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Books and Bites
JCPL librarians bring you book recommendations and discuss the bites and beverages to pair with them.
11_23 BB
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Carrie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Books and Bites podcast. Each month, we bring you book recommendations and discuss the bites and beverages to pair with them. I'm Carrie Green, and I'm here with my co hosts, Michael Cunningham and Jacqueline Cooper.
Michael: Hello.
Jacqueline: Welcome, everybody.
Carrie: So we are nearly at the end of the 2023 Books and Bites podcast
bingo reading challenge! Just this month and next month, December, to go. So how are you all feeling about it?
Jacqueline: I believe I have three books still to read. Mm hmm. So.
Carrie: So which are the prompts that you have to go? Do you remember?
Jacqueline: I don't remember. Do you remember yours, Michael?
Michael: Yeah, so I just started my last prompt, and that is the cookbook.
Carrie: Okay, so what cookbook are you reading?
Michael: Matty Matheson: The Cookbook. I think I covered one of his other cookbook in a previous episode. I can't remember if it was the book or the pairing. But he's one of my favorite [00:01:00] cooks. So, I had to read this one.
Jacqueline: This is a good month for cookbooks because it's November.
We're going to be making meals. Thanksgiving and Christmas meals for those who... Cook.
Carrie: And one of the cookbooks, well, the cookbook that I'm using in my pairing today would actually be a great option, it's The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman. I think we've talked about it before on Books and Bites.
Probably several of us have talked about it. But it's really interesting. You know, it's a, it's, we've had this discussion with a few people about, you know, why would you want to read a cookbook? But I feel like there are lots of cookbooks like this one that give a lot of background information about the food and the culture,
even the ingredients. Those are the kind of cookbooks I like to read. It's not like I'm sitting there reading [00:02:00] line by line every single recipe.
Jacqueline: Yeah, Julia Child's cookbooks could be pretty interesting, I would think. They've made movies about her, so.
Carrie: Yeah, I like to read Julia Child, too. How about you, Michael?
I mean, what kind of cookbooks do you like to read? Well, we also like that The Victuals.
Michael: Yeah. And this, this one I'm actually listening to on, an audiobook.
Carrie: Oh, really?
Michael: Written by the chef, Matty Matheson, which is interesting. You can tell he hasn't done much narration before, but like, it goes, it's unabridged, so it goes through every,
Carrie: Every single ingredient?
Michael: Every recipe, every
ingredient.
Carrie: Oh, so you're a real, you're not cheating.
Michael: I'm not. Oh, I'm, yeah. I thought it was maybe abridged, but no, no, it's, it's everything.
Carrie: Oh, huh.
Michael: So, it's interesting. I mean, there's, you know, every chapter has got, like, a little story or a little background information about the section of [00:03:00] recipes, and then each recipe has its own little,
little tale or introduction to it about how it relates to him. So it's all about, you can tell the cookbook is all about his cooking experience, his, his life growing up in Canada and the maritimes and him and his, wife's family coming together and cooking and they're, you know, his wife's family has Italian ancestry and incorporating that into his cooking and learning their recipes.
So it's, it's cookbooks are more interesting than you might think. There's a lot more in there than just recipes.
Carrie: Yeah. I was going to say, it's not like the, you know, the church cookbook that you might, but, but I enjoy reading those too. And actually, it just reminds me of, we spent some time with some friends in Wisconsin last year and, at a cabin in Wisconsin and they had like, in the cabin, there was like a, [00:04:00] cookbook for It was like a church or local kind of cookbook.
And you know, there was a lot of hot dish, it being Wisconsin.
And one of our friends, Tyler was, was reading the recipes out loud. Like, in this outraged voice because, you know, of the, all the canned mushroom soup. It was probably one of the funniest things I've experienced in my life. So, you know, reading, just reading a cookbook like that, that can be fun too. But anyway, back to more serious topics.
November is... National Native American Heritage Month and so in honor of that, we are discussing the prompt, books by Indigenous authors. So we have some great suggestions for you and we hope you'll stick around.[00:05:00]
Jacqueline: The book I chose to read for this month's prompt is the Firekeeper's Daughter. The Firekeeper's Daughter is a young adult mystery by Angeline Boulley. The story mostly takes place on Sault Ste. Marie Reservation in northern Michigan. The main character, Daunis Fontaine, is torn between two worlds, her mother's wealthy French and white family and her father's Ojibwe firekeeper's side.
Although Daunis code switches easily between both cultures, Daunis does not feel like she fits in her hometown or on the Ojibwe reservation. She dreams of getting a fresh start by going away to college. During her senior year of high school, tragedy strikes the Fontaine family. Daunis's uncle David dies mysteriously of a drug overdose.
Daunis's mother, Grace, and David were [00:06:00] remarkably close, and she is devastated by his death. Grace does not believe that he overdosed. She feels that David could not have died that way since he's been clean for years. Then six weeks later, Grandma Fontaine, otherwise known as Grand Mary, has a stroke. Daunis decides to put her dreams on hold.
With her Uncle David gone, Daunis feels she cannot leave her fragile mother all alone to take care of Grand Mary. The only good thing to happen to her lately is meeting Jamie, the cute new hockey player on her brother Levi's team. Daunis is thrilled when her half brother Levi, the captain of the local junior A hockey team asked Daunis to show Jamie around.
They start spending a lot of time together and begin having feelings for each other. But when they witness a shocking murder suicide, Jamie can no longer hide the fact that he's an FBI undercover officer. Jamie and his partner Ron asked Daunis to be part of their [00:07:00] investigation. They are looking into Uncle David's death.
Uncle David was an informant helping them investigate a new legal drug. The drug being distributed is having devastating effects on a lot of reservations. The FBI want her help because Daunis knows about Ojibwe traditional medicine and chemistry. She agrees to help because she wants to protect her community.
As the investigation goes further along, the more dangerous it becomes for Daunis to be involved. She does not see the danger she's in because she's so focused on the investigation. Will she find the distributors before anyone else dies or will she become a victim? The book begins slowly, like the romance between the two main characters.
Readers will be rewarded if they continue. The author does a fantastic job of depicting modern Ojibwe culture through her characters. For example, Daunis relies on her traditional [00:08:00] culture and science to solve her problems. I would recommend this book to fans of Angie Thomas or Tiffany Jackson. There are a lot of sexual innuendos that might put off some readers.
However, the author's use of strong language seems to taper off as the book progresses. This book is for mature readers because it deals with tough topics like rape, drug, and racism, and death. For my bites, I chose a recipe for fry bread. It is sold at the annual powwow that Jamie and Daunis attend. In Chapter 7, Boully describes the smell of the bread and the dancers, giving us a glimpse of the community that celebrates old traditions with new traditions.
Fry bread is often served and eaten at ceremonial events, feast days, and powwows. I think Boully chose to feature fry bread in her book, even though it's controversial. Some believe it represents a symbol that connects generations, but for others, the bread is a painful reminder of the [00:09:00] past, since fry bread originated because Native Americans could not get the food they knew, or even the food they usually grew, and had to rely on sub designed foods.
But for others, it signifies resilience, community, and culture. I chose the recipe by Afro Indigenous author Kevin Maillard, the author of the children's book Frybread, a Native American Story. In his interview with the New York Times, Maillard says for him, fry bread is a symbol of resilience and connection to his family.
Maillard's recipe is a modification of his aunt's recipe because typical recipes are high in calories and fat. One ingredient Maillard substitutes is unrefined coconut oil for lard to make his bread healthier. The bread can be served alone with taco ingredients or served sprinkled with powdered sugar and honey.
And we have multiple copies of both Boulley's book and Maillard's [00:10:00] books at the library here.
Carrie: Well, that's interesting about Fry Bread. I kind of knew from, well, from reading the book that I read that there was some controversy about it, but they didn't really go into it. So, thank you for explaining that.
Jacqueline: Oh, you're welcome. I thought it was interesting and people might be wanting to know about it.
Carrie: Was that in that, that book? The... You have a children's book.
Jacqueline: Yeah, so this is the, this is the book I was referring to and the recipe is in there. So if you want a short book for your prompt, I think this would count because it talks about fry bread and it's a story.
Yeah, there's a recipe in there and it talks about the history and the connections people feel. So, it's a cute little book. I think it won the Robert F. Siebert Award medal and it won American Indian library Association medal. So, cool. [00:11:00]
Carrie: And the book that you, the Firekeeper's Daughter, I just put together a list of books, um, well, I was looking at some lists of books for, for recommendations if you like the TV show Reservation Dogs, and the Firekeeper's Daughter was on that list.
So, if you like the TV show Reservation Dogs, which I certainly did. You might like The Firekeeper's Daughter.
Michael: Yeah. Just started watching that show. That's a good, that's a good
Carrie: show. Oh yeah. Oh, it's so good. Good.
Michael: For this month, I chose Don't Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones, a member of the Blackfeet tribe. This is the second book in the Indian Lake Trilogy and the sequel to My Heart is a Chainsaw. This book in series is for all the slasher fans out there. So if you're a fan of Michael [00:12:00] Myers, Freddy Krueger, Ghostface, Jason Voorhees, etc.,
you will probably love this trilogy. It follows Jade Daniels, a slasher superfan. She's half Native American teen with an abusive father and absent mother, and she's a bit of an outcast and town nuisance. In My Heart is a Chainsaw, we learn she experienced some deep trauma, causing her to retreat into her safe space.
space of all things Slasher. She lives in the small town of Prufrock, Idaho, a town that has everything a horror fan could want. A lake witch, an abandoned summer camp with a murderous past, and a town at the bottom of the lake that's haunted by a zealot of a preacher. When two dead bodies turn up, she's convinced that it's the work of Prufrock's very own Slasher, and that she must educate the final girl who she's certain is Latham Mondragon, a wealthy girl who lives in the new exclusive development across Indian Lake, reserved for the super rich. So one thing leads to another, culminating in a Fourth of July massacre that leads to Jade going to jail. So Don't [00:13:00] Fear the Reaper picks up four years later, when Jade's conviction is overturned just before Christmas.
Now, a little more world weary and having sworn off slashers, Jade, who now goes by her given name, Jennifer, arrives back home in Prufrock just in time as a once in a lifetime blizzard paralyzes the town. And unbeknownst to her, Dark Mill South, an indigenous serial killer, who is seeking revenge for 38 Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes his prison transport when an avalanche hits near Prufrock.
People start turning up dead in uncanny ways. They're straight out of slashers. Jay knows so intimately. Is Dark Mill South acting out his vengeance on the citizens of Prufrock? Or is there another killer lurking around town? This book ups the ante, taking everything to a new level. There are more points of view, more action, more deaths, and way more blood.
There's so much going on. He kind of throws everything but the kitchen sink into this book, making it a little difficult to keep track of everything, [00:14:00] especially with his breakneck pacing, but it is one heck of a fun ride. There's also a fever dream quality is certain parts of this novel where the things that are happening are so off the wall, you're not quite sure that it's real or part of Jade's imagination.
Just like in the last book, Jones, one of the preeminent authorities on the slasher genre, calls upon his vast knowledge by including like a thousand references of slashers in the book, from mainstream titles to the super obscure. I would highly recommend starting with my Heart of the Chainsaw before reading Don't Fear the Reaper.
You do have plenty of time to catch up before the final book of the trilogy, The Angel of Indian Lake, drops next year. So I paired this book with a recipe for Three Sisters Chili. Named after the traditional Indigenous farming practice of planting corn, beans and squash together. This recipe from country grocer.com calls for ingredients like winter squash, black beans, kidney beans, corn, tomatoes, garlic, and red pepper. Even though it's vegetarian,[00:15:00]
it sounds really good to me and perfect for this cold weather .
Carrie: I love how you say, even though it's vegetarian , I was thinking, man, that sounds really good. I didn't really. Think about the fact
that it was
a vegetarian.
Jacqueline: People probably had a lot of vegetarian meals years ago.
Carrie: There's a lot of vegetarian meals in the Sioux Chef cookbook, not only vegetarian, but vegan because, dairy was not part of the Indigenous, diet, North American Indigenous diet. So they were very healthy eaters.
Jacqueline: Oh, that's, that makes sense.
I'm gonna have to check out that cookbook.
Carrie: So I know that Stephen Graham Jones has a ton of books because just from looking up [00:16:00] indigenous book lists, have you read a lot of his other books or?
Michael: I've read, yes, see I read, I've done a couple before, see I've done, one on the podcast, what was it called?
The Night of the Mannequins, which was something else, Mapping the Interior, which was definitely a little more, it definitely still has that fever dream quality to it, but it's definitely very kind of like emotional, definitely more of a gut punch. And then these. Oh, Only Good Indians.
Carrie: Oh, okay.
Michael: That one was... Excellent.
Carrie: Yeah, I thought you had done him before.
Michael: Yeah.
Carrie: And I think also just from, you know, there's a lot of Native American book lists floating around right now. Oh yeah. But I think there's a lot of horror written by Indigenous people. Yeah. There's
Michael: a, an anthology that just came out, I think, I want to say Don't Whistle Past the Graveyard, or Don't [00:17:00] Whistle at Night, I can't remember the title of it.
We have it here. It's an anthology of Indigenous horror authors. I haven't started reading yet, but I, I have it on my, on my to be read list.
Carrie: Yeah, I think I saw that when I was, when I was looking at lists and making lists myself.
Michael: There's a lot of Indigenous horror authors out there.
Jacqueline: That's funny. You found that just for this.
That's awesome. Yeah. Right up your alley.
Michael: Oh yeah.
Carrie: The book I read is The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. The Sentence is the story of Tookie, an Ojibwe woman, and Birchbark Books, an actual independent Minneapolis bookstore owned by author Louise Erdrich, who appears as a minor character in her own [00:18:00] novel.
Michael: Wow.
Carrie: Yeah. I would say very minor, like, you know just appears every, every now and then.
Tookie begins working at the bookstore after an early release from a ridiculously long prison sentence, given her crime. She marries Pollux, a former tribal police officer, and the man who initially arrested her. She's happy to finally be living a normal life, and even more so when Pollux's daughter moves back home with a new baby.
Shortly after the novel opens, Flora, a white woman who claims Native American ancestry and who is one of the bookstore's most annoying customers, dies. She begins haunting Tookie, rustling around during her normal shopping hours, throwing books off the shelves, and just generally making a nuisance of herself.
Then 2020 arrives. The [00:19:00] pandemic shuts down everything, including the bookstore. A relief to Tookie at first, because it gives her a break from Flora. But when they reopen to fulfill online orders, Tookie sometimes has to work alone. Flora's hauntings become even more overt. After Flora tries to enter Tookie's body, another staff member always accompanies her at the store.
George Floyd's murder hits the Indigenous staff hard, and they are all involved in the protests, but it's especially traumatic for Tookie with her history of incarceration. Even being at home is difficult, as she can't stop thinking about Pollux's role in her arrest.
Flora's haunting of Tookie becomes more resonant when it's juxtaposed with these complex issues of race and policing, allowing the reader to consider how the Indigenous and Black communities are still being haunted by colonization and [00:20:00] slavery. While this is a complicated and sometimes spooky read, it doesn't overwhelm.
Tookie's dark sense of humor and bookstore community help both her and the reader process the difficult moments. The Sentence is atmospheric, compelling, and character driven. It also has a very satisfying ending. Book lovers will appreciate the bookstore camaraderie and discussion, and this novel would also qualify for the Book About Books prompt.
Throughout The Sentence, the characters come together for some delicious sounding food, including Pollux's hand harvested wild rice. As Sean Sherman writes in The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, quote, wild rice isn't rice at all, but the seed of an aquatic grass, unquote. It's also tastier and more nutritious than the cultivated wild rice most of us are used to.
I had the pleasure of eating some on a trip to [00:21:00] Wisconsin last year, the trip I mentioned earlier, and I can confirm his description of a nutty, toasty, and woodsy taste. It's expensive to order the real thing online, but if you're up for it, I recommend it. And as I mentioned before, the Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen is a great option for the Read a Cookbook prompt.
There are several other recipes I want to try, including Salad of Griddled Squash, Apples, Wild Greens, and Toasted Walnuts.
Jacqueline: You can make that for me, Carrie. That sounds good.
Carrie: I would say some of the ingredients in that book, you know, would just be very difficult to source down here because it's talking about local ingredients for the, like, the Upper Midwest.
But, there are some recipes that you could try.
Michael: That book has, you got ghosts, you got [00:22:00] books. You got social justice.
Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. It really had a little bit of everything. Yeah. I was thinking about, you, Michael, when I was reading it because, oh, I think Michael, this has a haunting. And, so Michael might like this book
too.
Jacqueline: So this book could cover a couple of our prompts and, you can start turning in your bingo sheets on the 1st of December, so go ahead and fill out those...
Michael: bingo cards.
Jacqueline: Bingo cards. Yeah. Thank you. I was like, whoa, I don't want to say sheets again.
Carrie: Yes. Excellent. Thanks for the reminder, Jacqueline.
Jacqueline: You're welcome.
Carrie: Thanks for listening to the Books and Bites podcast. To learn more about Books and Bites Bingo, visit us at jesspublib.org/books-bites. Our theme music is The Breakers from the album In Close Quarters with the Enemy by Scott [00:23:00] Whiddon. You can learn more about Scott and his music at his website adorafordesk. com.