21. The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing 2nd ed. (NF)

By Charles Papazian (398 pgs)



Rating: 4


Everything you need to get started brewing beer at home, well almost everything. You still need a huge brew pot and a great big bucket, as well as a number of other sundry items, but certainly everything you need to know to start brewing. The second edition is split into three sections: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. The beginner section runs the reader through the brewing of a very basic beer. The intermediate section gets into the 'whys' of how the process works and includes more involved recipes. The advanced section...is scary ;)

The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing is a reasonably well written manual. There are a couple of details that could use a bit more treatment but the information is all there if one looks for it. The third edition came out a couple of years ago and I suspect that many of the unclear details were resolved in that edition.

Recommended to beer lovers even if you'd never attempt to brew beer yourself.

11. Comfort Me With Apples: More Adventures At the Table (NF 3)

by Ruth Reichl (320 pgs)

Rating: 4

Comfort Me With Apples picks up where Tender At the Bone left off. Reichl is living in a Berkley commune with her husband when she gets her first gig as a paid restaurant reviewer. This is not, apparently, a suitable occupation for a commune living hippie. Ah well, life does go on and in Reichl's case it gets even more interesting. From this simple reviewing gig Reichl launches herself on a career where in she meets the stars and rising stars of the culinary world while travelling all over the world.

Reichl continues with her frank conversational style the story of her life including the break up of her first marriage and the reasons for the break up of her first marriage. Her honesty, at times, made me a little uncomfortable but I found in the end that I felt grateful for her ability to share that time of her life...even if it made me all soppy.

Recommended to foodies, cookbook fanatics, and people in tough relationships.

10. Tender At the Bone: Growing Up At the Table (NF2)

by Ruth Reichl (304 pgs)

Rating: 5

Ruth Reichl, in case you don't know, is the restaurant reviewer for the New York Times. This, her first memoir, covers from her childhood through to the 1970s. It's an interesting read partly because her family is so eccentric and partly because of Reichl's conversational tone. I began to feel that she was sitting on the other side of my kitchen table with a mug of coffee and telling me about here bi-polar mother and her misspent teenage years. Her frankness in the telling stops well shy of being embarrassing and is instead a comforting level of confiding.

Tender At the Bone is a very good, very quick read. I suspect that it may appeal slightly more to women then to men, but I think that's more incidental than intentional. The recipes look interesting although there are only a couple I suspect I will try.

Recommended to everyone, but specifically those who love to cook, those who love to eat, and those with crazy families.

6. On Writing (NF 1)

By Stephen King

Rating: 4 (320 pgs)

On Writing is about two thirds memoir and one third instuctional text. The memoir is actually fascinating and I didn't go in thinking it would be. I've never been a huge King fan. I like his books just fine but I never put him on the 'god of horror' pedistal that so many seem to. That being said, I wasn't thinking of him as particularly human either. It was refreshing, to say the least, to discover he was really just a man like I'd always suspected and encouraging to know that he's struggled too. The instuctional third was interesting but nothing particularly new. As most of King's books, On Writing is well written.

Recommended to those who want to write and those who love King.