"The Upstairs Delicatessen," by Dwight Garner

How could I resist a book titled "The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading about Eating, and Eating While Reading" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)? For someone like me (and, I imagine, many of you) who also loves to read, loves to eat, loves to read about eating, and loves to eat while reading....well, this book is irresistible! Regular readers of this blog of course know how much I like to read, but also may have noticed that I have fairly frequently posted about books about the restaurant world and other food-related topics. The author of this book, Dwight Garner, is a longtime book critic at The New York Times, and is obviously, not surprisingly, tremendously well read. In this book he writes enthusiastically about food and his own experiences with food and restaurants; the book is crammed with entertaining anecdotes, as well as with many quotations by famous authors about food (and drink). The tone of the book is light, generous, humorous, joyous, and celebratory of the pleasures of life.