I spent an hour at one of my favorite places: Once Upon a Tart on Sullivan Street in Soho. I love them because you can order a salad-and-frittata combo and feel virtuous over your delicious and healthy lunch, and then get one of their many excellent baked goods and feel like the virtue of the healthy entree sort of cancels out the non-healthiness of dessert. Today I had a cornmeal-almond biscotto.
While there, I read a relatively crappy book in a mystery series by Diane Mott Davidson that I'm inexplicably drawn to. The detective is a caterer who lives in Colorado who's married to a policeman. Many things about the series irritate me. The language is sloppy and often cliched, the main character is humorless, and most annoying of all, her recipes are highly unappealing. That's what really gets me, although it's in keeping with the rest of the book's mediocrity. Of course, the question is Why do I keep reading these? I really don't know.
I also had a novel with me called Ali and Nino: A Love Story, by Kurban Said, which I found through a great book called The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life by Tom Reiss. (That's a review for another day.) Ali and Nino, first published in 1937, is the story of an Azerbaijan Muslim boy and a Georgian (Soviet) Christian girl who fall in love. Both the NY Times and Entertainment Weekly give it raves, which is promising, since it usually means the work in question has some intellectual weight but is also totally readable.
And yet, I read this crappy mystery, The Main Corpse. I'm of two minds: I feel like I should clear my palate with something more worthy but I also feel like this mystery is so lacking in impact that reading it is almost like meditating.
Happy New Year!
