In the last few years we have seen books about cod, salt and potatoes, and the authors of these tomes appear to have employed a roughly similar method. Settle on a topic, learn everything -- and I do mean everything -- about it, and then weave all the facts and factoids, tidbits and anecdotes into a narrative that will keep readers plowing through more pages than they had ever imagined could be written about cod, salt or potatoes.
Most readers who pick up these books will not share the authors' obsessions with their topics, so to draw them in the writers must be skillful indeed. Eric Talmadge, who is obsessed with the Japanese bath, is such a writer, but also working in his favor is that, at least for the hedonists among us, bathing will always be more engaging than cod.
"I am stark naked," Talmadge writes, "immersed up to my chin in an outdoor pool of smelly, near-scalding water with a half-dozen equally exposed, wrinkly old men."