Reading and Watching

 A newspaper article, a novel, and a recent film: all very absorbing!

“No more chocolate, coffee or wine? ‘Last supper’ shows stakes of climate crisis,” is an article that I read in the Guardian by Rachel Leingang. Endangered foods? It’s not just the ones that are always covered — quite a few favorites that we eat and drink every day have a worrying future. Above all: coffee! Chef and political worker Sam Kass invented a dinner menu that featured a number of dishes that we generally take for granted: “Courses included Norwegian salmon, oysters, lamb, fingerling potatoes, sticky toffee pudding.” Leingang explained how climate change is a threat to these favorite and not-at-all exotic foods and quite a few others.

UPDATE February 9: “Chocolate maker Hershey issues warning over record cocoa prices” another article in the Guardian notes that commodity price for cocoa has doubled in the last year.

Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes is a disappointing novel, because it’s hardly a novel at all. It’s more a collection of meditations on history and culture strung together as the thoughts and lectures of two characters: Finch, a freelance writer and teacher; and the narrator, once her student, later her sort-of friend, finally, the curator of her papers and books that she leaves when she dies. Very didactic and a little boring,

“The Holdovers,” a film about a prep school in 1970, which sometimes channels Catcher in the Rye (especially when there’s an outdoor skating rink scene), and sometimes “The Dead Poets Society,” and sometimes other similar tropes. It’s corny at times, as the two opposing forces, the pedantic teacher and the resentful student, are thrown together — abandoned when everyone else goes home for Christmas — with only one other person, Mary, the school cook and in my view the only fully sympathetic character. I found it watchable; you probably have watched it too as it’s very trendy right now, I think.

Reviews © 2024 mae sander