The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman

Allegra Goodman's novel, The Cookbook Collector, has been on bookshelves since 2010. Some of you many have already read it. Others may look at the title, think it's about cookbooks and skip it. Please don't. The novel, which takes place between the fall of 1999 and October 2001, is about people, life and loves -- whether tangible or not.

The cookbook aspect is one small portion of the novel, and it comes late. I would have liked to have seen it explored more thoroughly and earlier. But when Goodman does deal with it, she does so expertly and, to some degree, symbolically.

Rather than cookbooks, the novel is about people with imbalanced lives, about two very different sisters. Both are smart. The younger one, Jessamine Bach, is a doctoral student studying philosophy. She is content to work as an assistant in a used bookstore, doesn't worry about money or fashion, and for a time is controlled by a man with his own political agenda. Emily Bach is older, practical, a financially successful businesswoman in a fledgling Internet business. She, too, is in love with a colleague, Jonathan. Like her, work, decor and the stock market are paramount for him.

As different as the sisters are, I see parts of myself in both, as well as in other characters Goodman has created.

Like Tom McClintock, I collect cookbooks but don't cook much. When I do, I most enjoy stirring in the unexpected -- the herb, the spice, the Peruvian sea salt or the Syrian pepper flakes nowhere to be found on the recipe. I like to make it my own recipe.

Like the philosophical and tree-hugging Jessamine Bach, I hunger for books, old and new, even when I am surrounded by them. I have little money but find enough to plant trees and shrubs for the birds, gangly milkweed for the monarchs and bee balm for the honey bees and hummingbirds.

Like Jess, I'm not always practical. I write and sometimes reveal major financial problems at a public institution and wonder how could the bankers and the accountants not have recognized them before I did. After all, I've not balanced my checkbook since hippies were in style.

Like Jess' older sister, Emily Bach, I focused the first 25 years of my adult life on my career. Relationships came second, third, often not at all. I was single in the big city, Chicago. I lived a couple blocks from the Magnificent Mile and cabbed it to The Art Institute. So many opportunities, so many people. Yet, I could look out my high-rise apartment window and see my real home -- a tall, gorgeous black-and-gold building that housed The Associated Press offices where I worked.

Goodman's book has other subplots that will interest different readers. The sisters' mother, who died when they were young, was Jewish, a religion and culture they begin to explore during the book. The growth of Internet businesses and the speculation that went with them form another subplot as do the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and their impact on people's lives and the economy.

Finally, readers may want to visit Allegra Goodman's website -- allegragoodman.com -- and look at the first question she poses for reading groups: "Who is the cookbook collector in this novel?" Maybe I'll talk about that another time.

The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister

Erica Bauermeister's debut novel, The School of Essential Ingredients, is the kind of book you read to relax, enjoy and feel better.

The book isn't what I had expected. It's not really food writing. Rather, it is a series of linked stories about the lives of Lillian, who teaches a cooking class, and her eight students. They range from a couple who survived a long-ago affair and a woman with early-stage Alzheimer's to a lonely widower and a young mother needing time for herself once again. Food is merely the force that unites the group and that symbolizes the diverse, unexpected ingredients that make up our lives.

Beauermeister's prose is simple and effective. She is particularly good at dialogue. The book's only flaw is that things seem to work out too conveniently for everyone. But maybe that's not a flaw in this kind of book. Maybe the hope that things, problems, will eventually work out is one of the "essential ingredients" we need in our own lives and occasionally in our reading as well.