Staff Picks: Katie Schloss’s Favorites

After reading (and loving!) Ruth Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires, I was so excited when Save Me the Plums hit stands in April 2019! Reichl was the restaurant critic for The New York Times, exploring every hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the East Village and putting Korean barbeque on the map, all while dressing up in various disguises to keep maître d’s and hosts alike from knowing her true identity. Save Me the Plums is about life after being The Restaurant Critic and stepping into her new role as the Editor-in-Chief at Gourmet. NOTE: It pairs well with Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter (who just announced her forthcoming memoir, Stray, will be coming out with Knopf in May 2020, which you can pre-order here).

If you liked The Glass Castle, you’ll love Tara Westover’s Educated. I met Westover at Prairie Lights, an independent bookstore in Iowa City, whose list of visiting authors rivaled The Strand. I fell in love with memoirs after reading that book, and reading it again (and again), it’s a beautifully written book that will forever bring me back to a particular place and time. I also love the cover design!

I’m slightly biased, because this is a book by my division, but this is—hands down—the best gift of all time! This gorgeous coffee table book is broken down by month and suggests where you should go each month and why. It is (definitively!) the resource book for booking all of your 2020 adventures!

This is—without a doubt—my favorite book about creativity. There’s rarely a day that goes by when I do not think about or mention this book, and I often use the audio book (read by the author) to fall asleep, if I need some positive thoughts to keep my wandering mind from racing (which happens often living in a place like New York City)! Gilbert also had a great, two-season podcast called Magic Lessons.