Very little reading was done during the last few days of August. In fact, none, despite the fact that I piled books up around my reclining chair. The books mostly acted as a supporting table for a box of kleenex while I watched tv or dozed. Rather than books, my companions were average but entertaining movies and all three seasons of Grace and Frankie.
The last book I started was Days Without End by Sebastian Barry, but, although the novel is incredibly poignant, and beautifully written, the opening sections of the novel were, in fact, too slowly meandering and lyrical for my sinus congested brain to latch onto. Luckily, it is also a book that is easy to put down and equally easy to pick up later, even a week later.
In many ways the book unfolds the way a life unfolds, the way the American prairie unfolds. In that it is a uniquely American novel, although the time and the place are captured in a way that perhaps no modern American could, suffused as we are with our own history, our own sense of being American. Of course we have to remember that "America" as experienced by McNulty and John Cole is itself a more elusive concept than the more defined nationalism we carry today. The book is unflinching in the brutality that occurs, but also equally open-handed with love and community building, in its tenderness, yes, its tenderness. The writing is deceptively simple, and although the book is at times shocking, what might be most important about this story is what is not said, or more exactly the way it is not said. This is the story of one man's journey. It deals with his life, with the complexity of what it means to be human, and with the dangers of seeing people as the other, with gender fluidity, with race, poverty, and love. And yet the novel doesn't actually address any of these things and this may be its greatest strength, the way it seeps under you skin -- subtly, quietly, and with humanity.
Days Without End is the fourth of the books listed for the Man Booker Prize that I have read. (Elmet and History of Wolves, here)(Lincoln in the Bardo, here) I read more novels than anything else in August, and that makes me very happy. Although I can't bring myself to read novels exclusively, my mind is too peripatetic for that, I am happiest when my reading is more heavily weighted toward fiction as opposed to non-fiction. Of the novels I read in August, Elmet, Where Roses Never Die, and Karin Slaughter's The Good Daughter were the ones I most enjoyed reading. Slaughter is another author who is new to me, but then the genre is something I have only recently begun to explore as well. It is a good story and with excellent and gentle development of deeply flawed and traumatized characters.
On other fronts, I read two cookbooks although I didn't cook from either of them. Squirrel Pie is about food traditions and the way those traditions reflect their cutlures. There are recipes I may cook someday but that really isn't why I love the book. Mrs. Wheelbarrow's Practical Pantry, is about preserving food and I loved reading it although I haven't cooked anything from it either.
Years ago, in what feels like a former life, I used to make jams and preserves, chutneys, pickles, vinegars and syrups. I look back on that self now and think I had much energy. And yet, I'd still like to think that I might again preserve some of my food. I like the idea of preserving the best of what is local, the idea of making. Even though the act of canning, drying, preserving in any way is not the simplest thing to do in any modern sense, in any sense in a world where it is easy to jump in a car and buy almost anything, in my mind it ties to something simpler, to being more connected to what fuels us and drives our lives.
I do make kimchi and sauerkraut. I make the occasional pickle. I ate some fabulous kohlrabi pickles with my lunch yesterday. I put them up last fall when I had a glut of habanero chiles. After the initial fermentation the pickles were hot and spicy, now they still have a little echo of that habanero heat, but the fruitiness of the pepper is more evident. I find this evolution, the process of fermentation and change, fascinating. Increasingly I also want the deliberate slowness and connection that I see as the promise of this book. It speaks of the simplicity of taking some sense of ownership in what is essential to our own lives, and what is in fact essential to life itself, not to our man-made world but to the world in which our cells and bodies, our food belong. In my mind, this book is filled with promise.
Or perhaps it is not really the book itself, merely that it acts as a jumping off point for my own thoughts. Much as I think about connection to the earth, I am not about to ditch civilization and move to a parcel of land and attempt to live off the grid. That is not me. Instead I am thinking about a new stove. I do not like my current stove. I loved the induction cooktop at my former house. I had far more control over temperature and heat with it than I do with my current Jenn-Air stove. I realize that this is the fault of the stove, which is old, not the fact that it is gas. And although I also realize that learning to cook on gas is itself a process, my mother's gas stove (Kenmore?) is far more useable than this, fancier, stove in my new house.
All my adult life I wanted a gas stove. I couldn't have it in Hyde Park, not without completely gutting half the house and starting over. The kitchen was in the middle of the house and building codes forbad gas in that circumstance; besides bringing the gas line down from the street would have involved blasting through hundreds of feet of rock. And yet I have never had as much meticulous control over heat as I had on my induction cooktop in the Moss Creek House. What do I want? If I get an induction cooktop, I would have to use an electric water bath canner, and could not use a pressure canner, since they are not made for induction. Canners really shouldn't be used on glass cooking surfaces anyway. Realistically speaking, will I ever use a canner? Or is this just some idle dream? An obscure dream is no reason to make a decision, and yet the sorting out of dreams is part of the process, my process at least.
Did I tell you that I'm the kind of person who will mull over this decision for some time? Even when I seem to make snap decisions, extensive background mulling and fretting has been swirling about beneath the surface. There is plenty of time. In the meantime, my current stove and I are slowly defining the terms of a truce.
