For Readers: Blog

Girl dinner

This past summer, ladies took to social media to share their girl dinners—typically a low effort meal of snacks and odds and ends from the fridge. If you found this trend fascinating you might enjoy these reads featuring women and all the different things they choose to eat.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Before the nightmare, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary life. But when splintering, blood-soaked images start haunting her thoughts, Yeong-hye decides to purge her mind and renounce eating meat. In a country where societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye's decision to embrace a more “plant-like” existence is a shocking act of subversion. And as her passive rebellion manifests in ever more extreme and frightening forms, scandal, abuse, and estrangement begin to send Yeong-hye spiraling deep into the spaces of her fantasy. [e-book | print]

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting, until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting. Early in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey. [print]

Sourdough by Robin Sloan
Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Lois loves their food and the sourdough bread is the only bright spot in her day until suddenly the brothers have to close up shop, and fast. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens up. [e-book | print | audiobook]

A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers
Food critic Dorothy Daniels loves what she does. Discerning, meticulous, and very, very smart, Dorothy's clear mastery of the culinary arts makes it likely that she could, on any given night, whip up a more inspired dish than any one of the chefs she writes about. But there is something within Dorothy that's different from everyone else, and having suppressed it long enough, she starts to embrace what makes Dorothy uniquely, terrifyingly herself. Recounting her life from a seemingly idyllic farm-to-table childhood, the heights of her career, to the moment she plunges an ice pick into a man's neck on Fire Island, Dorothy Daniels shows us what happens when a woman finally embraces her superiority and appetites. [e-book]

Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
At home full-time with her two-year-old son, an artist finds she is struggling. She is lonely and exhausted. She had imagined a different life other than one where her husband, always traveling for his work, calls her from faraway hotel rooms. One more toddler bedtime, and she fears she might lose her mind. Instead, quite suddenly, she starts gaining things, surprising things that happen one night when her child will not sleep. Sharper canines. Strange new patches of hair. New appetites, new instincts. And from deep within herself, a new voice. [e-book | print]

This Delicious Death by Kayla Cottingham
Teen girls need to eat too. Three years ago, the melting of arctic permafrost released a pathogen of unknown origin, causing a small percentage of people to undergo a transformation known as the Hollowing. Those impacted slowly became intolerant to normal food and were only able to gain sustenance by consuming the flesh of other human beings. However, scientists were able to create a synthetic version of human meat and, as a result, humanity slowly began to return to normal, albeit with lasting fear and distrust for the people they'd pejoratively dubbed ghouls. Zoey, Celeste, Valeria, and Jasmine are all ghouls living in Southern California. As a last hurrah before their graduation they decided to attend a musical festival in the desert. But on the first night of the festival Val goes feral, and ends up killing and eating a boy. As other festival guests start disappearing around them the girls soon discover someone is drugging ghouls and making them feral. And if they can't figure out how to stop it, and soon, no one at the festival is safe. [print ]

Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda
Lydia is hungry. She's always wanted to try Japanese food. Sashimi, ramen, onigiri with sour plum stuffed inside, the food her Japanese father liked to eat. And then there is bubble tea and iced coffee, ice cream and cake, foraged herbs and plants, and the vegetables grown by the other young artists at the London studio space she is secretly squatting in. But Lydia can't eat any of these things. Her body doesn't work like those of other people. The only thing she can digest is blood. Lydia knows that humans are her natural prey, but she can't bring herself to feed on them. As Lydia develops as a woman and an artist, she will learn that she must reconcile the conflicts within her (between her demon and human sides, her mixed ethnic heritage, and her relationship with food, and, in turn, humans) if she is to find a way to exist in the world. Before any of this, however, she must eat. [print]

Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal
When Lars Thorvald's wife, Cynthia, falls in love with a dashing sommelier, he's left to raise their baby, Eva, on his own. He's determined to pass on his love of food to his daughter, starting with puréed pork shoulder. As Eva grows, she finds her solace and salvation in the flavors of her native Minnesota. From Scandinavian lutefisk to hydroponic chocolate habaneros, each ingredient represents one part of Eva's journey as she becomes the star chef behind a legendary and secretive pop-up supper club, culminating in an opulent and emotional feast that's a testament to her spirit and resilience. [e-book | print | audiobook | large type]

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
A smog has spread and food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles. There, the sky is clear again and rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body. In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate. [e-book | print]

My Life in France by Julia Child
Although she would later singlehandedly create a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, Julia Child was not always a master chef. Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever with her newfound passion for cooking and teaching. This story paints a vivid picture of Julia’s life and the food she loved to eat and cook. [e-book | print | large type]

⏤Gina