guy walks into a bookstore

i haven't finished a moveable feast, and now i can't find it. this is a bad habit of mine, starting a book and setting it aside to finish later. i'm still just a couple hundred pages from finishing up tree of smoke, which i started two years ago. but over the last week or so i've been thinking about this blog and whether or not it's a bunch of babble and kicking around the usual prodding of self-doubt, as writers tend to often do. just like his work, the writer never seizes to be a work in progress. so i took a page from hemingway and made a trip to the bookstore.

hemingway wrote that rather than purge his writing and carry on and on, as soon as he stopped writing, he also stopped his thoughts on his work, which i think any writer will tell you is practically impossible. but he had a remedy to help achieve this, and that remedy was to read. to read and read and read.

a few days ago the la times published a q&a with johnathon safron foer, whose everything is illuminated achieved someting of a cult following amongst my peers when i was an undergrad at usc. i read his second novel (extremely loud and incredibly close) in my first weeks as a grad student in boston, so when i found out his new book was in fact non-fiction, taking aim at factory farming and so many of the issues i've tried to bring to light in this blog, bringing the book home was a no brainer. i started it today and have already found thoughts and facts within its first pages that i'll more than likely reflect on here. the book is called eating animals.

i also came home with this year's edition of one of my favorite books from the past year: the 2009 edition of best food writing.  for fiction writers, this series is known as best american, or in long form, the best american short stories. i first read a best american collection as an undergrad, which for any writer is a goldmine of proof for what editors are buying in the small and grossly competetive short fiction market. the best food writing series is no different. represented this year are publications like gourmet and saveur and various city papers, but so too are small press pubs like gastronomica and even trend-driven sites like chow.com. point being, the book is a serious effort to find the best on food that writers had to offer from the past year. these aren't restaurant reviews and apple pie recipes, but rather the true grit of what's going on with our foodstuff. these are stories that would grab anybody's attention.

 

and then i saw this:

since the eighties, charlie trotter has been one of the world's best chefs. his restaurant is in nearby lincoln park and dinner there will set most people back a week's income. i haven't yet met the man and at this point in my life, he's one of two chefs who, having managed to stay safely away from the public eye, i view as something of an immortal—a status achieved solely through professionalism and reflected reputation (the other is thomas keller, who i was bummed to see will be on a certain bravo tv show next wednesday night). the book pictured above is his first cookbook, its influence stemming from his restaurant up to the early nineties, which is when the book was published. what i walked out with was one of three autographed first-edition copies of the book that were just hanging out on the bottom of a promotional cookbook endcap, the covers on the books with enough wear and tear that they easily could've been sitting unsold in that store for several years (as it was, they'd been published  fifteen years ago).

alicia thought buying that book was a pretty stupid thing to do, and maybe it was, but i drove home with a big ol' grin slapped across my face.

i definitely think there's redemption to be found when reading a book. whether it's to deter the mind from a fight with a friend or to keep busy on a snowed-in saturday in the middle of winter or, in my case, to find that spark a writer needs to keep on going, it's there in so many ways. this is a different kind of redemption, though. one that doesn't blow holes in the ground nor draw blood from the wounds of war. at least for me, when i read, i'm finding a way to redeem those demons inside of me that keep me from getting where i want to go.