I'm being facetious with my heading as this first book is hardly about food, although one could make a case for it belonging because much of the story is driven by the poverty and the inability to have proper nourishing food. Nevertheless, I was simply using the "grapes" from the title:
![The Grapes of Wrath]()
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
I first read this book some many years ago
Set in the years of the Great Depression, this powerful novel follows the Joad family as they are driven off the land they have farmed for generations and seek work in the "promised land" of California. Drought has made instant profit impossible and the property owners aren't interested in waiting another year or two for the weather to right things - instead they have invested in great machines that turn the land and everything else in their paths. But the Joads have a brightly coloured handbill telling them of jobs in California, so, reluctant to leave their home but with no other options open to them, they head off in hope. So do thousands upon thousands of others.
Steinbeck made comment after the publication of this book that he held back on some of the atrocities in the Californian camps for these thousands of starving families looking for work, but what he wrote was enough to have his book banned because of the outrage of those who refused to believe. As Kerry wrote in the Goodreads group "Banned and Controversial Books"
When I first read this book, it wasn't as required reading at school (not living in the US), but rather someone introduced me to Steinbeck's books, and I loved the first one so much that I read every one I could get my hands on.
I was a little doubtful about reading it this time round - because of the length (and the many other books I want to read) - but am really glad I chose to. Steinbeck's writing is superb. I love the way he uses repetition to stress what he's saying - the pictures build and build through the repetition and I find myself totally entering into the text, whether it be a description of the fields or a description of the people and what's going on for them.
The story is also so sad. Here in New Zealand we certainly experienced the Depression of the 1930s - I remember my grandparents talking about it, and I've read a number of novels set here in that time - but because our population then was only one and a half million, we never had the mass exodus and migration of workers thrown off their land by technology and the greed of rich landowners.
Reading this gives me some more empathy also for the 'economic' refugees who are still looking for a place to live in so many parts of the world today. Their stories are probably not dissimilar to that of the Joads and all the others in US Depression history. Tragedy continues.
Neither does this book have food as a theme, but "honey" is there in the title:
![Curse of the Scarab (Big Honey Dog Mysteries, #1)]()
Curse of the Scarab by H.Y. Hanna
I discovered H.Y. Hanna and her beautiful dog, Honey, here on Goodreads and have been following her blog with great interest. I was delighted when this book came out to see Hanna asking for reader-reviewers and very quickly said that I'd love to pitch in. And I was not disappointed.
Big Honey Dog is a Great Dane who has a wonderful life with her human, and who is scared of cats. I can understand that - they have claws, they hiss, they size up really frightening, and they're temperamental (mind you, I do love and feed a cat, but she's getting old and cantankerous and I often wish my littlest granddaughter would develop a little bit of fear because she keeps getting scratched when she disturbs the cat too much). Honey Dog also has a great many friends in the neighbourhood, all with their own size and shape and distinct doggy personalities.
When Honey Dog's human goes away for a little while, a dogsitter and her Great Dane puppy arrive. Puppies are nuisances! But then the puppy goes missing, joining a number of other missing puppy cases, and Honey and her friends can't sit back and do nothing.
This is a delightful book. It's similar to The Hundred and One Dalmatians in the way the dogs talk to each other and the way they understand everything that humans say. It's also similar in the struggle to get innocents away from the grasp of evil. But it's also completely up-to-date (I love the way the cellphone is heard to ring from inside the ever-hungry stomach of one of Honey's friends!) and has realistic tension and acknowledgment of pain and of death in a way that older anthropomorphic animal stories for children didn't. Honey is also forced to face her fears, and finds herself learning a lot along the way.
I really enjoyed the Egyptology - an excellent setting for this first Honey Dog Mystery with its scope for detective work and for fascinating facts. This book will definitely be one for my grandchildren, and I'm looking forward to more in the series.
Pure sugar, I know, but still vegetarian (so I haven't betrayed my principles by including a book about a rooster in this post - that will have to wait another week or two). And this time the food in the title is exactly what the book is about:
![How Many Jelly Beans?]()
How Many Jelly Beans? by Andrea Menotti
James can count up to a hundred now, with only a few skips and jumps. Zenobia can count up to ten. But counting, and having an understanding of the size of numbers, are two different things.
I've always loved maths - I didn't take it further than secondary school, though I could have done it at University - but I realised when I started reading about children's education (when I was expecting my first child) that it needed a lot more than a natural aptitude in order for most of us to learn the basic concepts. So I had fun with my children throughout their schooling, and I also became a Numeracy Tutor for adults with basic needs. I remember one project I did with a group over 8 weeks, which was "Spend a Million Dollars" (and it wasn't allowed to be spent in one fell swoop on an expensive house).
We talk of millions, but mostly it's just talk. This delightful book shows us a million jelly beans. Of course, we build up to it gradually, starting with 5 (dead easy for both James and Zenobia), then 10 (not quite so easy for Zenobia when it's not just saying the words), then the two children in the book keep besting each other.
The small variations keep the book from simply being repetitive - one time they work out a number using a calendar, another time an apartment block, another time dividing the jelly beans into colours - and the children's eyes when we opened up the big spread at the back were wide as wide can be!
Handle this book with care, or be prepared with the sellotape for the last spread, but read it often with the kids.
Back to healthy and figurative:![]()
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
This novel has been on my to-read list since 2006 or 2007 and was on a Favourite-Books list that had been done by The Women's Bookshop (and please note here that I'm having little twinges of guilt advertising the opposition (because I work at the Pt Chev Bookshop, which isn't too far down the road and around a few corners), but then neither I nor the current owners of the latter had anything to do with it over a year ago, so honestly my twinges of guilt are superfluous). The former bookshop does great lists, voted on by thousands (probably), and my list was their 2005 one - it would have been favourite woman authors or something similar.
So, preliminaries over, I am really glad that I recorded the list and that I picked this book at random earlier this month to read. It's not a light read, though far from heavy either. But it's a tale with quite a lot of sadness, frequently covered by a self-deprecating and wry humour. A very short Wikipedia article uses some literary terms that I looked up but have already forgotten their meaning, but basically said it's a tale of growing up. Yeah, that'd be right.
Winterson takes us right into the life of Jeanette (Wikipedia says it's generally regarded to be semi-autobiographical) and her thought processes as she grows up in a Pentecostal household in England (well, mother is the one, father just does what he's told) and struggles to make sense of her differences from the rest of the world, and then from her own kind. It's 1960s in Britain, and though I was brought up on the opposite side of the world there are things (attitudes, maybe) that I could recognise from my own childhood. So, for me a bit of a trip down memory lane; for younger folk it's a little bit of history told in a voice that we can all relate to.
I found this book at a garage sale or something, and greatly enjoyed reading it: figurative
![of cabbages and things...]()
of cabbages and things... by Shona. McFARLANE
This book is a nice little blast from the past. McFarlane is an artist, a writer, a TV personage (Beauty and the Beast - remember that NZ?), and also happened to have a husband who was a politician. This book is illustrated by her own paintings (many of vegetables and fruit) and the odd photograph, and contains short 'essays' ranging from 100 words to 1500. A very nice bedside book to dip into.
I'm not really a cookbook fan. I'm even less of a diet book fan!:
![The Dukan Diet]()
The Dukan Diet by Pierre Dukan
This is a terribly biased book review - in fact, it isn't really a book review at all because I am too upset that the diet is useless for me and so I can't even think about whether it's well-written or whether it sets out to do what it says it's going to, or any of that.
The reason I'm upset is because this diet was highly recommended by 2 women I know who are on the diet as part of workplace initiative, and I could see myself that they have both lost a lot of weight. I could do with losing a lot of weight, so I borrowed this book from the library. On its cover it says, "5 million French people can't be wrong" and I wail loudly, "What about the however-many-there-are-of-French-vegetarians?!"
My problem, I know. My choice to be vegetarian. My problem if I can't stand the thought of eating nothing but eggs and non-fat cheese for 10 days in a row. Obviously a protein-only diet is not going to work for me. I'm fated to be fat.
So my one-star rating is based on the fact that there's nothing personally in it of use to me. Aside from that, it's what I expected - a whole lot of words around the basic facts. Even if I wasn't a vegetarian I'd get annoyed with that. I want the facts - what to do and how to do it - and then I want to find the background information easily without having to read several chapters of chatty book. I guess you can't really expect anything else - the author would never make any money out of the book if it didn't pretend to be something that people wanted to read.
And that's enough of a recent reading report for now. No great words of wisdom this time....
The Grapes of Wrath by John SteinbeckI first read this book some many years ago
Set in the years of the Great Depression, this powerful novel follows the Joad family as they are driven off the land they have farmed for generations and seek work in the "promised land" of California. Drought has made instant profit impossible and the property owners aren't interested in waiting another year or two for the weather to right things - instead they have invested in great machines that turn the land and everything else in their paths. But the Joads have a brightly coloured handbill telling them of jobs in California, so, reluctant to leave their home but with no other options open to them, they head off in hope. So do thousands upon thousands of others.
Steinbeck made comment after the publication of this book that he held back on some of the atrocities in the Californian camps for these thousands of starving families looking for work, but what he wrote was enough to have his book banned because of the outrage of those who refused to believe. As Kerry wrote in the Goodreads group "Banned and Controversial Books"
The book was banned in a number of USA states, as it was regarded as a form of Communist propaganda. Californians were particularly angry with Steinbeck, as they felt (wrongly, as it turned out) that he has shown them in a bad light. In fact, he had told the truth of the desolation suffered by migrants in the Depression.
When I first read this book, it wasn't as required reading at school (not living in the US), but rather someone introduced me to Steinbeck's books, and I loved the first one so much that I read every one I could get my hands on.
I was a little doubtful about reading it this time round - because of the length (and the many other books I want to read) - but am really glad I chose to. Steinbeck's writing is superb. I love the way he uses repetition to stress what he's saying - the pictures build and build through the repetition and I find myself totally entering into the text, whether it be a description of the fields or a description of the people and what's going on for them.
The story is also so sad. Here in New Zealand we certainly experienced the Depression of the 1930s - I remember my grandparents talking about it, and I've read a number of novels set here in that time - but because our population then was only one and a half million, we never had the mass exodus and migration of workers thrown off their land by technology and the greed of rich landowners.
Reading this gives me some more empathy also for the 'economic' refugees who are still looking for a place to live in so many parts of the world today. Their stories are probably not dissimilar to that of the Joads and all the others in US Depression history. Tragedy continues.
Neither does this book have food as a theme, but "honey" is there in the title:
Curse of the Scarab by H.Y. HannaI discovered H.Y. Hanna and her beautiful dog, Honey, here on Goodreads and have been following her blog with great interest. I was delighted when this book came out to see Hanna asking for reader-reviewers and very quickly said that I'd love to pitch in. And I was not disappointed.
Big Honey Dog is a Great Dane who has a wonderful life with her human, and who is scared of cats. I can understand that - they have claws, they hiss, they size up really frightening, and they're temperamental (mind you, I do love and feed a cat, but she's getting old and cantankerous and I often wish my littlest granddaughter would develop a little bit of fear because she keeps getting scratched when she disturbs the cat too much). Honey Dog also has a great many friends in the neighbourhood, all with their own size and shape and distinct doggy personalities.
When Honey Dog's human goes away for a little while, a dogsitter and her Great Dane puppy arrive. Puppies are nuisances! But then the puppy goes missing, joining a number of other missing puppy cases, and Honey and her friends can't sit back and do nothing.
This is a delightful book. It's similar to The Hundred and One Dalmatians in the way the dogs talk to each other and the way they understand everything that humans say. It's also similar in the struggle to get innocents away from the grasp of evil. But it's also completely up-to-date (I love the way the cellphone is heard to ring from inside the ever-hungry stomach of one of Honey's friends!) and has realistic tension and acknowledgment of pain and of death in a way that older anthropomorphic animal stories for children didn't. Honey is also forced to face her fears, and finds herself learning a lot along the way.
I really enjoyed the Egyptology - an excellent setting for this first Honey Dog Mystery with its scope for detective work and for fascinating facts. This book will definitely be one for my grandchildren, and I'm looking forward to more in the series.
Pure sugar, I know, but still vegetarian (so I haven't betrayed my principles by including a book about a rooster in this post - that will have to wait another week or two). And this time the food in the title is exactly what the book is about:
How Many Jelly Beans? by Andrea Menotti
James can count up to a hundred now, with only a few skips and jumps. Zenobia can count up to ten. But counting, and having an understanding of the size of numbers, are two different things.
I've always loved maths - I didn't take it further than secondary school, though I could have done it at University - but I realised when I started reading about children's education (when I was expecting my first child) that it needed a lot more than a natural aptitude in order for most of us to learn the basic concepts. So I had fun with my children throughout their schooling, and I also became a Numeracy Tutor for adults with basic needs. I remember one project I did with a group over 8 weeks, which was "Spend a Million Dollars" (and it wasn't allowed to be spent in one fell swoop on an expensive house).
We talk of millions, but mostly it's just talk. This delightful book shows us a million jelly beans. Of course, we build up to it gradually, starting with 5 (dead easy for both James and Zenobia), then 10 (not quite so easy for Zenobia when it's not just saying the words), then the two children in the book keep besting each other.
The small variations keep the book from simply being repetitive - one time they work out a number using a calendar, another time an apartment block, another time dividing the jelly beans into colours - and the children's eyes when we opened up the big spread at the back were wide as wide can be!
Handle this book with care, or be prepared with the sellotape for the last spread, but read it often with the kids.
Back to healthy and figurative:
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
This novel has been on my to-read list since 2006 or 2007 and was on a Favourite-Books list that had been done by The Women's Bookshop (and please note here that I'm having little twinges of guilt advertising the opposition (because I work at the Pt Chev Bookshop, which isn't too far down the road and around a few corners), but then neither I nor the current owners of the latter had anything to do with it over a year ago, so honestly my twinges of guilt are superfluous). The former bookshop does great lists, voted on by thousands (probably), and my list was their 2005 one - it would have been favourite woman authors or something similar.
So, preliminaries over, I am really glad that I recorded the list and that I picked this book at random earlier this month to read. It's not a light read, though far from heavy either. But it's a tale with quite a lot of sadness, frequently covered by a self-deprecating and wry humour. A very short Wikipedia article uses some literary terms that I looked up but have already forgotten their meaning, but basically said it's a tale of growing up. Yeah, that'd be right.
Winterson takes us right into the life of Jeanette (Wikipedia says it's generally regarded to be semi-autobiographical) and her thought processes as she grows up in a Pentecostal household in England (well, mother is the one, father just does what he's told) and struggles to make sense of her differences from the rest of the world, and then from her own kind. It's 1960s in Britain, and though I was brought up on the opposite side of the world there are things (attitudes, maybe) that I could recognise from my own childhood. So, for me a bit of a trip down memory lane; for younger folk it's a little bit of history told in a voice that we can all relate to.
I found this book at a garage sale or something, and greatly enjoyed reading it: figurative
of cabbages and things... by Shona. McFARLANEThis book is a nice little blast from the past. McFarlane is an artist, a writer, a TV personage (Beauty and the Beast - remember that NZ?), and also happened to have a husband who was a politician. This book is illustrated by her own paintings (many of vegetables and fruit) and the odd photograph, and contains short 'essays' ranging from 100 words to 1500. A very nice bedside book to dip into.
I'm not really a cookbook fan. I'm even less of a diet book fan!:
The Dukan Diet by Pierre DukanThis is a terribly biased book review - in fact, it isn't really a book review at all because I am too upset that the diet is useless for me and so I can't even think about whether it's well-written or whether it sets out to do what it says it's going to, or any of that.
The reason I'm upset is because this diet was highly recommended by 2 women I know who are on the diet as part of workplace initiative, and I could see myself that they have both lost a lot of weight. I could do with losing a lot of weight, so I borrowed this book from the library. On its cover it says, "5 million French people can't be wrong" and I wail loudly, "What about the however-many-there-are-of-French-vegetarians?!"
My problem, I know. My choice to be vegetarian. My problem if I can't stand the thought of eating nothing but eggs and non-fat cheese for 10 days in a row. Obviously a protein-only diet is not going to work for me. I'm fated to be fat.
So my one-star rating is based on the fact that there's nothing personally in it of use to me. Aside from that, it's what I expected - a whole lot of words around the basic facts. Even if I wasn't a vegetarian I'd get annoyed with that. I want the facts - what to do and how to do it - and then I want to find the background information easily without having to read several chapters of chatty book. I guess you can't really expect anything else - the author would never make any money out of the book if it didn't pretend to be something that people wanted to read.
And that's enough of a recent reading report for now. No great words of wisdom this time....
