Rum and coke

A History of the World in 6 Glasses - Tom Standage (Walker & Company, 2005)


I remember being positively giddy when this book came out. History? Through an element of pop culture so fundamental I don't think you can even call it pop? Love the idea.

Which of course meant I waited years to actually read it. And also possibly built it up a little too much in my head. How can a popular history possibly live up to such expectations?

The premise: six drinks that both reflected and shaped the world (culturally, economically, politically) in which they were dominant. Six drinks which are still pretty bloody popular today, for that matter. First alcohol, then caffeine. Beer in Mesopotamia and wine in ancient Greece and Rome. Distilled spirits in the colonies. Then coffee comes in from Arabia and helps the growth of the professional clerical class, not to mention Habermas's "transformation of the public sphere." And tea, which looked one way in the Ancient Far East, and quite another once the British got ahold of it. And then Coca Cola, which symbolizes everything about the "triumph" of American capitalism (and our political rhetoric). (Although, if put on the spot, I found myself most interested in how carbonated drinks became popular around the turn of the last century. A world without fizzy water seems almost too terrible to imagine.)

So I wanted more rigorous scholarship. (Not saying the research wasn't vigorous, but I could have gone deeper into it with Standage.) But given the intended audience, this was pretty fun. Recommended.

Falling in love amidst a whole lotta plot lines

Secrets of the Lost Summer - Carla Neggers (Mira, 2012)


We've probably established that I am a sucker for novels featuring hockey players. (Too lazy to find supporting links. Bad librarian.) So that's how this book came across my radar. She's back home in her small town licking her wounds and pursuing a new venture; he's a former hockey player who inherited the rundown house down the lane. Sounds simple enough, despite the shocking lack of fake marriages or anything of the like. :)

But then there's more. The house fell into Dylan's lap because of his father, who was hunting for treasure. And the old lady who owned the house for decades before that has a secret. And Olivia's whole family is terrified about an agoraphobic anxiety that may or may not be genetic. And everyone wants to either stay home or escape to somewhere else, or both all at once.

So there's a lot going on, and as someone who struggles to come to terms with her own (different) brand of anxiety, I found a lot of the anxiety sideplot(s) confusing. And the hockey thing..... well, no. There wasn't enough of it to matter. You could probably change his old profession by altering less than 100 words in the book, and it wouldn't really make a difference to the story. But that's okay. Because it was sweet. And it did feel a little like coming home. It was one of those books that made me feel okay about how often I want to embrace the side of me that is a homebody and crafty and bake-y. (The hidden Etsy-er?) Now if only to find the time to let her out....

Egyptology, bitches

The Other Guy's Bride - Connie Brockway (Montlake, 2011)


So I'm reading capsule reviews and I see something about turn of the (last) century Egypt. And my ears perk up. And then I see a comparison to Amelia Peabody, and I am sold. Huzzah.

I read very few period romances, so I can't really compare this to other works in the genre, so I ended up comparing it to Elizabeth Peters all the time. And it's not really fair, because no one is going to be Radcliffe Emerson. And NO ONE is going to be Ramses. But I digress. This is cute. Ginny comes from a family renowned in archaeological circles, but she's sorta the black sheep. Until now. She has a plan to make her name, but this means figuring out how to get to the middle of nowhere in the Egyptian desert. Fortunately, this is exactly where another lady on her ship is headed, more or less, to meet her military fiance. So Ginny manages to take her place and get escorted out to wherever, except along the way she has to fall in love with her escort and face a bunch of dangerous situations. And then everyone comes together, and secret identities are revealed and ... etc etc etc.

But it was so fun! Yay. :)

Sometimes you wanna go...

Lucky Girls - Nell Freudenberger (Ecco, 2003)


I'm kinda meh about short stories. I want my fiction in big epic doses, where I can fall into a world and only climb back out when I really must (the occasional New Yorker short story aside). So I put off this highly touted collection for years, delaying the actual pleasure of reading it.

225 pages, 5 stories. So if you're doing the math, these are longer than your typical short fiction. Not quite novella length, but more capable of letting me take a dip into the world, if not quite swim in it. The stories are chiefly about women, but maybe more about displacement. In three, Americans find themselves living in India, but in a way such that they don't quite belong in either land. And they are all at the mercy of relationships - their own, but also ones where they sit on the periphery, and yet still find themselves buffeted by storms.

And yet, for all these thoughtful pensive impulsive characters, I paused at a different line, attributed by the mother of the last tale's narrator: "If you're always thinking about how things are going to be in your life, you can never be happy."She then points out how her mother falls short of this recommendation for living, but the woman has a point. What would these stories be if the characters thought just a little less?