pagesofjulia

Another in the vein of Wednesday’s post. In a word: I loved the content, learning about the culinary history of my hometown. (Food and Houston: these are a few of my favorite things.) The book? I’ll be brief and just rehash some of what I wrote the other day about the Guy Clark bio. This was more pamphlet than finished monograph. The early material, on the history of Houston restaurants in general–history of the city, its ethnic makeup, and a few of the early businesses along Main Street, for example–seemed promising. The writing is lackluster, more emphasis on listing of facts than any care to the construction of sentences for their charm. This feature became much more pronounced when we moved into the restaurants themselves. Each entry read like a exhaustive catalog of every fact dug up in source materials, not so much constructed into sentences and paragraphs, let alone an artful narrative, but rather a list in paragraph form. By the end it was painful to read.

Again, as with the Clark bio, it was nice to see my familiar and loved hometown show up on these pages. But it was downright hard to read in many spots. I am frustrated.

This would make good source material for the neatly put-together history of Houston food which is still waiting to be written.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: food writing, Texas |