Oh, yeah . . . books!

Amongst the kindle vs tree discussions, death of the midlist articles in professional magazines, plagiarism scandals blowing up all around and - I'm not kidding - a blogpost on how to write how-to articles, I managed to spend the first month of 2012 writing 2000 words a day and sitting by the fire in the evening reading books for pleasure.

As follows:

At the end of the Christmas holidays, - 12th night; I know how to stretch a feast! - I was still reading Meat: A Benign Extravagence by Simon Fairlie.  Fascinating stuff as a famer and omnivore sets out to get to the facts behind the slogans about meat eating, social justice and sustainable food production.



Straight on to Alan Bradley's I am Half-sick of Shadows and then one I've been looking forward to since last September when I met the wonderful Donna Andrews and found out that as well as her bonkers birds series she's written four mysteries featuring Turing Hopper, an artificial intelligence program detective.  The first -You've Got Murder - is just splendid.  Turing herself is an engaging character and the limitations and frustrations of her life make for a claustrophobic atmosphere throughout the novel that fits perfectly with the mounting tension of the plot.



At this point I found out that Val McDermid was coming to Berkeley and decided to re-read The Mermaids Singing.  I'd forgotten how good it is, especially the structure and pacing.  For me structure (and pacing) are like film scores.  If they're terrible, they ruin it; if they're pretty good, I don't notice them; only if they're fantastically brilliant do I ever think "Boy this is fantastically brilliant".

  This book is a masterclass on handling tricksy structure without it seeming tricksy, just exactly what you need to read when you're writing a new book.  It made all things seem possible.  And so I decided to go back to the first Kate Brannigan novel Dead Beat and re-read that too.  Also a great book, not such a great idea.  Inspiration tips over into intimidation so gently you don't know it's happened until you're sitting at your computer eating chunky kit-kats dipped in salt (a taste sensation) and asking yourself why you should bother.

A third tip-top crime novel would have finished me off at this point, so I read Tracy Kidder's House, Tawni O'Dell's Sister Mine (risky move, almost bought more kit-kats) and John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash, after hearing a review on R4's A Good Read.  It's 1929 in Dandy Gilver's world now, so I thought I should know what happened.  I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did and also - cover of the month, hands down. 



And then all buoyed up with research and non-fiction and a book about Pennsylvania mining communities that there was no point getting jealous about, I finally went back to a book I started last August staying overnight in the writer's suite at the home of McKenna and Brenda Jordan of Murder by the Book in Houston: Denise Mina's Garnethill.  It was hard work not to steal it to finish on the plane.  Well, I finished it yesterday and it's fabulous.  Just delightful. The best fictional family I've read about for as long as I can remember.  And the best fictional best friend ever.  How can I not have read this trilogy before?

And yet, I'm not sure it's book of the month.  It's definitely novel of the month, but I think book of the month might be

even though Shug looks scarily like Vic Reeves with the new hair-do.  This book's running at 3/3 so far: the roasted beetroot soup with horseradish cream was scrumptious, the parsnip and ginger soup was incendiary, just the way we like it, and last night's sweet potato and peanut gratin was a revelation.  I was ready to love it anyway since it had three tablespoons of peanut butter "lightened" with half a pint of double cream and a slug of olive oil, but it was mermaidssingingly, garnethillishly. you'vegotmurderously great.

Hmm.  Quite a lot of food for a blog about reading. 
 .

Winner o' the puddin' race


So yesterday was Burns' Night, the 253rd birthday of Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet and most beloved son.  Officially her most beloved son, by the way: he beat Mel Gibson - I mean William Wallace - to be named greatest Scot of all time.

On Burns' Night, Scots get together to eat haggis (great chieftain o' the puddin' race) drink whisky, toast the immortal memory of Rab, toast one of his other great interests in life - The Lassies (ooh, he was a one!) - and recite poetry.  Or if your Supper isn't until the weekend (see above, re. whisky) at least we all have haggis for our tea.


For Scots in Scotland, this means a trip to the local High Street butcher or a trip to any chain supermarket to buy a haggis.  For Scots in California, it means digging deep into their pockets and mail ordering a McKean's haggis from Maine.  I did this last year, in a state of some trepidation having invited ten people for a Burns' Supper in my house.

Well, it was delicious, easily worth the delivery charge, light, fluffy, peppery, savoury - everything a haggis should be.  I can't recommend it enough.  If you'd asked me yesterday, though, I was ready to damn McKean's and all their works.  My haggis wasn't here.  It didn't come.  All I got in the post  was a phone bill.

Then I checked in with the undergardener and guess what?  He thought I'd ordered it and I thought he had.  This would never have happened in the good old days when men were men and women flirted with the butcher. 

So.  Early afternoon on Burns' Night, no haggis, 7000 miles from Scotland.  What to do?  I could have given up and had a burrito if I hadn't started the day with Val Mcdermid's Burns guestblog for Jungle Red Writers.  I had wept with homesickness and now needed haggis like oxygen.

And I had a recipe for it.

In a book with tablet on the cover - got to love that. 

So I made my own.

Sort of.

Eleanor Cowan's easy haggis calls for lamb's liver, suet, oatmeal, onions, salt and what another Scottish chef Nick Nairn calls "insane amounts of pepper".  I had oatmeal, onions, salt, and insanity and I knew I could get liver - maybe not lamb's liver (more of this later) but hey.

I knew not to even try to get suet, having hauled myself round the local meat counters last Christmas looking for suet to make mincemeat to make mince pies.  However, I thought maybe egg and breadcrumbs would have the same lightening and binding effect.  And of course I knew from the kick-off not to try the difficult haggis recipe - liver, lungs, heart, and pluck (instestine).

Back from the supermarket, with my calves' liver and a lamb chop (very untradtional but I had to get some mutton in there somehere), I fried the onion in chicken fat (considered snipping in a bit of bacon just to hit every animal in the farmyard) then followed the least hopeful seeming recipe step I've ever seen.

"Boil the liver for forty minutes".  Here's what boiling liver looks like:

Yeah, it's mostly scum.  I do have a picture of what boiled-for-forty-minutes liver looks like too, but I'm always going on about how they shouldn't put the corpses of fallen dictators on the news so in all conscience I can't post it.

And it gets worse.  After the chicken-fat onions, toasted oatmeal, illicit lamb chop and seasonings were combined, the mixture was moistened with . . . you guessed it . . . the liver water.  Yummmmmm.


And then the whole thing went in a pudding basin and boiled in a bain-marie for two hours.

I felt no great hope.  But as my co-shopping-failure said when he came home: "it smells like haggis".  And then when I undid the foil and spooned it onto a plate, I couldn't help but think: "it looks like haggis".

And fan me flat with a rinsed pluck if it didn't taste like haggis.  And pretty good haggis too.  Very good haggis, actually.  Well worth an address.  I'm now covered with glory.  Bloated,  but covered with glory and I might change my Twitter profile to novelist and haggis-maker.

For dinner tonight, of course, we'll have that other great Scottish speciality.  Leftovers.  Fried.







Stone Thumbs

They say it's going to rain today.  Finally.  For the first time since Thanksgiving Day almost two months ago.  And so I decided to get my little bit of necessary gardening done first, before writing.

Some real gardening - pruning and moving some roses, taking some pelargonium cuttings and putting the parent pelargoniums in the open ground.  The cuttings are insurance: I still don't really believe in the concept of overwintering pelargoniums outside.  I've got some cheat gardening to do too: potting up the primroses and daffs I bought at the garden centre. 

Anyway, when my hands were nipping, covered with cold mud, I suddenly found myself saying what I always used to find myself saying, gardening in winter in Galloway.  "Oh, I am stone thumbs, feet of glass", a line from one of my favourite poems: "Pruning in Frost" by Alice Oswald from The Thing in the Gap-stone Stile. (OUP,1996). 

A wave of pure happiness broke over me.  Here - let me slosh some of it over you:

Pruning in Frost

                                                          Last night, without a sound,

                                                          a ghost of a world lay down on a world,

                                                          trees like dreamwrecks

                                                          coralled with increments of frost.

                                                          Found crevices

                                                          and wound and wound

                                                          the clock-spring cobwebs.

                                                          All life's ribbon frozen mid-fling.

                                                          Oh I am

                                                          stone thumbs,

                                                          feet of glass.

                                                          Work knocks in me the winter's nail.

                                                           I can imagine

                                                           Pain, turned heron,

                                                           could fly off in a creak of wings.

                                                          And I'd be staring, like one of those

                                                          cold-holy and granite kings

                                                          getting carved into this effigy of orchard.

And the reasons the roses are moving?  The flower bed where I planted them last spring is making way for a fruit orchard.  Maybe one day next winter, I'll have trees like dreamwrecks, coralled with increments of frost.  But for now . . .

A(nother) year in books

The TBR pile today

A few years ago I started keeping a note of what I read because whenever anyone asked me in a Q&A I was stumped.  It looks bad when a writer can talk about her own books without drawing breath for 20 minutes but can't remember a single book by another person. 

It looks even worse when she (i.e. me) covers the lapse by saying "I don't really read any more: so many CSIs to keep up with".  Maybe my delivery was overly deadpan but it turned out a few people believed me.  (Note to self: say boom-tssh after every joke.) 

And it wasn't even the first time that had happened.  When I started working as one of four lonely linguists in a large and cold-hearted English literature department and someone - oh, probably a specialist in renaissance poetry but I honestly don't remember - asked what I read, I said "I read the TV Guide to find out what time Star Trek's on".  This was in reference to my interview talk when I used Mr Chekov in an example sentence and they all thought it was odd that I didn't call him plain Chekov like everyone else does.

Aaaaannyway, it came back to me through the grapevine that some post-colonial drama theorist (or something) was shocked to learn that one of the new linguists watched television instead of reading.  I dunno.  You'd have thought that literary types would get irony.

So.  Here's what I read last year, with some helpful links, * against book of the month, and explanations where needed:

Christmas holidays
John Steinbeck Cannery Row*
Spring Warren Turpentine
Stephen King Full Dark, No Stars
Anita Shreve Rescue
Garrison Keillor Life Among the Lutherans

January
Karen Campbell Shadowplay
Julia Glass The Widower's Tale*
Jill Paton Walsh The Attenbury Emeralds
Fannie Flagg  I Still Dream of You  (yes, really)

February
Jonathon Franzen Freedom*
PJ Tracey Dressed to Thrill (they're back!  Yeay!)
Aline Templeton Cradle to Grave
Jenny Diski What I don't know about animals (one of my favourite writers, but not her best book.  Start with Stranger on a Train or Trying to Keep Still)

March
George Pellecanos The Night Gardener
Garrison Keillor Pontoon
Lisa Scottoline Lady Killer
Stella Gibbons Nightingale Wood (a delicious suprise)
Spring Warren The Quarter-acre Farm*

April
Eileen Rendahl Dead on Delivery
Eileen Rendahl Do me, do my roots
Ellen Gutcheon Still Missing* (from the delightful Persephone books.  How I love them.)
Frances Brody Dying in the Wool
Chris Hedges The Death of the Liberal Class
Eileen Rendahl Balancing in High Heels
Dave Eggers Zeitoun

May
Clare Davis Winter Range
Lisa Scottoline Save Me
John Lescroart Dead Irish
John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath*

June
John Lescroart The Vig
Michael Connelly 5th Witness
Annie Proulx Bird Cloud*

Oh, starting to lose reading time because of chores like going to Manhattan - poor me.

July
Kathleen George The Odds*
Stephen King The Tommyknockers (on a plane trip, whatever happens, I won't run out of book!)
William Landay Defending Jacob

Then I lost track completely.  In August and September  I was travelling and reading for panels, so these are not in order and I've probably missed some out:

Donna Andrews Murder with Peacocks and Cockatiels at Seven
Jess Lourey May Day and June Bug
Sandra Balzo Brewed, Crude and Tattooed and Bean there, done that
Sarah Shaber Louise's War and Simon said
PJ Parrish Dead of Winter
Gwen Mayo Circle of Dishonor
Carolyn Wall Sweeping Up Glass* (so fabulous it kept me up all night)
Clare O'Donohue Missing Persons
Russel McLean The Lost Sister
Ella Barrick Quickstep to Murder
Barbara Ehrenrich Nickel and Dimed

October
Esri Allbritten  The Chihuahua of the Baskervilles
Rick Hutto A Peculiar Tribe of People*
Eileen Rendahl  Vanished in the Night
Esri Allbritten A Portrait of Doreene Gray
Briggitte Aubert Death from the Woods
Rumer Godden An Episode of Sparrows
Abraham Verghese Cutting for Stone
Jess Lourey August Moon

November
Fiona Carnarvon Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey
Mary McDonagh Murphy Scout, Atticus and Boo
Erin Morgenstern The Night Circus
Tawni O'Dell Fragile Beasts*
Joy Fielding Kiss Mommy Goodbye (re-read)

Mary Higgins Clark  We'll Meet Again

Then life got away from me - re-reading Joy Fielding's fantastic passive-agressive characters for inspiration and then curling up inside the comfort of the Mary Higgins Clark was an early sign that it was slipping - as I tried to get my own book finished.  December was a haze of re-read chapters of Nancy Mitford, re-read pages of PG Wodehouse, snippets of Strictly Come Dancing on Youtube, Desperate Housewives DVDs, Ben Goldacre essays, Doris Day movies, Nigel Slater recipes . . . December was a blur.

So there's my 2011 in books.  A good dose of crime, a lot of books by pals - so many by Eileen Rendahl that it looks a bit like stalking.  I discovered a couple of new-to-me writers that I now look forward to reading everything by: Julia Glass and Barbara Ehrenrich.  I only gave up on one book this year - and since it was by an author no longer living I'll say which one:  Rumer Godden's An Episode of Sparrows.  Which is not to say that I loved everything else - in a couple of cases stopping reading would have been like turning away from a train wreck while it happens - but reading bad books can be quite helpful sometimes.  Thankfully, none of the bad ones was by anyone I know.

And the year ended as it began with Stephen King, when I started 11/22/63 on Hogmanay.  Can't be bad.

Last Christmas . . .

  . . . I gave you my heart, sang stubbly George. 

In my case, last Christmas I tore down a house (not the Ugliest House in California - we kept that one  - but instead the spare house, with more right-angles, less beige and, crucially, no building permit.)

Gasp, by all means, but note two things:

1.  It was made of wood, not stone or brick.
2. I didn't do it single-handed - there were six of us for one day, four of us for one day, and then two of us for the rest of the time.  Even so, it was the heaviest, least rewarding, stinkiest (the carpets fermented in the rain) job I've ever done and I'm never doing it again. 

You know that bit in Die Hard when Bruce is crawling along a duct, bleeding and filthy, and remembers his friend saying "Come out to the coast, we'll have a few laughs"?  Well, that was me last Christmas, dressed in yellow raingear, shovelling wet sheetrock/plasterboard into a dumpster/skip and remembering the undergardener (but head shoveller) saying "come to California with me, live in the sunshine and eat lotus blossoms".

Here it is in photo-form.  These are the Christmas pictures I took, in order, just as they came off the camera:

There's a moose (and and an elf) loose about this hoose.

So, Catherine Lepreux, is my oldest friend.  We've known each other since we were babies too small to know that we knew each other.  See what good friends we are.

That was Mondavi Winery, Napa, on the 2nd of December.  Now see how tenuous the friendship became during two and a half weeks of constant contact and design decisions?

Just kidding, the photographer wanted to get the wee boat in.

My living room (a pretty weird-shaped room even for a ranch house (but right at home as part of the Ugliest House in California)) looked, last month, like face with no eyebrows and too much lipstick.  Lots of colour round the bottom and lots of nothing round the top. 

But now, it's got brows:

It's got lashes:


And it's got a beauty spot -

 - a wee mouse,hiding a bracket that was on show thanks to the wonky - make that organic - shape of the eucalyptus log.  And isn't that just about the funkiest vintage barkcloth in all of eBay?

Not only that either.  Catherine was roving the halls with a needle in hand and mouthful of glass-headed pins.  There was no stopping her.   Every dull corner of the U-est H in C has been spruced up.

The U-est thing in the U-est H - the aircon return pipe - has disappeared.

Spot the difference in this corner of my study.

Unfortunately the house-elf is on her way home now.  But when I get back from dropping her off at SFO this afternoon, she'll still be everywhere.

101 things to do with a dead eucalyptus

Well, okay two.  Three - just thought of another one.  Four.

To start with the last one: you can use a dead eucalyptus instead of a gym.  God, it's hard.  Here is the undergardener, peching like a bull mastiff, after sawing up a wheelbarrowful.

And once it's sawed and split and your arms have turned to jelly, it lights with one match and a barely scrumpled style section and burns hot and bright for hours on end.  Here's a picture of the first fire we lit after moving in.

You'll have noticed what it's burning in.  That, folks, is what we call The Flinstones' Memorial Fireplace.  Or sometimes The Climbing Wall.  Occasionally we call it The Ugliest Fireplace Ever Built (Also The Largest).  And yet, and yet, I've grown to love it over the last year in the new house.  I love it like you would a one-eared, three-legged cat with halitosis.  Protectively.  In spite of yourself.

So we decided to honour it with a mantelpiece.  After a year of having nowhere to put a clock or prop an invitation, it was back to the cuddy for the undergardener and his boss/father-in-law.  I somehow managed not to get any pictures of them actually working (funny that) but here they are doing the almost-as-important sitting down with a beer afterwards.

And here is the fruit of their labour.  The Jim McPherson Mantelpiece, with clock.  As fine a dod of eucalyptus as was ever hewn and oiled and placed atop a bracket or two.

It was no mean feat, thanks to the idiosyncrasies of Fred the Fireplace.  There was a bit of trigonometry involved in getting it to fit.

And now there's no stopping him.  Curtain poles?  Pah.  Curtain poles are for wimps.  Crack out the chainsaw and get some pelmets worth the name.

If only I could sew I could match the effort with something to hang from them.  I can't sew (or knit, or crochet, felt, quilt or tat)  but luckily I have a friend who'll fly from Edinburgh to San Francisco to sew stuff for me.  And she's a professional designer.  Catherine Lepreux, my oldest and dearest friend.  

Next week, I'll show Catherine's part of the project.  By then, I'll still have the ugliest house in California on the outside but the inside will be dripping with original craft and design genius (and all I did was open the beer and make the tea).