Have you ever picked up a book that you normally might not give the time of day and something about that book makes you crack it open at that moment? I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book Eat, Pray, Love over the weekend. Normally, I’d probably ignore this book, but then a galley arrived in the mail and I remembered reading something favorable about it in PW months ago. That same day the NYT Book Review, which had a review of the book on the cover, showed up on my desk. Cosmic? Who knows. What intrigued me about this particular book was Gilbert’s impiousness and the fact that the book seemed to be less about how everyone should go on some sort of religious pilgrimage and more about how she herself found some inner peace. Plus she lived in Italy, India, and Indonesia over the course of a year. I am a sucker for books set in exotic locales.

I found Gilbert’s writing lively, honest, and I particularly enjoyed the personal tone she set from the very introduction. Sometimes when authors address the reader directly, it can be distracting to what’s going on, but here I think it helped. She lays it all out in the beginning. Reeling from a bad divorce and then heartbreak from a rebound boyfriend, she decides to spend a year living in Italy, India, and Indonesia in order to explore herself. In Italy, she studies Italian as well as how to enjoy the pleasures of eating and exploring. In India, she stays at an ashram to explore her relationship with the divine (her description of what she means by ‘god’ is pretty good, but just saying it a review might give you the wrong impression of the book). And finally she returns to Bali to study the balance between temporal pleasures and the divine path.

It’s funny how sometimes the book you consider least likely to read can bring you satisfaction. I don’t know why I enjoyed this book so much. You’d think by now we’d stop trying to categorize so much and stray a little from our preconceived notions, especially when it comes to reading.

I’ve finished quite a few books recently. I’m hoping to write something a bit more about Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler, which I enjoyed so much, I then immediately read his first book River Town. They’re two different books written by a very observant and open author. His first book is more of a travelogue/memoir. Oracle Bones has no definable category. It’s somewhere between history, travelogue, cultural commentary about the changes happening today in China.

I picked up The Girl in the Glass next by Jeffrey Ford mainly, to be honest, because I liked the cover. It’s a wonderful mystery set during the Great Depression, with spiritual hucksters as the main characters. The mystery has several turns and twists, but more importantly, the writing keeps you sitting in your chair saying, ‘just one more chapter before I go to bed’, until you’ve finished the book.

Continuing with the mystery theme, I grabbed Dope by Sara Gran off my shelves. I keep hearing about this great new noir novel written by a woman no less. It lived up to its expectations. Set in postwar New York in 1950, the story involves recovering addict Josephine Flannigan as she gets paid by a couple to find their heroin-addicted daughter. Easy money she thinks, accepting the first thousand dollars up front, but things are never what they seem. As the novel progresses, we find out more about Josephine’s difficult childhood growing up in Hell’s Kitchen and her years as an addict. We follow her through all of the junkie hotspots in New York, talking to taxi dancers, pimps, and other addicts. Yet no matter how many old “friends” she runs into, no one seems more alone in the world than Josephine. The plot twists grip you and the ending shocked the hell out of me. Gran certainly deserves the comparisons to Dashiel Hammet and Raymond Chandler.

Have I mentioned how much I enjoyed Michelle Tea’s new novel Rose of No Man’s Land yet? It’s not your typical coming of age novel—for starters it doesn’t revolve around boys. Tea’s protagonist Trisha Driscoll stands on the brink of adulthood, even though she’s only 14. Already an alcoholic, she has no friends and rarely leaves the house. She finds it difficult to relate to her older sister, who so wants to flee their hometown of Mogsfield, MA that she’s trying to get a spot on MTV’s The Real World. After Trisha gets abruptly fired on her first day at Ohmigod! at the mall, she finds herself making friends with Rose, another mallrat who works at the carnival food eatery Clown in the Box. I loved Trisha’s brashness mixed with naivety. She captures the feeling of being old enough to know, but not old enough to know better. It’s a great book.

What would make a journalist crazy enough to train at the Culinary Institute of America without getting a degree at the end? For Michael Ruhlman it was his Grand Uncle Bill rhapsodizing about potatoes he had eaten decades ago at Gallatoire in New York. Though the meal involved many fancy ingredients, to his uncle the simple potatoes stuck in his mind due to their simple perfection. Ruhlman decides he wants to learn how to “put himself in the service of the potato” and hatches a scheme to get the CIA’s permission to attend classes and write a book about it, The Making of a Chef. During the 8 week Skills class, Ruhlman’s journalistic objectivity goes right out the window—and the book is all the better for it.

Often called the Harvard of cooking schools, the CIA produces passionate and trained chefs. Critics of the school complain that the chefs often demand higher pay and arrive in kitchens ill-prepared for the fast, frenetic pace and to his credit, Ruhlman does not shy away from addressing these concerns. His fervor for cooking infuses the book from the beginning with energy. Though he may jump around from topic to topic within chapters, he follows almost the entire course of the school, albeit faster than an enrolled student. The introductory class on skills takes up the first third of the book and the instructor, Chef Michael Pardus, remains a influential figure for Ruhlman throughout the book. The CIA program ends with a stint at one of the school’s 4 restaurants, where the chefs also must spend a week as a waiter. Ruhlman’s book paints a thoroughly complete portrait of the school.

As an avid cook, I found this book fascinating—I even managed to pick up a few hints from it. Ruhlman’s enthusiasm for the subject makes this book hum. I think if he had retained his objectivity, the book would have failed. His zeal echoes the pace of a typical kitchen, and you get a real sense of what working in a kitchen might be like (you can also read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential). I am looking forward to reading his upcoming book The Reach of a Chef, which “looks at the state of cooking in a post-Child, Food Network era”.