Just in time, before we say goodbye to 2023, I didn’t want the year to leave without posting the annual recommended book list that has become a favorite here on the blog. This year’s selections center around nature, literary figures, artists, the art of collecting, and the curation of home in all the ways that make it personal and unique.
As is the way every year, these books were randomly discovered while doing research for other projects. They popped up while uncovering origin stories for shop heirlooms, researching story snippets for the blog, or understanding context surrounding a vintage recipe.
Serendipitous in their arrival on the bookshelf, yet ironically all connected via some common themes, these books were new to me this year but not newly published this year. The oldest one in this batch hails from 1979 and the newest one debuted just last year in 2022. All deal with historical subjects in one way or the other, but each one brings a very unique and fresh perspective to its subject matter. They take us on adventures from the wild beaches of coastal Massachusetts to an out-of-the-way antique shop in Mexico. We are introduced to a famous performer’s real-life home in California and a fictional version of a real-life literary figure’s farm in Georgia. There feature one Ernest, two Barbaras and three oranges. There’s eccentricity and domesticity, color and craft. But above all there is captivating storytelling right from the first page. Let’s look…
Six Walks by Ben Shattuck (2022)
What is it like to walk in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau? Do you see the same trees, smell the same air, touch the same ground, feel the same breeze? Henry lived and wrote and walked around the woods in Massachusetts over one hundred years ago and the impact it made on his life made his life. During the pandemic, trying to process a breakup and a general malaise that hovered over his thoughts like unsettled storm clouds, Ben Shattuck rediscovered Henry’s journals. Henry’s words so inspired Ben that he set out to see the world through “someone else’s eyes for a change,” hoping that he might gain some new perspective to help him past his grey days.
Following six of the same walks that Thoreau once took in the early to mid-1800s, Ben was searching for a new perspective, and a new understanding on life, love, and his place in it. For Henry, the walks were about looking at nature, about describing his surroundings, and about drawing comparisons between the natural world, human evolution and the emotional and spiritual impact on both. For Ben, walking was a form of therapy to help him move past some darker days, all the while submerging himself in the comfort of a favorite writer’s words and viewpoint. What results is this incredibly gorgeous book about nature writing, about escapism, about processing emotional trauma, and about seeing the real beauty that surrounds us every day.
On the walks, Ben meets an interesting array of characters. He goes in search of his ancestral homeplace, canoes down rivers that feel wild and untamed, and walks down long stretches of the beach until his feet are bloody and blistered. Funny, tender, thought-provoking and beautifully written, Ben’s perspective and lovely turns of phrase are just as illuminating as Henry’s. Part travel memoir, part therapy session, part sketchbook, Six Walks is one of the most beautifully written books about journeying that I’ve read in a really long time.
Finding Frida Kahlo – Barbara Levine (2009)
Written in both English and Spanish, this book is a fascinating portrait on the act of collecting and the art of curating. Finding Frida Kahlo is the true story of discovering a set of trunks belonging to Frida Kahlo in a Mexican antique shop. The woman who discovered these historical heirlooms was Barbara Levine, a former exhibitions director at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art who had recently moved to Mexico and was trying to assimilate into the culture. A trip with a few friends to an out-of-the-way antique shop led to the discovery of several trunks belonging to Frida Kahlo each filled with all sorts of her treasures – clothing, paintings, recipes, letters and personal heirlooms.
This discovery started a storytelling chain that is movie-like in scope and plot, unfolding all the unusual circumstances that led to the ultimate understanding of how trunks from one of the world’s most revered, most studied, and most collected artists could possibly have wound up quietly sitting on the floor of an antique shop practically unnoticed. Throughout the story, there is Barbara’s commentary on the processing of the collection, interviews with the antique shop owners, the detailed history of communication with the collector who held the suitcases originally, and consultations with the Fridos (the last remaining group of artists and writers who personally knew Frida Kahlo). I won’t share any more of those details here so as not to spoil the pacing of the story, but only to say you’ll be engaged right from Barbara’s first sentence… “I have long been a collector.”
Non-spoilers aside, Barbara tackles her discovery with a museum curator’s mindset, methodically documenting and photographing each item in each trunk with an unbiased approach. Frida’s objects come to life on the page. And in turn, Frida herself comes to life. You can see her handwriting, her diary entries, her sketches. You can see her clothing, her scrapbooks, her trinkets. You can see the weathered wood of the trunks in exquisite detail. There’s fabric and masks and stuffed taxidermy. There are recipes for Chicken Fried with Garlic in Peanut Sauce and another one for Spicy Salsa (more to come on that front in 2024). There are graphic, grotesque medical drawings of bloody amputations and beautiful brightly-colored paintings of birds and flowers. All along, these heirlooms are accompanied by Frida’s handwriting and you come to understand how all these objects formed her heart and her art.
The Mansions of Long Island’s Gold Coast – Monica Randall (1979)
Built by wealthy business tycoons as getaway “cottages’, trophy houses, entertainment venues, weekend retreats and flamboyant examples of architectural artistry, the opulent mansions that dotted the Gold Coast of Long Island reveal fascinating insights into American culture, wealth and folly.
Beautiful and haunting, The Mansions of Long Island’s Gold Coast spotlight incredible stories about the architects, owners, domestic staff, and modern mid-century families who all spent time in these grand estates. A book of architectural history could easily become boring if you stick with just the well-known, well-documented facts but Monica’s meticulously researched biographies, interviews with local residents, and first-hand experiences growing up in the area have brought forth only the most interesting details of each property.
Told in brief snippets, there are romantic love stories, untimely deaths, bizarre occurrences, ghostly apparitions, lavish design details and tragic degradation. House after house exposes the highs and lows of the ultra-wealthy during the 19th and 20th centuries and all that they celebrated but also all that they destroyed. Some of these estates still stand today, carefully maintained as examples of grand domesticity but many featured in this book were torn down, broken down, burned down, or fell down due to neglect and the lack of capital to maintain them. Monica captures each one in the state that she finds it in the 1970s, focusing on what they once were and what they now have become.
A Good Hard Look – Ann Napolitano (2011)
A fiction novel based in the small town of Milledgeville, Georgia, A Good Hard Look centers around a fictional recounting of the real-life writer Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) . It opens with a wedding in town of a doted daughter of the community, Cookie, and her fiance, Melvin – a wealthy New Yorker who is not used to Southern culture or the tight-knit atmosphere of small-town life. Not unlike Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, we see this town, these characters and Flannery herself through Melvin’s eyes who fully wants to commit to his new wife and his new life, but finds the peculiarities and the general mood of the town unsettling.
The plot twists and turns, so I won’t say more so as not to spoil the story, but one of the things I loved most was all the detail about Flannery’s peacocks. As central characters in the book, you learn so much about these big, beautiful, boisterous, unruly birds who played not only a big part in the story but a big part in Flannery’s life too.
This book reminded me a little bit of Midnight In The Garden of Good and Evil mixed with the storytelling styles of William Faulkner, John Updike, and Anne Tyler. Once finished, it also prompted its own further research into Flannery’s life. Especially regarding the peacocks.
My Passion for Design – Barbra Streisand (2010)
All the buzz around Barbra Streisand this holiday season concerns her newly released memoir, My Name Is Barbra, but I’d like to shine a light on a book she published in 2010, My Passion for Design about building her dream house in California. It’s a memoir in and of itself, but it’s also a design book showing you (not telling you) how to build and fill a space with things you love. Barbra’s not following trends here. She’s following her heart and what results is a home packed with intimate stories of how it came to be. Included at each step are a bevy of sketches and before and after photos, many of which Barbra took and drew herself.
A lifelong antique collector, a lover of old houses, and a creative outside-of-the-box thinker, Barbra’s step-by-step building project is a captivating look at her creative journey towards fashioning the ideal homeplace. Even though she references films and performances along the way, you forget that Barbra is a world-famous singer, actor and director. Here in this book, she’s simply a woman on a mission to create a space she loves. Her vision for what she wants is mostly clear but she stumbles and changes directions sometimes too and occasionally has to compromise when the ideas in her head can’t feasibly match a comparable reality. It’s all very relatable.
Located right on the cliffs above the ocean, with views of the water from the backyard, Barbra’s compound is a conglomeration of buildings that includes two barns, a mill house, a 1950s ranch house, and a big main house. She thoughtfully designed and decorated each space from the ground up, but she’ll be the first to say that she’s the “idea” person only not the actual contractor, and never had any inclination to swing a hammer or erect a wall herself. Instead, she left all that up to her team of contractors and specialists – the talented individuals who had the tenacity to deal with her perfectionism, a trait she fully recognizes can be a bit difficult to work with.
What I really loved about this book was how Barbra talked about the idea of home and the creative touches that give a space meaning. She’s really thoughtful about every detail and wasn’t willing to compromise on something if she felt it wasn’t right. Intuitive and observant, she discusses her design inspirations (a certain painting, a detail from a movie set, the color of the sky at sunset) to the extent that you get the sense that she’s always on the lookout for objects, colors, textures, and patterns that stir a personal emotion. Even though her design style is not exactly my design style, it is refreshing to read an interior design book about someone who wholeheartedly embraces what she loves unapologetically. Instead of following trends or typically accepted interior design layouts, she follows her heart and her interests. What results is a home that is entirely her own.
Even the exterior gets her thoughtful attention as she color coordinates all the flowers and landscaping to each building so that complimentary shades float freely in and out of doors. To accommodate changing moods and seasons, to find surprise and joy year by year, to delight the senses, to calm and also energize the spirit all while maintaining a sense of unique charm and character – those were what Barbra was reaching for in building her perfect place. By books end you can see that she accomplished all that, and maybe even a little bit more.
Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts From A Life Edited by Michael Katakis (2018)
I haven’t completely finished this book yet, but I knew it was going to be on the Best Of list just for the introduction by Michael Katakis alone. His perspective on memories and how they can be shaped or reshaped, defined or redefined, based on the truths and the fictions you want or are led to believe is compelling. He shares an incredible story that links the death of his mother to the assassination of John F Kennedy to the discovery that Ernest Hemingway lived in the same neighborhood as his relatives – all events that occurred within a few days of each other. Of course, all these big events affected him deeply, but it was Ernest’s writing that brought emotional comfort and mental escapism during that difficult time. A lifelong interest in the author and his work bloomed and would eventually make him the manager of the Ernest Hemingway Estate, and the editor of this book.
There’s so much that has already been written and recycled about Ernest Hemingway, that it’s difficult to separate the man from the myth. And you might suspect it would be difficult to present any sort of new factual information about him. But in Artifacts From A Life, there is an assortment of little-known or at least lesser-known details that paint Ernest in a new light.
Famous for writing short succinct sentences – his hallmark style – I always thought that was something Ernest developed over time, but actually it was a writing tip received during his first newspaper job. He was advised to stick with short sentences and to leave out the adjectives. Ernest adapted that way of writing and stuck with it for the rest of his career. Had the newspaper dictated that he write long, flowery sentences we might of had a completely different Ernest Hemingway experience altogether.
Packed with never-before-seen photographs, paper ephemera, letters and objects from his personal estate, there’s much to learn about Ernest and his strengths, weaknesses and vulnerabilities. One of things of particular interest is Michael’s commentary as he manages Hemingway’s estate and discovers the wealth of information that it contains. He brings a unique perspective to the task and a wistful reverence for how things used to be that is so that is fresh and compelling.
“There are over eleven thousand photographs, bullfighting tickets and scraps of paper with lists of what books a struggling writer should read,” Michael writes. “There are airline, train and steamship tickets that are so lovely they seem a page from an illuminated manuscript and demonstrate how much beauty there once was in the artifacts of daily commercial exchanges. As I went through his things I realized how much tactile aesthetic has been sacrificed and replaced with a severe digital practicality.”
Opposite Michaels’ words on that topic are images of a beautiful 1930s receipt from a Paris bookstore with its stylish logo and sales clerk handwriting itemizing the books that Ernest had purchased that day. It’s that kind of thoughtful attention to history and to Ernest’s life that make this book a page-turner, and a truth, from the very beginning.
Picnic, Lightning – Billy Collins (1998)
Speaking of truth, I’ve never read Billy Collins’ work before, even though he’s considered to be America’s favorite poet and was the actual Poet Laureate of the United States in the early 2000s. But just this past fall, I discovered his 1998 book of his poems Picnic, Lightening and fell absolutely in love with the one on page 49. It’s titled This Much I Do Remember…
It was after dinner.
You were talking to me across the table
about something or other,
a greyhound you had seen that day
or a song you liked,
and I was looking past you
over your bare shoulder
at the three oranges lying
on the kitchen counter
next to the small electric bean grinder,
which was also orange,
and the orange and white cruets for vinegar and oil.
All of which converged
into a random still life,
so fastened together by the hasp of color,
and so fixed behind the animated
foreground of your
talking and smiling,
gesturing and pouring wine,
and the camber of your shoulders
that I could feel it being painted within me,
brushed on the wall of my skull,
while the tone of your voice
lifted and fell in its flight,
and the three oranges
remained fixed on the counter
the way stars are said
to be fixed in the universe.
Then all the moments of the past
began to line up behind that moment
and all the moments to come
assembled in front of it in a long row,
giving me reason to believe
that this was a moment I had rescued
from the millions that rush out of sight
into a darkness behind the eyes.
Even after I have forgotten what year it is,
my middle name,
and the meaning of money,
I will still carry in my pocket
the small coin of that moment,
minted in the kingdom
that we pace through every day.
“This Much I Do Remember” by Billy Collins. Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998).
Oranges have been a real theme in the kitchen in these past three months. We made a vintage Parisian orange cocktail for the blog this month, shared a vintage recipe for orange sugarplum cookies in last week’s email newsletter and now there is this vintage poem about oranges sitting on a kitchen counter. It’s funny how things come together like that. The whole sensory experience that Billy sets up in this snippet of life with the camber of shoulders, the tone of voice lifting and falling in flight, the hasp of color, the painting within is just gorgeous. I love the way he likens the oranges fixed on the counter to the way the stars are said to be fixed in the universe. So beautiful.
So far Billy has published 18 books of poetry, starting with Pokerface in 1977 and just recently Musical Tables which came out in 2022. Picnic, Lightning was book number six debuting in the late 1990s. If you are new to Billy’s work, there is lots to choose from but I recommend starting with page 49 of Picnic, Lightening and working your way around his words from there.
Reading This Much I Do Remember was such a nice way to wrap up this past year – another one that was so full of tumultuous world events, political upheavals, and powerful weather occurrences. I love how in the poem, a natural peace was found in the kitchen. I love that time stopped. That the moment was recognized and appreciated before being committed to memory. I love that this poem is about a confluence of small unassuming details that turn out to make a big lasting impression. Cheers to more of that in 2024.
And cheers to Ben, Henry, Frida, Ann, Flannery, Ernest, Billy, Michael, Monica, Barbra S. and Barbara L. for sharing such wonderful insight into the passions that move the world forward through art and storytelling. Hope your new year overflows with equal joy. And I hope you find a book or two to fall in love with from this list. Thank you so much for being a part of our wonderful community. We can’t wait to share more favorites in 2024. Happy New Year!
In the Vintage Kitchen: Where History Comes To Eat 