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3.43 AVERAGE
3.43 AVERAGE
I was eager to start On the Noodle Road, but this audiobook version is awful! Coleen Marlo's pronunciation of Mandarin and Italian words is amazing, but her narration style is not. Her pacing is strange (rushed in some parts and dragging in others for seemingly no reason) and her tone is so infuriatingly pretentious that I couldn't make it past the second disc.
I would had dropped this book entirely if it hadn't been recommended to me by someone who thought I would love it. Curious to find out if it was the author's writing style or the narration (or both) grating on my nerves, I looked up Jen Lin-Liu on YouTube and listened to a presentation she had given. I was shocked to find that she was not at all how I had expected her to be (or how Coleen Marlo had made her sound). In fact, I found her very likable and I was eager to hear what she had to share.
I'm going to scrub my ears and read this in paperback.
I would had dropped this book entirely if it hadn't been recommended to me by someone who thought I would love it. Curious to find out if it was the author's writing style or the narration (or both) grating on my nerves, I looked up Jen Lin-Liu on YouTube and listened to a presentation she had given. I was shocked to find that she was not at all how I had expected her to be (or how Coleen Marlo had made her sound). In fact, I found her very likable and I was eager to hear what she had to share.
I'm going to scrub my ears and read this in paperback.
This book made me hungry. Jen Lin-Liu's descriptions of food are very good. I wanted to try all the dishes she wrote about. Got a bit bored with the navel gazing about her husband, but the travel and food writing is very good.
I really liked this. It's, I think, less about food and more about the journey. Lin-Liu charts her progress through the Silk Road, but it's really a path about thinking what it means to cook - a role predominately taken on at home by women - and what it means to be a wife. The food is both an important part of that and secondary at the same time. Also, this deepened my desire to go to China and eat all the food.
I love reading about food, though like many others I felt rather eyeroll-prone with Lin-Liu's descriptions of marital questions. Were this a film, that'd be where I'd fast forward. I listened to the audiobook for this, and I'm guessing that the publisher went with someone fairly comfortable with Italian pronunciation, because the Chinese pronunciation for various dishes was so butchered that it took me out of the book. It made me suspect of other dish names mentioned all along the silk road. My own interest and study of Chinese and Chinese food made this book a real treat, trying to tie links along the silk road, and the relationships with other cooks across various countries still made this a good read for me, despite occasional cringes at priveledge, and cross cultural assumptions.
"'You're leaving?' a neighbor called out. 'Yilu shun feng.' The Phrase is usually rendered as 'Have a good journey,' but the literal translation is more poetic: 'Let the wind move you on the road.'"
"Every family pickled their own vegetables and made their own preserves. She brought in a jar from the balcony and opened it, handing me one of her pickles, which was crisp and just sour enough to make me reach for another. She dropped a spoonful of berry preserves into my tea, which enlivened it with the flavour of summer. 'Right now, at my university, the most popular topic of conversation is, 'What did you conserve?' she said.
"Communism had made women as education and gainfully employed as men."
"We got closer and stumbled into an enormous bazaar. The aisles were filled with the most beautiful produce I'd ever seen. Cashews, almonds, and pistachios were carefully arranged in plastic tubes that formed geometrical patterns like the decorative tiles on the facades of mosques. Pristine pears, greenish-red like autumn leaves, formed cylindrical towers. Split pomegranates hung on wooden posts, their pink pearls spilling out of the peel. Even ordinary staples like eggs looked alluring, the white oval arrayed in perfect squares. Vendors polished tomatoes and lemons. In an aisle full of salads, sellers rapidly chopped purple, yellow, and orange carrots into sticks and shreds behind colorful heaps of jade cabbage and magenta beets."
"All I could do was cringe and wish her the best. Another thing you could find across cultures besides fried chicken and burgers, I thought, was women who fell for the wrong men."
"The intense sweets included fried balls of dough basted in thick honey to chewy squares of Turkish delight dusted with powdered sugar and infused with different fruits or exotic flavorings, such as mastic, a tree sap that tasted like earthy spearmint. And there were heavenly slices of flaky baklava crammed with pistachios and drenched in syrup, in a shop that smelled of warm butter."
"Every family pickled their own vegetables and made their own preserves. She brought in a jar from the balcony and opened it, handing me one of her pickles, which was crisp and just sour enough to make me reach for another. She dropped a spoonful of berry preserves into my tea, which enlivened it with the flavour of summer. 'Right now, at my university, the most popular topic of conversation is, 'What did you conserve?' she said.
"Communism had made women as education and gainfully employed as men."
"We got closer and stumbled into an enormous bazaar. The aisles were filled with the most beautiful produce I'd ever seen. Cashews, almonds, and pistachios were carefully arranged in plastic tubes that formed geometrical patterns like the decorative tiles on the facades of mosques. Pristine pears, greenish-red like autumn leaves, formed cylindrical towers. Split pomegranates hung on wooden posts, their pink pearls spilling out of the peel. Even ordinary staples like eggs looked alluring, the white oval arrayed in perfect squares. Vendors polished tomatoes and lemons. In an aisle full of salads, sellers rapidly chopped purple, yellow, and orange carrots into sticks and shreds behind colorful heaps of jade cabbage and magenta beets."
"All I could do was cringe and wish her the best. Another thing you could find across cultures besides fried chicken and burgers, I thought, was women who fell for the wrong men."
"The intense sweets included fried balls of dough basted in thick honey to chewy squares of Turkish delight dusted with powdered sugar and infused with different fruits or exotic flavorings, such as mastic, a tree sap that tasted like earthy spearmint. And there were heavenly slices of flaky baklava crammed with pistachios and drenched in syrup, in a shop that smelled of warm butter."
The authors Silk Road journey to discover the origin of the noodle...where very little about noodles is actually discovered but so very much more is. This was fascinating and so educational, I learned so much about the different cultures in that area, some cultures I hardly knew existed except maybe in passing in a news story and then usually in a political way not a cultural way.
The book is well written, engaging and informative without being overly preachy though I did find it a bit hard to believe the author was as naive as she came across about the way women are treated in that part of the world.
The overall balance in the book between the cultures, their history and her personal experience was handled quite well and she never spent to much time on one or the other that I lost interest.
I really enjoyed this and I am definitely going to be checking out her other book.
The book is well written, engaging and informative without being overly preachy though I did find it a bit hard to believe the author was as naive as she came across about the way women are treated in that part of the world.
The overall balance in the book between the cultures, their history and her personal experience was handled quite well and she never spent to much time on one or the other that I lost interest.
I really enjoyed this and I am definitely going to be checking out her other book.
I really wanted to love this book. It had so many qualities that I usually enjoy- food, travel, memoir, recipes. I couldn't even get through the whole book.
A true story by an Asian American writer and food lover traveling along the Silk Road from Beijing to Rome to discover the secrets of noodles.
I was a bit put off by the authors somewhat whiney voice but still I mustered through. But the intricate details of how each noodle was prepared just was not captivating to me.
A true story by an Asian American writer and food lover traveling along the Silk Road from Beijing to Rome to discover the secrets of noodles.
I was a bit put off by the authors somewhat whiney voice but still I mustered through. But the intricate details of how each noodle was prepared just was not captivating to me.
This was a lot of fun. A largely not stressful journey along the Silk Road in search of the origin of noodles with a side of musings on gender and relationships. It was a fun, quick read.
Loved this travelogue in search of where noodles originally came from. Have always been intrigued by the Silk Road and this book doesn't disappoint. In fact, I want more, more about the journey, more about the cultures, more recipes.