The reaction puzzled me. Before I started the book, I already knew some intriguing facts about salt, for instance that the English word “salary” derives from the use of salt to pay Roman soldiers. I knew vaguely that salt had been important in the preservation of food before refrigeration. What I didn’t know about salt would fill a book, and fortunately Mark Kurlansky has written it. Kurlansky is also the author of books about cod, the Caribbean, and the Basque — all subjects, it turns out, with close ties to salt. (Perhaps a book about cheese, which depends far more on salt than I had known, will be next?) It’s a tribute to how consistently fascinating I found Salt that I want to read them all.

I may take a good while to read them all, as I took a long time to read Salt. The book moves roughly from ancient to modern times and individual chapters often have a geographic focus. Sometimes I got a little overwhelmed trying to keep track of which culture had used which evaporation techniques, and I enjoyed the book most a chapter or so at a time.

But it was chock-a-block with amazing tidbits. Among my favorites were accounts of the disastrous consequences of state-controlled salt monopolies (vigorous black markets; sparking one of Mahatma Ghandi’s early acts of defiance), the Chinese deep-bore mines, and salt-mine tourism at Wieliczka and Dürnberg.

Needs More Demons? Nope.

But it’s also a book about a crazy challenge — specifically, cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s massive Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the span of a year. And it’s a book that derives in part from an online journal and explores the metatextual ground where autobiography turns into fiction. As Powell confesses in the Author’s Note, “sometimes I just made stuff up.” These are much more interesting aspects to me. Powell also discusses the negative aspects of her marriage with a candor that I’d find distressing if it were applied to me, but grimly intriguing when it’s directed at someone else. Of course, some of her digs at her husband could be among the parts of the book that are more fiction than not, but she provides ample evidence that she has a sharp and sometimes careless tongue.

Bottom line? I laughed, I cringed, my stomach turned. I feel like i was rewarded for stepping a bit outside my literary comfort zone.

Needs More Marrow? No. (variant metric courtesy Editrix)