The Cookbook Collector, Allegra Goodman
The Cookbook Collector, Allegra Goodman
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The Cookbook Collector

Author: Allegra Goodman

Narrator: Ariadne Meyers

Unabridged: 15 hr 44 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/06/2010

Synopsis

Heralded as “a modern day Jane Austen” by USA Today, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author Allegra Goodman has compelled and delighted hundreds of thousands of readers. Now, in her most ambitious work yet, Goodman weaves together the worlds of Silicon Valley and rare book collecting in a delicious novel about appetite, temptation, and fulfillment.

Emily and Jessamine Bach are opposites in every way: Twenty-eight-year-old Emily is the CEO of Veritech, twenty-three-year-old Jess is an environmental activist and graduate student in philosophy. Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily is rational and driven, while Jess is dreamy and whimsical. Emily’s boyfriend, Jonathan, is fantastically successful. Jess’s boyfriends, not so much—as her employer George points out in what he hopes is a completely disinterested way.

Bicoastal, surprising, rich in ideas and characters, The Cookbook Collector is a novel about getting and spending, and about the substitutions we make when we can’t find what we’re looking for: reading cookbooks instead of cooking, speculating instead of creating, collecting instead of living. But above all it is about holding on to what is real in a virtual world: love that stays.

About The Author

Allegra Goodman’s novels include The Chalk Artist, Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls (a National Book Award finalist). Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Commentary, and Ploughshares and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She has written two collections of short stories, The Family Markowitz and Total Immersion and a novel for younger readers, The Other Side of the Island. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, The Jewish Review of Books, and The American Scholar. Raised in Honolulu, Goodman studied English and philosophy at Harvard and received a PhD in English literature from Stanford. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Salon Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is writing a new novel.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Vicki on July 21, 2010

This was well-written and very readable and stood head and shoulders above most books with this plot. But therein lies the problem. I don't have a lot of interest in reading YET ANOTHER book about any of the following: 1) a pair of sisters, one of which seems to have it all together but has her life......more

Goodreads review by Emily on January 15, 2011

Meticulously boring, or perhaps boringly meticulous, this novel reminds me of why I usually don't enjoy literary fiction that takes place in the here and now. The protagonists are sisters Emily and Jessamine Bach, who live in California in the heady days of the dotcom boom. Emily is the chief of a h......more

Goodreads review by Ciara on September 13, 2010

this is another one of those novels that is entertaining enough while i'm reading it, but when jared asks for a plot synopsis, i realize that it's completely ludicrous (see also: a gate at the stairs by lorrie moore). emily is the CEO of an internet start-up specializing in online data storage. jess......more

Goodreads review by Gary on September 17, 2013

Allegra Goodman is a wonderful writer but I wish publishing marketeers would stop hailing her as a contemporary Jane Austen; it does them both a disservice. You could argue that marriage is at the center of The Cookbook Collector and that moral questions drive the plot, but it is a stretch to find m......more

Goodreads review by Becky on April 23, 2010

I finished The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman this morning after staying up late, shirking kid duty in the morning in order to read in the tub, and pushing my weekly breakfast with Dad back a half-hour so I could read the last 20 pages. I just loved it. I hadn't read Goodman's previous books,......more

Quotes

“If any contemporary author deserves to wear the mantle of Jane Austen, it’s [Allegra] Goodman, whose subtle, astute social comedies perfectly capture the quirks of human nature. This dazzling novel . . . is Goodman’s most robust, fully realized and trenchantly meaningful work yet.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Fans of Goodman's lovely, nuanced novels have a treat in store with this tale of two sisters."—Entertainment Weekly

"Goodman is remarkably successful in creating rich, engaging characters and a complex story of love and identity."
—Library Journal, starred review

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