Two books for y'all:

Fran Gage's Bread and Chocolate, My Food Life in San Francisco. Chock full of interesting little stories about climbing the rain-damp hills searching for mushrooms, visiting the cheese-maker way out on the sheep ranch, plumbing Tomales Bay for oysters.... All that, plus bread and an article about Scharfenberger Chocolate, which was sad, cause by now they've been bought out.

Only $3 at Half Price Books.

I am now about 1/3 of the way through Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, and it's the most Buffista-esque adventure. They keep leaping onto trains traveling through old European cities, hoping to find vital information at the library. Plus they're hunting the legend of Vlad "The Impaler" Tepes. I keep thinking, if Buffy had been the giant brain daugher of a diplomat...

I liked The Historian, even if I could play "follow the research!" from a couple of books in my personal library.

I loved the Historian. A good friend of mine has formed a friendship with the author. I think her new book is coming out early next year.

It's like your library is telling you that all those books can actually be useful to you!

A friend sent me an email asking me what I knew about Sherlock Holmes fandom. 'Cause, really, you can call it the Baker Street Irregulars and have fancy symposia and analysis etc., but you're all fanboys, gentlement. So anyway, I got the email, I turned my deskchair around, considered my Sherlock Holmes shelf, and then wrote a three-page email in return giving the history of the Irregulars, Baring-Gould, Nicholas Myers, Conan Doyle's son's anthology of stories, and the anthology that includes a Holmes story written by Stephen King, etc.

I felt like such a scholar.

One of my friends has been known to say that if vampires are proven to be real, the zombie uprising happens, or something from a plot of SPN happens, I'm the first person she's calling because I've got the research material to help us.

Cool, Connie At one time in my life, I was quite up in that sort of stuff, (I guess it was my early fandom, but I wouldn't have known to say that.) I don't get into it much now but I'm kind of stoked there's another movie coming up.

I am now about 1/3 of the way through Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, and it's the most Buffista-esque adventure. They keep leaping onto trains traveling through old European cities, hoping to find vital information at the library. Plus they're hunting the legend of Vlad "The Impaler" Tepes. I keep thinking, if Buffy had been the giant brain daugher of a diplomat...

I liked it very much, although the ending was a bit disappointing. Of course, it didn't help that I found a bat in my basement while I was reading it.

I always felt Stephen King was particularly attuned to the cruel of class, and how that fuels sexism, and he proves that in his review of this Raymond Carver bio.

(If you are a Carver fan and can't enjoy a writer after knowing they did horrible things, then I would recommend against reading it, because - when he was an alcoholic - he did some horrible things.)

Why do I read Candace Bushnell? Why? Because for a while, it's all sexy fun, and then sometime in the middle, I want these shoe-fetishizing wenches to get sent to some North Korean work collective and never screw again.