All three books in the inbox this month were Christmas gifts from my dad. He knows me pretty well and is good at picking out books I haven't even seen myself. He also likes to encourage my pie making for somewhat selfish reasons. The candy apple pie I made at Thanksgiving was a particular favorite of his.
I read Made to Stick for work. It's got really great ideas, but it's definitely overwritten in that way business books often are. Maybe some people needs eight parallel examples of one principle (half of which they've already heard somewhere else), but I'm not one of them. I'm glad I read it, because the ideas really are sound, but it could have easily been condensed down. I understand now that some books are made to be scanned, rather than read closely.
Fictitious Dishes is a fantastic art project, one of those things that so perfectly rings all my bells that it makes me wish I'd thought of it. Dinah Fried styled and photographed all the images in the book based on memorable passages about food and drink from literary classics.
Everybody's Baby was classic Lydia Netzer fun. An e-book only novella, it didn't have the depth of some of the her novels, but was enjoyable nonetheless.
Station Eleven was absolutely breathtaking. I read it for book club, and it was unanimously beloved. It's one of those epic stories that mesmerizingly weaves together plots and characters across decades with stories encircling a virus epidemic, an aging actor, a production of King Lear, a reformed paparazzo, a cult leader, and a gorgeous sci-fi comic book. Somehow all the disparate places and characters share similar themes and work beautifully together to tell a universal, human story.
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