I dragged my feet with this book for a long time. The character sketches were phenomenal, but something about the style kept me at a distance and it was a great effort to keep turning pages. Even being laid up during the covid-19 lockdown didn't help. Have to mark as 'abandoned'. 

by Ivana Nitzan and Michal Moses

I couldn't resist this cookbook because I love anything caramel, toffee or butterscotch. One of the first things the book clarifies is the difference between caramel and toffee, which I never really knew before. Dulce de Leche also comes up in some of the recipes and is defined for those who didn't already know.

The recipes! I did expect some wonderfully decadent sweet recipes and was not to be disappointed, but the unusual savory recipes, matching caramel with chicken and other foods we wouldn't normally think of, makes this cookbook unique. I should clarify though that the savory recipes are caramelised rather than having something like caramel sauce on chicken, although you could get that effect with the caramel fondue and chicken pieces if you were having weird pregnancy cravings or something.

I especially liked that it started with recipes to make your own caramels and toffees rather than relying on melting down commercially made ones. As a Brit who misses Toffos, I intend to experiment with the toffee recipe and flavoured syrups!

Some of the sweet recipes are just too good. Caramel marbled into chocolate brownies, a chocolate banana toffee torte with cream on top and sticky toffee buns are just the sort of thing I picked this book up for. The brilliant thing is that these wonderful recipes are easy! No weird, exotic, hard to find ingredients. Basic sugar, butter, and cream are the building blocks for most caramel related recipes and many wonderful treats await.

There are even healthy recipes like carrot cake with white chocolate caramel frosting or using fruits and oats in the sweet sections. I think I'll b e getting more use out of this cookbook than many others in my collection!

Richard Armitage read The Trouble at the Dinosaur Cafe. Lovely read.  

The dinosaurs are having a good time at the cafe but the bully Rex comes in. Luckily, Rex is defeated with tickles. 

My latest podcast is up on the New Books Network website! In it, I interview Wilson J. Moses about his survey Thomas Jefferson's manifold intellectual activities and what they reveal about his ideas. Enjoy!

The twists and turns of a large extended family that revolves around one character in one way or another while showing the change of life in Mississippi over the course of 80 years.  Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner is a novel constructed around seven interconnected short stories revolving around the McCaslin family and relations.

The novel begins with “Was” relating how one night’s search for an escaped slave ultimately leads to the birth of the book’s central character, Isaac “Uncle Ike” McCaslin, and his Beauchamp relations who are descended from McCaslin’s grandfather with a black slave.  “The Fire and the Hearth” follows Lucas Beauchamp, a black sharecropper who is farming his McCaslin’s ancestor’s land and getting away with treating the white landowner Roth Edmonds with bare contempt.  “Pantaloon in Black” follows Rider who lives on Roth Edmond’s plantation who buries his wife then after seeing her ghost essentially goes suicidal as he kills a white man who’s been cheating blacks at dice for years and gets lynched.  “The Old People” follows a ten-year old Isaac McCaslin killing his first deer on his first hunt with help from Sam Feathers, a son of a Chickasaw chief and a black slave-girl, who then leads him to an old tribal ritual to mark him becoming a hunter.  “The Bear” follows Isaac over the next several years as he and the hunting group attempt to kill Old Ben, which only succeeds after they get a feral terrier named Lion that brings the bear to bay to allow to kill.  Afterwards Isaac goes over his family’s history and decides to sign over his plantation to his cousin McCaslin Edmonds, Roth’s grandfather.  “Delta Autumn” sees a nearly 80-year Isaac go on another hunting trip but with the sons and grandsons of the first hunting group seen in “The Old People”, he learns that Roth has had an affair and child with a black woman who turns out to be a distant Beauchamp cousin.  The titular “Go Down, Moses” follows Gavin Stevens as he arranges the return and burial of Lucas Beauchamp’s executed grandson at the instigation of Lucas’ wife.

The quality of each story is up and down with “The Old People” read like the best followed by “Was”.  Every other story really wasn’t that good, and some were just frustrating, especially “The Bear”.  “The Bear” was compelling until the final third when Faulkner changed writing styles as Isaac explores his family history before giving away his land to his cousin while still taking care of his Beauchamp relations.  Faulkner’s writing style decisions either made the stories good or frustrating, but I must admit that all of them did have some compelling things.

Go Down, Moses is not considered one of William Faulkner’s best works by many of his fans.  While I can’t speak to that, I know I was not a fan of this book.  This is many second Faulkner book and both have not been to my liking, I may read another Faulkner book several years in a future but nothing soon.