Humor

Celebrate Hobbit Day with Literary Breakfasts!

Brenna Clarke Gray

Staff Writer

Part muppet and part college faculty member, Brenna Clarke Gray holds a PhD in Canadian Literature while simultaneously holding two cats named Chaucer and Swift. It's a juggling act. Raised in small-town Ontario, Brenna has since been transported by school to the Atlantic provinces and by work to the Vancouver area, where she now lives with her stylish cyclist/webgeek husband and the aforementioned cats. When not posing by day as a forserious academic, she can be found painting her nails and watching Degrassi (through the critical lens of awesomeness). She posts about graphic narratives at Graphixia, and occasionally she remembers to update her own blog, Not That Kind of Doctor. Blog: Not That Kind of Doctor Twitter: @brennacgray

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Sep 21, 2012

Did you know that today is Second Breakfast Day? It is! And that’s a joy for us all. If you don’t know what a Second Breakfast is… Well, your childhood must have been terribly deprived. It’s from JRR Tolkien’s universe — hobbits love them some Second Breakfast (that’s how you get in six meals a day). According to Wikipedia, it’s also a European thing, but shut up Wikipedia, I’m talking about hobbits. I have been thinking about second breakfasts a lot lately, because I am a recent inductee to the gluten-free club (ps, this club sucks so hard) and the lactose-free club (pps, this one is legit worse) and have found that in this new version of my life, the one where I can’t eat anything delicious ever, I have to eat all the time or else I die. That’s my understanding of what gluten does for my body. I’m new at this. It’s a process. In honour of Second Breakfast, I thought I might share some favourite literary breakfasts.

Breakfast of Champions. One of Kurt Vonnegut’s best, in my opinion, about Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover and some amok-running at a conference. In this novel, of course, the “breakfast of champions” is a martini, which is incidentally a gluten- and lactose-free part of this complete blog post.
Bachelor Brother’s Bed and Breakfast. Bill Richardson, when I was growing up, was a CBC radio host and an openly gay, openly fabulous man of letters who had a very public life in Canada. I have lost track of him, but this novel was one that I adored. The premise is that people come and go from this bed and breakfast, taking and leaving favourite novels as they come and go and enjoy their breakfasts. It’s marvelous. I would like to go there for a Book Riot retreat.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Truman Capote’s 1958 novella. You know, people often refer to me as the Holly Golightly of Book Riot. (Stop laughing.) But right now she makes me sad because I have been fully excluded from cafe society, with all its gluten and lactose. Not to make this all about me. Except, you know. What are your favourite literary breakfasts, dear readers? Meet me in the comments to chat.

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