The cook, by Maylis de Kerangal

 

This was a very short but interesting work about the development of a young man into a skilled chef. The narrator follows Mauro's tracks as he bakes cakes for his friends, goes to university, works in a series of restaurants, then decides to become credentialed as a chef at the same time that he completes a masters degree in economics. It's billed as a novel but it reads more like a magazine essay. If I didn't know that it was supposed to be a novel, I would have thought it was a profile of a real person. There's not much to it, so it's not overly satisfying as a novel, but I did enjoy the book, perhaps because I like long-form journalism and this reminded me of that (and I like to cook as well, so the subject was familiar and interesting to me).