Whoops… running behind here! Got a couple memes I’ve been tagged on. And since my brain’s a little foggy this morning, what better way to warm up?

First Melissa tagged me for the 6 random details meme. I have a feeling I did something like this once before… aha! Eight random details meme. But what the heck… the last time I got tagged for this one again I just pointed to the earlier post; this time I’ll do a new one.

• Even though I have two cats, I’m very allergic. Allergy shots did part of the job (they don’t work for the majority of people; thankfully they worked for me), and I found a breed I don’t react to as strongly (Cornish Rex). When my husband has business travel the cats keep me from going stir-crazy.
• Most of our friends can’t come to our house to visit because they’re also strongly allergic to cats. This is highly disappointing as my husband and I love to cook for people, and it would be nice to reciprocate our friends’ hospitality.
• When I was 16, two of my best friends died in a car accident. A third friend was driving the car and was in the hospital for months. I didn’t realize until the other day how much of my reaction from the phone call that morning was still locked away inside of me, when I heard that the house of some friends got hit by a tornado while most of the family was home. Thankfully, this time no one was hurt, but boy did that pounding in my chest feel familiar.
• I am virtually unemployable. I have tendonitis from fingertip to shoulder in both arms that acts up if I’m not very careful (or when the weather is stormy), and although I do well in general, stress can make it hard for me to work due to mental illness. Designing shirts and writing book reviews might not make a huge amount of money, but it at least lets me feel like I contribute something to our household finances. The important thing is I do it on my own schedule, so there’s no stress. For me that makes all the difference in the world and allows me to get a lot of work done: on a good week I can review six books.
• I don’t like alcohol. It has nothing to do with morality—I don’t like the taste. I can enjoy some wines in small amounts, or the occasional fruity or chocolaty cocktail (if it’s light on the alcohol). I can also enjoy alcohol in cooking, such as an Irish Cream cheesecake. But that’s about it.
• I consider myself a cynical optimist. I hope for the best and expect the worst. I have the heart of a romantic and an idealist, but the expectations of a cynic.

I doubt that was terribly enlightening or fascinating, but there you have it. If you want to participate, consider yourself open-tagged and feel free to drop a link to your entry in the comments.

And now, for the second meme: the Meme of Fives, from MotherReader.

• The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
• Each player answers the questions about themselves.
• At the end of the post, the player then tags 5 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player’s blog.
• Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

What were you doing five years ago?

Living in New Hampshire, tending a vegetable garden, and trying to figure out why I was so restless and unable to work. That’s when I got my PTSD diagnosis.

What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order)


Do a bit of gardening.
Write a book review.
Read another book.
Hopefully make a last recipe from the agave baking book so I can review it soon.
Watch an episode of ‘Wire in the Blood’.

What are five snacks you enjoy?

Hummus with just about anything to dip into it (pita bread, crackers, veggies).
Fruit (cherries, blueberries, bananas, mango, etc.).
Chocolate (the darker the better).
Crackers (like TJ’s water crackers or Passport’s ‘Everything Flatbread’, and preferably with a sharp cheese).
Cereal or meusli.

What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?

Move to Virginia near our friends, probably build our own house with an uber-kitchen and a huge library. Yeah, that’s the selfish one.
Make sure certain family members are set for life.
Donate to some of my favorite charities, like the Cheetah Conservation Fund (cheetahs are just awesome), Child’s Play, local food banks, etc.
Hire someone to clean the house (kinda hard to keep the house clean with tendonitis).
Invest, invest, invest! Money can vanish before you know it, no matter how much you have.

What are five of your bad habits?

I’m the queen of clutter. Give me a day and I’ll have stuff strewn everywhere.
I have the sweet tooth from hell; leave something delicious and sweet in the house and I’m a goner.
I’m also a compulsive eater. It’s a struggle not to eat constantly.
I enjoy playing World of Warcraft a bit too much. Luckily, however, I’m great at multitasking, so I read review books while playing.
I’m stunningly forgetful.

What are five places where you have lived?

Delaware, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maryland.

What are five jobs you have had?

In high school I had a summer job as a waitress.
In college I worked shelving books at a campus library part-time.
After I dropped out of college I worked as a receptionist, secretary, and physics paper typesetter in one MIT department, and then in another as a receptionist and secretary.
Next I did freelance writing in the tabletop roleplaying industry, primarily for White Wolf.
Now I design T-shirts and write book reviews.

What five people do you want to tag?

Morsie
Literary Feline
Tara
caribousmom
Court
(If you wanna—totally optional!)

And back to the book thing, the latest reviews are: Angela Knight’s seriously smokin’ Warrior, and Edwin Alexander’s fascinating Theft of the Master.

It’s sunny today! Woohoo!

MotherReader is hosting the third annual 48-Hour Book Challenge. To quote:

I’m setting the date for the 48 Hour Book Challenge — that special contest that allows you to read guilt-free for as long as you can stand it! I’m avoiding ALA and Father’s Day weekends, plus I like having the Challenge on my birthday. So the chosen weekend is — ready for it? — June 6–8, 2008.

…

Read and blog for any 48-hour period within the Friday-to-Monday-morning window. …

The books should be about fifth-grade level and up. Adult books are fine …

It’s your call as to how much you want to put into it. …

The length of the reviews are not an issue. …

For promotion/solidarity purposes, let your readers know when you are starting the challenge with a specific entry on that day. Write your final summary on Monday, and for one day, we’ll all be on the same page, so to speak. …

Your final summary needs to clearly include the number of books read, the approximate hours you spent reading/reviewing, and any other comments you want to make on the experience. It needs to be posted no later than noon on Monday, June 9th.

You’ll need to sign up in the comments section of the above-linked post.

I’m definitely hoping to play along, although I’ve no idea how much of that weekend I’ll be available for. I also have at least one friend who’ll be doing it as well and who, since he doesn’t have his own blog, will be joining in with a user account on this one. I’ve created a ‘guest posts’ category and we’ll come up with some way to make it obvious who’s posting at the time.

Speaking of books, today’s reviews are: Patricia Cornwell’s Predator and Janice Maynard’s upcoming By Appointment Only. I highly recommend the former!

Oh yeah… Iron Man was great! Very fun, although the odds of an MIT grad forgetting his social security number so quickly after spending his entire time there using it nearly every day as his ID number for EVERYTHING is a little small. (Yes, you can roll your eyes now.)

If you tried to visit toward the end of last week or over the weekend you might have noticed a few problems. First the static content part of the site went down, although the blogs stayed up. Then the reverse happened as we worked on solving the former. In theory it’s all worked out now and shouldn’t happen again; we’ll keep an eye on it just to make sure.

Today’s review is of Jill O’Connor’s Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey. Yes, that’s a dessert cookbook, and a damn fine one too! I have two more semi-cookbooks I expect to review over the next couple of days, and I’m halfway through a novel (Ronald Cutler’s The Secret Scroll).

For today’s ubiquitous slideshow (yeah, still going crazy with the camera), it’s three pieces of new furniture we got:

Sorry about the lack of reviews. It turned out there’s a gluten-free baking mix recipe in the gluten-free eating book, and I wanted to test it out before reviewing that book. I just made a final recipe from Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey, so I hope to review that soon. I also plan to make a final recipe from the superfoods cookbook tonight.

Wednesday was the upper endoscopy. Apart from a killer headache that I couldn’t take anything for (no food, water, etc. for 6 hours before the procedure) it was quick and easy (not to mention I was blessedly unconscious for it). No ulcers; it looks like I just had acid reflux masquerading as gallbladder trouble, etc. A month on an acid-reducing proton-pump inhibitor med plus an improved diet has definitely helped, so, looks like I’ll be taking an acid-reducer for a while. Meanwhile they’re doing biopsies just to make sure there’s no h pylori infection or celiac disease (since the latter runs in the family and the former is often a cause of acid & ulcer problems).

Then I spent yesterday gardening, since my tomato seedlings arrived Tuesday. I planted nine seedlings (three each of three varieties), and six medusa pepper plants that I bought at the last minute (a decorative but edible sweet pepper with a bush growth habit). Some nifty new furniture that we got also arrived yesterday.

Here are a few gardening photos:

The red thing around the tomato seedling reflects red light at the plant, which is supposed to lead to a larger harvest. It acts as a mulch so you don’t have to weed around the tender roots. And if you pour water into the tray, it directs it down toward the roots of the plant, so they grow strong and deep instead of shallow.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I’ve gone crazy with the camera.

I was hoping to review The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Gluten-Free Eating today, but it looks like my tomato plants are about to be delivered and I’m not ready for them. Eeeek! So I think I’m going to get into gardening gear and go do some digging. I’d like to say it’ll be up tomorrow, and it very well might be, but tomorrow afternoon is my endoscopy so I’m not sure what all I’ll get done. I apologize in advance for the slow pace of reviews (and everything else) this week. Hopefully I’ll make up for it on Thursday and Friday!

Edited to add: *groan* Apparently the former owner of the house buried landscaping fabric all around the roses I’m trying to dig up. It’s under a couple inches of soil, and it’s thick enough to be a real impediment to digging things up without being thick enough to stop some tough things from growing up through it. I spent a while loosening up soil around the plants, but I’m going to have to appeal to that husband of mine to do some digging.

Well, I suppose we should be grateful that whoever-it-was just ran up a $1600 phone bill in my husband’s name. Or I suppose, that’s all we’ve found out about so far. It apparently happened 2-3 years ago, and we’re just now getting the collection notice. Fingers crossed that we can get all this worked out easily. Police reports and all that will be involved. Urgh.

Today’s book review is

…

*Sigh* Let’s start over. That’s where the timer beeped and I had to move banana oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (part of testing a review cookbook!) to the cooling rack.

…

Take three. That’s where my husband got home from work, still deep in the throes of a conference call. So far today I’ve written two book reviews (today’s review of Donna MacMeans’s The Trouble with Moonlight and tomorrow’s queued up review of Emmett James’s Admit One). I’ve cleaned up cat puke from the doorway of the guest room. I’ve put up a new design at Caffeinated Chicanery:

Still looking for my muse

I visited a goodly handful of cool book blogs (just check out the blog roll on the reviews blog if you want some ideas for where to start!). I made a marinade for Chinese BBQ pork (cha siu, if I recall correctly). I got a package of gardening stuff and got all that put away. I still need to do a load of laundry and clean up the living room and dining room, and my husband gets to vacuum.

The cleaning is because an old friend of mine is coming tomorrow and staying for a week (yay!). The rest of it is just me apparently going a little crazy.

It’s appointment day. This morning I went to see my GI doc. The last HIDA scan showed no gallbladder problems (which doesn’t fit with the symptoms, but that’s the weirdness of the human body for you), so in about a month I’m getting an upper endoscopy done. Wheee. I’ve always wanted someone to stick a camera down my throat. (Yes, that’s sarcasm there.)

There’s nothing like invasive tests and chronic mild pain to make you feel like you’re getting old. Mid-30s shouldn’t be old. (Ick, I’m whining! I’d better move on to another subject, quick!)

In different news, I’m finally looking at the possibility of getting a digital camera—I’d really love to liven up the cookbook reviews with some home-grown food photography so you can see what some of the yummy results look like. My tentative pick is a Canon PowerShot SD1000—it looks like it’s good quality, and capable of taking crisp, clear photos, even when food is involved. And it doesn’t cost a fortune (well, when we’re talking digital cameras). Speaking of which, yesterday’s review was of Betty Rosbottom’s Coffee cookbook. YUM!

Dewey has put up a fantastic new book meme that I just have to participate in, because it provides plenty of food for thought: the negativity meme.

1. When you dislike a book, do you say so in your blog? Why or why not?

Yes. I see my reviews as existing to help people pick which books they might want or not want to explore in their precious spare time. The best way to honestly help people is to list everything I think they might want or need to know about a book in order to make that decision. That includes not just things I like or don’t like, but why, and things I think others might like or dislike even if I don’t agree.

(more…)

First, before I forget, today’s review is of Peggy Knickerbocker’s delightful Olive Oil from Tree to Table.

Second, it’s time for the weekly Booking through Thursday meme, which I’ve actually missed for the last few weeks. Today’s meme is:

How about a chance to play editor-in-chief? Fill in the blanks:

__________ would have been a much better book if ______________________.

Now, I do a lot of book reviewing, so there are dozens of places I could go with this. But since I reviewed a cookbook today, I’ll let that dictate my choice—particularly because that’ll give me the opportunity to turn this into a rather funny story.

“The Fearless Chef would have been a much better book if the recipes had been kitchen-tested.”

To quote from that review:

I have a great love of Bananas Foster, so we decided to make the Jamaican Rum-Baked Bananas, which are described as “a tropical answer to Bananas Foster.” They include a bit of curry, and instead of flaming the alcohol you simply bake the dish in the oven, which sounded easier.

When we mixed things together I found myself triple-checking (literally) the amount of alcohol to go in; 1 cup of dark rum sounded like an awful lot. In fact, I even just checked it again because I still find it hard to believe the recipe called for that much. But hey, we were testing the cookbook, so I figured we should use the recipe as written.

We put everything together and into the oven. We basted it halfway through as stated. Then, at the end, I watched out for the cats and my husband opened up the oven to see if dessert was done.

I heard a whooshing sound and the slam of the oven door. Then I smelled burnt hair. I whipped around, and when my husband turned to face me all I could say was, “umm, you should look in a mirror.” His eyebrows had been trimmed, his eyelashes (despite his glasses) were a rather interesting ragged length, and the front row of his hair above his forehead was shriveled and now brown instead of black. A gout of flame had apparently shot straight out of the oven when he opened it up.

Nothing like that has ever happened to us before.

Now, on to the topic I was planning for today. Recently I ended up in Penguin’s database of reviewers. Because of this, I suddenly find myself reviewing a lot more erotic romances and variations on the same than I ever expected.

The other day, someone I know said to me, with a tone of horror, “don’t tell me you’re reviewing romances!” as though this was a terrible thing. It reminded me that once upon a time, that’s how I would have viewed it. Yes, I bought into the stereotype (which, mind you, existed for some time with good reason) that romances were ‘bodice-rippers’—ridiculous stories in which helpless, naive women waited for the strong, domineering man to come along and rescue them. And maybe once upon a time that was largely true, but it isn’t any more.

Out of curiosity I decided to read Alison Kent’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Erotic Romance a couple of years ago. And in reading that book I came to realize that romances have changed a lot, and I decided to give them a try. Since then, I’ve come to a conclusion.

Romances have changed. And really, that shouldn’t be a surprise. The women of recent generations don’t tend to have patience for stupid, helpless heroines, and these women are writing more and more of the erotic romances out there. This means that the people writing these books tend to want the same things we as readers do: strong heroines who are capable of standing on their own two feet, and can match wits with the best of the heroes. Just like books of any other genre, romances can be written well or poorly depending on the skill and talent of the individual writer. Dismissing the genre out of hand is simply silly.

So I’m no longer vaguely embarrassed by the idea of reading & reviewing these books. Instead I’m enjoying opening my eyes to a whole new genre and discovering some wonderful writers, many of whom write in other genres I enjoy as well.