Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Thoughtful Thursday-Bookworm Edition

Posted in Books, My Thoughts, tagged , , on September 15, 2011|

Did you all, my readers, think I have stopped reading since I haven’t had a bookworm post in so, so long?  Never fear, I have had a book in my hand all spring and summer long and have read some really good books and some not so good ones, too.  Let’s take a look, shall we??

I guess I had better say something first…I read for pure pleasure.  Unless it is the Bible (the perfect instruction manual for life) or a cookbook/gardening/how-to book, I read to get lost in another world or another life.  Books are an escape for me and I love them!  Sometimes I think I should have been a librarian in some big old library full of rare and precious books, but maybe that is because of the book I am reading right now.

I am in the middle of “The Historian” by Elizabeth Kostova, and it is so good.  If you recall, I wrote a short post about another book by the same author called “The Swan Thieves”, and I think I like “The Historian” better than that one. 

I have also read the first two books by Stieg Larrson: “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” and “The Girl Who Played With Fire”.  My co-worker, K, has the third book, “The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest”, and I can’t wait to get a hold of that one, too.  I highly recommend these, but with one caveat.  The first book starts out a little slow, but don’t give up on it.  If you can make it through the first 50 pages or so of story background information, you will be rewarded.  The plot takes off from there and doesn’t stop until the very end.  The second book, not weighed down by history, takes off at a run and keeps going.  It is great!  These will be the only three books by the author because he passed away shortly after the third books was completed.  So sad!

Two other books that I have read this summer and enjoyed were food-related.  Yay!  One of my favorite topics!  The first was “The Hundred Foot Journey” by Richard Morais and “A Year in Provence” by Peter Mayle.  My local library was having a summer reading program for adults and these two books were on the reading list.  I didn’t get signed up in time to complete enough books before the deadline, but it was fun to read some different authors that I have never heard of before.

My favorite of the two was “A Year in Provence”.  I think I finished it in three days and wished it was much, much longer.  It is about the author and his wife’s first year of living in the Provence region of France, and it is a true story, which makes it even more entertaining.  “The Hundred Food Journey” is fiction, but good as well.  An Indian family decide to move from India to England and then France after the death of a special family member.  The interactions between the Indian family and the locals of France is especially entertaining.

I also read “Eat Pray Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert since I had heard a lot about it, but had not yet seen the movie.  I don’t think I will bother with the movie.  I finished the book, but it was a struggle.  This is also a true store of one woman’s journey to put her life back together after a difficult marriage and divorce.  She travels to Italy (to eat), India (to pray), and Indonesia (she finds love) to recover from her sadness.  I guess the best way to say it is that I was very uncomfortable with her religious decisions.  It seemed like she wanted to take the “best” parts of every religion and put them together to make some sort of hybrid.  That just doesn’t fly in my book.  If you want the easy, happy, and loving parts of God, you must also take his rules along with them. 

I hope you enjoyed my little book review list.  I hope to start on the Harry Potter series soon.  I like the movies and want to try the books, too.  Happy reading!!

Read Full Post »

Thoughtful Thursday

Posted in Books, Cooking, My Thoughts, tagged , , , , , on August 18, 2011|

Up until now, you would not have found many, if any, ice cream recipes on this little blog o’ mine.  Why?  Well, I am extremely lactose-intolerant.  So bad that one little bite of regular ice cream will send my stomach into fits for hours, and that is so NOT FUN!  I can take the medicine that helps, and it does just that, helps, but it does not go away completely. 

All of that is about to change.  You may see a dozen ice cream or frozen treat recipes on here all in a row because of a birthday gift that I received.  My in-laws (God bless ‘em, they are wonderful!) gave me a tabletop ice cream maker along with a recipe book titled “lick it!”, which is full of vegan ice cream recipes.  Now, I am not a vegan, and probably will never be a vegan, but one thing that vegans and I share is a need for food without dairy in them.  This book rocks!

The ice cream maker is a Cuisinart model ICE-21 and it is awesome!  Check it out here for all of the info.  It makes 1.5 gallons at a time in about 20 minutes.  At that point the ice cream is like soft serve which is the way I like it.  If you want it firmer, just put the deliciousness into a freezer-safe lidded container and let it harden for a couple of hours.  That is if you can wait that long!!

So far I have made the chocolate rocky road, vanilla, and orange sherbet recipes from the “lick it!” book, and they are great!  I couldn’t tell that they weren’t the real thing.

If you are lactose-intolerant or vegan or just want to try something a little different, get yourself an ice cream maker and this book.   A little word to the wise, you might want to invest in coconut milk and soymilk stocks.  Just wait, you will understand!

Read Full Post »

Almost-Wordless Wednesday

Posted in Books, Travel, tagged , , on June 22, 2011|

One of my favorite books is Big Stone Gap and here is proof that the town really exists…

DSC06069

Read Full Post »

The Swan Thieves

Posted in Books on August 8, 2010| 1 Comment »

I love to read!  Books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, food packaging…I guess you get the point.  I also love my local library.  My mom was the family historian and spent many hours at the library using their extensive local genealogy section.  While she browsed through rolls and rolls of microfilm, I browsed the children’s book section.  I would take home stacks of books to read and enjoyed every minute of it.  I read my way through the entire Little House on the Prairie series, the entire Nancy Drew series, and entire Anne of Green Gables series, plus others too numerous to mention.

Sometimes I will go looking for a certain book and sometimes a book finds me.  The latter is the case with The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova.  The cover of the book caught my eye and I am very glad that it did.  Painting, really art in general, is something that I do not know much about.  This book opened up that world to me and it was very interesting.  Here is a link to a synopsis of this book:  http://www.shelfari.com/books/5694040/The-Swan-Thieves.

If you like historical fiction (I DO!) and art, I highly recommend this!

Read Full Post »

Mastering the Art…

Posted in Books, Entertainment on July 7, 2010|

When C & I recently spent the weekend in Lexington, we shopped at the Joseph-Beth Bookstore which is one of my favorite places to browse.  If you are a book-lover like me and you happen to find yourself in Lexington, please take the time to visit this wonderful place!  I could spend hours just browsing their shelves…fiction, cooking, gardening, decorating, Kentucky books…you name it and I think they will have it!

The real reason for this post is the paperback book I purchased that night, Julie & Julia by Julie Powell.  Many of you may had probably already read this, but I had not had the opportunity.  I grabbed it up and started reading it that night.  Maybe it is because the writer and I are close in age or maybe because our love of cooking is a respite from the daily grind, but I loved this book! For those of you that don’t know about this book, the author attempts and succeeds in cooking all of the recipes in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in exactly one year and blogs about it.  Ms. Powell’s writing is sharp, poignant, funny, and sometimes a little profane, but she definitely gets her point across in a most entertaining way.  Her experiences with these difficult, detailed French recipes that included killing a lobster and boning a duck were hilarious!  She wrote that her bedroom white noise machine was really singing “lobster killer, lobster killer, lobster killer” all night long, but she gathered her strength and did what she had to do for the greater good.  Ok, maybe not the greater good, but definitely for her blog readers.

Tonight, I watched the movie that was made based on her book.  It was good…very good in fact.  It stars Meryl Streep as Julia Child (which was perfect casting) and Amy Adams as the author.  I really should know by now that I need to watch the movie first because there are always so many details that are left out.  If you are a “foodie”, you should definitely watch the movie and read the book, but be warned that they are not the same.  The movie focuses much more on Julia Child’s life than the book does.  I really enjoyed both, but the book was my favorite!

Read Full Post »

Bookworm Alert #2

Posted in Books on May 11, 2010|

I love to read!  I almost always have a book that I am reading, although I am not like some bookworms that I know that have 2 or 3 going at one time.  I have to concentrate on just one. 

I finished a book Sunday that was very good and interesting.  It is The Postmistress by Sarah Blake and I highly recommend it.  I was in our local town library looking for something new to read when the cover of this book caught my eye.  I guess it is the old letters and dried flower on the front that really did it. 

It is set during World War II right before the United States joined the fight.  There are 3 female main characters who are very different from each other, but their lives eventually come together in a small New England town close to Cape Cod.  One is a young woman married to the local doctor, one is a middle-age single postmistress in this small town, and the third is a young reporter covering the war in Europe for radio. 

If you enjoy strong emotional writing and interesting story lines, I think you would enjoy this book.  I know I learned a few things about World War II that I had not heard much about before such as the female radio reporters of the time.

Read Full Post »

Great Reading

Posted in Books on September 6, 2009|

Here’s another author/book recommendation for you.  I stumbled upon a blog earlier this year and really enjoyed the lady’s writing.  She was smart and funny.  Her bio listed her occupation as an author so I went to my local library to see if they were available.  They did have one and I checked it out immediately and really enjoyed it.  The name of the book is Between, Georgia and the author is Joshilyn Jackson. 

She is a Southern writer to the core.  Being from the deep South, she “knows” these characters personally.  It is a complex story of 3 generations of one family in a very small town called “Between, Georgia”.

I received her other 2 books for my birthday back in July and just finished reading them both.  Those are Gods In Alabama and The Girl Who Stopped Swimming.  Both were excellent, but I think my favorite is The Girl Who Stopped Swimming.  I can’t even begin to describe it, but it weaves family drama, mystery and almost a little horror into one story.  It was one of those books that I didn’t want to put down until it was finished.

If you are looking for something a little out of the ordinary, please check these out.  You won’t be disappointed!  Also, check out her website, www.joshilynjackson.com which contains her blog.

Read Full Post »

Bookworm Alert

Posted in Books on July 30, 2009| 1 Comment »

I post a lot about cooking and gardening, but today I wanted to tell you about an author that I really like.  I think I have read all of her books and enjoyed every one of them.  Her name is Adriana Trigiani.  The first book of hers that I read (and I think it is the first she wrote) is Big Stone Gap.  The name of the book is the name of the small Virginia mountain community in the book.  The main character is Ave Maria Mulligan, “the 35-year-old self-proclaimed spinster” of the town.  Needless to say, she eventually finds love and happiness.  The two sequels are Big Cherry Holler and Milk Glass Moon. 

I have just finished the latest installment of this series, Home To Big Stone Gap.  I think I like these books because I can relate to the “small town” feel of the setting.  It reminds me a lot of the small town in which C & I live, love, and work. 

Ms. Trigiani’s characters are human.  They have flaws and have to make tough choices (not always the right ones) like we do.  Even her characters that are based in New York City, like Valentine Roncalli in her latest book Very Valentine, (yes, I have read that one, too!) feel like real people, not just beautiful, talented, perfect people in some other books. 

So, if you are looking for a good summer read, choose one of Ms. Trigiani’s books whose story stands alone, like Very Valentine or Queen Of the Big Time, but if you have some time to invest, read the Big Stone Gap series.  I hope you like it as well as I do!

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts