Kill My Mother

I was first introduced to Jules Feiffer’s work in college when my then-boyfriend (now-husband) informed me that The Phantom Tollbooth, illustrated by Feiffer, was one of his very favorite books and I should read it with all possible urgency. I loved Feiffer's artwork and have made it a point to keep an eye on him over the years.

He’s come out with two awesome (and wildly different) books in 2014: Rupert Can Dance, a children’s picture book about a cat who likes to break it down while his little girl sleeps, and Kill My Mother, a graphic novel inspired by the pulpy noir fiction and films of Feiffer’s childhood. I came by an advanced reading copy of the latter at a library conference in Indianapolis last March. The weather was below freezing, and a bunch of us librarians had to wait in the cold for a bus back to our hotel from the conference center. I pulled out Kill my Mother and totally forgot about how miserably cold I was as I fell into a Chandler-Hammett land peopled by thugs, starlets, crooners, and cross dressers. As soon as I finished the book I called my husband and informed him he had to read this book with all possible urgency. Turnabout is fair play!

Foodie Reads

 Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.

-Orson Welles 

I like to cook and I like to eat, and I am endlessly entertained by reading books about other people cooking and eating. Give me a snack and a foodie book and I’m dead to the world until I want something else to eat. I think M.F.K. Fisher explained the enjoyable nature of food writing best when she wrote in “The Gastronomical Me,”

It seems to me our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one.

So, yeah, what she said. A ton of great food-related books have come off the presses in the past few years, but I’ve managed to winnow my list down to these three winners to share:

Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley

Knisley, whose mother is a chef, relates her life story as it pertains to food in this very enjoyable graphic novel. Incorporating great recipes into her vignettes, Kinsley dispenses her culinary know-how in an easily digestible (sorry, pun alert!) form. I am generally not into graphic novels, but I totally loved this one.

John Saturnall’s Feast by Lawrence Norfolk

Literary fiction meets fancy food in this historical novel set in the seventeenth century. When his mother dies after being run out of town by proselytizing witch hunters, John is sent to work in the kitchens of a nearby estate. He soon becomes an indispensable cook and woos the underfed daughter of the house with his creations. A novel about sin and love and hunger.

Consider the Fork: How Technology Transforms the Way We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson

Did you know that people didn’t have overbites when they just used their hands and a trusty knife to eat? I didn’t. And I didn’t know a whole lot of the other facts scholar Bee Wilson presents in her highly entertaining and engaging account of cooking technology through the ages.





For these and other culinary reads, stop on by the library!

Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol

Anya is a sullen teen who hates school and isn't very nice to her family and friends. She's sort of a portrait of me at sixteen, except with more cigarettes. And oh yes, a ghost.

Anya acquires the ghost when she accidentally falls down a well, where a girl named Emily died ninety years ago.

Emily the ghost seems lonely. She hangs around with Anya, asking questions and demanding attention, and soon she proves her worth by providing Anya with a lot of nice things. She's a friend and a supporter, and she helps Anya cheat on tests, and keeps watch while Anya sneaks cigarettes, and helps her manipulate a cute boy. Actually, you start to wonder if maybe Emily's not a very good influence on Anya after all.

Anya's Ghost provides a funny and real glimpse of high school life, with expressive drawings and a sweet, surprising ending. Neil Gaiman calls it a masterpiece, and I think it's pretty wonderful, too.

Two ways of telling a story

In 1931, the brilliant German filmmaker Fritz Lang released M, a movie about a child-killer, and about those - the police and the city's criminals - who hunt him down. Set in the shadowy streets of Berlin, the film presents shades of moral ambiguity: a killer who cannot help himself, judged by those who are no better than he. The best thing about it is the way it looks, the gray alleys and black shadows, the smoke-filled rooms. It's one of the most visually haunting movies I've ever seen.

Would a print version of the same story be as effective as the movie? I would have said no, until I saw the graphic novel version by the extraordinarily talented illustrator Jon J. Muth. This graphic novel, like the film, is almost wordless; its striking images capture the film's gritty intensity.


So is the novel as good as the movie? Why not check them both out and compare for yourself?