Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain

Call me crazy, call me idealistic, but you know what I believe? I believe that when you're making hamburger for human consumption, you should at no time deem it necessary or desirable to treat its ingredients in ammonia. Or any cleaning product, for that matter.

I don't think that's asking a lot—and I don't ask a lot for my fellow burger-eaters. Only that whatever it is that you're putting in my hamburger? That laid out on a table or cutting board prior to grinding, it at least resembles something that your average American might recognize as "meat."

Recall, please, that this is me talking. I've eaten the extremities of feculent Southern warthog, every variety of gut, ear, and snout of bush meat. I've eaten raw seal, guinea pig. I've eaten bat. In every case, they were at least identifiable as coming from an animal—closer (even at their worst) to "tastes like chicken" than space-age polymer.

-Medium Raw

I recently moved halfway across the country and—perhaps this goes without saying—it's been stressful. The day before I flew out, I was looking for the perfect book to accompany me on my trip. It needed to be light and entertaining but also totally absorbing—something that would take my mind off of what I was doing. I stumbled across Medium Raw and was relieved immediately: I couldn't have asked for a book that better fit the bill.

Medium Raw is Anthony Bourdain's followup to the bestselling Kitchen Confidential. Since that book's publication, he's gone from a journeyman chef to a household name. In that time he's been on about a million international adventures, divorced and remarried, and reconsidered that whole "no fish on Monday" thing. (His new rule is to use your discretion, keeping the chef in mind: you're fine at Le Bernardin; think twice at TGI Friday's.) Medium Raw is discursive, touching on everything from the consideration of meat (as in the excerpt above) to a slightly terrifying encounter with Sandra Lee.

I read the bulk of the book in the airport and in flight; I was definitely disappointed when it came to a close. Bourdain is a devilishly good travel companion, funny and knowledgeable, but self-deprecating at the same time. I would have picked up another book of his immediately had I had one in my possession at the time. Instead I read New York magazine, which was fine, of course, but not particularly informative about Vietnamese cuisine, Top Chef, or the art of cutting fish*. Sigh.

Up next: Moonshine by Alaya Johnson, a vampire novel set in Prohibition-era New York City. Great so far!

*I'm once again forced to lament the passing of Gourmet magazine, gone before I ever got to snag an issue on the newsstand. Thank goodness for back issues!

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that's not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. But as Luca Spaghetti pointed out, we seem to like it. Alarming statistics back this observation up, showing that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes. Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). Americans don't really know how to do nothing. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype-the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.

I once asked Luca Spaghetti if Italians on vacation have that same problem. He laughed so hard he almost drove his motorbike into a fountain.

-Eat, Pray, Love

It took me a long time to get to Eat, Pray, Love, and I picked it up with some misgivings. I was concerned that it seemed a bit New Agey, perhaps a little treacly, like some other bestsellers that I've found underwhelming in the past few years. I saw the movie a couple of weeks ago, however, and found it pretty enjoyable, so I thought I'd give the book a fair shot.

I think most people are familiar with the premise of the book by this point: an American woman travels around the world in order to learn how to live a balanced life. It's a lot more entertaining than that little summary suggests, though (which I guess explains why it's been so popular, yeah?). Writer Elizabeth Gilbert starts her story at home in New York, where her marriage is falling apart and she's coping—well, not at all, really. She quickly finds herself in another relationship, but that, too, turns sour before long. She falls into a depression, finding comfort only in reading words from an Italian dictionary.

The comfort of these words becomes part of her inspiration to travel around the world. She begins in Italy, to discover the art of pleasure. This was my favorite part of the book, simply because I cannot get enough of all things Italian. (I really want to read this, by the way.) There are a lot of descriptions of amazing food, as well as many tales of how Italians live. After Italy, Liz moves onto India to learn how to live a spiritual life. There are some entertaining anecdotes in this section (I love anything with Richard from Texas) as well as some thought-provoking ideas. Sometimes she lost me entirely, particularly in describing her most successful meditation sessions—but she herself acknowledges how difficult it is to relay such an experience and how she had trouble reading accounts until she'd experienced it herself. It was interesting, regardless.

Liz finishes her journey in Bali, where she tries to achieve balance between a life of pleasure and one of devotion. She listens to a wise (and often entertaining) medicine man named Ketut and makes local friends. (As she does everywhere she goes, by the way. Quite a talent.) One of these is a divorced Brazilian man named Felipe; despite her best intentions, the book ends with Liz once again in a relationship. It's not a bad ending—it also marked the beginning for her more recent book Committed—but for whatever reason I found the Balinese section of the book to be the least engrossing of the three.

Overall, though, I really liked the book. Liz has a great voice and the ability to make you feel like you're a pal along for the trip. I even laughed out loud a few times, which is always lovely (unless you're in public, so fair warning, I suppose). Although Committed received somewhat lukewarm reviews, I think I'd be interested in reading it as well simply because I enjoyed her writing style that much.

Up next: Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain. Love me some Tony! Speaking of Italy, I recently saw his No Reservations episode from Rome and it was awesome. Made cacio e pepe with la mia mamma the next night!

Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris

I love spring for all the obvious reasons. I love the flowers blooming (which happens early here in Louisiana); I love the birds twittering; I love the squirrels scampering across my yard.

I love the sound of werewolves howling in the distance.

No, just kidding.

-Dead in the Family

I'm finally caught up with the Sookie Stackhouse series. It's been a good ride, so I'm a little sad things are at an end (for now). Luckily, Dead in the Family is just as enjoyable as any of the previous books in the series.

I was a little overwhelmed at the start of the story, I'll admit, since it had been a few months since I finished the previous book (and I've been watching True Blood, so my time line is all mixed up). Suddenly I found myself inundated with names—particularly those of fairies—which it sometimes took me a minute to place. After a few short chapters that served as a refresher in Sookie-ology, though, the story ran smoothly.

So let's see, what's Our Sookie up to? Well, for one thing, she's still dealing with the aftermath of the Fae War, which left her injured and in mourning. Although the fairies supposedly left the human world at the close of battle, it seems that a few were left behind—and at least one of them has no love lost for Sookie. She's still getting used to the commitment she made—albeit unknowingly—to Eric. And since that's not enough to deal with, the Weres come back to the forefront in a big way. Hello, Alcide! Although his halo's been tarnished a bit, I still like having him around.

Speaking of Alcide, I do wonder where Charlaine Harris is going to go with Sookie's men/supernaturals. I like Eric, but I liked him better in small doses, in all honesty. He adds more spark when he's there for a couple of intense scenes than when he's lecturing Sookie on vampire politics. Bill is probably still my favorite, despite his past behavior. Even though he didn't get too much face time in Dead in the Family, he shared in a couple of the most powerful moments of the book. (I especially liked the subplot with the family bible). I'll be very curious to see what the next story brings.

Up next: Eat, Pray, Love, which I am enjoying way more than I expected.

The Wood Wife by Terri Windling

 

The room was now bathed in blue pre-dawn light filtered through the french doors and two small windows set deep in the adobe wall. Through the glass of the doors was a view of the Three Graces (as he had once named the three tall saguaro cactus in a letter to her) and a yard full of ground-hugging prickly pear, scrubby wildflowers and hard-packed earth. In the distance, beyond the long dirt drive, was the wash, a fugitive river that ran only after the heaviest rains. Its banks were edged by cottonwoods with the mountains looming behind them, black against the purple sky. It was a dramatic landscape, harsh and vivid. She did not find the desert beautiful.

-The Wood Wife

After being faced with a panoply of choices for my next book to read, I chose a favorite of my mom's, The Wood Wife. I always like to try people's favorites—just like I appreciate when other people try things I've recommended—although I go in with the understanding that I very well may have a different experience.*

I probably wouldn't have picked The Wood Wife out on my own, simply because I don't read much fantasy that isn't YA (or Sookie Stackhouse, which falls in is its own category to me). I'm also not particularly drawn to books set in the Southwest, but that turned out to be an asset in this case. Maggie Black isn't a desert girl either.  She comes to Tuscon after the death of her mentor, the poet Davis Cooper. Though she'd exchanged scores of letters with Cooper over the years, the two had never actually met; thus Maggie is surprised to find that she is the recipient of his home and its contents according to the terms of his will. Maggie is a writer herself—though she hasn't written poetry in many years—and she hopes this will be an opportunity to begin a biography of Cooper, as she's long hoped to do.

 As Maggie settles into Cooper's house, though, she begins to notice something unusual is going on. The objects that keep disappearing. The locked room. The cryptic letter Cooper wrote her the night of his mysterious death—did I mention he drowned in the desert? It slowly becomes clear that there's more happening out there than Maggie ever anticipated.

You have to take a bit of a leap with this one, I admit. Anytime you don't invest in the reality of the fantasy, as it were, it's going to come across as silly.  You can maintain some skepticism—Maggie does for quite awhile—but at a certain point you need to suspend your disbelief or you're not going to enjoy it. If the creatures Maggie encounters (spirits, fairies, or whatever you want to call them) had been all-knowing and benevolent, I might have scoffed, but their amorality kept things unpredictable and, consequently, more interesting. Although I thought the story got off to a bit of a slow start, I did find myself more invested as things continued, and I thought that the climactic implementation of the spiral path concept was pretty neat.  Some of the dialogue rang a little false to my ear, but Windling did a great job describing the desert (giving me, who's never been, a pretty clear mental picture). I think it might not be a bad idea to read more western-oriented books, particularly as I'm gearing up to move further west myself.

Up next: The most recent Sookie Stackhouse novel, Dead in the Family. Woo!

*The one downside of recommending things is that it's a bummer if someone doesn't enjoy something you loved. A little disheartening, isn't it? 

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

Each spring for a period of weeks the imperial gardens were filled with prize tulips (Turkish, Dutch, Iranian), all of them shown to their best advantage. Tulips whose petals had flexed too wide were held shut with fine threads hand-tied. Most of the bulbs had been grown in place, but these were supplemented by thousands of cut stems held in glass bottles; the scale of the display was further compounded by mirrors placed strategically around the garden. Each variety was marked with a label made from silver filigree. In place of every fourth flower a candle, its wick trimmed to tulip height, was set into the ground. Songbirds in gilded cages supplied the music, and hundreds of giant tortoises carrying candles on their backs lumbered through the gardens, further illuminating the display. [...] The whole scene was repeated every night for as long as the tulips were in bloom, for as long as Sultan Ahmed managed to cling to his throne.

-The Botany of Desire 

A pretty scene, isn't it? (Well, I'm not sure if the giant tortoises would agree.) There's something so magical about a beauty that transcends time, something boiled down to the essentials of color, shape, and light. The beauty of a tulip bathed in the radiance of candles as opposed to that of, say, some shiny new high-tech device, however nice its contours or its color. Of course, I'm a former art history student, so I tend to get a bit excited over color and light.

I also get excited about books about food. The Botany of Desire is a little different than other food books I've read, because it mostly focuses on the development of plants; specifically, how they have evolved to fulfill certain human desires. Pollan looks at apples (sweetness), tulips (beauty), marijuana (intoxication), and potatoes (control). Each plant/desire leads him in a different direction, some of which I found more interesting than others.

 We begin with the apple. How can you not? Adam and Eve, Johnny Appleseed—the apple is so woven into our mythology. Even so, I found this to be the driest section, although I did appreciate the look into the importance of biodiversity of the species (also addressed in the potato section).

Pollan then moves on to the tulip, with a look at the tulipomania that struck the Netherlands in the 17th century. Again, I didn't find this particularly compelling—but luckily things pick up once Pollan starts in on marijuana. He shares his own pot-growing high jinks, but also considers why/if the plant encourages intoxication.Throughout, Pollan speculates on plants developing in ways that would encourage people to grow them. With the discussion of marijuana, I thought this became more interesting, possibly because the idea of intoxication itself merits a lot of attention—thus scientists continuing to look into how marijuana works on the brain.

And then we came to the potato.

The toxin, which is produced by a bacterium that occurs naturally in the soil, is generally thought to be safe for humans, yet the Bt [Bacillus thuringiensis] in genetically modified crops is behaving a little differently from the ordinary Bt that farmers have been spraying on their crops for years. Instead of quickly breaking down in nature, as it usually does, genetically modified Bt toxin seems to be building up in the soil. This may be insignificant; we don't know. (We don't really know what Bt is doing in soil in the first place.) We also don't know what effect all this new Bt in the environment may have on the insects we don't want to kill, though there are reasons to be concerned. In laboratory experiments scientists have found that the pollen from Bt corn is lethal to monarch butterflies. Monarchs don't eat corn pollen, but they do eat, exclusively, the leaves of milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), a weed that is common in American cornfields. When monarch caterpillars eat milkweed leaves dusted with Bt corn pollen, they sicken and die. Will this happen in the field? And how serious will the problem be if it does? We don't know.

I can't lie, the potato was my favorite chapter. Pollan looks into the development of potatoes that are resistant to the potato bugs—not because of anything sprayed upon them, but because of their genetic makeup, as designed by chemical giant Monsanto. It's a fascinating, troubling look at the difficulties facing farmers today. Some of the issues addressed came up during the tail end of Food, Inc., when the topic turned to the burgeoning field of patents on particular varieties of corn—once again, designed by Monsanto. I certainly imagine you can't help but look at the potato differently after reading this chapter—I know I'll be thinking hard about where the next potato I buy comes from and what might be in it.

Overall, I didn't enjoy this one as much as In Defense of Food, but I still found it to be a worthwhile read. I'd also be interested in checking out the television documentary of the same name (currently streaming on Netflix!).

Up next: Good question! There must be something lying around....

The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbø

She half turned without seeing him and wrinkled her nose as if there was a potent smell coming from somewhere, which was a possibility Harry could not completely exclude. She asked the checkout girl for a pack of 20 Prince Mild cigarettes.

'Thought you were trying to give them up.'

Vibeke turned round in surprise, scrutinised him and gave him three different smiles. The first one, fleeting, automatic. Then one of recognition. Then, after she had paid, one of curiosity.

'And you're going to have a party, I see.'

She put her purchases into a plastic bag.

'Something like that,' Harry mumbled, reciprocating her smile.

-The Devil's Star

Harry Hole is in a bad way. As we saw in The Redbreast and Nemesis, Harry's struggle with his demons is unending. By the beginning of The Devil's Star, Harry has given up the fight.

We don't know why at first, but the result couldn't be clearer: we meet Harry in the midst of an epic bender. His supervisor kindly put him on leave four weeks earlier, when Harry just stopped showing up for work. But a police officer can't be on leave indefinitely, and he's finally called in to a crime scene. A woman has been murdered; her index finger ritualistically severed. Harry's partnered up with Tom Waaler, whom he loathes. It comes as no surprise that things get off to a rocky start.

'One of the officers at the crime scene threatened to write a report on you. He says you were visibly intoxicated when you arrived [...] Were you intoxicated, Harry?'

'Of course I wasn't, boss.'

'Are you absolutely positive you're telling me the truth right now, Harry?'

'Are you absolutely positive that you want to know?'

Harry heard Møller's groan at the other end.

Soon enough, a woman has disappeared, and it isn't long before the two cases are connected. As usual, Nesbø has engineered a remarkably clever mystery that requires a serious amount of effort to untangle. The Devil's Star is complex without becoming overly convoluted; Nesbø seems to have become somewhat more judicious with his twists. (I did have a bit of trouble picturing some of the logistics of the gruesome climax. Perhaps that was just a self-preservation instinct.) Overall, I consider it the strongest of Nesbø's novels to date.

Aside from his crackerjack plots, Nesbø's greatest strength as an author is the shape he gives to the damaged, driven Harry*. There is no romanticizing of Harry's problems here—Nesbø never shies away from showing exactly how low Harry can fall. I was wincing at points, because at his core Harry is wonderful—smart, resourceful, caring, funny—and as a reader I can't help but hope for better for him. Harry's behavior, in this book more than any other, has realistic and potentially far-reaching consequences. I am very interested to see where things lie at the start of the next book, The Redeemer. I'm not sure when it will be out in the US, but I see that it's already available in paperback from amazon.co.uk. Oh, so tempting....

Up next: I'm picking up The Botany of Desire again. Good so far, but I can't exactly call it a page-turner.

*And all of his characters, really. I'm consistently impressed to how much depth he gives to characters who might only be around for a few pages.