Week in Reading: August 3

Sign at Flying Dog Brewery, Frederick, MD

The humidity finally broke around here, and this weekend was the perfect shade of summer: hot but never unbearably so, bright and clear and sunny. My weekend was full of running and sailing (and an exhausted eleven hours of sleep following a day of running and sailing) and a visit to the ever-clever Flying Dog Brewery (see the welcome vs. not welcome sign in their bar, above). And of course, the reading:

I enjoyed Charles Belfoure's debut novel, The Paris Architect, and a hundred pages into his second novel (House of Thieves), I'm sucked into a story of house robberies in 19th-century New York. Set in the same time period, but a drastically different story, is my audio pick this week (after finishing Bittersweet over the weekend): Church of Marvels, by Leslie Parry. I'm still in the early stages of this, but so far, it has a lot of promise. I've also got the county needs assessments for three counties in Maryland sitting on my desk for work this week: such uplifting reading I do for my job (though really, I do love my job).

Last, but certainly not least, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's incredible, dense, scientific, fascinating forthcoming cookbook: The Food Lab. I sat down to read the introduction this weekend and find myself 400 pages in (with 458 pages to go). This might just be the first cookbook I read cover to cover. Stay tuned for more thoughts closer to publication date (September 2015); in the meantime, you can get a sense of Lopez-Alt's style in his Food Lab column at SeriousEats.com.

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What are you reading this week?