Writer's Rooms

My last post got me interested in writer's workspaces, and luckily one of my favorite websites has a whole collection of such images (originally published from 2007 to 2009). A few of my favorites:

Jane Austen

Located at Chawton Cottage, Jane wrote at this small desk next to the front door. From this 12-sided walnut table she wrote, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion.

Charles Darwin

This is the study, located in a village in Kent, where Darwin wrote his On the Origin of Species. It was also here he researched and wrote 10 books. Apparently only the most select guests were ever allowed inside.

Virginia Woolf

This room was created for Woolf's writing in a wooden toolshed next to her house in Sussex. Though it had beautiful large windows she often had to retreat indoors during the winter because it was so cold. Other times she wrote under a chestnut tree on a board on her lap. She wrote parts of all her major novels here, and it was here that she wrote a farewell letter to her husband Leonard on Friday March 28, 1941 before drowning herself in the River Ouse.

Sarah Waters

Waters, one of my 2010 favorites, admits she wants to create an amazing workspace, but all she really needs to write "is a flat surface, a computer, and a closable door." She says the world map is to improve her sense of geography and that she also has a map of London, which is used while writing The Night Watch.

Antonia Fraser

Fraser, the writer of Marie Antoinette: The Journey, The Wives of Henry VIII, and one of my favorites, The Warrior Queens, works in this study on the fourth floor of her house. It used to be her children's nursery, but once they moved out she installed the bookcases. She decorated the room like "an old-fashioned country house bedroom, blue bows, chintz and roses...It's all rather untidy, but that gives me a sense of security. I want my mind to be the only orderly thing in the room."

Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It

By Gary Taubes

“Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.”

~Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 1825

Gary Taubes' second book on health and obesity centers around an intriguing idea that everything we have been told about why people get fat is wrong. Taubes states, “We get fat, our physicians tell us, because we eat too much and/or move too little, and so the cure is to do the opposite.” This mentality is known as "calories-in/calories-out" and essentially says the reason we get fat is when we take in more energy than we expend. Taubes argues convincingly that this thinking is just plain wrong and has helped result in the massive obesity epidemic we are currently facing.

He points out that up until the 1960s most obesity researchers did not define obesity as a disorder of energy balance or eating too much, they believed obesity is fundamentally a disorder of excess fat accumulation. Taubes outlines what regulates fat accumulation. 

Essentially, when insulin levels are elevated, we accumulate fat in our fat tissue; when these levels fall, we liberate fat from the fat tissue and burn it for fuel. Secondly, our insulin levels are effectively determined by the carbohydrates we eat. The more carbs we eat, the easier to digest they are and the sweeter they are, the more insulin we will ultimately secrete. Therefore, carbohydrate is driving insulin is driving fat. We get fat because the carbohydrates in our diet make us fat. The science of fat tells us that obesity is ultimately the result of a hormonal imbalance, not a caloric one.

Taubes points out that the official embrace of low-fat, high carbohydrate diets coincided “not with a national decline in weight and heart disease but with epidemics of both obesity and diabetes…” 

Taubes' plan to lose weight is pretty drastic for the average person. He recommends cutting out all carbs and sugars and just eating lots of eggs, beef, poultry, fish and certain vegetables low in starches. He also points out that our genes were shaped by the two and a half million years during which our ancestors lived as hunters and gatherers prior to the introduction of agriculture twelve thousand years ago. The popular "paleo-diet" is another example of this type of thinking. 

Why We Get Fat is a fascinating book, and is considered to be more user friendly than his first book, the heavily researched, highly scientific, Good Calories, Bad Calories. It offers lots of information as to why we crave sweets and carbohydrates (sugar appears to be addictive in the brain in the same way in which cocaine, nicotine, and heroine are). The book was an engrossing read, and I finished it within a few days. 

If you're interested, check out Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories as well as his blog for more information on low-carb eating. 

The Pioneer Woman Cooks

By Ree Drummond

I realized that I've only posted one food related book on this blog, and it really was more of an autobiography with a few recipes thrown in for good measure. I'm not huge on cookbooks, but for the past year this cookbook has become a staple in my life.  I discovered it by reading the blog of the author, Ree Drummond, the wife of a cattle rancher in Oklahoma. She posts daily musings on the reality of raising four kids on a cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere and she also manages to find time to post beautifully photographed recipes which she shares on the Pioneer Woman Cooks! section of her blog.

Her cookbook came out over a year ago, but it continues to be one of my favorites because the food tends to be simple and delicious (she loves butter and sugar). She also includes step by step instructions (with photos!) which are a huge help for a non-foodie who doesn't cook everyday. It also includes tons of photos of her family and life on the ranch where she lives and works.

In addition to her cookbook, I recommend checking her blog's cooking section. She updates it frequently, and I have found some amazing recipes there as well.

Step-by-step instructions with photos!

Top Selling 100 Books of All Time

I've recently become a fan of The Guardian, a British news website. Specifically I love their section on books, which recently published a list of the top selling 100 books of all time (click here). While I don't tend to put a lot of weight on lists claiming to rank the 'best' books of all time, I do enjoy lists like this because they show what people are actually reading. 


Of the 100 books on the list I've read 29. All of the Harry Potter books are listed (one of my favorite series of books) as well as the Twilight series (one of my most hated series of books, and yes, I've read them all). Below are some of the books listed which I found interesting: 

#54 The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
One of my favorite children's books. 

#61 The House at Riverton by Kate Morton
Fantastic novel by a young Australian novelist. I'm hoping to start her most recent book, The Distant Hours, soon. 

#66 & #96 The Subtle Knife & The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
Part of His Dark Materials Trilogy (the title taken from John Milton's epic religious poem Paradise Lost) Pullman's spellbinding books have been described as the anti-C.S. Lewis for children. The books are fantastic and a great read. Skip the horrible movie adaptation of The Golden Compass with Nicole Kidman. 

#86 The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Not shocking that this book would find it's way onto the list, however, I consider it to be one of the most overrated books of the 20th Century. 

The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

My most recent Sarah Waters novel, The Little Stranger, proves once again Waters possesses a rare gift for historical fiction as well as the ability to write an unnerving ghost story.

However, Waters describes the book not as a ghost story, but as a haunted house story, and it is the decaying grand manor house Hundreds Hall that looms over the novel and its protagonists. Whatever haunts Hundreds Hall is far stranger and more menacing than any ghost. Instead of setting the story during the Victorian era as she did for Fingersmith (my review here) and Tipping the Velvet, she chooses the early 1940s after WWII when England was undergoing significant social and financial changes. (Her excellent novel The Night Watch takes place during the same time period.) 

Our highly unreliable narrator is the well-intentioned, lonely doctor Farady, who first visited Hundreds Hall at the age of 10 in 1919. His mother worked as a parlor maid at the time and the Hall continues to fascinate him. Returning 30 years later to treat a servant he is shocked to find the once grand house falling apart, and its owners, the Ayers, struggling to hold onto a quickly dying way of life.

Dr. Faraday soon becomes involved (and slightly obsessed) with the various members of the Ayers family: the stately widow Mrs. Ayers; Roderick, her 24-year-old son wounded during the war; and her older unmarried daughter Caroline. As his relationship with the family deepens, sinister occurrences begin to plague the house and its inhabitants. 

Waters expertly plays on the issue of class as she did in her previous books. England is quickly changing, old families like the Ayers are forced to sell off their vast estates (often to newly built council houses) in order to survive. People from working class families, like Dr. Faraday, are gaining access to schools and money, creating a new middle class. One can't help but get the sense that the Ayers are being preyed upon not only by the mysterious happenings of their home, but by the swiftly changing social mores which seem to find them and their way of life archaic. 


The Little Stranger will draw you in while slowly upping the sense of unease, leading to the tragic conclusion. The perfect book for a cold winter's night. 

Snow!

The Snow Storm

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

No hawk hangs over in this air:

The urgent snow is everywhere.

The wing adroiter than a sail

Must lean away from such a gale,

Abandoning its straight intent,

Or else expose tough ligament

And tender flesh to what before

Meant dampened feathers, nothing more.

Forceless upon our backs there fall

Infrequent flakes hexagonal,

Devised in many a curious style

To charm our safety for a while,

Where close to earth like mice we go

Under the horizontal snow.

Tinker, Tailor Movie!

No, I'm not talking about the 1979 television mini-series. 


Tomas Alfredson, the Swedish director of Let the Right One In, is currently filming a new movie version of Le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy. And if IMDB is to be believed, Le Carré is one of the writers. 


Normally I don't get excited when I hear one of my favorite books is being made into a movie, but I can't wait to see how this turns out.


It also helps having an amazing cast: 

Gary Oldman as George Smiley

Colin Firth

Tom Hardy as Ricki Tarr

Mark Strong as Jim Prideaux