Book Review: A Bowl of Olives: On Food and Memory

A Bowl of Olives is a delightful book on food and cooking, and all things related.

The book features mainly watercolour illustrations by Sara Midda with occasional photographs. The artworks are lovely. They can be the different leaves used in salads, picnic baskets, utensils and crockery, colour swatches created from basket of fruits, food wrappers, flowers in vases used to decorate dinner tables and more.

The informative text talks about how food is prepared, different ingredients, food culture and markets in different countries, other interesting stories and personal experiences from Midda herself.

It's a beautiful artist sketchbook.

Unfortunately the major downside is the book is too small, about palm size only, slighly less than A5 size. That's exactly the same complaint I have with her earlier book Sara Midda's South of France: A Sketchbook. It's tiring to read because the fonts are too small, and the beautiful detailed watercolour artworks are wasted when most are also printed quite small.

So overall, while the book has good art and interesting text, it is frustrating to read because everything is so small.

3 out of 5 stars. 2 deducted for the small size of the book.

A Bowl of Olives: On Food and Memory is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

Visit Amazon to check out more reviews.

If you buy from the links, I get a little commission that helps me get more books to feature.

Here are direct links to the book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.es | Amazon.co.jp | Amazon.cn