Goodbye, 2013 Books!

January 31st, 9:43 pm: Is this the last possible moment to present a roundup of everything I read in 2013? It may well be. Although the calendar is an arbitrary thing, January still belongs to Old Year/New Year comparisons, while tomorrow--February already--represents slogging through the slush of remaining months. So tomorrow will be too late.

I've been thinking about my list for a few weeks, and not quite typing it out. One problem is that I haven't kept a reading journal, so I had to reconstruct my year in books. I might have missed some, especially short fiction daily zapping around the Internet, stories from heaven, and hell.

A more mundane problem is household noise. Yakking kids, barking dog, TV in the background. Here's a little slice of our soundscape this evening: the History channel, which should be fine for young people, right? Let the educational bonanza begin. Except "History" was inexplicably running a show called Ancient Aliens, complete with so-called experts discussing star portals--whatever they may be--in Lake Michigan. And I was proud of, if a tad distracted by, the derisive hoots coming from my offspring. They know their history from their sci-fi, unlike the network programmers who are even now violating the terms of their broadcast licence.

At the moment, things are calmer. My son is watching the old film My Cousin Vinny, one of our faves. It's still in my ears, though, still slowing me down. I'll do my best to keep the inflections of the stern Southern judge character (played by the hilarious Fred Gwynne of The Munsters fame) and Joe Pesci's smartass Brooklyn lawyer out of this report to the world.

The thing about this list is how random it seems, even to me. It's the result of a mysterious combination of bookstores I wandered past, short stories I found online and in journals, book club dictates, and my abiding interests in food, migration, and big data/surveillance. Not included are books that I gave up on. At a glance, my list appears to be weighted toward Americans with some British and Canadian writers in the mix and achieves a rough balance between male and female writers, as well as fiction and non-fiction. Pure happenstance, all of it. Still, tracking reading habits is an exercise worth doing, if only to assess how scarce hours disappeared.

Allow me to introduce, and say goodbye to, my 2013 reading list. Here, in no particular order, are some books and stories you might want to read yourself.

Fiction

• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet by David Mitchell: I'm slowly working my way through all of Mitchell's books. His Cloud Atlas is an inspiration (and the film version, while entertaining, doesn't touch that book's magic).

• 419, by Will Ferguson: winner of the 2012 Giller Prize, featuring a global plot sparked by Nigerian telecom scams.

• The Age of Miracles, by Karen Thompson Walker: first novel about a girl and her family coping (and not coping) when the earth's rotation begins to slow.

 

• John Henry Days, by Colson Whitehead: This may have been the novel of my year. It's not a new book (found in a in a New York bookstore bin), but I couldn't stop thinking about its intriguing thematic structure--spokes of narrative arrayed around the hub of a cultural icon, John Henry. It's funny and angry. The open-to-interpretation ending almost killed me. 

 

• NW, by Zadie Smith: wonderful, find my notes here, and I'll be rushing to get her new work, The Embassy of Cambodia.

• A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan: read on vacation, long after everyone else had stopped gushing (for good reason) about it.

• Tinkers, by Paul Harding, a gorgeous, compressed meditation on fatherhood that also manages to be rich in character and incident; winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 and somehow I never heard of it until September 2013.

• Beatrice & Virgil, by Yann Martel--allegorical animal stories within the story.

• The World Without You, by Josh Henkin: a family gathers for a memorial service for their son, a reporter killed covering the war in Iraq, and navigates the aftermath of grief.

• Notable short stories:
• Alice Munro's To Reach Japan
• E.L. Doctorow's A Writer in the Family
• Emma Donoghue's The Widow's Cruse*
• Mia Alvar's The Kontrabida*
• Amity Gaige's The Soul Keeps the Body Up*
  
• several stories from Edith Pearlman's collection, Binocular Vision; and
• a strange story called Birds in the Mouth by Argentinean writer Samanta Schweblin, translated by Joel Streicker, and recommended by PEN America on the Recommended Reading website.

 * These all appeared in the literary journal One Story, itself a huge find. Must renew subscription.

Non-Fiction

• Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, by Michael Pollan: short and sharp, find it here.

• Hungry for Change by A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi: examines the connections between hunger and obesity; the capitalist transformation of food production; and ways to address the global subsistence crisis, which affects us all. I loved learning about the ties between seemingly unrelated people and circumstances, such as Haitian and Lousiana rice farmers.      

• How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, by Stanley Fish: bought in e-book format and, while it was engaging enough for this word nerd, I'm glad I didn't spring for the hard copy.

• Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, edited by Peter Orner: powerful and disturbing testimony, part of the McSweeney's Voice of Witness series. I wrote about this book previously.

• The Devil's Highway, by Luis Alberto Urrea: beautifully written account of a disastrous journey through the Arizona desert by a group of migrants in 2001. No surprise, it's tragic. A finalist for the Pulitzer, the book also has the distinction of being among a group of similar-themed works banned by Tucson district schools.

• Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace, by Ronald J. Deibert: I'm still immersed in this book, which came out before the Snowden revelations. It details many cases of cyber-espionage and hacking that University of Toronto's The Citizen Lab, which Professor Deibert leads, has uncovered. Everyone should read it. 

• Finally, I must include How to Expect What You're Not Expecting: Stories of Pregnancy, Parenthood and Loss, edited by Lisa Martin and Jessica Hiemstra, because encountering the wide-ranging, poetic voices of the other contributors was a revelation.

DIY Dairy

No, not milking cows. The title refers to do-it-yourself dairy products. I've been wanting to try making yogurt, sour cream, cream cheese and more ever since launching this slo-mo, haphazard Unprocessed Project a year ago. Homemade ricotta cheese, our first dairy experiment, turned out to be ridiculously easy.

I'm not ready to tackle yogurt, which requires both cooking and prolonged, temperature-controlled resting. But soon. Making your own yogurt sounds so hippie-ish, doesn't it? Pity that I was born too late to be a hippie.

Today's kitchen lab featured a less ambitious dairy project: sour cream made with a recipe from The Home Creamery--and, credit where it's due, I found this book through one of my favourite blogs, Obscure Canlit Mama.

The process is simple: mix some buttermilk into light cream. Cover and let stand 24 hours in a warm place. Stir, refrigerate another 24 hours to thicken, and then it's ready...we hope! I'll report back if disaster results. Meanwhile, here is the sour-smelling concoction warming in the cupboard over the heat vent, the only cozy spot in our drafty old house.

I was feeling a sense of accomplishment on the unprocessed food file this afternoon, having made not only the sour cream, but also brownies, hummous, and two kinds of scratch pizza, regular and beet-green. And then my son asked if we had any ranch dressing (for the pizza crust). Which of course we did not. And that was simply one dish too many. I invited him into the kitchen ("step away from the computer"), and the rest is edible history.

Joe's creation

Postscript: Anyone trying to feed a family based on Michael Pollan's 5-ingredient food rules will be defeated by the average supermarket dairy aisle. Most commercial dairy products contain long lists of ingredients, including milk protein concentrate (likely imported, made from milk possibly containing the synthetic growth hormone rBGH, which is banned in Canada but not the U.S.) and additives to extend shelf life, thicken, or emulsify, such as guar gum and carrageenan. Why not duck all that? 

Competing with Squirrels

Just over a year ago, I posted these pictures without explanation and never returned to the topic.

Perhaps it was because we were too busy dealing with this particular topic in the material realm. An overflowing topic, claiming space in boxes and pails, presenting itself as a chore that could be assigned to wayward children. They took turns--short turns--crushing nuts and sorting bits of shell from nutmeat before rebelling, quick to point out that they don't even like walnuts. Why do we collect them, anyway?

Yes, why: I don't know why. It has something to do with not wanting to waste nature's offerings. Our yard is surrounded by gorgeous black walnut trees that annually drop fruit at our feet. It also feels right to enact a ritual from earlier times. My paternal grandmother would have known what to do with all these nuts. My father (operating on genetic memory?) advised wearing gloves when peeling the green outer hull to avoid staining our hands black. So far, we haven't made our own dye, but that's an idea, too.

For my husband, who does 99% of the collecting and crushing, this extraordinarily labour-intensive activity is a race against his enemies. Every nut collected is one denied to the squirrels. He lives to defeat them, whether it's defending the bird feeders from rodent raids or, more recently, live-trapping and moving to friendlier territory the squatters nesting inside the ceiling of our mudroom (in the old summer kitchen, not inside the house proper, but still, ick...we could hear them up there, having a raucous party...they can't live with us, amIright?).  

So, here we are, one year later, sorting shells again. (And happy blog anniversary to me: 48 posts, not bad for the first year of an experiment, if I do say so myself.)

eldest daughter fails to employ walnut-avoidance tactics of her siblings

You, too, can harvest black walnuts and get free food. This tutorial will help. Thank you, friendly YouTube guy teaching us from Hamilton, Ontario. (Note: if the clip does not appear below, find it here.)

Somewhere online I read that people drive over the nuts to crush them, but that seems extreme, and our driveway isn't paved. The hammer method works. Tim wraps the nuts in cloth and demolishes a bunch all at once, but before the hammer, he tried crushing them with his vice, which broke. The shells are really, really hard.

I use the nuts in baking. Last year, we even had a few jars to give to relatives, to whom I offer a sincere and belated apology for any tooth-breaking shell fragments we might have missed.