Bookdwarf

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.

It’s a very nasty day here in Cambridge, all billowy and cold, down to the bones cold. I’ve been quiet again. I’m just not reading much that excites me these days. Right now I’m reading Cleaving by Julie Powell. I’m not sure why though. Trust me to say that I’m not here to trash her or her book. There are plenty of other internet trolls to do that. I’ll just say that I’m not enjoying it. It’s pretty much a rip off of Elizbeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, but with a much less likable more self-involved author. It’s her memoir about her crappy life after Julie & Julia. She and her husband separate, get back together, she’s sleeping with someone else, she discovers she’s into bondage, she learns some butchering skills too. That’s the thread that’s supposed to tie it all together somehow. Also, she travels. See? Elizabeth Gilbert. So maybe I am trashing it after all.

I can’t stop reading it for some reason either. I think it’s because I want to know if it gets any better or if she has some sort of great breakthrough that makes her likable. I don’t know. I’m just hoping I can finish it tonight.

Also, Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss is totally worth reading by the way.  You might have read some of her essays in Harper’s. She’s got a few of her essays listed on her website. Check them out.

My friend Emily Pullen at Skylight Books in Los Angeles wrote a great post about the price wars between Amazon and Wal-Mart. If you haven’t heard, the two behemoths are reducing prices of bestsellers to ridiculous prices. I love Emily’s response:

But times are tough, everyone’s pockets are feeling a little empty these days, right? What kind of soulless person would think that cheaper isn’t better? According to Merriam Webster, the verb to cheapen also means “to lower in general esteem; to make tawdry, vulgar, or inferior in some moral sense.” And frankly, that’s something that I’d rather not do to our concept of reading and its influence in our lives. I’m amazed that publishers don’t seem more outraged about this. As luxuries go (and reading is usually a luxury), you can’t get much more economical than a book. Let’s say you read one page per minute for 30 minutes every day. At that rate, it would take you 10 days to read a 300 page book, or 5 total hours. Where can you get 5 hours of entertainment or education for less than $15, let alone 10 DAYS of entertainment or education for about $25? And what if that book happens to change your life? Priceless.

• Owner of my store, Jeffrey Mayersohn, has a post over at the Huffington Post, where he discusses why exactly he bought the store.
• The trailer for The Fantastic Mr. Fox directed by Wes Anderson looks amazing!
• The National Book Award Finalists were announced today. It’s an odd list, if I might say so. Almost no one reviewed Far North, but it’s a great book!
• Ed Champion led a roundtable discussion of Sarah Hall’s fantastic Booker nominated novel How to Paint a Dead Man last month. I recently finished this book. I’ve read all of Hall’s work and this is probably the best so far.

The 2009 prize was awarded to Herta Muller. I had to look her up. The Literary Saloon has more information on her.

The title of the post pretty much says it all. “Speaking on stage after her name was announced, Mantel said: ‘I can tell you at this moment I am happily flying through the air.’”

• New England booksellers are optimistic according to this PW article about the NEIBA trade show I missed last week in Hartford. “Incoming NEIBA president Dick Hermans, owner of Oblong Books & Music in Millerton and Rhinebeck, N.Y., said that his stores were up in August, which is usually his third biggest month.” Optimistic booksellers are about as rare as snow leopard sightings!
• Maud Newton and Bookforum write enthusiastically about Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s first novel The Informers, a fabulous novel. From Bookforum:
  

  Vásquez has much in common with Roberto Bolaño. Vásquez’s great theme is memory: the nightmares, personal and political, that return to haunt us. But unlike Bolaño’s stolid, serviceable prose, Vásquez’s style is musical, occasionally even lush, and its poeticism remains unmuddled in McLean’s translation.

  I posted about how this novel spurred me to read more about colonization and Colombian history back in April.

• The National Book Foundation has announced the “5 Under 35” for 2009.
• James Wood responds to Ed’s response to Wood’s review of Richard Power’s Generosity in the New Yorker. I disagreed with Wood’s take on the novel, but I also think I have different expectations from novels than he does.
• Electric Literature’s latest video is Martha Colburn imagining a Diana Wagman sentence from her memoir Three Legged Dog.
• An interesting post on pre-publication anxiety by an author.
• Oh, hey, we’re on television! You might have to search for “book machine” on WBZ-TV’s website. We launched our Book Machine last week, now dubbed Paige M. Gutenborg. I’ve got some photos to show too. It’s pretty neat watching the books being made, sort of like our own Rube Goldberg machine.

I read these two large books back to back: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt. One of the few things they have in common is that they’re both shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize. One is an exploration of Tudor politics through the eyes of one of the major players, Thomas Cromwell. The other follows a well-known writer and her family through the end of the 19th century into the 20th. Both novels involve a complex cast of characters.

I read Wolf Hall first. It took me a while to get into it, but once there, I couldn’t put it down. Even though we know what’s going to happen historically, the inner life of Thomas Cromwell drew me into the events in a way I never expected. Usually portrayed as a sympathetic figure, Mantel’s Thomas More seems more life like. He’s a pompous jerk. Mantel’s Cromwell, while always likeable, is a fully fleshed out character. His heartbreak over the loss of his family to disease was heart wrenching. Cromwell came to prominence through will-power, not family connections. He’s an outsider, constantly taunted by the noblemen for his shabby beginnings. I’m not sure what other novels to compare. Mantel has written something entirely different, historical, imaginative, and simply wonderful.

I dove right into The Children’s Book. It’s quite easy to do. Byatt recreates the years between 1895 and 1919 so passionately and with such detail, that a friend also reading this book, wrote out a cast of characters for us to make it easier. She weaves together the fictional people seamlessly with historical figures such as Oscar Wilde, Rupert Brooke, and Emma Goldman.We begin with Olive Wellwood and her husband Humphrey. She is a well-known children’s book writer, he a banker. As part of the Fabian society, they’re inclined toward equality for all, which includes treating their children as equals. There’s also Humphrey’s brother Basil and his wife Katharina, who don’t share their socialist beliefs, and their children. The social circle arcs out to include some writers, artists and radical academics. The entire novel brims with the arts–theater, pottery, the Arts & Craft movement, painting, poetry, etc. The last third of the novel deals with World War I, the rude awakening to the upper class English. Many of the people you’ve read about die. Byatt was quite ruthless with that, but she had to be I imagine.
I cannot compare these two magisterial novels. I urge people not to let their size intimidate them. They’re two of the best books I’ve read so far this year. With more time to reflect, I imagine they’ll take their place in my favorite top 20 books ever.

You might have heard something about the National Book Foundation picking the best of the best this year. They started a special blog featuring a past winner each day. Now they’ve opened the polls. You can pick from 6 books which is the best National Book Award book. It’s a tough one. Right now Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man leads the pack. The winner will be announced at the 60th National Book Awards ceremony on November 18th.