Five Books For When You Need A Bit Of Magic, fun stuff edition
A bonus recommendation, a links roundup, our monthly music, a poem, and more
Welcome to this month’s Fun Stuff Edition of Five Books For, a newsletter for people who love great stories.
Over at Global Comment, in this month’s Great Adaptations I look at Chocolat by Joanne Harris, and the movie of the same name starring Juliette Binoche. Harris is one of my favourite authors and this book is such a delight, I hope you’ll feel inspired to read it if you haven’t already.
As always for this edition of the newsletter, we have a bonus recommendation, a poem, a playlist and some reading links, all in keeping with this month’s theme of magical realism. I hope you’ll find something here to surprise and delight you. If you aren’t already subscribed, then you can sign up here to receive these newsletters directly in your inbox. The newsletter is free but if you would like to support it with a paid subscription that option is also available. If you don’t have the funds for a paid subscription at the moment but would like to leave a tip instead, the button below will allow you to send an amount of your choosing as a one-off payment.
Let’s dive in!
Bonus recommendation: Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
“She had hoped that in this house full of words, there would be some place where she could hide from the truth.”
So what’s it about? Set in early 20th century Mexico, Like Water For Chocolate is the story of Tita, the youngest daughter of a traditional Mexican family, and her forbidden love for a man called Pedro. In Tita’s family, the youngest daughter never married and instead stays single to look after her elderly parents until their death. This means that Tita and Pedro cannot marry, despite their love for each other, as Tita is expected to care for her mother instead. To stay close to Tita, Pedro marries her sister Rosaura, leaving Tita to express herself through the meals she cooks for the family, with her emotions influencing the food in magical ways so that anyone who eats her cooking finds themselves affected. But will Tita and Pedro ever be able to express their love for each other, or will they be stuck orbiting around each other, unable to ever truly connect?
What’s great about it? One of the loveliest things about the book is its structure, where each chapter begins like a cookbook with a recipe that is relevant to the chapter ahead. Tita and Pedro are emotionally nuanced and the books explores its themes of love and passion, family duty and repression through beautiful prose which really brings the magic into the everyday through Tita’s cooking. The writing is vivid and alive with lots of sensory details and such a pleasure to read. There’s a sense of wonder throughout the story which captivates and makes you want to wallow in the book for as long as possible even as you want to read on to find out what happens. It also provides a fascinating glimpse into Mexican culture and especially food and the significance of family relationships, as well as questioning women’s roles in the society of the time.
Give it a try if: you love food and eating; you love complicated move stories with lots of nuance; you love stories with a bit of magic; you love books which explore family relationships as well as romantic ones; you love books set in Mexico; you love beautiful prose and gorgeous sensory descriptions.
This month’s music
I had to give a lot of thought as to what music might best work with this month’s theme of magical realism before I realised that Bjork was the perfect choice. Surreal, ethereal and intensely creative, this is the perfect thing to listen to while you’re reading any of this month’s books or if you just feel like a bit of listening magic. Here is the link to her greatest hits album.
There’s also a soundtrack for the HBO adaptation of Like Water For Chocolate, with the soundtrack available here:
This month’s poem
Ode To Tomatoes
By Pablo Neruda
The street filled with tomatoes, midday, summer, light is halved like a tomato, its juice runs through the streets. In December, unabated, the tomato invades the kitchen, it enters at lunchtime, takes its ease on countertops, among glasses, butter dishes, blue saltcellars. It sheds its own light, benign majesty. Unfortunately, we must murder it: the knife sinks into living flesh, red viscera, a cool sun, profound, inexhaustible, populates the salads of Chile, happily, it is wed to the clear onion, and to celebrate the union we pour oil, essential child of the olive, onto its halved hemispheres, pepper adds its fragrance, salt, its magnetism; it is the wedding of the day, parsley hoists its flag, potatoes bubble vigorously, the aroma of the roast knocks at the door, it's time! come on! and, on the table, at the midpoint of summer, the tomato, star of earth, recurrent and fertile star, displays its convolutions, its canals, its remarkable amplitude and abundance, no pit, no husk, no leaves or thorns, the tomato offers its gift of fiery color and cool completeness.
From the collection Elemental Odes.
This month’s reading links
A lovely interview with Laura Esquivel on Like Water For Chocolate. I would have loved to see the ballet. (AARP, free)
Ben Okri talks about writing The Famished Road and on the books that have shaped his life. (The Booker Prizes, The Guardian, free)
A deep dive into magical realism as a genre. (The Novelry, free)
Sarah Dornseiff talks about why she loves writing magical realism. (Farrago Magazine, free)
Natasha Pulley talks about The Bedlam Stacks. (Chicago Review Of Books, free)
Fernando Sdrigotti on the “choke chain” of magical realism as a label applied to Latin American writers. (LA Review Of Books, free)
For those of you who are more in the mood for listening this month:
Rather than sharing a list of individual podcasts, this month I’ve compiled them into a playlist to make access easier. Below you’ll find two great podcasts on One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.
Thanks for reading!
As always, I’m grateful to each and every one of you who subscribes, free or paid. I know we all have such crowded inboxes these days and I feel so lucky to be sharing the joys of reading with you like this. I would love to hear from you - what have you been reading recently? Have you read or watched any of the books I’ve covered this month? Let me know in the comments. I’ll be back next month with a new theme and more reading joy.
Happy reading!
Kate
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