Summer Books!

By far the best thing I read over vacation was food historian Michael Twitty’s The Cooking Gene.  Twitty re-enacts the slave kitchens of 18th century American plantations, but his project is so much more than that as he demonstrates that what we think of as “American” or “Southern” food is directly informed by the cuisines of Africa and the Caribbean.

Kim Young-ha’s newest, I Hear Your Voice, didn’t work for me.  I’d recommend any of his other novels in English before this one.  Also, while violence and darkness are always part of his books, here the gang rape and torture feels kind of gratuitous rather than deserved.

I’ll admit, China Mieville’s October, a dramatic retelling of the Russian Revolution, was kind of over my head.  Other than Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, I had a really hard time simply keeping people’s names straight.  Not a bad book by any means, but I probably should have stuck to a more conventional historical introduction.

Finally, Lauren Beukes The Shining Girls was a drag.  I’d heard lots of good things about it but read her much better, more layered Broken Monsters instead.

I guess almost two-for-four isn’t too bad, but by all means get a copy of Twitty’s book.  It’s awesome.