Love Italian style by Melissa Gorga (2013)

Love Italian style: The Secrets of my Hot and Happy Marriage is not just a bad book – it’s a terrible book. It’s really, truly dreadful, but not in a car crash kind of way – in an awful “Should we call the police? kind of way. Let me explain what I mean.

As I may have mentioned before, I love reading celebrity novels, memoirs, cookbooks – any longform literary printing. Slap a celebrity name on the cover somewhere and I am there, credit card ready. Love Italian style is from Real Housewives of New Jersey alum Melissa Gorga and fits the trash-read bill perfectly. For those unfamiliar with Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise, it’s a cable TV series that focus on wealthy women behaving badly. The most recent series I’ve seen centres on the ongoing drama between Teresa Guidice and her brother and his wife, Joe and Melissa Gorga. You see, Teresa, her husband “Juicy” Joe and her brother Joe used to be best friends but then Melissa came along and stole Joe away. There’s been tables flipped, punches thrown at christenings, the whole family-drama works. Teresa Guidice’s cookbook Skinny Italian was very successful (and, apart from the random chapter on makeup, surprisingly full of really good recipes. Everything I’ve made from it is delicious), so it was only a matter of time before Melissa released one of her own. This is that book.

When Melissa was young, her father was the most important man in her life. Girls were horrible to her because she was so gorgeous and good at things (something about varsity cheerleading? I don’t speak American high school). She even got beaten up for her suspected promiscuous ways (she wasn’t promiscuous! She was a virgin! A woman’s virginity is precious and a gift to her husband). But she always had her dad to rely on…until he was killed in a single-car crash and she and her mother found out he’d lost all of their money. Melissa’s college fund was gone and her mother needed to go to work to support them. Oh, and by the way he was a serial adulterer who would leave the family without notice for weeks at a time when he wanted to “run wild”. What a great man.

Melissa’s giant teenage ego aside, that’s actually a really sad story. Melissa’s family friend volunteered to pay for her tuition so she was able to go to college but she had to work three jobs to cover her rent and living expenses. That must have been hard for her, so good on her for working hard to get an education. Then, while waitressing in one of her three jobs, she met Joe. Five months later they were engaged and five months after that they were married. Then the problems started.

Firstly, Joe didn’t want his wife to work. He believes it’s a woman’s role to cook and clean for her husband. He works hard, he wants a hot wife to rush to the door when he arrives home before serving him a home-cooked meal just like the ones his mother cooked for him (she took lessons from his mother so her food would literally be the exactly same). So, despite how hard she worked to get a degree, despite what happened to her and her mother when her father died leaving them penniless, Melissa doesn’t work. Not a good start. Also, if you were hot when he married you and you stop being hot by getting fat or frumpy, don't be offended when your husband tells you so - he's not being a dick, he's helping you. It's because he loves you so very very much. I think I need a shower.

Then, Joe starts becoming a bit more prescriptive about what he wants his wife to do. He doesn’t like her to talk to people at parties. He doesn’t like her to see her single friends. In fact, he doesn't want her to socialise at all if he's not there. He wants her to wear a wedding ring (she’s his property) but doesn’t wear one himself. He doesn’t let her spend the night away from home without him – he doesn’t like her to spend time away from home at all. So Melissa doesn’t. He’s her king, she does what he says. The relationship as described is not only not healthy, it’s abusive – Joe is controlling, dominating and occasionally violent.

The more I read this book the more disturbed I was by what I was reading. Melissa lists the actions she takes to avoid her husband’s anger. She has sex with him every day, even if she doesn’t feel like it, because when he gets angry he throws chairs and not having sex makes him angry (he calls sex “getting the poison out”. Romantic, right?). Her relationship to marital sex and fidelity is horrific. If you have bad news to give your husband, have sex with him first and then he won’t mind as much. And if you don’t have sex with him, the consequences are dire. She says, “Refusing to initiate is a Top Three reason men cheat. The ugliest girl in the world could come on to a man in that state of mind, and he might have to go for it. He thinks, At least someone wants me.” (side note, these are direct quotes from the books. The random caps and italics are in the original.) Who even thinks this way, let alone puts those thoughts on paper and publishes them?

I made it to p64 and then I had to stop (although I admit I did flick through the rest because I felt bad writing a review for a book I’d only read a third of). I recognise that this book may not be an accurate picture of the Gorgas’ relationship. Maybe it’s the story the publisher thought would sell best. That this book got published at all is really disturbing. I hope if any of it is true, then Melissa’s friends and family get her the help she needs. And even if it’s not, people need to stop reading, buying and borrowing this book.

One final thing – how pissed off would you be if you were Melissa’s mum right now? You raised her, went back to work to support her once your deadbeat husband who lost all of your money and screwed around on you died, and he gets the book dedication?

Tales of the City books 1-6

Every now and then one’s reading life, a person discovers a series of books that, simply, makes them happy. Even looking at these books on the shelf can be cause for a smile and reading them again is like hanging out with old friends. The discoveries of these special stories are more valuable because of their rareness and, for this particular reader, they are cherished and loved and sometimes feel more real than people who are actually living.

Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City is one of those series for me. It opens with the story of Mary Ann, a woman from Cleveland who arrives in San Francisco and loves it so much she impulsively move there. She moves into the house of the mysterious Anna Madrigal on Barbary Lane, where a bunch of other interesting characters live, including Michael (Mouse), Mona and Brian among many, many more. The books don’t focus on any one character – the narration shifts between many different stories in what this reviewer calls a “third-person kaleidoscope narrative”. This is a huge part of both the series’ appeal and the skill of Maupin’s storytelling – each of the points of view shown to the reader feels real (with a few minor exceptions, like that of Queen Elizabeth II in Babycakes) and the relationships, loves and heartbreak ring true.

I discovered the series when I was an undergrad on the recommendation of a friend and I have retained my love of the series although the friendship has long faded (does anyone ever has as many friends as one has when one is an undergraduate? Why am I continually referring to myself as “one” in this review?). One of the things I loved most about these books was how they represented gayness. In Tales in the City, being gay was just one part of a character’s personality. It was of bigger or smaller importance depending on the person but it was never anyone’s defining characteristic – they were “a best friend who was gay” rather than “a gay best friend”. This was true to my real-life experience with friends who were gay and, to find out that it was possible to write gayness like this was honestly revelatory for me. Looking at how many facets of the media still struggle with their representation of homosexuality today (Hollywood, I’m looking at you) make me appreciate how truly groundbreaking Tales really was.

The final book in the Tales series, The Days of Anna Madrigal, has been released. I haven’t read it yet because I’m not quite ready to let these characters go. I don’t want to read a new one knowing there will be no more so, to delay the final sad moment, I have collected the entire series so far and read the first six. I’d never read them all in sequence before and it was fascinating to watch the changing fashions and cultural mores from the ‘70s until the late 1980s of Sure of You. The city of San Francisco is a character in these novels and it to changes and develops along with everyone else. After one weekend binge Tales session I also realised that these books are much kinder to their male characters than the female ones (the most appealing female character in the book was, in fact, born a man) but you can’t have everything and I love Mouse enough to make up for it.

If you haven’t, please read these books. They are a delight and a treasure and I love them.

Mayim's Vegan Table by Mayim Bialik and Dr Jan Gordon (2014)

I imagine there's this moment in publishing house planning meetings where they discuss upcoming titles and the kind of people who will buy them, maybe laughing at or wondering about the people who buy a book just because of the famous name on the cover. I admit - I am one of those people. If it is written by a female actor, I promise you it's on my list of books to read. Some, I liked a lot (Molly Ringwald's When It Happens to You and Lauren Graham's Someday, Someday, Maybe were both very good and the cookbooks from Real Housewives Bethenney Frankel and Teresa Guidice are excellent and in regular use at my house), some made me smile and watch Clueless again (The Kind Diet by Alicia Silverstone) and some were just awful (Oh Dear Sylvia by Dawn French and Skinnydipping by Bethenney Frankel were really, really bad). So when I saw Mayim's Vegan Table available on Netgalley, I was torn. I find Mayim Bialik fascinating - a woman with a PhD in microbiology who plays a character on TV with a PhD in microbiology - but I am not a fan of vegan cookbooks, as they are often full of frankenfoods and weird ingredients,. Clearly, my curiosity won out and I requested the title.

Upon downloading my copy, I was again a bit hesitant when I saw there were four chapters on veganism before the recipes even started. With all due respect to any vegans out there, I too have read the research and decided that it's not a lifestyle I want and I don't read books to feel lectured at about my choices (although I have more respect for vegans than I do for people who "eat paleo". Don't even get me started on people who follow "our ancestors' diets" and then cook with ghee and canned coconut milk - just like ancient man). However, these chapters were very reasonable and not polemic at all. I found myself nodding quite a bit - a healthy diet is about making better choices for the environment and our bodies - and, as a society, we eat too many meat products and way too much processed food. These authors (Bialik and Dr Jay) advocate for making better choices, which I fully agree with. They are argue strongly and persuasively that we need to be feeding our kids better food - less processed chips in individually packaged bags that go into landfill and more fresh, healthy food. Also (and I agree with this wholeheartedly) food needs to stop being used as a way to reward or console. Teaching a kid that doing something good means you get a sweet treat leads to adults with a unhealthy relationship with both food and rewards.

So, the writing gets a tick from me. But, at the end of the day this is a cookbook, so I picked two recipes that I had the ingredients for in the cupboard and started cooking.

First up, Spanish Rice. 

Excuse the photo - the steam from the hot food fogged up the camera lens! I served this with kidney beans, jarred salsa and fresh diced tomato in wholegrain tortillas and it was simple and delicious. My boyfriend ate all of the leftovers straight from the pan and didn't believe me when I told him it was vegan. I will definitely be making it again.

For dessert: Chocolate Fudge Cake.

It's a bit flatter than it should be because I halved the recipe. Bialik ices her cake but I actually don't particularly like "frosting" so I just dusted it with icing sugar and served with fresh raspberries and blueberries. This also was a winner - easy, simple, moist and tasty.

My one criticism of the book is that I would have liked to have a key added with information on recipes' suitability for freezing, making ahead and if they were gluten-free. What I liked most about this book is that it wasn't about trying to replicate food with animal products in vegan form - it is full of healthy, simple recipes that taste good and I've got a whole bunch of other recipes flagged to try. I never thought I'd say this about a vegan cookbook, but when my Netgalley copy expires, I think I will actually buy a copy. Four stars.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2013)

It seems a bit cheeky that my first book review of the year with a book that I read 98% of it in 2013 but, given the size of this book, I think I will not be the only one doing so! I speak, of course, of Donna Tartt’s very long highly anticipated The Goldfinch, her long-awaited follow-up to The Secret History and The Little Prince.

This book is told in the first person by Theodore Decker. His mother is killed in a terrorist attack at the Museum of Modern Art in New York at. Following the explosion, at the behest of a dying man a concussed Theodore steals the famous painting The Goldfinch. The rest of the novel follows Theo as he firstly lives with a wealthy foster family, then his father then his mentor, James Hobart.

There are many many reviews of this book out there – so many that I do feel a bit redundant sharing mine. But what is the point of having a book blog if I don’t get to share my Opinions? (Capital O, of course. My Opinions are many and strong) There were two fundamental things I took from reading this book. Firstly, Donna Tartt is a wonderful writer. Her language is beautiful and evocative and her descriptions of Theo’s grief after losing his mother are poignant and heartbreaking. But this first point is dramatically overshadowed by the second dominating aspect of the novel: this book is too bloody long!

I like a long book – Anna Karenina is one of my favourite books of all time and that is both lengthy and detailed. However, because so little happens in The Goldfinch and because we only ever hear the story from Theo’s perspective, rather than being lost in the story or entranced by the language I found myself becoming increasingly impatient. I wanted to tell Theo (and, by extension, Tartt) to hurry up and get to the point! By the end of the book Tartt had started to write in partial sentences (either Tart was as sick of the book as I was or was trying to use writing style to allow us to enter the mind of the protagonist – whatever the rationale, they were jarring and frustrating). I would estimate that a good third of the book is just about Theo getting wasted. You know how when you’re at a party and you’re sober and everyone else is getting wasted and telling you stupid repetitive stories that go on and on and on? That’s what reading about someone getting wasted all the time feels like. I reached the stage where if the first sentence of a paragraph made any mention of drugs or drug use I skipped it and moved to the next one. Life’s too short for reading the same paragraph rearranged slightly differently 3,000 times.

The most disappointing part of reading The Goldfinch for me was that it had the potential to be a really great book. The concept is great and at times Tartt’s writing is close to divine. It just really needed a good editor to tease out the story and cut back all of the excess verbiage. Instead of reading this book, I recommend re-reading The Secret History instead. 2.5 stars.

My copy is more than 4cm deep! Do not, I repeat, do not attempt to use this book as commuting material. This book is single-bookedly contributing to the death of the published book and rise of the e-reader. 

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

I read 78 books for the year, which falls a few short of my target of 104 but is still not a shabby number! I wrote 21 reviews, one more than my target of 20.

Cheers to a wonder 2014 that involves many books, much talking about books and many long, lazy afternoons reading books on the couch. 

Kinsey and Me by Sue Grafton (2013)

I am not a big short story fan. I find the format really limiting in that I prefer longer, more involved stories and the craft involved in writing short stories - and it is a format that requires a lot of skill and work to do effectively - is not necessarily the type that I admire the most. Given this disinclination, when I saw Sue Grafton had written a book of short stories featuring my favourite female detective Kinsey Millhone, it took me rather a long time get around to borrowing it from the library.

Well, after finishing this book I cannot believe how stupid I was to let my silly prejudices prevent me from reading this book for so long! Kinsey and Me is a collection of short stories, the stories are divided up into two separate sections. The first section are detective stories starring Ms Millhone, which are fun and entertaining and everything I've come to expect from Sue Grafton. However, it was the second section that really surprised me and that I enjoyed the most.

I think sometimes we don't think of authors in the same way we do celebrities in that we don't form an attachment to them but to the characters they write. We may associate authors with a particular genre, style of writing and set of characters but I know that I rarely think of their lives beyond the books they publish. Even though Sue Grafton is an actual living breathing person and Kinsey Millhone is not, it is Kinsey who feels more real to me. Or, should I say, did before reading this book. The second section is stories about Kit Blue, who Sue Grafton tells us is a fictionalised representation of her. Grafton says she wrote the stories to deal with her feelings following the death of her mother, who was an alcoholic, and the result is hauntingly beautiful exquisitely crafted moments in a life that say so much using so few words. They were poignant and sad but hopeful and loving - I enjoyed them very much and, as much as I love Kinsey, using these tales as a basis I hope that Grafton does write more non-Kinsey novels.

Five stars.

Cooked by Michael Pollan (2013)

Michael Pollan’s contention in Cooked is that it is through the act of cooking food that we can address the health and environmental issues concerning food and food practices that permeate our culture. Not only is cooking at home healthier than eating processed food, it both encourages and allows consumers to be closer to the food chain process and, in the process through the act of sharing meals, foster a better family environment.

This is the first Pollan book I have read. I was familiar with his food philosophy – “Eat food. Mainly plants. Not too much”, which I think is an excellent way to approach eating (although, based on the amount of meat he says he eats in this book, he doesn’t practice what he preaches). I also like his idea that you can eat whatever you want – as long as you make it yourself. He argues that it is the easy access to high calorie foods that were previously labour intensive that has led to widespread health problems. Previously, making French fries or potato chips was a labour-intensive time-consuming process that, because it was difficult to do, was done less often. Now, not only is access to potato chips and French fries easy, it is cheap – cheaper than other nutrient-dense lower-calorie foods. In this book, Pollan extends his food philosophy to the practice of cooking by developing his basic cooking skills in four different cooking practices: grilling with fire (bbq), cooking with liquid (braising), baking bread and fermenting (brewing beer). He was “surprised and pleased” to find these elements just happen to coincide with the classical elements of earth: Fire, Water, Air and Earth. What a happy coincidence! Warning: do not read this book if eye-rolling is an issue for you because situations such as this abound throughout the pages of Cooked.

I had two thoughts when reading this book. Firstly, Pollan does go on a bit. He talked about onions for many more pages than I felt was justified – we get it, onions are a big deal. I imagine in person he’s a man who very much likes the sound of his own voice. I found this very wearying and I admit that I did skip the last chapter on brewing completely because I felt that if he can be so unbearable on the subject of onions, then what would he be like on the infinitely more wanky subject of homebrewing? I did find his tone quite offputting and, in places, a bit patronising.

Secondly, there seems to be a huge disconnect between Pollan’s understanding and interaction with the cooking process and actual real life. I am not implying that Pollan is some sort of cyborg and not a real person; rather, that he has no concept of how the average person interacts with food and cooking in their everyday life. For example, he makes a convincing point that cooking is important and that everyone should cook at home. But to develop his cooking skills, he hires a chef to come into his house once a week and teach him to cook. No one I know would consider that a reasonable option. In another section, he waxes lyrical about how well the bread-making process fits in to his personal writing schedule. If you work in an office to which you have to commute, fitting regular bread baking into your schedule is very difficult.  At one stage he realises that if you set aside time on the weekend to make meals in advance, it is cheaper and healthier than buying takeaway or microwaving meals. No shit, Sherlock – do you reckon? Not only is that information included in most cookbooks (which I have noticed now tend to contain a helpful key that indicates whether meals are freezer friendly, vegetarian, gluten-free, etc), the kind of person who would read a book called Cooked by a food philosopher and activist already knows that.

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This leads me to the central paradox of Cooked. It says some really important stuff! The links between poor health and processed food are persuasively outlined and the case for cooking more (by both genders, he is clear to state) is convincingly made. But while he identifies the problem (current food consumption practices are bad for us and the planet) and the solution (cook more, especially more local food) there’s no bridge between those two positions. It’s like asking ‘How do I produce more knitted objects?’ and then answering ‘Knit more’. Well sure, but unless I stop paying rent or seeing my friends or exercising, that’s not actually a useful solution at all. I’m not sure there’s a point of identifying a solution, even a really really good solution, if there’s no way of implementing it. (Although, I do admit that after reading Cooked I put a book on making sourdough bread on reserve at the library and I’m going to have another go at creating a starter of my own…I’m very suggestible when it comes to bread baking!)

Cooked raises an important topic but is lacking in its delivery and execution. I give it a tentative three stars.