A Hash at Home is Better Than a Roast Among Strangers

The Hymn to Dionysus, Natasha Pulley

I didn't enjoy this one as much as her other books; I'm not sure whether I wasn't in the right frame of mind or whether the book just wasn't as good. It definitely didn't seem as well written, and most of the plot points were confusing. There are some of Pulley's usual touches--automata (here called marvels); a tall, lithe male protagonist who is nevertheless awkward and shy; a precocious child who befriends the protagonist. I did learn that Dionysus was not just the god of wine; he was also tied to agriculture (especially vines), insanity, religious fervor, and probably other things. The tag line is "a man needing a god to remind him how to be a human," which I didn't get at all.

The Core of an Onion: Peeling the Rarest Common Food, Mark Kurlansky

Kurlansky has probably earned the right to publish a book that seems to have taken very little time or effort, and not just because it's short. The first half of the book is onion trivia in no particular order and without editing, such that one sentence appears twice in a paragraph and some facts appear more than once. The second half of the book is onion recipes, mostly very old ones that don't have a lot of appeal to modern palates. For example, there's a recipe for an onion pie that includes placing slices of hard-boiled eggs over the onions. 

Memphis, Tara M. Stringfellow

A debut novel about three generations of Black women from about 1950 to the 2000s. My main complaint is that there was very little about the city of Memphis aside from one of the women meeting her future husband while working in a store that could have been Stax's Satellite record shop and another woman's comment that there was always music around in Memphis. If you've read any contemporary fiction in the past 5 years, you've read a book like this: it jumps around in time, there's plenty of trauma, and the uplifting part is supposed to be that the family endures.

The Soul of Malaya, Henri Fauconnier

This book came out in 1930 and reflects the entrenched racism and exploitation underlying colonialism. Fauconnier wrote very lyrically about the native jungle of what's now Malaysia yet also wrote that the Chinese were always devious, the Tamils were lazy, and so on. The protagonist works on a rubber plantation (which was created by burning the jungle) while getting life lessons from the plantation's owner and sleeping with wife of one of his Malay employees. I put this one in the recycling bin.

The Indians of Texas: From Prehistoric to Modern Times, William W. Newcomb, Jr.

A much more even-handed account than I was expecting for a book that came out in 1961. I hope that we know more about the Native Americans of this region than Newcomb knew in the 1950s; there was a lot of hand-waving and guessing for some of the groups that left little in the way of artifacts or interactions with Europeans. One thing that Newcomb mentions that I hadn't realized is that the Plains Native Americans became expert horse riders in a very short span of time--maybe a hundred years. They had about another 100 years before they were relegated to small plots of land and unable to keep their traditions.