Books

The Mistress of Spices (Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni)

An exotic and sexy book about India, love, magic, and of course... spices.

Tilo, owner of a spice shop in California, is not the elderly Indian woman she appears to be. She has been trained as a mistress of spices, so she evokes the magical powers of the spices of her homeland to help her customers. These customers, mostly first or second generation immigrants, are having difficulties to adapt to the new world. Though trapped in an old woman's body and forbidden to leave the store, Tilo is unable to keep the required distance from her patrons' lives. Her yearning to join the world of mortals angers the spices, and Tilo must face the dire consequences of her disobedience.

Hunting and Gathering (Anna Gavalda)

A beautiful love story. Great storytelling too, I love the way Anna Gavalda writes it. Her characters are unique. And most of all, I love the way she uses Paris as the setting without falling into a cliche. Camille, a talented artist exhausted by ennui and anorexia, cleans offices at night and cowers in a shabby garret by day. Philibert, the fastidious scion of a titled family, peddles museum postcards while squatting in his dead grandmother's Parisian mansion, waiting for her estate to be settled. Philibert's roommate, Franck, a talented (and womanizing) chef with ambition to burn, motorcycles once a week to look in on his stubborn, ailing grandmother Paulette, an "inmate" at a retirement home. When Philibert finds Camille deathly ill one day, he rescues her from her icy garret and deposits her in his shabby but spacious home. Franck and Camille take an immediate dislike to each other, a sure sign that they're bound to fall in love—which happens, cutely, after they liberate Paulette. That's when, "for the first time, each and every one of them felt like they belonged to a real family." Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon I like the darkness of this book. A page-turner! The time is the 1950s; the place, Barcelona. Daniel Sempere, the son of a widowed bookstore owner, is 10 when he discovers a novel, The Shadow of the Wind, by Julián Carax. The novel is rare, the author obscure, and rumors tell of a horribly disfigured man who has been burning every copy he can find of Carax's novels. The man calls himself Laín Coubert---the name of the devil in one of Carax's novels. As he grows up, Daniel's fascination with the mysterious Carax links him to a blind woman with a "porcelain gaze," Clara Barceló; another fan, a leftist, Fermín Romero de Torres; his best friend's sister, Beatriz Aguilar; and, as he begins investigating the life and death of Carax, a cast of characters with secrets to hide. Officially, Carax's dead body was dumped in an alley in 1936. But discrepancies in this story surface. Meanwhile, Daniel and Fermín are being harried by a sadistic policeman, Carax's childhood friend. As Daniel's quest continues, frightening parallels between his own life and Carax's begin to emerge.