There needs to be a warning label.  I'm serious.  Government ought to step in, quit fooling around with mosquito spraying and frac'ing regulations and do something useful for us poor citizens.

Warning labels on cliffhangers!

Neither movies nor books should be exempt.  Do they realize how disappointed Ed was at the end of The Desolation of Smaug?   I forgot to warn him--but why should it be my responsibility?

And that brings us to

Cinder
by Marissa Meyer

A very oddball take on the Cinderella story, complete with charming prince and wicked stepmother (but her evil seemed to have logic in it's madness.)   And androids.  And cyborgs.  And Lunars...like the comedy series that started with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, this ought to be called Cinderella and Robots.

I loved this book.  Oh, it had the usual teenage angst in endless self-reflection.  Oh, the world-building a little peculiar in a not bad at all way.  But the plot was delightfully twisty and turny and the main character was a hoot.  I liked her a lot.

But how long do I have to wait to see if she gets her you-know-what?

Doing penance in Boise

 I thought Canada Geese nested in Canada!  These guys got no farther north than Boise, Idaho.

Giving me the eye.

I'm not much on baby animals, but this guy was just too cute to ignore.

Snoozin'

 Isn't that the cutest thing?






Cats playing king of the hill.  Except I don't think Yuki knew they were playing.


I'm heading out for a week business trip tomorrow, so there may be nothing new for a while.

No foodie stuff for me

 I've been too discouraged to try vegan cooking this week, so instead I'm trying vegan eating. 

Subway's veggie sub with guacamole was skimpy and the guac tasted fake.  Chipotle's salad was excellent, as always.  Mooyah black bean burger with sauteed onions and mushrooms, plus sweet potato fries, was so good it was worth the hefty price tag.  I can't pretend it was good for me--my nose would grow.  Masala Wok's vegetable balls with spicy sauce and rice nearly made me cry...but what in the world was in those balls to make them taste so good?  Whatever resemblance to vegetables they might have had was pureed away to oblivion.

Oriental Express veggie deluxe with tofu and brown rice was excellent as always.


So far it's a tie between Chipotle and Oriental Express.  Next up, Sprouts deli, Tom Thumb deli, or Central Market.  Stay tuned.

Got to love this lady!

Home

by Julie Andrews
 is subtitled A Memoir of My Early Years.  I want the rest of her years!  So far, anyway.  It was a lovely memoir.  I wish it had gone a little deeper, but you know?  If I were in her position, that's about as deep as I would have gone.  It's none of my business to want to know all of the intimate details.

It ends in 1963, after Camelot and right at the start of Mary Poppins.  Since I recently re-watched Saving Mr. Banks, reading her brief conversation with Miss Travers made me start singing all of the Mary Poppins songs over again, in my head.  Endlessly.  I love 'em to death, but enough!

By the way, it's beautifully written.  I've never read any of her kids' books, but I suspect she's one of the few "celebrity" authors who deserves to be called authors.

trying to catch up on the reading challenge....

 

Slave: My True Story
    by Mende Nazer and Damien Lewis



At age twelve, Mende Nazer was stolen by Arab raiders from her family and sold as a slave to a family in Khartoum.  When did this happen, in the nineteenth century?  Last century?  In the dark ages?

1993.  And this was a girl who could read and write, who was attending school and hoped to become a doctor some day.  It seems nearly impossible, yet it happened.  She was isolated and afraid; had no place to go for help and no confidence that help would come even if she tried.

I am convinced that the only way to stop this sort of atrocity is to cut off the demand.  In any European country and--I think--and country in the western hemisphere, the idea of anyone owning a slave was repugnant.  Hiring a Hispanic housekeeper and not paying social security--well, that's still socially acceptable.
Other than the bare outlines of the story, the book is not that exciting.  Like many of these "shocking" memoirs I have read, it has a sweet, idyllic beginning--a perfect childhood in a rural environment, loved, protected and adored by a close knit family.  Then violent collision with the evil outside world.  Then a rather long, boring day-to-day description of life as a domestic slave.

I was really hoping for something deeper. Especially at the end.  Didn't get it.  It's too bad that non-fiction writers are restricted to reality and can't invent a smashing ending.  But even without taking license to exaggerate, he could have tried harder to show us the internal revolution that must have happened as Mende began to realize her freedom.

salad fresh

Really fresh.  There's something different about a salad when you wade out through the mud to the garden and rip the lettuce and spinach leaves right off the plant.  Jerk radishes out of the ground and shake dirt all over the kitchen.  Add just a couple of leaves of arugula, then top with baby bella mushrooms and zucchini.

That's some salad with serious flavor.

Crusades, King Richard, and an enigma in horsehair

Blood Red Horse
by K.M.Grant




I'm seriously conflicted about this one.  I listened to it on CD but I think it needed to be read on paper.  I can read faster than someone can talk, and the dragging dragging dragging parts would have made for quick reading.  (My brother says I skim instead of read, but that's a lie!)   Like many other YA novels I've read, there are too many passages of internal angst expressed as questions.  Will I ever have a life?  How can I stand this?  Will I ever see home again?

So.  It's a fabulous story--characters so real you can taste them--war and the holy crusades in all shades of living color--the perfect balance between imagery and action--

But don't give up halfway.  I was tempted to and I'm glad I didn't.  There are some gruesomely painful passages, but they--sadly--make the story real.  People do learn from their mistakes.  Well...some people learn from some of their mistakes.  Any more would be telling.

I love that picture

           The Tenth Muse:  My Life in Food

           By Judith Jones

I guess this book goes on my cookbook shelf.  I didn't know it had recipes in it!
There are even a couple of recipes I'd like to try.   But I do wish the editor had intermixed the recipes in with the text and maybe included a few more of them.  Crammed at the end and out of context, they weren't as interesting.

As a memoir goes, this is a good one...especially if you are a foodie interested in the history of modern American cooking.  Which I'm not--not a foodie, anyway.  But I'm interested in the history of modern American anything--food, music, dialect, forensics--whatever.   The name dropping of the various chefs and cooks she worked with in the course of her "life in food" didn't keep my attention.  I knew some of the names, of course, but not all of them and not nearly enough to be excited when they appeared on the printed page.

Note that you won't see any posts on cooking this week.  I lost the heart and only fixed food for the family, not me.  Instead I'm exploring the vegan options of fast food.  So far I've hit:

1. Subway veggie delight sandwich with guacamole --bland and the guacamole didn't taste like avocados at all.   There are two other dishes I can try there, so better luck next time.

2. Chipotle salad with cilantro-lime rice, black beans, salsa and guacamole--good guacamole!  Great as always--wish it were twice as big.  Also I added on the grilled vegetables this time, yum.  A little expensive--about $8.50 compared to the $4 I spent on the sub.

One day YA

Pretty much finished Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson in one reading.  Well...okay...not one reading.  One day; several readings.  It kept moving and I kept picking it up.


I'd read her book Speak, but it was so very, very different you wouldn't even guess they were by the same author.  All different--time, place, tone and narration.  The only thing in common was the marvelous story and the heart-rending characterizations.


But I won't bother with the sequel--it's told from a different point of view.  I want Isabel!

Finally a movie!

And I only had to skip washing dishes, doing laundry, weeding the garden and mowing the back yard to see it.



Remarkably good for a Marvel Comics sequel.

Listening definitely the best on this one

Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging

I raced through this book.   And it's funny.  People said Bridget Jones' Diary was funny, but they don't know funny!  This was chortle, snort, laugh-out-loud funny.

Meet Angus, the cat who attacks people, eats inappropriate substances, and terrorizes the neighbor's poodle.  Meet Georgie, the delightful mixture of teenage angst and near-adult bravado who writes in her diary obsessively--good, bad, and dreadful!  It's all here.  And meet her three-year-old sister Libby, sweetly cuddly, smelling a bit like a hamster, and prone to leaving well-used diapers in Georgia's bedroom.

The narrator did a toss up job, too.  (Not to be confused with tosser, which is Brit-speaker for a wanker.)  The glossary at the end is almost the best part of the book.