I was caught up in the book from the very first chapter. Terrier Rand comes from a family of thieves – burglars, second-story men, con artists and grifters. (All named after breeds of dog, for reasons that are never fully explained.) His brother, Collie, is on death row after a killing spree that included an elderly couple and a nine-year-old… Read more
Disclaimer: I voted for Carla Hall for Fan Favorite on Top Chef. I loved Carla’s attitude and I loved the look of her food when she was on Top Chef. I always prefer the low-drama, high-teamwork folks who are focused on the cooking. Because of that, I was really excited to check out Carla’s cookbook. Now, I am always a little… Read more
Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd is the story of Lysander Rief, a London stage actor who has come to Vienna in search of a cure for his sexual problems. He gets his cure, although not quite in the way he planned. Rief meets a crazed woman in his psychiatrist’s office, a Miss Hettie Bell, and from that moment on,… Read more
I am admitting defeat. I have tried at least 4 times to get through The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food by Josh Schonwald. In theory, it’s the sort of book I should love. I am interesting in food and gardening and how the growing population of the planet will be fed over the coming years. I am… Read more
I love this quote. I have had people ask me what my favorite book is and I can never tell them. I don’t have just one favorite or a few favorites. I have favorites in a million categories and, depending on what I read day-to-day, I am adding new books to the list all the time. “Picking five favorite books… Read more
Stephanie LaCava tells the story of her childhood — uprooted from New York to a village outside Paris — by focusing on the strange objects she collected and obsessed over in An Extraordinary Theory of Objects: A Memoir of an Outsider in Paris. It’s an interesting way to tell a story, but I ended up far more interested in the… Read more
I’ll say it up front: I am a pack rat. I come by it honestly. My father is a pack rat — he saves everything, and whenever you need some obscure bit of something, he normally has it. (Whether or not he can find it is a different story.) My mother is not one of us. She has no problems… Read more
If you think of punch as something in bowl with ginger ale, melting rainbow sherbet and fruit juice, this book will change your mind. The Punch Bowl: 75 Recipes Spanning Four Centuries of Wanton Revelry aims to take you back to the glory days of punch, when it was brewed from spirits, spices and not-too-clean water. Our sanitation has improved and… Read more
I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately, which is always a good time to catch up on my audiobooks. I’ve got a stack of great audiobooks that the good folks at Macmillan Audio sent me, and I’ve been putting them to good use. I finished this novel sitting at home, warm and cozy with a cup of coffee —… Read more
Sometimes a book tells you things about the author. Douglas Nicholas is an award-winning poet, and some of that poetry seeps into his novel, Something Red. There is a certain lyrical quality to it that I appreciated, and I found that quite interesting, mixed as it was with a tale of murder and mayhem. The story is told through the eyes… Read more