Restaurant and Tour Guidebooks

One of my bookshelves is lined with small, thin, colorful books whose titles begin with "Zagat," "Michelin," "Frommer's," or "Lonely Planet." Although these are not the kinds of books we generally read cover to cover, they are extremely useful. I don't rely on any one of them completely, and always "cross-check" with other sources, but they are very valuable in providing ideas and information when we want to eat at restaurants, or when we are planning trips. I often annotate the pages of these books after a trip or a restaurant outing, so they become records and souvenirs for later. And there is another dimension to these books, beyond their practical uses: they provide us with material for daydreaming. Leafing through a guidebook, savoring the photographs of castles and cathedrals and museums and green hills, or deciphering the maps, I either remember former travels, or imagine and hope for future voyages. I make itineraries in my head; I picture myself in various settings. Or with the restaurant guides, I imagine going to charming Michelin-starred restaurants in little towns in France or Spain, or the latest fashionable eating places in bustling cities all over the world. What these little guidebooks have in common with all good books is that they open up our worlds, they let us live in realms where everything seems delightfully and deliciously possible.

Reader's Digest Condensed books

Readers of this blog may well be surprised to see the title above. I am guessing that you, like me, firmly believe that books should be read unabridged; abridging books seems unnatural, almost like mutilating them. But I have to admit that when I was a child and young teenager, I sometimes liked reading Reader's Digest Condensed books. What an odd medley of books (mostly novels) each volume contained! Each included about five books, five tastes of five different worlds. Opening up a new volume, one never knew what one might find. Reading these condensed versions allowed me to read many books I probably wouldn't have read otherwise, especially when we lived in India and didn't have easy access to libraries with books in English. Sometimes these volumes introduced me to new authors, and I would later seek out and read other (unabridged) novels by those authors. So, although I haven't read any of them for decades, I find I have affectionate memories of those solid, uniformly gold-trimmed volumes that looked so impressive sitting in a row on a bookshelf, each containing such surprising mixtures of reading experiences.

The Upstart Crow: A Pioneering Bookstore

Yesterday I wrote to recommend Lewis Buzbee's book, "The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop." In that book, Buzbee writes about the first bookstore where he worked many years ago, in San Jose, California. When I saw the bookstore's name, I gave a start of recognition; it brought back memories from 30 years ago. Soon after I moved to San Francisco from Michigan, my parents moved to Fresno, California, also from Michigan. On one of my first visits to Fresno, they took me to a bookstore they had discovered there, one that included a cafe, of all things: Upstart Crow! It was a member of a small chain of bookstores. (The source of the name, according to Buzbee, was an envious contemporary of Shakespeare, who scornfully dubbed him an "upstart crow"). As Buzbee tells it, "Decades ahead of other book retailers," Upstart Crow created bookstores with "foreign periodicals, chessboards, plenty of big tables and comfy chairs" and a cafe. Now, of course, all of these features are old hat, but at the time we were amazed and impressed by the combination of a bookstore and a cafe: What a very clever idea!

A Must-Read for Bookstore Lovers

Please put "The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, A History" (Graywolf Press, 2006), by Lewis Buzbee, on your to-read list! I recently came across this book when I was chatting with a bookseller at The Depot, an independent bookstore near where I live in Marin County; when I told her how much I loved bookstores, she pressed this book on me and told me I absolutely had to read it. She was right! Buzbee writes vividly and engagingly of his lifelong love affair with books and bookstores. He worked in bookstores and later as a book sales representative for many years, and is a published fiction writer himself, so he knows this world very well. As the title suggests, the book includes Buzbee's own very well-told stories, interleaved with (just enough, not too much) historical background about books and bookstores. For me, the book's interest is enhanced even further by the fact that Buzbee lives in San Francisco, and writes about bookstores that I know as well. And, coincidentally, I found out after I finished the book that he teaches creative writing at the university where I teach too. "The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop" begins as follows: "When I walk into a bookstore, any bookstore...I am flooded with a sense of hushed excitement." How could you not want to continue reading?

On NOT Reading "Wolf Hall"

I've decided NOT to read the novel "Wolf Hall" (Henry Holt, 2009), by Hilary Mantel. Yes, it is about an important and interesting topic (the time of, and interactions among, Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, and Anne Boleyn). Yes, it is by an esteemed, award-winning author. Yes, it has been well-reviewed. Yes, it is one of the "big" and important books of the past year. And yes, it is a bestseller (the latter not necessarily a point in its favor!). I put it on my request list at the library. But when I got the message that it was ready for me to pick up, a curious unwillingness came over me. "Do I really have to read this?" I asked myself. And soon found myself -- with a sense of relief -- giving myself permission not to read it. I hate to admit it, but it was partly because the novel was so dauntingly long (560 pages). But that doesn't stop me when I really want to read a book. Maybe it was because I don't generally read a lot of historical fiction. Or maybe because this is a topic I have often read about before. In any case, the commitment was too much for what I anticipated the rewards to be. I am sure it is a wonderful novel, and I do not want to discourage others from reading it...not at all. But it won't be on the pile on my bedside table.

"Kafka's Soup"

"Kafka's Soup: A Complete History of World Literature in 14 Recipes" (Harcourt, 2005), written and illustrated by Mark Crick, is a lovely little souffle of a book for those of us who love both literature and food. Each recipe is written in the style of a different author. The recipes include "Tarragon Eggs a la Jane Austen"; "Tiramisu a la Marcel Proust"; "Clafoutis Grandmere a la Virginia Woolf"; and "Onion Tart a la Geoffrey Chaucer." Each "recipe" is really a miniature (about three pages long) story. Let me quote from the Virginia Woolf recipe: "She placed the cherries in a buttered dish and looked out of the window...the cherries...would not be pitted, red polka dots on white, so bright and jolly, their little core of hardness invisible...Gently she melted the butter, transparent and smooth, oleaginous and clear, clarified and golden...Should she have made something traditionally English? (Involuntarily, piles of cake rose before her eyes.)...With great serenity she added an egg...whose yellow sphere, falling into the domed bowl, broke and poured, like Vesuvius erupting into the mixture, like the sun setting into a butter sea." This is a small, airy, light, whimsical and witty book, and I promise that you will smile when you read it.

On "Perfectly Fine" Books

Since I read so much, you might wonder why I don't more often post recommendations of specific books I have just read. The answer is that I only want to recommend books that I am really excited about, and are especially well written, or perhaps intriguing for some other reason. The truth is that although I read reviews before I select books, I still read a lot of books that -- in my humble opinion -- are either not particularly good, or -- more often -- are fine but not exceptional. After all, by definition, outstanding books can only be so against the background of all the "OK" or "perfectly fine" books. Also, of course deciding which books are outstanding is at least partially subjective; some of the examples I list below have been well reviewed. I fully admit that my opinions are only my own, and are perhaps sometimes idiosyncratic. And I often enjoy and learn from these "less than outstanding" books; I am not sorry that I have read them. Today's post is a recognition of books that -- for me -- fall into the "absolutely fine, even quite good, but nothing to post a glowing blog entry about" category. Some such books that I have read in the past few weeks are Louise Erdrich's "Shadow Tag"; Ursula Hegi's "The Worst Thing I Have Done"; Jonathan Tropper's "This Is Where I Leave You"; Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's "One Amazing Thing"; and Marisha Chamberlain's "The Rose Variations." Now you know why I haven't posted about any of these.