Readers share their favorite double book pairings
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| The Thread's Must-Read | 
"Voracious" by Cara Nicoletti
"Like Water for Chocolate" by Laura Esquivel
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The care and creativity you brought to your own book pairings is inspiring! Some of the book matches you sent via Twitter and email fit together like chocolate and caramel. They complemented one another — and I could see how each book was adding to a kind of holistic view of an idea or an experience.
Some of the pairings were unexpected, and yet I could see that the books were in a kind of conversation with one another.
Amy immersed herself in wartime Germany with “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr and “The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah.
Karen emailed with Barbara Kingsolver’s “Prodigal Summer” and Jeanette Winterson’s “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.”
I heard from Doug who read “Stones of Silence” by George B. Schaller and Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard” — dual accounts of a biologist and a novelist who traveled into the Himalayas together.
Christina read Tobias Wolff’s searing memoir “This Boy’s Life” and the memoir of his older brother, Geoffrey Wolff, called “The Duke of Deception.”
Laura paired “Such a Fun Age” by Kiley Reid, a novel about a Black babysitter and the white privilege of the family she works for, with “A Good Neighborhood” by Therese Anne Fowler, a novel which, interestingly enough, Reid was pretty critical of when she reviewed it in the New York Times — all the more reason, I say, to read the books together.
Elie Tweeted a triple pairing of Roxane Gay’s “Hunger,” Kiese Laymon’s “Heavy” and Sabrina Strings’ “Fearing the Black Body.” And Shane suggests Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto” and Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”
Finally, Barbie emailed to say she’d finally read one of my favorite classics, “Jane Eyre,” and paired it with “My Education” by Susan Choi.
Book critic Julia Keller calls these pairings “literary synergy” and says to think of them like a dinner party, where you have “a great bouquet of different flavors and sauces and scents.”
I love the idea of thinking of these pairings as nourishment — fulfilling, delectable and delicious.
So, in that spirit I leave you with one more pairing of two books that sit next to one another on my bookshelf: “Like Water for Chocolate” by Laura Esquivel and Cara Nicoletti’s “Voracious.”
Inspired to curate a book & food pairing? I’m all ears! Tweet me the dish & the novel that simply must go together! @KerriMPR.
— Kerri Miller, MPR News |
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