riverECHO

I remember bits and pieces from a high school history class about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, but learning about them again through a historic novel made the era much more interesting. The novel is written from the perspective of Anne’s younger sister, Mary, who is in fact Henry VIII’s mistress for about five years before Anne takes her place. It makes Anne out to be a dreadful, selfish woman that you want to feel bad for, but can’t help from despising. Mary on the other hand, although immature and ignorant in her younger years, is easier to relate to. She follows her heart instead of her greed and is able to eventually escape the power hungry ways of the court, marry for love and live in the country. I think the book would appeal to most women and not to many men, but I thought it was a fascinating story and very entertaining way of learning about England in the sixteenth century.

I picked this book up at our favorite little independent cinema in Arrowtown – Dorothy Brown’s.  This one was finally purchased during an intermission (yes, they still exist) as I had found myself continuing to pick it up and reading the back cover week after week.  I had no background or preconceptions other than what is on the back cover:

“Warned by a Hong Kong fortune-teller not to risk flying for a whole year, Tiziano Terzani – a vastly experienced Asia correspondent – took what he called ‘the first step into an unknown world…It turned out to be one of the most extraordinary years I have ever spent: It was marked for death, and instead I was reborn.’ Traveling by foot, boat, bus, car and train, he visited Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Mongolia, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia.  Consulting soothsayers and shamans wherever he went, he grew to understand and respect older ways of life and beliefs now threatened by the crasser forms of Western modernity.”

This was an incredible book that explored three areas of interest to me.  The simplest was the geographical and cultural information for a region of the world that I hope to be in before the end of this calendar year.  It was great to get a first hand account of specific areas and towns that we may need to put on our list to visit.  The second was the slow demise of Eastern traditions as Southeast Asia races to become more Western (the new sign of success!).  And, lastly, was the personal investigation of these ancient traditions by Terzani as he tries to grasp spirituality, fate and leaving things to chance.

Set in the 1800s, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan portrays life as a woman in China when foot binding is a common practice, the size of a woman’s feet determines her fortune and future, and an arranged marriage is for the sole purpose of benefiting the family. There isn’t much choice in the life of a nineteenth century woman in China, and it’s a pity, according to the culture, that the woman wasn’t born a man.

But there is one method of escaping it all . . . through nu shu writing, a secret written language that only exists between women. The story follows two young girls, joined as latong (a friendship bound by contract, literally meaning “old same”), who experience childhood, foot binding, marriage, children, and death together through their nu shu writings.

Beautifully written, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a fascinating novel about friendship, love, deceit, and the hardships of being a woman in nineteenth century China.

Our flatmate Ali brought this book home from the Queenstown library. She didn’t know anything about it and picked it off the shelf “just because.” I didn’t mean to read it actually but one rainy Friday afternoon I picked it up and by the time I put it down I was about half way done.

The storyline is simple . . . an American girl, Laura, studying art in Italy falls in love with an Italian chef. The twist . . . the man she falls in love with, Tommaso, and the Italian chef, Bruno, are actually two different people and best friends as well. To try to win Laura’s heart Tommaso needed the skills of a talented chef and talked his best friend into secretly cooking, while Tommaso took the credit, for Laura. All hell breaks loose when Laura finds out that she was actually in love with Tommaso’s cooking, and therefore Bruno, and not Tommaso at all. It’s a quick read and I almost had the sense that I was watching a movie as I read it.

Jean handed me this book just before we left the country. It looked interesting but I didn’t realize how amazing of a story it would be. The synopsis: a true story of a transient, usually homeless, family told from the point of view of one of the daughters, now a successful journalist living in New York City. Jeannette’s living conditions would make most of us gawk in disapproval but they never seemed to phase her optimism nor joy as a child. She spent nights in a cardboard box, ate moldy stale bread when there was nothing else to eat and sometimes just didn’t eat, dug a huge hole in their backyard to throw trash so they didn’t have to pay the dump bill, and dealt with an abusive alcoholic father and a lackadaisical self pitying mother. But her dreams of what can be never falter and eventually lead her to a life very different from the one in which she grew up.

I finished a wonderful book yesterday, that I would recommend to everyone, called The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I, of course, started the book during our vacation in Fiji but couldn’t find much time in New Zealand to finish it until now. It’s not that I haven’t had the time. It’s that every time I sit down to read, I remember something I really need to do at that moment. I can thank the fact that I am my mother’s daughter for that and for my need to stay busy with “projects.” Anyways, the book . . . Michael Pollan explores three ways that food gets from its natural state to our tables (corn, grass, and the forest). You would be amazed at how much corn (natural, processed, and really processed) takes up an American’s diet, especially an American who dines at McDonald’s. This was especially interesting to me after spontaneously visiting a corn processing plant with BJ’s family in southern Idaho before we left the states. Most of his mother’s side of the family, except for his mom, has spent their working careers working for Seneca a.k.a. Green Giant. Pollan explores the sustainability of eating organic versus local and in the end he goes through the trouble of creating a meal from ingredients that he gathered, hunted, or knew exactly where they came from in their raw state. I won’t describe the entire book, but in the end I felt inspired to pay a little more attention to what I buy and what I eat. In the end, if I have the choice between organic and local . . . I’ll choose local.

Yesterday evening, as BJ was wrapping up work, I got to work in the kitchen making dinner. My dinner creation wasn’t consciously inspired by the book I had just completed, but while we sat down to homemade pesto over homemade linguine with homemade bread with very un-homemade butter on the side, BJ made me reconsider how much the book had taken effect. In fact, my roommate Ali has been my inspiration for the homemade pasta and bread . . . especially with the help of a pastamaker and a breadmachine. The pesto was inspired by a cute little basil plant that we bought at the market the other day. The basil plant, full of leaves, was actually cheaper than buying fresh basil in a package – ha! With just a little water every couple of days I can make pesto any time I want. But I can’t take credit for knowing where all the ingredients in our meal came from like the flour, the yeast, the pine nuts, the garlic, the butter and olive oil . . . all I know is that I completed the final round of processing the food before we put it in our mouths.

A few years ago while spending a few weeks in El Salvador, I read another of A.C. Weisbecker’s books, In Search of Captain Zero.  I really enjoyed reading about the “real-life” adventures of Weisbecker as he searched for a long lost friend among the surf regions of Central America.  It is because of this, that I picked up Cosmic Banditos.

Although quite a romp through Mexico, mixed through Tequila infused Quantum Physics, I didn’t enjoy this book nearly as much as the first.  However, even Weisbecker himself has the following in his Author’s Note at the end of the book:

“It’s about as different from this book as it’s possible to be.  I bring this up in case you didn’t like this book.  See, if you didn’t like this book, you’re virtually guaranteed to like In Search of Captain Zero.  They’re that different.”

I’d have to agree!

This was a great simple read for me to get my head back into the world of “tangible” text.  Its been a while since I have actually opened a book as I feel like I read all day long.  Yet, code does nothing to expand my knowledge and relax my thoughts from the real world.  This book, a personal quest by Steven Kotler for the story of the “Conductor”, the origins of surfing and its spiritual ties, was a great way to get back into it.

Spending my days lying in the hammocks of Fiji provided the perfect setting to hop alongside Steven, who had suffered from Lyme Disease, as he travels the world to find a purpose to life through the eyes of surfing and its surrounding culture.