Book #98: The Cookbook Collector

Title: The Cookbook Collector: A Novel
Author: Allegra Goodman

I've been listening to Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector for the last few weeks. When I was buying the book, I looked at a few of the reviews at audible.com and noticed that someone said that it was a book that "MBAs will like, MFAs will not." I was intrigued, and after reading the book, I'll admit that I agree with that simple assessment. The Cookbook Collector centers on the stories of two sisters, Emily and Jessamine Bach, who both live in the San Francisco Bay area, but whose lives seem to represent different ends of the spectrum of stereotypes. Emily is a computer science geek with a internet startup company, a girl who goes from having no money to being a hundred-millionaire literally overnight. Jess is a grad student, hugging trees and whiling her way through Berkeley. The other characters they meet also feel somewhat stereotypical-- the high-flying venture capitalists, the startup CEOs who lose their souls, the guys who made it big at Microsoft and now collect wines and rare books with the same enthusiasm they once applied to cracking code. At times, the book felt like a satire. If it had been a satire, I may have liked it better. But, right there in the title, Goodman calls it a novel.

While the characters often annoyed me and it felt like there were too many stories for a single novel, all ideas that probably could be pursued in their own individual novels, I did love the passages with the cookbooks and those that take place in George's rare book store. It's obvious that Goodman loves her books, and she conveys that love to her readers. As for this book becoming a classic, one worth putting in my personal library, I'm not so sure.