A few of my favorite things from 2007…

Now that I’ve put Scrabulous in its place, I can get to the posts I wanted to write at the end of last year.

My top reads of 2007:

The books that moved me the most this year are ones that took me to a contemporary place revealing a world previously unknown to me.

• In Martin Amis’s House of Meetings, a book that is a pleasure to read for the language alone, the protagonist survives Stalin’s work camps only to return to them in 2004 as an 84 year old dying man recounting his past in a letter to an American stepdaughter.

• Against a backdrop of Post-WWI historical tumult, The Bad Girl, by Mario Vargas Llosa, is patterned after Madame Bovary, but begins its journey in Peru in 1950 and meanders through Europe and Asia to end in contemporary France.
• Septembers of Shiraz, probably my favorite novel of the lot, is the story of a middle class Iranian Jew imprisoned by the Revolutionary Guard in 1980s Tehran and his family. A prodigious first novel by Dalia Sofer, it suffers from a lousy title for the U.S. market, but one that comes clear in an ending scene that has a bittersweet universal quality.
• Then there is Elizabeth Hand, who’s work I only just discovered through her collection of short stories called Saffron and Brimstone. Several of these stories, set in real time or near future, had a prescient quality when I read them-they seemed to happen to me when I was grappling with aspects of their themes, so the paranormal characteristics of her style seemed to leak into my life. Filed under sci-fi/fantasy, Hand’s writing really belongs to the genre of speculative fiction inhabited by authors like Angela Carter, JG Ballard, Ursula LeGuinn, Margaret Atwood-all favorites of mine, which is why I am surprised that I’ve never heard of Hand before.
• I read lots of essays and short stories this past year, but one piece stands out as absolutely the most compelling I read all year: Werner, by Jo Ann Beard, from Tin House’s fantastic Graphics Issue. Werner has been anthologized in this year’s Best American Essays –just read it.

Favorite cookbooks: This is kind of a cheat, but my two favorites from 2007 are books I bought from Amazon UK in 2006, but were released in the U.S. in 2007.

• I still can’t get enough of Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries, which I read often and cook from only in the sense that his sensibility has slipped into my own attitude towards food.
• I also love to read Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories, which came out in paperback in the UK in 2006 and supposedly was released in the U.S. last year, but I haven’t seen it anywhere. He’s a fun writer and each chapter contains an essay and several recipes for his favorite ingredients, such as anchovy, brains, chicken, chocolate, and on through the alphabet. Try the leek tart and the steak au poivre. I’m still trying to find a humane source for fresh rabbit so I can try his recipe for rabbit terrine.
• I also enjoy cooking from How to Pick a Peach by Russ Parsons, and A Twist of the Wrist by Nancy Silverton, though I don’t always reach for the latter because I seldom have the pantry ingredients called for on hand.
• Favorite cookbook I can’t wait to get to: this would be Jamie Oliver’s Cook with Jamie.
  

  Yeah, you heard me right, Jamie Oliver. The new book is very pretty and full of Oliver’s inexhaustible spirit and inventiveness. I’ve always enjoyed his slightly manic, “let’s just pop round to the shops and go home and whip something up” attitude and I also admire that he has turned his fame into activism. Plus his food is always tasty, and this book really makes me want to cook, unlike Alice Waters’ latest, Art of Simple Food, which wins my vote for Most anticipated book I almost bought and then decided to wait until it comes out in paperback. Don’t get me wrong – Waters is responsible for a important shift in the way that Americans (at least on the coasts) look at food. But this book has a fussy, overprivileged aesthetic that is off-putting. And I have to admit that as much as I refer to and cook from her books-especially the collaborations with Paul Bertolli and Lindsey Shere, there is something about these books that is a little intimidating.

Long story short, if I were to invite someone into my kitchen to teach me something about cooking, it would be Jamie, not Alice. I feel like I’d be getting an education, not a lecture.

Jamie’s School Dinners Ad for Channel 4

 

 

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I also read books…

In case you have the impression that I only watch episodic TV, herewith are my impressions of two books I’ve read recently. One is History of Love by Nicole Krauss (wife of post modern wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer), which was much celebrated when it came out and which I recently read in paperback. The other is House of Meetings, by Martin Amis, which came out in January.

I liked Krauss’ book when I was reading it, propelled by her protagonists Leo, an aging New York Jew who escaped the Nazi occupation of Poland, and Alma, a lonely adolescent girl whose life intersects with Leo’s at the novel’s end. This book has been widely praised by the critics and exalted as a book club selection, but I have to say that after praising and defending it myself in my book circle, I’ve now come to the conclusion that I was hoodwinked. Have you ever read a book, or seen a movie, or married somebody and later realized that you’d ignored some fundamental, perhaps even unforgivable flaw because you were blinded by a veneer or greatness? This is what I think happened for me with this book. There are beguiling, quirky characters, both funny and heartbreaking scenes, and numerous instances of really, really good writing. But this is a book about a book that the reader is to believe changed lives, and the book within the book is just not very good. It’s almost like an afterthought. Or maybe like the author took a bunch of short pieces she’d workshopped in a writing class but didn’t know what to do with, and glued together the plot line of her novel with them. Speaking of plot lines, there are many of them that crop up and then evaporate, and at one point I created a chart to try to sort them out, just knowing that things would be resolved in the end. Which they are, but only for a couple of the characters, and the climax of the novel, the moment when you just know everything will be revealed, is ultimately precious, instead of profound.

Then I read House of Meetings, Martin Amis’s novel about a Russian expatriate and survivor of Stalin’s “social experiment” which is itself a sort of book within a book, and a love story with its own links to Nazi Germany (and some rich observations of why Germany has survived the legacy of WW2, while Russia is dying). While reading it, I realized how scarce really great contemporary novels are anymore. Maybe it is unfair to compare Krauss who has two novels under her belt while Amis has an entire oeuvre, and yes, this is probably the greatest book even he has written. But I can’t help but compare the two because I read them back to back, and because they do share some similarities, such as exploring facets of history, love, and the differences between the Eastern European and American psyche. The experience of reading House of Meetings is unlike anything I’ve had in a long, long time -not a word out of place, not a single wasted emotion, no game playing with technique or plot. Such a long time in fact, that I’d completely forgotten what it is like to reread paragraphs several times and then stare off into space contemplating them only to move onto the next paragraph and do the same. So different from the usual practice of reading voraciously to get to the next crescendo or moment of clarity, or bit of insight.

Now I want to find something else to read, but I will probably start rereading House of Meetings again, not only because its the kind of book that rewards you with a second reading, but because I’m not aware of anything else out there at the moment that will measure up.

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