For readers who have ever wondered what it’s really like to work the line at an upscale restaurant, you finally get your chance with Sous Chef, Michael Gibney’s debut entry into the Kitchen Confidential-genre of food writing. As a junkie of this genre, I assumed I was picking up another memoir of smoking, drugs, yelling chefs, maybe some sex in the walk-in, but this book surprised me from the start. Written in the second person, the author takes you through an entire day in the life of a sous chef in a high-up, but not too high-up, restaurant. It includes diagrams, lengthy explanations of not only kitchen stations and obscure recipes, but also the dynamics of the kitchen. And he nails it, as he should with his years in restaurants.

This book is getting tremendous buzz, with blurbs from the cooking world wunderkinds Gabrielle Hamilton and Anthony Bourdain. With such strong writing skills, I expect to hear more from Gibney, assuming he can find the time when he’s not in the kitchen.

I don’t normally read short stories, but was intrigued enough by the description of Phil Klay’s debut collection Redeployment to give it a go. I was not disappointed. Klay received an MFA after his stint in the Marine Corps and served in Iraq. All of his stories involve soldiers of various stripes, from a Mortuary Affairs Marine who processes bodies to a chaplain trying his best to provide solace to a soldier. What struck me most was Klay’s ability to shift characters and yet have them all feel authentic. The older chaplain felt just as believable as the soldier who seeks help from a counselor about a killing he didn’t commit to help his friend.

Visceral, searing, both tender and brusque all come to mind when I think of this book . Klay has the ability to convey the posturing of men who are trying hard to be blind to the horrors happening in front of their eyes and, with occasional touches of humor and grace, he succeeds. I tried to find some sort of witty closing for this review, but in the end I felt it would be doing a disservice to this stunning  and unnerving collection. Just read it.

The topic of Israel and Palestine is, to say the least, divisive. Look up reviews for Ari Shavit’s book My Promised Land and you’ll see that some accuse him of being an apologist for the wrongs done by Israel, and others accuse him of being an apologist of the wrongs done to Israel. To me, that’s a sign he’s pretty even-handed.

I’m no expert, but after reading the book, I think I understand a little more about the issues that make Israel so contentious. Shavit begins with his childhood, with his own military service and his work in the peace movement. He works his way back to the very beginnings of Zionism, and then forward through the history of the nation’s founding, its wars, its conflicts, its troubles.

He explains how the early Zionists argued that the Jewish people, in order to remain a cohesive people, needed to have a nation-state. They couldn’t live with the pogroms of eastern Europe, and they couldn’t remain distinct with the assimilation of western Europe. And after all, it seemed only just and necessary that every nation should have a state and that every state should naturally be ruled by and for the nation that dwelled within it. World War II and the Holocaust made that argument a lot more urgent, and so the British carved out a slice of the middle-east and gave it to Israel.

Of course the story doesn’t end there, any more than the European colonization of North America ends with the first Thanksgiving. There were already people living in the area. First they were neighbors, then rivals, then fighters, then refugees. Shavit doesn’t shy away from covering how Israel’s independence day coincides with the Palestinian day of commemoration of the Nakba, (Catastrophe), and why.

Over the course of the book, Shavit interviews historians, politicians, lawyers, refugees, and soldiers. He talks to settlement founders who have built homes in occupied territories to try to expand Israel. He talks to Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, and goes with them to the ruins of Arab homes razed in war.

A comprehensive study of the region would be endless and unreadable, and this book is necessarily incomplete. So I was inevitably disappointed with some of the omissions. Shavit doesn’t include voices from the occupied territories, and his focus is all too often on people he likes and admires rather than on those with whom he disagrees. He laments that ultra-Orthodox families reject military service and jobs and focus on religious study, but doesn’t interview them. He laments that Arab women remain cloistered and do not participate in the formal economy, but doesn’t interview them. He spends a chapter on the settler’s movement, but that chapter is devoted largely to accusing it of ruining the opportunity for peace rather than trying to understand it.

Still, he does a good job of outlining Israel’s history as a nation-state and the major threats facing it, both external (nukes, terrorism, the rising sanctions movement) and internal (social fragmentation, political disarray, economic stratification, the moral stain of occupation and sanctions).

If there were  a clear and simple way forward we’d have found it by now. But if you want to understand the problems of the region – and more people really must if there’s any hope for a future peace – this seems like a pretty good place to start.

The danger of trying to review Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux is that I’ll reveal too much. To call it a literary thriller does this novel no justice, as it strives to cross many genres. This is the story of Dr. Nicholas Slopen, a Samuel Johnson scholar, as told by his university girlfriend Susanna, who runs into him years later. He didn’t look quite the same, but everyone ages, right? But it turns out that the Slopen died months before. The former girlfriend finds a memory stick that contains faux-Slopen’s strange tale and this sets up the beginning of the novel, a story that relies on Samuel Johnson, a Poe-esque plot about dead people inhabiting live bodies, and a lot of suspension of disbelief. Theroux’s rich writing and the slow reveal of the story make it easy to suspend disbelief.

Theroux’s novel explores the concepts of identity and memory. What does human consciousness mean? Can it be coded and transferred? And if so, what makes it different from the original? Through it all, the book bristles with so many excellently written sentences that you won’t blink even when the final twist is revealed.

In a recent NPR interview, Theroux had this to say: “I suppose one of the things I wanted to do in the book was celebrate the act of reading, which is such a mysterious and not sufficiently remarked upon transaction between two consciousnesses, only one of which needs to be alive.” There is such a great deal of reading and talk about literature in this novel, tucked in amongst the thriller plot, that the book defies categorization. Luckily for us, Theroux is still alive, so our consciousnesses will have ample time to commune again in future books.

Are you a space nerd? Do you perk up when you see NASA, Apollo, or Mars mentioned anywhere? Does the idea of exploring and settling on Mars seems not only feasible, but like a really good idea? If you answered yes to these questions, then read The Martian. Written by self-proclaimed space nerd Andy Weir, this book tells the story of Mark Watney, who is believed dead and left behind on Mars after a dust storm forces the rest of his mission crew to abandon the planet. Watney,  who is both a botanist and mechanical engineer, tells his story through the logs he records detailing his daily survival plans, facing new challenges every day. Eventually NASA realizes he’s still there and everyone on Earth scrambles to try and rescue the lost astronaut.

Setting aside the feasibility of the story line and the science, what keeps this story going is Watney’s sense of humor. Yes, he’s a brave, hardy astronaut, but he’s also a nerd who can disassemble complicated machinery, listens to disco (it’s a plot point), and almost blows himself up countless times. It’s fun and gripping–I can already picture who’s going to play Watney in the movie. As a person who grew up in a city that helped build major parts of the space program, visiting the Space and Rocket Center each year on school field trips (and eventually working there), who has seen The Dream is Alive probably 20 times at least, I adored this novel so much that I wish Weir could strand Watney on Mars again for a follow-up book.

I’ve been reading faster than I can post lately, so here are some quick thoughts about some books I read.

Stacey D’Erasmo captures the adrenaline rush of performing on stage in Wonderland, her newest novel. It follows Anna Brundage, a tall, sexy dynamo, who once made a record that turned her into a legend. Though she’s still considered a legend, hasn’t produced a record in seven years. Now she’s back on tour in Europe with new material and must navigate the changing music world. As she reflects on her unusual upbringing as the daughter of an experimental artist, mistakes she made in her past, and her future, Anna tries to forge a new path. D’Erasmo is most successful when she’s describing the performances, managing to capture the electricity of a great show.

Even though I read it out of order, I still quite enjoyed Oliver Potsch’s second book in the Hangman’s Daughter series, The Dark Monk, which follows the hangman Jackob Kuisl and his daughter Magdalena in 17th century Bavaria. While I’ve read many historical mysteries that feature awkwardly anachronistic characters, Potsch’s creations have a ring of truth to them. Though the plots often delve into the Indiana Jones territory, they’re fun and inventive, and are often based on historical details—this one focuses on the Templars and a supposed treasure. A bit dark and full of twists and turns, they’re absorbing reads.

I was excited to read Elizabeth Elo’s debut literary thriller North of Boston, which as the title suggests, is set here in Boston. Too often books set here involve either gangsters from Southie or Boston Brahmins, possibly historical. Elo’s book follows Kirio Kasparov, who has improbably survived 4 hours in the frigid sea when the lobster boat she is on is rammed by a freighter. The captain of the boat, Ned, who also happens to be the husband of her best friend, perishes in the accident and Pirio is forced to watch over the widow Thomasina and son Noah. Everything is not what it seems, and danger appears as she begins investigating this supposed accident.

While Beah’s novel Radiance of Tomorrow appears like the simple story of a village in Sierra Leone called Imperi trying to recover after years of civil war full of violence and death, in reality he’s trying to tell the more complicated and discouraging story of recovering in an era of greed, corruption, and waste. You’ll remember Beah from his ground-breaking memoir A Long Way Gone, which chronicled his years as a child soldier. This is a strong debut novel from a talented writer. The characters and their voices bring the book to life and Beah’s fine storytelling expertly walks the tightrope between hope and despair as the people of Imperi try to get their lives back on track against many obstacles. The author has such a unique voice and is one I plan on continuing to follow for years to come.

It’s not until three quarters of the way through The Time Regulation Institute that the narrator explains what exactly the institute in the title even is. The author, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, is a preeminent Turkish writer whose works are just now being translated into English. This fine novel, translated by Maureen Freely and Alesxander Dawe, has just been published by Penguin Classics in a handsome French-flap edition. Helpfully they include a timeline of Turkish history as well as an introduction by Pankaj Mishra that sets the novel in context.

Explaining the novel is difficult. I was reading it on the subway each day and it took me over 200 pages to finally get caught up in the story. That sounds like a lot, but I’m really glad I stuck with it. Tanipinar’s allegorical novel satirizes the 20th century, using the rapidly changing Turkish culture to poke fun of both tradition and modernity. The narrator Hayri Irdal tells the reader about his life and how he helped found the institute for time regulation, which is exactly what it sounds like. His mentor Halit Ayarci takes Irdal’s love of watches and timepieces and creates an entire bureaucracy around the idea of making sure all clocks and watches are set to the same exact time. There’s more to the story, both about Irdal’s life and the eventual unraveling of the institute, but it’s complicated and frankly sounds crazy when I try to explain it.

Overall it’s a funny and smart novel, well worth your time reading. Based on this novel, Tanpinar is long-overdue for a wider audience in English, an audience I hope that embraces this charming writer.

We see plenty of tragic irony in Laura van den Berg’s book of short stories, The Isle of Youth. Much of it is crystal clear: something bad is going to happen to our hero, and he’s unaware, and it’s inevitable. But it’s rarely applied directly to the protagonists.

Here, a young woman describes hunting turkeys:

When it appeared, its tail feathers were spread into a beautiful rust-colored fan. Dana thought he looked big and regal, and for the first time the gap between what she knew and what the animal knew seemed cruel.

In another story, a character watches a community production of Don Giovanni:

Run away, I would whisper in the back row. Just run away. Of course, he never did, and it wouldn’t have changed anything if he had.

But of course, these are contemporary short stories, not classically structured dramas, and the ironies are layered and tilted in a way that’s somehow both familiar and entirely new. It’s as though we haven’t seen our old friend tragic irony in years, and now she looks uncanny when we see her again.

The women in these stories don’t quite know the shape of what’s coming, but they know it’s bad, and then they lean right into it.  These disasters are all the more poignant for being entirely avoidable, and seen in advance by protagonist and reader and author alike.

In van den Berg’s stories, diffident women marry indifferent men; teenagers rob banks; estranged daughters drive to the jailhouse where dad’s locked up, then can’t get out of the car.

Each story is over in about a half-hour or 45 minutes, and each one leaves me shattered.