February Best Books of the Month

From Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer’s Guide, to Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life by Alan Cumming, the books featured here are guaranteed to spark your imagination and inspire you to seek new adventures and experiences.

“Eating may be the most immersive, visceral travel experience,” suggest authors Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras in their introduction to Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer’s Guide (Workman. $40. www.gastroobscura.com). Every meal served around the world incorporates some common ingredients: History, culture, geography. Many also include a dash of religion, a pinch of politics, and even a sprinkle of entertainment. Its these abstract elements of the global larder that enliven the hundreds of eating experiences spotlighted in this beautifully designed compendium whose entries range from profiles of esoteric edibles (fried octopus ink sacs; Kool-Aid brined pickles) to oddball restaurant recommendations (the meat lover’s buffet with all-you-can-eat camel and crocodile along with beef and chicken; the coffee bar in a London public men’s room) to surprising food festivals (Louisiana’s Giant Omelet Celebration; the massive Indian gathering at which 4 million women simultaneously cook rice pudding). The book is organized by geography, so in addition to randomly browsing it like a culinary Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, you can make it your go-to reference before you go just about anywhere. One note though: The articles here have been selected and refined from Gastro Obscura website’s much larger, and continuously growing, crowd-sourced motherlode. The book offers an enticing amuse bouche, but the full banquet is online.

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“I like many things in this world,” writes Rax King, “not all of which have the approval of n +1 or Artnews.” Among the lower-falutin’ subjects she shamelessly celebrates in her debut essay collection Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer (Vintage. $15. www.raxkingisdead.com) are The Cheesecake Factory, Hot Topic stores, Guy Fieri, and Josie and the Pussycats. Whether unexpectedly bonding with her father over MTV’s Jersey Shore, spending untold hours pseudo-living amongst the digital Sims, or offering a compelling argument on the excellence of Meat Loaf (The singer, not the dish), King writes with earnest affection; there are no guilty pleasures here. “As far as I’m concerned, tackiness is joyfulness,” she explains. Her joy is infectious.

Geoff Dyer, one of this column’s favorite writers (Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It; White Sands) has returned to one of his favorite subjects, photography, which he last explored in The Ongoing Moment. Dyer’s new See/Saw (Graywolf Press. $24. www.geoffdyer.com), is a collection of brilliant, brief (most are fewer than five pages) essays. Dyer reacts to the work of dozens of photographers as if he’s nerding out with a friend (his prose makes you feel like a pal and a confidante, not a student). “I just look,” he writes in the introduction, “and then think about what I’m looking at, and then try to articulate what I’ve seen and thought, which encourages me to see things I hadn’t previously noticed, to have thoughts I hadn’t had before the writing began.” This pressure-free, open-minded approach dismantles the condescension of much art criticism and invites readers to feel comfortable and capable forming their own opinions and impressions. It’s a part of what Dyer, who has also published books about travel, literature, and jazz, refers to as “an ongoing project of self-funding education” on the subjects that most intrigue him. Whether reconsidering the works of a ubiquitous image-maker like Andy Warhol, or the in-your-face portraiture of queer contemporary photographer Zoe Strauss, Dyer brings fresh perspective to all he surveys. These casual essays zoom in on unasked questions and nudge readers to follow their own curiosity

With translation software getting better each year, it becomes less and less likely that you’ll find yourself unable to come up with the right words to communicate your basic needs when traveling abroad. Figuring out how to say “banister” in Italian or “chilly” in Mandarin or “gas station” in Norwegian is now a matter of typing into your ever-present digital device. But translating complicated emotions into any language remains a challenge; sometimes you just can’t find the words for how you feel. Enter John Koenig, author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (Simon & Schuster. $19.99. www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com), a bewitching little book which takes notions that are dancing inarticulately through your brain and moves them to the tip of your tongue by offering new words with which to express them. What traveler can’t relate to neologisms like Koenig’s “volander. n. the ethereal feeling of looking down at the world through an airplane window, able to catch a glimpse of far-flung places you’d never see in person, free to let your mind meander, trying to imagine what they must feel like down on the ground—the closest you’ll ever get to an objective point of view” which he kluged together from volare, Latin for “to fly” and “solander,”a book shaped box used for holding maps. This strange little book hovers somewhere between poetry, philosophy, and comedian Rich Hall’s 1980s “Sniglets” routines. So are the words in this dictionary legit? That’s up to you, suggests Koenig “When the proper path is too difficult or ineffective to express an idea, when ‘self-portrait with a phone’ doesn’t seem to cover it anymore, someone will cut to the chase and blaze a new trail.”

AIRPLANE READ OF THE MONTH

Baggage - February Best Books of the Month For decades now, actor-cabaret performer-nightclub impresario-activist-author Alan Cumming has demonstrated not just indefatigability, but surprising credibility in every one of his hyphen-separated endeavors. In the past year alone, you may have caught Cumming singing and dancing as late-blooming queer Mayor Menlove in Schmigadoon on Apple TV, doing voiceovers on The Simpsons, touring his musicand- comedy concert act with gay NPR anchor (and sometime crooner) Ari Shapiro, or hosting Alan Cumming’s Shelves, a podcast series in which he tells the stories of his tchotchkes. Oh, by the way, he also published a new book: Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life (Dey Street. $27.99. www.alancumming.com ), his sixth (4 for adults, 2 for kids, if you’re counting). This latest volume has a structure well-suited to Cumming’s peripatetic, polymorphous career and lifestyle. It’s omnibus of anecdotes and mini-memoirs. It strikes an ideal tonal balance between Cumming’s psychologically fraught excavation of family history in Not My Father’s Son (2014) and his verging-on-frivolous compendium of photos and slight showbiz reminiscences You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams (2016). In Baggage. Cumming lets his guard down enough for thoughtful reflection, but always treats the reader as his guest rather than his confessor, deftly balancing entertainment and insight. Some of the choicest bits are lighthearted, like Cummings’ bemused account of the Goldeneye James Bond film premiere, during which his working class Scottish mother becomes fast friends with Judy Dench and Tina Turner. But Cumming also revisits a story he superficially touched upon in Bigger Dreams, this time not shying away from its gravity: Recounting a fraught 2001 evening with Gore Vidal and Howard Austen, the curmudgeonly author’s steadfast partner of 52- years. He notes how Vidal cruelly refuses to acknowledge that he has ever been in love. “Its not as if he had a problem with admitting he liked cock,” Cumming tartly observes, “He just had a problem admitting to liking the rest of the person a cock belongs to.”