Two challenges today: will the abondigas taste reasonable and can I match Aunt Bet in her re-reading? (Not to mention the production of the obligatory photograph in the pouring rain!)
I have discovered that Spanish meat balls are very labour intensive and, with the extent of the chopping that I have done it is little short of miraculous that my fingers are still intact. For this meal I have chopped garlic, aubergines, red peppers, parsley and courgettes all of which have been reduced to a most satisfactory fried pulpy mass in the best traditions of the Iberian Peninsular!
We have made an industrial quantity of meat balls and I will be interested to see how many remain at the end of the evening.
I will watch carefully to observe the secrets of Carmen’s recipe for Patatas Bravas. I have been astonished by the wide variety of dishes which seem to lurk under the general heading of Patatas Bravas from the fried diced potatoes from the ludicrous tapas bar in Cardiff Bay to the Rolls Royce of tapas found in the seemingly never closed restaurant in Barcelona. The sauce which accompanies the tapa has varied in piquancy from the totally bland to the tongue burningly assertive – admittedly the last was made by my good self after a more than usually vigorous judder with the Tabasco bottle! We shall see.
The second challenge is the response to the task that Aunt Bet has set herself: the complete re-reading of the works of Dickens. As she said, the only thing that was keeping her back was the assertion by one of her friends who said that he would read the Bible from front to back and died before he completed the feat. Aunt Bet is made of firmer stuff than that and will survive to read the letters and the Lesser Tales and go on to the entire oeuvres of Dickens’ contemporaries starting with Wilkie Collins! The Challenge will be to match her, book for book.
When deciding to read the Complete Works there is a necessity for a Reading Strategy to be put in place so that the whole enterprise can have a structure and form. I asked Aunt Bet how she would approach the task. I had considered various ways of doing it. The historical approach using chronology is a time honoured way of experiencing the developing technique of a writer and one I thought would appeal to her.
The next method I had considered was to take the Major Novels and read those first. The problem here is, of course, which of the novels you regard as major, and then which order you read them in. ‘Great Expectations’ would have to be in the top five and ‘Martin Chuzzelwit’ would not make it into the top ten, but which other four novels would you put into the Big Five? ‘Bleak House’ would have to be there, and ‘David Copperfield’ too, but ‘Oliver Twist’? What about ‘The Tale of Two Cities’ and ‘Pickwick Papers’? And is ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ anything more than an unfinished novelty? Then there is the Marxists’ favourite ‘Hard Times’ and the truly disturbing (on so many) ‘Nicholas Nickleby’. And what about the ones that I have left out? Some people I am sure will say that ‘Our Mutual Friend’ and ‘Dombey and son’ are masterpieces. And what about ‘Barnaby Rudge’? and ‘The Old Curiosity House’ and ‘Little Dorrit’? You are on a hiding to nothing in trying to rank the novels.
Perhaps the simplest way of reading them is starting with your favourite novel and working your way downwards. So, by this method, you would start with ‘Great Expectations’ and then go on to ‘Bleak House’ and ‘David Copperfield’ then ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ and . . . I don’t like doing it this way because, now I’ve put ‘Bleak House’ second, I’m not sure that I can justify it to myself and I’ve always had doubts about the sub-plot of Mrs Joe and Orlick in ‘Great Expectations’ so its prime position is not always assured.
So why not fall back on the tried and proved method of re-reading what is to hand and then worrying about what to read next.
Or my personal favourite: go down town, enter a book shop, find a really well printed copy of any novel and start there and then buy the rest!
Aunt Bet said that she was going to start with what Dickens novels she had lying around (though she did tell me that she had given so many of them away to family and friends that there had to be another plan to supplement this initial idea) and she did speak about going to her local bookshop! Aunt Bet is another firm believer in the Ruskin dictum, “If a book is worth reading, it’s worth buying.” My mother always had a feeling of warm hatred for Ruskin as I frequently trotted out this quotation when justifying yet another literary purchase to add to the claustrophobic construction of shelves that constituted the ‘library’ that had taken over my bedroom.
Which method have I decided upon? I think that I will start with the novel that was dickens’ major breakthrough in mass popularity and one that I am still not convinced that I have read all the way through. My confusion is based on the fact that I quote the novel enough and I have memories of whole chunks of the novel: the great scenes of the election, for example and the character of Sam. But have I read the whole thing through from start to finish? So, it’s purchase of ‘The Pickwick Papers’ tomorrow, immediately after I sign on!
Such a life of incident and neat juxtaposition.
I have discovered that Spanish meat balls are very labour intensive and, with the extent of the chopping that I have done it is little short of miraculous that my fingers are still intact. For this meal I have chopped garlic, aubergines, red peppers, parsley and courgettes all of which have been reduced to a most satisfactory fried pulpy mass in the best traditions of the Iberian Peninsular!
We have made an industrial quantity of meat balls and I will be interested to see how many remain at the end of the evening.I will watch carefully to observe the secrets of Carmen’s recipe for Patatas Bravas. I have been astonished by the wide variety of dishes which seem to lurk under the general heading of Patatas Bravas from the fried diced potatoes from the ludicrous tapas bar in Cardiff Bay to the Rolls Royce of tapas found in the seemingly never closed restaurant in Barcelona. The sauce which accompanies the tapa has varied in piquancy from the totally bland to the tongue burningly assertive – admittedly the last was made by my good self after a more than usually vigorous judder with the Tabasco bottle! We shall see.
The second challenge is the response to the task that Aunt Bet has set herself: the complete re-reading of the works of Dickens. As she said, the only thing that was keeping her back was the assertion by one of her friends who said that he would read the Bible from front to back and died before he completed the feat. Aunt Bet is made of firmer stuff than that and will survive to read the letters and the Lesser Tales and go on to the entire oeuvres of Dickens’ contemporaries starting with Wilkie Collins! The Challenge will be to match her, book for book.
When deciding to read the Complete Works there is a necessity for a Reading Strategy to be put in place so that the whole enterprise can have a structure and form. I asked Aunt Bet how she would approach the task. I had considered various ways of doing it. The historical approach using chronology is a time honoured way of experiencing the developing technique of a writer and one I thought would appeal to her.
The next method I had considered was to take the Major Novels and read those first. The problem here is, of course, which of the novels you regard as major, and then which order you read them in. ‘Great Expectations’ would have to be in the top five and ‘Martin Chuzzelwit’ would not make it into the top ten, but which other four novels would you put into the Big Five? ‘Bleak House’ would have to be there, and ‘David Copperfield’ too, but ‘Oliver Twist’? What about ‘The Tale of Two Cities’ and ‘Pickwick Papers’? And is ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ anything more than an unfinished novelty? Then there is the Marxists’ favourite ‘Hard Times’ and the truly disturbing (on so many) ‘Nicholas Nickleby’. And what about the ones that I have left out? Some people I am sure will say that ‘Our Mutual Friend’ and ‘Dombey and son’ are masterpieces. And what about ‘Barnaby Rudge’? and ‘The Old Curiosity House’ and ‘Little Dorrit’? You are on a hiding to nothing in trying to rank the novels.
Perhaps the simplest way of reading them is starting with your favourite novel and working your way downwards. So, by this method, you would start with ‘Great Expectations’ and then go on to ‘Bleak House’ and ‘David Copperfield’ then ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ and . . . I don’t like doing it this way because, now I’ve put ‘Bleak House’ second, I’m not sure that I can justify it to myself and I’ve always had doubts about the sub-plot of Mrs Joe and Orlick in ‘Great Expectations’ so its prime position is not always assured.
So why not fall back on the tried and proved method of re-reading what is to hand and then worrying about what to read next.
Or my personal favourite: go down town, enter a book shop, find a really well printed copy of any novel and start there and then buy the rest!
Aunt Bet said that she was going to start with what Dickens novels she had lying around (though she did tell me that she had given so many of them away to family and friends that there had to be another plan to supplement this initial idea) and she did speak about going to her local bookshop! Aunt Bet is another firm believer in the Ruskin dictum, “If a book is worth reading, it’s worth buying.” My mother always had a feeling of warm hatred for Ruskin as I frequently trotted out this quotation when justifying yet another literary purchase to add to the claustrophobic construction of shelves that constituted the ‘library’ that had taken over my bedroom.
Which method have I decided upon? I think that I will start with the novel that was dickens’ major breakthrough in mass popularity and one that I am still not convinced that I have read all the way through. My confusion is based on the fact that I quote the novel enough and I have memories of whole chunks of the novel: the great scenes of the election, for example and the character of Sam. But have I read the whole thing through from start to finish? So, it’s purchase of ‘The Pickwick Papers’ tomorrow, immediately after I sign on!
Such a life of incident and neat juxtaposition.
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