Terrell’s Front Table Books 

This is my favorite column of the year to write. At the end of the December, the staff all gathers around the computer while we run the report that tells us the bestselling hardcovers of the year. We hold our breaths wondering which of our favorites were your favorites, whether you’ve favored a particular region of the world, if you’ve chosen the serious, the humorous, the whimsical, the adventurous. OK, we don’t really hold our breaths, but it’s still fun to see what you decided to read in 2008.

Of the top twenty hardcovers, you overwhelmingly picked non-fiction. Only three of our bestsellers were novels, four if you count the graphic variety. You chose books about food, a couple of biographies, sociological studies, humorous essays, and some traditional travel literature titles. Two of the bestsellers weren’t even new, Gibson’s Bedside Book of Birds and the Dalai Lama’s Art of Happiness. The thing I found most surprising is that there is not a single book about Italy on the list. Last year there were three!

We were thrilled that long-time friend of the store, Bob Birkby’s latest book Mountain Madness made the list. Bob’s book is a biography of his friend, mountaineer Scott Fischer, one of the guides whose deaths on Mt. Everest were recounted in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. A personal book that presents his own memories of Fisher as well as those of family and other friends, Mountain Madness tells the story of an adventurous kid from New Jersey who was driven to ever higher goals in his mountaineering career. A quick aside - Bob will be here on Feb. 17th celebrating the paperback release of Mountain Madness and taking us, via visuals, to Siberia. 

China was your favorite country this year-maybe it was the effect of this summer’s Olympics. Simon Winchester’s book The Man Who Loved China about eccentric scientist and author Joseph Needham’s obsession with the Middle Kingdom appeared in this column in June and Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem, a cautionary tale of man’s destructive potential set in Mongolia made the May edition. You all found Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper by Fuchsia Dunlop without any help from me. This memoir by the British food writer of her adventures learning to eat and cook in China is a serious foodie book but also excels at expressing some of the ideas that draw us to travel. Dunlop writes that being so far away from home, studying at Sichuan’s premier cooking school, she was able to break away from the expectations of friends and family and find her true self. Her fluent Chinese enables her to delve much deeper into Chinese culture than most travel writers and her understanding of the connections between food and cultural identity adds new dimensions to the usual stories of the curious things Chinese people eat. And there are recipes.

You also favored books about really long journeys. It was no surprise to find Paul Theroux’s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star on the list. This account of his journey by train through Eastern Europe, Central Asia, India and China travels through time as well as place, comparing scenes from his 1973 classic, The Great Railway Bazaar to today’s landscape. A September arrival on the Front Table, The Marco Polo Odyssey by Harry Rutstein, has already racked up enough sales to achieve bestseller status helped by an in store appearance by the author, a Seattle resident. The book tells the story of his ten year effort through three expeditions to retrace the steps of the famous traveler. His ten meter sailboat nearly foundered off the coast of Turkey, he trekked through the high mountain regions of Pakistan, and he finally succeeded after years of struggle with Chinese bureaucracy in becoming the first foreigner to enter China through the closed Western border. It’s a truly epic journey that Rutstein documents in words, pictures and even film on the DVD included with the book.

We had a couple of around-the-world titles on the list with Eric Weiner’s study of happiness in many lands, The Geography of Bliss (now arriving in paperback) and Around the World in 80 Dinners, Cheryl and Bill Jamison’s attempt to eat their way through ten countries in three months. You also decided to read up on cities. Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City is a serious but accessible study about the importance of where we chose to live. With charts, graphs and statistics, Florida analyses the effect of place on careers and lifestyles. He looks into the reasons people say influence their decisions to move from place to place and then tells us the truth about why we really do what we do. In the final chapter he offers a ten-step decision making manual to help us make informed decisions about where to live in order to achieve our life goals. And the appendices offer pages of rankings of cities and regions in various categories to assist in that decision making.

You showed England some love, making a novel and an affectionate look at British foibles bestsellers in 2008. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Fiery Barrows and Mary Ann Fiery Shaffer has been on fiction bestseller lists around the country and was featured in September’s Front Table column. Sarah Lyall’s essays about her new life in London after moving there from New York in the ’90s, The Anglo Files, seems to have hit your collective funny bones. A worthy entry in a long line of books about the eccentricities of the U.K. that includes such classics as Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island, Lyall regales us with hilarious stories of British dentistry, the anachronistic oddities of the House of Lords and much more.

We’ll round out the list with a couple of bestselling staff picks. Timm has been handselling his favorite novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Bosnian-born author Sasa Stanisic since its June debut on the Table. My personal favorite on the bestseller list isn’t written at all. The Arrival is a wordless graphic novel, brilliantly plotted and illustrated by Shaun Tan. In sepia-toned drawings slightly reminiscent of Chris Van Allsburg’s classic children’s books, Tan shows a man forced to leave his family to travel to a new and very strange land to try and build a new life. His struggles to adapt to this darkly whimsical world are moving and uplifting especially for anyone who has ever stood in a new place and wondered if you’ll ever manage to make it home.

Happy New Year! We look forward to seeing what you’ll be reading in 2009.

Ham and Black-Eyed Pea Stew

Ingredients:

• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 green bell pepper, diced
• 1 cup celery, diced
• 1 large ham hock
• 2 12oz. bags of fresh black-eyed peas
• about 6 cups of chicken stock or water
• 3 or 4 bay leaves
• 1 tsp cayenne
• 2 tsp thyme
• 2 cups ham in 1/2 inch dice
• 1 tbsp fresh oregano, chopped
• 1/4 cup flat-leaf parsely, chopped
• 1 tsp cornstarch

Saute onions in olive oil over medium heat until golden, about five minutes. Add garlic and cook until fragrent, about one minute. Add the next eight ingredients along with enough salt and pepper to make you happy and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for an hour or until peas are tender. Remove the bay leaves and ham hock. If there’s meat on the hock, cut it off the bone and return it to the stew. Add the ham and fresh herbs and simmer another half hour or so. Adjust seasonings.Disolve the cornstarch in a little cold water and then add to hot stew to thicken. Serve in bowls over white rice with corn bread on the side. I usually offer hot sauce to guests but I like mine as is.

Time to look back at those resolutions from last year and see how I did.

#1 Write Every Day. Hmmm. I have written articles and Front Table columns for the newsletter every month. I’ve blogged a reasonable amount and I did a little work on my travel journals. I not only didn’t work on the novel but after the trip to Chautauqua in August, I pretty much decided it was no longer viable. It, at least, would take a major rewrite to make it catch up with Chautauqua realities. Starting from scratch on a new project would probably be easier. On the other hand, I did make a whole new website and blog for the choir and learned a lot in the process.

#2 Walk Every Day. Did pretty well on this one. Up until December I could count on two hands the number of days I had missed excercising. I bought the bike in September and have ridden fairly regularly. Hopefully today. I’ve lost around thirty pounds since last Christmas, mostly in the first six months of 2008. I’m down about three pants sizes but I still have a long ways to go. Hopefully after Gritty moves I can clear all the snack food out of the house and make some more progress.

#3 Picture Taking Obsession. Backslid on this one. Control was good for a while but the last couple of months I’ve been Flickring a lot again. Seems to be a favorite method of conflict avoidance. Never bought the DSLR but I’m looking again.

#4 Photo Organizing Project. Never went anywhere. After the move, this one will become non-negotionable.

#5 Get Out of the House. Middling success here. I did go downtown. I did ride DART. Never made it to Plano or Greenville. I know good bike routes to LBJ and White Rock though.

SO…here are the goals for 2009.

#1 Stop starting sentences with ’so’ when I write. And cut down on the ‘ands.’ Oops.

#2 Continue excercise/weight loss efforts.

#3 Really, seriously, go to Greenville and find Anne Terrell’s grave.

#4 Find an apartment and plane ticket for the Buenos Aires trip. (I’m leaving on a jet plane.)

#5 Write something substantive either about or while on the trip.

#6 Keep singing. I’ve come a long way with the vocal control this year. Muscles are stronger and I’ve learned a lot about blending head and chest voice. I’m afraid if I stop singing while I’m in transition this year that I’ll never really get that back. Getting older, you know.

#7 Keep in touch. I’ve been so much better about keeping in touch with people I don’t see very much since the invention of email, I don’t usually make this resolve anymore. I’ve made some friends this year that I don’t want to lose track of, though, so I’m putting it back on the list.

#8 Decide what to do with the rest of my life. I don’t really have to think about this until I’m finishing up in B.A. but at the moment I have not the trace of a plan for what to do when I get back from South America. I think I’d like to get involved with a non-profit of some kind, maybe working with literacy but it’s all very vague.

We had the big family Christmas shindig last night at Thom and Trish’s house. Trish had decorated the house beautifully and Thom made yummy tenderloins on the grill. Everybody did well with the food this year. Mark did his usual good job on creamy rice. John and Leta made salad, Chris and Cindy brought tasty zucchini in pomodoro sauce. George went crazy and brought three desserts, chocolate cake, chocolate pecan pie and, the family fave, caramel cake. With all the basics covered, I had to think of something else for my contribution and ended up making the Sweet Potato and Butternut Squash Soup published in the New York Times a week or so before Thanksgiving. For Will’s benefit I made the vegetarian version with vegetable broth. I also made croutons from a loaf of Central Market rosemary bread drizzled with butter and oven toasted.

Chop up a bunch of veg (I made a double recipe). Saute the onions, add the ginger and then the rest of the vegetables.

Add 6 (12) cups of stock, vegetable or otherwise, and cook about 45 minutes until potatoes and squash are tender. Puree it all up in the blender, always being mindful of the flying hot soup problem. Enjoy.

While the soup was cooking I took a moment to photograph the scarves I made for Margaret and Alex this year. Last year I made five of these and never got a photo other than half way through the first on. This is Ginny’s head they’re wrapped around.

Winter Greens Soup
Adapted from The Greens Cookbook by Deborah Madison (At least, I think that’s where it came from.) The main changes I made were halving the recipe, using chicken broth instead of vegetable and upping the garlic content. Even with the half recipe it makes enough for about 8 portions. I  usually freeze half of it in cup size containers so I can pull out a single bowl out whenever I feel a cold coming on. I always feel much healthier after I eat this. She calls for green chard in the original recipe. I’ve used red to make it, too, but green seems slightly better.

Ingredients:

Terrell’s Front Table Books

This December Front Table is rather a surprise. As we head into the holiday season and toward the end of the year, the publishers usually slow down on releasing new books, preferring to concentrate on marketing rather than production. This year, for whatever reason, they have changed their ways so we have a Table full of exciting new titles, perfect for gift giving or long winter night reading.

Anglophiles and other fans of literary non-fiction get to rejoice over Peter Ackroyd’s latest, Thames: The Biography. A native of London, Ackroyd’s work has always focused on his beloved home city. Although he began as a poet and novelist, his most recent works-and some of his best books-have been non-fiction “biographies” of London and England. His new book is an homage to the river that built London. At only 215 miles, the Thames is the shortest of the world’s most famous waterways but it has witnessed such historic events as Julius Caesar’s invasion and Ann Boleyn’s trip to her beheading. It has served as the inspiration for Turner’s paintings and Handel’s Water Music. And it has been the lifeline of English commerce since Neolithic times. Ackroyd regales us with its long history (including modern attempts to control and clean the river), walks us along its banks to towns less famous than London, and provides us with a small sample of the many poems and stories about England’s great river. ($40.00)

Some readers will find ‘exciting’ a serious understatement in reference to Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s posthumously published masterwork, 2666. Reviewers are using phrases like “define an entire literature” and “a landmark in what’s possible in the novel as a form” and comparing this remarkable book to Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past. At 900 dense pages, this complicated five-part novel is definitely challenging on every level. Parts of the novel revolve around a fictitious German author who seems to have lived in a Mexican border town called Santa Teresa and a small group of critics dedicated to his work. A large section is devoted to an unflinching investigation of a series of gruesome murders in Santa Teresa based on true events in Ciudad Juarez. Sometimes raunchy and always dark-sometimes darkly humorous-2666 is not for the faint of heart but will be incredibly rewarding for the intrepid reader. (Available in hardcover or as a three-volume, slipcased paperback, either at $30.00)

Ooh, look, Jon Fasman has a new book out, The Unpossessed City. His debut novel, The Geographer’s Library was one of my staff picks when it came out in 2005 so I’m delighted to see his name back on the Table. This time he takes us to Russia with Jim Vilatzer, a thirty-something, slacker type deeply in debt to Serbian mobsters. Realizing that working in his parents’ Maryland restaurant is not going to pay off the bad guys, Jim takes a job in Moscow where the Russian he learned from his grandparents comes in handy. Soon he is drawn into a web of corrupt Russian officials, shady biotech scientists and hostile CIA agents. The plot is exciting and the characters well-imagined, but it’s the author’s depiction of contemporary Russia that makes this thriller a stand out. Fasman has a real talent for making readers feel like we’re in the middle of the action. ($25.95)

If you’re one of the many people who can’t get enough of “I moved to France” stories, try Mark Greenside’s I’ll Never Be French (no matter what I do): Living in a Small Village in Brittany. In 1991, Greenside got dragged-much against his will-to France by a soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend. He gave her a list of impossible (and hilarious) conditions for the house he would consider renting which she immediately fulfilled, so he wound up spending several months in the part of Brittany called Finistere which translates to “end of the world.” He fell in love with the village and the people and eventually bought a house there. Greenside’s book is a relief not only because it is not set in Provence but also because it’s incredibly funny. He laughs at his inability to speak decent French, his struggles to understand everyday tasks, and his own cynical attitudes contrasted with the locals’ salt of the earth goodness. This light and entertaining bagatelle is a great midwinter mood lifter. ($24.00)

Daniel Everett’s new book, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle is a gift to all of us who are fascinated with language. Back in 1977, Everett went to live as a Christian missionary with the Piraha tribe of Brazil, intending to learn their language and translate the Bible for them. He soon became fascinated with the tribe’s world view (their language is not related to any other and lacks some concepts which were believed to be universal to all humans) and eventually adopted many of their ways of thinking instead of the other way round. This book is an interesting combination of memoir, adventure story and linguistic case study. Some of the later chapters on language may be a little technical for the casual reader but the big ideas of how language, thought and culture are connected are easy to follow especially since they are illustrated with exciting incidents from his jungle life. Fighting off snakes and dealing with near deadly cases of malaria were daily intrusions into his attempts to understand a unique language and people. ($26.95)

In this season of visiting relatives it may be time to take up celebrated Mexican author, Carlos Fuentes’ new collection of short fiction, Happy Families. In some of these stories that title can be taken literally. In others, irony or even sarcasm may apply. These pieces examine those ties that bind in a variety of Mexican settings, some contemporary, some historical, some in the houses of the poor, one even in the presidential palace. Renowned for his brilliant use of language, this collection is another example of Fuentes long fascination with the difficult and sometimes tragic lives of his countrymen. ($26.00)

Ya’ll have a great holiday!

Terrell’s Front Table Books

Made lunch for the Mah Jong ladies–wow, was it three weeks ago? I was trying to think of something fall-ish for the menu and came up with lamb and eggplant. OK, I know they’re really spring and summer things but if you consider that the lamb probably came from New Zealand where the seasons are all turned around maybe it works. Anyway, I found a recipe for braised lamb with a red wine and pomegranate sauce that sounded interesting. I had some open wine that needed using up and I’ve been wanting to try something with pomegranate. Unfortunately, I really should have read the recipe more carefully before I hit the butcher counter at Central Market. Yes, it calls for shoulder roast but it should have been boneless shoulder roast. I wound up having to debone it myself which wasn’t pretty but worked out OK. I really need some better knives. One of the things I liked about the recipe was doing the braise the day before so I don’t have so much to do in the morning. The meat was good. I think I could have jazzed the sauce up a little and made it more interesting but it was pretty tasty. The thing that was really good, though, were the eggplant and zucchini stacks that I got from the Williams-Sonoma catalog. With fresh herbs from my garden and thin sliced vegetables that cooked to just the right texture, these were yummy. I finished off the plate with basmati rice that has the right firmness and nutty flavor to stand up to the lamb. Dessert was a pretty forgettable apple pie. I really think apple is the hardest pie to do well.

My article and Front Table piece for the WWB newsletter were due the same day as the lunch, so I had to finish those off in between cooking, walking and the three hour choir rehearsal that evening. The classic lit piece came out well enough that we got an complimentary email from James O’Reilly of Travelers Tales who wanted to Twitter about it. I don’t think he really did but still it was great to get noticed like that.

Last Sunday was the choir’s Memorial Concert. We did five Mozart pieces which went off pretty well. Considering that Jay had to change many of the orchestra musicians at the last minute when Father Tony insisted we had to change our long-scheduled rehearsal so he could have All Saint’s Day mass in the church–eleven people showed up–I think the music sounded pretty good. Jay played the CD of the concert at the next rehearsal. For a smallish, strictly amateur choir, we did well. The audience was about double last year’s turnout, so we were very pleased with that too. And a lot of people came down to Trinity Hall for the reception after which was nice.

Thursday, I finally had enough time and good weather that I took tiny bike out, planning a longer ride. It had rained briefly on Wednesday (Phillip says it was really just the Republicans’ tears) which apparently left some slick spots on the streets, one of which I hit going around the corner on Fairfield on my way up to Golf. Whoosh, there went the wheels out from under me and I hit pretty hard on my right side. No permanent damage, although I got some nifty scrapes and bruises and the bike, thank goodness, was completely unscathed. The guy waiting at the stop sign got out of his car to come pick me up which was both nice and entertaining since he was drop dead gorgeous. Dang. Almost worth the spill. I realized later as I was finishing my regular twelve miles that my ankles were fine. I’m totally sold on the lock-in pedals. With my old toe clips, I guarantee there would have been a sprain.

And (now almost caught up) the most recent news. Monday I had my voice lesson with Jay and he mentioned that he had told John that if Gia couldn’t cantor for Taize on Tuesday I could do it. I laughed off the suggestion until John called me at 3:30 on Tuesday to say that Gia had been in a minor car accident and would prefer not to sing, no one else was available and would I be willing to cantor. So I did. It wasn’t tragic but I wouldn’t call it good either. The first song had verses for the cantor and trying to sight read notes and words at the same time proved a little much. The other chants were easier since we just left out the verses. I don’t think I really have the temperament to really be a soloist. I’m not terrified but I never feel as confident as a soloist should.