The Friday Four, Part 36

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It's been a little quiet around the blog lately because we had a massive invasion of family this past weekend.  My second oldest turned 8 last week and was baptized on Saturday, so we had grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins coming out of our ears and filling every room of our not-so-big house.  We even had to pull the camp trailer out of its temporary winter retirement to house a few.  (The cousins loved that!)

It was a great weekend, both getting to spend time with family and celebrating Josh's special day.  Even if it meant I was a little short on time to read and write.

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Photo courtesy wikipedia

Malala Yousafzai has been all over the news this week.  A year ago, she was shot in the head and neck by Taliban soldiers for daring to speak out regarding her desire for an education. She has made a miraculous recovery and has continued her advocacy of education for all. At the age of 16, she is the youngest person ever nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and even though it was ultimately awarded to someone else last week, her inspirational influence is expanding.

Because of her example, I try to be a little more courageous in speaking out and standing up for what I believe.

Watch her great interview with Jon Stewart here.

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Neil Gaiman is a brilliant author.  I love The Graveyard Book and Coraline.  He creates deliciously spooky worlds for his quirky and substantial characters to inhabit, and articulates Truth beautifully.

A few days ago he spoke to The Reading Agency in London about the importance of libraries and, well, reading.  You can read the whole text of his address here, but I've included a few of my favorite excerpts below:

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

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We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

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We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

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"Delicatessen with love" is a project by Gabriele Galimberti. He photographed dozens of grandmas around the world, pairing a portrait of each of them in their kitchen or dining room surrounded by the necessary ingredients for their "best" dish with a picture of the completed meal.  It's not only food photography at its best, it portraiture at its best.  The differences between the women and their situations are fascinating; the commonalities are striking.  I love looking at their faces.  These women are beautiful!

And the food.  Oh my goodness, I want to gobble it all up!  (Except maybe the caterpillars in tomato and onion sauce from Malawi, though the Malawian grandmother's smile is delightful.)  Gabriele also includes cooking instructions, so if you're interested in trying to replicate grandma's chicken vindaloo from India, or tolma from Armenia, or inkokt lax a from Sweden, or Honduran iguana with rice and beans from the Cayman Islands, you're in luck!