kismet09

also in bed with the laptop. since tim's sharing a hotel room with another woman this weekend, i feel no guilt at toting both laptop and palm pilot to bed.

i am one of those consumers that companies love, because they advertise and advertise and then one day i finally give in and decide to partake of what they're offering, and then regret it for a long time. purchases have included door to door vacuum sales (altho i feel only minor pangs of guilt about that one - it's a really excellent vacuum) and any number of of-the-month clubs.

i have finally fulfilled my book of the month club obligations, after sending at least 10 automatically sent featured selections of the month back (they start sending you mean letters about declining the offerings online rather than returning the books to them at their cost). i purchased a math/lewis carroll biog, and medium raw, anthony bourdain's recently released sequel to kitchen confidential. kc is probably the only book i've reread other than harry potter in recent years. i just love the way bourdain writes - it's smart and sarcastic (without it seeming forced or cliched) and all about food. the first bit of medium raw made my mouth water.

i'm on a food book kick. almost everything i've read in the past year was about food, eating, or serving food. highly recommended: service included, by phoebe damrosch, about serving at per se; the apprentice, by jacques pepin. recommended: Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress by Debra Ginsberg. i'm partway through Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto by Victoria Abbott Riccardi, which is interesting, but not that compelling, and The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World's Most Famous Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn (what's with all my books being colon-ized? good thing i'm just copy and pasting rather than typing - those are really long titles.... even service included has a colon, but i didn't feel like looking it up on amazon). eventually i'll probably go back to fiction, but something about food memoirs is pulling me in right now.

i'm a little afraid to get too much deeper into medium raw, since once i do, i'll probably just keep reading and stop sleeping for a bit, and there are other things i need to get done. maybe i can be patient enough to save it for the plane to dallas.

first mp3s, then movies, now this! y'all keep me busy:

1. Total number of books I've owned: Ever?! Shoot, who knows. Currently living on the shelves in this room? 85. There are more in the basement, in my office, and also in boxes all over my house.
2. Last book I bought: The Original Scrabble Players' Dictionary, fourth edition
3. Last book I read: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
4. 5 books that mean a lot to me:

• Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupery
• Redwall, Brian Jacques
• Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
• To All the Girls in Love with Horses, Robert Vavra
• Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel

Tag 5 people and have them fill this out in their LJs: u4ic, maratcal, kestrel127, greensock and helloyarn -- tag, you're it!

Reading non-fiction makes me feel more aware of things in my life. I just finished _A Dog Year_ by Jon Katz, which is a beautifully-written memoir of a year in the life of a dog owner, who goes from owning two labs to two border collies, losing the first two to old age, and gaining the second two at the encouragement of an insightful and persuasive breeder. It's really just great to read books about dogs from the perspective of a dog owner and lover, and since I've owned a lab and currently have a border collie, it seems even more poignant to my own life.

I started reading this morning, continued through my lunch of a quesadilla and a mocha frap at starbucks, and finished up just now in my bathing suit in the backyard, surrounded by my small canine harem. Walking back inside, I listened to the birds chirping in the nest that they've built in the beams of our back porch patio, and now I'm listening to the rhythm of the washing machine, almost as intently. I really have to convince myself to read more often - it keeps me so well-grounded.

Stolen from firecat who got it from someone who got it from The Big Read: "In April the BBC's Big Read began the search for the nation's best-loved novel, and we asked you to nominate your favourite books. The votes poured in from all around the UK and here's the results!"

( I've read the ones in bold )

If you have other summer reading recommendations, especially any based on my favorites:

1. The Little Prince (Saint Exupery)
2. The Eight (Neville)
3. The Mists of Avalon trilogy (Zimmer Bradley)
4. Secret Garden (Hodgson-Burnett)
5. Harry Potter series (Rowling)
6. 100 Years of Solitude (Garcia Marquez)
7. Memoirs of a Geisha (Golden)
8. Redwall (Jacques)
9. A Severed Wasp (L'Engle)
10. The House of the Spirits (Allende)

...let me know :)