THE COLLECTED STORIES OF LYDIA DAVIS
THE NEW YORKER 20 UNDER 40 (ed. Deborah Treisman)
Jay-Z, DECODED
Keith Richards, LIFE
Dyna Moe, MAD MEN: THE ILLUSTRATED WORLD
Sharon Waxman, REBELS ON THE BACKLOT
Roger Sterling, STERLING'S GOLD
And book-related if not the actual object, the Penguin cover postcards. (Geeking out!)
Elsewhere in the household, the former American Studies major unwrapped THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN, the assistant president of the basketball fan club got KISS 'EM GOODBYE: AN ESPN TREASURY OF FAILED, FORGOTTEN AND DEPARTED TEAMS and the enthusiastic late-adopter grandpa got a Kindle... not bad on the landscape. Okay, your turn to brag. What did your holiday book-stack look like?
4 days ago
9 comments:
I am way too excited about having received How to Live, the new biography of Montaigne.
Got an iPad. Great for reading PDFs.
I got the new Lynda Barry book (PICTURE THIS!), the re-release of the classic Rosalind Creasy Edible Landscaping book, the bible of organic beekeeping and two magazine subscriptions (mother earth & bee culture).
Typical, but still exciting!
As Christmas presents, I received Colonel Roosevelt, the third installmeny of Edmund Morris' excellent biography of Theodore Roosevelt. My parents also gave me a copy of The Moosewood Cookbook, which doesn't really count, but is still awesome.
I stopped at The Book Outlet while I was home, and, though their selection contained somewhat less literary fiction than it has in the past, I nonetheless found a couple of good ones: William Vollman's Europe Central, Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry, Charles Baxter's First Light, and Mary Karr's The Liar's Club. I also bought my father Lush Life and Ian Frazier's Family. They were $1 each, but, due to The Book Outlet's 25% off post-Christmas sale, the entire haul cost me only $4.50. Not bad, huh?
I gave my cousin Jeff a copy of DECODED.
I got Mark Bittman's THE FOOD MATTERS COOKBOOK, which really sounds perfect for me, the non-vegetarian who nonetheless would like to eat more vegetables and less meat for health and environmental reasons.
Morgan got Eleanor Robson's MATHEMATICS IN ANCIENT IRAQ: A SOCIAL HISTORY from my parents and another math book whose title I cannot remember from my Uncle Tom, as well as a giftcard to buy e-books for his Kindle.
I am loving all your haulblog comments. I didn't even know there was a new biography of Montaigne out.
Jo, how is the iPad so far?
Jess, are you a beekeeper already? Or are you planning to start in 2011?
Wade, my mom has a copy of the Moosewood Cookbook and we practically grew up on it. And those are some excellent finds although EUROPE CENTRAL will probably take you all of 2011 to finish...
Elizabeth, is that the NEW Bittman? Would you recommend his other books?
Bittman's HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING is my canonical go-to cookbook if I want to, well, cook anything. Did I pick up an orange cauliflower at the farmers market and have no idea what to do with it? Do I have a hankering for tom kha gai, but the only Thai restaurant in the neighborhood makes it way too spicy for me? HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING is where I turn to.
THE JOY OF COOKING ostensibly fills the same niche, but unless I'm looking up a beverage recipe (in which HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING is sadly lacking), I haven't opened it once since I got HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING. Mark Bittman's worldview, with his 21st-century aesthetic and his teensy-weensy galley kitchen, just fits mine a lot better than Ethan Becker's does (for whom, it seems, every recipe gets cross-referenced to at least three other recipes. Now really, who has time for that?)
Yes, THE FOOD MATTERS COOKBOOK is his latest book (pub. Sep 2010). It's a follow-up to last year's FOOD MATTERS, which is less a cookbook than a manifesto (not that I've read it). THE FOOD MATTERS COOKBOOK is therefore more consistent with the recipes you find on the Bitten blog (in Mark Bittman's new world where he eats no animal products or processed foods before dinnertime, and where meat is used as a seasoning, not as the centerpiece of the meal) than in the pre-revolution HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING.
I decided that, since I'm just about done with Infinite Jest, I needed another doorstop of a novel that will take me three years and like two false starts to finish, so why not pick one written by a contemporary, friend, and former co-wunderkind to David Foster Wallace? Everybody wins.
Also, my mother loves the Moosewood cookbook and used to make recipes from it all of the time when we were kids. At some point she got out of the habit of using it; I don't know if she found a new cookbook or just generally had less time to cook once both of her children started having basketball and soccer practices and tae kwon do lessons to which he had to drive them.
I would add that I too love How To Cook Everything. When I bought it, I was more or less a novice chef, and so I appreciated his easy-to-follow, straight-forward instructions, and the illustrations are really good at showing you how to do some of the more complicated techniques.
Also, I love his "______, seven ways" recipies, where he tells you his favorite way to cook, for example, brussels sprouts, then gives you six simple variations, where, by adding lemon or swapping one spice for another, you can basically create an entirely new dish. Its very handy.
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