Top Ten Books of 2006, stars Hilary Swank and Emmy Rossum. Wildgen’s work includes fiction, essays, reviews, and food writing. She is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher, and an executive editor at the literary magazine Tin House. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.Recently I asked Wildgen about what she was reading. Her reply:
I’m prepping for a food writing class I’ll teach in a couple of months, which means I’m reading a lot of delicious stuff like Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything and It Must Have Been Something I Ate. Steingarten is one of my great favorites for his incredible erudition, laugh-out-loud wit, andVisit Michelle Wildgen's website.wide range of interests. He’s witnessed pig slaughters in France, immersed himself (almost literally, one suspects) in choucroute garnie in Alsace, and tortured a series of assistants with a never-ending series of exacting cooking experiments.
I’ll tell you what food books I’m not reading, though, and wish I were: Wasn’t Ruth Reichl scheduled to write a memoir about her time at the helm of Gourmet? I’ve been waiting for that with bated breath and hadn’t heard a word about it in years, so I asked on Twitter and discovered she has a contract for the memoir but has been sidetracked by novels and plans to write it next year. So I am holding on another year or two.
I’m also re-reading Lev Grossman’s The Magician King in anticipation of his third installment later this year—I like to convince myself that in order to appreciate a series I’m required to reread the others each time a new one appears. Really, I just love rereading books and this belief makes me feel I am accomplishing something instead of indulging myself. But I am, because one of my sharpest childhood memories is the creeping sensation of pure let-down that accompanied the realization that I would never learn to fly, be invisible, or see a leprechaun or fairy. As an adult I’ve reconciled myself to this, but at 6 or 7? Man, it stung.
The Page 99 Test: You’re Not You.
The Page 69 Test: But Not for Long.
The Page 69 Test: Bread and Butter.
--Marshal Zeringue
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