Book #2, A Homemade Life

It’s nearly ten 0’clock in the evening and I’m just sitting down to write today’s post because, gosh darn it, I said I would write on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays (and I asked you to hold me to it).  So I’m writing.  I’m fueled by whole wheat pasta, a sense of purpose and Tanzanian dark chocolate, which I could not tell apart from the Venezuelan were it an interrogation upon which my life depended.

 
A more prepared person would have had their Wednesday Post up earlier in the day, but instead, here I clickety-clack as my final to-do before calling it a night.  In all honesty, if I can summon the energy to write in the evenings, after the cacophony of the day has subsided, I’m a more focused writer than when I try to do it among the rest of the day’s insistences.  And I enjoy it more, to boot.

Another one of my goals was to read 25 books during the year, and just a few minutes ago, I closed the back cover, er… turned off the Kindle of the second one, A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg. 

To me, this was the kind of book that made you have to set an alarm for yourself for just ten more minutes before you really had to get in the shower if you expected to get to work on time.  The kind of book where being awoken in the middle of the night was not an interruption in your sleep but an unexpected awake opportunity where you could squeeze a few extra pages in.  The kind of book that makes you want to read more and write more. 

And cook more.

The book is a series of short personal stories, each punctuated with a recipe.  Some are sweet, some are full of vinegar – both the stories and the recipes – but shared in a way that is both compelling and entirely relatable.  The recipes range from easy to complicated.  The culinary novice that I am, I threw together a batch of scones on Sunday night on a whim and they turned out delicious. 

I loved it, the book and the scones.

The unfortunate fact is that by reading a recipe or reading a jacket cover, you never know whether you’re actually going to like the outcome in the end.  I often find that books sound promising, and fall entirely short of what I had hoped. There’s a reason I have so many books my “started, never finished” shelf on GoodReads.  But this one?  Started and finished in 5 days.  A modern day record for this habitual extra-curricular over-committer. 

So, what’s next?   Hopefully, another book that stirs me (ha! no pun intended!) the same way this one did.  Or at least something that didn’t let me down as bad as Julie & Julia did.

Until then.

Psst! Molly, is your next book out yet?!