recent reads

[toastykitten]

•  Garlic & Sapphires by Ruth Reichl - Just finished this reread because I needed something light. I forgot, though, that Reichl's husband was a journalist at CBS, and so bits of harsh reality will break through every so often. At the end, he misses out on going to interview someone named Osama bin Laden. This is the book where she gets the job as New York Times food critic, and in the hopes of fooling the restaurants who have her picture hung up on their walls like a wanted poster, she takes on different disguises and personalities. I have always really liked Reichl's writing, and this was no exception. It's warm and engaging, and honestly, I wish I could feel and taste what she tastes whenever she has food, because she writes about it so sumptuously. Really fun read. I remember also really enjoying her tenure as editor-in-chief at Gourmet, and oh yeah, she wrote a memoir about that, too. 
• It reminded me to go to her Substack La Briffe, and on the latest post she put up a rant she did about food writing. 
• Also she did an interview with the new Gourmet online magazine. By the way, it's called Gourmet because Conde Nast let the rights to the name lapse, and so five food writers/journalists decided to snatch it up and make their own online magazine. It looks like it should be good. 
• In other online reading news, The Key is a new online magazine focused on Palestine, from the Palestine Festival of Literature. Opening essay is on why legacy media may be beyond saving, called "It's Not Complicated". Sara Yasin spoke to LitHub about it: “What are the things you cover if the baseline is someone thinks that not only is a genocide happening, but that genocide is wrong?” Yasin said, “What does it mean to tell stories if the goal isn’t, ‘You have to humanize Palestinians?’”