Readings for this year
- At the beginning of the new year, we seem to be renewing our ideas, and some of us make lists of tasks to be carried out. One of those tasks is the list of books that I have to read, an increasingly fatter list. Not a few of you have asked me what I read, so I thought I would make this list known. As I have just learned that the Hontza library of Donostia is looking for follow-up, today I also write about my books with heartache.
I have all these books at home, some of which are starting to read and some of which I haven't touched. When you write a book, it's hard to read, at least that's how I live it; I often think my eyes ask me to rest. Thus, the list becomes increasingly fat, because those who have bought with enthusiasm and started reading await me on the shelf.
The book Zuza Zaken Slavic Kitchen Alchemy, nourishing herbal remedies, magical recipes & folk wisdom is the first. The book gathers what the Polish grandmother taught her, a broad culinary tradition, but without great differences between food and medicinal herbs.
Aina S. I also have to finish the book The women who made us see the wonderful world of the plants of Viriditas de Erice and Amanda Mijangos. It was given to me by Uxoa Iñurrieta who made the translation and I found it especially beautiful, in the absence of a few pages I think I am in a moment to finish.
There's also a treasure that I've found in secondhand bookstores, a book that's almost my age. William A. Oh my God! Thomson's Enlightened Practice Guide to Medicinal Plants is the most common and usable title of the work. Today it serves to see what is at this time, also to know the fame of other medicinal herbs not so long ago; I think it will serve me to see how this evolution has happened.
In Katakrak I discovered Gótico Botanico, tales of a perverse verdor of the editorial Impedimenta. It is a catalogue of stories by authors who have read the vegetable world from fantasy. Nathaniel Hawthorne or Road Dahl are some of the best known, but there are also books by Mary Elizabeth Counselman, Eli Colter or Maria Moravsky. From now on, the green will be the new black on the back, as many times the authors show in their stories a nonsensical sinister verdor. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many people saw plants as mysterious and beneficial and deadly beings, a little away from the present fascination.
The traveling tree, by Michio Hoshino, is the latest on the list. The editorial highlights that it brings together aspects such as ecology, mysticism, love of land and car discovery. Something will have, as it leaves in the 72 edition. The author is a photographer who took the subject of nature, who died by a brown bear when working in Russia on a commission – which has not happened to us on my order, but burned the claws of Dani Blanco and Ibai Arrieta who was lost in the lavender field.
And when I feel compelled to rest from medicinal herbs, nature and “my subjects” I will continue reading Hetero de Uxue Alberdi. Contrary to custom, I started reading backwards and we will continue swimming in cold waters. Because the strands between fiction, life and what (is becoming) are many and varied in this plot we call reality.
