Murder in Matera - Helene Sapinski

True crime stories are awesome--terrible, but awesome.  I just started listening to this amazing podcast, My Favorite Murder, which is both terrifying and fascinating at the same time.  I can't stop listening, or looking over my shoulder as I do so to make sure no one is lurking there with a large knife.  And so what could be better than a book combining true crime, history, and Italian food?

Murder in Matera is the story of Helene Stapinski's search for her family's fabled murder.  She grew up with her mother telling her stories of how her great-great-great (I think) grandmother, Vita, murdered someone in Matera, Italy, and fled to the United States with her children in tow, but lost one of them along the way.  Stapinski's family is apparently riddled with criminals, the most notable being her grandfather, Beansie, and she's haunted by a concern that criminality is a genetic trait and that she has passed it down to her children, and so she wants to "solve" the murder in order to figure out what happened...because apparently that will fix it?

There are some awesome things in this book and some things that bothered me.  First off, anything involving tracking down a murder--particularly one that took place over a century ago--is interesting.  Stapinski had to dig down into the archives of various towns in the region in order to find out what happened--with her great-great-great grandmother, grandfather, the padrone of the region, the children, etc.  She speaks some Italian but also hires a few locals to help her as researchers, and struggles with navigating the small-town atmospheres of the places she goes.  The scenery is clearly gorgeous and Stapinski captures it well, as she does with the food.  This is a book that will make you want to eat Italian food--all the Italian food, from fresh fruit to pasta puttanesca to pizza to--well, absolutely everything.  Even foods you don't like will sound good here.

But what I didn't like was when she takes broad liberties with Vita's story.  The actual details of the murder are eventually discovered, because they're contained in a court document.  But for Vita herself, Stapinski blatantly makes up her thoughts, feelings,a and actions, saying in the afterword that the relied on her "Gallitelli blood and bones" to know what her ancestor would have thought...which is ridiculous.  You can't just make up history.  The problem is that she wants Vita to be a saint, and so she decides that's how things must have been, without having any evidence of really knowing it.  Ascribing emotions and actions to people from the past without having any idea of what they actually did is a classic pitfall in talking about history, and Stapinski blunders into it full-throttle here.  These portions do not belong in a work of nonfiction.  Additionally, her obsessing about her children's genes got old quickly.  Apparently there is one study from Iceland about prisoners (or was it Finland?) that said many who committed violent crimes had a gene tied to aggression, but guess what?  You are not your genes!  Just because you have a gene tied to aggression doesn't mean you have to kill people!  In this way, Stapinski seems to throw her hands up in looking at the past, putting it all down to fate and not looking at responsibility for one's own actions, which really bothered me.

Overall, an okay book that could have been a good book, but strayed past its boundaries and into fiction instead of history too much.  The nonfiction portions are excellent, but the "creating stories out of whole cloth" portion left a bad taste in my mouth.

2 stars out of 5.

Flat Broke with Two Goats - Jennifer McGaha

This was a book I saw and disregarded, but then it came up again as the Big Library Read.  I probably should have factored this in to reading it, because I actually disliked the last Big Library Read (The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett) quite a bit.  But hey, if everyone was reading it, I wanted to be cognizant of what everyone was talking about, and so I picked it up from the library.

This is a memoir of a time when McGaha and her husband owed over a hundred thousand dollars in taxes to the federal government and over eight thousand to the state of North Carolina.  They lost their house and the friends they had bought it from in the process.  They moved to a crumbling and snake-infested cabin in the Appalachians.  And McGaha blamed her husband for all of it, as he had handled their accounts, even though she was complicit in it all.  You can imagine what a strain this could be on a marriage.

McGaha says she doesn't blame her husband, not entirely, though she certainly put all the blame on him when these events first unfolded.  But really, she still does seem to be blaming him entirely, and she certainly never demonstrated a willingness to take ownership of their financial situation, either before the owed taxes or after it.  She worked as a part-time English instructor at a college, and when she realized she'd need to get a full-time job, she sniffed and turned her nose up at anything that required her to dress professionally (even business casual!) or exhibit the barest minimum of organization, saying she couldn't do it and who would hire her anyway?  This does not seem to bode well for her students; how many papers must she have lost or grades must she have bungled if she couldn't be organized?  Excuses.  I smell them.  Really, what she seems to have wanted was to kick back her feet, drink mixed drinks, and let someone do all the work for her.  And to be fair, who doesn't want that?  But we can't all have that, and that's what McGaha seems to refuse to accept, heading for the hills as soon as things turn sour.

McGaha's background is in writing, and some of the writing here is absolutely lovely.  The descriptions of the Appalachians, of food, are wonderful.  But the entire book is so suffused with McGaha's bumbling around and refusing to take personal responsibility (Oh, you mean moving several states away from your spouse, leaving him in the snake-ridden cabin while you bopped around living your #bestlife, didn't result in your marriage getting better?  WHO KNEW?) that it's hard to see past the author's entitlement and how she wallows in how her privilege didn't give her everything she ever wanted by default.  And even if that was how the events unfolded--and things do unfold in less than satisfactory manners--the writing of a memoir is a time to reflect on how you ended up where you are, what you could have done better, and how the events of your life have changed you.  McGaha doesn't do any of that, which makes this come across as, "Hey, I'll write a book about this and make lots of money and pay off my taxes!"  Which at least has her doing something, but probably not the best something, particularly when considering the product she put out for that purpose.

I had initially given this book three stars for the writing, but upon reflection, I'm downgrading it to two.  If you liked The Rules Do Not Apply for Ariel Levy's entitlement and avoidance of responsibility, you'll probably like this too.  Otherwise, stay away.

2 stars out of 5.

The Rules Do Not Apply - Ariel Levy

"Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It’s also a symptom of narcissism."

How right Levy is in putting that statement out there so early in the book.  It sets the tone for what is to come after, when Levy's entire life falls apart in pretty short order.  It's not a book of great reflection, but in a few small moments--like that one--she hints that maybe, just maybe, she was being narcissistic, and some of this dissolution--not all of it, but some--was partly her fault.

Ariel Levy presents in her memoir the story of a life coming unraveled.  A happy marriage maybe wasn't so happy after all, on either side; a baby died; and everything else went down the drain, too.  Levy starts her account at the end, or nearly at it, and then unspools back to the beginning before everything went right, and then wrong, to tell things in chronological order.  Well, mostly chronological order; there are some flashbacks to her younger days, but mostly the chronology isn't disturbed, and it's easy to see when the timeline changes.

That said, Levy isn't necessarily the most reliable narrator for her own story.  Though there are a few short sentences, buried in the rest of the book, that hint that maybe, maybe she sees her complicity in some of the things that happened here, much of the book is very entitled white girl whining.  (And as an entitled white girl, I know how that looks.)  Levy is, of course, not to blame for her miscarriage, no matter what some of the people in her life seem to think.  However, she barely pauses to consider that hey, her wife's alcoholism might have had something to do with their marriage falling apart, but maybe Levy's own ongoing affair had something to do with it, too?  Just maybe?

Levy has a background in journalism, and it shows here.  The sentences and some of the imagery are wonderful; the pictures she paints of Africa, of the lions, of Mongolia, all of that is wonderful.  It's so wonderful that it's easy to miss how unreflective and unrepentant Levy truly is.  She admits in some small degree that maybe she's a narcissist, drops two or three sentences here or there about, "I didn't think about this then," but never reflects on it later, and ultimately never seems to grow as a person.  There's not a lot of resolution in the book for this, either.  Of course, you can easily Google her name and find out what happened to her, but including something of it might have shown some personal growth, and that's something that was sadly lacking here.  Perhaps this is because there was no internal struggle that would have propelled growth, but rather instead just a stream of whinging, "But it's not fair!  No one understands me!"

Levy's writing carries this book.  But she doesn't seem like a great person, and the lack of reflection or evidence of growth in this book lowered it quite a bit from what I was hoping it would be.

3 stars out of 5.

Shrill - Lindy West

My pick for a feminist book for my 2018 Popsugar reading challenge, Shrill is an angry book.  And why shouldn't it be?  Women get the short end of the stick in pretty much every area of life.  West isn't at the very bottom of the social structure--she is straight and white, which are two points in her favor--but she is overweight and loud, which are two things that society does not take kindly to.  Take, for example, the recent internet kerfluffle that was "Describe yourself as if a male author was describing you," in which many older (read: not twenty-three-year-old) and/or overweight women had to point out that either they would automatically be relegated to the role of villain, or they wouldn't be in a book written by a man at all.  West has a career built in comedy, but it's one she fought for tooth and nail against pretty much every odd, and in this book she takes on that, as well as the struggle to just be seen as a person while fat and female.

West is loud.  She is opinionated.  This book has probably made a lot of people angry, because how dare a woman--and a fat one at that--have opinions like that?  How dare a woman not find rape jokes funny?  How dare she not find it flattering that men threaten to rape and kill her for protesting against the very un-funniness of rape jokes?  How dare she put it out that hey, it's hard to be a fat person, so please stop piling on the emotional abuse on top of an already challenged existence?  How dare she suggest that we don't go out of the way to shame and humiliate each other?

Nothing is off limits here, and that's probably one of the things that will make people mad.  West is a modern woman.  She has had an abortion, one she does not regret, though the emotions surrounding it were hard for her.  She is in a relationship with someone of another race.  She has struck out alone, written scathing articles directed at her own editor and climbed a professional ladder.  She has dealt with death and grieving and rejection and basically every sort of humiliation that she could possibly face.  In Shrill, she tears into all of it.  She mourns the loss of her "funny" card, from when the comedy community turned on her for speaking out about rape jokes.  She talks about online harassment, about being absolutely terrified at some of the things anonymous commenters threaten and the personal details they reveal they know, the fear that stalks her at the things they say--Are they watching me?  How do they know that?  She swears, she mocks herself and others, and she is angry, and justified in being so.  The title of the book, cooked up during the 2016 presidential campaigns, is deliberate, because West's anger, like so many other women's, comes to the surface in a time when a populace--including a majority of white women--would elect a sexual predator rather than a woman.

Her writing is good.  It is raw in some instances, but it reads like it seems West would speak, and that makes the book seem like a conversation, and a deeply personal one at that.  Is it the most polished thing in the entire world?  Probably not, because it's hard to be completely polished while being so forthright.  However, West has an extensive journalistic background, and that expertise shows here.  Among her new writing are excerpts of some of her former works, and in reviewing them she adds a few points of polish and remarks on things that she wished she had done, reflecting that not only is she not writing a 260-page rant--this is much more than that, more structured, more thought-out, more everything--but that it's largely her professional growth that has attributed to this.  That said, there are points where her writing is shocking, particularly at the beginning, and I found myself reeling back somewhat.  Maybe a bit more of easing in would have been good for the reader who wasn't quite prepared, but wanted to know--but then again, maybe that would defeat the point.

Overall, a harsh read, but a good and important one nonetheless.

4.5 stars out of 5.

Bleaker House - Nell Stevens

The happy, pale turquoise and penguin clutching a page  on the cover caught my eye while perusing books at a well-known local bookstore a few weeks ago.  Unfortunately, I'd already bought a few other books at said store (at full cover price--ouch) and didn't have it in the budget for this one.  Luckily, the library came through for me, because I'd skimmed the first few pages and was intrigued by the premise of this memoir: young woman finishes MFA and, with the opportunity of going anywhere in the world for up to three months, chooses Bleaker Island, a tiny hunk of land in the Falklands (just north of Antarctica) in the middle of the southern hemisphere's winter, in the hopes that a sense of extreme isolation will give her the discipline and concentration she needs to write a novel.  Does it work?  Well...

I found this a charming book set in a depressing AF setting.  Stevens wants to be a writer, desperately.  She picks Bleaker Island as her spot to write out of a sense of wanting to be different; and don't all writers?  But upon her arrival, she finds herself thinking, "If the island is Bleaker, it's bleaker than what?"  The answer: everything.  It is a desolate place, as the Falklands in general seem to be, at least in the winter.  It is devoid of fresh produce, and regular contact with the outside world, with a language that has evolved out of several kinds of language into its own weird sort of dialect.  Nell finds herself scrutinized by citizens who are wary of outsiders in general and writers in particular, and then eventually completely and literally isolated: the only human on Bleaker Island for six weeks.  There, she struggles to apply everything she learned in school to the creation of a novel set in the Falklands, and on Bleaker in particular.  Ultimately, the novel doesn't work, and what she produced--in her diary from her stay, in her attempts at the novel, in short stories from school, in snippets of her life leading up to the trip to the Falklands--became this book instead.

I did like Stevens' writing.  She has a dry and self-deprecating sense of humor, and while her time in the Falklands might not have turned her into a novelist (at least not a published one), it certainly seemed to let herself know herself more, though this seems to have come in an epiphany moment near the end of her stay rather than in a slow but steady stream of self-realization.  In this, she was successful, and I think the book showed that.  She realizes that not everything she has to write is amazing.  She realizes that being alone and being lonely are very different things.  And she realizes that even if she's not going to write a novel based on her time in the Falklands, she can still certainly write a book.

This was a trip taken on a whim; while Stevens has some justification for her choice, she seems aware that it's flimsy and that she's going primarily because no one else was, and that even her written proposal sounded pretty silly once it was read back.  But she definitely got something out of it, I think we can safely say.  The structure of the book feeds into this idea; while it starts with Nell's arrival on Bleaker, it jumps back with the first chapter to do a mostly-chronological account of her time in the Falklands, interspersed with snippets of her life beforehand and other writing projects she worked on, mostly a few short stories in their full form.  Because she includes pieces of her life, you can see her penchant for including life in her writing, just as she was hoping to do with basing a book on Bleaker.  It's an insight into her creative process, and the evolution of it over time.  I personally thought it was interesting--most aspiring writers probably will, if only to see someone else sharing in their struggles.  But other people might not.

Overall, this was a book I really liked.  It's light, but not fluffy, and while there's nothing world- or even life-shattering about it, I found it was a book I could empathize with...though the Falklands are probably off my list of places to visit, honestly.

4 stars out of 5.

When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi

This is a book that I had seen many, many times in various contexts, but avoided like the plague.  Why?  Because it sounded depressing, that's why.  The author, Paul Kalanithi, was finishing up his time as a chief resident in neurosurgery when he was diagnosed with extensive lung cancer, and then eventually brain cancer.  Having struggled with life and medicine and the meaning of it all throughout his life and career, Kalanithi set out to make sense of his own life--and death--and purpose before the end came.  You know all of this from the flap of the book, or the foreword at the very least.  It sounded like a serious downer and possibly preachy as well, which was not a conversation I wanted to delve into.  However, when I needed a book on death or grief for my reading challenge, it seemed like an obvious choice.

I was very much surprised by this book.  It's not religious at all, which I appreciated--a lot of people who aren't even really religious turn to it in the end--though it is deeply introspective.  In his career as a neurosurgeon, Kalanithi worked with the brain which, he points out, ultimately contains the self.  Part of this book looks at what makes life living--is it worth living if you have an injury or disease that takes away your language and ability to communicate?  If it leaves you in a coma or a vegetative state?  And in the process of coming to terms with his own death, he sees the people around him go through their own stages of grief--not only for him, but for things that they thought might be, especially when hope briefly seemed to be so close.

One thing that's worthy of noting is that the writing here is absolutely beautiful.  Kalanithi certainly had a way with words, and his aspirations to spend the second half of his career--the half he never got to experience--as an author were certainly well-merited.  He faces down some of the things that were piling up, such as a dissolving marriage that even most of his family wasn't aware of, the deep pain he was in all the time, and the terror he faced at leaving his life not fully lived, and turns it all into poetry.  When I read the foreword and saw how Verghese lauded Kalanithi's writing, I had to roll my eyes.  Surely the book couldn't actually be that good.  And honestly, depressing as it sounds, it really sounded kind of gimmicky as well.  But no, Verghese was right--the writing really is that good.

This is one of those books that it feels weird to say you enjoyed, because hey, does the average person really enjoy reading about a real person dying tragically?  No, not really.  But it was a wonderful book.  Was it ground breaking in anything it revealed?  No, not really.  But just as Tuesdays with Morrie or The Last Lecture were sad books but lovely at the same time, so was this.  It's not a book that's going to reveal the secrets of the universe.  But it's a personal, insightful journey, and hey, you can learn some about neurosurgery to boot.

4 stars out of 5.

Hunger - Roxane Gay

Hunger is up for a Goodreads award, I had it from Book of the Month, and a coworker had read it it and recommended it, and so this confluence of events led me to read it.  Gay's memoir is, essentially, about being fat.  At her heaviest, she weighed close to six hundred pounds, and while she's significantly below that now, she's still considered super morbidly obese.  Her weight problem stems from childhood trauma--after being gang raped at the age of twelve, she began eating in an attempt to make herself overweight and repulsive to men because she didn't want to be hurt again.  Now and adult, she doesn't want to be overweight, but essentially a lifetime of bad habits have made it hard to lose the extra pounds--and then, when she does start to lose weight, the old fears rear their ugly heads again and send her back into bad habits.

Gay's memoir is painful to read because of how real it is.  I am not overweight.  I am one of those skinny girls who sees a little padding on her hips (because you suddenly develop hips in your midtwenties--who knew?) and starts to agonize over it.  I chew my nails over inconsistent sizing at Old Navy because I wear different sizes in different styles of pants, and even though I intellectually know that sizing is bullshit, I still don't want to wear a 6 in one size when I wear a 4 or even a 2 in another.  And why is that?  Because I know the thing that Gay hammers home so hard--that our society treats fat people like shit, and I don't want to come even close to falling into that category.  In that way, Gay's memoir is easy to empathize with even for someone who isn't overweight, because many of us can tap into the fears of being so--we want to be young and pretty and skinny and fit, but life doesn't always work out that way.  I mean, I might want to weigh ten pounds less, even though my weight is perfectly healthy, but I'd also much rather spend my time reading books than going to the gym.

The other way that Gay's memoir connected with me was giving me a terrible feeling of guilt because, like a lot of society, I have a knee-jerk reaction when I see someone who is very overweight.  I do make snap judgments about their character.  I've become much better at recognizing these reactions, walking them back, and using logic to guide my thoughts and actions instead, but it's hard to buck what is essentially a lifetime of conditioning that fat equals bad.  At the same time, though, I can't bring myself to wholeheartedly jump onto the body positivity train, because at some point being overweight does lead to health problems, and I don't think "healthy at any size" is really a thing when someone can't walk a mile with their friends without having to worry about breathing problems or a heart attack.  Yes, this is judgey of me, and I am coming out and admitting it, because Gay admits so much in her memoir that I feel like the least I can do in a review is come out with the same honesty.

But Gay's story isn't just about a physical hunger for food; it's about hungering for so many more things, like company and love and security.  These are all other aspects on which I think anyone can empathize, because it's a rare person who is completely fulfilled and can't connect with some aspect of hungering for something they don't have.  This also isn't a book of wallowing, despite how intense and painful it can be.  Instead, it is an explanation and an attempt to make readers see how peoples' actions affect each other on many levels throughout life, and to make them re-evaluate how they see different people and situations.  In this, I think she is extremely successful.

This is a powerful story that I think can resonate with many audiences.  I only had two real issues with it, neither of which was content-related and instead were writing-related.  First, and this is the more minor issue, I don't get what's up with the constant parentheses around (my) body in the early part of the book, especially when they vanish later on.  Can someone explain this?  Second, the writing here isn't a solid narrative and is very scattered.  It jumps to and fro in time in a series of chapters which rarely surpass five pages and often don't go past two or three.  This jumping means that she often re-hashes things that have been covered before, sometimes two or three times, and it can sometimes be hard to follow the thread of thought.  At times, I thought that the chapters were being grouped by theme, particularly when there were a few close together which talked about Gay's relationship with food through cooking...but then that fell apart and went back to roaming to and fro, and I was left a bit perplexed again.

Overall, I think this is a book that serves its purpose very well, and can resonate with readers across a wide spectrum of ages, body types, ethnicities, etc.  But it probably could have done its job a bit better if it had been a bit more structured.

4 stars out of 5.

Funny in Farsi - Firoozeh Dumas

A lighthearted memoir, Funny in Farsi was the Deliberate Reader Book Club title for October's month-long discussion.  The author, Firoozeh Dumas (her father specifically told her not to mention her maiden name in the book, and then wondered why she hadn't used it once it was published) first came to the United States when she was seven, when her father had a two-year work assignment for the Iranian oil industry in California.  After returning to Iran, her family later came back to the United States to liver permanently.

Despite the cover claim that this is "A memoir of growing up Iranian in America," I felt like much of the book wasn't really about Dumas so much as it was about her larger family, with her serving kind of as an observer in the background.  Each "chapter" is really more like a little vignette focusing on a different incident, and there's also a pretty big jump from when Dumas was a child to when she was adult, with only one real chapter on her adolescence--one minute she's trying to get her mother to bake American snacks for her elementary school, and the next she's getting married.  Many of the stories focus explicitly on Dumas' father, something that she admits in the afterword of the book.  Her parents are definitely the center of this narrative; despite having brothers and an extended family, most of the stories involve her parents in the central role, whether it's her mother's accent and learning of English consisting mainly of watching The Price is Right or her father wanting to compete on a bowling game show, "fixing" up the house on his own, or trying on her engagement ring when her boyfriend asked her father's permission to marry her.

Obviously, the humor here is in the clash of cultures that comprises Dumas' life.  While her family is eager to embrace much of American culture, they're still baffled by other parts of it--such as why Americans like turkey.  And then, once Dumas marries a Frenchman, yet another aspect of culture clash enters her life.  To some degree, Dumas presents herself as better than the others around her--better at adjusting, better at understanding, just better, which is a little self-centered, even more so than writing a memoir about your experiences.  (And she is correct that you don't need to have done something amazing to write a memoir about your life.)  Maybe it's that she's more pragmatic than other people in her life, maybe it's a skewed viewpoint; it's hard to say.  However, it's still an amusing read, though one that, like many memoirs, you probably need to take with a grain of salt.

Overall, this was an enjoyable read, but it's one that lacks a lot of depth.  Rather than really digging into any issue, light or heavy, Dumas instead skims over pretty much everything, keeping the focus away from herself.  I would have liked to see a little more depth here in some respect; depth doesn't mean that something has to be depressing, but it would have made the book seem a little more whole-hearted; as it was, it just felt a bit shallow.

3 stars out of 5.

Wild - Cheryl Strayed

Another audiobook down.  These are great for listening to while working on spreadsheets, guys!  This one drew me because it was on several recommendation lists; one for adventure-lovers, one for memoirs, and I think it was on a list of recommendations from the cast of something that I watched recently, but I'm not 100% sure on that last one.  The idea of a woman whose life is in shambles going on a twelve hundred mile hike and finding herself along the way appealed to me, and so off I went.

The narrator for this was good, and so is the book structure.  Strayed intersperses the parts about her journey on the trail with more biographical sections about her life before the hike.  Breaking it up like that is a wise decision, so that neither part seems like too much of a slog.  However, I felt like there was more pre-trail biographical material in here than was really needed.  She spent a lot of time re-hashing things that she had already gone over--yes, yes, she loved her mother and was devastated in the wake of her death.  This was a wrenching story the first time around, less the fifth or sixth time.  With all of this going over and over again, it really felt like the book ended up being the story of her pre-trail life interspersed with her trail life--that is, that the pre-trail life was the bulk of the book, and the hiking actually took up less of the book than one would think, given the title and cover of the book and how it begins, with a scene of Strayed losing one of her hiking boots over the edge of a cliff.

And here's something to keep in mind if you're planning on reading this book: Cheryl Strayed, at the time that she embarked on her adventure, was not necessarily a good person.  Her marriage had dissolved after she confessed to sleeping with a ton of people who were not her husband while they were married; she had substance abuse problems, including heroin.  Sometimes she acknowledges that she was not really a good person, nor was she in a good place before the hike; at other times, however, she tries to spin it off with a sort of "Hee hee!  Look how messed up and quirky I was!  Tee hee!" sort of tone, which annoyed me vastly.  Because that's the thing: if you're going to put your whole life out there for everyone to read, everyone gets to judge you for it.

As for the hiking portions of the book, not a lot actually goes on.  It becomes very quickly evident that Strayed was not prepared for the hike, which she freely admits.  There's a lot of suffering, toenails falling off, boots plaguing her, burning the pages of books as she reads them to lighten her pack, dubbed "Monster" for its size.  She sees a bull, bears, and rattlesnakes, but no mountain lions.  But mostly it's pretty much exactly what you can expect: a lot of walking.  The people she meets along the way are enjoyable, but for the most part this was a solitary journey for her, and that shoes.  It was definitely an adventure for her to live, but it perhaps doesn't shine quite as well when you're reading (or hearing) about it, especially years later.  Parts of it did make me want to go off and have a hiking adventure of my own--but other parts made me never want to leave the city again, though in an age of cell phones (and solar chargers) and GPS technology, it would no doubt be a very different experience from the one Strayed lived in 1995.

Overall, an amusing listen, but certainly not what I thought I was getting myself into (much like Strayed herself) and probably not something I would go back to, with the balance issues it has.

3 stars out of 5.

Voracious - Cara Nicoletti

When I first saw Voracious' description, I thought it would be love at first read.  "A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way Through Great Books."  What more could a hungry reader who reads her way through great books want?  Well, the answer is apparently something other than Voracious, because while this book had nice parts, it wasn't really what I wanted.

Cara Nicoletti is a woman with a career in the food industry and a love of books.  Our love of books doesn't always overlap--I've only read a few of the books she covers in Voracious--but that didn't really matter to me.  What mattered to me was that she is also the author of the blog Yummy Books (last updated in 2015) and a blog is exactly what this book reads like.  This was my issue with What If? as well; it didn't read like new material, but like material that was just recycled into book form from the blog.  And here's the other thing: I like blogs, I like food, but I generally don't like food blogs.

Yes.  I said it.  Here's the thing.  For some reason, food blogs seem to have this thing about them that no other type of blog I've encountered has, and that's that food bloggers seem to feel the need to put deep and personal stories in front of all of their posts, when what I really want is just the recipe.  My favorite food blog, Budget Bytes, falls into this pitfall as well, though maybe not to the same degree as other ones.  As you've probably gathered from the preceding sentence, I don't particularly care about these personal stories.  And that was exactly the case here.  I really liked the parts of this book where Nicoletti dug into the books she talked about, showed how food played into them and how the characters in the books used food in their lives, or abhorred it.  But I didn't particularly like the stories about Nicoletti's life.  While her life in the food industry and in New York in general was no doubt interesting in its own way, it was the very last thing I was looking for in a book about food and other books, and consequently it did not hit the right note here.  I think this book might actually be aimed at people who already read and liked Nicoletti's blog, and were just looking for some new material in the book, other than an entirely new audience.

Overall, I'm just not convinced that blogs made into books are a good market.  They just seem to lack something that books actually conceived as books seem to have, and I haven't yet found one that's really worked.  So, while I liked the actually bookish parts of this and some of the recipes definitely seemed intriguing, the book as a whole didn't really agree with me.

2 stars out of 5.

Heads in Beds - Jacob Tomsky

Heads in Beds was my latest foray into the audiobook world, because it seemed to fit what I needed perfectly--something not too heavy, easy to tune in and out of without losing a major thread, and with a good narrator, who in this case was the author himself.  Tomsky has worked in hotels for years and, as he states in the beginning of the book, has disassembled them all and re-assembled them into two hotels for the purpose of the narrative.  One hotel is in New Orleans, and the other in New York City.  He's also changed names, including his own, and conglomerated some people, made up a few scenarios in order to demonstrate general rules of working in hotels that he might not have remembered a distinct incident to illustrate the point for.

Overall, this is pretty amusing.  Tomsky has worked in a few different areas of hotels, and in this book he talks about his time as valet, front desk worker, and a lower-level manager in housekeeping.  He suffers burn out, just like we all do, and it becomes clear in the end of the book that he pretty much wrote the book on a three-week bender in a fury after being fired from one position.  However, that doesn't eliminate the appeal of the rest of the book, which for the most part is written in a lighthearted manner...as long as you can be pretty sure that you're not one of the people he's talking about in the book, in specifics or in stereotype.  Having never actually checked myself into a hotel--geeze, I can't remember the last time I stayed in a hotel--I was pretty safe on that front, though now I have a handy arsenal of tricks filed away in my head for the next time I do have to stay in a place that's not mine or my family's or an Airbnb.  Hint: it involves carrying plenty of cash and being willing to give it out freely.  Allotting an extra $100 probably wouldn't go astray, in various denominations for doormen, bellhops, front desk attendants, etc.

Of course, many of the things that people suspect go on in hotels are confirmed--employees slurping from the minibars, discriminating against you because you booked via Expedia instead of direct, etc.  But he firmly maintains that some of the things that people claim happen really don't, such as housekeepers stealing from guests, and honestly, why would they?  His pictures of entitled guests and stuck-up management are spot-on, as someone who has worked in an extremely unpopular arm of service, aka the front desk person in a parking enforcement office. (Ask me about the time we honestly thought a guy was going to leave and come back to shoot up the place.  Go on.)  So no, you definitely don't have to have worked in hotels to empathize with this memoir; you really just have to have worked in any job where a portion of the population you work with feels entitled to treat you like garbage, which is pretty much every job.

Overall, an enjoyable listen.  Sometimes Tomsky does come across as an asshole, and I strongly suspect that he's casting aspersions on people who really didn't mean anything bad some of the time.  After all, not everyone is aware of "the rules" of staying in hotels, especially because those rules don't seem to have changed even while many of our other social contracts have.  I would not doubt at all that millennials are particularly egregious at this hotel stuff, because that's just not how we work.  But there are some good stories, some good lessons, and some good wince-worthy moments (yes, that's a thing) that shine, and this was definitely worth the time.

4 stars out of 5.

Tender at the Bone - Ruth Reichl

I live in a magic neighborhood where people leave books out on their yard walls for passerby to take.  While heading to the convenience store for a sugar fix this weekend, I stumbled across a house that had so many books out!  Among them were a bunch of food memoirs, including this one.  I love books, I love food, I love books about food, so of course it found its way into my bag, along with about fifteen other ones.  How lucky that I took the bag with me!

I've come to the decision that I really like Ruth Reichl.  While her memoir about her time as a food critic at the New York Times, Garlic and Sapphires, wasn't a home run, it was still good, and her novel Delicious! was, in fact, delicious.  Now, I've moved on to Tender at the Bone, which is basically a memoir (albeit an embroidered one) about how Reichl grew up to love food and managed her crazy family.  Born in New York City, Reichl's mother suffered from bipolar disorder (though they didn't know this when Reichl was young) and went through manic stages that turned Reichl's life upside down.  Her mother was also a terrible cook.  However, Reichl loved food and found good food in plenty of other places, and came to learn to cook first as a necessity and then as a passion.  Watching this journey as she grows was fascinating, and I would have never thought that Reichl had such a tumultuous past!  From being shipped off to a boarding school in Montreal because of a passing comment about how she wished she spoke French to essentially living on her own when she was in high school to living in what was basically a hippie commune, it was all fascinating.

Was it all true?  Well... Reichl states in the preface to the book that embroidering, reordering, and sometimes just making up stories is a family tradition, and that she's done some altering to this memoir in order to make it flow better as a solid narrative.  I do appreciate that this one was in chronological order; if I recall correctly, Garlic and Sapphires jumped around a bit, which was disorientating.  But embroidered or not, I think this is a good memoir that makes the author more of a real person.  She suffered from imposter syndrome at various points, feeling like she was a fake, which is something I think we all struggle with sometimes.  And while I appreciated that her mother had a mental illness, I could also empathize with Reichl's yearning to sometimes just slap her mother upside the head and tell her to get over it; no matter how much you tell yourself it's not their fault, sometimes it just grates on your nerves.  The memoir is also interspersed with recipes that Reichl encountered for developed throughout her life.  These are at the beginnings of chapters, which is a little weird and led to some whacky formatting in the book, but I still appreciated them.  I might even try my hand at a lemon souffle someday.

Overall, this was a poignant and mouth-watering memoir, even embroidered as it is--and honestly, I don't mind a little embroidering as long as the author owns up to it, which Reichl did before she even got started.  I can't wait to read her other memoir, Comfort Me With Apples.

4 stars out of 5.

Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain

I originally had Bourdain's book No Reservations slated for my reading challenge this year, but absolutely nowhere had it available.  So I picked another book for that category and got this one from the library instead.  It's probably better that way, since this was Bourdain's first book and laid the groundwork for a lot of his career, which is of course what I've been watching on Netflix.

This is the updated edition, which has a bit of a foreword and an afterword that serves as a kind of "where are they now" catch-up section, and a PS section that has discussion, an interview, etc.  I didn't care about the PS stuff but the added foreword and afterword were a nice touch.

Here's the thing.  Having watched collections of "No Reservations" (the show, not the book) and "The Layover" on Netflix, I could totally hear Bourdain's voice.  He lays out what he sees as the fundamentals of the restaurant world and the path of his own career.  But then he goes back later on and turns it all on its head, showing that not all cooking crews are the sort that he experienced and seems to seek out.  He doesn't really go into how his life of booze and drugs affected his career at various points, but he also doesn't hide that away, and finally mentions that he hit a point where he knew if he didn't stop, he probably wasn't going to.

And here's the other thing... Bourdain is an ass.  Anyone who's seen him on any of his shows can tell that pretty easily.  But he's so up front about it, without really making himself seem better than others, and I found that I could move past it pretty easily.  There are, of course, moments, when I step back and go, "Wow, Anthony, you're an asshole."  But for the most part, I felt like I could step away from that terribly abrasive part of his personality and still enjoy his writing and his tales of "the culinary underbelly," as the book refers to it.  Bourdain seems to prefer what he calls "pirate crews" which are basically a bunch of former (and sometimes current) criminals and drug addicts and overall people who are just as unsavory as he can be.  But at the same time, as I mentioned before, he brings up kitchens that run as smoothly as a well-oiled clock or a well-choreographed and rehearsed dance.  While he greatly speaks from his own experience, he doesn't pretend that his way is the only way, and I can respect that.

Overall, I found this book a very enjoyable read.  Though I can't say that I look up to him as a person or would ever want to work with him.  But that doesn't meant his stories aren't good or shocking or that this book wasn't good (though sometimes shocking) because it was.

4 stars out of 5.

Stealing Buddha's Dinner - Bich Minh Nguyen

Stealing Buddha's Dinner has been on my "to read" list for a while, and when I needed a book written by or about an immigrant for my 2017 reading challenge, it seemed like the perfect time to finally get to it.

Nguyen, her father, sister, grandmother, two uncles, and an uncle's friend all fled Vietnam when she was eight months old in 1975, when the American were clearing out their embassy and Saigon was being bombed.  Arriving as refugees in the United States, they settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Nugyen grew up as essentially American, not really being able to speak Vietnamese and wanting more than anything to be one of the "real" people she saw in commercials and TV shows and in books.  But as one of few Vietnamese or other minority people in "a sea of blond," things weren't as easy as she wanted them to be.  Nguyen wanted to assimilate, deeply, but still cherished the Vietnamese parts of her life.  Sitting with her grandmother in meditation, having fruit from the shrine in her house, the foods that her grandmother would make--Nguyen might have craved Tollhouse cookies and Otter Pops and 7UP and all manner of other "American" foods, but there was still a big Vietnamese part of her life, and she struggled with balancing it with her desperate need to fit in.

Nguyen has a way of making the most junky of all junk foods sound absolutely tantalizing, and she's easy to empathize with.  I didn't grow up an immigrant, but Nguyen manages to draw on the ostracism that most kids face at some point or another.  I was also the kid with glasses who wanted to read more than anything else, who didn't really have a lot of friends and felt like the parents of the friends I did have were always looking down on me.  By drawing on these experiences, Nguyen manages to build a bridge so that even those of us who don't share her exact background can understand her isolation and longing to belong.

The book is written in a non-linear style, which I don't mind, but it does seem a bit scattered in the beginning.  After the first few chapters, the parts of the book become more thematic, but the first few seem to flit from topic to topic with little cohesion.  Things come up and are dropped, never to be seen again or only to be seen at the very end of the book--a mention that her stepmother (who she really does view as her mother, not remembering her mother from Vietnam and not meeting her until she's in college) drew away and left the family, when in fact she didn't, and then the mention of her biological mother being left in Vietnam, which only comes up again much, much later.  It feels like these things were brought up for no reason at the time they were first mentioned, and could easily have been better woven in later, near where the actual exposition regarding them ended up.

Overall, this was a very enjoyable and poignant memoir about wanting to belong and not quite managing to do so.  Despite being born a quarter of a century after Nugyen, I could see a lot of parallels in our childhoods, and that really helped draw me into the narrative.  I've never had to balance two halves of myself like she did, but by evoking those parallels, she made the understanding easier, and that is a real accomplishment.

4 stars out of 5.

Garlic and Sapphires - Ruth Reichl

I read Ruth Reichl's novel, Delicous! a couple of years ago, and really enjoyed it.  Following a young woman who takes a job at a food magazine, only to find it shut down and that she's been left on as the only employee to uphold its "Delicious Guarantee," it's filled with the wonderful food scene of New York City to a woman who hasn't lived there her entire life.  Now, reading Reichl's nonfiction Garlic and Sapphire, I can see where so much of that book came from.

Garlic and Sapphires follows Reichl through her time as the food critic for the New York Times.  Coming from the Los Angeles Times, Reichl is stunned to realize that the restaurateurs of New York are prepared for her arrival, and decides that the only way she'll get a genuine eating experience is to don disguises.  And so begins a string of alter-egos that Reichl draws up, from the happy and flamboyant Brenda to the downright mean Emily to the semblance of her own mother, and more.  Of course, she doesn't do all of her dining anonymously, and the differences in treatment as her very own self and her alternate personas becomes evident pretty much immediately.  When she dines as herself, she's showered with good service, the raspberries on her tarts get bigger, she's showered with a wealth of deserts and tasting dishes.  When she dines anonymously, she gets the experience that pretty much any other diner would get, which varies wildly from place to place.

What I disliked about this book is that, while Reichl revels in her alternate identities, they seem to become an excuse for engaging in bad behavior more often than not.  She sends every dish in a meal back to the kitchen because it's what her mother would have done.  She's unnecessarily cruel to a young couple sitting at the next table over.  She does realize this, in the end, but only because a friend points it out, and she never really takes responsibility for the things that she does while in disguise.  She acts like, when she puts on a wig, fake makeup, and clothes from the thrift store, she actually becomes another person, with no control over her own actions, when in fact that isn't the case.  She never really owns up to this, just decides to put the whole thing behind her, and it made me really not like Reichl as much as a person.  Yes, the anecdotes she relates are entertaining, but underlying most of them is this subtle menace of bad behavior that will never be acknowledged or apologized for.

But one thing is certainly true: Reichl can write about food.  This shouldn't come as a surprise, given her stints as restaurant credit and editor of Gourmet magazine (now defunct), but the descriptions of food absolutely shine in this book.  She can make any meal seem appealing, even, strangely, the ones that she didn't actually enjoy.  It's the specter of good food, maybe, more than the actuality of it that does the trick.  It all comes back to something Reichl says early in the book: that restaurant reviews aren't written for the people that will eat at the restaurants, but for those who never will.  As someone who will definitely never eat at any of the restaurants Reichl describes (if they're still even open; she was the NYT critic in the early 90s) I can appreciate the luscious descriptions she puts down on the page, drawing out every experience as if I were actually there.

There was one more downfall to this book: it's repetitive.  Reichl follows her narrative experiences of restaurants with actual reviews of some of them, which usually tend to rehash a lot of the same stuff she just related.  She does intersperse the reviews and narratives with recipes, her own takes on some of the things that she ate, which helps to break this up, but not enough to completely save the book from its repetitive feel.

Overall, an enjoyable reading experience, but I have some reservations about the repetitiveness and the way that Reichl never really seems to own up to her bad behavior.  I'm interested in reading her other works--Delicious! was just so good--but while I liked this, I couldn't bring myself to love it.

3 stars out of 5.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - Barbara Kingsolver

This was the January 2017 pick for the Deliberate Reader Book Club.  I was a little leery of this book because of the title.  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle... It sounds like it's going to be preachy, doesn't it?  I've read some other Kingsolver books, though, and they weren't preachy, so I went for it.  What I didn't realize before starting it was that this is a nonfiction book!  Gasp!  The other Kingsolver books I've read were The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, which were both fiction, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect with this.  (Clearly, I did not read the description beforehand.)

Well, it turns out that this is a book about Kingsolver and her family's year of eating locally--or at least as locally as possible.  Moving to southern Virginia from the deserts of Tucson, the family takes up a life of heavy-duty gardening, prowling farmer's markets, and canning every vegetable they can get their hands on.

The book is a bit preachy, with the first chapter probably being the worst.  Or maybe I just got used to it.  Either way, I almost didn't read this one because I didn't really want Kingsolver sneering down her nose at my non-local-food-eating ways for the duration.  But it's not preachy in a religious sense, and there's actually a lot of good information in here about why eating locally is good not just for you, but for your community and the environment.  The book is also partially authored by Steven Hopp, Kingsolver's husband, and Camille Kingsolver, her daughter.  Hopp contributes mini-essays about various topics, and always includes some additional resources at the end in case you'd like to look up more information on a particular topic.  Camille writes about her experiences with the "locavore" experiment and also includes recipes and meal plans that go with what's typically available seasonally.

Now, clearly eating entirely locally isn't possible for everyone.  It's not possible for me.  I live in a city and while there are farmer's markets, they're not present year-round, and I certainly don't have access to a garden plot.  (There is a community garden near my apartment but there's a two-year waiting list to get a spot in it; I might not even be here in two years!)  Even if I stocked up during the summer, I don't know where I would put all the food needed to get me through winter in my city-sized apartment.  It's not even strictly possible for the Kingsolver family to eat locally; she notes that they still have to buy some things, such as flour, olive oil, and pasta, from the store.  But there are some good points here that are applicable to a lot of people.  The one thing that struck me the most was that, if everyone at one meal per week that consisted of local foods, it would drastically lower the carbon emissions produced by transporting food across the country and across the world.  With global warming looming large, this is a huge thing to consider, and it's a very small change of habit to do.  I also found some of the insights about eating free-range and grass-fed meats (cows, chickens, pigs, etc.) to be very interesting; in addition to the animals themselves being healthier and (presumably) happier, the products are much better for us overall, too.  More good fats, less bad fats, lower cholesterol, etc.  And yes, those products are more expensive, but maybe it's something to keep in mind?

This book also presents something of an idyll.  "Oh, look how healthy and happy we are!" says Kingsolver.  Yes, she says there are still arguments, demands to get stuff off the table before it gets thrown out, but there are relatively few conflicts that actually seem to come from the locavore experiment itself, which seems strange and maybe not entirely honest.  All problems encountered here are easily solved and no great inconveniences presented.  But Kingsolver has such an eminently readable style that it almost made me forget about this.  Still, I have to eye it a little suspiciously, because hey, surely something must have gone horribly wrong over the course of this year-long experiment?

Overall, though, this was a much more enjoyable read than I anticipated.  I'm not sure how much of it will carry through into my life, but it definitely presents things to think about, and I'll try to keep some of them in mind while perusing the grocery store next time I'm there.

4 stars out of 5.

Born a Crime - Trevor Noah

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend was going out for drinks with a friend at a local bookstore and cafe.  I was invited, but am a total homebody and told him have fun, but bring me a book.  He brought back Born a Crime and Neil Gaiman's new nonficton, The View from the Cheap Seats.  Born a Crime was shorter, so I started that first.

Born a Crime is exclusively about Noah's life before he left South Africa, and it's largely about his life before he got into comedy--comedy is only mentioned a handful of times, at best.  The majority of the book takes place during his childhood and teens, when he lived with his mother and, later, his stepfather and younger brother.  During his early childhood, apartheid was still in effect in South Africa, and later on its effects were still being felt even after it was officially abolished.  As a mixed-race child (black South African mother, white Swedish/German father) Noah was literally born a crime, and his anecdotes are about race, discrimination, and the fluidity of identity during apartheid and after.  As a mostly basic white girl, these things were fascinating to read about, because it's a culture I will never be a part of, but something I dearly want to understand in order to be a more educated, worldly, and tolerant individual.

Floating around in the background of many of the anecdotes is Noah's home life, which practically vanishes from the page after his mother marries his stepfather.  This lends a very strange dynamic to the book, because you can tell there's something to do with that, and abuse, floating around in the background, but it seems like Noah's avoiding it.  Which is totally his right, if wants to, but it's a strange feel.  Well, he's not avoiding it.  He comes out with it all in the last chapter of the book, and I can see why.  While much of the book has touching moments, that final chapter is definitely the one with the strongest emotional impact.  It adds so much context that was missing in the rest of the book and makes a lot of things much clearer in hindsight.

Noah has an extremely readable style.  While he's a comedian, this book is frequently poignant rather than laugh-out-loud funny, though a few of his signature jokes are in there--like how, during apartheid, he couldn't walk with his mother when police were around because mixed-race relationships were illegal, and when cops would appear she would drop him like a bag of weed so that they wouldn't be harassed.  Each chapter is prefaced by a shorter section that says something about apartheid and how it affected and still affects the people in South Africa.  He shows both how far South Africa has come, and how far it still has to go, in a variety of ways--from racial equality (not that the United States is exactly a beacon of excellence in this area) to things such as basic sanitation.  But at the same time, he includes touching stories of his relationship with his mother (this book was infinitely better than Maya Angelou's Mom & Me & Mom in that regard) and of finding himself.  It's a great book, an easy read but one that packs a punch at the same time in a lot of areas, and I highly recommend it.

5 stars out of 5.

The Good Girls Revolt - Lynn Povich

One of the newest Amazon series is Good Girls Revolt.  I started watching it recently, and immediately began to wonder what was the story behind it.  So I Googled, and it turned out that it was based off this book: The Good Girls Revolt by Lynn Povich, which is about the women who worked at Newsweek in 1970 suing the magazine for discrimination based on their sex.  Though women worked at Newsweek, they were confined to low-paying and low-prestige roles, such as delivering mail, clipping articles from other publications, and checking facts in stories that (male) writers produced.  Unfortunately, this wasn't as riveting a story as I'd thought.

The thing is, the lawsuit wasn't really a lawsuit.  I mean, yes, a lawsuit was filed, several times, but the women kept dropping the suit and turning to arbitration with the management instead.  There isn't really anything interesting here, other than that it happened.  It's mostly just a bunch of negotiations, most of which didn't have any results and few of which had long-term results; in fact, the book starts off with a prologue featuring a few women who found themselves still facing discrimination in the 2000s!  Knowing that going into the story, it was a rather discouraging tale from the beginning.

There were two things I found interesting about this.  First, the exact form that it takes.  Lynn Povich was one of the women who worked at Newsweek and was part of the suit, and was actually the only female writer on the staff of the New York bureau when the conflict started.  Because of her personal involvement and her journalistic background, the book is half memoir, and half traditionally researched book.  While she relates her own experiences and memories of the events, she also makes sure to include plenty of quotes from interviews with the other parties involved, including the women, the management, and the lawyers.  The inclusion of all of these different perspectives helps to give a really cohesive feel to the book, even though it's quite short.  For example, she makes sure to include the women for whom the suit didn't work out, either because they ended up being punished for their daring, or because they didn't actually want to advance, and were happy in their pre-suit positions, but felt like they were being forced to advance so as not let down their fellow women.  The second part was that the first lawyer who took on the case was Eleanor Holmes Norton, who currently serves as the District of Columbia's representative to Congress!  (With limited powers because screw all of us in DC, right?  But still, pretty cool.)

The book finishes up with a rather cheesy "Where Are They Now" epilogue, which feels like it came off an entertainment news broadcast.  It definitely suited the 1970s Newsweek that Povich portrayed in her book.  Honestly, her portrayal of the magazine's atmosphere was probably the most vivid part of the book.  The descriptions of how people there interacted, how they behaved while waiting for the stories to come in--playing baseball in the hallways and having rampant affairs in the infirmary, for example--definitely gave a sense of time and place to the events in the book.  It's hard to imagine such an atmosphere anywhere and anywhen except at Newsweek in the 70s.  (In fact, a few people said that it wasn't like that, even at other magazines.)  But the story itself isn't interesting, even though the prologue hints that it's a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court and essentially changed the workplace forever.  In fact, it wasn't like that at all, and I was left rather disappointed in the end.

Basically, if you're hoping for the drama of the Good Girls Revolt on Amazon, stick with the show.  The book is interesting if you're into feminist negotiations, but even for someone who's interested in law, it was rather a let down overall.

2.5 stars out of 5.

Blood, Bones & Butter - Gabrielle Hamilton

This book was on sale recently, so I picked it up and decided to use it as a sort of twist on a category for my reading challenge for 2016.  The challenge category was "a book with a protagonist who has your occupation," but, as a mid-level university bureaucrat (essentially) main characters with my occupation aren't exactly easy to come by.  So I decided to read a book with a protagonist (in this case, the author, as this is a memoir) who has an occupation I would like to have.  Gabrielle Hamilton is a chef and the owner of the restaurant Prune in New York City.  She is also, as I established from reading this memoir, a very confusing and not very nice person.  Well, at least as she portrays herself here.  But then that's the risk of putting out the story of your life for anyone to pick up, isn't it?  Total randos like me, who've never met you, can totally judge you.  And judge I did.

This book is divided into three different parts, following the title: Blood, Bones, and Butter.  Blood follows Hamilton's childhood, the first chapter of which seems to be happy, and the rest of which is about her rather misspent use doing drugs and wandering Europe.  Are there wonderful, heartwarming moments scattered throughout?  Yes, there are.  Her time spent in France sounds lovely, as does her time in Greece.  But then you balance that about the coke-snorting waitress who maintains she earned $90,000 in a year and spent it all on drugs, and you have to wonder a little bit, now don't you?  But still.  She was young.  Life moves on.  She apparently got over her drug problems, decided to further her education in a more traditional sense.  We move on to Bones.

Bones follows her as she goes to Michigan to get her master's degree and also through several different stages of her professional career, from working as the cook at a summer camp to being a high-energy catering champ to opening and running Prune.  This is probably the most diverse portion of the book, and it's also where I started really raising my eyebrows.  The affair, with a man who she apparently finds relatively attractive given that she references making out with him, having sex with him one every available surface, etc. despite her professions that she's a lesbian.  The fact that she married a man, and stayed married to him for ten years (they are now divorced, FYI; thank you, Wikipedia) looking for a deep and meaningful relationship when she apparently knew from the beginning it wouldn't be that way and that the marriage was really for a green card; the way that she portrayed her mother so flatteringly and then as such a raving bitch and then as a wonderful person once again; the way that she acts so superior to everyone else, says that she got over that, and then continues on with it... All of this made me not like Hamilton very much at all.  Here's the thing: I felt like I couldn't trust her.

I know, I know.  People are complicated creatures.  We have many facets.  This also applies to both Hamilton and all of the people she portrays.  But at the same time, when you write a memoir, you're really going through a reflection process and, one would think, clarifying some things not only for yourself but for others.  The things that come out in memoirs tend to be a bit more focused than thoughts running around our heads every day of our lives because of the time and process of writing and focusing them.  That doesn't seem to have been the case here, and also makes me side-eye the memoir as a whole.

Then there's the third part, Butter, which deals mostly with her in-laws and children and the time that she spent with them (and her husband) in Italy, where her husband is from.  This was a lovely part, overall, other than the continuing issues Hamilton as a person that I just couldn't bring myself to get over.  She has a terrible relationship with her husband, and go figure; they live apart, they don't communicate, and yet she seems completely baffled that this marriage, which was formulated on very flimsy pretexts to begin with, isn't a fairy tale.  And she seems to think that all of this is her husband's fault.  I can't even go into this any further, because the amount of justifications that she offers for as to why none of her terrible relationships are her fault, but rather entirely due to other people, are just so mind-boggling that I really can't even.

This is a wonderfully written book--Hamilton has a way of describing food, and places, and even people in a way that makes them seem to live and breathe.  Her way of writing food is mouth-watering and made me crave foods that I have, actually, tried, and didn't like, which is a real talent.  And I could practically see the places she went and the things she did.  The writing at various places is absolutely beautiful.  But there's also the part where this book is apparently about "The inadvertent education of a reluctant chef," and it's debatable whether that's really the case.  There are episodes that contribute to this, of course.  Her time working in Michigan definitely falls into this category, as do her travels.  I think this all really comes out when she's looking at opening Prune.  But beyond that, this seems like an angry dump about, again, all of those terrible relationships that aren't even a little bit due to her participation in them.

This was such a mixed bag of a book for me.  The parts about food and growing professionally were wonderful.  The few parts where she seemed to look honestly at her relationships were good.  But then she would backtrack and start angrily building up a case for why all of her relationships are all crap and it's not her fault that they are, because everyone else is terrible and she's not.  I just don't buy it, and it really tarnished the book as a whole for me, because these parts took up so much room that I think could have been put to better purpose.  Overall, as far as memoirs, and particularly "food" marketed memoirs, go, I think that there are better ones than this.

2 stars out of 5.

Climbing the Mango Trees - Mathur Jaffrey

This title came to me via the virtual book club over at The Deliberate Reader.  I've been following along via the club (which discusses via Facebook) but haven't actually read most of the selections because, well, I've been doing other things.  But July's book was The Cuckoo's Calling, which I read earlier this year.  I joined in the discussion and had such a good time that I decided to bump the other books up on my priorities list!  I won't be reading September's book, which is Hannah Kent's Burial Rites, because I read it a while ago and don't care enough for it to re-read, but I'll spend the rest of this month and next catching up on the other titles for the year that I haven't read, and join back in for October.

Madhur Jaffrey is apparently a chef and an actress, but I had honestly never heard of her until I picked up this book.  She grew up in India in the years of WWII and India's independence.  Her family lived in a multi-family setup in the area of Delhi.  Jaffrey was a fairly privileged child, as far as I can tell.  Her father managed various factories, but they could afford private schools and private drivers and could go on vacations in the hill resorts that involved servants packing picnics and renting out multiple houses for the family to stay in.  Because of this, I don't think this is a really good example of what "life in India" was like.  Granted, it's a memoir, and therefore limited to Jaffrey's view--but I'm also reading another memoir currently, that of Malala Yousafzai, and I think that one does a good job of including not only Malala's experiences but a broader view of how life in her area was in general.  I don't think Jaffrey quite managed to do that.

The memoir is very food-focused but not in the way that many food books are.  Jaffrey admits to not being interested in cooking until later in life, past the point in time at which this memoir occurs.  Why would she have been?  Her family had servants to cook for them, and while it seems like the family as a whole was more involved with food for special occasions, Jaffrey focuses more on other aspects of those--for example, the throwing of paint pigments and such during Holi--than on the food.  Consequently, there's talk of food but not a real understanding of it.  I know that Jaffrey possesses that understanding as an adult, but she keeps it entirely removed from the years of her childhood that are depicted in this book.  The last forty pages or so are recipes for some of the things that she discusses in the book, and I guess it's there that the real appreciation and understanding is meant to be conveyed; but as much as I love food and cooking, I'm not going to sit down and read forty pages of recipes, so that was kind of lost on me.

Something else that I found rather lacking in this was a larger sense of what was going on.  Jaffrey was in India for the time of both the second World War and India's independence, and yet, except for a few small excerpts such as going to watch Ghandi speak once, a sense of any of this going on is completely absent.  This memoir could have place at almost any point in history, because there's nothing there to ground it.  Even if Jaffrey didn't pay much attention to those things at the time, I feel like she could have put in a little bit of "looking back" perspective that would have helped to anchor this memoir in that specific era.

Overall, I didn't really enjoy this book.  I think that Jaffrey (or her ghostwriter; I'm always so skeptical of memoirs like this) didn't actually have a lot to say because she doesn't really have any compelling experiences behind her, at least not in this particular point of her life.  While that makes for a happy childhood, it doesn't really make for an interesting one.  It's the old "every happy family is happy in the same way, but every unhappy family is unique" thing, or however the quote goes.  The points that stood out at this were the unhappy ones, such as when her parents were so devastated that they had to re-join the bigger family because of her father's job changing, and knowing that it would put an end to the happy independence they'd had for several years.  But as for the rest...it's a steady stream of frolicking that I don't think really had much of a larger message or purpose lingering behind it, which made for boring reading.  The writing itself isn't bad, but there's not really any compelling content to propel it along.

2 stars out of 5.