The End of the Road: Moving on to “Joy of Reading”
After almost 18 years, it s time for a major change. I will no longer be writing on WordPress. Instead, I will be wordsmithing on Substack, at “Joy of Reading.” Please join me there.
CYNTHIA D. BERTELSEN
Gherkins Tomatoes ... Since 2008
Latest posts
Cooks, the Forgotten Characters in Fiction
A few days ago, I spent an hour in the local Barnes Noble. There s only one other bookstore in town, indie, focused on banned books and so on. Nothing wrong with that, but their inventory isn t as large as B N, and I was looking for mass market paperback crime novels. Yeah, I do read [ ]
Pilgrymes, Passing to and Fro: Chaucer Got it Right
By God, if women had written stories,As clerks had within here oratories,They would have written of men more wickednessThan all the mark of Adam may redress. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer Somehow, I managed to get through many years of schooling without ever cracking open a copy of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Fleeting references to it [ ]
“A Hastiness of Cooks”: A Practical Handbook for Deciphering the Mysteries of Historic Recipes and Cookbooks*
Food is Life. I once stood on a busy street corner in Puebla, Mexico. A market day, a late October morning, battleship-gray skies overhead. I watched women – young, old, rich, poor―lugging string bags or baskets laden with food, hurrying home to cook almuerzo, lunch. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head: Food [ ]
They Called it Callaloo
A fully grown up tree cannot be bent into a walking stick. ~ African proverb Stuck off the beaten track but surrounded by the heavy traffic of a congested city, the Grand Market in Virginia Beach, Virginia is not an easy place to pinpoint, even with GPS tracking technology. But Sam s voice droned, Turn right, then [ ]