BuzzSugar

What's Buzzworthy? The Best Books of 2007

BuzzSugar — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 11:30:21 PST

I love reading under any circumstances, but with the writers' strike likely to roll into next year, I'm going to be needing book recommendations more than ever. So before we flip the calendar to 2008, I wanted to ask you all about your favorite books of 2007.

One of my favorites: Will Allison's What You Have Left, a book I picked up almost by accident at my local library and ended up devouring in a weekend. The novel is essentially a set of interconnected short stories focusing on an estranged father and daughter trying to find their way back to each other, with side appearances from NASCAR, the Confederate flag, and poker machines. It's a small, spare book that manages to be incredibly affecting.

Others from the year that I'd recommend: Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which made me want to make my own cheese; Ann Patchett's Run, which had some of my favorite characters of the year; and Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, as good a follow-up as I could have imagined to The Kite Runner.

So now, what are yours? Just use BuzzSugar's cool bookmarking tool to find your favorites online, write a little blurb about why they stood out to you, and tag them with the phrase Best Books of 2007. Then, next week, I'll feature some of the books here so we can all get our reading lists ready for the coming year.

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What's Buzzworthy? Food Writing

BuzzSugar — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 08:00:00 PDT

All month, Yum has been posting some great food writing in the site's summer reading series. For this week's Buzzworthy challenge, I wanted to put Buzz readers to the test to see what other drool-worthy food books you had on your shelves.

Here are the parameters: Fiction and non-fiction are both OK, but no cookbooks - though books that include recipes within their chapters are certainly welcome. To start things off, I've bookmarked Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which Fit read recently and I just finished the other day. It's a well-written look at the very hot topic of eating locally, tracing Kingsolver's family's move to a farm where they raise much of their own food and buy the rest from their neighbors.

Just use Buzzsugar's cool bookmarking tool to bookmark your great reads online and tag them with the phrase food writing. I'll post some readers' picks here next week. You can also now make a list of your picks. Here are mine:

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Weekend Reading: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

FitSugar — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 02:00:00 PDT

The 100 mile diet is not fiction for author Barbara Kingsolver, as she and her family decided to live off the land and buy only locally grown food for an entire year. Lucky for us, she recorded those 365 days in her latest book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Blending the art of the memoir with journalistic investigation, Kingsolver chronicles her family's move away from the industrial-food pipeline to southern Appalachia. As incredibly proficient gardeners, the family of four also "puts up food for the winter" by canning their own tomatoes and pickling their own veggies. After giving up meat due to overly industrialized production of meat, the family discovers the pleasures of "conscientious carnivory," as well as the surprises of animal husbandry. The book reminds me at times of The Little House on the Prairie, but with a decidedly political bent.

Kingsolver's writing is thoroughly enjoyable to read. Since I love her novels, it feels like a treat to read her prose on any subject matter. Not only is this book entertaining, it also provides helpful tips for shopping both seasonally and locally. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a convincing argument for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

Buy it online for $18.86 (30% off the cover price) from Cody's Book Store.