Blue Plate Special
by Kate Christensen (Doubleday, $27)
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The Telling Room by Michael Paterniti (Dial, $27)
The quirky Spanish cheese-maker at the center of this book “lives the life every desk jockey and poet has dreamed of,” said Ben Frederick in CSMonitor.com. Journalist Michael Paterniti chronicles the quixotic quest of Ambrosio Molinos to continue his family’s generations-old tradition of producing cave-aged sheep’s milk cheese. It would have been so easy for Paterniti to lose readers through his digressions and asides. Yet in his “amazingly well-crafted story,” it all comes back to the cheese.
On the Noodle Road
by Jen Lin-Liu (Riverhead, $28)
The origins of the humble noodle are “shrouded in enough mystery to inspire the next Dan Brown novel,” said Stephan Lee in Entertainment Weekly. Writer and chef Jen Lin-Liu traveled the Silk Road to trace the history of pasta, visiting kitchens in China, Iran, Turkey, and Italy along the way. The question of whether spaghetti came before lo mein becomes secondary to Lin-Liu’s journey, and insights into the societies she encounters are served up with “generous helpings of detail and humor.”
Gaining Ground
by Forrest Pritchard (Lyons Press, $19)
Forrest Pritchard has written “a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress for the farmers market age,” said Russ Parsons in the Los Angeles Times. In 1996, the unemployed former English major decided to try and save his family’s small farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Though he peppers his tale with “funny stories of country life and of city folks adapting to rusticity,” Pritchard ultimately learns to put some of his romantic notions of sustainable agriculture aside and focus on making it profitable.
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”