'Heat' by Bill Buford

Heat, Bill Buford (3.5)

I read this book years ago and remembered it fondly. Rereading it now had some major pluses and minuses. The book follows the journalist, Mr. Buford, along 3 major cooking adventures: working in the kitchen of a Mario Batalli restaurant, traveling to Tuscany to learn how to make homemade pasta, and returning to Tuscany to apprentice with a butcher. Given our recent interest in cooking – particular all things Italian – I loved the kitchen and pasta sections. Given my pescatarian/vegetarian predilections (I was a carnivore during the first reading), I found the butcher section almost unreadable. Mr. Buford has a somewhat annoying habit of bending towards the superlative (i.e. everything is the best, most wonderful, only possible….you get the drift) that gets a bit tiresome. That being said, the characters he meets along his journey come alive in his writing and are extremely likable and interesting. I will add that many of his passages made me worry about Mr. Batalli’s health (can anyone eat and drink that much and stay out till 4am???). If you like meat, cooking and Italy – this is probably a 4.0 book. It’s also worth reading if you are just interested in a behind the scenes look at a famous restaurant in New York City.

'Aunt Julia and The Scriptwriter' by Mario Vargas Llosa

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa (3.5)

This book took a bit for me to latch onto, but as it progressed, I found it very charming and couldn’t put it down. A semi-autobiography written in 1977, it is the story of a young man (Mario) in Peru going to law school and working at a local radio station. The two characters in the title are the big influences on Mario during that time: his divorced aunt-by-marriage and the passionate Bolivian scriptwriter brought in to write serials for his radio station. By far, the most interesting character in this book is Pedro, the scriptwriter. His odd proclivities (Argentinians are horrible, man’s best age is his – 50) show up humorously in each story. The book intersperses Mario’s life (becoming crazy as he falls in love with his aunt) with the emotional stories of the serial. As Mario’s life runs out of control, the scriptwriter’s stories do as well. The beauty of this book is in the language, the creativity of the stories and the humor spattered throughout (loved the naked stowaway with 1 tooth!). The characters are a bit cartoonish and the serial stories can be quite confusing, but it you stick to it, the reading experience can be quite entertaining. I found the ending brief and relatively sad, though that did not appear to be the intention.