Damn you, nonfiction!

This is why I avoid nonfiction:  it makes me feel bad.  Even when it's good, and funny, or moving, or beautifully written, or evocative of far-away places where I really want to be, it just makes me feel, gosh this is embarrassing, JEALOUS.  Lord help me, I know it is deeply immature but I just can't get past it.  I also dislike it when it feels like academic work, but that was my topic last time.  

Two examples (both of I recommend despite the fact that they made me feel bad):

Mindy Kaling may claim that she looked like a dork as a kid - actually she doesn't have to claim it, see the snap on the back of the book, she did - but she looks terrific now as an adult.  And she's super smart, and has awesome friends, and a great job that she works really really hard at and that is obviously wildly fulfilling.  Goddammit, why can't we all have that?   Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (And Other Concerns) (Three Rivers Press, 2011) isn't the angst-fest that the title suggests.  Rather, it's basically How Mindy Made It with funny stuff about her views on men and fashion and other stuff and you can learn some cool stuff about comedy writing and that she has really funny friends and that you'd never ever hang out without her.  Plus which, she is apparently the World's Greatest Daughter, and talks to her parents every day.  Every day!  While I could do without how she totally killed it in college (at Dartmouth, no less), I found her chapter on "When You're Not Skinny, This is What People Want You to Wear" to be crie du coeur, a call to arms, a manifesto for the could-lose-20-lbs. set. For the record, I don't think Mindy needs to lose any weight.  Rock on gal.  And also for the record, I do have friends, and I'm not an idiot, and I have a good job.  And I have an awesome husband and kids so suck on that, Mindy.  Then please hire me.

Now, Mindy talks of her quirky Indian-American upbringing as a vaguely outsider experience, but Luisa Weiss is in fact way more of an outsider.  And a whole lot more serious too.  The insensitive reader might say jeez, lighten up!  Daughter of an Italian mother and American father living in Berlin, Weiss has to figure out where she fits in after they divorce and Dad moves back to the States, and My Berlin Kitchen (Viking, 2012) is her chronicle of her efforts to find herself and love in the process. It's billed as a "love story" (so that is a red flag right there) "with recipes" because in addition to being totally cosmopolitan, she is also a budding food writer, creator of the popular blog "The Wednesday Chef" (blog titles:  italicized like books?  Just in quotes?) and the story is also that of her evolution from editor to writer.  Our heroine bounces back and forth, here and there between New York and Paris and Berlin with a lot of Italy thrown in, and she works through a couple of serious relationships and jobs but never quite feeling like she's found her place until she realizes that The One (the practically perfect in every way Max) and The City (Berlin) and The Job (writer) have been there all along.  Get it - watcher, controlled observer, on the fringe, moving to the center, letting go, taking a change and finding herself and her voice thanks in part to falling in love?  

Now look, divorce is unsettling, I completely relate to that.  And the sense of where am I from ergo who am I, well hello central concern of my life.  But I found myself just a little bit consumed with jealousy for someone who got into publishing and rode the blog wave successfully and travelled and married this wonderful fellow, in Italy, for chrissakes.  And I am supposed to feel her pain in all of this soul-searching?  They had fritto misto at their wedding!  Me likie, as Tina Fey would say.  

Yet reluctantly, I do get it.  Weiss ends up living in the Berlin she started in, which she paints as not quite a paradise but certainly a place where you, or I at least, would really really like to live.  It is full of deep family resonance for her but also lively and interesting and and forward-facing while existing if not comfortably then at least engaged with its history.  It is a place where there are lots of apartment building parties and fruit-picking and warm family get-togethers and much kaffee und kuchen which I think we could all do with more of.  It seems to be a place - and I don't remember this from Germany but I was young and my parents had their own take and it was a totally different city in the west - that takes family and neighbors and human connectivity and nature seriously.  I suppose everyone's reality is different, but I'll have what she's having.  

Each chapter has a recipe associated with it, and some are classically German - Quark cheesecake, rote grütze, Pflaumenkuchen - while others reflect her fabulous Italian heritage and even her dad's cooking.  I'll probably make some of these recipes, and yes, I've even checked out The Wednesday Chef and yes, it is worth following.  A teeny quibble is that Weiss uses the descriptors silky and slicked a little too much, words I'm tired of reading in food descriptions, but you know sometimes they work and generally evoke a tasty sense of whatever recipe or food experience she's discussing.  

So the point of all my kvetching here is to say that nonfiction sometimes gets a little close, and that's why I generally stay away from it.  Don't get me started on great romances or The Human Condition as a subject.  But you know, these are the books that are sticking around in my head right now. 

A year of profitable reading

Hello, and welcome to the one year anniversary of Crime Pays.  I think I've done pretty well reporting out on my reading for 2012, and I look forward to adding on in 2013.  If you're new to Crime Pays, you can start at the bottom of the list to your right, last January, and read forward for all the gory details.  This time of year, all the other crime fiction blogs seem to report endless lists of a) the best crime/mystery/thriller fiction of 2012 (almost none of which I have read) and b) what's coming in 2013 (more to add to the list of books I will probably never get to). Not I!  And no New Year's Resolutions, either.  But I may see if I can figure out a way to post some of my travel journals here, since you may find them mildly interesting.  And by all means, if you have suggestions for good books, please do send them my way. 

At any rate, the turn of the year sees me enjoying the start of another promising series from Soho Crime, with Martin Límon's so-far-terrific Jade Lady Burning.  The tough pair of George Sueño and Ernie Bascom are CID detectives with the 8th Army in Seoul in the early 1970s, and while they've seen it all, Límon's strong sense of place keeps the story grounded and compelling.  I'll report out on this one as soon as I finish it, which will be soon because I am really inhaling it.  There have been series from Soho Crime that I've not cottoned to, but man when they hit it, they really hit it.  Maybe this will be the year I write and tell them that, and they will hire me  on the strength of that letter as a senior editor who works from her home in Cambridge just twenty hours a week, choosing the next great crime fiction series while being a devoted and loving wife and mother and getting to yoga regularly. 

I'm also taking a little break from the dark stuff with Miranda Hart's Britishly sweet and funny Is It Just Me? (she's a kind of nerdier English Tina Fey- can you imagine), Jennifer Worth's Call The Midwife (yes, Miranda Hart is game Chummy in telly version of same), and the so-far rather melancholy My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss.  Crime, England, humor, and food are an odd literary mashup, but it works for me, in fact now that I put it together it is rather the perfecta of my interests (minus musical theater of course, but that's for another day).

On deck are Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken (xmas gift), Muriel Barbery's Gourmet Rhapsody (ditto), Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (more in the immensely entertaining genre of look-what-a-dorkus-I-was-and-how-I-turned-that-into-being-a-super-smart-and-wildly-successful-comedienne), Benjamin Lorr's Hell-Bent:  Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga (that's me, competitive yogi), and Philip Kerr's Prague Fatale (because one should just keep up with Kerr).  Possibly not in that order.  I'm also pretty excited that the latest Charles Todd and Andrea Camilleri books are coming out in January and February respectively.  Well, that may be another New Year's Resolution:  I will not buy any more books for the next week.

I note that in my introductory entry on this blog, I thought I might also note what was for dinner.  That seems to have fallen by the wayside, probably because if you really want to know what we're eating you can just friend me on Facebook, and there you'll find it pretty much every day that I cook.  For what it is worth, frascatelli with mustard greens tonight.