I’m on the third book, Voyager, and in honor of the second series premier tonight, I decided to recreate the peppery, creamy oyster stew Jamie and Claire share after their first night together in a very long time, where we find Claire remembering some very seductive and erotic moments from the night before. Reading this series is a sheer, sensual pleasure of the mind and the heart. I’ve started re-reading the whole series from the beginning, as much to prepare myself for the second season of TV series, as to lose myself again in this marvelous world. She then excuses herself to vomit profusely in the gardens. Claire watches in bemused fascination as the king pops one of the little blackened birds into his mouth, chews, and swallows. Mentions of food and drink are quite plentiful throughout the entire book series, with such wonders as a rabbit-and-pigeon pie, soused pig’s face, wild turkey with chestnuts and truffles, sangria drunk with a pot-smoking priest, a chocolate cake with walnuts (shell bits and all) for your biting pleasure, something dreadful-sounding called parritch, which is some sort of nasty porridge eaten in Scotland, and one of my favorite food scenes in any book, when Louis XV invites Jamie and Claire to an ornate luncheon at Versailles Palace and a baroque display of stuffed baby quails, roasted in their original shape, bones and all, are presented to the king, a sort of kingly four-and-twenty-blackbirds-baked-into-a-pie. But I still watched the Season 2 premier!

The TV series, though great, falls short in details, and was extremely dark and at times, unbearable to watch. Gabaldon clearly understands the convoluted pathways of the human heart, and expresses them in all their lovely, ugly glory in the 8-book series. It’s a much more detailed, ornate and intricate story, however, involving British, French and American history, the battle for Scottish independence and the devastation of the Battle of Culloden Moor, a whiff of the supernatural, a hint of sci-fi, and probably one of the most beautiful, complex and mature love stories ever written about in literature.

I know I do.įor those few people who might not have heard of either the books or the TV series, the premise is simple: a woman travels through time, meets the love of her life 200 years in the past, and forever alters her past, present, and future. If you’re a book lover, a lover of history, a lover of epic love stories, a lover of time travel, or if you watch STARZ, you’ve probably heard of the Outlander series by this marvelous writer, and hopefully, you also think it’s the shizzle. So I won’t bore you with my gushing adoration for the books of Diana Gabaldon.

Voyager outlander series