The Cookbook Collector

by Allegra Goodman

Book Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER 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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385340869
• ISBN13: 9780385340861
• Release Date: July 2011
• Publisher: Dial Press
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Strange Title

This book dragged a good deal, and had TOO many characters, and subplots to keep straight. Took almost half the book to get to understand why it was called the Cookbook Collector. Liked the ending, but just too many characters to keep straight. Had to refer back to the start a couple of times as I forgot who a couple of them were.

A moving, beautiful book

Allegra Goodman is one of my favorite authors, and this juicy book, delicious as the ripe peaches on the cover (and on the counter in a memorable scene) did not disappoint. I love Goodman's rich sensory descriptions, her engaging and realistic characters that feel like people I know or want to know. The characterization of Goodman as a modern-day Austen is not misplaced, as this novel features a "sense and sensibility" pair of motherless sisters: 28-year-old Emily, a calm and rational Silicon Valley CEO, and 23-year-old Jess, a passionate and idealistic graduate student in Berkeley. To complain that the title is misleading seems a bit overly literal. A major focus of the novel is indeed a collection of rare cookbooks and the lingering presence of the late collector and his mystery muse. The world of rare books and the sensory delights of cooking are contrasted to the fast-lane, high-tech, cut-throat world of the dot.com boom, where twenty-somethings became overnight millionaires but often lost their friendships, loves, and youthful ideals in the process. A third world periodically intrudes, that of the Bialystoker Jews, a Hassidic sect obviously modeled on the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, and portrayed with sympathy but not sentimentality. The world of environmental activists is also portrayed, although less effectively and compellingly than the others. The book is about love and what builds or destroys it, about confidences and secrets, about youth and maturity, optimists and pessimists, sisterhood and the power of family. Like the biblical book of Ecclesiastes,it is frank in its examination of wealth and material things; they are illusory and corrupting, but also potential forces for great good. Ultimately, the book celebrates life in all its transitory, uncertain glory. If there is a major weakness in this book, it is probably the excess of coincidences; yet I didn't find them too hard to swallow since I know that truth can be stranger than fiction in that regard. Bonus treats for me were the book's great sense of place in my second home of Berkeley and the San Francisco Bay Area, and the positive yet not overly heavy sprinkling of Jewish spirituality and its role in the life of many ostensibly "non-religious" people. All-in-all, this is a great read that I'm recommending to my friends and family!

Not really about cookbooks

Anyone who reads this book thinking that they'll be regaled with the challenges of collecting cookbooks is in for a surprise. This first decade of the 21st century novel incorporates an involved plot, sympathetic characters, and real-life events into a very modern novel. The story line basically follows the life, loves and interests of two sisters. Emily, the steady, overachieving, do things by the book older sister is played off of her younger sister, Jessamine, who is flighty, smart, rule-breaker and kinder than kind. Throw in a cup of the electrifying dot com boom, a few handsome if imperfect lovers, some family intrigue, some key current (or recent) events, and you have a great book to curl up with on a beach or a rainy afternoon. There are a couple of areas where the author bogs down in too much explanation of the intricacies of the Internet businesses, but overall, this is a very satisfying read.

Love this book

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.

Love in the Digital Age

"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.