best. food. book. this. year. PERIOD. @dayofhoney
Remember how people got all persnickety over the way Eat, Pray, Love—lyrical and compelling as it was—centered on a waspy upper-class writer who went wandering off to do yoga?
Imagine if someone took that close, compassionate, luminous writing and transposed it on top of a working-class Midwest girl, daughter of a single mom, who married an Arab reporter and moved to Baghdad just as America’s war there got going.
Now imagine it’s written with a very close eye to food: the way that it snakes a tendril into every piece of our daily lives, the way it can bring you closer to strangers, the way that cooking can ground you, “like Antaeus” in the place you find yourself in.
Imagine it’s written with not just compasssion but laugh-out-loud humor, an empathy that only comes from having experienced deprivation yourself, a down-to-earth love of family and all its travails, a curiosity about a new culture that’s just beginning to open itself up.
Stop imagining. Go buy Annia Ciezadlo’s Day of Honey instead. And while you’re at it, like her Facebook page (which seems more functional that her Twitter), so you can know when she’s coming to town to read etc.
If you are like me you will devour it in roughly two days, the slow pace of your reading attributable to the fact that you have a job.
