Fine Cooking: Your Guide to Choosing & Preparing the Season’s Best by the editors and contributors of Fine Cooking (2011)

Yes, I read cookbooks.

I cook often, and I enjoy cooking! I don’t often focus on produce, because I’m a meat-eater. This book highlights the fruit and veg that’s best in each season. It explains how to choose the best produce, how to clean and store it, and offers recipes and thoughts on how to serve it. So I guess it’s not just a cookbook.

But! The recipes.

Some of them seem a little strange, at least to me — squash and vegetable stew, curried apple soup, lemon parmesan turnips — but you never know, they could be good. Branching out is probably good for me.
On my list of ‘that looks/sounds delicious and I want to cook and eat it ASAP, as in the turnip parm can wait a hot second’:

• Hungarian ragoût: sautéed wild mushrooms with cream and spicy spices, served over noodles;
• ramp and bacon quiche: I’ve never eaten (or heard of) ramps, but apparently they’re garlicky oniony greens. The more you know! And bacon and cheese are involved, so duh;
• poblano peppers stuffed with cheddar and chicken: cheese, so duh again. I’d probably add bacon;
• peach Bellini ice pops: because summer and liquor.

And now I’ve made myself hungry and I’m drooling over the pictures in this book, so it’s a-foraging I go!

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson (2006)

If you look closely, you can see the map as the border on the front cover. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You wouldn’t think a book about a cholera outbreak in 1850s London would be very interesting, but this one certainly was. The narrative describes Dr. John Snow, an anaesthesiologist and researcher, and the Reverend Henry Whitehead, the local cleric, over the course of a week as they investigate the vicious outbreak that hits their city.

Working with what they knew at the time — which, in 1854, wasn’t much — they had to pull so much information together to make any sense of the cholera outbreak: how and where waste is disposed, where residents get their water, who had died (and where and when and how it had happened), did the terrible smell in the air have anything to do with it? At that time, the prevailing thought was that cholera was an air-borne disease, and it mainly affected the poorest and dirtiest members of society. Snow and Whitehead had to do a lot of work to find out where the cholera had come from and how it worked, in order to try to save the Golden Square neighbourhood where the outbreak took place.

The level of detail is phenomenal. Johnson has assembled so many bits and pieces to create this book, and each bit is interesting on its own. Some of these 150-year-old anecdotes are worth the price of admission.

Johnson describes Snow in particular as being a “consillient” thinker — that is, he took what he knew from his research in so many different areas (including biology, sociology, psychology, pharmacology, statistics,…) and made connections between those concrete facts and abstract ideas to translate them to another field: epidemiology research.

Johnson’s brain seems to operate the same way. The art of tanning leather; the propensity among certain ethnic groups to lactose intolerance; information design and mapping; nuclear weaponry; drinking brandy: what could any of these things have to do with cholera? Not much, you’d guess, if you hadn’t read the book.

Introduction

Hi, my name is Kathryn, and I read a lot of books. Like, LOTS of books, and on all kinds of different topics. I thought it might be an awesome idea to share thoughts about what I’m reading. Although you probably already guessed that if you read my tagline. The blog title comes from something my parents used to say to me all the time when I was little: “Kathryn, put the book down while you’re eating lunch! Stop trying to tie your shoes with a book in your hand! Get your nose out of the book while you’re walking; you nearly tripped over the cat!” etc., etc. And now I’ve made it to where I am today. Look at me now, ma! Anyway, let’s hit the books!