Book Review: An Everlasting Meal

...also on track with last week’s posts about cheap eating and beans. Adler’s book is not a cookbook. It has recipes throughout, but its mission is more about imparting an attitude, a style, a way of thinking in the kitchen, than delivering recipes. In fact, the core of her message is that you don’t need a recipe to cook. I was attracted to this book because it is reportedly inspired by M.F.K. Fisher’s book, How to Cook a Wolf, which is one of my fav...

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Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up

...praise be–diagrams of her arcane folding techniques. These things made the book worthwhile for me. The book itself is interesting as an object. It’s smallish, and pretty. Inside, the illustrations are Japanese-cute line drawings. It doesn’t look like any cleaning or organization book I’ve ever seen, and that is what makes it special. Kondo understands that tidying is a spiritual activity, not an organizational activity. The same week we got this b...

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My Morning Routine: Tarrying With the Negative

...has created his own version of Good Reads using Airtable to track all the books he digests. I won’t be offended if you skip these reviews or feel they are “off topic.” And a disclaimer: I’m an amateur and I don’t necessarily endorse an author’s entire work because a review appears on this blog. We begin with Slavoj Žižek’s Tarrying With the Negative, but first . . . What I’ve learned about difficult reading Tarrying With the Negative is not a bea...

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Book Review: What the Robin Knows

...ould otherwise have fled our presence long before. Most of all I like this book because he asks a lot of you. At one point in the book he’s talking about how there’s no formula for this stuff, just lots of dedication and time, and notes, “The lifelong learning curve is the ultimate appeal of what we do.” This made me laugh out loud. Appeal? The notion of working on one skill all your life (especially one as unglamorous as robin-watching) is not a...

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Josey Baker Bread: One Bread Book to Rule Them All

...to hold up half a dozen. Not any more. Now I can send students to just one book: Josey Baker Bread. The appropriately named Josey Baker (who used to work with another baker named Dave Miller–who mills his own flour, naturally) has written a perfect bread baking course in book form. Everything I’ve figured out about teaching how to bake is in here–start with a simple white bread, graduate to sourdough and then start baking with whole grain. Having...

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