Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films we’re watching, the television shows we’re hooked on, or the music we’re loving.

Joanna Di Mattia is reading Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson

Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires has ignited a pretty big fire in my brain. It’s a work of personal and cultural memoir about what bodies do when they cook. Johnson is interested in ‘unromancing’ what happens in the kitchen, and in removing the sentimental idea that when women cook for others there is nothing intellectual at work, indeed no work involved at all – that they do it trancelike, performing joy and cooking only out of love. 

Johnson puts it well – buying into the idea that a dish is made with love means we never have to think about the material conditions of the person that cooks, or on any of the specificity of the cook’s life, history and own voice. But while she topples this idea, Johnson also embraces the potential for closeness and connection with herself and others that cooking offers. It is rarely an either-or proposition. 

Cooking is a physical act but it’s also a thinking act. Johnson begins with a simple Marcella Hazan recipe for tomato sauce, which she cooks over 1,000 times over several years, using this personal ‘hot red epic’ experience to examine how that simple recipe is something different every time; how it serves a different purpose, a different appetite or hunger, becomes a different experience for her and the people she cooks it for. 

Small Fires is playful and very smart. Johnson takes what bodies do in the kitchen with the utmost seriousness, demarcating the kitchen as an intimate and erotic space that offers a radical potential for giving and receiving pleasure. It’s a brilliant book and one of the most genuinely provocative things I’ve read in a long time.

Lucie Dess is reading Supper Club by Jackie Morrow

Supper Club was suggested to me online while I was reviewing another graphic novel and I immediately knew I had to read it. So, of course, I emailed Angela our Children’s Buyer and INSISTED she ordered copies so that I could.

I was not disappointed. This was such a fun, heartwarming story about Nora, Lili, and Iris. On the first day of senior year at highschool, they discover they have zero classes together and all their extra-curricular activities mean they’ll barely see each other. So they come up with the idea to start a secret Supper Club on Friday night’s where each girl brings a dish to share, potluck style.

Supper Club explores friendship, the pressures of high school, anxiety, grief and of course, really good food. Now I really want to start my own supper club!