Inspired by Diane Rehm’s pre-Halloween show on “the scariest novel ever written” I am reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which I have never read before. I did read the beginning once, back in grad school for a lecture on the uncanny, and was impressed by just how scary it was—raising the hairs on the back of my neck. So I picked it up and started reading, determined to see it through to the end. Now I don’t know how many of you (dear readers) have read this book, but it IS really really scary. And I have to say that things are not looking good. In fact, I’m not sure, but I think someone—or someTHING—is sucking the blood right out of these people! Can you imagine!
I do not recommend you read this book alone at night and then sleep with the door open, not even just a crack.
Another book I read fairly recently and highly recommend is Bill Buford’s second book, HEAT: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany.. I couldn’t get enough of it. And it is much less scary (except when you think hard about the wisdom of ordering fish on Monday, or being the last jerk wanting food at a restaurant when the kitchen staff is ready to go). Although it starts out being about the famous New York chef Mario Batali, it ends up a book about Buford’s obsession with food and cooking.
Bill Buford was the founder and ediotr of Granta magazine, which turned into one of the best and most influential literary small presses. At the time he was working on Granta, he was an American ex-pat living in London. While there, he also wrote his fantastic first book, Among the Thugs, about soccer hooligans (which I also highly recommend). About fifteen years ago (?) he moved to New York City and became the fiction editor for The New Yorker. I haven’t always loved his choice in fiction. At The New Yorker and at Granta he seemed to bend over backwards to publish “world” literature. And while I admire his ambition to expand readers’ ideas about what good stories are, sometimes I felt he forfeited quality for exoticism. But that’s another story.
Heat came about because Buford wanted someone to write an article on Mario Batali, and then decided to do it himself. Buford got so caught up in doing research for the article that the next thing he knew he had quit his job at The New Yorker and was working in Batali’s kitchen full time, learning to cook. If you read the book you’ll see why. He goes way beyond obsessed. And the product of this obsession is a fantastic adventure story that will make your mouth water and leave you with the realization that you have never really eaten a decent meal in your life.
More recently, Buford contributed a fantastic article (to The New Yorker, of course) about chocolate and the new obsession with the health qualities of dark chocolate and the recent boom in boutique chocolate and the whole cocoa industry in South America.
So, I guess between Dracula and Heat, I’ve been interested in books about fancy eating habits lately.
