Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, Julie Powell (paperback)original hardcover title: Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchenfrom Amazon.com: From Publishers WeeklyPowell became an Internet celebrity with her 2004 blog chronicling her yearlong odyssey of cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. A frustrated secretary in New York City, Powell embarked on “the Julie/Julia project” to find a sense of direction, and both the […]
The Festival of Books is here!
This weekend at UCLA, it’s the LA Times Festival of Books! No Rock Bottom Remainders this year, but we still enjoyed the browsing earlier today. The weather was sunnier and warmer this year than last, and seemed to bring the crowds out early. I had wanted to participate in the giant crossword puzzles again, but as it turned out we didn’t see any. The exhibitor whose booth is don’t-miss for us is Pennyworth Books. (I […]
On the changing times
One of the blogs I keep up with his Leslie Morgan Steiner’s “On Balance” blog through the Washington Post’s website http://blog.washingtonpost.com/onbalance. This recent post put me in mind of conversations I’ve had with friends, and my husband, about how it’s not like it was when we were kids anymore. Every generation of parents has probably had that thought, but it means different things in different times. On Balance blog post – Leslie Morgan Steiner En […]
A change is coming
If I’m going to try to get in the habit of updating this blog regularly, I need to start posting more often, and shorter, so I need to stop doing my “reading” posts in a monthly-update format. Effective with my next one, when I finish Julie and Julia, each book review will get a post of its very own. Then I won’t be playing catch-up all the time. And I’m going on the record with […]
Unpredictable
An unexpected substitute dog-sitter has emerged from a source we’d never have predicted. The stepkids’ mom, TallGuy’s ex, has offered to keep Princess Fuzzybutt during our trip, due to Mom-in-law’s broken leg/foot…and we’re thisclose to taking her up on it, although we haven’t officially done so. SDKate is pretty excited about having her step-dog with her for the entire week – good thing, since she’ll probably be doing most of the caretaking. We honestly never […]
The best laid plans
So here it is, two weeks before we leave for Tennessee, and I really should be working more than I am today. And as if there weren’t enough things to worry about, we get to add one more – Mom-in-law took a fall and will have her leg in a cast for several weeks, so she can’t drive and probably won’t be walking so well either – and she’s our designated dogsitter. Either TallGuy and […]
April’s reading so far…
Waiting, Ha JinFrom Amazon.com: From Publishers WeeklyJin’s quiet but absorbing second novel (after In the Pond) captures the poignant dilemma of an ordinary man who misses the best opportunities in his life simply by trying to do his duty as defined first by his traditional Chinese parents and later by the Communist Party. Reflecting the changes in Chinese communism from the ’60s to the ’80s, the novel focuses on Lin Kong, a military doctor who […]
Not really “Marching” on…
March 2007 Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, Ayelet WaldmanFrom Amazon.com: From Publishers Weekly How a five-year-old manages to make the adults in his life hew to the love he holds for them is the sweet treat in this honest, brutal, bitterly funny slice of life. When Emelia’s day-old daughter, Isabel, succumbs to SIDS, her own life stalls. She can’t work; she can’t sleep; Central Park, once her personal secret garden, now is a minefield of […]
Back to the Beginning – January/February 2007
The year started off with a pretty high level of reading activity – taking vacation days for the first week of January gave me the opportunity to get my reading going at quite a pace! January 2007Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, Melanie RehakFrom the Amazon.com product page: From Publishers Weekly The intrepid Nancy Drew has given girls a sense of their own power since she was born, Athena-like, from the […]
The past is fading fast – or, some notes on Fall 2006 reading
I’m not sure how much I remember about some of these now, so the notes may not be too long. November 2006To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee (for Book Club)Summary from the Amazon.com page: Amazon.com Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus–three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual […]
