Manic Bookstore Cafe

Yesterday's tragic events in Ukrainian skies bring the world's attention again to the border of Russia and Ukraine. It has been a tough year. Initial student demonstrations on Maidan Square, renamed EuroMaidan because of the protestors' orientation toward European ideals of free speech, democracy and accountability for elected officials, led to bloody repercussions in Kiev, the Russian takeover of Crimea, and separatist movements in Luhansk and Donetsk. Ukraine hasn't been in the news this much since ... well, probably ever. More will emerge about the shooting of Malaysian Airlines flight 17 (which already has its own Wikipedia page). Investigations will be conducted, opinions aired, perhaps international courts convened. And eventually a memorial will be erected in the midst of those Ukrainian wheat fields. I have for some time been planning to write about my former student, Andriy Lyubka, a poet and writer whose time on the barricades in December and January di...

The Free Library of Philadelphia has initiated a series of workshops on culinary literacy . Now this is really cool. "Our mission is two-fold: The first part is teaching literacy skills through cooking, and the second part is exploring culinary literacy." Recipes are a window to math and reading, but they also are the missing link in our current society to health and wellness. "Culinary literacy" means an awareness of the advantages of fresh food, of cooking "from scratch." In a sense, it is the opposite of 20th century food science -- the Minneapolis labs of Pillsbury where my aunt worked after college to make new recipes and to invent ways to utilize baking "products" (see here for photos of the Mill City Museum, including the "Baking Lab"). As I discovered this spring in my course on Russia and cuisine, reading recipes can be a great access point to culture. For my students, it was about vocabulary and grammar...

Recently my former student, the Ukrainian poet, shared an article about the masses of plastic trash that are filling the oceans of the world. The article (from the Ukrainian newspaper Zbruc ) featured this image: The original article can be found  here . Most of us are aware of this huge environmental issue, though when you are a landlubber like me you might not always be focused on the problems of the marine world. But you don't need to be in a sea kayak to know that our world is endangered by trash. Having grown up in the 1970s, I have always been obsessed with recycling and reusing. Some parents my age complain about their children the eco-terrorists, who internalize the lessons of elementary school and torture them at home with their righteousness about environmental issues. But I actually got those lessons from my own father, with whom I used to cart bottles to the recycling station. We had to separate them into clear, green and brown, and my dad made a game of...

One of my former students is now living in one of the (post) Soviet peripheral high rise neighborhoods of Tbilisi, Georgia. Her experience highlights that important aspect of post-Soviet life: the centers of many East (and Central) European cities are charming (if sometimes decrepit), and the peripheries, where the buildings all went up in aesthetically-challenged times, are generally not.  Back in 1987, several people I knew lived in what seemed to me to be wonderful old buildings in downtown Leningrad, and they explained to me that they were resisting " kapremont " -- capital renovation. The city wanted to move them out of these apartments temporarily to make capital improvements, but they were afraid that once they'd been moved to the edges of the city, they might never see their downtown apartments again. So despite the leaky plumbing, the cracking walls, and the rats, they continued to fight Soviet officialdom. This seemed to me utterly reasonable at the time -...

So, readers may be asking, where's the "bookstore" aspect of the Manic Bookstore Cafe? I just found a link to my Bunin and Butter post on Christian Book Barn.com  (go figure!). But it is one thing to comment on literature as a "professional," and something else entirely to disappear into books the way I did as a kid, as an "amateur," the way I try to do every summer (and holiday break, if I can manage it). A really good bookstore manager would have opinions about all kinds of books. My interest these days runs almost exclusively to contemporary fiction. When my kids were smaller, I manically read YA fiction in the summer -- Jeanne Birdsall's trilogy starting with  The Penderwicks , or Hilary McKay's Casson Family series, or even Harry Potter (to keep up with my son). But now my daughter has moved on to Jane Austen, my son is reading history and re-reading The Iliad  most weeks, and I am on my own. So, what to read? A great way to dive i...