I'm not really doing this intentionally, really. However, here's my fourth nonfiction out eight total books. I'm still at 50% nonfiction so far this year. I'm not sure where this new found love of nonfiction is coming from. Ryan has pointed out that none of these nonfiction are pedagogy books, which is true. Our observation is that 95% of pedagogy books are legitimately awful. They tend to suffer from a small common sense idea being stretched out to fill 180 pages which makes them tedious to say the least. That other 5% can be pretty transcendent, though. In any case, I'm going to try to keep up the streak.
This one is a graphic novel format cookbook. Let's Make Ramen! is, at it's core, just a solid exploration of ramen in it's traditional forms with some solid advice from various icons in the ramen world. Content-wise there's nothing terribly earth shattering here. The delivery is what makes it brilliant.
A visual process like cooking lends itself well to the visual graphic novel treatment. The background history was well supported by the drawings and it was fun seeing the various ramen masters rendered in drawing s that allowed them to address the reader directly. The recipes are clear and the drawings are helpful for understanding the steps and processes.
I suppose it all could be done with high quality photographs but it wouldn't be as much fun, and I've always found photos more difficult to follow than a well done drawing.
It turns out that this is part of a series of cookbooks. There's a dumpling cookbook and a bread one as well. I'm looking forward to checking them out.
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