I have two cookbooks on my reading pile right now and am enjoying taking the time to dig into the stories behind them as well as the recipes.

The first one–Tequila Mockingbird–meets the LibraryThing challenge of reading a book with a pun in the title. This whole book, subtitled Cocktails With a Literary Twist, is filled with punny names for cocktails from A Rum of One’s Own to The Lime of the Ancient Mariner. Each cocktail includes a snarky description of the book and how it connects to the cocktail.

The second one–The Jersey Shore Cookbook–was an impulse buy at Better World Books, touching a nostalgic chord with memories of many summers spent down the shore in Ocean City, New Jersey. The cookbook is much newer and covers the whole coast, but I am still having fun reading about the various chefs and restaurants. Not surprisingly, it focuse on summer food and as we head into February, I am dreaming of summer meals of crab chowder, sweet corn and tomatoes.

I haven’t read cookbooks this way before, from start to finish, complete with bookmark. I might read the description of a particular recipe or the introduction to a chapter, but I’m wondering what other treasures are on my shelf to pull off and read?