“THINGS BECOME OTHER THINGS,” BY CRAIG MOD

I happily inhaled this moving and meditative travel memoir, which comes at a perfect time for Father’s Day gifting. It is a strong Bookshop Staff Pick.

The author is Craig Mod, who fled his violent, drug-infested post-industrial Connecticut town at age 19 to begin a new life in Japan. For the past two decades, he’s devoted himself to walking hundreds of miles through rural Japan, keeping his senses open and treasuring the “shrinking towns and villages of fisherman working their salty waters” along his path. His notes and photos from those walks are memorialized in a variety of newsletters and podcasts, which have more than 40,000 followers.

“Things Become Other Things” is the diary of one of his walks: 300 miles along the coast of the Kii Peninsula. It is written as a series of observations addressed to his childhood friend Bryan, who was murdered shortly after they graduated high school. These messages to Bryan are written in the present tense — a vibrant approach that reminded me of haiku — and are accompanied by dozens of photos.

The Japan that Mod discovers, mile by mile, is not the gleaming office-tower Tokyo of Murakami or that Bill Murray movie. Instead, Mod takes us to the rapidly depopulating coastal villages, with their cigarette smoke-filled coffee shops, blue clouds of salty curse words, and unforgettably gritty characters. To me, Mod is the John McPhee of Japan (which is saying a whole lot).

Another writer who delighted in walking for weeks along Japan’s back roads was the 17th-Century haiku master Bashō. In his travel memoir “The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton,” Bashō described the feeling of his walks: “As I stood there, lending my ears to the roar of the pine trees upon distant mountains, I felt moved deep in the bottom of my heart.” That is the feeling that infuses this book.

“I REGRET ALMOST EVERYTHING,” BY KEITH McNALLY

This rowdy, opinionated, and charmingly candid memoir by the transplanted Brit who invented the downtown Manhattan dining scene ticked a bunch of boxes for me.

It is a dazzling story of chutzpah and charm. McNally, the child of a London dockworker whose family could never foot a restaurant bill, improbably revived Manhattan’s gritty, mostly-abandoned Tribeca neighborhood by opening The Odeon, inspired by brasseries he had seen in Paris, followed by more than a dozen restaurants including Balthazar, Pastis, Cafe Luxembourg, Minetta Tavern, and Lucky Strike.

It is also a behind-the-scenes account of New York restaurant life, livened by McNally’s customer-first approach (for instance, inviting a customer who was unhappy with the loud dining room to return for a complimentary private dinner; secretly filling the menu’s “cheap” $15 wine carafes with fine vintages) and all of the quiet details and cinematic near-death experiences that are part of restaurant ownership.

And, it is a survival story. McNally suffered a massive stroke in 2016. Two years later, distraught over its cognitive and physical effects - “my speech was shot to pieces and my right side fully paralyzed” - he tried suicide. He describes his return to health with the help of family and skillful therapist.

Keith McNally’s own dinner table has been filled with notorious and loquacious contrarians, including the polemicist Christopher Hitchens, the neurologist and science writer Oliver Sacks,  and the acerbic art critic Robert Hughes (all RIP). “I Regret Almost Everything” proves that McNally learned a thing or two from them about telling colorful, engaging, and sometimes outrageous stories. Great fun.

“THE FRENCH INGREDIENT,” BY JANE BERTCH

In this breezy and inspirational memoir, an expat Chicagoan banker tells how she learned to feel at home in notoriously-impenetrable Paris and founded a world-renowned French cooking school for English speakers, La Cuisine Paris.

Author Jane Bertch got the stereotypical cold French shoulder when she relocated to Paris for her banking job. “With my red hair, American accent, and audacious ideas, they considered me a circus animal.” But, one faux pas at a time, she deciphered the “code” that governs every Parisian relationship, and learned to “seduce” (her word) her neighbors and associates (with the comical exception of her building’s haughty concierge). And, despite the Notre Dame fire, the terrorist attacks, and the pandemic, she built a thriving business.

This is as much an instructional book as it is a fish-out-of-water story. In chapters titled “Cracking Le Code,” “Seduction for Dummies,” and “When a Non Is Not a Non,” she explains the process of how Parisians warm to outsiders. Spoiler alert: The “French Ingredient” is relationship.

“ON THE HIPPIE TRAIL,” BY RICK STEVES

OK, Rick Steves is not an expat. In fact, he told the NY Times that he “would never live anywhere but the United States.” But, he said, he “desperately wants” Americans to leave the US and be exposed to the rest of the world.

That impulse has led Steves to devote the last five decades to writing travel guidebooks and hosting travel shows on PBS and NPR (the Times fondly called him “one of the legendary PBS superdorks”).

But, before all of that, when he was a 23-year-old piano teacher, Steves and a school friend spent a summer backpacking 3000 miles from Istanbul, through  Afghanistan and Pakistan, to India and Nepal, a route he calls the “hippie trail” and remembers as “the adventure of a lifetime.” As he traveled, he wrote an on-the-fly diary, 60,000 words long, which is now compiled into this book along with his trip photos.

Steves subtitles the book “The Making of a Travel Writer.” Actually, he was a pretty compelling and enjoyable travel writer even then. (On drinking boxed milk billed as never going bad: “We agreed it’ll never go good either.”). But, the trek made Rick Steves a travel writer by opening his eyes to the size and variety of the world…and also to hashish, disabled buses, scary flop houses, border challenges, and the glories of traveling with little planning and even less cash.

Your Weekly 15% Off Discount Code

For 15% off in-store pickup of the books featured in this week’s Constant Reader, please use the code EXPAT when you check out (or, just mention the code when you buy these books at the store). The code will expire in one week, at the end of the day on Saturday.

Until Soon,

Scott

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