#FoodandLit
February in Food and Lit
A beautifully packaged cookbook and highly personal culinary and cultural journey through the diverse regions of Vietnam.
Join Luke Nguyen on a culinary and cultural journey through the country of his heritage to discover the people and recipes that have endeared Vietnam to the millions of travelers who visit each year. Luke Nguyen’s Vietnam follows his trip from northern Vietnam down to the south, through marketplaces and kitchens of strangers and family alike to find the best recipes Vietnam has to offer. Luke records his experiences with the people he meets and the places he visits along the way, breathing life into the classic recipes of Vietnam, from pho to banh mi and everything in between. Luke Nguyen’s Vietnam is a culinary showcase of Vietnam filled with heartwarming stories, breathtaking location shots, and mouthwatering food photography—a must-have cookbook that will be treasured for years to come.
I mostly listened to Vietnamese music, read the fairy tales and folklore and cookbooks, two fantastic ones are pictured.
I did read a few fiction books.
In these pages, Le Ly Hayslip—just twelve years old when U.S. helicopters landed in her tiny village of Ky La—shows us the Vietnam War as she lived it. Initially pressed into service by the Vietcong, Le Ly was captured and imprisoned by government forces. She found sanctuary at last with an American contractor and ultimately fled to the United States. Almost twenty years after her escape, Le Ly found herself inexorably drawn back to the devastated country and loved ones she’d left behind, and returned to Vietnam in 1986. Scenes of this joyous reunion are interwoven with the brutal war years, creating an extraordinary portrait of the nation, then and now—and of one courageous woman who held fast to her faith in humanity.
First published in 1989, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places was hailed as an instant classic. Now, some two decades later, this indispensable memoir continues to be one of our most important accounts of a conflict we must never forget.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer
This led me to the mARC up book coming out March 2021 The Committed and then The Sympathizer…. so yes, I read them backwards.
Book One:
Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Winner of the 2016 Edgar Award for Best First Novel
Winner of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
“[A] remarkable debut novel”―Philip Caputo, New York Times Book Review(cover review)
The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards, The Sympathizer is one of the most acclaimed books of the twenty-first century. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who comes to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping spy novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.
Book Two:
The sequel to The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and went on to sell over a million copies worldwide, The Committed tells the story of “the man of two minds” as he comes as a refugee to France and turns his hand to capitalism
The long-awaited follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer, which has sold more than one million copies worldwide, The Committed follows the man of two minds as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon. The pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure their futures by engaging in capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing.
Traumatized by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, Man, and struggling to assimilate into French culture, the Sympathizer finds Paris both seductive and disturbing. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals whom he meets at dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese “aunt,” he finds stimulation for his mind but also customers for his narcotic merchandise. But the new life he is making has perils he has not foreseen, whether the self-torture of addiction, the authoritarianism of a state locked in a colonial mindset, or the seeming paradox of how to reunite his two closest friends whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition. The Sympathizer will need all his wits, resourcefulness, and moral flexibility if he is to prevail.
Both highly suspenseful and existential, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen’s position in the firmament of American letters.
That was it for me for Vietnam.
