"What they're reading" appears as an occasional series in MinnPost's Book Club Club section. We're asking well-known and not-so-well-known Minnesotans to tell us about the books they're reading and recommending to others — and why. Today, St. Olaf President David R. Anderson shares a few of his recent reads.

Nicole Mones' "The Last Chinese Chef"

I happened upon "The Last Chinese Chef" — a novel by the author of "Lost in Translation" — at Left Bank Books in Searsport, Maine. Ostensibly, it's a story about food and love.

The narrator, Maggie McElroy, is a grieving young widow shocked to learn a paternity claim has been lodged against her husband's estate by a woman in China. To resolve the suit, McElroy travels to China.
 
A food writer, McElroy takes the opportunity to profile a half-American, half-Chinese cook in Beijing named Sam Liang. The two meet, get to know each other, and good things happen.

It's a lot more complicated than that, of course. There are rich subplots relating to a cooking contest in which Liang is participating, Liang's fraught relationship with his father, the resolution of the paternity suit, and McElroy's emergence from grief.

A blurb on the back cover describes this book as "the perfect leisure read." That underestimates the novel.


Stieg Larsson's "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest"

"The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" is the third novel in Stieg Larsson's series about investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander.

The tone is kind of preachy, with Larsson revisiting themes of right-wing extremists, the role of a free press in a democracy, and violence against women.

Salander spends most of the novel in a hospital bed recovering from a wound she received in the last pages of "The Girl Who Played with Fire," so her place in the novel is circumscribed, though she  does eventually gain access to a computer with internet.

It's an interesting take on a crime fiction trope: the detective who, for whatever reason, is immobile and must solve crimes by cerebration. (Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe was such a detective.)

Reportedly, Larsson planned to write ten books for this series, but died after completing "Hornet's Nest,"" making it the final chapter in the series. 

I wish we could have the other seven novels.

   
David Ebershoff's "The Danish Girl"

I just picked "The Danish Girl" off the shelf because the cover caught my eye. I had never heard of it, even though it was apparently an international bestseller.

Set in the 1920s, the novel is based on the life of Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe, a Danish painter who became one of the first identifiable cases of surgical gender reassignment.

The book follows Wegener's/Elbe's journey from identifying as male to dressing as a woman, to a forced departure from Denmark, to the decision — with his wife's support — to go to Dresden for gender reassignment surgery.

This is a slow, meditative novel that will draw you into its interior space. This is one of the most intimate novels I can remember reading and I recommend it.

It's a meticulous recounting of the sate of mind of someone going through this extraordinary set of experiences.