Voracious - Cara Nicoletti

When I first saw Voracious' description, I thought it would be love at first read.  "A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way Through Great Books."  What more could a hungry reader who reads her way through great books want?  Well, the answer is apparently something other than Voracious, because while this book had nice parts, it wasn't really what I wanted.

Cara Nicoletti is a woman with a career in the food industry and a love of books.  Our love of books doesn't always overlap--I've only read a few of the books she covers in Voracious--but that didn't really matter to me.  What mattered to me was that she is also the author of the blog Yummy Books (last updated in 2015) and a blog is exactly what this book reads like.  This was my issue with What If? as well; it didn't read like new material, but like material that was just recycled into book form from the blog.  And here's the other thing: I like blogs, I like food, but I generally don't like food blogs.

Yes.  I said it.  Here's the thing.  For some reason, food blogs seem to have this thing about them that no other type of blog I've encountered has, and that's that food bloggers seem to feel the need to put deep and personal stories in front of all of their posts, when what I really want is just the recipe.  My favorite food blog, Budget Bytes, falls into this pitfall as well, though maybe not to the same degree as other ones.  As you've probably gathered from the preceding sentence, I don't particularly care about these personal stories.  And that was exactly the case here.  I really liked the parts of this book where Nicoletti dug into the books she talked about, showed how food played into them and how the characters in the books used food in their lives, or abhorred it.  But I didn't particularly like the stories about Nicoletti's life.  While her life in the food industry and in New York in general was no doubt interesting in its own way, it was the very last thing I was looking for in a book about food and other books, and consequently it did not hit the right note here.  I think this book might actually be aimed at people who already read and liked Nicoletti's blog, and were just looking for some new material in the book, other than an entirely new audience.

Overall, I'm just not convinced that blogs made into books are a good market.  They just seem to lack something that books actually conceived as books seem to have, and I haven't yet found one that's really worked.  So, while I liked the actually bookish parts of this and some of the recipes definitely seemed intriguing, the book as a whole didn't really agree with me.

2 stars out of 5.