Today’s Nonfiction November is hosted at Sarah’s Bookshelves. The theme this week is fiction/nonfiction book pairings:
It can be a “If you loved this book, read this!” or just two titles that you think would go well together. Maybe it’s a historical novel and you’d like to get the real history by reading a nonfiction version of the story.
I will heartily recommend two books where it’s all about wine.
Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker was one of my favorite nonfiction books this year. A perfect pairing to me is Peter Mayle’s A Good Year
This quote below is from the fictional book. Yet you learn something. There is more to the story than wine but it plays a healthy role along with food, relationships and a bit of mystery.
“See the diagonal cut on the stem? That’s a cut made by secateurs. And look – there are bunches all the way along this row…..They cut off two or three bunches so that the bunch left gets all the nourishment. This makes it concentrated, with a higher alcohol content. The fancy name for it is vendage verte. It’s slow and expensive because machines can’t do it.
“This is a great spot. The exposure is right; facing east, the stony ground warms up slowly, which is better for the roots and there is a perfect slope for drainage. Land like this would fetch a small fortune in Napa.”
Now to move on to another love of mine, food and cooking. You see a theme here, right?
The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister is a fictional accounting of strangers coming together to learn to cook. Some carry emotional baggage and this learning process and creating meals together helps them heal. As in real life, not all wounds are visible and the emotional scarring can be very well hidden. I loved this book.
Currently I am reading The Comfort Food Diaries by Emily Nunn. This is about heartbreak, healing, moving ahead with very liberal passages of food and recipes. It’s good so far but I have to say, I am already concerned about the dog Maggie. If a dog is in a story I will worry about it’s demise, guess I will find out as I read.
Join in or check out the pairings at Sarah’s site. Thank you for hosting, Sarah!
I like your pairings. I sure hope nothing bad happens to Maggie, I’m mush when it comes to dogs.
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I know what you mean, Vicki. We checked into a dog’s “future” in a movie we wanted to watch and found out it was killed so we didn’t watch it!
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I don’t read a lot of food and cooking books, but these sound pretty interesting.
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I want to expand on those interests, Kim. I like some things about the space program too.
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I love both of these pairings! I’ve read Mayle but didn’t realize he wrote a novel, and I already want to read Cork Dork. The School of Essential Ingredients was wonderful on audio and you got me to add Comfort Food Diaries to my list last week 🙂
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JoAnn, I am almost done with Comfort Diaries and I sure hope you like Cork Dork. I loved it. Mayle has quite a few fiction books out and A Good Year was my first. Enjoyable!
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I may have read the last few pages of more than a few books to make sure the dog was there at the end. I really need to read Cork Dork. I loved The School of Essential Ingredients. It was one of my first audio books and I thought the whole thing was magical.
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