What are the BEST BOOKS you've read in 2024?

[Hekate]

1. The Land of Milk & Honey by C Pam Zhang, who I swear must have read Douglas Rushkoff's...

…Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. Or maybe she just channeled the same information we all can read,, since the books came out about the same time last year.

Zhang’s heroine longs for the sunshine and abundance of mouthwatering food growing everywhere in her native Southern California. She is a chef stranded in London, exiled by closed borders in a planet gone gray with an inexplicable sticky smog that has killed crops everywhere.

From the start, her descriptions of certain foods are sensuous, bordering on hallucinatory. A fragrant sun-ripened strawberry as soft and luscious as a woman’s inner thigh. The longing for what is gone, seemingly forever.

The billionaire trying to escape what the Earth has become hires her to be his chef in a far and very secret location.

A haunting and most excellent book.