 |
| Photo: Travis Rathbone |
Bring both a small and a large pot of salted water to boil. Add 2 cups chopped kale to the small one and cook until tender, about 5 minutes. Drain. In the large pot, cook an 8-ounce package of soba noodles according to package directions, reserving 1 cup cooking water when draining. Toss noodles with 1 Tbsp. oil. In a frying pan, sauté a large handful of chopped walnuts in oil until golden. Add kale, walnuts, small pinches of salt and cayenne pepper, and ¼ cup cooking water to noodles. Stir and add more cooking water, if desired, and lots of grated Parmesan.
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Every Monday, we'll be letting you
know about new releases the editors at O and Oprah.com couldn't stop
reading. This week, we're in love with a paperback release of the comedic English novel:
The Old Romantic
by Louise Dean
Just about everyone who turns 18 dreams of changing their name and running off into the night, never to be seen again. But what if you actually did it and ended up, not on the mythical open road, but at the one of the best universities in the country? What if you became, not a rock star or famous painter, but a divorce lawyer, with all the stereotypical trappings; Range Rover, flashy flat, spa-addicted girlfriend? Deep into middle age, Nick finally comes home to confront/forgive/survive his long-abandoned father, Ken— one of the crankiest, cheapest, sourest, most foul-mouthed men on the planet, who's also begun to question his own life choices, due to a new friendship with an obese undertaker. What ensues goes far, far deeper than the repair of one familial relationship as Nick's brother, mother, stepmother, sister-in-law, girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, and old roommates from Cambridge get involved—each with his or her own versions of what happened when Nick disappeared in the past and each with his or her own role to play in his future. As a writer, Dean's gift is to make totally unappealing people intriguing, funny, vulnerable, and even lovable. You'll end up laughing (with glee!) as Nick, Nick's brother and his father Ken hit the road to chase down Ken's trod-upon ex-wife and his supposedly stolen 40,000 pounds, only to have your heart broken when Nick admits finally, "He wanted to be in the car with his family," remembering a childhood trip when "they came back from that cherry-pie pub....mouths full of After-Eight mints, his mother dispensing them from her handbag, fairly and squarely, and how he and his brother slept the sleep of angels in the back of the car, how sleep was never as good as that ever again, a rocking contentment, well fed, happy... lurching in and out of his tubby little brother and ending up at their favorite arrangement, where he had his head on his brother's back and his brother had his head on his lap." This is the genius of The Old Romantic, which captures so acutely those moments when our golden looks at the past brush up against with our black, bleak visions of the present, leaving us to decide which view, exactly, will permanently color the other—and ourselves.
Read More:
9 Other Paperbacks to Love and Leave Behind
Check out now: Girl Reading
The Old Romantic
by Louise Dean
Just about everyone who turns 18 dreams of changing their name and running off into the night, never to be seen again. But what if you actually did it and ended up, not on the mythical open road, but at the one of the best universities in the country? What if you became, not a rock star or famous painter, but a divorce lawyer, with all the stereotypical trappings; Range Rover, flashy flat, spa-addicted girlfriend? Deep into middle age, Nick finally comes home to confront/forgive/survive his long-abandoned father, Ken— one of the crankiest, cheapest, sourest, most foul-mouthed men on the planet, who's also begun to question his own life choices, due to a new friendship with an obese undertaker. What ensues goes far, far deeper than the repair of one familial relationship as Nick's brother, mother, stepmother, sister-in-law, girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, and old roommates from Cambridge get involved—each with his or her own versions of what happened when Nick disappeared in the past and each with his or her own role to play in his future. As a writer, Dean's gift is to make totally unappealing people intriguing, funny, vulnerable, and even lovable. You'll end up laughing (with glee!) as Nick, Nick's brother and his father Ken hit the road to chase down Ken's trod-upon ex-wife and his supposedly stolen 40,000 pounds, only to have your heart broken when Nick admits finally, "He wanted to be in the car with his family," remembering a childhood trip when "they came back from that cherry-pie pub....mouths full of After-Eight mints, his mother dispensing them from her handbag, fairly and squarely, and how he and his brother slept the sleep of angels in the back of the car, how sleep was never as good as that ever again, a rocking contentment, well fed, happy... lurching in and out of his tubby little brother and ending up at their favorite arrangement, where he had his head on his brother's back and his brother had his head on his lap." This is the genius of The Old Romantic, which captures so acutely those moments when our golden looks at the past brush up against with our black, bleak visions of the present, leaving us to decide which view, exactly, will permanently color the other—and ourselves.
Read More:
9 Other Paperbacks to Love and Leave Behind
Check out now: Girl Reading
Men! What are they thinking? We can't always answer that, but we'll be posting our favorite glimpses into their world in this space every Thursday.
* Take a tour of master organizer Peter Walsh's California home, and learn his genius tricks for a clutter-free life. (O Magazine)
* Writer David Foster Wallace would have turned 50 this week. The Awl has compiled a fantastic list of things you can read if you'd like to mark the occasion. (The Awl)
* Come on, baby, don't you want to go... President Obama got bullied into singing Sweet Home Chicago at a concert on Tuesday, and it was very charming. (Videogum)
* Irving Wardle explains everything an 82-year-old man needs to know about Zumba. (More Intelligent Life)
"And what more can you say about books? They're the greatest things ever, and everyone should have more."—John Locke, a designer who's turning New York City phone booths into guerrilla libraries. (The Atlantic Cities)
 |
| Photo: Saverio Truglia |
* Writer David Foster Wallace would have turned 50 this week. The Awl has compiled a fantastic list of things you can read if you'd like to mark the occasion. (The Awl)
* Come on, baby, don't you want to go... President Obama got bullied into singing Sweet Home Chicago at a concert on Tuesday, and it was very charming. (Videogum)
* Irving Wardle explains everything an 82-year-old man needs to know about Zumba. (More Intelligent Life)
"And what more can you say about books? They're the greatest things ever, and everyone should have more."—John Locke, a designer who's turning New York City phone booths into guerrilla libraries. (The Atlantic Cities)
Every Monday, we'll be letting you know about new releases the editors at O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This week, we're transfixed by the stories of seven women in:
Girl Reading
By Katie Ward
The old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words gets trotted out pretty regularly, but we so infrequently stop to think what it means. In this luminously vulnerable debut novel, Katie Ward takes seven real images of women reading and imagines a story for each one. From a young girl struggling with an unintended pregnancy in 1333 to a performer photographed by her less flamboyant but much more talented sister in the Victorian era to an adolescent who's fixated on a much older man during World War I, Ward's characters are so utterly relatable that you'll feel you know them after a few sentences. Yet none of them appears for more than a chapter, transforming each tale into a snapshot of a woman’s life. At first, the brevity of interaction is disappointing, because getting to know the characters is such a pleasure. But as you go (and the pages in this book do turn quickly), Ward's reason for creating these short portraits becomes clearer. The sketches she composes are an invitation to the "girl reading" (that's you!) to go further on your own, to imagine the characters' next chapters, or even their whole lives, to enjoy the infinite imaginative possibilities offered by a finite portrait. If you dig into the stories, you'll get far more than a mere thousand words. In fact, you'll discover, as one of Ward's characters says, that "there is a world under” each and every one.
| Photo: Simon & Schuster |
Girl Reading
By Katie Ward
The old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words gets trotted out pretty regularly, but we so infrequently stop to think what it means. In this luminously vulnerable debut novel, Katie Ward takes seven real images of women reading and imagines a story for each one. From a young girl struggling with an unintended pregnancy in 1333 to a performer photographed by her less flamboyant but much more talented sister in the Victorian era to an adolescent who's fixated on a much older man during World War I, Ward's characters are so utterly relatable that you'll feel you know them after a few sentences. Yet none of them appears for more than a chapter, transforming each tale into a snapshot of a woman’s life. At first, the brevity of interaction is disappointing, because getting to know the characters is such a pleasure. But as you go (and the pages in this book do turn quickly), Ward's reason for creating these short portraits becomes clearer. The sketches she composes are an invitation to the "girl reading" (that's you!) to go further on your own, to imagine the characters' next chapters, or even their whole lives, to enjoy the infinite imaginative possibilities offered by a finite portrait. If you dig into the stories, you'll get far more than a mere thousand words. In fact, you'll discover, as one of Ward's characters says, that "there is a world under” each and every one.
Men! What are they thinking? We can't always answer that, but we'll be posting our favorite glimpses into their world in this space every Thursday.
* In 1928, Bill Traylor, an illiterate former slave in his seventies, moved from the Alabama plantation where he was born to Montgomery. There, he drew what he saw, and if you're lucky enough to live near Atlanta, you can see his amazing work on display at the High Museum of Art through May. (Prospero)
* Warning: These photos of author Michael Cunningham's library may inspire bookshelf envy. (Work in Progress)
* Jack Nicholson has been sitting courtside at Lakers games for 30 years, and the L.A. Times put together the photos to prove it. (LATimes)
* "I am still very much aware of people's perceptions of me—or what I imagine their perceptions to be... And now that I am a published young adult author, in addition to my job as, essentially, a reviewer of YA fiction, some of the people in my imagination look at the direction my life has taken, furrow their brows, and mumble: 'Weird.'"—Lucas Klauss on being a grown man who loves young adult fiction. (Omnivoracious)
| Photo: High Museum of Art |
* Warning: These photos of author Michael Cunningham's library may inspire bookshelf envy. (Work in Progress)
* Jack Nicholson has been sitting courtside at Lakers games for 30 years, and the L.A. Times put together the photos to prove it. (LATimes)
* "I am still very much aware of people's perceptions of me—or what I imagine their perceptions to be... And now that I am a published young adult author, in addition to my job as, essentially, a reviewer of YA fiction, some of the people in my imagination look at the direction my life has taken, furrow their brows, and mumble: 'Weird.'"—Lucas Klauss on being a grown man who loves young adult fiction. (Omnivoracious)
Every
Monday, we'll be letting you know about new releases the editors at O and Oprah.com couldn't
stop reading. This week, we're fascinated by the year-long marital experiment described in:
No Cheating, No Dying: I Had A Good Marriage. Then I Tried to Make It Better
By Elizabeth Weil
Maybe you've looked at the couple next door and thought, "Wow, those people seem to have such a great, loving marriage. Does that mean they never fight? Or does it mean that they fight all the time, horribly, in secret?" Maybe you've looked at your own relationship and thought, "Gee. I"m happy, but I'm not over-the-moon. Does that mean I have a good marriage or a good marriage that's about to crumble if I don't pay attention?"
The underlying idea is: How do you know when a relationship is as solid as it can be, not just as solid as you have time or the emotional stamina for? Writer Elizabeth Weil addresses this head on, creating her own social experiment by shepherding herself and her husband to psychotherapists, sex therapists, and marriage counselors in order to unearth the dicier, undiscussed subjects in their seemingly contented life. The engaging story that results is about two people who love and respect each other, but who have a lot differences when it comes to religion (she's Jewish, he's Christian), dependence, friends outside the marriage, and some past events that haven't been fully dealt with. At times, the reader may long for more detailed revelations (for example: about Weil's teenage battle with anorexia and her relationship with her mother, which are mentioned but only in passing). At other times, however, such as while discussing an emotionally wrenching pregnancy that ended up in termination, Weil and her husband have you spellbound—and desperate for them to work things through. Although dealing with heavy subject matter, Weil has a voice that charms, full of wit, intelligence and compassion—qualities that no doubt come to great assistance in marriage as well as writing a thought-provoking book.
Read More:
Books to get you through hard times
One wonderful quirky novel...about divorce?
No Cheating, No Dying: I Had A Good Marriage. Then I Tried to Make It Better
By Elizabeth Weil
Maybe you've looked at the couple next door and thought, "Wow, those people seem to have such a great, loving marriage. Does that mean they never fight? Or does it mean that they fight all the time, horribly, in secret?" Maybe you've looked at your own relationship and thought, "Gee. I"m happy, but I'm not over-the-moon. Does that mean I have a good marriage or a good marriage that's about to crumble if I don't pay attention?"
The underlying idea is: How do you know when a relationship is as solid as it can be, not just as solid as you have time or the emotional stamina for? Writer Elizabeth Weil addresses this head on, creating her own social experiment by shepherding herself and her husband to psychotherapists, sex therapists, and marriage counselors in order to unearth the dicier, undiscussed subjects in their seemingly contented life. The engaging story that results is about two people who love and respect each other, but who have a lot differences when it comes to religion (she's Jewish, he's Christian), dependence, friends outside the marriage, and some past events that haven't been fully dealt with. At times, the reader may long for more detailed revelations (for example: about Weil's teenage battle with anorexia and her relationship with her mother, which are mentioned but only in passing). At other times, however, such as while discussing an emotionally wrenching pregnancy that ended up in termination, Weil and her husband have you spellbound—and desperate for them to work things through. Although dealing with heavy subject matter, Weil has a voice that charms, full of wit, intelligence and compassion—qualities that no doubt come to great assistance in marriage as well as writing a thought-provoking book.
Read More:
Books to get you through hard times
One wonderful quirky novel...about divorce?
Every
Monday, we'll be letting you know about new releases the editors at O and Oprah.com couldn't
stop reading. This week, we're in complete awe of the wholly original,
heartbreaking novel:
First You Try Everything
By Jane McCafferty
This life-stopping
novel by Jane McCafferty (a crackerjack of a writer) is billed as a book about
divorce—a subject that's far too limited in scope to reflect what happens to
the heroine, Evie, when her husband of 16 years, Ben, decides to leave her. This
book is about heartbreak—as it happens to all of us, from Evie who tries to
find salvation (or maybe just friendship) in the mysterious calm presences of a
convenience store clerk, to Ben who can't reconcile his own life with his
adulterous father's, to Lauren, the woman who comes between the two of them but
who was also abandoned by her heroin-addicted parents, left in a booster seat
at Denny's at age two. All of which should result in a sob-fest. Except that it
doesn't.
McCafferty's gift is character, and she creates such singular, riveting personalities that you're laughing and puzzling out whole new understandings of the world (all while thinking, "ow"). Middle-aged Evie steals the show with her endearing oddball approach to existence which includes writing letters to Senators about animal cruelty that go: "Dear Senator, How are you, I'm OK though it's been raining for 8 days here" (letters which Ben describes so accurately as "like a kid at summer camp writing home to mom and dad.") Evie gets so happy that she jumps out of tree into a lake with joy—and breaks her legs. Evie gets so grim that she thinks "she needs an auditory shelter from the storm of her own thoughts."
She, like all the people in this book, is so unlike anyone you've ever met—or even just read about before—and her always unexpected turns of mind also creates turns in yours, leaving you with a fresh understanding of what we want love to mean, and what really love means, and what it really requires of us (most especially when it fails to turn out the way we'd hoped).
First You Try Everything
By Jane McCafferty
McCafferty's gift is character, and she creates such singular, riveting personalities that you're laughing and puzzling out whole new understandings of the world (all while thinking, "ow"). Middle-aged Evie steals the show with her endearing oddball approach to existence which includes writing letters to Senators about animal cruelty that go: "Dear Senator, How are you, I'm OK though it's been raining for 8 days here" (letters which Ben describes so accurately as "like a kid at summer camp writing home to mom and dad.") Evie gets so happy that she jumps out of tree into a lake with joy—and breaks her legs. Evie gets so grim that she thinks "she needs an auditory shelter from the storm of her own thoughts."
She, like all the people in this book, is so unlike anyone you've ever met—or even just read about before—and her always unexpected turns of mind also creates turns in yours, leaving you with a fresh understanding of what we want love to mean, and what really love means, and what it really requires of us (most especially when it fails to turn out the way we'd hoped).
Read More
17
Books to Buy This February
How
Not to Kill Your Book Club
Every Monday, we'll be letting you know about new releases the
editors at O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This week, we're in complete awe of the blunt, surprisingly memoir:
Crazy Enough
By Storm Large
Actress and singer Storm Large (yes, that’s her given name) spent much of her childhood in and out of hospital psychiatric wards and mental institutions visiting her mother, who was troubled with a litany of diagnoses, ranging from schizophrenia to multiple personality disorder. At age nine, when she asked a doctor if she might suffer from the same issues, he said, without skipping a beat, “Yes, it’s hereditary. You will absolutely end up like your mother.” Left without hope, Large embarked on a heart-wrenching journey paved with sex, drugs and plenty of raw self-destruction (note to readers: this book is heavy on the exceptionally salty language). The memoir, however, told in honest, poignant prose, really takes off when Large begins to use her excruciating past as an inspiration for her life on stage as a risky, fearless artist, showing all of us how to let go—not without fear and doubt, but with it.
Crazy Enough
By Storm Large
Actress and singer Storm Large (yes, that’s her given name) spent much of her childhood in and out of hospital psychiatric wards and mental institutions visiting her mother, who was troubled with a litany of diagnoses, ranging from schizophrenia to multiple personality disorder. At age nine, when she asked a doctor if she might suffer from the same issues, he said, without skipping a beat, “Yes, it’s hereditary. You will absolutely end up like your mother.” Left without hope, Large embarked on a heart-wrenching journey paved with sex, drugs and plenty of raw self-destruction (note to readers: this book is heavy on the exceptionally salty language). The memoir, however, told in honest, poignant prose, really takes off when Large begins to use her excruciating past as an inspiration for her life on stage as a risky, fearless artist, showing all of us how to let go—not without fear and doubt, but with it.
Every Monday, we'll be letting you know about new releases the
editors at O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This week, we're obsessed with the novel:
Come In and Cover Me
by Gin Phillips
Thirty-nine-year old Ren is working on a dig in New Mexico, searching for Mimbres pottery that dates back to the 12th-century when she meets Silas, a fellow archaeologist whose methods are radically different that hers. While Silas dates objects by, say, counting the carbon in preserved prehistoric corn, Ren relies on a slightly less scientific method—visitations by tribal ghosts who show her how the bowls and jars were created. Novelist Phillips brings the culture and lives of these ancient people to life, as well as the fascinating details about the art of archaeology—from how a fallen bit of adobe can preserve a parrot feather to why coroners are required to examine bodies that date back 800 years. Interestingly, though, it's the personal details in this book that resonate. Ren's relationship with the past is more than professional: Her brother's death during her childhood has left her unable to connect to others, even Silas who, if things were different, she might be able love. It's this tension—between her belief that "The past was solid, weighable as cement...that it was done and over, and could be wrapped and stored without fear of it ever changing" and her awareness that she must re-examine what really happened 20 years ago in order create some kind of future for herself—that connect you to the book, both due to the subtle, evocative flashbacks and the relief at seeing for once, a woman character who is emotionally unavailable and a man who has to crack her tough shell, instead of the other way around.
Read More:
11 books you'd never thought you'd read (but will love)
How to write when you think you just can't
Come In and Cover Me
by Gin Phillips
Thirty-nine-year old Ren is working on a dig in New Mexico, searching for Mimbres pottery that dates back to the 12th-century when she meets Silas, a fellow archaeologist whose methods are radically different that hers. While Silas dates objects by, say, counting the carbon in preserved prehistoric corn, Ren relies on a slightly less scientific method—visitations by tribal ghosts who show her how the bowls and jars were created. Novelist Phillips brings the culture and lives of these ancient people to life, as well as the fascinating details about the art of archaeology—from how a fallen bit of adobe can preserve a parrot feather to why coroners are required to examine bodies that date back 800 years. Interestingly, though, it's the personal details in this book that resonate. Ren's relationship with the past is more than professional: Her brother's death during her childhood has left her unable to connect to others, even Silas who, if things were different, she might be able love. It's this tension—between her belief that "The past was solid, weighable as cement...that it was done and over, and could be wrapped and stored without fear of it ever changing" and her awareness that she must re-examine what really happened 20 years ago in order create some kind of future for herself—that connect you to the book, both due to the subtle, evocative flashbacks and the relief at seeing for once, a woman character who is emotionally unavailable and a man who has to crack her tough shell, instead of the other way around.
Read More:
11 books you'd never thought you'd read (but will love)
How to write when you think you just can't
Every Monday, we'll be letting you know about new releases the
editors at O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This week, we're obsessed with a paperback, the new edition of:
How do you
keep a memory alive? How do you erase it? These two conflicting questions form
the cornerstone of The Empty Family, Colm Tóibín's masterful collection of short stories. In
Silence, Lady Gregory (a character based on a real-life friend of Henry
James) publishes thinly-veiled retellings of her love affair. In Two
Women, a woman known only Frances cuts off any human connection and
possibility of emotion, so that memories of her dead unfaithful lover can't
intrude, only to emerge into the real world for a business trip and find herself
confronted at every turn by reminders of him. But for Tóibín himself, both
these approaches to memory seem flawed. Nowhere is this demonstrated more
thoroughly than in the title story The Empty Family in which a nameless,
genderless character mixes vague recollections of a former lover with the
discovery of a stone on the beach, which he notes has been battered by time yet
is “all the more alive for that, as though the battle between colour and water
had offered it a mute strength." Reading the account of the stone, which is
tucked between enigmatic yet still painful details of a bygone relationship,
it’s hard to not be convinced that memory's great power is its "mute strength”
which endures no matter our warping or distortions, no matter how hard we try to cling
to it or run away.
Read More:
9 books that will help you change your life
Find a (sort of) sequel to your favorite recent read
Read More:
9 books that will help you change your life
Find a (sort of) sequel to your favorite recent read
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