And if you were a spirit, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then there you would wait for someone to return, and the story to unfold. Mark Helprin’s Winter's Tale was a magical enthralling ode to New York City and the first and only book I wanted to read after 9/11, despite having originally read it when I lived in NYC . It’s a timeless tale ... Read More...
The Forgiven
The suburbs of Tangiers were ruined, but the gardens were still there. And so were the crippled lemon trees and olives, the dogged disillusion and empty factories, the smell of seething young men. A sybaritic weekend in the Saharan desert of Morocco, at a fantastically renovated fortress compound. Richard and Dally have invited friends from around the globe and for Londoners, ... Read More...
The Headmaster’s Wager
In 1930 Percival Chen’s father left him and his mother in mainland China to go to Vietnam and seek his fortune. He never returned and so, after his mother’s death, Percival left their province to go to school in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the Japanese invasion in 1941 meant that Hong Kong was no longer safe, but it precipitated Percival’s marriage to a young beauty much above ... Read More...
Sometimes a Great Notion
When I learned that Ken Kesey grew up in Oregon I thought I was long overdue to read one of his books. I had seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and didn’t think I needed to revisit that subject so I opted for his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. The story is set in Oregon logging country in the early 1960s. It catches the Stamper family (aptly named) at the height of ... Read More...
In Between Days
He looks out the window to his left and notices a small row of brown stucco houses, all old and somewhat disheveled, and realizes then, with something like panic, with something like fear, that he doesn’t actually know where he is, that he must have made a wrong turn somewhere, that somehow, in this city where he’s grown up, this city where he’s lived all his life, he is ... Read More...
Yes, Chef: A Memoir
The odds that Marcus Samuelsson would survive infancy were slim. That he would not only survive but would go on to become a world famous chef is almost beyond reckoning. And yet, he did. In his memoir Yes, Chef, he writes of his life, not just in the kitchen but from his childhood as the adoptee of a Swedish family to the pinnacle of his career, cooking at the White House for ... Read More...
