What I'm Reading & Eating These Days

8 books, 2 restaurant highlights & 2 happy hour snack ideas...

First, do you know why this little letter is called Reading & Eating? Way back in 2007, just after Cold Tangerines came out, my publisher said okay, now that the book’s done, you’ve got to start a blog. I barely knew what a blog was, and I didn’t totally know what to write about, so I told myself that if I couldn’t think of anything else on a given day or week, I could always talk about what I was eating and what I was reading—because that’s what I talk about everywhere, all the time, with everyone. If you’ve spent an hour with me, there’s a one hundred percent chance I’ve asked you about the last book you’ve loved and what you’re going to have for dinner.

Fast forward several years to when I did one tiny season of a podcast, and I ended each interview with a segment called Reading & Eating—a set of rapid-fire questions like “what’s the book you give as a gift most often?” and “what ingredient could you absolutely not live without?” (For the record, my answers are John O’Donohue’s To Bless The Space Between Us and eggs…)

All that to say, when I look at the long stretch of my writing life, talking about books and talking about food are definite through lines, things I’m always happy to talk about. That’s why here in this space sometimes we’ll talk about other things—music, travel, friendship, spirituality—but we’ll always come back to reading and eating, my two favorite things to talk about.