I learned a new piece of Massachusetts history in reading The Celestials by Karen Shepard. In June of 1870, 75 Chinese laborers arrived in North Adams, after two weeks on a train to cross the picket line at Calvin Sampson’s shoe factory. Mostly teenagers, they arrived at the factory of one of the biggest industrialists in the U.S. speaking no English, with the exception of Charlie Sing, their foreman. The townspeople, many of them angry industrial workers, greeted the train intent on launching a protest, but found themselves awestruck at the vision of these young, Asian men, in their blue blouses and soft slippers.

Shepard’s novel imagines the inner lives of Sampson and his long struggling wife Julia, who had lost 14 pregnancies. Historically, they did not have children and lived in a hotel, but she creates a wonderful story about a love triangle between Julia, Sampson, and one of the new laborers. The Celestials, with the help of well-meaning Christian townswomen, forge new lives, managing to fit in as well as they can into North Adams. At a time when the industrial age was just beginning, the  conflicts around immigration, labor, and technology all threaten to come to blows time and again. Julia begins a relationship with Charlie, who finds himself surprised at his own feelings. When a mixed race baby appears, the town and even Sampson don’t know how to react.

With quiet prose, the author examines this crucial turning point with her main characters. Some desperate for change, others wanting nothing more then for things to remain as they are. The most tightly drawn people, Charlie and Julia, want both.  With only a few mis-steps, Shepard’s novel brings to light a mostly unknown history with good detail.

I’m always amazed when someone so young writes something so grown-up, as Fiona McFarlane has down with her debut The Night Guest. I’ve been on a string of reading successes with FSG affiliates Faber & Faber,  and this excellent novel, part psychological thriller, part wistful look at aging, is a perfect example.

75-year-old widow Ruth Field lives alone in an isolated beach house outside of an Australian town. Her well-meaning sons call occasionally, but most of her days are spent in solitary reflection about her past. Once in a while, she imagines she hears a tiger prowling in her living room, a reminder of a childhood spent in Fiji with missionary parents.

One day a stranger shows up at her door. Frida Young has been sent as a care worker by the government. Alternately soothing and bullying, Frida upends Ruth’s life with her cleaning, fixing, and rearranging.  Ruth must adjust to having someone in her home, and the process also begins upending her memories. Can she trust Frida? Can she trust her own memories? What parts of the story is she imagining or fabricating?

McFarlane imbues this suspenseful tale with powerful details and a touching sense of the uncertainty at the twilight of life. There’s something about this book that lingers in my imagination, much like the tiger that Ruth hears rattling around her home. I look forward to the author’s future work.

While reading Idiopathy, Sam Byer’s debut novel, I had to wonder how much glee the author felt while skewering his characters so cruelly. The title refers to Bovine Idiopathic Entrancement Syndrome, which is spreading through Britain’s cattle population, idiopathy being a condition that arises spontaneously or for which a cause is unknown.  The novel rotates between several points of view and the reader gets a portrait of their collective ennui.

Katherine is stuck at a job as a facilities manager, having “accidentally” moved to Norwich from London. She smokes a lot, drinks a lot, and has been having violent sex with a recovering addict co-worker, Keith. She’s being eaten alive by her own bitterness. Angry at herself and the entire world, she implodes once she discovers she’s pregnant after a horrible vacation to Malta with Keith.

Her ex-boyfriend Daniel is  a PR flack for a biotech firm. His new girlfriend Angelica is a cloying ex-hippie with a giant barfing cat and a crowd of friends who protest outside the very research facility where he works. Byer mocks the protesters as sharply as he mocks the objects of their protests: “For people … who railed daily against the tyranny of the squares, they were oddly humourless, as if free expression and boundless emotional exploration were such a serious business that it left no room for actual fun.”

Katherine and Daniel are reunited when their old friend Nathan is released from a psychiatric facility and moves back in with his mother, who has just written a self-help book for parents who have survived troubled children. It’s called Mother Courage: One Woman’s Battle Against Maternal Blame, and she wants Nathan to help her promote the book about how he ruined her life by opening a Facebook account and getting his friends to like it.

The novel portrays all of these characters up to the penultimate reunion of Katherine, Daniel, and Nathan. I was reminded of the Mike Leigh movie Secrets and Lies, or that awful feeling when you’re sitting next to a table in a restaurant and can overhear the couple fighting and it’s just so awkward. There’s no real plot, just the inner lives of the main characters, in all of their awfulness. Byers lays bare the worst of their qualities expertly and it sort of just ends with no real resolution, but I didn’t mind. In this author’s hands, the combination of terribleness and hilarity worked well, but there’s only so much a reader can take. Don’t get me wrong, Byers has written an excellent book that I enjoyed reading, but I had to watch some kitten videos to restore balance.

Noodling is fishing for catfish using only bare hands, practiced primarily in the southern United States. The noodler places his hand inside a discovered catfish hole, whereupon the catfish will swim forward and latch onto the hand. It’s an odd thing and even odder to me that they call it “noodling,” because what does it have to do with noodles really? This brings me to a book I finished recently by Jen Lin-Liu, On the Noodle Road: From Beijing to Rome with Love and Pasta. In her second book, she travels the Silk Road in search of the answer to Who Really Invented the Noodle? You might have heard that Marco Polo brought noodles back from China, but in fact, that’s a story created for a 1929 magazine called The Macaroni Journal (a quick google search told me that the publication is now the Pasta Journal put out by the National Pasta Association, whose mission statement is increase the consumption of pasta, promote the development of sound public policy, act as a center of knowledge for the industry and the consumer, and whose website is appropriately ilovepasta.org. Yes, I fell down the internet hole but quickly pulled myself back up). Turns out Italians were eating pasta way before Marco Polo met Kublai Khan.

Lin-Liu began in Beijing and traveled West, visiting provinces that contain ethnic minorities many Westerners will find unfamiliar. Then she hit the ‘Stans–Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, hoping to find the roots of noodles. Iran proved eye-opening in a good way, while Turkey, Greece, and Italy all provided interesting anecdotes. Throughout it all, she tastes all kinds of amazing sounding food, though does come down hard on the Central Asian dish plov.

Plov, also known as pilaf, is a rice dish cooked in a seasoned broth, with seasonings and add-ins that vary per region. Each region promises that they have the best plov, but after a while, Lin-Liu seems pretty unexcited about eating it at each meal. The reader also notices that there’s a gap between noodle sightings, noodles not being a main dish in much of Central Asia and the Middle East. She picks up the noodle thread (hah, see what I did there?) back in Europe to wrap up the book in sumptuous Emilia-Romagna, the province in Northern Italy that produces not only balsamic vinegar and Parmesan-Reggiano, but mortadella and prosciutto. I would move there in a heartbeat.

One theme Lin-Liu hits upon as she travels is how women are treated in all of the places she visits. You won’t be surprised that women are treated shabbily at best in many parts of the world. The author is at her best when she asks all of the women she meets about their lives. Her knowledge of food history across many cuisines also helps her spot connections between various ethnic traditions. If I had one critique, it would be that her own personal journey with her husband and trying to navigate marriage and independence is the least-interesting part of this otherwise fantastic book of travel, food, and sometimes noodles.

In the brilliantly titled book I’m reading, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, it turns out the author’s father worked at the Ministry of Health’s Mausoleum Research Lab, where 150 people toiled to keep Lenin looking good in his sarcophagus. They cleaned his outfit–underwear and all. Anya Von Bremzen’s Father Sergei monitored changes in Lenin’s skin hue. And of course, they weren’t allowed near the body itself–that required top security. No, they practiced on “biological structures,” i.e. cadavers, 26 of them. According to Anya, the job was classified as dangerous to employees’ health, so came along with perks like shortened work hours, free daily carton of milk, and a monthly allotment of “purest, high grade spirt (ethyl alcohol).”

Suffice it to say, I’m really enjoying this book, especially now that I have a much longer commute to my new job.

When Rose George published The Big Necessity, her study of global sanitation and toilet access, the natural comparison was to Mary Roach, who is known for her nonfiction treatments of earthy and scatalogical topics.

But George, while still bringing a sense of humor to her work, isn’t a humorist. The Big Necessity featured the occasional laugh, but it was by no means toilet humor. It was just a book about how important sanitation and bathrooms are to contemporary societies, and their impact on health both public and private.

Her new book, 90 Percent of Everything covers maritime shipping, those giant boats carrying hundreds or thousands of intermodal shipping containers.

She goes on board a Maersk boat as a supernumary to understand the misery and boredom of shipboard life, joins a Portuguese naval vessel off the Somali shore to talk piracy, visits a whale-research vessel to talk pollution. All the while she recounts the horrifying underpayment and mistreatment of merchant sailors, and the ways the multinational freight companies manage to fly flags of convenience and escape even the most basic responsibility for the lives of their crews and the oceans they float on.

It’s a revealing look at an industry we just don’t think about that much, even though, as she points out, about 90 percent of everything we consume has at some point been on a ship.

Judging by her Facebook feed and her blog, Allie Brosh is kind of reluctant to promote her book, due out this October. She’s shy, and I can imagine she would be worried it won’t measure up to people’s expectations. I mean, books based on blogs can be disappointing, even books based on blogs as good as Hyperbole and a Half.

I got a promo copy, though, and the book of Hyperbole and a Half is every bit as good as I had hoped it would be. It’s about half new stuff and half greatest hits, and new or familiar it made me laugh until I cried. It got pretty awkward on the subway, is what I’m saying.

Preorder it now. Just do it.