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Title details for The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman - Available

The Cookbook Collector

A Novel

by Allegra Goodman
Ariadne Meyers
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
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 is the CEO of Veritech, twenty-three-year-old Jess is an environmental activist and graduate student in philosophy. Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily is rational and driven, while Jess is dreamy and whimsical. Emily’s boyfriend, Jonathan, is fantastically successful. Jess’s boyfriends, not so much—as her employer George points out in what he hopes is a completely disinterested way.
Bicoastal, surprising, rich in ideas and characters, The Cookbook Collector is a novel about getting and spending, and about the substitutions we make when we can’t find what we’re looking for: reading cookbooks instead of cooking, speculating instead of creating, collecting instead of living. But above all it is about holding on to what is real in a virtual world: love that stays.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    July 6, 2010

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780307736871
      • File size: 453228 KB
      • Duration: 15:44:13

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Goodman's novel focuses on two sisters and their lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California, around the end of the 1990s and through 9/11. Jess is the airy philosophy major who ends up in love with a mysterious collection of rare eighteenth-century cookbooks while Emily is an intense software entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Their lives are touched and changed by partners, friends, trees, estranged family members, the stock market, and other connections. Ariadne Meyers narrates with an enthusiastic, if not overly feminine, touch. It works well with the sisters but less so with several male characters, who are portrayed as either growlers or slackers. Still, Meyers's humorous embodiment of two quirky rabbis is highly entertaining. R.M. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 8, 2010
      If any contemporary author deserves to wear the mantel of Jane Austen, it's Goodman, whose subtle, astute social comedies perfectly capture the quirks of human nature. This dazzling novel is Austen updated for the dot-com era, played out between 1999 and 2001 among a group of brilliant risk takers and truth seekers. Still in her 20s, Emily Bach is the CEO of Veritech, a Web-based data-storage startup in trendy Berkeley. Her boyfriend, charismatic Jonathan Tilghman, is in a race to catch up at his data-security company, ISIS, in Cambridge, Mass. Emily is low-key, pragmatic, kind, serene—the polar opposite of her beloved younger sister, Jess, a crazed postgrad who works at an antiquarian bookstore owned by a retired Microsoft millionaire. When Emily confides her company's new secret project to Jonathan as a proof of her love, the stage is set for issues of loyalty and trust, greed, and the allure of power. What is actually valuable, Goodman's characters ponder: a company's stock, a person's promise, a forest of redwoods, a collection of rare cookbooks? Goodman creates a bubble of suspense as both Veritech and ISIS issue IPOs, career paths collide, social values clash, ironies multiply, and misjudgments threaten to destroy romantic desire. Enjoyable and satisfying, this is Goodman's (Intuition
      ) most robust, fully realized and trenchantly meaningful work yet.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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