restaurant review: My Thai

This is a relatively new Thai place at Walnut and Aiken, in the Ann Taylor building. They had some dishes I hadn't seen in Pittsburgh. We got a bunch of food and shared, and everything was pretty good. Not quite spicy enough, but maybe you could ask them to jack it up. The crispy whole fish and Kevin's thing with the fat chow-funny noodles were particularly good. They have a mango sticky-rice dessert that's reported to be excellent, but they ran out of high-grade mango.

Tasty. I think I like Thai Cuisine a little better (and they're a bit cheaper), but My Thai is up there. Way ahead of Thai Place. I haven't tried the revamped Lemongrass.

Anne Fadiman, _Ex Libris_

A short concentrated book, a collection of essays: on merging libraries with her husband (of five years), on reading books in the places they describe, on books as sacrosanct physical objects versus as children's blocks, on reading catalogs, on flyleaf inscriptions, on doomed polar expeditions by British gentlemen, and a dozen more. Very funny sometimes, not from jokes but from the tickle of recognition. Her introduction remarks on how "books are so often written about as if they were toasters": "This model of readers as consumers [...] neatly omits what I consider the heart of reading: not whether we wish to purchase a new book but how we maintain our connections with our old books, the ones we have lived with for many years [...]", which pinpoints a reaction I had to the collectors in Basbanes's book.

I have to drop in a couple more quotes:

[Sir Robert] Scott's last journal entry is indescribably sad. But for reasons I cannot fully explain, I find myself even more affected whenever I read an account of what the search aprty found on his sledge: thirty-five pounds of rocks containing Paleozoic fossil leaves and stems of the genus Glossopteris, which the men had dragged 400 miles from the Beardmore Glacier. Scott had been so eager to travel light that he had weighed his party's food rations to the last fraction of an ounce, but he didn't dump the rocks. If he had, his men might have been able to walk the last eleven miles.

I am certain, however, that the gene has passed to our six-year-old daughter. She can't yet spell well enough to correct words, but she has definitely inherited the proofreading temperament. When she was two and a half, George said to her, pointing to our bird-feeder, "Look, Susannah, a rufous towhee!" Susannah said, witheringly, "No, Daddy, a rufous-sided towhee."

Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth an Nectarine -- good God how fine. It went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy -- all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large Beatified strawberry.
-- in a letter from Keats to a friend, Charles Wentworth Dilke

These essays, all together, end up being the best description I've ever read of the inner life of a certain kind of book-loving person, and of how that life takes root in a library and grows into the books and draws from them, draws their texts up to populate the inner landscape.