Next on my Summer reading list: Goat Song

Goat Song:
A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding,
and the Art of Making Cheese

By Brad Kessler
(Scribner, 239 pages, $24)

Reviewed on the Wall Street Journal:

"Mr. Kessler goes off to the French Pyrenees to study cheese-making, taking a few bottles of Vermont maple syrup with him for trade. A dutiful student, he learns how to make a variety of hard cheese called tomme. Back home, he sets about creating his own version of it. We read about the turnings and moldings, the saltings and ripenings. It is an art that owes much to the early monastic Christians. The imagination settles, inevitably, on metaphors of transfiguration."