Mansfield Park

My reading list from the past few months.

Thanks to b.a. for the idea to share it this way.

Thanks to two nice naps with Fitz, I finished Mansfield Park by Jane Austen a few weeks ago. I had read it before, sometime in high school or at the beginning of college, and I hated it. The premise is that Fanny Price goes to live with a rich uncle when she is nine years old because her own family is so poor. She is ignored and mistreated most of the time, but has a kind cousin, Edmund, who cares about her feelings and gives her good advice. She loves Edmund, but since he only thinks of a sister, she is his confidante when he falls in love with seemingly sweet Miss Crawford. She waits and waits in pain until the end which ends like a romance should. I always wondered why Jane Austen would have created such a weak-willed, pathetic heroine.

I have a knack for forgetting most of the details and part of the plot of any story I read or movie I watch. This is a little unfortunate since I love reading so much, but it works out nicely when I want to read a book and can't get to the library or bookstore. We got Mansfield Park on Netflix, because my nice husband lets me put movies I want to watch on the subscription he got for Christmas. It had lots of "scandalous" insinuations that I was sure weren't present in the book, but despite the parts I suspected weren't true, I enjoyed the movie. I decided to give the book antoher whirl.

Although it wasn't the fastest moving, most romantic love story in the world, there were a few things I liked about it. First, it was realistic. There was no unlikely match between a rich older man and a poor younger woman--just two like-minded people who are in love. And one of those people wasted time liking someone else because he let her flashy exterior distract him from her selfish heart. People aren't perfect, and even the main characters that you root for throughout this book are imperfect. Second, the book ended with repentence from some of the characters. Edmund repented of his interest in Miss Crawford and Sir Thomas Bertram (Edmund's father) repented of the way he had treated Fanny and the way he had raised his children. Beyond repentence, Sir Thomas went forward and did good, inviting Fanny's younger sister to live with them and be provided for. Lastly, I could see why Fanny was so timid this time around, and had compassion on her in her anxiety rather than disdain.

If you're interested in the movie, this version is entertaining, although it is not terribly thorough and adds some unnecessary (ie: not in the book) sexual undertones. This version, with Billie Piper, made for Masterpiece on PBS looks like it will have more undertones and be even less accurate. This mini-series version is on my Netflix instant queue, and I've watched four of the six episodes.

Are there any book-to-movie combinations you love?

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

I saw this book at Barnes and Noble last month, and, in a moment of profound logic and self-control, decided to check it out at the library. I even remembered to renew it before being fined.

You probably already know that I love food. I love reading about it in stories and watching stories unfold around it in movies. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp (husband) and Camille Kingsolver (daughter) proved to be the brilliant marriage of a good, food-based, true story with a plethora of thought-provoking information about food and the food industry. Be forewarned—Barbara Kingsolver has been named seventy-fourth on a list of one-hundred people who are destroying America.

The book takes you through Kingsolver’s family’s journey to eat only home- or locally-grown food for one year. They move to their farm in Appalachia one January, start their experiment in March, cultivate an enormous garden, harvest and preserve, and survive through the following Spring true to their challenge. They buy flour from local mills, make their own bread, yogurt, and cheese (I SO want to try this), frequent local farmers markets, and raise their own chickens and turkeys for eggs and meat. Each member of the family gets one item to cheat with on the condition that they could learn a way to obtain it that benefits the grower and the land where it grows. Kingsolver writes, “We hoped to establish that a normal-ish American family could be content on the fruits of our local foodshed.”

Kingsolver scatters humorous details throughout the book that assure the reader that things are absurd enough to be real life. For instance, she plans to make mayonnaise from a recipe she received in her high school French class that instructs one to “whip heartily for two minutes while holding only pleasant thoughts in mind” (33). She also hearkens the person who helps Thanksgiving turkeys (which are bred too stupid to reproduce on their own) reproduce as a job to add to the list of “unsavory jobs” (90) to threaten your children that they’ll be stuck with if they ditch school.

The book had a prominent serious tone at times, discussing the environmental and social issues related to conventional farming. I knew that buying local food is good for the local economy and that many local farmers grow food organically, even if they’re not certified, which is good for the environment. I’d never considered that buying locally grown food is good for the environment because of the fossil fuels that aren’t used to transport them. In one of his mini-essays, which usually appear in each chapter, Hopp tries to explain away the higher cost of local and organic foods, referencing the petroleum subsidies (paid through our taxes) that support the growing, processing, and shipping of industrial grown food. This comes to a total of about $725 per household per year. If we make the decision to buy locally, it seems that we are only paying more: subsidies through our tax dollars, plus higher priced produce. Perhaps if we begin to support local food with our pocket books, we will make enough of an impact to communicate to our legislators that this is not how we want to spend our hard earned dollars.

Kingsolver also had some interesting things to say about vegetarianism. She writes, “I find myself fundamentally allied with a vegetarian position in every way except one: however selectively, I eat meat. I’m unimpressed by arguments that condemn animal harvest while ignoring, wholesale, the animal killing that underwrites vegetal foods. Uncountable deaths by pesticide and habitat removal—the beetles and bunnies that die collaterally for our bread and veggie-burgers—are lives plumb wasted” (222). She points out that vegetarians often cite that an acre that grows crops will feed more people than an acre used to raise animals—that their choice is helping the cause of world hunger—as a reason for abstaining from meat. However, for some families, having a goat to supplement their small farm in an area where farming is difficult allows them to turn food that grows naturally in their area that is inedible to them but edible for their animal into human-edible milk and meat.

These pages didn’t contain any information so compelling that I’ve become a strict locavore (Kingsolver’s term for local-food-only-eater) or to begin eating meat responsibly again, but it did provide surprising new information that I will use as I make my food-buying decisions in the future. I will make it a priority to buy some local food and free-range or grass-finished meat may end up on my husband’s plate every once in a while. But, I’m not quite ready to stop going to the grocery store or to give up bananas altogether.

If you’ve read this book, what did you think? If not, what sources have impacted your food buying choices the most?

Bibiophilia

During college, I thought I lost my ability to read fiction. I barely had time to read anything not school-related, and when I did, I couldn’t find the right balance of focus and relaxation to allow me to plow through a mystery or novel like I could in the past. I still read the Bible and a few other books you might find in the “Christian Living” section of the bookstore, but you’d rarely find me reading for fun. I could read novels for the English classes I took, but I was always making intertextual connections and identifying premonition and analyzing things from a historical perspective, which, although I enjoyed it, was far from relaxing.

I loved to read as a kid and took pride in calling myself an avid reader. (Other people had other names for this tendency.) In college, I could usually still count on being one of the only people in a room who had read the book that the period movie we were watching was based on. But I worried that my pleasure reading days were over forever.

After graduation, when our post-graduation chaos had subsided and I was still waiting for my sub applications to go through, we began getting a lot of Hercule Poirot dvds from the library (and forgetting to return them on time, making the free library rental idea much less worthwhile). After watching a few of these dvds, I decided to venture back to the bookshelf and pulled a Poirot mystery from the shelf. I read half of it that night and finished it the next day. Whew! I was glad to find out that my fiction aversion had subsided as soon as forced reading subsided.

For a while, I thought that I was going to have abundant time to read, sitting at home in my immaculate house, waiting for the phone to ring and take me to work. This is not the case. I am still capable of making a big enough mess each day to keep me busy whenever I have free time, and I’ve been working so much that I’ve had to refuse jobs to catch up on things at home. But, I do have the luxury of deciding what to do when I get home each day, and I am confident that this will include reading.

After Poirot, I started a nonfiction book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsovler. One benefit of forgetting how to read fiction was discovering my love of nonfiction. Now, I’m on to Mansfield Park, a Jane Austen novel I’ve read before. I imagine I’ll keep alternating between fiction and nonfiction to keep my mind sharp.

What’s been on your reading list lately?

Why I Like Food

For some reason, I've always had an emotional connection to food. I'm sentimental about eating fried bread with tomatoes or sugar on Christmas and always make sure we get to my grandma's house in time to eat that meal. I'm sentimental about Oreos because my mom bought Dexter and I a giant box of Oreos packaged in tubes when we first got married, so we spent several evenings splitting a tube of Oreos and watching Ace of Cakes on Food Network. I'm sentimental about Creme de Menthe cake because that's what my dad had for his birthday a lot when I was a kid and I thought the greenish coolwhip looked really cool.


But I'm not just emotional about food I've experienced or eaten. My favorite books and movies have food related parts that become the focal point of my memories about the story. Now, it seems like my favorite books are cookbooks.


In Bread and Jam for Frances, after Frances begins to weary of eating bread and jam at every meal, she asks her friend Albert what he had in his lunch. "'I have a cream cheese-cucumber-and-tomato sandwich,' said Albert. 'And a boiled egg and salt shaker. And a thermos of milk. And a bunch of grapes. And a tangerine and a cup custard.'" At the end of the book, Frances shows off her lunch fare to Albert, "'I have tomato soup,' Frances said. 'And a lobster-salad sandwich. I have celery, carrot sticks, and black olives. And plums, and cherries, and vanilla pudding.'" There is no way I would have eaten tomatoes, custard, lobster, or plums as a child. But I always had a sense of excitement as I imagined Frances unpacking her lunchpail with so many different things inside. Maybe I was learning the moral of the story that Albert iterated, "I think it's nice that there are all different kinds of lunches and breakfasts and dinners and snacks."

Fast forward a few years to The Boxcar Children. My favorite parts of the book are when Henry thins the vegetable garden at the doctor's house and takes the tiny vegetables home so Jessie can make a stew, when they collect blueberries and have them with milk, and when they pick cherries at the doctor's house. (I also like the part when Henry organizes the doctor's garage, but that appeals to my OCD side, not my hungry side.)

In Little Women, one of the parts I remember most is when the sisters are astounded by a feast on Christmas morning despite slim rations because of the war, and their decision to take it to the poor family that lives nearby. And how Mr. Laurence sees what they did for the neighbors and sends over another feast. (Reminds me of Matt. 19:29).

In the movie The Shop Around the Corner, the shopkeeper who has just found out about his wife's unfaithfulness invites the hungry, poor messenger boy, who has moved to the city to earn money to send back to his family, to dinner. I cry at this part every single time.

And in Desk Set, it is over lunch on the roof with tough roast beef sandwiches that Mr. Sumner finds out how complex and brilliant Bunny's mind is.

I'm not sure why I like these parts of these stories, but I do. If I ever become a famous, amazing writer, I've decided I'll be a food writer.

Are you a turnip eater?

I didn't grow up eating a wide variety of vegetables. Potatoes, corn, green beans, and raw carrots were the staples. I learned to love broccoli, to my mother's chagrin, at my grandma's house, and am currently making strides with tomatoes.


Every once in a while, I'll remember a vegetable mentioned in a book I read as a child or have seen at the grocery store, and realize that I've never eaten it and possibly have never talked to a real live person who regularly eats that vegetable. (I recommend reading The Pea Patch Jig by Thacher Hurd in order to instill vegetable curiosity in your children.)

I don't know where my imaginary connection to turnips is coming from. I'm wondering if Rabbit grew turnips in his garden in Winnie the Pooh. Or maybe Frances refused to eat them in Bread and Jam for Frances. Did Molly eat turnips on the first page of an American Girls book that I've never read? Either way, I've had turnips and parsnips on the brain and decided to buy a bag of turnips for experimentation.

My first turnip attempt was roasting. I love other vegetables roasted and thought it would be a sure fire way to get myself to love turnips. That was a flop. My first mistake: roasting them alongside potatoes. Roasted potatoes are just too simple, comforting, and delicious to allow other vegetables to shine at all. My second mistake: roasting turnips in the first place. They turned out mushy and bitter.

I almost gave up hope but didn't want to throw away my four remaining turnips. I threw one into Sarah's potato soup and it was completely masked by the soup's creamy delightfulness.

I'm about to try my wildcard turnip recipe, which I found at allrecipes.com. If you go to the HC house church, on Sunday, along with a delicious chana masala and a tantalizing chicken Indian dish, you'll be experiencing Kashmiri-Style Kidney Beans with Turnips. Brace your taste buds, folks. This is going to be interesting.

While I've been doing all this experimenting, I've started to wonder if eating turnips is even important. Maybe it's one of those vegetables that tricks you in to thinking you need to eat it because it's a vegetable, when really it has little nutritional value. What I've found out is that turnips have fiber and Vitamin C. Turnip greens, which had been removed from my turnips, contain large amounts of Vitamin A and lutein, which can prevent cataracts and cardiovascular disease.

I don't know that turnips will become a staple on our household menu, but I'm glad to have experienced turnip week. I'm still curious, however, if and how other people eat their turnips.