Vacation Reading

During our recent vacation, I had quite a bit of time to read, both in airports and while relaxing in the condo where we stayed. Here's a brief summary of the books I read:

Hunger: A Memoir of my Body by Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay is a powerful social critic, and a suffering human being. She's experienced mistreatment and scorn because she's black and because she's very obese. Throughout this memoir, she keeps her focus on how her own pain connects to her experience in American life. As she describes being shunned, ignored, abused, hated, derided, blamed, and disrespected, the reader should cringe! Although many of the specific experiences she describes have been covered by others who were abused because of their race or size, her words are poignant.

Gay probes the causes of her obesity, which she says was a result of her having been raped when she was around 12 years old: she responded by trying to be as unattractive as she could, and she did this by eating to become fat. She describes the sympathy and loyalty of her parents during her lost years in her 20s, when she was very poor and lived in difficult circumstances. A sad and impressive book.

Here's a paragraph that embodies some of the things I'm trying to say:

"When you’re overweight, your body becomes a matter of public record in many respects. Your body is constantly and prominently on display. People project assumed narratives onto your body and are not at all interested in the truth of your body, whatever that truth might be. Fat, much like skin color, is something you cannot hide, no matter how dark the clothing you wear, or how diligently you avoid horizontal stripes." (Kindle Locations 1107-1110).

The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir by Anne Fadiman

A long time ago, culture could be classified into simplistic pigeon holes: highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow. These were very judgmental words! One of the biggest popularizers of middlebrow culture was named Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999). He was the moderator of a popular radio program titled "Information Please" from 1938 to 1951. He chose books for the Book-of-the-Month Club. I believe that he's now mainly forgotten.

In her memoir, Fadiman's daughter Anne Fadiman described his early life in Brooklyn. She discusses his parents who were poorly-educated immigrants, and how he left them behind. (Her grandfather died when she was 10 years old: she met him only once!) She tells how he went to Columbia University and managed to invent himself as a cultural icon. This story is very fascinating.

Anne Fadiman especially explores her father's love of wine, about which he wrote several books. It's details her struggle to love wine as much as her father did. One of the most interesting chapters of the memoir, in fact, is not about him at all, but about her discovery of modern neuroscience of taste and how it enlightened her about her lack of wine love -- and thus her fear that she was not a "good" daughter.

If you want to read only a part of the book this chapter was excerpted in the New Yorker: "How Science Saved Me from Pretending to Love Wine:The fault was not in my stars, nor in myself, but in my fungiform papillae." By Anne Fadiman, September 30, 2017.

Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef's Journey to Discover America's New Melting-Pot Cuisine by Edward Lee.

This book, I would say, is jut OK. Edward Lee, the author, seems to try too hard to be bold and imaginative. Sometimes I found him to be sort of a shadow of another famous Korean-American chef, David Chang.

Lee travels around America to immigrant communities, and tries to talk to the people who are cooking in ethnic restaurants. Sometimes they refuse to let him in the kitchens, and won't tell him anything. Sometimes they invite him into their homes and workplaces and the bars where they hang out. He tries to understand how they have adapted their native foods to America. Sometimes he seems to get more insights than other times. Sometimes I felt like his writing had too many clichés.

Lee's description of a visit to a Lebanese diner in Louisiana:

"The menu is split into three sections: Southern favorites, Lebanese foods, and Italian dishes such as spaghetti and lasagna. I order something from each section. Tom is impressed by my appetite. He has the girth of a chef who likes to eat and a handlebar moustache that he teases with his fingertips when he speaks. Tom and I talk about the history of Clarksdale, about food and authenticity, about what it means to have a culture sewn so tightly into the fabric of everyday life that it is normal for a white blue-collar worker to come here and ask for his kibbeh on a roll as though he were ordering a cheeseburger. This isn’t Lebanese food anymore, Tom tells me. This is Delta food and, more specifically, Clarksdale food."  (Kindle Locations 2029-2034).

St. Burl's Obituary by Daniel Akst.

This book was supposed to be a selection for my culinary reading group, but I think it's been deferred or replaced. I’m not liking it much — it’s very forced, and the plot gets worse as it goes along.

Burl, the main character, was a very very fat man. Having read Roxane Gay's book, I'm aware of how cruel it is to use a fat person in a book the way this book uses its protagonist. Yes, he does love food, and detailed food descriptions are a major thing in this book. But... But...

An example of how the author uses food and fatness:

"For his own meal he was constrained as usual by fastidiousness, or an overdeveloped sense of propriety. Burl loved barbecue, for example, and fried chicken, but was too self-conscious to eat it in public, imagining himself in the eyes of onlookers as a living Thomas Nast cartoon, or Henry VIII brandishing a drumstick. He settled on smothered rabbit, cooked crisp in an iron skillet but salty and moist on the inside, heaped with sautéed onions and served over grits, with coconut sweet potatoes and greasy, smoky-tasting stringbeans." (Kindle Locations 480-484).