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Foodie - September Book List
This month’s list is all about food! In all of these novels, food plays a central role in the story or character’s lives. As a foodie myself, I’m really excited about these books! I hope you like them too :)
As always, please vote for which of these books we should read. Link is at the bottom of this post.
And on to the books...
Cinnamon and Gunpowder, by Eli Brown
The year is 1819, and the renowned chef Owen Wedgwood has been kidnapped by the ruthless pirate Mad Hannah Mabbot. He will be spared, she tells him, as long as he puts exquisite food in front of her every Sunday without fail.
To appease the red-haired captain, Wedgwood gets cracking with the meager supplies on board. His first triumph at sea is actual bread, made from a sourdough starter that he leavens in a tin under his shirt throughout a roaring battle, as men are cutlassed all around him. Soon he’s making tea-smoked eel and brewing pineapple-banana cider.
But Mabbot—who exerts a curious draw on the chef—is under siege. Hunted by a deadly privateer and plagued by a saboteur hidden on her ship, she pushes her crew past exhaustion in her search for the notorious Brass Fox. As Wedgwood begins to sense a method to Mabbot’s madness, he must rely on the bizarre crewmembers he once feared: Mr. Apples, the fearsome giant who loves to knit; Feng and Bai, martial arts masters sworn to defend their captain; and Joshua, the deaf cabin boy who becomes the son Wedgwood never had.
Quentins, by Maeve Binchy
Is it possible to tell the story of a generation and a city through the history of a restaurant?
Ella Brady thinks so. She wants to film a documentary about Quentins that will capture the spirit of Dublin from the 1970s to the present day. And Quentins has a thousand stories to tell: tales of love, of betrayal, of revenge; of times when it looked ready for success and times when it seemed as if it must close in failure. But as Ella uncovers more of what has gone on at Quentins, she begins to wonder whether some secrets should be kept that way...
Sourdough, by Robin Sloan
Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers close up shop, and fast. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her—feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it.
Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens up.
When Lois comes before the jury that decides who sells what at Bay Area markets, she encounters a close-knit club with no appetite for new members. But then, an alternative emerges: a secret market that aims to fuse food and technology. But who are these people, exactly?
The Kitchen Daughter, by Jael McHenry
After the unexpected death of her parents, painfully shy and sheltered 26-year-old Ginny Selvaggio seeks comfort in cooking from family recipes. But the rich, peppery scent of her Nonna’s soup draws an unexpected visitor into the kitchen: the ghost of Nonna herself, dead for twenty years, who appears with a cryptic warning (“do no let her…”) before vanishing like steam from a cooling dish.
A haunted kitchen isn’t Ginny’s only challenge. Her domineering sister, Amanda, (aka “Demanda”) insists on selling their parents’ house, the only home Ginny has ever known. As she packs up her parents’ belongings, Ginny finds evidence of family secrets she isn’t sure how to unravel. She knows how to turn milk into cheese and cream into butter, but she doesn’t know why her mother hid a letter in the bedroom chimney, or the identity of the woman in her father’s photographs. The more she learns, the more she realizes the keys to these riddles lie with the dead, and there’s only one way to get answers: cook from dead people’s recipes, raise their ghosts, and ask them.
Five Quarters of the Orange, by Joanne Harris
When Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous Mirabelle Dartigen - the woman they still hold responsible for a terrible tragedy that took place during the German occupation decades before. Although Framboise hopes for a new beginning she quickly discovers that past and present are inextricably intertwined. Nowhere is this truth more apparent than in the scrapbook of recipes she has inherited from her dead mother.
With this book, Framboise re-creates her mother's dishes, which she serves in her small creperie. And yet as she studies the scrapbook - searching for clues to unlock the contradiction between her mother's sensuous love of food and often cruel demeanor - she begins to recognize a deeper meaning behind Mirabelle's cryptic scribbles. Within the journal's tattered pages lies the key to what actually transpired the summer Framboise was nine years old.
Please vote for our next read here.
#book list#booklr#food books#cinnamon and gunpowder#eli brown#quentins#Maeve Binchy#sourdough#robin sloan#the kitchen daughter#jael mchenry#five quarters of the orange#joanne harris#readerbookclub
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If you dont know how to deal with emotion, other people's feelings can hit you like a drug.
—jael mchenry
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The Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry
Character 5| Setting 3| Plot 4| Writing 3.5| Enjoyability 3.5
Overall Rating: 3.8
I want to first say I have never read a book with a neurodivergent protagonist, and I think McHenry did a good job, but I am not autistic.
I think McHenry did a fantastic job of character development through how Ginny is in the beginning and how she is in the end. I loved what she made the tenseness of a familial relationship go through. Amanda wasn't my favorite, but we are seeing Amanda through Ginny's eyes. Ginny is a unreliable narrator.
Ginny goes from being obstinate and never wanting to interact with people to have made a place for herself in her family with the feeling of independence. I felt like she grew so much from running from her relatives at the beginning.
I really enjoyed the themes of Death causing a fracture in a relationship and another death causing a repair to that fracture. The coming together was really sweet. I kind of wish I had a relationship like that with my family.
I could not get into this book until about 150 pages. It felt slow and drawn out, but once you get that far it really starts to kick off. And boy did the tears start flowing.
This is a story of grief and letting it overtake you or you overtaking it. Everyone's grief is different and some may need help with it, while others can take care of it themselves.
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Arplis - News: The Future of Politics in Novel
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At the time I write this, we have no idea what the political future of America looks like: with the conclusion of voting in the 2020 U.S. election imminent on November 3rd, I’d venture to say no modern American election has ever quite looked so uncertain from so close a vantage point.
But politics isn’t just elections, and there’s a lot more than U.S. Presidents to consider when one thinks about politics.
This topic rose to the top of my brain recently when I was reading a fairly recently published romance novel. I love romance; I’d say I generally read books in four or five genres in any given month, and for the past couple of years, romance has regularly been one of those genres. I enjoy both the way category romance always delivers on its promise (happily ever after, or at least happy for now!), and the ways a wonderful author can bring inventive, surprising new elements to the form.
I was midway through a contemporary romance from an author I’d never read before, featuring a hero who’d moved from one of the Dakotas to a major West Coast city. At some point it is revealed that not only does the hero own a gun, but he retrieves and loads it in the presence of the female love interest, whose only reaction is one of clear approval and appreciation.
And I thought: wow, that is not something I expected to see.
But why didn’t I? Because although I grew up in a Midwestern rural setting, where hunting was common and so were guns, a lot of things have changed since then. I’m now far more concerned about the prevalence of gun violence in American society. The negative influence of the NRA. The fact that even after Sandy Hook, after Vegas, nothing seems to have changed. I respect the idea of responsible gun ownership but worry that it may be impossible to ever agree on what, exactly, counts as “responsible.”
And I thought: wow, I could never put a gun in a book in such a casually approving way.
That’s why I can’t agree with the idea that we should keep our politics out of our books. Because I don’t think the author of that romance novel thought, “Gee, I want to put something positive about guns in my book!” I think there’s a very good chance that she put it in there without even really thinking about it. The heroine is worried because she heard someone rattling the knob of her locked back door a few nights before, in a house where she lives alone; when she tells the hero, he immediately jumps into action to protect her. That’s presented as completely positive. And given that in this same book, the author takes pains to break down stereotypical gender dynamics – while her ex-boyfriend was not cool with purchasing feminine hygiene products for the heroine, the hero doesn’t even blink at it! – I found it especially glaring.
They say that when certain readers tell authors to “keep your politics out of your books,” what they really mean is, “keep politics I don’t agree with out of your books.” Because you tend not to notice the politics — the beliefs, the mores — that an author puts in their books that happen to align with your own.
These days, it’s much more jarring for me to come across a book that excludes LGBTQ+ or POC characters than one that includes and embraces them. And because I think we should always be reading and writing toward inclusivity, I’m going to embrace books that align with those beliefs. But I know there are plenty of readers out there who feel differently. And because the publishing world is so vast, those readers have hundreds, even thousands, of books to choose from that don’t challenge their worldview.
Can you keep your politics out of your books? Maybe, if you really, really try, it might be possible. You can scrub your writing of anything even remotely controversial. But at the same time, even the exclusion of “controversial” elements is, in itself, political. Because politics is about belief, and while you may not believe exactly what your characters believe, the way those beliefs are presented is controlled by only one brain: yours, not theirs. And you may not realize just how much of you is in them until a reader who thinks differently stumbles across your book and says: Wow, that is not something I expected to see.
Q: Do you try to keep your politics out of what you write? Do you expect the same of the writers you read?
About Jael McHenry
Jael McHenry is the debut author of The Kitchen Daughter (Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books, April 12, 2011). Her work has appeared in publications such as the North American Review, Indiana Review, and the Graduate Review at American University, where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing. You can read more about Jael and her book at jaelmchenry.com or follow her on Twitter at @jaelmchenry.
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source https://arplis.com/blogs/news/the-future-of-politics-in-novel
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“I need the comfort. I look for a food memory to calm me and I settle on ceviche. A tart bite, a clean, fresh wave of flavor. Think of the process. Raw fish is translucent, but when you dip the lime juice onto it, it becomes something else. Cubes of white-fleshed fish begin to flake. Shrimp turn pink. Texture becomes color. Visible streaks, almost stripes, show the grain.”- Jael McHenry, The Kitchen Daughter https://www.instagram.com/p/CDSIb7jj5XzqLtgsb6dm93lcwpzbPSR0ttt-p40/?igshid=1av0ypknd69i9
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Summer Reading List II : Food and Magical Realism
This one is oddly specific, but that’s because it happens to be my favorite genre. Food and cooking, for me, have always been magical and so to see this translated well into a book is always warm, filling, and wonderfully satisfying.
Chocolat, Joanne Harris |buy|
Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel |buy|
The Kitchen Daughter, Jael McHenry |buy|
The Girl Who Chased the Moon, Sarah Addison Allen |buy|
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Aimee Bender |buy|
The Secret Ingredient of Wishes, Susan Bishop Crispell |buy|
-SJ
p.s.- if you have any recommendations in this genre (you’d make my day!!) or requests for a particular theme for our next book-list, shoot us a message :)
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Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.
Genre Freebie Week.
Have you ever read a book where the foods described in such detail that they either made your mouth water, or made you want to gag in disgust?
Have you ever read a book where food as an essential part of their plots in particular?
If you have, then CONGRATULATIONS!
You’ve been reading
Culinary Fiction.
Here is a list of 10 authors who I’ve read in this genre, and the books of theirs that I’ve read and reviewed (in alphabetical order of the author’s last name).
Brooks, Karen – The Chocolate Maker’s Wife
Flagg, Fannie – Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café
Grimwood, Jonathan – The Last Banquet
Harris, Joanne – Chocolat, Blackberry Wine, and Five Quarters of the Orange
King, Crystal – The Chef’s Secret and Feast of Sorrow
LaBan, Elizabeth – The Restaurant Critic’s Wife
Mah, Ann – The Lost Vintage
McHenry, Jael – The Kitchen Daughter
Prior, Lily – La Cucina
Tom, Jessica – Food Whore
What Genre are you putting on your list this week?
TCL’s Top Ten Tuesday for March 24, 2020. Genre Feebie Week - I choose Culinary Fiction Writers! #TTT #TopTenTuesday #TuesdayBookBlog #BookBloggersHub Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to…
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Portfolio Entry #6: Media Ethnography
In this entry, I will discuss an internet site that I frequently use. It is called Wattpad. On Wattpad, people write fan fiction, or just stories in general. Others can comment on them and add them to their private “libraries”. I have interviewed five people and asked them questions that are essential to their activity on the website.
1. Jocelyn Maclean
Q: How much time do you spend on Wattpad in a day?
A: I usually only spend at least an hour there.
Q: Are there any suggestions you would like the creators of Wattpad to consider?
A: Please fix technical difficulties that we keep experiencing, or at the very least could you lessen them? That would be great. Especially on mobile.
Q: How often do you post stories on Wattpad?
A: Once in a while. I lack the time to do so.
Q: What do you look for in a good story?
A: I usually become invested in a book for its interesting hook, richness of plot, complexity of character personalities and character development, and sometimes simply the style of writing and dialogue is enough to keep me hooked.
Q: What is your favourite story?
A: My favourite story on Wattpad is ”WARNING! FairyTales” by RobThier.
2. Claire Maclean
Q: How much time do you spend on Wattpad in a day?
A: I spend around two hours there.
Q: Are there any suggestions you would like the creators of Wattpad to consider?
A: I would like if there was a “like” function on Wattpad that would allow someone to like a story.
Q: How often do you post stories on Wattpad?
A: Once every two weeks.
Q: What do you look for in a good story?
A: A variety of characters.
Q: What is your favourite story?
A: “He Calls Me Sunshine” by xLittleHx
3. Sophia Alexis
Q: How much time do you spend on Wattpad in a day?
A: 30 minutes per day.
Q: Are there any suggestions you would like the creators of Wattpad to consider?
A: Include some graphics. It would look really nice. Also, please reduce the amount of times the website crashes.
Q: How often do you post stories on Wattpad?
A: I’ve never posted a story on Wattpad. I just like to read other stories.
Q: What do you look for in a good story?
A: I prefer violent stories.
Q: What is your favourite story?
A: “His Daughter’s Friends” by smackmack.
4. Justice Tribble
Q: How much time do you spend on Wattpad in a day?
A: Depending on how much homework I have, I spend around 30 minutes to 1 hour on Wattpad. Most of the time, I reduce this amount to 15 minutes.
Q: Are there any suggestions you would like the creators of Wattpad to consider?
A: I don’t know. It’s mostly fine. Except for the fact that I can’t upload my stories when it just so happens to malfunction. If they fixed that problem, that would be nice.
Q: How often do you post stories on Wattpad?
A: I am occasionally inspired to write my own stories on Wattpad, but I don’t usually because I am too much into reading the fan fiction of others.
Q: What do you look for in a good story?
A: Usually one-liners are the funny things that attract me to certain stories.
Q: What is your favourite story?
A: “The Damned” by DemNox.
5. Judy Peck
Q: How much time do you spend on Wattpad in a day?
A: Ten minutes or less.
Q: Are there any suggestions you would like the creators of Wattpad to consider?
A: I would ask for them to expand their cooking section.
Q: How often do you post stories on Wattpad?
A: I occasionally, maybe around once a year, post a recipe of my own. Otherwise I use this website purely for reviewing the recipes of others.
Q: What do you look for in a good story?
A: I don’t read stories very often, however I usually like books that are centered around cooking, such as “The Kitchen Daughter” by Jael McHenry. In recipes, however, I tend to stick to desserts and soups.
Q: What is your favourite story?
A: I don’t have a favourite story. My favourite recipe, however, is spaghetti with marinara sauce, pesto and ricotta cheese.
To conclude this entry, most people go on Wattpad for approximately 47 minutes per day. It is most commonly used to read and write stories, but can also be used as a tool to write fan-fiction and read recipes. Improvements that people would like to see are the reduction/elimination of technical difficulties that pop up with the website every now and then, graphics, a “like” function, and an extended cooking section.
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GETTING ON DOWN THIS VERY ARBITRARY ROAD.
GETTING ON DOWN THIS VERY ARBITRARY ROAD.
If you don’t know how to deal with emotion, other people’s feelings can hit you like a drug. — Jael McHenry #GUEST POST | The author of this piece prefers anonymity and so it shall remain. Well, I did this thing and fell for a fling. I swear it was just meant to be ‘not a thing’ but silly me, kept love ringing on the other line while clinging on my fling. She was just supposed to be a crush, and…
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If you don’t know how to deal with emotion, other people’s feelings can hit you like a drug.
Jael McHenry
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August TBR
So, I haven't posted in a while because surprise! I was in a bookslump!
I'm hoping I'm getting out of the slump. I want to see if I can read 7 books this month even if I got a late start.
My Current reads are
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller 125/378 pages. I have read this book before and it's one of my favorites! It was my pick for my bookclub!
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon 523/831 pages. This book is really long and I kind of feel like it should have been published in multiple books(at least 2...) I really like this, but sometimes it's really slow.
The Dragon Republic by R.F. Kuang 44% on the Audiobook. I love Kuang's writing so much. I'm enjoying it a lot.
Dragon Age The First Five Graphic novels
Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry
The Chain by Adrian McKinty
Dread Nation by Justina Ireland.
I'm hoping to get through all of these. And I don't want to be in this slump again.
I'm really excited for Dread Nation!!
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Arplis - News: The Future of Politics in Novel
s
At the time I write this, we have no idea what the political future of America looks like: with the conclusion of voting in the 2020 U.S. election imminent on November 3rd, I’d venture to say no modern American election has ever quite looked so uncertain from so close a vantage point.
But politics isn’t just elections, and there’s a lot more than U.S. Presidents to consider when one thinks about politics.
This topic rose to the top of my brain recently when I was reading a fairly recently published romance novel. I love romance; I’d say I generally read books in four or five genres in any given month, and for the past couple of years, romance has regularly been one of those genres. I enjoy both the way category romance always delivers on its promise (happily ever after, or at least happy for now!), and the ways a wonderful author can bring inventive, surprising new elements to the form.
I was midway through a contemporary romance from an author I’d never read before, featuring a hero who’d moved from one of the Dakotas to a major West Coast city. At some point it is revealed that not only does the hero own a gun, but he retrieves and loads it in the presence of the female love interest, whose only reaction is one of clear approval and appreciation.
And I thought: wow, that is not something I expected to see.
But why didn’t I? Because although I grew up in a Midwestern rural setting, where hunting was common and so were guns, a lot of things have changed since then. I’m now far more concerned about the prevalence of gun violence in American society. The negative influence of the NRA. The fact that even after Sandy Hook, after Vegas, nothing seems to have changed. I respect the idea of responsible gun ownership but worry that it may be impossible to ever agree on what, exactly, counts as “responsible.”
And I thought: wow, I could never put a gun in a book in such a casually approving way.
That’s why I can’t agree with the idea that we should keep our politics out of our books. Because I don’t think the author of that romance novel thought, “Gee, I want to put something positive about guns in my book!” I think there’s a very good chance that she put it in there without even really thinking about it. The heroine is worried because she heard someone rattling the knob of her locked back door a few nights before, in a house where she lives alone; when she tells the hero, he immediately jumps into action to protect her. That’s presented as completely positive. And given that in this same book, the author takes pains to break down stereotypical gender dynamics – while her ex-boyfriend was not cool with purchasing feminine hygiene products for the heroine, the hero doesn’t even blink at it! – I found it especially glaring.
They say that when certain readers tell authors to “keep your politics out of your books,” what they really mean is, “keep politics I don’t agree with out of your books.” Because you tend not to notice the politics — the beliefs, the mores — that an author puts in their books that happen to align with your own.
These days, it’s much more jarring for me to come across a book that excludes LGBTQ+ or POC characters than one that includes and embraces them. And because I think we should always be reading and writing toward inclusivity, I’m going to embrace books that align with those beliefs. But I know there are plenty of readers out there who feel differently. And because the publishing world is so vast, those readers have hundreds, even thousands, of books to choose from that don’t challenge their worldview.
Can you keep your politics out of your books? Maybe, if you really, really try, it might be possible. You can scrub your writing of anything even remotely controversial. But at the same time, even the exclusion of “controversial” elements is, in itself, political. Because politics is about belief, and while you may not believe exactly what your characters believe, the way those beliefs are presented is controlled by only one brain: yours, not theirs. And you may not realize just how much of you is in them until a reader who thinks differently stumbles across your book and says: Wow, that is not something I expected to see.
Q: Do you try to keep your politics out of what you write? Do you expect the same of the writers you read?
About Jael McHenry
Jael McHenry is the debut author of The Kitchen Daughter (Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books, April 12, 2011). Her work has appeared in publications such as the North American Review, Indiana Review, and the Graduate Review at American University, where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing. You can read more about Jael and her book at jaelmchenry.com or follow her on Twitter at @jaelmchenry.
Web | Twitter | Facebook | More Posts
#REALWORLD
Arplis - News
source http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Arplis-News/~3/A1wBzR9-Fck/the-future-of-politics-in-novel
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Difficult, but not impossible. I am not impossible.
Jael McHenry
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There is no normal. There's only what's right for you and being honest
Jael McHenry, The Kitchen Daughter
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