It’s summertime and we live in Mississippi. Growing up in Florida, I always assumed it was the hottest state; I mean, it’s that part of the U.S. that sticks out at the very bottom — tourists pose for photos at the southernmost point of the country in Key West — so doesn’t that mean it’s the most sweltering? Then I went to college in Arkansas, and was introduced to the heat of the landlocked south. Oh man. The other day after work I got in my car and the temperature read 104 degrees.

It’s not all bad. Summer in Mississippi also means picnics at the reservoir, sitting on the porch in the evenings with a good book, and the smells of cut grass and watermelon and smoking grills. For those of us coping with the heat, we know there are a few tricks to stay cool. At my house, the one room that never cools off is the kitchen. If I use the stove at all, it will take several hours to cool back down. To keep the heat out, we’ve been grilling quite a bit lately, and I’ve been collecting grilling cookbooks.

My favorite so far is the Chronicle book Grill Every Day.  We grilled chicken last night, and while I was at the store picking up salad stuff I saw that Mississippi corn was on sale, so I grabbed a bunch of ears and was excited to throw them on the grill too. I hadn’t ever grilled corn in the husk before, and my roommate was skeptical that it wouldn’t go well, so I looked it up in my cookbook.  I’m glad I did, cause if I would have just thrown the husks on like I was originally going to do, I probably would have set the corn on fire. Not only were there instructions for how not to start a husk fire (soak the corn in water), but also there were great ideas for sauces to put on the corn.

We also have Robert St. John’s New South Grilling, a must-have for all Mississippians who like to grill. He has several pizza recipes that I’m excited to try this summer. In the winter, we make pizza from scratch and bake it, and the heat the oven generates is welcome. In the summer, we have to find new ways to make it, because it’s still the best food ever. We haven’t perfected the art of the pizza on the grill — in fact, we burnt one — but I think it’ll just take practice, mainly in figuring out the amount of coals to make it just the right temperature.

So stay cool this summer, enjoy your Cathead Vodka on the porch, and make Mississippi smell delicious.

First Editions Club: July 2010

The Story Behind the Pick: Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross

“In 1995, my father told me about the suspicious death of my second cousin, who was morbidly obese, struggled epically with depression, and also suffered from lethal nut allergies.  According to her husband — who was, conveniently, the only witness to her “suicide” — he came home from work to find her sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of peanuts before her.  They had an argument, which she interrupted by taking a fistful of nuts in her hand and eating them.  I was stunned when I heard this story — I was sure she’d been murdered — and immediately afterward wrote three chapters in one sitting that closely resemble those that begin the novel now.”  — Adam Ross in an interview with Jillian Quint.

This story was the inspiration for Mr. Peanut and Ross used it as a model for the first pivotal scene in the novel. When his wife Alice dies of anaphylactic shock brought on by a peanut allergy, David Pepin explains that he came home after they had a argument to her committing suicide.

Unlike many reviews that I’ve read on Mr. Peanut, this one will not focus on the marital issues that are so prominent in the book.  Though they’re quite important to the content, as I am not married I can not truly relate to that subject. Rather, I’d like to bring up a few of the many underlying themes that I couldn’t help but notice.

First up is the Mobius strip.  By definition the Mobius strip is “a surface with only one side and only one boundary component.  The Mobius strip has the mathematical property of being non-orientable.”  This means it’s a one-sided surface that appears to be two-sided.  The detectives investigating Pepin’s case suspect he hired a man named Mobius to murder his wife Alice.  Through Mobius we get the story of Sam Sheppard, one of the detectives investigating Alice Pepin’s murder.  In a article in Aesthetica, Ross says, “I intentionally shaped the novel as a Mobius band, having it loop back on itself, since marriage, like that oddly shaped figure, is an institution where two people are supposed to be walking on the same side of the street, but oftentimes appear to be on completely opposite sides [and] in writing Mr. Peanut, I tried to construct a text that would also reward re-reading.”

Next is the character Sam Sheppard.  In real life Dr. Sam Sheppard was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife in 1954 as was his character in Mr. Peanut.  “[Sheppard’s character] appeared several years into drafting, again a gift from my father.  After my dad and I watched The Fugitive, he told me a brief history of the case, so I read about it and, bingo, there’s my guy.  What I found so captivating about the Sheppard case was its mystery and muck, what with Sheppard’s serial womanizing, his narcissism and the way his relationship with his wife anticipated so many moral hazards of the sexual revolution, not to mention the fact that his guilt or innocence remains in question.  The cold facts are directly incorporated into the novel because you can’t get around them.  They’re out there, and so I used them as the plot’s scaffolding.”

Finally I also want to point out, without going into too much detail, a couple of other interesting things.  On the title page of the book there is an M.C. Escher print called “Encounter.”  Escher’s surreal art figures into the story on several levels.

References to Alfred Hitchcock appear often as well.  David and Alice meet in a class that studied Hitchcock’s film work.  Sheppard’s partner, Ward Hastroll, is an anagram for the villain in Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.”

As there are so very many different things going on in Mr. Peanut, it’s difficult to get all of the aspects of the novel down in one place without giving too much away or writing out the entire book.  My suggestion is to get your hands (or eyes) on the book and start reading immediately.

Seeing as this is a debut novel and we are the first stop on Ross’ tour we are quite excited about our event on Wednesday, June 30th, starting at 5 o’clock.  Mr. Peanut had an initial print run of 60,000 copies.  It was published by Alfred A Knopf.

How to Be an Adult Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

by David Richo

Shambhala (2002)

I would venture to say that we all have problems in the relationships we share with those we care the most about. It’s how we interact and respond to these problems that often solve the conflict or result in a disastrous outcome. Our awareness about ourselves and the understanding of our responses with the desire for adult consideration seem to work out the best results. Responses generated without forethought and heavy on emotionalism break down willingness for communication, increase drama, and lead to a disintegrating relationship.

David Richo understands that love is experienced differently by each of us. He has centered this book on the five aspects of love and how our self-esteem emerges from relationship contact with others:

1. Attention (leads to self-respect)

2. Acceptance (being a good person)

3. Appreciation (generation of self worth)

4. Affection (feeling loveable)

5. Allowed Freedom (pursuit of our deepest wishes, needs, desires, values, etc.)

David’s very helpful book explores these five As in detail, breaking down the positive and negative effects of interpreting our behavior effectively. He helps us to understand the five As and how they can improve the chances for a  more positive companionship while exploring real intimacy.

David leads the reader to explain their past behavior by exploring their shadow. The result is increasing the awareness of why we make certain choices.

How to Be an Adult is not just about romantic time with your partner. It’s also about child-parent, parent-aging parent, worker-coworker, etc., basically any meaningful relationship in your life. David’s book is a major treatise for improving your knowledge of who you are, a guide on how to express truthfully and genuinely who you are, a guide for learning about and respecting boundaries.

Having a good relationship requires much work on ourselves. By being more comfortable about who we are allows us to pursue the satisfaction of our times with others more completely with more satisfaction. This is a masterly crafted tool for us to use to chisel our interactions in a way to create an artfully fulfilled life.

When I think of Her Fearful Symmetry, I think of it in terms of couples.

Robert who mourns the death of his wife, Elspeth. Edie who must confront decisions made long ago with her twin, Elspeth. Martin whose mental illness isolates him from his wife, Marijke. And finally, the twenty-one-year-old twins who inherit their Aunt Elspeth’s flat in London, next door to Highgate Cemetery.

Open since Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1839, Highgate Cemetery seems a never-ending study as Robert writes his PhD thesis and provides guided tours to visitors of the cemetery: “. . . the Victorians had created Highgate Cemetery as a theatre of mourning, a stage set of eternal repose. But as he did the research Robert was seduced by the personalities of the people buried in the cemetery . . .” (53).

As Kelly wrote in her blog not long after the novel’s hardback release in September of 09, Her Fearful Symmetry is a book about identity:

How much of the identity of a twin is dictated by her sister?  How much are any of us defined by our family or our work or who we surround ourselves with?  How much should we work at protecting that identity so that we don’t begin, as Valentina finds herself doing, fading away?  And how difficult would it really be, if one were determined enough, to slip into another person’s identity?

Her Fearful Symmetry is many things: a ghost story, a family saga, a coming of age story, and an exploration of what makes us unique.

Many readers may know Audrey Niffenegger through the very popular novel Time Traveler’s Wife, which was made into a movie this past fall. I urge fans to not miss this second novel. And for those of us who have never read Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey has written a mesmerizing, “unputdownable” tale in Her Fearful Symmetry. Often times it is one character that grabs my heart in a novel, but in Symmetry so many of them were endearing. I still think about them, especially Martin–and you’ll have to read the book to find out why.

You may not know that Audrey is also a visual artist and her original approach to the story of a time traveler and his wife was through a visual novel. She has two visual novels in publication: The Adventuress and The Three Incestuous Sisters. Years ago, Lynd Ward’s God’s Man was an inspiration for Audrey and she adopted the term visual novel from him. Audrey also designed a beautiful limited edition of Her Fearful Symmetry. A true lover of books, she has been known to write, hand-print, and bind her own books.

Come meet Audrey! She will be here Wednesday, July 21st for a signing and reading  at 5:00 and 5:30. (The signing and reading will be held at our events building next door to Banner Hall.)

Audrey Niffenegger’s official website

…because I picked up Justin Cronin’s The Passage. When both Joe and Maggie recommend a book this strongly, you can be confident there’s something there worth reading. I had a few other books stacked up on the nightstand, but after reading nearly 300 pages in the first 3 evenings I realized that this wasn’t a book that would share my reading time politely — it required my full attention. There’s a fantastic quality to the story that reminds me of Michael Crichton’s writing — the sense that the characters are truly overwhelmed by their plight, and the story builds with such unrelenting pace that it’s nearly impossible to find the page you are willing to stop on.

Books like these can be difficult to explain — it’s unfair to say that it’s sci-fi, or a thriller, or a literary novel, or any single genre. To do so immediately limits what the author is trying to do. I thought for a while last night about how I could summarize this book, in one sentence, if I had to, especially with other literary references (because that’s often the easiest way to explain a book)…and this is what I came up with:

It’s Cormac McCarthy’s The Road crossed with Max Brook’s World War Z.

That’s it.

Okay, that doesn’t really cover all of it, but that’s the best I’ve got. Just know that if you start it, it’s going to get under your skin like a virus.