Peachy Reads

Who hasn’t heard the story of Marco Polo bringing pasta to Italy from China?  Well, apparently it’s a myth, thought up by a pasta company in early twentieth century America to popularize pasta in American kitchens.  If not personally delivered by Marco Polo, pasta was nonetheless likely brought to Italy by merchants on the Silk Road, an important trading route that stretched from China to the Mediterranean.  The author sets out to travel the entire length of the route from the heartland of the Chinese noodle to the Italian province where ragu is expertly paired with a noodle like tagliatelle or pappardelle (and never spaghetti!).  She investigates the noodly aspects of the current cuisine of each country she visits along the way, some of which do not seem to have maintained even a vestige of the versatile noodle.  From western China, across a couple of the former Soviet republics ending in -stan, Iran, Turkey, and finally Italy, Lin-Liu traces the hist...

A patron recommended this title to me the other day in the library and I thought it sounded really interesting.   After having gone through the agony and the ecstasy of the college admissions process last year with our one and only child, I am still tuned in to the admissions cycle and have even been lurking in online college admissions forums to shadow students who are agonizing over their choices for college and university, and ultimately the choices that the college and universities make when considering their apps.   It was just such a monumental process that it’s hard to turn it off.   Maybe this book will serve as part of my therapy. I also saw the movie based on Admission starring Tina Fey, and while it was billed as a comedy (which the book most certainly is not), it was only mildly entertaining.   The book, as frequently is the case, is not like the movie.   The author provides wonderful insight into the highly competitive admissions process a...