Reads: The Book Thief

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

Yet another book that made me cry at the end! I can be such a sap sometimes.

This book is classified in bookstores as Young Adult, but I would put it towards the upper age range of young adult (upper teens) or adult since it deals with a pretty heavy subject matter and is peppered with the occassional curses. (protect those virgin ears!)

Eats: Caffe Tosca

Caffe Tosca     

15 North Street Hingham, MA

 781-740-9400

Website: http://www.eatwellinc.com/caffetosca/

Last Saturday, Mister Mango and I met up mid-day to go to the Hingham Farmers Market.  We picked up some peache and cucumbers and then headed up the road a bit for lunch at Caffe Tosca.  It was a gorgeous day, so we sat out on the patio with most of the other patrons. Caffe Tosca only offers their lunch menu seasonally. Caffe Tosca is the sister restaurant of the more upscale Tosca, which is directly across the street.  Caffe Tosca serves country Italian food. Their lunch menu contains a selection of soups, salads, pastas, sandwiches and a few entrees.

SmokeHouse Chicken Panini

Challenge: Book Awards II Challenge

 I may not have been around for the first Book Awards Challenge, but I am here now for the Book Awards II Challenge (hosted by 3M) .

The basic rules: read 10 award winning books in10 months (deadline (June 2009). The list must include winners from at least 5 different awards.

My tentative starter list at this point (again in no particular order and some of these overlap with the 1% challenge list):

1:  How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman (Booker Prize 1994)

2: American Gods by Neil Gaiman (Bram Stoker Award 2001)

3: The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov (Hugo Award 1973)

4: Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (Nebula Award 1992)

5: A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler (Pulitzer Prize 1993)

6: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (Pulitzer Prize 1972)

7: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (Spur Award 1985)

8: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami  (World Fantasy Award 2006)

9: The Master by Colm Tóibín (IMPAC Dublin 2006)

These are all books that I already have on my shelf. The rest of the list ist yet to be decided.

Reads: Peony in Love

Peony in Love: A Novel by Lisa See

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I give Lisa See’s latest novel  3.5 stars, but since goodreads doesn’t support 1/2 stars AND I am feeling generous, I will round it up to 4. I read See’s novel “Snow Flower & the Secret Fan” last year for another book club and overall enjoyed that one more.

Good things about Peony in Love:

1) Obviously well researched on 17th century China, in particular the lives of women of that time.

2) A new euphenism for S-E-X: Clouds and rain

3) Made me happy to have been born in 20th century America where I can wear my size 8 kitten heels without being ashamed of the size of my GIGANTIC feet.

Not so good things, in my opinion:

1) The first part of the book was a bit slow going with all its talk of the plot of the opera The Peony Pavilion.

2) I never really connected with the main character Peony she seemed boring and dull… forever mooning for her one true love that she met for all of 5 minutes.

3) I felt See kept pounding it into my skull how much Peony’s life followed the plot of The Peony Pavilion. I get the point already!

View all my reviews.

Reading Challenge: 1% Well-Read Challenge

The 1% Well-Read Challenge   is hosted by 3M at 1morechapter.

The goal of this challenge is to read 10 books in 10 months from the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. For you non-math people, 10 out of 1001 is approximately 1%, hence the title. The challenge will run from May 1, 2008 through February 28, 2009. You may change your list at any time and cross-posting to other challenges is permitted. The only requirement is that your ten book choices must be on the ‘1001 List‘.

I’ve already read 142 from the list before starting this challenge.   That’s 14% for those of you calculating along at home!  Why not do this challenge and bring that number up to a nice almost even 15%?!? See my ‘1001′ shelf on GoodReads for my ratings and reviews of the ones that I’ve read thus far in my illustrious reading career.  I’m a little late getting started with this challenge… but hey, I read wicked, wicked fast.  Plus, these 10 books probably won’t rot my brain quite as much as my self-imposed Summer of Fluff-Reads Challenge. (ugh!)

I picked my 10 (and 15+ alternates) from books I have sitting unread on my to be read shelf. So here are my selected 10 in no particular order:

1. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson

2. Junkie – William Burroughs

3. The Razor’s Edge – William Somerset Maugham

4.  V. – Thomas Pynchon

5. Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey

6. The Music of Chance – Paul Auster

7. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving

8. Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter

9. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami

10.  The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago

My 10 books for the challenge

What’s Cooking: Pasta with Shrimp, Spinach & Tomatoes

Mr. Me requested shrimp pasta for dinner… so I went out to the garden to pick some tomatoes and basil. I had found a recipe for Penne with Shrimp, Tomatoes and Basil on epicurious.com that I modified a bit based on our tastes (read as: more garlic and red pepper).

The tomatoes and basil I picked from our garden and used in the pasta.

 

Reads: Cooking for Mr. Right

Cooking for Mr. Right by Susan Volland

rating: 4 of 5 stars
First off, a little background info…thanks to GoodReads and my obsessive-compulsive need to rate every book I’ve read and list every book that I own but have not read yet, I realized I had 125+ books that I need to read. Such a chore, right?

Well, I set a goal for myself at the beginning of the summer that I would try to make a good dent in that number by reading all the chick-lit and/or trashy/puff/brain-candy books that I had sitting on my to-read shelf.  It was all fun and quick reading, until about 2 weeks ago, my brain rotted from ingesting all that brain candy. I started to yearn for more literary reads…but I HAD to keep marching towards my goal.

“Cooking for Mr. Right” by Susan Volland had the honor of being the final book on my shelf that I needed to read to reach the goal. It was a pretty quick read and I read it in about 2 days. “Cooking for Mr. Right” is a chick lit novel whose main character is Kate, a 20-something sous-chef living in Seattle. She’s recently broken up with her longtime boyfriend Gaston and is not happy with her job at a local restaurant. When she finds out that Gaston has become engaged to another woman, Kate is determined to win him back. She cooks up lots of schemes and meals to try to woo him back.

Take-Out Talk: Indian Delight

Indian Delight

428 Washington Street Weymouth, MA 02188

web site: http://www.indiandelightrestaurant.net

Due to the unceasing headache that I’d been battling all day I wasn’t up for cooking Sunday dinner.  So, I had the mister stop off at Indian Delight to pick up some take out. 

We have eaten in the dining room at Indian Delight a few times. They must do a steady take-out business since I’ve never seen more than 2 parties in the dining room in the several years that they’ve been open. It is kind of awkward… I always wait for crickets to start chirping or something to fill the silence. As far take-out goes, you can do much worse than Indian Delight in Weymouth.   Indian Delight is something different than the plethora of Pizza and Chinese joints. It is one of the few Indian restaurants on the South Shore.