Title: Vegetable Love
Author: Barbara Kafka
Extent: 720 pp
Publisher: Artisan (a division of Workman Publishing)
Publication Date: 4 October 2005

The Gist: Subtitled “Vegetables delicious alone, or with pasta, seafood, poultry, meat, and more,” Barbara Kafka’s Vegetable Love encyclopedia is an authoritative exploration of vegetables by region, replete with recipes of all ...
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Title: The World Without Us
Author: Alan Weisman
Extent: 320 pp
Publisher: Harper Collins Canada
Publication Date: 5 July 2007

The Gist: What would happen if human life disappeared from the planet tomorrow? How would nature subsume the complex infrastructure of our cities? How long would it take for human “debris” — our ...
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Title: No One Belongs Here More Than You
Author: Miranda July
Extent: 224 pp
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: 15 May 2007

The Gist: A woman who gives swimming lessons on the floor of her kitchen. A writer in love with a mysterious “dark shape.” A couple unexpectedly transformed after a stint ...
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Time will show, I think, that the 2006 publication of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma marked a tipping point for the American food system. The book’s appearance coincided with a surge in the number of local farmers’ markets and consumer knowledge growing by leaps and bounds. Pollan’s meticulous study of the complex industrial systems, and alternatives to them, ...
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A morning during which I’m reading a cookbook about preparing food in a French state of mind — with appreciation for high-quality fresh ingredients, a joyful spirit, and the social and sensual act of eating — seems a good time to come clean about my croissant-eating habits: I split them, toast them, and then slather them in butter.

This seems excessive, I ...
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Catharine Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada came into my life at this particular time for for two chief reasons: (1) I was recently visiting Lakefield, Ontario, and (2) of late I’ve been rather obsessed with pioneering life.

Like my friend Lisa, who visits local booksellers when ...
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The following is a true story. It is an example of how your brain works after you read The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating.

I meet with friends for a Summerlicious dinner at Czehoski. I decide on truffle-Brie perogies on a bed of Riesling-braised red cabbage with a side of salt-baked ...
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Houseboat Chronicles: Notes from a Life in Shield Country is a book I had high odds of never reading. I knew nary a thing of Jake MacDonald’s memoir before plucking the hardcover copy out of the remainder bin at my local Book City, probably about two years ago now. It was the photograph on the ...
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Reading Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, I couldn’t help but wonder: What would it have been like to read this novella when it was first published in the 1980s, before the notion of achieving authentic happiness by “following your dream” — fulfilling your Personal Legend in Coelho’s translated words — became a mass-marketed idea flogged by every talk-show host ...
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“Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blond Ukrainian divorcée. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.”

So opens Marina Lewycka’s Continue reading ...