Le Tasting Menu du Jour

Le Tasting Menu du Jour

            I always love samples, whether they’re beauty products, food, or even demos on my Kindle. Each sample is like a teaser of the real thing, and—of course, as a marketing strategy—gives you a good sense of the product and leaves you wanting more!

Here are a few samples that are specially selected for you from the books we’ve read in True Believers this year. Enjoy!

The Appetizer*

 (The fastest, wittiest, most minimalist French-crafted prose)…………..Candide, Voltaire

She quite innocently took his hand, he as innocently kissed hers with singular grace and ardour. Their lips met, their eyes flashed, their knees trembled, and their hands would not keep still. Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh, happening to pass the screen at that moment, noticed both cause and effect, and drove Candide from the house with powerful kicks on the backside. Cunégonde fainted, and on recovering her senses was boxed on the ears by the Baroness. (21)

The Main Course

(Classic American detective story, with all the more credit for not having a traditionally “American” happy ending)…....………………………The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

He reached for another of my cigarettes, placed it neatly between his lips and lit it with a match the way I do myself, missing twice on his thumbnail and then using his foot. He puffed evenly and stared at me level-eyed, a funny little hard guy I could have thrown from home place to second base. A small man in a big man’s world. There was something I liked about him. (168)

The Sophisticated Dessert

(An allusion-filled and metaphor-stuffed experience of flowery words, bawdy insults, and the general spitefulness of royal politics)…………………Henry IV Part I, Shakespeare

If to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be loved.

 (II.IV, 457-458)

OR

Ill-weaved ambition, how much art thou shrunk!

When that this body did contain a spirit,

A kingdom for it was too small a bound;

But now two paces of the vilest earth

Is room enough. (V.IV, 87-91)

* Candide : The predominant philosophy here is that of Pangloss: “This is the best of all possible worlds”. While the man becomes a living paradox—in this “best of all possible worlds,” he soon finds himself without an eye, an ear, many teeth, his health, and his home—he is also a beacon of hope, for if this man can adhere to his beliefs through his chance-driven life, then certainly anyone with a less traumatic existence can hope to do so as well!