Have a bookish mother in your life? Here are some
books that might make her day.
Lessons in Chemistry
by Bonnie Garmus
“For Elizabeth, cooking wasn’t some preordained
feminine duty. As she’d told Calvin, cooking was chemistry. That’s because
cooking actually is chemistry.”
Malibu Rising
by Taylor Jenkins Reid
“What a gift it was to know so clearly what you were
not, who you did not want to be. Nina wasn’t sure she’d ever asked herself that
question.”
Ms. Hempel Chronicles by
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
“How could she not be depleted when she came home,
having been exposed for hours, without protection, to all those thrumming
radiant selves? Here they were, just old enough to have discovered their souls,
but not yet dulled by the ordinary act of survival, not yet practiced in
dissembling.”
Simon the Fiddler by
Paulette Jiles
“To Simon, the world of musical structures was far
more real than the shoddy saloons in which he had to play. Nothing could match
it, nothing in this day-to-day world could ever come up to it. It existed
outside him. It was better than he was. He was always on foot in that world, an
explorer in busted shoes.”
The Chicken Sisters by
KJ Dell'Antonia
“Good fried chicken was remarkably hard to come by in
New York, but this---tender, with just enough crust-only bits protruding, skin
peeling easily away from the meat---this was good. The fries were thin and
still hot, some with crunch, some with bite, lightly sprinkled with the salt
blend they'd always used. The biscuits were fresh and flaky, and the salad's
iceberg lettuce was dressed in Mimi's trademark sweet oil dressing---a closely
guarded (but really very simple, and once very common) recipe.”
Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss,
Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller
“It was the dandelion principle! To some people a
dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much
more. To an herbalist, it’s a medicine—a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing
the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it’s a pigment; to a
hippie, a crown; a child, a wish. To a butterfly, it’s sustenance; to a bee, a
mating bed; to an ant, one point in a vast olfactory atlas.”
