Whatever Thursday - What I Have Read and Reading

With the library semi-open, I have been picking up books from my 'hold' list. A couple which have stood out to me are...

Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury and Women's Voices

The synopsis from Amazon:

50+ recipes, short essays, and quotes from some of the best bakers, activists, and outspoken women in our country today—this cookbook encourages women to use sugar and sass as a way to defend, resist, and protest. 

Since the 2016 election, many women across the country have felt rage, fury, and frustration, wondering how we got here. Some act by calling their senators, some write checks, some join activist groups, march, paint signs, grab their daughters and sons, and raise their voices. But for so many, they also turn to their greatest comfort—their kitchen.

I love reading cookbooks. To me, it is a chance to slow down and explore something I enjoy doing - cooking, especially baking. And while this book is filled with lovely recipes, I now have a name for what I have been doing for years - Rage Baking!

Many times I have spent hours in the kitchen baking and cooking - experimenting with ingredients - and letting the world dissolve away. 

I particularly enjoyed the brief stories attached to each recipe from the contributors to the cookbook about how cooking helps them sort through the mess they find the world in. Definitely a book worth reading on a couple of fronts.

Then I switched from outward contemplation to inner contemplation with At the Center of all Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life.

Once again, the synopsis from Amazon:

A profound meditation on accepting, and celebrating, one’s solitude.

Whether seeking more time for solitude or suffering what seems a surfeit of it, readers will find the best of companions here. Fenton Johnson’s lyrical prose and searching sensibility explores what it means to choose to be solitary and celebrates the notion, common in his Roman Catholic childhood, that solitude is a legitimate and dignified calling. He delves into the lives and works of nearly a dozen iconic “solitaries” he considers his kindred spirits, from Thoreau at Walden Pond and Emily Dickinson in Amherst, to Bill Cunningham photographing the streets of New York; from Cézanne (married, but solitary nonetheless) painting Mont Sainte-Victoire over and over again, to the fiercely self-protective Zora Neale Hurston. Each character portrait is full of intense detail, the bright wakes they’ve left behind illuminating Fenton Johnson’s own journey from his childhood in the backwoods of Kentucky to his travels alone throughout the world and the people he has lost and found along the way.

Combining memoir, social criticism, and devoted research, At the Center of All Beauty will resonate with solitaries and with anyone who might wish to carve out more space for solitude.

This book caught my eye, once again for a couple of different reasons. One, I am interested in the 'creative life' and how others merge creativity with daily life. The other is about solitude and being 'alone'. 

I have been divorced for decades now and have not sought out someone to share my life. There have been several reasons for this. One, I'm lazy and it seemed like too much trouble. Two, after two divorces, obviously my choices of partners is not the greatest. And third, if there was a person in my life I would have to give up time from something else to spend with that person and I'm selfish. After all, it's all about me!

But this was a really interesting read and something I found was very calming. And it's okay to be 'alone' and not having someone in my life on an intimate level - physically or mentally. 

Right now I am listening to Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig as my monthly book club read.

The final novel from a great American storyteller.

Donal Cameron is being raised by his grandmother, the cook at the legendary Double W ranch in Ivan Doig’s beloved Two Medicine Country of the Montana Rockies, a landscape that gives full rein to an eleven-year-old’s imagination. But when Gram has to have surgery for “female trouble” in the summer of 1951, all she can think to do is to ship Donal off to her sister in faraway Manitowoc, Wisconsin. There Donal is in for a rude surprise: Aunt Kate–bossy, opinionated, argumentative, and tyrannical—is nothing like her sister. She henpecks her good-natured husband, Herman the German, and Donal can’t seem to get on her good side either. After one contretemps too many, Kate  packs him back to the authorities in Montana on the next Greyhound. But as it turns out, Donal isn’t traveling solo: Herman the German has decided to fly the coop with him. In the immortal American tradition, the pair light out for the territory together, meeting a classic Doigian ensemble of characters and having rollicking misadventures along the way.

I am still on Donal's bus trip to Aunt Kate and meeting the people he meets along the way. While the book is set a few years before I was born, there are things mentioned which spark memories. S&H Green Stamps!

Plus it's set in Montana and I miss Montana and my peeps there. 

Another book I am in the process of reading is The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.

This is part of #onebookjuly2020 with Carie Harling on YouTube is reading through this book. I am really, really enjoy gong through it. Tons of things to think about and seeing how they can be incorporated in my life. 

"What is the ONE thing I can do right now such that doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?"

You can substitute 'right now' in the sentence with today, this week, this month, this year to move you closer to the life/goals you want. Loads of information in a very readable format.

But for now it's time for work and I must put my books down. However, I can listen to a book on the drive to work!