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yes

Italian Folktales, Italo Calvino

I've finally read his tome on Italian folktales, and they're amusing, in that folktale kind of way. The endnotes are especially helpful for tracing the background of these folktales, as well as some of the thought Calvino put into textualizing them. Warning, there are quite a lot of them, not all of them that varied from each other. If you like analyzing folktales, though, you'll love the completeness; it allows one to easily recognize similar themes. Oh, and he makes no effort to hide the violence in traditional tellings of folktales -- another good point, in my book.

Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges

I've finally read some Borges now, and I can't believe I'd waited so long. This man is amazing! I understand where Pavic probably gets some of his style now! All that semi- mathematical- semi- religious- semi- surreal contemplation, that must all be from Borges! He's like the godfather of a lot of the stuff I like to read, or so people tell me, and after reading him, I know why. My favorite of his stories that I've read? Predictably, "The Library of Babel."

The Bourbaki Gambit, Carl Djerassi

Carl Djerassi (inventor of the birth control pill, wow) is the best fiction writer who's also a scientist that I've ever read. Kicks Sagan's and Clarke's asses. The Bourbaki Gambit is an amazing book, about four older biochemists/ molecular biologists/ biophysicists who team up together as a sort of "revenge" since they've been forced into retirement by their respective universities. They publish under one name, Diana Skordylis, all under the auspices of a salonierre, Diana Doyle-Ditmus.

Djerassi skillfully tackles issues of ageism, scientific priorities (mostly for fame and recognition), and feminism. There are conversations between fictional historians and scientists that sound real. There's comparisons between European/ Japanese/ American scientific culture, analysis of graduate student-professor relations, and talks of grantsmanship. And all with a fictionalized account of the discovery of PCR!

You can tell by the length of this that I really loved the book. It's traditional prose, but nevertheless, it's everything Galatea 2.2 (discussed below) should have been, and more. Good issues, but not so much that it was pedantic -- the story flowed excitingly (though not, I admit, unpredictably.) The quote in the front from Chemical and Engineering News was quite appropriate -- "There is delight in finding the world with which one is familiar rendered real as art." Yeah. I'm dying to read Menachem's Seed now.

The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

(Yes, I can return the book now to you Kirk.) I enjoyed this a lot, especially the Satan plot/subplot, where he goes around wreaking havoc on a Russian drama center. The Pontius Pilate narrative was fun, too, especially flipping back from present to past-book-narrative. However, yes Yuriy, I could tell there was a lot of stuff I just wasn't getting because I'm not familiar enough with 1920s Russia, alas. (On a note about coincidences, both Yuriy and Kirk highly recommended this novel to me, at similar times.)

The events were tightly knit, the description was lovely, and the semi-horrific-semi-laughable supernatural events worked quite well. I'm not sure I'd call it magic realism because in magic realism-styled books people just accept the magic, right? Whereas in this, people question it so much that it leads them into further (humorous) trouble.

My one reservation about this book was with the Master and Margarita plot, which, alas, didn't ring true for me. I just couldn't understand what they saw in each other, which was too bad, because the book would've been great and fully rounded if that part worked. It's like a well-structured wine missing the acid or something.

One more coincidence. (Boy, the reading of this book was chock-full of coincidences -- I *love* it!) I was at a party, right after finishing this book, mentioned that to one of my former students, Greg, and he happened to be reading the book at the same time! He seems to have a better version of the book than I, though, one with footnotes that explained all the historical references. Time to borrow the book from him (in return for him borrowing my CDs.)

Secret Rendezvous, Kobo Abe

You know how sometimes you go to a bar, you see this hard- to- find- whisky/ tequila/ scotch you'd been meaning to try for awhile, but instead you decide you're not ready for it, and order a microbrewed stout instead? Kobo Abe has become that microbrewed stout for me. As a prelude to reading The Master and Margarita, which yes I've been meaning to read, I read Secret Rendezvous instead. I'm not trying to say you don't have to think when you read Kobo Abe, but it's a different sort of think, a less on-your toes kind of think. You enter this black weird kind of dream world where nothing's going to make sense anyway so just sit back and relax.

So. Secret Rendezvous. It's like a mix of The Trial and The Vanishing. Guy's wife disappears in an emergency ambulance, too early in the morning for the guy to make sense of it or react. He tries to find her, he enters a nightmarish underground hospital complex, with a test-tube secretary, a nymphomaniac thirteen-year old girl who is the concubine of the assistant director of the hospital, who in turn has had an operation to become a horse-man (the lower torso of another man is attached to his back.) We'll see if Kobo Abe replaces Milorad Pavic in the exalted place of Steph's Favorite Author after I read The Ruined Map.

The Chess Garden, Brooks Hansen

Dr. Uyterhoeven -- his past, his friends' present, his travels in the imaginary Antipodes where the landscape is the landscape of board games. I liked the juxtaposed pseudo- fantasy- world/ past- life/ "present"- life (well, early 1900s) motif. Same goes for the game-playing motif. And, of course, I love epistolary novels. Problem was that for some reason, the fantasy world was just a wee bit too cutesy for me, though the idea of Goods was kinda neat. On a strange random note, I was talking about this book to one of my friends who was also coincidentally reading it, and coincidentally, he was at the same point in this book too.

The Inner Side of the Wind, or, the Story of Hero and Leander, Milorad Pavic

Well, I had to read this because I'm a big Pavic fan. I was pleased to discover that Hero is a chemist, and regards prose as reprieve from poetry, and that Leander has a neck that is just begging to get cut. The first read through I buried myself in the imagery, and I think I completely lost track of what plot there was. It didn't help that I was reading Chess Garden at around the same time, started mixing up the pictures in my head, and decided to stick with just Inner Side of the Wind so that I wouldn't get so confused. Still, it was a beautiful confusion, I recommend it to anybody.

The Kangaroo Notebook, Kobo Abe

Another book you read for the imagery. I have no idea why I picked this up, except that I was going through a bookstore with my boyfriend, we were talking about whether or not I could pick a book I would enjoy without knowing anything about the book and just perusing the cover. Sure, I said. So I picked up Kangaroo Notebook (one of the "new books" out now, though I think Kobo Abe is dead now), looked at the cover, which had a weirdo picture on it and that nice colored blue eye in a Magritte kinda way that I so love, and a texture I like, and a back cover that made comparisons to Kafka. I was sold. I read about the narrator's crazy hospital bed that carried him to the banks of hell, I read about the radish sprouts that grew on his legs that he ate as salad, I read about the three sisters/girls that he was attracted to that kept cropping up again and again, and I read about squid bombs. Anyway, so there John, got a book by the cover, read it, and enjoyed it.

Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino

More Calvino. Cosmicomics was a hilarious! If you liked Cyberiad, you'll like Cosmicomics, I think. It's a collection of short stories about the evolution of the universe (if you can believe that), and it's adorable. The life and loves of a mollusk, the last of the dinosaurs, some cosmic creature playing games with atoms, and they're all the same narrator. Hard to describe, but very good. Like I said, check it out.

If On a Winter's Night, A Traveller, Italo Calvino

Wow. I was amazed. A book about books, and that sort of weird feeling that one gets when one really wants to finish a book but can't for some extenuating circumstance. A book about the reader. Second person. And written in that sort of surreal, lyrical way that I like. Lyrical, I use that word too much. Anyway, not only is there a "cool conceit" (words of a friend's), it captures a lot of real feelings I've had about books. Like the way the whole first chapter opens up with you the reader going into a bookstore, walking past Books You Know You Should Read But Haven't, past Books You Had Bought But Haven't Read Yet, and fun stuff like this.

Landscape Painted with Tea, Milorad Pavic

Milorad Pavic is the best. His descriptions are beautiful, lyrical, and evocative. That previous sentence was fluff, but I didn't mean it as fluff. How to describe him better? He makes use of analogies that people would never ever think to use, and sews them finely into the text, not too neatly, but with some knots flowering out. But even those knots are part of the design. His narrative format is all over the place, controlled chaos. Yeah, wow. And the thing I like about Pavic is that there's an exploratory aspect to reading him, much more so than reading other pieces of fiction, I think. Like he doesn't put the pieces together for you -- he lays them out, even temporally scattered.

Tours of the Black Clock, Steve Erikson

Also sorta post-apocalyptic, but without the nuclear war. Just (just?!) Hitler winning the war, inspired by a pulp fiction writer describing Hitler's perfect woman for him, and the mesh of truth-vs-nontruth in that context. The book itself was vaguely inspirational, because reading it I realized that hey, short chapters are okay! So I felt better about usually using short chapters in my own writing. Long sentences, short chapters, I feel like an anti-Hemingway. Oops. I've wandered. Anyway, I liked Tours. A little less floaty and beautiful than the two books above, but fun, nevertheless. And the image of a blueprint for the Twentieth Century is nice.

Vanity Fair, Makepeace Thackeray

Mocks all the books in its genre, and people around it besides. Mockery is wonderful. I read this in high school, and occasionally reread it for its satire.

The Valis Trilogy, Philip K. Dick

I read this in college and was amazed. This was the sort of book that I always wanted to write in high school. (You can see how I approach reading, less from a critic's aspect and more from a wanting-to-write aspect.) In high school I imagined writing something about some sort of Messianic return with alternating narratives coming from the divine party and the earth, with each narrator being the other narrator's dream. This was as close to that vision as I've seen in a book, and way better than anything I could write. I enjoyed it a lot. It's one of the few Dick books where I didn't think the ending completely fizzled, either.

Lempriere's Dictionary, Lawrence Norfolk

Hey, what more can you ask for? Greek myths, mysterious grotesque deaths, translating Latin, all focused around the major 18th century tea trade. It was a good holiday read, made me feel good that I remembered my mythology, and it was beautiful besides.

Cantor's Dilemma, Carl Djerassi

The only fiction book I've read that had scientists as the main characters but wasn't science fiction. I have my college advisor, Prof. Philip Phillips (thanks) to thank for this read. Tackled issues of professional ethics, relationships, etc. Not sure why he recommended me this, except he knew I was minoring in literature. Anyway, the author was the inventor of the birth control pill, too! Wow. He says he writes "science in fiction", rather than science fiction. If anyone knows of more books like this, please please let me know! Remind me to read Bourbaki's Gambit, too.

maybe, if read again

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

I wanted to like this, really I did. It was beautiful for awhile, like one of those Sandman interludes waxing on the Arabian nights, but then it just got tedious. Maybe because I read it half while drunk/half while over-caffeinated. I promised David Li, who berated me for this bad review, that I'd reread this again after I finish my dissertation. But maybe I'll hold off on that promise for awhile. Read Gogol's "Nose" "Diary of a Madman" and was unimpressed, so I have a feeling that our reading tastes do not completely overlap.

At Swim, Two Birds, Flann O'Brien

A lexicon-novel. Sounded like a good idea, so I read it. Um. I sort of liked the way that the novel- in- the- novel's characters fought with the characters in the novel (with the "villians" protesting by being good), and I liked the way the story twisted and turned, I just didn't, well, like the story.

Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban

I think this book needs a rereading by me. I read it on a snow day and enjoyed it, but am sure I completely missed lots of it. A post-apocalyptic story (a genre which I must admit I'm very partial to) told in some future dialect, about trying to put together the pieces of fallen humanity (who hasn't heard *that* in a post-apocalyptic context before?) Anyway, it was neat putting together what certain current words had devolved into, what happened to start the war, etc. I'm not sure I was happy with how the book wrapped up, though. Like I said, I think it deserves a rereading.

Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne

I'm sorry to say that I just didn't get it at the time. Something about the writing style annoyed me, too, maybe this sort of stuck-on-itself air about it. I could be wrong, though. Anyway, Dan assures me that I should reread this, which I will, next time I go home (because somehow it has ended up back in Memphis again.)

maybe

Grey Area, Will Self

The Washington Post review on the cover says "If Magritte had been a writer instead of a painter, his work might have looked something like the nine stories in Grey Area." No. If that's what Grey Area was like, I would've liked it more. As it was, the stories in this collection weren't nearly as daring and unconventional as I would've liked, although some stories in the collection were better than others. "Between the Conceits" for instance, and "A Short History of the English Novel", and "Inclusion". But "Scale" was eh, and "The End of the Relationship" seemed too formulaic. It was interesting how there were semi-recurrent characters in the stories, though they were somewhat different in each story.

Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes

Seemed like it'd be interesting, but really, it was a pallid version of Nabokov's Pale Fire. Yeah yeah, if you read the prose (ostensibly the narrator historically stalking Flaubert) you could get something about the fictional narrator's relationship with his dead wife, but even that wasn't too rewarding.

Galatea 2.2, Richard Powers

It seemed to have a lot of elements I like -- self-referentiality (a fictional Richard Powers almost exactly like the real Richard Powers), artificial intelligence, and literary criticism (and criticism thereof). But it tried way too hard, and you could tell, which made it come across a little contrived and pompous. Instead of conjuring up questions in the reader's head, it directly asked them, and I hate that -- the author filled in the blanks way too much.

Maybe I'll read Goldbug Variations someday. But maybe not -- Goldbug Variations promised a love story involving DNA researchers, and I just didn't "get" the love story in Galatea, which is scary, because I think it's autobiographical. But maybe it's harder to describe a real life love story than a fictional one. Oh yeah, and the ending with Helen was way way too predictable.

Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

I wanted to like this. (Of course, why else would I have read it?) Vonnegut is my friend George's favorite author, and I wanted to see what all the hoopla was about. I dunno. He's just too straightforward for me. Kinda amusing, nifty science fictiony elements, good explanation of the different forms of ice (better than I gave in the background section of my original research proposal, sadly enough), but still, the book didn't strike me as all that amazing. It was, well, just kind of plain. And the ending was predictable. Maybe I should've read Slaughterhouse Five.

The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, Nikolai Gogol

Eh. I read this because this guy who read my web page recommended it, but now it seems like he recommended it more because *he* is a big Gogol fanatic rather than because he thought I'd like it. I hate recommendations like that. Anyway, it was okay, but not stunning. I liked Poe's writings about insanity better than "Diary", and "The Nose" didn't feel like it broke as much new ground as this guy thought it would. The one very salvaging story was "The Overcoat", which I liked. Maybe I'll read Dead Souls someday, maybe not.

no

Four Hands, Paco Ignatio Taibo III

Drat. And I *so* wanted to like this one, too. But I didn't. It was one of the books I'd picked out to see if I could pick a book by its cover (and I was able to, for the Abe books, really!) and I honestly did like the writing style, but the chapters were even shorter than Steve Erikson's chapters, and disjointed besides. Not to say that disjointedness is a bad thing, because I actually like it, but I just don't think it works in the context of a conspiracy novel. I mean, the whole beauty of conspiracies is this underlying pattern beneath everything, where you see little parts of it sticking up and you have to be in awe of all the stuff that just *must* exist and *must* be hidden, but you don't get the sense of it in this book. Sigh.

In The Hold, Vladimir Arsenijevic

This was my attempt to see if I really like Pavic, or just some kind of style inherent in translations of Serbo-Croatian. If this book is any indication, it seems like the former holds true. It was a really short book, honestly, I gulped it down in an evening, all about people in Belgrade getting drafted and dying, getting AIDS and dying, having heroin overdoses and dying, which I guess is fine and all (the NIN Prize people certainly thought so) but I really didn't think this book was all that. Like Trainspotting, give a war, take the humor.

The Summer Tree, Guy Gavriel Kay

The reason why I'm putting this here, even though I was in high school when I read it and I want this list to be more current than that (and because now, in my snooty kind of way, I thumb my nose at fantasy and instead read "magic realism", which I know that you can make the argument for is really the same thing as fantasy, but let me continue on my own little snooty route), is because I love ragging on this book. I HATED HATED HATED this book! Idiotic immature individuals getting transported to this place called Fionovar (fantasy-esque names make my teeth shiver) and their stupid meanderings and their oh-so-cliched plotline and that I'm- so- cool- I'm- writing- High- Fantasy- so- I- take- myself- too- seriously style of writing. I was appalled when I found out all these people I knew in college liked this book, because this was the Very First Book which I read and made me realize "Oh, so you don't have to write well to get published." I can't begin to tell you what awful dreck I thought this was. I'm glad I never finished the rest of this trilogy. This was the beginning of the end, for me, with the fantasy genre.

non-fiction

The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler

A particularly rabid book attributing all nastiness in America to cars, suburban developers, and corporate mass-marketing practices. No wonder I liked this book so much. Sure, it's preaching to the converted, and it won't do shit to convince a car-loving resource-pig to abandon his vehicle of death, but it sure made me feel good to read.

Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism, Pat Califia

Pat Califia comes out with yet another thoughtful book on sexuality. The book has a thorough coverage and critique of transgender resources/ history/ writings, but doesn't stray from her bold views on sexuality.

A Civil Action, Jonathan Harr

Had to read this book for class (I read books with actual narrative for class now! I love law school!) and it was pretty good. The reason why our prof gave it to us was that she thought it had a pretty good narrative of civil procedure. I thought it was amusing to run across a friend of mine's dad, in the book. Problem was, when I told her about it, she was like "Oh, is that that book about the Woburn trial? They made my dad look so awful in it! I hate that book!" Oh well.

An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, John Storey

A friend and I were talking about finding a good intro text to cultural theory, and this really seems like it. Sure, I don't have a good perspective (to get a good one, I'd have to be an expert in the field so i could judge the survey texts) but it seemed good to me. John Storey even seems to caveat the parts where he is overtly biased (and admits bias everywhere, as well a cultural theoretician should.) Chapters on culturalism, structuralism, Marxism, feminism, postmodernism. A lot to cover in one book, yeah, but that's 'cause it's a SURVEY TEXT.

Symmetry and Spectroscopy: An Introduction to Vibrational and Electronic Spectroscopy, Daniel C. Harris and Michael D. Bertolucci

Speaking of survey texts, I *do* feel qualified to judge this field, or at least more qualified than at cultural studies. This book is awesome. Much better than the stuff I had for classes. Good in depth coverage of vibrational and electronic spectroscopy, with enough equations to make a theoretician grin, but not so awful that it makes one dizzy. And examples, examples everywhere! (Examples are a godsend.) And a cute little footnote in one of the sections made me feel not-so-bad about finding Molecular Vibrations (Wilson, Decius, and Cross), the bible of vibrational spectroscopy, difficult to read.

Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past, Daniel L. Schacter

One of the better books on memory research I've seen, if only because the author seems so well rounded. Instead of a bunch of case studies about neurologically damaged patients (which can be done well, I admit), he also ties in literature and visual art into his discussion. Field memory, observer memory, semantic memory, procedural memory. Wow.

Eastern Standard Time, Jeff Yang, Dina Gan, Terry Hong et al.

What a great book for us Gen-X Asian Americans! Okay, so it's not meant to be read straight through or anything, but I keep opening up random pages and finding out nifty niblets on video games, Hong Kong movie stars, that icky icky orientalism, Asian American designers, and modern Japanese lit. And the book is hilarious! So good that after I bought it for my brother and my friend Rita for their birthdays, I had to buy a copy for myself! Ooh.

The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race, Paul Krassner

Does satire fall under fiction or nonfiction? I'm putting this under nonfiction. One thing I realized is that satire is Really Weird when one is entirely disconnected with what is being satired. Krassner writes about the American government, Timothy Leary, Patty Hearst, Robert Kennedy, Nixon, and the Vietnam War. I am aware enough to tell that I might find this funny if I was more familiar with what he was talking about, but I am a modern- history- impoverished Gen-X-er, so I am not. It does, however, inspire me to learn more history so I can "get" satire. (Ain't that backwards? Sorta like how every now and then I think it would be a great idea to learn Serb so that I can understand Pavic better, but then I realize that the mutations of Serbo-Croatian languages is so great that an outsider like me who wants to learn the language is starting with a huge drawback.)

The Third Culture, edited by John Brockman

Supposedly, this book is about "the third culture", scientists who actually write/ speak/ etc. to the public. This is not why you want to read this book. The reason you want to read this book is to see how the AI/consciousness theory scientists snipe amongst themselves, and how the evolutionary biologists/ theorists snipe amongst themselves. It's hilarious watching all these scientists catfight. Oh yeah, and Daniel Dennett, the ubiquitous Tufts philosopher, is in there too, sniping away. I love this stuff. It's like Wrasslemania for geeks.

A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman

No, I never managed to watch the PBS series that my roommate so graciously taped for me, but the book was great. Very beautiful descriptions of all the senses, as close as I tend to get to mushy romantic stuff. (As seen on my personality type, I'm more of a thinking type -- geez, I even intellectualize food.)

Culture Clash, Law and Science in America, Stephen Goldberg

Ooh, I read this book after writing my law school application essay, and was delighted to see the same concerns I wrote about echoed in the intro of this book. It's similar to the book below, with a focus on American legal history of science and law.

Science at the Bar, Sheila Jasanoff

My brother got this for me for my birthday or something. It kicks ass. How does a changing knowledge base affect legal decisions? How do we legally define risk, when risk as a scientific concept is uncertain? How do we balance ethical issues of genetic engineering in a legal framework? Jasanoff gives a well rounded picture of the problems surrounding the bridge between science and law. (And of course, being in between myself, I found this book wonderful.)

Politics on the Endless Frontier: Postwar Research Policy in the United States, Daniel Kleinman

Basically a history of the founding of centralized coordinating agencies for scientific research in the US. I originally read this because my boyfriend was reading it, and I wanted to be able to talk about a book with him, but no, he never finished it and I did. Learned a lot of stuff from it, though, about the debate between Kilgore's New Deal Science vs. Vannevar Bush's (a Tufts/MIT alum, yay!) "elite science".

Who Owns Information?, Anne Wells Branscomb

As a science-law geek, I gotta delve into intellectual property. This was a rather scary book, discussing many different aspects of "information" (telephone number, email, medical history, entertainment history, etc.) Tons o' footnotes, too, some of which I actually looked up.

Searching for Certainty: What Scientists Can Know About The Future, John Casti

Brings up a lot of good philosophical issues for those of us who are modellers, and attempts to create a workable definitions of uncertainty. A difficult job, and Casti do made fairly good work of it, even if I didn't agree with everything he wrote.

A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, John Allen Paulos, and also Innumeracy

I read these during a particularly rabid period of my life when I was extremely concerned with the state of science education today (sorry I put you through that, Fonda). It seemed like in both the author made a pretty accessible case for keeping math concerns in mind when reading periodicals but it's sort of preaching to the converted, hunh? I lump them both together because they're really the same kind of book.

Irrationality: Why We Don't Think Straight, Stuart Sutherland

Also read during this aforementioned rabid period. (Another mea culpa to Fonda.) I liked this book a lot, though, it outlined various causes of irrationality, correlating them to psych/economics studies.

The Man Who Tasted Shapes, Richard Cytowic

(Random note, I keep calling Richard Cytowic, Oliver Cytowic. I don't know why. Oh, duh. That's why. See below.) Anyway, the book is about synesthesia -- a disorder you wouldn't imagine was real -- the commingling of senses which affects ten in a million people. Completely fascinating. Done in the tradition of the book below.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks (and his other books, like Anthropologist on Mars, etc.)

Oliver Sacks makes me cry. He treats people with severe neurological disorders (people with no mental concept of past, people who can't see half of their visual field, artists who've lost their color) with so much respect and dignity it gives me hope for the medical profession, which I've often stereotyped as being icky money grubbers. I heard Oliver Sacks speak at the Brattle, describing taking out a man whose concept of now was literally trapped in the 60s to a Grateful Dead concert, and describing the man's confusion as the Dead progressed onto songs he had never heard, "new" songs. I was in tears at his depiction of the confusion, of the bewilderment experienced by that man.

Hyperspace, Michio Kaku

Higher dimensional space, superstring theory, all the stuff I loved when I was a kid but my parents, in a fit of attempting to convince me to be a medical doctor, convinced me I was too stupid to understand. Michio Kaku makes it accessible. And beautiful. And he manages to relate it all to philosophy as well.

food and drink

Kindred Spirits, F. Paul Pacult

It's a guide to the world's spirits and fortified wines. Okay, so it's not really a "read", since it's an encyclopediac listing. *God* it's comprehensive. So much stuff. I know enough about these sections to be able to appreciate Pacult's evaluations: (A) brandy (especially grappa!!!), (B) gin, (C) tequila, (D) sherry, (E) port. Now you can see what I drink. I am jealous jealous jealous of the experiences that Pacult got to go through to compile such a tome. I was hoping it'd have some stuff about sake, but it doesn't. Alas, another book I should purchase for my collection.

The Brewer's Companion, Randy Mosher

You think Papazian's Complete Joy of Home Brewing is the shit? Well, you're right, it is, but The Brewer's Companion is a great supplement (better, I think, than Papazian's Homebrewer's Companion). This book has xeroxable fill-out forms for charting the progress of your brews and your brew recipes! It's got well organized charts with styles vs. original gravities, platos, percent alcohol, attenuation, IBUs, etc. It's got quick reference indexes of hop alpha acids, boiling time vs. percent acid utilization for hops, percent carbonation vs. beer style charts, different mash infusion processes, details on yeast types, again, all in BIG EASY-TO-READ charts!

Straight Up or On the Rocks: A Cultural History of American Drink, William Grimes

Oh god, a history of cocktails. What further joy could there be than sitting at home, drinking a martini, and reading about more martinis? Actually, the first time I came across this book was during my brief foray into actual freelance writing (Encyclopedia of North American Eating and Drinking Traditions, Kathlyn Gay, ed.) when I was researching cocktails. Well-written, if a little snooty (he doesn't like jello shots!) but understandably so. He gets the joy of cocktails across quite well, if in a men's club kind of way.

Eating In America, Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont

Waverly Root is the Midas of food history, everything he writes about is gold. He's also written Food of Italy, Food of France, and many others. In depth history (more than I can stuff in my head), on the dot sociological analyses, coupled with descriptions that make your mouth water.

The Food of China, E.N. Anderson

The best history of Chinese food that I've seen. Comes complete with a dynastical chronology in the front, which is great for plebes like me. Well indexed and well documented.

Indian Food: A Historical Companion, K.T. Achaya

The best history of Indian food I've seen. Great focus on regionalities, and individual chapters tying in religion with the different regional cuisines. Oh, and fab pictures.

Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads, Sylvia Lovegren

A partial cookbook, a partial history book, this is chock full of camp, as well as a good referential timeline for discovering when certain odd things (yellow margarine! sausage pinwheels! microbreweries!) entered our American culinary consciousnesses. Kitchen Culture: Fifty Years of Food Fads, from Spam to Spa Cuisine, by Gerry Schremp also deserves mention in this category, as well as Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating In Modern America, which gives a more solid historical base.

The Rituals of Dinner, Margaret Visser

Margaret Visser is a goddess. (She also wrote Much Depends on Dinner, whose chapter on salt was of much inspiration to me.) A lucid discussion of table manners, with her thesis being that much of table manners involved distinguishing The Eater from The Eaten (hence the stricter manners systems in many more meat-centered cultures.)

The Art of Eating, M.F.K. Fisher

A big MFK Fisher compendium. It has Serve it Forth, Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf, The Gastronomical Me, and An Alphabet for Gourmets, and it is some of the most beautiful food writing I have ever seen. Describing it does not do it justice. Her passage, "Define this Word", about an insistent waitress in a lonely French restaurant, and the overconsumptive feast that ensues, will forever stick in my mind. Same goes for her passage on her first oyster, and her passage on the man who would ritualistically eat avocados in his regular restaurant, and her passage on fried egg sandwiches. She puts the beautiful into the everyday.