Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day

This isn't anything groundbreaking, but it's a quick overview of Roman culture, customs, and mores written in the style of a travel guide. While not for the serious scholar, it's a fair introduction to daily life in the greatest city the world would see for over a thousand years. The author also breaks up each section with short passages from Roman writers like Martial, Horace, Virgil, and Juvenal.

Not something to seek out, but a decent way to kill some time.

Our Man in Havana

Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana wasn't considered by its author as one of his serious novels, instead being "an entertainment". A lighthearted comedy set during the Cold War during the last gasps Fulgencio Batista's regime (Castro disliked the novel because it trivializes the cruelties of Batista), it's the story of a vacuum cleaner salesman who's recruited into Britain's secret service.

A satire of colonialism, the Cold War, spy agencies, and bureaucracy,Our Man in Havana is easy reading, the plot breezily moving forward through the third person limited viewpoint of Wormold, the titular man. Recruited in a men's bathroom by a mysterious and laconic secret agent, Wormold reluctantly goes along, caring only for the money, and protecting his beautiful daughter from the notorious policeman who's attempting to court her.

It's a fun story that careens towards the inevitable conclusion, even if the ending feels a little tacked on.

Ninety-Two in the Shade

I've seen Thomas McGuane's Ninety-Two in the Shade described as "written on drugs", which may be a fair description, but it's a funny, worthwhile novel. A story of going crazy, family issues, lost potential, certain death, fishing, love affairs, dropping acid, rodents eating cake, living in a bomber fuselage, relatives running whorehouses, women with shopping compulsions, bonefish, rubes from the Midwest, told through bursts of literary pyrotechnics.

I don't have much else to add here. The prose can occasionally become overwrought, and the characters maddening. The plot (described in another review as "ephemeral as a cocaine high") moves swiftly and inevitably, and the ending is, if not satisfying, then worth a smirk. I plan to re-read this at some point, just for the fireworks.

Distant Star

Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star is a novel I'd been looking for for some time. It's an expansion of a short chapter at the end of Bolaño's earlier Nazi Literature in the Americas, although the name of the pilot changes between the two stories (for the worse in my opinion).

Like quite a bit of Bolaño's work, Distant Star focuses on poets and poetry. Our narrator is someone like Bolaño, a Chilean exile who has bounced around over the years. (As mentioned by Bolaño in an author's note, this is most likely Bolaño's alter ego, Arturo Belano). Narrator first encounters the poet/pilot in a poetry workshop, which he (Carlos Wieder, the pilot) had been attending under an assumed name.

I've seen Distant Star called a companion piece to Bolaño's By Night in Chile, in other reviews, as they both deal with the post-coup literary scene. Of course, while this is true, they're quite different works. The paranoia and irrationality of O'Ryan (whose obsession with Wieder drives much of the novel) pales before that of our priest in the latter novel. (Not to mention that the pacing is significantly different. A deathbed rant as opposed to a fugue.)

Recommended, as with all of Bolaño's work that I've come across. (Although I'd prefer the chapter in Nazi Literature in the Americas, to this.)

Monster of God

David Quammen’s Monster of God is an ambitious work in which he attempts to link both the fate of several species that prey on man (lion in India, crocodile in India and Australia, the brown bear in Romania, and the tiger in Siberia) as well as the effect they have on humans. While other species will occasionally kill a human, these are a few of the predators that see man as prey. (Others include the great white shark, and the Komodo dragon, and related species of shark, felid, or reptile.) Quammen coins a term for these animals – “alpha predator”, that is one animal that will stalk, kill, and eat a human, rather than kill a human out of territoriality or fear.

Probably the most interesting part of Quammen's work here is what the Amazon.com review calls "[his] peripatetic mind", as he jumps from topic to topic -- the lions of an Indian nature reserve lead him to another nature reserve (for crocodiles) in another part of India, to a lurid work on crocodiles in Africa written during the 1970s (titled Eyelids of Morning, one of many references to God's description of Leviathan in the Book of Job herein*) , back to India, and finally to the saltwater crocodiles of Northern Australia. Quammen is also prone to digression, as he spends time late in the work discussing the Alien franchise, as well as cave paintings in France. This is not a problem, unless one is unable to keep up.

While Quammen does provide a fascinating survey of a variety of subjects, and has clearly done a significant amount of fieldwork (or at least tagging along with biologists while they are doing fieldwork), his overall attempts at tying everything together are a tad weak. Not that this is not a fascinating book -- because it certainly is. Just I feel he fails to live up to the latter part of the subtitle of the book -- the man-eating predator is well covered in the jungles of history, but Quammen's foray into the jungles of the mind falls short. Still recommended.

*One of my favorite of Roger Zelazny's works is "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth", which also takes its title from that part of Job (Chapter 41, verse 14-19, King James 1769).

Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth [are] terrible round about.
[His] scales [are his] pride, shut up together [as with] a close seal.
One is so near to another, that no air can come between them.
They are joined one to another, they stick together, that they cannot be sundered.
By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes [are] like the eyelids of the morning.
Out of his mouth go burning lamps, [and] sparks of fire leap out.

How Would You Move Mount Fuji

William Poundstone's How Would You Move Mount Fuji? is a quick and easy read. Focusing on the hiring process at Microsoft, and the interviewer's use of puzzles and brain-teasers to weed out the most desirable candidates, the book offers a shallow overview on interview preparation, before getting to the interesting part: puzzles and Fermi problems, as well as the answers.

The insights and anecdotes detailing the Microsoft interview process are neither particularly illuminating or useful for anyone other than a potential interviewee, and even then, it's doubtful they'd be of much use. This book is more like an overview of typical coding interview procedure, which is at least a little interesting from a cultural anthropology standpoint.

Of course the highlights are the puzzles included here. Some of which are relatively straightforward and well-known ("How would you weigh an airliner without using scales?" "Why are manhole covers round?") Others are a little more esoteric: ("You're in a boat in the middle of a perfectly circular lake. There's a goblin on the shore who can't swim. He wants to eat you. And he can run four times as fast as your boat. How do you escape?") Most aren't quite so weird, but worth puzzling out. Since these are the kind of problems designed to be solved in an interview setting, they're pretty quick. The book closes with recommendations on how to interview, both as a prospective employee and as a hiring manager, but they're not exactly groundbreaking.

The Billionaire's Vinegar

Benjamin Wallace's The Billionaire's Vinegar has an unusual structure in that it unfolds like a mystery, with our author slowly peeling back onion-like layers. Unfortunately, he has to go slow, as the big reveal isn't much of a payoff. Still, this is an engaging look into high-end wine drinking and collecting.

Wallace's narrative focuses on two characters: Michael Broadbent, an English oenophile and auctioneer, and Hardy Rodenstock, a German wine collector and aficionado. Our story opens with Broadbent auctioning off bottles of what is allegedly some red wine from the 18th century, supposedly from the cellars of Thomas Jefferson. This was immediately doubted by Monticello, as Jefferson had kept meticulous records, and did not have record of those specific vintages. Broadbent went ahead with the sale, as the bottles did appear sufficiently aged.

The Billionaire's Vinegar mainly concerns itself with Rodenstock's adventures and wine parties/lavish meals, although there's a fair amount of information on aging wine, the various chateaus in France, and trends in wine tasting and collecting. The reveal at the end isn't quite as complete or satisfying as I had been hoping, but it's a worthwhile read.

Gun, With Occasional Music

Jonathan Lethem's Gun, With Occasional Music has a fun, if not entirely original, premise -- it's a detective story set in a not-quite-dystopian future. The premise succeeds, in that the story is entertaining, depressing, and featuring a whodunit where the perpetrator is not immediately obvious. Our protagonist is a hard-boiled private eye in the classic mold, and the dialog is quite snappy. As a pastiche, it works fine. However, that's not all that's going on here.

Sci-fi writers often seem to make choices solely to set up a cheap gag or to make an obvious point. However, much of Lethem's choices (the drug 'make', the evolution therapy allowing 'babyheads' and speaking animals, the role of the secret police) both advance the plot and allow for commentary -- the world post-Metcalf's wakeup is very different from the (messy) world he previously inhabited.

I'm glad someone finally wrote a novel with a kangaroo as a villain.

The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet is like nothing I'd ever read before, and probably like nothing I'll ever read again. Pessoa was a flaneur (the short way to define this is "street walker", but that's not feasible, for obvious reasons. It means a cultured observer, who strolls throughout a city) in Lisbon during the first 30someodd years of the 20th century, but this book isn't quite what would be expected. Rather than a record of the various characters one encounters while walking, the bustle of the markets, the crowds in squares, public transport, the views and buildings, this is a diary of an inner life, slightly informed by these scenes.

Pessoa's dreamy, expansive work is divided into nearly 500 fragments, and nearly fifty short essays. A few are so short as to be aphorisms, but none stretch more than a few pages. This makes the book easy to swallow, but difficult to digest. It took me at least a month and a half to finish this, and I doubt I fully absorbed it all. Due to its structure, this isn't a book to read straight through a second time, and perhaps not even the first. Perhaps I'll build a randomizer to pick a passage.

Pessoa spends a lot of time dwelling on tedium and withdrawal from life, on how to experience reality, on how the weather, or the scenery, or a chance encounter makes him feel. Or not so much feel, as how these stimuli set his thoughts in a certain direction. It's a different way to think, that I think we'd all do well to delve into.

Miscellania

Read while my access to the blog was limited:

Luigi Pirandello's Short Stories Link
Roberto Bolaño's The Return and The Insufferable Gaucho Link and link
Murray Kempton's Part of Our Time Link
Daniel Okrent's The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Link
Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground Link

Pirandello is a noted short story master, and here's only a small selection. I found these a bit uneven -- there's four sections: "Sicilian Tales", "Tales of Humor and Irony", "Tales of Frustration", and "Tales of Anguish and Hope". I found the first two sections had the stories that were most to my liking (particularly "Sicilian Tales), and the latter two were pretty poor, in my opinion. "The Umbrella" is a particularly bad offender here. Many of the latter stories were very cloying.

Bolaño's two short story collections here are both excellent; The Return is a bit more conventional, while The Insufferable Gaucho features several slightly longer pieces. Standout works in The Return include "Joanna Silvestri" about a South American porn star spending time with John Holmes before his death, "The Prefiguration of Lalo Cura", about tracking down a forgotten porn actor, and "The Return", which although is not about pornography, is about necrophilia. The Insufferable Gaucho has "Police Rat" which seems to take place in one of Kafka's universes, and "Alvaro Rousselot's Journey", about an author confronting a foreign filmmaker who adapts his works without credit. This isn't too different from the other works of Bolaño's that I have read, and that's not a bad thing.

Part of Our Time is a book I had had to buy for a class some years ago. It was out of print, but I was able to easily find it on Amazon. It's back in print these days, which is a fantastic thing -- this is an even-handed, non-hysterical look at what drew several men (and women) to unions, to socialism, to communism. Published in 1955 (!!!) it's a fascinating look back at the conditions of the thirties, and how these workingmen responded to them. Kempton covers some familiar names (Alger Hiss, Paul Robeson), and some unfamiliar ones (Joe Curran, J.B. Matthews). This is an extremely frank and thoughtful work, which has made me want to seek out other pieces of Kempton's, as well as wonder about the Red Scare in general -- I was under the impression that work of this tenor wasn't done on anything remotely Left during that time period.

Daniel Okrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition is, like the previous, a fascinating look at a period of history I had been unfamiliar with. It's a little less academic than Kempton's work, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Unfortunately, unlike Kempton, who breaks up each narrative into a separate chapter, Okrent moves chronologically, which is probably the most logical way to cover the period, but can lead to leaping back and forth. Still, it's a great look at a period in American history that I've often seen skipped over. One memorable moment is a quote from Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas: "There's as much chance of repealing the 18th Amendment as there is for a humming bird to fly to Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail."

Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground is very short, but not quite an easy read. Unfortunately, as the translator's foreword notes, the only text we have had been significantly edited in order to be initially published, and Dostoevsky chose to keep the edits in subsequent printings. An introspective rant, written as a polemic against mid-nineteenth century Russian intellectuals, this is significantly less intimidating than some of Dostoevsky's longer novels, and has inspired me to pick one of them up soon.

Snow Crash

Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash is a novel that's consistently been both praised and recommended to me. As page-turning science fiction novel, it's tough to find a peer for this. While the plot isn't quite as complex as Stephenson's later work, such as Cryptonomicon, in that the narrative is not skipping back and forth in time, there's still enough threads to tie together to keep the story engaging.

Yes, Stephenson names his main character Hiro Protagonist (how the fuck do you think that's pronounced), but the humor is otherwise mostly dry, which is a good thing in a science fiction universe -- too much silliness isn't a good thing in such an artificial world. In re: artificiality, some of the computer discussion is hopelessly dated, but the novel was published in 1992. So it goes.

Despite how dated much of the referencing is, the Internet as conceived by Stephenson (referred to in the novel as the Metaverse) is, if not a realistic vision of how the Internet developed, an interesting vision of an alternate reality. The Metaverse seems like a cross between the Internet as people use it and Second Life. The introduction of Sumerian mythology/history/general culture in the later plot is even more interesting, but since most of us are unfamiliar with anything beyond the basics and possible The Epic of Gilgamesh, it's tougher to double check on the fly. (Yes, this is exactly the sort of question that the Internet is useful for answering)

Very entertaining and fun sci-fi novel that ties together several diverse threads at the end, even if some of those threads are a little simplistic. (The glossolalia comes across as bunk, and the Sumerian as human machine language particularly.) A great diversion, but I'd recommend Cryptonomicon before this.

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms is one of those books I probably should have read in high school, but somehow didn't. I finally rectified this recently, and I'm relatively glad I did.

Like all of Hemingway's work, the prose is unadorned and straightforward, lacking florid description, and occasionally leaving off where another writer would feel the need to elaborate. This can lead to a feeling of lack of depth.

The story is concerned with a young American Lieutenant (Tenente) driving an ambulance on the Italian front during the First World War, his relationship with his military contemporaries, and his experiences being wounded and falling in love with a British nurse.

The depiction of Tenente's paramour, Catherine Barkley, is either Hemingway's image of an ideal woman (wise, but unable to contain her passion), or a male dream (continually asserting what a 'good girl' she is, existing only to please her man). Or perhaps both. Her conversations with Henry are insipid, although that's the fault of both characters. Whether this is Hemingway's style, his lack of feel for women, or my poor ear for early twentieth century conversation remains to be seen.

The novel features judicious use of profanity, that has been excised (by the publisher) from my edition. I'm unsure how to feel about this -- the language is not quite archaic, but it would be jarring to see "shit", "fuck", and "cocksucker" (the three excised words) interspersed with clearly out-of-date dialogue.

Overall, an extended meditation on death in war, how deaths in battle become statistics, but that doesn't make the deaths of those we love any easier. A worthwhile novel, and one I'm glad I finally got around to reading.

The Tin Drum

Yet another winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum is a novel that I'd already like to reread; this is due to the novel's complicated and subtle rhythm, designed to evoke the titular drumming. Grass frequently lays out passages that swell and build in intensity, as in a cadence. Such writing must be a bear to translate, and Breon Mitchell covers some of the steps he took in his re-translation, including working with Grass.

Our protagonist is Oskar Matzerath, who is a classic unreliable narrator -- the story is written as his memoirs, composed while he's imprisoned in a mental institution. Oskar has spent his entire life as a dwarf; he claims that he hurled himself down a flight of cellar stairs on his third birthday to retard his growth,
which is a claim that we should treat with skepticism if Oskar was not chosen to represent the German people.

Later, after his (presumptive) father's death, Oskar resolves to grow. He doesn't reach normal adult height, though -- becoming a hunchback, with limited stature. Again, suggesting that Germany's political state is not quite normal. Oskar almost achieves normalcy, though -- his mother had promised him a tin drum on his third birthday. When Oskar receives this gift, he's entirely taken with it, and it defines him. He's never without it until the death of his (presumptive) father, where he throws it into the grave.

While there's a lot going on in The Tin Drum, it's an easy and engaging read. The novel is broken up into three books, each with a different focus and tone, but again, engaging. Would recommend.

Homage to Catalonia/Down and Out in Paris and London

In Homage to Catalonia, it's easy to see the ideas behind both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four taking shape. Orwell's experiences in the militia fighting against Franco's coup are similar to Michael Shaara's sketches of Gettysburg in The Killer Angels, in that they're an inset, rather than the complete picture. (Of course, this is significantly more forgiveable in Orwell's case, since he's writing about his experiences, rather than about the scope of the coup and the subsequent war)

If I wasn't aware of the history, I would think that the final third of this book was embellished -- street battles between members of the same side during a civil war? I've seen it argued that the Soviet Union's assistance hurt the Left in Spain more than it helped, and after reading this, it's certainly a perspective I have to take seriously.

Overall, this is a fascinating work, both from its perspective on soldiering in an unfamiliar land, as well as Orwell's analysis of the political situation (which, until the end, he keeps in separate chapters, which is a nice touch if one wants to focus on one or the other). What is obvious to us over sixty years later (that the USSR's purpose in Spain was to advance its own foreign policy, rather than necessarily to help the Republicans) was tragically not so during the war, much to the detriment of the dead.

The second work in this book, Down and Out in Paris and London, shows Orwell's socialism in if not quite an inchoate form, at least not at its final stage of development. The descriptions of the lives of poverty led by waitstaff, tramps, and residents of cheap hotels are real, but the feeling is similar to Pulp's "Common People":

cos when you're laid in bed at night,
watching roaches climb the wall,
if you call your Dad he could stop it all

In short, that Orwell is living like this to have a taste of the life, not because he has no alternatives. This is illustrated when, fed up with working fifteen hour days underground as a "plongeur" (a dishwasher/errand boy), he writes a friend in London, who is able to get him a job quickly, so Orwell is able to leave his (miserable, but not untypical) fifteen hour workday.

The second portion of Down and Out in Paris and London is along the same lines -- when Orwell arrives in London, and is informed that his position will not be ready for a month, he decides to spend the time slumming, sleeping in workhouses and public dormitories. Here, the conditions are truly appalling, and Orwell does meet some fascinating characters. However, he does occasionally slip into lecturing, but that can be forgiven in such a young (at the time) author.

Clearly, Down and Out in Paris in London is no longer quite relevant -- not because no one in major Western cities lives or works in poor conditions, but because the conditions described here no longer exist. It is a worthwhile document of a bygone time, and it's worthwhile to see a young Orwell's ideas taking shape. Homage to Catalonia is, in my opinion, the more significant and interesting work here.

Interpreter of Maladies

I really wanted to hate Jhumpa Lahiri's debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies. All these neat, precious stories where everything is tied up with a bow at the end. (Maybe I was just upset because the eponymous story in the collection is about an interpreter who works for a doctor, rather than some sort of shaman). Fortunately, I was not able to -- the stories flow quite well, as the limpid prose is eminently readable, and Lahiri makes it easy to become invested in her characters.

Having previously read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children helped me avoid too much culture shock towards Lahiri's Indian characters and settings, but she does an excellent job at making the exotic familiar -- all of Lahiri's characters are easy to relate to, and as such, there comes familiarity with the things, foods, and customs that they are familiar with.

Despite their ease of reading, I have little desire to revisit these stories. They're all the sort of work that I'm glad I read, but there's little pleasure to be had here, in re-reading. I'd love to be proven wrong, but this is an experience to have once. The characters are good to have met, and the craft is to be admired, but there's little memorable or to be reflected upon.

One thing I wish I could remember -- in "Sexy", an American (of non-Indian extraction) asks an Indian what the Taj Mahal is like, and is told: "The most romantic spot on earth. An everlasting monument to love." I wish I could remember what work I'd been exposed to said of the Taj Mahal "it's a tomb" to emphasize how misguided the desire to build one for a living woman was.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

David Foster Wallace's book of "essays and arguments" is, if nothing else, a fantastic way to enrich one's vocabulary. Luckily, reading Wallace is much more than a lexical exercise -- he's engaging, wryly funny, insightful, prone to digression, and given to self-examination and introspection. In other hands, the consistent footnotes and self-glossing could be distracting, but all of these essays flow quite well.

The collection is without a unifying theme, although there are two essays on tennis -- one on Wallace's experiences as a regional junior player from roughly twelve to eighteen (from twelve through fifteen, he was "near great"), and the other on Michael Joyce, at the time ranked in the 80s in the world. The latter is dated several years later, and Joyce so impresses Wallace that Wallace resolves not to mention his experiences on the junior tennis circuit, where he (Wallace) had been highly ranked in his small corner of Illinois.

The capstone and eponymous essay uses copious footnotes, and is an extremely in-depth followup to the previous essay on the Illinois State Fair (a magazine had sent Wallace to the Fair the previous year, and had liked the results so much that he was sent on a luxury cruise to attempt to duplicate his hyperliterate-fish-out-of-water act). Unfortunately, it's also the only essay in the collection where Wallace moves from wry observer to neurotic complainer, as his interactions with the crew (and his reflections upon these interactions) display paranoia. He is able to laugh at himself, but it's a little unsettling.

Overall, this is an extremely engaging and diverse collection of essays. While two (television and literary criticism) can be a bit dense, they're all worth reading. It's also interesting to see the differences in style -- the early essays lack footnotes, the television essay uses them for their ordinary intended purpose (cites), the Lynch essay uses them extensively (and is delivered in vignetted form), and the title work uses them on nearly every page, with occasional sub-notes (!). Extremely engaging and thought-provoking.

The Killer Angels

I have never heard of a historical novel quite like Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning effort; while other novels certainly feature equal or greater depths of research, Shaara is alone, as far as I know, in using only primary sources in his attempt to bring to life the Battle of Gettysburg. In a brief (one page) note, Shaara explains why he did so thusly:

You may find it a different story from the one you learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle and that war. I have therefore avoided historical opinions and gone back primarily to the words of the men themselves, their letters and other documents. I have not consciously changed any fact. I have condensed some of the action, for the sake of clarity, and eliminated some minor characters, for brevity; but though I have often had to choose between conflicting viewpoints, I have not knowingly violated the action.

Shaara also cites Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage as an inspiration for his novel -- that reading history isn't enough to induce the feeling of being there. Of course, this raises the question as to what liberties Shaara took -- what minor characters he eliminated or condensed, and why was this done? (Although, who needs a dozen different aides to a general when one will do?)

The Killer Angels is split into chapters in which the narration is focused on one man, from a third person perspective. I believe this is the best way to convey the scope of the planning, buildup, and execution of the battle, as Shaara rotates the viewpoint with each chapter (although the narration remains third person omniscient). The biggest criticism of this usage is that the thoughts of the most recurring characters (Longstreet for the Confederacy, and Colonel Chamberlain for Union) can get repetitive -- Longstreet constantly despairing of his inability to persuade Lee to engage in a more defensive posture, and Chamberlain doting on his younger brother, Tom. It is precisely because of this narrative structure that The Killer Angels succeeds as a humanistic portrait of the battle, rather than a historical analysis -- real people can be tedious and repetitive.

While I don't have the historical chops to go into whether or not Shaara's narrative is a) faithful to the sources he worked from and b) in line with what modern historians believe, I feel that I should point out that after the battle begins, he neglects to mention much beyond Little Round Top (because that's where Chamberlain was, and where Longstreet, on Lee's orders, attacked) and Pickett's Charge (because Longstreet and Chamberlain were again both involved). While the action on Little Round Top and the Federal center were not inconsequential to the battle, other areas of engagement are glossed over. So while the novel is large in scope, it seems almost narrow here.

The Killer Angels is a worthwhile, easy read, and certainly made me want to look more into the Civil War in general, and the Battle of Gettysburg in particular. In that respect, it is a smashing success. Is it a worthy Pulitzer winner, though? Out of the winners I have read, I would rank it next to last, ahead of only Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies.

Lords and Ladies

Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies is one part of an extensive series (thirty eight total novels, according to Wikipedia), but I was able to read it as a stand alone novel, without being familiar with the rest of the series, or its extensive mythology. This is a major point in its favor, as many series can be impenetrable if the reader isn't familiar with the basic premise and previous plotting.

Lords and Ladies is pretty standard comic fantasy (although Pratchett is one of the originators of the genre, so maybe that's not a totally fair criticism) with witches, elves, dwarves, trolls, wizards, and a jester who has become king. The conflicts are predictable, but the resolution not quite so. A worthwhile way to spend some time, although I have little desire to read the rest of the series. (It is, however, a comforting thought that if I were struck so, it would not take me an inordinate amount of time).

City of Thieves

David Benioff's City of Thieves begins with a conceit; that the author is relating his grandfather's experiences during the siege of Leningrad. This is, of course, patently false, but it might be a better hook than a typical cold open. Benioff has the good sense to stay out of his own way after this -- there's no interlude where he asks his grandfather "and then what happened," as they both sip tea or vodka.

This is a plot-driven novel, which certainly isn't bad -- it's easy reading, and I was able to finish it over the course of a few hours. Our protagonist is Lev, a malnourished seventeen year old boy, stuck in Leningrad during the siege. When a dead German pilot falls from the sky, Lev and his friends loot the body, and Lev is arrested by the NKVD. Rather than shooting him on the spot, they take him to prison, where he meets Kolya, a deserter with literary pretensions.

After spending the night in prison, Kolya and Lev are delivered to a colonel, who offers them their freedom for a price -- his daughter is getting married in a week, and he needs a dozen eggs so she can have a wedding cake. It's a surreal request, in a city where people eat dirt (from underneath a sugar factory), the bindings of books, "bread" made from bark flour, and where rumors of cannibalism abound (and are horrifyingly confirmed, here). With no other options, Kolya and Lev agree to the colonel's request, and are set back into the city, sans their ration cards. Without the ration cards, they will be unable to obtain even the meager amount of food that is available in the city.

This all occurs in the first forty pages. The remaining ~220 are devoted to the pair's increasingly difficult quest, as they meet numerous dead ends, and deal with various obstacles -- literature, an amateur butcher, a rooftop henhouse, German shelling, Kolya's libido, Russian troops, the winter, partisans, kept whores, the Einsatzgruppen, and chess. It's a fun adventure, and worth seeking out.

Heat

Bill Buford's Heat is the story of one man's descent into madness. Buford meets Mario Batali, the celebrity chef, and proceeds to insinuate himself in the kitchen of one of Mario's restaurants, Babbo. Buford's goal is to soak up culinary knowledge for his own benefit, to be a better cook at home. Buford begins in the prep kitchen, where food is initially prepared (dicing carrots, trimming fat and bone from cuts of meat, preparing herbs) so the service in the evening just has to cook. From there, he moves around the kitchen, working the grill, the pasta station, and plating food.

After a year in the kitchen, Buford wants more. Despite his proficiency (he's already quit his job as an editor, and is working full time as a line cook), he takes some time off from the restaurant to spend time in Italy with the family who taught Mario how to make pasta. The family is only too happy to take on a friend of Mario's, and Buford makes several trips, becoming quite close to the family, who live in a backwater Italian town. He is even shown a tortellini recipe on the condition that he keeps it from Mario.

This still isn't enough for Buford, and he returns to Italy (with his long-suffering wife, who he has convinced to quit her job as well) to work with a Tuscan butcher, who Mario's father had worked with. The butcher is a larger than life individual, much like Mario -- at Buford's first encounter with him, everyone in the shop is drinking, and the butcher is declaiming the Divine Comedy. At the butcher shop, Buford is instructed by the butcher's mentor, and learns that not all countries have the same cuts of meat -- he's relating to Mario the various cuts he's learned on the leg, and Mario stops him, laughing, with the revelation that he's never heard of these cuts. The student has, while not quite surpassed the master, become something different.

The book ends with Buford and Mario enjoying a night on the town, and Mario offering to help Buford start a restaurant. Buford demurs, saying now that he's master Italian cooking, he needs to follow the example of Catherine di Medici, and master French.