March Reads

A few days to go until we say goodbye to March. Some plans were cancelled, DELIBERATELY cancelled and forgottten most especially those related to cleaning up our room. This month I went back to buying books because... I simply can't resist the wonderful finds in Booksale. I'm afraid I am guilty of 積ん読, that weird habit of amassing books without reading them. Well I do read a few pages while in the bookstore to see if the book is worth my hard-earned money and most of the time they are so the next thing I know I am walking out of the store with a lot of books on my hands. 

This month I'm happy to have finished reading one wonderful book related to FOOD. It's the first time that I read such a book. John Mariani's How Italian Food Conquered the World is a deliciously written history of Italian food en bref. It narrates how the food was in Roman times, how before there was no such thing as Italian cuisine, only regional cookings which were diverse and very different from each other. Mariani traced the evolution of the so-called Italian cuisine from its humble beginnings in trattorias to how it eventually replaced French cuisine as an epitome of fine dining as the social elite began patronizing it and dining at fancy restaurants became the IT thing. It is interesting to see how the lives of various Italians change as Italian cooking slowly gained its place in America, and as the title of the book says, how Italian food conquered not just America but the world.

Right now I'm alternating between E.D. Hirsch's The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them and Ben Kiernan's The Pol Pot Regime. The first is written in a very academic way and the ideas presented are a bit shocking since the author attacks the views of the Romanticists (whom I admire) with regards to education. The second is a heartbreaking account of what happened during that terrible era in Cambodian history when many innocents were killed in the name of a twisted ideology. That and from time to time browsing some French books lest I forget my French. (I came across two old French men in Bohol and they were surprised when I replied to them in their language LOL. I just love seeing the look on Westerners' faces when they see an East Asian-looking girl speak European languages. PRICELESS!)

And I have yet to start Game of Thrones season 3. My friends are all telling me to watch it already since season 4 will be aired next month. I only wish there were 30 hours a day instead of 24. Tsk. 引き籠もり on the horizon and I am more than tempted to file a one-week leave just to do the things I want need to do.

Okay... I will try to at least arrange my books this month...