Mr. Dimock Explores the Mysteries of the East by Edward Cameron DimockAlgonquin Books, 1999

This book, subtitled “Journeys in India,” is a series of clever and chatty vignettes about Indian culture and life on the Indian subcontinent. Dimock is at his best telling funny stories: the one about the monkey who gets into the house and amuses itself at Dimock’s wife’s dressing table; the one about the difficulties of trying to track down and get permission to see old manuscripts in India, the one about getting inadvertently stoned on hashish. Elsewhere, I got distracted, or tired of Dimock’s cleverness or the episodic nature of these essays. (Which isn’t to lay the blame on Dimock or his writing: maybe I was in the mood for a novel and shouldn’t have been reading a book like this one.)