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Food books beyond recipes and restaurant reviews? These 12 novels use food to probe political turmoil, gender violence, grief and adolescent anguish. Pomegranate Soup carried me through lockdown. Like Water for Chocolate sizzled with magic. Butter gutted patriarchy. Each one fed my soul.
My recent reading leapt from the Ibis trilogy’s layered histories to Van Gogh’s famine canvas and a Japanese food-fiction tale. Together they made me think about hunger, grief, and how we find ways to heal what we’ve lost. That’s 3 books, a painting, an art essay and a 12-hour podcast for the feels.
From the Ibis trilogy’s dense histories to Van Gogh’s famine scene and a Japanese tale of grief served as meals, my recent inspirations circled hunger, loss, and how we digest our lives back into healing.
The past few years of consciously chosen books to read and curated book experiences has been reflecting on what they taught me and where they tested me.
Female friendships were once shaped by urgency, competition and emotional overfunctioning. Now I see other women, like me, seeking gentler ways to connect, with room for clarity and calm. Post 40, friendship feels less like survival and more like a choice that honours who we’re becoming.
Friendship with men was all about managing patriarchal egos and predations. The 40s have brought me a clearer sense of self & better boundaries. Maybe that means better friendships too.
A breakdown became my impetus to create boundaries. Not rules but choices rooted in who I want to be. My empathy is not absolution, just witness. Curiosity is costly. So is living honestly. Boundaries aren’t just to protect me, they also honour the right of others to leave what they cannot hold.
Reading a sweeping colonial saga (Sea of Poppies) and a quiet Tibetan memoir, I trace how language, history and the gaze of others shape identity. Book selection becomes a curatorial act to choose the lens that I live by, temporarily.
What if women’s stories are richer not in spite of their flaws, but because of them? From kitchen whispers to church pew confessions, these tales serve spice, sorrow, and fierce truth in every bite.
In Third Places I slip out of the roles that cling too tightly. No one expects anything. I listen, sometimes speak, and leave without needing to be remembered. That lightness stays with me longer than most company ever has.
A police drama. A feminist novel. Both markers in my journey to trusting my judgement again. 'The Rookie’ and Meena Kandasamy’s debut novel were soul mirrors.
