A check-outable feast

There's just a month to go before the next Key West Literary Seminar and just in time, we at the Key West Library have received a shipment of books by writers appearing at the Seminar. This year's subject is The Hungry Muse: Food in Literature and the offerings are indeed appetizing. (It's not, by the way, the much-feared "cookbook seminar" and it's not just straight-up food writing, either -- our panelists will include novelists and poets and historians as well as some of the finest food writers in the nation.) We already had a bunch of books by these writers in our collection but the new ones are most welcome, including Eating by Jason Epstein, Ratio by Michael Ruhlman and At Home with Madhur Jaffrey. Jaffrey, by the way, will be at both sessions, as will be Calvin Trillin, Roy Blount, Jr., and Billy Collins. If you're interested in attending, there are still spots left in the second session -- and if you're in Key West, don't forget the Sunday afternoon panels and readings are always free and open to the public. Bon appetit!

And if you're wondering what's up with the slide show below -- well, I'm not much of a cook, to be honest. Given a couple free hours I will invariably spend my time reading instead of shopping for and preparing food. But these are some recent culinary creations of mine worth note -- the Swedish family recipe cake I made for our Stieg Larsson Book Bites session at the library, two pies I made for Thanksgiving (the inevitable pumpkin and the always popular apple-cranberry-raisin from the Fanny Farmer Cookbook), a batch of liebkuchen from another family recipe (and my favorite Christmas treat of the many, many kinds of cookies my grandmother used to make every year) and a cocktail, a Pisco guava punch prepared at the long-distance direction of Embury Cocktails impresario and New York Times-certified cocktail expert Jason Rowan. And all of them turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. Recipes available on request.

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Important anniversaries

This weekend is Labor Day. In the Florida Keys that usually means some commemoration of one of the strongest hurricanes to hit the continental United States -- the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. It swept across Islamorada in the Upper Keys and killed an estimated 408 people, many of them World War I vets working on a New Deal relief program to build a highway in the Keys. It also destroyed the Overseas Railway, Henry Flagler's final achievement, which connected the Keys to the mainland for good. The railroad was not financially worth rebuilding; much of the roadbed and most of the magnificent bridges were converted for use in the Overseas Highway. You can see a lot of them today, alongside the replacement bridges that were built in the 1970s and '80s. Why is this a topic for a book blog? For one thing, I have written many times about the railroad and interviewed survivors, for an oral history series I wrote for the Miami Herald in the 1990s and an oral history compilation I put together for the Herald's late, lamented Tropic Magazine. But more currently, my current employer the Monroe County Public Library has just posted more than 700 images related to the railroad to our Flickr account, and these images (including the one above) are something to see. Historian Tom Hambright wrote a blog post about the images and the railroad for our website [link to be provided once the library website recovers from whatever database affliction it is currently suffering].

The other anniversary is upcoming -- in 2012 we in the Keys will be marking the centennial of the railway reaching Key West -- on Jan. 22, 1912, Henry Flagler himself rode the "first train" onto the island and was greeted by, essentially, the entire town population. The Key West Art & Historical Society is already planning a major exhibit, which I can't wait to see, and I'm sure many other events will spring up. If you're looking for a readable account of the railroad's construction and destruction, I recommend Les Standiford's Last Train to Paradise. There are a bunch of others that focus solely on the hurricane; I like this one because it captures both ends of this epic, tragic story that changed and defined the Keys.

Too close for comfort

I have an issue with books that touch on subjects close to me, fiction or nonfiction. Maybe it's two issues:

1) They get it wrong, which is irritating on all kinds of levels -- it's kind of like when some out-of-town journalist comes in and writes about your place and those little details that aren't quite right drive you nuts.

Or, 2) They get it right, which is even more uncomfortable and reminds me of my own weaknesses, or things I should have done, or places and people I miss. For these reasons I haven't been able to bring myself to read The Last Resort, Alison Lurie's novel set in Key West. That one will be resolved soon; the novel is the next choice for the library's One Island, One Book program so I will read it, dammit. I also have not read Home Town by Tracy Kidder, which is about Northampton, Massachusetts. Northampton is not, strictly speaking, my hometown although I was born there, but I grew up close by, knew it my whole life and worked there as a newspaper reporter one summer. I had my feet measured at Ted's Boot Shop. I remember when the main street had a hardware store, not a bunch of ice cream shops and trendy boutiques. I know that if you're really from there and not some Smithie/yuppie transplant you call it Hamp, not Noho. Kidder has lived in the region for many years and is a wonderful reporter and writer; there's no reason to fear he's going to get it wrong. I'm more afraid with this one that it will make me question my choice to live my adult life so far from home. This is not the most rational of approaches.

So a couple weeks ago when I started reading reviews of a novel called One Day by David Nicholls I felt a combination of anticipation and dread. Anticipation because this novel was about two people almost exactly my age (they graduate from college in 1988; I graduated in 1989), following their lives connecting and not connecting for the next 20 years. It had a strong endorsement from Nick Hornby, so I knew it was likely to be a highly readable, probably funny novel. But I also knew that even though it is British it might strike uncomfortably close to home.

I ordered it from the library anyway -- there just haven't been that many novels that are so exactly on point for Generation X -- and on just about all counts, I was right. It is highly readable, it is in many ways quite funny and it strikes way too close to home, especially the female lead, Emma Morley. She's smart, an aspiring writer who wants to do good in the world but is insecure about competing with self-promoting media types. The male lead, Dexter Mayhew, did not remind me of me but he reminded me of a few guys I have known and been fond of, even when they behaved badly. He's goodlooking, confident and comes from money, all of which means while Emma is toiling away in a crappy Mexican restaurant then starts teaching at a comprehensive (public in the American sense) high school, Dexter is traveling in Italy and India, then effortlessly launching into a career as a TV host of silly pop culture shows. It doesn't mean he's any happier than Emma, just more commercially successful. And to a few people -- like Emma -- Dexter reveals his own insecurities and his own capacity for kindness and generosity. Even while he is also behaving very very badly.

BIG SPOILER ALERT HERE -- I'M ABOUT TO START TALKING ABOUT KEY PLOT POINTS SO IF YOU WANT TO READ THIS BOOK AND DON'T WANT TO KNOW, STOP READING RIGHT NOW!!!!

Still here? So ... when I finished this novel, I felt upset. Really upset. I was curious about whether Dexter and Emma would ever get together -- they do, of course -- but I suspected Nicholls was going to pull the rug out from under me in some fashion. I was not expecting him to go and kill off one of the protagonists. Naturally, it was Emma, the one I really identified with. So I was upset that Emma died, I was upset that poor Dexter, after finally getting his act together and recognizing the good woman in front of him, was griefstricken ... and I was upset with myself for being so upset about people who are, after all, fictional characters.

What is up with that? I tell myself these people don't really exist, never existed -- but its gets to me far more than it should. Which is I suppose why we read fiction -- to enter another world, find out about other people, get a view into other people's lives and get into their heads the way you never could with a real person. When bad things happen to fictional characters, provided they are fictional characters I have emotionally invested in, it's far more upsetting than when I'm reading nonfiction where plenty of bad things happen to people. This doesn't really make sense -- after all, in nonfiction you're talking about real people who presumably really went through the terrible experience you're reading about. But with fiction you have collaborated in bringing the characters to life for the period of time you're reading about them. That's my excuse anyway. A book with a similar emotional residue was Maggie O'Farrell's "After You'd Gone" -- although that one was less of a shock because of, you know, the title. It's all enough to make me want to go running back to books where I know damned well the ending will be happy -- or possibly nonfiction, where I'm unlikely to get quite as caught up in the interior lives of others.

I'm giving One Day 4 stars -- it's very well done and I didn't mind the premise, in which Nicholls checks in on the characters on a single day each year. Some people have called it gimmicky, but it seemed like a fine structure and worked for a novel covering a 20-year timespan. The day is July 15, St. Swithin's Day, which has no significance for me but apparently the Billy Bragg song was a big inspiration. Give it a read, especially if you're a Gen Xer who's been hankering for some fiction that reflects the lives of our generation.

When Ernie met Martha

[gallery columns="2"] Who knew Tony Soprano had a Hemingway thing? Well, who doesn't? It turns out James Gandolfini has long wanted to bring the story of Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn's relationship to the screen -- and will finally do so, with Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman in the leading roles.

This is of interest to us around here because Key West is where the pair met -- Hemingway was living here with his second wife, Pauline, and Gellhorn was an ambitious young journalist hanging out with her family. The place they met was Hemingway's favorite hangout Sloppy Joe's -- then on Greene Street in the building now known as Captain Tony's. The pair married but the union was the shortest of Hemingway's marriages -- possibly because Gellhorn was the most independent and professionally successful of his wives.

So far the reaction I've heard around here is: Clive Owen as Hemingway? Really? And Clive Owen? If he comes to town, I'm planning to occupy your guest room! Either way we'll keep you posted. But be aware, the guestroom is booked.

I think it might be cool to look at this time in Hemingway's life because it's the period we don't often hear about him -- between the young man in Paris of the 1920s and the iconic Papa of the famous Karsch portrait. Maybe it will encourage more Young Hemingways to enter the annual lookalike contest at Sloppy Joe's.

Another question: Will Kidman pull out her fake nose from The Hours?