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The author of How to Cook Everything and Food Matters recommends some literary nourishment.
Although his popular and influential New York Times column on cooking and food is called "The Minimalist," Mark Bittman's influence on American diets is anything but small. His compendium of recipes and principles How to Cook Everything has become a generation's kitchen bible; more recently, in Food Matters, he offered a masterful guide to applying 21st-century awareness of nutrition and ecological concerns to our everyday eating. We asked him to recommend three books that feed the mind and soul.
By George Gissing
"The definitive novel about the world of freelance writing. Scary, horrifying even, and yet not entirely bleak. Written 150 years ago, and yet the world it describes hasn't changed much. If I'd read this in 1970 I'd probably have become a doctor, as my mother wanted me to."
The Fire Engine that Disappeared
By Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
"My favorite police procedural ever, this is the highlight (maybe) of the brilliant ten-part series written by a Swedish husband-and-wife team in the 70s. As with all the books, it's filled with cleverly drawn, sympathetic, and often hilarious characters and a biting critique of Sweden's crumbling malfunctioning so-called welfare state. But unlike the others, there are two parallel mysteries here, and both are fun."
By John Welwood
"A novel exploration of love and what it means. Maybe revolutionary, but at least different."
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"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.
The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?
Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.
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