Degrees of Affection

This is a difficult book to classify. I don't think I can do it justice because while it is basically a simple idea, you really need to experience it to understand how amazing this idea turned out.

I'll admit, for me, food is generally not a big deal for me in literature. There are only books I can think off the top of my head that I even remember them eating at all. The Harry Potter books with their boarding school tables of course, Lucy's tea with Mr. Tumnus the faun in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and the bounties and lean times in Laura Ingles Wilder's series. And yet after reading (and devouring the pictures) this book, I remembered so much more and learned of some I'd never heard of before. The scene in Anne of Green Gables with the "raspberry cordial" and Alice's tea party with the Mad Hatter and March Hare. Even Edmund's box of magical Turkish Delight, which I ceased to be interested in when I discovered how nasty they sounded to me. Oh, and Heidi's toasted cheese bread, which I remembered all but tasting when I read it a couple decades ago.

The author/photographer picked several important moments in literature based around food and then made the food, set up the shots, and shot some absolutely beautiful pictures. They each take you directly to that moment and even worked fairly well for books I'd never read. Each picture is accompanied with the quote from the book the meal is taken from as well as footnotes about the book, food, or other tidbits. A deceptively quick and simple books, I ended up reading it for much longer then I thought I would as I compared the words of the text to the pictures and took in the extreme amount of detail in the photographs.

If you love books as much as I know many of you do, you should check out this book. Even if you haven't read all the books mentioned, it's a neat read and I'll never look at these scenes from my favorite books the same way again.

Could you guess all of them? The last three I think are pretty obvious but the first one won't be. The answers are here: