I like to cook double of everything when my family gathers for Christmas. I resisted the urge this year and, boy, am I glad, because everyone is gone now and we still struggle to finish up goodies like this tasty White Chocolate Party Mix.

white chocolate party mix

This week’s book is even less nutritious than the candy-coated stuff. Being busy with guests, I couldn’t get to the library. So I downloaded a little piece of fluff called Build a Man, by Talli Roland, wherein Serenity, a girl from backwoods Maine lands in London with ambitions of becoming a tabloid reporter. She takes a back-up job on sufferance — as a receptionist in a plastic surgeon’s office. While minding the appointments of the Botox-seekers, she gets the bright idea to write about a man who comes in wanting just about everything fixed.

All secretly, of course. Poor bloke has no idea she’s spilling about his life to the Daily Planet.

Also, she has no place to live, so her doctor boss tells her she can crash at his pad and, just like that, she becomes his girlfriend. That is, his girlfriend who mines his practice for her tabloid ambitions. Poor bloke has no idea she’s spilling about his patients.

I simply can’t believe that this smooth, rich doctor doesn’t already have a woman (or several) in his life.

Furthermore, her subject/victim owns a peachy townhouse in central London, which surely costs a few million. Yet his entire wardrobe is t-shirts and jeans.

Uh-uh.

Serenity, who is shallower than a parking lot puddle, looks down on all the customers stopping in for their Botox.  I admit that if she sat behind me on an airplane, I would surely eavesdrop on her, partly because this girl would never clam up, but mostly because we’d be trapped together for a few hundred miles.

Serenity might wake up somewhere in this story and say to herself, “My word, how shallow I am,” but it’s a moment I’ll never witness because . . .

I have moved on to a tale from the era of torches and horse-hooves. It’s got enough characters to fill up a class reunion photo and I read along more than a little confused. But it’s a pleasant confusion, kind of like when the good headache drugs kick in.

At least it’s more nutritious reading. With the book in one hand and Dictionary.com in the other, I now know what a hawser is, as well as a bollard, and a coracle and some whin.

So Happy New Year. Starting things off right, I’m sure, by filling up on fancy words and leftover empty calories.