As social habits go, listening to talk radio rates somewhere between shopping at Wal-Mart in your pajamas and tossing litter out of your car window. Especially if your afternoon fix is Rush Limbaugh. I’ve eaten dinner with friends who dismissed the “dittoheads” they know as crazy sheep-like paranoids who take their marching orders from a bombastic liar. But I like the guy. I’ll gladly listen. [...]
Just curious: I know you love books. But which do you love best? Book-books? The kind with the spine that breaks if you keep your place by resting it upside down? The kind where you get to turn the pages? Or e-books? The kind where you can read in bed without your flashlight? The kind where you can take whole libraries on your trip [...]
How about you and I sit down to a lunch of these tasty Easy Salsa Sloppy Joes, and I’ll just reach over and help myself to half the chips on your plate. You don’t mind, do you? Oh, you do. Well then. How about you and I take a hike at state park together? Go ahead and strap on your backpack. And wait just a [...]
If you or your loved ones are currently battling cancer, you might not be in the mood to read Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: a Biography of Cancer. But the rest of us might find Mukherjee's book an illuminating read. How did they understand the disease centuries ago, when medicine was little more than blind supposition? The list of cures might make you [...]
Let’s say you are the mother of a teenage girl. Let’s say you’ve convinced her to wait to have sex. But she’s surrounded by other teenagers that are doing it. You want her to know that becoming a mom at age fifteen is not the way to go. She nods like Yeah, yeah, Mom, but then one of her friends has a baby and all [...]
Take an ordinary American family: mom, dad, two young boys. Put them through a common American ordeal: packing up their furniture, their books, their toys, and moving it all to a new home. In Beijing. Foremost Good Fortune is Susan Conley’s memoir of two and a half years in China which, I don’t have to tell you, doesn’t much resemble her native Portland, Maine. For [...]
I'm sorry you can't see the slices of apple tucked into this yummy Chicken & Apple Waffle Sandwich, but they're in there. My friend found a killer deal on Pacific Rose apples at our local Kroger, and made sure we all got a bag. Sliced thin and hidden somewhere between the melting cheese and the smoky ham, they added a sweet surprise to a Friday [...]
First off today, I made a guest appearance on this blog. ====================================== Now, back to our normal programming. Long ago, Nick Nolte starred in the movie Cannery Row. I never saw the movie. I just assumed that, with Nolte starring, it would be about a sad young drunk in a sad part of town. When I opened the by John Steinbeck, I braced myself for [...]
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 [...]
I opened Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake with skepticism. The cake on the cover looked tempting indeed. But the thought of something lemon-flavored, generously iced with chocolate frosting? Maybe somebody knows books much better than they know cooking. Nevertheless, I fell in love with Rose Edelstein immediately. At nine years old, she discovers, to her shock, that she can taste emotions in [...]
