#3. Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual by Michael Pollan (Illustrated by Maira Kalman)

Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.

From this simple dictum comes Food Rules, full of crowdsourced advice and generations-old common sense about not just what we eat, but how we eat and how we connect to the part of our life that has to do with food. It’s short, it’s poignant, and it will make you very hungry.

I definitely, definitely, definitely recommend the illustrated edition of the book. Maira Kalman brings these loose rules to life with humor and rich color.

#2. The Clocks by Agatha Christie

My first Hercule Poirot mystery, I picked this up as a quick read while I figured out what my next big literary indulgence would be.

The book read quickly; as you can see, I did not.

This mystery novel is another great ensemble piece by Agatha Christie: a hard-nosed detective, a spy with his heart on his sleeve, a screaming typist, mysterious bodies (both breathing and not), a heap of peculiar neighbors, and of course, the armchair sleuth Poirot.

A shorthand typist is called to a woman’s home in an old Victorian neighborhood on a fairly normal afternoon. What she finds sets off a chain of inquests, questions, and even more murders. In a room with a dead body, a blind woman, and four mysterious clocks, the key to this murder isn’t in the complicated scene, but in the simplest of details.