binge reading reviews and some advice please

A big week of reading for me. Finished Jasper Fforde: really enjoyed it but as the fantasy/sci-fi?/high comedy genre is not one I'm very familiar with, I did tend to get a bit confused because there were so many characters and flights of Fforde's extraordinary imagination on every page.It was hard to keep up with all the ideas: I think he is quite brilliant. The book became a bit Soylent Greenish and grim towards the end.There are going to be two more novels in the sequence: more adventures of Eddie Russett and Jane Grey - excellent.

"Grave secrets" I simply raced through. The mystery of the missing sister was solved and the outcome not predictable and quite shocking. I loved this little series and hope there will be more adventures of Harper and Tolliver, even though Harris finished up in such a way that this could be the end forever, it is hard to say if she'll keep going. I hope so.

"The other family".... Hmmmn. The character I most liked was the fat kitty called Dawson - I would have preferred more of him and less of the ghastly, vindictive and petty Chrissie and her three horrible daughters. I kept reading, hoping against hope they would all fall under a bus or something. What a nightmarish dreadful role model of a mother Chrissie was... do people really behave like this? Would love to know if anyone else has read this yet,it is only just out I think. Question: when did Joanna Trollope start hating women so much? I give it a score of one out of ten, for the kitty, and because now I know about Newcastle in the UK so I learned something new.

And now some advice is needed. I never purchased Stephanie Alexander's "Cook's Companion" when it came out in 1996 because I already had many cookbooks with basic recipes. I've borrowed it from work half a dozen times in the last couple of years though, when my books have lacked a recipe I want to make, or I want to fiddle with an existing one, I do check Stephanie's version.Last year her "Kitchen garden companion" came out, a beautiful book I AM going to buy - I didn't last year because we were saving every spare dollar to go overseas and I couldn't justify the expense.

I have the work copy at home currently, just last night I read Stephanie's opinion on whether Warrigal greens need to be blanched before eating (yes, she says). I was adding them to a curry.

My question: do others have the first book and is it worth buying if you already have a small library of cookbooks? And you are more than a basic/ beginnery cook?
I know lots of youngens swear by it but possibly it is their only cookbook?
Thoughts?

Note: the pictured tomatoes were not grown by me, but a gift from a work colleague. They taste wonderful and the colours are lovelier than a bunch of flowers, sitting as they are in the kitchen window.