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three books to kick off your fall reading list

10/26/2015

Fall is wonderful. You can wear flannel without sweating, eat cinnamon-apple flavored everything, and best of all, spend the weekend curled up under a blanket with a book and a mug of something steaming. These three books will be wonderful companions during the long, cold nights ahead.

Speak by Louisa Hall

While not being an assigned read, Speak has been the breakout hit in my book club. It was published in mid-July and every month since, someone else has read and loved it. Told in a chorus of voices, over several hundred years, it looks at what it means to communicate and to be human through the lens of artificial intelligence. One of my favorite voices is a fictional Alan Turing who writes letters to his school friend's mother which always end with the most wonderful post-scripts.

Written in a similar format as David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, the story is not locked into a single time or place. Rather, the experiences of each character are woven together to create powerful parallels. The disagreement that Mary Bradford, a teenager crossing the Atlantic with her family in 1663, and her father have over whether her beloved dog has a soul is echoed later when 21st century parents fear their children's deep connections with their babybots. This thoughtful and thought-provoking novel will stick with you days after you have turned the last page.

Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway

Nick Harkaway is my favorite discovery of 2015. Earlier this year, I read his debut novel, The Gone-Away World, and he is now one of my favorite authors. I fell absolutely in love with his writing style, but his books can be counted on one hand, so I've been trying to ration them out. (I have Tigerman on my bookshelf, but am waiting until Thanksgiving weekend to crack it open!)

Angelmaker defies categorization. It is a spy novel and a gangster novel, but neither description really prepares you for this story. The cast includes a clockmaker, a ninety-year old former spy, members of London's criminal underbelly, and Ruskinite monks who are all trying to get their hands on a doomsday device from the 1950s. It is a delightful adventure story with a beautiful blend of laugh-out-loud absurdity and philosophical thoughts. I finally understand why people make margin notes in fiction; I have to keep a notepad near me while reading Harkaway so that I can keep track of all my favorite quotes.

The Rise & Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman

When Tooly, living above a used bookstore in Wales, receives a message from an ex-boyfriend in New York telling her that her father is sick, she has no idea what father he could mean. She spent her childhood traveling around the world, first with Paul and later with Sarah, Humphrey, and the charismatic Venn. The message sets her traveling once again, this time to try to piece together her own history.

The story jumps back and forth across time, mixing Tooly's childhood memories with her current quest for answers. Although you will initially be sucked into the story wanting to solve the mystery of her abduction, at its core The Rise & Fall of Great Powers is about what it means to be a family and what people will do the protect the ones they love.

What books are currently on your nightstand or tucked into your bag? Share your favorite fall picks in the comments!

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game review: funemployed

8/25/2015

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Recently, I started attending a local board game night to meet some new gaming friends. At my first event, one of the other attendees pulled out a party game, Funemployed, when we were in between games and I cannot stop raving about it. It is in the same vein as Apples to Apples, but with a storytelling element that makes for a more exciting and raucous game.

For each round, a different player takes on the role of the hiring manager who will judge which candidate is best for the current job opening. The job cards cover a wide range of occupations, from Televangelist to Butcher to Mall Santa (if you use the seasonal help expansion pack). All of the other players are applying to the job and have to pitch themselves to the hiring manager, however, their pitch must include the qualifications listed on the cards in their hand.

Each applicant is dealt four qualification cards at the beginning of the round. There is also a slush pile of ten additional qualification cards face up in the middle of the table. After the hiring manager flips over the job title card, the applicants have a minute to craft a pitch using their cards and, if necessary, swap out some of their cards for options in the slush pile. After the minute is up, each candidate has to explain why they should be hired for the position, using all of the words or phrases on the cards in their hand. You can add in as much additional information as you want, so you can end up with some really well crafted and amusing stories.

Click through the slideshow below to get a sense of the game mechanics and then check out what my pitch would be based on the cards left in my hand at the end. You can order the cards anyway you wish, just remember to reveal each card as you use it so that the other players know what your qualifications are!

"I am applying for the position of School Nurse because nothing can rattle me. I am Deaf in One Ear so I can barely even hear the hordes of screaming kids running down the hallways. I have years of experience dealing with all sorts of emergencies, from teachers eating poisoned Apples to students using safety Scissors in a very unsafe manner. I heard that your last nurse was sued for putting a Hello Kitty Bandaid on a student who specifically requested Dora the Explorer, but I have Diplomatic Immunity so litigation doesn't worry me.

What story would you create to get hired for this position? Share your ideas in the comments and let me know if you have played this game before!

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the joy of footnotes in fiction

8/6/2015

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Most of the people I’ve met fall into two categories: those who find footnotes to be disrupting and irritating, and those who look to the bottom of the page with great anticipation. I fall firmly into the second category. Footnotes are expected in nonfiction where the additional information adds citations, guides the reader the more resources, and offers definitions for ideas or words that may be unfamiliar to all but those most entrenched in the subject. When reading nonfiction, there is always the option to do your own research on the topic to discover more, but in fiction truths have been created or stretched by the author so outside source material is generally off-limits. In fictional works, footnotes become a space to explore the far reaches of the story. They give insight on the details that may be too mundane for the narrator to address or are best appreciated as an aside.

I first experienced footnotes in fiction when I read Foundation by Isaac Asimov and I immediately fell in love with the concept. The singular footnote in Foundation is a citation with publishing information for the fictional encyclopedia that is quoted throughout the book. It is not exactly integral to the story, however, it instantly makes the world of the book feel bigger. Early on in Foundation, the encyclopedia project is cast-off as a non-priority, yet that footnote informs readers that the encyclopedia is not only eventually completed, but published in at least 116 editions. On a more comforting note, the reader also knows that in the future the world still exists in some recognizable form. We don’t know whether the interceding years were a cultural Dark Ages or maybe even a time of great innovation, but we at least know that we are not heading towards a post-apocolyptic world.

Footnotes in fiction do not always take the form of formal citations. Ruth Ozeki’s novel, A Tale for the Time Being, and The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara both feature annotations of first person material. In Time Being, one character annotates a diary that washed up on the beach. In them, unfamiliar words and concepts are defined, commentary is offered, and a social reading environment is created. The translation of Japanese words in the footnotes keeps the reader engaged in the story and not constantly flipping through a dictionary. Other commentary provides feedback on the text in real time which turns a normally solitary activity into one that feels more like a discussion at book club. It is like reading along with a friend who pipes up with interesting facts and clarifying context.

Annotations also add an interesting layer to the story because they are seldom written by an unbiased voice. In Trees, a Nobel Prize winning, but now-disgraced medical researcher writes his memoir from prison and it is edited and annotated by a long-time colleague of the inmate. The memoir unabashedly discusses some unsavory parts of the inmate’s past, which the colleague attempts to justify and whitewash in the annotations. The closeness of the relationship between author and editor eventually leads the editor to excise a passage that he feels would be damning to the inmate’s reputation. However, even that footnote is telling because it confirms the reader’s worst fears about the main character.

Of course, not every book in the fiction section would be improved with the addition of footnotes. They force the reader to acknowledge that the text they are reading has been edited and adjusted along the way. The end result is less that you are swept up in current of the story and more that you are collecting pieces of the story and watching them fall into place. But the act of collecting pieces gives you the freedom to rummage around a bit in the story as you synthesize the information. Maybe commentary in the footnote prompts you to reassess the reliability of the narrator or slows you down long enough to wonder about what seems to be an inevitable course of action. A useful footnote should either clarify to improve your comprehension or obscure in a way that forces you to think deeply about what you have read. Great books aren’t only a single layer deep and footnotes provide one of those extra layers.

I feel a tiny burst of joy when I see a footnote waiting for me at the bottom of the page, like the prize at the bottom of the cereal box, an extra nugget of plot to devour. You never know what exactly you will find in those unassuming sentences in tiny font. But beware, footnotes are very easy to fall in love with, so don’t be surprised if your heart starts to leap when you see one at the bottom of the page.

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choosing a book by the width of the spine

8/1/2015

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In elementary school everything could be turned into a competition and the weekly trips my first grade class took to the school library day were prime time for friendly rivalries. It was far from the most exciting hour of the week since the book options were limited and we were only allowed to browse the stacks in small groups. During the inevitable downtime, my friends and I created ways to demonstrate our literary prowess, including the perennial favorite of timing how fast someone could read a page. One day the ante was upped and my friends bet, for bragging rights only, that I could not read the biggest book in the library in a week. Since my school only housed kindergarten through third grade, most of the books were fairly slim and the real heavyweights, the encyclopedias, were never allowed to leave the confines of the library. In fact, I don’t remember them ever even being moved from their shelves. As a result, the epic that I ended up being tasked with reading was the quite manageable Nightbirds on Nantucket by Joan Aiken. When I got my hands on the book, it had not been checked out in several years, most likely because the thick cover it had been rebound into made it appear significantly larger than its neighbors on the shelf. I gained some short-lived admiration from my peers the next week when I returned the completed book, but more importantly I had discovered a new favorite book.

I re-tried what I thought was a winning process when I moved up to the intermediate school and on my first trip to the school library, I once again looked for the biggest book available. I am still not entirely sure why a school library that only served fourth and fifth graders had a copy of A Tale of Two Cities, but I had it checked out for most of my fourth grade year. I don’t look back on that year of reading with much fondness because my battle with Charles Dickens overshadowed the books that I did enjoy. I didn’t want to lug such a heavy book back and forth between school and home so I left it in my desk for quiet reading time. However, in-class reading time only happened in fifteen minute increments a few times a week and A Tale of Two Cities required a little bit more of a time commitment. I never got into the story, but I was too stubborn to return the book unread to the library so I struggled through it until summer break when I gleefully abandoned it. Unfortunately, instead of learning that I shouldn’t judge a book based on its size, I came away from that year doubting my strength as a reader and I have avoided Dickens ever since.

This myth of bigger books being for better readers followed me into high school. In a class on European history, we were required to read a book from a list of relevant titles. However, it wasn’t as simple as just choosing what sparked my interest. The bigger the book, the more points you would earn from the assignment and that in turn improved your overall grade for the course, so I chose the high point value Crime and Punishment. I think it is safe to say that diving into Russian literature based on page count instead of content is not a great way to foster a great love of the genre. But, everyone around me seemed to be saying that the only way I could “improve” as a reader involved choosing increasingly large books, so I did. The problem, of course, is that eventually the pool of available books gets pretty small.

I picked up a small book completely by accident last year. A review for Your Fathers, Where Are They? and The Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers intrigued me so I preordered it from my local bookstore. When it arrived, I was startled to discover that it only contained a mere 210 pages of large font. Yet somehow in that short span a world was created, characters evolved, and the ending satisfied. My brain did not atrophy and no one pinned a sign on me saying that I was a subpar reader. I read a short book and survived.

I still get flustered when someone catches me reading a thin book, but now in the midst of justifying my choice, I will recommend it. I will tell you that a story doesn’t always need to fill up 400 pages to be told well, even as I hurry to say that this is a palate cleanser after finishing a tome so heavy that it gave me wrist pain. I might also mention that thin books are great for the over-crowded shelves in my studio apartment and are convenient to carry around in purses and pockets. One day though, I will answer without all the baggage and just describe how the words and characters speak to me (or not) and avoid all mention of the width of the spine.

Did the cover of a book in the photo catch your eye? Let me know in the comments and I will happily provide the title and author information if it is too small to decipher.

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3 paperbacks to read at the beach or the bar

7/6/2015

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With the warm weather come the lists of books that are perfect for reading on a beach. I know that reading on the beach is incredibly popular but I've never really gotten into it, mostly because the bright sun on white pages makes my eyes hurt. My summer reading venue of choice is an air-conditioned bar, preferably in the middle of the day when the background noise is ambient, not distracting. But no matter where you choose to read, you want to read something amazing. Somewhere along the way, summer beach reads became synonymous with light and fluffy fiction. The implication is that anything that would be enjoyable to read on a beach would have the literary value of a soap opera, however, these stories feature mult-faceted characters with complicated family dynamics that will keep you furiously flipping pages. Plus, all three of these novels are available in paperback which makes them ideal for travel.

3 books to read at the beach or the bar via practicallystyli.sh

Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen

This was the April book club pick at my local indie bookstore and I don't know why it took me so long to hear about it! It is one part family lore, one part childhood nostalgia, and one part falling down the rabbit hole of research. Lee Lien has returned home after finishing a Ph.D. in English without a job and with increasing apathy towards Edith Wharton, the subject of her dissertation. Stuck under the same roof with her mother and grandfather, who both immigrated from Vietnam, Lee finds comfort rereading the Little House series, looking for clues to confirm that a brooch left in her grandfather's restaurant in Vietname belonged to Rose, the journalist daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her search takes her on a journey West as she unravels the mysteries of Rose's life and tries to find direction for her own. I love that the family dynamic of the Lien family mirrors that of the Ingalls Wilder family, highlighting what it means to be an immigrant looking for a place to call home.

The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai

As the title suggests, this book tells the stories of the inhabitants of the house over its first hundred years, but the twist is that the chronology is reversed. The first section takes place in 1999 when Zee and her husband, Doug, move into the guest house on her childhood estate. However, Doug dredges up the past as he tries to find information for his book about Edwin Parfitt, a poet who stayed at the house when it was an artists' colony. Doug does not find all the answers he wants, but the reader does as the story jumps backwards to previous groups of tenants until the house is just a piece of land with a broken branch marking the future location of the front door. Each generation has their secrets wrapped up in the house and as time turns back, the layers are pulled away to expose the tangled web of the family. This is a book that begs to be reread because each dip further into the past adds new understanding to the future. Last summer I heard an interview with Rebecca Makkai about this book on WUWM, Milwaukee's local NPR station, and was immediately sold so I'm thrilled it is now out in paperback.

Arcadia by Lauren Groff

Of my three recommendations, this is the most serious, though that is not to say that it is without joy. Rather it shows all the ups, downs, and in-betweens of life. For about fifty years, the story follows Bit, the first child born into a commune in Western New York called Arcadia. A story of an unorthodox childhood morphs into something more complex as both Arcadia and Bit grow up and cracks in their perfect world begin to show. The idealistic values erode under the charisma and hubris of Arcadia's leader and an agrarian utopia becomes an outpost of debauchery. Arcadia is Bit's family and home, but he is forced to leave the people and the place that he once loved, though Arcadia never really leaves him.

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homemade freeze pops

7/3/2015

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Do you remember eating freeze pops on a hot summer day as a kid? There was always a mad rush when the box came out of the freezer as everyone tried to get the best flavor. (No one in my friend group ever wanted an orange ones.) Freeze pops are little more than colorful sugar ice, but at the time they were a refreshment that we all looked forward to with great excitement.

While scrolling through Pinterest, I kept stumbling across pins of homemade freezer pops and discovered Zipzicles. They make tall, narrow, resealable bags so that you can make freeze pops at home without a food vacuum. Plus, they have tons of great recipes on their website so that your homemade freeze pops are more than just colorful sugar ice.

For the 4th of July I thought that red, white, and blue freeze pops would be appropriate. The red ones are berry and gin, the white ones are mojito, and the blue ones are vodka lemonade (with a healthy dose of blue food coloring).

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a red, white, & blue dessert for the fourth

7/2/2015

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Strawberries and blueberries make an appearance in pretty much every 4th of July dessert and this one will be no different. I love to make a trifle that features the red and blue fruits because it is an easy-to-assemble dessert. My mom claims that trifle is a winter dessert because her family used to eat it on Christmas, but I pretty much only make it during the summer months when fresh fruit is in season.

Trifle is a layered dessert, so for the biggest visual impact, serve it in a clear dish. For parties, I like to make individual servings in cocktail glasses, but if your event is outside, you might prefer to use clear plastic disposable cups or mason jars. To serve the dessert family style, make the trifle in a glass serving bowl with tall sides.

Ingredients
1 pound cake
strawberry jam (optional)
1 lb. blueberries
1 lb. strawberries, hulled and quartered
vanilla pudding (recipe below)
1 can whipped cream
chocolate shavings (optional, for garnish)

Thinly slice the pound cake. An optional step is to spread strawberry jam on half the slices and then assemble jam and pound cake "sandwiches." Layer the ingredients, with pudding in between each as shown in the diagram below:

Use a piece of baking chocolate and a cheese grater to garnish the trifle with chocolate shavings.

Ingredients for Vanilla Pudding
1/3 cup flour
2/3 cup sugar
<1/2 tsp. salt
2 egg yolks
2 cups milk
1 tsp. vanilla

Combine the dry ingredients in a saucepan. Add the milk slowly while whisking over low heat. After the milk is added, cook over medium heat, stirring until the mixture has thickened. Take off the fire and add a spoonful of the mixture to the eggs to temper the eggs. This brings the temperature of the eggs up slowly so that you don't end up with scrambled eggs in your pudding! Add the eggs to the mixture in the saucepan and stir until combined. Finally, add the vanilla and mix until it is evenly distributed throughout the mixture.

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the perfect summer pasta salad

7/2/2015

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If you are going to only use one pasta salad recipe this summer, it should this Mediterranean-inspired orzo salad. It is easy, delicious, and feeds a crowd. The original recipe is from PopSugar and though I still have no idea how I made it onto the email list for their newsletter, I'm glad that this recipe found its way into my inbox. I have simplified the recipe somewhat, removing the olives (of which I am decidedly NOT a fan) and sun-dried tomatoes, and by using a pre-made red wine vinaigrette (if you do prefer a homemade dressing, I suggest using a different recipe since the PopSugar one is overly heavy on the vinegar). My version requires only five items from Trader Joe's: orzo, grape tomatoes, basil, red wine vinaigrette, and feta cheese that comes pre-seasoned with Mediterranean herbs. (If you don't have a Trader Joe's nearby, the seasonings in the feta cheese include sundried tomato, oregano, garlic, and basil.)

5 ingredients to make a Mediterranean-inspired orzo salad that is perfect for summer!

Prepare the orzo (1 lb) according to the instructions on the bag. After it has finished cooking, pour it into a large bowl and mix together with the red wine vinaigrette (8 fl oz). (The liquid will absorb into the orzo for flavorful pasta.) Cut the tomatoes (1 lb) into the halves or quarters and add to the orzo and vinaigrette mixture. Chop about fifteen leaves of fresh basil and add to the bowl. Stir until everything is thoroughly mixed. Loosely cover the bowl with plastic wrap and put the bowl in the fridge for a couple hours, until the vinaigrette is absorbed. When you are ready to serve (or if you are bringing it to a party, before you leave home), mix in the feta cheese (6 oz). Then enjoy! This pasta salad is easy to assemble, full of flavor, and perfect for a hot summer day which means that you will find yourself reaching for the recipe time and again this summer.

Mediterranean-inspired orzo salad via practicallystyli.sh

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