Skip to main content

Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes is a memoir of Mayes' adventure in buying an Italian villa. 

This was my book club's pick for this month, and it's not something I'd usually read, so I'm grateful for the venture outside of my norm.

However, it wasn't my favorite. A large part of that's because it's dated. She's talking about the years between 1990-95 which is now 20 years ago. Times have changed. With the prevalence of internet and cell phones, I can't imagine that getting a house and living in a house in Italy hasn't changed. 

Her descriptions of the calmness of Italy is infectious, however. I could feel myself relaxing, imagining the smell of lemons and picking herbs in a bright sunlit garden. It made me a little homesick for summer -- especially since I read this in two "snow days" that I had off from work. I was cold and I wanted sun. Mayes is fantastic at describing the way sun feels. 

She spends a lot of time describing food too. I love food. So it's a little hard to read about any kind of food and not want to eat it. When I read things about pie, I want pie. When I read things about curly fries, I get a mysterious craving for curly fries. Mayes includes two chapters on recipes. She calls the cuisine easy peasant food, but each recipe looked difficult and time-consuming. Of course, that made sense when I found out Mayes is a gourmet chef. Everything seems easy if you can make anything.

The one thing I could truly connect with in the book is her desire. She feels an indescribable pull to Italy. I feel that way about France. And maybe I'm a little irritated because this book just made me want to buy a house in France and live there. But Mayes is working at a college and is an older adult with a handy husband. I'm a recent college graduate with a job that gets me buy but in no way could ever afford me a house. Situations are never ideal, but mine is especially distant from being able to move to France on a whim. 

If you love Italy, you'll probably enjoy this book, even if it is dated. 



Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More Diversity in Your Book Diet

Hello Lovelies! As usual Top Ten Tuesday is brought to you by the lovely people over at The Broke and the Bookish . Today's topic is Top Ten Books for People Who Like X, and I'm going to go with... Top Ten Books for People Who Like Diversity Thanks to the efforts of groups like We Need Diverse Books, diversity is having a resurgence in young adult and children's books. For the last couple years, I have been trying to read more books with diverse characters or by diverse authors. (Diverse in this respect includes race, sexuality, gender, and disability). I haven't endeavored to challenge myself to only read a certain type of book i.e. only those by women of color or anything that isn't by a white heterosexual male, but I try to be extra aware of the characters and ask myself if they actually are white (sometimes the text doesn't say it, sometimes people just assume it!) and if being white is necessary for the character or not.  But here are my top t...
5 comments
Read more

TBT: The Witch of Blackbird Pond

In middle school, I was a member of this reading club where we had a set of books to read as a team, and then we did like little quizzes on them against other teams. (SUPER NERD!). And now, I'm not entirely certain, but I feel pretty sure that club was where I read this book for the first time. The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare is a Newbery award winning historical fiction novel. Orphan Kit Tyler has been moved from her home in the Caribbean to her puritan relative's home in Connecticut.  She feels like she has nothing in common with these relatives, but she does form an attachment with an old Quaker woman and a young sailor, Nat. Of course breaking out of the mold is not without its price, and Kit learns this for herself when she is accused of witchcraft. This is one of those books that I think about constantly. I haven't reread it in several years, but I always want to. I recommend it frequently to other. This is a book for readers...
1 comment
Read more
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll  is a very entertaining classic. I think everyone knows the story of young Alice who follows a White Rabbit into the world of Wonderland where everything is just slightly (or significantly) strange. For some reason, every time I've picked up Alice's Adventures before, I've put it down without making it more than 10 pages or so. But this time, I managed to finish it. It's a quirky sort of book, but I enjoyed it. It did make me think of The Phantom Tollbooth (here's my review of that classic), but I preferred Carroll's novel to Juster's. There's some great play on words and delightful misunderstandings because of homophones and characters not paying attention to each other. I think this is a worthwhile classic, but I don't actually have that much to say about it. Middle Grade March Count: 5
Post a Comment
Read more