Up with the Lark

Through the Children's Gate

Regular readers of The New Yorker magazine will already be familiar with the wonderful writing of Adam Gopnik.  Those of you who are new to his writing are in for a treat with this gem, Through the Children's Gate.  Gopnik ruminates about his family, his adopted city and life in general with a great deal of wit and charm.  He is insightful without ever being arch and he portrays the intelligence of his children without making them seem coy or precocious.  He is effortlessy funny - his three year old invents an imaginary friend who is too busy to play with her - but there are moments of real emotion as well.  This a companion piece to his earlier book Paris to the Moon which chronicles his family life during their five years in Paris.  From beginning to end this is a fabulous read.  Buy at Amazon

Climbing the Mango Trees

Anyone who has read the work of writers such as Nigel Slater or MFK Fisher knows that food can feed memory.  And so it is true of Climbing the Mango Trees, a delightful memoir by Madhur Jaffrey.  Jaffrey's childhood is recalled through the spices, textures and the aromas of the food that surrounded her.  Living with her parents and siblings alongside her grandparents and many aunts, uncles and cousins she mentions in passing that she was an adult before she realized that most immediate families did not consist of at least thirty people.  I loved Jaffrey's description of her and her many cousins sitting in their grandfather's mango tree.  The eldest sat nearest the top with a knife and handed down pieces of green mango for the smaller children on the lower branches.  When she began to dip her mango slices into salt and chili she was no longer considered a baby.  Jaffrey is an elegant writer and effortlessly evokes what it was like to be a child of privilege growing up at the end of British rule in India.  Her descriptions of the family foodstuffs is mouthwatering and she provides over thirty of her family recipes in the back of the book.  Amazon

Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

I found the beginning chapters of Bill Bryson’s childhood memoir Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid charming and amusing. By the time I had reached the middle of the book, I was getting a bit fatigued by both the style and the content. I recognized aspects of my own childhood, (Bryson is my senior by about 5 years) and that was fun, but it seemed to me to lapse more into nostalgia than awareness. On the other hand, it was a nice change of pace to read a memoir that didn’t involve drug addiction, alcoholism or incest.  Buy at Amazon