tastes and textures of India.
The book also refers to lots of classic Bollywood movies, and songs and lines from those movies, and a large part of the plot is about the film stars and starstruck film fans in India. I've never seen a Bollywood film. Chandra recommends a few to see in his interview (Pyaasa (Thirst, 1957); Kaagaz ke Phool ("Paper Flowers," 1959); Mughal-e-Azam ("The Great Mughal," 1960); Sholay ("Embers," 1975); Parinda ("Bird," 1989); Satya (1998); Lagaan ("Land Tax," 2001); Lage Raho Munnabha ("Keep at it, Munnabhai," 2006). Has anyone seen any of these?
The novel is about the rise and fall of a powerful Indian gangster, and is set after 9/11/01, although there are many flashbacks in time to the Partition and its aftermath, and a number of side plots. It's also about terrorism, the criminal underworld, the Pakistan/India conflict, corruption (especially in the Indian police), politics, poverty, religious faith, and the nature of love. What it's really about is the emptiness at the center of a boy who cannot go back home, who searches all his life to replace the father he lost, who ultimately cannot find happiness or satisfaction because of the emptiness inside.
You don't embark upon a journey like this lightly. But in addition to the small feeling of loss I feel after I read something that really captures me, I feel the satisfaction of having been halfway around the world and back inside the pages of a book.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Photo: "Ham is Spain" by Julie Lemberger. (The little cups on the ends of these hams hanging in a bar in Spain are to catch the drips of fat that run down the hams on a warm day so they don't drop down your neck.)

Michael Pollan is not trying to turn his readers in to vegetarians in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma. In fact, after trying vegetarianism for a limited period as part of his research for this book, he concludes that he has too many philosophical and practical objections to embrace it for himself. But it is impossible to read the book without confronting what you buy and eat more directly, which is his goal. Or maybe his goal is to establish a new right (and responsibility): the right to look at what you are buying and how it is raised and processed and then decide for yourself. I think this paragraph is the essence of his book:

The industrialization--and brutalization--of animals in America is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. No other people in history has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do. Tail docking and sow crates and beak clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering four hundred head of cattle an hour would promptly come to an end--for who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We'd probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we'd eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve.

I can't verify his assertion about America brutalizing animals our animals most, so I don't know if it's true. But this paragraph, and his thoughts about America's lack of a single traditional food culture, and his extended account of hunting for a feral pig in Sonoma County in order to be able to serve a meal that he had grown, foraged for, or hunted himself, kept making me think of Spanish ham. Alongside the frozen pizzas and shrink-wrapped hamburgers and copas de maize (Cornflakes) in Spanish supermarkets exists a deeply entrenched traditional culture around food, and at the heart of this culture is jamon iberico--the highest quality serrano ham, made from a special breed of pig, the pata negra--that in my experience is nearly always eaten with consciousness, ceremony and respect, perhaps in part because of its price tag but also because of what it represents for Spaniards. I'm not saying that Spaniards would be any more eager than Americans to know how that shrink-wrapped hamburger lived and was killed and processed. But I do think Spaniards have a clearer idea than we do of how and what to eat that is grounded in their cultural tradition.

I remember how in my Spanish class at a business institute in a tony Barcelona neighborhood, my teacher set down her dry-erase pen and turned away from the whiteboard with a serious look in her eyes. She was a svelte, stylish woman in her early 30s who liked to tell us about her shopping trips to Paris for the weekend, but what she was going to tell us now was not frivolous. "We have been discussing vocabulary for food, organized by food groups, such as fruits and vegetables, grains, dairy, meats, etc.," she told us in Spanish. "But what I am going to discuss now it is in a food group all its own." She paused for effect. "It is ham." And for the next 20 minutes she lectured us on the pata negra, how it is raised, how it is killed, how the ham is cured, how to tell the good quality from the poor, how it should be stored, sliced, and eaten. I actually still have my notes from that class, so I know that she concluded with the following statement: "In fact, jamon iberico is just about the most healthy thing you can eat."

The profound importance of ham as an expression of Spanish culture came back to me when my husband, upon leaving his job in Spain to return home, received his parting gift: a whole ham (see photo above) We had to eat it all before we left the country because it would not pass customs. During out time in Spain, I had come to observe that eating ham in Spain represents a connection to the land, which nourishes the oaks that produce the acorns upon which the pata negra feed. It represents small villages, and their traditional air-drying curing methods without chemicals or impurities. It--and much of Spanish cuisine--represents a certain ritualized way of dining slowly and convivially, taking the time to prepare dishes the way they have always been prepared, recalling Spain's connections to other Mediterranean cultures but also its own special peninsular nature. It may be largely symbolic, but eating a large lunch at 2 pm every day reaffirms for Spanish people who they are.

Pollan's "perfect meal," which he himself acknowledges is impractical and largely symbolic, is an attempt at this kind of affirmation, in almost a spiritual sense. Questions regarding who we are in relation to what we eat underlie Pollan's book: Is this who we are? Is this who we want to be? The (in the words of the owner of the sustainably-farmed Polyface Farm) "...amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated, fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate."? No!

Pollan's point is that examining how our food is produced, examining in fact the whole food chain from our food's origin until it arrives at our table, can also reaffirm who we are as people, and our relationship to the other living things--vegetable, human, animal, even fungal--that live on this planet. Living in the Bay Area, I am lucky to have many places to buy food where I can learn something about where it came from and how it was raised, even if some of those "stories" are a bit more rosy-hued than reality (like "Rosie the Free-Range Chicken" who never ventures outside of her coop, as Pollan discovers). But I can always dig deeper, and make more conscious choices. I'm so relieved I don't have to be a vegetarian, I'll make the extra effort.

My one reservation is that I enjoy eating many different kinds of foods. For me, one of the joys of being American is being able to partake of and experience many different cultures in my daily life, every day. So, affirming my American identity through food means making burritos one night, going out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant the next night, and cooking my Grandma's Swedish pancakes on Saturday morning. We may not have one single tradition of food, but I love our multiplicity of food cultures. I'm not willing to give that up, even if I'm not always able to know as much as I'd like about where it this bewildering array of food comes from.

Visiting Life

I heard author Bridget Kinsella read from her memoir Visiting Life: Women Doing Time On the Outside at Lit Crawl last October, and finally read it over the last few days, during which time I couldn't put it down. I have been struggling over this post because I'm conflicted about the book, but I found it fascinating and moving.

Kinsella tells her story of falling in love with a prisoner at Pelican Bay State Prison, a man condemned to life for murder. They meet because a friend of Kinsella's, a creative writing teacher at the prison, gives her Rory's manuscript to read because she works in publishing. Through this relationship, which they both recognize as a "fantasy love" that will one day come to an end, she comes to terms with her divorce from a man who realized that he was gay, and with the reality that she will probably not have the children she has always longed for. Interspersed with her own story are the stories of several women visiting other men at the prison. At the end of the book, her interest in prison families leads her to become involved with a group called "Get on the Bus," which takes children on an annual Mother's Day visit to their incarcerated mothers.

Kinsella reveals many intimate thoughts and feelings about her past and her relationship with Rory, and Rory does the same. While I believe their love for each other is genuine, I also sense a degree of manipulation on both sides of the relationship, for what each wanted from the other. Of course we only know what Rory feels through Kinsella. As Kinsella describes it, over the course of their relationship, she regains her sense of self worth through Rory's love. The stories of the other women, all of whom, like Kinsella, developed their relationships with the men after they were imprisoned, are uniformly sad. They don't shed much light on Bridget and Rory's relationship, because theirs is different: both of them know that it won't last. It's hard for me to believe each got everything they said they got out of their relationship, while at the same time knowing that Kinsella would move on. But then, that's partly what the book is about, suspending judgment about the relationships women have with men behind bars.

The Get on the Bus chapter was completely heart-breaking. I could not help but weep. Kinsella says that there are 1.5 million children in the U.S. with an incarcerated parent. Kinsella's involvement with Get on the Bus is another way for her to heal and find a sense of purpose. I was able to set aside my doubts about her relationship with Rory in admiration of her determination to make a child's life better.

Book Club

Tonight I hosted book club and we ate half the ginger cake I baked. This is the second ginger cake I've made this week. First I made the gingerbread recipe from the Fanny Farmer Baking Book (by Marion Cunningham), and my son whipped cream to go with it, and it was very good, but I also love it with lemon sauce. So I made lemon sauce from Joy of Cooking (1964 edition) for the rest of it. I had to laugh when I opened the book to the dessert sauces pages because it was so spattered and smudged.
That lemon sauce recipe might be the one my mom made the most from that cookbook. Then there was so much lemon sauce left over after we finished the first ginger cake, and because I was hosting book club, I made a second ginger cake. The second one had fresh ginger in it. I can't decide which one I like best.

Here's the fresh ginger cake recipe. It's from Room For Dessert by David Lebovitz (one-time Chez Panisse pastry chef).

Fresh Ginger Cake

4 oz. fresh ginger
1 cup mild molasses
1 cup sugar
1 cup vegetable oil, preferably peanut
2-1/2 cups flour
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ground cloves
1/2 tsp. ground pepper
1 cup water
2 tsp. baking soda
2 eggs, room temperature

1. Position the oven rack in the center of the oven. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a 9"x3" round cake pan or a 9-1/2" springform pan with a circle of parchment paper.
2. Peel, slice, and chop the ginger very fine with a knife (or use a grater).
3. Mix together the molasses, sugar, and oil. In another bowl, sift together the flour, cinnamon, cloves, and black pepper.
4. Bring the water to boil in a saucepan, stir in the baking soda, and then mix the hot water into the molasses mixture. Stir in the ginger.
5. Gradually whisk the dry ingredients into the batter. Add the eggs, and continue mixing until everything is thoroughly combined. Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake for about 1 hour, until the top of the cake springs back lightly when pressed or a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. If the top of the cake browns too quickly before the cake is done, drape a piece of foil over it and continue baking.
6. Cool the cake for at least 30 minutes. Run a knife around the edge of the cake to loosen it from the pan. Remove the cake from the pan and peel off the parchment paper.

Dave recommends serving with a plum and raspberry compote, sliced and sugared peaches, or lemon curd mixed with a little whipped cream.

In between eating and talking about our children, we did talk about the book, Run, by Ann Patchett. Although most of us liked it, the general concensus was that it was not as satisfying as Bel Canto. Bel Canto had an emotional intensity and depth; the writing was lyrical, resonating long after I read it. (If you haven't read Run, you might want to stop here.)

Run has an intriguing and engrossing plot, but the characters were like cut-outs--not fully fleshed. Someone said, "It's like an abridged version of itself." Another person said they could see it as a movie, and there would be nothing left out of the movie that was in the book. I certainly could see the scenes vividly enough--the accident on the snowy street at night, Tennessee lying in the hospital bed, light flooding into Tip and Teddy's room--and suddenly the book did seem more like a screenplay. Actually, the snowy scenes were some of the most beautifully written passages. My favorite part was when Tennessee came back to talk to Tennessee. But did that really fit with the rest of the book? The person in the book that I would like to hear from when she grows up is Kenya. It seemed incredibly sad to me that the secret of her origins died with her second mother. Would she ever find out who she really was, and how important would that be to her?

Currently Reading Meme

This photo shows General Robert E. Lee shortly after the surrender at Appomattox Court House. Photo by Mathew Brody.

This is another one from Caroline at Food for Thought. Here's the rules:
Open the book you’re currently reading to page 161, and post the fifth sentence on the page, then think of 5 bloggers to tag.

Here's my sentence: "They were forced to watch until their turn came." It's from "April 1865: The Month That Saved America" by Jay Winik.

You can tell it's about something unpleasant; in fact, something horrific--war. The sentence refers to the suffering of Union soldiers at the barbaric guerilla warfare conducted throughout the Civil War by a Missouri rebel named Quantrille and his band.

I don't usually read history, but I have been riveted by this book, which the librettist for Philip Glass' new opera, Appomattox, mentioned as one of his sources of inspiration, among others. So I went out to get it at the library. I am extremely ignorant about Civil War history--I must have been asleep in class for days when we studied it--and wanted to get some context for the opera.

(The opera is about the surrender of Lee to Grant at Appomattox Court House, with some flash-forwards to incidents in African-Americans' long struggle for civil rights. I was lucky enough to see it a week ago during its premiere run here in San Francisco. It was wonderful! Philip Glass wove his own pulsing, hypnotic rhythms and melodies with Civil War era ballads and soldier songs, a few of which he wrote himself. And the libretto! Christopher Hampton used nearly all original words spoken or written at the time. I was completely engrossed from the opening note to the last. You can get a glimpse of the opera at San Francisco Opera's website.)

Here is a more momentous quote from the book--actually a letter, from Lee to Grant, responding to Grant's first overture to Lee regarding a surrender. This letter is sung in its entirety in the opera:

"Genl
I have recd your note of this date. Though not entertaining the opinon you express of the hopelessness of further resistance of the Army of N. Va.--I reciprocate your desire to avoid the useless effusion of blood, & therefore before considering your proposition, ask the terms you will offer on the condition of its surrender.
Very respy your obt. servt
R.E. Lee, Genl"

I'm not tagging anyone in particular. If you play, leave me a comment so I can see what you're reading.

Book Meme

Thanks for the tag, Marmee. Her post is here. I enjoyed reading others' answers to this meme--and I think I was tagged before but never got to it. So I will give it a whirl:

1. Hardcover or paperback, and why?
I will buy a hardcover if it's an author I love or a book I just have to read and I just can't wait for the paperback or the other 42 requests in front of mine at the library. Some books I really just want to own. I often buy remaindered hardcovers when I find them. Some books I have bought full price in hardcover are A Handbook to Luck by Cristina Garcia (I was at her reading), The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (I got about halfway through this book in Spanish and gave up, then went to his reading of the English translation and gratefully finished it in English), and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (for our book club). I am about to RUN out and buy Ann Patchett's Run in hardcover. Other than that, I buy paperback.

2. If I were to own a book shop I would call it…
Bluestockings. A writer I know has a column of that name, but I don't think she'd mind.

3. My favorite quote from a book (mention the title) is…
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." (Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen)

4. The author (alive or deceased) I would love to have lunch with would be ….
Although I would have answered differently at different times in my life (as a child, E. L. Konigsburg; in college, Emily Dickinson or Virginia Woolf), right now I would choose Irene Nemirovsky, author of the incomplete Suite Francaise. I would make it a long lunch, and bring my laptop, so she could write the remaining three sections.

5. If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except from the SAS survival guide, it would be…
Remembrance of Things Past (or, In Search of of Lost Time, an alternate translation) by Marcel Proust. I have never read it and finally I would have the time.

6. I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that….
is a kind of helmet with attached headlight and reading glasses that would stay in place even when I read lying down on my side. I can manage to hold the book up myself, but those darn reading glasses! I have just recently graduated (?) to reading glasses and find it impossible to wear them and read lying down, which is truly the most comfortable way to read.

7. The smell of an old book reminds me of….
The hours of my life I have spent in used bookshops. And this reminds me of a show a few years ago at Adobe Book Shop on 16th Street in San Francisco, where an artist named Chris Cobb rearranged all the books in the store by color, rather than by subject. He and volunteers spent hours beforehand putting little slips in each book so that afterward, they could spend more hours putting all the books back where they belonged. It was an extraordinarily beautiful, and made for some odd and inspired juxtapositions of titles. NPR did a feature on it.

8. If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be….
Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables.

9. The most overestimated book of all times is….
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. It is supposed to be inspiring, and is so to many people, but I didn't find inspiration there.

10. I hate it when a book….
ends.

I tag anyone reading this who would like to play. Post a comment with a link to your post if you do.

The Literary Pub Crawl

Last night my friend Lisa and I went to Litcrawl, the culminating event of Litquake. It's a free, three-hour hop through the Mission District from bar to cafe to bookstore and more, each hosting a reading a different theme. Lisa and I knew we had to strategize, so we chose "Real Life: Memoir Authors Tell It Like It Is," "Girls Tell All," and the MacAdam/Cage publisher's panel, the last one because we both know Susan Ito (also my wonderful writing teacher), who was reading. Other events beckoned--the one featuring SF Chronicle columnists, the TWO/LINES bilingual English-Spanish reading, Mommy Lit, food and wine--but we didn't want to stretch ourselves too thin.

At Double Dutch on 16th Street, the venue for "Memoir," we heard Clayne Hayward on her chaotic hippie childhood, Alan Kauffman on his disturbed Jewish mother, Scott Keneally on being a man who cried at Dove commercials, Brigit Kinsella on falling in love with man behind bars, Rachel Sarah on single motherhood, and Max Velario on experiencing the rush of testosterone as a transsexual. Wow. Six new books added to my "Books to Read" list in 45 minutes.

From there we cruised to the Beauty Bar on Mission Street, for "Girls Tell All," but I guess others wanted to hear what the girls had to tell, too, because it was overflowing out the door. I glimpsed some pink sparkly wallpaper and vowed to return some other time. The Litquake door monitor told us to just go to our next venue and get a good seat. But we decided to peek in at Modern Times bookstore where Seal Press was exploring "...the F Stop: Female Authors Take On Fashion, Fucking, Feminism, Felines, Freestyling, and Felonies." I couldn't keep my attention on Daphne Gottlieb's rant about discovering herself as a thinly disguised character in someone else's writing, and how others kiss and tell but she doesn't and how there is another person living in England with--gasp!--her same name. Maybe it was the result of the glass of white wine I drank at "Memoir." So I looked at the books on the table in the back, and bought two anthologies while Samara Halperin read about craving an Izod shirt. We left before hearing the last reader and hopped over to the Make-Out Room on 22nd Street.

Snowflakes of light danced around on the walls and bounced off strips of silver hanging from the ceiling. We found Susan and shared a booth with her and two friends. She read an excerpt from her essay in the anthology "Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion" coming out next week. Hers was about a pregnancy she had to terminate--either that, or lose her life. She read calmly and didn't seem nervous, although her excerpt was the most wrenching anbd took the most courage to read. Angela Mi Young Hur read from her book about girls in Koreatown, Sheldon Siegel read a description of the Mission District, and Janice Cooke Newman read from her historical novel, "Mary," about Mary Todd Lincoln--another book to add to my "Books to Read" list. We also heard from Clive Clevenger and Eric Martin in short pieces they had written to be performed at Litcrawl--from what they read, I'm less sure what those writers were about.

Besides the literary stimulation, we ran into other people we knew, and gazed unabashedly at other people. And an added bonus for me: now I know about three cool Mission District bars! Maybe I'll even make it to one of them before I go bar-hopping again at next year's Litcrawl.

Kidquake!

I volunteered at Kidquake today, the childrens' event of the Litquake literary festival here in San Francisco. I did it last year, too, and got to help out at two workshops--but this year I helped at the authors' assembly and got introduced to ten different childrens' authors. What a treat! Here are the authors I heard: Belle Yang, Yuyi Morales, Oliver Chin, Annie Barrows, Bob Barner, Marissa Moss, Lynn Hazen, Henry Neff, Maya Gonzalez, and Susan Taylor Brown.

Most are from the Bay Area, and each of them had something unique to express in their allotted eight minutes (I was the timekeeper so I had to hold up signs saying "Two Minutes Left" and "30 seconds left!" and "Your Time Is Up!"). I enjoyed hearing all of them, but I was struck by a few particular comments.

Illustrator and author Maya Gonzalez wore a bright pink skirt and blouse and talked about her bilingual book, "My Colors, My World" ("Mis colores, mi mundo"). She wore her paint-spattered apron over her beautiful clothes because she wanted everyone to see how she looks in her studio. She also made a point of saying that she loved pink, and that pink used to be a boy's color, but girls decided it was awesome so we took it for ourselves! She said she has three rules: 1) Everyone is an artist, 2) There is no right or wrong in art, and 3) It is always a courageous act to face a blank piece of paper and create art. She said it so clearly and simply I'm sure everyone in the audience--children and adults--understood what she meant, even though it is a profound and even radical trio of rules.

Illustrator and author Yuyi Morales read from her luminous "Little Night," but before that she mentioned that she grew up in Mexico and that was why she has an accent when she speaks English. She said, "I am still learning English, and I will probably always have an accent in English. But that is okay, that is part of who I am." I loved that she said that.

Illustrator and author Belle Yang bravely passed around an in-progress piece of artwork for the children to examine. Illustrator and author Bob Barner played a tape recording of "Dem Bones" while drawing a cartoon skeleton on a large sheet of paper.

And yes, there were a few just plain word people: Annie Barrows (the Ivy and Bean series), Lynn Hazen, and Susan Taylor Brown.

All the classrooms that came (more than 15 of them) received books for their classrooms from the Childrens' Book Project and First Book Project. And what an attentive and appreciative audience they were. They read aloud with the authors when asked, raised their hands, and cheerfully shouted out answers. On the way out, a teacher was clutching the drawing Bob Barner had done. "Look what we scored for the library!" he said excitedly to one of his students. It seemed like several hundred book lovers had just been born.

The Last of Harry Potter

I just finished reading "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." Sigh. It was satisfying. Now my son can take it to camp tomorrow.

Love and Hatred

I just finished Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. It is composed of two novellas about WWII France, the first (“Storm in June”) about the exodus of civilians from Paris when the Germans were about to occupy the city, the second (“Dolce”) about a small French village during a short period of time when it is occupied by a regiment of German soldiers. There were to be three more sections, but the author was unable to complete them because she died in 1942. To explain why would be a spoiler, I think, even though it has been discussed extensively in reviews. The novellas stand on their own as a story about the effect of war on ordinary people. The circumstances of the book’s writing and rediscovery (described in the appendix) are both devastating and miraculous. The novellas were not published until 2004 (in English, 2006).

Several pages from the manuscript are reproduced as the endpapers of the book: they are filled with lines of tiny cursive script, some of which are crossed out and rewritten. The two novellas are essentially a first draft. It is hard to believe that, reading them. She did not have the luxury of cut and paste, of revising and changing. She wrote the stories sitting outside on her coat in the French countryside, while waiting for things to come to the end she saw clearly.

There are many loving and beautiful moments in the book, also funny moments and brutal ones. Mostly the focus is on the everyday lives and concerns of the characters, who are loosely entwined and overlap in the two novellas. One of my favorite chapters, in “Dolce,” describes the fantasy of a bitter, lonely older woman whose son is a prisoner of war. In her darkened bedroom, she pretends her son is sitting by her side, a chubby toddler, and acts out stroking his hair. She is not crazy, just creating for herself the solace she needs. She imagines him returning from the war and sitting by the fire, while his wife (whom she resents and tyrannizes) reads to him. Involved in her fantasy, she gets up and starts downstairs to greet him. Could that be the voice of her daughter-in-law reading? She opens the sitting room door to see her daughter-in-law reading aloud to the German officer billeted in her home.