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The Cookbook Collector: A Novel
- ISBN13: 9780385340854
- Condition: New
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Product Description
Heralded as “a modern day Jane Austen” by USA Today, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author Allegra Goodman has compelled and delighted hundreds of thousands of readers. Now, in her most ambitious work yet, Goodman weaves together the worlds of Silicon Valley and rare book collecting in a delicious novel about appetite, temptation, and fulfillment.
Emily and Jessamine Bach are opposites in every way: Twenty-eight-year-old Emily… More >>
Jul 18th, 2010 at 7:47 pm
Forget the Austen comparison. Nothing compares to Austen anyway, and it obscures the many real virtues of this broadly scoped novel.
Allegra Goodman has always mixed romance, work, and Jewishness in her novels and this one follows the pattern. She’s got a contrasted pair of sisters who become more like one another as the novel goes on. She’s got a beautifully drawn June-November romance (neither half quite qualifies as May or December). She’s got a dead mother whose life conceals a mystery, and she’s got a set of quick views of different types of Jewishness – including one rather unexpected type that I don’t want to spoil for you by revealing here. Her picture of bookstore life in Berkeley is fun to read, too, and if you like to read about collectible books you’ll get a bellyful – semipun intended.
Best of all, she gets the tech startup stuff right. Both of the startups she depicts are familiar to this veteran of two tech startups. Some of her programmers even talk like programmers, and she paints the startup highflyer response to technical crisis just right. And she avoids the pitfall of writing overly explicit dialog for her programmers, so she doesn’t get that wrong. Good judgement on her part. Her Bay Area details are right. I don’t know enough to judge her Boston details.
And she manages to include 9/11 without bathos. I hope we see more books that incorporate 9/11 without exploiting it or centering on it.
There ARE some faults here. A few characters get short shrift in the shifting romances. Goodman probably tries to do too many things in one novel. There are too many up to the minute brand and culture references for a novel that has a chance of surviving and being read after this decade or century is past. The political commune is not convincing. There are a couple of credulity-straining coincidences that you’ll just have to accept and go on. Someone once said that a novel can stand one major and one minor coincidence, but I think this one overexploits its allowance. And I don’t get the title, which seems to apply only to part of the book.
But there are also gems. Convincing scenes of delicate romantic approach, and the final scene is outstanding. The writing itself is mostly swift, knowing and delicate.
If you’ve enjoyed other Goodman books you’ll like this one too. If you haven’t read Goodman, this or the previous one (Intuition) are good places to start.
Rating: 5 / 5
Jul 18th, 2010 at 9:40 pm
I loved this book and expect it to stay with me for a long time.
It’s is chocked full of characters but they all have a connection to one or both of two sisters, Emily and Jess (Jasmine). The girls’ mother died of breast cancer when Emily was only 10, but Emily had to grow up fast because she promised her dying mother that she would always take care of Jess, who was only five at the time.
The book begins in 1999 as the sisters celebrate Jess’s twenty-third birthday. The girls are close but very different. Natives of Boston, they both now live in California, where Jess is a graduate student at Berkley and Emily is CEO of a dot com she co-founded and is about to take public. Emily has a boyfriend, Jonathan, on the east coast. He also co-founded a dot com and he and Emily are equally ambitious and driven to succeed with their companies.
In contrast, Jess is flighty, has no real goals or interest in making money, and has had a string of irresponsible boyfriends. She does have a part-time job in a rare book store, which is owned by George, who made his fortune with his own dot com and has now retired to enjoy his hobby of rare books, although he’s still interested in making money.
The time period of the book continues through the rise and fall of dot coms and the subsequent fall of many young millionaires, then through September 11 and its aftermath.
As its description promises, this book is “rich in ideas and characters.” The many characters include the girls’ father back in Boston and his young new wife and their two little girls, the various other founders and staff of Emily and Jonathan’s dot coms, and George’s wealthy friends. Also, two rabbis, one on each coast, play important roles in bringing the sisters’ story together.
The major ideas are about learning what’s important in life, and how we make substitutions, such as reading cookbooks instead of cooking, because we think what we really want is unattainable.
Rating: 5 / 5
Jul 18th, 2010 at 10:58 pm
When the Publishers Weekly folks (and the publisher itself) start tossing Jane Austen’s name around, I expect a well-written, gentle comedy/satire. When a cover looks like an oil painting, I expect depth and quality. When the title includes the word COOKBOOK, I expect a soothing read.
This is not that book.
This is a book about a bunch of yuppie techies working 24/7 during the [...]
bubble. It covers 1999 through 2001 (or maybe 2002). Given the present economy, I simply don’t think readers are going to relate to that period today, and it makes me wonder if the author wrote this during that time (she certainly seems knowledgeable) and then stashed it in a drawer until she became well-known enough for someone to publish it sight unseen.
The book starts with a lot of promise. Jess is a grad student working for a quirky man named George who collects old books in a bookstore in the San Fran area. I’m interested in that. However, they are not the main story. There are hundreds of pages about two startup companies that do data file storage and such. Yawn. There are multiple subplots with the one-dimensional people who work at these companies. Yawn. Very occasionally, the story returns to George and Jess. I started skimming after about 100 pages and gave up at 200.
Clearly the publisher realized that if the cover showed a diligent CEO in a suit beside the geek squad working all night, readers would not grab this book. But consider yourself warned: that’s what this is. Poor Jane Austen must be rolling in her grave!
Rating: 2 / 5
Jul 19th, 2010 at 12:51 am
“The Cookbook Collector” follows the lives of two sisters, Emily and Jess, between 1999 and 2002 as they seek out purpose and love in the heady dot-com era of the late 90s. Althought the sisters are close, they have little in common–Emily is the CEO of a high flying tech startup, Veritech, while Jess is studying for her PhD in Philosophy at Berkley and working part time at a used bookstore. Both young women are exploring love, friendship, and wealth, and the combination of the three that can make you truly happy in life. As the high flying tech bubble finally crashes to an end with the events of 9/11, the two sisters will have to decide what is really important in life.
I really, really enjoyed this book, even though it didn’t turn out to be quite the “Sense and Sensibility for the New Millenium” it was billed as. Author Allergra Goodman would spend a couple of chapters telling the story from the point of view of a particular character–including both sisters, their boyfriends, and even employees at the tech startups–a technique which really allowed me to get into the heads of these characters and get emotionally involved with their different stories. There are lots of characters and lots of stories, many of which are very, very different from each other, but Goodman does a masterful job of weaving them all together. She also does a good job of working 9/11 into the plot of her story in a meaningful way, instead of simply throwing it in as much recent fiction has done. This book was powerful, and I think it will be remembered as one of the best of the year.
Rating: 5 / 5
Jul 19th, 2010 at 2:38 am
Touted as “SENSE AND SENSIBILITY for the digital age,” THE COOKBOOK COLLECTOR lives up to that description only in the most general sense: out of the half dozen or so main characters, there are two sisters, one being a pragmatic CEO of a “dot com” startup, and the other being a romantic student of philosophy at Cal Berkeley. However, although interesting as individuals, the sisters lack the enduring charm of Jane Austen characters. They come across as nothing more than two modern women who make the usual sorts of good and bad choices about their careers and private lives.
It was the Berkeley/Silicon Valley part of the advertised “bicoastal” setting that originally motivated me to read THE COOKBOOK COLLECTOR. Unfortunately, the San Francisco Bay Area background is disappointing. The plot involving the characters’ thoughts and actions is superimposed on a rather simplistic and stereotypical historical account of the Silicon Valley “dot com” bubble of the late 1990′s and early 2000′s. Predictably, the East and West Coast characters’ high-flying companies run into deep trouble soon after their initial IPOs, and only the investors who sell their stock quickly end up with “dot com” fortunes.
Activities taking place in Berkeley also seem rather stereotypical. The romantic sister becomes deeply involved with a “Save the Trees” group. Yes, Berkeley has such groups, and they make headlines periodically, but Berkeley has many other groups and causes that a graduate student of philosophy might espouse. Writing about Berkeley “tree-huggers” is an easy way out, for an author who wants to give the impression that a novel is set in Berkeley. The description of the romantic sister’s 1999 neighborhood, which name-drops Pegasus Books, People’s Park, Amoeba Music, Shakespeare & Co., and Moe’s, seems slightly off. What about Cody’s? And were these Telegraph Avenue institutions really important in 1999, except as standard Berkeley icons? The amusing character of the Bialystok rabbi could be based on a real personality, but is cartoonish, and likewise seems to be a character that readers who are unfamiliar with Berkeley might expect to find in Berkeley.
Allegra Goodman is a talented writer, and THE COOKBOOK COLLECTOR is a fast and easy read. It is an entertaining book, ideal for vacation reading. However, the characters and their troubles sustained my full attention as a reader only through a portion of Part Four. After that, it was easy to skim the rest of the book to learn what happened to the people and their “dot com” companies. THE COOKBOOK COLLECTOR is a good novel, but it is certainly not great literature, and it doesn’t stand up to being compared to a Jane Austen novel.
Rating: 3 / 5