Reading List

It's been a while since I updated my reading list and I'll forget what I've read if I don't get it down here.  Maybe you'll find something for some of the people on your holiday shopping list!

I believe that last time I did a book post I was in the middle of The Nasty Bits by Anthony Bourdain.  What an enjoyable read!  I'm a closet foodie ( the Dean & Deluca catalog is like porn for me -- seriously), so I love reading about food.  Bourdain's food writing is raw and accessible -- sometimes eye-opening, sometimes stomach churning -- but always interesting.

I finally read Lian Hearn's Heaven's Net Is Wide from the Tales of the Otori Series -- this is a prequel to the trilogy I read over the last year or so and is an excellent book!  If you are going to read the series, read this one last.  (More on this series here & here.)

Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon was my next read.  I was so taken with Barabra Kinsolver's book -- Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life -- that I decided I should explore some other books of this nature.  Plenty didn't excite me as much as Kingsolver's book (which I absolutely loved) but it was a very interesting look at another way to go about eating locally.  While Kingsolver and her family grew much of their food, Smith and Mackinnon lived in an urban area and were forced to find other alternatives while sticking to their 100 mile diet.  I'm not much of a gardener myself, so I enjoyed reading about their hunt and hope to do some of this myself over the coming year. 

After reading The Road and being so so moved by it, I knew I wanted to try some more of Cormac McCarthy's books.  Pete had a copy of All the Pretty Horses that he picked up at the used bookstore, so I gave it a try.  Now McCarthy is probably best known for his "cowboy" stories -- a genre I am not accustomed to reading.  However, I soldiered on and found this book quite enjoyable, although I was not moved by it as I was by The Road.  Quite a bit of dialog is written in Spanish, which I found distracting -- but if you know a bit of Spanish, I'm sure you could read it easily enough.  I probably won't be reading any of his other books, but I think this book would be great for anyone with an interest in westerns.

I'm now reading American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza by Peter Reinhart.  While it is a cookbook technically, there is large part of the book devoted to Reinhart's quest for the perfect pizza which takes him around the US and Italy.  I love making homemade pizza and I think this book will give me a greater appreciation for it as well as a vast amount of knowledge concerning how to make a great pizza at home.  Reinhart is also the author of the most excellent cookbook --  The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread.

I'm not sure what is up next in fiction, I'm thinking of re-reading J.R.R. Tolkein for the holidays.  Or maybe I'll go in a totally differrent direction -- until I decide, I'll keep reading about pizza with my tummy rumbling and my mouth salivating -- yum!

Comments

[jacey]

if you liked Kingsolver's book, try the Omnivore's dilemma! Easily the best book I've read all year! So engaging and informative. When I got to the end, if it hadn't been due back at the library, I would have started reading it again right then. Really, it's so good!