Pie and sundries
Jan. 17th, 2009 06:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philenaWow. I'm getting awfully bored with vacation, and apparently the way I deal with my boredom is to make pie. I posted pictures of the apple pie already, but I have since then also made a butternut squash pie (it's just like pumpkin pie, only with butternut squash. Very good. I think just about any kind of squash would be good in that setting--except spaghetti squash, because the texture wouldn't work) and cornbread. This is good. I like baked items. Mr. Philena likes baked items. The problem is when the baked items are combined with lolling around the house all day while reading Trollope novels. I'm not normally the kind of person to worry about that, but I have a niggling sense down somewhere in my brain that it is not the healthiest thing to sit around inside all day and eat pie, whether or not one is accompanying the activity with Trollope. It certainly does taste good, though.
Anyone here read Trollope? I love him. He's one of those innumerable 19th-century British novelists, and I like to compare him to Jane Austen because he's not nearly as serious or earnest as George Eliot, and not as bitter or agenda-driven as Thackeray. This is not to say that Austen or Trollope are trivial; they simply demand less from the reader than writers like Eliot and Thackeray--and, to some extent, Dickens. Dickens reads very easily, but he's not shy about killing his characters or ruining their lives and that tends not to happen in Austen or Trollope novels--at least, not to characters we like. His genius is in creating stories whose plot revolves around the question of whether a woman's family will realize that she's not so fond of a local clergyman as they think she is, and yet preventing it from being boring.
Another way I've been occupying my time during this far too long break is by watching Star Trek. I've forgotten how wonderful classic Trek is, and although it is not the most subtle of shows, there certainly is enough innuendo that I completely missed when I was twelve. At the moment, unfortunately, only the first season is up on Netflix's watch-now site, but I have high hopes that eventually they'll post the next ones. I suspect, however, that the influence of Trollope's parliamentary novels will be pushing my interest away from Star Trek and more towards Yes, Minister--which, incidentally, is also available on Netflix's watch-now list. But who am I really kidding? I'm not going to have a spare half hour to myself for the next fifteen weeks after Tuesday.
Anyone here read Trollope? I love him. He's one of those innumerable 19th-century British novelists, and I like to compare him to Jane Austen because he's not nearly as serious or earnest as George Eliot, and not as bitter or agenda-driven as Thackeray. This is not to say that Austen or Trollope are trivial; they simply demand less from the reader than writers like Eliot and Thackeray--and, to some extent, Dickens. Dickens reads very easily, but he's not shy about killing his characters or ruining their lives and that tends not to happen in Austen or Trollope novels--at least, not to characters we like. His genius is in creating stories whose plot revolves around the question of whether a woman's family will realize that she's not so fond of a local clergyman as they think she is, and yet preventing it from being boring.
Another way I've been occupying my time during this far too long break is by watching Star Trek. I've forgotten how wonderful classic Trek is, and although it is not the most subtle of shows, there certainly is enough innuendo that I completely missed when I was twelve. At the moment, unfortunately, only the first season is up on Netflix's watch-now site, but I have high hopes that eventually they'll post the next ones. I suspect, however, that the influence of Trollope's parliamentary novels will be pushing my interest away from Star Trek and more towards Yes, Minister--which, incidentally, is also available on Netflix's watch-now list. But who am I really kidding? I'm not going to have a spare half hour to myself for the next fifteen weeks after Tuesday.