Or 80 days until the big gift giving day.

Whether we like it or not, the holidays are around the corner, especially if you are in retail. With that in mind, throughout the season I will post information about books for gift giving or festive pleasure that you may or may not know about or hear about, but that deserve a look.  I am taking the liberty to choose books that strike my fancy and that I think our customers will like, based on many years of holiday selling.

What and why? A Confederacy of Dunces COOKBOOK: Recipes from Ignatius J. Reilly’s New Orleans by Cyntha LeJeune Nobles. (Louisiana State University Press).

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kenney Toole is a perennial seller for us and sales of it spike during the holidays because year after year it is a book people give as a gift.  It has been many years since I read it, but thinking about it brings a smile to my face as will the new A Confederacy of Dunces COOKBOOK, inspired by the novel, bring to yours.

According to the author Cyntha LeJeune Nobles, the cookbook “is meant to memorialize the foods, both the nutritious and the wickedly unwholesome, that are important to the book’s characters, as well as to introduce new classics that spin off from what the characters ate”. In addition to recipes, Nobles includes a little New Orleans food history and a tour of Ignatius’s favorite haunts.  The cookbook includes a list of characters, a Dunces glossary, photos of the dishes, and food related quotes from A Confederacy of Dunces that help tie everything together.

Nobles is a food columnist for the Advocate of Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Acadiana, and a member of the Newcomb College Culinary History Writers Group. The recipes in the cookbook include those for dishes she serves at home, those from her experience as a food columnist, from New Orleans cookbooks from the 1960s, and from chefs and the author’s personal friends from around New Orleans. It’s a treat.

Who might like this book? Foodies. People who loved A Confederacy of Dunces. Fans of New Orleans food, culture and history.

80 days until the big gift giving day.