Ex-rock drummer and professional sheep shearer pulls up stakes in England and heads for a new life in rural Spain. Colorful (and hunger-inducing) without being precious.

As close as Larry McMurtry (author of “Lonesome Dove” and “The Last Picture Show”) is probably going to come to an autobiography.

A long essay that starts from pondering German literary critic Walter Benjamin’s essay on storytelling, being read at the Archer City, Texas, Dairy Queen, and spinning out to include his early life on a small Texas ranch, the realities of pioneer and cowboy life; and including along the way McMurty’s beginnings as a reader, book collector, bookseller, and writer. Food for thought for the voracious reader and/or book collector. Recommended.

Colorful, almost food porn, cookbook that showcases recipes combining Japanese and Western elements. Essentially uses Japanese staples in Western ways, in ways that are not, for the most part, too complicated to prepare and yet seem to embody some pretty interesting taste combinations. Ingredients like edamame (soybeans), miso, ginger, konbu (kelp), shiitake mushrooms, umeboshi (pickled, salty plums—which I have never liked), and (yes) tofu are used to make dishes like Edamame Mint and Shiitake Pestos, Rice Vinegar Chicken Breasts, and Littleneck Clams with Umeboshi Broth. The book is available in Japan now, but not until October in the US.

A book about the fishermen and people of a small Sicilian island called Favignana and their centuries-old ritual of bluefin tuna slaughter called mattanza.

It’s more romance than reportage, as Maggio tries to capture the life, rhythm, rituals, myths, and, yes, romance of life on the island, centering her story on the fishermen who deploy the nets and traps that gather hundreds of the giant bluefins for slaughter. The tuna once made the island prosperous, but declining numbers of fish and competition from long-line trawlers has taken its toll (the island’s cannery closed in 1981, throwing a thousand people out of work), and soon the ritual of the mattanza will probably disappear from Favignana, leaving pretty much nothing but tourism behind.

There is a Japan connection, BTW: it’s Japan’s voracious appetite for sashimi that’s helping keep the mattanza going: when the bluefin tuna are slaughtered, the Japanese are waiting to send them off to the tuna auction at giant Tsukiji Wholesale Market in Tokyo. Maggio includes a rather over-the-top chapter about Japanese sushi, exaggerating (in my opinion) the ritual and price of sushi: she quotes 10-year-old Bubble-Era prices for tuna (in 1992, she says, a 715-pound bluefin was sold for $83,500, or about $117 a pound) and extrapolates from that, despite the fact that the average price is a very small fraction of that peak.

The kind of highly stylized sushi places she describes, where they sell toro for $75 a plate, are places I’ve never set foot in and probably never will: I go to the far more common, far more plebian kaiten zushi (conveyor belt sushi) restaurants, where I can snarf down maguro and toro for about $1 to 2 a plate. Sure, the fish isn’t the highest quality, the atmosphere is utilitarian, and the wasabi is reconstituted from powder, but it’s still tasty and, I think, a more usual experience than the romantic and ritualistic kind Maggio describes.

I like the book, I must say. Maybe I’ll tackle the Lawrence Durell book on my shelf next.

A particularly educational overview of the battlefield between nature vs. nuture camps in evolutionary biology.

Autographed by the author, at one of his Tokyo book tour appearances.

A journey through the fractured remnants of Yugoslavia by veteran journalist Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman.

In 1977, he and his family drove across what was the unified country of Yugoslavia on their way to his latest posting. Twenty-two years later, he accompanies a NATO refugee rescue mission trying to save the victims of a Serbian “ethnic cleansing” sweep, and Winchester realizes with a sudden shock that he’s been to this place before; what was once a peaceful valley where his family stopped for a picnic is now a squalid and desperate refugee gathering that the British NATO forces are scrambling to help.

So now he wants to know: how the hell did this happen in just twenty years?

His journey, from Vienna to Istanbul, across the old Ottoman Empire, is his attempt to figure it out.

Notes from James Ellroy Country, or what an Andrew Vachss novel could be if populated by recognizable humans instead of comic-book superhero riffs.

Given the recent hoo-ha over currency exchange rates (a bit of economics that affects me directly), I’ve started rereading this book, hoping to get a better handle on the whole issue, which involves, among other things, the US current account deficit, the Bank of Japan’s interventions to keep the yen weaker, the question of whether the dollar needs to be weaker (or, really, how soon the dollar should be weaker), and if 80’s-style trade protectionism will make a comeback. The Economist magazine devoted much of its recent Survey on the World Economy to this (last week’s issue, still at your local library if you’re interested), and so did Bloomberg News columnist William Pesek in a recent column.

Much of this stuff, is, admittedly, over my head, but I know enough to be bothered by some neo-protectionist rhetoric I’m hearing from folks back in the States. Give me some time, I might even be able to articulate my concerns.

An interesting approach to comparative sociology, using the vehicle of Tokyo Disneyland to compare and contrast how Japan consumes—and alters—the cultural exports from the USA.