Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [4]
I’ve included numerous older articles because they were particularly well written, thought-provoking, or unique in some way, and because the authors’ views stand as a valuable record of a certain time in history. Even after the passage of many years, you may share the emotions and opinions of the writer, and often you may realize that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. I have many, many more articles in my files than I was able to reprint here. Though there are a few pieces whose absence I very much regret, I believe the anthology you’re holding is very comprehensive.
A word about the food and restaurant section, “The Turkish Table”: I have great respect for restaurant reviewers, and though their work may seem glamorous—and it sometimes is—it is also very hard. It’s an all-consuming, full-time job, and that is why I urge you to consult the very good cookbooks I recommend as well as guidebooks. Restaurant (and hotel) reviewers are, for the most part, professionals who have dined in hundreds of eating establishments (and spent hundreds of nights in hotels). They are far more capable of assessing the qualities and flaws of a place than I am. I don’t always agree with every opinion of a reviewer, but I am far more inclined to defer to their opinion over someone who is unfamiliar with Turkish food in general, for example, or someone who doesn’t dine out frequently enough to recognize what good restaurants have in common. My files are filled with restaurant reviews, and I could have included many more articles; but that would have been repetitive and ultimately beside the point. I have selected a few articles that give you a feel for eating out in Istanbul, alert you to some things to look for in selecting a truly worthwhile place versus a mediocre one, and highlight notable dishes from Turkey’s surprisingly diverse cuisine.
The recommended reading for each section is one of the most important features of this book, and together they represent my favorite aspect of this series. (My annotations are, however, much shorter than I would prefer—did I mention that I love encyclopedias?—but they are still nothing less than enormously enthusiastic endorsements, and I encourage you to read as many of these as you can.) One reason I do not include many excerpts from books in my series is that I am not convinced an excerpt will always lead a reader to the book in question, and I think good books deserve to be read in their entirety. Art critic John Russell wrote an essay, in 1962, entitled “Pleasure in Reading,” in which he stated, “Not for us today’s selections, readers, digests, and anthologizings: only the Complete Edition will do.” Years later, in 1986, he noted that “bibliographies make dull reading, some people say, but I have never found them so. They remind us, they prompt us, and they correct us. They double and treble as history, as biography, and as a freshet of surprises. They reveal the public self, the private self, and the buried self of the person commemorated. How should we not enjoy them, and be grateful to the devoted student who has done the compiling?” The section of a nonfiction book I always turn to first is the bibliography, as it is there that I learn something about the author who has done the compiling as well as about other notable books I know I will want to read.
Reading about travel in the days