"The Best Twenty-five of twenty-five," part IV

16. The best book

No new additions were made in the last year to my list of all-time favorite books. I read some good stuff, just nothing that wowed me to an exceptional extent. Still, of all the books I read for the first time this year, I enjoyed A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway, the most. What caused it to stand out was a combination of the excellent narrative style and the insightful reflections on the process of writing and observing life in Paris in the 1920's. The fact that I was in Paris while I was reading it didn't hurt, either.

17. The best beat

If it weren't for the new song, "Maracas," by Mates of State, available to listen to on their website as a preview to their upcoming new album, I might have had to have gone with final track on Sufjan Stevens' latest LP, released in October. But now I'm giddy with anticipation of the other new tunes that Mates of State has created. Mates of State is just so good.

18. The best beet

This one:

Dad's "proud" face.

19. The best tomato

The verdict is unanimous: of the six varieties of heirloom tomatoes I grew in the garden this year, the Yellow Brandywine's seeds are the ones most worth saving. A bountiful producer, this monster of a plant outgrew its tomato cage while its neighbor plants were still reaching only about a foot high. The fruit is proportionately gargantuan, attractive in shape and color, and delicious.

20. The best baked goods

I frequently dabble, with mixed results, in creating my own recipes. This year, my greatest triumph was my recipe for strawberry-lavender muffins (muffins aux fraises et lavande), which I made several times throughout the hight of the strawberry season with consistently superb results. I am confident that these muffins will become a late-spring/early-summer staple in years to come.

Why doesn't everybody know this stuff?

Yesterday at work, a woman came up to the register and asked, "What's a sonnet?"

To be honest, it took me a moment to realize that I hadn't misunderstood her question, so long has it been since I've talked about sonnets in the presence of someone who didn't know what one was. She had to repeat herself and explain that she had seen the words "Modern Sonnets" on a book somewhere.

In my best teacherly voice, I explained that a sonnet is a fourteen-line poem, and that the lines are written in something called "iambic pentameter," meaning that the meter sounds something like, "da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM." I told her that, traditionally, sonnets stick to a specific rhyme scheme, but contemporary sonnets don't necessarily have to.

Later, when I relayed this story to my co-worker, somehow expecting him to share my amazement that someone didn't know what a sonnet was, he simply replied, "All I know is that it's a kind of poem and Shakespeare wrote a lot of them."

I have the sudden impression that not everybody knows the same stuff as me and sees the word the way it is inside my head. It's very unsettling.

Shakespeare Spirit

This week and last I attended two separate productions for the 2011 Shakespeare Festival at the Old Globe in Balboa Park. Last Wednesday was The Tempest; tonight, Much Ado About Nothing.

Watching a Shakespeare production, especially one as well-acted and well-directed as the one I had the pleasure of viewing this evening, I am overcome by the giddy sensation that language is imbued with unbridled possibilities. Though, for my own purposes, I often find language a bit cumbersome, struggling for the right words in conversation and constantly consulting a dictionary while I'm writing to ensure that I'm using terms correctly and that no undesirable connotations are riding piggyback in with them, Shakespeare harnesses, manipulates, and invents words, stringing them together in such ways as no other person ever has. I am so in awe that I come home and pull out my own copy of Shakespeare's complete works. I heave the hefty tome open on my lap and skim through the text of Much Ado About Nothing, slowing down when I get to my favorite parts. I want to find one good line or two that exemplify Shakespeare's genius, but, to my slight disappointment as much as to my utter delight, I cannot chose just two. Because they are all good.