Books like Sourdough — picked by fans

The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living drops you into the action from word one and immerses you in the main character, Livvy’s, life (and the wreck she’s made of it) immediately. The story sucked me in, and rural Vermont as the setting made me wish I could be there. Then there’s the food… Oh man, I would have made a hundred apple pies if I’d headed into the kitchen every time I wanted to when I read this book. Martin is the perfect book boyfriend, too. Their relationship builds slowly, and he is so delicately written that he almost seemed ghost-like to me sometimes – a wonderful foil to the boisterous Livvy.

Louise Miller’s writing is straightforward, beautiful, and sticks with me way after I’ve finished reading. She’s one of the first authors I look for if I want something real but perpetually hopefully even at the bleakest momen… show more.

Speaking of weird…Kenny Shopsin is a force. If you haven’t seen it, there’s a documentary about his New York restaurant called “I Like Killing Flies” and it is like no other restaurant to ever exist. Shopsin breaks every restaurant rule that ever was. He makes “crepes” using flour tortillas. His specialty is a dish called “Blisters on my Sisters.” He’s hilarious, quintessentially New York, and absolutely bonkers. It’s one of my life’s regrets that I never got to eat at Shopsins. This book is the closest I can ever get.

P.S. The best part of the book is the absolutely priceless copy of the Shopsins menu which could take a week to read and a lifetime to digest. You could cook a different item from it every meal for five years and still not make it all the way through. 

Oh, and did I mention that his kitchen was approximately… show more.

I am in love with Paris. I went there once for work. I was there for four days and gained eight pounds. The pastries, the chocolate, the bread, the wine. Oh, the endless butter and sugar. So, a romance set in a Parisian Chocolaterie? I’m all in. There’s also a seduction set whilst walking up a staircase that’s the sexiest thing I have ever read and it’s not even close. 

Slyvain Marquis is every woman’s dream in that he woos them with chocolate. The descriptions of the flavors, textures, and smells are transporting. I’m so sad that a real box of his chocolates will never exist in the real world.

This book hit so hard. The main character just got away from an abusive relationship and opens a food truck. The food and cooking are a tool to help her find footing. She’s unsure of everything about herself except her food. I love her so much because she is so much stronger than she thinks and realizes it gradually through the book. 

And the love interest isn’t the typical sensitive boy an author would pair a damaged woman with, but a bossy, domineering Michelin-starred chef who grew up in foster care.

The food truck is great. The food sounds amazing and I’d be the first in line if I had one of these in my neighborhood. Especially those meatballs. Yum. You can tell that the author actually worked in a restaurant at some point. The descriptions of the kitchen sing with the reality of experience. That’s not always the case… show more.

Did this book give birth to hardboiled literature? No, but I feel it mothered and fathered it. 

Did this book—when filmed in 1941—give rise to film noir? I would say yes or “oui.”

This book lives on in libraries and bookstores, in minds and memories, on screens big and small, as a cultural masterpiece. But please don’t get me wrong about masterpiece. Hammett’s existential story of antiheroic private detective Sam Spade wriggling out of death as he fends off the cagey but crazed pursuers of a worthless “jeweled” bird breathes more deeply, more compellingly every time I re-read it. Through the book, I face the dark—and find the gloom almost charming. 

This retelling of the Book of Hosea reminded me that love is meant to be unconditional. Patient, healing, hopeful. No matter what Angel does, Michael loves her. I read this entire book in less than two days. I laughed, I cried, and while I couldn’t put the book down, I dreaded closing the cover for the final time. I had a book hangover for days.

If I could choose one book to reread for the first time, it would be this one. I haven’t experienced things that these characters have, but this story still inspired healing and sparked hope. It broke me and put my back together. I walked away with a clearer view of how much God loves me and the lengths He will go to prove it.

The Words We Lost is a powerful portrayal of the surprising gift of kindred spirits, of the trust required to grow deep friendships, and of the intense emotions when friendships are interrupted by death—all things I’ve been dealing with in the recent loss of a dear friend. 

This book is a beautiful study of the long and complicated, individual journey of grief, and of the persistence needed to restore broken trusts. Trust, friendship, betrayal, grief, and the journey to restoration of trust and friendship are all themes close to my heart—themes beautifully portrayed in the contemporary story of The Words We Lost.

I love historical mysteries, and this series set in nineteenth-century San Francisco delivers the goods. I really like the main character, Annie Fuller. She’s been left on her own, and she excels at her ventures as a boardinghouse owner and a financial advisor. When she learns she has sleuthing talents as well, there’s no stopping her. In this book, she goes undercover as a housemaid to solve a mystery. 

An interesting thing about reading this book is that I had read a novel about Dorothea Lange only months earlier. But when Darznik’s publicist reached out and asked me to read it, I couldn’t resist! Why? Because I love Dorothea and can’t get enough of her.

Dorothea is exactly the kind of woman I want to be BFFs with. But whose story would give me the intimate connection I was looking for? Jasmin Darznik, in her enchanting new novel, The Bohemians, that’s who.

On page one, I stepped into the relationship of two daring and talented women who seem different as night and day. Dorothea, a blond from New York and Caroline Lee, a black-haired Chinese American, raised in an orphanage.

The forthright honesty and the audacity of Nora Simms, narrator of Erika Mailman’s Woman of Ill Fame, is stunning and nearly as compelling as the murder mystery at the center of the novel. Set in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, the novel takes us into the city’s bordellos, which, like the rest of the state, have been infected by a get rich quick at any cost ethos. The cost for many of Nora’s colleagues is high. Women of ill-fame are being killed, one by one, and only Nora is capable and willing to wade through layers of deception to discover the identity of the killer and to save her own life. 

Nora is not your typical damsel in distress and that might be why I love this book so much. She’s not a “good” woman, by society's standards, but she is one of the… show more.