I recently read Ruth Reichl’s latest book called “Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise.” It’s about the former New York Times restaurant critic’s experience, and her stories about disguising herself to fool restaurant managers and owners is very entertaining. Part of the charm of the book is that she intersperses a handful of recipes throughout. One of them is Nicky’s vanilla cake, named after her son. I love vanilla, so I decided to make this for a brunch I hosted a week ago. The result was so disappointing — it tasted too much like baking soda — that I decided to make it again this past weekend. After all, what’s the likelihood that the former NYT critic and current Gourmet magazine editor-in-chief would get a recipe wrong? It seemed more likely that I made a mistake and perhaps put too much baking soda in.

I made it yesterday, and as hard as it is to believe, it appears that there’s something wrong with the recipe. I got a little worried so I used less baking soda than the recipe called for, so it tasted a bit better but there’s still something wrong with it. This time, I know I didn’t make any mistakes because I was very careful. I can’t believe I wasted a pound of butter to make the two cakes. The second cake is on its way to the garbage.

This is the titillating title of a Japanese book that is generating some buzz these days. It’s not really a book as much as it is a compilation of a so-called blog entry and the responses to it. Earlier I wrote about an ad campaign for a portal called Goo run by Japan’s dominant telephone company NTT.

Well, this portal has a feature called Ask Goo in which users can write in with questions and the community can freely respond to it (slightly different than Google I think). Well, one day some guy writes in saying that he found out that his wife planned to commit adultery next week and asked the community what he should do. He also knew which hotel they were going to because the first one he called randomly happened to be the one where they had booked a room. The book is a compilation of the hundreds of responses he received in just two weeks. Some people told him to storm in at the scene and beat the guy up, others suggested hiring an investigator to gather hard evidence for when he filed for a divorce. Some people got pissed off at his indecisiveness, others were sympathetic. Reading the book gives nosy people like me immense satisfaction.

Showa is the era in Japan that starts in 1925 (I think). The book is about the history of mainly the World War II years by Kazutoshi Hando, a known WWII scholar and a former editor-in-chief of a respected Japanese monthly called Bungei Shunju.

Right at the beginning, he presents this premise: Japan has created and destroyed the country in modern times in 40 year increments. Specifically, he defines the start of modern Japan as 1865 when the Emperor declared that the country would be open to foreigners after being closed off for 200 years. From there, Japan spent 40 years through 1905 turning the country into a global power. It won not only one, but two wars against Russia. Then, however, the country “becomes conceited and overconfident, declares war against the entire world and destroys the country that former leaders had worked so hard to build.” That takes us to 1945. Jump to 1952 when Japan regains its autonomy after seven years under U.S. occupation. The country again works furiously to become an economic superpower this time, but again, in exactly 40 years, the bubble bursts.

It’s an intriguing thought given that we’re more than 10 years into an economic slump (another 30 more years according to his theory?). Anyway, he presents a remarkably balanced and human account of what triggered World War II in Pacific Asia (a war-hungry bumbling idiot military and a system that covered for their mistakes) complete with excerpts of diaries and official documents as well as their translations into understandable Japanese. It’s a real shame that it’s not available in English.

This is a great book. The sub-title is “Great Journalism Too Hot to Print”. Basically, it’s full of articles that were killed for one reason or another.

Some notable ones include:

- Betty Friedan’s article imploring women to take their college studies more seriously in the early 60s when most of them were just looking for future husbands. The article was killed by male McCall’s editors, who were threatened by the notion of strong women. The rejection of this article supposedly prompted her to write “Feminine Mystique.” Whether you’re a feminist or not, it’s a brilliantly-written article that logically makes the convincing point that education only helps women obtain what they want in terms of successful husbands, large families and a good life.

- An article about a Jewish American reporter, who goes to Palestine to report on the real people that live there.

- A personal narrative by a male award-winning writer in Canada, who also works as a prostitute.

- The real story behind the Body Shop.

And so on. At any rate, I definately recommend it.

This is probably one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It’s about a librarian that involuntarily travels through time . The book hooks you from the beginning when he — as a 40-something year old, shows up in his wife’s backyard, naked when she’s six. He can’t control when or where he goes, and he always arrives somewhere naked because he can’t take or leave with anything. Between the time that she’s six and the time that she meets him for real, when she’s 22, she’s already met an older version of her husband more than 80 times. It’s a storyline that could sound really flaky, but the author — Audrey Niffenegger — pulls it off. Niffenegger is a professor at Columbia College in Chicago, and this is her first book. Highly recommended.