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French Milk
French Milk by Lucy Knisley Illustrated by: Lucy Knisley Published: 2007 Publisher: Touchstone Length: 188 pages I really enjoyed Relish when I read it last year, so I’ve been meaning to try Knisley’s other graphic novels since then. Her Wikipedia page shows five books released through publishers and a number of self-published works as well. This one is a food-centric travelogue through Paris, which ticked all the right boxes for me. Lucy Knisley wrote this at the age of twenty three while spending six weeks in Paris with her mother. It’s a great way to keep a journal, a mix of traditional journaling and illustration. I love the idea of…
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Back to the Classics Challenge 2016 Wrap-Up
The Back to the Classics Challenge 2016 was one of the two challenges I took part in this year. The goal was to read classics from twelve categories. There’s a draw associated with how many you read, but I mainly take part because I love lists. When I first joined in on this, back in 2012, it really gave me a push to incorporate more classic fiction into my reading. This and The Classics Club actually changed how I read for the better over the years, so I’m a big fan of taking part in these reading prompts. Here’s my 2016 list: A 19th Century Classic: Three Men in a…
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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle Published: 1892 Series: Sherlock Holmes #3 Length: 307 pages I’ve never been a fan of short story collections. I find I can enjoy a single short story, but reading twelve of them in a row is just too much. By the end of the collection, I remember half of it and don’t care about the other half. So when I decided to read this book, the first collection of Sherlock stories, I thought I’d try a different tactic. Instead of reading it straight through in one go, I read one or two stories between each novel I read and jotted down…
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Laughter in the Dark
Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov Published: 1932 Translated By: Vladimir Nabokov (from Russian in 1938) Length: 292 pages This was written twenty-three years before Lolita and also deals with a relationship between an older man and a younger woman. These are the only two Nabokov novels I’ve read so far, so I’m hoping he does branch out a bit in his other novels, but this was still a much different story than what happened between Humbert Humbert and Dolores. Where Humbert is a calculated predator, Albert Albinus, this story’s older man, is a fumbling and naive fool. He’s a well-off art critic living in Berlin who meets Margot,…
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Heat
Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford Published: 2006 Narrated by: Michael Kramer Length: 12:17 (336 pages) I ignored this very popular book for years because I wasn’t that interested in restaurant culture. I love food and cooking, but the day-to-day schedule of a line cook, preparing the same thing every day, wasn’t something I found exciting. My assumption was that this would be the account of Bill Buford spending a month or two in a kitchen, waxing poetic about the strong work ethic and the screaming chefs, but it’s much more than that. He spent…
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Roadside Picnic
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Published: 1972 Narrated by: Robert Forster Translated By: Olena Bormashenko (from Russian in 2012) Length: 07:08 (209 pages) What if aliens made first contact, landing in various locations across our planet for two days, and then they just left. No abductions, no anal probes, no tripods with heat rays, no chest bursters, no communication via music tones and flashing lights, and no floating bicycles. Maybe we were too insignificant a species to acknowledge and this was just a rest stop for them, a roadside picnic, or maybe the aliens have a long-term plan for the planet. Whatever the reason for their leaving, their…