Do you eat while you read?
Mindfulness gurus suggest meals are best consumed thoughtfully without distraction. However, your hectic life often demands that if you ever hope to find out who killed the guy on pg. 39, you’ll need to read on your lunch break.
But reading while eating (or eating while reading, depending on your priorities in the moment) comes with risks to both your digestion and the unblemished condition of your book.
Plus, there’s a judgmental element to all this: If you’re enjoying a cup of tea and some ginger snaps with your cozy mystery, people assume you’re classy. If you’re hunched over a bowl of mac and cheese, slurping a leftover McFlurry? Less so.
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Either way, I don’t judge. Back when we were working in a crowded newsroom, I’d sneak off with a book to eat lunch at the park, a move I highly recommend. But I also know how easy it is to look down at a plateful of crumbs and wonder what happened to your sandwich over the past 10 pages. Or to feel guilty about getting a tiny stain on a page that, let’s be honest, you’ll likely never look at again.
This all came to mind while I was reading and listening to “Between Two Fires,” Christopher Buehlman’s historical horror novel set in France in the year 1348 during the Black Death. The book has just been republished by Tor Nightfire, with a wonderfully creepy cover, after gaining traction via TikTok.
Sure, the term “the plague” was probably an indicator that sharing my leftover curry with a disgraced knight and a strange young woman might prove to be a gustatory challenge. The term “medieval horror” might have also been a clue.
That said, “Between Two Fires” is a novel that’s been recommended more than once, and now having read it, I can see why it’s become a cult favorite. While I was a little hesitant to commit in the first few pages – I don’t read a lot of horror – I was soon drawn into the epic, episodic journey of a damaged soldier, his odd young companion and a drunken priest as they make their way through the disease-ridden countryside and into a pestilent Paris and beyond.
As mentioned, it is a horror novel, and one that employs Hieronymus Bosch-level bedevilments and creepery, so, you know, be forewarned that its damned landscape features clashes of good versus evil, angels versus devils, monster versus man and this all plays out viscerally and with, um, viscera.
It’s best not paired with spaghetti and meat sauce, I can attest.
But it’s really good. Having recently read “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century,” Barbara W. Tuchman’s fantastic history of medieval Europe, Buehlman’s “Between Two Fires” is a terrific companion volume, one that constructs its horrors out of the concerns of the day: sickness, damnation and violence, among them.
Published in 1978, Tuchman’s history still feels current – there are pandemics, oligarchs, inequality, misinformation campaigns and endless warring, to name a few things that continue to bedevil us. Despite its size, the book seems made for readers today; the sections are brief and punchy, and keep building and knitting together a greater understanding of this long-gone world.
And “A Distant Mirror” is full of compelling stories and characters, such as that of Jeanne de Montfort. After her husband was captured and imprisoned, she put on his helmet and armor, mounted his horse and led his soldiers in battle.
Apparently, the book’s more modern sensibility – it discusses the lives of women, for example – turned off some historians nearly 50 years ago, but for those who don’t need their histories to be mustier and dustier, it’s a terrific read (even if, I imagine, there’s been fresh scholarship about the era since then).
It’s probably fairly obvious, but either of these books would be something a fan of “Game of Thrones” would likely enjoy.
So back to eating and reading: What did I do when things got … squishy? I just grabbed something else to read and prayed it would all work out fine. (As well, I cook a lot and try to listen to audiobooks that don’t clash with meal prep.)
How about you? Do you consume calories while you rack up your page counts or do you keep these delights separate? And what medieval-era books do you recommend? Ken Follett’s “The Pillars of the Earth”? What else?