Chew: Taster's Choice

I freaked Kevin out yesterday.  He came home and found me reading.  Now, that in an of itself is not odd.  What caused him to do a double take was the fact that I was reading a graphic novel.  That tends to be Kevin’s home turf, not mine.  But my hold list at the library is deep and wide so I really never know what will pop up on the shelf for me.  Sometime in the murky past someone recommended this book to me and it finally found it’s way into my hands.   And although it is rather gruesome, it is also rather delightful.

My experience with graphic novels is pretty grim.  Mostly spandex clad muscle me and frighteningly busty women all deeply conflicted and trying to “Do Right.”  The pictures are circus color bright and the writing full of exclamation marks and sounds like “SPLAT!” or “K-THUNK!”  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a bit of escapism as much as the next girl but most super hero comic books just don’t butter my biscuit.

However, I should also confess that as a young kid I adored Mad Magazine.  I loved the goofy drawings and all the little funny jokes hidden in the background of each page.  I even remember playing Mad the board game and loving it.  Alfred E. Newman.  Ha!  Perhaps that is why I liked Chew.  The drawings are Mad-esque and there are funny little scribbles hidden throughout.  I actually found myself scouring each picture looking for the joke.  The story itself is strange and slightly disgusting.  Our hero has the ability to see the past of everything he eats.  This poses difficulties for him when trying to enjoy a nice pork roast but also leads him to join the FDA where he takes bites out of corpses, dead pets and severed fingers to find out the identity of bad guys.  Gross, right?  But also funny, dark, and strangely addictive.  I’m actually going to put the next volume on my hold list.  Not for the squeamish or the very young, but perfect for the odd duck.

The tea ritual:
such a precise repetition of the same gestures
and the same tastes;

accesion to simple,
authentic
and refined sensations,

a license given to all,
at little cost,
to become aristocrats of taste,

because tea is the beverage of the wealthy
and of the poor;

the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing
into the absurdity of our lives
an aperture of serene harmony.

Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness,
lost souls mourn beauty,
insignificance surrounds us.

Then let us drink a cup of tea.

Silence descends,
one hears the wind outside,
autumn leaves rustle and take flight,
the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light.

And,

with each swallow,

time is sublimed.

–The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

I went to the library today to check out some books and the librarian told me they were due back in December.  

What!

How is that possible?  December is, like, weeks and weeks away, right?

Right?

Oh man, I am in so much trouble…..

I’m a book binger.  I’ll admit it.  If I find an author I like, I plow through everything they write all in a row.  If I’m not stuck on an author, I’ll hit a genre and ride if for weeks.  For a while, I was all Fantasy, then Sci-Fi, then historical romance, then mystery, then non-fiction environmental, and now, memoirs.  But not famous people or historical memoirs.  More like fish out of water.  Random adventures of otherwise normal people in foreign lands.

I’ve been hooked on an English family transplanted to the Greek isle of Korfu, a sheep sheerer who moves to the hills of Spain, or a man trying to revive a neglected English garden after the war. Right now, I’ve pouring through a Thoreau-like memoir of a man who buries himself beside the Rogue River here in Oregon for a few months to wrestle some demons and I’m totally hooked.  I find myself day dreaming about escaping to a cabin somewhere out in the wild where I could roam the hills and fish for wild salmon with the bears.  Yeah, it’s pretty crazy.  When I told Kevin this, he looked at me oddly.  He could see maybe staying alone for a few weeks but for months and months?  No thank you.  I’m thinking once I finish this book I may have to pick up the source book of On Walden Pond and really immerse myself in some good old escape-to-nature reading.

As much as I love these types of books, I don’t have much luck finding them.  There are some that everyone recommends – A Year in Provence or Under the Tuscan Sun – but after you mine the obvious ores, where to go next?  I have had some blind luck in just wandering the non-fiction section of the library and grabbing arbitrary books but I’d like to find something a bit more focused.  Let’s face it, the odds of me moving to the Rogue or raising sheep in Andalusia are slim to none at the best so a good book really is my only hope!  But where to look….

Unless, of course, you could recommend something….eh?