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From the Desk of Duncan Smith: You Are What You Read
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We all know the old saying "You are what you eat" but an important variation on that saying is "You are what you read." An appropriate example is the story of Mia Bauer. Mia was featured on NPR's business-oriented radio program, Marketplace, in a segment about how books influenced the careers of successful business leaders. For Mia, that book was Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. One of the reasons she loved Wharton's book was the description of the food and the role it played in the daily life of the characters. After reading The Age of Innocence, Bauer made a commitment to not end up like the characters in the book; she resolved not to live a life of regret. She directly attributes Wharton's work with giving her the courage to abandon a successful but unfulfilling legal practice and found CRUMBS, the bake shop that pioneered the gourmet cupcake craze.
Food-related are among the most popular in our collections. In Library Journal's survey (February 15, 2013), 81% of respondents indicated that cooking was in the top five nonfiction topic areas circulating in their libraries. The article doesn't indicate whether or not "cooking" was limited to cookbooks but this issue of RA News indicates there is a lot more going on in kitchen literature than recipes.
As Jennifer Brannen points out in
"History by the Slice," food has been a popular topic for the
microhistory subgenre since it came to prominence. Maureen O'Connor's
article on culinary awards contains background on the history of the James
Beard awards that you will want to share with anyone interested in borrowing
food-related titles. And finally, Nanci Milone Hill and Bethany Latham have
written articles which the fine art of dining plays a key role. Both of these
articles are book displays just waiting to happen. So as we approach the busy, food-filled end of the calendar year, I hope you will find a few minutes to sit back and savor this issue of RA News.
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In This Issue
A Historical Feast Around the Web What's Cooking? NoveList Bookshelf Taking a Bite Out of Crime History by the Slice
NaNoWriMo
November is National Novel Writing Month. Participants spend the month typing (more like sprinting!) away to reach their goal of 50,000 words by 11:59 pm on November 30. Will you write the next bestseller this November?
For Veteran's Day
When Clare Byers' Army officer husband was deployed to Iraq, she sought catharsis in fiction. Her list of suggested titles may help you provide bibliotherapy for those at home.
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by Bethany Latham
One draw of well-written fiction is that it can be gloriously escapist, providing readers with the opportunity to travel to different worlds. In science fiction this can be literal -- whole other planets to explore. In historical fiction, it’s the prospect of meeting the inhabitants of the past and seeing the environment in which they lived. Historical fiction authors use details of the clothes, the buildings, and the language to immerse readers in these temporally unfamiliar worlds, to allow readers to feel that they’ve travelled to the past. When I travel, one of the things I enjoy most is sampling the local cuisine, so it’s not surprising that...
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Each month Jessica Zellers adds a few items to your web-surfing itinerary. Take a look at these lists, articles, reviews, and the best of new RA materials and advice. As the days get darker, so does my reading. I am revisiting The Shining, a story with subtleties and shades of quiet menace that never materialized in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation. In the movie, the crazy father is a monster by virtue of being Jack Nicholson. “He’s crazy from the start,” writes James Smythe in The Guardian. “He’s got that manic grin and unkempt hair.” In the book, I am realizing as I experience the novel for the first time as an adult, the father is a likeable guy. The monster is…
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by Maureen O'Connor
The three major culinary-writing awards in North America are the James Beard Awards, Taste Canada —The Food-Writing Awards, and the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Awards. The books awarded prizes by each of these groups cover an eclectic range of culinary and narrative writing. The James Beard Foundation began when Beard's friends and colleagues, led by Peter Kump, responded to a call from Julia Child to preserve his house after his death. His house had been a landmark gathering place for authors, chefs, students, and other culinary professionals. In preserving Beard's home, Peter Kump and his colleagues set in motion…
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Every month, we include a few of the titles that NoveList staff and contributors are reading. Have you read them? What did you think?
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Son
Recommended by Beth Gerall
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by Nanci Milone Hill
Cesar Chavez said “If you really want to make a friend, go to someone’s house and eat with him…the people who give you their food give you their heart.” With food being such a large part of our lives, it’s no wonder that it has made its way into the fiction we read. Culinary mysteries first appeared in 1934 when Rex Stout published Fer-de-Lance, the first Nero Wolfe novel. Though Wolfe is a brilliant private detective, food is one of his delights. Recipes appear in the novels, along with precise instructions for preparation. The next mystery series to emphasize food…
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by Jennifer Brannen
William Blake famously wrote about seeing a world in a grain of sand. While he didn’t necessarily have the fine art of microhistory in mind while writing poetry, some historians have embraced those proverbial grains of sand for the stories they reveal, choosing one event, object, or behavior to explore and illuminate larger historical patterns. Science, technology, design, and everyday objects frequently appear in this form of narrative nonfiction. The microhistory is currently so diverse and popular a “genre” that titles range…
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