alisarae's Reviews (1.65k)

I read this for #SundayPoetry and the group Catching Up On Classics.

Unfortunately I couldn't track down an edition with Blake's illustrations (he was a printmaker, too). [Update: https://www.bl.uk/works/songs-of-innocence-and-experience#]. But I remember last year I went to an exhibition here in São Paulo on the translation of The Tyger that included an enlarged copy of his original print... lovely. The exhibition itself was a testament to how captivating Blake's poetry is: it seems that nearly all Brazilian and Portuguese authors worth their translation weight have tried their hand at it. A rite of passage, to capture the Tyger.

The poems I liked the best were irreverent, unexpected. At times I get caught in the trap of thinking that Victorian prudishness extended much farther back in time, and I'm always happy to discover I'm wrong.

The interesting thing about this story is that it displays a side of Indian womanhood that I have seen little of: women who do not want to be wives and mothers, who shrug off the mantle of expectations. There are consequences, of course.

I liked this book ok. It is really introspective and I don't always have the patience for that.

I keep coming back to this cookbook. I think it’s time to buy it for myself instead of constantly checking it out from the library.

I am a sucker for cookbooks that give themselves a challenge. This one is full of arbitrary restrictions and I'm in love:
- 18 chapters, 1 for each of the most common ingredients (mostly meats) people get at the supermarket.
- Each chapter has 7 recipes
- Each recipe has <10 ingredients. Most have 7.

Lots of great ideas to mix things up and get out of a cooking rut. I'm going to have to come back to this one after lent (I'm vegetarian for lent again this year.)

I've checked out a few different Moosewood cookbooks before and didn't like them. This one is more contemporary and international, but still keeps to the principles of fresh, unprocessed ingredients. It's all vegetarian except for a chapter on seafood.

This book is good to have on hand when you need to figure out tonight's dinner and don't have a lot of energy to be creative, which is most nights' reality for me. It has a good mix of cuisines so there is surely something to pique your interest. I like it!

Something about this memoir was mesmerizing to me. It was like a combination of a diary and the Neapolitan novels for the first two parts, and the last part was like a psychological thriller. It was fascinating to read what life was like in Copenhagen during the 1940s, people’s attitudes about the war. Tove’s life was gripping and heartbreaking.

Trigger warnings, though, for abortion and addiction. She is quite frank and describes it in detail.

Food pairing: a cheese danish and black coffee, hah.

Just as enchanting as I remembered!

I hadn't read this book since I was a kid and it brought back a lot of memories. I remember that I tried so hard to be Dickon and charm wild animals. Though I did collect a lot of animals when I was young, even wild ones, only box turtles and toads were reliably docile. In spite of this, I was quite sure that I would be a natural with horses if given the chance.

I remember that I also tried to like jumping rope, like Mary. I even got one with a nice cotton cord and wooden handles, but I never got very good at it. There was only one area, the wooden walkway to the door at the front of the house, that was smooth enough to jump rope on.

I'm glad I remembered all these things. You know a story is good when it inspires hours of play.

Somehow I managed to escape spoilers for 30 years before reading & listening to this play. I never saw the movie and only had a faint idea of what the story was about (I knew there was a drunk guy who yells STELLA but in my head he looks like Jack Nicholson yelling HERE'S JOHNNY). I certainly didn't imagine this story—shocking!

I listened to the 1973 Lincoln Center Revival cast recording while I read the script. The minor line edits in the recording were certainly for the better (Sorry, Tennessee!), but the music was all over the place and didn't follow the meaningful and significant "blue piano" instructions in the script (sorry, Tennessee). If I had just listened to it without reading, I would have missed the important lighting and colors, as well as key actions (ie scene 10... what happens there would not have made sense at all).

But I was grateful for this experience. It completely immersed me and I would love to see this on the stage. I am always so appreciative of art that is perfectly designed for its medium. I simply can't imagine how this would be a film instead of a play, so I'm curious to see the famous 1951 Marlon Brando on screen. On a tangent here: Recently I watched Chadwick Boseman's last film, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and it kept slapping me in the face with how it was meant to be on stage. The acting is fantastic, but the only thing cinematic about it was that a camera was involved.

I always enjoy Nnedi Okorafor's stories. They are poised and unique.

Food pairing: fried plantains and pepper sauce

I had never read anything by Gretel Ehrlich before this and I was pleased to find that her voice (audio and written) sounds a lot like Anne Lamott. California boomer women, I guess.

This book is a memoir of sorts, a fractured catalog of events in her life and her personal experiences with climate change. She spent many years ranching in Wyoming as a single woman, extensive periods in remote Greenland experiencing arctic ice culture, and a long visit the backcountry of Zimbabwe learning about how rotational grazing can reverse climate change and prevent drought. She also employed rotational grazing on her Wyoming ranch to great effect: water was pulled into the ground regenerating long-lost native rye grazing pastures that were able to support a herd of wild elk in the winter and her herd of cattle in the summer. It made me wonder if this could be used in Brazil to stop greedy deforestation of the Amazon in order to grab more grazing land for cattle. It would be nice if the UN or someone could step in with grants to get ranchers the basic fencing and water tanks needed to set it up.

I liked hearing about the adventurous life she led. In addition to stints in Wyoming, Greenland and Zimbabwe, she also toured Kosovo after the war, closed down a ranch on an island off the coast of California, was stuck by lightning and recovered, made movies, wrote magazine articles, learned to break horses from a horse whisperer, lost homes to divorce and wildfires, nearly starved to death while hiking a glacier, buried her parents, and had relationships with a variety of men.

The problem is that the book is not arranged by any discernible logic and it comes out as stream-of-consciousness glimpses of her life. I had zero reference for what year she was talking about, which husband if any she was married to at the time, when the events happen in relation to each other, how old she is, etc etc. That was very frustrating and made my interest in the book dwindle (unbelievable, considering all that happened), so I wouldn't recommend the book unless you don't really care about that kind of thing.