“Try This, 2–Excess in All Things,” by Jane Smiley
In this guest post to Ariana Huffington’s blog, Jane Smiley celebrates The Fat and the Thin (also translated as “The Belly of Paris”), a volume from Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, which brims with food and characters: “I almost said that the best thing about The Fat and the Thin is the complexity of the characters, major and minor, but really, so many things about the novel are both astute and beautifully rendered that there is no best thing. Foodies should not miss this novel, because it is an incomparable trip to the original monument of cuisine, high, low, and everything in between.” Zola’s Money, an Editor’s Choice, does the same for the world of banking and stock market speculation.