Sunday Salon: Rainy Day Reads

After a night out dining at The Savant Project, I woke up to the sound of raindrops on the skylight and rolled out of bed a little late (for me) this morning. A little late for me is 9 AM…I know….sad.

We toughed the rain and went to one of our favorite breakfast spots where I went the light route by just having a bowl of fresh fruit. After breakfast, we went to check out some appliances, fixtures, and tiles for our upcoming bathroom/laundry room project. I am thrilled that it is becoming more and more real. The contractor is stopping by next weekend to give us an updated estimate.

Now that my husband is off at work I am catching up on some emails and postings and also doing some spring cleaning.  A bit later I plan on curling up and reading some more of my book club’s selection Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. Mister Pip is the ideal escapist read for book lovers. In this novel, the residents of a tropical aisle are distracted from the war around them by reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.  The book is a very quick read and I am tearing through it. If I ignore my housecleaning, I just may finish reading it today.

Sunday Salon: Dim Sum & then some…

I started the day off by meeting with 6 others for some Dim Sum in Quincy. It has been a couple of years since I last had dim sum so I was looking forward to it.  Some of our group were not the most adventurous eaters so we didn’t try that many dishes and walked out of there with a bill of only $30 and change. Pretty affordable!  Next time, I will be taking my husband since he loves to join me on my dining adventures.

And now I am back in my cozy little house where I did a bit of work and then finished the last 40 pages of The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien. This was an odd little book that counts for two different reading challenges I am participating in: the LOST challenge (books referenced by the TV show) and the 1% Well Read Challenge (books from the 1001 list).

My next book that I will start reading later today is My Life in France by Julia Child. I checked this out of the library along with about 9 other books. Not to mention the 4 library books that I already had sitting at home. Yes, I have a book addiction. There is a slim chance that I will finish all of the books by the time they are due. But, seriously, why do I do this to myself?? I guess that I am just a life long overachiever… Too bad that I don’t always succeed.

The rest of the books I currently have checked out of the library are:

• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
• The Quiet American by Graham Greene
• Travels with Alice by Calvin Trillin
• Candy and Me: A Love Story by Hilary Liftin
• That they may face the rising sunby John McGahern
• The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher
• In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster
• The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
• The Spy Who Came in from the Coldby John Le Carre
• Slow Man by JM Coetzee
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
• In the Forest by Edna O’Brien
• Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas
• Vanishing Point by David Markson

sigh.

So what are you reading/doing today?

Sunday Salon: The Big 200 & My Fave 100

This is officially my 200th post on this blog. I started this blog late last summer as a way to keep track of my reading and cooking experiences. I’ve joined several online cooking groups as part of this blog and enjoy the challenge of trying my hand at new recipes. Some have been more successful than others. I also love discovering new books by reading other book blogs.

I especially love it when I get to combine my loves for cooking and reading by reading a book & cooking a dish inspired by it.  I have to make an effort to do this more often.

As a nod to all things “hundred”, here’s my 100 all-time favorite reads (in alpha order by title):

1. After the Quake by Haruki Murakami
2. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
3. All Souls: A Family Story from Southie by Michael Patrick MacDonald
4. All the Names by Jose Saramago
5. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
6. Animal Farm by George Orwell
7. Bird by Bird  by Anne Lamott
8. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
9. Blindness by Jose Saramago
10. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
11. Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
12. Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond
13. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
14. Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
15. Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber
16. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
17. Dance, Dance, Danceby Haruki Murakami
18. Day by Elie Wiesel
19. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
20. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
21. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
22. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
23. Emma by Jane Austen
24. Empire Falls by Richard Russo
25. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
26. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
27. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
28. Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie McDonald
29. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
30. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
31. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
32. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe by Fannie Flagg
33. Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
34. The Giver by Lois Lowry
35. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
36. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
37. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown
38. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
39. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
40. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling
41. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
42. The Hero’s Walk by Anita Rau Badami
43. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
44. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
45. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
46. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
47. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
48. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
49. The Life Before Her Eyes by Laura Kasischke
50. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
51. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
52. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
53. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
54. Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde
55. Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra
56. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
57. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
58. Middlemarch by George Eliot
59. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
60. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
61. The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff
62. My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki
63. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
64. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
65. Night by Elie Weisel
66. 1984 by George Orwell
67. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
68. Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell
69. Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
70. The Omnivore’s Dilemna by Michael Pollan
71. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
72. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
73. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
74. Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross
75. The Rice Mother by Rani Manicka
76. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
77. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
78. Snake Charmer by Sanjay Nigam
79. The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Towards Perfection by Michael Ruhlman
80. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
81. Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
82. The Stand by Stephen King
83. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
84. Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl
85. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
86. Tess of the D’ubervilles by Thomas Hardy
87. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
88. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
89. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
90. To Kill a Mockingbrid by Harper Lee
91. Transplanted Man by Sanjay Nigam
92. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
93. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
94. Watership Down by Richard Adams
95. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
96. Wicked by Gregory Maguire
97. A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
98. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
99. Wonder When You’ll Miss Me by Amanda Davis
100. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle

Are any of these amongst your favorite reads?

Sunday Salon: Spring, is that you??

So, after a several weeks of snow storm upon snow storm and day after day of below freezing temperatures, yesterday was a relatively balmy 45 degrees. And today it is supposed to reach 50 degrees. I sit hear listening to the sound of melted snow gurgling down the gutter drains from my roof. A couple of days ago, I actually saw a robin. This is WAY too early for robins to be back in this area. I hope he stays safe and warm. Perhaps he knows something that I don’t know.

I am inspired by the weather today to do some spring cleaning. I am totally ambitious and  planning to:

•  empty out and reorganize my kitchen cabinets
• reorganize my cook book shelf, which looks like it is about to explode
• put away the last of my Xmas decorations (I know, I know, what a slacker!)
• pack up clothes that I don’t wear anymore to give to charity

We’ll see how much of this I actually get done.

While cleaning, I can listen to a little more of my audio book. I am currently listening to T.C. Boyle’s Drop Cityon CD. I am almost halfway through. This is the longest audio book that I’ve listened to thus far…16 whole CD’s. I am on disk 8 and really liking it so far. The story takes place in the States during the time of the Vietnam War. A commune of hippies is forced by local authorities to pick up and leave California. They chose to relocate to Alaska…. and this is as far as I’ve gotten.

In the middle of this flurry of cleaning I will also start my book club book, The Monsters of Templeton. My book club meeting is on Wednesday and I haven’t started reading the book yet. I’ve heard great things about this book and it’s been on my to read list for awhile. Must.Finish.Book.Before.BookClub

How’s the weather where you’re at and what are your big plans for the day?

Sunday Salon: January Reading Round-up

And so ends the first month of 2009. I read an interesting variety of books this month.  I made a little bit of progress on my reading challenges. The list below links to my reviews. My favorite reads of the month were the first 2 that I read: Nights at the Circus and Supercapitalism. What were your favorite reads in January??

1. Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
2. Supercapitalism by Robert Reich
3. Rasputin’s Daughter by Robert Alexander
4. House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
5. Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O’Nan
6. Talking with My Mouth Full: Crab Cakes, Bundt Cakes and other Kitchen Stories by Bonny Wolf
7. A Fortunate Age by Joanna Smith Rakoff

---

Reading Challenge Progress:

1% Well-Read Challenge
GOAL: read 10 books in 10 months from the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list
DEADLINE: February 28, 2009
COMPLETED SO FAR:

1. Junky by William S. Burroughs — September ‘08
2. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath — September ‘08
3. The Accidental  by Ali Smith — October ‘08
4. Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons — October ‘08
5. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami — October ‘08
6. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka — October ‘08
7. Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion — November ‘08
8. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain — November ‘08
9. The Music of Chance by Paul Auster — December ‘08
10. Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho — December ‘08
11. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle — December ‘08
12. Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter — January ‘09
13. House of Mirth by Edith Wharton — January ‘09

REMAINING: COMPLETED!  –into bonus round: +3 books

Book Awards II Challenge
GOAL: read 10 award winning books in 10 months
DEADLINE: June 2009
COMPLETED SO FAR:

1. American Gods by Neil Gaiman– September ‘08 –WON: Hugo Award, Nebula Award and Bram Stoker Award
2. The Accidental by Ali Smith — October ‘08 – WON: Whitbread Prize for Best Novel
3. Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons — October ‘08 — WON: Hugo Award for Other Form
4. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami — October ‘08 — WON: World Fantasy Award 2006
5. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz — November ‘08 – WON: Pulitzer Prize 2008
6. Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter — January ‘09 — WON: James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction

REMAINING: 4 more books to read in 5 months

Well-Seasoned Reader Challenge

GOAL: read at least 3 books about food/cooking/travel/culture

DEADLINE: March 2009
COMPLETED SO FAR:

1. Talking with My Mouth Full: Crab Cakes, Bundt Cakes and other Kitchen Stories by Bonny Wolf — January ‘09

REMAINING: 2 more books to read in 2 months

LOST Books Challenge

GOAL: read 5 books mentioned or alluded to on the show LOST

DEADLINE: 2010 (series finale)
COMPLETED SO FAR: none

REMAINING: 5 more books to read in 1 year +

Sunday Salon: Another Snowy Sunday

Surprise, surprise!!  Another weekend and another snow storm. It seems like it has been snowy on a lot of recent Sundays…from late December to just last week.  We’ve been stuck with arctic temperatures all week. It was 5 degrees out (according to my car) the other morning. Brrr!  At least today isn’t that cold. Snow isn’t so beautiful when tracked in all over your hardwood floors leaving salty footprints everywhere. So, after doing a little cleaning of the floors this morning, I am now settled in my comfy chair ready to do some reading.

I am hoping to read a little bit each of both of the books that I have in progress.  I am reading an advanced readers copy of A Fortunate Age: A Novel by Joanna Smith Rakoff and The Lambs of London: A Novel by Peter Ackroyd.  I just started Lambs of London yesterday. This work of historical fiction follows siblings Mary and Charles Lamb and their love for literature, especially Shakespeare.  So far, I am having mixed feelings about it. Hopefully, it will grab my interest more as I get further into the book.

I am about half way through A Fortunate Age. This debut novel is about a group of friends who met each other while at college at Oberlin and follows them through the nineties and early 2000’s as the get their footing in the world of life after college. I find it interesting since I graduated from college in the nineties. The  characters are entering the working world and marriage at about the same time that I was.  I am hoping to read about 60 more pages of it today and post some thoughts on it on the Barnes & Nobles First Look discussion board. They started the Fortunate Age discussion there last week, so I am a bit late. Oops!

Along with my reading, I am also going to cook some spicy beef chili and bake my Berry Surprise Cake. I love to cook on Sundays as I have a good stretch of undisturbed time of me in my little kitchen. Snowy Sundays are even better for cooking & baking!  Who wants to come over for dinner??

Sunday Salon: Stuck in the Snow

Another week, another snow storm.

I actually quite like snow. It’s very beautiful and a calm silence falls over the world when it’s snowing out…at least until the snow plows rumble by.

I was supposed to have a book club meeting early this afternoon to discuss Last Night at the Lobsterby Stewart O’Nan, but we’ve pushed it off to 2 weeks from today due to the weather. I am keeping my fingers crossed that there will not be another big snow storm on that weekend. It is kind of ironic that a snow storm has delayed our discussion about a book where one of the driving forces in the story is a snow storm. sigh. So goes life.

Due to the snow storm I now have more time to read a book for another book club: Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life by Robert B. Reich. Reich served as secretary of labor during Clinton’s presidency. In Supercapitalism,  Reich discusses the dynamic between democracy and capitalism.  I am about 80 pages into it now (~225 pages total in the book) and am finding it interesting and informative.  This is far from the typical sort of book that my book club reads and I heard a few members grumbling about the selection. I hope that I am not the only one who ends up reading it!

I will also finish listening to the unabridged audio version of House of Mirth today while I am folding laundry and preparing dinner. I am such a cultured little wife.  ;)

What are your plans for this fine Sunday?

Sunday Salon: Winter Wonderland??

So, last week at this time, I was lounging on a beach on Anguilla. And now…

I am pretty much trapped in my house in the snow. It started snowing Saturday morning, shortly after my husband left for a 2 week trip to Asia.  Now I am home alone (insert Macauly Culkin image here). Saturday night some snow removal angels plowed and shoveled my driveway and front walk. I have no idea who these guys were, but thank you whoever you were.

But, it was still snowing and blowing out, so by Sunday morning, there was a blanket of snow on the driveway and walkway.  My husband had asked one of his workers to stop by and shovel me out on Sunday, so his guy came and did that and without my knowing it, must’ve taken my snow shovel with him!  Either that or he put it somewhere that later got covered with a snow drift. *sigh*

And since it is still snowing, my driveway and walkway are once again covered, and since I have no shovel anymore there is nothing that I can do about it, so…. I’M TRAPPED!   (I wish those snow angels would come back) 

Since I am trapped, I am going to spend the whole day cleaning, doing some holiday baking and hopefully finish up 2 of the books that I am currently reading: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle and The Boat by Nam Le.  Reading and stuffing my face with freshly based cookies: a good way to cozy up on a snowy day.

And sorry library, but my books are going to be at least a day late, since I can’t get out of my driveway. Oops!

Sunday Salon: Reading Rants

No, I am not ranting about reading…I am reading rants. Or more specifically, I am reading Waiter Rant. I am reading it for the Food for Thought book club which is an on-line book club with a food focus.  I have about 100 pages left and if I am lucky will finish it today or tomorrow morning. So far I am enjoying the book. Although I have never personally worked as a waiter, I have several friends who have or still do. I’ve heard plenty of tales from them and there are some similar ones in Waiter Rant.

I am also reading some of Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees. I am not finding it to be a very captivating book. I am about halfway through and am starting to feel tempted to abandon it. BUT… I am not a book abandon-er!!! Gah! I can only remember twice in history where I’ve given up on a book because I wasn’t liking it. I typically stick it out to the bitter end. I will probably stick this one out too. sigh. I can be such a sucker for punishment.

mango missives week in review:

• Book Review: Don’t Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff
• Cooking: Abrorio Rice Pudding
• Cooking: Turkey & White Bean Chili
• Book Review: A Carnivore’s Inquiry by Sabina Murray
• Cooking: Spicy Southwestern Slaw
• Book Review:  Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion
• Cooking: Perfection Pound Cake
• Cooking: Chicken Piccata

Sunday Salon: Book Swap

Yesterday was a busy day. I hosted a book swap gathering at my house. I’ve hosted a couple of other book swaps in years past. The basic concept is that everyone brings books that they’ve finished reading and are willing to part ways with.  We have some snacks and chat and browse through the books that others have brought.  Everyone picks out some “new-for-them” books and takes them home. We then donate the leftover books to the local library or Salvation Army.

Yesterday, was a rainy and windy fall day…but 14 ladies ventured out to my humble abode with their bags of books. Okay, Amanda brought a whole Rubbermaid tote of books, but most people brought one or  two grocery bags of books. I had two big boxes of completed books under my bed. I dragged those out, brushed off the dust bunnies and brought them down to join their book swap brethren. We had  mountains of books to browse through, everything from mass market romance and mysteries to past Oprah Book Club Selections, classics to modern lit.  

Thankfully, (for my storage space shortage) I gave away more books than I took as “new for me”. I ended up with 10 new books and gave away several dozen. Later today I will be taking a trip to the library down the road to donate the books that no one selected.

Now, its time to start building up my pile of completed books for the next book swap.