The Beautiful Cookbook SeriesI’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 [...]

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.

Movie Review: Thank You for SmokingOnce again, I started watching a movie, expecting a documentary (this time about the evils of the tobacco industry). Instead, I was given a delightful thinking comedy movie about the tobacco industry, lobbyists, spin doctors, and the sales industry.
Nick Naylor is the spokesman for the tobacco industry. [...]

Movie Review: WALL-EI finally got the chance to watch this, and I was very impressed. This has to be the cutest robot movie I’ve ever seen, and it is one of the best movies for kids that I’ve seen in a long time.  Rated G – now how often do you see that anymore?  Truly [...]

Whale Rider Movie ReviewWhale Rider is a lovely little movie about a rural Maori town in New Zealand and their search for a leader. It’s about the struggle for a little girl to be accepted, about the struggle between tradition and modern ideas, fulfilling your dreams, and about love within a family and within a [...]

Movie Review: The Science of SleepI started watching this movie, expecting a documentary from BBC or the Discovery Channel about sleep and dreams. It was definitely not that, but something much better. A Michel Gondry film. The director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, many of Bjork’s music videos, and several other amazing works, [...]

Movie Review: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless MindI absolutely love to see Jim Carey in a serious role. I think that Kate Winslet is beautiful. Charlie Kaufman (screenwriter for Adaptation and Being John Malkovich among others) is brilliant. And I think that Michel Gondry is an absolute genius. It also has Elijah Wood and Kirsten [...]

A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Kite Runner by Khaled HosseiniI 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 [...]

The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan
I’ve just finished reading The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan. As with The Joy Luck Club, I was very impressed and found myself lost in the realism and emotion of the story.
As with many of her books, Tan brings in the elements of the mother-daughter relationship, and old China [...]

Plain and Simple: A Woman’s Journey to the Amish by Sue BenderI loved this little book (just 152 pages, I read it in a few hours). It was not only a delight to read, but also aesthetically pleasing and nice to hold in my hands.
It is an autobiography, but also a spiritual book. Although Sue [...]