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It's been a filled with beautiful, mild days so far, so of course I've had to spend most of them stuck inside at work. At least I've been able to squeeze in a fair amount of reading around the margins. So, without further ado:
What I Finished Reading This Week
Eating Wild Japan – Winifred Bird
This combination travelogue, field guide, and cookbook was a pleasure to read, and left me highly nostalgic for Japan (I lived in many of the locales Bird visits) and eager to try her recipes. As the title suggests, Eating Wild Japan looks at some of the foraged plants and seaweeds that have played a role in Japanese food from the Jomon era to the present. Bird wisely chooses to focus on the foraging and culinary subcultures of several locations on Japan's four main islands instead of writing an encyclopedia of every wild plant that has ever been foraged in the country. This lets her really dig into the history and sense of place of her chosen locations, and the people who live and forage there; I particularly enjoyed the sections on seaweed and the food culture of northern Japan's indigenous Ainu. Her field guide on the plants and seaweeds mentioned ranks with some of the best herbals I've seen (although again, it's neither comprehensive nor includes drawings or photographs of the featured plants—the book's one major downside). And the recipes are both solid examples of katei ryori and can be easily prepared with ingredients available in major supermarkets with substitutions suggested for ingredients that might not be easily foraged outside of Japan. This one is an all around winner.
Spindle And Dagger – J. Anderson Coats
I very much enjoyed Coats’ The Wicked And The Just, and Spindle And Dagger is even better. It is, in fact, a really, really good book. It's a retelling of the story of Owain ap Cadwgan's abduction of Nest ferch Rhys within the context of the Welsh and Normans' 12 century struggles for control of Wales. But it's the story as told by Coats, which means the focus is squarely on how the “extras”—if you will—would have experienced these events, versus the heroic treatments said events receive in the original chronicles. In other words, it's both a ripping good story and a powerful corrective to the standard point of view used in historical documents or Tolkienesque genre tropes. On top of that, Coats has once again written a cast of amazing female characters, full of warts, strengths, imperfections, and ambitions—or, to put it another way, the sort of nuance and complexity usually reserved for men in similar retellings. (Indeed, Coats does this so well there were points in the book where I wanted the protagonist to be a bit less realistic.) Guys, this one is good.
Run Me To Earth – Paul Yoon
Run Me To Earth is a series of interconnected short stories told by three orphaned children and several adult personnel manning a field hospital in Laos during the American bombing campaign and beyond. It took awhile for this book to click with me, but once it did (at about the halfway mark), I finished it in a few days. At its root, it’s a novel about how individuals who’ve lived through a war simultaneously recover and never recover from the experience, and Yoon’s depiction of this contradiction through the characters’ narrative arcs results in a novel that exceeds the sum of its parts.
What I Am Currently Reading
Skellig – David Almond
I’ve been circling around reading this one for over 20 years, so we’ll see what I think.
The Romance of Lust – Anonymous
Like bad fanfic.
Complete Book of Ceremonial Magic – Lon Milo DuQuette & David Shoemaker, eds.
This week I read the chapters “Enochian Magick & Mysticism” by Aaron Leitch, “The Golden Dawn” by Chic Cicero and Sandra Tabatha Cicero, and “Thelema & Aleister Crowley” by David Shoemaker. The first was as good of a basic introduction to this complex topic as you can get, the second another well written introduction, and the third reconfirmed my opinion that Thelema, A∴A∴, and the rest are just Christianity reskinned with Egyptian deities and 100 percent more naked ladies for Crowley to try to bone.
London And The Seventeenth Century – Margarette Lincoln
This week my brain wanted well-written nonfiction and so far, this book has delivered.
Manx Fairy Tales – Sophia Morrison
This is my current right-before-bed reading.
Tokyo Junkie – Robert Whiting
By the author of You Gotta Have Wa and Tokyo Underground, so I’m excited to be reading this one.
What I'm Reading Next
This week I acquired Living Yoga (edited by Georg Feuerstein and Stephan Bodian), Martin Scott’s Thraxos And The Sorcerers, Belisa Vranich’s Breathe, and the Almond, Bird, Lincoln, and Whiting.
On another book-related note, RIP Norton Juster.
これで以上です。
What I Finished Reading This Week
Eating Wild Japan – Winifred Bird
This combination travelogue, field guide, and cookbook was a pleasure to read, and left me highly nostalgic for Japan (I lived in many of the locales Bird visits) and eager to try her recipes. As the title suggests, Eating Wild Japan looks at some of the foraged plants and seaweeds that have played a role in Japanese food from the Jomon era to the present. Bird wisely chooses to focus on the foraging and culinary subcultures of several locations on Japan's four main islands instead of writing an encyclopedia of every wild plant that has ever been foraged in the country. This lets her really dig into the history and sense of place of her chosen locations, and the people who live and forage there; I particularly enjoyed the sections on seaweed and the food culture of northern Japan's indigenous Ainu. Her field guide on the plants and seaweeds mentioned ranks with some of the best herbals I've seen (although again, it's neither comprehensive nor includes drawings or photographs of the featured plants—the book's one major downside). And the recipes are both solid examples of katei ryori and can be easily prepared with ingredients available in major supermarkets with substitutions suggested for ingredients that might not be easily foraged outside of Japan. This one is an all around winner.
Spindle And Dagger – J. Anderson Coats
I very much enjoyed Coats’ The Wicked And The Just, and Spindle And Dagger is even better. It is, in fact, a really, really good book. It's a retelling of the story of Owain ap Cadwgan's abduction of Nest ferch Rhys within the context of the Welsh and Normans' 12 century struggles for control of Wales. But it's the story as told by Coats, which means the focus is squarely on how the “extras”—if you will—would have experienced these events, versus the heroic treatments said events receive in the original chronicles. In other words, it's both a ripping good story and a powerful corrective to the standard point of view used in historical documents or Tolkienesque genre tropes. On top of that, Coats has once again written a cast of amazing female characters, full of warts, strengths, imperfections, and ambitions—or, to put it another way, the sort of nuance and complexity usually reserved for men in similar retellings. (Indeed, Coats does this so well there were points in the book where I wanted the protagonist to be a bit less realistic.) Guys, this one is good.
Run Me To Earth – Paul Yoon
Run Me To Earth is a series of interconnected short stories told by three orphaned children and several adult personnel manning a field hospital in Laos during the American bombing campaign and beyond. It took awhile for this book to click with me, but once it did (at about the halfway mark), I finished it in a few days. At its root, it’s a novel about how individuals who’ve lived through a war simultaneously recover and never recover from the experience, and Yoon’s depiction of this contradiction through the characters’ narrative arcs results in a novel that exceeds the sum of its parts.
What I Am Currently Reading
Skellig – David Almond
I’ve been circling around reading this one for over 20 years, so we’ll see what I think.
The Romance of Lust – Anonymous
Like bad fanfic.
Complete Book of Ceremonial Magic – Lon Milo DuQuette & David Shoemaker, eds.
This week I read the chapters “Enochian Magick & Mysticism” by Aaron Leitch, “The Golden Dawn” by Chic Cicero and Sandra Tabatha Cicero, and “Thelema & Aleister Crowley” by David Shoemaker. The first was as good of a basic introduction to this complex topic as you can get, the second another well written introduction, and the third reconfirmed my opinion that Thelema, A∴A∴, and the rest are just Christianity reskinned with Egyptian deities and 100 percent more naked ladies for Crowley to try to bone.
London And The Seventeenth Century – Margarette Lincoln
This week my brain wanted well-written nonfiction and so far, this book has delivered.
Manx Fairy Tales – Sophia Morrison
This is my current right-before-bed reading.
Tokyo Junkie – Robert Whiting
By the author of You Gotta Have Wa and Tokyo Underground, so I’m excited to be reading this one.
What I'm Reading Next
This week I acquired Living Yoga (edited by Georg Feuerstein and Stephan Bodian), Martin Scott’s Thraxos And The Sorcerers, Belisa Vranich’s Breathe, and the Almond, Bird, Lincoln, and Whiting.
On another book-related note, RIP Norton Juster.
これで以上です。
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