Question meme, round five

[mrissa]

sam_t asks the last round of questions for the moment:

1) If you had to pick five books from your bookshelves as examples of the things you like in books, what would they be?

Steven Brust, Dragon
Octavia Butler, Blood Child and Other Stories
Vilhelm Moberg, A History of the Swedish People
Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia
Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night

There are still gaps like crazy, but that's the closest I can get to coverage. Now I am entertaining myself trying to arrive at formulas for my other books based on these: D'Aulaire's Norse Gods and Giants would be about 4/5 Moberg + 1/5 Paterson, for example, and trying to get the proportions just right to get The Dubious Hills from here is kind of amusing. I only got Dragon by getting the other four and then sniffing around what I couldn't get from them.

2) If you had to pick five books to be your only reading material for a significant period of time, what would they be? (I'm assuming this is from my current bookshelves as well.)

The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose
The Sagas of Icelanders
The Complete Works of Shakespeare
Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 by Jonathan Israel
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

3) This question has intentionally been left blank for you to fill in with any interesting things you might have to say about whether the answers to 1 and 2 are the same, and why/why not.

Heh. Oh, not even close. Because the first is about constructing a holographic representation of sorts, and the second is about what's going to keep me occupied for quite some time. I could read any of the books from question 1 except possibly Gaudy Night between now and going to the symphony tonight, without even reading through dinner with my folks. That would be immensely unsatisfying in a book that was 1/5 of my reading material for a big chunk of time.

I'm more of a rereader than some people, but what I am not is someone who can comfortably reread soon after the initial reading. Even The Nine Tailors, which I love, was not enjoyable to me five months after I'd last read it; I had to wait significantly longer than that. So if I have to pick five volumes to hold me for quite some time, we're looking for the tissue pages, the wrist-wreckers.

(For some reason I now want to write a sort of Sayers-LeCarre-Megan Lindholm thing called The Nine Tinkers. If I ever propose this seriously, I expect some of you to make me lie down until the sensation passes. Or else make helpful suggestions. One or the other.)

4) What distinguishes a Minnesota Autumn from anyone else's?

From anyone else's? Lakes and Ingebretsen's. The smell of the air and the leaves is different with the abundance of lakes and sloughs than when you're in a place with different geography. Also you can go buy a dozen pounds of Swedish meatball meat that's mixed just right so you don't have to fuss with mixing the different ground meats by hand, and that makes fall so much nicer than if you were trying to get the meats to mix evenly with your fingers. We're going to have to do that soon. If I didn't have dinner plans for tonight and tomorrow, I might be pushing markgritter towards the shower so we could get up there yet this afternoon.

But really, the Bay Area's autumn is not the least bit autumnal, to my way of thinking; what distinguishes a Minnesota autumn from that, or from a Miami autumn, is approximately everything.

5) What's the most unusual thing you've ever cooked?

You know, I'm really not sure. When the "one hundred weird foods" meme went around, I was very surprised that spaetzle was the thing from the list that I'd eaten and the most of my friends hadn't. Spaetzle strikes me as incredibly normal. My great-aunts eat spaetzle. My great-aunts also eat pickled pigs' feet, though, so possibly I should have stopped using them as a gauge of normalcy years ago. Despite the fact that I live around other Minnesotans now, I'm going to guess blueberry soup? Maybe? With mango and cardamom. Apple-crab-curry soup might also qualify. Speak up if those sound alarmingly normal to you.

Comments

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Bay Area autumns really aren't very. I mean, the rain starts, and that's a seasonal marker, and "fling" begins (wherein the large trees outside start flinging their huge leaves at my patio and sidewalk with resounding "THWAP!" noises) and if you go out of your way you can find some red and yellow leaves and smell woodsmoke, but ... it's nothing like where I was born (where there's a Maple Leaf Parade every year).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Exactly. It's like Bay Area winters and people taking their kids to visit snow. It just doesn't count as the same thing.

[brooksmoses]

Tell me about it. *sadface*

[redbird]

The blueberry soup doesn't sound "alarmingly normal." What it sounds is tempting.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think the problem with fruit soups in general for me is that I want about a bowl of them, and they're really good for a bowl, and then I'm done with that particular fruit soup for a month or more. So I have to figure out whether they can be frozen in small quantities or what, or else I have to make them for very large gatherings of people who aren't afraid of fruit soup.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

The kind of fruit soup that has no dairy can be frozen in small quantities. Sometimes they go a little watery on thawing, but one can cover that by stirring in dairy on thawing (or by not thawing, and disguising them as sorbet.) If a person has a hand blender, it might also be possible to make a small quantity of fruit soup at a time. I know everything works out neatly when you do it a mango at a time, but a quarter-mango might be more manageable, at least in soup terms. I like pumpkin pie, but I've never made a pumpkin of it at a time.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Heh. That's true, I hadn't really thought of it in terms of the pumpkin. And it's a lot easier to find a home for 3/4 of a mango worth of mango slices than several servings of soup.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Cold fruit soups are generally summery sorts of things. Does blueberry soup still seem tempting for the middle of October? The fruit is lightly cooked, so I think good frozen berries would be fine (even if they were not generally higher quality than the berries the local supermarkets ship all over the country and sell as fresh.) I could make some next week.

[redbird]

If we get relatively warm weather, I think it would be tempting. For values of relatively warm such that 60 might be okay, and I doubt I'd want fruit soup if it was 40F.)

[skzbrust.livejournal.com]

Awwww. You're sweet.

*walks away, ego well-stroked*

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's just until you write me Tiassa.

timprov and markgritter say that the Khaavren Romances ought to make me patient about Tiassa's turn in line. Well. They can say it, I guess.

[skzbrust.livejournal.com]

Okay, then I'll have to do that next, I suppose, now I've finished Iorich.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If it's not too much trouble. I can send you Guinness gingerbread if you think that'd help you think about Tiassa.

[keilexandra]

I've seen a recipe for chilled blueberry soup in a conventional recipe book (can't remember if it was low-fat/low-cholesterol or the free Costco one), although I've never tried it.

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

Thanks for answering! I never know how much detail to put in questions - for example, I thought about saying explicitly that you could choose whose definition of 'usual' you wanted for question 5, but I thought you'd probably have an interesting answer to whatever definition you thought I meant anyway.

[laurel]

The lack of consumption of spaetzle on those lists surprised me too. But then my parents lived in Germany for three years and I'm half Norwegian and half German so, you know. I don't have spaetzle often, but sometimes it's just the thing.

I can't really imagine life without a true autumn, like the ones we have here. Of course for me this is the One True Autumn.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It was extremely confusing to live in California with two seasons instead of four seasons. I have a great deal more difficulty placing when things happened in the four years we lived in California than since (and it's not because of the distance, either--it happened at the time).

[brooksmoses]

It's not only that there are only two seasons -- I even have trouble remembering when they're supposed to start. And I'm starting to get the impression that the weather can't, either.

This year, we had a nice late-summery sort of September, and then an October that was what passes for early-autumnal here, with some rain and blusteryness and some cool spells, which was quite pleasant to have. And now we're having a nice late-summery sort of November, which is entirely confusing and out of sequence.