Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  The temperatures are rising, the snow is almost gone here outside of Chicago and I hope everyone is having a good week.  Plus, baseball is almost back.  So let's roam through what I found this week.

This book is a little bittersweet for a couple of reasons.  I mean, I love a pretty cookbook as much as the next person (just ask my wife about how many cookbooks we have) and I do love a historical cookbook, but this one is from 2010 and is recent enough that it's just sad to see restaurants mentioned in here that simply don't exist anymore.  

The various locations in the Francesca's chain are still around, thankfully; maybe not the best Italian in the city but they have a well-earned reputation for being very consistent and solid with a quite good wine selection.

Chicago Chop House for some reason has always had a bit of a reputation for being touristy, but I think that's more the location (it was in the same area of River North that also had the Rainforest Cafe, the Rock & Roll McDonalds and the Hard Rock), but all of that touristy stuff came after they opened.  It's a very, very solid steakhouse that I miss a lot.  I just can't wait to get vaccinated for various reasons, like hopefully not getting ill, but also for just plain going to restaurants (not to mention movie theaters; god I miss movie theaters).

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Hey, did you know Ursula K. Le Guin is getting her own postage stamp?  It's not highlighting The Dispossessed, which I was really happy to find a hardcover of this week even though it's a Book Club edition, but instead The Left Hand Of Darkness, her brilliant work about First Contact and gender identity and friendship.  But Dispossessed is also great, about a man exiled to a partner world due to his beliefs and trying to come to terms with living on an alien world that is les familiar to him than he hoped.  

Le Guin's fiction always is tinged to me by how her parents were celebrated authors and anthropologists; Theodora Kroeber and Alfred Louis Kroeber specialized in Native American history and Le Guin would use the themes of colonization and oppression in her fiction for decades, as well as people actually trying to understand alien cultures.  (Her short story, "The Word For The World Is Forest" is a masterpiece at this.)  A simply fantastic author who I think is one of the people who wrote something for almost everyone's tastes.

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Maybe my favorite Hitchcock movie and I've read this novel a few times.  It always amuses me that Hitchcock adapted DuMaurier three times, and they're this, The Birds and Jamaica Inn.  (DuMaurier apparently only liked the adaptations of Rebecca and Don't Look Now, the '70s Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie movie, and I 100% agree with her about Jamaica Inn, which is just Not Good.)  And if you have never seen Rebecca, why not?  It's freaking great and also a nice use of how (here comes the heresy) Laurence Olivier is a bit of a stiff as an actor.

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I love the story of Beowulf and Grendel and Grendel's mother, and I've never read this one, which I do remember getting a lot of praise at the time.  (Similarly, everyone should read the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf, which is amazing even to me, who doesn't have much of a taste for poetry.  Maybe I'm just into epics; similarly, I love the Robert Fitzgerald translation of The Odyssey.)

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Wine?  France?  California in the '70s?  History?  Hell yes, I'm here for this.  I swear I've seen the Alan Rickman-starring vehicle about this, Bottle Shocked, but don't remember a damn thing.