I love reading cookbooks. From beautiful pictures of artfully presented dishes to useful tips and recipes that enrich your experiences in the kitchen, there is a lot to love about them. But what fascinates me the most about cookbooks is their ability to pass down history and tradition, serving as a manifesto of our foodways. In his book Nueva Cocina …
Initiation into Spain
Anywhere in the world, there is some sort of an initiation into the city or nation. When traveling, the initiation may take place in the form of “Top Ten Things To Do In ___” lists, but when living in a new nation, the process of initiation is much more time consuming and confronting. The most important forms of initiation were …
La Bella Figur-HUH?
“Being Italian is a full-time job. We never forget who we are and we have fun confusing anyone who is looking on,” the lines that open Beppe Severgnini’s La Bella Figura: An Insider’s Guide to the Italian Mind. In the book, Severgnini is the foreigner’s spy, traveling throughout Italy like a tourist but decoding modern Italian culture as a Crema-born …
Lightness or Heaviness?
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera, explores the life philosophies of lightness and heaviness. The book opens up discussing Nietzsche’s philosophy of eternal return, or heaviness, versus Parmenide’s idea that life is light. Set in my very own city of Prague, Kundera wonders if we can even assign a meaning to our lives if we haven’t had the …
Prague, My Love
Prague, My Love: An Unusual Guide Book to the Hidden Corners of Prague by Hilary James is a fascinating read that takes you through a thousand year span of Czech history, across the region’s trials and tribulations, as it was built up and torn down. And living up to its name, the book acts like a tour guide who teaches …
Perpetuating Themes
The Unbearable Lightness of Being that explores Czech society in the 1960s and 1970s through Tomas, a womanizing surgeon. The book delves into the artistic culture and intellectual life of the Czechoslovakia during the time after the Prague Spring, which helps understand how historical themes continue to perpetuate Czech culture to this day. The book helps illustrate how communism restricted …
Beyond the Chestnut Trees and into the Countryside
Beyond the Chestnut Trees by Maria Bauer is an emotional and intriguing recount of her return home, to Prague, 40 years after her forced emigration during World War II. Bauer does an excellent job of contrasting the different geographical periods of her life, whether it be prewar Prague in the 1930’s, France, Spain, Portugal, her subsequent move to America and, …
An Educated Traveler
Prague as a city went through a lot in the past century. With its involvement in the World Wars, communist government, and liberalization, understanding the city is very complicated. While walking through Prague, you gain a sense of newfound freedom but also the feeling of distrust. In the book A Romantic Education, Patricia Hampl travels to Prague to regain an …
A Tramp Abroad
Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad chronicles the travels of Twain through Europe, and the small details that travelers such as himself come across while on a long journey. He notices the colors of hats on students, identifies small bugs on the ground, and the characters of renowned hotels and gesticulating Italians. When you visit a place for a day or …
It’s about the Journey, not the Destination
Robyn Davidson, the author of Tracks, was tired of city life. In 1975, she set off on her 1,700-mile journey from Alice Springs to the shores of the Indian Ocean in Western Australia in order to find some privacy. I was aware of the fact that almost 90% of the population lives in urban areas before I came to Australia, …
Two Americans, One City
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast” – Ernest Hemingway. For my second book, I chose to read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. A Moveable Feast is a memoir sharing Hemingway’s time spent …
Somebody’s Heart is Burning
For the second book assignment I read Somebody’s Heart is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa by Tanya Shaffer. Similar to the first book I read, Black Gold of the Sun, this is another memoir based on travels throughout Ghana. But since Shaffer is a woman born in California with no connection to Ghana (other than the desire to travel somewhere new), I could relate more …
Paris, Infamous City
Paris Spleen is a collection of 51 prose poems written by Charles Baudelaire and published posthumously in 1869. I chose to read this book because I was intrigued by the genre of the prose poem—prose writing that simultaneously exhibits poeticism in its images and language. Despite the fact that Baudelaire’s views of Paris are from the stance of someone living …
Sketches of London
For my second book I chose Sketches by Boz by Charles Dickens. Like Virginia Woolf’s The London Scene, this collection of essays depict London and it’s people. Dickens lived right around the NYU London area in Bloomsbury (one of the houses he lived in is one block away from my dorm). In his writing he includes streets, places, and parks …
Remember the Rabbit-Proof Fence
To be honest, before coming to Australia, I didn’t even know if Australia had slaves. I knew it had been founded as a penal colony so I expected there to be some people of African descent, but only a tiny amount of the population. When I arrived in Sydney, this guess was confirmed by the infrequency of which I saw …
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