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A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee. A murder mystery with a noir-ish feel, set in 1919 Calcutta. Our main character and narrator is Sam Wyndham, ex-Scotland Yard detective and WWI veteran, newly recruited to boost the investigative skills of the police in Calcutta. On Sam's arrival, he is greeted with the body of a white man dressed in black tie, found in an alley in a "native" neighborhood behind a brothel. This at first seems to be a simple case of robbery or scandalous sex gone wrong, but expands to become a conspiracy involving the highest political and economic levels of the British Raj.
The depiction of historical Calcutta is detailed and fascinating, but Sam himself is, alas, less interesting. He's a mystery hero cliche in several ways: the dead wife, the addiction (morphine this time instead of the usual alcoholism, at least), the attempt at hard-boiled writing:
I coughed as the stench clawed at my throat. In a few hours the smell would be unbearable; strong enough to turn the stomach of a Calcutta fishmonger. I pulled out a packet of Capstans, tapped out a cigarette, lit it and inhaled, letting the sweet smoke purge my lungs. Death smells worse in the tropics. Most things do.
[...]
Still, I’d seen worse.
Finally there was the note. A bloodstained scrap of paper, balled up and forced into his mouth like a cork in a bottle. That was an interesting touch, and a new one to me. When you think you’ve seen it all, it’s nice to find that a killer can still surprise you.
It's not bad, it's just a pallid imitation of much better writers. Though to be fair to Mukherjee, there were occasional passages that made me laugh:
Four storeys high and about two hundred yards long, with massive plinths and huge columns topped off with statues of the gods. Not Indian gods, of course. These ones were Greek, or possibly Roman. I never could tell the difference.
That was the thing about Calcutta. Everything we’d built here was in the classical style. And everything was larger than necessary. Our offices, mansions and monuments all shouted, Look at our works! Truly we are the inheritors of Rome.
It was the architecture of domination.
It all seemed faintly absurd. The Palladian buildings with their columns and pediments, the toga-clad statues of Englishmen long deceased, and the Latin inscriptions on everything from palaces to public lavatories. Looking at it all, a stranger could be forgiven for thinking that Calcutta had been colonised by Italians rather than Englishmen.
Sam's character is thin and inconsistent. He's sometimes on the side of the Indians, sometimes on the side of the British. Such flip-flopping could be an astute characterization of a basically decent man reluctant to lose his own privilege, but that's not the case here; it's just messy. He knows way too much about Indian culture, languages, and history for a dude who supposedly arrived in the country days ago. His treatment of the one important female character is sexist and leering (though I am fairly certain that's from Sam's view and not Mukherjee's, but either way it makes me reluctant to spend more time with the character).
The mystery is well-done and several secondary characters are appealing, but ultimately I didn't enjoy it enough to continue with the series.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
I Love My Bread Machine: More Than 100 Recipes for Delicious Home Baking by Anne Sheasby. When I was growing up, my mom went through a phase of obsessing over her bread machine, making all kinds of standard and unusual breads in those funny rectangular loaves. They might look a little weird, but there's nothing like the smell of baking bread. I've fallen out of the habit in recent years and haven't used a bread machine in ages, but when I saw this book, I figured it would be a good way to start again.
There are indeed all sorts of tempting recipes in this book, from the sweet (Golden Gingerbread, Lemon Blueberry Loaf) to the savory (Pesto Whirl Bread, Greek Black Olive Bread), traditional (English Muffins, Sesame Bagels) to new (Garlic Bubble Ring, Orange and Cinnamon Brioche). There's even a whole chapter on gluten-free breads!
Unfortunately I have a major complaint. A large number of the recipes (I'd guess over 50%) use the bread machine to knead the dough, but then require you to do the actual baking in a normal oven. They sometimes ask you to do additional steps as well: mixing, shaping, coating, drizzling, brushing with egg, and even more kneading. What's the point of using a bread machine at all if you're still doing three-fourths of the work the old-fashioned way? You may as well just skip the machine step and use a traditional bread cookbook.
On the other hand, Garlic and Coriander Naan does sound delicious. Maybe this book will tempt me out of my laziness over baking after all.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
The depiction of historical Calcutta is detailed and fascinating, but Sam himself is, alas, less interesting. He's a mystery hero cliche in several ways: the dead wife, the addiction (morphine this time instead of the usual alcoholism, at least), the attempt at hard-boiled writing:
I coughed as the stench clawed at my throat. In a few hours the smell would be unbearable; strong enough to turn the stomach of a Calcutta fishmonger. I pulled out a packet of Capstans, tapped out a cigarette, lit it and inhaled, letting the sweet smoke purge my lungs. Death smells worse in the tropics. Most things do.
[...]
Still, I’d seen worse.
Finally there was the note. A bloodstained scrap of paper, balled up and forced into his mouth like a cork in a bottle. That was an interesting touch, and a new one to me. When you think you’ve seen it all, it’s nice to find that a killer can still surprise you.
It's not bad, it's just a pallid imitation of much better writers. Though to be fair to Mukherjee, there were occasional passages that made me laugh:
Four storeys high and about two hundred yards long, with massive plinths and huge columns topped off with statues of the gods. Not Indian gods, of course. These ones were Greek, or possibly Roman. I never could tell the difference.
That was the thing about Calcutta. Everything we’d built here was in the classical style. And everything was larger than necessary. Our offices, mansions and monuments all shouted, Look at our works! Truly we are the inheritors of Rome.
It was the architecture of domination.
It all seemed faintly absurd. The Palladian buildings with their columns and pediments, the toga-clad statues of Englishmen long deceased, and the Latin inscriptions on everything from palaces to public lavatories. Looking at it all, a stranger could be forgiven for thinking that Calcutta had been colonised by Italians rather than Englishmen.
Sam's character is thin and inconsistent. He's sometimes on the side of the Indians, sometimes on the side of the British. Such flip-flopping could be an astute characterization of a basically decent man reluctant to lose his own privilege, but that's not the case here; it's just messy. He knows way too much about Indian culture, languages, and history for a dude who supposedly arrived in the country days ago. His treatment of the one important female character is sexist and leering (though I am fairly certain that's from Sam's view and not Mukherjee's, but either way it makes me reluctant to spend more time with the character).
The mystery is well-done and several secondary characters are appealing, but ultimately I didn't enjoy it enough to continue with the series.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
I Love My Bread Machine: More Than 100 Recipes for Delicious Home Baking by Anne Sheasby. When I was growing up, my mom went through a phase of obsessing over her bread machine, making all kinds of standard and unusual breads in those funny rectangular loaves. They might look a little weird, but there's nothing like the smell of baking bread. I've fallen out of the habit in recent years and haven't used a bread machine in ages, but when I saw this book, I figured it would be a good way to start again.
There are indeed all sorts of tempting recipes in this book, from the sweet (Golden Gingerbread, Lemon Blueberry Loaf) to the savory (Pesto Whirl Bread, Greek Black Olive Bread), traditional (English Muffins, Sesame Bagels) to new (Garlic Bubble Ring, Orange and Cinnamon Brioche). There's even a whole chapter on gluten-free breads!
Unfortunately I have a major complaint. A large number of the recipes (I'd guess over 50%) use the bread machine to knead the dough, but then require you to do the actual baking in a normal oven. They sometimes ask you to do additional steps as well: mixing, shaping, coating, drizzling, brushing with egg, and even more kneading. What's the point of using a bread machine at all if you're still doing three-fourths of the work the old-fashioned way? You may as well just skip the machine step and use a traditional bread cookbook.
On the other hand, Garlic and Coriander Naan does sound delicious. Maybe this book will tempt me out of my laziness over baking after all.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
