New Books for a New Year MadMeme!
28 Jan 2009 Leave a Comment
in Books, Literature, On Books & Reading, Reading, Thoughts Tags: MadMeme, meme
I’ve been looking back over 2008 and realized just how many new books I’ve been exposed to this year. Truly I’m a reader of habit – I find series and authors that I like and I read them over and over again – but living in a country with an extreme lack of books in your language forces you to take what you can get, even if it’s completely different from your normal reading fare! I’d like to share with you my favorite of this past year, so if your resolution’s “try new books!” I hope you’ll dig into some of these!
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Marcus Didius Falco Mystery Series (starting with The Silver Pigs)
A fun mystery series by Lindsey Davis. Marcus Didius Falco, handsome, witty informer in Ancient Rome, solves mysteries and murders in the ancient world. Witty, well-written and engaging. How good you ask? I’m still reading after the first 12 books!
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Nazi Germany. A small girl’s escape from death and the beginning of an adventure with words of all kinds, narrated by Death himself. A breathtaking story of life, death, kindness and cruelty.
MFK Fisher’s Serve It Forth
MFK Fisher is one of the staples of the food writing world. She wrote many books on food, eating, and cooking starting in the 1920′s. A strong character with her own ideas of freedom of lifestyle and freedom of cuisine. Her books are usually collections of short essays about her life around the world and the foods that she discovers while traveling. I love her introspective, almost melancholy writing style, which covers the iron will she had as a self-motivated woman in the early years of women’s independence like a velvet glove. Serve it Forth is a brief food history interspersed with other interesting stories.
Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford
Highly-placed writer/editor Bill Buford decides to take some time off from his desk job to do research for an article about Mario Batali – from behind the front lines. He takes his place as a kitchen slave in the three star restaurant and the transformations begin. A slightly disturbing (soup from garbage?!) but unusual look at what really happens behind kitchen doors, spiced up with lots of wry wit and a twist of personal transformation.
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So now the big question is, what have you been reading? Post this meme on your blog with a link back!
~MS the Younger
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