apropos of anything

Hmm. I suppose that’s not entirely true, but close enough.

Tomorrow is Ice Cream Friday at work. I have been looking forward to this ALL WEEK. They bring in a Ben and Jerry’s man, and he has six or seven tubs of B&J ice cream, and there are toppings, but I so rarely get them because the ice cream is too good to pollute with sprinkles and crushed Oreos.

Tomorrow I’m also going to Chicago for the weekend because Rashaad has graduated from college, so of course we all have to show up in the same place and have a party. There was a suitcase issue (namely that I didn’t have one, as my gargantuan suiter that I took to India is still in Augusta), but that’s happily been resolved by me borrowing Mansoor’s carry-on for the weekend. Now I’m having a packing issue as I realized halfway through, while on the phone because I like to multitask, that everything I’d packed was either black, white, or denim. I know this season is all about the monochromatic, but I think that’s taking it a bit far.

There’s a possibility my plane reading material is going to be my hardback copy of Jonathan Strange, which is also monochromatic, and that’s no end of funny to me. And possibly only me.

(Also, y’all will be proud of me for going to Borders purposely to buy plane reading and walking out with nothing because I have several books at home that work perfectly well as plane reading. I almost caved on In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, which Doppelganger loved so much, but I decided I had to start at the beginning of the series, and The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency was only available in hardback.)

I was going to take a laptop and work on the blog somewhat, and work on work somewhat, and catch up on my email a little, but now I think a few days away from the computer will be good for my carpal tunnel and for me, too.

Y’all, I think I have a problem.

I buy a lot of books. A lot of books. I can’t remember the last time I bought clothes, but last weekend I debated between Quicksilver, The History of Love, and Never Let Me Go for almost an hour before finally settling on Quicksilver because it’s the one I’ve been watching the longest. I even temporarily debated buying all three.

Quicksilver is almost 900 pages long. So, by the way, is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I’ve been working on for several months now. I’ve been sitting one-third of the way through Artemis Fowl because I happened to pick up Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire last Friday, which meant I finished both that and Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix over the weekend (both of them 800+ page tomes), and am now rapidly reconsuming Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in the evenings. This week, that’s meant after eleven since my calendar’s been full to bursting, but that’s another post, coming soon, maybe.

I have more then a dozen books sitting at home waiting to be read. Some are nonfiction, which I usually only pick up if I am in a particular mood, but I have no excuses for stacking up the works of fiction. I know shouldn’t buy more books until I’ve finished the ones I already have, but they have such intriguing covers, or such good buzz, and after all, the very nature of an addiction is to suck you further and further in.

Perhaps I need a reading vacation, like Tammy. Or perhaps I should just limit myself to adding books to a wishlist instead of my bookshelf, at least until I make some headway with the backlog.

Rereading the Harry Potters in such rapid succession made me like Order of the Pheonix far more than I have in the past. When I first bought the book, I hadn’t read any Harry Potter in months, so the universe and the events from Goblet of Fire weren’t so fresh in my head. The plot choices, character development, and editing irriated me so much that sometimes I considered Harry to be the literary version of whiny Luke Skywalker from his A New Hope days.

In context of its predecessor, though, OotP works much better, and I find that pretty amazing. Television writers have trouble remembering details from episode to episode, and they churn those out over the course of a compressed year. Rowling, on the other hand, wrote 800 pages, and then another 800 pages, over the course of several years, yet still managed to retain such a uniform, tightly-written story that one book feeds seamlessly into the next. I wonder how many times she has to read her own work to be that familiar with the details that carry over from one book to another.

There’s more to be said, about Harry Potter, about Kaavya Viswanathan and How Opal Metha Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, but I have to go now. Two thousand pages aren’t just going to read themselves.

I’m not certain “quiet” is the right word, actually. Tumultuous, maybe. Tentative, definitely. Or, possibly, withdrawn. At the moment, withdrawn is an exceptional fit.

Withdrawn is not conducive to blogging. (Hence the drought from last Monday, and even that was a throw-away kind of post designed to fill space.)

In lieu of a real post, then, I’m offering up an excerpt of poetry that’s somewhat reflective of the goings-on in my brain despite having nothing to do with the goings-on in my brain. Cookies to the first person who can recognize it, without the help of Professor Google. It’s a pretty popular piece, so that shouldn’t be too difficult, which means I’m going to remove some trademark lines:

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

…

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

Title and author necessary to win.

Giada de Laurentiis has a new book out, and I bought it, despite never having seen her show on the Food Network and despite flipping through her freshman offering and passing on it. I bought it because Borders sent me a coupon for forty percent off, because the reviews were good, and because Grant seems to approve. The latter is relevant because I figure if I like the recipes he posts on his site, I should trust his cookbook sense as well.

As is my wont, I sat in the bookstore and flipped through the pages first. It’s one of the rare Italian cookbooks that doesn’t use some kind of alcohol in every recipe or devote a large chunk of its pages to pork. Strangely, booze and bacon just doesn’t do it for me. De Laurentiis does use a lot of pancetta and prosciuotto, but I can work around that. Roasted pork loins, on the other hand, leave me grasping for options.

There’s one thing about Giada’s Family Dinners so far. The pictures. Lots of pictures. It’s just that… so many of them aren’t of the food so much as they are of Giada, who is a lovely woman who seems to own only scoop-neck t-shirts. Very scoopy scoop-neck t-shirts. Sometimes you can’t see the food for the scoopiness. If it’s a marketing ploy, I don’t get it, considering the cover of the book is relatively tame, and in any case, your target audience probably doesn’t care to see those particular features.

(Ivan pretended he didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. Ken took it like an honest man and admitted the pictures were… distracting.)

For the most part, I’m willing to forgive in exchange for the butternut squash lasagna and raspberry tiramisu. I mean, wouldn’t you?

I made her ravioli with creamy tomato sauce last night. I changed it up a bit because I’m attempting to clean out my refrigerator before the vegetables I bought two weeks ago and the multiple open bottles of pasta sauce spoil; I always feel so guilty when I let food go bad that it preys on my conscience when I know I have potential for rot in the fridge, and then my obsessive-compulsive self has to do something about it expediently. In any case, de Laurentiis did say the recipe was open for manipulation, so I’m comfortable appraising it even with my tweaks.

It’s fast, simple, and unpretentious, and the resulting dish is very acceptable for a weekday meal. I don’t know that I’d serve it at a fancy dinner party, except perhaps as a starter. The recipe that I really want to try is her penne with creamy spinach sauce, but I have to finish going through the refrigerator first.

I sped through In Cold Blood pretty quickly, usually reading a little during my lunch or after work while I waited for traffic to die down or for files to deploy. I had a hard and fast rule, though: No reading In Cold Blood after 8 p.m., as Capote writes so well I easily became involved with the story, and the characters and events all feel very real. In fact, I usually read something light, like The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants right before bed so I wouldn’t, as my project manager predicted, wake up in the middle of the night thinking about the Clutter family.

Saturday night, though, I had only thirty-some pages left to go, and I thought since all that was left was the execution, I’d be okay. I finished the book, worked on the tagline post, lost my Internet connection before I could post it (that has been happening far too often for my liking, and I’m torn between blaming BellSouth or pinning it on my decrepit old router and modem), and went to sleep.

I woke up suddenly at 5:30 a.m. because I was sure I’d heard somebody knocking on the front door. Then I started to wonder if maybe what I’d heard wasn’t knocking but opening of the front door. And then, because I wasn’t about to just sit in my bedroom wondering if there was in fact somebody downstairs, I went on down to check, turning on every light in my path.

The front door was locked. The back door was locked. There was nobody there. I know. I checked every nook and cranny, including the hall closet, the downstairs bathroom, and the pantry. Oh, and Mansoor’s room and bathroom. If you’re going to be obsessive, you might as well do a thing right.

As I finished up fajr, I realized what I’d heard was most likely somebody knocking on my neighbor’s door, as the trio that just moved in next door is still a little young and in the “party all night” phase of their lives. I realized this because I heard them running up and down the stairs leading to their front door, driving away, and then coming back.

Dan says I’m not allowed to read any more creepy books, which I think is highly unfair. You have ONE “episode,” and suddenly people start creating banned books lists for you…

In the last book of Madeline L’Engle’s Time Quartet, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Charles Wallace takes a trip through time to right a series of Might-Have-Beens in the hope of preventing a nuclear holocaust in his present. As I finished In Cold Blood this afternoon, the end of which dabbles in the murderers’ childhoods, I kept saying to myself, oh, if only child-Perry had had someone to take care of him and love him and give him attention, what Might Have Been.

I suppose that makes me a bleeding-heart liberal, focusing on the murderers like that, ostensibly to the disregard of the victims. Except that I don’t forget the victims. They were the Clutter family, Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon, and they were each shot in the head for pretty much no reason at all. Nancy and Kenyon were children. The death penalty was exactly the right punishment for both Perry and Dick; their crime was heinous, premeditated, and, if you’ll forgive me, in cold blood. They deserved to hang, but that doesn’t mean I don’t read certain paragraphs and think, if only.

In high school, I read a short story about a woman who thought about what she would do if she were attacked by a rapist, how she would talk to him and get to know him because then he wouldn’t rape her because they would be friends. Of course that’s not true. The majority of rapes in this country are date rapes, perpetrated entirely by people who know and claim friendship with the victim, because rape is not about familiarity so much as control. I don’t remember the exercise behind reading the story, but I do clearly recall my teacher discussing the narrator’s naivete and lack of understanding.

And now, here I am, talking about kindness and familiarty, moments and might-have-beens, and how they affect crime… I wonder if that makes me naive. Is that what we bleeding-hearts are, naive? Do I not understand the way things truly are, am I over-simplifying the problem? Perhaps I am, but that doesn’t mean that I’m entirely wrong, either.

And serve Allah. Ascribe no thing as partner unto Him. (Show) kindness unto parents, and unto near kindred, and orphans, and the needy, and unto the neighbour who is of kin (unto you) and the neighbour who is not of kin, and the fellow-traveller and the wayfarer and whom your right hands possess. Lo! Allah loveth not such as are proud and boastful; [4.36]

Unto the neighbor who is of your kin and unto the neighbor who is not of your kin, show kindness. Unto everyone, show kindness. It is a command from God Himself.

I think Dick would have ended up executed or in prison for life regardless of his childhood, especially since Dick’s childhood was decent. Not great, but decent. He certainly had everything Perry lacked and wanted. It’s funny how he didn’t actually kill any of the Clutters but I still didn’t care one bit about his thieving, lying, animal-abusing, pedophilic ass ending up in The Corner. With Perry, I am glad he was caught, glad he was sentenced, glad that justice was served, and at the same time just a little sad that somebody couldn’t have saved him as a child.

And you see, the thing is, I have to be a bleeding-heart liberal. I can’t be anything else. I can’t relegate the poor to poverty, the starving to famine, the uneducated to illteracy. I can’t. I have to believe that for the most part, people aren’t born wanting to hurt others, that they didn’t just come that way, that kindness and attention can make real differences. I have to believe in the good ripples. It’s simply the way I’m built.

There’s been so much going on in the world lately, and it’s all a jumble of words in my head, flashes of pictures in an order that makes sense only to me and could never translate onto a blog. It’s partly why I haven’t posted of late. The other part is that the jumble of words is also symptomatic of the disorganization that’s pervading my life at the moment. I have papers and books and yarn, but none of it is where it belongs. I need to tidy up if I’m going to get back on track.

In the meantime, I’m going to succumb to writer’s block and fill out the latest meme I’ve seen floating ’round the Internet. As usual, religious books are exempt because it’s not a fair fight.

1) Name five of your favourite books. It’s always hard to narrow them down, but here goes.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
My senior AP English teacher lent me this book the weekend before our first semester finals. I was obsessive about studying for finals; my parents wanted to see perfect scores on our report cards, and that included the semester final grade that showed up right next to the semester grade. I thought I could read a few chapters of the book as a periodic study break. It would have been a perfectly reasonable plan if only I hadn’t loved the book from the very first sentence. Eventually I was studying during my infrequent reading breaks.

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
The red-headed orphan who unexpectedly finds herself installed at Green Gables remains one of my favorite literary characters. She’s the one I picked to have lunch with in my Governor’s Honors application essay. Anne Shirley is not perfect, unlike the sickeningly idyllic Nancy Drew, but that’s what makes her a great character.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
“Thank you for my children, Arthur.”

That line gets me every time. The whole book gets me every time. It’s such a good story, and it’s written so beautifully. “Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of those books you can read over and over again, each time finding something new to make you love it even more than you already did.

The High King by Lloyd Alexander
I was introduced to the Prydain Chronicles while I was still finishing up the Chronicles of Narnia, and I wasn’t interested in beginning another fantasy series where the characters might overlap personalities or the plots might overlap thematically. Of course, I didn’t know at the time the Narnia books were a giant Christian parable, although I’d begun to be a little suspicious as I was reading The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle.

In any case, read The Book of Three I finally did, only to discover it was as like the Narnia books as wine is to water. Both series have epic stories, but the difference is in the characters. (Also, now that I am older, the comforting lack of skull-shattering religious allegory.) Taran and Eilonwy live for me far more than any of the Pevensie children. I relate to them more. It helps that Alexander keeps essentially the same set of characters throughout his chronicles while Lewis cycles them out like they’re regulars on a Law and Order series.

Of all five books, The High King is the one that most resonated with me, that got into my head and wouldn’t get out. I think I could still quote lines even though I haven’t read it in years.

Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
My introduction to Salinger. After this I read Nine Stories and then Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, and after that, Catcher in the Rye. I did it backwards. I gotta say, I like the Glass family better than Holden, which doesn’t mean that I don’t like Holden, just that I like Seymour and company more.

2) What was the last book you bought?

There were three of them, actually, since I was scanning the Borders buy-two-get-one-free table and actually found three books I was interested in and hadn’t already read. I often fall victim to that table, so I’ve adopted a new policy of reading the first chapter in any book I’m considering, and if the first chapter doesn’t hook me enough to make me want to read the entire thing right there in the store, I’m not allowed to buy the book. I used to feel guilty about reading books in bookstores — after all, it’s not a library, and I know I don’t want to buy a book whose spine has been broken and whose pages have been smudged by grubby hands — but I’ve since decided it’s okay since my intentions are good. Also, I take good care of the book as I’m reading it, so there are no cracked spines or dog-eared pages on my account.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
I’m reading this one now, along with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and I’m surprised by how much I like it. Vowell relates the history of various presidential assassinations (I’m only through Lincoln as of now) with humor and compassion, sometimes drawing parallels between events then and events now. It’s likely I would be less appreciative of the book if I were Republican, as Vowell makes no secret of her politics, but luckily for me, I’m a Democrat.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Not because of Capote since I’ve never been the kind of person that reads a book because of a movie, but because I’ve wanted to read it since I learned Capote and Harper Lee were such good buddies. I’m not even entirely sure I want to see the movie.

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon
The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay was good, if a bit descriptive. I like the way Chabon writes, too, and I’ve been trying to read more good writing lately.

3) What was the last book you read?

The Golem’s Eye by Jonathan Stroud
I liked The Amulet of Samarkand, but I think I love The Golem’s Eye. I’m not sure why. It may have to do with how much more tolerable I found Nathaniel this go-around. In Amulet, he was kind of whiny and raging, while here he’s less so despite being in a position where it’s slightly more warranted. Golem knows more about the themes it’s trying to convey, or at least is better at conveying them, possibly because it’s not facing the unenviable task of setting up a trilogy.

4) List five books that have been particularly meaningful to you (in no particular order).

The Holy Quran
Okay, so I lied. Here it is. But making up a list of meaningful books and omitting the Quran is like making chocolate chip cookies without the chocolate chips: a mere shadow of the cookie (or list) it’s supposed to be.

Many people think of the Quran purely from a religious perspective, as a collection of rules and parables, a book of what to and not to do. It’s that and so much more. In the Quran, I find guidance and support, warnings galore, strength and wisdom. “On no soul doth Allah place a burden greater than it can bear,” says the Quran, and that’s what I need to hear to know that I can indeed do this, whatever “this” may be.

In the Quran, I find a message I can believe. I find faith. And in the Quran, I find poetry.

Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The Parable of His Light is as if there were a Niche and within it a Lamp: the Lamp enclosed in Glass: the glass as it were a brilliant star: Lit from a blessed Tree, an Olive, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil is well-nigh luminous, though fire scarce touched it: Light upon Light! Allah doth guide whom He will to His Light: Allah doth set forth Parables for men: and Allah doth know all things. [24:35]

As with all religious books, the Quran means more to those of us who believe in its message. To me it means very much indeed.

On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder
This was my very first novel. I read it over and over again until the cover started to fall off and my mother had to put it back together with masking tape. I think I like the later Little House books more (there’s nothing better than Laura telling Almanzo whether she’ll marry him depends on the ring he offers her), but I have a special fondness for the one that got me into the series in the first place.

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
The funny thing about this book is that I avoided it for years. Almost everyone I knew had read it, and I was not going to be like everyone, especially since if everybody read it, that meant it probably wasn’t good anyway. I don’t remember why I finally read it in high school, but I do remember the copy I had gotten from the library was missing the last few chapters. It had the page where Anne is standing in the door of the farmhouse holding narcissi and Matthew falls… and then nothing. Waiting to find out what happened next was agonizing, especially because I always have to know what happens next, even if I hate the book/show/movie itself. It’s much worse when you love the characters, like I did (and do) Anne and Matthew and Marilla.

I took to haunting the library for the sequels, which never appeared in the order I needed them to, until finally I just gave up and read Anne’s House of Dreams before the elusive Anne of the Island and Anne of Windy Poplars. I had problems obtaining Anne of the Island, so many that I asked one of my middle school friends if she’d check it out of her school library for me. In exchange, I’d get Gone With the Wind for her from my high school library.

The only copy of GWTW my school had had a cover whose photo was a still shot of the scandalous Rhett/Scarlett scene from the movie version, with Vivien Leigh in Clark Gable’s arms, her red dress just about falling off in places it most certainly shouldn’t, so I put the book into a paper bag as though it were contraband whiskey and took it with me to Islamic school at the mosque on Friday. I was too young to drive, and the mosque was the one place we were both guaranteed to be.

We met up to make the switch, only she’d forgotten to get Anne of the Island for me. I gave her GWTW anyway, and she said bring me my book the next week. On Sunday, she returned GWTW to me because her father had seen the cover and didn’t approve of her reading “those kinds of books,” and that was the end of our deal. I didn’t actually read Anne of the Island until I bought myself the entire set, figuring I checked the available ones out of the library so much I might as well own them.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
Like and equal are not the same. Love is more powerful than evil. Being different is a good thing.

This is a book whose first line is, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

I wanted a Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit of my very own, but I think I know now what they meant when they said there were some things we have to do by ourselves.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
I bought this book to give myself a distraction, possibly a happy distraction, so I wouldn’t pay quite as much attention to how tumultuously sad I was at the time. It was forty percent off at Barnes and Noble (the one on Peachtree right before the Buckhead bar district that I used to go to in college because it was (at the time) the closest bookstore to Tech, that I don’t go to now because it’s no longer in my line of activity but that I still love because it takes me back to being in college), it was in hardcover, and it had been positively featured in an articled I’d read recently. This was, I should mention, back before Harry Potter took the States by storm.

Dan and I went to the Caribou Coffee on the corner of 10th and Piedmont (the intersection made infamous in an episode of ER for being a drug corner although I think they meant the corner of Juniper and Pine because I actually have seen drugs there, whereas 10th and Piedmont is just flamboyantly gay) to study theory, except that I couldn’t put down Harry Potter, and Dan had to give me A Lecture On My Priorities. But y’all, I loathe computing theory.

I am personally responsible for addicting a dozen people, none of whom had previously heard of the book, by either raving about it or giving them a copy of it, whether they appreciated it or not. (Somebody who shall remain nameless dismissed it as a children’s book she’d never read or like. She brought it out one night when she was suffering from insomnia, only to sit up until dawn reading it.)

The Harry Potter series I love because they are good books, but this particular one is special because it brought me brightness at a time when I dearly needed it.

5) Name three books you’ve been dying to read but just haven’t gotten around to it.

The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong
I’m holding this book hostage as incentive to get me through The History of God, which is long and cumbersome even if it is also incredibly interesting. I keep getting distracted when I make an attempt to plow through the latter as it reads like a text I’d be assigned in a history course, so I’m not allowed to read the less-scholarly Battle until I’ve finished its predecessor. I’m really curious as to how reading Battle will affect my perspective on the rising religious fundemantalism in the world today.

The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
I loved The Namesake for its writing and its story and the way it made me think about changes and sacrifices and fitting in. I’ve heard Maladies leaves Namesake in the dust, so I have to read this book. I put it on the bookshelf in a fit of cleaning one day, and now I tend to forget that I have it since usually the only books on the bookshelf are the ones I’ve finished reading.

Ptolemy’s Gate by Jonathan Stroud
The last book in the Bartimaeus trilogy, but it’s not out in paperback yet, and I can’t buy the hardback version because that will ruin my set. Having a matching set is very important to me. Yes, I am a little obsessive. It’s okay, though. I’m a patient obsessive.

Whew. That’s a long post, both in terms of content and how much time it took me to do. And now, who do I tag? Hmm… Aisha, of course, because of all the times she’s tagged me, Dan, Rashaad, and Alicia, if she’s reading this post because I know she has something to say on the subject.

Y’all know the drill… if you’re tagged, you gotta do it, especially if you’re just sitting up waiting until it’s time for you to take your parasite pills, so here it goes:
Four Jobs I’ve Had in My Life…

Receptionist/secretary/assistant in a doctor’s office
News editor at the Technique
TA for the introductory CS classes at the CoC
The one I have now that I don’t want to elaborate on too much

	Like they say on TNT, the original is still the best (well, except for Empire, but I’m going to blur the line between the original movies, up until the point they leave Tatooine in Jedi

Four Movies I Could Watch Over and Over, and Have

Star Wars
Bend It Like Beckham
The Sound of Music
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Four Places I Have Lived

Chicago
Houston
Augusta, GA
Atlanta

Four TV Shows I Love To Watch

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Gilmore Girls
Veronica Mars
Grey’s Anatomy

I am such a girl.

Four Places I Have Been On Vacation

Mumbai, India
Gatlinburg, Tennessee
Disney World!
Ft. Lauderdale, Florida

Four Books I Love

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The High King by Lloyd Alexander
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling

This was a hard one; how do you pick just four? Most of these are one of a series, and I would have put the whole series if I could. Instead, I put either my favorite of the series or the reason I found the series in the first place. Also, religious books were not eligible as that wouldn’t be a fair fight!

Four Websites I Visit Daily

CNN
Television Without Pity
the BBC
My friends and strangers

Four Favorite Foods

Fish biryani with eggplant raita
Curry — not what most westerners consider curry, but the creamy yellow sauce that desi people call curry
Chicago-style deep dish pizza
Ice cream

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now

Mumbai: At the moment I am going through a horrible bout of homesickness for a place that isn’t technically even my home.
San Francisco: It’s beautiful and there are people I want to visit.
Medina: I love it so much the only reason I could bear to leave was because I was going to Mecca for the first time.
Spain: I want to see it!
Italy: Ditto!

Nowhere. East, west, hame’s best. Yes, I know that’s more than four.

Sometimes when I eat by myself, I’m watching television or catching up on my Web sites. Sometimes I’m reading email, occasionally even responding to it, particularly if what I’m eating is conducive to juggling. But usually when I’m eating by myself, I’m reading cookbooks.

It appears I am not the only one who reads cookbooks.

I read them for fun, for information, for unique tidbits tucked away in the margins. I spend weeks scouring Amazon for reviews and then hours on the floor at Borders, flipping through pages, weighing the pictures-to-words ratio and judging the gloss of the paper, not to mention the accessibility of the ingredients and the complexity of the recipes. I cannot buy a cookbook without first getting to know it to see if we are compatible.

In college I discovered Allrecipes and Epicurious and quickly decided I adored the former and loathed the latter. The Epicurious recipes were too difficult for someone who had to carry her cutlery down a flight of stairs into a shared kitchen where somebody else might possibly be washing her hair despite the RA’s large sign, “PLEASE WASH YOUR HAIR IN THE BATHROOM.” But Allrecipes and I, we became bosom buddies, surviving through multiple redesigns and site changes. I had over a thousand completely free recipes at my beck and call.

Then things changed, or perhaps I did. The site began diluting its collection with “premium” sections and less savory offerings. There were suddenly twenty different ways to make chicken tetrazzini, and I was interested in exactly none of them. I wanted more than casseroles and stews and two hundred uses for condensed cream of mushroom soup. Coincidentally, I got my first cookbook right around then too.

	I too would like to be a domestic goddess, I think, but Irene Sax at Epicurious has a mixed review.

The Internet versions are faster and more accessible, but I think, generally speaking, I prefer the real thing, the book I can touch and spill things on. I like writing my notes in the margins. I like knowing, as I pass a certain slightly crinkly page, that I made that recipe for the Evans Girls winter party in 2003, the one where Jason set his foot on fire and almost took out my brand new hardwood floors. Or that in this book, there’s a grocery receipt marking the page that has the recipe for the chocolate-raspberry cake I make for showers, and in that book, my coconut waffles with mango-strawberry compote that I made for brunch last week.

The problem, though, is that I can never make up my mind about what to buy. You don’t really know about a cookbook until you’ve taken it home with you, and cookbooks are too expensive to simply take a chance on. I’m looking at Asian Noodles by Nina Simonds, recommended by the forum denizens at Chicklit, but I haven’t had a chance to devote an hour to poring over it at Borders yet. If they even have it at Borders, actually. And Irene Sax at Epicurious has a whole section on cookbook reviews… but they’re mostly all positive. On the surface, anyway. Her opinion of Nigella Lawson’s How to Be a Domestic Goddess seems complimentary, but falls apart some in the right rail. Also, I look for things most people wouldn’t — what percentage of the recipes have wine as one of the ingredients, how many use pork/sausage/ham, etc.

I guess, like most things, the return is directly related to the effort put into the project. There’s a line in one of the Lloyd Alexander books about the struggle being worth more than the actual achievement, but I can’t remember it exactly. Not that cookbook hunting is all that arduous a struggle anyway…

Cover art for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Let’s hope this one is better than the last one. Which is not to say I didn’t like the last one. I did, but it wasn’t as good as the volumes before it, particularly Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which remains my favorite Harry Potter book yet.