My Goodreads Challenge widget informs me that I have completed 39 out of the 60 book target that I set for myself this year. We’ve just stepped into the second half of this year (already!) and I am about 9 books ahead of schedule, which is heartening. But beyond the numbers, 2012 has been happy reading so far. I’ve ventured into series and authors that I haven’t explored before, relying more than ever on the community of readers to help me select, more often than not, very good reads.
This past June was a month of mostly food memoirs and mysteries. Come summer, reading lists sprout everywhere, telling you how you ought to spend your time at the beach or at the porch. I don’t prefer to read at the beach or the porch and I don’t believe in seasonal reading lists. My reading does not peak in summer, does yours?
Last summer, NPR recommended Blood, Bones, & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, memoir of East Village’s Prune restaurant owner and chef Gabrielle Hamilton. Prune, apparently has a cult following, a bit like, but very different from Shopsin’s, the diner which enjoys a particular type of cultivated reputation. Hamilton’s writing style is also quite unlike Kenny Shopsin’s (whose Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin I read earlier). Although, in hindsight, they both do share a proclivity to employ, what are usually considered, un-pretty words. Hamilton, whose bohemian childhood and exotic French mother, sounds like she would fit right into The Glass Castle, starts out in the food industry cleaning and waitressing, and graduates to corporate catering. Making 600 identical devilled eggs is not necessarily adequate training to become the chef (and the owner) of a restaurant, but this is what Hamilton does when she has some kind of an epiphany while inspecting a dump of a deserted restaurant. While food does feature prominently in her memoir, Hamilton herself and her singularly unconventional life choices attract a good amount of spotlight. Her writing, I must say, is mostly impeccable.
I also read Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone: Growing up at the Table, which was pleasant and engaging. The tag Food Memoir can include a wide variety of works, that share one theme, food, whatever their other themes may be. In Reichl’s case, Tender at the Bone is a bittersweet coming-of-age story of a girl who understood her love for food very early in life.
Earlier this year, NPR also Maureen Corrigan at NPR recommended some works of mystery. Among them were Charles Todd’s The Confession and Anne Perry’s Dorchester Terrace. Both are period mysteries, The Confession is set in early 20th century, and Dorchester Terrace in the late 19th century. While the blurbs of both of these books are enticing enough, I can’t say they lived up to all the high praise. The authors of both books are more interesting. Charles Todd is actually the pen name employed by an American mother and son writing team. The Confession, a squeaky clean novel, doesn’t dwell as much on period descriptions, as does Dorchester Terrace.
A few months ago, after watching Kate Winslet’s masterful performances in Revolutionary Road and The Reader, I set about watching some of her earlier, less popular roles. Winslet, it turns out, made her screen debut in a 1994 New Zealand movie, Heavenly Creatures, which is based on the real-life relationship of two troubled teenage girls in the 1950s, who together bludgeoned one of their mothers to death. After a term in prison, one of them took the name Anne Perry and took to writing historical detective fiction. Unfortunately, and not for any reason related to Perry’s past, it does not look likely that I will be reading more of her works. The slow, armchair type mystery of Dorchester Terrace held little appeal for me. But Perry does seem to have chosen her genre well – it really did feel like it was written in the late 1800s.
After being very impressed with Wenguang Huang’s The Little Red Guard, I looked for more books that would talk about Communist China, especially the Mao era. This June, I read Li Cunxin’s Mao’s Last Dancer. I was a little confused about the book – it read like good fiction and on the front cover it says ‘Based on a true story’. Heck, I thought it was a true story. It certainly was a good story – poor peasant family, son selected to study ballet, childhood indoctrination, becomes very proficient, learns about the West, feels betrayed by ‘glorious communism’, defects, and becomes quite the superstar. I also enjoyed reading about ballet, having had no idea that it was studied seriously in an Asian country (Russian influence, of course). An inspiring story, I hope it qualifies as non-fiction.
The books I read last most definitely qualifies as fiction. Solid, well-crafted police procedural with a surprising theme. In Right as Rain, author George Pelecanos introduces detective Derek Strange. Middle-aged, tough, and black. I haven’t experienced much diversity in detective fiction. There are some women alright, but mostly detecting is the turf of men, white men apparently (at least on my bookshelf). Strange is my first black detective, and this brilliant book delves into being black, and into racism. And then, surprisingly on NPR again, I found Pelecanos talking about crime and race in the DC area, where his works are set.
I’m not really interested in writing books about racists. I’m much more interested in people who don’t think that they have any kind of those bad feelings inside of them, they deny it.
A black cop is killed by a white cop, in what appears to be an accident. Strange uncovers what really happened, as he navigates racial tensions, personal relationships, and the streets of DC. I’m going back for more Pelecanos.
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