TweetI’ve started a new collection of cookbooks. The Beautiful Cookbooks truly are beautiful, as well as informative. These are oversized coffeetable books about various regions in the world. So far, I have the American, Texas, Asia, and Provence cookbooks. Each of these cookbooks has historic information about the region, including its people, culture and food. [...]

It puts a lot of things in perspective, and makes you look at them a different way. You don’t necessarily agree with the viewpoints, but you can see where they’re coming from. Combined with a twisty plot line, well-developed and believable characters, and shocker ending that isn’t sappy sweet, it all makes for a great novel.

Food is, of course, the most basic of our needs beyond water and air (and toilet paper!). Isn’t it funny how we take these simple things for granted? You breathe in and out, you pull on the roll, you turn on the tap, you pop a Lean Cuisine into the microwave, or answer, “Yes”, to “Fries with that?” Easy, automatic, instant. But of course, it’s not. All of these things, with the exception of air, require a complicated combination of infrastructure and workforce to get to us. We only think about it when the system breaks down (imagine a toilet paper factory worker’s strike!), or when we pay our bills.

TweetI found this book at the free store and almost didn’t take it. It looked kind of cool, a hand with candy sprinkles all over it. But the description, about a man with an addiction who goes through rehab didn’t sound that exciting. I’ve read a few of those, and they’re mostly over-Christiany, “feel sorry [...]

TweetI’m always interested when I see an “Oprah’s Book Club” seal on a novel, and I’ve never yet been disappointed. They are always haunting, thought-provoking, realistic stories. Once again, I was not disappointed. The story is from the point of view of the 14 year old daughter (Connie) of a Vermont midwife (Sibyl). The girl [...]

TweetI just found a great program to earn some quick money. Most of us know that we can make money on E-bay or Amazon, but that takes creating an account, fees, dealing with customers,and so on. Cash4books will pay you for your books, and pay the shipping. You just type in the ISBN number, and [...]

TweetThis is one of those rare perfect books that I will want to keep forever to loan out to friends in need of enlightenment or encouragement. It has everything: a good storyline; characters that are real, complex and that you would want to meet in real life; it’s funny; it talks about the Northwest US [...]

TweetThis is a neat little book that I read almost in one day. I found a lot of myself in it. Some of you may think that this statement is odd. After all, it’s about a British girl growing up in a small town under a severely religious, perhaps deranged family, to find out that [...]

TweetI was already interested in the book based on a friend’s recommendation, but then I opened it up and found it was written by the same author as The Kite Runner and I was hooked. I loved both of these books. Both novels are about Afghanistan, but tell a different type of story. The Kite [...]

TweetHave you heard about the new “Kindle” from Amazon? This is a great little product, and I just love it! It’s a little device, about the size of a paperback novel, that let’s you download and read books, newspapers and magazines, as well as audio books, word files and more from your PC, etc. It [...]