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This post written by Clint Peppers: A Story of Hot Pursuits
by Amal Naj
[cover name=peppers]
Amal Naj grew up in India, so you’d think he’d be okay with hot peppers. However, he really didn’t like spicy food until he was in college in Ireland and started to miss food from home. From there, he went on to be a hot pepper junkie. If you really love hot food, this is probably a book for you. Peppers: A Story of Hot Pursuits is a collection of pepper facts and stories.
This book covers a lot of pepper-related topics. It includes some of the history of peppers around the world and how they have been used as medicine. It also includes some science – Naj hangs out with a number of biologists who study peppers. Two chapters cover the rather bizarre story of McIlhenny Company, the people who make Tabasco sauce. Naj also describes some of his pepper-related travels, such as his visit to Hatch, New Mexico, which is probably the hot pepper capital of the United States, or the Andes mountains in Bolivia, where he joins in the search for the the original wild pepper.
This book came out in 1993, so some of the facts, especially where people talk about the science of peppers and how they are used in medicine, are probably outdated. There is no mention of the Naga Jolokia (the ghost pepper), either. Habaneros are as hot as this book gets. I also noticed that this is not the easiest book to read, although it’s not that bad. The author sometimes uses larger words when shorter ones would work just fine, and sometimes the science sections get bogged down by long lists of names. As long as you know to expect it, you should be fine.
Also, if you want to read more about Tabasco sauce, you might want to check out this series of articles from 2004.
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This post written by Clint Are You Really Going to Eat That?: Confessions of a Culinary Thrill Seeker
by Robb Walsh
[cover name=areyoureallygoingtoeatthat]
Robb Walsh was in the advertising business when he started writing about food and restaurants on the side. Pretty soon, newspapers were paying him to travel to different parts of the world and review unusual foods. Not long after that, he lost his advertising job and his wife divorced him. He’s still writing about food, though, and according to his blog, he’s married again.
Are You Really Going to Eat That? is a collection of some of the articles he has written for various newspapers and magazines from 1993 to 2003. Don’t let the title fool you. While Walsh really has eaten bugs and other stuff that most people in the United States would find extremely unusual, that’s not what this book is about.
These articles are about more than just restaurants and food. Walsh gets a little bit of culture and history. He also introduces us to some interesting people like Jay, the owner of a Houston bagel shop who threatens him for taking notes in the restaurant. I doubt you’ll visit many of the places Walsh writes about, but the stories he tells are interesting enough to keep you reading.
Most of the foods Walsh tries aren’t that far out, especially if you live in California. You might learn about some new foods, but a lot of it is about fairly ordinary things like hot sauce, coffee, cheese, oysters, crabs, and bagels. However, Walsh always finds some interesting angle on his foods, and he often travels to various parts of Europe or the Americas to learn more.
For example, he goes to Switzerland and France to find out who really invented Gruyère cheese, since the two countries have been fighting over it for years and years. He heads down to Argentina to check out the pizza places in Buenos Aires.* He visits Trinidad to find out about curry and hot sauce, and he goes to a prison to find a famous soul food chef.
Of course, he does spend some time looking at foods that some of you may not be familiar with. My favorite is the durian, a huge, spiky fruit that tastes delicious and smells like a herd of rotting cows. (It’s the fruit on the cover, right beneath the machete.)
As a bonus, Walsh includes twenty recipes that you might (or might not) want to try out.
You can read some of it online at Google Books. If you need more, you can check out the author’s blog.
* Sorry, Robb. The best pizza out there is Zuppardi’s Apizza in West Haven, CT.
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This post written by Clint Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom
by Julie Kenner
[cover name=carpedemon]
Kate Connors never went to high school or college, but she had a job she loved and was good at. Then she married a co-worker and settled down to raise a family, and she never even thought about going back to work. She used to be a demon hunter, and that’s not really something you can do while also raising kids.
Kate has been a full-time mother and a full-time wife for the past fifteen years. Her husband doesn’t know about her past, and she’d like to keep it that way. She really wants her husband to see her as a wife and not an unstoppable killing machine. Her daughter doesn’t know about her past, although Kate might tell her one of these days. Her son doesn’t know and wouldn’t care if she told him, since he’s only two years old. Kate doesn’t really like keeping secrets, but since she’s not longer fighting demons, nobody really needs to know.
Her husband is running for a political office and has to win important people over, and one day he calls her to ask if she can put together a dinner party for that evening. Then an old demon jumps through her window and tries to kill her. Now she has to clean up the glass, hide the demon corpse, and make the dinner party happen.
This is where Kate’s life gets fun. Some big, bad demons are moving in on her town, and due to budget cuts and recruiting trouble, she’s the only demon hunter around. She does eventually get the help of an alimentatore, an advisor who is the brain while Kate is the brawn. Unfortunately, her alimentatore has a day job, so he makes Kate dig through records. She also gets the help of another retired hunter. Unfortunately, he’s currently in a nursing home. She also finds a sidekick. Unfortunately, when danger threatens, her sidekick plans to scream and run. Then, of course, she’s got to deal with her husband, teenage daughter, and two-year-old son. With help like this, how can she lose? Oh, and she’s a little out of shape, too. Not a lot, but enough to make fighting demons dangerous.
You can read some of it online at Google Books.
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This post written by Clint Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm
by David Mas Masumoto
[cover name=epitaphforapeach]
David Masumoto’s family farm, near Fresno in the Central Valley of Northern California, is in trouble. His peaches taste really good, but he can’t sell them to big business because his peaches can’t be kept in refrigerators at major supermarkets for weeks and weeks. New kinds of peaches don’t taste as good, but they do last a lot longer, and that’s what corporations want. However, David decides to give his old-fashioned peaches one more year, and if he can’t sell them, he’ll tear them down and put in new, less-tasty peaches.
Running a family farm isn’t easy, even if people are interested in buying your products. The Masumoto farm grows peaches and raises grapes. Insects, drought, or disease can kill his trees and vines or destroy the fruit before the harvest. Even worse, sine the family dries the grapes in the sun to make raisins, any rain after the grapes are harvested will cause the grapes to mold. That’s right, rain at the wrong time will actually hurt the farm. How fair is that?
The Masumoto farm is an organic farm – they don’t use chemical fertilizer or insecticides. They try to work with nature rather than against it. Unfortunately, David is kind of new to this. His father farmed in the 50s and 60s, when people thought that chemicals were the ultimate answer to everything. Like some farmers, David has noticed that this isn’t true, but since he didn’t grow up doing things the organic way, he has to learn for himself.
Epitaph for a Peach is made up of a bunch of short pieces that represent his thoughts and experiences for that year. In some of these pieces, he tells us about his struggle to run a family farm and find a market for delicious peaches that nobody wants to buy. In others, we learn about the story of his parents and grandparents, what it was like to grow up on a farm, what living on a farm is like now, or glimpses of what it’s like to be Japanese-American. He is often very serious or philosophical, but other times he is funny.
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This post written by Clint The Grin of the Dark
by Ramsey Campbell
[cover name=thegrinofthedark]
Simon Lester is a film critic, but he isn’t doing that well at it: he works part-time at the local gas station. Then one of his old college professors asks him if he is interested in writing a book on Tubby Thackeray, who was a comedian from the era of silent movies. Tubby used to be famous, but now it seems like nobody has heard of him. In fact, Simon has a terrible time finding anything about him. His films seem to have been removed from film archives, and things written about him seem to have been lost or destroyed. When he asks people about Tubby, they often get hostile. Clowns threaten him. Some guy on an Internet forum starts giving him trouble.
Finally, Simon finds people who know about Tubby Thackeray and are willing to share information and copies of his old films. Some of his work is really bizarre and troubling, and it seems to follow Simon home. The spirit of Tubby starts to take over his life, and it seems to be possessing his girlfriend’s son. Simon has enough trouble in the real world without any supernatural events, and he starts to crack up.
This story is dark and disturbing, but it doesn’t have much blood or gore. Supernatural things happen, but the real horror is in Tubby’s films and Simon’s head.
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This post written by Clint The Invention of Hugo Cabret
by Brian Selznick
[cover name=theinventionofhugocabret]
Hugo’s father used to work in a museum. That’s where he found the automaton – a clockwork human sitting at a desk, ready to write a letter. Sadly, the automaton was broken, and Hugo’s father never figured out how to repair it. When he died, Hugo inherited the mechanical man and his father’s notebooks.
Hugo also inherited his uncle’s job, sort of. His uncle used to keep all the clocks in a Paris train station wound and running okay. In exchange, he and Hugo were allowed to live in a little apartment in the station. His uncle disappeared one day, so now Hugo secretly winds all the clocks on his own. As long as nobody notices that his uncle is gone, Hugo can keep living in the station and trying to fix the automaton.
Hugo needs parts to fix the automaton, so he steals toys from a toy store in the train station. He’s not that good of a thief, though, so the shopkeeper catches him, confiscates the notes his father gave him, and makes him work to pay for everything he stole. Then things get complicated.
The story is told through a mix of pictures and words. This isn’t quite the same as most graphic novels, where pictures contain words. Instead, some pages have words and others have pictures, but the two don’t really mix. You might find thirty or forty pictures in a row with no words, so you really have to pay attention to the art if you want to understand what is going on in the story.
You can watch a slide show of the opening pictures at the author’s website.
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