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Tom Mueller, Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

2011 | Publisher: Dreamscape

01.24.12 “A substance of such prestige and volume, the ancient world’s answer to sweet light crude, naturally attracted criminals.”

This is one of those books, you know the type. Maybe you’ve seen the ones about bananas, or tomatoes, or tea? It’s one of those fascinating “food biographies” so bursting with facts and vignettes that you adopt more than a newfound respect for the subject — you start to think it’s the most important thing in the history of the world. Okay, beg your pardon, that’s a wild hyperbole, but Tom Mueller’s sensuous storytelling stimulates the romantic mind. Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil makes the case that its slippery subject has been capturing imaginations and greasing the wheels… more »

Alex Ross, Listen to This

2011 | Publisher: Macmillan Audio

01.24.12 Introducing his subjects’ human side without straining for it

It’s hard to sound as learned and erudite as Alex Ross without seeming like an elitist and a snob, but Ross is neither of those things. “The best music is the music that persuades us that there is no other music in the world,” he writes in the introduction of  Listen to This, a compendium of his work for The New Yorker, where he’s written primarily (but not only) about classical music since the mid ’90s.

That’s the balance of things here: Classical music is Ross’s root source, the music he immersed himself in until he turned 20 and experienced a punk rock epiphany in college radio, which he outlines entertainingly in that same… more »

Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

2011 | Publisher: Macmillan Audio

01.24.12 As much a puzzle of a marriage as a portrait

As a specialist in domestic dramas (A Home at the End of the World, The Hours) Michael Cunningham has a way of elevating dinner table conversation to Italian opera. Set in New York’s SoHo sometime in the mid-aughts, By Nightfall is the story of Peter and Rebecca Harris, an art dealer and magazine editor, respectively, who represent the staid yuppiedom we’re familiar with from Mia Farrow-era Woody Allen movies. Cunningham’s outsized references to Fellini and Thomas Mann help stir the Creuset, making for a page-turner that’s hard as hard to resist as a 2 a.m. Thai food delivery or a designer sample sale.

As the Harrises evaluate their long marriage, the already… more »

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

2011 | Publisher: Macmillan Audio

01.24.12 Rewarding nostalgia for college grads of any era

In nearly two decades, Jeffrey Eugenides has given us three very different novels. It’s really only their shared focus — young adulthood — that indicates they’re written by the same author. Following his intoxicating but quiet first effort, The Virgin Suicides, Eugenides let loose a much more rabid imagination, darting across time and continents to chart the life of Middlesex‘s charming protagonist Cal Stephanides. The Marriage Plot splits the difference. More intimate than Middlesex and more down-to-earth than The Virgin Suicides, The Marriage Plot is about paralyzing campus love, about the need to define oneself and go bravely into the adult world when one’s chief interest may really be devotion to someone else. Set… more »