An Omnivorous Reader

In his online New York Times obituary (June 14, 2023), Robert Gottlieb, the noted book and magazine editor (Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf; The New Yorker), was reported to have said that in his teens he read War and Peace by Tolstoy in one day and Proust's  Remembrance of Things Past, described in the obituary as a "monumental" work, in one week.

As a boy, Gottlieb told the Times in a 1980 article, "I would read three to four books a day after school, and could read for 16 hours at a time. Mind you, that's all I did. I belonged to three lending libraries and the public library."

The title of his 2016 memoir, Avid Reader: A Life, which I read and thoroughly enjoyed, is an apt description of his reading habits as a child and as an adult.

No One Can Be Food-Deaf

Book and magazine editor Robert Gottlieb in his memoir, Avid Reader: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), described his lack of culinary skills this way: "...I can't do more in the kitchen than boil an egg, and am generally considered food-deaf."

The term "food-deaf "is an inaccurate description. A person can be tone-deaf because that refers to sound. But a person can't be food-deaf because one doesn't listen to food as its being prepared in the kitchen. The terms that are more accurate, although imperfect, would be food klutz and cooking inept.