Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes by Shoba Narayan (Random House)

What we eat is at the heart of who we are. It shapes our stories as completely as it shapes our bodies and defines our cultural worlds. In the United States, a certain post-war generation is bound together by the memory of canned creamed corn and Campbell's chicken noodle soup, as firmly as those a few years older are by the mention of powdered eggs. It is an unfortunate truth that none of these iconic culinary emblems are more than marginally edible.

And then there is the food that pervades the life of Shoba Naryan: flavorful, enticing, sumptuous dishes that are not just part of her existence. They are the substance and heart of her life. From the moment that she was taken to a Hindu temple for the rice-eating ceremony that marked her first meal, where she spat out the initial morsel because the clarified butter that had been stirred into the rice was burnt, food envelopes the milestones of her life and gives them a dimension of voluptuous, succulent, and bountiful pleasure.

When Shoba's mother becomes pregnant with her second child, she and her small daughter move back to her parents' home for the final stages of gestation. Shoba's mother takes to her bed where she is given "milk spiked with saffron, ground almonds and jaggery or cane sugar" rather than the calcium and iron tablets that serve the same function, and her favorite foods are brought by friends and relatives,who believe that "feeding a pregnant woman was akin to feeding God." It's impossible--if you're female-- to read about this incredibly civilized form of prenatal care without feeling overwhelming waves of envy and a longing to be born Tamil Brahmin in the next life.

After Shoba starts school, every lunch hour becomes a wildly exciting picnic, with little girls sharing bite-sized pieces of their biriyanis, appams dipped into stews of vegetables, cashews and coconut milk,mango pickles, idlis, with the girls with the best lunches reigning over everyone else.

Trips on the night train take on the same feast-like quality, with passengers sharing their food with nearby strangers: roti stuffed with spiced potatoes, sweet-and-sour buttermilk soup, spiced kidney beans. Vendors at stations along the way sell mangoes, milk sweets, and "thick yogurt in tiny terra-cotta pots." Travel is one long delightful culinary adventure.

Although food is the predominant feature of her daily landscape, Shoba cooks her first full meal only when a successfully prepared vegetarian feast will allow her to accept a fellowship to a U.S. university. While her family is confident that she will never be able to pull this off, Shoba has grown up eating, marketing, and watching her mother cook. She prepares food so luscious that reading about it causes an immediate trip to the closest South Indian restaurant and eating it guaranteed that Shoba's family will permit her to leave for America.

The stories in this memoir are as irresistible as the food that underpins it. Murdering New York goldfish leads to a frenzied taxi ride to replace them and an instant friendship and a fabulous meal with a taxi driver from Kerala. An eccentric sculpture professor opens up an undreamed of world of experimental art, lesbian friends and a wasp-nest of outraged Southern academics. And who would ever dream that an unconventional, outspoken artist who has lived for five years in the States would return home and find true romance in an arranged marriage?

You may not wish you were Indian as you gulp down this delicious memoir, but you certainly at times will wish you were Shoba Narayan, if only so you can eat the way that she does. Since twenty-one recipes garnish her anecdotes, this is easy to accomplish. But to have her sense of humor, flair for description, and adventurous spirit? Maybe in the next life!

Yak Butter Blues: A Tibetan Trek of Faith by Brandon Wilson (Pilgrim’s Tales)

Asia By the Book is delighted to be joined by reviewer and book omnivore, Ernie Hoyt, a bookseller for the past 21 years who continues to work in the industry in Tokyo. You can read more of Ernie's book reviews at Ern's Monthly Page Turners on his bilingual blog http://tokyoern.blogspot.com where he also shares his passion for eating in Tokyo and beyond

What's a couple to do after completing a journey from London to Cape Town during which they didn't end up killing each other in the process? To attempt what no other Western couple has done before. To walk the 1000-kilometer pilgrimage trail from Lhasa, Tibet to Katmandu, Nepal. However every travel agency they went to told them it was impossible, or out of the question, or that the Chinese government would never allow it. But those two words -– "can't" and "impossible"-- were just the catalysts needed for Wilson and his wife to make their trip a reality. This book recounts their odyssey.

After checking with a number of travel agencies and being told the same thing over and over again, "It can't be done", "That's impossible", they found a travel agent who was able to help them. Trekking in the Himalayas is no slice of cake, so they trained by climbing the mountains near Vail, Colorado. When all their necessary documents had been approved, they started their journey by flying to Lhasa. It was here where they got a firsthand look at the lives of the Tibetans and their struggle against oppression and prejudice. When the Wilsons discovered that walking this trail is forbidden to Tibetans, it only strengthened their resolve to accomplish their goal.

Their plan was to travel 35 kilometers a day and to reach Katmandu within a month. That plan was shattered after their first couple of days trekking. But instead of giving up or hiring transportation, the Wilsons went in search of buying a pack horse. It was as if they were given Herculean tasks that they would have to clear before reaching their next step. But with faith being their strongest bond, good fortune came upon them again. They found and bought a horse that was to be their companion. A Tibetan horse named Sadhu, which also happens to be the word for a "holy man". How is that for a good omen?

What started out as an adventure soon became a matter of survival. Armed with a dated and nearly useless map and their ever-present faith, they had to endure blizzards, sandstorms, high altitudes and being shot at by careless Chinese soldiers, who claimed they were shooting at birds -- for sport. They also had to worry about restocking provisions and feeding and resting their horse. The further they trekked from Lhasa, the villages became fewer and farther between and they found themselves having to rely on the kindness of strangers.

As they reached the border, they had only one concern -- would there be any trouble in taking their horse with them? Their dilemma was solved by not claiming anything when crossing the border and by not mentioning that they had a horse as a companion. As the border was quite crowded with a line of vehicles, the border guards virtually ignored them. They also unwittingly passed the Nepal Veterinary Checkpoint. Wilson and his wife might not be able to free Tibet from China, but they were able to free at least one Tibetan -- and that would be their constant companion, Sadhu.

This is an inspiring and unforgettable journey--you will be glad you made the trip.

Highways to a War by Christopher J. Koch (Minerva)

What leads people to that spot on earth that forever claims them? How are people drawn from one obscure corner of the world to another that absorbs them so completely that they become consumed by it? How do a time and a place intertwine to become so powerful that decades later they are still conjoined?

Saigon, Phnom Penh, 1965-1975-- two cities that flourished and floundered and fell in the same decade, and thirty years later, certain music and flavors and shades of light can bring these years and these places together again, dancing and dying in the memories of those who had been there.

Once upon a time, a boy from Tasmania came to Singapore with a camera, a tape recorder, enough money to live on for a month, and fell into Asia, its "wave of smells" and "sun which pours over him like a thick and scalding soup." He watched it all through his camera, he began to starve, his money dwindled. Sick and delirious, he was inexplicably rescued by a man obsessed with history and with a ravenous appetite for details from the present. "You'll show your appreciation eventually...," the boy was told, "There's a quid pro quo for everything in this life: haven't you noticed that yet?"

Given an opportunity, Mike Langford became a journalist who was legendary for his daring, his luck, and his love for Vietnam, where "laughter was like breathing" and where "youth casually vanished." Through Hardwick, his mysterious benefactor, Langford met Madame Phan, half-French, half-Vietnamese, who introduced him to a commander of the ARVN, the Army of South Vietnam, in the Mekong Delta. The company was in a region called the Cradle, and it was there that Langford began "a life that would last for a decade, and die with the war."

Other journalists stuck with American troops, "eating ice cream in the field and flying back to Saigon for a shower and a change in the evening", but Langford, from his first patrol, became one with the ARVN. He showed the world the faces of Vietnamese troops on the front lines, how they fought and how they died, until the commander of the company he photographed was killed by American "friendly fire" and Langford moved on to Phnom Penh.

A city "of charmed peace" "which no longer exists, which will never exist again," Phnom Penh attracted journalists "like a whole mislaid life" that was both exotic and familiar. The war lay beyond, down the highways, and photographers and reporters traveled to it in taxis--or in Langford's air-conditioned Mercedes. The battles were removed but real and children- turned -soldiers died in them. Beyond the highways, American B-52s dropped thirty-seven tons of bombs in a single year, destroying villages and sending rural Cambodians to the ranks of the Khmer Rouge.

As the war drew closer to the Cambodian capital, Langford drew closer to the war, as he fell in love first with Phnom Penh, then with its inhabitants, and then with a Khmer journalist whose fierce love for her country fed Langford's own passion for it. "He's losing his professionalism," a colleague said, "He's picking up the gun."

What happens to a man when a country that he deeply loves falls, and the woman he loves is still within its borders? What happened to Mike Langford, and will anyone really know what he paid when the quid pro quo came due?

A novel that is steeped in research, with a number of titles cited in the introduction that could form the core of a Southeast Asian studies program, this is a book that recreates history while it creates unfading characters and a dazzling view of the countries that they inhabited, however briefly but fully. Find it, read it, keep it.