Tag Archives: Magnus Nilsson

Desert Island Books

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The BBC Radio has a longstanding program called “Desert Island Discs.” Each week, the program invites a notable to be cast away on a hypothetical desert island with recordings of eight songs of his choice, plus the Bible, the Complete Works of Shakespeare, and one book pick. The guest also gets one luxury item. The format is an interview with the person about his life and why the songs mean something to him. The program, which is available as a podcast, is quite enjoyable.

Go big or go home

So if I could choose only eight books (single-volume titles only) to accompany me in an exile, what would they be? If we are talking about a banishment of a weekend, then a selection from the current pile of books by my chair would suffice. For a month or two? Well, a slightly different list of criteria might come into play. And what if my time as a castaway was indeterminate, possibly years without contact? Selecting those few books to accompany, to suffice, to hold my attention, becomes a formidable feat indeed. In any given year, I’m likely to pull a hundred books off my shelves, if only to read a page or a chapter. But limit that number to eight in what could extend to a lifetime, my choices would be required to soothe, entertain, or educate, again and again.

Of course, the BBC program makes no reference to the type of island, the “Desert” of the title seems more a stand-in for “deserted” than for an arid wasteland. Most guests interviewed make the assumption that it is a tropical island. For myself, I’m going to take the liberty of claiming a remote rocky isle in the north or south Atlantic, one not far enough in either direction to be barren. A place where in exile I could still raise a garden of greens and root vegetables in the shelter of a stone wall. Maybe tend a small flock of wild sheep, a scraggly bunch of chickens, work outside before retiring at night into a 300-year-old stone cottage. (This is my island, get your own.)

When preparing to pack my eight titles, it became clear that most fiction wouldn’t work: A simple murder mystery, much as I love a well-written one, would not make the cut. Once it was read it would be tossed aside, at least for a few years. The books for the solitary exile must contain worlds within worlds that sustain his interest, making him want to pull them off the shelf, day after day, month after month, year after year. Truly, this is an impossible task. And whatever I select today might change tomorrow. But once rowed onto that rocky shore, shoved off the dinghy and left behind … it’d be too late to make a trade-in.

So here’s my list. I tried to put it together on mere instinct. A few of the books are solid choices; the others shifted about as I typed. Many different anthologies sprang to mind only to be discarded on a whim. In the end, some made the list for the simple reason that I ran out of time: The gendarme is knocking at the door. No time to pack. My exile for unnamed crimes commences today.

Eight Books for Exile

Book 1: Icelandic Sagas. The Folio edition edited by Magnus Magnusson. An evening reading of Hrut and his unsatisfied wife, Unn, or the endless tales of bloody vengeance, battles with Skraelings, and other assorted adventures from another island should be the tonic to take my mind off my own isolation. And, if Unn floats over on a raft to say hello, well….

Book 2: Complete Works of Shakespeare. Even if I am not reading each play from start to finish, just dipping a toe in the inspiring waters of the St. Crispin’s Day speech has got to be worth an evening, or two, or perhaps one thousand, seven hundred and twenty-four.

Book 3: Lord of the Rings. By J.R.R. Tolkien, the big single-volume edition. First off, I should state that this is not my favorite book or author and that out of his works I prefer The Hobbit. But I’m in exile, dammit, for God only knows how long. And it is an entertaining story that I have already enjoyed reading once, and it has the added blessing of being pretty darned long. Plus, with my meager memory, I could get to the end and start to wonder how it all began … and start over, there and back again (or, was that the other one?).

Book 4: Webster’s New International Dictionary. My 1910 copy runs close to 3,000 pages. There is enough in this volume alone to fascinate, educate, and pass a lifetime of lonely evenings.

Book 5: Meditations. By Marcus Aurelius, the Hicks translation titled The Emperor’s Handbook. I read a little of Aurelius most mornings. It has helped me make sense of the world for many years. So, while sitting on a promontory pondering my misdeeds, a few paragraphs might serve to calm the spirit.

Book 6: Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. The Modern Library edition. So this slot was reserved for the Library of America volume of Wendell Berry’s fiction. But those stories, of family and community, might just cause me to leap over the cliff some late night in a fit of isolated despair. Instead, this classic collection of things that go bump in the night should be the tonic, with the cold wind outside rattling the cottage, to scare myself silly while sipping on my Scotch or bourbon (more on this later), reading by the peat fire.

Book 7: The Iliad. By Homer, Robert Fagles’s translation. I reread this from start to finish this past year. Now, in these succeeding months, I find myself thinking of those doomed men and women, both the victorious and the vanquished. Sitting alone on a scarp, watching and hoping for the boat to arrive someday and release me, I could while away the days rereading those ancient pages. Particularly of Hector, the family man, the man of honor, brother to the self-centered weakling Paris.

Book 8: The Nordic Cookbook. By Magnus Nilsson. At close to 800 pages, this encyclopedic insight into the cooking traditions of the Nordic world should be just the thing to reference when I need to roast a puffin, cure and smoke a leg of mutton over sheep dung, pickle a seal’s head, or figure out yet one more way of making porridge out of the same four ingredients taste good. That Nilsson is a good writer and this book an amazing read are an added bonus.

I am also allotted one luxury item. Mine is that my island, miraculously, is located near an ocean current that drifts in a case of fine-tasting Scotch or bourbon to my rocky shores at least once a year. It could happen. The SS Politician was no myth.

So, what eight books are you taking when they come for you?

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Reading this morning: lamb cookbooks

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The Life and Death of a White Oak

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One hundred and eighty years ago, while Andrew Jackson was president, around the year the Cherokee signed the treaty to vacate these lands, a white oak seedling began to grow on our farm. Ignored by the tramping feet and perhaps nurtured by the blood, by the close of the Civil War this seedling would have grown to a modest thirty feet — one of many thousands in a vast troop competing for space in the canopy, biding its time, waiting for the weaknesses of other trees to become manifest before taking its rightful space.

At the turn of last century, this particular white oak would have approached sixty-five to seventy-five feet, closing in on its mature height of ninety feet. But it would have another full century and more to add to its girth. Nourished by a taproot plunging deep into the earth, undisturbed by the butchery of men in distant lands, the arrival of the car, the plane, the tractor, this tree methodically put on growth: skinny rings in the lean famine years and fat, upper-class belly rings of indulgence in the feast years.

A survivor of countless storms, the tree stayed put when others failed. Not some flighty understory sprout that rose, then fell back in mere decades. Not the grand, fast-growing tulip poplar. This white oak was the mighty burgher of the woodland village, stolid.

An active participant in staying put, it constantly moved. A casual glance down the drive found our gauge of the weather: with each breath of wind, the twitching and bending of its smaller branches in dance informed us of the tempo of the music.

When on that day an average thunderstorm rolled across the opposite ridge, when out of the thousands of lightning strikes one sought out this tree, our tree, was there any awareness of death, self, family, loss, and the endurance of nearly two centuries? Was there a sense of submission to a greater power, any hubris that this couldn’t happen to such a mighty oak?

In the end it was an honorable death, a long life that fell to a greater axe than mine, that random but predictable shaft of wild energy — an act foredestined those one hundred and eighty years ago, that the mighty and the low will fall.

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Reading this weekend: The Nordic Cookbook by Magnus Nilsson. The perfect book in case you get marooned on the Faroe islands and have to cure a joint of mutton.

Homestead Weekend: the productive arts

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Homestead Weekend: a weekend devoted to the productive arts (22 degrees this morning)

1. Squirrel Confit: Every New Year I make confit with the goose legs from our roast goose. It occurred to me that one could make a confit (meat cured in salt and preserved in lard) with anything at hand. What was at hand was a squirrel. Cured in salt, garlic, thyme and basil for 48 hours. Browned in in a skillet with lard. Placed in a pan with enough lard to cover for three hours at 250 degrees in the oven. Pulled out and allowed to cool the squirrel was stored in a mason jar and covered with the lard. Delicious! The remaining meat will be shredded and served over a small portion of pureed split peas as an appetizer.
2. Kimchee: I created a version of kimchee with cabbage, Hungarian and Hatch peppers, ginger, garlic, green onions, fish sauce and salt. Tossing it all together it was packed into a ½ gallon mason jar where it is fermenting nicely. Should be ready in 2-4 weeks.
3. Turnip Kraut: Ten pounds of purple top turnips and greens shredded, salt added and packed into ceramic crock. Fermenting nicely and should be ready in 4-6 weeks.
4. Lard: Five pounds of leaf fat (fat from around the kidneys of a hog) rendered out into beautiful snow white lard. Perfect for baking.
5. Bread: Cindy has been busy baking outstanding bread the past few days.
6. Strawberry Mead: Four pounds of honey, water and a pint of frozen strawberries from our patch, natural yeast and the mix is fermenting quietly in the corner of my study. The mead should be ready in six months.
7. Pork Link Sausage w/figs, brandy and nutmeg: replicating a reference I found to a traditional German Christmas sausage. Four of my favorite food stuffs…how could it go wrong? Making this one later today.
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Reading this weekend two early Christmas presents: The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz (ah, that explains the above) and Faviken by Magnus Nilsson, a great cookbook when you are trying to figure out what to do with your “perfectly shot and mature hazelhen” and that handful of lingonberries, or a backstrap loin of moose.