tamarinne

"Little, Big" by John Crowley.  This book just made me more and more frustrated the longer I read.  It's an interesting world with lovely writing, but it's populated by 2-dimensional archetypes and no plot.  I doggedly kept reading because (A) the world was cool and (B) something had to happen, sooner or later.  Right?  About 500 pages into it, when I had already suppressed the urge to throw it across the room half a dozen times, one of the "characters" is writing for a soap opera and is thinking about about how interesting the soap opera is as a structure, because it just keeps going on and on and never ends and never comes to any kind of resolution and I thought "if you are actually talking about this book I will KILL YOU DEAD."  Finally, FINALLY, something happened on page 700?  or thereabouts?  and took approximately 30 seconds to read.  And then the book was over.  I set the book down and thought "it took you 700 pages of maundering to get to THAT?  THEY ALL TURN  INTO FAIRIES????  Really??????   Oh, and PS, why did you kill the only character I cared about even a little?   That was unnecessary on so many levels!  You're just trying to make me care about the ending of this awful book!  But it's not going to work!  Your book is still terrible!"    I cannot believe this book won the world fantasy award.  Although, upon reflection, I can believe it.  I'm sure it was the same bunch of yahoos who gave the award to Mythago Wood, which was infuriatingly awful in much the same way.     Oh, John Crowley.  I shan't be reading any more books by you.  Not one more.  And when I get home tonight I'm going to throw out any books of yours that are sitting unread on my shelf. 

Have I really not posted about this before???

Over the holidays, we tried out some bread at Tom & Meredith's from the cookbook "Artisan Bread In 5 Minutes A Day". We liked it so much we told Rick's mom about it, and she surprised us with a copy of the book a few days later.

This book has seriously changed my relationship with home-made bread. We now pretty much only eat warm, fresh-made bread, even after long days at work. We're contemplating getting rid of the bread machine, because it does not hold a candle to the bread we can make from this cookbook, plus the machine takes longer. The bread is crusty on the outside, chewy on the inside, and the dough keeps in the refrigerator for weeks.  You can make as much or as little as you want at one time (one naan, or two rolls, or an entire loaf).

An article describing the basic recipe and the process is here, and if you're interested in buying the cookbook, it's here.

Highly recommended.

Hey achaosofkittens, you might find this interesting: The Straight Dope talks about how the Chicago of the Dresden Files compares to the actual Chicago. 

Cross-posted to bookfind

I'm looking for a book for which I have the following description:

A "choose your own adventure" type children's storybook which would have been written and published sometime between 1900-1930.  It was hardback, set and very likely produced in England and was about a girl and a boy searching the local countryside for buried treasure, with "go to page such and such" story options at the end of each page.

If anyone even has a suggestion for places where I could try to track this down, it would be much appreciated!   (For that matter, if anyone knows of any "choose your own adventure" type books or plays that date back more than fifty years heck, earlier than the late 70's/early 80's, those would be helpful too.)