Kevin H Souza
“The Japanese Garden” by Sophie Walker is a comprehensive and visually stunning exploration of Japanese garden design spanning over eight centuries. It offers an informative perspective on the Japanese gardens through a series of essays ranging from authors to architects and showcases 100 featured gardens, ranging from ancient Shinto shrines to contemporary Zen designs.
A beautifully written and compelling novel that steeps the reader in the Edwardian and WWI Britain eras in Cambridge.
Alice B. Toklas' remembrances of life in France with Gertrude Stein and the foods they ate and cooked combined my passion for historical reading and cooking. This is one I will come back to again and again.
In additional to everything I learned about great white sharks, I most enjoyed the history of the Farallon Islands. For a short documentary on the islands see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVL_2exHQrg
America's magical realism masterpiece? Maybe....I can't make the claim because I have not read enough of this genre set in America to make the call, but I would be willing to bet that this beautiful novel is the one.
The story of America's loss of innocence and idealism and its transformation into a new republic as told through the stories of a family whose history spans over 100 years. Enter a world of orreries, fairies, transfiguration, a unique deck of tarot, a house with four faces, a folding bedroom, and a working farm hidden inside the City.
John Crowley's complex and beautiful writing leaves nothing to accident. Every word, comma, and phrase is carefully constructed into some of the most beautiful writing from an American author.
I stumbled upon Crossings by Chuang Hua because it was referred to by Ruth Reichl as an important food novel. Not a food book per se, but considered to be the first modernist Chinese American novel and what an extraordinary work of writing. Hau only penned this one book (1968) and then retreated from society.
The writing is very unconventional in its use of (or often lack thereof) punctuation and paragraph structure. During a single paragraph she may take you from the present to the past and even into fantasy. You have to stay on your toes!
“The past continues to speak to us. But this is no longer a simple, factual “past,” since our relation to it, like the child's relation to the mother, is always-already “after the break.” It is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. (p224)”
This short book is worth a read, if not two; a fascinating, haunting, erotic and mouth watering journey for the character Jane, middle daughter of an upperclass Chinese-American family in the mid 20th century.
It takes a lot for me not to like a food novel and this one certainly has some wonderful moments where you can feast on the descriptions of food, but overall this book is disjointed and directionless. The center portion of the book is where you find the most delightful narrative. Here the main character is living opposite a fine French restaurant and coming into his own as a chef. I assume the upcoming film is a retelling of this portion of the novel, though I hope it is not as evil.
The end of the novel just spins off into crazy directions like an out of control firework. One that leaves you burned in the end.
A thoughtful and compassionate memoir about Kerman's time at Danbury prison and a revealing depiction of life for women in prison. Most interesting is the light she shed on illogical circumstances that land most of them there. This is not the story of the Netflix series and anyone who watches it should definitely read this non-sensationalist story of what really happened.
Intensely powerful and moving book that reflects a future that could come to be with only a nudge. Anyone who loves the smell of cedar and appreciates the unconditional love of a canine companion will find their heart among the pages.
The sexual revolution is often attributed to the 1920's. The 1950's saw a return to traditional male/female roles as America tried to recover from the war and men felt the need to re-assert their legitimacy in a country that had been superbly run by women during war. But the 1950's saw the evolution of more frank conversations about sexual roles and practice as we see in the conversation in The Price of Salt between Therese and Richard when Therese asks him, the man she had been dating, about the possibility of two women or men falling in love as a man and woman do.
Patricia Highsmith's novels are full of tension and this novel is no exception, though it is subtly executed in a very sophisticated style. Since most 1950's gay and lesbian fiction was published in the pulp-fiction style, this novel was published under a pseudonym and with a wonderful lurid pulp fiction cover. This novel has come out of the shadows and provides an important glimpse into the un-apologetic love of two women at a transitional time in our history.
A rating of 3/5 means I enjoyed this novel and recommend it to those who are interested in this particular genre or author.
Enjoyable and provocative tour of cinema through a queer lens of desire. A bit uneven at times but I think Thomson had a enjoyable time with this book.
It is easy to say that this is my favorite cookery book about Southern food. The stories of life in the rural South captures much of my own experience growing up on a farm in Tennessee. While I don't cook this way much anymore, reading these stories and recipes brings back all of the sights, smells and tastes of country cooking.
Crime fiction does not get better than this. Hammett's atmospheric prose puts you smack in the middle of 1930 San Francisco. Enjoy with a plate of “chops, baked potato and sliced tomatoes.”
A quiet and well written novel by Dominic Smith that centers on a story of grace as is delivered through the paintings of a fictional 17th Century Dutch Painter named Sara de Vos. Grace comes to the painter, and to a 20th century art historian and a collector.
A well written and solid story about Cage Weatherby, a poet and businessman who befriends Lincoln during the years of his early political career in Illinois. Opening with the Blackhawk War through the establishment of Springfield as the capital, the California gold rush and the civil war. Harrigan set down solid characters, particularly women, in this tale of the friendship of men.
Perhaps one of the most powerful and difficult books I have ever read. I have to put it on my “top shelf” of all time reads but this book is not for everyone.
This is a detailed story about the love and friendship that four men share from college into late middle age and it centers around one of the four, Jude, who is a severely broken person stemming from an unimaginable childhood. However he finds grace in a transformative relationship with someone who loves him so deeply you will often be on the verge of tears.
Don't go lightly into “A Little Life,” but go you might.
The Buried Giant by [a:Kazuo Ishiguro 4280 Kazuo Ishiguro https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1424906625p2/4280.jpg] is like a warm comfortable bard's epic tale told around a warm fire. Like other epic tales of a quest the story is more about the journey and relating the deeds of legendary characters than about the characters themselves. Like ancient epic tales born out of an oral tradition, The Buried Giant's characters are fairly two dimensional, but I argue that this is keeping with the genre of this novel. As you read, imagine the narrator talking not only to you, but to a small gathering on snowy night. With the mood set and some explanation about the structure of the book, I'll note that The Buried Giant is a story of the long and complicated love between a couple who move through fear to acceptance of their fates by way of a great journey filled with knights, warriors, dragons, and a boatman. A note about my rating system: 5 Stars = Among the greatest books. Recommend to anyone.4 Stars = A great book that I would recommend to most, even if it is a genre they don't normally read3 Stars = I liked this book but would only recommend it to those who like the genre or the particular author. 2 Stars = I dont like this book, but for whatever reason I finished it. 1 Star = Rubbish and could not finish.
My father was deployed to France and Germany after the Normandy Invasion. I have a lot of photographs he took as he journeyed from the northern coast of France through Germany, where his regimen helped liberate concentration camps and onto Obersalzberg. I really enjoyed The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah as I did All the Light You Cannot See for their ability to immerse me in a time that had MAJOR impact on my parents and the world I was born into.
My rating of 4/5 means I would recommend this book to any avid reader.
Hopeful for some closure on the original three novels of the Vampire Chronicle I found this novel very tedious. The writing is bloated and the plot does not move the mythology significantly forward.
David Mitchell writes beautiful and complex stories about the human condition and the bone clocks is no exception. However I found this novel inconsistent in it's narrative. Mitchell almost lost me on at one point in this book but the story that erupted on the other side of that was mesmerizing.
What's there not to like about NPH? Smart, funny, handsome, OUT, married, a father, entertainer, singer, and he put together an entertaining autobiography.
Like many trilogies it is best to judge them as a complete arc. The Magician's Land brings this series home with brilliance.
Ruth Reichl's first novel has received very mixed reviews and I'm here to say I really enjoyed it. It was a tasty read from start to finish. is it a “great novel?” No. Is it a fun, food infused, mystery, with romance and crazy New Your characters? Yes. The main character is a superhero in my opinion because she can discern any flavor/ingredient in a dish, but a dark secret keeps her out of the kitchen. Lucky for us that is what propels her right into the novel's mystery.
Read...relax, enjoy and have a slice of ginger cake, or two.
I listened and read this book together, and the narrator, Mark Meadows, was fantastic. As for the writing, the Victorian style is intricate and immersive in a world I certainly knew nothing about, but the story was overly complicated and its mystery, once solved, not vert satisfying for 834 pages.