a birthday afternoon tea

Another year, another birthday. This year I celebrated by baking up a storm and then hanging out with a bunch of friends for some sugar overload times in the park. Fun!

It seems that every time I bake, I decide that since I do it so rarely I should bake all the things at once. Which results in baking from Friday night to just before the guests start to arrive on Saturday afternoon. But it's fun to have an excuse to try out some new and delicious looking recipes. 

No added food colouring! This is just from maraschino cherries

The cherry cake necessitated a last minute frantic hunt for a maraschino cherry provider in Sydney, but it turned out ok. I think it was a mixed success though, the icing was heavy on the butter and not everyone was a fan of the almond/maraschino flavour of the cake. I liked it though, and it definitely looked gorgeous (thanks to decoration by Andrew, I had trouble getting the food colouring to take with all that butter!).

Cherry-Vanilla Layer Cake (recipe from Sprinkle Bakes)

I also made some sage and polenta madeleines and chocolate stout whoopie pies. I haven't had whoopie pies before, but I think they were the stand-out from my baking selection. The stout made for an unusual (but delicious) flavour and the texture was fantastic, dense but fluffy. I plan to make these again, though I'm hoping to use a chocolate stout rather than plain Guinness (the bottle shop I went to before making these had a rather limited selection of stouts). Making the caramel sauce for the buttercream was lots of fun as well, there's something about heating sugar and water until it bubbles up that feels like you are breaking some kitchen rule, and at the same time almost like a science experiment. I recommend making caramel all round, fun and tasty- what more could you want?

Sage and polenta madeleines (recipe from Kitchen by Marie Claire) and Chocolate Stout Whoopie Pies with salted caramel buttercream frosting (recipe from Endless Simmer)

I asked everyone to bring a plate as well, so we ended up with heaps of food. I am slowly getting through the leftovers...

More of the spread

extracts from my notebook 5

Daydreamer by trade

"No more dreaming like a girl, so in love with the wrong one"
- Florence and the Machine (although I later found out it's actually 'wrong world', which is even better)


"There's always a bit of a tug-o-war between the sexes, there's always a bit of tension when there's romance involved."
- Overheard in a cafe, older woman giving advice to younger woman


"All of that filthy empathy for the way we're feeling"
- Bright Eyes

What the preacher wants to show him is that the real basis of wisdom is a frank acknowledgement that much of what happens is quite inexplicable to us, and that most occurrences 'under the sun' bear no outward sign of a rational, moral God ordering them at all
- JI Packer, 'Knowing God', on Ecclesiastes

We were all struts in a rickety scaffold, holding each other up.
We were all falling down.


"He is as delighted as he is wet"
- Soccer commentary, rainy world cup group of 16 game- Uruguay vs. South Korea

1910s- swann's way (1913)

Going into the century of books challenge I wasn't really sure what I was going to read but I knew one thing- I wanted to read some Proust. Though Remembrance of Things Past (the version that I read used that title, so I'll stick with it) is a somewhat daunting proposition, I felt like I could handle reading just one part, and after all I had heard so many good things from people. So my trepidation was mixed with optimism as I started pt. 1- Swann's Way.


I may have been familiar with the name of Proust, but I really didn't know much about what to expect when I started the book. I was even unsure whether Swann's Way really counted as a book, after all it's only part 1 of 7, and I discovered it's also been published in two separate sections itself. To make matters more confusing, the version that I read had the first two parts in the same volume. Part of the complication of reading an old, long, work in translation I suppose. Really the book falls into two (or maybe three?) parts, with quite distinct switches between them, although the themes and characters remain the same and they pick up on some of the same images. The change between the end of chapter 1, 'Combray', which brings to a close the discussion of the 'Overture', and the start of chapter 2, 'Swann in Love', is almost jarring- switching from first person to almost third person, though the story remains the same. It's interesting that though it is a novel of many different sections and different parts, the style is fairly fluid and almost stream of consciousness.


Apart from the many divisions and subdivisions, I knew that it was a novel about time and memory. The blurb on the back of my copy said that it was about "obsessive love", and both these things are true. But they seemed like fairly abstract ideas to start a novel with, so I really wasn't sure what I would find, and whether I would love it as much as other people did. Now I can't really speak for other people, but love it I did! I was enchanted by the way he described experiences like waking up in darkness and being disoriented about where you are:

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would endeavour to construe from the pattern of its tiredness the position of its various limbs, in order to deduce therefrom the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, to piece it together and give a name to the house in which it lay. (Moncrieff and Kilmartin trans.)

I really liked the attention given to small things, the details of everyday life, and how well he captured things like the experience of reading a book as a child. Most of all it is a really good book about memory, since it both talks about the action and triggers of memory and at the same time is the act of the narrator remembering, at times I thought it was just perfect, it made me feel nostalgic in a very generalised way. I also loved the sense of humour, the way the characters' foibles were wittily but lovingly portrayed. 

But really this review has mostly been about the first part of the book, though it's true that the themes (and the characters etc.) go throughout the whole book, there really is quite a dramatic shift at the start of 'Swann in Love'. Most notably, the narrator switches from talking about his own experiences to someone else's, so that it is no longer an act of remembering and more an act of recounting. For another, the focus seemed to switch from 'time and memory' to 'obsessive love'. And I was not so keen on the obsessive love part. I found the characters a bit less sympathetic, there was more distance between us after all, and while it really was an evocative description of love and obsession it is a less pleasant topic I think. But I had fallen in love with the book earlier so I was willing to look on the bright side. Really this is still a very good book, but I found the reading process less joyful and progress was slower. Strange that I found it slower going in the part where there was a plot (kind of) to the part where there wasn't. Maybe this is very much a personal preference? But there were still some lovely passages about memory and music, and the relationship rang very true I think. Sad to read, but very true.

All in all I am very glad that I did read this, and I am looking forward to read Volume 2 in the future. I want to see more of the characters lives, I want more of the passages I loved, and I am really happy to have found a book that I enjoyed so much. And that is so conducive to starting conversations on trains.

happenings

I've just started reading Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, I'm hoping to blog about Swann's Way for the century of books, for the 1910s. I'm not sure if I'll get it done by the end of February, but I thought it was a great opportunity to read this book that I've heard so many great things about.


I do most of my reading on the train, and this morning on the way to work I was standing in a train carriage, reading my book, when a lady interrupted me to ask if she could take my picture. And I was flattered because yes I was wearing what I thought to be a pretty good outfit at the time, but as you may have guessed she wanted a picture because I was reading Proust. She said something like "seeing a young person like you reading Proust gives me hope for the future." Then she asked if I was on my way to uni. She may have overestimated my youth, I'm not really sure, would she have done the same if it wasn't casual Friday and I was wearing my office uniform instead of jeans would it have had the same effect?


Anway, clearly it's a book that inspires strong feelings, so I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it!

1900s- a room with a view (1908)

I said in my previous post that I didn't understand E.M. Forster's books, and that's not entirely true. In fact, I found A Room With a View quite accessible, and really in many ways a straight-forward story. But I felt, as I did with Howards End, that I wasn't quite sure what he was getting at, that somehow Forster and I do not exactly get along. The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton, on the other hand, is quite straight-forwardly puzzling, starting, as it does, as a thriller, and progressing to farce, before unexpectedly turning into a religious allegory. I'm not really sure where to go with that, so I'll review A Room With A View instead, and hopefully get some thoughts in order. I'd love to hear what other people thought as well, and whether I should be so flummoxed. I'd like to talk about the ending too, so be warned! Unfortunately I left this a bit late to write, and late night blog posts are not my most considered blog posts. But it's better than no blog post, right?


A Room with a View starts in Florence, where Lucy and her older (and somewhat more staid) cousin Charlotte. Excited as she is, the first night is not shaping up well- the hotel and the people in it seem so very very English, Lucy and Charlotte have not been given their promised rooms with views, and worse still they are overheard complaining about this and a stranger actually offers to swap rooms with them! The stranger is Mr. Emerson, travelling with his son, with a dislike of convention and a seeming inability to see why that makes him unpopular among the other English travellers. But Lucy is more torn, between the kindness shown by Mr. Emerson and the tensions of the more conventional travellers, between a kind of annoyance at his son and a feeling of empathy. She and the son, George, experience a moment of connection when Lucy witnesses a murder, and later another when they got lost at a picnic and he kisses her in a field of violets.


I really enjoyed this book, at least at first, and a lot of that was down to the character of Lucy Honeychurch. She was such a likeable character, torn between her sympathy for people and enjoyment of the world and the need to adhere to convention. Always polite and aware of what she should do, but sometimes rebellious all the same. Her foil is her cousin Charlotte, constantly 'thinking of others' to the point that she causes others great discomfort, constantly thinking of 'the right thing to do' to the point that it creates ridiculous complications, and seemingly determined to spend her time in Italy mostly in the hotel, to the annoyance of the more adventurous Lucy.


What I did not enjoy so much was the sudden shift in the second half of the book (fast-forward a few months and Lucy and Charlotte are home in England after visiting Rome, with Lucy now engaged to Cecil Vyse, a somewhat pretentious and aggravating young man). I'm just not a fun of sudden lurches forward in narrative. It bothered me last year in The Pastor's Wife, and it bothered me here. But that is not a terrible crime, eventually it is possible to readjust to the new time-frame. And the story continues in fine form, with Lucy and her mother and brother being lovely and a bit silly, Cecil being obnoxious, the clergyman Mr. Beebe (first encountered in Florence) sympathetic and humorous, the Emerson's as revolutionary as ever and Charlotte irritating as always, as Lucy realises reluctantly her attraction to George Emerson and her unsuitedness with Cecil. And then, another thunderclap! George and Lucy are married, all the sympathetic characters have turned their backs on their former friend/family member and the unsympathetic ones are redeemed. I found it difficult to believe that Lucy's loving mother and brother would cut her off like that, even if I could believe it of Mr. Beebe. I really did like, though, the twists that occur with Charlotte's character, the way they come to think that maybe they underestimated her, after all. Sadly for me, the edition I was reading included an epilogue written in the 1950s, which gave a small summary of the lives of George and Lucy up till then. I wish I never read it, I think it's much better to leave things at their ending and let the reader speculate than tack something on that tells you everything and yet does not feel like part of the book. I would recommend not reading that part if you get the chance to avoid it, finish on the happy ending!


Anyway, it was not this that confused me, after all. It is just that I can never quite figure out what Forster is trying to say, he pokes so much fun at everything. At the end of Howards End I did not really know what he was saying about women, or art or class I suppose. Should women marry the annoying man with the large house and dote on him, or live unconventionally and have babies and be excluded from society? *ahem* I know that's a little specific, but I was not that happy with Margaret's decisions. But! That's a totally different book. Writing this review it seems simple enough: it's a book that points out the restrictiveness of social conventions, and instead wants to celebrate the free human spirit. But it's the sly humour that gets me, that makes me unsure, sometimes, of quite who Forster is laughing at... Maybe I am overthinking it?


In summary: I would recommend this book, it's light and fun but at the same time quite serious. On the whole, I enjoyed it. But definitely don't read the epilogue/appendix.

1900s- the man of property (1906)

Since I don't read much from the 1900s usually I thought I should make a list of options to make sure I found something to read, but then I couldn't choose so I read three (unfortunately two ended up being from the same year):
The Man of Property by John Galsworthy (1906)
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton (1908)
A Room with a View by E.M. Forster (1908)


Basically I decided to use this challenge as an excuse to read some of the books I've been meaning to read for a long time but haven't gotten around to. It's taken me a while to get around to blogging about them because I just wasn't sure what to say. I said to a friend the other day that I used to judge whether books were good or not by whether I could understand them. If I had no idea what a book was about by the end of it, it must be very high literature indeed. By this token The Man Who Was Thursday is incredible, and E.M. Forster should be my favourite writer. On the other hand, reading The Man of Property was like being hit over the head with the one idea. John Galsworthy likes to demonstrate his concepts, then explain them, and then spell them out again in case you didn't understand them the first time. But all this sounds extraordinarily negative, and really it wasn't like that at all, so I'll go through them in more detail (with some spoilers). Starting with:


The Man of Property by John Galsworthy
Published in the 1900s, but set in the 1880s, this is the first book of the famous Forsyte saga. It follows the Forsyte family, with its many aged uncles and aunts and the family patriarch, Jolyon Forsyte. It opens at the engagement party for June (Jolyon's grand-daughter) and her architect fiancee Bosinney. Meanwhile, June's uncle, Soames, and his wife (and June's best friend) Irene are having marital difficulties. 


The title says it all really, a lot of the novel is a criticism of, I guess, materialism- or rather the focus on ownership. The novel's crisis is brought about by Soames purchase and construction of a house, and focuses on his desire to 'own' his wife. The writer claims all Forsytes are obsessed by property, and by 'Forsytes' he means the upper-middle classes, the noveau riche I suppose. The book is informed by  Victorian social changes and a real distaste for 'Forsyte-ism', mixed with occasional affection (for Jolyon and June, for instance). It's mostly quite a fun (if terribly tragic) read, though I did feel for June, who loses her fiance to her best friend. But we are not allowed to sympathise for long, she is a Forsyte after all.


While you do get a sense of authorial intervention, very critical of the Forsytes, the story is largely told from their perspective. This reinforces the sense of Bosinney and Irene as outsiders. While that may be effective, I found it frustrating to have so little sense of Irene's character. She is charming, and we're constantly told that she is sort of accidentally seductive. But we are always on the outside, Irene is, after all, a mystery to all the Forsytes. She is also apparently pliable with a core of certainty. She has a horrible time of it through the book, and I just wished I knew more about her. 


This is also a book in which I spent a lot of time thinking "why don't you just talk to each other? Just ask each other what's going on?" This would clearly be more effective for some characters than others, but I feel that if my fiance didn't talk to me for weeks, maybe I would ask him about it? And on the other hand, that's not really behaviour that's calculated to make me feel sympathetic towards anyone, starving artist or no. Overall, I found Bosinney really quite infuriating. If I felt that Irene was made out to be mysterious, Bosinney's character was made out to be very irritating. But while they drive the plot of the book, it's not really about Irene and Bosinney at all. It's about the Forsytes, and at that the book is a lot more successful.

on egypt

Last year I wrote about reading The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif, and how relevant it felt reading about Egypt's history in light of the Tahrir Square demonstrations and the revolution that was happening. I wondered how Ahdaf Soueif would feel about it, and whether she would write her book differently if she was writing today. Well, apparently she's written a new book about the revolution in Cairo (in which she was involved), and there are what I think are extracts from that book in the Guardian here. It's a very personal account of Egypt and revolution, interesting to read as Egypt's new Government holds its inaugral session, although the extracts end before the elections.


And my reading around the world posts will come soon! I hope.