As I’m drafting the review for a cookbook plus memoir I just read, which I had originally planned to focus on as a cookbook but ended up really enjoying for the memoir, it got me to thinking about how often one picks up books for one reason but ends up really enjoying them for very different ones. I don't know as it's exactly a reading lagniappe or even the multiple book personalities of the post title, but I'm not sure what else to call it.
The cookbook, The Seventh Daughter, is by Cecilia Chang, founder of The Mandarin Restaurant in San Francisco. She introduced Americans to such things as Peking ravioli and hot and sour soup, showing them that there was a lot more to Chinese food and Chinese restaurants than chicken wings and egg foo young. The recipes in the book are very good (I did try some of them), well written, complete with helpful hints and substitute suggestions. They range from a few complicated banquet dishes through some restaurant favorites to basic Chinese home cooking. But what makes the book fascinating is the story of Ms Chang’s life. She grew up as a Chinese child of privilege (which was something new and fascinating to read about on its own), with a mother whose feet were bound (Ms. Chang describes how this was done), something which defined her in one way when Cecilia was young and in a very different way by the time of Mao. Cecilia went from this structured, carefully sheltered life through an exodus brought on by the upheaval of the Japanese invasion to a very different life as she worked to establish herself as a restaurateur in America (both the new career and the new place of residence happened by accident). Order takeout from the Chinese restaurant with the good stuff and enjoy the story, saving the recipes for another day.
Since I read a lot of historicals, where I come across this sort of pick it up for one reason / enjoy it for another most often is with historical mysteries and their settings. Rhys Bowen is one of the authors I was thinking of in my last post, with multiple series I feel differently about. I just finished Royal Flush, third in the Her Royal Spyness series, which I enjoy quite a bit and somewhat to my surprise. It’s light reading, but light reading that still provides some well researched windows into different aspects of what life was like during the early 1930s. Which is not my sort of setting—I prefer my history well aged, pre-Victorian at a minimum—and features a relatively impoverished, 34th in line to the throne member of the royal family—not my sort of protagonist either. But Georgie's life spent straddling multiple aspects of society, from dealing with Queen Mary's matchmaking on her behalf to visiting her beloved Cockney grandfather (on the non-royal side), and dealing with the inevitable conflicts and headaches her different roles create, helps the reader see the time from different perspectives and in a very personal way. I picked the first book up because I like the author and found myself thoroughly caught up in it, despite it not being anything like her other books and having those “not my sort of thing” aspects to work past. Fun reading that I now think of more in terms of the setting and characters I never would have picked it up for than the author for which I did.
Dolores Gordon-Smith’s Jack Haldean series set a decade earlier, during the 1920s, falls in the same category of fun, light reading that brings to life and left me interested in a setting that wouldn’t on its own pique my interest. The books have a strongly Golden Age (Allingham, Sayers et al) feel but stand on their own and are not blatantly derivative. A big part of why they made me interested in the setting is Haldean himself, who is not just a popular part of the social scene but also someone who carries his own scars from the recent war. Scars (mental and physical) which didn’t leave him the sort of deeply, visibly tortured person Charles Todd depicts with Ian Rutledge, but scars nonetheless. The fact that they are largely buried gets you thinking all the more when they do appear about comparable not so visible scars that period must have left on countless other regular people, including the sort of person you or I would have been and known. They come out in small ways, such as when Haldean suggests a friend who is acting very strangely "see someone (i.e. a shrink of some sort)", and the friend looks at the confident, well adjusted man saying this and asks what he knows about such things, since he’s never... Haldean just smiles... oh. It leaves the reader with an impression of how much well hidden damage that time must have done to how very many people, in a way that all the more obviously scarred Rutledges of the world can't, because this could be me or you.
