The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman

Allegra Goodman's novel, The Cookbook Collector, has been on bookshelves since 2010. Some of you many have already read it. Others may look at the title, think it's about cookbooks and skip it. Please don't. The novel, which takes place between the fall of 1999 and October 2001, is about people, life and loves -- whether tangible or not.

The cookbook aspect is one small portion of the novel, and it comes late. I would have liked to have seen it explored more thoroughly and earlier. But when Goodman does deal with it, she does so expertly and, to some degree, symbolically.

Rather than cookbooks, the novel is about people with imbalanced lives, about two very different sisters. Both are smart. The younger one, Jessamine Bach, is a doctoral student studying philosophy. She is content to work as an assistant in a used bookstore, doesn't worry about money or fashion, and for a time is controlled by a man with his own political agenda. Emily Bach is older, practical, a financially successful businesswoman in a fledgling Internet business. She, too, is in love with a colleague, Jonathan. Like her, work, decor and the stock market are paramount for him.

As different as the sisters are, I see parts of myself in both, as well as in other characters Goodman has created.

Like Tom McClintock, I collect cookbooks but don't cook much. When I do, I most enjoy stirring in the unexpected -- the herb, the spice, the Peruvian sea salt or the Syrian pepper flakes nowhere to be found on the recipe. I like to make it my own recipe.

Like the philosophical and tree-hugging Jessamine Bach, I hunger for books, old and new, even when I am surrounded by them. I have little money but find enough to plant trees and shrubs for the birds, gangly milkweed for the monarchs and bee balm for the honey bees and hummingbirds.

Like Jess, I'm not always practical. I write and sometimes reveal major financial problems at a public institution and wonder how could the bankers and the accountants not have recognized them before I did. After all, I've not balanced my checkbook since hippies were in style.

Like Jess' older sister, Emily Bach, I focused the first 25 years of my adult life on my career. Relationships came second, third, often not at all. I was single in the big city, Chicago. I lived a couple blocks from the Magnificent Mile and cabbed it to The Art Institute. So many opportunities, so many people. Yet, I could look out my high-rise apartment window and see my real home -- a tall, gorgeous black-and-gold building that housed The Associated Press offices where I worked.

Goodman's book has other subplots that will interest different readers. The sisters' mother, who died when they were young, was Jewish, a religion and culture they begin to explore during the book. The growth of Internet businesses and the speculation that went with them form another subplot as do the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and their impact on people's lives and the economy.

Finally, readers may want to visit Allegra Goodman's website -- allegragoodman.com -- and look at the first question she poses for reading groups: "Who is the cookbook collector in this novel?" Maybe I'll talk about that another time.

The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister

Erica Bauermeister's debut novel, The School of Essential Ingredients, is the kind of book you read to relax, enjoy and feel better.

The book isn't what I had expected. It's not really food writing. Rather, it is a series of linked stories about the lives of Lillian, who teaches a cooking class, and her eight students. They range from a couple who survived a long-ago affair and a woman with early-stage Alzheimer's to a lonely widower and a young mother needing time for herself once again. Food is merely the force that unites the group and that symbolizes the diverse, unexpected ingredients that make up our lives.

Beauermeister's prose is simple and effective. She is particularly good at dialogue. The book's only flaw is that things seem to work out too conveniently for everyone. But maybe that's not a flaw in this kind of book. Maybe the hope that things, problems, will eventually work out is one of the "essential ingredients" we need in our own lives and occasionally in our reading as well.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

I don't know why I waited so many years to read William Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness novel, As I Lay Daying. But it spoke to me in ways it likely would not have when I was in my 20s or 30s.

In my 30s, I had not been married, had no children and lived in Chicago even though I grew up in rural Arkansas. I worked in a job where I generally was surrounded by intelligent people. None of us seemed old -- not even those of us who were. We lived.

Now, though, I am married. Like many marriages, it's had good and bad times. I now have a 10-year-old daughter, adopted late in life during a trip to China. I now live in the South, in a town less rural and more educated than Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. I work alone, but just yesterday a man who might have easily been Anse Bundren walked into my office. He smelled, he hated, he was clearly the boss in his family -- one where a little girl's head was shaved rather than spend money on a good haircut and lice shampoo. For a time, he was Anse Bundren. I suspect he always will be.

I've seen Addie Bundren, too. She's in Chicago, Conway, everywhere. But I do think she's more common in the South, where women and children are quickly put down if they stand up too much to male authority, even when the man is of Anse Bundren's quality. She suffers; she endures; she seeks happiness but never finds it. She is married but neither loves nor is loved by her spouse. Never has been. She knows "that the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead."

If you're young, read this book. But read it again in 20 or 40 years. It's as timely now as it was when Faulkner wrote it in 1930.

YOUR TURN

Now, it's your turn. Please make a comment and share the title of a book you've recently read and enjoyed. Just click on COMMENTS immediately below this post and type your thoughts in the space provided, then click on Post Comment. Thank you! dhs

Just Kids by Patti Smith

Patti Smith's memoir of her time with the late artist Robert Mapplethorpe is a love story. The book tells of the young couple's love and passion for each other and for art.

While the pair's love at first is a romantic, sexual one, the relationship changes as Maplethorpe becomes interested in other men and as Smith slowly accepts his homosexuality. Her acceptance is somewhat of a reluctant one, allowing for the pair's love to transcend sex and become a platonic one.

Smith's memoir also reflects the changes in Maplethorpe's art and photography, from religious works to what many would view as sacreligeous works. My own view is that Maplethorpe likely saw his art neither as religious nor sacreligeous; to him, the works, no matter how offensive to others, were just art, albeit often with a shock value and eventually a hefty price tag.

The book has plenty of name-dropping, from Janis Joplin to Jimi Hendrix to Sam Shepard. In each case, Smith is remembering her time with the famous, whether for only a few moments or for much longer as with Shepard, already a successful playwright in the 70s. At the time, Smith was young and in awe of these talented, already-successful artists, so her memories of their encounters are vivid.

The edition I read includes some photographs of Smith and Maplethorpe as well as photographs by Maplethorpe. It also includes an addendum of sorts with a picture of Maplethorpe's desk and a summary of what happened to it after his death in 1989 from AIDS.

Smith is not only a talented musician and artist but also an excellent writer. Her words seem to flow freely, naturally -- at times seriously and at other times with a slight laugh at her and Robert's youth.

The book reminded me of my own college years during the Vietnam era. I didn't have the controversy in my life that Mapplethorpe and Smith did. But I did have the idealism and the view that, with others, I could effect political and social change. And we did.

If you like this book as much as I did, you may want to check out Smith's website.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

This little book says more in its 197 pages than most of the 300- and 400-page books I have read. Set during Mao's Cultural Revolution, which was at its height in the 1960s and 70s, Dai Sijie's simply yet wonderfully written novel tells the story of two young men -- a violinist and a prominent dentist's son -- who are ordered to leave their comfortable and cultural lives in the city for a remote mountain community where they will be "re-educated." Their job there is to haul human and animal manure.

But while there, the two find a suitcase packed with books by Western authors from Balzac to Flaubert to Dickens. Because knowledge is power and a sign of rebellion against Mao, the boys must handle the books carefully, for the novels are not only treasures but also the equivalent of contraband in China.

While on Phoenix Mountain the boys also get to know a pretty young woman known simply as the little seamstress. They tell her and her aging father stories from the books they have read and re-read, The Count of Monte Crisco, Madame Bovary and more.

As a result, the little seamstress learns of Western ways and, hence, gains knowledge and power, too.

The author, a filmmaker, was born in China in 1954. He was "re-educated" between 1971 and 1974 and left China for France in 1984. He wrote this first novel in French. Ina Rilke translated it.

As I read this book, I realized two things. First, I shall save it for my daughter, who was born in China in 2001. I hope she will read this book when she is older to learn more about her homeland's history. I also realized more than ever how many Westerners, including myself, do not realize the treasure, the freedom we hold in our hands each time we read a novel, a poem or other works of literature.

Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear

Like the previous Maisie Dobbs mysteries, this one -- the third of the investigator/psychologist adventures -- again draws readers into World War I and its aftermath.

This book, set in about 1930 as Adolph Hitler was coming to power in Germany and as England and France were still recovering from The Great War, focuses on Dobbs' efforts to confirm that two of her clients' relatives were, in fact, killed during the war as the British government said they were. An unrelated subplot deals with the case of a 14-year-old girl accused of murder, unjustly so in Maisie Dobbs' view.

Author Jacqueline Winspear further develops Maisie's relationship with Dr. Andrew Dene in this novel and has Maisie amd readers wondering whether her trust in her longtime mentor, Maurice Blanche, has been misplaced. The book also delves into the world of those who claim to have a sixth sense and know what others do not. Winspear, through her characters, also explores the question of whether some lies are pardonable and suggests they, indeed, are.

The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors by Michele Young-Stone

If lightning strikes you, your first and correct impulse probably would be to call 911 -- or have someone call for you. And if you're a character in Michele Young-Stone's debut novel, The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors, your next impulse might be 1.) learning how to avoid another strike and 2.) how to live with life after lightning.

In Young-Stone's novel, two children of the South -- Becca Burke, who is stricken twice and who also witnesses a beloved dog's death by lightning, and Buckley Pitank, a boy who loses the only person who really loves him, his mother, to a bolt of lightning -- are forever changed emotionally by their experiences. Becca becomes an artist, leaves North Carolina for New York where her artworks reflect her encounters with lightning. Buckley, who grows up in a small, rural community of northwest Arkansas, ultimately flees his selfish grandmother and money-grubbing, preaching step-dad.

Like Becca, Buckley becomes obsessed with lightning, so much so that he tries to set himself up for a non-fatal strike. He writes a book, a manual to help lightning-strike survivors and, through it, has his first contact with Becca. It's not giving away much to say the two characters, who lead separate but similar and lonely lives, will eventually meet. What makes the book so interesting is the paths that lead them together and the paths they take afterward.

The novel is more about loneliness and dysfunctional families than lightning, which ultimately is just the medium that brings their despair to the forefront and that unites the book's main protagonists.

The book is fast-paced and an easy read. It's occasionally sad and full of good, bad and even clueless characters. Check it out; it's a different and enjoyable read.

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

Nicole Krauss' novel The History of Love is a wonderful and mysterious story spanning 60 years, two continents (Europe and North America) and more than a few lonely, confused, even disturbed people. It's also a book in a book. Not surprisingly, the book within the book isn't that good, though only excerpts appear.

Krauss' novel, however, is truly a good read. It leaves the reader wanting more, wondering what lies ahead for certain characters even after the last page. The novel is rather confusing, perhaps intentionally so. After all, the various narrators who tell the story are confused about their own lives, their own history. One seeks proof of his own existence. Another is translating a book for a man who does not really exist. One is unaware that he is a published author. A young boy is building an ark for the next great flood. A young girl, Alma, works to solve the mystery of who everyone is -- including the other Alma for whom she is named.

Leopold Gursky, a Polish immigrant and the novel's main character, is a Holocaust survivor, one who hid in the woods, foraging for food, even eating bugs and rats. Alma, the young woman he loved, pregnant with his child, left Europe amid the Nazi threat. That child grew up to be the acclaimed author Gursky had yearned to be.

The Holocaust is long over, and yet Gurksy is still alone in the woods, a lonely man in a New York apartment with a similar solitary friend, very likely an imaginary friend. Gursky drops things in stores and asks odd questions so that people, at least one person, will notice him each day -- so that he will not die having gone unremembered that day, almost to verify his own existence.

I enjoyed the novel but believe it needs read twice. No doubt a second read would highlight details, names that might go unnoticed in the first read. The novel also is replete with literary allusions, which could be better appreciated on a second read.

The novel is, not a study, but a detailed, mysterious look at human loneliness, human desires, human frailties, human hopes, human memories, humanity's connection. A World War II soldier's oversight, a man's plagiarism, a first name repeated, an old man's curiosity and a young girl's persistence interact in ways no single character ever foresaw and together form The History of Love.

Memorable Lines

From William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying in a chapter narrated by the dying Addie Bundren: "My father said that the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead. I knew at last what he meant and that he could not have known what he meant himself, because a man cannot know anything about cleaning up the house afterward. And so I have cleaned my house."
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From the preface to Jacqueline Winspear's Pardonable Lies appears this quotation from Sophocles' Creusa:
"Truly, to tell lies is not honorable;/
but when the truth entails tremendous ruin,
to speak dishonorably is pardonable."
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From Nicole Krauss' The History of Love, a novel: "Really, there isn't much to say./He was a great writer./He fell in love. It was his life."
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From Audrey Niffenegger's "After Words" in The Night Bookmobile, a graphic novel: "In the same way that perfume captures the essence of a flower, these shelves of books were a distillation of my life."
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From A.L. Kennedy's short-story collection, What Becomes, these lines appear in "Edinburgh" -- "She gave him books. The same words that were in her mind, now in yours, still warm."
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From "Alex & Me" by Irene Pepperberg, a memoir in which the African Grey parrot's last words to owner and scientist Pepperberg include: "You be good. I love you."
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From French writer Muriel Barbery's novel Gourmet Rhapsody about an ailing food critic, his food memories and the last food he craves: "He dies."
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