Let's Get Reading: Newsletter 76

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” – Jane Austen

I’m off to Naples this week for a long-planned visit and I immediately wondered what relevant local books I might bring with me. Any suggestions? (Please post in the comments). I have packed a book containing a short collection of letters by Pliny The Younger about the eruption of Vesuvius in 8 million BC (erm… it turns out it was in 79 AD, I was a bit off), which he witnessed and which of course resulted in the total destruction – & weird preservation – of Pompeii.

I always try to read local (or locally themed) literature wherever I travel, it just gives any trip a much greater flavour. The best combo I’ve ever achieved to date was reading The Magus, by John Fowles, on the Greek island of Spetses which is where the novel was written and where it is set under a different name. It remains to this day my favourite novel, mostly because I basically lived in it for a blissful week, sans the weird mindf**kery of a Nazi collaborator billionaire.

Favourite Recipes of Famous Women: Bacon ‘n’ Eggs à la Zelda

Anyone who knows anything about Zelda Fitzgerald knows that she was not the kind of woman to lie down and stay quiet in the face of sexism (or at any party, for that matter). I love this somewhat tongue-in-cheek response when in 1925 a Texan writer/girl-about-town by the name of Florence Stratton asked her to contribute to a book titled ‘Favourite Recipes of Famous Women’.