Continuing a review of the historical novel, I dipped again into that guilty pleasure, W. E. B. Griffin. He’s not Patrick O'Brian, but Griffin can write a bit, he keeps a rein on his politics, and he has a knack for sketching memorable characters with short touches of dialogue. Like O'Brian, but running against genre, Griffin rights war stories in which the war is almost always offstage, even though he’s never very interested in those who only stand and wait.

In 1908, as he prepared to leave the White House after seven extremely popular years, Roosevelt convened a national conference on Conservation to address the deterioration of the environment. “We should not forget,” he said in the opening keynote, “that it will be just as important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time as it is to us to be prosperous in our time.” At lunch, he was delighted to talk with The Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan, who personified the Other Party (and who would run and lose, once more, in the upcoming election). The two got along famously; Roosevelt still lived in a world where Republicans were reality-based and if the environment was not yet much of a Democratic cause, everyone could see the importance of preserving forests and waters and minerals would hold for the future.

At the start of the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt created a new synthesis of American politics — an energetic, reform-minded, and conservative Republicanism. He was terrifically popular and surprisingly successful, and when he left the White House in 1908 it seemed that the Republicans would continue to be the party of Progress, leaving the Democrats the sad consolation of the solid South, the religious crazies, and a few anti-government tycoon extremists. Roosevelt's future took a century to unfold, and required the other party will pick up the banner his successors cast aside in the early twentieth century and tried to trample underfoot in the first years of the 21st.

I fancy that, in the introduction to this inviting volume, we hear an echo of Isak Dinesen's "I had a farm in Africa."

My delicious revolution began when, young and naïve, I started a restaurant and went looking for good-tasting food to cook.

The restaurant was Chez Panisse in Berkeley, the year was 1971, and the revolution was complex. The first part is now well known: Waters found that she couldn't buy the ingredients she wanted and, unlike American chefs before her, she wouldn't make do with substitutes or imports, but instead built a network of growers who cultivated produce and raised meat specifically for her. Nor was she content with simply getting great ingredients to her restaurant: she lobbied everyone else in sight to do the same thing, and to patronize the same growers, and so the growers made more money and their neighbors began to emulate them. Out of her kitchen, she set up a series of former employees as bakers and suppliers. And, while she was at it, she made her kitchen the training-ground for an entire generation of American chefs and restauranteurs, many of them women, and they went on to transform the industry Unless you know the story, that line about "my delicious revolution" gets lost.

This manifesto masquerades as a recipe book in two sections. First, we have about 30 pages of introductory essays: what to have on hand, what to cook. These essays are lively and engaging reading for any cook, and they can open your eyes. Waters is the Prophet Of Fresh, but after explaining what staples you absolutely need in your pantry (garlic, onions, shallots, celetery, carrots...), she takes time out to list about fifty dishes you can make using nothing but the stuff you have in your pantry -- that is, dishes you can make for dinner when you just couldn't manage to get to the store. It's terrific to be reminded of what you can do when you have nothing to cook tonight: whip up some carrot soup, a cheese souflée, roast shallots, and finish with lemon curd or butter cookies, and who would know that you couldn't be bothered to shop?

The second section of the book discussed "foundation" recipes, exploring food groups and styles through a few exemplary recipes. We start, characteristically, with salads: how do we make a decent salad? The breads, broths, beans, pasta, and on to baking, satueeing, braising, poaching, and grilling. The book then concludes with hundred and fifty pages of recipes that can be treated more concisely because the foundations have been covered.

This volume, then, is a mirror to the new Ruhlman: where The Elements of Cooking supplements some essays with a glossary, The Art of Simple Food supplements some essays with a recipe book. In both cases, the author (or their editors?) are trying to hide those unpopular, unsalable essays in a more palatable and familiar melange. In both cases, I think, the essays are by far the strongest point. The foundational arguments can be done as well by Sally Schneider (The Improvisational Cook, but only Waters can tell us about her delicious revolution.

A tribute to the engineers of Imperial Rome, and most especially the men who designed, built, and who for centuries maintained the sophisticated system of aqueducts the brought water — and with it, civilization — to the towns and cities of the Empire. This story of one engineer, a temporary aquarius sent to be superintendent of the Aqua Augusta after his predecessor disappeared. This system of aqueducts, mostly underground and at this point already decades old, served the naval base at Misenum (commanded by the irascible admiral Pliny) as well as Neapolis, Herculaneum, Pompeii, and neighboring towns. The year, unfortunately for Marcus Attilius, is 79 AD.

In this volume, we spend a week driving around Wales and the Marches with an eminent and sociable linguist who has plenty of fine and amusing stories with which to amuse the dull spaces between towns. He knows why each city and village is named as it is, and he knows what interesting thing happened there in 642 or in 1739. Once in a while, we stop to do some work — to give a talk at a conference, to attend a festival of used books or Welsh music, to record sample accents for a BBC documentary. We learn why, in the British navy, one should never speak the word “232” aloud. We learn why Charles Darwin’s famous grandfather didn’t get along with Dictionary Johnson. We learn exactly what the differences are between Harry Potter’s British and American editions. We learn that Austrian bees can understand the dance of British bees, but that they dance with slightly different accents that lead to mild misunderstandings. It’s a pleasant, unsystematic interlude, a working week away from work.

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

Notice that ambiguous but quietly uncompromising disjunction. Have nothing that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. Does Morris mean that we can retain ugly but useful things? Surely not! And note, too, the subtle acknowledgment that we can know something is useful (by using it) but we can only believe in its beauty.

This pleasant and concise biography of William Morris focuses most strongly on his literary work, but not to the exclusion of his contributions to interior design, printing, stained glass, and politics. Morris seems never to have hesitated to study something he wanted to know, or to pursue expertise he felt he might enjoy or that might benefit his friends and countrymen.

Everyone was talking about veal stock this week. I spent the weekend roasting bones and simmering at a lazy bubble and skimming, skimming, until it was so good it hurts. And so I found myself rereading the opening chapter, and one thing led to another.

A tasty pendant to Paradise Lost.

Blake was right: in Paradise Lost, Satan and his crew are by far the most interesting and, for the most part, admirable characters. They are in a bad place. Literally. They address themselves with commendable directness to their problems. Shall they continue the war, which they now know to be hopeless? Shall they reconcile themselves to accept eternal punishment? Shall they attempt to remodel Hell to make it less unpleasant, or to change themselves to better fit their circumstances? Shall they use their wits to conquer a new world?

Adam's a problem, and Eve is worse; much of Paradise Lost seeks to justify woman's subjugation to man. Much of the language is wonderful, even to the most casual reader:

Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon:
The world was all before them where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They, hand in hand, with wand'ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Milton is more fun than his reputation would suggest, and this lovely edition is nicely printed, nicely bound, yet not unreasonably expensive.

We know almost nothing about Shakespeare's biography, but we do have one record of something he actually said, not wrote.

On Monday 11 May 1612, William Shakespeare have evidence in a lawsuit at the Court of Requests in Westminster.

This deposition involves a dispute over an unpaid dowry; back in 1604, when he was lodging in Silver Street with in the Montjoy household, Christopher Montjoy has asked Shakespeare to convince Montjoy's former apprentice to marry Montjoy's daughter and to officiate at the betrothal. Shakespeare obliged. The family has now fallen out, the son-in-law is suing for his dowry, and Shakespeare testifies that some dowry was agreed but can't remember the exact amount.

From this small shred, Nichols pursues a fascinating, rigorous, and readable pursuit of Shakespeare's London environment. The house on Silver Street is gone, burnt in The Great Fire. Silver Street itself is gone, erased in postwar development. We can know that Shakespeare's room was upstairs, as was the privy. We can know he had a window. And though we have no idea which way his window faced, Nichols reconstructs that he might have looked out on the busy shopping street, or perhaps into a neighboring apothecary garden. And he finds out what they grew in that garden, and why.

Nichols' tireless search through record rolls, tax ledgers, physician’s case books, property archives, and the entire body of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, yields remarkable detail. When the newly-married couple moved out of the house, they moved in with George Wilkins, a nearby victualler who longed to be a poet, who was indeed writing a play (Pericles) with Shakespeare, and who — Nichols pieces together the evidence very neatly — seems to have at the same time been launching a career as a pimp.

Nichols is careful not to dash beyond the evidence, but his point is wonderful. As Shakespeare was writing Lear, we know — we have contemporary testimony from multiple sources — that in the house where he was living a young bride and her father were bitterly falling out. They moved into a friend's house, a shady friend — shadier, perhaps, than they realized — at about the time Shakespeare is writing about a virtuous woman living in a brothel.

Having reread The Subtle Knife , I found I couldn't stop there. And so here we are.

Pullman does a fascinating and complex job of showing his characters grow up without making a fuss or calling attention. In the first book, Lyra has plenty of energy and will, but it's all about hiding from grownups or manipulating them, or running away. She's a child. In The Subtle Knife, she's on her own, alone with Will and her guiding spirit and with a mission she doesn't understand but knows is right. And in The Amber Spyglass, she is in control and in charge and she knows what must be done; she is a woman long before she walks into that murmurous golden glade.

Aaron Swartz raved about this book, even though he says he doesn't usually like novels. It was short-listed for the Booker. In the end, I don't see the attraction. Lodge chronicles the sexual escapades of Jet-Setting English Professors as they fly from conference to conference. None of them seem particularly interested in their research, all of them seem surprisingly interested in misbehaving, none of them seem to enjoy it much or learn anything at all. Some of the characters, I expect, are wicked caricatures of noted critics; Morris Zapp is apparently based on Stanley Fish, I suppose Michel Tardes is Michel Foucault, and I can see how that might turn into an amusing game.

As I'm burning through audiobooks at a ferocious clip, I thought I'd reread this middle novel of Pullman's great trilogy. I still agree that it's stronger than the first book — itself a remarkable achievement, since middle books have intrinsic problems that I have always thought intractable. I'm not quite to sure that the usual consensus, that holds this to be stronger than The Amber Spyglass, is correct; if we didn't know the marvels that were coming, would this book be quite so fine?

The sly, slow disclosure that life here is not entirely fun and adventure is literally wonderful.

A strangely delightful book about The Boy, who is eight and who is being raised by his grandmother because his parents were radical extremists in the 1960's. It's also about how a bit of friendly gossip about old friends after your successful Vassar job interview can lead an assistant professor of English to wildly unexpected places — in this case, the remoter corners of Queensland.

This book features what is probably the best fictional phone call ever written.