And I tag — EVERYONE! List ten of your favourite new books in your blog or in the comments (or however many you can come up with). They don’t have to be new this year, just new to you this year. Here are mine:

Anthony Powell, Dance to the Music of Time. This is a link to the first of four volumes in this monumental series. I can’t beieve I had never read this before. Perfect for people who like novels about decayed upper classes in England between the wars.

Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus I liked this almost as much as In the Company of the Courtesan. About painters in Renaissance Florence in the time of Savonarola, if you like juicy but realistic historical fiction, this is for you.

Rebecca Stott, Ghostwalk. Nicely spooky, this blends animal rights activism with Isaac Newton and makes perfect sense.

Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream. Have I ever put up a list of books that didn’t have a de Lint book on it? This is another novel about an artist that threads together past and present perfectly.

Guy Gavriel Kay, Ysabel. Photography, magic, myth, Gauls and Romans, this is perfect or fantasy-loving adolescent. Or a fantasy-loving adult.

Gail Godwin, Father Melancholy’s Daughter. I love all her books, but I am especially partial to novels about angsty Anglicans and this is a perfect example of that genre.

Mohja Kahf, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf. A novel about growing up Muslim in Indiana, beautifully written and rich with the textures and varieties of religious life.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees. One of the good things about this book for the would-be writer is that it is wonderful, like all of hers, but it was her first published novel and you can see how she improved in her later work. It is encouraging.

Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire. This is romance novel set in Japan, Hong Kong, and New Zealand in the aftermath of World War II. No, not a love story, a real romance novel. See for yourself. Who says literary fiction and romance are incompatible? Not me.

Steven Brust, Brokedown Palace. A fairy tale with all the requisite elements set in a magical, strange not-quite-but-almost-Hungary.

Okay, that’s ten. Now it’s your turn. Spread, little meme, and prosper, and may the authors you introduce prosper likewise!

It’s a Gothic novel about twins, and it also shares many of the same attributes as Zafon’s wonderful Shadow of the Wind: books, fire, and hidden identities. If you liked that, you’ll love this one, but it is also very much more of a “women’s novel,” written for anyone who ever loved Wuthering Heights, or The Lady in White, or The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, or Middlemarch, or Jane Eyre. Above all Jane Eyre, especially if, like me, you lost interest in that book the first time you read it after the part when Jane’s first friend dies, and she returns from school.

So what are you waiting for? Go! Go! Times a-wasting. Start reading!

That means you especially, Mum.

Yet passionate we are, and the whole Chicago branch of that demographic was present at the Chicago Theatre last night for a wonderful reunion concert of their distinctive bluesy electro-pop.  I’d like to say “long-awaited” reunion concert but really, who knew?  It was the best sort of surprise, one that you don’t even know you want until it happens.

I’d say more, but I’m tempted to revert to sullen teenager mode and just say either you get it about Yaz or you don’t.  I was asked last night when I first learned about them and the answer is that I heard about them the way all new music gets transmitted, from the older sister of a friend.  She loaned me a mixed tape, which I dubbed and still have.  It was my first introduction to music beyond Top 40 and AOR (bonus points if you remember what AOR stood for).  For the record, below the fold, the contents of “Lucy’s Tape,” named after her, not me:

• Trio — Da Da Da
• Flock of Seagulls — Space Age Love Song
• Thompson Twins — In the Name of Love
• Clash — Rock the Casbah and Should I Stay or Should I go
• Jon and Vangelis — Friends of Mr. Cairo and Back to School
• Haircut 100 — Love Plus One
• Spoons — Nova Heart
• Marshall Crenshaw — Cynical Girl
• Yazoo — Don’t Go
• Beatles — Ballad of John and Yoko

The second reason I love their books is that the food is delicious.  The receipts typically have modest lists of ingredients and they always work.  I admit that my pantry may be better stocked with unusual ingredients than most, but almost everything in their latest book can be made with things you’d find at an ordinary grocery store.  It isn’t “restaurant” ethnic food; it tastes more like home cooking, and it is often based directly on dishes they have eaten on their travels, with ordinary people.  The classics make way for unusual and unique receipts and their books will not duplicate anything else you have in your collection.

But why take my word for it?  I thought I’d make one of their receipts and present it here for you.  So, below the fold: Savory Boiled Dumplings!
What follows isn’t the receipt as it appears in the book, but rather the way I made it, which differs a little.  First the wrappers:

• 1 1/2 all purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 large egg
• about 3/8 lukewarm water

Put the flour, salt, and egg in the bowl of a food processor, turn it on, and pour the water through the feeding tube.  The dough shouldn’t be too sticky.  Let it sit for an hour while you make the filling:

• 1 small leek
• 1/2 cup ground pork
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. soy sauce
• 1/4 tsp. roasted sesame oil

Quarter the leek lengthwise and slice it thinly.  Measure out about 1/2 of leek and put it in a bowl with the other ingredients.  Mush it all up with the back of a fork.

Divide the dough into four pieces.  Roll one into a log abut 8″ long, reserving the other three.  Cut the log into eight pieces.  With fingers and rolling pin, press each piece into an oval about 2″ by 3″.  Put around a teaspoon and a half of filling on the oval, and pinch up the edges to enclose it like a calzone.  No need for extra water — this dough is soft enough without it.  Put each formed dumpling onto a cookie sheet covered in wax paper that has been sprinkled with a little flour (that tip alone made the book worth its price.  My dumplings always used to stick together).  Repeat with the other 3 lumps of dough.

Here’s where I really diverged from the receipt.  They suggested boiling the dumplings in water and then straining them.  I boiled my in homemade chicken stock with some ginger slivers and the rest of the leek.  They cook in a couple of minutes, and I served them in a shallow amount of stock. I made a dipping sauce of 2 parts soy sauce, 1 part rice vinegar and a few more ginger shreds, and on the side I made a salad of chopped cucumber and tomato dressed with salt, lime juice and dill, also inspired by the book. The dumplings were yummy and chewy, fulfilling all my dumpling dreams. And how did they look? Well, see for yourself:

My son inhales books, but he has pretty firm tastes, like most almost-thirteen year olds I know.  When we’re in a bookstore, I usually hand him things I think he might like, and insist he read the first paragraph or jacket copy.  He tends to think very little of my suggestions (like most almost-thirteen year olds I know).  I had heard a lot of Cory Doctorow’s venture into YA fiction, Little Brother, online at places like John Scalzi’s Whatever and over at Making Light, and it sounded like just the thing my son should enjoy —  computers, hackers, terrorists, and evil authority figures.  So I handed it to him, and hoped for the best.  Dear reader, he was enthralled.  We took it home, and he kept trying to read it while we were walking.  He’d stop and say, “I really should be talking to you now,” and then he’d start reading again.  And now he’s finished it and is threatening to put something called “Paranoid Linux” on my old laptop computer.  I’m not exactly certain what that is, but somehow it is all connected.

This made me think about where I learn about new books, and it strikes me that a large number of them I hear about first on the internet, mostly through blogs.  I bought a whole pile of new books last week in addition to the Doctorow, and I am going to mention them in a future post and try to figure out where I first learned about them, and whether that might say anything useful about book publicity.

I finished this while I was on holiday in Mexico, and it wasn’t what I expected. I thought it would be a heart-warming, rollicking, tragicomic family ensemble piece but instead it was much more interesting. Veronica Hegarty’s attempts to come to terms with her family’s history after the suicide of her brother, Liam, become a meditation on the relationship between memory, history, and story and the way we use all three to endure our lives.

Liam’s death challenges the stories that Veronica uses to prop up her life, and she needs to come up with a new acount of the past. The book we read is meant not only to describe but actually, in the fiction that she has written it herself, to be the path she takes to recover lost memories and discern the fictions she has told herself from the facts she must face. It recalled the process of therapy, in which a crisis has made an old narrative unusable, and the patient, by rendering an account to the counsellor, must come up with a new version of the past that can be taken into the future. The one who can survive the strongest, is the one who can come up with the best story.

This story of a young girl in Nazi Germany during World War II was the other great historical novel that I read at the end of last year, cover to cover in one go on a transatlantic flight. The most important thing I can tell you about it may be that even though the narrator tells you how the book will end on page 22, and reminds you a couple more times during the course of the book, I still had no power to stop tears streaming down my face at the end.

There are two big ideas in this book. The first is about the dangerous and beautiful power of story telling, and the way story shapes action, for better or for worse. The second, and more interesting, is about the consequences of these actions. The heroes of this book perform with the best of intentions acts which sometimes have very good ends, and sometimes very tragic. It struck me today as a result of a conversation about something quite different, that Zusak’s attention to this problem of our actions and their results may be derived from the way Hannah Arendt connects freedom to action. The characters are only free when they act, when Eric Vandenburg protects Hans Huberman from battle, when Hans gives bread to a prisoner from Dachau, when Leisel Meminger writes a book in the basement.

This book commands us to do good even in the worst circumstances, not because doing good will change the world and make it good, but because doing good and not just thinking good, knowing good, and believing good, is the only way to be free. In a culture that believes anything is possible if you only try hard enough, this message may resound as pessimistic, but I found it intensely hopeful.

I read a fair amount of rather middling historical fiction in 2007, trying to figure out what worked for me, why, and why not, but two wonderful novels I read at the end of the year made up for all the previous suffering I did for my Art. The second, I’ll write about in my next post (which will be soon, I promise) but the first is Sarah Dunant’s tale of the dwarf Bucino, and his life as companion to the talented courtesan, Fiammetta, in sixteenth-century Rome and Venice.
Why did this work? First of all, I felt that Dunant has an excellent period sense which is beautifully conveyed through her writing. I found the world she created entirely satisfying and convincing. I know just enough about the period to be tiresomely opinionated, but Dunant won me over from the first page. The mood she created reminded me very much of novels like Helle Hasse’s The Scarlet City or Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion.
The other great strength of this novel is Dunant’s main character, Bucino. He is a sidekick in the drama that is Fiammetta’s life, and he knows and accepts he’s a sidekick, but Dunant pulls him out of his ancillary role into the spotlight. The story is about his development as a human being, how he comes to term with the fact he is a dwarf, how he learns to love and to live for himself and not always through others, the sacrifices he makes, and the price he pays. The dramatic and exciting events that happen over the course of the novel serve as catalysts for the development of this memorable and appealing character.