Nearly three years ago, I mentioned the El Bulli cookbook, which contains the mad scientist recipes of the famous Catalan chef Ferran Adria. At his restaurant, El Bulli, Adria popularized techniques like creating foams and gelatins using unexpected ingredients and layering flavors and temperatures in his dishes in disconcerting ways. In keeping with what some might call the inaccessibility of his cuisine, his cookbook is large, expensive, and pretty hard to get a hold of. A new edition out in 2005 made it a little easier to take a peak at Adria’s recipes, though, even on sale at Amazon, it’ll still set you back almost $200. This hasn’t kept chefs from coveting the book, according to a recent article in the Contra Costa Times. With Adria’s mystique, and the book’s steep price tag, El Bulli would likely be a jewel in any cookbook collection.
A Cookbook with Staying Power
News Roundup
Now the much-vaunted "Oprah effect" has hit Britain, where a brief mention of Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea on a popular daytime show caused sales to go through the roof. Stunned by the response, the hosts claim that they will once again press their producers to allow them to start a book club. It's amazing to me that the TV book club phenomenon did not actually originate in England, where the world of books is far more integrated into popular culture. In fact, last summer's "Big Read," a sort of all time greatest books countdown show on the BBC, was wildly popular and apparently bumped book sales in England noticeably. Meanwhile, Star of the Sea, a book that received decidedly mixed reviews gets a boost that points to the power of the television in the world of books. Here's the original "Oprah effect" story.To anyone who has read Dan Brown's mega-blockbuster The Da Vinci Code, here's an interesting article from the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel that tries to separate the facts from the fiction.The Pulitzer Prizes will be announced in a couple of months and I've been thinking about who might win. I've lately been favoring Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc in the General Non-Fiction category. I'll probably muse over who I favor for the next several weeks, and stay tuned for the First Annual Millions Pulitzer Pool (complete with prizes!). Details to come.
Brick Lane sparks a dispute
A row (as they say over there) has erupted over the filming of a movie based on Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane, spurring protests and threats of a book burning. The anger has arisen from the portrayal of Bangladeshis in the book. So far a number of notable authors have come out in support of Ali, including Salman Rushdie, Hari Kunzru and Lisa Appignanesi, as discussed in the Guardian. Now a few weeks old, the dispute is sparking secondary disputes amongst the British literati, who are taking sides. The Independent goes into detail about how "Rushdie has launched an outspoken attack on fellow literary heavyweight Germaine Greer."
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What people are reading
Spotted on the Red and Purple lines of the El today and organized by Amazon ranking:Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt (4)Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (7)Wicked by Gregory Maguire (140)The Source by James Michener (9,873)Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt (15,939)Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia (21,324)Fabulous Small Jews by Joseph Epstein (37,316)Jungle of Cities and Other Plays by Bertolt Brecht (505,028)You've got the bestsellers Blink, Freakonomics and, to a lesser extent, Wicked on one end, and you've got Brecht on the other... probably a grad student, but I like to see those literary, engaging books (the Arendt, Garcia, Epstein) that occupy the broad middle reaches along the span between big media-backed bestsellers and academic obscurity (with no disrespect meant toward Brecht, he just happened to be there). As for the Michener, well, you never know what you're going to see people reading on the El.
New Books: Clare Allan, Scott Anderson, Guillermo Arriaga, Peter Carey
A debut novel called Poppy Shakespeare is getting rave reviews in England. The book, by Claire Allan, follows the narrator "N" and the eponymous Poppy at the Dorothy Fish, a mental institution, among 25 residents, one for each letter of the alphabet, "the 'X' chair is vacant." Some quotes from the British press: "Allan's story comes armed with a voyeuristic potency, because she spent 10 years inside the kind of institutions she satirises so well." - from The Independent. "Her voice is so idiosyncratic in its rhythms and terminology... her habit of exaggeration so surreal and her use of metaphor so extravagant, as to subtly transform the reader's perspective of the natural order of things." - from the Telegraph. In the Times (London), a profile of Allan charts her course through mental illness to become a published author. Also, the British cover is way cooler than the American one. An excerpt is available.Set in the fictional Middle Eastern kingdom of Kutar in 1983, Scott Anderson's Midnight Hotel sounds like a broad satire of America's travails in that region. Diplomat David Richards first toes the party line, but ends up abandoned in the country watching as American meddling goes awry. An excerpt is available. Scott Anderson is also a war correspondent like his brother Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer for the New Yorker, author of The Fall of Baghdad, and one of my favorite writers.Guillermo Arriaga wrote the screenplays for Amores Perros (which I loved) and 21 Grams (which I hated). The Night Buffalo is his first novel to be published in the U.S, though he originally wrote it 11 years ago. He's also bringing it to the silver screen (as El Bufalo de la noche). In a profile, the Financial Times compares the novel to Amores Perros, saying that both are steeped in violence, but it sounds to me like 21 Grams, steeped in melodrama. From the jacket: "The Night Buffalo is set in Mexico City, revolving around the mysterious suicide of Gregorio, a charismatic but troubled young man who was betrayed by the two people he trusted most." Still, I'll see any movie he writes, so perhaps his novel is worth a try, too.Two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey has a new book out, Theft: A Love Story. The big news about this book is the claim that it is a thinly veiled attack on his ex-wife. The Independent has ex-wife Alison Summers' side of the story: "The phrase 'alimony whore,' repeated within the pages of Theft: A Love Story, has left her feeling 'devastated' by Carey's version of events." Controversy aside, the Sydney Morning Herald sidesteps the drama and says of the book, which is, indeed, about a man who has been divorced and bankrupted by his former wife, "All in all, Carey's new show contains much that is lively, engaging and teasingly self-referential." An excerpt is available.