It’s Top Ten Tuesday time and the topic this week is ‘Ten Books Every X Should Read’. In my case, the X is for memoir fans.
The first five are those type of memoirs that are so horrifying that you have to keep checking whether they are not, in actual fact, fiction. The next bunch are not misery-memoirs at all – quite the opposite – they made me laugh. Continue reading
It’s not often that I do the following:
– want to cook every single thing in a cook book*
– read aloud every single food description to whoever happens to be sitting next to me
– finish a book and move it from my bedside table to my cookery book shelf
– dream about potato salad
I did all of those things recently and all can be attributed to Michael Lee West’s memoir, Consuming Passions. Continue reading
First Chapter, First Paragraph Tuesday is hosted by Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea – it’s is a weekly meme where you share the first paragraph (or two) from a book you are considering reading.
My pick this week is Mermaids in the Basement by Michael Lee West.
I had a Michael Lee West binge fifteen years ago and exhausted all that she’d written – my memories were of stories set in the Deep South focused around female relationships – think Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and more recently, The Help. I was unpacking some old boxes a few months ago and came across a couple of Lee West novels and was reminded of how much I had enjoyed them. It prompted me to seek out a few more, including Mermaids in the Basement and Consuming Passions that I’ve earmarked for the Foodies Reading Challenge. Mermaids begins with this –
“If I had not read the cover story in the March 2, 2000, National Enquirer, it’s doubtful that I would have gone to Alabama and ruined my daddy’s engagement party, much less sent the bride-to-be into a coma. Just for the record, I don’t go around hitting other women, even if they are all wrong for my daddy; I don’t read tabloids, and I certainly would never steal one, yet that’s exactly what happened.”
Intrigued?
I wasn’t going to participate in Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by The Broke and the Bookish) this week simply because talking about what books are at the top of my TBR list is ludicrous given this…. The situation is made all the more ridiculous by the fact that I have 40-something unread ARCs in my NetGalley queue and let’s not even get started on the ‘virtual’ TBR stack on my Kindle.
But then I read Bookshelf Fantasies ace post on choosing vacation reading – there was a poll! I loved it! I voted! I stole Lisa’s idea! Here it is!
Please vote – it will decide the order of (some) of my TBR stack.
Note that it may not be the freshest, shiniest bunch of new releases but all of the books I’ve listed have been sitting on my shelf since last year and all qualify for my Off the Shelf reading challenge… And if I complete this challenge I’ll feel justified in spending up big on new books at the end of the year. Yay!
Is ‘Foodie Literature’ a genre? Well it is now.
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created and hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Each week a new ‘top ten’ challenge is posted – anyone can join in. This week’s topic is Top Ten Authors from X Genre. I mostly read books classed as ‘contemporary literature’ but regular readers of my blog also know that whatever the book, whatever the genre, I match it with a dish. Yes, some people pair food and wine, I pair food and books (but won’t say no to wine as well!).
I love cooking, I love reading and I really love reading about cooking! So, here’s my top ten Foodie Literature picks (or perhaps Edible Fiction? Or Fiction with Flavour? Or Fiction in the Kitchen? Or Delicious Reads?… okay, stopping now, especially as there’s a couple of non-fiction titles in the mix). Continue reading