Spice of Life Reading Challenge

We all must eat everyday. Quantity of food may vary with our diets; holiday feasts may be rare.  The quality of the food we eat may be sporadic, depending on who’s doing the cooking. Yet variety in food is a big part of the delight!

The most delightful part of food is eating something spectacular, making good food a part of our every-day life, and (for some us) learning to cook better.

The goal of the Spice of Life Challenge is to read and/or review books about food and eating our way through a good life. It will run from July 1, 2009 until December 31, 2009 so you can include all those scrumptious summer salads, savory fall soups, and yummy holiday books that get you in the mood for turkey dinner. Feel free to overlap your books with any other reading challenges you have. If you feel so inclined, share a favorite cookbook as well. The idea, however, is to find new favorites to fill our belly (and our minds!).

If you don’t have a blog, you can still join us for the meal! Feel free to leave your thoughts about your choices in the comments on the review pages.

I’ve created four categories:

• Cookbooks share recipes so we can recreate delicious meals. I love a good cookbook, and I’m always on the lookout for another favorite. I’d love to hear about your new discoveries! To count a cookbook for the challenge, please share a little bit about what types of recipes it contains, any of the favorites that you may have cooked, and what you liked or not about it. You obviously don’t have to read every page of a cook book or cook every recipe.
• Nonfiction books are about food in general, including history of any food, cooking and diet guides, and reference books. For reference books, as for cookbooks, you may not need to read every word, including those  dense ones that you will be referring to again and again. Sometimes nonfiction books are best read in small bites; keep in mind you have six months to nibble through something!
• Memoirs, autobiographies, or essays are written by cooks or the everyday eater and are about learning to cook or about cooking or eating in general.
• Fiction captures the significance of food in our lives by making food a main part of the story. Define this as you will: if food is important to the story, it counts!

Note that some books will fit into multiple categories. Assign them to categories as you would like to meet your own personal challenge.

You can join the challenge in any of three levels of participation:

• A Taste: Joining the Spice of Life Challenge for “a taste” means that, although you love food and you love books about food, just a taste of food books will satisfy you right now. You’ll read and review just read two books from any of two of the above categories (different categories).
• A Sampler: Joining the Spice of Life Challenge for “a sampler” means that you want to balance your food book diet with variety, for variety is the spice of life. You will read and review a book from each category for a total of four books.
• A Feast: Joining the Spice of Life Challenge for “a feast” means that you want to fill yourself with good food books of all kinds this year! You will read and review six to eight books from at least three of the above categories.

If the thought of reading these books has made your mouth water, join by signing up in the comments below. You do not need to determine your books before you read them if you don’t want to, but do leave a link to your blog if you have one.

Also, feel free to add a button to your blog.

After you read and review your books, visit the review page and leave us a link so we can come and drool too.

Any questions? Ask in the comments below or send me an email at rebecca [at] rebeccareid [dot] com.

I’ve joined – hope to see some of you there:)