July 2014 - Theme

It's time to start discussing theme options for July! Here are the themes suggested for May that we didn't end up using:

- fourth estate/journalism
- food/agriculture
- disasters
- poverty

Anyone have other suggestions?

I'd be interested in "food/agriculture" - a lot of directions to go in - both fiction and non-fiction. It's very tempting to re-read Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons for one.

Food/Agriculture sounds good to me as well.

Any of those sound fine to me.

Fourth Estate/Journalism -- Gore Vidal's Empire

Food/Agriculture -- Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, plenty by John Steinbeck

Disasters -- Marion Garthwaite's Shaken Days about the 1906 California earthquake, by one of my favorite middle-reader novelists from the 1950s/60s

Poverty -- Carolyn Chute's Letourneau's Used Auto Parts maybe? And there's always Dickens!

I could go with food/agriculture for July. My second choice would be poverty.

The only other suggestion I would like to add is perhaps series and sequels. That would give us all an opportunity to catch up with some historical series we are reading and perhaps discover some new ones. I don't think we have done that theme here before. I know it does get done in other threads from time to time.

Series and sequels would also work for me. I definately have some that would fit that theme.

Several of us who are in the 75ers group participate in September Series and Sequels each year. Maybe we could hold onto that idea for our September theme to coincide with the 75ers annual Series and Sequels month?

I would be willing to try any of the proposed themes, and since I usually host the September Series and Sequels I love the idea of that also being our September theme as well.

Seeings we have a few suggestions I'll put the voting up.

I'm wondering if disasters could include the sinking of the titanic?

>16 Roro8: I think that would definitely qualify!

Katrina, the Hindenburg, San Francisco Earthquake/fire 1901 Galveston Hurricane, 1918 Flue Epidemic. Lots and lots of choices for that one.

Incidentally, for Katrina there's a wonderful middle-reader book, Ninth Ward by Jewel Parker Rhodes, which was an Honor for the Coretta Scott King Award.

Are we ready to call it? Right now, food/agriculture is the front runner...

I was just checking the count out as well Christina. It looks pretty clear at the moment.

Is it official that we will go with Food/Agriculture in July? I have a few books I am looking at for this -

The Way to Minack by Derek Tangye - about a couple that left city life behind in the early 1950's, moved to Cornwall and started a daffodil farm.

Alice's Tulips by Sandra Dallas - about a bride who has to stay and work on the farm with her mother-in-law while her husband goes off to the Civil War

Blood Sisters by Barbara Keating - The first book in The Langani Farm Trilogy, set in the highlands of Kenya, this first book is set in 1957 and deals with the Mau Mau uprising.

I will narrow my selection down closer to July.

It does look like food/agriculture is the July theme. I'm planning on Hoosh, about food eaten in the Antarctic beginning with the earliest expeditions.

Yup, Food and Agriculture will be July's theme! Now it's off to find something appropriate from the TBR...

>22 DeltaQueen50: The Tangye books are about my part of the world. I think I probably read one or two when I was at school down here. Daffodils are still farmed... along with potatoes and cauliflower (called broccoli in Cornwall). Some places one finds the remnants of tiny shoreline fields called "quillets" where scented violets and other flowers were grown. Mind you these were already remnants in the 1960s!
Hope you enjoy the book.

>25 greydoll: I have read quite a number of the Derek Tangye books, I love the setting. What a beautiful part of the world you live in!

I just finished The Blithedale Romance in the Norton Critical Edition, the only Hawthorne novel I've never read. A definite 5*****, especially with the Norton supplementary materials, which include selections from Hawthorne's letters as well as other materials pertaining to the Brook Farm communitarian experiment of the mid-1840s. As always, some critical articles are better than others, but this edition's article generally get high marks from me (with one exception, Russ Castronovo's "The Half-Living Corpse: Females Mediums, Seances, and the Occult," which includes a good bit of rather confusing Marxist criticism). This edition, based on the "Centenary Edition" of Hawthorne's works, also includes three passages not appearing in the "Centenary Edition" but which the editor considered of interest (for example, a critique of the temperance movement) and marked appropriately for easy identification.

I don't think I'm going to read anything more in this month's "food and agriculture" theme since I'm still working on last month's Elizabethan period by doing a complete read/reread of Spenser in the Cambridge Student's Edition (complete) and the Norton Critical Edition (generous excerpts, but annotated and with Norton's supplementary materials), reading the poetry in tandem with Andrew Hadfield's Edmund Spenser: A Life. This Spenser project should keep me occupied off-and-on for the next few months.

I have completed The Way to Minack by Derek Tangye and actually this wasn't the best book of the series to fit July's theme as this book was mostly about their early lives and how they came to the decision to leave the city behind in favor of a more rural lifestyle. There is mention of how they raise daffodils and freesia in the spring and then grow hothouse tomatoes in the summer.

Half way through Devil's Food by Kerry Greenwood. A Corinna Chapman Mystery.

She has a bakery that makes wonderful muffins and breads, Some recipes included.
Quite humorous, quirky characters, and set in Melbourne Australia. One in a series.

Just picked up The Empress of Ice Cream by Anthony Capella from the library. It was on my TBR list, so this month's theme is the perfect excuse to read it.

I read Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine for this month's theme. The author has a decade of experience working in Antarctica. He's not a chef, but he did take on the task of planning meals and cooking for a 100-day 2-person assignment to build an emergency runway on a glacier. It's an interesting history of food and cooking from the earliest Antarctic expeditions to the present research stations, and I learned a lot about Antarctica as well as about food and nutrition.

My reads for July's Food / Ag theme:

Hunter's Stew and Hangtown Fry, What Pioneer America Ate and Why by Lila Perl
Just what the title suggests. An interesting look at regional foods of old-time America.

Fred Harvey Houses of the Southwest by Richard Melzer
Pictorial history of the famous Harvey Houses, their employees, standards and designers; of the food served, how the menus items came about. Altogether interesting read.