Madeline Peyroux | Careless Love

If only I’d been introduced to Peyroux sooner, there would have been a different album registering at No. 1 on my Top 10 Albums of 2004 list. Peyroux’s voice is a picnic of red wine, cheese and baguettes on a warm Tuscany afternoon. It’s long grasses and butterflies and sundresses. Her casual swing jazz style and bourbon honey vocals are the kind last found in greats like Billie Holliday and Sarah Vaughan. Her adaptation of Bob Dylan’s folk ballad “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” is exquisite, an aural sashay through one of the greatest songwriters of all time’s work. And as Norah Jones before her, Peyroux revamps a Hank Williams tune, with the dirge-like “Weary Blues.” However, Peyroux asserts herself as a songwriter as well with “Don’t Wait Too Long,” which, with its scat inducing rhythm, stands out as one of the best songs on the album.

Ha Jin | Waiting

Rustled up from the used books section at City Lights, Waiting is set in China from the years of China’s transition to communism in 1949 until just after the Korean War and tells the story of one man’s 18-year-long quest to divorce his wife. Dr. Lin Kong, an officer in the Chinese army, falls in love with Manna Wu, one of his nurses. However, through his arranged marriage Kong is bound to Shuyu, a loyal, though uneducated woman with whom Kong spends no more than his 10-day leave each year. Divorce is forbidden without consent from both marital parties and as Kong returns home to attempt to dissolve the marriage each year, each year he is turned down. The novel — the first for author Ha Jin and winner of the National Book Award for Fiction — is much less grandiose than our own tales of romance. It is slow, methodical, if not laborious. What drives the story is the elegance of Chinese tradition and the human emotion of lovers bound not by physicality, but by dogged desire to one day be together.

Chicken Salad

There is an art to making chicken salad. I don’t really know what that art is, because I’ve never tried to make chicken salad, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know good chicken salad when I taste it. I’m talking white meat here. And not a bunch of celery filler (the reject vegetable). Maybe some grapes if you’re feeling funky. Locally, I can only give my endorsement to Waynesville’s Sunset Grille and their curried chicken salad. Though decidedly un-Southern, this spicy take off is a terrific lunch time pick me up. However, the award for the hands down best chicken salad ever must be shipped down to the North Carolina coast where you’ll find Roberts Market. Built in the 1940s and located in Wrightsville Beach, Roberts is one of the few neighborhood grocery stores still around. The store sells several ready to eat items for beachgoers, and even though it’s January it’s never too early to be thinking about surf and sand.

— by Sarah Kucharski