Posts Tagged ‘Book review’

A Magical Culinary Novel

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

One of the great pleasures of being a bookseller is to discover and promote a new writer.  In this debut novel, Seattle author Erica Bauermeister tells a fictional tale of a chef who shares her culinary techniques with a cooking class held on Monday evenings at her restaurant.  Through the sensual and magical power of food, she and her students undergo self-discoveries and transformations.  For fans of Like Water for Chocolate, this is the perfect follow up-but set in the Pacific Northwest!

Such a small amount of ground spice in the little bag Abuelita had given her. It lay there quietly, unremarkable, the color of wet beach sand. She undid the tie around the top of the bag and swirls of warm gold and licorice dance up to her nose, bringing with them miles of faraway deserts and a dark, starless sky, a longing she could feel in the back of her eyes, her fingertips. Lillian knew, putting the bag back down on the counter, that the spice was more grown-up than she was.

Farmers Market, 1975

Monday, January 4th, 2010

The Christmas holiday is a great time to catch up with reading. The trouble is I couldn’t decide if I should finish the pile from 2009 or start with the new one for 2010. Instead, I dug back, way back, to 1975 when John McPhee wrote “Giving Good Weight” in The New Yorker.

In this classic story (published as a book of the same name along with four other splendid stories), he describes what it was like to work as a farmer in upstate New York, and sell at the greenmarkets of Harlem and Brooklyn. What is remarkable to me is that his vivid description of the personalities, the setting, the conversations, and the concern for the land seems like it was written today.  Here’s the opening passage:

You people come into the market—the Greenmarket, in the open air under the down pouring sun—and you slit the tomatoes with your fingernails. With your thumbs, you excavate the cheese. You choose your string beans one at a time. You pulp the nectarines and rape the sweet corn. You are something wonderful, you are—people of the city—and we, who are, almost without exception strangers here, are as absorbed with you as you seem to be with the numbers on our hanging scales.

Later this month our mobile bookstore will be at the Washington State Farmers Market Association conference in Renton. This is one timeless book that we will be sharing.