52 Loaves, Three Continents and Six Daily Calls to Prayer

How did William Alexander have time to bake, let alone travel when he was dealing with renovating the big brown house in the town that time forgot and tending his 22 beds of vegetables.  Well, the horticulture does recur in this book when he decides to grow the wheat, to grind the grain, to build a brick oven to bake the perfect loaf of bread.  Ah come on, talk about obsessive compulsive.  Even rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to not settle him down.  It is only when he goes to Normandy to a monastery built around 635 AD does he come close to his perfect boule, actually a more communal bastarde, given that the monks want each of them to have a slice that is equal to everyone else's.

While I laughed by the first few pages of The $64 Tomato, I was tearing up in the last few pages of this book.  His critiques from his children who only want him to make croissants, his outlay of huge amounts of money to learn how to make restaurant quantities of bread at Escoffier in Paris, and his side trip to Morocco, all come together to have taught him what he needs to know to reintroduce home or in this case abbey baked bread to the monks.  Only to return home to miss the regime of vigils to complines and to receive an email that the monks will vote on whether to continue to use his recipes.

I think I have another one of Alexander's books on reserve but it seems a long time in coming in from the hinterland branches.  Will head over tomorrow to return this one and collect another, I hope.  Otherwise, I think I will start another alphabet sequence of biographies.

The $64 Tomato by William Lawrence

The best book so far in 2015.  Do not rely on NYT's review ... rely on the Hammagrael kid.  When your college roommate says a book reminds her of you, you take the bait.  OMG, it's me, it's my yard, my garden, my water bill, and on and on.  On a snowy day, a day early in March when I should be thinking about hiring someone to till out the blackberry roots so the deer won't have a maternity ward, this book reminds me that spring will eventually come, with weeding and mowing and vermin control.

As much as I'd like to, I am not about to prepare a 2,000 square feet vegetable garden, although I probably will look to winter over my thyme and find some wild aggressive arugula seeds.  I loved this book because it is set in the Hudson River valley, because Mr. Lawrence seems to have all the parallel experiences of a long married couple with two aloof children, a house with never-ending annoyances (yesterday, the newly installed back door knob came off in my hands, leaving the screws in the door and a gaping hole for the drafts to come through.  I can relate to inexplicably high water bills, unhandy repairmen, and purslane.

At my advancing towards retirement age, I also chide myself from trying to maintain beds of flowers that are an unending cycle of tending, dead-heading and babying.  And like WL, this is a hobby of only one person in the household, me, the rest just enjoying the bouquets and seasonings.

Besides laughing reading whole paragraphs out loud, there is one page worth quoting at length:
"...In short, I am an Existentialist in the Garden.  Camus in chamomille, Satre in the salad.  How on earth did I get here, and how do I get out?  Do I want to get out?  If I leave, where to I go?  ... What I've been doing is rewarding, nourishing, and reflective of a philosophical belief in self-sustenance and healthy, fresh food -- but how do I make it fun again.  This is supposed to be a hobby, not a burden ... a lesson in how quickly novelty becomes ritual becomes chore.  The great, terrifying existential question:  If you were doomed to live the same life over and over again for eternity, would you choose the life you are living now?  The question is interesting enough, but I've always thought the point of asking it is really the unspoken, potentially devastating follow-up question.  That is, if the answer is no, then why are you living the life you are living now?  Stop making excuses, and do something about it."

I thought I mentally debated this during my two bouts of cancer and resolved the issue once and for all, Not.  My daily life comes under continuous reassessment.  Garden is the least of it.

The Room by Jonas Karlsson

Let me say this yet again:  I have been duped too often by NYT review.   The Room is not a funny book.  Despite being Swedish, it does not rise to The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo.

It is a book about a man who is a delusional paranoid, who unfortunately reminded me of someone at work.  Bjorn retreats to a "room" that no one else can see, a room that does not exist, but a mental state where he can produce work that far exceeds his fellow workers.

The NYT said this was funny.  It's not.  It's a quick read so you won't waste more than an hour should you decide to try it, but I would say not.

Redeployment by Phil Klay

A couple of Sundays ago, it finally got warm enough to venture out of our igloo and feet of snow to have a late lunch with one of our book club founders.  She asked me point blank why I hadn't attended any meeting in months, probably going on a year.  She speculated that it was because of one particular member who stiffed my on decorating advise.  I said no, but would not admit the real reason why:  I cannot stand reading and then talking about books that are either on Oprah's list or the best seller fiction list, essentially books about dis-functional families, frustrated women, or biased views of historical events.  So to satisfy my rebellious spirit, I read Redeployment, a recent National Book award winner, written by a former Marine who fought in the Mid-East wars, I believe had graduated from an Ivy and got his MFA from Hunter after the war.  I needed to read a "male" book.

While I have suggested to some of the men who work for me that they might want to read it, I can only give it a B-/C+.  I am not widely read in war recollections, I feel this was just an updated version, a tad less forceful, than others I have read,  Such books almost have to be written by survivors.  The lessons they learn are universal, applicable to any war.  (I compare this to a memo I was asked to edit this week at work about the difficulty of program managers talking to computer geeks, a topic that echoed all my experiences from the mid-70s).  All that was different between Redeployment and Nam was there was no fracking.  Thank God for an all volunteer/no draft military.

A collection of stories with different characters, the one I liked best was Money as a Weapons System, a story with MASH-like humor and one that had all the absurdity of governmental best intentions to far from the ground: widows becoming beekeepers, a water purification plant with an overseer on the take and pipes with too much pressure, and a women's health care center that was a success but funding ineligible.  Reading it was like a day at work.

I was thinking about telling the book club to read this.  At least it did not have "discussion questions" included in the back of the book.  But I can't and so my absences continue