In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books…
Permanent Reading List:
The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin w/ introduction by Randall Kenan— Read through the book reviews in the last section of the book and am now reading through the various essays in the first section...which confirms my own sense of the general trajectory of Baldwin’s writing career.
Guilt is a very pecuilar notion. As long as you are guilty about something, no matter what it is, you are not compelled to change it. Guilt is like a warm bath or, to be rude, it is like masturbation: you can get used to it, you can prefer it, you may get to a place where you cannot live without it, because in order to live without it, in order to get past this guilt, you must act. And in order to act, you must be conscious and take great chances and be responsible for the consequences.
”The Uses of the Blues”
I am reading:
Genius- The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick— This is a very very challenging and very very rewarding read because a) Gleick goes into a lot of detail about the science and b) Gleick is a really good writer. I am almost through with the chapter on Feynman’s time at Cornell when his personal life (deaths of his first wife and his father) and views on the sciences— especially now in the post-Los Alamos/Hiroshima era— is in flux.
The atomic scientists felt the guilt that flowed from the sudden deaths of at least one hundred thousand deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; meanwhile, the scientists found themselves hailed as hero wizards, and this was a more complex role than many of them realized at first, containing as it did the seeds of darker relationships.
The Feynman who could be wracked by strong emotion, the man stung by shyness, insecurity, anger, worry, or grief— no one got close enough any more to see him. HIs friends heard a certain kind of story instead, in which Feynman was an inadvertent boy hero, mastering a bureaucracy or a person or a situation by virtue of his naiveté, his good humor, his brashness, his commonsense cleverness (not brillance), and his emperor’s-new-clothes honesty.
Yes Chef: A Memoir by Marcus Samuelsson with Veronica Chambers— In the space of the 50 or so pages that I have read in the past week, Samuelsson has gone from Switzerland to Vienna to New York City, to a cruiseship and is about to go to France.
I wrote in my food journal almost every night. I tracked what I was learning, but I also started to ask questions, to play with the what-ifs of dishes that were taking shape in my mind. What if you matched turbot with a miso-based stock? What if you put seared salmon into crisp spring roll wrappers? It was not my place to suggest these things openly, but the ideas kept coming so I scribbled the down.
The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing— I promised myself that this year, I would read more fiction and that I would read more women writers. Doris Lessing has long been on one of those lists of writers that I wasnt to read but I have never gotten around to it...until now with this, her very first novel. Let’s see how long I last.