Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton

Blood, Bones & Butter is not just another book for foodies. Gourmands will enjoy it, but so will almost any reader who likes a good story with offbeat characters. There's not a single recipe in this book whose cover depicts a chicken's head turned upside down -- perhaps reflecting the way life has at times been for author/chef Gabrielle Hamilton, neither predictable nor conventional.

I cannot recall a single paragraph where Hamilton, owner of Manhattan's popular Prune restaurant, waxes eloquently about the taste of green vs. white asparagus, oysters on the half shell or a mirepoix.

What Hamilton does is wax, usually with eloquent writing and often with earthy language, about a life spent learning to survive and even thrive in the kitchen and, more importantly, with her own family and her husband's -- with food somehow almost always at center stage. Her work in the food industry has not always been a pretty job. She writes of almost being arrested once in her low-wage waitress days. She recalls later cleaning up "legions of cockroaches," human excrement, rotten apples and the remains of a dead rat.

Clearly, a chef who will clean up a stranger's excrement rather than delegate that chore to a subordinate is likely not prone to food snobbery. Indeed, Hamilton, who's more akin to Anthony Bourdain than Daniel Boulud, once even mentions how unimpressed she was by a meal at one of New York's most upscale restaurants. Still, food is a big part of Hamilton's story -- her memories of it as child at family meals, her dependence on it to make a living as a young adult and finally her adventure with and love of good food and those around her who also celebrate it and, like her, want to learn more about it.

Hamilton is also nothing but candid about herself. She writes of her strengths; she writes of her weaknesses. She writes of her own indecisiveness. She writes of her lesbian lovers followed by her Italian husband and never fully explains the change in lifestyles, sounding a bit baffled by it herself. The couple have two children but have never lived together.

Hamilton tells her life story almost as if she were talking, without dressing up her language or her actions over the years. The same goes for those who have played major roles, good or bad, in her life. Her parents, who divorced when she was a child, come across as more than a little negligent. Her in-laws, whom she sees once a year in Italy, fare much better despite the lack of demonstrative love between Gabrielle and her husband. I say "demonstrative" because it's clear that Hamilton wants more from her husband, that she wants him to suggest a romantic evening or such even though he is more concerned with getting the latest iPhone.

Because of the first-person narration, the reader sees all of the characters in Hamilton's life through her point of view, an unflinchingly opinionated one at that.

Hamilton is not only a gifted chef but also holds a master of fine arts degree in fiction writing. She is a visual artist as well. Just look at the picture of the bloody asparagus at the front of her book.

Hamilton's memoir is interesting and, for the most part, well-done. At times, though, I found her writing rough and hard to follow -- a bit uneven just as Hamilton's own life has been.

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje

At 269 pages, Michael Ondaatje's newest novel, The Cat's Table, is reasonably short. As a result, Ondaatje leaves the reader wanting to know more about different characters and plotlines. Isn't that what a good book should do?

So many authors today write what they apparently perceive to be epics and leave no room for a reader's imagination. In 500, 700, 950 pages and more, they share every detail -- past, present and future -- with the reader, leaving little, if anything, to the imagination.

The imagination is what allows intelligent people to disagree at times about parts of a book's plot, to wonder what happens to the characters after the work's final page, to have differing interpretations of an ending.

The imagination is what allows a child to read C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia solely as fantasy. It is what allows that same person, once an adult, to read the same series for biblical themes as well as fantasy. Imagination is what left me grasping for more information, searching the Internet for clues to the meaning of the ending of Audrey Niffenegger's wonderful novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, and to wonder even more about the symbolism, if any, in her adult graphic novel, The Night Bookmobile.

A long book is not necessarily bad anymore than a short one is necessarily good. I've read excellent long books. But I've also read some that could and should have been shorter. I liked Stephen King's 11/22/63, for instance. But I also thought it was excessively long and repetitious. Just as a good reporter is not necessarily a good writer, an author who excels at plot is not necessarily a good writer.

The Cat's Table is not a book I expected to like but ended up thoroughly enjoying. A man named Michael and nicknamed Mynah narrates the story. He recalls a three-week voyage from Sri Lanka to London that he took as an 11-year-old boy along with two other young boys. Aboard the ship, the youngsters were relegated to eat, not at the captain's table, but at the less-desirable "cat's table." While at sea, the youngsters did as many unsupervised little boys might do -- they snooped around, got into trouble and played in places that were off-limits to them -- the ship's upper-class swimming pool, for example.

Along the way, the boys encountered a bizarre group of passengers: a woman who stashed pigeons in her pockets; a botanist; a prisoner escorted in chains; a pretty cousin who sparked Mynah's sexual desires at a time when he likely was entering puberty; a murder at sea; a savvy thief who uses the little boy to crawl through small spaces to steal expensive items from the rooms of first-class guests.

Ondaatje, who also wrote The English Patient, has said he took a similar voyage when he was a lad. Yet, his book includes a disclaimer saying it is not autobiographical. With his own memories for inspiration and his talent for story-telling and writing, Ondaatje has created a book that is believable yet incredible and also restrained. With the last, he has allowed the reader to wonder about his story's unanswered questions and to wish the novel had not ended.

Coming Up & What I'm Reading Now.....

Now reading: Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, essays by Anna Quindlen, one of my favorite authors.

Coming soon will be thoughts on:

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman.

Messenger of Truth, a Maisie Dobbs mystery.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading by NPR's Maureen Corrigan.
Writers on Writing, essays first published in The New York Times.

Soon to read: Room.


And more.

A Note to Readers

Books I discuss on this blog often have already been reviewed by many others. So, I tend to offer more personal thoughts about the books I read than traditional reviews. While I generally say whether I like a book and why I feel that way, I often write about what the book meant to me or aspects of writing and life that it brought to mind. I hope you enjoy the entries and offer your own comments as well.