I am always nervous when it comes to be my turn to select a read for my friends The BiblioWorms. It seems like such an enormous responsibility. So I was really at loose ends for a couple of weeks in October when pondering our book for November.
Things I considered ranged from The Measure of Her Powers: An M.F.K. Fisher Reader (wonderful essayist) to Pasternak, Tsvetayeva, Rilke: Letters: Summer 1926 (we haven't read any letter collections) to Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water (writing about nature and life) and other selections from the "bought but not yet read" shelf in my study upstairs. But nothing seemed quite right.
So of course I found myself one Saturday afternoon in The King's English, casting about the shelves and tables for inspiration. It is not like there is a dearth of books in our house to choose from ... like the entire shelf of adventure/disaster/near-disaster travels; the books on grasses, trees, and birds of East Africa; or even the one I suggested my good friend not take to read on a very long plane flight. (Wouldn't you find it off-putting to be on a very long flight sitting next to someone who is reading Quantifying Catastrophic Risk?)
But I digress. Which seems an appropriate way to talk about the book I picked up off the table in the fiction room at King's English: The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet.
I was drawn to it (really, no pun intended), at first, by the book's slightly unusual shape. It reminded me of the shape of my Brownie Handbook with the heft of the Junior Girl Scout Handbook ... a happy flashback that only grew stronger when when I opened the pages and saw an interesting variety of drawn images, illustrations, and maps in the margins.
One of the things I regret about electronic writing, like this, is the inability to draw "stuff" in the margins. My colleagues in the '80s routinely received memos from me that had some kind of cartoonish sketch included to draw attention (pun this time intended) to the subject at hand. So while the author's drawings in the margins of Spivet, which seemed to me rather like visual footnotes, have been rightly summed up by reviewers as a precocious device, they were my favorite part of the book!
Without the drawings and interesting typography, the book itself -- the story -- is somewhat unremarkable, with occasional bits of really beautiful writing. In our book group discussion, we found connections to other contemporary writers like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Safran Foer that seemed to take some of the luster of "originality" from Spivet. I'm not sure it's a book I would recommend as a must-read, but it is one I may turn to when I need to think creatively -- like when sitting down later today to pen our annual holiday greetings (which would probably benefit from having maps drawn in the margins).
So Spivet will remain on my bookshelves -- perhaps not nestled with novels, but somewhere on the shelves where I keep creative references. That's the room where the illustrated children's books live, too. Madeline and Babar weren't part of my house when I was young, so it is nice to find these friends in my house now. Not to mention the canine classics Lassie Come Home and Lad: A Dog (along with my very own realio, trulio little pet collie -- with apologies to Ogden Nash and Custard the Dragon, I never really envied Belinda and her little pet dragon as much as I did the girls who lived across the street ... they had Rascal The Collie).
But perhaps those are enough reflections around the margins of T.S. Spivet?
I thought the Guardian review of the book pretty much matched our discussion around the fireplace. A quick Google will bring that up along with the Spivet website (which is actually kind of interesting, if a little precious), reviews from The New York Times, and an interview with author Reif Larsen on the "Bookslut" website.
Meanwhile, after selecting the book, my thoughts pretty much immediately turned to what to serve for our late-morning gathering. Here's the recipe for the mustard-caper sauce we had with smoked salmon and a cucumber/fennel salad. The sauce is adapted from Bon Appétit via epicurious.com with notes from Hayl's Kitchen:
BiblioWorms Caper Sauce
3/4 cup spicy brown mustard (I used Gray Poupon "country style")
a little bit of sugar (recipe called for half a cup and that sounded like way too much)
1/3 cup fresh lemon juice (I keep bottled Santa Cruz brand lemon juice and lime juice on hand at all times)
1 tablespoon dry mustard
3/4 cup non-flavored (canola or grapeseed) oil (I probably used canola, and less)
3/4 cup drained capers (we love capers and buy large jars when we're stocking up at Caputo's -- far more economical for us, anyway, but certainly would be worth considering for this)
1/2 cup chopped fresh dill (one could use fennel fronds here ...)
Freshly ground black pepper
This is very straightforward: mix all the ingredients together, whisking in the oil as if making a vinaigrette and adding the fresh dill (or fennel fronds) at the end. I've since used this on grilled chicken and it would be fabulous on grilled fish, as well. It wasn't bad with steamed broccoli, either!
So with that, here's to more BiblioWorm Capers in the coming year!
