Here are 100 books that Nathan Turner's I Love California fans have personally recommended if you like
Nathan Turner's I Love California.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
By Chase Reynolds Ewald and Heather Sandy HebertAuthor
Why are we passionate about this?
At Home in the Wine Country coauthorsHeather and Chase love the open, nature-focused attitude toward living that California does so well. Heather worked in the field of architecture for 25 years and is the author of The New Architecture of Wine. Chase has been a western lifestyle writer for 30 years and is the author of 14 books, including Modern Americana, American Rustic, Cabin Style, and Bison. As writers and consultants they work with publishers, magazines, and design, hospitality and wine clients to craft and convey their stories. Heather and Chase live in spectacularly scenic Marin County, halfway between San Francisco and California's iconic wine country.
Under Western Skies celebrates the best in landscape design throughout many western climates, from mountains to desert to rainforest, from wine country to urban oasis. 36 harmonious designs prove that glorifying nature rather than work against it results in landscapes that belong. The book is full of ideas and inspiration, as well as practical information for the home gardener or the armchair traveler. One reader called it 'an homage to the horticultural arts.'
This photo-driven book explores how the rugged landscape of the American West deeply influences the way people garden. It profiles 35 of the most groundbreaking gardens in the region. From desert perch to seaside oasis, gardens in the American West are on the frontier of garden design. Under Western Skies proves this, with profiles of 35 of the West's most innovative gardens - places that truly capture the wild spirit of the region. Under Western Skies reveals how the grandeur and rugged beauty of the region's landscapes set the stage for stunning and innovative design, while the various climates allow…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
By Chase Reynolds Ewald and Heather Sandy HebertAuthor
Why are we passionate about this?
At Home in the Wine Country coauthorsHeather and Chase love the open, nature-focused attitude toward living that California does so well. Heather worked in the field of architecture for 25 years and is the author of The New Architecture of Wine. Chase has been a western lifestyle writer for 30 years and is the author of 14 books, including Modern Americana, American Rustic, Cabin Style, and Bison. As writers and consultants they work with publishers, magazines, and design, hospitality and wine clients to craft and convey their stories. Heather and Chase live in spectacularly scenic Marin County, halfway between San Francisco and California's iconic wine country.
Jenny Kayne personifies the easy, laid-back approach to design and life that is so characteristic of California. Comfort plays a role equal to that of style, which is always organic, natural, and textural. Jenni Kayne's style leans toward a neutral palette that embraces and accentuates the light, color, and texture of the California landscape. She shares work from her own home, as well as homes of other creative women who share her natural design ethos.
A known tastemaker and authority on style, Jenni Kayne spans the worlds of fashion, interiors, and entertaining. Inspired by organic textures, thoughtful simplicity, and natural landscapes, Kayne embodies an earthy and effortless aesthetic one that is intentional and where beauty and authenticity exist in every detail. In her second book Kayne turns to interior design, sharing her beautifully designed interiors as well as the homes of other creative women who embrace a similar natural design ethos. The book introduces the homes by location, spanning varied landscapes and design characteristics: houses by the ocean, desert-style spaces, mountain homes, and abodes in…
By Chase Reynolds Ewald and Heather Sandy HebertAuthor
Why are we passionate about this?
At Home in the Wine Country coauthorsHeather and Chase love the open, nature-focused attitude toward living that California does so well. Heather worked in the field of architecture for 25 years and is the author of The New Architecture of Wine. Chase has been a western lifestyle writer for 30 years and is the author of 14 books, including Modern Americana, American Rustic, Cabin Style, and Bison. As writers and consultants they work with publishers, magazines, and design, hospitality and wine clients to craft and convey their stories. Heather and Chase live in spectacularly scenic Marin County, halfway between San Francisco and California's iconic wine country.
A big bold book glorious in its celebration of art with a West Coast perspective authored by collector Chara Shreyer and interior designer Gary Hutton. One of the most significant private collections of modern art in the U.S. — approximately 600 pieces — is showcased in homes ranging from a Pacific beach house to a Los Angeles aerie to a ridgetop residence in Marin County. The book features masterworks by Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Louise Nevelson, Diane Arbus, and Frank Stella, plus important works by emerging 21st-century artists. It is a colorful, vibrant, and poignant portrayal of one woman's art journey.
Leading art collector Chara Schreyer’s forty-year collaboration with interior designer Gary Hutton has produced five residences designed to house 600 works of art, including masterpieces by Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Louise Nevelson, Diane Arbus, and Frank Stella. Art House takes readers on a breathtaking visual tour of these stunning spaces, which range from an architectural tour-de-force to a high-rise “gallery as home.” An exploration of a life devoted to living with art and to designing homes that honor it, this title is an inspiration for art and design lovers alike.
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
By Chase Reynolds Ewald and Heather Sandy HebertAuthor
Why are we passionate about this?
At Home in the Wine Country coauthorsHeather and Chase love the open, nature-focused attitude toward living that California does so well. Heather worked in the field of architecture for 25 years and is the author of The New Architecture of Wine. Chase has been a western lifestyle writer for 30 years and is the author of 14 books, including Modern Americana, American Rustic, Cabin Style, and Bison. As writers and consultants they work with publishers, magazines, and design, hospitality and wine clients to craft and convey their stories. Heather and Chase live in spectacularly scenic Marin County, halfway between San Francisco and California's iconic wine country.
The new monograph of the work of one of our favorite architects from our book — San Francisco-based Feldman Architecture. It's a look at 20 years of the firm's work, a collection of homes that both reflects and defines what it means to live authentically within the landscape of Northern California. We particularly love how the architects design for site, whether the home is situated high on a ridge, nestled amongst oaks or tucked within a cityscape, and their masterful use of materials. Their Surf House, overlooking the ocean in Santa Cruz, is lined inside and out with local Monterey cypress. An existing San Francisco Edwardian was transformed by the addition of a central staircase with skylights bringing light deep into the interior. Butterfly House speaks to the land trust on which it dwells as a sustainably-minded home designed as three separate volumes united by a butterfly roof. No matter…
Immersed - The California Houses of Feldman Architecture is an indepth look at 20 years of the firm's defining residential work spanning three areas: Urban, Suburban, and Rural. Feldman Architecture, a vibrant San Francisco-based studio, aims to create authentic, sitesensitive, sustainable spaces through a deeply collaborative process. This book, which includes commentary from Aaron Betsky and Daniel P. Gregory, as well as an interview with Vladimir Belogolovsky, situates Feldman Architecture's work within the northern California design canon and illustrates how the firm's voice subtly translates across diverse geographies and contexts. Jonathan Feldman, in closing, reflects upon the values and aspirations…
I didn’t always know I wanted to be a chef and food writer. But I have always known that I loved to prepare and enjoy beautiful food! In college, that meant throwing dinner parties for my friends. This was before Instagram, but I still wanted my food to look pretty and draw a crowd! Fast forward a couple decades. I have worked as a private chef, taught farm-to-table cooking classes, and written more than 27 published cookbooks. My favorite thing about my work is creating inspired meals that bring people together with those they love.
I’ve dined at the restaurant Lemonade in Venice Beach several times and was thrilled when I discovered they had a cookbook.
LA is defined by exceptionally fresh produce year-round and a diverse culinary scene thanks to immigrants from all over the world. Lemonade reflects that beautifully! I used many of the recipes in this book when cooking for the Patagonia women’s surf team and was thrilled with how much people loved them and how easy they were to scale up to feed a crowd.
Narrowing it down to my favorites was tough, but I can’t get enough of the Avocado, Cherry Tomato, Pine Nut, and Lime Vinaigrette; the Black Kale, Shiitake, and Kumquat Vinaigrette; or the Red Miso Beef. And of course, they have a full lemonade chapter with interesting, virgin concoctions including my favorite, the Green Apple Jalapeno lemonade.
The Lemonade Cookbook takes the bold flavors, imaginative dishes, and southern California lifestyle that have made the brand an instant hit and captures them in a fresh, beautifully-designed, full-color book. Like Los Angeles, Lemonade's cuisine is carefully blended with variety. L.A. is agents and movie grips, surfers and yoga moms, students and celebrities, and a wide mix of different culinary traditions. At Lemonade the marketplace salads, unique sandwiches, and slow-simmered stews taste as though every culture stirred a bit into the pot―for example, the skirt steak with grilled onions and piquillo peppers with its smoky depth, pairs perfectly with the…
I’ve loved cooking and baking since I was a little girl. I attempted to bake a chocolate cake when I was nine without a recipe and put the resulting glop in a plastic bowl in the oven. Luckily, I forgot to turn the oven on and my mother discovered it later, no harm done. I was always a foodie but also a tremendous reader with a great love for the English language, so food writing marries my two passions. My published works include The New York Timesbestselling The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook (over a million copies sold), and I write a food column for a women’s magazine.
If you are starting out in life and can only get one cookbook, get this one. It contains recipes for the classics as well as the familiar, basic dishes you must have in your repertoire—and the recipes are foolproof. Because the recipes are thoroughly tested, you can hardly go wrong if you follow the detailed instructions.
Like the best treasured cookbooks of the past, The America's Test Kitchen Family cookbook offers more than 1,200 kitchen-tested recipes, more than 1,500 4-color photos and much more. Here are some of the special features of this book: *Test Kitchen Tips Illuminate Key Recipe-Specific Facts *Hundreds of Variations Give Cooks Lots of Recipe Choices *Equipment Ratings Point Out Our Favorite Brands and Explain Why *Ingredient Testings Rate All Manner of Supermarket Ingredients So Cooks Can Make the Best Choices *Fast Recipes are Highlighted Throughout the Book *Prep Times and Total Times Make Clear How Long a Recipe Will Take *A…
Chasing Light is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. At its core, it is a story of resilience, forgiveness, and the transformational power of human connection. It sheds light on the overlooked realities of homelessness and addiction, while emphasizing the importance of compassion…
Miko and Jenne are librarians who love to eat. Their love of classic children’s literature led them to start their 36 Eggs blog, where they recreate foods and experiences from their favorite books. In 2019, they published the Little Women Cookbook, which required extensive research into the food of the Victorian era.
If you strive to be a Victorian-era food snob, this is the guidebook. It’s a comprehensive overview of food and cooking customs from the second half of the 19th century, packed with illustrations and tons of fun trivia. (For example: celery was considered a high-status food by the middle class because of its connection to Homer’s Odyssey. If you were looking for a trendy centerpiece, you could put it in specially appointed silver or glass vases like a bouquet of flowers. Haha!) You’ll also find an explanation of mealtimes, and how expectations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, and supper were different from today’s. There’s a whole chapter on Victorian table etiquette! By the way, Victorians advise that if you’re hosting a dinner party, make sure to wear an outfit that’s “rich in material, but subdued in tone” so you don’t show up any of your guests.
Savory Suppers and Fashionable Feasts offers a delightfully flavorful tour of dining in America during the second half of the 19th century. Susan Williams investigates the manners and morals of that era by looking at its eating customs and cooking methods. As she reveals, genteel dining became an increasingly important means of achieving social stability during a period when Americans were facing significant changes on a variety of fronts - social, cultural, intellectual, technological, and demographic.
Focusing on the rapidly expanding middle class, Williams not only examines mealtime rituals, but she looks at the material culture of Victorian dining: the…
I’m a writer and history buff who loves to make fiction out of facts. For me, the best stories are imagined out of truths we have all lived, real places that are mapped in our memories, real people whose names conjure events, past times that are prelude to our own. I like to read books built on plots and puzzles, so I write mysteries. I love books about real people, so I write biographical novels bent around the secret selves of people we only thought we knew: Eleanor Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Georgia O’Keeffe.
Food history—why and how and what we eat—is one of my favorite topics. The first edition of Irma Rambauer’s The Joy of Cooking inspired 1930s American cooks to make an eight layer cake, a celery aspic, a chicken bisque, cinnamon toast, shrimp wiggle, and green peppers filled with macaroni. Recently widowed, Rombauer self-published the book to support her family—and thereby became a heroine for 1930s homemakers. Her Cheese Custard Pie, so far as I know, is the first recipe for quiche in an American cookbook. It is introduced with these memorable words: “In Switzerland we had a vile tempered cook named Marguerite” whose quiche varied with “her moods and her supply of cheese.” (I love recipes that tell us something about the cook.)
In 1931, Irma Rombauer announced that she intended to turn her personal collection of recipes and cooking techniques into a cookbook. Cooking could no longer remain a private passion for Irma. She had recently been widowed and needed to find a way to support her family. Irma was a celebrated St. Louis hostess who sensed that she was not alone in her need for a no-nonsense, practical resource in the kitchen. So, mustering what assets she had, she self-published The Joy of Cooking: A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with a Casual Culinary Chat. Out of these unlikely circumstances was born…
By Andrew T. Huse, Bárbara Cruz, and Jeff HouckAuthor
Why are we passionate about this?
Our obsessions with food and history mean that recipes are not the end of the journey, but the beginning. Recipes are an answer to a whole host of questions, challenges, and opportunities, and those are the stories that interest us. A recipe with no history is like the punch line with no preceding joke, incomplete at best.
Capitalizing on the charming landmark “Cross Creek” novel about her fish-out-of-water life in central Florida’s backwoods in the 1920s, Rawlings shares recipes using ingredients she harvested from her primitive surroundings.
There isn’t much call in the Instacart and UberEats era for entertaining dinner guests with Pot Roast of Bear, Lamb Kidneys with Sherry, or Alligator-Tail Steak. The days of serving Jellied Tongue have long passed, thankfully. Rawlings and her Cross Creek neighbors ate those dishes by necessity more than choice.
You devour what the land provides, whether it’s by shovel, by hook, or by gun. When the world gives you loquats, you make Loquat Jelly.
The Classic Book on Southern Cooking First published in 1942, Cross Creek Cookery was compiled by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings at the request of readers who wanted to recreate the luscious meals described in Cross Creek -- her famous memoir of life in a Florida hamlet. Lovers of old-fashioned, down-home cooking will treasure the recipes for Grits, Hush-Puppies, Florida Fried Fish, Orange Fluff, and Utterly Deadly Southern Pecan Pie. For more adventuresome palates, there are such unusual dishes as Minorcan Gopher Stew, Coot Surprise, Alligator-Tail Steak, Mayhaw Jelly, and Chef Huston's Cream of Peanut Soup. Spiced with delightful…
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
by
Alexis Krasilovsky,
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
I'm a retired professor who wrote about and taught about the American South for almost four decades. I directed a research center focused on the South, and I helped found an institute dedicated to the study of Southern food. The South’s creative traditions in music and literature are well known, and its foodways are now recognized as a distinct American cuisine that represents the region’s innovations in culture. Through reading about southern food, readers can explore the traditions of eating and cooking in the region, and the creative contributions of ethnic groups with national and global sources. I've chosen books that give flavor to thinking about the South as a distinct place in the imagination.
Reed is a leading scholar of southern culture, and he brings his considerable knowledge of the region to bear in a slim book loaded with stories and recipes about barbecue.
Since early settlement of the South, southerners have held barbecues to mark homecomings, holidays, reunions, and political campaigns.
In a lively and witty style, Reed traces the story of southern barbecue from its root in the sixteenth-century Caribbean, showing how the slow, smoky cooking of meat established itself in the coastal South and then spread inland.
He discusses how choices of meat, sauces, and cooking methods vary from one place to another in the region, reflecting local environments, farming practices, and ethnic traditions.
He suggests that barbecue in the South, in its diverse expressions, is the closest thing we have in the United States to Europe’s traditions of wines and cheeses, as one finds mustard sauce in South Carolina and…
John Shelton Reed's Barbecue celebrates a southern culinary tradition forged in coals and smoke. Since colonial times southerners have held barbecues to mark homecomings, reunions, and political campaigns; today barbecue signifies celebration as much as ever. In a lively and amusing style, Reed traces the history of southern barbecue from its roots in the sixteenth-century Caribbean, showing how this technique of cooking meat established itself in the coastal South and spread inland from there. He discusses how choices of meat, sauce, and cooking methods came to vary from one place to another, reflecting local environments, farming practices, and history.
