« Archives in January, 2006

An exploration of The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

The Robber Bride is one of those books that seems like it’s going to be about absolutely nothing at all, but ends up being astonishingly substantial. The plot is focused on three women, Tony, Charis, and Roz, that have little in common except that they attended the University of Toronto together in the 60s. While there, they met a woman named Zenia who proceeded to devastate each of their lives, at the rate of one per decade. At the end of the 80s, Zenia is killed in an explosion in Lebanon. Tony, Charis, and Roz settle into the routines of their bruised lives and try to forget about the malicious woman that did them so much harm.

Fast forward to the early 90s: The three friends meet for lunch at a restaurant to discuss old times, and they are mortified when Zenia walks in, alive and as threateningly lush as ever…

In this exploration, I will give a brief synopsis of the plot, followed by a loose collection of things that I found particularly interesting that you might want to watch out for when reading (or re-reading) this book.

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Word/Phrase origins: No quarter, turn the tables, and restaurant

I wasn’t even looking for most of these ones, but somehow I ran across the stories of the origins anyhow, and I thought they were interesting enough to merit sharing them. (Admittedly, two of the three are phrases rather than words. Oops.)

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Debo’s Spicy Chicken Broth

I invented this broth last week when Suz and I managed to ping-pong colds off of one another. Your typical bland chicken broth doesn’t do much for me, so I decided to improvise and I was pretty surprised with the results.

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Word origins: turncoat, booby-trap, and woolgathering

Three different words caught my attention recently, and I found myself wondering about their origins. I did a very shallow investigation (ie web-only, so don’t put too much stock in it), and this is what I came up with…

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