Here’s my reading update for December 2014. I found this great quote (from Nick Hornby) to justify (to myself) some of my lighter reading predilections this month.
I’m beginning to see that our appetite for books is the same as our appetite for food, that our brain tells us when we need the equivalent of salads, or chocolate, or meat and potatoes.
My brain was telling me to go light, light, light with a Nora Roberts trilogy, and go deep for relationships with Carol Wall’s memoir, Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening, and to delve deeper into loss and death with Caitlin Doughty’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory and Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
When I started the month, I thought that I was going to go overboard by buying too many books, but after two splurges (and one book on back order so it doesn’t count for this month!) the purchases stopped. I had hit the Interweave book sale and then a book fair at my temple and was satisfied.
Books Bought December 2014
| Title | Author |
|---|---|
| 150 Scandinavian Motifs | Jane Mucklestone |
| Unexpected Afghans | Robyn Chachula |
| Graphic Knits | Alexis Winslow |
| The Betrayers | David Bezmozgis |
| The Kosher Carnivore: The Ultimate Meat and Poultry Cookbook | June Hersh |
| The Book of Schmaltz: Love Song to a Forgotten Fat | Michael Ruhlman |
| Encyclopedia of Jewish Food | Gil Marks |
The Betrayers was purchased for a book club meeting in February, so I haven’t even opened it yet. I’ve coveted the three books from Interweave Press for some time, so was thrilled to get them at a discount at an extended Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale. The only thing wrong with the Kosher Carnivore is that it doesn’t have any Pork recipes (can you imagine!). Pork is one of my favorite meats, but I had to buy this book anyway because it has some good recipes (for example, Coffee-Crusted Hanger Steak, Roasted Veal Shoulder with chicken liver stuffing, Simple Spatchcocked Chicken and roasted root vegetables) to get me out of my usual cooking methodology. I think Simple Spatchcocked Chicken was one of the recipes I looked at while determining to buy the book, and this description definitely leveraged my decision:
Grab your dictionary and you’ll find that spatchcock is a method of splitting (butterflying) a chicken. It’s a fun word, which you can use to impress your friends or win at Scrabble. If time is of the essence, but you want to make a crispy, flavorful roast chicken, spatchcocking is a great option.
I completely excelled at reading this month! I rediscovered my library beyond the e-selection, and now juggle between my e-books and my hard books, and my knitting – oh, yeah and work and life too.
December 2014 Reading
I was thinking which was my favorite book this month. I thought it might be Eat The Yolks because it explains the Primal/Paleo food movement, scientific thought and reasoning so well. I would highly recommend it. However, the author’s writing style is a little too chatty for me. On one hand, it’s good because the information is presented at a personal level, but on the other hand, it’s annoying.
Then the tales from the Crematory was really fascinating. We just hit the 3rd year anniversary of DDSO’s passing, and I was wondering what state his body was in at this point. so it was really good timing for me to happen upon this book. Not that I got this question answered exactly, because the author worked in a crematorium and DDSO is buried, but she expounded upon many cultures’ handling of death, as well as the body’s decaying progress/process. So it was good, but it went on a little too much for me and I ended up skimming through the last third of the book. I would still recommend it though.
I also enjoyed Roz Chast’s book. It was funny, it was moving, it was complete. A complete story that told the story of her parents’ relationship with each other and with her, and the struggle through their final years. A quick read (2-3 hours) and totally engaging.
In the end, I must go with Carol Wall’s memoir, Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening, as my favorite reading this month. Carol hired Mister Owita to help with her landscaping and together they also grew a friendship. The book is about how one doesn’t really know what other people are thinking or going through, how one’s perceptions of other people’s lives are never really how you imagine, and how people get along, or don’t. It’s one of those books that you want to know how the relationships and the people turn out but at the same time you don’t want it to end.
