The Aubrey-Maturin Series, by Patrick O’Brian

Not to stretch a naval metaphor, but I’ve been in a reading doldrums. Nothing satisfies. At these times I fall back on one of two tried-and-true authors: Terry Pratchett or Patrick O’Brian. Pratchett pops up pretty regularly on Blogging for a Good Book, but I am amazed to see that we have never written about O’Brian, whose 20-volume Aubrey-Maturin series fills an entire library shelf.

Set in the world of the royal navy during the Napoleonic wars, O’Brian’s novels are first and foremost the portrait of a lifelong friendship between Jack Aubrey, affable and resolute ship’s captain, and Stephen Maturin, surgeon, naturalist, and intelligence agent. The series pretty easily finds its audience of men (and women) who are interested in age-of-sail adventures on the high seas; I’m not sure it always finds its audience of women (and men) who enjoy Jane Austen’s prose style, well-crafted sentences and characters, or the complications of Regency-era manners.

The New York Times may have called them “the best historical novels ever written,” but I avoided this series for years based solely on the infernal diagram of sails that opens every volume. No one wants to have to memorize sailing terminology just to get into a good story. Even as I began to be won over by O’Brian’s carefully-chosen words and dry humor, I simply refused to care which sail was a spritsail.

Fortunately, there is so much more than sails to care about as you turn the pages: there are also debauched sloths. Battles, mutinies, French prisons, typhoons, desert islands, music, birds, rich vocabulary, and a whole Dickensian roster of colorful secondary characters. There is indeed a lot of naval jargon, but the reader is not beat about the head with it, or if he is, he has a sympathetic ally in his ignorance in the person of Stephen Maturin. Stephen is also a landlubber, an outsider looking in to the regimented world of the royal navy, and he does not care any more about how many masts a ship has than I did.

Jack is famously lucky at sea, a skilled, courageous ship’s captain who will take, burn, and destroy the enemy at every opportunity, while on land, he is easy prey for speculators or a pretty face. Stephen is an Irish-Catalan physician with a passion for natural philosophy, and is forever cluttering Jack’s ship with beetles, wombats, and diving bells. If you cross him, he will fleece you at cards. If you double-cross him, he will find you, he will shoot you, and then he will dissect you. Their world of naval battles and subversive intelligence work occasionally collides with the domestic sphere and the polite drawing rooms of Jane Austen, usually with disastrous results, and then they are back to sea to escape debt, lawsuits, wives, sweethearts, and mothers-in-law.

And if you do begin to care about spritsails, there are many fine books to help you explore Aubrey and Maturin’s world, whether you’re interested in the vocabulary, the geography, the ships, or even, heaven help you, the food (probably the only cookbook in the library with a recipe for rats in onion sauce).

Check the WRL catalog for Master and Commander.

Or try the audiobooks. Patrick Tull and Simon Vance are both fantastic readers.

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Alone on the Ice, by David Roberts

Crunch crunch crunch crunch tang tang tang tang crunch crunch.

Tang is the sound your boots make when you are stomping about in the Antarctic, and suddenly you are no longer stomping on solid ice, but rather on a thin layer of snow disguising a crevasse of unknown depths. Sometimes the snow “lids” are thick enough that you can walk over these pits without danger. Sometimes they aren’t.

Crevasses are the essential theme of Alone on the Ice, a riveting account of Douglas Mawson’s 1911-1914 Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE). The AAE was contemporary with Scott’s and Amundsen’s race for the South Pole; when Scott and his men were dying in their tent in the middle of nowhere, Mawson and his men were tentbound in the same blizzard in another part of nowhere. Geologist Mawson and his band of Australians and New Zealanders were not interested in the South Polar holy grail, however; they were in Antarctica for science. Amassing specimens and data, they scattered across the inner blank of the continent in several parties, mapping, geologizing, and falling into crevasses in every direction.

Irrepressible young photographer Frank Hurley, who would later take such memorable photographs of Shackleton’s Endurance expedition, actually admires the “unearthly beauty of the abyss” while he hangs about awaiting rescue. Mawson, starving and alone in his crevasse with no one to rescue him and no strength to haul himself up, has one great regret: that he didn’t eat all of the rest of his food the night before.

The first of Mawson’s sledging companions, Belgrave Ninnis, drops into a gaping abyss along with the strongest of the dogs, the tent, and nearly all of the food. Xavier Mertz succumbs to starvation, or possibly to vitamin A poisoning from eating dogs’ liver. Mawson continues on. Despite having no real hope of survival, he saws his sledge in half with a pocket knife and rigs a windsail out of his dead comrade’s trousers. He even gets out of his crevasse, quoting Robert Service as he climbs: “it’s dead easy to die, it’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.”

Meanwhile, at base camp… Mawson’s men build their winter base in, literally, the windiest place on earth (you can watch them struggling in Frank Hurley’s silent film). Against all odds, they manage to erect a radio tower and establish rudimentary communications with the men staffing an almost equally cold and lonely outpost on Macquarie Island, but! in a Hitchcockian turn, the only man who knows how to operate the radio begins to lose his mind. Descending into paranoia, he accuses his companions of hypnotising him, threatens them with death and lawsuits, refuses to wash, and begins to collect his urine in small bottles.

Roberts, the author of several books on mountaineering, quotes from letters, diaries, and Mawson’s account, The Home of the Blizzard, to tell this story. Exciting, horrifying, and full of human interest, it’s a great read for anyone who enjoys tales of exploration, and especially for Shackleton fans, who will recognize many of the expeditioners. That’s right… some of them went back!

Check the WRL catalog for Alone on the Ice.

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The Sun King’s Garden, by Ian Thompson

As my history on this blog will attest, I have a perennial reading interest in books about the giant dorm full of crazy spendthrift aristocrats that was Versailles. This illustrated history of the palace gardens, while shelved with books on garden design, actually has a great deal to offer in the way of history and personality in addition to its details about landscape architecture.

It opens with a party hosted by Louis XIV’s finance minister, Fouquet, to show off his newly completed chateau at Vaux-le-Vicomte. Fouquet hoped to impress the young king (Louis was 23) with his wealth and good taste: gold plates, a play by Moliere, a ballet by Lully, and finally a fireworks display, highlighted by a mechanical whale that belched fire as it “swam” up the garden’s Grand Canal. Louis was a little too impressed. Three weeks later he had Fouquet arrested for embezzlement and imprisoned for the rest of his life in the Alps. Louis then swooped into Vaux and appropriated the house furnishings, the orange trees, the architect, the interior decorator, and the gardener. These three men would be the force behind one of history’s greatest home makeovers—the transformation of a remote hunting lodge into a showpiece of French wealth and power.

Gardener is probably not the correct term for the work done by Andre le Notre. Piping in the water for Versailles’ fountains alone required engineering and hydraulic feats of gargantuan proportions, with soldiers drafted to do the work in lieu of bulldozers. A third of Versailles’ building costs went to water supply (Thompson notes that there was better plumbing in the gardens than in the apartments), but there still wasn’t water pressure to run all of the fountains at once. Instead, a fountaineer was kept on constant standby, in case the king should suddenly decide to take a stroll. His boys would run around behind the hedges, switching the fountain jets on as the king approached and off again when he had passed.

Louis XIV was my kind of gardener, if operating with a very different budget. He liked instant gratification, flowers blooming all the time, no matter the season. Mature trees were transplanted from the forests around Versailles, to save all those tedious decades of waiting, and plantings were set into the ground in ceramic pots and changed out as necessary. On one occasion, visitors to the Trianon noticed that the color scheme of the surrounding flowers changed entirely while they were inside.

Illustrations show the formal style in favor at the time, with box hedges and yew trees trained and clipped into unnatural, geometric topiary shapes. Hedge-edged pathways called parterres were laid out in curlicue patterns, like embroidery, and bosquet served as outdoor rooms for dancing and intrigues. Most of the book focuses on the era of Louis XIV, but it concludes with the changes to the gardens in the more bankrupt era of Marie Antoinette, including the gardens as the backdrop to the “diamond necklace affair,” a public relations fiasco involving the queen, a cardinal, a fake comtesse, and 647 diamonds.

You’ll enjoy this book if you’d like a different lens through which to view the life of Louis XIV, or if you’d just like to daydream about how you would “garden” with an unlimited budget, 1,890 acres, and an army.

Check the WRL catalog for The Sun King’s Garden. 

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Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel

Following her success with Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel won a second Man Booker prize for this second volume in a historical trilogy bookended with executions. In Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel continues to flesh out her portrait of Thomas Cromwell, self-made man and adviser to Henry VIII. (One reviewer calls him Henry’s consigliere.) We’re still only a sixth of the way through the Tudor mnemonic rhyme: Divorced, beheaded, she died…, but the atmosphere of doom is palpable.

Anne Boleyn’s days are numbered. The king is watching another woman, plain, “bun-face” Jane Seymour; Anne hasn’t given him a son; and Henry’s own brush with mortality reminds everyone how badly peace in England depends on establishing an uncontested succession. Always alert, Cromwell is the first to sense the direction of Henry’s thoughts, but it isn’t always obvious whether he’s making use of events or triggering them. It’s a credit to Mantel’s storytelling that she makes so much of this history seem fresh and immediate, when we all know what’s going to happen. When Henry falls from his horse and is thought dead, we know this isn’t how he’s going to end, but we’re still caught up in Cromwell’s panic as he envisions the political chaos and civil war about to break loose.

Bring Up the Bodies covers a briefer time span than Wolf Hall, and the prose is more fanciful and meditative. At the same time, events are moving quickly, overtaking even calculating Cromwell’s long range plans. Less than a year passes between the king’s first infatuation with Jane and Anne’s demise. Fortunately, Cromwell, like many a fifty-year-old, spends a lot of time thinking about his past. It helps to bring readers back up to speed on the convoluted court politics, as well as to trace the very long roots of reward and revenge that guide Cromwell’s actions.

Even as we follow Cromwell’s thoughts in Mantel’s close first-person, present tense style, it’s not as easy as you’d think to make out his intentions. A literary Hans Holbein, Mantel builds her depiction out of layers and layers of conversation, rumor, and inner monologue, while reminding readers all the while about how haphazardly history chooses which details remain and which are forgotten. Cromwell himself, constantly sifting the gossip of the court to separate useful facts from scurrilous fancies, manipulates the fact that it’s Anne’s reputation, rather than her actions, that will make or break her as Queen. As I reread, I’m still trying to work out which “facts” Cromwell is learning from Anne’s treacherous ladies-in-waiting and which “facts” he’s inventing to take her down. No mere Machiavelli, though, Cromwell wants what every good father wants: a better life for his son than the one he had. Charming, hospitable, generous and utterly ruthless, he, Cromwell is a fascinating man to spend time with.

There are only two things missing: first, I always want more of Anne’s blustering uncle, Lord “By the thrice-beshitten shroud of Lazarus!” Norfolk. His scenes in this novel are fewer and his role more chilling, as he wolfishly presides over the sentencing of his niece. And second, although I can’t believe I’m saying this about such a cracking good novel, footnotes! Endnotes! What I wouldn’t give for a look at Mantel’s research.

Gorgeous turns of phrase and a convoluted plot make Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies excellent candidates for re-reading, or re-listening. Both novels are great audiobooks, read with gravitas and dry humor by Simon Vance.

Check the WRL catalog for Bring Up the Bodies, in print or audiobook.

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The Wizard Hunters, by Martha Wells

In this fantasy with steampunk trappings, an unstable playwright and a think tank of sorcerers attempt to defend their city against an enemy with superior technology.

Tremaine, the daughter of Nicholas Valiarde from The Death of the Necromancer, is a shell-shocked young woman contemplating how best to end her life without inconveniencing anyone. Her city, Vienne, is under aerial attack from an unknown assailant. No one’s ever seen the faces of their enemies, the Gardier, whose airships appear as if from nowhere to bombard the once-beautiful city with weaponry and sorcery that far outstrip their defenses. It’s like watching nineteenth-century Paris undergo the Blitz. A Manhattan Project of sorcerers hope to create a weapon powerful enough to turn the tide of the war, but it’s not looking good so far. The best of their sorcerers vaporized himself, as well as Tremaine’s father, in a failed experiment, and now the younger and less experienced are left to finish his work without even quite understanding what it was about. When they’re able, with Tremaine’s reluctant help, to activate the spell, it’s not a weapon at all. It’s a gateway.

On the other side of the gateway is not only a Gardier base, but another world, including a more primitive society where the use of magic is anathema. Giliead and his foster brother Ilias have already defeated one evil megalomaniacal sorcerer here, but although they beheaded him pretty thoroughly, all signs are pointing to his return. He may even have something to do with the army of zeppelin-building wizards that are using Giliead’s land for a base.

Spies, airships, and magical spheres with clockwork gears make for an entertaining adventure, but Wells’s winning characterization really makes the story. Tremaine is an unusual and uncommonly dark heroine. She may be a playwright, but she was raised by a crime lord, and in addition to lockpicking and a few other esoteric skills, she’s inherited his black humor and ruthless streak. It isn’t necessary to have read Death of the Necromancer to enjoy this trilogy, but if you have, you’ll be happy to see some of the characters again.

Check the WRL catalog for The Wizard Hunters.

The trilogy continues with The Ships of Air and The Gate of Gods.

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Sacré Bleu, by Christopher Moore

 ”En garde!” said Toulouse-Lautrec, … boldly drawing a cordial glass from his walking stick. “Oh, balls. Run it is, then.”

I would read many more books in which crimes were solved by Count Henri-Marie-Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec, who frequently mixes up his sword cane with his flask cane, in which is concealed cognac and a cordial glass. The artist as inebriated detective is the best thing about this magical-realist historical farce, in which Toulouse-Lautrec teams up with Lucien Lessard, a baker and aspiring painter, to investigate the murder of Vincent van Gogh. It’s a romp through the cabarets, brothels, and studios of Impressionist Paris.

“Henri was finding the detective work did not agree with his constitution as it involved talking to people who were odd or stupid, without the benefit of the calming effect of alcohol.”

With his last breath, van Gogh warned his fellow artists against the Colorman, a pigment grinder who supplies his customers with a particularly potent shade of blue, and his female companion, a woman of many guises. Perhaps you’ve seen her as Manet’s Olympia, or the inexplicably nude picnicker in Le déjeuner sur l’herbe. Maybe she’s Whistler’s White Girl, or Toulouse-Lautrec’s Carmen Gaudin. Maybe she’s the mysterious and elusive Juliette, with whom Lucien Lessard has fallen in love. And if she is, Lessard is in trouble, because where this muse goes, madness and murder follow. As they say in France, cherchez la femme.

Moore’s humor often comes with its own rim-shot (of course Georges Seurat’s muse is named “Dot”), but the number of things that are played for laughs can’t disguise the fact that Moore has fallen deeply in love with this time period and its crazy bohemian painters, and his enthusiasm buoys the story.

As an added bonus, the text includes color reproductions of most of the paintings that are mentioned, so, although it may be like learning about Wagner from a Bugs Bunny cartoon, you can pick up quite a lot of art history. And if you want to know more, Moore has a time sink of a web site preserving his research notes, additional paintings, and photographs.

Check the WRL catalog for Sacré Bleu. 

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The Little Silver House, by Jennie D. Lindquist

The book from my childhood that I would most like to see reprinted is The Golden Name Day, published in 1955 by Jennie Lindquist. Lindquist was a librarian and an editor of Horn Book, and she wrote this charming, quintessential little girl’s book by drawing on stories from her Swedish immigrant parents. Nine-year-old Nancy, whose mother is in hospital, spends a summer in the country with the Bensons, Swedish immigrants to New England. Each of the girls she befriends–Sigrid, Elsa, and Helga–celebrate not only a birthday but a “name day” as laid out in a calendar of names and dates in the Swedish Almanac. But as much as the little girls enjoy these special celebrations, there’s no “Nancy” in the almanac. Threaded through their season of picnics, animals, flower crowns, and May baskets is the story of how Nancy’s friends provide her with a name day of her own.

Sadly, our library doesn’t own The Golden Name Day, but we do own its sequel, which is even more fitting for this time of year, as it takes Nancy and her friends through the autumn, Advent, and the “Long Swedish Christmas.” In The Little Silver House, an abandoned, boarded-up house captures the girls’ imaginations, especially when the portrait of an old-fashioned ten-year-old girl is discovered in its attic. With this mystery in the background, it’s the celebrations of occasions great and small that give the book its charm. Gift-giving is the theme of the season, and the girls’ “random acts of kindness” include planting bulbs along the roadside for “traveler’s joy” and giving up some of their most treasured possessions for a special care package. Lonely newcomer Ben and others are brought into the circle of the Bensons’ warm hospitality and good food. Oh, how I wanted to be Swedish! My generic American family seemed so dull by comparison—no special traditions and not a chance that my mother was going to let me put lighted candles in a wreath on my head for St. Lucia’s day. The holidays continue with hand-wrapped karameller given to visitors, the Long Christmas Dance, Dipping Day, and “Second Christmas,” which made me wonder whether the Swedes are related at all to the hobbits.

Finding a book like this on the library shelves is as close as we come to time travel. Nancy’s yellow rose wallpaper! The horses, Whoa-Emma and Karl the Twelfth! For a nanosecond, I was nine years old again. Illustrated with the feathery pencil drawings of Garth Williams, so familiar from his work on the Little House series, these warm-hearted books will appeal to the same girls who enjoyed the Christmases of Laura and Mary Ingalls, whether those girls are nine years old or, ahem, somewhat older.

God Jul.

Check the WRL catalog for The Little Silver House.

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A Shadow in Summer, by Daniel Abraham

 Daniel Abraham is presently juggling two of my favorite ongoing series—the fantasy series The Dagger and the Coin and, under a pseudonym, the Expanse series of space operas. While I’m in the lull between installments, I’ve been slowly making my way through his first fantasy series, the Long Price Quartet. Each of its titles relates to a season, and as the conceit suggests, it’s a series that takes its time to unfold from one generation to the next.

The story is set in an East Asian-inspired, hierarchical empire of city-states, with a bloody tradition of inheritance based on which son survives being stabbed or poisoned by his rival brothers. For all that its ruling family is routinely engaged in factional murder, it’s a stable, complacent society, its upper classes enjoying wealth, comfort, and good trade, and so secure in its peace that there are no standing armies.

Although he isn’t sure he’s good enough, Maati is a young man hoping to become a poet, one of the class that make this wealth and peace possible. “Poet” isn’t quite the job description you’d expect. After long study, and at great risk, a poet’s manipulations of grammar can make an abstract idea concrete, a personification called an andat. Having brought this power into the world, a poet splits the rest of his life between using its harnessed function for the good of society, and vigilance against the andat’s attempts to free itself. As an apprentice to Heshai, the poet of Saraykeht, Maati is a witness to this daily struggle. Saraykeht’s cotton-exporting economy depends on Heshai’s andat Seedless, the anthropomorphic equivalent of a cotton gin, but its ability to render life sterile could have far more sinister applications if its poet were to lose control. And even as Heshai grows older and weaker, Seedless is conspiring with foreign powers to bring the city down.

With a wide scope and complex plots, the four titles in this series build momentum as you go along. Abraham excels at creating a vibrant world out of convincing details, including fanciful architecture and an elaborate language of gestures and postures that convey details of rank and etiquette. He builds such a solid portrait of how this society works in the first half of the quartet that it’s really affecting when, in the second half, he starts to take it apart. His characters, while occasionally admirable or sympathetic, are deeply flawed. At first, their mistakes are those of the young and impetuous, and they mostly hurt one another, but as they gain in age and power, twisted by lost chances and regretted choices, their decisions will affect nations for generations to come.

The Long Price Quartet is a good choice for a leisurely, immersive read. The animosity between the poets and their andat reminded me of the leashed gods of N. K. Jemisin’s Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, while the theme of one man’s private flaws wreaking public catastrophe is shared by K. J. Parker’s bleak Engineer trilogy. Abraham is kinder to his characters, though, as they are in some cases able to make it through their catastrophes and into a more hopeful future.

Check the WRL catalog for A Shadow in Summer. 

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Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman

Forty years before this young adult fantasy opens, a truce ended a bloody conflict between human and dragon kingdoms. For the generation that has grown up in peace, dracomachia—the art of fighting dragons—has been forgotten and knights have been sent into exile. Despite old prejudices, lingering hatred between species, and the occasional street riot, nobody’s been burnt to a crisp in ages.

Well, a prince has been recently decapitated. In a suspiciously dragonish manner.

Seraphina Dombegh is assistant music master to the royal court, where the festivities marking the 40th anniversary of the truce place her in the thick of intrigue among the ruling family and visiting ambassadors. The celebrations must go on… even while Seraphina, with Lucian Kiggs, the captain of the Queen’s Guard, investigates signs that Goredd’s remaining heirs are also in danger. Unfortunately, Seraphina, having grown up with a heavy load of family secrets and parental disapproval, has learned to approach life through layers of disguise and deception, including a habit of lying that comes between her and the charming Kiggs… who’s engaged to someone else anyway.

Hartman’s contribution to this traditional fantasy setting is her entertaining take on dragon kind, highly intelligent but essentially other, gifted at higher math but with a Vulcan disdain for human emotions and the way that passions dictate human lives. “They’re nothing but feral file clerks,” complains one character, “they used to alphabetize the coins in their hoards.” Dragons can take human form, and the most entertaining characters are the ones who pass for human, but without really understanding what makes people tick. Dragons who become too human are policed by censors, and if they’re determined to be emotionally compromised, they may need to have their brains excised. The conflict between logic and art, left brain and right will be a familiar one for veterans of original Star Trek.

Seraphina has her own psychological complications: repeating visions of 17 figures, which she’s learned to control by a sort of lucid dreaming she calls “cognitive architecture.” As lives and the uneasy peace are threatened, the figures from her visions start to surface in real life, and her search for the remaining mystery characters is sure to drive a sequel.

Check the WRL catalog for Seraphina

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Knives at Dawn, by Andrew Friedman

Sometimes called the “culinary Olympics,” the Bocuse D’Or is an international cooking competition, held every two years in Lyon and traditionally dominated by the French. In 2009, supported for the first time by a top-notch roster of chefs including Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, and Jerome Bocuse, the American Bocuse D’Or organization threw itself into a bid for one of the top medals.  Andrew Friedman, who is, appropriately enough, both a food writer and a sports writer, follows the American team as they compete for a chance to represent the U.S. in Lyon, spend months agonizing over recipes and presentation, and finally spend an adrenaline-fueled five-and-a-half hours preparing their meat and fish platters for judging.

If The Sorcerer’s Apprentices didn’t tempt my palate, Knives at Dawn did the trick. It wasn’t just reading about the high-end dishes described—not a lot of caviar or foie gras cross my kitchen counter—but the way the chefs discuss their process, how they create and refine and troubleshoot their creations. It inspired me to not just heat something from a box or even follow a recipe in my usual way, but actually pull some proteins and other components together and create a dish (I used to call them “ingredients,” but I’ve had too much exposure to Top Chef.)

Why do I enjoy reading about chefs so much? Again, it’s not just the food, but a fascination with extreme, specialized competence, creativity combined with machinist precision. Competitor Hollingsworth and his assistant Adina Guest (whose wicked knife skills suggest the nickname the Adina-Matic) are veterans of Thomas Keller’s French Laundry, where perfectionism is practiced for its own sake and vegetables are perfectly turned even if they are only going to be pureed.

The French also take food quite seriously, and the Bocuse d’Or is like a sports event, an occasion for cheering spectators and announcers whipping the crowd into a cowbell-ringing frenzy. Cooking show junkies will enjoy competition day, when even months of practice can’t account for the little things, the frozen shrimp and the inevitable sliced finger, that can derail a tightly-orchestrated timeline into a last-minute exercise in kitchen improv.

And my pan-seared pork loin chops with apples, onion, and cranberry chutney were fantastic, thanks.

Check the WRL catalog for Knives at Dawn

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The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: a Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià’s elBulli, by Lisa Abend

This book saved me $400!

Actually, not having a spare $400 plus airfare to Spain saved me, but this book made me feel better about it!

I had long cherished a hope of dining at elBulli, the cutting-edge restaurant on Spain’s Costa Brava, open only a few months out of the year and able to book an entire season’s reservations in a single day. Its 30-course tasting menu showcased chef Ferran Adrià’s revolutionary style of molecular gastronomy (he prefers the term “modernist cuisine”): foams, airs, unexpected flavors, textures altered by liquid nitrogen, and dishes that look like one thing but taste like another.

Both aspiring and established chefs have come from around the world to labor at elBulli for free, hoping to learn from Adrià’s creative approach to food. Lisa Abend, a journalist for Time magazine, follows 35 of these apprentices, or stagiaires, through their season of indentured servitude, describing their work behind the scenes as well as the varied backgrounds that led them to the culinary field. The stagiaires at elBulli are particularly overqualified, in some cases having left behind paying jobs in four-star kitchens. Others have gambled everything to get here. A South Korean ex-army cook literally camps out on Adria’s doorstep to get one of the coveted places.

While I enjoyed reading the cooks’ stories, two things became apparent. First, even given that elBulli’s menu is supposed to be out of the ordinary, there was not a single product or preparation described in this book that tempted my appetitite. With disdain for boring proteins (“What the hell am I going to do with a whole chicken?”) Adrià constructs his 2009 menu from the skin of chicken feet, gelatinous tuna spine marrow, deep-fried rabbit tongue, soy milk skins, and something combining agar-agar and “Parmesan serum.”

If I’m less than enthused about rabbit tongue, you should talk to the stagiaire whose daily job it is to prep the rabbit heads. Because, to borrow Anthony Bourdain’s notion of the restaurant kitchen as a pirate crew, elBulli’s kitchen is one unhappy, if not mutinous, ship. No talking, no joking, unquestioning obedience to the chef, and no tasting. Some of the rules make sense when you have dozens of people running about with sharp knives and hot oil. But, no tasting? “It’s like trying to play the violin wearing mittens,” complains one frustrated cook. Only one lucky apprentice gets tapped as “creativity assistant,” to take notes as the chef invents and vets new recipes. For the rest, learning is slaphazard, unless you count the highly-specialized tasks they perform over and over and over, without talking. They may be working in a genius’s kitchen, but they are weary of spherifying.

Or maybe Abend and the 2009 class of stagiaires came to elBulli at a bad time. The culinary world, less enamored with liquid nitrogen, was moving on. 2009 was the first year that elBulli lost the “Best Restaurant” title (to Noma, a Scandinavian establishment on the new cutting edge of foraging and entomophagy). At the end of the season, when the cooks have the crowning insult of having to pay for their own end-of-season party, Adrià announces that the restaurant—which never turned a profit—will be going on hiatus.

A few years later, it still isn’t clear exactly what’s going to happen when (if?) elBulli reopens. But making a culinary pilgrimage is no longer high on my list. Well… maybe just for dessert.

Check the WRL catalog for The Sorcerer’s Apprentices

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The Duchess of Duke Street

Created in the 1970s by the BBC and the producer of Upstairs, Downstairs, this two-season period drama bases its story of a Cockney cook, caterer, and hotelier on the life of Rosa Lewis, known as the “Duchess of Jermyn Street.” Although I am a sucker for stories about cooking, upstairs-downstairs memoirs, and the Edwardian era, I’d never tried this series, because… well, I remember the ’70s. Many aspects of the ’70s have not aged well. I am pleased to report, though, that Duchess of Duke Street holds up decades later, thanks not only to good storytelling but to detailed costuming and set dressing.

In the last years of Victoria’s reign, if you wanted the Prince of Wales to come to your dinner party, you let him know that Rosa Lewis would be cooking. (Whether it was only Lewis’s cooking that Edward admired was a subject on which she would not comment.) Having begun life in service, Lewis parlayed her skills in the kitchen to a career as caterer to aristocrats and proprietor of the Cavendish hotel, a place where the wealthy could find a discreet rendezvous with, or away from, their loved ones.

While the BBC series changes the names— to Louisa Trotter and the Bentinck Hotel—many details come straight from Lewis’s memoirs, including the doorman who vets customers according to whether Fred, his terrier, approves of them. While Lewis never elaborated on her history with the Prince of Wales, the series spins an engrossing story of how their association might have caused and then destroyed her first marriage. When that marriage implodes, Louisa Trotter drags herself out of debt to build a career and a clientele at the Bentinck,via hard work and high standards for everyone, but especially for herself.

The hotel makes a perfect setting for episodic stories, functioning as a more genteel, old-fashioned Fawlty Towers with both an eccentric cast of regulars and visiting guest actors such as a young Anthony Andrews. Class issues are frequently the centerpiece of a story: a clerk with only a short time left to live decides to spend his savings living like a lord; a wealthy woman leaves her estate not to her gadabout nephew, but to her chauffeur, who needs My-Fair-Lady style lessons to handle his new status in society. Throughout the series, Louisa and her maybe-soul mate, Charlie, Lord Haslemere, circle around one another, separated by issues of both class and trust—and eventually by the fact that he has married a Gothic Heroine, oops. I’m still watching my way through series 2, where the War is on the horizon.

Gemma Jones plays Louisa Trotter with great force of character, square-shouldered physicality, and fantastic dresses. The supporting cast are enjoyable as well, particularly John Welsh as Merriman, the hotel’s scowling, curmudgeonly butler. His deadpan reactions to the behavior of the younger generation—which is everybody else on the show—are some of the show’s best moments.

Check the WRL catalog for The Duchess of Duke Street

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Unspoken, by Sarah Rees Brennan

“Sorry-in-the-Vale, Sorriest River, Crying Pools,” said Jared. “Is the quarry called Really Depressed Quarry?”

“Yes,” Kami answered. “Also I live on the Street of Certain Doom.”

Many young children have an imaginary friend, but not many teenagers. Kami Glass doesn’t advertise the fact that she hears someone else’s voice in her head. She doesn’t want the rest of her home town, Sorry-in-the-Vale, to think she’s crazy. She’d prefer they think of her as an intrepid investigative reporter tracking leads for her next big story. But her latest act of journalism, an investigation into the aristocratic Lynburn family—just returned to their ancestral manor after a generation’s absence—brings her face to face with someone even she didn’t believe existed: Jared, the guy who’s been sharing her thoughts for seventeen years.

For someone she’s been talking to her whole life, Jared isn’t what she expected. And although she’s predisposed to trust him, everyone else, even the boy’s mother, is warning her about his mysterious past and his violent temper. Meanwhile, something’s going on in Sorry-in-the-Vale: foxes killed in the woods, young women attacked in town. The investigation is getting deadly, and Kami really needs to know who she can trust.

Kami as telepathic Nancy Drew is a great, self-rescuing heroine with an entertaining entourage of friends. As she demonstrated in the Demon’s Lexicon series, author Brennan writes great villains of all stripes, some absolutely steeped in villainy and others conflicted with twinges of regrettable morality.

Set among the woods and lakes of the English Cotswolds, this first of a series plays with all of the elements of Gothic novels: the town full of secrets, the brooding rebel, and the foreboding house, with its motifs of drowned women and doorknobs shaped like clenched fists. If you were filming it, you’d have a hard time choosing one color palette: the atmosphere varies from lighthearted, Scooby Doo-style clue-hunting to shadow-drenched menace. The combination of adventure, smart-aleck commentary, heady emotional confusion, and one very dysfunctional family reminded me of Holly Black’s Curse Workers series, and readers of one should definitely try the other.

Check the WRL catalog for Unspoken.

You might also enjoy Brennan’s posts recapping, with loving mockery, the great Gothic novels and lady sleuths who inspired this series. Try Jane Eyre for starters.

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Hide Me Among the Graves, by Tim Powers

This is why I love historical fantasy: after a certain point, the lives of the Romantic Poets actually make more sense if you assume the influence of vampirical ghouls.

Set amidst the churches and graveyards of Victorian London, this dark fantasy throws together a cast of Pre-Raphaelite poets, painters, and muses with menacing Lovecraftian other-dimensional monsters.

Some of the characters are historical: the poet Christina Rossetti and her brother Gabriel; Gabriel’s laudanum-addled wife Lizzie Siddal (probably best known as the model for Millais’s drowned Ophelia); and septuagenarian adventurer Edward Trelawny, one-time crony of Byron and Shelley. Some of the characters are original such as a hapless veterinary doctor being dragged about London by a reformed prostitute who’s just informed him that they had a daughter together who is in mortal danger, so run!

And some of the characters are spirits in approximately-human form, monstrously old and homicidally jealous. Once you have drawn the attention of these, you can expect to remain single because, in order to keep you to themselves, they will destroy the lives of your kin, your spouse, and your children. On the other hand, while you have their malevolent attention, you will write truly inspired, ageless romantic verse (which, for some poets, is an end that justifies any means).

And these are the stakes: a child, the Rossetti family, and the fate of London itself, menaced by monsters from a dark and violent past.

It’s the details of this supernatural adventure that make it click, including the sights, sounds, and smells of London. I love the way Powers weaves together fantastical reasons for historical events; it helps to have characters like Gabriel Rossetti, who did, in fact, bury his poetry with his lamented wife but later exhume her coffin to get the poems back. With seances, automatic writing, consultations with ghosts on the Thames, heart-stopping encounters in and under cemeteries, and jokes about bad poets, Powers relieves moments of delicious creepiness with glints of dry and deadpan humor.

For fans of old-fashioned, eerie horror and ghouls-by-gaslight adventure: if you enjoyed Martha Wells’s The Death of the Necromancer or Sarah Monette’s The Bone Key, this should be right up your alley.

Check the WRL catalog for Hide Me Among the Graves.

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Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein

The narrator of this WWII historical thriller is a coward, a quisling, a traitor to her country. She has caved under pressure (okay, you might call it torture) from her Gestapo captors and blabbed everything she knows about wireless codes and English military secrets. The real Resistance prisoners she’s held with spit on the ground when she walks by.

Held for weeks in a makeshift prison in occupied France, our narrator is writing a confession of sorts for SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden, who really wants details about English double agents and air forces, but is getting more story than he bargained for: her first flight on a Puss Moth, her recruitment as a special ops agent, and, especially, her friendship with Maddie Brodatt, a female pilot with the Air Transport Auxiliary.

And it’s weird, but in the slowly-emerging picture of our narrator’s old life… she doesn’t sound like a coward. In fact, I keep picturing Steve McQueen. Steve might be dismayed that I have mentally cast him as a tiny Scottish blonde, but there is a clear Steve McQueen vibe coming through in her attitude. Specifically, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape: cracking wise, mouthing off, locked up in the cooler with his baseball and biding his time until the next escape attempt.

And this handwritten confession has been underlined in key places–passages that describe the repurposed hotel/prison, its layout, the timing of the guards, everything you might need to know, in short, if you were planning a rescue mission.

I’ve gushed about Elizabeth Wein’s prose before, and I’ll say it again: not a word is wasted. Details about the English home front, wartime aviation, and the French resistance fly by in support of a cracking good adventure. I did not need to see the closing bibliography to know that the author immersed herself in memoirs from the time, because she uses the kinds of detail that only real life supplies to fiction. Nor did it come as a surprise that Wein has firsthand experience as a pilot. Her descriptions of England as seen from the sky are some of the book’s most moving passages.

Suspense, characters you care about, a thrilling and heartbreaking adventure. Historical fiction: this is how you do it.

Check the WRL catalog for Code Name Verity.

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Barton Hollow, by the Civil Wars

Ain’t going back to Barton Hollow
Devil gonna follow me e’er I go
Won’t do me no good washing in the river
Can’t no preacher man save my soul

I have an unfortunate susceptibility to earworms—those catchy snatches of melody that get stuck in your head for hours on end, sometimes for days. The lines above have been in my head for at least 48 hours now, the latest in a succession of songs from Barton Hollow that have infiltrated my subconscious brain. I’m writing this post in the hopes that by spreading the word about The Civil Wars, I can get them out of my head, and into yours. A musical exorcism, if you will. You’re welcome.

The Civil Wars are a duo: California girl Joy Williams and Alabama native John Paul White. They’re musical partners, not husband and wife, but you might guess otherwise from their close harmonies. They sing together like a long-married couple on the dance floor, melody and harmony swinging each other around with ease. I “discovered” this album a few days before it won a Grammy for Best Folk Album of 2012, so you don’t have to take my word for it!

“C’est La Mort” was the first melody that took root, a lullaby-like tune so sweet and perfect that I was sure I was remembering it, not hearing it for the first time. This one and “Birds of a Feather” are beautiful sweet-sinister love songs, for those moth-to-a-flame relationships, caught between love and destruction. “My Father’s Father” is your train song — gotta have a train song on a country album! — and the harmonies capture perfectly that sound of a far-off lonesome whistle in the middle of the night. The title song, “Barton Hollow” is a great one for wailing along with in the car:

Did that full moon force my hand?
Or that unmarked hundred grand?

“Forget Me Not” is another of those tunes that sounds as though it must have already existed, with a harmony that takes you straight back to Phil and Don Everly’s “Let It Be Me.” Confidential to my (hypothetical) future bridesmaids: you can sing this one at my (hypothetical) future wedding.

Check it out if you enjoy Nickel Creek or the more countrified, traditional songs of the Decemberists. You can download a free live album at their web site.

Check the WRL catalog for Barton Hollow.

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Napoleon and the Empire of Fashion, edited by Cristina Barreto and Martin Lancaster

This last post of BFGB Fashion Week is for the Jane Austenites. When you’ve paused your latest BBC rewatch or turned the last page of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star, this catalog from a Milan exhibition is just the eye candy to take you back to the era of Empire waists, flawless white muslin, and feather headdresses. Taken from a private collection of original Napoleonic-era dresses and accessories, exhibit photographs are accompanied by plates from Costume Parisien, the Vogue of the Empire period, and a handful of essays.

Taking their inspiration from the tunics of classical Greece and Rome, ladies put away their corsets in favor of thin-to-transparent cotton muslin gowns that fit the figure. If you associate Empire dress primarily with novels of manners, as I tend to do, it’s easy to overlook what a wild, sensual freedom these dresses actually represent. Gone were the panniers, farthingales, and other heavy infrastructure of earlier court dress—now one could actually dress oneself without a maid… in a gown that silhouetted one’s actual body!

Illustrating trends from 1795 to 1815, this catalog is a great browsing book. Photographs of the preserved and restored clothing are its chief draw, but the essays touch on many topics to do with fashion, trade, and daily life:

• The exhibition demanded specially-made mannequins, because the made-to-measure dresses—worn by women whose ribcages and shoulders were shaped by years of corsetry and deportment lessons—wouldn’t fit properly on a modern silhouette.
• Napoleon assigned uniforms for all official positions partly in order to plough some money back into France’s silk and lacemaking industries, still reeling from the beheading of many of their main clients. He also encouraged consumer spending by cultivating a fashionable horror of being seen twice in the same dress, and was not above publicly ridiculing women who dared to repeat an outfit.
• Where men’s fashion was judged by its close tailoring, a woman’s loose dresses were distinguished by her accessories. First among these was the cashmere shawl, which represented as many as three years of craftsmanship, not counting traveling time from Kashmir to the shops of Paris. Fashionistas like this woman, artfully draped in red, were sporting the financial equivalent of a new car… thus leading to shawl theft, a shawl black market, and, not to be missed, “the affair of the infernal machine” (pages 125-126) in which a shawl saves Joséphine’s life! while Mlle Beauharnais receives a slight hurt on her hand! and an unnamed fashion magazine founder is regrettably killed.

You can preview some of these elegant outfits at the exhibition web site.

Check the WRL catalog for Napoleon and the Empire of Fashion.

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Hark! A Vagrant, by Kate Beaton

This may be my shortest post ever, because I really don’t know how to review a comic book, except to say: it’s funny, and you should check it out. If I have to explain why I burst out laughing at a strip with nothing but 2 faces and a guy shouting “Kierkegaard,” I can only conclude that humor takes place on a subconscious, maybe subatomic level, because there’s no rational reason for that to be funny.

Kate Beaton is the artist; she’s Canadian; she took her degree in history and then went into cartooning instead. As you can tell from leaping Napoleon on the cover, history is still her thing, along with 19th-century English novels, Shakespeare and–surprise!–glam rock stars, preferably all in the same panel. You can find her comics online at harkavagrant.com, they’re indexed by subject, even! but the book is handy and portable if you’d like to laugh somewhere not in front of a computer.

If you like 19th-century novels, or maybe you just like to make fun of Jane Eyre, if you would like to mock Canadian stereotypes; the covers of Nancy Drew books; Marie de Lamballe’s head on a pike; the dueling egos of Byron, Shelley, Chopin and Liszt; Isambard Kingdom Brunel vs. the Steampunk movement; or the story of the Shoemaker and the Elves, only the elves are members of KISS and make high-heeled glam boots, then this is the book for you. To English-lit geeks like myself, I recommend Dude Watching with the Brontës and anything to do with Jane Austen. I hope you’re not offended by four-letter-words.

Oh, and you’ll learn a little bit about Canadian history! Because apparently Canada has history too, who knew?

Check the WRL catalog for Hark! A Vagrant.

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