The Cookbook Collector

A Novel

By: Allegra Goodman

Narrated by: Ariadne Meyers

Heralded as “a modern day Jane Austen” by USA Today, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author Allegra Goodman has compelled and delighted hundreds of thousands of readers. Now, in her most ambitious work yet, Goodman weaves together the worlds of Silicon Valley and rare book collecting in a delicious novel about appetite, temptation, and fulfillment.

Emily and Jessamine Bach are opposites in every way: Twenty-eight-year-old Emily is the CEO of Veritech, twenty-three-year-old Jess is an environmental activist and graduate student in philosophy. Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily is rational and driven, while Jess is dreamy and whimsical. Emily’s boyfriend, Jonathan, is fantastically successful. Jess’s boyfriends, not so much—as her employer George points out in what he hopes is a completely disinterested way.

Bicoastal, surprising, rich in ideas and characters, The Cookbook Collector is a novel about getting and spending, and about the substitutions we make when we can’t find what we’re looking for: reading cookbooks instead of cooking, speculating instead of creating, collecting instead of living. But above all it is about holding on to what is real in a virtual world: love that stays.

Critic reviews

“If any contemporary author deserves to wear the mantle of Jane Austen, it’s [Allegra] Goodman, whose subtle, astute social comedies perfectly capture the quirks of human nature. This dazzling novel . . . is Goodman’s most robust, fully realized and trenchantly meaningful work yet.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Fans of Goodman's lovely, nuanced novels have a treat in store with this tale of two sisters."—Entertainment Weekly

"Goodman is remarkably successful in creating rich, engaging characters and a complex story of love and identity."
—Library Journal, starred review

Wonderful , and Captivating

loved it.! very detailed. loved the narrator. wasn't what I thought but loved the book anyway

Great book!

This book is fantastic. Allegra Goodman does tell the story of the .com surge, 911; lots more. People living in either Boston or California will recognize the people such as Amanda Palmer who she’s morphed into a software writer/performance artist; they’ll recognize places and events, including restaurants, popular in the 1990s and early 2000s. Goodman remembers how we all first used our phones, how freely we moved about the country, how we compensated. It’s long and it’s ambitious, which usually means an exhausting novel to read, but stick with it, because it is fantastic.

Predictable

Every single character felt like a trope, predictable and with just enough character depth to thing “oh the author googled that.”

Despite that I did enjoy the story!

Loved this story!

This book has a cast of very contrasting characters with opposite stories and lives that eventually interweave and come together for a very satisfying read. I had a very hard time getting used to the narrator as she made the lead female characters sound like they were whiney thirteen year olds. Enjoyable from start to finish.

Enjoyed the story, the narrator - not as much

I enjoyed the story overall. It was a story of love and loss. It also included a fictionalized history of the dot com boom and crash, and it's a love letter to antique books. As a computer person and lover of antique and classic books myself, it kept my interest. The description of the books made me want to find an antique book store!

The narrator was ok. She did a pretty good job creating different voices for the characters, however her voice sounded somewhat young girlish, and it was distracting to me at some points.
It's always a little strange when a male narrator tries to create a female character and a female tries to create a male, but in this case, it was a bit more annoying because of her voice in general.

She wasn't as good as Martin Jarvis when he reads Dickens, but she wasn't terrible either.

I'd recommend this audiobook to anyone interested in a good love story