I was feeling a little otherwise, which is probably how I came to completely mistime my walk into the city for a lazy lunch. How to fill a 45 minute gap?

1. Mecca Cosmetica, Little Collins St

Amazing staff, always very helpful and friendly and totally non-judgmental when an unmade-up person with scarily unkempt brows walks in and starts poking around.  As soon as I’d said “lipstick” the assistant was rummaging around painting colours she thought would both appeal and suit on the back of her hand.  We narrowed it down to two, and I walked out with an Ellis Faas lipstick and a booking for the Nars event. Huh?

I was tempted to buy the Nars "Damned", just because of the name...

2. Myer – 35% off cookbooks

No, I don’t need any more cookbooks.  Let’s face it, I don’t need any material possessions beyond basic clothing, right?  The frivolity of cosmetics purchases needed to be balanced by something more practical.  Something more useful.  Something I could almost justify as being a money-saver in the long run.  So now I am the proud owner of bourke street bakery – the ultimate baking companion.  Of course, now I think I’m going to need a proper electric mixer… Recommendations welcome!

3. Sole Devotion, Degraves St

Last year I bought some shoes online from John Fluevog Shoes, which means that they now send me regular emails to tempt me into further purchases.  As far as I’m concerned, the existence of these shoes makes up for Michael Buble and Celine Dion.  Anyway, SD in the city also stocks the shoes and I was in the area… sort of… and couldn’t resist dropping in.  Once you’re in there, it’s impossible not to try on shoes and once you’ve tried them on, it’s unlikely you’re going to be able to walk away without them.  My new black Viardots are similar enough to the Malibrans to sneak under the shoe-monitor’s radar for a while, I suspect.

Government

2009 proved that I still have some remnants of idealism that haven’t been lost in middle-aged cynicism, in that I was surprised to find myself disappointed by governments and their poll-driven pandering. Governments increasingly do what people want, rather than what’s necessary; follow rather than lead. Unfortunately what they are following is usually sentiment that’s been drummed up by PR manipulated mainstream media. 2010 promises more of the same. The first news story I read this year revealed the massive US aid package to Israel (with a substantial percentage earmarked for Israel to spend on US made military hardware) with additional funding to the Palestinian Authority to train security forces. Sounded a lot like profiting from continued instabiity to me.

Social Media

2009 was the end of Facebook for me. I quit it early in the year and found that my life was none the poorer for missing out on endless status updates of people I’d added only because it seemed churlish to keep them out. I managed to get through my year, despite not knowing which Brady Bunch character I was, which Thomas Pynchon novel I was, which Kanye remix I was, which Michael Bay special effect I was. If I’d ever had any regrets about not having a Facebook account, they disappeared over Christmas lunch, when my cousin’s teenage boy expressed shock that I wasn’t “on” Facebook: “Even Grandpa’s on it!”. Exactly.

On the other hand, Twitter came into its own. I’d joined up – in my real name – in 2008 but hadn’t really used it. In 2009 I set up my current Twitter account and started adding some of the “big names” (few of whom have survived into my 2010 list) and a couple of people whose blogs I’d been following. Where my Facebook circle was limited to people I knew, my Twitter circle had (until recently) no people I’d actually met. Our common interests (largely food, film and TV) kept the conversation going and, mostly, interesting.

Travel

We started the year off revisiting old haunts in Malaysia and tried something new in September with our first trip to China. I rely on having a trip to look forward to, but have realised that this approach is seriously flawed. Having already booked flights for our 2010/2011 holiday (South Africa via Hong Kong), I am now wishing away a year that has barely started.

Food

Both overseas trips were dominated by food.  That was a motivating factor for going back to Malaysia, however the variety and quality of the food in China was a revelation.  Locally, Cutler and Co made a big splash when it opened and I’m glad that 2010 is starting with another visit.  Libertine continued to be the best local restaurant a person could possibly want, Hutong’s XLB are getting better the more distant the memory of Shanghai’s dumplings get, and my obsession with Gingerboy’s son-in-law eggs is nearly out of control.

On the home front, Fuschia Dunlop’s books dominated domestic output in 2009 and I don’t really see that changing in 2010.  The most frequently cooked recipe, though, goes to Frank Camorra’s simple but delicious Wet Rice with Chicken from the Mo Vida cookbook.

As for reading about food, newspapers have given way to blogs.  Blogs helped us plot our way around KL and Penang, gave us tips for China and keep us inspired to try new things at home.  On the other hand, The Age’s once dispensible Epicure section became even more pointless with the recent departure of Matt Preston.  His column kept me reading this year despite the weekly torture of Larissa Dubecki’s reviews, although she provided me with a fair bit of ranting material for this blog, so perhaps I should be grateful.

Work

For the past three of four years, I’ve felt as though I was starting anew with each new year. That gets tiring. 2009 was the first year that I didn’t have to build from scratch, which was not only refreshing but allowed me to explore some more interesting new approaches. 2010 should – hopefully – be more of the same, which is to say same, same, but different.

Television

2009 was the year of Foxtel. While we were in Malaysia, we had access to cable television and this made us feel as though our lives would be incomplete were we to miss the finale of the Iditarod: Toughest Race on Earth or the episode of Time Warp where a bullet was shot into a banana. As it happened, we didn’t watch any more of the sled dog race when we got home and the novelty of things in super slow motion wore off quickly – there’s no cutting to the chase when slowing things down is the raison d’être of the show. We did, however, become seduced by Andrew Zimmern as he travelled around the world eating Bizarre Foods and developed something of a dependency on a weekly dose of Anthony Bourdain. Plus there was the real Masterchef in various iterations (an amazing Professional version, and a Celeb version that left the Australian one in the shade), Top Models from a number of countries and wannabe designers of clothes and interiors. On slow days, Yes Minister and even The Goodies kept the tele on.

The really big events of the year, though, were the finale of Battlestar Galactica, the penultimate season of Lost and the debut of Masterchef Australia. With BSG over, 2010 sees the debut of the related series Caprica, which could either be a triumph or a let-down. Lost starts in late January in the States and Channel Seven is advertising it already, although the ads give no hint as to whether it will be “fast tracked”. The second season of MCA is being filmed now – will it be as successful as the first?

Reading

I started the year really well, reading a number of books in a relatively short time during our Malaysia holiday.  This just proved that the adage “start as you intend to continue” doesn’t mean that momentum will carry you through, as my reading fell off sharply once holidays were over (quite possibly because of the above).  As the backlog of unopened New Yorkers piled up, I considered cancelling my subscription and admitting that I was no longer a reader.  The Infinite Summer reading challenge got me back to print, and then the 100 must reads inspired me to “read a list”.  That is, until I got halfway through Lord of the Flies and stopped.  This year I intend to read more.  At least one book a month.  That should be achievable, unless I decide to pick up Gravity’s Rainbow again.

Movies

For the second year in a row we missed the Melbourne International Film Festival and we didn’t find much that gave us the energy to get to the cinema during the year. In addition, our last easy-walking-distance local video shop closed, so if we missed something at the cinema, it was gone (unless we could think of another way of seeing it… hmmm). Amongst the enjoyable were District 9, Inglorious Basterds (50% really good, 50% mediocre), Star Trek, Avatar, Coraline, Julie and Julia (possibly only because Meryl Streep was so amazing), In the Loop and Up. We have just signed up at the nearest video rental place, so will hopefully catch up on some of what we’ve missed.

Music

First, the good stuff from 2009. Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone is lovely and my first gig for 2010 will be seeing her at the Hifi. Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavillion gets a lot of iPod time, as does Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest. Thanks to iTunes making it easy to download songs, I have spruced up my workout playlist a bit (Daft Punk has exactly the right BPM for cardio, but gets a bit tired after years of repetition), but they are songs I dread coming up when the iPod is shuffling away on the dock during a dinner party.

The bad stuff is largely a result of having Foxtel. It’s easy to put the TV onto Max, V, Vh1 or V Hits and that often forms the soundtrack for the weekend (during the week, the Food channel tends to be the background noise). This means that I hear more “new” music than I am used to being exposed to, but it also means that I suffer through a lot of crap. Approximately 90% of the music videos also bring me pain, for a couple of reasons.

• Pants or, more precisely, a lack thereof.  Beyonce, Rihanna and Lady Gaga, I’m looking at you.  Actually, I’m looking at more of you than I particularly care to, video after video.  Put on some pants, or look into frocks.  Thanks.
• I’d also like to see the death of relentlessly porny clips.  I’m well aware of the fact that I can – and do – turn off the TV, but that’s beside the point.  As is Shakira in a flesh coloured body suit performing stripper moves in a cage.  Or Britney hanging off a bar in a skimpy white leotard humping a crew of dancers.  Just stop.
• David Guetta. He crops up in collaboration with a number of singers and he could well be responsible for writing the songs, producing them, orchestrating them… whatever. I don’t care enough even to google him. The reasons I wish he’d disappear is because the music is boring and his contribution to the videos is to stand in the background looking like a Scandinavian serial killer. Creepy.

Oh, thought I’d finished ranting about music related things, but… auto-tune.  I hate it.  If a singer needs a producer to get them on key, they’re not a singer.  If it were a case of nudging the occasional bum note, or if it were being used as a deliberate effect, I might feel differently.  As it is, it’s being deployed so aggressively that a lot of new music sounds soul-less and robotic.

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Have I made any resolutions?  No, that would be setting myself up for failure!  Along with reading more frequently, I plan to

• get back on the bike in an attempt to regain some semblance of fitness
• establish a more interesting week-day cooking repertoire
• attend at least ten MIFF sessions
• open the New Yorker as soon as it arrives, and abandon the idea that I have to read every article before moving onto the next issue

And, inspired by Daniel, I’m instituting mono-tasking January.  One thing at a time!

You might have noticed the StreetSmart logo in the right sidebar.  The annual StreetSmart campaign, which raises money to help the homeless, kicks off tomorrow.  It’s one of those ideas that is so simple: participating restaurants add a small donation to your bill (you’re welcome to increase it from the standard $2, but don’t forget your usual tip!).  As they note on the site – this isn’t even the cost of a cup of coffee, these days.  I’m planning to restrict myself to only eating at StreetSmart supporters for the duration of the campaign.  Restrict, though, is probably a misleading word – check out the list of supporters!  It’s certainly no hardship to eat that list.

For those of you following @StreetSmartAust on Twitter, you can also eat, tweet, and (perhaps) be treated.  (Remember to use #SSEats for your entries.)

Thanks to Ed at Tomato for revving up the Twitter and blogger communities to support this!

Recaps

I’ve been busy over at Reality Ravings this week.  Hell’s Kitchen is winding up, Beauty and the Geek is hotting up, and The Amazing Race is… really a tad boring this season.

Reading

I’ve finished Swallows and Amazons.  How did I not read this in my childhood?  Perhaps I got into too much of a Jill’s Perfect Ponies rut, because I know it was always on the bookshelf at the Mornington house.  It certainly would have fuelled some of the adventure fantasies during all those canoeing-fishing-campfiring Gippsland lakes holidays…  Next up?  Lord of the Flies, which I’m sure I’ve quoted and successfully answered trivia questions on, without having read it.

I’m still watching The Rachel Zoe Project and doing blitz recaps of that, as well.  It’s such a fun show to watch, but I hope there will be some personnel changes soon.  Taylor’s constant moaning is starting to get me down.  When it was directed at a floundering Brad last season, it was novel, but he’s found his feet and is one of the programme’s highlights so the carping is now just sad.

Reality Raver was talking up Tabatha’s Salon Takeover and I caught it for the first time today.  I’m not sure how I’ll fit it into the weekly schedule, but it’s definitely worth a look.  It’s Kitchen Nightmares for hairdressers, and loads of fun.  Jeff Lewis is back with Flipping Out, but his meltdowns seem to have been curtailed a bit by the Global Financial Crisis^TM – it appears he can control his personality when he needs to.  Pity.

It’s not all television, though.  After my reading list post, where I realised that 12 months of reading hadn’t reduced either of the 75 lists, I decided I had to make an effort to fit more real reading into my life.  Since posting the Guardian list, I’ve read two books (ok, so they were very short books) and I’m starting to catch up on my backlog of New Yorkers.  My copy of Middlemarch has been found and I think that’s the next project.

This, therefore, is the list I’m going to try to crack (although… The Bible? Really? I’m going to make an exception for that. Oh, and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. I mean, honestly.)

Anyway, the full list – with strikethroughs – after the jump.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling  (I have some of them, and I’ve read the first one… I guess that doesn’t count)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible  (Not a chance)

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell

8 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – William Shakespeare  (Again, I have them…)

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (I don’t understand the duplication, here. Surely TLTW&TW is included in The Chronicles?)

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernières

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (Maybe after I finish the Bible…)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (Now I really wish I’d joined the Dracula group post Infinite Jest, instead of the Gravity’s Rainbow group.  I’m not sure I can even find my copy of GR now…)

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton (I’ve read these, and the Narnia books, so many times – does that earn me a pass on Five People?

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery (I can’t believe I haven’t read this. This will be my first “achievement” – I think I’ll read it tomorrow. Edited 25/10 to add: read it on the number 70 tram out to Burwood yesterday afternoon and loved it.)

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Misérables – Victor Hugo

The good news? I’ve read a lot of these already.  The other good news? There is a bit of crossover to the other lists, so Middlemarch, Moby Dick, Ulysses, Cold Comfort Farm and a couple of others will make inroads in two places.  The bad news? Well, I’m stating upfront that I’m not reading the Bible, but… I don’t think “reading the list” is a good enough incentive to get me to pick up The Da Vinci Code, The Lovely Bones or The Five People You Meet In Heaven.  Seriously.  Life’s too short.

As of today, then, I’ve read 62 of the 100.  I’ll try to remember to check back…

25/10 – 63/100 The Little Prince

26/10 – 64/100 A Christmas Carol

7/11 – 65/100 Swallows and Amazons

9/12 – 67/100 Gem has just posted a BBC list and that reminded me to update here.  I’ve read a lot in the past year (a lot by my recent standards) but only two from this list: Lord of the Flies and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.  The Holmes prompted me to read a lot more Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as get into the reruns of the fabulous Jeremy Brett series.  And then, of course, came the glorious Benedict Cumberbatch…

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1. In fact, in the past year I have only crossed one book off the Jez list and nothing from the Esquire list.

As I read, I checked in at the website and read some of the discussions but never joined in.  I realised that I was reading it in a different way to how others seemed to be.  I was not jotting, referring, agonising – I just read it.  Read it and read it and read it.  I don’t think I could have done it any other way; it seemed to require that sort of momentum.

At about 50 pages to go, I started to suspect that certain stories would not be resolved.  I started to wonder whether any “plot” lines would be resolved.  I started to consider whether resolution would even fit with this type of work.

And then I finished.

Early on in the project I read this post by Marcus Sakey:

Still, I labored through the rough spots, and found more than enough to tickle me and keep me going. But while I don’t want to reveal too much, I will say that when I got to the end, my initial reaction was, “Huh.”

Not in a bad way. There had been moments of such startling brilliance along the way, episodes so hilariously sad and tragically funny, that I knew even at the time that it was something special. But still, at the very end, there was a “Huh” factor.

And so I’ve finished. Huh.

I doubt I’ve finished with it for ever, though.

When the book arrived in the post, I was intimidated by it’s heft. And by all the tips on how best to tackle this monster. It started to feel as though it was going to be punishment and I read for pleasure rather than pain. Still, I gamely printed off the custom-made bookmarks (complete with schedule) and laminated two of them: one to keep my place in the text and one for the endnotes, as advised. I signed up to the Google app somebody had ingeniously created to track reader progress against the deadlines. I added a column for #infsum in my Tweetdeck. And, on 21 June, I started reading.

Now, I signed up for this because it seemed like an interesting thing to do. There was a certain novelty value attached to reading – usually a solitary pleasure – en masse. Before I started, some quick-off-the-mark participants had already started, and started tweeting ominously about OMG just got to endnote 24 and When do I read Endnote 304? and Does anybody have a guide to the characters? and Do I need to re-read Hamlet before I start? and How many notebooks are people keeping? and Here is the url to the glossary I’ve started… and… and I really started to think I’d be better off finishing American Wife and using IJ to raise my computer screen to a less neck-straining height.  There were people tweeting their page number (up to p163 already!) and how far ahead of schedule they were (9% into #infsum and I’m already at the 38% mark!).  What had been described as “endurance reading” was now starting to look like a competition and I was thinking of copping out at the start.

I’m glad I didn’t.  What wasn’t clear to me amidst all the sound and the fury¹ was that it was an amazing, funny, engaging book. Sure, there are sentences that go on for paragraphs, paragraphs that go on for pages, endnotes that strain the eyes with thousands of words in a tiny font, but it’s a wonderful book to read. I’m enjoying setting time aside to read each day and I love the tangential nature of some of the endnotes.  I don’t read with a dictionary. David Foster Wallace uses many more words that I can’t define than any author in my recent experience, but I find that stopping and looking words up, or noting them down to look up later, interferes more with the flow of the text than having an incomplete grasp of some vocubulary does.  I’m not writing notes – sometimes a character appears and I have no idea who they are.  It’s not until later – much later, perhaps; say, when I read a tweet “ah! Steeply!”  – that a light goes on.

So, I am enjoying this book immensely.  If you ask me what it’s about, I’ll struggle to tell you.  That might still be true even when I have finished it.  I’m fairly confident, though, that at the end I’ll still be able to say that it’s an amazing book and that I enjoyed it immensely.

¹ I know this is from Macbeth, not Hamlet.

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_{Having said how much the competition aspect was alienating me, I was embarrassed by how pleased I felt to see my name on the weekly leader board…}

A cook book? It’s as though the show’s creators looked at Idol and decided that the equivalent to a recording contract for a singer would be a publishing deal for a cook. The difference, of course, is that throughout a singing competition the audience hears the competitors perform – they know what they are in for when they buy a recording or tickets for a concert tour. During Masterchef, viewers watch the contestants cook but cannot taste their offerings and – in the case of Masterchef Australia – can’t always rely on the judges to do it for them. There’s also a difference in the level of “investment” – the risk/reward. If you like an Idol winner, the $1.99 you spend on iTunes for the single will have no surprises: you’ve already heard the song. The album – if it’s ever released – will only set you back around $16.00. If it’s utter garbage, no biggie. Even if the Masterchef winner is a particular favourite, a cookbook is around $50. It’s a riskier purchase.

I’ve been watching this series of Masterchef since the beginning and I am finding it reasonably entertaining TV, but it’s not good “food” TV. I am struggling to remember any of the dishes the contestants have served up, and I know that there has been nothing offered so far that has made me want the recipe.

This is going to be a problem when the winner’s book comes out.

It’s likely to be a fairly generic book.  Chances are it has already been written and will just have a few tweaks and pics added to suit the winner (i.e. some Frenchy stuff thrown in if Justine wins, some beer recipes for Chris, some… golf snacks for Lucas? Really, who knows what it might be if any of the others win!). Anybody who has written a book of any genre would be amused by the idea that the end result of their hard work – publication – is a prize to be granted, so having a ghost-writer is the only way this could constitute a reward and not a chore for the winner. There might be some out there who buy it for novelty value, or who need a gift for somebody they don’t particularly like but have a gift-giving arrangement with. Otherwise, I can’t really see a market.

Let’s look at some scenarios.

Sandra wins. Sandra has already stated that she is keen on good nutrition, especially for children, and helping mothers feed their poor fat children properly (won’t somebody think of the children?). Now, Sandra is no pioneer here; it’s a path well-trodden. And there’s the problem. It’s a path well-trodden by people with a high profile based on (in most cases) established form. Jamie Oliver didn’t burst from obscurity and start hectoring people about their diets. He used the celebrity status he’d achieved from his early shows (a celebrity that was born of actual restaurant experience, by the way) as a platform for a crusade. Likewise, Gordon Ramsay didn’t start with teaching Britons to cook healthy food for their families; he started as a chef, built his empire, and incorporated that message into one of his programs. Jessica Seinfeld. Okay, I had no idea the woman existed, let alone ate or cooked, but she has a famous husband and access to Oprah and a book about tricking kids into eating healthy food (which is a completely objectionable and counter-productive idea, but that’s OT).

What will Sandra offer? She has said what she wants , but has no credentials to support this. She doesn’t shine as a personality amongst the contestants. In fact, she comes across as lacking in some essential food knowledge (see her risotto technique at the Easter Show challenge), unwilling to take advice, and rather surly when things don’t go her way. Given that her cookbook will be sold on the profile she’s established during the show, would it succeed? Unlikely.

Julie wins. She says she loves cooking for her family and the cooking she’s done on the show backs this up – she seems like a good family cook without much range. Her pick of ingredient for the British challenge? Lamb, which – instead of stuffing – she stuffed up. She comes across as a lovely person, down to earth and caring, but also disorganised, hopeless under pressure and lacking flair. What would her cookbook offer?

Julia wins. From the moment she won the “Beat the Chef” challenge, she’s been out of the regular competition. Sure, we get glimpses of her honing her skills at The Pantry, but no insight into her “food” identity. Would you buy her cookbook?

I’ve got some fairly strange cookbooks in my collection. I’ve never, for example, cooked from the Roald Dahl book, but I love the anecdotes and illustrations. I have no idea why I own a very earnest wholefoods cookbook, but it sits there on the shelf, unused. I fantasize about making biltong from the South Africa book, but have nowhere to hang drying meat here so I’m hanging on to it in case of a move. Loyd Grossman’s Top 100 recipes is a sign of my dedication to the real Masterchef, and I open it occasionally and read the intros to dishes in my best Loyd voice, but have only ever cooked the kedgeree from it and the result was dire. There is a whole pile of cookbooks that I was given or misguidedly bought from a bargain table somewhere that I don’t have room for on the shelves, or the inclination to cook from. I will not be adding to that with the Masterchef winner’s book.

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This has been cross-posted at Reality Ravings.

We’ll probably all have loads of time on our hands once the quarantining for swine flu really starts to kick in!

Keep an eye on the website Infinite Summer, launched yesterday, for details.

So, all in all, I read seven books and crossed none off my “to read” list!

Goldengrove – Francine Prose

The Gerald Manley Hopkins-inspired title was what caught my eye; the beautiful writing captured my attention. I put this book down reluctantly late on the first night of reading, and picked it up again first thing the next morning. The scope of the story is small and the plot is simple, but Prose has managed to create a surprising amount of tension within this work.

The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga

Lots of Booker Prize winners leave me cold (The Line of Beauty stands out as an exception), but this is wonderful. The structure could have been irritatingly gimmicky, but it works perfectly. Energetic, witty, tragic… another novel that demanded attention.

Shark’s Fin & Sichuan Pepper – Fuschia Dunlop

Entertaining and frustrating, in equal measure. Dunlop’s decision, at a relatively young age, to take up study in Chengdu was offbeat and courageous. She captures the exhilaration, as well as the frustration, of adapting to a new culture and language and the passion with which she writes about food is engaging. I did, however, find the combination of naivety and arrogance irritating – where she can no longer claim to be oblivious to the nature of the Chinese state apparatus, she attempts (unsuccessfully, in my opinion) to justify her acceptance of preferential treatment. I’m always put off by memoirs that have this brand of “it was great, but it’s gone now so you missed it” smugness and, towards the end, this becomes overwhelming. It’s an interesting book, but perhaps I should have read it over a period of weeks, rather than over a couple of days.

With Nails – Richard E. Grant

The cover line read “Funny, bitchy, utterly fascinating” and this is about 58% true. It’s quite funny – particularly on Withnail and I, the “bonding” camp at Coppola’s ranch for Dracula, and all of the Hudson Hawk entries – somewhat fascinating (he writes beautifully about his father, and his authorial voice matches the expectation set by Wah Wah), but not at all bitchy. This is not a criticism; I would, quite possibly, have been devastated had it been bitchy. Still, the cover line demonstrates what publishers think will sell in celebrity memoirs.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People – Toby Young

I wasn’t expecting much from this book and it failed to meet even those limited expectations. My love for Simon Pegg will probably find me renting the DVD version, but not until it comes out as a weekly. God knows how Young even got the Vanity Fair gig – dude cannot write. The fact that he’s parlayed his utter failure there into two books and a spin-off film is unfortunately less unbelievable than it should be.

Love in a Cold Climate –Nancy Mitford

A very silly book. Lots of fun.

Wicked – Gregory Maguire

When I saw this in H.S. Sam’s, I thought “oh, no, somebody’s cashed in on the musical and written a book”. God, I’m ignorant. This is a good “beach” book: it’s engaging enough to keep the pages turning but not so engrossing that you miss out on swimming and walks down the beach; interesting enough to pack in the bag for the trip home, but not so valued that it matters when the spine fills up with sand. Maguire’s “alternative Oz” has clearly been successful – having not known of the existence of this book prior to my encounter with Sam’s dog-eared copy, I can’t seem to avoid seeing the sequels everywhere. I doubt that I’ll pursue my relationship with Oz beyond what it is now (although I’m planning to watch the movie – Judy Garland’s, not Michael Jackson’s – again soon).

What’s next?

I’m currently reading Kafka on the Shore and I still have People of the Book sitting on the shelf.  Hopefully I won’t have to wait until another holiday to get stuck into that!