Book Reviews: Untangling My Chopsticks & Absinthe

I am squeezing in two short book reviews to complete the Books About Food reading challenge today. Interestingly, both books are centered around green beverages: green tea and absinthe. The first book, "Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto", by Victoria Abbott Riccardi (NY: Broadway Books, 2003), recounts the author's year spent in Kyoto, Japan, learning about the art of kaiseki. Kaiseki is the traditional and highly ritualized series of foods to accompany green tea ceremonies and involves a series of small dishes of exquisitely prepared and garnished foods.

Riccardi lands in Kyoto without much knowledge of Japanese culture or language, but is fortunate to have some friends of friends to stay with until she finds other lodging, enrolls in language classes and snags a coveted spot in a prestigious tea kaiseki school where there is an American ex-pat to help her navigate the new culinary and language challenges she faces.

The kaiseki banquets she studies sound exquisite; they evolved from Buddhist monastery traditions into highly formal social dining banquets in which tastings of thick and thin whipped green tea are interspersed with samples of the freshest, seasonal dishes, exquisitely garnished. She also provides interesting glimpses of Japanese home cooking and ordinary restaurant fare, and includes many recipes easily adapted to Western kitchens.

Though this book is but a glimpse into a highly complex Japanese culinary tradition, it was a mouthwatering introduction and I will be referring back to it when attempting my own forays into Japanese cooking.



The concluding book for this Books About Food reading challenge is actually about a distilled spirit, and one which not only does not provide any nourishment butwas historically considered quite deadly in large doses. The spirit in question is Absinthe, that green spirit made from wormwood and the favorite tipple of many an artist, writer and dreamer in 19th century Europe, including Toulouse-Lautrec, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.

The fascinating history of this often-outlawed beverage is fleshed out in "Absinthe: Sip of Seduction: A Contemporary Guide", by Betina J. Wittels and Robert Hermesch (Golden, CO: Speck Press, 2008). This revised edition is an entertaining look at the rituals of drinking this bitter spirit, which involve diluting it with water and straining it through an absinthe spoon and sugar cube to produce an opalescent, cloudy cocktail. Absinthe was perhaps the most vilified alcoholic beverage during the temperance movement that swept the West over the last century, associated as it was with the excesses of the bohemian lifestyle, but it has since become legal to imbibe in the United States and Europe again.

The book contains a wealth of illustrations of Art Nouveau posters, postcards, absinthe drinking paraphrenalia and photographs of Absinthe fans from Aleister Crowley to Johnny Depp, so this makes for an entertaining foray into the lore and truths about this infamous beverage.

This concludes my reading for this short but sweet Books About Food Reading Challenge. In addition to the two books reviewed succinctly above, I also enjoyed reading:

The Language of Baklava: A Memoir, by Diana Abu-Jaber

A Bowl of Red:The Classic Natural History of Chili Con Carne with Other Delectable Dishes of the Southwest, with Recipes and a Guide to Paper Napkin Restaurants by Frank X. Tolbert

Stealing Buddha's Dinner, by Bich Minh Nguyen

My original list of Books About Food was changed to suit my mood, but all were enjoyable and recommended reading. Now I am primed to read some more science and classics books. Off to the couch!

Book Review: Stealing Buddha's Dinner, by Bich Minh Nguyen

There's another helping of book review to serve forth for my Books About Food Reading Challenge, having read the delightful memoir, "Stealing Buddha's Dinner", by Bich Minh Nguyen, NY: Viking, 2007). The first book I read for this event was another memoir about growing up in an American immigrant family, Diana Abu-Jaber's "The Language of Baklava". This book had similar themes about straddling two cultures and finding one's own adult identity, though the main characters switched from being an American Arab to being a Vietnamese refugee.

Nguyen's book starts with her earliest memories of being a toddler in a cold and drafty house in Grand Rapids, Michigan, living with her extended family of her father, older sister, grandmother and five adoring uncles. We find out early on that the family fled Vietnam during the Fall of Saigon in 1975, but we don't know what happened to the girls' mother until much later in the book. Her father works long hours at a pillow factory and sleeps with a ceremonial sword on the downstairs sofa to protect his family. His mother, Noi, is a devout Buddhist who cares for the girls and cooks the meals, and is the quiet matriarch in the family.

The uncles provide comic relief and spoil the Nguyen girls with sweets, rock and roll music and toys. The uncles' lairs throughout a succession of moves are a nostalgic morass of Seventies pop culture: shiny rayon clothes, ABBA albums, leather recliners, elaborate hi-fi setups, silver wallpaper. They easily turn off the switch from work to play when they come home from their factory jobs, unlike Nguyen's dad, who spends his few off-hours tensely smoking on the porch or playing cards and billiards with his Vietnamese friends, marinated in lots of booze.



The family is enlarged when Nguyen's father marries Rosa, the socialist teacher and daughter of Mexican migrant workers. She brings her daughter Crissy with her and the family now has to figure out how to integrate this new mother and cook. Rosa is pursuing college and post-graduate studies throughout the book, so her cooking time is precious and limited to a few standard meals that the Nguyen bunch stoically eats without much relish. The author, however, through the lens of adult insight, has a great empathy for her stepmother and insightfully shows her isolation from the rest of the family when they go to Vietnamese parties on the weekends. There, the tall and curvacious Rosa is left to herself, separated by age, gender and language from the cliques of poker-playing men, the TV-watching children and and extended sessions of gossip and deep-frying among the slender women of the kitchen.

Young Binh doesn't want "weirdo" Vietnamese food made from exotic ingredients from the Asian grocery, nor does she savor Rosa's timesaver, budget meals bought with coupons and made from generic cans and boxes. Instead, she covets American junk food: Pringles, a chocolate rainbow of candy bars, Dairy Cones with strawberry dip, McDonalds burgers and buckets of fried chicken. She wants to eat what her conservative, Christian, primarily Dutch heritage neighbors and schoolmates eat so she can fit in, but finds this a constant struggle. As she points out, coming of age in the Seventies and Eighties was to grow up before being ethnic was cool, before phrases like "multiculturalism" and "diversity" were embraced. And Nguyen is unable to become popular like her two pretty (her author photo says she's a knockout too), more gregarious older sisters.

She finds solace in reading and the titles of many of the classic juvenile books she hoards in her special bookcase and which she nests among her bedclothes, will appeal to all those who came to bibliophilia early in life. While her sisters spend their spare change on banana lip gloss and Pat Benatar records, the author buys (and racks up huge library fines) for books outlining the adventures of her friends Encyclopedia Brown, Ramona Quimby, Charlotte the Spider, the March family, Harriet Welsch, and the entire Ingalls clan.

Slowly, though, she comes around to appreciate her grandmother's daily offerings of fruit, (first offered to Buddha on a lacquered salver) carefully peeled and sliced; her Pho slippery with noodles and slices of oxtail; and even Rosa's holiday tamales. Though she may still covet "regular" American foods, she finds greater appreciation for her family's spicier tangle of comfort foods.

"Stealing Buddha's Dinner" does not mix in as much wit as "The Language of Baklava", but was as enjoyable for its detailed and sensual evocations of time and place. Foodie readers will enjoy the Bacchanalian descriptions of Vietnamese holiday feasts and Seventies' spreads at "Ponder Rosa" (the Ponderosa steakhouse chain), while others will delight in the way the Nguyen family changes and grows during their years in America. The author explains a lot about traditional Vietnamese and Buddhist culture and how aspects of both clash against against modern American culture.

Recommended reading for foodies, fans of biography and memoir, social history and the American immigrant experience.

Book Review: A Bowl of Red by Frank X. Tolbert

A Bowl of Red: The Classic Natural History of Chili Con Carne with Other Delectable Dishes of the Southwest, with Recipes and a Guide to Paper Napkin Restaurants, by Frank X. Tolbert, Dallas, TX: Taylor Publishing Company (1988), reprint.

This book is a reprint of the classic chilihead bible, originally published in 1953. Tolbert was a born-and-bred Texan, first, and a journalist and founder of the World Chili Championship held each November in Terlingua, Texas. The book swaggers with lots of outsized Texas bravado about how hot a proper chili should be, how a classic bowl of red would eject any attempts to throw beans into it, and some interesting profiles of cowboy chuck wagon cooks.

"A Bowl of Red" is a little dated, with all of its references to period film stars and celebrities, and some non PC references to various ethnic groups, but it does contain great information about Southwestern culinary history and will make your mouth water for something spicy. He lists some of the many chili aficionados of the day, including humorist H. Allen Smith, Lady Bird Johnson and LBJ, Jack Benny and trumpet virtuoso Harry James, who notes "Next to jazz music, there is nothing that lifts the spirit and strengthens the soul more than a good bowl of chili".



Tolbert's book explores the various permutations of chili (suet or no, tomatoey and garlicky or vegetable-free) and then examines some other Texan specialties, including son of a bitch stew (an extravaganza of cattle organ meats), tamales, enchiladas and burritos. He has the highest regard for the humblest of chili chefs, from diners, jailhouse kitchens and those like Early Caldwell, the Tamale King, who hunts down prime corn shucks and other ingredients and steams up vast quantities in his home kitchen to sell every other day at a prime corner in Athens, Texas.

The book is very entertaining and a great look at a chunk of American food history. I would definitely seek it out as a gift for any chili heads in your life. This is the second book I have read for the Books About Food challenge, which I am thoroughly enjoying. Next up for that reading challenge: "Stealing Buddha's Dinner", by Bich Minh Nguyen.

Book Review: Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich

Ravens in Winter, written and illustrated by Bernd Heinrich (NY: Summit Books, 1989)

I just finished a great book about ravens and Nevermore will I look at these intelligent birds in the same light again. The author is a Professor of Zoology at the University of Vermont and has written other books about insects, owls, marathon running and ecology.

The book provides a great look at the social behavior of ravens and other birds, bears and creatures of the winter forest in New England, as well as an interesting glimpse into Heinrich's style of scientific observation. He displays his marathon training during the hardcore camping and activities of his first several winters of raven research. He is an Iron Man that sleeps in an unheated cabin during below zero weather, drives hundreds of miles through blizzards, gets up before dawn to shimmy up swaying pine trees to await his feathered research subjects and nonchalantly slices off pieces of raven-ravaged moose butt for supper. A more rugged scientist seems hard to imagine.

The author is dogged in his research and spends monotonous hours in his outdoor blinds watching for ravens to come to the thousands of pounds of slaughterhouse guts and roadkill carcasses he drags uphill on his weekend raven research sessions. He is equally disciplined in avoiding inferences from random observations and reading interpretations into one-time events. He attributes this to a single-minded avoidance of advancing theories without multiple evidence:

When I was very young and didn't "see" what seemed obvious to adults, I often thought I was stupid and unsuited for science. Now I sometimes wonder if that is why I make progress. The ability to invent interconnections is no advantage where the discovery of truth is an objective.

He has a somewhat dry writing style, but his heroics make for interesting reading and he certainly has a sense of humor about his unorthodox research methods. He drives through Maine during hunting season with a dead goat strapped to his hood noting that the beast, which is the same size and coloring as a deer doe, looks "good enough to tag". He enlists volunteer help in capturing and banding razor-beaked test by advertising free beer and a sheep roast at a "Raven Roundup" party.

You may not want to party with Dr. Heinrich but you have to admire his patience and determination and this book was an excellent start to my Science Books Challenge, where I intead to read six books about science in 2009 to expand my selection of reading matter and the content of my gray matter.

The Language of Baklava: A Book Review

The Language of Baklava: A Memoir, by Diana Abu-Jaber (NY: Pantheon, 2005).

"The Language of Baklava" is the second book pick for the new foodie book club, Cook the Books, that a couple of blogger friends and I have organized. What a fantastic book on so many levels. It is a book full of food memories and recipes, a devastatingly funny collection of crazy family scenes and dialogue, and a writer's memoir, full of interesting
remembrances about how keenly she observed and sensed things throughout her unique childhood. She perfectly captures the buzzing level of energy I remember having as a child and the easy acceptance most children have of new friends and situations.

It is also a funny and perceptive lens on the American immigrant experience of her Jordanian-born father, "Bud" (originally Ghassan), whom we learn is the descendant of Bedouin sheiks and has at least four other wild and crazy brothers who joined him in trading their desert homeland for the Syracuse area of upstate New York. Arid desert winds are swapped for six months of snow and wind that no longer stings from sand but from ice.

Bud was raised Syrian-Orthodox but turned into a "mild" Muslim when he was an adult and struggles with being a gregarious immigrant with high hopes in an American culture that fools and disappoints him often. He marries a tall, American goddess, Abu-Jaber's quiet teacher mother, a retiring figure in the book that quietly accepts moves back to dusty Jordanian compounds when Diana is a pre-schooler and then gets ready for another move when she is a rebellious adolescent. She seems to mutter and slowly fold her objections down inward with each of Bud's new schemes or impromptu dinner parties and I kept wondering why she was so retiring and such a surprisingly minor character in this book. I understand why she was attracted to Bud, a larger-than-life host who can even charm nuns with his spicy special rice and pontifications about religion and philosophy, but I wonder why she never voices any misgivings or argues. She is a very passive character and yet I sense hidden passions and strength.

We learn more about Diana's maternal grandmother, a disdainer of men, in a hilarious Chinese restaurant scene. Never has self-confidence (Gram) and acute adolescent self-anguish (Diana) clashed so mightily as when Gram blunders her way through a conversation with a highly cultured Chinese waiter about the "Chinese opera" she had just taken Diana to see (it was actually Madama Butterfly, a Puccini opera about a Japanese heroine).

Gram's a larger-than-life match for Bud's personality as well. After enduring a bossy father, a scalawag husband that abandons her, and the Great Depression ("brought about by men"), she tries to stanch the burgeoning romance between her daughter and Bud by inviting him over for a bright pink and glistening ham (Muslim taboo), followed by a second dinner of shrimp which Bud thinks are giant insects. Abu-Jaber further defines the difference between them in terms of their cooking styles:

"The problem seems obvious to me: Gram is a baker, Bud's a cook. Cooks are dashing, improvisational, wayward, intuitive; bakers are measured, careful, rational, precise. Gram can follow a recipe, but the drama for spice isn't in her bones. "Oh, rosemary," she says to me dismissively as we discuss a chicken recipe. "Rosemary is for show-offs."

Bud is a restless figure, always wondering whether he should move his family of three daughters back to Jordan to keep them as "good Arab girls" and switching them from suburban to rural real estate around Syracuse as restaurant dreams ebb and flow. As a result, young Diana has to "re-create" herself with all these moves to fit in with new circles of friends. I was especially interested in her comment that American food tasted of "sugar, stone, and chemicals" when she returned from an extended stay in Jordan.

Then, there are the recipes! They sweeten the end of each chapter and I have already tried two of them, Magical Muhammara ("a dip or spread for when you want everyone to quit running around and come to the table") and "Start the Party" Hummus, and can say that they are as sumptuous as Abu-Jaber's writing.

I read Abu-Jaber's second novel, "Crescent", last year and was delighted when "The Language of Baklava" was selected as the second Cook the Books title. It is a book that I can't wait to read it all over again soon.

This book is also the first book read for my portion of the Books about Food challenge, which is headquartered here.

Book Review: The Salt Letters by Christine Balint

While I am a few days over my Orbis Terrarum Reading Challenge deadline, I did want to clear the decks for a new Reading Year in 2009, so I have a ninth and final book to review. We travel in the uncomfortable and fetid steerage compartment of a ship bound from England to the wilds of Australia in 1854 with a young woman narrator, Sarah, in Christine Balint's debut novel "The Salt Letters" (NY: W.W. Norton, 2001).

Sarah spends yawning days and nights crowded into a bunk and a small room with a cluster of other unmarried women. Their every move is monitored by a Matron, and they are segregated from all other passengers, except for brief journeys above deck when the weather is fair. Otherwise, it is a hot, dank, smelly and long trip, with nothing but a little needlework and gossip for entertainment.

Sarah's recollections about her life in England, which includes an earthy grandmother, a hydrophobic mother and a forbidden attraction with her cousin Richard, are all very interesting and contrast with the squalor of her sea travels. However, having read even more vivid descriptions of conditions on board ships bound for Australia during the same era in Robert Hughes' wonderful history "The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding", I would more likely recommend the latter to anyone looking for a good book on the subject.

Balint has great descriptive talent, but the plot line weaves in and out like one of the heroine's fevered reveries, and ultimately, I was not entirely sure how the book ended. Was she now married? Was she pregnant? Was Richard on board? Did her mother die? Were they finally arrived in Australia? I just didn't feel that things wrapped up and that Balint could have fleshed things out a bit at the end.

Thus concludes my journey around the world with nine books by nine authors about nine different countries, which included:

* 1) Far Afield, by Susan Kaysen (Faroes Islands)
* 2) The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera (Czechoslovakia)
* 3) The Harafish, by Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt)
* 4) Murder on the Leviathan, by Boris Akunin (Georgia, Russia)
* 5) The Story Teller, by Mario Lllosa Vargas (Peru)
* 6) Talkative Man, by R.K. Narayan (India)
* 7) Balzac & The Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie (China)
* 8) Reef, by Romesh Gunesekera (Sri Lanka)
* 9) The Salt Letters, by Christine Balint (Australia)


"Far Afield" was a-far and a-way my favorite book out of the lot; it was mordantly funny and the characters were well-described in all their glorious eccentricity. A close second and third for "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" and "Reef", where I was transported to exotic locations and moved by the characters' longing for their former lives.

In 2009 I plan to tackle another reading challenge to stretch my personal reading habits, perhaps with a peek at some classic literature or some history. The structure of a reading challenge like Orbis Terrarum helped keep me on track with my goal and certainly, announcing something publicly on this blog, spurred me on to complete my self-assignment. I am glad that I found some new authors to read further and to recommend to my friends and customers and feel a little more well-read having checked these nine new authors out.

Happy New Year!

Book Review: The Reef by Romesh Gunesekera

I am going to try and squeak through with a strong end of the year finish on my Orbis Terrarum reading challenge. I was supposed to have read 9 books in 9 months by 9 authors from 9 different countries to expand my knowledge of world literature, and while I have read nine such books, I only have eight book reviews under my belt (if I count this present one) which leaves little wiggle room for the final book review. I am going to press on, because I want to try another reading challenge in 2009, and hope to clear the decks with a clean reading conscience in these final days of 2008.

For my eighth Orbis Terrarum read, I savored Romesh Gunesekera's Reef (NY: Riverhead Books, 1996) about life in his native Sri Lanka before civil war tore apart this beautiful island nation in the 1980s. I had previously enjoyed reading Michael Ondaatje's "Anil's Ghost", which is also set in modern Sri Lanka and contrasts lyrical descriptions of the lush, tropical setting and the hellacious ravages of war. I was not disappointed with this second portrayal of the former Ceylon, a giant tear drop set in the Indian Ocean.


Reef was was a finalist for the Booker Prize and one can see why it garnered this attention. Gunesekera's writing is deceptively simple, yet it conjures up exotic and unusual images. The novel depicts the coming of age of Triton, a young boy taken in by a bachelor marine biologist, Mr. Salgado, when his mother dies and his father descends into alcoholism. Triton grows up to become an accomplished cook and main household servant for Mr. Salgado when he gets into a struggle with an older manservant, Joseph. Here's Gunesekera's ominous description of Joseph:

"He was not a big man but he hd a long rectangular head shaped like a devil-mask. His face was heavy and his lower jaw jutted out, making his head look detached from his bdy. A sullen heart compressed the muscles beneath the skin of his face in a permanent grimace. He had big hands that would appear out of nowhere. And as I was always trying to avoid him and never looked up at him, the sight of his hands suddenly on a doorknob or reaching for a cloth was terrifying."

Triton is not educated, but he is extremely observant and reads and re-reads the contents of the Salgado book shelves. Triton is devoted to his benefactor and reveres his live-in lover, Miss Nili, but he has nothing but disdain for Salgado's boorish houseguests when they trample his immaculately clean rooms and gobble his intricate banquets. A Christmas turkey feast is wonderfully etched by the author's words, as he shows each dinner guest's inner soul by the way they approach their plates.

Ultimately, the story ends with a melancholy and reflective finish, but it was a treat to read. This book will remain in my home library, a rare honor for me to bestow upon a novel. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

A seventh leg of my Orbis Terrarum Book Reading journey is complete. I tried to read Primo Levi's "The Periodic Table" about pre-World War II Italy, but much as I wanted to dive in, it was just not meant to be. I picked up and read the first several chapters a bunch of different times, but couldn't get into it, so I switched over to another book which had logged some time on my nightstand, Chinese-born writer Dai Sijie's novel "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" (NY: Anchor Books, 2002).

This novel was a treat, being not only a book about books and reading, one of my favorite genres, but as a vividly-portrayed look at 1970s China during the harsh re-education policies of the Communist government. The heroes of this too-short novel are teenagers Luo, son of a dentist who dared mention publicly that he had worked on the teeth of Chairman Mao, and his unnamed chum, the son of two medical doctors, who are branded "intellectuals" after their extensive middle school education and banished to a remote mountain farm village. There they live in an unheated agricultural storage building and spend their days hauling baskets of excrement up the mountainsides to fertilize distant fields of opium.

Our young heroes do not know if they will ever be allowed to return to their families in the big city of Chengdu, but find sparks of hope for a way out of their dreary lives when the Village leader discovers their talent for storytelling. They are also allowed a bit of freedom to travel to infrequent movie showings at the nearest market town so as to relate the embroidered plots to their villagers at a later date. It is during these visits that they make the acquaintance of a tailor's daughter, the little Chinese seamstress of the title, and reunite with another teenaged friend from Chengdu, Four-Eyes, whose poet-mother smuggled in a secret suitcase of books, including prized novels by Balzac.

Sijie himself was "re-educated" during the 1970s and left China a decade later for France, where he has since worked as a writer and filmmaker. The imagery in the book is very cinematic and visual, and I could imagine a bird's sweeping view of the mountainous landscape and steep pathways that pepper the book.

I would highly recommend this book to other readers, particularly those who enjoy a bit of history woven into their fiction. Images from the book have stayed with me and I find myself thinking about the symbolism of the red-beaked crows that watch over our protagonists and of the crazy home dentistry scenes in another chapter.

I have read two more books for this 2008 reading challenge (9 books by nine authors from 9 different countries in nine months), and am hoping to bang out two more reviews about them to meet the end of the year deadline, so stay tuned.

Orbis Terrarum Book Review: The Talking Man by R.M. Narayan

I am now 2/3 of the way across the globe as part of my armchair journey on the Orbis Terrarum Reading Challenge(nine books by nine authors from nine different countries)having just visited India by reading The Talkative Man: A Novel of Malgudi, by R.K. Narayan, NY: Viking, 1987.

This was a short hop as the book is a short novella of only 123 pages. "The Talking Man" is a fable set in a rural village in South India which is the fictional setting for many of Narayan's other works. The tone and dialogue are light and humorous and are perfect for describing the gossip, intrigue and comedy of manners that ensue in everyday Malgudi.

One day a mysterious visitor who works on equally mysterious projects around the world for the UN worms his way into local village life, first camping out in railway station much to the detriment of the agitated station master's mental health. The stranger then stays as a lodger with TM, a well-off man who dabbles in journalism. The Mysterious One carries on an inappropriate romance with a young college student and after hearing from other women around the globe who have been romanced by this cad, TM and the other villagers save the young lady and her family from embarrassment in a farcical ending involving pompous government ministers, apocalyptic scenarios involving weeds, and hecklers of every stripe.

I found this novella thoroughly enjoyable and will seek out other Malgudi novels so I can visit again. Recommended for those who enjoy comic novels, Indian literature and short romps where villains get their comeuppance.

Book Review: The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa

The fifth part of my journey on the Orbis Terrarum Reading Challenge (nine books by nine authors from nine different countries) took me to 1950s Peru with Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Storyteller" (NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989). The book tells the tale of two college friends, one unnamed narrator and his red-haired Jewish buddy Saul, alias "Las Mascarita" (Mask Face), because of the huge port-wine birthmark that obscures half his face. The pair have many philosophical conversations during their university years, though always given ultimate punctuation with Saul's jovial tone and references to his friend as "pal", "little brother", or "old man".

Their friendship erodes as graduation nears and the narrator seeks out a scholarship for studies abroad while Saul is seen less and less on campus and is rumored to be either somewhere in the jungles of eastern Peru living among the Machiguenga people or has emigrated to Israel. Our narrator graduates and is hired to work with a field team from the Institute of Linguistics and later, as a producer of television documentaries. In both jobs he tries to contact Saul to get his take on Machiguenga culture, but he never hears from him again. There is only a haunting image from the first chapter of the book, which has the narrator viewing photographs at a Florentine art gallery and recognizing Saul as a tribal storyteller among the Machiguengas.

The book juxtaposes chapters in the narrator's voice with chapters about Peruvian Indian mythology and this makes for rich reading. A chapter in which Saul and the narrator discuss the influence of missionaries and Western business interests on traditional Machiguenga culture is followed by a folk tale about the elements, animals and the spirit world. Is this the voice of a Machiguenga storyteller? Or of Saul? I didn't know, but enjoyed the weaving in and out of these two viewpoints and the thought-provoking dialogues between the two "pals".

"The Storyteller" is not light reading, but was an enjoyable excursion into another time and place and brought up many interesting sideline discussions about the definition of "civilization", how anthropologists can properly study other cultures, and how outsiders or minorities fit into their larger society. I will be seeking out other novels by Llosa and have already squirreled away "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" for my winter reading pile.

Recommended for anyone interested in Peruvian culture and history, mythology mavens and armchair travelers.

A Foodie Fiction Selected Reading List

The following is my select reading list of novels that give front and center to delicious plots and passages about food, chefs, restaurants and other gourmet attractions. The Book Trout has read many of them, and they run the gamut from cozy mysteries and chick lit novels to literary classics. Please feel free to add comments below to suggest additions to this hors d'oeuvre.

Allison, Karen, "How I Gave My Heart to the Restaurant Business: A Novel", (NY: HarperCollins, 1997). A novel of the New York City restaurant business by a former three-star restaurateur.

Binchy, Maeve, "Scarlet Feather", (NY: Dutton, 2001). Cathy Scarlet and Tom Feather are cooking school chums and upon graduation, decide to combine forces in a Dublin, Ireland catering company.



Bond, Michael - Monsieur Pamplemousse series. Prolific author Michael Bond, creator of Paddington the Bear and the Olga da Polga guinea pig childrens' tales, has at least 15 mystery novels featuring undercover French restaurant critic and gourmand, Monsieur Pamplemousse (French for grapefruit). Magnifique!

Carl, JoAnna - Chocolate Mystery series. This cozy series features Texas ex-trophy wife Lee McKinney, who moves back to her Michigan hometown to work in her aunt's gourmet chocolate business.

Carter, Sammi - Chocolate Mystery series. See JoAnna Carl above. Another cozy series with another divorcee in a chocolate shop.

Davidson, Diane Mott - Goldy Bear Culinary Mystery series. Davidson is the reigning queen of the culinary mystery series, with a Colorado caterer, Goldy Bear, who solves many a whodunnit in between whipping up fabulous feasts. Recipes included.

Esquivel, Laura, "Like Water for Chocolate" (NY: Anchor Books, 1992). The author's first novel, a magic realist AND foodie classic. The Mother of all Foodie Novels. Esquivel interweaves the bittersweet story of a young Mexican woman, Tita de la Garza, whose home cooking is infused with her emotions after her mother forbids her to marry the love of her life. A recipe for a Mexican dish or folkloric home remedy heads each chapter.



Flagg, Fannie, "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe", (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1988). A folksy foodie classic set in a down-home Southern cafe during the 1930s. You can almost taste the pimento-cheese sandwiches.


Fluke, Joanne, Hannah Swensen mystery series. A light culinary mystery series featuring a Minnesota bakery owner. Recipes included.


Gordon, Nadia, "The Sunny McCoskey Napa Valley Mystery series". Chef Sunny is the heroine of these novels which feature her organic restaurant and the other bistros and wineries in this California region.

Hart, Ellen - Sophie Greenway & Jane Lawless series. This art has two separate culinary mystery series: one featuring Minneapolis food critic Sophie Greenway and the other featuring Minneapolis restaurateur Jane Lawless.

Hendricks, Judith Ryan, "Bread Alone" (NY: William Morrow, 1993). Wynter Morrison gets ditched by her upwardly mobile husband and drifts over to Seattle, where she works in a bakery and heals her sore heart with breadmaking.

Hildenbrand, Elin, "The Blue Bistro" (NY: St. Martin's, 2006). Described as a sophisticated romance novel in which upscale Nantucket restaurant hostess pines for the affections of her boss, who dines nightly with a female chef.

Jaques, Brian - The Redwall series. This juvenile fantasy series is chock full of feasting scenes among the Good animals (hares, voles, otters, badgers) of Redwall Abbey. They work hard at the harvest and in fighting off the Bad animals (foxes, rats, wild cats) but then enjoy bountiful harvests of nut-studded cheeses, ales, casseroles of grains and vegetables and toothsome, honey-drenched desserts.

James, Kay-Marie, "Cooking for Harry: A Low-Carbohydrate Novel" (NY: Shaye Areheart Books, 2004). This light confection was written by a best-selling author under the pen name of Kay-Marie James to raise money for her financially-strapped best friend, so there's a mystery underpinning this tale about a chubby hubby whose gourmet hobby must be curtailed on the advice of his doctor. Plenty of mouthwatering cooking scenes.

Laurent, Antoine, "Cuisine Novella" (NY: Viking, 1987). The author's first book, a novel in which a French master chef proposes to instruct fashion designer Annabelle Fleury in the secrets of haute cuisine.

Lyons, Nan and Ivan, "Someone is Killing the Great Chefs of America" (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993). A sequel to the Lyons' wildly successful gastronomic murder mystery, "Someone is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe", which was made into a 1978 film with the wonderfully comic actor Robert Morley as the overweight gourmand determined to sample the specialties of various world-class European chefs, but finds that they are fatally "prepared" in the same way as their dishes before he can dine. In this American sequel, murder breaks out at a Culinary Olympics.


Mason, Sarah J., "Corpse in the Kitchen" (NY: Berkley, 1993). English Det. Sgt. Trewley is aided by his scientist and judo expert partner, Sgt. Stone, as they investigate the murder of a baker, suffocated by a wad of her own bread dough.


McCouch, Hannah - "Girl Cook: A Novel" (NY: Villard, 2004). A chick lit novel centering on the trials of Layla Mitchner, looking for love and respect in the heat of Manhattan's trendiest restaurant kitchens.

McKevett, G.A. - Savannah Reid series. Light police procedurals featuring Southern California Police Detective Savannah Reid, a chubby, 40-something policewoman with a fondness for desserts.

Mehran, Marsha - "Pomegranate Soup" (NY: Random House, 2005). This debut novel and its sequel "Rosewater and Soda Bread", combine Persian cooking with Irish culture, as the three Iranian Aminpour sisters open the Babylon Cafe in a rural village.

Myers, Tamar - Magdalena Yoder series. These culinary mysteries feature Yoder as the owner/cook of an Amish inn located in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country. Loaded with down-home cooking and recipes.


Mones, Nicole, "The Last Chinese Chef", (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). Recently widowed Food Writer Maggie McElroy finds solace in classical Chinese cuisine when she travels to Beijing to write an article about a chef hoping to make a spot in the National Cooking Team for the 2008 Olympics.

Pence, Joanne - Angela Amalfi series. A breezy, romantic, culinary mystery series with San Francisco food writer and caterer Angela Amalfi at the helm.

Pezzeli, Peter, "Francesca's Kitchen" (NY: Kensington, 2006). Francesca is an Italian-American Queen of the Kitchen, who faces widowhood and an empty nest with sadness until she finds a new family to cook and care for as a part-time nanny.

Prior, Lily, "La Cucina" (NY: HarperCollins, 2000) . The Sicilian version of proto-foodie novel "Like Water for Chocolate", in which our middle-aged librarian protagonist, Rosa Fiore, leaves her raucous rural peasant family, comprised of six older brothers, a pair of younger Siamese twins, and her frequently absent parents when her lover is murdered by the Mafia. She becomes an academic librarian in Palermo and saves her passions for her cooking, until a mysterious English visitor, L'Inglese, enters her life.


Rich, Virginia - The Eugenia Potter series. The late Virginia Rich wrote several food-laden mysteries, starting with "The Cooking School Murders", which star the savvy Eugenia Potter, a Nantucket retiree. Nancy Pickard has continued the delightful and well-written series.



Stout, Rex - The Nero Wolfe mystery series. Grand master mystery writer Stout wrote over 30 novels and 30+ short stories featuring his corpulent, housebound (by choice) detective Nero Wolfe, whose sidekick Archie Godwin does all the legwork in solving multiple murders. Wolfe's passions are for growing orchids in his opulent New York City brownstone and for the three gourmet meals his personal chef Fritz prepares for him (with Wolfe's critical suggestions).


Temple, Lou Jane - Heaven Lee series. Lee is the chef at her Kansas City restaurant, Cafe Heaven, and sleuths for clues when she's not cooking there or judging barbeque contests in this cozy culinary mystery series.


Winston, Lolly, "Good Grief", (NY: Warner Books, 2004). Sophie is a young widow with panic attacks and depression who moves to Oregon to make a fresh start as a culinary student and bakes her way through her grief.

Book Review: Murder on the Leviathan by Boris Akunin

Another good book has been read and savored on my Orbis Terrarum Reading Challenge list (9 books by 9 authors from 9 different countries), in which I endeavor to make my bedside book pile more worldly. I read Georgian-born Muscovite author Boris Akunin's "Murder on the Leviathan" (NY: Random House, 2004), a charming murder mystery set on a luxury ocean liner in 1878. While I had picked the book thinking that there was going to be more insight into Russian culture, this instead provided an old-fashioned locked room mystery puzzle peopled with characters straight out of the Clue board game: stuttering Russian diplomat Erast Fandorin; a pompous French policeman, Commissioner Gauche; a half-mad, ginger-haired English aristocrat, Sir Reginald Milford-Stokes; the Italian Ship's Physician, Dr. Truffo; a outwardly calm but inwardly passionate Japanese nobleman, Gintaro Aono; a pregnant Swiss banker's wife, Renate Kleber; and a middle-aged English lady, Clarissa Stamp, who has recently come into a bit of money.

Commissioner Gauche is aboard the Leviathan steamship on its maiden voyage, bound for Calcutta, India, in search of a mass murderer. Back in Paris, an eccentric collector of Indian antiquities, Lord Littleby, was found bludgeoned next to a shattered display case missing a gold statuette of the god Shiva and painted Indian shawl. Downstairs in the kitchen of his mansion, nine of his servants, including two children, are found poisoned and are slumped in their seats at the table. The only clue Gauche finds at the crime scene is a whale-shaped golden key, which turns out to be a ticket for luxury accommodations on the Leviathan.

The writing is well-paced and the characters are interesting and have their inner ruminations fleshed-out in chapters written from each of their perspectives. A great deal of wit shines through. In this passage, written from Commissioner Gauche's perspective, he comments on the undercurrents of a literary conversation among the suspects:

"The commissioner noted that the person who evinced the liveliest reaction was Miss Clarissa Stamp, the old maid, who started babbling about artists, the theater, and literature. Gauche himself was fond of passing his leisure hours in an armchair with a good book, preferring Victor Hugo to all other authors. Hugo was at once so true to life, so high-minded, that he could always bring a tear to the eye. Besides, he was marvelous for dozing off over. But of course Gauche had never even heard of these Russian writers with those hissing sibilants in their names, so he was unable to join in the conversation. Anyway, the old English trout was wasting her time; "M. Fandorine" was far too young for her."

An old English trout! Indeed.

Similarly, in other chapters written by other suspects we get snarky references to the "amoeba-like" Mrs. Truffo, Anglo-French nationalist rivalry, and Aono's seething rages over daily faux pas committed by his red-haired barbarian shipmates and the completely the reverse, European and American astonishment that Aono would be clad in only a loincloth doing martial arts moves and meditating on the upper deck. Overall, a wonderful mystery novel with all of the elements in place for a mental escape to another time and place: interesting characters, humor, an intricate plot and wonderful atmosphere.

Recomended for lovers of classic British-y and literary mysteries, devotees of historical fiction and anyone interested in Indian folklore and legend.

Biblionovel Review: Death of a Bore by M.C. Beaton

Beaton, M.C., "Death of a Bore", (NY: Mysterious Press, 2005).

Gangly, flaming-locked Hamish Macbeth is the constable of a small Highland Scottish village and resists promotion to big city detective work. In this novel he solves the murder of the narcissistic, boring writer who alleges to teach the village residents how to write, but prefers to just talk about himself. The villagers, full of eccentricities and self-esteem, will have none of it, however, and insist that he review their literary efforts. One by one, he curtly dismisses their prose, introducing any number of infuriated, possibly homicidal, suspects.

Before the murder, Constable Macbeth takes it upon himself to chat up the insufferable one, and let him know that noone will likely sign up for the writing classes as they are scheduled for the same night as a popular television show, but Heppel gleefully lets him know that the registration is going quite well and further tweaks him by presenting him with a copy of his "Tammerty Biscuit Award"-winning memoir, inscribed "To Hamish Macbeth. His first introduction to literature. John Heppel". I thought that Macbeth had been acting more like a town gossip than police officer in this visit, but after that obnoxious gesture, I was rooting for him all the way. Heppel further irks the township by his constant fake tan and makeup-wearing antics in front of the local television news cameras and the stage is now set for his untimely demise.

M.C. Beaton, the nom de plume for historical romance writer Marion Chesney, deftly describes each of the many characters in this book, including an admirable canine, and makes them quite memorable, whether through their dress, speech, or inner thoughts. I had read one of Beaton's books in her other mystery series featuring curmudgeonly retiree Agatha Raisin and didn't feel compelled to read all of the others, but now I have a delightful bit of catching up to do with the previous 20 (!) Hamish Macbeth books.

These are light, humorous mysteries and are perfect summer reading. Recommended for Anglophiles, dog lovers, cozy mystery readers and the biblionovel contingent.

Book Review: The Drowning People by Richard Mason

"The Drowning People", by Richard Mason (NY: Warner Books, 1999)

Boy did this book have a hook. Here's the opening paragraphs:

"My wife of more than forty-years shot herself yesterday afternoon.

At least that is what the police assume, and I am playing the part of grieving widower with enthusiasm and success. Life with Sarah has schooled me in self-deception, which I find--as she did--to be an excellent training in the deceiving of others. Of course I know that she did nothing of the kind. My wife was far too sane, far too rooted in the present to think of harming herself. In my opinion she never gave a thought to what she had done. She was incapable of guilt.

It was I who killed her."

So of course I had to read this book.

And it was a great read, full of psychological intrigue, an island castle in Cornwall, moldering aristocrats, concert pianists, art auctions and coffeehouse arguments in Prague, murder trials, suicides and an intricate, twisting plot. The writing had an old-fashioned flavor, reminiscent of Daphne DuMaurier, and was very evocative. Great comic relief is sprinkled throughout to liven up the melodrama from a minor character, James' witty, patrician dressmaker chum, Camilla Boardman.

My only complaint is that I felt that even though the main character, James, narrates the book in circumspection about events leading to his wife's murder, I never felt that his character is completely fleshed out. The reader understands that he is a celebrated classical violinist and is attractive to others, but I never came to understand why he was so beguiling. He has passion, but that doesn't seem enough to have at least two other characters in the book become wildly besotted.

The book was Mason's debut novel, and finished up while he was a twenty-something Oxford student, so I look forward to more from his pen. He certainly described obsessive love quite well.

Recommended for mystery mavens, lovers of things Gothic, literary fiction fans and anyone who thinks Daphne DuMaurier was not prolific enough.

Book Review: Reading New York by John Tytell

Book Trout Book Review: Reading New York, by John Tytell (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003)


The book reeled me in with its grainy old cover photo of a 1911 Manhattan street scene and the sexy subtitle "A Celebration of New York Writers, The Essence of the City, and the Transforming Effects of Reading", but what really hooked me in the gills was the short first chapter which described the author's horrible eye condition which necessitated periodic corneal scrapings and a prohibition against reading. Weepy eyes and parents notwithstanding, Tytell went ahead and read. What a little hero!

The rest of the book interjects snippets of Tytell's youth, university days, sexual awakening with his Arthur Murray dance teacher, and (more interestingly) his interviews, research and sometimes interaction with leading literati in New York City. He offers short overviews of the work of some major NYC writers, including Herman Melville, Henry Miller, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe and the various Beats.

Tytell's style is polished and interesting, and the fact that he met with Miller, Allen Ginsberg and some of the other Beat writers and can provide a contrast between their private and public personas gives the book a freshness and intimacy with the reader.

My only criticism is that the end was much too abrupt. I was cantering along with Tytell in the 1970s, as his Queens College teaching job was in financial jeopardy, along with the rest of the New York City government, when I turned the page to find out that there were only two more chapters left. The final chapter summarizes the next thirty years of Tytell's writing career in five choppy sentences. He went to Venice to write about Ezra Pound, taught in Paris, hung out in Southeast Asia and then came back to roost with some doves in the Village. I guess that's all fodder for the next book.

The Book Trout recommends this book, particularly for the New York City-Obsessed, Lovers of Literary Biography, Beat Readers and those who fancy good Books About Books.

Book Review: Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera (NY: Harper and Row, 1987).

I had heard so many reader rhapsodies about this novel from my friends. In the bookstore, in a reversal of form, so many customers pressed the book into my hands and recommended it so highly that I brought it home to reside in my bedside town of book piles. It was a long-term tenant, however, just not piquing my interest each time I reached for a new book to read. When I decided to try the Orbis Terrarum Reading Challenge, in which nine books about nine countries by international authors are chosen, I blew the dust off this novel and decided I would travel to Czechoslovakia before and after the 1968 Prague Uprising for the second leg of my around the world trip.

After having read it, I am of two minds about the book. I think it is an interesting and thoughtful book, one with many provocative images and unusual relationships and ideas. For someone who enjoys novels of ideas or who enjoys reading philosophy or poetry, I can understand how one could have such passionate views about it. I am not such a reader, preferring characters with lots of depth or unusual descriptions of time and place.

The book follows two couples throughout the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, and the immersion into that historical era was interesting to me, so I kept slogging on, despite my lack of interest in the four main characters and their endless loop of: A) self-doubt and unhappiness driven by philandering lovers or B) sexual/psychological domination while wearing unusual haberdashery.

Kundera is certainly a vivid writer. I was struck in particular by two images he portrayed: a description of the human body as a machine with a nozzle for oxygen intake and the face as instrument panel for the clockwork brain; and a sad chapter about a dying crow, buried up to its neck in rubble by street urchins and rescued by Teresa, the most tormented main characters.

I wouldn’t state that I enjoyed reading this book, but I am glad that I learned more about that era in Czech history and I can at least converse intelligently with my buddies about this book. I do, however, look forward to my next armchair journey on this reading challenge, to a sunnier Egyptian climate, with Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz in The Harafish. Onward!

Book Review: FAR AFIELD by Susanna Kaysen

The first leg on my Orbis Terrarum Reading Challenge is complete and it was a fantastic voyage. I read "Far Afield", by Susanna Kaysen (NY: Vintage, 2002), the author's second novel, originally published in 1990 and reissued after the huge success of her memoir about time spent in a mental hospital, "Girl, Interrupted", later made into the Wynona Ryder vehicle of the same title.

"Far Afield" took me and the hero, Jonathan Brand, to the Danish territory of the Faroes Islands, a cluster in the North Atlantic, located between Iceland and Scotland. Jonathan is a Boston anthropology student doing fieldwork on this Scandinavian nation, to the dismay of his professors, who don't feel that cultures with newspapers deserve study. He perseveres and diligently studies the Faroese language, folkways and history. This meticulous preparation by the introspective and quiet Jonathan is in contrast with the other two Americans he encounters while on assignment: Wooley, another anthropology grad student (blasted luck!), whose breezy California manner and mangling of Faroese get the same local reception as Jonathan's self-conscious reserve; and Bart, the chain-smoking consumptive and presumed CIA agent, who tucks into Faroese cuisine with gusto.

Food comedy is peppered throughout the novel. Jonathan's first local contact is the outrageous Eyvindur Poulsen, a painter/politician/free spirit whose constantly tests poor Jonathan's stomach with the wildest Faroese delicacies: Spik (whale blubber), Turrur Fiskur (rotten halibut), Kjot (rotten lamb), boiled sheep's head and roast puffin). Jonathan is put off by this endless array of boiled fish and mutton and lack of vegetable accompaniments:

"Cod it was, cooked beyond necessity--beyond conscience--to a bleached stiff mass. Jonathan shut his eyes and wished for an artichoke, a little pot of hollandaise, a goose sausage, an endive salad: a roadside inn near Nimes. The last green vegetable that had touched his lips had been an Icelandic one, many weeks before. A slow cementing process was occurring inside him; each day the amount he expelled decreased in comparison to the amount he ingested. Soon, at this rate, he would lose the ability to excrete."

Brand does eventually use the bathroom and it is this most unglamorous of human functions that leads to his entree in Faroese society. Poor Jonathan clogs up the toilet in his rented flat and discovers that he must empty the septic tank. His neighbors crowd around to silently watch him dig and fill up his wheelbarrow with the noisome leavings. Old Jon Hendrik needles him first by remarking "In America, you hire people to do this, hah." Jonathan retorts with a shot about having proper sewage systems in the U.S, but Jon Hendrik reminds him that he is not home. Jonathan keeps shoveling and spits out in perfect Faroese "Vaelkomin til Foroyar" (Welcome to the Faroes). With that magical phrase and mordant acceptance of life's indignities, Jonathan is one of the gang. From then on he is invited to dinners and tea (temun), he is set up with potential girlfriends, gets a new soul-searching, bad-boy buddy, Hedin and government-rationed booze, formerly completely unavailable, is now proffered.

Warning****Plot Spoilers Ahead**********

Toward the end of Jonathan's year of study, fishing boats spot a herd of whales and Jonathan's neighbor, Sigurd, hurries the American into his patched up car for a trip over the hills to the grind, the whale hunt. The whales are herded towards the beach by Faroese fishing boats. Once the leader of the whales is beached, the others ground themselves on the shore en masse. Jonathan is staggered by this sight but has no time to jot down field notes when he is dragged into the kill by Sigurd and Hedin, and shown how to straddle the man-sized whales and sever their spines. Drunken and violent revelry at the village hall with Hedin continues all through the night.

Jonathan has finally achieved that which he carefully researched and sought; acceptance by his Faroese comrades. He has had doubts about whether to fully integrate with his new friends and stay on as a permanent resident. Much of the book contains this internal debate and his feelings of being an outsider in American society, too. The debate ends with the grind and another unsettling incident when a cat is tortured to death by a young neighbor and this is shrugged off by everyone as a old custom, something that kids just do.

The book reminded me of another great novel, Annie Proulx's "The Shipping News", with its weary, tragi-comic hero, maritime setting and eccentric characters. I recommend it to others with the high praise that my copy is staying put in my home library and will not be traveling to our used bookstore for resale.

Next on the Orbis Terrarum reading itinerary is the Czech Republic with Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". I'll report back soon.

Turn to Page 123, Now, Class

Sarah from the excellent and contemplative book blog, Sarah's Books, tagged me with a reading meme. Normally, I politely turn down these Internet chain letters, but I think highly of Sarah's writings and the topic interests me. In this meme, tagged bloggers are invited to share the contents of the whatever books they are currently dipping into and divulge lines 8 through 10 of page 123.

Here's what's on my nightstand and in my car:



1) Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature, by David P. and Nanelle R. Barash, ( NY: Delacorte Press, 2005).

This is the book I stop and start and am carrying around in my car for reading while waiting for my daughters to get out of softball practice, eye doctor appointments, art lessons, etc. Despite the bad photoshop design of the front cover,



I would recommend this book as an interesting view of great books themes and their basis in biological imperatives (Othello: Male Sexual Jealousy, Pride and Prejudice: Female Nesting, Catcher in the Rye: Parent-Offspring Conflict, The Three Musketeers: Friendship as Reciprocity, etc.).

p. 123 quote

"And in deference to entropy, rooms should never be tidied. As to "fitness," this biological concept simply indicates a living thing's capacity to pass on genes, in a given environment. Thus, being "fit" may mean being big and strong, or perhaps smart and cunning, or it might be the weak and suitably frightened or the sneaky and unprincipled who reproduce successfully."


2) "The World Without Us", by Alan Weisman (NY: St. Martin's Press, 2007)

A fantastic but very depressing book. Weisman roams all around the world to let us know how different regions would change if humans vanished from the earth. We find out how Manhattan's skyscrapers would implode from groundwater-flooded footings, how Kenya's wildlife would blast out of their impossibly small refuges to eat up coffee plantations, and how it would take huge swatches of geologic time to allow all the little nurdle-lets of plastics to blast their way through the marine food chain to settle into oceanic floor sediment (see p. 123 quote above). Weisman's prose is vivid and more easily digested than any polymer, but I find that I cannot abide reading more than a chapter at a time. As a Homo Sapiens with a perhaps 70-80 year life span, I am saddened about the dire long-term effects my species is unleashing for others to clean up.

p. 123

"However, what Moore refers to is a type of runoff and sedimentation that the Earth had hitherto never known in 5 billion years of geologic time-but likely will henceforth. During his first 1,0000-mile crossing of the gyre, Moore calculated half a pound for every square meters of debris on the surface, and arrived at 3 million tons of plastic. His estimate, it turned out, was corroborated by U.S. Navy calculations."


3) Johnny's Selected Seeds 2008 Seed Catalog (Winslow, Maine: Johnny's Selected Seeds, 2008).

I love to order my garden seeds from the Johnny's Catalog. If a plant can grow in Maine, I figure the odds are good that it can grow in our more southerly, if more windswept garden micro-climate. They specialize in heirloom varieties, with their wild colors and extra delectability. While I normally focus on vegetable and herb seeds from Johnny's, page 123 brings me to the flower section:

p. 123 quote:

Ageratum: Tall Blue Planet (Annual)

80-100 days. New! Tall, upright sturdy stems.
Comparable to Blue Horizon with tight flower clusters.


4) The Mauritius Command, by Patrick O'Brian (Glasgow: Fontana, 1989).

The Master and Commander series by the late Patrick O'Brian is a wonderful, dense nautical series with great humor, and a cast of complex characters to satisfy me for several years to come. I keep reading chapters and then putting the book aside to enjoy when I have absolute quiet for an absorbed reading session so that I don't miss all the details. I'm only on Book #4 after a year now, because the noisy, bothersome parts of life keep interrupting my concentration, but that only means I get to backtrack and savor chapters all over again. The movie version of O'Brian's opus, which smashed together bits of "Master and Commander" and "The Far Side of the World", while an entertaining piece of costume drama, only scratched the surface of the fascinating friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey and Ship's Surgeon/Spy Stephen Maturin.

p. 123 quote:

"She was a beautiful craft, beautifully handled, and she sailed closer to the wind than he would have thought possible; yet his anxious, worn expression did not lighten when she rounded to and lay there under the Raisonable's quarter, her captain looking up at her lofty poop with an inquiring face.

Jack nodded absently to the schooner, told the signal-lieutenant to summon the captain of the Sirius, stepped aft with a speaking-trumpet and hailed the Boadicea, desiring her acting-captain to come aboard. The Commodore received them rather formally in the fore-cabin, where Mr Peter handed Eliot written orders to proceed to the Mauritius in company with the Sirius, there to lie off Port-Louis, the capital and the chief port, in the north-west of the island, and to rendezvous with the rest of the squadron on that station: in the intervening time they were to watch the motions of the enemy and to gain all the information they could."

*After transcribing these but three sentences, I see why I am having a longish time reading through the series. The writing is dense and O'Brien's sentences are LONG. But I still attest to their savor!

I hope you have enjoyed this biblio-appetizer from my reading pile. Thank you Sarah for this enjoyable romp.

I now tag Bruised Reads and Laird's Books for a turn at this booklover's meme.

-Rachel
Old Saratoga Books/Book Trout

Seeing Shelley Plain: A Bookstore Book Review

Even before Dan and I became booksellers, I enjoyed reading memoirs by bookstore owners for the vicarious thrill from their book hunting adventures. They still delight me and I just finished reading a very atmospheric bookseller memoir, Seeing Shelley Plain: Memories of New York's Legendary Phoenix Book Shop by Robert A. Wilson (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2001). Wilson also wrote the bibliophilic classic "Modern Book Collecting", but this book focuses on time he spent as proprietor of the Greenwich Village bookstore from 1962-1988.

Wilson started his bookseller career in his forties, having served as an Army soldier during World War II, a diplomat in Poland and South Africa, a Broadway actor wannabe and a cuckoo clock factory office manager. A long-time book collecting passion (he collects Gertrude Stein and various poets' works) led him to become the fifth owner of the Phoenix Book Shop in New York's Greenwich Village. Wilson developed the store's specialties in poetry and first edition fiction, and there are lots of great anecdotes about dealings with Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Alice Toklas, Alan Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, Glenway Westcott and others.

The writing is a bit old-fashioned, but that only serves to enhance the reader's immersion into a gentler time in New York City bookstore history. I loved his account of his first day at the helm of the Phoenix, when his gracious colleague, Frances Steloff, of the legendary Gotham Book Mart, came to bless his shop with his first sale. There is a wonderful photo of the snowy-haired Steloff animatedly chatting with a smiling Wilson that captures their mutual delight with each other's company.

As a bookstore owner, I relished Wilson's accounts of venturing into the homes of some exceedingly eccentric authors and collectors. He has a courtly way with words and an understated way of relating how prickly some of these dealings can be. At least twice, however, he hinted at some crazy behavior or insult that he had to endure but then did not dish out the details, so I was annoyed at that. Half-hearted dish is worse than leaving out the incident altogether, but I suppose the publisher's lawyers may have had the final say on these tidbits.

If Oak Knoll's legal department did have the final edit, however, I wish they would have addressed the distractingly large number of typos in this book. I was astonished at the multitude of misspellings, weird punctuation and uncapitalized proper nouns in a book coming from such a literary author and publisher. There were at least two or three such jolts per chapter, which will hopefully have been addressed in any later editions. I can only imagine that Wilson, a publisher himself of an impressive number of literary and poetical titles as noted in the text and in a list at the rear of the book, must have pulled out hanks of hair after seeing these errors in print.

Overall, a book highly recommended for bibliophiles, poetry lovers, fans of literary New York City history and bookstore prowlers.

More Schtick Lit Recommendations

Great Scott! It seems that I have been on even more of a schtick lit binge than I thought (see previous schtick lit posting).

Schtick Lit is the word coined by writer Steve Almond for non-fiction titles in which the author spends a year or so immersing themselves in a subject and then writing about the experiment, as in A Year of Living Biblically by Schtick Lit maestro A.J. Jacobs in which he follows the tenets of the Old Testament to the letter, white robes, ZZ Top beard and all.



While reading Crossworld: One Man's Journey into America's Crossword Obsession by Marc Romano, I remembered that I had already digested Stefan Fatsis' Word Freak about his descent into the madness of competitive Scrabble playing. Fatsis' book is the most absorbing; he pays attention to all the quirks of the eccentric Scrabblers and provides a more interesting journey than does Romano. Romano's book is heavier on his self-introspection, although he does provide an interesting chapter on the changeover at the New York Times from serious and rigidly-ruled crosswording to the more whimsical, pop culture-infused crosswords that are in vogue today under the direction of Crossword Puzzle Editor Will Shortz. Fatsis' book spends more time on the, shall we say, "quirks" of the full-time Scrabble players and the seemingly joyless methods for advancing one's competitive abilities, like memorization of reams of two- and three-letter words, and words beginning with x, etc., etc.



I suppose Barbara Kingsolver's excellent book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life also falls under the definition of Schtick Lit in that she and her family spent a year living the locavore lifestyle. Locavores try to grow their own food as much as possible and eat the rest from local farmers and vendors.

Kingsolver's fiction is always a treat and she touched on farming and food issues in her last novel Prodigal Summer. This nonfiction book was as engrossing for this gardener and home cook and I loved the extra passages about biological topics by Kingsolver's husband Steven and the toothsome recipes by her collegiate daughter Camille. Even youngest daughter Lily gets mention in the books, as she is an experienced chicken rancher and egg merchant.




I was thrilled to read about many new heirloom vegetable varieties that I can't wait to try in the 2008 garden, and think I might even take a stab at home cheesemaking, though I smiled at the prose about raising and "harvesting" the Kingsolver turkey crop, I am happy to trot to the supermarket to buy the meat for the 50% of our omnivorous family that eats it.

There is an AMV website which reproduces Camille Kingsolver's recipes and has other information and updates about eating locally, which I would encourage others to look into.

Schtick Lit Recommendations Recap:


Crossworld: One Man's Journey into America's Crossword Obsession, by Marc Romano (NY: Broadway Publishers, 2005). Recommended for serious crossword junkies and assorted word aficionados.

Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, by Stefan Fatsis (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001). Recommended for anyone who likes the works of Charles Dickens and other juicy books with lots of character development, Scrabblers, and sports nuts.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver (NY: HarperCollins, 2007). Recommended for foodies, gardeners, biologists, farmers, and anyone who eats.