October 19th: two things to read for fun

Other things I like to read besides historical studies of past events that have already been resolved and therefore I find less brain-exploding pressure when studying them than I would if I studied something currently happening now:

The New York Times Review of Books, every Monday.
It's just FUN.

Two items I want to recommend to anyone reading this, one from Review of Books & one from New York Times itself:

from review-books:
"The Terroirist," by Jim Holt. It's a review of a book entitled Liquid Memory: Why Wine Matters, by Jonathan Nossiter, [Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

quotes from the review:

> > > > > What is terroir? That is not easy to say. It is a French word, and everyone agrees that it is untranslatable. The disagreement is over whether it exists.

To its defenders -- notably the Old World winemakers of France, Italy and Germany -- terroir refers to the ineffable way that soil, light, topography and microclimate conspire, over generations of human stewardship, to endow a wine with its unique soul.

It's a sense of place you can taste.

To its detractors -- especially the New World winemakers of the Americas and Australia -- terroir is a marketing slogan dressed up as a poetic reverie. In other words, it's a hoax....

...Disdaining "winespeak," [the author, Nossiter] uses literary and historical metaphors. A Bordeaux wine, for instance, is structured like "a hefty novel," whereas a Burgundy has the "staccato lyricism" of a poem. < < < < <
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Cool.

The other article want to recommend today:
in New York Times, in a category titled "Choice Tables" an article:
'Singapore's Culinary Melting Pot'

Writer Gisela Williams describes the food in such an exciting way, it's just fun to read:

> > > > > ...A small group of chefs is reinventing the city's traditional food culture, finding a balancing point between the city's cheap but hard to navigate street food and the expensive white-tablecloth spots.

...I wanted to taste what the food bloggers rave about most often: spicy pastas and Peranakan dishes. We ordered the anchovy pasta..., crabmeat linguine and sambal buah keluak, a Peranakan dish made with finely minced pork and ground buah keluak, an Indonesian nut with pitch-black meat with an earthy, rich flavor; it has been called the truffle of Asia. < < < < <
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