labwriter: 2011, thread eight

Dear Old Jack, age 12

I love this photo because it absolutely captures Jack's personality. He's always been such a dignified soul, even when he was a puppy. He's also very smart. He knows more words than any dog I've ever been around. He does have another side to him that comes out sometimes--he can be very devious. I guess that goes along with his superior brain--ha. He's also such a social guy and loves visitors. I've always thought the perfect job for him would be Walmart Greeter.

Here's thread #7

Here's thread #6

Here's thread #5

Here's thread #4

Here's thread #3

Here's thread #2

Here's thread #1




Books Finished in September, 2011

1. Emerson Among the Eccentrics, by Carlos Baker. 4 stars

2. The Seven Storey Mountain, a memoir by Thomas Merton. 3.5 stars This is book #51 for the year. For some reason the ticker doesn't want to update this morning.

3. Port Mortuary, by Patricia Cornwell, a Kay Scarpetta novel, something like the 18th in the series. I was hoping for a 2-star read, considering how bad some of her latest books have been; imagine my surprise when this one turned out to be a 4-star.

4. A Good Hard Look, by Ann Napolitano. A fatally flawed novel that hijacks the details of Flannery O'Connor's life. No rating. Not recommended.

Books Finished in October, 2011

1. Elsie Venner, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. I'm tempted not to rate the book, since this is an 1861 novel. If I had to rate it I would give it 2 stars.

2. The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox, by Nina Burleigh. 4 stars

3. Manhattan Transfer, by John Dos Passos. 1925 novel. 4 stars. This is book #56.

4. Fort Sumter to Perryville, by Shelby Foote. This is the first book in a Civil War trilogy by Foote. Fabulous. 5 stars. Book #57.

5. Killing Lincoln: The Assassination that Changed America Forever, by Bill OReilly. 2 stars. Book #58.

I'm reading several books right now, maybe too many. I don't know that I'll finish even one of them before the end of September. Here they are:

The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality by Belden C Lane.

The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville, by Shelby Foote. This is the first book in a trilogy of the Civil War.

Manhattan Transfer, by John Dos Passos, a novel published in 1925 that was a seminal work for modernism.

In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir, by Dick Cheney.

About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, by Ben Yagoda.

Always nice to be first. I've got a lot of big heavies going too -- so I slipped in a short one.....

Hi Sib. I am mired in books. Not that I'm complainin'!

The action has moved!

I love the idea of Jack as Walmart greeter. Why should humans have all the fun? I think dogs and some cats would make MUCH better greeters, anyway. Tigger would have a ball.

Hi Suzanne. Ha--I know Jack would make a better greeter than a lot of humans.

Last night I had my Kindle beside my bed and my books were downstairs, so I decided to read a novel I've been meaning to get to--as if I need to start another book. Anyway, I started reading Elsie Venner, an 1861 novel by Oliver Wendell Holmes. This book fits in perfectly with my recently-read Emerson biography. At least one researcher, a biographer, believes that the character of Elsie Venner was based on young Margaret Fuller. Evidently Holmes and Fuller grew up together in Cambridge. One of these days I'm going to have to break down and read a Fuller biog.

This is a very readable novel. I'll report back later on it, since right now I have to blast off and take my younger dog Docker to the wonderful new vet I recently found for some "deferred maintenance" on his teeth. Fun.

$430 later...ooph. My younger dog, Docker, has always had "issues." He has seizures, for which he takes phenobarb. He had phenobarb levels done in the hope that we can decrease his dosage. He had a hemangioma removed from his arm. He had a tooth removed plus the other teeth cleaned, which required anesthesia and bloodwork. The vet also prescribed an antibiotic. All of this is absolutely standard for this dog, whereas none of my other dogs have ever had these kinds of issues. But Jack the Dog seemed to miss him terribly, and I have to admit that I did too. The house was way too quiet without him.

Yow. I'm glad that Docker can be put right - even for $430. That's like our vet bill for 4 cats though. And Jack is a handsome, distinguished looking fellow.
I'll wait with interest to see what you think of Elsie Venner since it's just my price on Kindle. I'm a bit bogged down in September too, having finished *Truman* and having bits and pieces of other things going. I hope to finish two of them by month's end, but that means taking a bunch off TIOLI. Oh well.

Ouch! to the $430 vet bill. Jack looks like a wonderful dog to hang out with. Of course, I'm partial to labs.

Thanks for the good wishes re: my crazy Labs.

I don't have a whole lot to say about my reading this morning. I'm about 70 pages into too many books, so it's pretty fractured right now. I'm also not all that crazy about some of them--Manhattan Transfer comes to mind. I was pretty sure I wouldn't love it, since it's modernist lit--not my favorite, by any means. However, it's a book that I at least wanted to give a good try. I've decided to read it the way I read Proust's Swann's Way--maybe 20 or so pages at a time, which will give me a strategy for finishing the thing. It's not a bad book, it's just not my cup of tea. I like character-driven novels, and I also like a good story. This book is very typically modernist in that it lacks both, which in many ways is the point of modernism, so that shouldn't be taken as a criticism. If you like modernist lit (like Proust, like Ulysses by James Joyce, like Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (which I love, by the way), then you should give this one a try. This is a seminal modernist work, and it should be more widely read--or known, if you will.

It's great you tackle books you don't always love -- I've found that some of those are the ones that are the most memorable reads in the end even when the whole read was a grind all the way through.

I'm glad your dog is better. I've only had two dogs so far in life, but I've noticed that they don't cost too much money when things are going well, but when a health issue comes up, the bill adds up very quickly! (I guess it's the same for humans too.) After our last dog passed away, we even looked into getting insurance for our new dog, but decided against it. It didn't cover everything, so it really wasn't practical.

Ouch re the $430 -- but the cost/benefit analysis definitely computes... I'm spending about $220 a month for Jasper now, between the insulin and the special food, but... Could I live with myself if I didn't? He is quite possibly the sweetest cat I have ever met. He just wants to love and be loved; he would be quite happy being a fur stole around my neck if I let him.

Thanks for visiting! Oh yes, I totally understand about the $$ for a beloved pet. What are you gonna do, right? I've thought about health insurance for the dogs, too. Instead I found a new vet who will work with me on what needs to be done for them. The other vet was part of a large group and routinely charged me $100 for a phenobarb level, saying that it was "protocol" to check the levels every three months. Now I've found a wicked smart young vet who works on her own. She wanted to check the levels this once (charged me $30), and said that if he's not having seizures, then we can pretty much assume that we have the right dosage. I really like her.

I was outside most of the day today working in the yard and gardens. Wow, what beautiful weather we're having, plus it felt so great to get things done out there. The reading might have to wait for cold weather, since I'm pretty sure I could profitably work out there every day for quite some time. So if you don't see me around as much, it just means I'm outside.

Manhattan Transfer is starting to grow on me, maybe because he's bringing the characters back around so they're not all new every other page.

It's a funny thing to think about -- the cost of a pet -- but it would be one of the last things I would relinquish if I had to downsize -- they give me so much simple and straightforward pleasure!

Do you ever have a time in your reading when you pretty much feel blah about every single book you're reading? That's where I'm at now. I need to finish some of these so that I can move on to something I like.

Our weather is so beautiful, and I'm happy to be working outside. It's truly amazing what a couple of hours of concentrated work can do for the yard and gardens. This summer was a bear, and I had no desire to be outside in the horrible heat and humidity. I'm making up for it now.

I have had to downsize this year, and have cut back on things like satellite TV (gone completely, which means no TV reception at all) and book buying to keep Jasper going. Priorities...

Yep, I'd get rid of almost everything to keep Barkley too. :)

Just wandering through the threads and had to stop and say how much I like the picture of Jack up on top. What a handsome boy and a great picture!

Hi Joanne, thanks for visiting. I see by your profile you live somewhere in Colorado. I was born & raised in Denver. I miss the mountains, but since I've been away for 20-some years now, I sure don't miss the traffic--heh.

Angela, is Barkley a dog? I looked for a photo on your profile, but only saw the cat you set up a shelter for--last winter, I think it was.

Our major downsizing this past year has come in the form of not going to restaurants. I think the only time we went out to eat in the past year was on my son's birthday. We have a favorite Scottish restaurant that we go to on his birthday. Otherwise--fuggetaboutit. I honestly don't miss it that much, since I enjoy cooking. However, in a perfect world, I would probably go out a couple times a month. It's pretty amazing the money we've saved by eating at home.

Nothing to report on my reading because I haven't been doing any. I read a little bit of Elsie Venner last night and promptly fell asleep. It's actually not a bad read, if you enjoy old fashioned novels with long sentences and a very chatty narrator.

Suzanne (chatterbox) posted a comment about the new Kindle Fire. I like the looks of this thing. I think this is just what I've been looking for as an alternative to the iPad, which in my world is too expensive. The Kindle Fire is $199; the comparable Nook Color is $249; the iPad starts at $499. The Kindle Fire has a 7" screen; the iPad is 9.7", so there's significantly more real estate on the iPad screen.

I'm pretty excited about this thing. I don't have a smart phone, and without one I've started feeling sort of out of it; however, it doesn't make sense for me to pay for a smart phone, considering how I would use it. The only additional charge for the Kindle Fire is $79 a month a year for Amazon Prime, which I get anyway for the free two-day shipping. Because of all the shopping I do online, saving on shipping through Amazon more than pays for the $79 bucks.

It's supposedly due out in November, with presales now. I've heard rumors that so many will be ordered, they won't be able to ship for Christmas. We'll see, although that wouldn't be a deal breaker for me.

Hi Becky, I've starred your new thread. Love the picture of your boy Jack.

I paid too much for the iPad but I'm loving it. I just figured out how to download a free audio book for our drive to Texas tomorrow. I'm glad I don't have monthly fees with the iPad. That $79 a month could add up to big bucks in a hurry. I never pay for shipping on Amazon because I can always meet the $25 minimum and don't mind waiting a few days longer for the books I don't need to be ordering anyway.

I'm loving our perfect fall weather, too. These too few weeks of moderation in the fall and spring make the other 40-some weeks of wicked weather almost bearable. ;-)

Whoops sorry - yes, Barkley is a dog. He's a Maltese, but we don't let his hair grow really long like you usually see. It's too much maintenance, and we love to let him run and play, which would be hard with floor length hair!

He's 3 years old, and he is such a mommas boy. :) He and Ms. Stripes (our outside cat) are really good friends now. I put a picture of him on my profile now. I uploaded pictures of him to Facebook and forgot that I never put one here on LT.

Now I'm going to have to check out the new Kindle, and the ipad. I'm surprised Donna - I thought for sure you would have to pay a monthly fee to have internet access with the ipad. But you don't?? Hmmm...if not I might have to check that out.

Isn't the fee for Amazon Prime $79 a year? That's pretty reasonable if you spread it out into monthly increments in the budget. Especially if you use it a lot. I haven't bought it yet but I have considered it.

>22 Donna828:, 23. Yes, Amazon Prime is $79 a year. I rarely use the free shipping for books, since if I buy a new book it usually goes on my Kindle. Mostly I use the free shipping for everything else I buy, and since I shop a lot online (it saves me huge amounts of time, and since I don't like shopping in stores, it's a win/win for me), I save a lot of money. Not everything you buy at Amazon is eligible for the APrime free shipping, but an amazing number of things are.

Now I need to get outside and take advantage of this beautiful weather to work in the yard.

Amazon Prime is $79 a year. Whew, I'm glad we got that straightened out. You had me worried. ;-)

>23 BookAngel_a:: Angela, I opted for the iPad version that doesn't have the built-in 3G network. I believe there is a monthly charge for that. We have a wireless network at home and most other places I'll be using it. When I'm in the boonies (i.e., road trip to Texas) I can still access podcasts and/or books that I've downloaded.

Thanks for the info! :)

Jack does indeed look like a total darling in the photo, I keep meaning to mention that!

I have indeed been through some bleh reading spells. I use the reward systerm -- I pick up something I KNOW I'll love and then I allow myself to read it after I've done a set number of pages of the other books. (Which can be as few as 5 if I really am struggling). Sometimes while I'm doing that I get reinterested in at least one of the books I'm reading too, sometimes it's just a mood, not the book!

K was working on our accounts and noticed that since moving back to VT we rarely eat out any more and it's an incredible amount of money saved. That's good!

Hi Sib. Yes, that seems like a good strategy. I know this book blah I'm into is just me, not so much the books. I think it's the change of seasons and feeling like I need to get my house in order for winter. DH's new office is in a room that was originally a sleeping porch, so it isn't insulated. He needs new windows before winter; otherwise, he'll be frozen out with an inch of ice on the glass (and then he'll have to share my office and, well, you know). So I guess I'm just distracted with "tasks." DH made the appointment today with the window guy and he's coming--tomorrow. Yikes.

Last year I spent a lot of time getting the house ready for DH's sister's visit--I know you remember my hysteria about all of that. Well, because I was painting then and doing things that I don't ordinarily do, I skipped the "normal" fall outside work around here. Ergo, I have lots to do and I'm feeling like I hardly know where to start.

I think this economy also has me on edge. Yesterday DH showed me a YouTube video of a couple, about 10 years older than we are, who live in a "homeless camp." WHY DID HE SHOW ME THAT? He knows that sort of stuff makes me crazy, but he thought it was interesting and wanted to "share." Pitiful. They were once successful, educated artisans who now live in the woods somewhere, keeping warm with a wood fire they make in an old oil can. Good Lord. The guy said at one point they spent over $100,000 "taking care of injured birds." Now they're destitute.

Then I saw a photo today on CNN Money website of a long line of people (older--all about 45+, white, mainly male, and wearing suits) who were all in line for a job interview. There are a boatload of 50+ males who have been laid off who essentially will never work again. I'm going to need drugs to get through the day, with all of this crap going on.

Every once in awhile I get this way. DH is used to it and is very good at talking me off the ledge--heh. This has been a horrible week for him. His company is putting out a new release at some software conference somewhere--something they do every year. It's big-time stress. He handles it well, but I don't. This is the first year that he's worked from home doing this stuff, so previously I was pretty much insulated from this stuff. Now it's like "in my face," every day. How do people handle this kind of stress? THE BUILD FAILED AGAIN, a message he got in an email at 1:00 a.m.. Oh cripes. I'd jump out the window.

I think it might be "cocktail time."

I decided this morning that Manhattan Transfer by Dos Passos can best be compared to an early Jimmy Cagney movie--gum-snapping slangy dialogue, chorus girls behaving badly, people and their money schemes, etc. I'm not a movie buff by any means. I have no patience for those 1930s fast-talking films, so I also pretty much have little patience for this thing. But if you like those early movies, chances are you'll like this novel.

I'm making myself read 20 pages a day, and sometimes I actually get carried away and read more. It's a pretty fast read, actually. If I would give it more time, I'd be done. Sort of like the difference between pulling the band aid off fast or slow--heh.

Good luck with the window man! And, well, good luck with everything! Gardening actually sounds extremely therapeutic under these conditions.

28: THE BUILD FAILED AGAIN, a message he got in an email at 1:00 a.m.

Heh. All in a day's work. But I can see why you'd want him in his own insulated office.

Could be worse. At least he didn't get a call that his billion dollar spacecraft fell over...

Ha, thanks for the laugh. No, this was some special thing for a user convention, starting Friday afternoon. But you're right, nothing phases these guys. I guess I was the same way when I was a nurse in Labor & Delivery. You could throw anything at us--the crazier the better--and we handled it. I'm glad I'm not doing that anymore, but I sure enjoyed it while I was there.

We were all adrenaline junkies.

October 1, first day of the fourth quarter. I thought I would take a look at what I've been reading this year and see how close or far off the mark I am of my reading goals for the year. Probably I'm off the rails completely in what I "intended" to do for the year.

Literary Correspondence/Journals = 2%

Biographies = 11%

Memoirs = 17%

History = none finished, but reading Foote's Civil War trilogy

Cultural History = 4%

Politics/Current Affairs = 1%

Entertainment Fiction = 30%

Classic Fiction = 11%

Books about Writing = None

Essays = None, although I read some of Emerson, some of Thoreau when I was reading the Emerson group biog. I also read some Camille Paglia essays, but not enough to count as a whole book.

Self Help = None

Religion = 3%

Lit Crit = 1%

Some thoughts about these numbers:

The percentages reflect only the number of books in each category, not the time spent reading the books. So while it looks like I'm heavy on Entertainment Fiction at 30%, I'm really not so much, since for the most part those are books that don't take a lot of time. A book of Literary Correspondence, on the other hand, normally takes a huge amount of time to get through since books in this category are invariably monsters. Even so, I'm a bit disappointed that only 2% of the books I've read so far are correspondence, since one of my goals for 2011 was to read more of them, and last year I "only" read 5%.

If I put Biographies/Memoirs together, then that's 28% so far. Last year I read almost 30% in that category, so that's about usual for me, I think. This represents a huge amount of my reading time, since biographies tend to be long.

Politics/Current Affairs/(Cultural) History: all of those together equal 4%, which is interesting since that's also the same for 2011. I think one of the reasons this category is low, even though it feels like I've been reading a lot of cultural history, is because I read three huge books about New York newspapers. Those three took me months to read, so I would say that although this category shows only 4% of the books, it represents probably 40% of my reading time (that's a rough estimate).

Religion so far is 3%. I read these books only on Sunday, and not every Sunday at that, so 3% isn't a terrible number. Last year I didn't have any in this category, so getting some of these books onto my list was one of my goals for the year.

I'm surprised I haven't read any books about writing, not even a memoir written by a writer. I should find a good one and put it at the top of my pile, since I have plenty of these on my shelf.

Classic Fiction so far is 11%. I'm pretty happy about that number, since reading more "literature" was one of my goals. Last year was only 4%, and I wanted to read more of them this year.

One of my main goals this year was to read more American Lit. All of my classic fiction has been by American authors. Also, most of the biogs I've read this year have been about Americans (with the notable exception of the Mitford sisters, which was such a wonderful read). Even so, I feel like I've just scratched the surface of what I'd like to read, although I also would love to do a British Lit year. I just can't decide whether I'd like to alternate years or do another AmLit year in 2012.

It may be too late in the year to make a significant course correction in any direction, since I'm currently reading six books--one AmLit, which I may finish soon; one AmLit book that I'm reading 20 pages at a time and wish I could leave behind on a bus or something; one political memoir; one cultural history that I hope to finish before the end of the year; one history book about the Civil War--ditto re: the end of the year; and one book in the Religion category that I may still be reading in 2012. Add to that the fact that my reading time has been slashed due to various projects around the house, both inside and out.

All of which makes me want to go hide out and just read the latest John Grisham, The Litigators, which probably good for me won't be out until the end of October. Then Sue Grafton's V is for Vengeance is due out in November. Good grief, I need to clear the decks of some of this heavy stuff and make room for some "good" reads.

Bye for now while I continue schlepping mulch out in my gardens. Where's a good rain when you need one for staying indoors--ha.

Becky, I check your thread first thing each morning just to see what you have to say. I often feel intimidated by your "heavy" reading, as you put it. But then you go chuck it all aside and delight in Nelson DeMille or John Grisham or Sue Grafton, calling them "good reads". I had to smile at you wanting to leave the one book on a bus - and yet you continue reading it. I would have abandoned it weeks ago, I'm sure. You're my reading heroine!

Good luck in the garden today. I'm over here on the other side of the state, also enjoying a perfect autumn day, also wishing it would rain. I'll be stuck inside today finishing up my tax return that is due Oct 15, since I didn't get it done by Apr 15. Especially dumb since I expect to be getting a refund. I hope the government still has some money left.

What a great post about your reading stats!

Hi Sandy & Sib!

Sandy, thanks for your kind words. I guess I got used to pushing on with books that I didn't particularly like when I was getting my English degree. I read some books back then that were really hard to get through--Tristram Shandy comes immediately to mind. (Apologies to anyone who is a fan--ha.)

Yesterday was so busy. When I finally stopped around 6:00 p.m., I told myself I'd just stop for a little and take a nap. I woke up at 9:00 long enough to watch a movie with one eye open, and then I went back to sleep for the night. I didn't even feed my dogs (who were not amused). I haven't slept that much in a long time, and I didn't read a word of anything yesterday.

Today is Sunday, so I owe myself a chapter in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. Hope the weather is beautiful where all of you are!

I'll be back later with some thoughts on this next chapter in Lane's book, Solace. Chapter 3 is "Prayer Without Language in the Mystical Tradition," and he begins the chapter with a discussion of the apophatic tradition. He says this is also known as the way of negation or via negativa.

We have a huge flock of birds who are spending the day in the three sycamore trees that are in our neighborhood (one in my backyard). I can't believe how loud they are--cheerful chirping. I don't know what kind of birds they are, because I'm ignorant of such things. I love it that they're hanging out here.

So, on to Chapt. 3 in Lane's book.

Lane gives examples of the apophatic tradition: 1) Moses on Mt. Sinai, learning that God dwells in "thick darkness." No one can see God and live. Then he gives New Testament examples from Paul.

Gregory of Nisssa: emphasized the inability of the intellect to comprehend the mystery of God.

That reminds me of a wonderful Episcopal Church, St. Gregory's of Nyssa in San Franciso. Their website is beautiful. In about the year 2000, I developed a website for my Episcopal church where I was a member. Oh my, talk about a time sink! I was probably spending between 20 and 30 hours a week on the website, an insane amount of hours, considering that I was also teaching writing at the university. I probably read 5 books that whole year, although I learned a boatload about websites and church websites in particular.

Anywho, here's the St. Gregory of Nyssa website, if anyone is interested. I would happily attend that church if I lived in San Francisco. I tried to get our rector to think about taking out the pews in our church so that the space could be better used--like for liturgical dancing. I might as well have been asking him to conduct Satanic rites in the sanctuary. Heh.

St. Gregory of Nyssa--seriously, a beautiful church.

#38 I love what I've read about St Gregory of Nyssa, San Franciso. And I'm with you on wishing we could get rid of pews and open out the space in church - but in my case, it's half the congregation who would be up in arms at the very suggestion (thought the other half are all for it!).

Interesting summary of the year's reading so far...

If anyone is interested in the writer Willa Cather, The Willa Cather Foundation has some fascinating information in their September newsletter. This group of Cather scholars are the best people, very welcoming to anyone interested in Cather. If any of you live near Nebraska and want to be part of a wonderful community of scholars, these people are the best.

Here's the link to the newsletter.

Goodness, Becky, you have an abundance of energy! Thanks for the link to the St. G of N website. They will be thrilled with the number of first-time users, I'm sure!

I love the opening photo of Jack. What a wonderful dog!

Thanks for the visits, all! Peggy, I think my "abundance of energy" is just a low tolerance for being bored. Plus the church website was a case of not being able to say "No" when I probably should have. Oh well, live & learn.

I should have mentioned about Cather--you don't have to be a professional Cather scholar to join the group; you don't even have to live near Nebraska. This is a group of about 200 or so people, many of them university professors, PhD students, and other academic types, but also many just "normal" people (haha, that's a joke), retired people or others who just have a solid interest in Cather and her work. They have an international colloquium once every two years (I made the one where they spent a week in New York; missed the one where they went to France) where scholars read papers on all aspects of her life and work. I was involved with them for about 10 years and loved my time with them. You don't need to write a paper to attend; you can just register for the colloquium and show up. Highly, highly recommended as a fun, unique experience, even if Cather isn't your all-time favorite.

Here's another website, the Willa Cather Archive.

When I get Elsie Venner and Manhattan Transfer off my plate, I'm going to do a reread of Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. I'd love it if anyone would care to join me.

Added to say there's nothing here about books or reading; it's mainly a rant against English ivy.

There's nothing but bright sunshine and clear skies in the forecast here all week, so I guess I'm not going to get much reading done. I'm working outside as much as I can to get all of my projects finished before the cold weather sets in. We're having a beautiful fall, although it's pretty dry here. I'm not complaining, considering the droughts that others have been going through--we're nowhere near that dry, and I commiserate with all who are praying for rain where they live.

Yesterday I started working on something that has bugged me for years. The dodo who lived in this house before we did planted English ivy as groundcover on the side of the house. We live next door to a church, and these people also belonged to the church where this same woman was on the Grounds committee. So guess what? They planted the ivy on the church side as well. After 20 years, I've pretty much gotten rid of the ivy that she planted in my yard, but the ivy on the church side keeps invading my gardens. There were also bushes planted along my fence but on the church side, and of course eventually the ivy killed those off--but it took awhile. Now that the bushes are finally gone, I can get rid of the ivy that always invades my gardens, creeping under the fence. It is criminally insanely STUPID to plant this stuff, and it ought to be illegal, which I guess it is in Oregon, but it ought to be illegal here as well because it's such an invasive plant. I will probably never get rid of it, but now that the bushes are gone I can keep it chopped down to nothing. I talked to the pastor of the church before I did this who told me that "probably" that ivy isn't a priority for the Grounds committee--so in other words, if I want the stuff hacked out, I would have to do it myself. Fine, no problem. After living next door to a church for 20 years, my recommendation is this: if you have an opportunity to buy a house next door to a church, DON'T DO IT.

So once the ivy is hacked down, then I'm going take out a fence that no longer works with my landscaping plan. Then I can use that piece of fence to repair the one in the front, because for some reason the piece of fence in the back is in much better shape. Then I'm going to move the stepping stones in back and create a path where the fence used to be. All because of a dogwood tree that grew insanely the past two years. I'm thrilled by the tree's growth because it blocks out my view of the neighbors when I'm sitting on my deck, but I didn't expect it to grow so fast.

Anywho, that's my non-reading plan for the day. Hope everyone has a beautiful Monday!

You are so ambitious, Becky! I had my annual eye exam today. Why is it that whenever I go to the eye doctor, it is a bright sunny day? And the older I get the longer it takes those dilation drops to wear off. So I am huddled inside the house, with all the curtains closed against the glorious sunny sky, and the laptop unplugged (so the screen isn't as bright). Can't see well enough to read or do needlework. Hate TV. Too bright to go outside. Maybe I'll take a nap! My eye doctor is a great guy, though. I had a book with me (of course) and when he came into the exam room he asked all about it - he said he gets his best recommendations from patients. Then he told me all about the book he's reading. It is so nice to have a doctor actually takes time to chat and be friendly instead of rushing around self-importantly. I often see him at a local sandwich shop for lunch, and he always recognizes me and says hello.

Oh, Sandy, I hate those drops. A nap sounds like an excellent strategy. Good doctors are pearls. I've put these projects off for a year and essentially did nothing this summer because of the heat, so it's about time I get outside and do some work in the yard.

I finally finished one of my many hold-overs from September, an 1861 novel by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Elsie Venner. I enjoyed the setting of the book, a small New England town or village, and I also liked some of the characters, although if you're looking for a book with New England character, I would recommend Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1869 novel, Oldtown Folks. Evidently Holmes does this better in a later novel (1867), The Guardian Angel, but something tells me that I'm done with Holmes's fiction.

Where the book went off the rails for me were Holmes's long essay-like rants against his Calvinist forefathers. I'm sure this part of the book was startling to many and probably of great interest to his contemporary readers, but much of it for me was pretty much of a slog. One of the major themes of the novel was Holmes's interest in testing the doctrine of original sin. Elsie Venner was a young woman whom "Providence in its wisdom has seen fit to bring under bondage" from birth; therefore, her inherited infirmities should not be held against her and she should not be judged for them. Radical stuff for Holmes's readers, perhaps.

The novel was originally published in installments in the Atlantic Monthly.

I gave it two stars, based on my rating system, although I'm not sure such a rating has any use for a novel like this. Let me put it this way: I made myself finish the novel, not really knowing why. I was very happy to see it come to an end, keeping track of the "percentage read" on my Kindle the entire way.

I'm still reading my 20 pages a day of Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos. I'm continuing on with this thing because it's a novel I feel I "should" know. I think I might be enjoying it more if I hadn't been reading all these other books at the same time that I'm also feeling fairly marginal about. Maybe "enjoying" is the wrong word; "tolerating" is probably closer to the best I can say about how I feel about reading this book. I skipped several days without reading in this thing, trying to finish the Elsie Venner book. So now I should be able to get back to this one and make a little progress. The book is filled with people down on their luck and no sign of anything getting better for any of them. That's Modernism for you. Ugh.

I'm making good progress outside. I'm tired and I'd like to take a day off, but I'm going to keep going because the weather won't be beautiful like this forever. So not that much reading again today. Right now I'm just waiting for it to get light so I can go outside. The window guy is coming today to measure (another measurement, this one done for accuracy instead of just cost estimate). I'm told that when they start tearing out the old windows, they will put up a sign on our lawn with warnings about lead exposure due to the old paint. My neighbors are going to love it. I've never seen such a sign on any house reconstruction anywhere, so this must be some damned new gov't regulation. And yes, I'm pretty crabby about it; I can only imagine what it's adding to the cost of the project. We should have done this two years ago when we originally planned to get new windows; they were significantly cheaper then and there was no talk of freaking out the neighbors. You can tell how happy I am about it.

Uh, Becky? What are you supposed to be doing inside the house for protection against the lead? Or do they figure that you've been exposed so long that you don't count anymore? I'd really like to know-----

Becky, I totally understand your frustration about the lead thing. We replaced the windows in our rental property last year - they were original from the 1950-ish construction date. We called all the usual window places and got estimates. Between then and the time we were ready to start the project, the regulations changed. Sears, for example, would not do any lead abatement, so if any lead were detected (of course it would be), we would have to have someone else take care of the lead then Sears would charge $75 PER WINDOW to test to make sure it was clean before they'd install anything new. So we bought our own windows from Lowes and hired a friend of our son - an engineering student who has done a lot of construction work - to install them for us. We saved a boatload of money and our tenants were thrilled to have new windows. Of course, if it had been on our own home, we probably would have done it differently. Trying to stay off my soap box, but it's my opinion that all these new government regulations, however well-intentioned, are strangling us and slowing down the economic recovery we all want by driving the cost of everything higher and higher.

Hi Peggy. This is lead from lead paint that's about 3 layers down into the wood. It was the original paint put on the wood in 1929. I would almost guarantee that every house in our town has at least some lead paint, unless the owner stripped all of the old paint off the woodwork. Probably most houses before 1978 have some sort of lead in them. The lead is an issue if you breathe it in, which might happen from lead dust from flaking paint. If the paint over the lead paint is intact, then it's not a problem. I guess it could also be a problem if you're chewing on the windowsills. I've done a little research, and evidently the lead in paint is mostly found in high-gloss paint that might have been used for trim.

Does anyone remember the lead paint that was on most of our metal toys when we were kids? How the heck did we survive, is what I want to know. Actually one of the major sources of lead used to be fuel additives, and I've read that lead levels in children have been consistently falling since they did away with leaded gasoline.

And yep, I was right. This is a 2010 gubmint regulation. I understand and agree with protecting the window installers. Plus you probably wouldn't want your baby to be napping in the room where they were taking out old windows. But having to put up a sign in my front yard about the poisonous hazards coming from my house absolutely burns me. We'll see--I haven't seen the sign yet. Maybe it's "discrete"--haha.

Added to say, Hi, Sandy--I didn't see your post before I published mine. Your story is very interesting. I had no idea this new regulation had been put into place ("You have to pass the bill to know what's in the bill"--heh). Well, I'm sure then that Sears will be knocked out of the window-installing business, as will a lot of other companies. These kinds of regulations are job killers.

I'm glad you've been able to get a handle on your ivy, finished the Holmes, and continue w/your program to get through the Dos Passos. The window installation sounds maddening. I learned on this trip that in Florida, Home Depot won't even SELL you an outside door until you declare who's going to install it! It HAS to be a licensed contractor or the actual Homeowner. So my 75 yr old aunt will go with her handyman, swear that she's going to install it, and I guess, stand there with a screwdriver in her hand while he puts it in. CRAZY! Florida is a very strange state indeed. I don't think I could stand living and voting here very easily. If you have a mean neighbor they might report you!

What a funny story re: you aunt and her door.

I was going to buy a new front door from these people who are doing my windows. The one I chose was solid wood rather than fiberglass or whatever they use these days. He said they couldn't sell that door with a warranty unless the house met certain criteria--like a front overhang or porch so many feet away from the door. Then when I found out the one I chose was somewhere in the $3,000-5,000 category, I decided that I'll have my current door dipped, restained, and add new hardware and that will suit me just fine. Wow, the price of things these days is crazy.

Good grief! $3-5 K for a door? That's crazy! (I'm not asking how much the window installation costs - my sisters did it on their house a few years ago.)

Congratulations on all the work you're getting done outside. I wish I could motivate myself . . .

Yowza! That's a lot of moolah for a door!

I'm taking a break from my "in progress" books to read a book that Suzanne reviewed recently on her thread: The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox, by Nina Burleigh. I didn't follow the whole Amanda Knox murder, trial, and appeal (or retrial), except to hear about it now and then on the news.

I'm about a third of the way through the book, and what I'm finding most fascinating is the discussion of Italian culture and particularly what goes on and why in the town of Perugia. This book is a cautionary tale for any young person (particularly female) who is planning to spend a "junior year" abroad, and the parents of same. Europe is a very different place than it was even a generation ago. The naivete of this girl and her family is stunning. She was 20 years old, had lived in the bubble of Seattle all of her life, and decided to go to Italy to immerse herself in the language and culture while studying there. One of her biggest mistakes, I think, was to go there on her own without the backing of her university, the U of Washington. The girl had no idea what she was in for, and she made just about every mistake possible even before she got herself into trouble with the murder.

The book is fascinating and well-researched. I needed a break from the other stuff, and this is a good one.

I'm continuing my break from other reading with the Burleigh book, The Fatal Gift of Beauty. Coincidentally, I saw an interview with the author yesterday on a station I don't normally watch. The interviewer hadn't read her book and didn't seem to be aware that Burleigh had sat through the trial and had a lot of first-hand information about the case from her own research. She was interviewed along with someone who was a PR "expert," had no first-hand knowledge, and was speculating about the PR campaign waged by the Knox family on their daughter's behalf. Burleigh came off as intelligent and gracious. I don't know how she kept from at least rolling her eyes at the interviewer--but that's just me, I'm terrible at controlling my face.

I agree with Suzanne in her estimate of Amanda Knox, who comes off as an unlikeable and unsympathetic character. She was immature and self-absorbed and evidently clueless about how Americans in general are perceived by Italians. Her arrogance about not being clued into what was happening to her (that during the five or so days after the murder, she was increasingly being targeted as a suspect, that she was the only one interviewed by police who didn't have either a lawyer or a friend or family member with her, that she didn't contact the American Embassy on day one, etc.) and inappropriate affect surrounding the death of her roommate (she was flirty with detectives, more than publicly flirty with her boyfriend who was also a target of the investigation, and she came across as strangely unaffected by her friend's death)--all of her own behavior, and also probably the fact that she was an American, seemed to put a target on her back.

The story the Italian detective put together of the murder to fit the "facts" of the case is beyond ludicrous. However, once the story was out there, it seemed that no one was willing to walk it back, regardless of what new evidence or new suspects were found. The whole thing seems to be a crazy perfect storm of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. It cost this girl four years of her life, and judging from her personality as someone who even before this happened was a constant attention-seeker, this will probably ruin the rest of her life. All of the media interest and craziness surrounding her will not be good for this girl, who from every description of her seemed to have a borderline "something" personality problem to begin with. It's all very sad. Equally sad is the casual and constant drug use and sex of these young people. They may have gone to Italy to "study abroad," but there was precious little studying going on in this group. I heard a reporter opine yesterday that Knox wants to "finish her degree," and I snorted my beverage through my nose. Seriously?

I still have about one-fourth of the book to read. I assumed the book would be mostly about the trial, but 70% or so into the book, the trial hasn't started yet.

Our beautiful weather continues (actually even warmer than normal and certainly dryer), so I'm still working outside, and this is the only reading I'm doing for now. Bye for now, and Happy Thursday.

What a sad tale - your summing up of the Knox affair is very welcome. Literally millions of American kids have studied in Perugia with no incident for probably over a hundred years! But most of them, as you say, don't have the behavioural issues of this girl. Perfect storm, perfect description!

Cooking with Convection, by Beatrice Ojakangas. This is my newest cookbook to go along with my convection oven that I still haven't tried. This looks like a great book, except, sadly, there are no pictures. I like photos of a new recipe.

"If you own a convection oven, but don't really know how to use it, this book is for you." That's me!

This cookbook comes highly recommended. I will report back.

I'm glad you're finding the Burleigh book a good read, Becky. I admit I was gobsmacked by the drugs/booze/sex stuff, too, but then some of that was probably also going on in my era and I just didn't really participate as over-enthusiastically. Perhaps because I'd first gotten v. drunk on a school trip to Paris age 14, decided I never wanted to feel that bad again, realized the cost/benefit analysis didn't compute. Plus, alcohol was never exotic, a sign that I was grown up. I could walk down the street from my home in Brussels and order a beer; my parents served alcohol at parties I had (which were supervised, and all the parents knew and did the same.) I'd note that I can only remember one case of someone being v.v. drunk in three years, no cases of driving while drunk, none of the stuff usually associated with drunk high school/college kids. I think we learned to drink sensibly. Drugs were around -- pot/hash -- but again, very much on the margins. No teen pregnancies that I know of. Kids went on to Ivy League colleges and Oxford/Cambridge. I really struggled with the party culture Burleigh describes, even having seen it in action in London, esp. (Pub closing hours contribute to this...)

I've been desultorily following the commentary on the Knox case, and I've got to say that a lot of it strikes me as very uninformed. People think that now no one is being held responsible for the murder, when in fact another individual is currently serving a 16 year sentence -- a case in which there was real evidence. You can believe what you want to, but the more you have to torture the facts to support those beliefs... Like the prosecutor who started believing the Knox family were somehow connected to Satanic rituals and Masonic conspiracies... I was a bit appalled when I heard that Nancy Grace still believes Knox is as guilty as sin, and declaring that on air. If the Italians had had an iota of undisclosed evidence, they would have wheeled it out to keep Knox in jail.

It's hard to imagine how she emerges as a stable, responsible person, though. Either she's been a flaky student with poor judgment or a prisoner. Not a good background. Going back to college might be a great thing -- if she could find a way to actually study and shield herself from the frenzy. Based on the way the Knox family has been parading around this week, I don't see that happening... Sigh.

I feel sorry for Meredith Kercher's family, and for Raffaele Sollecito and his family. Their lives have been ruined, and somehow it's all about this somewhat dysfunctional American chick.

Well, I agree with everything you say here, except that I think I'm about 10 years or so older than you. In high school people drank, but no one in my group got falling-down drunk. There were a few kids who did pot, but that was very unusual--the kids who did that were very "out there." When I got to college, which a very Leftist public college (U of Colorado at Boulder), there were groups: the "freaks" (I don't remember us ever calling ourselves "hippies"--other people called us that) and the kids who joined the sororities and went to the football games. I was a freak. People in that group didn't drink. If they did drugs, it was mostly pot, maybe a little hash. There were some who did LSD, but those kids were the ones who were pushing the envelope. There was no cocaine that I remember. I don't remember that we did the casual sex. People would pair off, but no one who I knew had five different guys in four weeks; a girl like that would have been shunned. Most guys kept up their grades, because if they didn't, then they were in danger of being called up for the draft. In fact, most people at that time aspired to grad school so they could stay in school as long as possible.

I agree with you, I really feel sorry for the Kercher family. What a mess this whole thing is.

One of the books I'm reading that's a holdover from September is the first of Shelby Foote's trilogy about the Civil War--Fort Sumter to Perryville. He writes a very readable narrative, but I was getting sort of bogged down in the descriptions of the battle tactics. I'm a visual person, and while there are some maps in this book, there aren't many. So I pulled another book off my shelf to read along with this one: The Civil War Battlefield Guide, edited by Frances H. Kennedy of The Conservation Fund. There must be hundreds of books like this one, but this one is very good, giving a short description of each battle, maps, and also pictures of what the battlefields look like today. This book is helping me get more out of Foote's book--highly recommended.

62: Oh, thanks, that book looks extremely useful. Narratives w/o maps drive me nuts.

There's another one that looks really good: Ken Shaara's Civil War Battlefields: Discovering America's Hallowed Ground. The touchstone doesn't work--don't know why. Discovering America's Hallowed Ground--there, that one works. I'm tempted.

That should be Jeff Shaara, which is why the touchstone didn't work.

I've finally found a great place for an herb garden. Don't you love it when things sort of come together? I lost a tree this past year, so that created a sunny spot--perfect for herbs. I've never really needed herbs before because I didn't do all that much cooking. Now I do, so hooray.

It's hot today and dry. It's been 80 degrees every day this week. After the hot summer we had, I'm ready for some cooler weather. It's not that it's hot, so much as it's hotter than normal. If this were an August day, we would all be dancing outside.

I finished The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox, by Nina Burleigh. There was really nothing much Burleigh could do to make this book a good "true crime" story, since the crime itself, the murder of Meredith Kercher, was abysmally stupid. The truth of it seems to be that it was a robbery gone bad. Anyone reading this book because of the subtitle--The Trials--will probably also be disappointed, since the trial doesn't actually begin until around 80% into the book. The Italian court system is very strange, and for all the problems with our U.S. court system, reading about how the laws and the courts work in another country makes me glad I live here. I gave the book 4 stars because of the good writing and interesting details about the Perugian culture. Amanda Knox is a stupid twit who needs to find a way to keep herself out of the tabloids for the rest of her life, but I have a feeling she'll be back.

It's a good Monday morning: DH is off fishing and I'm here on my own with the dogs, so today is going to be a reading day for a change. I'm focusing on two of my holdover reads from September: the Shelby Foote Civil War Narrative, Fort Sumter to Perryville, and the Dos Passos 1925 novel, Manhattan Transfer. John Dos Passos is an interesting guy, and I'm tempted by a biography of him that's on my shelf: Dos Passos: A Life by Virginia Spencer Carr, published in 1984. However, before I start anything else, I'm going to finish some of these other things I'm reading. Happy Monday to everyone!

Happy Monday to you too -- today is my only non-hausfrau (literally no errands, necessary chores etc) day so I am going to be doing a lot of writing and reading, I hope. Another beautiful Indian Summer day for us too. The leaves are really changing now and I have to figure out how to get a good photo of them. They aren't as good as I thought they might be -- maybe because it stayed warm w/no frost at all until last week?

Happy Monday Becky! Congratulations on finding a spot for your herbs. I love being able to run out and get fresh oregano or thyme when I'm cooking.

Hi Lucy & Ardene! My back yard in this house was nothing but shade until I lost that tree last year. Shifting things around and figuring out how best to use the sun has been this year's project. I just hope I can keep the rabbits out of the herbs, although it's a small space, so a little fencing shouldn't be too tricky.

I need to reherb our garden too. Right now all that we have is a pot of rosemary (nice, but not adequate) and some garlic chives. A project for spring!

We usually have parsley, tarragon, cilantro (we all like it, although I know some people loathe it), thyme and dill -- the volunteers that come back are the chives, and various mints, including the catnip which I use to get the naughty cat to come in at night.

It must be kind of exciting to have some sun in your garden.

Well, it's different having so much sun out there, and I wanted to go through a whole season before I really changed the gardens. I had a woman come out from a nursery one year and work up a landscaping plan. She spent about 20 minutes in my yard, and I wondered how she could know enough about how much sun all the areas got in order to put together a plan so fast, because I've got some tricky places in my yard. I used about 50% of her plan, and of the things I planted, about 50% of them did well. That was in my younger days when I knew a lot less about gardening and didn't really trust my own instincts.

My garden will include what you've mentioned (except cilantro, because I'm one of those who doesn't like it) plus oregano, rosemary, sage, basil, marjoram. I'll put the mint in a pot because it tends to spread and I don't use that much of it, but I love the way it smells. Pretty standard stuff, but I'm looking forward to it. What I'd really like to do is to grow medicinal herbs. I have an amazing book (what else--a book, ha) called A Reference Guide to Medicinal Plants: Herbal Medicine Past and Present, by Crellin and Philpott, and I'd love to learn something about this stuff. One of my favorite characters is Mrs. Almira Todd, found in The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett. "Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame . . . . If Mrs. Todd had an occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed." --And then Jewett goes on to give the most wonderful description of Mrs. Todd's herb plot.

Now I have to go watch my Cardinals (baseball, not birds). They had a terrible inning last night against the Brewers, so we're hoping for better things from them tonight. Any Brewers fans out there? They seem like they have a heck of a team. Lots of offense last night. Oof.

No Brewers fans, I guess. OK. Well, I'm here to say that the Brewers are done if the Cards continue to play the way they did last night. Go Cards!

Today I'm making soup from my new convection cookbook, Cooking With Convection, by Beatrice Ojakangas. When I bought my new range, I wasn't looking for a convection oven, because frankly I was pretty stupid about what it is convection ovens do. But I did want a double oven, plus the range I bought had five burners on top, and I was completely seduced by that, since I had been using about 1 and 1/2 burners out of 4 for the past five years or so. So the convection oven was secondary.

This morning I was thumbing through my new convection cookbook and found several soup recipes. So what the heck can a convection oven do for soup? Maybe everyone else in the world knows this, but I didn't. What you can do with a convection oven is--ta da!--roast vegetables.

Roasted vegetables pulverized with my Vita Mix = Soup.

I just made Roasted Eggplant, Zucchini, and Red Pepper Soup. OMG. It's fabulous. And easy, with the right tools.

DH is coming home this evening from his fishing trip. I bought a steak for tonight for him, and along with the steak we'll also have this soup. I think we're both going to be happy campers. Heh.

Added: We're also having Pesto Roasted Potatoes. Simple 15' recipe if you have a convection oven, a lot like but better than those "gourmet" frozen potatoes you buy at Good Foods or whatever the name of the store is for $4.00 per serving. Mine are about 50 cents per serving. That's the other thing about the convection oven: you can make to die for food on the cheap. Hooray.

I'm reading through the Battle of Shiloh this morning in Shelby Foote's first book of his Civil War trilogy: Fort Sumter to Perryville. The casualties are mind-numbing.

Union losses for the two-day battle: 1754 killed, 8408 wounded, 2885 captured: total, 13,047.

Confederate losses were 1723 killed, 8012 wounded, 959 missing: total, 10,694.

You have to wonder how many of those wounded later died.

Foote: "Of the 100,000 soldiers engaged in this first great bloody conflict of the war, approximately one out of every four who had gone into battle had been killed, wounded, or captured. Casualties were 24 percent, the same as Waterloo's. Yet Waterloo had settled something, while this one apparently had settled nothing. When it was over the two armies were back where they started."

Total American casualties in all three of the nation's previous wars--the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War--were 23,273. Shiloh's totaled 23,741, and most of them were Grant's.

Later Grant was to say that, from Shiloh on, "I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest."

Spousal Unit and myself stopped at Shiloh on a road trip; makes you very quiet, after. Antietam was another one that completely did me in.

I'm so glad you are enjoying your convection oven. I still have no idea what it is, and am not likely ever to. Even when we get around to building a proper kitchen, it'll likely be minimalist, appliance-wise. But you never know.

I didn't always enjoy cooking, especially when I was an RN working the night shift, since I just didn't have the time or energy. Maybe I'm making up for lost time. It's becoming something of a hobby, I guess, and as with other hobbies I've had in the past (like quilting), I appreciate having good tools. I've found what a huge difference something as simple as using the right kind of pan can make, for instance. I can eventually see myself canning, and the huge fifth center burner on this gas stove will be just what I need for those humongo pots. The double oven comes in handy when I'm doing a lot of cooking at once; otherwise, the small oven, which uses less energy and doesn't heat up the house, is usually perfect for heating up a casserole or whatever. This range was a splurge, but I'm very grateful to have it.

The convection oven is basically just a regular oven with a fan that blows the heat around so that the heat is used more efficiently and evenly. The air circulation speeds up the cooking time, plus the oven heats up in a flash. You can do things like bake 3 batches of cookies at once, because everything in a c-oven bakes evenly, so that's another time and energy saver.

I haven't done much of anything with mine yet, but recently finding out its roasting capabilities made me do the Snoopy happy-dance. We miss our smoker in the winter time, so having the ability to roast a chicken or a salmon fillet--or vegetables!--indoors is super-great.

Reporting in that I'm continuing to (slowly, glacially) make progress on the Dos Passos novel, Manhattan Transfer. I'm reading at the rate of 10-20 pages a day, and yesterday I finally hit the halfway mark.

What the reader encounters in this book isn't so much narrative as it is a description of a scene--and then the reader fills in the blanks. Between scenes there are ZERO transitions. This book is impossible to read without a list of characters, since he brings them in, here and there, with absolutely no context. If you think about someone narrating video that they've taken with their home video camera, this book is what you would have.

I've been thinking a lot about this book, and how much fun it could be to teach this book in a freshman AmLit class. That doesn't mean I like this book, but I think I could teach it in a way that would be fun and that students would like.

#79 - Ha! I've had his U.S.A. Trilogy on my TBR pile for a LONG time, but you make reading him sound like mild torture! Maybe I should hold off. : ) In truth, I think I'm just hesitant about getting involved in another trilogy, especially when each book is that long.

Like you before *MT*, Becky, I am Dos Passos illiterate. I own several but have never felt called to indulge.
Meanwhile, you have taken a place in the part of my mind labelled "Foodies." I think you will like this quotation from Neal Stephenson's Reamde, which is the main thing I'm reading now.
"...he was fascinated by the mid-western/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie Treats being a prototypical example in that they were made by repurposing other foods that had already been prepared.....And of course any recipe that called for a can of cream of mushroom soup fell into the same category. The unifying principle behind all recombinant cuisine seemed to be indifference, if not outright hostility, to the use of anything that a coastal foodie would define as an ingredient. ...mysterious mojo as their spurning of onions and salt in favor of onion salt?"
I find that quite entertaining.

Hi Kerri and Peggy!

>80 DorsVenabili:. I guess I'm not really selling the Dos Passos thing too well, am I--ha. I have the U.S.A. trilogy on my shelf too. There's some brilliant writing in Manhattan Transfer. He was young when this was published (29 years old), and I think he matured as a writer as he wrote the trilogy. I definitely haven't been put off reading the trilogy because of this one, but I'm going to save it for sometime when I'm feeling up for a challenge. It's probably just a matter of being willing to go with what he's doing--sort of like Ulysses, is what I'm thinking.

>81 LizzieD:. Peggy, I fell off my chair laughing at your post. Julia Child calls such recipes (the ones using a can of cream of mushroom soup) "assembly" rather than cooking. Actually I do quite a lot of assembly. Heh--"the midwestern phenomenon of recombinent cuisine." Now I ask you, where would we be without our Campbell's soup?

"foodie"--I had to look that one up to see if that's a good thing or a bad thing, since in the back of my mind the connotation of that word is "not good," and probably if I used it to describe someone it wouldn't be in the nature of a compliment. So it would seem that foodies are somewhat ridiculous--and probably also boring to most people: “A person who is very, very, very interested in food. Foodies are the ones talking about food in any gathering—salivating over restaurants, recipes, radicchio. They don’t think they are being trivial—foodies consider food to be an art, on a level with painting or drama…. The purpose of life is eating well.”

Oh woe. I'd better shut up about my new range--haha.

Ah, Becky, I'll take part of the definition of foodie -

A person who is very, very, very interested in food. Foodies are the ones talking about food in any gathering—salivating over restaurants, recipes, . . . They don't think they are being trivial . . . The purpose of life is eating well.

I like eating food, cooking , growing food . . .

But then, I also love books:)

Oh, I mean foodie as an absolute compliment. I don't want to spend all my time cooking, but I do adore to eat real food that somebody has prepared in an interesting, tasty, way.... Tuesday night I had cheesecake from my favorite foodie's kitchen: made with pears, cranberries and real maple syrup. TO DIE FOR!!!
I'm just too lazy and unimaginative to qualify.

Hi Ardene & Peggy!

Peggy, I don't think it's lazy or unimaginative not to enjoy something like cooking. We all go through stages in our lives where certain things repel and other things capture our attention. I couldn't be more surprised at this point in my life to find that one of my happiest places is the kitchen.

Ardene, I need a big sunny place for a vegetable garden. If this economy really goes sour, I'm going to tear up the grass in my front lawn and plant vegetables, although I might have to sit on my porch with my .22 to keep rabbits and "other critters" out. (Joke)

It's an entertaining image, Becky on her porch in her overalls guarding her garden......

I'm reporting receipt of a new cookbook: Comfort Food: Home-Cooked Delicious Classics Made Light from the people at Cooking Light magazine. I literally have never made a recipe from the Cooking Light people that hasn't been fabulous.

Today my son is coming for dinner, so we're having steak (I have nothing to do with that--the guys do that), green beans, and two recipes from the new cookbook: Potato-Gorgonzola Gratin and Maple-Walnut Apple Crisp (because I can't resist all the beautiful apples at the farmer's market). Seriously, my guys think I'm some sort of amazing cooking-goddess, but this stuff is so easy--something they will never hear from me!

Happy Saturday and Go Cards!

Added: It's an entertaining image, Becky on her porch in her overalls guarding her garden......

Don't doubt me.

My laptop is trashed. Fortunately, I had everything backed up on Carbonite. I don't know when I'll have it back. Sad, sad.

I think the gods are telling me, "Go read."

Gppd luck with your computer woes.

Slow going with the laptop fix, but I moved the PC downstairs to the main level so Jack the Dog won't be lonely. His gimpiness won't let him climb stairs easily, so I work in the dining room during the day. Then DH had to hook up the PC to a wireless device, so now I have an internet hookup. Good grief.

Today I FINISHED Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos. There was no narrator. There wasn't a single appealing character. It was all very depressing. I think some the people who are "occupying" Wall Street would probably love it.

So how do you rate a book with good writing, where the writer achieved exactly what he was aiming for? And yet I found reading it a total slog. Was reading the book worthwhile? Yes, I think it was, if only to understand some of the literature of the early days of modernism. I guess I'll give it four stars.

I think next I'm going to read some Ring Lardner, who was writing around the same time as Dos Passos. The Portable Ring Lardner has some good stuff, including two novels. I have a feeling that Dos Passos was rather heavily influenced by Lardner.

Here's the first couple of sentences of the Introduction to the Lardner book: "Ring Lardner is generally known as an American humorist who wrote in slang about baseball. It would be hard to pack any more misleading ideas into a single statement, especially since every word of it is true."

I'm making good progress on the Shelby Foote Civil War book, the first in the trilogy, Fort Sumter to Perryville. In order to get this thing finished, I'm reading it at night, which may be the cause of some of the disturbing dreams I've been having.

I'm at 606/810; it's the summer of 1862 and Foote is working through a series of six battles called the Seven Days Battles. I'm no Civil War buff, and I can't say that I'd ever heard of these. The generals on both sides seem as though they all could have been part of the Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight. It's sometimes quite difficult to keep all of these names straight--exactly who was fighting on which side. I wish the publisher had printed the names in blue and gray or something. I just found a Wiki site that would have been helpful with reading through this part of the book that gives all the names of the Federal and Confederate leaders of each division that was part of these battles. I wish I'd found this sooner, and I highly recommend some sort of reading guide like the Wiki site to anyone reading this book. Had Shelby Foote even just listed the commanders of the divisions and what side they were on, that would have been quite helpful.

This first book goes through the Battle of Perryville (Kentucky) which was fought in October of 1862.

It's interesting to note that often the primary source quoted by Foote for what a particular general was thinking about a battle or a particular day of the war is from a letter written by the general to his wife. Foote says in a biographical note in the back that he bases the narrative in part on the 128-volume War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, issued by the government in 1880-1901. "There you hear the live men speak--there and in their diaries and letters, their newspapers and periodicals--although not always as they spoke in later life, when they got around to writing their memoirs, regimental histories, and a host of articles...."

I've been wondering throughout this book if Foote would have anything to say about the fact that he was from Mississippi, and did that fact color (or rather, how did it color) what he wrote in these books. In fact, he does touch on that subject, at the end of his bibliographical note, and I think it's worth quoting:

One word more perhaps will not be out of place. I am a Mississippian. Though the veterans I knew are all dead now, down to the final home guard drummer boy of my childhood, the remembrance of them is still with me. However, being nearly as far removed from them in time as most of them were removed from combat when they died, I hope I have recovered the respect they had for their opponents until Reconstruction lessened and finally killed it. Biased is the last thing I would be; I yield to no one in my admiration for heroism and ability, no matter which side of the line a man was born or fought on when the war broke out, fourscore and seventeen years ago. If pride in the resistance my forebears made against the odds has leaned me to any degree in their direction, I hope it will be seen to amount to no more, in the end, than the average American's normal sympathy for the underdog in a fight.

>90 labwriter:. I realize I did a marginal non-job of not discussing the Dos Passos novel at post #90. I was happy to be done with the book and in rather a bad mood due to my computer woes. What I would say about the book is that it's worth the read, although prepare for a book with no narrator and no transitions from scene to scene. Dos Passos requires the reader to pay close attention to the details of a particular scene in order to know what year the scene is set in. The scenes are in chronological order, for the most part, but you might be in 1911 in one scene and 1913 in the next one, with no indication that time has passed except for a headline or reference to some sort of cultural icon, like song title or whatever.

The characters in this book all appear and disappear and then (usually) appear again. They change over time, but it's up to the reader to figure that out. One of the major female characters is variously known as Ellen, Elaine, Ellie, and Helena--plus, because she gets married three times or so during the course of the book, her last name changes as well, except when it doesn't, like when she uses one particular name as her professional name, even though she's moved on to a new husband. Without a cast of characters, it would be easy to confuse this one character, thinking Dos Passos was referring to three or four different people.

I came away from reading this book with every intention of reading the Dos Passos trilogy, U.S.A., made up of The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and Big Money. DP is an interesting writer--he's a good writer. I can't help but wish he'd written a "normal" novel using the same material that he used in Manhattan Transfer, but that's just me. I'm not really grabbed or fascinated by the modernist tricks in this novel, but I was willing to go with him and be patient enough with the reading to figure out what the heck he was doing. It was a lot like reading Absalom, Absalom!, although I enjoyed AA a lot more than MT. I'll get into the trilogy soon, but it probably won't be before the first of the year.

#92 - Thanks for this review!

Regarding your reference to Faulkner: I love Faulkner (passionately) and while Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury are difficult reads for the reasons you describe, they are rewarding and I have no problem putting in the work for such a magnificent payoff. However, this summer I read The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer, which is the same sort of modernist novel where the reader has to put in an incredible amount of effort just to know what is going on, who is talking, etc. I wanted to bang my head against a brick wall after each chapter, because (in my opinion) there was nothing about the novel that made that amount of work worthwhile. I wonder if Dos Passos is more like Gordimer and less like Faulkner? I think I've mentioned on your thread that I've always wanted to read The U.S.A. trilogy, but now I'm not so sure.

I should also add that I have every intention of reading more Nadine Gordimer. I read an amazing short story of hers in a class once. I just think The Conservationist didn't speak to me, for some reason.

Thanks for coming back with a second round on the Dos Passos -- sometimes all you need is a little time with the pressure off for new ideas and insights to bubble up. I'll be very very interested to see what you make of Lardner! He strikes me as a writer who was hugely influential to his contemps, but isn't read as much as many of those he inspired are today.... if that convoluted sentence makes any sense.

Hi Kerri. Oh, I love Faulkner as well. I did a re-read of AA earlier this year, and I think it's been my favorite read of the year. There's a book I still want to get to, but just haven't had the time: Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! by Joseph Urgo and Noel Polk. When I was finished with AA, I wanted to go back and read it again right away. The Urgo book would have been a good companion read on the second pass.

I have the Library of America edition of the Dos Passos trilogy on my shelf. It really does look as though Dos Passos had moved on from what he was doing in Manhattan Transfer. I imagine he also matured as a writer by the time he finished the trilogy. There was some excellent writing in MT, and for that reason alone I would be willing to give the trilogy a try. You might try reading just the first one--The 42nd Parallel, and then based on that one, decide about the other two.

I haven't read any Gordimer. I'll have to check her out. Thanks.

Hi Lucy. You're right, sometimes it's good to let a bit of time go by before summing up thoughts about a book. What do you think about the rating? I was all over about how many stars to give the book. I gave it 4, but not because I loved it like I usually like a 4-star book. Yet just because I didn't particularly like it, that doesn't mean he wasn't successful with what he was trying to do. Oh well.

#95 - Thanks! I will check out Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!. Now back to work...

I resurrected a book off of my shelves that I read at some point when I was in grad school: I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. For those who don't know it, this is a book of essays by 12 southerners. I think it was first published in 1930. If you're interested in southern literature, this book will grab you and you really ought to read it.

One of the essays in the book is written by a southern historian, Frank Lawrence Owsley: "The Irrepressible Conflict." If you're looking for something other than the same old, same old liberal northeastern academic spin on the Civil War (the winners write the history), then this essay is an interesting place to start.

In here are phrases like, "so-called Reconstruction;" the "holiness of the Northern legend;" and etc. He says that rising generations of southern schoolchildren, after Reconstruction, read nothing but Northern literature, "shot through with the New England tradition." Northern histories were taught in Southern high schools and colleges. "One would judge from the average history text and from the recitations conducted by the Northern schoolma'am that the Puritans and Pilgrim fathers were the ancestors of every self-respecting American. Southern children spoke of "our Puritan fathers. No child ever heard of the Southern Puritan fathers--the great horde of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and German Lutherans and other strict and puritanical peoples who had pushed to the Mississippi River and far North of the Ohio before the New England population had got a hundred miles west of Boston."

My 5th g-grandfather was Zachariah Campbell, originally a tobacco broker in Virginia who sent Virginia tobacco back home to Glasgow. That was c.1760, so Zachariah was part of those Scotch-Irish "hordes." He moved to northeast Tennessee where some of his descendents still live today. I've tramped all through that area, looking through a whole group of undocumented cemeteries 'way up in places where it's probably not 100% safe to be unless you have business there. Fortunately, I've found that if you're tramping the cemeteries with a notebook and a camera, people pretty much leave you alone. I've found many Campbell and Campbell-related gravestones that indicate my people from that area fought on both sides of that evil war.

My 4th g-grandfather from another limb of the family tree was Joseph Nihiser, one of those German Lutherans who made his way from Virginia to Ohio in about 1820. Not a New Englander, was Grandfather Nihiser; rather, he was one of those German Lutherans mentioned by Owsley who pushed into Ohio when it was all still old-growth forest. His son, my 3rd g-grandfather, was part of 58th Ohio Regiment, Infantry, in that evil war.

Owsley continues in his essay: "The North still sits in Pharisaical judgment upon the South, beating its chest and thanking-Thee-O-Lord-that-I-am-not-as-other-men and imposing its philosophy of living and life upon the South." He believes that the condemnation of the North upon the South has been "contemptible": "It is the particular object of this essay to point out the untruth of the self-righteous Northern legend which makes the South the war criminal."

Continuing on with the first of the Shelby Foote trilogy: Fort Sumter to Perryville. I'm within striking distance of the end--less than 100 pages. However, weekend busy-ness will probably get in the way of finishing. This book is simply brilliant and also heartbreaking. I've set everything else aside so that I can finish this one. Also, it's tempting to start the second one right away, but I don't think I'm going to let myself do that. It's probably better to put some space between this one and the next.

At 7:00 a.m. it's cold and still dark here this morning--37 degrees. Good grief. My dogs are unamused that I'm still telling them it's "too early" to go outside. When the heck to we get rid of this daylight savings time, anyway?

97: Hmm, I have Nihisers. Not mine directly; one of them married the sister of a great grandmother in Macon IL.

>99 qebo:. Yep, I'm betting those would be the same Nihisers. My 2nd great-grandfather moved from Hocking, Ohio to Macon County, IL. My g-grandmother was Alice Nihiser, born in Macon County in 1873. Small world. Just this past August I took a trip to La Junta, Colorado, which was where she lived most of her adult life--and which is 1/4 of the genetic story of how I came to be born in Colorado. Do you enjoy genealogy?

Wow, I just finished the first of Shelby Foote's Civil War trilogy: Fort Sumter to Perryville. It is quite simply an amazing book. I'm no Civil War buff, and I did tend to get confused about who was on what side when he would get into the weeds about the battles. I solved that by reading it with the internet open to a site that gave a thumbnail sketch of all the Civil War generals.

I think the great strength of this book is Foote's balanced approach to the conflict. He admits in the introduction that he's from Mississippi (see my post here #91), but his respect for both sides is clear throughout the book. He doesn't seem to have an axe to grind; he doesn't seem to have some pre-ordained moral agenda that he "assumes" to be right, above all others.

I'm really looking forward to reading the second book of the trilogy: Fredericksburg to Meridian, although before I read that one, I plan to read a biog of Lincoln that's on my shelf: A. Lincoln: A Biography by Ronald C. White, Jr. I also want to read a very different take on Lincoln, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, by Thomas DiLorenzo. I also would like to pick up the McPherson book about the Civil War again, Battle Cry of Freedom and read to the end of 1862, where the first book of Foote's trilogy leaves off.

The Foote book: 5-stars. One of the best books I've read in 2011.

That's high praise indeed, especially considering what you've read in 2011, Becky. I must get to it.

Hi Peggy. I don't think you'll be disappointed. It's the kind of book that rewards effort--any amount of effort the reader is willing to give to it will be returned. I'll warn you that it wasn't the kind of 5-star book that I couldn't put down. There were places where my eyes crossed with all the detail, and I'll admit that I found myself skimming occasionally--but not often. What happened most of the time was that I got completely caught up in the story he was telling. I appreciated that while he obviously did his research, Foote made the decision to put the emphasis on the narrative. Someone who is looking for footnotes and other scholarly apparati won't find that here, although he includes a Bibliographical Note at the end. Since I'm not a historian, I was willing to go with what Foote was doing.

I originally hoped to finish this book by the first of the year and then "hopefully" finish the other two before the end of 2012. Unless I get majorly sidetracked by something else (which of course may very well happen), I plan to get to the second one soon.

Yup, same family. Alice Nihiser's brother Elmer married Phoebe Daugherty, whose sister Josephine was my g-grandmother. Small world indeed. Most of my family arrived early (1600s and 1700s) and stayed put along the east coast, and records are fairly easy to find. It's fun to piece together the jigsaw puzzle; I've done no original research for these people, just downloaded internet census images, though my mother traipsed about to libraries and cemeteries for some years after retiring. When I asked my father about his mother's family in Macon, he named the people he'd known in his childhood (he last set foot there around 1950, his mother died in 1976, and that was the last tie), said as far as he knew they'd spontaneously generated there. Of course they hadn't, and they've proven to be an interesting bunch, with several mysteries remaining. I've gradually acquired birth / marriage / death records and traced back a few generations, but these were folks much as you describe, who traveled along the river and built cabins in the woods. There was a preacher who apparently moved his entire congregation from OH to IL. There were young men who arrived in IL alone, worked as farm laborers and married into local families. By the time information about possible origins shows up in records, it's vague and inconsistent. So I do this in spurts, reach a dead end, set it aside, and then a random tidbit inspires another round of research. My most recent tidbit was a letter found in a box by a cousin in Macon, a chatty update circa 1920 about the relatives back in OH, with enough names that I was able to confirm an identity and trace a gg-grandmother to a town in PA, not terribly far from where I am. Inquiries re records have yielded not much, but if I get my act together and figure out what I'm looking for, a visit in person might be worthwhile.

My "what on earth" moment of the day hit when I mis-read yr reference to a Lincoln biog as a Lincoln blog -- and I wondered who was channeling him.

Not sure I have the patience for Shelby Foote's mammoth opuses. I do think I have a distant relative who died at the Battle of the Wilderness -- brother to my 3x g-grandfather, who was a Vermonter.

>103 qebo: Here's a pic of Phoebe in her cloche. This was taken at a family reunion of the Nihiser siblings. They're outside, the women all sitting in chairs in front of their husbands. I estimate it was 1930 or so. Phoebe's dates: 1887-1978.



I've been all over the area, concentrating particularly in Flatbranch Township, which is just across the county line from Macon. Alice's husband's family was from Flatbranch, named Denton. They were there from about 1820-1850, and then they all disappeared from the area; generally they kept moving west.

I've started the biog (not "blog" Suzanne--ha) about Lincoln by Ronald C. White, Jr., published in 2009 (ref. post #100). So far it's rather persistently hagiographic; also, the writing level seems sort of 8th-graderish. Example: "Arriving {in Indiana} with his family in the late fall of 1816 at the age of seven, Lincoln would grow from a boy to a youth to a young man who would prove different from any young man (emphasis mine) in the world around him." Really?

That statement is just sort of silly. In reality, Lincoln wasn't all that different from a lot of young men who grew up to be "civilizers" who were the sons of frontier families. He worked as a clerk in a village store; he fought in the Black Hawk War; he became a partner in a village store that went bankrupt; he was appointed Postmaster of his town; he became a county surveyor; he was elected to the Illinois General Assembly; he studied law and received his law license. Lincoln was clearly ambitious, but he wasn't "different from any young man in the world around him." I have numerous men in my family tree who had similar biographies, young men who were sons of frontiersmen, born in the early 1800s, who lived in Kentucky/Indiana/Illinois. I have no patience for hagiography, particularly with someone like Lincoln, who already suffers at the hands of historians from a "Saint Lincoln" complex.

I'm barely into this thing, obviously, since Lincoln is only seven years old on page 23; I'll give it some more of my time, but I'm not going to have any patience with much more of this "one of a kind in the whole wide world" sort of thing. I got the White biog of Lincoln over David Donald's Lincoln because it was newer (2009 vs. 1996); however, I already think that I might have made a mistake.

Yep, this biog of Lincoln by White is going in the charity bin. If I'm going to spend time reading a biography of Lincoln, then I'll read the one by David Donald.

Good for you to have the strength to stop reading a book that just isn't working.

Becky, I've lived 20+ years in Georgia, and I have yet to read Shelby Foote. I really must bump him up the list.

I picked up McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom again, which is billed everywhere I read about it as the best--the best--one-volume history of the Civil War. I'm trying to catch up in this book where I left off in Foote. After reading Foote's first book, this one seems especially plodding. I do think it's worthwhile, however, mainly for all the time he spends on the buildup to the war.

I find it interesting that, in contrast to Foote, who puts his Mississippi bias squarely out front, McPherson doesn't do likewise. He is certainly not an objective player, and of course I don't expect him to be; it's quite simply naive to think that any historian is without bias. In the past, McPherson has accused people who support the Museum of the Confederacy as being involved in "a hidden agenda of white supremacy that they don't even know they're involved in." Those same people replied that not only does McPherson accuse them of here of racism, but he also adds stupidity to their sins. It's not a happy relationship (read: boycott of his work) between some of the Confederate heritage groups and McPherson.

OK, so I gave up for the second time on McPherson's book, Battle Cry of Freedom. It's just so plodding compared to Foote, and life is too short and my interest isn't at such a level that I feel a need or desire to read more than one comprehensive history of the Civil War.

I've been working on other projects lately, so the reading has been taking a back seat.

In an attempt to record the books that are capturing my interest these days, I'll report on a bread book that I recently bought: Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois. This book is for people who want to make homemade bread frequently--every day if they wish. The "secret" they share is a dough recipe that can be stored in the refrigerator for weeks. The idea is to use a small part of the dough for making your daily loaf of bread, and there's no kneading required, which cuts down considerably on the time and effort. If you really, really want to knead bread dough, then this isn't the book for you.

The specialty recipes in this book are the kind of peasant loaves you buy in a good bakery. I splurged and bought a baking stone for my oven.

Yesterday I received my Thanksgiving issue of Cooking Light magazine. It's a huge double issue, and the recipes look absolutely to die for. I honestly think I've never made a recipe from the Cooking Light people that hasn't been wonderful. The thing that really amazes me is that my family loves these recipes so much. My adult son is very health conscious (somewhat tedious about it at times, IMO--heh), and he appreciates the fact that he can get a great meal at our house and know that he isn't going to pay for it all week. DH loves to eat, so he honestly doesn't care, as long as things taste good. My only complaint is that I literally have hundreds of recipes that I will never get to, not if I lived to be 150. Sigh.

For anyone who loves cookbooks (I enjoy just paging through them, drooling my way through) this issue has the beginning of what will eventually be reviews of the top 100 cookbooks in the last 25 years. Cooking Light is turning 25 in 2012, so this is their way of celebrating that anniversary. This issue starts with Part I: General Cookbooks, reviews of the best nine.

My "other" Lincoln biog came today, Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald. I'm pretty confident that this one will be an improvement over the other one I tried and then abandoned after about 20 pages. I'm hoping for something other than hagiography, but we'll see; with Lincoln, that's pretty much standard fair. This one won the Pulit-Surprise, but that doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot. It's worth a shot, though.

In all the hundreds of books about Lincoln, one can surely hope there are one or two good ones.......

Hello! Thanks for posting about Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.
It looks great and I'm going to pick it up! My fiance will love it, nothing better than fresh bread in the house!

I confess that my fave bread comes pre-frozen -- Alexia Classic French Rolls (organic, artisanal). If I get a package of 8, they last a week and I heat one up in the oven in the morning and put some jam on. Yum. It's excellent. I find a lot of breads that are sold now have crusts that are far too hard for me, and have far too much air in them.

I do have an excellent recipe for carraway bread that I should make sometime soon, as it's fab for eating with cheese and soup -- assuming I can find the recipe and ingredients. It came from the mother of a Swedish friend of mine when I was 15, and is all metric...

Just a reminder: Bundt Pan Day is coming up, November 15. Of course, I have to find my bundt pan......

>114 ChelleBearss:. Hi Chelle, thanks for visiting!

>115 Chatterbox:. Suzanne, your French rolls sound great. IF I could find them in my town, I would probably have to go to someplace like Whole Foods, which I don't do. I do buy my chickens there, because they're the best in town, but I make DH go in after them while I sit in the car. I hate that store.

>116 sibylline:. Sib, LOL. Well, Bundt Pan Day is becoming a tradition around here. If I remember correctly, last year I found the recipe book that came with the bundt pan I received as a wedding gift in 1973. This year I guess I'm going to have to resurrect my bundt pan and actually make something from that little book. I remember there was something that could be made with a can of refrigerator biscuits. That sounds appropriate and pretty much up to the speed of my 1970-era cooking. Heh. Maybe a whiskey cake? Although I wouldn't have made one of those back then because we wouldn't have been able to afford the whiskey. Good times, though.

Lol, I remember last year's talk about Bundt cakes. I don't even have to look for my two Bundt pans - one harvest gold and the other a burnt orange trying to be red - because every once in awhile I get the urge for one of those moist Booont coffee cakes that are so easy and yummy.

Too bad about the McPherson book. My bookmark is still on page 78 and is not calling to me. Dang, I should have bought the Shelby Foote Civil War book at the recent library sale. It was a very used and abused well-loved copy that was overpriced for the condition... but perhaps underpriced for the content.

Hi Donna. I hear you about the McPherson book. It's hard to keep the Foote books in good condition, I think. My paperback copy has been read once, and it looks like it was a frequent flyer at a large city library.

OK, so I've reached a saturation point with Lincoln and the Civil War. I'm stopping all of those books and will probably wait to pick any of them up again until the dead of winter. For now I need something with a little pep. I had the Portable Ring Lardner sitting out because I'd been looking at his writing, comparing it with the Dos Passos book I read recently. I opened this thing up and started reading a story at random--and found myself falling off my chair laughing. The story is "The Love Nest." It was first published in 1916. I know that my dad was a big Ring Lardner fan, but sadly I don't know any of the details. Dad should have been a reporter. He would have been great at it.

MMMMMmmmmm I'm thinking RUM cake.

Reporting back on the bread I made yesterday from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I made the authors signature recipe, Deli-Style Rye. It was the easiest bread I ever made--and the best--and I found it to be very forgiving, since I made some mistakes with it. This is almost foolproof, non-fuss bread dough. You stir the flour, water, yeast, and salt together and let it sit for 2 hours. Thats it--no watching it, punching it down, kneading it--none of that. At that point its ready to put into the refrigerator, where it will be fine for up to a couple of weeks in a lidded container. Just cut off a grapefruit-sized piece, fold it around, let it rest for 40 minutes and bake it.

I kept warning my family that this first try might not turn out to be very good, because even though the recipe seemed foolproof, I goofed it up somewhat. I tried stirring this dough together with my food processor and ended up with a strange lump of something that I had to fold by hand into the rest of the dough. (Next time Im just going to stir it together by hand.) I thought, Well, we can eat around that I guess, but the lumpishness didnt appear once the loaf was baked. Then I messed up the oven temp. I think the roasting pan I put in the oven to hold the water was too big, so the water evaporated too quickly. Since I had to wait for the oven to get back up to temperature, I had to eyeball it and bake it until the crust looked done. I kept it in the oven a little too long, because I was afraid the middle would be a mess of undercooked dough.

With all of that, youd think the finished product would have been pretty bad, but it was fabulous. We had it with homemade vegetable soup and steak--a meal. Easy, schmeasy.

If youre going to try this bread, I would definitely recommend getting a baking stone for your oven. I think a baking stone is one of the big secrets to this bread. Also very useful but not absolutely necessary is a bread peel--one of those paddle things a pizza restaurant uses to put pizza into the oven. You can use a cookie sheet instead, but using a bread peel made me feel like a pro, and I think mine only cost me $14.

There are some wonderful-looking recipes in the book, including many different flatbreads and pizza.

Since I made just a half recipe yesterday, all of it disappeared, so I dont have any dough sitting in my refrigerator today waiting for 5 minutes of work to turn it into bread. So I think today Im going to make European Peasant Bread, which is a combination of rye, whole wheat, and white flour. Im sticking to the basic recipes until I get the technique down right.

Note: My laptop seems to have forgotten how to *do* apostrophes--vv annoying.

I decided to start a book thats been on my shelf since earlier this year, one that combines a couple of interests--cooking and the New York Herald Tribune: Hometown Appetites: The Story of Clementine Paddleford, the Forgotten Food Writer Who Chronicled How America Ate, by Kelly Alexander and Cynthia Harris.

I was reading a book about the history of the Herald Tribune earlier this year, which is where I discovered Clementine. Her dates: 1896 to 1967, making her yet another one of those wonderful women in my collection, women young in the 1920s, who went to New York and *made it big*.

I liked the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day book when I checked it out. I thought I'd already purchased my own copy, but it's still showing up in my "read but unowned" category. I'm going to check to see if I failed to update that status or if I need to go ahead and purchase that copy I intended to buy. Your report has motivated me to try it soon.

Hi Lori, nice to see you. The techniques and tips in this book are eye-opening, at least to me. Heres a good one: (Shes referring to the dough bucket used to store the dough in the refrigerator.)

When your dough bucket is finally empty, dont wash it! Immediately re-mix another batch in the same container. In addition to saving the cleanup step, the aged dough stuck to the sides of the container will give your new batch a head start on sourdough flavor. Just scrape it down and it will hydrate and incorporate into the new dough.

I did wonder about the apostrophes -- that's not at all like you! Glad to know it's the computer misbehaving...

What I like about WholeFoods is that I can go there if I want, say, two or three slices of roast lamb or roast pork from their prepared foods section. For one person, I'm not going to roast a hunk of meat, only to have to eat it for four days in a row. That said, I can't stand the crowds and the prices are rather lofty, too. But if you want to look for other stores that might stock the Alexia rolls, go to the mfer's website and type in your zip code. Curiously, whole foods doesn't stock these (perhaps bec. it's WHITE bread, as opposed to multi-grain???) but I can get them at a couple of chain stores and an organic food store not too far away. Sometimes wish I had a chest freezer to stock up on stuff like that!

Hi Becky, de-lurking after a long silence to say that I love the sound of that artisan bread book, and the fool-proof deli-style rye - my favourite kind of bread. Look forward to hearing how the European peasant bread turns out next. Real bread is so wonderful, and tastier and more interesting than standard shop-bought stuff and the 'artisan' types are usually so expensive to buy - it's good to know they work so well at home.

I love good bread too, and used to bake weekly. Why I'm not doing it again now that I can is a mystery to me. My signature bread is yeast rolls: graham and unbleached flours and oatmeal (which is what was available around here in the 70's and 80's when I was really baking) and honey. Got to do it!

MMMMMmmmmm I'm thinking RUM cake.

My thoughts exactly!

I'm tempted to get the artisan bread book - I love fresh baked bread, but I haven't been cooking much lately, so I think I'll to the turkey rollups I have in the frig before trying anything new.

Oh visitors! Hi everyone.

Suzanne, you are exactly right about Whole Foods and their prepared foods section. While its expensive if you were going to buy that stuff for a crowd, buying it for one or two seems to be pretty cost-effective, especially if you-re looking for a meat entre or something.

Peggy, I-ve never used graham flour, but I think that-s something I will try in the near future (my typing looks like stuttering--heh).

Hi Genny. Instead of the European artisan bread, I made their recipe for Boule, which uses all white flour. They use this same dough to make baguettes and all sorts of delicious-looking flatbread recipes. I simply made mine into 1# loaves, and again I halved the recipe, since I still don-t have the container I want yet for storing the dough in the refrigerator. We ate this with dinner, and then we ate it again for brunch today, making bruschetta with tomato, garlic, olives, and cheese--all stuff that was hanging out in my refrigerator. Oh my.

Hi Ardene. I know just what you mean. DH and I have been *talking about* baking bread again for years. When we were first married, we made bread because it was something we both wanted to try. As life got busier, we dropped the bread-making. With this book and the no-knead technique, plus being able to make enough dough at one time to last for about a week, I think I can probably find time to do this. Part of what I-m doing here is trying to justify getting my new range--ha.

I did some math this morning, checking out the cost of this bread I-m baking. I-m not buying flour in bulk (yet), but even so the flour is actually cheaper than I thought. I can bake 4 batches of bread and have flour left over from a 10-pound bag that cost me $3.50. I-m figuring that the yeast costs somewhere around 50 cents per batch. A batch makes 4 one-pound loaves. So I-m thinking that a one-pound loaf costs me around 50 cents. The reason I did this figuring was that I wanted to make sure I wasn-t spending $4 a loaf or something--ha. Now if I went crazy and bought my flour and yeast in bulk, then I could decrease the cost per batch significantly.

The shelf life of white flour in an unopened bag is one year. Whole wheat flour is the same. If the bag is opened, then it should probably be used within 6 months.

Glad to hear the bread making works out economically as well as taste-wise. I guess most made-from-scratch food does, so it's win-win.

Becky, I think I read that artisian bread book a couple of years ago from the library. It looked wonderful, and I'm glad to hear it's working out in practice. We have a bread machine and make bread in it every week for Sunday dinner, so we do get real bread regularly. Have several favorite recipes that we make, depending on which ingredients we might be out of that day.

We buy our flour at the supermarket, but buy yeast in bulk at Costco - we keep it in the fridge and it lasts a year or so. Much less than 50 cents per batch.

Might have to get that bread book again for another look...

Glad to hear the bread making is going well and for a good price! I went out today and picked up that book. Can't wait to try some recipes!

Sandy--thanks for the tip. I will pick some up at Sams.

Chelle--I just saw your dog Halloween pic and nearly fell off my chair laughing. So funny. I hope you like the book. I am having a blast experimenting with these recipes.

FYI. I should add that I am also doing Weight Watchers, sort of on again, off again. I had a mental picture of myself eating this bread and rolling in the door at WW for my weekly weigh-in. I checked it out, and a 1 oz. piece of bread (I have a little digital scale for such things) which is a decent-sized slice, is only 2 points. Ive decided that, within reason, Im just going to enjoy some fresh bread for awhile and not obsess too much about the the number on the scale. I think I can incorporate fresh bread into what I eat daily without gaining weight. We-ll see.

P.S. The apostrophe still isnt working, obviously. DH will get to it one of these days, but right now its pretty low on the priority list.

Please join me at my new thread for November is which is here.