“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm” In order to read this book you probably shouldn’t know anything about it. I’d heard it was about a black woman time traveling back to the antebellum south and I thought it was about the coolest concept ever. Time travel, check. Moral dilemmas, check. An exploration of the consequences of time travel for non-white, non-male people? Super check! And the opening line was just simple, intriguing. I was dying to know more. So […]
Finally, a celebrity autobiography that isn’t a total waste of time!
Usually, celebrity autobiographies are pretty boring. Even if you like the actor, it’s tedious to listen to them blather on about their craft and how lucky they are and blah blah blah (the obvious exceptions are the WW2 celebrities, who made movies and punched Nazis). Neil Patrick Harris gets this-not enough to resist the urge of writing an autobiography-and makes his book pleasant and clever-and surprisingly heartfelt. Framed as a Choose Your Own Adventure book, the reader is an active participant in the book, flipping […]
Hey, you got 80’s nostalgia in my dystopian novel. No, you got dystopian novel in my 80’s nostalgia.
And, if you get my title reference, then you are the target audience for this novel, which is a fun read so chock full of 80’s references that it made my teeth ache. It’s a great set-up. It’s the year 2044 and teenager, Wade Watts, lives in the future version of a trailer park (only imagine all the trailers stacked on top of each other), trying to stay out of the way of his abusive aunt, who would love to sell his computer to buy […]
Canning with Alternative Sweeteners
A few years a go a friend introduced me to Marisa McClellan, her canning books, and by extension her blog; and I’ve been hooked ever since. Naturally Sweet Food in Jars is her latest cookbook. As a sidebar, is it really a cookbook if it has canning recipes? Canning isn’t exactly cooking, but at the same time, what else do you call it? At any rate, this cookbook features canning recipes that use more ‘natural’ sugars in place of refined white sugar. A few notes on […]