100 Things: Food Edition

I spent almost all day reading in sunny Palo Alto (where Stanford is). It’s a lazy day for blogging but I make headway through Sense and Sensibility and Middlemarch. Book talk and review will return on Monday. I have snagged a very interesting meme on food from a Chinese-language blog.
The meme lists 100 food items [...]

Reading Sense and Sensibility

Sense \ˈsen(t)s\ Noun. 3: conscious awareness or rationality —usually used in plural 6 a: capacity for effective application of the powers of the mind as a basis for action or response : intelligence b: sound mental capacity and understanding typically marked by shrewdness and practicality
Sensibility \ˌsen(t)-sə-ˈbi-lə-tē\ Noun. 2 : peculiar susceptibility to a [...]

Friday Fill-Ins

1. When I’m sick I’m sleeping like a pig.
2. When I take a walk, I think about the people I care about and wonder what they’re doing.
3. Money can’t buy happiness but it can satisfy one’s vanity.
4. Cotton makes me feel comfyand soft and leather makes me feel tight and clammy.
5. The strangest person/character I’ve [...]

Booking Through Stories

If you’re anything like me, one of your favorite reasons to read is for the story. Not for the character development and interaction. Not because of the descriptive, emotive powers of the writer. Not because of deep, literary meaning hidden beneath layers of metaphor. (Even though those are all good things.) No … it’s [...]

[148] The Front Runner – Patricia Nell Warren

“In those very first winter days, he stirred up all the old feelings, to a pitch of intensity that I’d never felt before. He was not merely physically attractive, but an appealing human being as well. I was that lonely mature man, but I was also like an adolescent seething with longing. For the first [...]

Inside the Reader’s Studio Meme

The Literate Housewife Review tags me with this meme, which comes to rescue since I have been very busy with my first day of class (an upper-division Russian literature seminar) and I have yet any idea for a blog post!
What is your favorite word? Peremptory. This is the first word off my head. I [...]

The Sunday Salon: Mill Valley Book Depot

It happens again. No sooner had I posted my fall reading list did a couple books vie for my immediate attention at the bookstore. One is A Friend Like Henry, a true story of how a canine has enlightened the life of an autistic boy. But the highlight of this week’s Sunday Salon is a [...]

Dear American Airlines, A Friday Find

This book stands out from all the books that are vying for my attention at the new book table. Dear American Airlines is Jonathan Miles’s fine first novel. It takes the form of an epistle to the titular air carrier, which has stranded Benjamin R. Ford, the book’s middle-aged protagonist, in O’Hare Airport [...]

[147] Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.” [15]
Written at a time of political tumult, on the heels of the French and American Revolution [...]

Friday Fill-Ins

1. Dancing to the Mamma Mia soundtrack soings while watching the movie at the theater makes me high. You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life…
2. The last time I read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room I nearly collapsed into tears.
3. When I drive I try to avoid going through downtown areas.
4. [...]