Short Review: "My Life in Middlemarch"

 
Rebecca Mead's book "My Life in Middlemarch" is a longform account of how her life was informed and enriched (and in some cases aligned with) literature in general, but by George Eliot's novel "Middlemarch" in particular. Mead moves back and forth among her own life, Eliot's life, and the characters in Eliot's novel, weaving in analysis from Virginia Woolf and others. Part critique, part love letter, part history, and part philosophy, the book is particularly lucid on how young people feel as they are trying desperately to grow up, flailing and oversharing and searching wildly for meaning...noting for example that Eliot's purple teenage writing "...move[s] me because of [its] dreadfulness, not in spite of it [as for so many other analysts]."

As a lifelong frequenter of libraries, originally in buildings and now more often online, I found this book inspiring. I know what it's like to be startled into thought by printed text, to turn around and try to write something original after inspiration by a classic work, to befriend fictional characters and then change and grow because of them. Mead has done us a great service in showing how this book stimulated her through her life, in multiple contexts. I ordered Middlemarch (which I've never read before) about 20 pages in. About time.  

Highly recommended.

I received a free review copy of this book in exchange for a review. The image above links to the book's Amazon page.

Short Review: "Provence, 1970"

 
The author of Provence, 1970 (Luke Barr) is the great-nephew of MFK Fisher, a writer well known in the mid-20th century for her books on food, cooking, and their influence on culture. Fisher's first book was in published in 1937 (Serve it Forth, an unusual, sophisticated, and fearless culinary history). She had a long and distinguished career, but Barr's book focuses on just a few weeks, in France, in 1970, as Fisher participated in an incipient revolution in how Americans viewed cooking and eating. Her companions in these lively conversations were giants of the food world: James Beard, Julia Child, and others.

Working from a variety of family papers, including Fisher's diary and the original notebook she kept from the 1970 visit to Provence, Barr (who has inherited his great-aunt's gift for beautiful prose) has crafted a leisurely, intimate, fascinating book on French and American culture and the changes at work in the world of cooking at a single point in time. Don't try to read this in a hurry. Savor it.  

Highly recommended.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for a review from Blogging for Books. The image above links to the book's Amazon page.