Bookdwarf

Adam Ross’ Mr. Peanut might be the best book I’ve read so far in 2010. In fact, it might be one of the best books of the year.

I don’t say this lightly. I’ve already heard a number of other titles declared “Best of 2010,” and it’s absurd to make that kind of call as early as March, especially since the book doesn’t even hit stores until June. Nonetheless, this book blew me away.

David Pepin has often imagined and fantasized about his wife’s death, and when she dies, it’s more than a little suspicious. He rapidly becomes a murder suspect, and the detectives on the case each have their own back-stories winding around different combinations of marriage and violence.

It’s engaging and gripping like a good murder mystery, but more richly layered and intellectually engaging than a beach read. When I was looking through it to get quotes for this post, I kept getting sucked back into the story again, even though I’d just read it. I’m likening it to a great meal at a restaurant–the appetizer gains your trust, the first course provides some revelations, the second demonstrates the chef’s skills, and the dessert just blows you away. Ross is truly a great wordsmith.

I know it’s far too early to call “Best of 2010,” but this is a strong, strong contender.

• Here’s a great interview with one of my favorite authors Hilary Mantel in the Telegraph. She shares her thoughts on writing, her life, winning the Booker prize and even gives hints about the follow-up to Wolf Hall called The Mirror and the Light: ‘The title is a phrase that Cromwell used, and it just seems endlessly fertile, the distortions a mirror can throw up and yet the truth it tells. The way you can move the light towards the mirror… I am not sure I am ever going to get to the end of that.’
• A.S. Byatt writes about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for the Guardian. “Another thing which is odd about reading Alice is that the reader – even a reader aged seven or eight – can never stop thinking about the language. The texture of reading Alice is a series of linguistic puzzles, contradictions and jokes, of which Humpty Dumpty’s assertions of his own arbitrary power over words (a word “means what I choose it to mean”) are only the most striking.”
• This week Five Chapters will serialize Victoria Patterson’s new story “Violetta.” Victoria’s debut collection, Drift,  is one of three finalists for the Story Prize this week (along with books by Wells Tower and Daniyal Mueenuddin) and was named one of the top books of 2009 by the San Francisco Chronicle.
• The Quarterly Conversation has announced their new Spring issue featuring articles on Per Patterson, Roberto Bolano, and Herta Muller. They also announce their new blog called The Constant Conversation.
• Open Letters Monthly’s March Issue has landed.
• Penguin has posted a whole series of short videos on fonts called Type Matters. It’s pretty neat especially since they’re broken down into 1-2 minute clips.
• Apparently Henry Holt has decided to stop production of Last Train to Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino. The book came under question after some sources were unable to be confirmed. Typically, the more they dug, the more dirt they found.

I live on the third floor and my apartment was shaking with the amount of wind blowing. This morning on the walk to the T, we encountered a surprise. Mr. Bookdwarf is standing in front of it so you can see how big it is:

Fuschia Dunop (I feel like I should call her by her first name alone with the amount I writer about her, but I digress) has an article about the food stalls of Singapore in the Financial Times.

There is a stall with the famous Hainan chicken rice, where the brusque proprietor doles out plastic platefuls of poached chicken on aromatic rice to a long queue of customers; sweet mung bean soup with a tarragon-like medicinal herb; and warm, porcelain-white almond milk.

Yum!

Fuchsia Dunlop has done some pretty great travel and food pieces over the years, so when we got Land of Plenty we did a good deal of oohing and aahing over the pictures and recipes. But it wasn’t until this weekend that we actually cooked anything from it. We’ve finally gotten the range hood installed in our kitchen, so it’s only recently that we have enough ventilation to take full advantage of the big 18,000 BTU burners on the new stove. So, flat-bottomed wok pan in hand, we went to Sichuan.

We figured we’d try the Gong Bao - that is, Kung Pow - chicken and go for a slightly more authentic take on an often-disappointing westernized classic. And to go with it, we’d make a bunch of different veggie sides. We already had the sichuan peppercorn and tsien tsien peppers, and it didn’t take much more to get the ingredients together. We made a special trip to Super 88 in Malden to make sure we had both light and dark soy sauce. We’d already been over to Russo’s in Watertown and grabbed fresh water chestnuts, cauliflower, and chinese broccoli. (It was our first trip to Russo’s, and it was both wonderland and madhouse, exactly as we’d been promised and warned. We wound up with a pint of strawberries, too even though they didn’t go with our theme.)

Fresh water chestnuts were a revelation. I feel almost angry that I’m now going to realize what I’m missing when I eat the canned kind.

Everything turned out very well, and we were pleasantly surprised that the different vegetables we cooked, all from the same basic stir-fry recipe, came out so differently: The thin-sliced potatoes we deglazed with rice vinegar were tangy and gingery; the chinese broccoli played beautifully against the sichuan peppers, the cauliflower browned up well in the wok, and the Gong Bao chicken came out exactly right.

Plus, now that we have that fan, nobody choked when Mr. Bookdwarf started frying the chiles. We even took some (sideways, for some reason) video - and yes, that’s Mr. B dropping cauliflower on the floor, and then eating it.

If the rest of the recipes are as good as the ones we made last night, Fuchsia Dunlop is definitely going to be a frequent presence at our dinner table.

I’ve been reading faster than I can post! Here are a few quick reviews of things I highly recommend:

• Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steve Amsterdam
  Amsterdam’s debut features nine stories linked by a single narrator, related over several increasingly difficult decades of post-apocalyptic life. But instead of focusing on the pain and awfulness of the situation, Amsterdam has produced a series of original, dense stories about the canniness it takes to overcome adversity.
• Country Driving by Peter Hessler
  China now buys more cars, builds more highways, and emits more carbon dioxide than any other country in the world. What does that mean for the average Chinese person? What does that mean for you? In Country Driving (as in his previous two books) Hessler provides a clear-eyed, unbiased, on-the-ground look at China’s changing relationship with itself and with the west. He visits bra factories, highway security checkpoints, farming villages and urban factories in his journeys around the country and comes away with a fascinating and informative portrait of a nation undergoing rapid and hugely influential changes.

  PS You should also read Hessler’s previous books River Town and Oracle Bones! I’ve long been a fan of Hessler. You don’t have to read these in any particular order. They’re all fantastic.

• Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss
  You probably know that the telephone changed the world. But did you know that telephone poles were the primary instrument of lynching? Eula Biss will make you think twice about everything you’ve ever known. Growing up as a white girl in a mixed-race household, teaching in poor urban elementary schools, and working as a journalist for an African-American newspaper in Los Angeles, Eula Biss has the perspective and experience to make you doubt, and doubt again, and change the way you look at everything from apartment rentals to educational policy.

One of the books getting the most buzz at the Winter Institute last week (basically camp for booksellers) was Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, a novel about Vietnam. Morgan Entrekin, founder of Grove Atlantic, loved it so much that he struck a deal with Marlantes’ current publisher to put out a  more widely distributed edition.

I finished Matterhorn last night. Vietnam was fucked up. I doubt any movie or book can really make me understand quite what it was like to fight on the front lines of Vietnam. This book got me one step closer. It’s gritty, dirty, perhaps overwritten in a few places, but overall a scary claustrophobic book on a nasty war.

• Who doesn’t like to look at alcoholic and drug addicted authors?
• Goodreads has an author snapshot of Zachary Mason, who wrote the lovely The Lost Books of the Odyssey. I found him quite charming when I had the pleasure of meeting him last week in San Jose.
• This week 5 Chapters is serializing Sam Lipsyte’s “A New Start”, an excerpt from his new book The Ask.
• Electric Literature has published their 3rd volume featuring the works of Rick Moody and Aimee Bender to name a few.

Here’s what I’m reading on this freakishly warm Monday:

• Steve Almond writes in about why he chose to self-publish his latest book This Won’t Take but a Minute Honey on our book machine at the LA Times. On a side note, why the Boston Globe isn’t printing this article about a local author printing on a local machine, I don’t know. Oh wait, the Globe sucks….
• The National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for their book award on Saturday. The fiction list is pretty stunning. Three of my favorite books of last year are on it! That would be Wolf Hall, Blame, and The Book of Night Women.
• 5 Chapters is serializing Sigrid Nunez’s short story called “Nameless”. Nunez might be one of the best writers you’ve not heard of before. I read The Last of Her Kind a few years ago and loved it.
• The Millions has posted the Confessions of a Book Pirate.
• Publishers, want to see what makes a good e-book? Read Kassia Krozier’s article on Publishing Perspectives. Instead of worrying about adding flashy new extras, worry about the basics!
• Edwidge Danticat writes about Haiti in this week’s New Yorker.

It’s 2010 now and my only resolution so far is to try and energize my writing habits. I’ve been a slacker blogger for months. Every time I sit down to write something, it either or sounds stupid or doesn’t come at all. I’m not sure what happened. I love writing this blog and want to keep it going. So my new plan right is to add some food related posts.

My friends all know how much I love to cook. They’ve come to rely on dinners on Sunday nights. I spend hours in the kitchen trying new recipes and improving on old ones. In addition to all of the book blogs I read, I’ve got an equally long list of food related ones. On top of that, I’m a bit of a cookbook whore too. So, writing about what I cook seems like a natural extension of this blog. On to last night’s dinner!

Last week, Mr. Bookdwarf brought home some Macomber turnips, which originate from Westport, Massachusetts funnily enough. I’m used to the ones with the purplish tops about the size of baseballs or smaller. These were huge! I decided to make a turnip gratin with them. I stuck to a basic gratin recipe substituting turnip for potato. I also used Ree Drummond’s (aka The Pioneer Woman) recipe as a guide for assembling and cooking times. I don’t have a mandoline, so I sliced them all by hand. Luckily I got fancy new Shun knives when I got married last Fall. Piece of cake…er, turnip! You add some garlic, some herbs, and lots of gruyère as you layer it up. I popped it into the oven and about 35 minutes later, I had this:

Of course after I had assembled four layers, I was left with almost a whole turnip sliced. What should I do? Turnip chips! But how best to make them? Fry or bake? I decided to try both. I threw some of the turnips in a bowl with olive oil, S&P, and thyme then spread them on a baking sheet. I put them in the oven with the gratin. I took them out when the edges started browning.

The rest I tried frying in a little canola oil.

The baked ones tasted best in my opinion. Mr. Bookdwarf seemed happy with them–hence all the empty spots on the pan! I served it all with an arugula and Parmesan salad dressed with lemon vinaigrette.

I’m realizing as I’m writing this post how poor my camera skills are. Hopefully I’ll get better as I practice. And that ladies and gentlemen is my first food post of 2010. Feel free to comment on whether you liked it or not, or if you like turnips, or if you want to see more of these posts, or simply to say hello.

• Salon asked authors like Judy Blume, Junot Diaz, Colm Toibin, and Chimamanda Ngozi Aidichie pick their favorite book of the year.
• I really enjoyed Cory Doctorow’s article on audiobooks in PW last week. I’m not a big fan of DRM and agree with him that the current system doesn’t work. It all seems so complicated. What do you think?
• The Huffington Post features “11 of the Coolest Bookcases“. I particularly like the one called Infinity.
• Read Laila Lalami’s thoughtful piece on the Swiss’ ban on minarets from the Nation.
• Have you read any of Mavis Gallant’s short stories yet? If not, get thee to a bookstore! They’re fabulous. I haven’t read her latest collection from NYRB Classics called The Cost of Living, but I’m sure it’s great. Over at the Guardian, she reflects on her life as a writer.
• Maud Newton picks her favorite books of the year.
• I didn’t know the New York Review of Books had a blog, did you?

Chang-Rae Lee has written a very ambitious fourth novel with The Surrendered. It travels back and forth through time from Korea to New Jersey to Manchuria and Italy. The story begins with June Han, a Korean orphan trying to survive a trek to safe ground. Young GI Hector Brennan finds her on the road and brings her to an orphanage where the meet Sylvie Tanner, a missionary wife. There the pair vie for her attention. At least that’s where it seems to begin at first, but Lee also brings us to the point where June is orphaned; why Hector joined the military trying to escape the death of his father; what brought Sylvie Tanner to Korea. And it will suddenly move forward to Hector and June’s lives after the war.

The death of parents scarred June, Hector, and Sylvie. The repercussions of their deaths cause ripples of grief through all of them. Lee has written a very powerful novel about not just how awful war can be, but how love can be damaging as well as uplifting. He offers no easy endings or heartwarming coming-together, instead bringing to life a powerful, unpredictable, and occasionally painful story.

The slushy snow has now turned into rain. Don’t let this deter you however from coming to tonight’s event featuring yours truly. It’s become a tradition to have the buyers present their favorite holiday picks from 2009. There will be wine and cookies and lots of talk about books.

I’m sad to be not watching the Top Chef season finale as it airs, but at least I can watch it later. I had the pleasure of eating at chef Kevin Gillespie’s restaurant Woodfire Grill while visiting my parents over Thanksgiving. The meal made it to the top ten best meals ever list. Just course after course of fresh deliciousness. And Kevin was there! He seemed glad to be back at his restaurant. He spent about ten minutes chatting with us and was as nice as can be.

In other news, critic and James Wood has made his list of favorite books of the year. It’s an interesting list. We actually overlap a bit.

The Millions has a great interview with translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Knopf just release their translation of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories. Currently they’re working on a new translation of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

I’m going to appear on the show The Sound of Ideas that airs on WCPN in Cleveland tomorrow morning from 9 to 10 am. We’ll be talking about…wait for it…books!

Yes, you read that correctly. I’m staring out into some Spring like weather here in Cambridge. I hope to escape for a lovely run on the Charles this afternoon. I dashed off to Atlanta last week to visit my folks for Thanksgiving. I didn’t read as much as I had planned, but I did finish Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office Girl, one of the awesome NYRB Classics series. It’s a strange and compelling book, marred by the unfinished ending. Now I’m entranced by Chang-Rae Lee’s new novel The Surrendered. The first section got me choked up a bit, but it’s too soon to past judgment on the rest. The novel involves several viewpoints who shift back and forth in time and I want to see how he pulls the story lines together. I’m going to leave you with some links for your reading pleasure.

• The New York Times has announced their Ten Best Books of the Year. Meh. It’s a good list. Nothing exciting though.
• Cory Doctorow put together some thoughts on the future of bookselling.
• The Wall Street Journal asked me and some other booksellers to recommend books to particular people. It ran in last Friday’s paper. There’s sort of a link, but you can’t see the cool graph they printed!
• The Millions has started their annual Year in Reading lists!
• There’s a new Ian McEwan story in this week’s New Yorker.

I finished reading Paul Auster’s latest novel Invisible last night. I think it’s his best book in a while. This piece from Clancy Martin’s review really does it true justice:

You want to reread “Invisible” because it moves quickly, easily, somehow sinuously, and you worry that there were good parts that you read right past, insights that you missed. The prose is contemporary American writing at its best: crisp, elegant, brisk. It has the illusion of effortlessness that comes only with fierce discipline. As often happens when you are in the hands of a master, you read the next sentence almost before you are finished with the previous one. The novel could be read shallowly, because it is such a pleasure to read.

The winners are:
Fiction: Colum McCann for Let the Great World Spin

Poetry: Keith Waldrop for Transcendental Studies

Non-Fiction: T.J. Stiles for The First Tycoon

Young Adult: Philip Hoose for Claudette Colvin

I’ve been reading a lot of Spring galleys that I thought I would share with you. I’ve heard people who have been in the book business say that they thought this current season the best they’ve ever seen. This might be true. It’s certainly the best I’ve seen in my ten years, but what about the season that has to follow? I feel bad for the Spring books, forced to come on stage like the understudy. The Fall of 2009 is great, but let’s pretend for the Spring books that they won’t be compared. There are some gems, trust me!

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste is surely one of these gems. Set in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on the cusp of the revolution, the novel follows one family’s tumultuous time. In 1973, a television program revealed the true effects of the drought and famine on the Wollo region of Ethiopia, destabilizing Emperor Haile Selassie’s regime. It also allowed growing popularity of the socialists. Hailu, a skilled doctor in the capital, must shepherd his family through this rough era. His older son Yonas, a university professor, feels impotent against the violence, trying to protect his wife and daughter. The younger son Dawit meanwhile feels the fiery convictions of the college age. When soldiers request Hailu treat an obvious torture victim–she must not die, he is told–he makes a decision that will change his family’s fate. Their tragic story makes Mengiste’s debut novel powerful and gripping.

I don’t think I was alone when I was surprised to see Joshua Ferris’ debut novel Then We Came to the End nominated for the National Book Award in 2007. I mean surprised in a pleasant, excited way. Here was a fresh new voice and it was being recognized. Ferris returns in January with a new novel, The Unnamed, which couldn’t be more different from his first book. Attorney Tim Farnsworth thought he had recovered from a mysterious illness that causes him to walk to the point of exhaustion, but it’s returned and not getting better. His wife Jane does everything she can think of to keep him safe. Packing backpacks with GPS for him so she can eventually find him. The illness affects his daughter Becka as she is forced to take care of him over time. Ferris keeps the suspense up. Is he getting better? Will he go home again? Plus there’s the tragedy of Tim and Jane’s marriage. They truly love one another, yet he can’t stop the constant walking. It’s heartbreaking.

The last book I’ll mention is by one of my favorite writers William Boyd called Ordinary Thunderstorms. Climatologist Adam Kindred is back in England looking for work. A small good deed puts hurls him into the world of assassination, conspiracy, and the underworld. It comes across at first like a straight forward thriller. Yet Boyd uses the plot to examine different aspects of English life. Boyd tells the story from various characters’ viewpoints, including the head of a multimillion dolllar pharmaceutical firm, a prostitute living in public housing, a hired killer, and of course Adam Kindred. It succeeds in certain areas, fails in others. I don’t think it’s Boyd’s best work, but even his less successful efforts are better than most.

What a great day so far! I worked my first register shift today in the store. Can you believe I’ve worked here for ten years and never had to run the register? I could do most of it, but was never called upon to do so. Until today! I’ve conquered a brave new frontier. Okay, not really, but I found it fun and plan to keep on doing it.

What else made my day great? Cynthia Crossen mentioned me as a blog she likes to read in the Wall Street Journal’s Dear Book Lover column. Wow. I’m flattered. So thanks to anyone new to my site. I feel reinvigorated and promise to start posting regularly again. Now that my buying season is done, I can devote more time to writing and reading.

I might not be stating anything new here, but Thomas Keller writes one fine cookbook. I’ve never eaten at any of his restaurants. So, instead, I faithfully wait for each of his books to come to me. Ad Hoc the restaurant as a temporary restaurant, sort of an experiment in family-style dining while they were designing their next big project. Everybody loved it, so they never closed. And now they have a fantastic cookbook. When my friends and I got a look at Ad Hoc at Home, there was no disagreement: This was the choice for our next cookbook-themed potluck.

Keller is known for his respect for food, and his attention to precision and detail. And he does describe things very, very carefully in these books. Some people tell me that his books fall into the “coffee table cookbook” category: They look pretty, but nobody actually cooks from them. Now, that may be true of “Under Pressure” — after all, few home cooks have all that sous vide equipment handy — but his other books are totally usable. I love my Bouchon book, for example, and there are definitely several favorite recipes in there we make all the time at home. Based on last night’s meal, I think Ad Hoc will be similar.

The first recipe I saw when I opened the book was for Buttermilk Fried Chicken. I’ve never made fried chicken. Oh, I’ve eaten a lot of it, growing up in Alabama. Up here in Boston, I go to Highland Kitchen, which has incredible chicken, although only on Monday nights. And I’ve heard good things about the offerings at Trina’s Starlite Lounge. But could I do it at home and make it as good as Highland’s?

The rest of the meal came together rapidly: One guest contributed banana bread pudding, and I made the caramel ice cream to accompany it. Other guests brought spare ribs, cole slaw, and delicious whipped garlic potatoes. Things turned out perfectly. Even the novice cooks produced seriously excellent food, and the preparations we wound up with even looked almost as good as the ones in the cookbook - something that’s hard under normal circumstances, but is extra difficult when you’re making a recipe for the first time.

24 hours, a bottle and a half of vegetable oil, a quart of buttermilk, and several thousand calories later, our house still smells like fried chicken. And it’s kind of awesome.

Unfortunately, this is the only photo we have. We even fried some rosemary for a garnish and put it all on a nice platter. But we all scarfed it too fast to get anymore photos.
We might not make the fried chicken all that often - it is a huge production after all - but this cookbook is definitely going into heavy rotation in the Bookdwarf kitchen playlist.

More photos of the making of the chicken and ice cream can be seen here.