I don't exactly know why or how I remembered this blog, except to lay the blame/credit at the feet of Salman Rushdie. Well, and my own procrastination. I'm currently at the middle to tail end (I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel) of
Midnight's Children, a book I started when I first went to England, nearly a decade ago. Since then, I have taken it with me all around Europe, on optismitic train journeys and cramped RyanAir flights, and never made it past the first 100 pages or so. It's somewhat shameful that I have only now broken past this wall because Rushdie went on The Daily Show to talk about
Midnight's Children the movie. One of the few, completely arbitrary rules I have for myself (and everyone should have at least one) is that I refuse to see a movie before I've read the book it's based on (exception #1: unless I was unaware of the existence of the book). So my hipster shame finally won over my innate and incurable tendency to procrastinate, and at this moment, I am on page 238 of my literary albatross.
In triumphing over inertia and inspired by all the food mentioned in the book (faloodas and mango pickles and "curries and meatballs of intransigence," "fish salans of stubbornness and the birianis of determination"), I ruminated to my roommate that I should write a blog about food and books. It took a shameful number of hours later to remember that I already had one. My poor, neglected blog.
Unlike all the previous resurrections, I make no promises about how often or in what manner I will update this, but I am tentatively hopeful of both reading more and cooking (at all) again. I have visions of eating homemade lemon rice while hurtling toward the end of Midnight's Children. Wish me luck, and thank you, Mr. Rushdie.
