Lots of poetry, some lit crit, and a burnt lasange.

30. Rush, by bill bissett
(BookThug, 2012)

Reviewed for Broken Pencil.

31. Heroines, by Kate Zambreno
(Semiotext(e), 2012)

When I saw it in Book City, I couldn’t resist picking it up. Zambreno looks at the “mad” literary wives of famous authors as they’re popularly portrayed, with the men suffering their “difficulties,” when these same – or worse – resistances and reluctances in men, are seen as signs of their fastidious genius.

She writes from a very personal, very bloggy perspective, and it doesn’t come as a surprise that much of this text was cribbed from her blog, Francis Farmer is My Sister, which I hadn’t read previously, but now finds a place in my RSS feeds.

It’s an interesting book, personal biography intertwined with literary biography and feminist assessment. I hope to see more in this style. Continue reading »

Very brief comments on a lengthy list of books read in August. A banner month.

101. The History of Tattooing, by  Wilfrid Dyson Hambly
(Dover, reprinted 2009)

I love tattoos. At the time I read this I had only two, but for months I had been looking for an artist to complete my third and fourth. As I pared down possible artists, I read this, and found Hambly’s survey of dozens of indigenous cultures who use(d) tattooing for various purposes fascinating.

Later in the month, I had the first of two tattoos done by Alie K of Archive Tattoo, a gargoyle, my little monster. The second, to go on my right arm, will be a dragon.

102. The Last House, by Michael Kenyon
(Brick Books, 2009)

The Last House is Michael Kenyon’s third collection of poetry.

103. Food in Jars, by Marisa McClellan
(Running Press, 2012)

I’m amassing quite the collection of canning cookbooks. This is one of the most attractively packaged, and contains some of the most delicious sounding recipes, by far.

I’ve made a few of the recipes, among them a bread and butter pickle that turned out wonderfully. Last weekend my husband saw the recipe for lemon curd, and he helped make (or, in his view, he made) our first lemon curd. With the leftover egg whites he made meringue, and we create our own mini lemon meringue cookies, which turned out to be quite tasty.

I definitely need to try more things from this cookbook. Continue reading »

A varied month.

50. Twenty-Seventh City, by Jonathan Franzen
(Picador , 1988, 2001)

To backtrack, I really liked The Corrections, and thought The Discomfort Zone was pretty good, but I felt like I kept waiting for Twenty-Seventh City to make sense.

At its most bare, it’s the story of a conspiracy by a group of people to destroy a family in order to take financial and political control of a city, ranked twenty-seventh in America. But while individual threads sometimes work, as a whole it fails to come together.

Through the entire novel I kept waiting for Franzen to bring it all around, but to skirt actually resolving plot points, he just kills off characters and then the book stops. Not ends, stops.

Kinda disappointing.

51. Kiki de Montparnasse, by José-Louis Bocquet and Catel Muller
(SelfMadeHero, 2007, 2012)

Kim kindly invited me to TCAF, the Toronto Comics Art Festival, and it was my first time attending. I’ll definitely be attending next year. It’s a free festival held at the Toronto Reference Library with an overwhelming number of small and indie comic presses from around the world, as well as artists, writers – with comics, art and other merchandise available for purchase.

It was there that I can across this gorgeous book. Catel Muller and José-Louis Bocquet were there, illustrating and signing copies purchased. It’s beautifully made, and captures a fascinating woman I’d not heard about previously, Kiki de Montparnasse, nee Alice Prin. It captures the rich life of Paris in the twenties among artists. Continue reading »