Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

In 1931, in the British colony of Malaya, an aging British physician asks Ren, his 11-year-old houseboy to fulfill his dying wish. Find his missing finger within 49 days of his death and bury it with the rest of his body. The doctor dies and Ren begins his search, only the finger, blackened with age and preserved in a glass vial in a rural Malayan hospital is desired by several people at once. The finger might or might not contain supernatural powers, not so far-fetched in 1931, in Asia, where superstitions seem as reliable as modern science for explaining random acts of life. Night tigers attack night wanderers without warning. Philanderers and adulterers, as if deserving of punishment, are struck down by mysterious illnesses. Fortune and misfortune fall upon native Malayans and British ex-pats whose lives intertwine in hospitals, rubber plantations, storefronts, dance halls, trains, and secret rendezvous spots. While the voices of characters don't feel distinct, the characters

On my last trip to the Whole Foods Coop in Erie, I picked up 18 ounces of something called "7-Grain and Seed Mix:" cracked wheat, cracked rye, cracked barley, corn grits, steel cut oats, millet, and flax. I cooked a couple of cups in the microwave and then added some to my Cripple Creek whole wheat starter.  A cup of water plus the moisture in the cooked cereals meant I had to add a lot of flour before it would become bread dough: Swany white organic white flour, spelt flour, and then some freshly milled hard red winter wheat and hard white spring wheat. I also added about a quarter cup of molasses. The crust was crisp, the crumb tender, and the molasses gave the final loaf a faintly sweet finish.

The first in a mystery series for detective Jackson Brodie. Kate Atkinson's account of a series of women done criminally wrong is delivered with such tartness you can't help but snigger all the way through. Take for example, Sylvia, an ugly duckling of an adolescent, whose mother rationalizes Sylvia's personal conversations with God this way. "And at least conversations with God were free, whereas the upkeep of a pony would have cost a fortune." Or this example. An unsympathetic physician visited by an overweight Theo, a client of Jackson Brodie's, describes his GP as, "a young woman with a very short haircut and a gym bag thrown carelessly in the corner of the doctor's office." The GP calls Theo obese condemning him, "to skim milk and chaff." Theo thinks of himself as a rotund Santa Claus.  Even descriptions of children who disappear and unfortunate souls whose throats are unceremoniously slit come off rather jauntily. The action