Shucked (Weekend Reads)

Have I ever told you that my five year old - The Evil Genius/Death Wish - has a thing for oysters? Raw oysters. And preferably the East Coast varieties.

She tried them once when we were out for brunch. Hubby and I were sharing a dozen so we doled a bite out to the girls. The One Bite rule, right? They were both rather meh about them so we didn't think anything of it. Another trip to the same brunch spot a month or so later and she asked for one more. We're generous folks and don't mind sharing, especially with the kids, but before I had a chance to have my second oyster she'd had 6!

From there she went straight to eating dozens, literally, at a time. Taking her out for dinner or brunch is getting expensive!

So when I saw this book on the shelf at Anthropologie, of all places, I had to grab it. Purely for parental research, you know? Shucked: Life on a New England Oyster Farm is the personal story of a food and lifestyle writer in Boston. Erin Byers Murray is feeling jaded and bored and without too much thought decides to take a year off and work on an oyster farm. She describes her brutal, cold first days  - cleaning and culling just harvested oysters on the frozen Duxbury Bay, Massachusetts. Then summer comes and the work is backbreaking but thrilling. There are the challenges to her marriage with her now an oyster farmer at the mercy of the tides and her husband the bartender. There are also the highs of food festivals and post work beers and new relationships. Behind all that is the story of an oyster from seed to table. Not to mention all the farmers who make it happen.

My five year old is too young to read this book just yet, but I'll be keeping it on the shelf for her. And I predict she'll read it round about the time she starts paying for her own oysters.

A Stack O' Magazines (Weekend Reads)

So much talking, a lot of visiting, a whole bunch of driving, some attempts at surfing, campfires and sleeping bags, and a glorious stack of magazines.

I had grand plans for this stack. Some beach time, during naps in the car, quiet mornings in the woods. Beach time involved cheering on the girls at surf lessons and my own half-assed (or should I say double assed?) attempts while keeping the Garbage Truck from eating too much sand or discarded mussel shells. Naps in the car were great, but the roads in British Columbia are very, very windy and not conducive to reading. Quiet mornings in the woods? Nope, not at all when camping with 3 kids.

But I did get one afternoon by the fire on a lazy day and a straight stretch of a main highway in the day light.

Quilty - so many fun quilts in this issue. Lots of inspiration.
Cake &Whiskey - inspiring stuff for any of us working, running businesses, and living a life beyond school pick ups.
Uppercase - wildly rich in visuals and ideas.

Sometime next year I will read another magazine.

The Importance of Storytelling (Weekend Reads)

It's been slow on the reading front the last few months, for two reasons. One, I've been moving full speed ahead and barely have the energy to fall into bed for a few hours of sleep each night, let alone read. And two, the last two books I picked were a little heady. It made reading them a bit of a challenge.

Both books were quite good, but slogs to get through at times.

Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald was actually painful to read at times. Incredibly well written, wry, and full of great storytelling, it was also full of not a single likeable character. I spent the first half of the book alternating between cringing and wanting to reach into the pages to slap someone. But the details, the rich descriptions, and the subtle but incredible turns in the writing kept me going. Bad writing and mediocre storytelling would have had me toss the book early on, simply because of the characters.

It's a story that follows a family through their rural Cape Breton Island life, with a stint in New York City, that captures young love, abuse, racism, ugly marriages, music, evil, obsession, strength, and light. Not a single character is flawless and it isn't until the end that sympathy actually grows. And that's my experience. I wonder if a reader with a different perspective of many of these issues feels the sympathy differently? As the story unfolds and history is clarified your heart takes leaps and plunges. Without good story telling this is just a book about an family's ugly history.

As I've grown older I've realized that good storytelling is what appeals to me more than anything in a novel. So many novels are character driven. And that's fine, but the storytelling has to be there too. If not, I'm happy to put the book aside and move on to something else more interesting.

I nearly did that with The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. Very much character driven and rather pretentious through the first half of the book, I came very close to moving on. But I'd been warned that this might be my response. So I forged ahead, helped by the short chapters. A few pages a night and progression through the book was what I needed before bed, that's all. Then I came to this passage:

"Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty. When you speak, or read, or write, you can tell if you've said or read or written a fine sentence. You can recognize a well-turned phrase or an elegant style. But when you are applying the rules of grammar skillfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language... I get completely carried away just knowing there are words of all different natures, and that you have to know them in order to be able to infer their potential usage and compatibility."

And it goes on. I literally sat up in bed and read this passage over and over again. It explained so much for me as a reader and a writer. And it made me pay more attention to rest of the book, caught up in the stories of the characters now.

Words make stories, but in the hand of a good writer - someone who can ascend through language - they make beauty, even when the stories are ugly. That's what good storytelling is and I will always pursue that.

Piles of Books (Not a Weekend Reads)

No such thing as too many books, right?

My husband and I are on opposite sides of that answer. but one of us is a reader, the other is not. You don't hear me complaining about too many Top Gear magazines filling the house.

I am rather impatiently waiting the arrival of the built-in bookshelf for my studio space. So, for now, these books pile around me on the floor. Until the other day they were in my son's room/house dumping ground but I went on a spree and did up his room this past week. So now the books are piling up on the floor in my room. And that's not counting all my non-sewing related books (novels, bios, non-fiction, etc.) piling up on the floor of the bedroom. Also not counting the boxes of books stored away, hoping for a glimpse of the light.

It's no lie, I've dreamt of a home library for years. Just like Lord Grantham with his red couches, impressive writing desk, and a tray of crystal and hard liquor. Or perhaps a slightly more modern version. A girl has to dream right? Because libraries are exactly what the architects of these 50s tract houses had in mind when designing boxes to inhabit.

Any suggestions or pin boards on book displays/storage for a mid-century girl?