book talk: breakfasting with books

This morning before leaving to teach, I breakfasted with books. Eating-while-reading is one of my favorite things, as it combines the two best pastimes. I tried my hand at those strawberry oat bars from yesterday's post, and they were just awesome. A little more like a strawberry crumble than a bar, but still. The "crust" is really, really yummy--the pinch of sea salt really makes it!

I breakfasted with this book:

It has been on my reading list for about a year and a half (the hubs read it and loved it). Today, I cracked the cover. Beryl Markham, "Britain's Amelia Earhart," completely drew me in within the first three pages...her writing voice is frank and well-paced, making for easy (and kind of awed) reading. She masterfully begins detailing her life as a free-lance pilot in Kenya, with evocative descriptions of everything from hacked-out dirt runways to the then-burgeoning city of Nairobi. 

She just seems like the coolest person. I would've loved to take her out for a couple martinis. Very dry martinis. With olives. 

The best thing I discovered at breakfast was this little blurb on the back cover:

"Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer's log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people's stories, are absolutely true...I wish you would get it and read it because it really is a bloody wonderful book." 

--Ernest Hemingway

Well, if Ernest thinks it's good...