The richly colored Indian painting that wraps around the cover of this chunky book is well-suited to its contents: 5,000 years of Indian history in 500 pages. It was an ambitious proposition, but one that John Keay was ready for. He first visited the country in 1965 after reading Modern History at Oxford and later worked there as a political correspondent for The Economist. This book is one of several he has written on India.

The book includes many color insets of Indian art and architecture, maps, and timelines of empires. The narrative gracefully sweeps from the ancient cities of Harrapa and Mohenjo-daro all the way to the recent Indian arms race, dispensing insights along the way.

With so much material to cover, this book might have become burdened as a simple chronology of events, but the narrative is vibrant and very specific. Keay shares details of the personalities of individual sultans and useful insights on societies; for instance, he offers that the caste system circa 750 was not “wholly prohibitive and repressive,” but could confer rights of participation in economic and political life.

Keay’s India: a History is both comprehensive and highly entertaining, with writing as colorful as its collection of extraordinary images.

Naples is a haunting city, a city of ghosts who refuse to leave. Dozens of writers have tried to capture it, tried to hold it to definitions, but Naples refuses to sit still for anyone. It is ever changing, ever morphing: porous.

The streets and sidewalks are not defined: cars ride up onto terraces where people sit enjoying an afternoon espresso, and Neapolitan girls meander, arm in arm, down narrow streets where cars try to pass and sassy boys on their mopeds slither through.

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For my birthday, I received a ticket to the dark side. A set of cult-director Roger Corman’s ‘60s movies based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. It’s that most exquisite of cinematic pleasures, a complete personal vision—raw, intense, and immediate. It’s also strangely disturbing. Not because the fake blood and cardboard sets kid anyone that the wholesale slayings and suffering are real. But because Corman has the power to fleetingly stir in me imaginings which, as a law-abiding citizen with a house and growing record collection to support, I normally repress with ease. Imaginings of omnipotence and powerlessness, immortality and death, unbridled sex and unfettered violence. And in feeling these thoughts, if only for seconds, I gain more self-awareness than a thousand Sex and The City episodes will ever yield.

Corman, aka “King of the B’s,” directed throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s. While adults stayed at home to watch the nascent medium of TV, Corman catered to cinema’s new target audience, the teenager. His often fantastical stories of loners and outlaws are shot-through with the emotional and social upheaval real America faced then and since. These are no dumbly exploitative texts. Almost uniquely at the time, many Corman films have an unsettling feminist streak, with gun-toting Western dolls, Viking amazons, and gothic femme fatales ascendant. His most personal movie, The Intruder, was one of the first features to tackle the elephant in the room that was racism in the US. Apart from the fifty-plus movies he directed, the Stanford- and Oxford-educated Corman distributed hundreds more, including some by Truffaut, Fellini and Bergman, then largely excluded from the US market.

Yes, as we lie in bed with the Poe series playing on my laptop, my girlfriend and I howl at the sheer hysteria of it all. At the psychedelic, flagrantly sexual set designs; at Vincent Price’s doomed heroes; and at the volcanic vixens he must battle. But beneath the laughter we both feel the presence of a hidden hand, finely in tune with the human condition and able to strike our deepest inner chords.

Emily Carr once referred to Canada as something “sublime” that you are born into, a “great rugged power that you are a part of.” From my very beginning, I understood what she meant: I was a west-coast Canadian. Most of my west-coast Canadian towns were small: White Rock, before it was a haven for wealthy downtowners, and islands two steps off Vancouver Island and one away from being completely unknown. During these defining years, the places I lived had an average of about 3,000 occupants, provided you didn’t count summer residents (and you never should).

If you mentioned an Ivy school to me, I would have flashed on a rundown, three-room middle school nearby somehow becoming entangled in the green vines. Taxis were the mode of transportation for black-and-white movie characters. Going out for seafood meant pulling on a pair of black rubber gumboots and clomping across a muck of beach freshly uncovered by the tide to shovel for clams or oysters. In cities you have Red Lobster; in places like this you have red tide. (The two still seem equally dangerous in my eyes.) New York was a mythical place, like Paris, Rome, or Narnia. And had you asked me then, I probably would have put more likelihood on my walking through my closet to C.S. Lewis’s snowy wood than ever packing up for Manhattan.

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“My upcoming book is on my mind. I have been working on it for a year now and it is about connecting with food. As a society, we have disconnected food with culture and only care about cheapness, convenience and speed. This is a book to re-connect you with food values and features great stories about my childhood in Post-war France, the best time ever to live in France. It is a story mostly of a great woman named Maman Blanc who was my mentor in every facet of my life. She devoted her life to her family. The book is not trying to educate people but to re-connect them with food in a fun and celebratory way. We have created diets which are terrible for us when if we were eating well, we wouldn’t need diets. The book will give back respect to food while still being an enjoyable read.”

My Life in Food is published by Random House Canada and will be available from all good bookstores on November the 25th.

The Restaurant
Thursdays at 10 pm ET and Saturday at 9pm PT beginning July 26 in Canada
In this exciting reality series, world-renowned chef and restaurateur Raymond Blanc offers nine couples the keys to nine restaurants, which they have to start from the ground up. Each week, the couples compete in a series of competitions until one couple remains standing and is given the chance to go into business with Raymond.

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