make a list (admittedly idiosyncratic) of the 100 books I most love, and post it here, so that those who say they want to "read more books" can have 1 readers thoughtful ideas on where to start (15 DONE as of 1/21/06; ONLY 90 TO Go!

Since so many 43 Things folks are kitchen wannabes, here are a few to get started with.

Cookbooks

• 1. CookWise by Shirley Corriher. The most valuable teaching cookbook I know, because it teaches not only the how but the why, in simplified, fascinating language. Pie crust, always my personal bete noire, has become easy thanks to this book’s cogent explanation of fats and flours. Thanks, Shirley!
• 2. Passionate Vegetarian by Crescent Dragonwagon. You don’t have to be Cajun to love gumbo, Italian to love pasta, or vegetarian to swoon with delight over Dragonwagon’s chillies and curries, salads, amazing lasagnas and enchiladas. Aspiring vegetarians and carnivores, experienced and new cooks, will all find much to love in this huge book, my most frequently used and referred to.
• 3. Classic Home Desserts by Richard Sachs. This is the BEST dessert book I know, bar none. Most are unfancy, easy, do at home things (as you’d expect from the title). But he must have tested fiercely: not one recipe is a loser. He writes with authrity and wit.
• 4. The Breakfast Book by Marion Cunningham. Simple and stripped down and short, this hits every breakfast classic but gives it a new twist. Just yummy!

• 1. The Sprit Catches You & You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman. Rivetingly well-written book about Hmong immigrants in California, and how their belief system, especially around matters medical, meshes and doesn’t mesh with conventional western medical approaches. Compassionate, bright, funny, interesting, multiple viewpoints, characters who are so different but whom you really care about.
• 2. Stand Facing The Stove: The Women Who Gave America the Joy of Cooking by Anne Mendelson. Although partly the definitive biography of the Rombauers, the mother and daughter who invented the modern cookbook with that classic Joy of Cooking, and though these are fascinating and complex lives in themselves, even more extraordinary is the picture Mendelson gives us of how the world of cooking, and kitchens, have changed in the last 150 years ago. Extremely well-researched and written in sprightly fashion, the reader learns about people, food, technonogy, history, agriculture, development… amazing piece of work.
• 3. Stiffed, by Susan Faludi. A brilliant work about where American men are at, specifically the post-war generation, at this specific time. In fine, deep moving portraits from all over the country, she follows public and private male figures in sports, Christian fellowship, small and large businesses, porn acting, veterans :diverse fields, obviously, each with their own definition of manliness. Some of the men are single, some married… all trying to make sense in a world where the reality has changed far more quickly than the myth. Faludi, a Pulitzer winner, is surprisingly sympathetic to the neither-fish-nor-fowl, not-quite-articulated state of shell-shock many American males exist in.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY/ MEMOIR 10 in this category
Writing this list made me aware that what I love in a memoir is rigorous honesty (no puffery), lack of self-pity or self-dramatization, and individuals who surmounted huge odds to become who or what they are… books that address, in some way, the age-old questions about why unreasonable burdens crush some, yet enable others to not just survive but grow, thrive, excel, make peace, change the world, understand life…

• 1. Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography (He published several different editions, all of which have slightly different titles). This is an American classic, told by a former slave who escaped slavery and went on to become a writer, lecturer, etc. The writing is as beautiful as the pictures he paints of a Maryland slaves day to day life are lucid.
• 2. Truth and Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett. Two writers, best friends; one organized, one not; both brilliant; one born deformed and consigned to a life of constant surgical procedures; the other, “normal.” Compassionate, honest, literary, a touching portrait of Lucy, the friend Patchett treasured, care for, lost… a mditation on the literary life and how our looks transform and inform our lives. Highly readable; wholly honest.
• 3. The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest by Aminatta Forma. The main reason to read is it gives you a thousand lives in your one small life. Forma’s memoir transported me to a place and time I never would have been drawn to or known anything about: Sierra Leone. A journalist of mixed race (Sierra Leonean/Scottish), she is a brilliant writer, who manages to braid together investigative reporting with the suspense of a thriller (who was her father? How, and why, did he die?) with personal tragedy; an adult’s eye and mind overlaying a child’s confusion. Gripping.
• 4. All Over But the Shoutin’, Rick Bragg. A rough Southern boyhood; devoted, determined mother, alcoholic father, and how it shaped the man who won many awards as a journalist (though recent scandal caused him to resign from NYT)
• 5. Witness by Whittaker Chambers. Chambers was the man who brought down Alger Hiss in the red-baiting, McCarthy era 50’s. Though later proved a delusional schizophrenic, my GOD is the writing ever beautiful and powerful!
• 6. Garlic & Sapphires I think the best of the three culinary memoirs of Ruth Reichl, former food critic of the NYT, though I also liked Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me with Apples. She’s a funny, honest writer with a light touch; she’s not afraid to make herself look bad when it’s called for, she’s wry and tells just enough and not too much; what name-dropping she does is delightful.
• 7. Man is Wolf to Man by Janusz Bardach. This man, a youn innocent and a loyal Communist, was imprisoned in the Gulag by Stalin. Unforgettable book not just about life in the Gulag (prison camps) in Siberia but the amazing resiliency and choice it takes to stay alive in and despite and even through, impossible circumstances.
• 8. * A Round-Heeled Woman:My Late Life Adventures in Sex and Romance, by Jane Juska. A delightfully, funny, sad (but never self-pitying), honest confection of a book, this is a highly readable account of a 70-something woman who puts an ad in the New York Review Books saying she wants to experience good sex before she dies. I know of no other book remotely like it in its deft light-handedness.

Okay,enough for tonight.

And two more in the memoir category added a week later:

• 9. *Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres. An horrific and amazing memoir that for me was can’t-put-it-down-gobble-it-up-till-you’re-done riveting. Scheeres grew up in a fundamentalist home: strict, by-the-rules-as-rigidly-interpreted, where God was most certainly not love, where spirituality lost out to religion and human kindness took a distant second place to duty and fighting “sin”, where the common practice was to look away from anything troubling (including one’s own biological and adopted children), and cast them out or have them imprisoned, literally, when what was wrong grew so loud it drowned out everything else. A deep sibling friendship and loyalty; a different sibling relationship of abuse and fear; a grappling with sexuality, with worlds, inner and outer, in conflict, a virtual concentration camp of a “Christian” reform school… this one will break your heart several times over, and fill you with despair for the depths to which human beings can sink ( especially in the name of God), and respect for the heights to which they can soar (resilience and generosity despite all the odds).

• 10. Memories, Dreams, & Reflections, by Carl Jung. Markedly different from most of the other titles I’ve chosen in this category, Jung’s is a true autobiography, written late in life: a whole summing-up of that life, not a piece of it. I read this years ago (like, oh my god, 35 years ago) and have returned to it ever since. Jung was Freud’s chief disciple, but broke with Freud and went in a completely different direction, which included spiritual and mythological factors; he was the first to speak of a “collective unscious” while Freud’s explorations were more individual. It is fascinating, funny, you get to meet a lot of the heavy-hitters in this field, and it just follows the development, inner and outer, of a great and iconoclastic thinker as he observed the seasons and cycles of human life. And, I LOVE what he says in passing about how his boyhood antipathy for mathematics shaped him!