How to handle this one

What to do. The third book in Steig Larsson's Millenium trilogy is OUT!!! And my favorite independent bookseller has called to tell me the copy I reserved is IN.

I read the first, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and took Husband to see the movie, which I thought was one of the best book-adaptation screenplays ever. Of course the movie was different from the book, else you probably would have had a five-hour film, but the choices made were intelligent ones and in a few cases I thought improvements over the book. Husband like it so much, he read the book. And then he read the next one. Which is sort of amazing since his reading repertoire is usually limited to geeky science and construction magazines. I can list the books he's read in our twelve years of marriage. Here they are:

Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America, Theodora Kroeber. He read this on our honeymoon, perhaps reflecting on his recent state of captivity. Loved it—at the end, he cried sitting on the beach in Maui.

Sacred Hunger, Barry Unsworth. Good for him, I thought. Unsworth is hardly easy reading. He totally dug it but then didn't read another book for years. Seriously.

Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, Diane Wood Middlebrook. He picked this up following an NPR interview with the author. Billy Tipton was a female jazz musician who lived as a man—very successfully it would seem given that he was married to several woman who somehow did not notice this. It's a beautiful and poignant story of the nature of identity and gender, but alas, Billy dies at the end, once again bringing Husband to tears. To make things worse, every time he tried to get my book group to read this, everyone laughed. And we haven't stopped: We're supposed to nominate three books each time, and if we're ever short a choice, we throw in Suits Me and then vote for one of the other two.

Then a couple of summer ago when we were on an Alaskan cruise with the MIL, he read a book about the cruise ship business. It was just great: He regaled us at dinner each night with endless statistics on what it took to run a large cruise ship: how many freezers, how much lettuce, how many prep cooks. Fascinating.

And then he's read the first two books in the Millenium trilogy. And he wants the third one. Badly. He will not wait until paperback. And neither will I, for that matter. These books are a hoot, sort of like smart mind candy. Problem is they keep you up at night and prevent you from peeling yourself off the couch in the day time. When he was on the first and I on the second, Husband and I spend an entire rainy weekend day doing nothing but reading in front of the fire.We are both in love with Lisbeth Salander, that tattooed computer-hacking motorcyle-riding little minx. Did you know Larsson said once that he envisioned her as modern-day Pippi Longstocking? No wonder I love her so much.

But here's the dilemma. Whereas I am perfectly happy to buy the third book in hardback and even let Husband read it first (I'm in the middle of two other books—see the reading list), I am concerned about the ramifications of turning it over to him. His company, like mine, has mandated furloughs, and he has ganged up some of his to stretch Memorial Day weekend into a five-day frenzy of work on . . . (yes!) our house.

So if I give him the book, the furlough may get pissed away. If I withhold it, I may get a front door I can actually walk through and plastic tarps off the front of my house. Maybe. But I want him to be happy. So how about this: I let him have the book only between the hours of 7:00 and 11:00 p.m. During the rest of the time I'm going to have to either hide it or if that fails put it in the car and drive it away. So I can read it.

Questionable choices in children's literature

Because we're pretty seriously into limiting screen time for Sophie (very little television, a few movies, no Nintendo or any of those funny games I don't understand), I went to the local public library and checked out a stack of books on tape when we went on our long driving trip this summer. She got to watch a few dvds, but there's only so much Sponge Bob a mom can take. The tapes were a great alternative that we could all enjoy while watching the scenery at the same time. And I found them useful for filling in the cavernous gaps in Husband's childhood reading.

Here's what we listened to and I returned to the library the other day:

Because of Win-Dixie, Kate DiCamillo
Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt
The Hundred Dresses, Eleanor Estes
The Cricket in Times Square, George Selden
Misty of Chincoteague, Marguerite Henry

Remember those last two? They were two of my favorite books when I was a kid. Sophie loved them too, and they passed many hours on the road.

However, I have still to return this:

Did you ever read this?

It's quite a whopper: 12 disks, totally something like 40 hours of listening. Ok, maybe not quite that much, but we listened to this all the way through Nevada, and we still aren't done. We've got a weekend trip up to Mendocino coming up, and I've saved it for that.

But I have to admit, it's not quite what I thought it would be. I didn't read it as a child, but it's known to be a significant children's classic. It's about a boy and his pet deer. "Great!" I thought. "Sophie likes animals! We all like animals!" And there are a lot of animals in this book in addition to the deer. Thing is though that the humans occupying this story blast them away at a rate leaving a body count comparable to a Schwarzenegger movie. Context is important here: They live the Florida backwoods at the turn of the century and hunt (constantly) for what they eat (yum—bear!). Granted, the boy's father is quite clear that they don't kill for recreation. But when he need panther oil for his rheumatism he thinks "I'll go shoot me a panther!" When he requires grease for his boots, it's a gator he needs. And when they're not hunting, they're fishing. They take a little time out to plant a bit, but all in all, they spend most of their time killing shit.

Here's the funny part. Or really not so funny if you're me. Husband, a very sensitive guy, was disturbed by this story. All the killing upset him. I explained that it's how people lived their lives in that part of the country at that time. Realism, you know.

But now. We are going this weekend to a house party of friends up in Mendocino County. It's their weekend house, and every summer they invite everyone up to camp in their meadow, watch kids swim in the pond and coat themselves in mud, play and listen to music, and EAT. They usually have roast a pig or a lamb on a big spit, which turns all day and is a lot of fun for everyone to watch. But this year our friend informs us that someone is giving him a goat. LIVE. Recognizing that Sophie is a curious, adventurous girl, he wants to know if we would like to come up the night before when they will be BUTCHERING the goat. What I am unclear on is whether the goat will be dead when we arrive. Or will it be walking around being patted by the kids until . . . ? Husband is having the last laugh at how upset I am about this. Animals just don't appear on one's plate, he points out. They have to be killed. Just like in that really long book.


Maybe I can be off picking berries while this happens. And thank goodness there's always lots of vegetarian dishes at this party.

Cody's closes its doors, and a bit of Berkeley is gone

Does it ever seem like you blink and you miss something really important? Last week I did. I had a doctor appointment on Friday and so didn't go to the gym at lunch. And didn't walk past Cody's, a bookstore that has been a Berkeley institution for over fifty years, weathering the tear gas of the free speech movement, surviving being fire bombed for carrying Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, and providing the unique service and service that only a local independent bookstore can.

Cody's is in the background of this shot of the National Guard marching on People's Park during the 1969 riots.

And so I didn't know that on Friday Cody's closed their last store for the last time.

When I read of Cody's demise in the weekend San Francisco Chronicle, I felt like I had been kicked in the gut. I had bought a book there last month (The Little Prince for Sophie), and I had planned a spree to stock up on books for my upcoming vacation. I had a list, but I was too late.

The corny Tony Bennett song tells of leaving one's heart in San Francisco, but I left mine in Berkeley, over a decade ago when I lived in Washington, D.C. and took a trip down the California coast with a girlfriend from college and her husband. I spent my first evening in Berkeley at Cody's listening to Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest; thrower of parties that provided literary inspiration for Allen Ginsburg and Hunter S. Thompson; and the leader of the Merry Pranksters, whose cross country bus trip Tom Wolfe memorialized in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.


Kesey was reading from his book Sailor Song, slugging what was rumored to be peppermint schnapps from a thermos. He was absolutely lit an hour into the reading. And while I'm not one to extol the virtues of substance abuse, it was impossible not to notice that the creative juices were roiling. This was clearly a man on the path of his own destruction, but what a time he was having on the way. He finished his selection from the book (which no one really wanted to hear anyway) and quickly departed to stories of the Pranksters, the bus, old friends, and old times (which everyone wanted to hear). I was just discovering the Beat writers, having spent an afternoon in the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and leaving with a stack of titles including Ginsberg's Howl, Kerouac's On the Road, and a biography of Neal Cassady. Seeing one of their gang in the flesh was an amazing cap. I came back to pick up my heart several months later after securing the job I had interviewed for the day of that reading and then driving myself across the country to settle in a place I could finally call home.


In the first years I lived in Berkeley, a boyfriend and I would spend an evening wandering down Telegraph Avenue from bookstore to bookstore: Cody's, Moe's, Shakespeare. We would stop for a latte and later a taco and consider it a perfect evening. Over the years, my book buying habits changed. I was no longer willing to battle for parking, step over the homeless, and hold my breath through a cloud of patchouli to shop at the Telegraph Avenue location. I patronized their store on the posh, upscale Fourth Street, where I could park next to the building and combine a trip with stops at Benefits to buy fancy cosmetics and the gourmet shop to pick up my favorite black flaked salt and expensive cheese.

The death march was slow: First the Telegraph flagship store, then the Fourth Street store, and finally the much-reduced and only briefly existing Shattuck Avenue store. There are still independent bookstores with selections chosen by an actual person rather than a corporate office and staff who can recommend books and talk with you about them rather than an indifferent teenager who knows only how to work a cash register, but there are fewer all the time. And with the Big Kahuna of our area gone, how long will the others last?

Over the years, everyone who was anyone read at Cody's. The portraits exhibited of authors who passed through included all the greats. Where do those voices go when the independent bookstores are all gone? There are quotes and reviews on amazon.com, but there are no voices of writers reading their works, just the clacking of keys and click of the mouse as people navigate through screens in isolation. That direct connection between writers and readers is gone. Berkeley has gained another empty storefront, with only echoes of those voices that a decade ago read to crowds pushed up against the walls and spilling into the street. With chain retailers and internet sites like amazon.com we've gained cheaper books and free shipping, but look what we've lost.

Thank you Fred Cody, Andy Ross, and Hiroshi Kagawa for fifty-two good years.

Food, wine, and books—not necessarily in that order(well, ok, maybe)

It's so nice to have some help from the blogger gals when I need some inspiration for entertaining! I hosted our book group's monthly meeting at our house last night (I missed the last two meetings because of ski plans and school meetings, so I think this was a trick to get me to attend), and I needed a vegetarian-friendly entree and a dessert.

The Mrs. (a.k.a. One Fabulous Mom) made Blue Cheese Fondue at Easter that I've been wanting to try, and with the beautiful California asparagus available, it seemed like the perfect dish. The host usually sends out an email asking whose coming and announcing what she will be serving so other people can plan their contribution to the meal accordingly. At least one member was worried about the fondue being "too blue." But since it uses half blue and half cambazola, it was just perfect and not too salty the way I would imagine a fondue of just blue would be. I served it with steamed asparagus and broccoli; fresh fennel, scallions, radishes, and tomatoes (my produce market has these lovely romanito that are as good as it gets for such an early tomato); and olive bread. I think they like it.


For dessert, I borrowed a recipe from Gwendomama for Meyer Lemon Custard Cake. I have a Meyer lemon tree in my backyard that is finally producing lots of fruit, so I'm always looking for good lemon recipes. This recipe is similar to a souffle (at least that's how mine turned out), and I wish I would have timed it to be served straight out of the oven. Still, it was quick to prepare and delicious and paired nicely with fresh strawberries.

But, wait! It's a book group, right?? Indeed, it is, and so we didn't just eat and drink (our official name is the FoodIMeanBookGroup, but we should probably be called the WineIMeanFoodIMeanBookGroup). Look at how seriously Jim (the only male member of our group—he's sort of a girlfriend-type guy) is pondering our weighty discussion:


The book up for discussion was Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. You may have heard her recently on NPR flogging her latest book, an exploration of the science of sex. My advice is to skip that one and read Stiff.

The first couple of chapters especially are just hilarious (in the introduction she laments how when the funeral home prepared her mother for burial, they gussied her up such that Roach felt she like had asked for a regular wash and instead received a full detailing). Roach has an astounding curiosity and seemingly no boundaries: There is nothing she will not ask about, and with very few exceptions, if she's heard of something, she wants to see it. And tell you about it. This works well for satisfying the morbid fascination we all have (we're all going to end up dead, right?), although one member (the thoughtful one) noted that her persistent insertion of herself into the story is in some chapters distracting, as if she is continually peeking out from behind the curtains to draw attention back to herself. This could, I imagine, be more of a problem in a book on sex, especially since she offers up herself and her husband as subjects for sex therapy, which she then documents. Sounds like TMI for me! We also had a lot of fun talking about dead people we knew. I'm the only one who has never seen a dead person! Or an x-rated movie. Do I have to get out more, or is that ok??

For our meeting, we'll be discussing Water for Elephants (we decided that last meeting). For the meeting after that we chose from these three:






The winner was The Tortilla Curtain (we've got some T.C. Boyle fans in our ranks). I've read Easter Island and really liked it. I've been wanting to read The Gathering, which seems to be one of those books people either love or hate. I've already read Water for Elephants and liked it a lot.

Until next month!

Blood orange cosmopolitans

Since blood oranges are readily available at my favorite produce market this time of year, the blood orange cosmopolitan seemed like the obvious choice for official ski house drink last weekend.

This recipe is from the Williams-Sonoma Cocktail Parties cookbook, by one of my favorite cookbook authors, Georgeanne Brennan. It has easy and creative recipes for appetizers and drinks, both alcoholic and non. It's one of my favorite choices off my cookbook shelf when I need some inspiration.

Here's the recipe.

BLOOD ORANGE COSMOPOLITANS

1 cup orange vodka (I used lemon vodka because that's what they had at Trader Joe's)

1/4 cup triple sec (I used Patron Citronge, which I like to think of as the poor man's Contrineau: smoother than triple sec but not as expensive as Contrineau. Also available at TG's.)


1/4 fresh squeezed blood orange juice

1/4 cup fresh squeezed lime juice

Serves four.

The recipe directs to shake with ice in a cocktail shaker and then strain into chilled glasses. But we can't be bothered with such niceties on a ski trip. I made a large batch the night before we left in a large pitcher with a lid. I won't tell you how many times I multiplied the recipe because then you'd think we were a bunch of ski drunks. And don't ask what we served these in. You don't want to know.

And the official song of the weekend? Right here.


Sorry I'm not more adept at linking YouTube, but the click is worth it if you're old enough to remember Deep Purple's original version of this song. I have fond memories of rocking out to it in junior high. This video is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

What's a kid to read?

Well, lots of good stuff, according my girlfriend who is a middle school librarian. The American Association for Library Service to Children has issued its 2008 list of notable childrens books.

Books are grouped for the following grade ranges:

Young: Pre-K to 3
Middle: 4 to 6
Older: 5 and up

She writes

This is not yet another best book of the year list based on sales or popularity. I like the diversity of titles and subjects that the ALSC considers before they publish notable books. One way or another, this is a resource in case your kids declare they can't find  anything to read or you find yourself (like me) hiding books because you can not read that insipid American Girl Doll book  one more time.

Amen to that.

The January meeting of the FoodIMeanBook Group

And that's really what we call it because we are sometimes confused about why we really meet: To share a potluck dinner, drink wine, and gab? Or to do all those things and also discuss a book? We have all been friends for a long time and in our busy lives don't see each other as much as we wish we could, so there's always some catching up to do, which can be a little distracting from the task of discussing a book. But we try. And most of the time most of us read the book. And we even have our own website, which tracks what we're reading and have read, the books we didn't pick, and who's hosting.

We meet the second Thursday of each month (skipping usually December and August) at a different person's house. The host provides a main course, and everyone else fills in the rest. I always bring a dessert. This month's baking adventure was a Boston cream pie, a little messy to my eye but quite delicious:



I won't share the recipe because I grabbed recipes for the three components—the cake, the pastry cream filling, and the chocolate glaze—from three different places. My inspiration to make this came from the pastry cream I made for my New Year's dessert, which to cool quickly I popped in the freezer . . . and then left there. I had to make another batch of pastry cream at the party when I arrived, but I thought that I could use the batch that got left home for another dessert. Wrong. Did you know that you cannot freeze pastry cream? When it thawed it looked sort of like crumbly scrambled eggs—very nasty. Not the end of the world though. I made yet another batch while the cake was baking.

And in the course of all this I did learn some interesting things about Boston Cream Pie. I had assumed that Boston Cream Pie is to Boston what Canadian bacon is to Canada (I understand Canadians call the latter ham). On the contrary, BCP was first concocted in 1855 at Boston's Parker House Hotel. It's thought the early versions were baked in pie pans since those were more readily available than cake pans, hence the name pie for what is obviously a cake. It has been designated the official state dessert of Massachusetts. (MA is way ahead of CA: we don't have an official state dessert, whereas they have not only a dessert but a muffin, a bean, a cookie, and a donut. But give us time—we're a relatively young state.)

But enough about my dessert and on to the books . . .

We discussed David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004. (Notice how Man has snuck in there? Didn't we all used to call it just the Booker Prize??) All of us who read the book liked it, with some of us thinking is was one of the best things we have ever read. Really. It's not an easy read, but it's not impossible either. The book is a group of stories about six individuals who live in different times in history ranging from a voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850 to a young islander living after the fall of civilization. In between are a European composer living between the world wars, a Reagan-era journalist, an aging British publisher, and a genetically modified clone. The first half of the first story comes first with the last half of it being last, so that the stories sandwich each other like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 5 4 3 2 1. Reading "up" in the first half of the book is often slow-going, and it takes a while to manage the enormous gear-shift necessary to engage in each new story, but the ride down the other side is breathtaking—I could not put it down and, even though it is a long book, I was sad for it to end. Mitchell is a true vituouso. It's just unbelievable that someone could write in such wide ranging genres with such amazing facility. We enjoyed discussing which of the storylines we like the best. I loved the one about the composer, but I was really touched by the story of the clone, which surprised me because I usually turn up my nose at anything resembling science fiction.



After we finish discussing the chosen book, it's time for what is often the most entertaining part of the evening: the double elimination vote. It's so exciting!! Here's how we do it: The host chooses three books to nominate for next time, usually something she has read or at least knows enough about to recommend and provide a short description. The host presents the choices, passes them around, discussion ensues, and it's time for Round 1. Everyone gets two votes: you can vote for two different books or put both your votes on a single book. In Round 2 we vote for the two books from Round 1 with the most votes, with everyone getting one vote.

Nominations for our next book were (in what can only be described as the most schitzophrenic slate ever)

The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang
Aloft, by Chang-rae Lee

And the winner was . . . Aloft! Which I've already read (a wonderful book, as are his other books A Gesture Life and Native Speaker), so I've got what I call a "free read" for next month. I've already started David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, so I'll actually get to finish it before there is another book group book to read (voting for and nominating books I've already read is an old trick of mine).



So that's it for the FoodIMeanBook group until next month! Thanks for hosting, Jen!

What I think about what I'm reading

My annual bout of pneumonia and the Christmas holidays have provided considerable time for my favorite activity—reading. I've plowed through several books, all of which I can recommend.

Lovely Bones. Many thanks to those who recommended this book in spite of its upsetting subject (the murder of a young girl, told from her point of view). As many predicted, once past the initial descriptions of the crime, the story is told in a readable way, even for the mother of a young girl. And although the premise of this story—the girl narrating events on earth and in the afterlife from her position in heaven—is completely contrary to my atheist viewpoint, I appreciated the poignant and engaging account of how a family pieces itself back together in the wake of such a tragedy. Perhaps what I liked best was the message that healing was not in vengeance but in the ability to move on and continue to love. But as the mother of an only child, it was impossible for me to ignore that the parent who was able to do these things most successfully found the ability to do so in his love for his remaining children. I only have one, so what would I do? Go out and adopt more—immediately?? If I had to bury my only, I think I'd just as soon curl up in the earth and rest with her, and if (as in the book) she were lost forever, so would be I. Perhaps there's more to the "Heir and a spare" than one thinks.

An Unfinished Season. I moved on to this, an account of a young man's coming of age in a world largely not of his own making. The protagonist is a nineteen-year-old from a privileged family attempting to find his way as he bridges the high society of Chicago's north shore (a insightful foreign outsider refers to the debutante parties around which his nigh time life revolves as "children's parties") and the downtown office of a city newspaper, where his family connections have landed him a summer job. Although a very different book from Lovely Bones, I again appreciated the insights to adult relationships of those younger. With less bias and baggage, their views of these complex and muddled relationships are often refreshingly clear if not very sad.

Everyman. I've listened to interviews of Philip Roth on NPR and have long meant to read something by him. Everyman seemed like a good introduction. It was a good pick up from the Ward Just book on the introspection of the aging process. In Just's novel, the son observes the changes in his father as the father ages and inadequacies are admitted and compromises are acknowledged. Everyman gives a front-row seat to a man coming to terms with his many failings but also the reality of those around him and their sometimes unfair assessment of his character (what are you in the end—the sum of your intentions or you effect on others?). The main character observes that "old age isn't a batle, old age is a massacre," and portrays a completely understandable picture of someone embracing and coming to terms with their end.

Water for Elephants. I'm often suspicious of books that have had this much commercial success (in my view, some of the most appalling crap ends up on the best seller lists), but I picked up this one anyway. I started in on it this afternoon in the car (I can read on completely straight roads if I don't look up) and was alarmed to hear my mother-in-law exclaim from the back seat "Oh, I've read that! I thought it was just delightful!" "Delightful," I must explain, is my mother-in-law's equivalent for "totally rocks." For her, nothing gets any better than "delightful." And books she has thought totally delightful have included such things as the intrigues of Episcopalian ministers in various countryside communities. But I have to say, she is on the money on this one. The story is told by an irascible nursing home resident reminiscing about his youth as part of a traveling depression-era circus following the death of his parents and his consequent departure from an Ivy League veterinary college. I was hard-pressed to describe to my daughter the phenomenon of the freak show, which figures significantly into any circus story of this era, but I guess it's evidence that we've evolved a little if we no longer find gaping at human misfortune acceptable entertainment, right? It reminded me of the conversation Sophie and I had on our Alaskan cruise last summer about the original policy of women and children first into the life boats. She asked "What about Daddy? Didn't they think that Daddy was important too??" I explained "Yes, they thought Daddy was important, but they thought that Daddy would be better able to survive without a lifeboat than Mommy." "Why??" I explained that they were obviously confused about the difference between men and women back then—both their worth and their ability. In light of how much we're clearly confused about these days, it's a relief to see we've made a little progress, isn't it?

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

So since I have fallen seriously ill before my new shipment of books has arrived, I've had to make do with something else on my nightstand. A girlfriend gave me Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation ages ago, and whereas I agreed it was an excellent and exciting topic, I consistently put it aside in favor of some work of nonfiction, usually assigned by my book group. But I'm so glad I picked it up. There is so much I like about it, starting with the tale on the back of the dust jacket:

A panda walks in a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a poorly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

The author's point, of course, is that punctuation, rather than being ornamental embellishment meant to confuse people, influences meaning in important ways. She uses an analogy with good manners to illustrate the point that it often does this in ways that are subtle:

Truly good manner are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves.

What's not to like about that? Subsequent chapters then take on a piece of punctuation each and dissect what all has gone wrong in historical and contemporary usage. Examples like this ensue:

A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman: without her, man is nothing.

The author, a British journalist and BBC writer, enlivens this all with comments only a writer of that milieu can produce, for example

Look at that sentence fly. Amazing. The way it stays up like that.

Both words and punctuation spring to life in the most amusing way. I'm feeling better already!

What's next?

To read, that is. In a major personal victory, I have finished David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, a long and fairly complex tome that makes a mockery out of traditional narrative structure but was nontheless one of the best books I've read in years. This was a selection of my book group, and two months since choosing it for our monthly read, the only person who had finished it was Girlfriend D., who read it last summer over her summer break from her job as a school librarian (an unfair advantage, I think). The group voted an extension for it, and we'll discuss is at our January meeting (we skip December) along with the new book Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I've already read Middlesex and remember enough to fake my way through a book group meeting, especially after everyone's had enough wine, so I have what I call a "free pick" for my next book. Whoohoo!!

A local independent bookstore, A Great Good Place for Books, has offered Sophie's school a donation of 20% of all sales for people who give the school's name. Pretty generous, no? We're especially happy to have this promotion since we essentially fired Scholastic Books because we are sick of the crap they sell (including toys that accompany books—as if books aren't enough themselves) and their poor service. So I'm getting ready to put in a big order. Here's what I've got so far:

Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold (I've been avoiding this for obvious reasons but am taking a friend's word that I'll enjoy it in spite of the subject matter.)

Holidays on Ice, David Sedaris

Everyman, Philip Roth

Ghostwritten, David Mitchell

Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen

An Unfinished Season, Warren Just

That's enough to keep me out of trouble for ages! I'm also ordering a book for Big S. for Christmas:

The House of Mondavi, Julia Flynn Siler

And I'm waiting on word from my sister and sister-in-law on books that their kids would like for gifts. (Books are so easy to wrap, you know.)

I hope I get my book soon! I feel a serious chest cold coming on that should require several days of convelescence.

Getting out the Christmas books

Sophie is home sick from school. So she's wrapped up in a blanket on the couch, with a box of tissues near by. I've built her a fire, and we got out the Christmas books, many of which she can actually read to herself this year. Here's a line-up of our favorites.

Leave a comment and let me know what's your favorite Christmas (or other winter holiday) book. Any suggestions on books for us to add to our collection?

















My favorite is this one. It cracks me up every time.



And this year, we added this to the collection:


Unlike me, Olivia is a gal who knows how to accessorize. She would have done well at the Lori Bonn sale.