Cooking, plus thoughts about choosing books

It is summer, which means mountains of vegetables from my CSA farm share are filling my fridge every week. I was behind on cooking and eating all these veggies for a few week, but the other day I decided to have a great big fridge clean-out, in which I threw out everything that was past salvaging and stopped feeling guilty about it. Now that I’m not totally overwhelmed by veg—I still have a lot but it’s all sorted and organized and I have a list on the fridge telling me what I have —I am remembering how good Farmer John’s Cookbook is for CSA season. It’s full of veggie-centric recipes, and I’ve managed to find a few lately that are pleasingly simple, not boring but “I already have all the ingredients in the house.” Recent highlights: Last weekend Megan and I had dinner together and cooked the kohlrabi hash, which is gingery and surprising and great, even if the grating of the kohlrabi can be tedious. Last week at home I made “summer squash with a crispy cornmeal coating”: normally any recipes for breading and frying things seem like too much work, but this was simple and delicious and a perfect side dish. The other day I made some “broccoli with Asian-style dressing,” which is to say with vinegar and soy sauce and toasted sesame oil and garlic and ginger and peanut oil. And last night I made the Swiss chard with pine nuts and raisins and my boyfriend made us some cheeseburgers, and that plus white whine was the perfect summer dinner. Next up: curried rice and cucumber salad with walnuts and raisins.

Meanwhile, in non-vegetable-related news, a few recent conversations at work have been making me think about books/reading/how we choose what we read. Conversation one: someone was saying something about 1984, and how he felt surprised by how many details of the book had stayed with him through the decades, and then mentioned he’d recently reread Catch-22, another book whose details had stuck in his head since he first read it at age 15, and which surprised him on re-reading by being even better than he remembered it—and he’d remembered it as being quite good. (This made me wonder if I should also re-read Catch-22, which I only read because I had to read it for a college class. I liked it, but maybe I’d like it more now?) Another person in the room chimed in with, “wow, I don’t know when I last read a novel,” which prompted the Catch-22 reader and I both to say “you should!” Though of course, well, maybe he shouldn’t. If reading intelligent non-fiction (which I think is what this person reads: my impression is that his choices lean more towards the business/tech side of things than to general interest or history, though I might be wrong there) is what brings him joy, well, then, have at it, right? I might see something like Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business sitting on the sidewalk and pass it by (I *did* see it and pass it by the other day, actually, though not without briefly considering picking it up), but that doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t be reading it.

Conversation two: I was carrying To Say Nothing of the Dog in my hand on the way into the office one morning, and someone asked what I was reading. When I explained it, he said, possibly just matter-of-factly, or possibly a little dismissively, “oh, genre fiction,” then asked how I’d heard about it. So I said I’d heard about another book by the author on a book blog I read, to which his response was to ask if I read a lot of book blogs, to which my response was “yeah, I guess.” At which point he advised me to follow my own instincts. Which made me laugh, because of course I do, and I imagine most people who read book blogs do. It’s exciting to find out about promising-sounding books from blogs, sometimes especially exciting if the book is outside of my usual reading interests and therefore probably not something I would have discovered all on my own. But there are still lots of books I read about/hear about, whether on book blogs or elsewhere, that I have absolutely no interest in picking up—and I don’t see how reading book blogs is any different from reading the NY Times Book Review or book reviews in the New Yorker or Publishers Weekly (which I used to LOVE flipping through when Megan worked at Scholastic and would bring home old copies from the office). And of course, there are still times when I pick up a book just because it catches my eye, not because I’ve heard about it—or its author—anywhere.

All of which is to say: I sure do like having an ever-growing and ever-eclectic reading list. It’s exciting to me—and I’m OK with the fact that I’ll never read everything I want to read. (My boyfriend and I talk about this periodically. He tends to worry about whether a given book is worth his time, whereas I don’t really think about that. I mean, I guess I do think about it: there are, as I’ve said, books I’m entirely uninterested in ever reading. But once I hit the point of deciding that a given book might be interesting or fun, then I read it when it seems like I’m in the right mood for it.) What about you? How do you choose your books? Do you think reading book blogs has changed what you read?