Fork It Over by Alan Richman

The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater
Nonfiction

This is a fun read. Richman is apparently a well-known food critic (I don't usually read the mags that he writes for). He covers everything from the best barbeque sandwiches to the best five star French cuisine, in chapters arranged by food category. Some of these chapters appear to have been previously published as magazine reviews. The thing that I found most interesting was hearing how frequently the "best", most expensive restaurants often get poor ratings on various dishes.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

Fiction

Now this is a great book! I thoroughly enjoyed reading all 642 pages while ignoring my housework. Kostova does an admirable job of making the life of a historian seem adventurous, filled with exotic travels, exciting, and even dangerous! Heck, if I had read this in college, maybe I would have wanted to go on to graduate work in History, and actually become a historian. Ahh, what might have been . . . . No, really, I have no regrets.

The Historian is a tale of a man, his daughter, and his mentor, who all get mixed up in researching the life of Vlad the Impaler. He is the source of the Count Dracula legend. Or is it really a legend? Kostova blends fact and fantasy so well, that the reader will have a hard time distinguishing the truth.

One thing that interests me: the main characters all modern, atheist, and start out refusing to believe in garlic and crosses as a means of repelling vampires. As they each progress further into danger, they end up using these "medieval" charms as they become convinced of the existence of the evil they are fighting. In my opinion, the author never really resolves this issue. If you know there is evil, and a Christian cross wards it off, doesn't that mean that an opposite force to that evil (ie. God) does exist? I was disappointed that the characters, for all of their meticulous historical research, ignored the possibility of Christ. I think that Kostova could have handled it without relegating her novel to be published by the Christain press.

Overall it's extremely well-written, and quite a page-turner. I highly recommend it.

Great Tales from English History by Robert Lacey

Joan of Arc, The Princes in the Tower, Bloody Mary, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Isaac Newton, and more

Okay, as a former history major, I’m a little embarrassed to have read this book: It doesn’t have any footnotes! Horrors! It is definitely not a book to be found on a college course reading list. However (or should I say “as a result”?), Great Tales is an interesting book to read, and is part of a series. Lacey takes the reader through some of the significant events and people from about 1387 to 1687, mainly focusing on royalty. In my humble opinion, having studied a lot of this period in college and on my own, Lacey fills in some historical gaps a little too easily, without informing the reader that there is an alternate explanation. But, this book is not written for historians; it is for the typical uninformed, historically ignorant person. Such people will find it easy to read, informative, and fun (and so did I). I can’t complain about something like that! Goodness knows, I did not enjoy a lot of my college reading.

Vanity Fair

by William Makepeace Thackeray

Having been just a kid when I read this the first time, I got a lot more out of it this time. Vanity Fair is reminiscent of Dickens, but is much more concise. Also, the characters are more realistic than Dickens' (but I do love Dickens, nonetheless). Vanity Fair also reminds me of Gone With the Wind, which is of course unfair to Thackeray, as GWTW was published years later. I wonder how much Mitchell was influenced by Thackeray's work? The parallels between Becky Sharp and Scarlett, and Amelia and Melanie are awfully strong. There are a few other similarities as well, such as when certain characters who take too long to return love. Anyway, it's a classic, and quite enjoyable, so read it!