by Christie Purifoy | Jun 6, 2015 | Books, Summer, Uncategorized
There are so many ways to ask the same question.
Beach or mountain?
Rain or sun?
Coffee or tea?
Read or jog?
My answer for each one is the same: cozy. What I mean is that, while I usually choose mountain over beach, if given a choice between climbing a fourteener and sitting in a beach chair with a novel, I will change my answer. Beach, all the way.
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When I say that the books I’m recommending today are Beach Reads, I may not mean what you think I mean. They are not all light and fluffy. They are not summer-themed. But if the summer is the one season when we collectively give ourselves permission to read novels during the middle of the day, then here are three great books to feed your summertime fiction obsession.
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A God in Ruins: A Novel (Todd Family)
is the latest book by Kate Atkinson. Not exactly a sequel, it is the companion novel to her last book Life After Life: A Novel
. I wrote about that incredible book here. I do think it makes the most sense to read the books in order, but if the premise of the first is unappealing you can read A God in Ruins on its own. The characters will be new and unfamiliar to you, but Atkinson is a master with her characters. A few sentences is all she needs to reveal the depths of their souls.
And make you laugh out loud. Because Atkinson has a sharp and wicked sense of humor.
Atkinson’s humor is especially surprising given her subject matter. While Life After Life focused on Ursula Todd’s harrowing experience of the Blitz, A God in Ruins narrates the life of her beloved baby brother, Teddy, who was a pilot dropping bombs on Germany during the war.
Given the odds, Teddy should not have survived the war, but Atkinson gives him a fictional life in which we are allowed to discover just how important one life can be. In big ways (flying large bombs) and in small (choosing kindness again and again).
Atkinson’s narrative technique is unorthodox. She moves backward and forward in time. She tells her stories in snatches of thoughts in each character’s head. And the result, incredibly, is a seamless narrative that keeps you turning pages. I honestly don’t know how she does it.
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Another master novelist is Kazuo Ishiguro. His books The Remains of the Day
and Never Let Me Go
are favorites of mine. His latest book, The Buried Giant: A novel
, explores one of the most important questions for our world: how do we achieve peace after war and national trauma?
The book explores this question at the most intimate level as it follows an elderly married couple on a fairy tale-like quest. But it also asks the question in bigger ways as it explores the fractured relationship between two national communities that were only recently at war.
The surprising but very effective way in which Ishiguro tackles these difficult questions is by setting his book in the legendary, far-distant past. The Buried Giant is set in an England where ogres and dragons still roam. An England where Saxon and Briton have achieved a too-fragile accord. An England where the achievements of the late King Arthur are still felt in the land.
How do we mend personal relationships after betrayal and how do we forgive and find peace following national trauma? These are enormous questions and enormously important, but Ishiguro’s story is simple, spare, and elegant. It is slow and measured and beautiful.
It seems to use only the barest bones of our collective storytelling traditions. The characters are ones we have always known (wife, husband, warrior, boy) and the plot is just as familiar (a journey of discovery, a quest to destroy a dragon). But the result is a novel that is fresh and new and very much written for our world today.
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Ready for something a little less intense? If you are a mystery lover you will likely already have made the acquaintance of Mrs. Pollifax, the most unexpected CIA agent of all time. Widowed with grown children, Mrs. Pollifax has grown a little bored of her garden club and hospital volunteer work and so takes one last stab at a lifelong dream: she wants to be a spy.
Dorothy Gilman’s Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax
is the first in a delightful series. In a few places I almost find these book too delightful, but then Mrs. Pollifax says or thinks something so hilariously understated that I want to write it down and remember it forever.
These books are as light and frothy as any beach read but don’t be deceived. There is more to Mrs. Pollifax than meets the eye, and there is more to these books. These fun, funny, adventurous stories rest on a very well written and well plotted foundation.
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Tell me, do you keep a summer reading list? I’d love to hear what you plan to read this summer.
by Christie Purifoy | May 29, 2015 | allergies, Books, children, Gardening, Grace Table, Life Right Now, Summer, Uncategorized
(this post contains affiliate links)
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Is just so full.
The peonies are heavy, and ruffled, and scented. I have a jar tumbling with pale pink beauties right at my elbow, and I keep stopping to take deep, deep breaths. Like I’m dying of thirst, and this smell is cool water.
The strawberries in the vegetable garden are ripening so quickly I find at least a few mushy fruit no matter how often I pick. I keep keep them netted against the birds, and I try to gather most of them before the kids come home from school. It’s the only way I can guarantee at least a few berries for myself.
The blueberry bushes are small but loaded with fruit, and I’m ashamed now to remember just how angry I became when I caught the two-year-old stripping green berries off the branches. Now when we walk past, she looks at those bushes, shakes her little head, and says, “Mommy so sad.”
Spring allergies are wrecking me, most of us have had pink-eye, our dishwasher finally died (after a long, not-very-valiant struggle), and we’ve already had so many warm, humid days that I’m starting to get very nervous about the summer.
I read Kate Atkinson’s beautiful, mind-bending, heart-wrenching new book called A God in Ruins: A Novel (Todd Family). I’ll have a bit more to say about that in an upcoming installment of These Farmhouse Bookshelves, but I’ll tell you now that Atkinson, already one of my favorite writers, just keeps getting better and better.
Probably, I’ll also be recommending Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest: The Buried Giant: A novel. Only a third of the way in, I’m already stunned. Ishiguro is a master, an exquisite stylist and a compelling storyteller. I’m afraid my family is in for a weekend of being ignored, because I can’t stop reading this book.
All winter I sipped tea while I read, but I’ve switched to cold-brew iced coffee. I was once a pro with a mason jar and a fine-mesh sieve, but I am loving an early birthday gift from my mom. The Toddy Cold Brew Coffee Maker With 2 Extra Filters
makes the cold-brew process – already easy – even easier, and the lidded carafe keeps the concentrate fresh longer. You certainly don’t need a gadget like this for cold-brew, but, let’s be honest, sometimes a messy bit of cheesecloth or a sieve that isn’t quite fine enough are all it takes to send you to the pros at the coffee shop.
Tonight is pizza night in our house, but for the first Friday in weeks we won’t be putting asparagus on our pizzas. Our backyard harvest has ended for the year, but if you still have asparagus around I highly recommend sauteing a few spears in extra-virgin olive oil before laying them right on top of fresh mozzarella (I recently shared our quick-and-easy crust recipe at Grace Table).
On instagram, I’m sharing flowers, flowers, flowers, plus the occasional cute kid. I’m also taking time to step out into the last of the golden light even though it means changing the mud-streaked pajamas of the two little bedtime-avoiders who always follow me outside.
Life.
It really is too much. I can’t handle it all, but I suppose that isn’t the goal, is it? Not to handle it. Not to manage it. But to live it.
Which means, I think, to keep your eyes open, your heart broken, and the words thank you always on the edge of your tongue.
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by Christie Purifoy | May 20, 2015 | Family, guest post, Uncategorized, Writing
I write about me, my experiences, my own observations. Yet, somehow, I still manage not to tell you very much about myself.
Danielle Ayers Jones, writer, photographer, and an all-around lovely woman, is helping to rectify that. Danielle has posted an interview with me as part of her blog series Inspire: Women Who Create.
It is, as the title suggests, an inspiring series. I feel pleased and privileged to be a part of it.
If you have any interest in my personal and creative journey, in my upcoming book, or just want to see a photo of my cute kids (they are cute, even if we never do manage to capture all four smiling at once), I very much hope you’ll read all about it.
by Christie Purifoy | May 4, 2015 | children, Hope, Joy, Spring, Stories, Uncategorized
It is called the Golden Hour or, sometimes, the Magic Hour. Photographers and filmmakers revere it.
It rarely, if ever, lasts an hour. Usually it is less, though in the far north in deep winter, it might last all day. It is that period just after sunrise, or, more usually, just before sunset when the light is warm and soft and shadows are long and gentle.
During our winters, golden hour is something I glimpse from a window in mid-afternoon. A sight that causes me to pause. For a moment.
Now that it is spring, golden hour is more like a place. We might wander in and out of the house all day, but as sunset nears a new door opens. It no longer matters what indoor tasks are pressing on us (homework, dinner prep, a pile of laundry on the dining-room table). When that door opens we will stay outside until the door swings shut and every last, golden drop vanishes.
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This week, in this magic evening place, I have seen a two-year-old girl, her hair the same color as the light, kneel in a sea of violets. She used a stick to stir a basket overflowing with dandelions. She was so focused on her fluffy, yellow stew that she never saw the pink magnolia petals drifting behind her back. She never noticed the bright green buds from the maple tree dusting her shoulders.
This week, in the golden place, I have seen a brother and sister roll their bodies down a green hill, over and over again. My own shadow was so long, reaching toward them, it seemed as if I could wrap shadow arms around them while they rolled. I could use shadow hands to help them back onto their feet.
In the golden hour, all kinds of burdens are lifted. Dinner and homework and laundry matter so much less. Even the daily burden of gravity seems to lift. In this light, we walk somewhere between the earth and the sky, belonging equally to both. When the two-year-old cries, “I catch the moon!” I believe her.
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Here is what I have seen in the golden hour: my children are beautiful, the earth is gentle, there is no reason, ever, to be afraid.
Here is why I hesitate to share what I have seen: Baltimore burns, another young black man is dead, wars rage, a marriage is ending, young parents grieve a baby’s diagnosis, a friend has landed back in the hospital.
I am strongly tempted to keep the vision of golden hour a secret. I know that my world is not the whole world. Do I tempt you toward jealousy if I say that this week my life, between the hours of six and eight, is almost unbearably beautiful?
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Yet if I am silent then some essential part of the story goes missing.
CNN and NPR tell their stories, and we feel duty-bound to hear them. What about the good news? What about those dispatches from the golden hours?
The door to that place opens and closes according to a will that is not ours. Some evenings bring clouds and rain, and we are given only darkness.
I cannot even begin to guess why this is so.
But I hope that when the clouds move in, and darkness once again surrounds me, that you – yes, you – will have the courage to share your golden visions.
That I might know more of the story and take heart.
That I might glimpse the ending of it all and have hope.
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by Christie Purifoy | Apr 29, 2015 | Chicago, Food, Grace, Grace Table, hospitality, prayer, Uncategorized
In our home, Friday night is for pizza. I imagine that is true for many of you as well.
For ten years, we lived in pizza heaven (also known as Chicago.) Late on Friday afternoon, we would decide which neighborhood pizza place was calling our name.
Within a few blocks of our apartment we had two long-time pizza restaurants that served traditional, deep-dish Chicago pizza. I still dream about that spinach pizza pie. One slice would make you grab your belly and groan. Every once in a while my husband managed two.
There was also the little Italian restaurant on 53rd Street with its gourmet, thin-crust pizzas. We loved a version with thinly sliced potatoes and fresh rosemary, but I made the mistake of eating it early in my pregnancy with my firstborn. It was years before I could eat that pizza without remembering first-trimester suffering. Every few months, my husband would ask, plaintively, “How do you feel about potato pizza?”
Toward the end of our decade in the city, a new “bake-at-home” takeout place opened up. It was a little more affordable than the other options, and the ingredients were incredibly fresh. Baby spinach, large leaves of basil, golden, caramelized shallots, rich, briny olives … I think we tried a new combination every Friday night.
Then we moved to Florida.
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In Jacksonville, we sampled every pizza place in a 15-miles radius before accepting that things had changed. We’ve been making our own pizza ever since.
Our homemade pizza is cheap, quick, easy, and, oh my goodness, is it delicious. It may not be Chicago deep dish, but it is good.
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I’m sharing a story of homemade pizza, practical hospitality, and prayer over at Grace Table today. I am also sharing our recipe.
Won’t you join me?
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by Christie Purifoy | Apr 16, 2015 | Gardening, Spring, Uncategorized
Lesson One:
The weeds come back first.
Don’t be discouraged. Start weeding. Keep waiting.
And, especially, keep your eyes open.
Lesson Two:
Even your least-favorite colors are beautiful after a long winter. Neon-yellow forsythia, I’m looking at you.
Lesson Three:
After a long winter spent with books, it takes time to reacquaint yourself with the world outside your door. Like the two-year-old, you may at first mistake a bumble bee for a “porcupine.”
Lesson Four:
Don’t put off till tomorrow the cleanup you can do today. Especially because, tomorrow, all those brush piles will be edged with poison ivy.
Lesson Five:
The garden asks you to do and be. It is important to cut back all the hydrangeas that bloom on new wood, but it is just as important to sit in a green patch memorizing the stripes on a purple crocus.
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What’s growing in your bit of earth?
(P.S. These springtime photos were taken by my sister, Kelli Campbell, last year. If you’d like to keep up with the spring just beginning at Maplehurst, you can find my own images on Instagram.)
