by Edward Lee

Chef Edward Lee travels the country, eats food, and apparently wastes food, as the humongous amounts of food he reports ordering at restaurants cannot possibly be eaten by him. I just can’t believe he eats all that. And he doesn’t bring a traveling companion save in one chapter.

He visits New Orleans, Clarksdale, Montgomery, Indiana, and lots of other places. The chapters generally provide some introduction, some talk about the logistics of travel, interviews with chefs, and eating, and conclusion.

The most memorable was his chapter of visiting Detroit, a city with a large Muslim population, during Ramadan. He decides to try the sunup-to-sundown fasting. Yet he sticks to his plan of visiting restaurants and talking to chefs and ordering a ton of food – and photographing it and talking about it – just not eating it. I was intrigued why someone would torture himself that way. When sundown is moments away, and he orders a big meal at a restaurant that he can actually eat immediately, a fellow faster frowns at him. He tells him he should break his fast with something humble; the fast is about showing solidarity with the poor, so it would be more fitting to order something humble. Besides (here it comes) all that heavy food you just ordered would just make you sick if you ate it right away.

I wasn’t particularly grabbed by any other chapters. Lee seems likeable enough. I couldn’t help comparing it to EAT A PEACH by David Chang, another Korean chef memoirist. But unlike Chang, Lee is not into writing about his restaurants, or even himself, very much. They are very different books.

by Gretchen Rubin

A sequel to THE HAPPINESS PROJECT. Gretchen Rubin once again undertakes methodical, highly planned projects, or ‘resolutions’, to increase her levels of happiness. It’s hard for me not to relate to Gretchen, even though she does have kids. She’s a redhead. She twirls her hair. “Whenever possible,” she reads while she eats. She “dislike[s] talking on the phone.” There’s all that damn methodicalness. But maybe best of all, she flat-out refuses to try meditation.

She states up front that this is going to be HER happiness project; what works for her won’t work for everyone, but there’s still value in documenting her own personal journey, which can be a template or jumping-off point for readers whose mileage varies. OK, but she still gets way too deep in the weeds occasionally. I totally skipped the email exchanges with her sister about some collaboration they were going to do – I think it was a young adult mystery book? Why do I need to read all their emails about it? Suffice to say that collaboration was a source of happiness. And this weird project of building a little diorama in their kitchen cupboard also needed editing.

I like how she handles the most common criticisms leveled at her.

• “You really must meditate if you’re going to say anything about happiness.” Response: “Hmm.”
• Paraphrasing here: But you can’t aim directly at happiness; you have to simply do things that will cultivate happiness as a side effect. Response: How is that different than aiming directly at it? What concrete things are you doing to cultivate happiness as a side effect? How are they different than things you’d do to try to be happy directly? This is a really good point, once you start to think about it.
• And paraphrasing here: ugh, all those tasks you set for yourself! All those resolutions! Sounds so tiring! Happiness doesn’t come from being busy. Busyness is a distraction. Response: Works for me!

Her ultimate mantra, after all, is to be herself. Which isn’t a bad mantra. I wonder if she’s considered meditating on it.

by Raymond Chandler

A classic from 1939, made into a Bogart/Bacall movie in 1946, featuring private detective Philip Marlowe. I had never read one of these in my life. It was a real hoot. Philip Marlowe’s always got the deadpan response, whether he’s facing down a hot tomato or a Luger. Then the plot got too convoluted for me.

by Adam Platt

I really bought this based on the title. Adam Platt, with whom I was not familiar, is/was restaurant critic for New York (not The New Yorker) magazine. This is something of a food-focused memoir. We learn a little about his strange parents and stranger upbringing in Asian countries, then a little about his career in journalism and becoming a NYC restaurant critic. It’s somewhat repetitive. He uses the word “dyspeptic” to describe himself way too many times. There aren’t too many really stand-out moments. A chapter where he decides to bring five 4-year-olds to the fanciest restaurant in town is unusually lively and engaging, but it’s an exception.

by Peter Singer

This is an oldish book (2009) I picked up; it’s a bit dated, and I’ve heard all of Singer’s arguments before, but I guess I just like hearing them.

Singer’s out to get everyone to give more of their resources to the poorest of the poor. If you wouldn’t pass by a child drowning in a pond, how can you not give a small sum of money to save a child’s life across the world?

He attempts to refute all the common reasons we have for not giving more. He emphasizes the goal is not to guilt people, but to create a culture where more giving becomes the norm.

One thing that surprised me, until I remembered how old the book was – he says that of course we don’t want to just give people money. That fosters dependence and doesn’t change the institutions that keep them poor. I think he has since changed his tune, since his website, https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/, now lists Give Directly as a recommended charity. Give Directly flat out gives money to people. That’s all they do. That’s why I love them. I am fully convinced that giving poor people money is the best way to go. They don’t become dependent. They improve their circumstances. They often start or improve their businesses. And that is how they can begin to change their own institutions.

by Kati Marton

“WIr schaffen das.”

“We can handle it” is the translation given here. It is what Chancellor Angela Merkel said at a news conference about how Germany was going to handle the surging refugee crisis in 2015. I remember hearing this. In my memory, which may not be perfect, the question was particularly what was going to happen if the rest of Europe did not step up to the challenge. The emphasis was on the “Wir,” “we”, meaning Germany. If the rest of Europe did not step up, well, Germany would handle it. Germany would do what was right. And they did. This is when I first considered Merkel a personal hero.

“The fact that one million refugees had been allowed into Germany was, of course, the headline of 2015. However, an equally startling figure…: six million to seven million Germans helped them.”

“For Germany’s self-image – and how the rest of the world regards the former Third Reich – Angela Merkel’s regugee policy has been transformational. Nothing short of astonishing is the fact that the country responsible for the Holocaust is now regarded as the world’s moral center.”

This book is really a gem. It never devolves into a boring litany of Germany political mundanity (“first the Socialist Democrats formed a coalition with the Democratic Socialists who in turn…”). It has a somewhat chronological arc without being strictly chronological; after some straightforward early life biography, the book is divided into chapters which showcase different aspects of Merkel’s chancellorship: a chapter on the refugee crisis; one each on her relationships with W. Bush, Obama, and Trump; one on Ukraine (written alas before the latest invasion); etc. It really sustains interest.

Merkel has a doctorate in physics, as does her husband (who avoids all media attention and just likes to do his physics in peace). She honestly doesn’t seem to have gone into politics for any reason other than to get things done. She does her own shopping. The most lovable photo is captioned thus:

“Shortly after her heartfelt warning to the nation regarding the looming Covid pandemic, the chancellor was seen shopping in her neighborhood grocery store. Note that there are more bottles of wine in her cart than rolls of toilet paper. Merkel beseeched her countrymen not to hoard.”

Hero!

by Lena Andersson

“From the day she found language and ideas and realized where her mission lay, she renounced expensive living, ate cheaply, was always careful about contraception, only traveled rationally, had never been in debt to the bank or to any private person, and did not get herself into situations that forced her away from what she wanted to spend her time doing: reading, thinking, writing, and debating.”

Until, of course, now.

This short novel is about the woman described above, and how she abruptly falls in love. It is a literally excruciating look at self-deception. Ester’s love is unrequited and undeserved. Over and over, we wince as we read some variation on: “She thought: I should walk away. But I don’t want to. I want to stand here with him. It’s the only place in the world I want to be.” As Lionel Shriver says on a back-cover blurb: “Alas, most women have lived this story.”

by Thomas Sowell

He comes across as a really belligerent person. On one page, he’ s in a shouting match with a VP in his organization, and on the next, he is referring to a copy editor’s “idiotic questions.”

I also thought it was weird he never once mentioned the name of his first wife; married 9 years and mother of his two children. She’s just “my wife.” Also, I didn’t bookmark it, but I was floored in a passing remark he makes about this wife “insisting” on resuming her career after the children were born. The nerve.

So how was it as a memoir? In the preface, he promises that he will not try to “tell an exhaustive story.” But I did feel at the beginning that we were getting every little nook and cranny of remembrance he could come up with, which often felt like paths that led nowhere. I picked up this book because I thought it would be interesting to read about the life and intellectual development of a Black conservative thinker. Sowell started out as a Marxist. How did his thinking evolve? How did he come to be at odds with with Marxism and with the other Black “leaders” (he always puts that in quotes) of his time? There wasn’t much narrative arc to answer that question. The book read more like an overgrown curriculum vitae.

by Chuck Klosterman

You say it’s two thousand WHAT? And I’m fifty-WHO? The nineties were just a few years ago, weren’t they?

This book was absolutely scrumptious. If I have a complaint, it was that it was almost too good to read for an hour at a time. It’s essays, and almost every one is fantastic; and getting to the end of one was often like when you want to turn off the music when one of your favorite songs ends. Maybe I’m the only one who does that? Oh. Moving on…

The essays don’t follow a narrative or temporal arc. Normally I might feel that to be a detraction. I loves me some strong plot lines. But real life doesn’t follow arcs, and that’s what this was about: what the nineties were really like. You have to accept whatever comes next.

Let’s put it this way, which is a good starting point: “Among the generations that have yet to go extinct, Generation X remains the least annoying.” Two words: Hear and Hear!

The “remember when” vibe is there in full force, but in ways that make you think. “Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner. If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it.”

The most important thing about the nineties, though, and what he gets, over and over, is… how GOOD they were. Everything was really going… well. The economy? Boom. The cold war? Over. It was all going to be fine, and it didn’t really matter all that much who was going to be president or not… really, at the end of the day, one choice was as good as another. “Did the direction of change even matter? What’s the worst that could happen?” Exactly. I fooled around with third party candidates and affiliations; it was a good time to do that. I distinctly remember a friend of mine feeling slightly put off to see a protest against George W. Bush winning the election. Making a big deal about it seemed almost unseemly.

The entire Ted Kaczynski chapter was phenomenal. I take it back that I had only one complaint; this isn’t so much a complaint as a reaction of shock: WHERE ARE THE SIMPSONS? Could it be Klosterman just wasn’t that into them? But… sputter… that couldn’t be. Could it be he didn’t think they really had that much effect on the culture? I’m not culturally literate enough to really opine; but they were HUGE to me and everyone I knew. They got literally one reference.

It started with NEVERMIND and ended with the Twin Towers. Those were the nineties. And I’m Gen X, so the nineties are me: they were when I built myself.

by Alice Munro

These are classic short stories, the kind that end on a heavy ponderous note, without really have taught you anything or done anything other than get you really invested in a plot that then suddenly ends. And that is why I am not a fan of short stories – I read this for book club. I prefer the strong narrative arc of a novel. I was particularly invested when one of the stories was a continuation of the previous one, but then that streak ended at two. It also became tiresome to me that all the stories took place in the past, during a time when women wore dresses and had no worries other than who they would marry. If I’m going to read a book about a past era, I want it written in that era; then I guess I know I’m dealing with something authentic, and not an author who’s just guessing. There, I think that sums up all my negativity; at least I’ll say, I was interested in each story and character. Just vaguely annoyed each time a story ended and I was reminded, “Oh, that’s right, short story”.