Author Archives: bookdwarf

A Quick Mention Before I Leave Town

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.

Recent Reads

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.

Happy Friday!

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.

Thomas Keller is a Genius

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.

Buttermilk Fried Chicken

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.

On Gloomy Days

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.

Monday Shoutout

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.

Links!

  • 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.