In a world gone mad for hobbits and rings, for space battles, starships, zombies and other dystopias, I just don’t get it. I want my stories set on terra firma. The sun comes up where it’s supposed to and goes down where it’s supposed to. There are no trips down the rabbit hole, no clockworks orange or any other color. I can tolerate Atlanta burning, [...]
If they ever make a movie from Dennis Lehane’s Moonlight Mile, it’s going to be an expensive one. It won’t be the fancy sets, because Lehane’s characters troll through the seedier side of Boston and the Berkshire Mountains. Then again, if they use real houses, the movie carpenters will have their hands full, cleaning up all the bullet holes and sprayed blood after each scene. [...]
Today, we ate the Lazy Woman’s Sunday Dinner. Our dessert, Coconut Blueberry Cake was so easy, I made it late last night after a long bout of staring at a job list I didn’t want to finish. This Smoky Bean Stew was a rapid-assembly wonder that cooked itself during my Sunday nap. This was one of those dishes where I swabbed my finger around [...]
Who among us has not had a big secret that we bottled up for weeks? And what was your secret? A pregnancy? A For Sale sign going up on your lawn next week? A church calling? And there you sat, your lips buttoned up, letting on nothing while you frolicked with your friends, dipping chips into the dip. Piper Kerman had a big secret too. [...]
Sometimes the cow patties in a book are like weeds in the sidewalk cracks. It’s hard to keep a few from springing up. Best not criticize, unless your own sidewalk is weed-free. But when Carl Hiaasen wrote Star Island, I’m pretty sure he hauled along a bag of weed seeds and poured them in the sidewalk cracks on purpose. That said, he wrote a pretty [...]
If readers of Read Fast, Eat Slow would like to feast on some LDS books this summer, hurry over to New LDS Fiction and sign up for the Summer Book Trek. […]
You might be one of those people who resents the rich.But I think they fill a need in our society. They build castles to live in, and I get to walk by and admire them. I would certainly enjoy the country lane Nelson DeMille portrays in his novel, Gold Coast. […]
The sound of Sunday morning around my childhood home was filing-metal sound of Mom's spoon in the saucepan, stirring the jello until the ice cubes melted. By dinner time, a meatloaf showed up on the table, paired with some Rice-A-Roni, some peas, and that jello, and she considered her duty fulfilled. But Sundays require dessert, no? Mama didn't trouble herself with a lot of cooking experiments [...]
"Did you find everything all right today?" said the grocery store cashier."Yes, I did, and I was looking for a lot of weird stuff," I told her.Like spreadable goat cheese. And pesto. And roasted red peppers.We've got a Fast Sunday tradition around here of eating a big meal made made from all new recipes (also known as Dishwasher's Dismay). Currently, we're working our way through [...]
It's the book cover that got me.It sat on the endcap of the library shelves and, after a winter of heavy reading, I needed a little fluff. So I plucked Beth Kendrick's The Week Before the Wedding off its little display shelf and took it home.I whipped pretty quickly through this story about a woman all set to marry a surgeon, at a cute little [...]
