Announcing the Desk Book Club 2025 Picks 📚

Here are the six books we'll be reading in 2025.

The Desk Book Club—through our discussions and Sunday afternoon Zoom hang-outs—has been a highlight of this year. In 2024, we read Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson, Food in Cuba by Hanna Garth, and Longthroat Memoirs by Yemisi Aribisala so far, and to finish up the year, we’ll be reading Eating to Extinction by Dan Saladino. We partnered with Archestratus, a culinary book shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to offer subscribers 20 percent off each selection.

If you’re free on Tuesday, July 23, and would like to come hang out with me and Jerusha Klemper of FoodPrint at Archestratus bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn—please do! There are $5 tickets.

I am excited to announce the books I’ve selected for 2025, a mix of fiction, memoir, and food studies, and the schedule for when we will read them.

This year, our bookstore partner is Bold Fork Books in Washington, D.C. About them, in their own words:

Located in the diverse and bustling neighborhood of Mount Pleasant, Bold Fork Books is Washington DC's only culinary bookshop, featuring new and vintage cookbooks and elevated kitchen wares. The owners, Clementine Thomas and Sam Vasfi, worked in the district's restaurant industry for many years and the culinary books they collected over the years changed the way they cook, eat, and think about the world around them. Now they are committed to sharing this passion by growing a deeply connected and dedicated shop community of home cooks, restaurant professionals, and curious eaters through books and a diverse slate of events.

They’ve made a landing page for all the books we’ll be reading. I’ll drop the 20% off code for paid subscribers into the chat.

If you want to join the conversation in 2025 (or for our Eating to Extinction conversations to end 2024), become a paid subscriber.

January

Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto 

“Kitchen is an enchantingly original book that juxtaposes two tales about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan.”

February

The Hunger of Women, Marosia Castaldi

“The Hunger of Women is a novel infused with the pleasures of the body and the little shocks of daily life. Made up of Rosa's observations, reflections, and recipes, it tracks her mental journey back to reconnect with her own embattled mother's age-old wisdom, forward to her daughter's inconceivable future, and laterally to the world of Rosa's new community of lovers and customers.”

March

Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C., Ashanté M. Reese

“In this book, Ashante M. Reese makes clear the structural forces that determine food access in urban areas, highlighting Black residents' navigation of and resistance to unequal food distribution systems. Linking these local food issues to the national problem of systemic racism, Reese examines the history of the majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C.”

April & May

Between Two Waters: Heritage, Landscape, and the Modern Cook, Pam Brunton

“From the soil to the kitchen, Between Two Waters interrogates the influences on what we eat: capitalism, colonialism and gender, as well as our own personal and cultural histories. Yet it also captures with real heart all that the dinner table has to offer us: sustenance, both physical and imaginative, challenges and adventure and, most importantly, communion with others.”

June & July

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food & Longing, Anya von Bremzen

“Anya occupies two parallel food universes: one where she writes about four-star restaurants, the other where a taste of humble kolbasa transports her back to her scarlet-blazed socialist past. To bring that past to life, Anya and her mother decide to eat and cook their way through every decade of the Soviet experience. Through these meals, and through the tales of three generations of her family, Anya tells the intimate yet epic story of life in the USSR.”

September & October

Vibration Cooking: or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor

“In 1959, at the age of nineteen, Smart-Grosvenor sailed to Europe, ‘where the bohemians lived and let live.’ Among the cosmopolites of radical Paris, the Gullah girl from the South Carolina low country quickly realized that the most universal lingua franca is a well-cooked meal. As she recounts a cool cat's nine lives as chanter, dancer, costume designer, and member of the Sun Ra Solar-Myth Arkestra, Smart-Grosvenor introduces us to a rich cast of characters.”