The Undiet by Meghan Telpner

If you are looking for a way to change your diet and the way you cook, or just beginning cooking this is the book for you.  It does have some minor issues, however, if you are just starting out it is still the route to take.

Pushing for a different way of living, Meghan Telpner, a Certified Nutritionist and advocate for home cooked meals with only using the best nature provides (that means no pre-packaged foods), challenges readers to look at the way they are living.  Through her 8-week program in her friendly tone she breaks down the steps to successfully accomplish your goal of healthy eating, with vegan options.

Though I am already a vegan and cook most of my own meals, it was really nice to get some of her tips (my two new favourites are lemon cayenne water in the morning and taking the time to prep my veggies for the week).  This book is full of great tips and tricks to make living the undiet life easier, without the promise of it being simple to change.  Yes, change is a challenge, but this type of lifestyle means all the hard work is worth it.  She even throws in home cleaning recipes and beauty products.

The recipes are broken up into the various sections. For ease of use it would have been better to put them all together at the back of the book, or alternatively put them in the index by their ingredients.  To make my life easier I ended up writing names and page numbers of recipes I liked in the back of the book.  Not the end of the world, and it does not change the fact that this book had such great information that it is worth the minor inconvenience.

One big mistake was the book is directed to solely to the ladies.  It would have been nice if she interchanged between addressing women and men thereby making it approachable for her male audience. Hopefully, if she writes another book this will be taken into account.

For more about Meghan visit http://meghantelpner.com/ (it has great recipes too!)

Grace: A Memoir by Grace Coddington

For this book to be called a memoir is a tad misleading. It is more stories about her long and interesting life.  This book is structured as anecdotes about various notable moments in Grace's life.  Sometimes it follows a time line, but near the end it bounces around. She glosses over her idealistic childhood in Whales, and then her easy breezy years as a model ,were she proclaims she created the iconic 60s look of the doll eyes -- when models had to do their own make-up and hair in those days as this was before star hair and make-up artists became so instrumental to fashion. Then most important of all, she gets to the point where she almost fell into work for magazines with her start at British Vogue. 

The book is full of big names in fashion, like Karl Lagerfeld and of course arguably the most important woman in Vogue history Anna Wintour.  It has touching moments as well, as Grace struggles with her relationships and divorces, well creating a body of work that is absolutely unmatched, while all along having a faithful love of cats.  Her 50 years in the fashion world has seen some amazing moments and it is a pleasure to see them through the eyes of such a funny and often no nonsense woman.
Grace: A Memoir is not a typical autobiography, yet for fashion fans it is somewhat interesting read about one woman's love of fashion.