The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School (by Kathleen Flinn)

A nice and entertaining read. If you’re into cooking. I was surprised that – even though I’m vegetarian – I found a book interesting that goes on and on to describe different ways of stuffing meat with meat and then maybe wrapping it in some more meat. What’s wrong with the French? And why is everyone so crazy about their food? But that’s a different story…

a most uncommon degree of popularity (by Kathleen Gilles Seidel)

I will not read soccer-mom novels for at least a few months. I’m just tired of them. They scare me of being a mom in the US and annoy me in their predictable targeting of people very similar to me (aaaaah, I don’t want to be one of them!). So I closed this one at page 37 with a sigh of relief. Yes, I am allowed to not finish books.

Staying Alive – Real Poems for Unreal Times (Edited by Neil Astley)

If I had only one book of poetry, it would be this one. It’s my “take to the lonely island” choice of book. Mainly contemporary poems, some straightforward, others weird but not so straightforwards as to be banal and boring or so weird as to be inaccessible. I’ve been reading it for years and still find new and touching stuff when I open it, it’s as if someone assembled my favorite poems before I even knew them. Today’s find:

Poem for a Daughter

“I think I’m going to have it,”
I said, joking between pains.
The midwife rolled competent
sleeves over corpulent milky arms.
“Dear, you never have it,
we deliver it.”
A judgment years prove true.
Certainly I’ve never had you

as you still have me, Caroline.
Why does a mother need a daughter?
Heart’s needle, hostage to fortune,
freedom’s end. Yet nothing’s more perfect
than that bleating, razor-shaped cry
that delivers a mother to her baby.
The bloodcord snaps that held
their spheres together. The child,
tiny and alone, creates the mother.

A woman’s life is her own
until it is taken away
by a first particular cry.
Then she is not alone
but part of the premises
of everything there is:
a time, a tribe, a war.
When we belong to the world
we become what we are.

Anne Stevenson

People of the Book (Geraldine Brooks)

It’s been a while since I read a book that I wanted to stay up at night for and just read, read, read. This is one. The story of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautiful and precious Jewish book, unfolds as we follow the traces of the past that the rare book expert Hannah finds in the binding. The historical snapshots are all set at times and places where rich multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies are threatened by a backslash of intolerance and, often, terror against everything that does not fit into the smaller and smaller definition of truth. While I’m normally not so much into historical novels, this one managed to keep me entranced with believable, engaging characters.

The English Harem by Anthony McCarten

The lady in the bookstore highly recomended it… so I won’t recomend her… The story goes step by step, then he did this and then she did that and it was because she felt this. Maybe the translation into German killed some of the beauty of the original. Or maybe it’s just boring if every protagonist has a cliche instead of a character. Even the “unusual” ‘Persian or white trash girl are so typical unusual that there are few surprises. I finished it because I started.

Hundsköpfe (Hundehoved) by Morten Ramsland

What is it about Skandinavian family sagas, that they all have such a similar flavour? Which I actually like. If you enjoyed “Hannah and her daughters”, you’ll also enjoy this one. The story spans serveral generations which are all spinning around just slightly off axis. It feels rather autobiographical, even if it is not, the characters have depth and complexity and feel real even though I must admit, I know no one who resembles them. There is only one thing… but that might be more my fault than the book’s: Four generations result in too many people to keep straight and I wouldn’t be able to really remember, who is who. Especially as more than one son runs away and becomes a sailor and, just in general, it seems as if the faults of the fathers are inherited by the sons…

Goodnight Nobody (Jennifer Weiner)

Chick-lit. Nice enough. Some quite funny satire of life in the suburbs.

The Color of Water – A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (James McBride)

The subtitle annoyed me already – how is it that in this country a child of one black and one white parent is called black (as if the white part somehow doesn’t count) instead of mixed?

Anyway, most of the book, I enjoyed: By telling the story of his Jewish American mother who had 12 children with 2 consecutive black husbands, James McBride also tells part of the social history of America of this time (from the 40ies to the present day). By going against the grain of defined racial differences, her story highlights a lot of them. What I enjoyed beyond the obvious issue of race and multi-racial families was to learn something about being poor in America in times past, when being poor didn’t necessarily mean coming from a wrecked family background or living in high crime areas. Nice contrast to the present day black poverty account of “Gang Leader for a Day” (below).

A friend once told me: If you want to teach people from your own experience, you have to tell them a story without spelling out the moral of the story. And that’s why I only enjoyed most and not all of this book. If he could have resisted the urge to explain what this all means to the reader and just stopped when the story was done, it would have been a much stronger book.

Dead Heat (Dick Francis and Felix Francis)

As always (Dick Francis has written more than 40 of these), there are a lot of horses, some crime, a guy who would prefer to just mind his own business but gets drawn into solving the crime, a beautiful woman etc. I quite like the fact that, because he has written so many of them, any time I am in the mood for one, I can read one. And they are so un-memorable, that I’m not even sure whether I read this specific one before or not.

However, the biggest benefit of reading this particular one is a cool quote:

“Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.” Abraham Lincoln

One mystery that I couldn’t solve though: Why did they put a big picture of father and son Francis on the back-cover, where the father looks like he’s of rather poor health and doesn’t quite know where he is and the son wears one of his father’s ties (far too short for his huge frame)?

Gang Leader for a Day (Sudhir Venkatesh)

An amazing book on many different levels: A very authentic insight into American gang culture but also a pretty honest description of the complexities of long term field work.

Sudhir Venkatesh describes his first day of field work as a sociologist interested in urban poverty: He walks up to some young guys in the social housing projects with a questionnaire that asks: How does it feel, to be a young poor black man? Very bad, bad, so-so, good, very good. Obviously they can’t imagine that he means that and instead of answering hold him hostage for a night because they suspect he belongs to a rivaling gang and is there to check them out… Finally the local gang leader says: If you really want to understand us, don’t come with your stupid questionnaires, you have to hang out with us. And to everybody’s shock, the researcher comes back the next day and says: Here I am, I’ve come to hang out. And that’s how 10 years of field work and friendship start.

I enjoyed every page of this, also because Sudhir Venkatesh doesn’t make himself sound like this great clever guy but takes us with him through naive mistakes, ignorance and hustling and his fascination as well as his disgust with the gang members and their social system.