Culinary school is keeping me very busy! Taking evening classes can be a challenge, especially since I don’t get home until after midnight some nights and then have to wake up ready for work the next day. I’m not reading quite as much as I used to which feels strange but what I’m learning and the fun I have doing it makes the whole enterprise worth doing. If you check out my Flickr page, you can see some of the dishes I’ve been making.

Right now I’m rereading Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. I really want to read the second book in the trilogy River of Smoke but couldn’t remember enough of the characters’ trials and tribulations.  I’m loving it all over again. Ghosh brings such attention to detail I almost feel like I’m at sea when reading.

Hopefully I get used to this new schedule and can find some time to write more here. I’m not giving up!

Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin

This wonderful novel takes the voiceless character of Lavinia from Virgil’s Aeneid and creates a whole story for her. Her mother, crazed by the deaths of her sons, fixates on marrying Lavinia to her nephew Turnus, king of Rutuli. Before long Aeneas and the fleeing Trojans arrive on the shores. Fulfilling an oracle, King Latinus decrees that his daughter will marry Aeneas which provokes a war between the Trojans and the Rutulians. Caught between all of this we hear Lavinia’s voice, trying to navigate her own destiny. Le Guin gives us glimpses of Aeneas the man rather than the hero from the treasured epic. It’s definitely one of the best novels based on the ancient epics I’ve read in a long time.

The Ghost Map by Steve Johnson:
This one’s been out for awhile, but it’s got everything to please a nonfiction reader: Titillating details about the filth and oddities of Victorian London, a real understanding of science and the history of science, and relevance to amateur or professional students of contemporary city life, epidemiology, public health, and even counterterrorism. It details how a doctor and a minister teamed up to figure out that cholera was spread by contaminated water, and how they convinced others of the fact with what is now an iconic map of deaths and proximity to one particular well. A word of warning: If you’re prone to hypochondria, don’t read this while you’re sick at home with a stomach bug.

King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher:
The new effort from Philip Hensher is not perfect, but it’s pretty close. Like his previous novel, it follows a circuitous path through the lives of small-town England. Unlike The Northern Clemency, which chronicled a family in a dying coal city in the seventies and eighties, this one is set in a small but prosperous community in contemporary Devon, with an even wider range of characters.

There’s hardly any point in outlining the plot of the book, which meanders the way the life of the town does: A young girl goes missing, and the town gossips and worries; a college professor fights with her department head; a couple of men plan an orgy; a couple of teenagers fall in love; the neighborhood watch requests additional closed-circuit cameras.

The real point of the book is the way that privacy, and personal lives, intersect and are interrupted. Some of these interruptions are invited, when people meet, and get to know each other, and become friends. Others are annoying but inevitable in a small town: The neighbors know a great deal about each other, so gossip spreads quickly, and for the most part, harmlessly. But Hensher focuses as well on the way that surveillance and suspicion tend to drive a wedge into the heart of communities. Importantly, he does it with a linguistic style that is unmatched for beauty and grace in contemporary writing.

While almost all of the characters–even the most horrible ones–are well-rounded, the Neighborhood Watch leader is disappointingly one-dimensional. The closing vignette of the novel, in which several characters share a convivial epiphany about closed-circuit cameras, also falls kind of flat. And, OK, there are a couple places where the style goes from baroque to overblown. I could imagine that Hemingway fans would not appreciate all the adjectives Hensher uses.

Still, this is handily the best novel I’ve read in a long time. Start reading. Don’t worry about the circuitous route the plot is taking. You’re in the hands of a master stylist, and you’re going to be shown beautifully rendered portraits of people, their town, and their nation at the beginning of the 21^st century.

—Aaron Weber

Long before he became well known as a writer and producer for the justly-acclaimed television series The Wire, George Pelecanos had been writing some fine mysteries. This August, with The Cut, he’s introducing his newest character, Spero Lucas. An Iraq war vet, Lucas has set up an unlicensed investigation business in D.C.. He specializes in retrieving stolen property, taking forty percent cut of what he recovers. A crime boss, currently in jail awaiting trial, hires him to find several stolen packages for him. It seems like an easy job until the bodies start piling up.

Lucas at first seems like an idealistic young man, but he has a tough edge, honed by his years overseas at war. His multi-racial family grounds him when he gets carried away with his work. Pelecanos’s has created a compelling sort-of-hero, one who gets the job done but maybe doesn’t get the girl in the end. The sex and violence keep the pages turning right to the end, and I’m already looking forward to more.

August has been relatively quiet here. I finished buying books for the Fall season. Now I finally get a chance to clean up my office which seems empty as many of my co-workers take vacations. Of course this doesn’t mean that I stopped reading of course. To the contrary, I have now finished some of Fall’s biggest books.

• The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides: I’ll just say this. This book is excellent. I don’t know that I’ve read a better coming of age novel in some time now. Eugenides eye for the inner lives of folks seems masterful in this one. I can’t wait to see how it’s reviewed.
• King of the Badgers by Philip Hensher: I followed one truly excellent with another. Hensher wowed me with his Booker nominated The Northern Clemency in 2008. He returns with another tour de force centered around the town of Hanmouth in the west of England. Here he explores the inner lives of the townspeople, what is public and what is so hidden that even those closest to them don’t know about. It’s a remarkable work.
• Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron: This novel follows Jean Patrick Nkuba, a talented Rwandan runner, as he navigates the tensions in his country that constantly threaten to explode–until they finally do. Since you know historically what happens, the amount of tension just keeps climbing as you read on and on. Though I found this novel a bit hyperbolic at times, I found it pretty engrossing.
• Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward: Why I followed one traumatic book with another is beyond me. This one is set during the twelve days before Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf. It’s a rich novel about a poor family in Mississippi struggling to get by. Fourteen year old Esch finds out she’s pregnant while her brother Skeetah can’t seem to keep his pitbull puppies alive. Her older brother Randall tries to get money for basketball camp, while the youngest Junior suffers from the lack of their mother, who died giving birth to him. They’re devotion to one another can’t save them. It’s bleak but a wonderfully written debut novel.

The Chairs are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City by Mischa Glouberman and Sheila Heti

Misha Glouberman is basically a raconteur and this book is essentially composed of blog-length riffs about an incredibly wide variety of topics. Not a lot of writers can get away with a format like this, but this book is largely successful at doing what the author tries to do in classes and in life: Sparking ideas and then letting them wander off on their own in unexpected ways.

Still, while many parts of the book work as very short essays, some of them feel incomplete. For example, in a piece about neighborhood activism and negotiation, Glouberman relates how he got to know his neighbors, organize them, and bring up their mutual concerns with a city councilor, who helped build a win-win solution for their dispute with a nearby bar/restaurant.

But in the process of talking very convincingly about the importance of win-win “mutual gains” negotiation strategies, the nature of city governance, and zoning, he mentions the conflicts of gentrification and the dangers of overlooking people who live in the parts of the city where you go to play. And then he drops it and moves on to the next subject. So, the one restaurant got a patio if it promised to cut off the late-night DJ, but your blue-collar neighborhood is still full of drunk, belligerent, noisy yuppies on weekends? How is that a win-win?

Still, even while it falls short of completeness, The Chairs are Where the People Go is thought-provoking, and that’s what Glouberman is aiming for.

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War  by Tony Horowitz

Now, at the war’s 150th anniversary, Tony Horwitz has a beautifully-researched biography of Brown, his time, and his movement. This book is not as lighthearted or amusing as Horwitz’ study of civil war buffs and re-enactors, “Confederates in the Attic,” but he’s still a fascinating and engaging writer.

When She Woke by Hilary Jordan: Whereas Mudbound explored forbidden love between races in the post World War II era, When She Woke imagines a love affair between a renowned religious leader and one of his followers in a dystopian world caught up in religious extremism. I liked the intensity through most of the book, though the plot loses course about two thirds of the way toward the end. A fine sophmore novel.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead: I wish I had more time to write about this incredibly written not-about-zombies zombie novel. In a world infected by a plague, the novel follows one man nicknamed Mark Spitz for three days in Manhattan as he and his crew clear out the more innocuous infected ones, the “stragglers”, transfixed by the earlier lives. Ultimately we have to ask ourselves if we’re already living in a zombie world. Mr. Bookdwarf also liked this one. He says it’s funnier than The Road, but the humor masks the fact that it’s even bleaker in some ways.

The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh: In preparation for reading the second book the trilogy after Sea of Poppies, I’m reading Ghosh’s backlist. Turns out he turned his hand to scifi and won an Arthur C. Clarke award his efforts in 1997. A computer programmer discovers an aged ID card of a long-lost acquaintance , which draws him into an adventure that brings us back and forth through time. The history of malaria never seemed so interesting, and it’s great to see where Ghosh came from while you’re waiting for your preorder of River of Smoke to ship.

Damascus by Joshua Mohr: A wacky cast of characters all who hang out at a bar called Damascus in the Mission District in San Francisco inhabit this novel. Mohr wants to explore feelings about the war in Iraq and uses this setting to get behind a variety of people, including the alcoholic bar-owner, his outspoken niece, her artist friend, and an veteran discharged for a non-combat injury. Though the narrator’s voiceover gets a little wearisome at times, the characters make this novel sparkle.

Pao by Kerry Young: I hadn’t realized that there was a large Chinese population in Jamaica, but this novel of a Chinese man’s coming of age is set there. Pao moves to the island with his mother and brother after the Chinese Civil War and rises to become the godfather  of Kingston’s Chinatown. Though the rackets are small, Pao possesses a sensitive temperament that makes him want to do right by people. We see Jamaica move from post-colonial rule all the way to the Rastafarian revolution. Amidst all of this, Chinatown’s residents must find their own role to play.

The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam: I loved Anam’s debut novel A Golden Age back in 2008, about Rehana Haque and her children’s experiences during the Bangladeshi War for independence in 1971. In her follow-up, the children, Maya and her brother Sohail, must face the challenges of peace. Maya trains in medicine, devoting herself to the care of women raped and used during the war. Sohail, meanwhile, chooses a religious path that alienates both his sister and mother. Anam has written an thoughtful exploration of what it means to assimilate and to believe.