50books_poc | Entries tagged with new york

I just read Notes From A Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi with Joshua David Stein, thanks to this recommendation.

I enjoy chef memoirs -- The Apprentice by Jacques Pepin is a favorite and I've read it multiple times -- and this one definitely hit the spot. I appreciated getting the behind-the-scenes glimpses at different restaurants, including ones where I've eaten, and I appreciated the specifics of how different self-presentations, and sometimes lying, were instrumental to Onwuachi's steps on his career ladder.

Onwuachi is significantly younger than I am, and I found it edifying to get glimpses of how cell phones, social media, and related technologies have played different kinds of roles in his education than in mine.

Also, I rarely cook, and this book spurred me to get back in front of the stove!

brainwane

If you can get ahold of this idiosyncratic little memoir, it's pretty fun and light.

R.K. Narayan was a South Indian author, mostly of fiction, during the twentieth century. One year, in the 1950s, he travelled around the US (thanks to a Ford Foundation grant), and got two books out of it. One is The Guide, a novel about a tour guide. The other is My Dateless Diary, his diary of his travels from New York through Chicago, Berkeley, Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, and more.

He has a ton of wry observations about different bits of the US, comparisons to stuff back home in Mysore, conversations with celebrities (Greta Garbo and Aldous Huxley, for example), sitcom-esque misunderstandings, poignant conversations with strangers, etc. He runs into discrimination on a bus in the South, he has trouble finding vegetarian food, people keep asking him for spiritual advice and for his opinion of Nehru. And he drafts his book along the way and submits it to his publisher. He has fun, he runs into some worries and difficult situations but nothing ever goes deeply wrong, and his descriptions of various scrapes and angsts reminds me of Wodehouse.

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

7. Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy

This very short novel (though apparently heavily based on Kincaid's real life) follows Lucy, a young woman who moves from the Caribbean to New York City to become a nanny for a wealthy white family. There's little plot, and instead the book reads like a series of vignettes about Lucy's life, interspersed with memories of her childhood. The mother Lucy works for treats her more like a friend than an employee, leading to difficulties; Lucy adjusts to life in a new country; Lucy makes friends and has relationships. Despite relatively little happening, this is a powerful book. I found Lucy to be an insightful, cynical character, and really enjoyed her voice.

I actually read this book back in January and just have been terribly lazy about getting around to posting this review, but one scene in particular has stuck with me all this time: in New York, one day Lucy sees daffodils for the first time. However, as a child, Lucy memorized a poem about daffodils to recite at a school assembly, despite never having seen the flowers and their not growing in her country. This metaphor for the insidious results of colonialism and the ways it affects people really hit home.

Current Mood: cheerful

ms-mmelissa.livejournal.com

Beware of spoilers:

This novel will cut you.

There are only a handful of novels that I can remember affecting me so strongly that I had to put them down while I was reading them, the words on the page too much to handle. One of them was Alice Walker's The Color Purple. The most recent is Sapphire's 1996 novel Push.

The basic plot of the book should be familiar to anyone who was paying attention during last year's Oscar season when the movie adaptation, "Precious" swept through the awards circuit. A young teenager named Precious who is illiterate, unloved and sexually abused, pushes through her circumstances in order to find, if not happiness, then a little bit of hope, a sliver of light in a well of darkness.

( Continue... )

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

46. Terence Taylor, Bite Marks: A Vampire Testament

On Christmas Eve, in Times Square in the mid 1980s, a hooker named Nina is violently murdered by a vampire. Just before she dies, she manages to turn her small infant into a vampire itself to give it a chance to survive. Now everyone's trying to find that baby: the Veil, a secret government of vampires in charge of making sure humans never find out about them; Adam, the vampire who killed Nina, who wants to kill the baby before he gets in trouble with the Veil; Jim, Nina's brother, who wants to save the baby and get revenge; Steven and Lori, a couple working on a book about true stories of vampires; among others. And then the zombies show up!

I can't say this book is anything particularly deep, but it's a lot of fun. I love books set in NYC, and Taylor clearly knows it well. I like his diversity of characters- black and white and Asian and Arabic, rich gallery owners and street kids and junkies and donaters to the Met. The writing, on a sentence to sentence level, is nothing special, but the plot is fast and enjoyable. Originally I thought the idea of a 'vampire baby' was a bit cheesy, but it turns out to actually a creepy concept. Overall, recommended, and a great read for right now, since the entire book takes place in the few days between Christmas Eve and the first few days of January.

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: The Simpsons on TV

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

42. Diana Abu-Jaber, Origin

Abu-Jaber is totally my new favorite author. She has an amazing, vivid way of describing things, particularly places, which I adore. In this book, the setting is Syracuse, New York in the middle of winter, and everything about that is so exactly described: the particular blues and white of winter light, early twilights, lead-colored skies, too much wind, the look of snow falling in the early morning, black ice on the streets, the feelings of isolation, claustrophobia, and loneliness that winter often inspires, cold air in your lungs.

The plot is about Lena, who works as a fingerprint examiner in a police office. There's a case involving a dead baby that the medical examiner ruled to be SIDS, but which the mother swears was a murder, saying that she heard footsteps in her empty house just before finding that her baby had died. Meanwhile, Lena has been doing research into her own past: she was adopted at three, and has only strange, vague memories of the time before that- rain forests, monkeys, a plane crash- and no one seems to know if these memories are real, metaphorical, or just a three-year-old's daydreams.

Everything eventually turns out to be connected, of course, but the revelations still surprised me. This novel is completely different in voice from everything else Abu-Jaber has written; it's almost a thriller, with a tense, brooding tone that fits perfectly with the mysteries and the cold winter. Highly recommended.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: "Poor Man's Grey" Matthew Good

whereweather.livejournal.com

#11. Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine
2007, Drawn & Quarterly

I keep trying to like Adrian Tomine, and he kind of just keeps leaving me cold. Cool, anyway. I'm not really sure what else to say about it.

I read Shortcomings in the space of about an hour; and thought about it; and then I reread it, trying to be sure to catch whatever I might have missed. Tomine's work is much more technically accomplished now than it used to be, and sometime he even gets daring or lyrical in his framing. But his characters are kind of... they leave me untouched. What can I say? I know plenty of people who love his work. But I keep comparing his spare, skillful black-and-white comics about humans in relationships to the spare, skillful black-and-white comics about humans in relationships of Jaime Hernandez, and I'm like, "Man. One of these artists I keep going back to and his characters live in my imagination. And the other one... I close the book and they're gone."

Which is probably just as well, because they were assholes anyway. Nobody in Shortcomings is very likable, including the protagonist -- which is, I suppose, one of the strengths of the book. Ben, who (like Tomine) is Japanese-American, is having a rocky time in his relationship with his girlfriend Miko. Miko, also Japanese, suspects that Ben has a wandering eye for white women (by which both she and he appear to mean "blonde and blue-eyed," which apparently describes all the eligible Caucasian females in California). Ben denies it... and then concedes that maybe, yeah, he's been culturally conditioned to find that sexy, but it that his fault? Ben is intensely defensive, and never seems to give a moment's thought to Miko's well-being. Which is why, when the relationship gets rocky, it comes as no surprise...

An interesting book about interesting issues, and certainly a protagonist and perspective we don't see much -- or enough -- of. I just wish... I wish I could find an emotional heart in Tomine's work. It's so cool and cynical, it stands so far away while it dissects, that it's hard for me to care. A story about emotions that refuses to become emotionally engaged is... it's not something that can really become meaningful for me.

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Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

Entries tagged with new york

"Notes From A Young Black Chef" by Kwame Onwuachi with Joshua David Stein

R.K. Narayan's "My Dateless Diary"

7. Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy

1/50 Push by Sapphire

Terence Taylor, Bite Marks: A Vampire Testament

Diana Abu-Jaber, Origin

#11. Shortcomings, by Adrian Tomine

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June 2025

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