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4 audiobooks that celebrate food

Warning: Listening to these audiobooks during your evening commute will make you even more eager for dinner!

2. 'Mastering the Art of French Eating: Lessons in Food and Love from a Year in Paris,' by Ann Mah

  • By Rochelle O'Gorman Contributor

Mah, a novelist, food and travel writer, is also married to a diplomat who was assigned to Paris for several years.  In this memoir, she writes of her first year in France by taking a culinary tour in which each region’s specialty is described with loving abandon.

Though read very prettily by Mozhan Marno, who employs understated, yet sincere emotion and an authentic-sounding accent, the book is mired down by Mah’s self-indulgence. Soon after they landed in the City of Lights, her husband was assigned elsewhere and we hear every self-pitying detail. Her lengthy moping is very uninteresting compared to mouth-watering description of crepes in Brittany or pistou in Provence or cassoulet in Toulouse. Another problem is that each chapter ends with a recipe, which is fairly useless on audio. Grade: B

(Read by Mozhan Marno, Random House Audio; download only; 9 hours)

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Mark Sappenfield
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