In the time I’ve been writing this blog (more than ten years now), I’ve only included one post about children’s literature: Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales with a Yuletide recipe for fudge. Continue reading “Learning to cook”
Category: 20th century literature
Counting calories in literature
However delicious food is, it comes with one significant downside for some of us, namely weight gain. The anxiety about eating – and putting on weight – is one usually (though not exclusively) experienced more by women than men, as a result of the societal pressures placed on women to maintain a particular body weight and shape. Continue reading “Counting calories in literature”
Food as distraction
Just under two years ago I wrote a post about Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novel The Light Years, the first novel in a series of five – The Cazalet Chronicles – a family saga spanning three generations and unfolding between 1937 and 1950. The Light Years covers the build-up to the Second World War and – in culinary terms – is a masterclass in the writer’s use of food to locate a story in a particular moment in time. Continue reading “Food as distraction”
Racial passing
As well as exposing the continued ill-treatment and oppression of people from black and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, the Black Lives Matter movement also served as a reminder – to me and countless others – of the huge range of black-authored literature which is often overlooked by white readers and critics alike. Various websites and booksellers published lists of must-read BAME authors, and I was certainly glad to be pointed in the direction of a number of great books (both non-fiction and fiction), some of which I’d not even heard of, let alone read. Continue reading “Racial passing”