I feel like I am falling behind already. I whipped through book #13 The Zanzibar Chest by Aiden Hartley. I found it hard to put down, even though he describes things that no human should witness nor live through. Hartley, born in Kenya and most recently a reporter for the Economist, has felt an inexplicable pull to Africa his whole life. He comes from a long line of African colonialists—his father helped bring irrigation systems and new crops to various areas. Hartley returns to Africa as a young correspondent for Reuters. Covering large swathes of Africa, he writes about witnessing the tragic drought in Ethiopia, the fighting in Somalia, and the genocide in Rwanda. The hard, gritty writing leaves nothing undescribed. Everything he saw, the bodies, the filth, the savageness of the people involved he records. Shattered by his experiences, he returns home to find the journals of his father’s closest friend Peter Davey, who lived and died on the Arabian penisula. Hartley travels there to trace Davey’s mysterious death in 1947. This story he weaves throughout the book, and though the story is less compelling than the rest, it provides him with a touchstone for an examination of colonialism and its effects. Hartley loves Africa and this loving homage to the continent provides a small glimpse into a varied and exotic land.

After reading such an intense book, I needed something a bit lighter. Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany seemed like the perfect antidote. The plot of this book is self-explanatory from the long subtitle. Bill Buford, who spent 16 years as editor of Granta and 8 years as fiction editor of The New Yorker, chronicles his experience as slave to Mario Batali’s in the kitchen of Babbo in NY. That’s really just the first part. Eventually, Buford moves to Tuscany for a bit to learn the art of being a butcher. Over the course of several years, he attempts to learn why food matters. I found his portrait of Batali illuminating—he’s way more hardcore than I would have thought and Buford’s description pushes Batali off the pedestal he’s been living on for a while now. But the man can drink a case of wine on his own and he cusses like a sailor! Though he gets too bogged down in confusing historical details in places, his humorous writing made me finish the book. If you love reading about restaurants, meat, pasta, and Italy and don’t mind the occasional boring tangent, it’s a fun read.

I am slowly working my way through the novels of Graham Greene. The latest one I’ve read is Our Man in Havana, written in 1958. Overall, I have to say that it’s not as strong a book as The Heart of the Matter or The Power and the Glory, but I still found it enjoyable. Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, is running out of money. He worries what will become of his 17-year-old daughter Milly if something were to happen to him. When Hawthorne approaches him with an offer of $300 a month plus expenses to become a spy for the English government, he becomes Agent 59200/5. He files fake reports, filing for expenses, dreaming up a complicated miliary installation based on one of his vacuum cleaner designs, and recruiting imaginary people as subagents. The home office, so impressed with his work, even send him a secretary, Beatrice. Things turn topsy-turvy when some of the stories come to life. The whole darkly comic novel brims with satire of the espionage system.

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”.

I remember reading Justin Tussing’s story “The Laser Age” in the Debut Fiction issue of the New Yorker earlier this year. Something about his writing really spoke to me, so I was excited when I received a copy of his novel The Best People in the World from which his short story was drawn.

It’s 1972 and narrator Thomas Mahey seems cast adrift in his small town in Paducah, Kentucky. Two events change Thomas’ life: falling in love with his new history teacher Alice, 8 years his senior and meeting the town misfit Shiloh Tanager, a socialist transient. The trio flee to rural Vermont, stopping first in New York to visit one of Shiloh’s old haunts. They end up squatting in an old farmhouse for the winter, attempting to live off the land. Each of the novel’s 5 sections opens with a chapter involving 2 Vatican emissaries investigating religious miracles. You’re not meant to get the connection until the end of the book, as characters and identities are unmasked. After the efforts at growing food fail and the cold snowy winter blankets the farm, the trio are cut off from the rest of the world, hence the title I believe.

Tussing writes in shorter sentences that give his novel a sense of immediacy even though he also uses the past tense. Thomas Mahey is looking back and telling us the story. But he loses focus somewhere around the middle. The first part that made up the short story in the New Yorker I found beautiful. As the novel moves on however, I started losing interest in the characters. Alice is complicated but I don’t care enough about her to wonder why. Shiloh Tanager remains the most interesting and plot driven of the three. Thomas exists to tell the story years down the road. Tussing is a great writer, but I found this first novel lacking. I am hoping that his future efforts won’t disappoint.

Brooklyn Follies, Paul Auster’s strangely compelling new book, takes the Auster canon into a new direction and I honestly don’t know what to make of it. “Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. This is only the latest in a long line of follies.” At least that is what the back of the book promises. Even the first line of the novel begins with Nathan Glass contemplating his death: “I was looking for a quiet place to die.” Glass, a lung cancer patient in his late fifties, has given up on life, but spends most of the novel discovering its joys as though he hadn’t really lived before. Auster avoids treacly homily, mostly through the protagonist’s rueful sense of humor.

The Brooklyn Follies is totally unlike any other Auster work I’ve read: warm, moving, and sympathetic to its characters. Even the structure, featuring the protagonist’s memoirs as a book within a book, is barely postmodern at all. Nathan Glass runs into his nephew Tom behind the counter of a local bookstore. Tom had fallen into a funk in the past few years. And his sister Rory only appears from time to time, usually when she is in trouble. The book’s plot moves along when Rory’s daughter Lucy shows up unannounced on Tom’s doorstep one day. Luckily, Auster is a good enough writer to prevent this from feeling like a Nicholas Sparks novel.

Some of the time, I wasn’t sure if I even liked the book, but I found it compelling. The characters were interesting enough that I wanted to see how things would turn out for them. Besides, it was an Auster novel, so I kept expecting some sort of unsettling turn of events. Instead, the book proceeded more or less neatly toward a well-structured and satisfying end. It may not be Auster’s usual style, but it’s still quite good.

Just so you don’t think I’m going to be constantly dumping links on you, I’ll tell you about 2 books I’ve recently read.

The first, a paperback original from the new Harper Perennial line, is a memoir called I Am Not Myself These Days by Josh Kilmer-Purcell. Josh lived a double life—by day, he was a successful advertising executive and at night, he transformed into Aquadisiac, a successful drag queen. This is all on the back of the galley. They even got a blurb from James Frey, so you know it’s going to be full of drugs, if not a bit trashy (sorry, I didn’t think much of Frey’s book). It’s not as all tawdry as they would have you believe. The other executives at his firm know about his night life, mainly because he shows up at work either hung over or still slightly drunk and won’t shut up about it. I found him sympathetic though. The book mostly focuses on a relationship he had with Jack, a hot rich male escort who also has a crack habit. Josh, only several months in NYC, moves into Jack’s clean white penthouse and they settle into a sort of hybrid domesticity. The funniest parts are when Josh comes home to find some of Jack’s S&M clients tied up on the floor. It ends sadly of course, as Jack gets more dependent on crack and Josh realizes his lifestyle (the up all night wasted, spending 2 or more hours getting into his drag costume lifestyle, not the being gay part) no longer suits him. If this tells you anything about the book, there’s a note from the executive editor of HarperCollins that let’s you know the film rights have already been bought by Clive Barker.

The other book to appear on my desk this week is a fantastic smaller hardcover from the great David Godine. Bibliotopia or, Mr. Gilbar’s Book of Books & Catch-All of Literary Facts & Curiosities clearly is cashing in on the popularity of small trivia books such as Schott’s Original Miscellany. But this one is classier and looks better. The cover and binding alone make the book worth a look. The endpapers have fonts illustrating them. The book begins with the beginning of books. There are no chapters, rather the whole thing is bulleted with a heading and the facts. It’s all literary trivia, such as ‘Some Authors With Medical Degrees’, ‘Genius Award Novelists’, and ‘French Authors Pronunciation Guide’. Throughout the book are wonderful illustrations of authors by Elliott Banfield. I thought they were woodcuts or something, but it turns out he used a Mac G5 and some Adobe software. I am fascinated with this book. Everyday I’ve been coming into my office, grabbing Bibliotopia, and opening it to a random page. It’s marvelous.

Since I am a slowpoke at discussing books I read, I am making a concerted effort these days to write about them as soon as I am done. I read 7 books while on vacation in September and have only discussed 2 of them so far. So this is just a brief run down of what I read and what I thought.
After I finished Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, I started on Shadow of the Sun by famed Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. Amassed from over 4 decades spent as a correspondent in Africa, it chronicles a diverse continent as it grows and changes. It’s actually a great complement to Howard French’s The Continent for the Taking, as they visit many of the same places, so you can see how much has changed or not changed in the course of 50 years. I found Kapuscinski a wonderful and skilled writer.
After that, I read The Burn Journals by Brent Runyon. This was hard, as I had just read about a continent of people who eat maybe once a day if they are lucky. And to go to a book about a troubled and depressed 14 year old who sets himself on fire, well, I found it hard to empathize with him. Perhaps if I had not read these books in the order I did, I would have felt differently. Regardless, Runyon writes the teenage mind with great accuracy, at least in my experience.
I really enjoyed the next book—it’s probably one of the better books I’ve read all year. Sarah Hall’s carefully crafted novel The Electric Michelangelofollows Cy Parker, the electric “Michelangelo” of the title, as he becomes a tattoo artist. Hall pays careful attention to how each word sounds and fits together, writing a lyrical novel with ease. We see Cy Parker grow up in a seaside English town at the turn of the century, apprenticing with foul-mouthed binge drinker Eliot Riley, and eventually moving to Coney Island. Hall’s long, energetic sentences and imaginative power make this a beautiful, engaging novel about pain and beauty and I loved reading it.
I found a nice mass market edition of Jonathan Lethem’s Gun with Occasional Music while in Barcelona. I devoured the book. I liked the warping of the classic noir novel and the bending of the detective archetype. Conrad Metcalf, a down on his luck private inquisitor in 21st century Oakland, gets reluctantly drawn into investigating the murder of an affluent doctor, whose wife he just happened to be paid to follow a week previous. There are a lot of thought-provoking elements thrown in–drug use to control emotions, genetic engineering, government control. It was a fun read.
I wanted to love Willful Creatures by Aimee Bender, which I read on the plane home, however, I felt disappointed with some of the stories. Some of them worked, and some fell flat. Bender is an engineer of language and she constructs some great stories, but I felt like she was trying too hard in several of them. It’s still worth a read though.
And that wraps up the books I read on my vacation in September. I was happy with my choices and glad that I could finally read some of these books.