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Trolling through my now rapidly multiplying subscriptions on Google reader (the Google Labs folks have developed a great blog aggregator http://www.google.com/reader/view/) I stumbled on two interesting book-related posts I thought I would share.
The first can be found here. This is a post on the ephemera blog all about inscriptions found in books. I've found some good ones in used books and this post made me remember some of the good ones I've run across in old paperbacks.
The second post is here and really is more of an "art" posting, rather than a "book" post, but I thought the visuals were pretty cool. There are a number of illustrations from the Codex Seraphinianus which is a strange and magical book that I keep reading about, but have never actually seen. An excellent article about the bizarre b
ook is here. The Wikipedia entry is also enlightening here.
Two of the best non-fiction books I've read recently are about food. I think food writing is vastly underrated, but seems to be gaining momentum thanks to some popular recent books.
Heat, by Bill Buford and Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain are gripping forays into the hot, sweaty, grimy and fascinating world of high-end kitchens.
Kitchen Confidential will change your entire perception of the restaurant business. You certainly will never order fish on a Monday again. Bourdain is an amazing writer - funny, articulate, foul-mouthed and full of delicious tidbits of insider information. Here.
Heat by Bill Buford is a different sort of book. Buford, a writer for The New Yorker is an amateur chef drawn in to the restaurant scene by the brash and amazing Mario Batali. Buford interns at one of Batali's New York restaurants and becomes so engrossed in the meaning and history of food that he drags his wife off to Italy where he works as an apprentice butcher in the hills of Tuscany. His obsessions - how eggs made their way into pasta and how certain cuts of meat became popular are interesting historical diversions, but the real story is how Buford goes from a "foodie" to a true chef. Here.
Thanks to all for suggestions. Short post here:
Even though I'm having a slight existential book crisis, I have it together enough to recommend the hilarious King Dork by Frank Portman.
Portman is the founder of the Bay Area punk band The Mr. T Experience and King Dork is his first novel.
The main character, nicknamed Chi-Mo (short for child molester due to an unfortunate career aptitude test) is a teen dork who hides from reality by writing songs and coming up with band names - The Stoned Marmadukes, for example.
You will laugh. I promise.
Here.
The idea of Dana Vachon's novel about a young man of good breeding working as an analyst at a high-powered I Bank in New York was extremely appealing to me. Stories about wealth and the upper class in New York have always intrigued me. I think I might be a snob.
The execution, unfortunately, was too broadly comic for me to fully recommend. It seemed to me as if every character eventually became a just a frame to hang jokes onto. I was particularly disappointed by the monogram jokes Vachon hammered on repeatedly - the characters Manuel Oliveire Rodrigo Orjuela de Navarro (Moron, get it) and Carlos Ungaro Nunez de Talarico (see what I mean?) and others all wear their initials on their sleeves. Ha Ha.
There are some really nice sections, but Vachon takes the easy way out of pretty much every situation. Here.
Picked up The Ruins by Scott Smith on Friday. It was cheap, I'd read a good review and liked the movie A Simple Plan based on Smith's other book.
While the novel kept me flipping the pages, I was pretty disappointed. Two young couples on vacation in Mexico meet another vacationer who is in search of his brother. The five of them, with another fellow traveler - a Greek who has named himself Pablo and speaks no English - head off into the jungle with nothing more than day packs and a hand-drawn map in search of the missing brother who has become smitten with an archaeologist working in the wilds.
Here's the thing - while being watched by some Mayan natives during their hike, one of them mistakenly touches a plant growing on a hillside. Well, the plant is evil. The Mayans won't let them down the evil plant hillside since they are "infected" by the evil plant. The vines snag their legs; the vine mimics them. It is an damn evil vine. A battle for survival against the vine ensues.
Maybe I'm not a horror fan. Dunno. The story moves along, but ultimately it was pretty miserable, hopeless and not as interesting as it could have been. That said, I was sort of freaked out sitting in my back yard the next day! Here.
Some of my non-fiction loving friends have chided the blog for ignoring their genre.
The blog apologizes for this oversight.
Jon Krakauer's books covering fundamentalist Mormons, the ascent of Everest and the story of a young man's deadly journey into Alaska are all so thrilling that in many respects I view his work more as highly detailed fiction.
The first book of his that I read was Into the Wild. I picked it up used for $1.50 and on a lazy Saturday cracked it open. I didn't get up again until I turned the last page many hours later.
Chris McCandless graduates college, gets rid of all his possessions and makes his way to Alaska for what can only be described as a vision quest. A romantic, McCandless, is unprepared for the harshness of the wilderness. He's found months later, starved to death inside a rotting school bus.
Kraukauer investigates the how and why of Chris' death in a compulsively readable way.
Here.
Inspector Morse is cranky, brilliant, egotistical and alcoholic. I love him.
Colin Dexter wrote 13 books in the series featuring Inspector Morse and the loyal Sgt. Lewis. They are not your usual police procedurals, but rather remind me more of old fashioned detective stories. The Wagner-loving Morse is a truly memorable and deeply flawed character.
The first in the series is Last Bus to Woodstock, written in 1975. Dexter finished the series in a deeply poignant way in 1999 with The Remorseful Day. The books in order, here.
Many people are familiar with the series from the PBS Mystery! series based on the books. Obviously I think the books are far superior, but the actor John Thaw embodied Morse to a T.
I still don't understand British cryptic crossword clues even after reading all the books, but that's just me.
