Books & Essays

The Tassajara Bread Book

By Edward Espe Brown

The idea of baking bread from scratch had long fallen into the same category as Beyoncé’s abs circa 2004: enviable but intimidating. But The Tassajara Bread Book has gently eased me into the art of breadmaking, revealing its ease and joy.

Tassajara is a Zen monastery in central California, and this book was developed with simplicity in mind. The ingredients lists for most breads feature four to six basic items, and the directions are straightforward and sweetly whimsical. Does this sound a little austere, perhaps a tad precious? Worry not, as there are also recipes for unabashed delights like Butter Kuchen, Turkish Coffee Cake Cookie Bars, and Coffee Liquor Butter.

This book focuses on enjoying the process as it unfolds before you. Contrary to popular belief, bread is quite independent—it does not require full-time nurturing so much as a roll and a jab a few times throughout the day. And in the end, creating something so aromatic and delicious from nearly nothing is hugely satisfying. I’ll leave it to Mr. Brown to explain: “Bread makes itself, by your kindness, with your help, with imagination streaming through you, with dough under hand, you are breadmaking itself, which is why breadmaking is so fulfilling and rewarding.”

The Graphic Novels of Lauren Redniss

Through eclectic primary sources, insatiable curiosity, and inventive illustrations, Lauren Redniss exquisitely captures the riveting experiences and consequences of her subjects’ lives in her biographies.

Century Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Dorothy Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfeld Follies looks at the existence of a dancer, actress, teacher and general enthusiast who toured the world and met everyone from Charles Lindbergh to Caribbean dictators without missing a beat. The book’s ingenious scrapbooking renders Eaton both more familiar and monumental, perfectly grounding her spirited life within the context of a dizzying century.

Marie Curie’s improbable trajectory—which is the stuff of some potent Brontë-Alger cocktail—is brought to life in the stunning Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, a Tale of Love and Fallout Born Maria Skłodowska in Poland, Curie was first a governess shunned by her motherland’s aristocrats, then the Sorbonne’s first female professor, and later the first person to win multiple Nobel Prizes. She worked (and bicycled!) happily alongside Pierre until his tragic carriage accident, then became the victim of a xenophobic witch-hunt.

Redniss really digs into the Curies’ far-reaching accomplishments. Yes, their discoveries brought about great advances in medicine, but also laid the foundation for the atomic bomb. The book’s cyanotypes have a haunting, dreamy vivacity that beautifully captures the Curies’ feverish, indomitable minds. Plus, they actually glow.

I highly recommend Redniss’s books to anyone looking for an intimate, inspired take on the lives of others.

The Map and the Territory

By Michel Houellebecq

This is a fascinating novel about aging, success, parents, art, love, and the surprising ways that people evolve--and don't. In the past, I have found Houellebecq to be so focused on shocking his reader that he forgot to do much else, but here he has crafted something hauntingly beautiful.

The Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creations

By Tom Bissell

Tom Bissell and his pleasingly argumentative style explore the privileges and pratfalls of creativity in this loose, erudite essay collection. “Escanaba’s Magic Hour” takes a look at the makings of a film in the writer's hometown, and forces Bissell to come to terms with his dislike of his fellow Escanabans. Another standout is “Grief and the Outsider”, which gives a tour of the workings of the Underground Literary Alliance, a group of frustrated aspiring novelists who take on the intelligentsia with admirable intensity and irrepressible immaturity.

Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites

By Kate Christensen

Novelist Kate Christensen's memoir frames her peripatetic life through her love of food. She describes how her mother--a domestic abuse survivor and single parent to three girls--lovingly assembled budget meals that transformed her impoverished Arizona youth into a nurturing pep rally. While working as an au pair in France she discovers that zucchini can be magical and Nutella should be a controlled substance. And as an adult, she evolves from reluctant ramen preparer into some kind of culinary alchemist as she comes into her own as a writer and full-fledged human being. Christensen is frank, funny, and delightfully unpretentious about her lively, sometimes nutty, and occasionally harrowing experiences. Plus, she’s kind enough to share her recipes.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail

By Cheryl Strayed

This book’s appeal has me puzzled. Strayed is not very sympathetic—and I don’t mean the part about her being an adulterous drug addict. Despite the dramatic circumstances of her life and hike, there is nothing visceral about this book; it’s oddly flat and blasé. The writing itself is blunt, often ugly, and annoyingly accented with tenth grade vocabulary words.

It’s not that Strayed seems unusually awful. In fact, she seems ordinary. She is generally inconsiderate and lacks insight. She is prideful and disdainful in ways that are very common to people in their twenties who have a tattoo (c.f. she dismisses another female hiker as “too mainstream” for her smack-and-Faulkner stylings.) She admires nature in an offhand, uninformed way.

Theoretically, I like that people have found resonance with this book. We could all use a little redemption, after all. And it’s progressive that a woman can have seriously dangerous dalliances and still end up championed by Oprah and a million carpool moms. But I was expecting some warmth or guts or animation to poke through at some point. All I saw was a struggle that fit nicely into a book proposal.

Megan Mall