Does HG do anything but eat, drink, think about food, write about food, reminisce about food and plan future travel/dining adventures? Yes. HG swims an hour a day. HG strolls in the meadows surrounding his New Mexico home; HG builds a nightly blaze in the fireplace, visits BSK in her art/pottery studio, listens to chamber music (namely Mozart, Bach and Beethoven). And, HG reads. Obligatory periodicals: New Yorker, New York, Economist, New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, World of Interiors, Saveur, Bon Appetit, Santa Fe New Mexican, New York Times (online). And, non-fiction books. For some obscure reason, HG shuns fiction. Two recently read books HG recommends: Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan and Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century by Tony Judt. A critic summed up “Zealot” accurately: “Aslan rips Jesus out of all the contexts we thought he belonged in and holds him forth as someone entirely new. This is Jesus as a passionate Jew, a violent revolutionary, a fanatical ideologue, an odd and scary and extraordinarily interesting man.” Judt’s book Is a searching analysis of many things: Marxism, evil, history, foreign policy, Israel, the role of intellectuals. Judt (he died a few years ago, tragically too early, of Lou Gehrig’s disease) was a historian and thinker of great insight and uncompromising moral rigor. His landmark book, Postwar, an account of Europe’s recovery from the horrors and wreckage of World War Two, is obligatory reading if you wish to understand the troubled world we live in.
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