Please read Monique Truong's THE BOOK OF SALT. Or, rather, re-read it, because if you're any kind of a good reader -- and who else is on Goodreads? -- you read this back when it first came out in 2003. And if so, you don't need me to re-describe or re-recommend it to you. But I will. It's extraordinary, and all the more so for being one of those books that only gets better each time you re-read it.

It's 1934. The narrator, Bình, is 26 and in Paris, far from his home in Vietnam. Employed as a cook for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Bình weaves a story that wanders back and forth in time, across decades and continents, and, of course, one meal to the next. At the opening of the book, he's seeing the two women off -- "my mesdames" as he forever calls them -- as they sail to America for what will be a successful Stein lecture tour. At the end of the book, after many forays through other parts of Bình's life, we're back at that dock, wondering once more if -- or where -- Bình will sail.

This is not: a book of recipes, a fictionalized tell-all of Stein's Paris days, a romanticized look at Saigon--or Paris, for that matter. What it is instead is a headlong rush of lyricism that frequently reminded me of another book I love, and one that came out just 11 years before, Toni Morrison's JAZZ. It's not a perfect comparison, but I won't back down, in part b/c THE BOOK OF SALT doesn't. Both narrators see all, know all -- Morrison's, of course, is quite different, slyly, technically -- and both surround, if not swarm the stories they're telling. And both voices -- and authors -- needless to say, possess all kinds of authority. When THE BOOK OF SALT tells me how Toklas preferred her pré-salé lamb -- utterly unadorned, flavored only by the seawater saturated grasses it fed on -- I believe every last morsel of it.