This book would’ve been more accurately titled: ‘Knit Your Socks on Straight: A New and Inventive Technique with Just Two Straight Needles [and a crochet hook, not that I know how to use one of those because if I did, I’d have picked up the book called ‘How to Crochet Some Goddamn Doily-Looking Socks]: 20 Original Designs [That Even Your Great-Grandmother Would Never Make or Wear Because They’re So Ugly]’. A pointless book if you’re the sort of person who can’t figure out how to knit with one stick once you’re used to knitting with two (like me).
Month: January 2014
Nobody Does It Better… Why French Home Cooking is Still the Best in the World by Trish Deseine (2007)
I just want to eat everything in this book. I want to cook everything in this book, and then eat it. It all looks so appetizing! (Even the weird stuff — escargots, tripe, honeycomb, olive oil and fleur de sel on chocolate cake, …) Deseine does a great job of making everything sound easy-to-do, too — a pretty tall order for the haute-est of haute cuisines. It probably helps that, as an Irish lady, she’s an outsider too. And she’s funny! I mean, how often do you actually sit down and read a cookbook? If you’re someone other than me, I mean.
The Cult of LEGO by John Baichtal & Joe Meno (2011)
Yup, this is a book about LEGO. Yup, it’s got lots of pictures. Yup, it’s flippin’ awesome.
The history of the LEGO company! (They originally started out making wooden toys.)
A wooden pull-toy invented in the ’30s by the LEGO Group. Their famous bricks didn’t come along until the ’50s. Source: http://aboutus.lego.com/en-us/lego-group/the_lego_history
Their logo! (Based on one of their first toys, a best-seller: a little wooden duck.)
All the different sets! Pieces! Colours! LEGO-obsessed adults and their conventions! (I hope to one day reach this level of nerdery.)
I still have all my LEGO from when I was a kid… and I totally never take it out and play with it, especially when my nephew isn’t visiting… even though the electric train is still super cool… yeah, nope. I definitely don’t take that out and set it up.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
I first read this book in high school English, and it was already 20 years old at the time — I’ve got to say, it holds up well. Perhaps too well. It’s a story of a futuristic dystopia where people’s health and the environment are destroyed by chemicals, pollutants, etc. The women are sorted by a kind of caste system:
- Wives: high society mucky-mucks, mostly richer, mostly older, mostly can’t have their own children. They wear blue.
- Marthas: was Martha Stewart around in the ’80s? It seems like maybe this is where Atwood got her inspiration. These ladies are mostly older, mostly can’t have their own children, and are mostly poorer. They’re the cooks and cleaners for the Wives. Marthas wear green.
- Handmaids: they wear red, of course. (The colour of sex!) Handmaids do the baby-makin’, and then they hand the babies off to the Wives. Then they’re assigned to another household, where they do the same thing again. Handmaids are incubators.
The men are sorted too, and the poorer dudes are assigned Econowives (who wear red/green/blue-striped dresses because they fulfill all the above roles — their name and costume cracks me up, in a really perverse way). The really rich guys have a Wife, a couple of Marthas, and a Handmaid.
Overall, the idea of woman as host body to fetus reminds me of this story, where a brain-dead woman is kept on life support so the fetus growing inside her belly can be born. Marlise Munoz collapsed in November, when she was just 14 weeks along. A fetus is nowhere near viable at that point anyhow, but due to laws in Texas, the hospital refuses to take her off life support — even though that’s what her family wants, and that’s what Munoz’s own end-of-life directives were. According to the article linked, “the hospital’s plans for the fetus — as well as its health and viability — remain unknown.”
Women as incubators in 2014 — maybe this was the dystopia Atwood was writing about.
Put the Book Down 