Autumn makes me feel domestic, and I’m glad to find that living alone hasn’t dampened my appetite for baking bread or braising oxtail (though I did manage to leave the latter in the oven for 12 hours—oops.)

So I’ve taken to reading my cookbooks over breakfast. This one I picked up at a stoop sale over the summer. For some reason, I can only get into British cookery writers—the American classics just don’t do it for me.

Marianne Pearl is the widow of Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded in Pakistan in 2002. She’s an extraordinary woman, and their’s was a great love story.

I dug this one out after a project that left me feeling burned out and grumpy after just six months back in the workforce. Soothing proof that there is a better way, and we can build it. The best book on helping people do their jobs that I’ve found, with the bonus that the authors are Christopher Alexander fans.

I avoided this one for ages, even though I bought it as a gift for someone a year ago. Po Bronson seemed cocky to me, and I’m jealous of his dynamism.

I finally gave in when I found a half-price copy in the Strand. And I read it in a weekend. Went down to DC to visit my best pal, and found both her and her husband engrossed in it, fighting over their single copy.

Bronson inserts himself into the stories a little more than I’d like—he thinks he’s become a great therapist, but comes across as a bit of a steamroller. But age and hard knocks have mellowed him and he’s always an appealing storyteller. The book is inspiring. In tribute, Cait, Dan and I visited CakeLove, the DC bakery heavily featured in one chapter. It had all the signs of a lived-out dream.

A good question to ask this week. This Granta came out after September 11th. We’re still asking ourselves, three years on.

It’s about a Arab-African living through the turbulent post-independence period in an unnamed republic. I’d never read any Naipaul before, but wow. If a sentence doesn’t dazzle, you get the strong sense it’s because he’s chosen to restrain himself. In fact, my only niggle is, would the man who is telling the story in the first person be capable of such a gorgeous, masterly rendition?

A present from Caitriona, for what she ruefully calls our genocide shelf. Gourevitch is a marvellous writer.

I got a present of John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, and though I’m not becoming a novelist any time soon it’s the best book of writing instruction I’ve read.
Gardner was a gifted teacher and novelist, and also a womanizing alcoholic. (“The number one occupational hazard for writers,” he said.) In the early eighties he left his poet wife for Susan Thornton-another writer-and they planned to get married. Four days before the wedding, after months of drinking and playing the two women off against one another, he died in a motorcycle accident.
The book is an interesting look at the bizarre and sweaty world of writers’ conferences (in this case, Bread Loaf) and writing programs. What a fabulous teacher he must have been—and rather Susan Thornton than me.

Raban is an expat Englishman, pushing 60, but he’s the living writer I most identify with. This is the first novel of his I’ve read. His travel books (and I hate that genre ghetto: the best novels are travel books) are superb. His observations on America, in particular, are deep, sharp, and loving. Unlike many of his compatriots, when it comes to the USA he’s neither patronizing nor overawed by glitz, and he takes the trouble to learn.

I’ve never managed to love an American cook book. My next-door neighbor, who photographs and styles cookbooks, agrees with me that the Brits and Australians have a more fun, stylish approach to the field (which is hard to understand.)
I’ve been following Nigel Slater since he did Marie Claire’s food writing in the early 1990s. He’s come into his own voice, and if he’s getting a little flouncy on the proclamations (along the lines of “Only sad people make their own grissini…it’s sad and pretentious to serve pretty restaurant food instead of gloppy stews at home…”), he’s still entertaining and down-to-earth. Good breakfast table reading.