Watch for it

This book, I mean. This discovery saved what would otherwise have been a wasted hour screwing around on the Internet, link to link to link, but bam, suddenly, I can’t even remember how, I somehow found out about an upcoming book called Day of Honey. It looks so good it should have a trailer, like a movie, with a big ‘COMING SUMMER 2010’ at the end.

I know the writer’s byline from the Monitor, but despite this effusive praise, we’ve never met, and I have no earthly interest in how well her book does or doesn’t do. I’m simply, genuinely excited, and it’s so rare to get excited about a book, especially a war book, that I’m relishing it. And sharing it. You’re welcome.

Anna Ciezadlo’s book is about food, but I know it’s going to be good because I immediately want to say, “and about so much more.” From her website:

In the fall of 2003, Annia Ciezadlo spent her honeymoon in Baghdad. She moved to Beirut, with her brand-new husband and not much else, and spent the next six years in Beirut and Baghdad, cooking and eating with Shiites and Sunnis, refugees and warlords, matriarchs, and mullahs. In Day of Honey, Ciezadlo brings a broad historical, political, and cultural perspective to the everyday human struggle to obtain and prepare food during wartime.

And I dare you to read this without falling in love with the writing. Also from her website:

Some people construct work spaces when they travel, lining up their papers with care, stacking their books on the table, taping family pictures to the mirror. When I’m in a strange new city and feeling rootless, I cook. No matter how inhospitable the room, no matter what chaos is raging outside it, I construct a little field kitchen. In Baghdad, it was a hot plate plugged into a dubious electrical socket in the hallway outside the bathroom. I haunt the local markets and cook whatever I find: fresh green almonds, fleshy black figs, fresh-killed chickens with their heads still on. I cook to comprehend the place I’ve landed in, to touch and feel and take in the raw materials of my new surroundings. I cook because eating has always been how I understand the world. I cook foods that seem familiar and foods that seem strange. I cook because I am always, always hungry. And I cook for that oldest of reasons: to banish loneliness, homesickness, the persistent feeling that I don’t belong in this place. If you can conjure something of substance from the flux of your life—if you can anchor yourself in the earth around you, like Antaeus—you are, at least for that meal, at home in the world.

And if you go to her website, you can more about the book, including an excerpt.

Who’s coming to Kigali in August to bring me a copy?? You can pre-order it for me here.