Are you looking for a food book to complete your Unabridged Reading Challenge for 2023? This memoir is a great pick for that category!
For our April Book Club pick, we're discussing Ruth Reichl’s Save Me the Plums (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm). We also share our pairings, including Kim Fay’s Love and Saffron: A Novel of Friendship, Food, and Love (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm) and Stanley Tucci’s Taste: My Life through Food (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm).
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Bookish Check-in
Ashley - Akwaeke Emezi’s You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Jen - Rachel Cohen’s Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Our Book Club Pick
Ruth Reichl’s Save Me the Plums (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Our Pairings
Ashley - Kim Fay’s Love and Saffron: A Novel of Friendship, Food, and Love (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Jen - Stanley Tucci’s Taste: My Life through Food (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
Mentioned in Episode
Give Me One - Favorite Birthday Cakes
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Bookish Check-in
Ashley was reading...
Akwaeke Emezi’s You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
From the Publisher: "Feyi Adekola wants to learn how to be alive again.
"It’s been five years since the accident that killed the love of her life and she’s almost a new person now—an artist with her own studio and sharing a brownstone apartment with her ride-or-die best friend, Joy, who insists it’s time for Feyi to ease back into the dating scene. Feyi isn’t ready for anything serious, but a steamy encounter at a rooftop party cascades into a whirlwind summer she could have never imagined: a luxury trip to a tropical island, decadent meals in the glamorous home of a celebrity chef, and a major curator who wants to launch her art career.
"She’s even started dating the perfect guy, but their new relationship might be sabotaged before it has a chance by the overwhelming desire Feyi feels every time she locks eyes with the one person in the house who is most definitely off-limits—his father.
"This new life she asked for just got a lot more complicated, and Feyi must begin her search for real answers. Who is she ready to become? Can she release her past and honor her grief while still embracing her future? And, of course, there’s the biggest question of all—how far is she willing to go for a second chance at love? Akwaeke Emezi’s vivid and passionate writing takes us deep into a world of possibility and healing, and the constant bravery of choosing love against all odds."
Jen was reading...
Rachel Cohen’s Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
From the Publisher:
"In the turbulent period around the birth of her first child and the death of her father, Rachel Cohen turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. For Cohen, simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became her refuge and her ballast. She was able to reckon with difficult questions about mourning, memorializing, living in a household, paying attention to the world, reading, writing, and imagining through Austen’s novels.
"Austen Years is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of a writer’s relationship to reading, and to her own family, winding together memoir, criticism, and biographical and historical material about Austen herself. And like the sequence of Austen’s novels, the scope of Austen Years widens successively, with each chapter following one of Austen's novels. We begin with Cohen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she raises her small children and contemplates her father’s last letter, a moment paired with the grief of Sense and Sensibility and the social bonds of Pride and Prejudice. Later, moving with her family to Chicago, Cohen grapples with her growing children, teaching, and her father’s legacy, all refracted through the denser, more complex Mansfield Park and Emma.
"With unusual depth and fresh insight into Austen’s life and literature, and guided by Austen’s mournful and hopeful final novel, Persuasion, Rachel Cohen’s Austen Years is a rare memoir of mourning and transcendence, a love letter to a literary master, and a powerful consideration of the odd process that merges our interior experiences with the world at large."
Our Book Club Pick
Ruth Reichl's Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
From the Publisher:
"When Condé Nast offered Ruth Reichl the top position at America’s oldest epicurean magazine, she declined. She was a writer, not a manager, and had no inclination to be anyone’s boss. Yet Reichl had been reading Gourmet since she was eight; it had inspired her career. How could she say no?
"This is the story of a former Berkeley hippie entering the corporate world and worrying about losing her soul. It is the story of the moment restaurants became an important part of popular culture, a time when the rise of the farm-to-table movement changed, forever, the way we eat. Listeners will meet legendary chefs like David Chang and Eric Ripert, idiosyncratic writers like David Foster Wallace, and a colorful group of editors and art directors who, under Reichl’s leadership, transformed stately Gourmet into a cutting-edge publication. This was the golden age of print media - the last spendthrift gasp before the internet turned the magazine world upside down.
"Complete with recipes, Save Me the Plums is a personal journey of a woman coming to terms with being in charge and making a mark, following a passion and holding on to her dreams - even when she ends up in a place she never expected to be."
Our Pairings
Ashley recommended...
Kim Fay’s Love and Saffron: A Novel of Friendship, Food, and Love (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
From the Publisher:
"When twenty-seven-year-old Joan Bergstrom sends a fan letter--as well as a gift of saffron--to fifty-nine-year-old Imogen Fortier, a life-changing friendship begins. Joan lives in Los Angeles and is just starting out as a writer for the newspaper food pages. Imogen lives on Camano Island outside Seattle, writing a monthly column for a Pacific Northwest magazine, and while she can hunt elk and dig for clams, she’s never tasted fresh garlic--exotic fare in the Northwest of the sixties. As the two women commune through their letters, they build a closeness that sustains them through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the unexpected in their own lives.
"Food and a good life—they can’t be separated. It is a discovery the women share, not only with each other, but with the men in their lives. Because of her correspondence with Joan, Imogen’s decades-long marriage blossoms into something new and exciting, and in turn, Joan learns that true love does not always come in the form we expect it to. Into this beautiful, intimate world comes the ultimate test of Joan and Imogen’s friendship—a test that summons their unconditional trust in each other.
"A brief respite from our chaotic world, Love & Saffron is a gem of a novel, a reminder that food and friendship are the antidote to most any heartache, and that human connection will always be worth creating."
Jen recommended...
Stanley Tucci’s Taste: My Life through Food (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)
From the Publisher:
"Stanley Tucci grew up in an Italian American family that spent every night around the kitchen table. He shared the magic of those meals with us in The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table, and now he takes us beyond the savory recipes and into the compelling stories behind them.
"Taste is a reflection on the intersection of food and life, filled with anecdotes about his growing up in Westchester, New York; preparing for and shooting the foodie films Big Night and Julie & Julia; falling in love over dinner; and teaming up with his wife to create meals for a multitude of children. Each morsel of this gastronomic journey through good times and bad, five-star meals and burned dishes, is as heartfelt and delicious as the last.
"Written with Stanley’s signature wry humor, Taste is for fans of Bill Buford, Gabrielle Hamilton, and Ruth Reichl—and anyone who knows the power of a home-cooked meal."
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