The CookBook Collector Gave me Food Poisoning

Ack--am I the only person in the world who thought Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector stunk? Let me count the ways: the plot was utterly predictable, the characters were completely unlikable, and there were too many minor subplots and coincidences to believe. I have read a few of Goodman's short stories, and I loved them. But this novel is awful (although to be fair, I also felt compelled to finish it). I have read comparisons to Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility , but that's an insult to Dear Jane.

I'm not going to recount the (completely contrived) plot here, but suffice it to say that Goodman threw in everything she could to the mix, including 9/11, tech startups, and ecowarriors. Oh, and an unbelievable coincidence that results in the two main characters discovering that they had an entirely new family in England, and their aunt (cousin?) just happened to be the nice rabbi's wife one of the sisters recently met. Agh--even recounting the novel makes me mad that I wasted the time reading it! And how can someone make events that were so monumental to so many people seem banal and super dated?

This is way I usually read kids' books. . .

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

This week I turned back into an adult, and read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet. It's fantastic, plain and simple. The novel is set in shogun-ruled Japan in 1799, and details the experiences of a clerk in the Dutch East India Company, Jacob DeZoet. But the book is so much more than the story of this one character. The author, David Mitchell (who was Man Booker Prize nominee for Cloud Atlas), manages to combine a page-turning suspense novel with a fascinating history lesson on imperial Japan, Dutch colonialism, and life in the 18th century, all rolled into one. Mitchell's writing is absolutely gorgeous, but beyond that, his pacing of the novel is fantastic. I couldn't put it down. And what's not to love about learning major history in so painless a package? Loved, loved, loved this book. My only two quibbles are that occasionally I mixed up some of the minor characters (some of the Dutch and Japanese names and their characters weren't easily distinquishable), and at the end, Mitchell feels the need to sum up. I hate summing up. But those two gripes aside, this is a novel worth reading at least a couple of times.
And if you like this one, have a go at The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng. It is equally terrific.