Books I Read June 15th, 2025

I was the only white guy the year I worked in the bakery. Everyone else was a first generation immigrant from Mexico or Central America. I knew nothing about professional baking. My Spanish was extremely limited. I was not expected to stay long. But I stuck with it, stacking bins and sorting palettes of flour, trying to make up in effort what I lacked in skill. One day, some six months into my tenure, when I was scrubbing ash out of the deck ovens, the second in command of the bread department came over and interrupted my efforts.

“You work like a Mexican,” he said.

I felt honored, and remain so. The men and woman with whom I worked (both as a baker and later as a line cook) upheld the highest standards of the immigrant ideal. Industrious, sober, capable and family oriented. There is absolutely no question that without their labor, the city would fall apart. Moreover, without their existence the city would not be what it is, a glorious, contradictory amalgamation which I have been privileged to call my home for some eight years.

At the moment, LA feels like an occupied country. Foreigners have descended to arbitrarily remove members of the community, and to parade, weapons drawn, across our public spaces. The minor acts of nightly mayhem which we have suffered are due entirely to this provocation, and are an anticipated result of the weakening of the rule of law. As so often, I'm reminded of Rebecca West's judgment of the human species in her endlessly valuable Black Lamb and Grey Falcon:

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”

Curse Donald Trump and anyone who ever supported him. May the weight of your choices fall to you and you alone.

Land and Blood by Maloud Ferouan – Inter-familial tension smolders than explodes in a Kabylite village shortly before the war of independence. The well-observed customs of a dying world, if a bit formal feeling.

I am Alive by Kettly Mars – The Haitian earthquake of 2010 sends a schizophrenic back to his bourgeoisie creole family for the first time in thirty years, upends and inspiring the household. Unfolding in polyphonic confessional, Mars paints an honest but hopeful portrait of mental illness and its secondhand effects, one painfully recognizable apart from any distinction in language, race or culture. Mars is a writer of rare talent, I've been impressed with this and the also excellent Savage Seasons.

Season of Crimson Blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim – A May-December romance between an aging Islamic widow and a street tough leads to devastating consequences for all in this strange, bleak, original tale. I found the unfamiliar context and sympathetically drawn characters engaging. An impressive debut.

Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou – An orphaned youth tries to find his way in 70's Brazzaville in this brisk and stylish Dickensian satire. Mabanckou's work roils with energy and cleverness.

Chronicle of a Blood Merchant by Ya Hua – Half satire of village life in post-Revolutionary China, half epic chronicle of a man's journey into fatherhood. Ya Hua made his name as an enfante terrible of Mandarin letter but this is funny and sentimental (though not cloying). I bought it for my Dad for father's day.

I was an Elephant Salesman by Pap Khouma – A loosely fictionalized account of the author's experiences as a seller of trinkets in Italy during the mid and late 1980s, before the explosion of immigration from Africa. Engaging and touching, its depiction of the hazards of life as an undocumented immigrant felt sadly apropos given the situation.