Four years ago, British author E.L. James was at her holiday home in Cornwall, England, when she started to feel strange. “I rang my husband and said, ‘I don’t feel great — come home now,’ and he found me sitting in the chair in my study,” James says. “I was trying to measure my pulse rate, and it was through the roof, and I couldn’t remember where I was. He thought I’d had a stroke.”
She had transient global amnesia, a temporary loss of memory. She didn’t know who the British prime minister was or anything else about the previous seven years. Her mental clock had rewound to 2012 — a year she and her husband, Irish screenwriter Niall Leonard, call the “Great Madness.”
My father had suffered a massive heart attack earlier that year; his job wasn’t waiting for him when he recovered. My mother had just survived the first of many bouts with cancer — and had been laid off. No income, no insurance, eking out a living on dwindling unemployment: We plowed up the extensive lawn and planted rows and rows of vegetables we could can and preserve. My first experience of gardening was a lesson in scarcity and sustenance. It would be years later, in adulthood, that I would also discover the joy.
When I next approached the garden plot, it wasn’t for food security but succor of a different kind. I am disabled; I am autistic and have a connective tissue disorder that causes problems for my mobility. Gertrude Jekyll, a 19th-century woman who designed more than 400 gardens, once said, “A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.” I needed just such things, myself, for I couldn’t trust my own body and hadn’t learned to accept new realities. Still, I’d always been a willing student. Maybe I could find my way by investing in the soil — a new way of digging in, different from those sweltering summers when I could still move nimbly between rows of beans and corn. And so I wondered, what would disabled gardening look like? More importantly, how would it feel?
I’m a food writer living in Los Angeles, so I decided to buy a pickup truck.
The history of literature is, in no small part, the history of love stories. And with all due respect to Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, the greatest romantic stories nearly always end unhappily. Their pleasure is inseparable from their pain.
Pain and pleasure do the tango in the engrossing new novel Kairos, the story of a love affair set in East Germany right before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's the latest book from the East Berlin born Jenny Erpenbeck, the 57-year-old writer and opera director who I fully expect to win the Nobel Prize sometime in the next five years. A grownup writer for grownup readers, Erpenbeck has an unsurpassed gift for showing how our ideas, passions and choices are shaped – and reshaped – by passing time and the ceaseless transformations of history.
As a plane awaits permission from air traffic control to land, it will trace a certain path in the sky — a period in suspension called a “holding pattern.” Jenny Xie’s debut novel, also called “Holding Pattern,” unfurls a similar period of in-between, with the protagonist Kathleen Cheng back in her childhood home in Oakland, Calif. Here she’s stagnant — fresh off a crushing breakup and preparing for her mother’s upcoming wedding, unsure if she wants to continue her graduate program back in Baltimore but not certain where else she’d want to land.
This is a strange and beautiful book, and when you try to catch it in your hands, it dissolves.
As Johnson shows, recipes can focus our attention productively on some unending conditions—the need to be fed, the duty to feed others, the hope that our translation from ideal to real, or from art to hunger, could be permanent and perfect rather than temporary and approximate. Since the forms of our negotiation with such premises guide our good-enough flourishing, Johnson’s book is both invitation and example. “In the cuisine,” writes Hortense J. Spillers, “contradiction comes home and is not unhappy.” As Small Fires accepts contradiction, and makes it interesting, it shows us an honest and artful rejection of inevitable unhappiness.
Cassidy presents the facts of history and science, but he also leaves room for plenty of okay-but-what-ifs and the kind of debates you’d have with your friends over a kitchen table and a cold glass. You’ll learn a thing or two — and you’ll love every second of it.
That makes “How to Survive History” extraordinary fun for smarty-pantses, history buffs, fun-fact lovers and science geeks who’ll surely want s’more.
I used to think that
I chose books, based on what
I wanted to read.