100 books like What She Ate

The family stories in this book bring history to life on a personal level. The five families are connected by their immigrant experience, but they approached food in different ways, from family-oriented German biergartens to kosher delis to imported olive oil. Each new wave of immigrants brought their own unique traditions to America, and the neighborhood evolved as each successive group brought something new to the metaphorical table.

I find the tension between maintaining food traditions and adapting them to a new nation fascinating. It also made me think about how much each group contributed to the American diet. 

I think Sanora Babb is an underappreciated author. During the 1930s, Babb worked for the Farm Security Administration and was inspired to write a novel about Dust Bowl migrants. Unfortunately, her publishing contract was canceled when John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath.

As much as I love Steinbeck, I love Babb’s novel more. She paints a vivid picture of life in small-town Oklahoma through small, domestic details. I appreciated the range of characters across the economic spectrum. Her characters are strong, but they are also aware that they are cogs in a machine, caught in circumstances beyond their control. She manages to highlight the plight of farm workers while maintaining their dignity as human beings. 

This book made me want to pour a glass of cider. Diane Flynt writes about her hunt for heirloom apples as the owner of Foggy Ridge Ciders in Virginia. Along the way, she shares the rich history of apples in the South.

Her writing is poetic. I could almost taste the apples and smell the evening air in the orchards as she checked on her trees. Flynt makes a strong case for why we need agricultural diversity and how the terroir of place is important for the food we produce.

My only regret in reading this book is that Flynt is retired, so I’ll never be able to taste her fine ciders.  

I love books that challenge our accepted knowledge of the past. For over 100 years, textbooks have told children that Cyrus McCormick invented the mechanical reaper. Spoiler alert—it turns out the textbooks were all wrong.

Ott takes us through the whole story—how the reaper was actually invented, how the McCormick family created a monopoly on farm equipment, and how they eventually created a monopoly on history. I especially enjoyed the final section of the book, which explains exactly how historians preserved and manipulated history to serve the McCormick company’s ends.

Amanda Quick writes a variety of fiction, all of which include romance—romantic suspense, historical romance, and historical mysteries.

This is the start (you guessed it, right?) of a series set in 1930s California at an exclusive resort enjoyed by Hollywood stars. The heroine sleuth, a rookie reporter, hopes to get a scoop on a new leading man from an actress, but instead finds her dead in a swimming pool.

With the handsome owner of the hotel, she investigates, and finds that this glamorous paradise hides dark and dangerous secrets.

Those Who Write for Immortality is, simply put, a remarkable book. It’s an in-depth study of British writers whose work was written with the goal of surviving what Horace called “the teeth of time.” It confronts the literary careers of authors who managed to be remembered after their deaths to the failed attempts of gifted, but ultimately unsuccessful rivals. This study illuminates both the romantic period and the quest for literary fame in our own time. A must-read for anyone interested in Austen, Keats, Blake, and Lord Biron, it is also indispensable for readers willing to explore the theoretical issues associated with the goal of writing for those who are yet to be born, people whose values and aesthetic preferences might very well become completely different from our own.

Any collection of famous people’s gravesites is going to be idiosyncratic. Ask 10 people whose graves they would like to visit, and you will get 100 different answers. That said, this is the most entertaining and reasonably comprehensive encyclopedia of the graves of the famous that you will find outside of Find-a-Grave. I’ve gotten hours of fun from it.

Since it contains very few grave monument photographs, Where Are They Buried? includes a whole lot of people whose ashes have been scattered. I would have loved to leave a rose at the grave of John Lennon, but the Strawberry Fields mosaic in Central Park will have to do.

This is a gorgeously written book about two best friends doing nothing in particular. Isa and Gala arrive in New York City intertwined and allied.

They whirl through all the requisite stops of the party girl layabout lifestyle. I was fascinated by the friendship’s closeness; Isa and Gala know each other’s quirks and fears in staggering intimacy. They function as a unit, as a “we.” Isa’s aimlessly wandering through life, but she isn’t in it alone, and that’s comforting to me.

Together, Isa and Gala turn aimlessness into freedom. It’s a detail-packed, slow-burning portrait of how we build identity together, intertwining ourselves and pushing each other forward.

I admire Wendy’s sense of intimacy and ability to enter people’s private lives through their interiors. I find her sense of style timeless. I love the intimacy level she connects with a room and its owners. I think she can see life and excitement at every level.

I know her personally and am very fond of her love for interiors, of original and unique living space as well as the way she has to find them.

For me, this book is a master class on using animals to write about humans without losing sight that animals aren’t human at all. It’s also laugh-out-loud hilarious because each story here is based on a real celebrity’s fateful encounter with an animal—and Millet uses a delightfully broad and irreverent definition of “celebrity.”

In this book, Noam Chomsky tries to sell a used gerbil habitat, Sharon Stone’s journalist husband is bitten and infected by a komodo dragon, and Madonna, in her British accent phase, shoots a pheasant badly. Millet’s precise prose satirically skewers our relationship with celebrities and creatures, inviting us to reconsider both.