The Labyrinth of the Spirits by Carlos Ruiz Zafon— Just started this, the fourth book of Ruiz Zafon’s “The Cemetery of Forgotten Books” series that began with The Shadow of the Wind. At the moment, all that I want is an atlas of historical maps of Barcelona, the main character of the series.
Then, as I gazed at the curse I had dragged behind me, it suddenly became clear to me that the city and my destiny would be forever caught in that haunting, and that I would never be able to remember my mother’s face.
Kitchen Confidential : Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain— Got caught up in the Bourdain craze this week, so I started reading this book. I’ve worked in enough restaurants and been in enough kitchens to know that, yes, restaurant life is as hectic as Bourdain portrays it here (I’ve had a fork and a serious butcher knife pulled out and directed at me while doing restaurant work in another lifetime!); yet I still feel as if he romanticized life in a restaurant and the people that worked in restaurants a bit, to this point.
Provincetown was (and is) essentially a small Portuguese fishing village all the way out on the fish-hooked tip of the Cape. During the summer months, however, it became Times Square/Christopher Street-by-the-Sea. This was the '70s, remember, so factor that in when you conjure up the image of once quaint New England port town, clogged with tourists, day-trippers, hippies, drifters, lobster poachers, slutty chicks, dopers, refugees from Key West, and thousands upon thousands of energetically cruising gay men. For a rootless young man with sensualist inclinations, it was the perfect getaway.
I spent a lot of time reading Bourdain and about Bourdain by clicking on the links at The New Yorker’s David Remnick’s Sunday Reading: Remembering Anthony Bourdain. Eventually, the links took me outside of the New Yorker universe to old articles like Maria Bustillos’s 2017 article “Fiction Confidential” in The Eater and Bourdain’s own 2012 essay about fatherhood, which Bon Appetit reprinted after his death.