Getting Emotional about Cooking and Reading

Our book this episode is the joy bomb that is Victoria Hannan’s I Love the Whole World! This novel stars Leslie McDonald, 43, newly divorced and feeling diminished by the experience and her ex-husband, physiotherapist Dennis (who left her for his Alexander Technique teacher). Her art history degree, and her love of art has been put in a box, forgotten for the past twenty years, and her relationship with her adult daughter, Moose, is prickly. Then Leslie starts entering competitions and wins an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas. Her best friend pulls out at the last minute, and Leslie goes anyway. It’s the year 2000, and she discovers, as the book’s title suggests, that she actually loves the whole world. It is thoughtful, guileless, funny, generous and earnest. We both loved it.

How would you cope if time fell apart for you but kept ticking on for the rest of the world? This is what happens to Tara, the protagonist of this episode’s ‘book guest’. The Calculation of Volume, Part 1, by Solvej Balle. Tara Selter is an antiquarian book dealer who keeps waking up on November 18. She realises that she is trapped in a time loop and seems to be reliving this one day indefinitely while the rest of the world, including her husband, friends and family, all move on to November 19 completely unaware. While everyone and everything (except the food she consumes) resets to their exact state each morning, Tara ages and her memories accumulate. This first volume was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, and the judges said, “It takes a familiar narrative trope – protagonist inexplicably stuck in the same day – and transforms it into a profound meditation on love, connectedness and what it means to exist.” It gave us plenty to talk about in this episode, and as always, you don’t have to have read the book to (we hope) resonate with the threads we pull from it. And there are no spoilers. Links and show notes are coming to subscribers shortly. Something to Eat and Something to Read is a podcast for people who love reading and eating and reading about eating (and cooking), hosted by Sophie Hansen, a food writer and farmer from Orange in central-west New South Wales and Germaine Leece, a bibliotherapist and psychotherapist based in Sydney. Germaine and Sophie x We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which we are recording today – Sophie on Wiradjuri Country in central-west New South Wales and Germaine on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation in Sydney. We pay our respects to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all First Nations people listening.

Hello and welcome back to Something to Eat and Something to Read, a podcast for people who love food and cooking and reading, hosted by Germaine Leece, a bibliotherapist and psychotherapist based in Sydney and Sophie Hansen, a food writer and farmer from Orange in central-west New South Wales This episode’s book ‘guest’ is the hugely successful Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. And the conversation we have around it is a juicy one, spanning everything from returnism, the ‘performance’ of eating, cooking and parenting, friction-maxing, trad wife culture, cooking as care vs cooking as control and how this book ‘misses the most important point of all’. What did you think of this page-turner? Show notes are coming to our subscribers shortly. Germaine and Sophie x

Today’s book ‘guest’ is Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day by Tamar Adler and how reading it has nudged us both to think more about noticing the small pleasures we can so easily miss every day and what it means to actually pay attention to your own life. Show notes are coming soon, featuring lists of all the books and topics we discuss. In the meantime, thank you for listening, and thank you to our wonderful producer, Kristy Reading, for putting this and every episode together so beautifully. Germaine and Sophie x We acknowledge that the land on which we work and live is the traditional land of the Wiradjuri Nation (Sophie) and the Gadigal of the Eora Nation (Germaine). We pay our respects to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all First Nations people.

Thanks for joining us for another episode of Something to Eat and Something to Read, where we think about pleasure and reading and throw away the idea of “challenging” reads. We discuss the ways that being more conscious of what we are reading and the journey this takes us on will lead to a depth of experience that is much more pleasurable than staying on the surface of a story. Most importantly, we can get this depth of experience from ANY novel we read, including Sophie’s beloved Jilly Cooper and Germaine’s beloved Patricia Cornwell. The book we’re reading for our next episode is Tamar Adler’s Feast on Your Life. Show notes are coming soon, featuring lists of all the books and topics we discuss. We will also follow this up with a letter to our subscribers that further explores the richness of reading what we love. In the meantime, thank you for listening, and thank you to our wonderful producer, Kristy Reading, for putting this and every episode together so beautifully. Germaine and Sophie x We acknowledge that the land on which we work and live is the traditional land of the Wiradjuri Nation (Sophie) and the Gadigal of the Eora Nation (Germaine). We pay our respects to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all First Nations people.