Snow Flowers

I went to Eden Center (a Vietnamese shopping center in Falls Church, VA) with my friends the famous dcfood bloggers .They wanted to pick up some staples at the Vietnamese grocery store, and I wanted to find exotic crackers. I picked up two kinds.

Katashima brand “Snow Flower” crackers: These are kind of like rice cakes, but they are made with tapioca starch. Actually, you know what they’re really like? Have you ever had shrimp crackers? They have the consistency of shrimp crackers, but they taste faintly of coconut instead of shrimp. They have a sprinkle of sugar frosting on the top--I think that’s why they’re called snow flowers. Now that I’ve totally confused you with that description, I’ll add that I like them. They are just a tiny bit sweet, so they’re good if you want a sweet snack without too many calories. Actually, I have no idea how many calories they have, but they seem to be made mostly of air, so how many calories can they have?

Green Onion Thin Cracker: These are made by Silang. They are, as the name implies, thin crackers. They taste mostly like oil with a chemical aftertaste. So, not very tasty.

I went to a baby shower yesterday, and I was telling the father-to-be about my blog. He had the brilliant idea that I should match crackers to books--what kind of cracker would I associate with a particular book? And vice versa. So, here goes. The snowflower crackers are like Bridget Jones Diary--light, fun, but not particularly nutritious. The green onion crackers are like The Perks of Being a Wallflower--should have been good, but left a bad taste in my mouth.

Shorter books, more posts

I told my friend Yia about my blog, and said that I was having trouble writing regularly. I would like to post an entry every day, but it’s not every day that I finish a book or try a new kind of cracker. I mean, I could finish a book a day, but then I wouldn’t have time to work, and I could eat a new kind of cracker every day, but then I would have half-empty cracker boxes filling my kitchen. I guess I should have thought of this wrinkle before I started my blog.
Anyway, she suggested I read shorter books, and she loaned me Griffin and Sabine (the first book in the Griffin and Sabine trilogy by Nick Bantock) to help me out with this goal. I finished it in the car on the way home (don’t worry, I wasn’t driving). Now I desperately want to read the rest of the series! Help! I did read the trilogy before, when the books first came out (in the early nineties), but I was too cheap to buy them, so I just read them in the bookstore. I felt guilty about it, especially when I was taking the letters out of their little envelopes so I could read them. But I did it anyway. I just wanted to find out what happened! I have this problem sometimes, when I am reading a book that has some element of mystery or suspense to it (so, practically every book ever written), that I start reading more and more quickly as I get near the end because I just want to find out what happens. Unfortunately, that often means that I start missing important details and then I don’t understand the ending when I get to it. That’s what happened to me last time I read the Griffin and Sabine trilogy, but this time I’m going to do it right. So, right now I know that Griffin is a lonely artist and he starts receiving postcards from the mysterious Sabine, who lives on an exotic island and (supposedly) see visions of Griffon’s paintings (drawings?) as he creates them. Griffon starts to think that maybe he is going insane, and at the end of the book he has disappeared. I know that a griffon is a mythical creature with the head of an eagle and the body of a lion. Sabine uses a lot of bird imagery in her art, so I wonder if she is supposed to be a part of or a projection of some part of Griffon? One thing I notice on this reading is that Griffin's parents died early in his life (when he was 15, I think), but he wasn't sad about it at the time or later. That seems very strange. And perhaps significant?

Books: I get on these Jane Austen kicks and I get the urge to read every Austen novel for the 12th time. The catalyst for the latest rampage is the PBS Masterpiece series of adaptations of Jane Austen novels that is currently running on Sunday nights. After watching the adaptations of Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, and Mansfield Park, I decided to read Sense and Sensibility again before watching the adaptation. I finished it on Friday, and discovered that Turner Movie Classics was showing the Emma Thompson adaptation of the novel on Sunday. I haven’t seen that version since it came out in theatres when I was in college. I had just finished a Jane Austen seminar, where we reading everything she wrote, including her juvenalia, which is hilarious, and her unfinished novels. Anyway, I remember watching the film at a theatre in Minneapolis, tears streaming down my face the whole time. It was awesome.

Crackers: It turns out that I don’t want to write about crackers today. Oops. I’ll just tell you about another book! A friend of mine lent me The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. It takes place in Germany during World War II, and is narrated by Death. It’s a long book (about 550 pages), and the friend who lent it to me is a bit impatient with long books. She said she hadn’t finished it, but she had a pretty good idea of what happened at the end. The main character is Liesel Meminger. She lives on Himmel Street (Heaven Street) in Molching, Germany, and her family (actually, her foster family) takes in a Jewish refugee, Max, who hides in their basement. The book is darkly humorous, and less painful to read than I had expected. The relationships between Liesel and her foster mother and father are funny and touching. It did drag a little--I’m not sure it needed to be 550 pages. And at the end--SPOILER (highlight the following text to see the spoiler)--everyone on Himmel Street, including Liesel’s parents, neighbors, friends, and soulmate, is killed by a bomb. Only Liesel, who had been in the basement writing, and Max, in Aushweitz, survive. It's a sad book, but definitely worth reading.