3 Books to Read This January

Photo: Emily Kate Roemer/Studio D
Tantalizing Topic
John McQuaid's Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat (Scribner) mixes science, literature, history, and anecdote in the service of his stellar inquiry into the inner workings of taste, also called flavor, which McQuaid finds to be the most underappreciated of the senses. Flavor, he asserts, is a "secret world lying just under the surface of everyday experience, waiting to be cracked open."
Debatable Propositions
I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel (Knopf), by best-selling author David Shields (Reality Hunger) and a former student of his, current stay-at-home dad Caleb Powell, ingeniously captures their feisty debate about Art and Life. During a retreat at a cabin in Washington's Cascade Range, the two longtime pals disagree on marriage, religion, sex, politics, happiness, film—and everything else—with passion, insight, and panache.
As The Fur Flies
In his story collection Hall of Small Mammals (Riverhead), Thomas Pierce mines the mysterious rift between fantasy and reality with the intricate skill of an archeologist and the sheer wonder of an imaginative child. In the exemplary "Shirley Temple Three," an Atlanta man hosts a controversial reality show on which extinct animals such as a woolly mammoth are cloned, with unexpectedly moving results.
This article appears in the January 2015 issue of ELLE magazine.

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