Doris Dörries “The Rice Goddess”: This book puts you in a good mood!

Doris Dörrie has published a new book “The Rice Goddess”. Our gift tip for people who like to travel, dream and listen to stories.

Doris Dörrie has brought a lot with her from all her travels. For yourself, for your loved ones. And with this book once again for your readers. Oh, Dörrie just knows how to tell stories. For her it's purely an end in itself: every day the Munich director writes down her thoughts in a notebook. Because whoever describes what is happening around him and inside him perceives it with all his senses. The chirping of the birds, the smell of pretzels wafting from the bakery, the warmth of the spring sun rays on the skin that is finally free of socks again, the children fighting over the best spot on the bus platform. And so Doris Dörrie's new book “The Rice Goddess” is, like all her works, a sensual pleasure.

The 68-year-old presents lots of souvenirs, flea market bargains and finds from foreign supermarkets. Each anecdote is only a page and a half short, perhaps written down on the park bench while waiting for the bus - Dörrie's tip against smartphone fiddling - but full of feeling, humor, laconicism and infectiously warm nostalgia. Reading Doris Dörrie always means: feeling that ultimately we humans are very similar in our desires.

Empathy should actually be quite easy. Often it doesn't do that at all. Not even a woman like you who is trained in meditation and Zen and mindfulness. But, how pleasant, Dörrie knows it herself, takes her own shortcomings with humor and encourages people to do the same between the lines. The desire for more humanity, perhaps the most important side effect of all travel, gently flashes through the texts. She almost always buys local clothes and shoes from far away places. And cleverly takes the hot air out of the sails of any self-proclaimed humanitarian who is outraged by this: “In Mexico I was given a friendly nod in my colorful mananita; in South Africa I learned 20 different ways to wrap a turban. Yes, you can call it cultural appropriation, but I understand another culture a little better when I take a few steps in someone else’s clothes or shoes.”

When you read Doris Dörrie's new book, you immediately want to rush over the Brenner

Traveling broadens your vision, souvenirs ensure that it stays broadened. That you are the person you were in the distance for a little longer. That's why Doris Dörrie brings them all to her cozy, full home: the perfect knife from Chinatown in San Francisco, the Ruchmehl from Switzerland ("And as soon as I'm back home, I bake bread, which is, as we all know, against all kinds of things Blues helps"), the slippers from Morocco or the artificial cherry blossoms from Japan ("The cherry blossom, the symbol of transience, the beauty of the moment that you cannot capture"). And again and again: lemons. From the countries where “the word itself doesn’t sound so sharply sour, but rather soft like a warm summer wind: limone or limón”. After reading this little book, you'll want to jump in the car and go over the burner, pick a big batch and put it in a bowl at home. A fragrant, citrus-yellow reminder of sun-kissed summers full of lightness. “I imagine that I am a funnier, freer, more generous person in the south, that I lose a little of my German righteousness and principledness, that I can dance better and that I simply look better, all in all, as a person and as a woman like it better. As a reminder of this, I continue to carry lemons from the south to the north. One after the other, until what seems so much easier in the south finally becomes true in the north: smile.”