The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Lucky 14, the official Classic Club 'Spin' number, corresponded to a title from my "Quickie" category, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. With only 250 pages, I was able to finish several days ahead of the April 1 deadline.

Most readers are probably familiar with the basic premise of this 1890 novel. A beautiful young man remains forever youthful while his portrait ages and reflects the degradation of his soul. The Picture of Dorian Gray is an exploration of beauty, youth, vanity, and sin. In other words, not what I was expecting.

My daughter has enjoyed Wilde's plays and says they are quite funny, but that humor is not at all apparent in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The novel is very dark and full of philosophical nuggets that beg the reader to pause and ponder. Dealing with similar themes, it was an especially good follow-up to my recent reading of Vanity Fair.

So, did I like The Picture of Dorian Gray? Judging from all the post-it flags in my book, you would have thought I loved it. But let's just say I didn't dislike it... yet I can't whole-heartedly recommend it either. Wilde does have a beautifully visual, sensual quality to his writing that makes me want to read some of his other works.

I should also mention that around St. Patrick's Day, Audible treated its members to a free download of The Picture of Dorian Gray  narrated by Steven Crossley. You may recall that I loved Crossley's reading of In the Woods  by Tana French, so was thrilled with this offer and more than happy to make this another read/listen combination.

Finally, is it just me or do you think the cover of the Oxford World Classics edition pictured above bears a striking resemblance to Dan Stevens (Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey)?

Thank you, Classics Club, for hosting this event. I'm hoping for a fall edition of The Classics Club Spin!

Not So Wordless Wednesday (and a new header photo)

It's April 10 folks, and I'm still looking at a semi-frozen lake. This photo was taken yesterday afternoon and there is a little more open water today, but this is pretty late... even by Central New York standards.

On a brighter note, I'm pretty sure our last snowbank will be history before the end of the day!

Top Ten Tuesday: Pre-Blogging Favorites

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week we're talking about favorite books from pre-blogging days.  Lakeside Musing has been around since 2008 and I read many of the books I consider all-time favorites before then.

You are probably getting tired of seeing Pride and Prejudice, East of Eden, Crossing to Safety, and The Good Earth appearing in my TTT posts. And, no matter how much I love them, even I am getting sick of mentioning them week after week! So, all-time favorites aside, here are my:

 Top Ten Favorite Books I Read Before I Was A Blogger 

Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Berniers

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

(Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street)

In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike

I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb

Howards End by E.M. Forster

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Clara Callan by Richard B. Wright

Yes, I know that's eleven (actually thirteen), but I just can't trim it any further. In fact, I'm even going to add one more non-fiction title that really stands out.

And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts

What are some of your pre-blogging favorites?
Visit The Broke and the Bookish for more Top Ten Tuesday posts.

Real Irish Food by David Bowers

Real Irish Food: 150 Classic Recipes from the Old Country
by David Bowers
Skyhorse Publishing, 2012
source: library copy

"In the same way Italian food is about more than spaghetti and meatballs, real Irish food is a far more complex and exciting thing than the corned-beef-and-cabbage caricature we tend to think of in North America."



Real Irish Food by David Bowers is not a new title for the Weekend Cooking crowd. After reading other blogger reviews (I should have made a note so I could link back), I requested the title from my library. The first thing I noticed was the stunning photography - not just food, but gorgeous landscapes, towns, and markets, too.

The book begins with a brief introduction to Irish cuisine and its history, then continues with a pantry section. Special attention is paid to stocking an Irish kitchen in America and Bowers, quite helpfully, provides sources for obtaining many of the basics.

Chapters are divided by dish and include Breakfast Foods, Starters and Snacks, Stews and Chowders, Meat and Game, Vegetables and Side Dishes, Cakes and Tea Things, and many more.

Quite honestly, I would never consider trying many of the recipes (4 cups of fresh pig's blood is the first ingredient in Black Pudding), but who can resist Potato Cakes? I just happened to have leftover mashed potatoes on hand, so I made some for breakfast. They disappeared instantly!

I bookmarked several other recipes to try later:

• beef and barley stew
• mustard roasted chicken
• cauliflower cheese (Barbara Pym Reading Week is coming!)
• old-fashioned spicy gingerbread
• shortbread

Bowers also includes plenty of background information with the recipes. I can't tell you how many times I've read about potted meats in novels without understanding precisely what it meant. Alongside the Potted Shrimp recipe, I found a straight-forward explanation.

"Potting" fish or meats was an old way of storing them. Leftover meats such as chicken or ham or seafood such as fish or shrimp were pounded together with nearly an equal quantity of butter...to make a rough paste, then seasoned with salt and mace, nutmeg, or another warm spice. The paste was then poured into a small container and covered with clarified butter, sealing out air so it could be stored in a cool pantry." 

Bottom line:
While not a cookbook from which I would regularly cook, Real Irish Food  by David Bowers was very interesting to read. I learned a lot about traditional Irish cuisine and the gorgeous photography made it a feast for my eyes.

Weekend Cooking, hosted at Beth Fish Reads, is open to anyone who has a food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up over the weekend

Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

Mudbound
by Hillary Jordan
Algonquin Books, 2008
324 pages
source: personal copy

Summary (from Goodreads):

In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm--a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not--charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion.

The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale. As Kingsolver says of Hillary Jordan, "Her characters walked straight out of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are with me still."

My thoughts:

I loved Mudbound!  It is my first (and only) five-star read of the year and will surely appear  on my list of favorites in December. It has everything I look for in a book: well-drawn characters, a setting that comes to life, a compelling story, and truly exceptional writing.

Novels with multiple points-of-view always appeal to me, and Mudbound, featuring six different viewpoints, has been described as a virtual chorus. Set in the deep south of the 1940's, the characters very effectively mirror each other on either side of the racial divide - two wives/mothers, two farmers/husbands/fathers, and two young men returning home from WWII.

As the characters and plot gradually developed over the first half of the book, I found myself savoring Jordan's beautiful writing. Before I knew it, I was unable to stop turning the pages and even wiped away a tear or two before reaching the very emotional conclusion.


A couple of favorite quotes:

"When it rained, as it often did, the yard turned into a thick gumbo, with the house floating in it like a soggy cracker. When the rains came hard, the river rose and swallowed the bridge that was the only way across. The world was on the other side of that bridge, the world of light bulbs and paved roads and shirts that stayed white. When the river rose, the world was lost to us and we to it." p.11 

"How simple things were for Henry! How I wished sometimes that I could join him in his stark, right-angled world, where everything is either right or wrong and there is no doubt which is which. What unimaginable luxury, never to wrestle with whether or why, never to lie awake nights wondering what if." p.182

Book club reaction:
Mudbound  was the February selection for my book club, but it turned out to be late March before a small group of six actually met at a local coffee shop for discussion. Everyone read the book and loved it. Topics of discussion ranged widely from the beauty of Jordan's writing to racial relations and prejudice, both past and present. We talked about women's issues, farming and sharecropping, WWII, and the difficulties in returning to civilian life after war. Several members declared the book an all-time favorite.

My rating:

Bottom line: 
If you haven't read Mudbound yet, do it now!

Tuesday Intro: High Rising by Angela Thirkell

The headmaster's wife twisted herself round in her chair to talk to Mrs. Morland, who was sitting in the row just behind her. 

"I can't make it out," she said reflectively, "why all the big boys seem to be at the bottom of preparatory schools and the small ones at the top. All those lower boys who got prizes were quite large, average children, but when we get to the upper forms they all look about seven, and undersized at that. Look at the head of the Remove for instance - he is just coming up the platform steps now." 

Mrs. Morland looked. In front of her was the platform where the headmaster stood behind a rapidly diminishing pile of prizes. On each side were the assistant masters, wearing such gowns as they could muster. A shrimp-like little boy in spectacles was coming up to get his prizes.

High Rising
by Angela Thirkell

This is the book that ended the TBR Double Dog Dare a few days early for me. The first novel of Thirkell's Barsetshire series sets the stage and introduces many characters that will appear again and again in later installments. Angela Thirkell has a small, but very loyal group of fans in my blogging circle. I'm enjoying High Rising  immensely and can feel my opinion on series in general shifting.

Have you read Angela Thirkell? What do you think of the opening?

Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the opening paragraph (sometime two) of a book she decided to read based on the opening. Feel free to grab the banner and play along.

It's All Over...

...the TBR Double Dog Dare, I mean. Three months of reading from my shelves met with mixed success this year.

Success #1:  I did not 'stock up' on new books in December.

Failure #1:  Fall of Giants  by Ken Follett
Discovered on the bookshelf in our Florida condo last January. Hey, that's somebody's TBR shelf, right? Besides, the 1,000 page novel was already on my wish list. I ended up purchasing the e-book to finish on the way home... a perfect vacation read.

Success #2:  Mudbound  by Hillary Jordan
My book club selected a book from my TBR pile. Mudbound  is my favorite novel so far this year, and my only 5-star read. Our discussion, originally scheduled for February, was postponed until last week. I'll post a few final thoughts soon.

Failure #2:  A Glass of Blessings  by Barbara Pym
Another slip occurred in February when I received an email from Open Road Media asking if I'd be interested in reviewing a new electronic edition of a Barbara Pym novel. How could I refuse? Of course, that meant joining NetGalley and subjecting myself to a whole new form of temptation, the e-galley! I'm not apologizing though, the novel was excellent.

Success #3: Vanity Fair  by William Makepeace Thackery
With encouragement from my read-along buddies, I was able to remove this 800 page classic from the 'to be read'  shelf. There were ups and downs, but I ended up enjoying it quite bit.

Failure #3: High Rising  by Angela Thirkell
Thirkell has been on my radar for quite some time, but I finally made the purchase after reading Audrey's irresistible review. By last Friday evening, I could resist no longer and had to start reading. The TBR Double Dog Dare came to an end a few days early.

I could go on like this for a couple more rounds, but these highlights certainly give you the general idea. Successes and failures aside, my third year participating in the TBR Dare has proved every bit as challenging and rewarding as the previous two. Thanks again, James.