Sci Fi to die for

The Infinite Sea
by Rick Yancey

Rick Yancy has done it right this time!  The first book nearly did it for me and I wasn't sure I could stomach another.  It had it's moments but they were few and far between--hours of teenage angst, self-doubt, and soul searching that reminded me of the first book in the Twilight series.  The characters in a science fiction book don't all have to be Han Solo but neither do they have to be Bella Swan.

This series is science fiction with a human focus--my favorite.  Alien ships are circling the earth, ready to move in once all the pesky little humans are gone.  And the aliens choose some very unusual methods for removing us.

The first book concentrated on 'how'--this one on 'why'...and I'm still guessing.  Answers lead to more questions and it left me in burning curiosity to find out what the real answers are. I'm hooked for the duration.

Wednesday

I am not  a scratching post. I am a human being!

SAD tidings

I ate the typical SAD last night. Green salad with too much dressing; barbequed chicken; potato salad and bread with butter.  This morning my sixty minute jog felt like a marathon.

Beans for lunch.

Molly's life, with recipes

I really need to learn to resist my affinity for memoirs with recipes.  Or at the least, I need to always purchase the electronic copy.  Once again, I've ended up at the end of one--A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg--with dozens of little bookmarks at recipes that need to be laboriously copied into my to-try file.

I master the technology to scan them into PDFs, but seldom bother to use it; instead convincing myself that if I really want to try a recipe, I'll take the time to copy it out by hand.

As to this one, I can say without reservations, that I enjoyed 95% of it. Toward the end the memoir got thinnish and the recipes came faster; I read a few of them but in general, I'm not into reading recipes for pleasure.  And this book gave a lot of pleasure.

Mostly vegetarian, too, but seldom vegan.  I don't blame her and her husband for loving a good cheese; I'm just trying to stay away from the stuff.  but if you're a cheese-lover, go for this book.  If not, go for it anyway.  It's fun.

cooking on the glorious 4th

 First rule of cooking--keep your workspace tidy.

The problem

The right tool

SOLUTION!

Too real to be fiction

Faith by Jennifer Haigh

from GoodReads:

When Sheila McGann sets out to redeem her disgraced brother, a once-beloved Catholic priest in suburban Boston, her quest will force her to confront cataclysmic truths about her fractured Irish-American family, her beliefs, and, ultimately, herself.

from  me:
Editing.  Needed editing.  The removal of excess backstory for the major characters and the trimming of a myriad of unimportant descriptions.  At the time of reading (listening) I occasionally thought, "enough already," and later learned that I'd been wrong--the extra detail was necessary in understanding the character. But other times I was right--too much.

Case in point--the youthful Shelia on the boat.  It explained a good bit about what it was like for her growing up in the family and it showed us a picture of the mother and father we needed to see.  But did we really need to hear about the cigarette and beer and the first encounter in the head?   Fun stuff but pure filler, IMHO.

Some people will say I'm full of bull and it had exactly the amount of detail it needed.  I have to admit that as the story drew near the end and I kept wanting it to last longer, I wouldn't have minded a little more detail.  And you know what?  That's great storytelling.  Revealing the details in a tantalizing, somewhat episodic way, not in the order they occurred but in the order you needed to hear them.

Too real to be fiction

Faith by Jennifer Haigh

from GoodReads:

When Sheila McGann sets out to redeem her disgraced brother, a once-beloved Catholic priest in suburban Boston, her quest will force her to confront cataclysmic truths about her fractured Irish-American family, her beliefs, and, ultimately, herself.

from  me:
Editing.  Needed editing.  The removal of excess backstory for the major characters and the trimming of a myriad of unimportant descriptions.  At the time of reading (listening) I occasionally thought, "enough already," and later learned that I'd been wrong--the extra detail was necessary in understanding the character. But other times I was right--too much.

Case in point--the youthful Shelia on the boat.  It explained a good bit about what it was like for her growing up in the family and it showed us a picture of the mother and father we needed to see.  But did we really need to hear about the cigarette and beer and the first encounter in the head?   Fun stuff but pure filler, IMHO.

Some people will say I'm full of bull and it had exactly the amount of detail it needed.  I have to admit that as the story drew near the end and I kept wanting it to last longer, I wouldn't have minded a little more detail.  And you know what?  That's great storytelling.  Revealing the details in a tantalizing, somewhat episodic way, not in the order they occurred but in the order you needed to hear them.