Just when I really needed it to break out of my writer’s block, James of the Daily Brouhaha tagged me with an easy meme. Thanks James!
He wants to know what I’m reading. Well. I am the sort who always has several books going at once in different parts of the house (generally in all the places where I sit to nurse a baby or toddler). Here are the books and magazines lying open face down today.
- The latest issue of The Atlantic Monthly. I threatened to cancel my subscription after they stopped the crossword puzzle, but never actually went through with it.
- The latest issue of Cooks’ Illustrated. This is a magazine with fabulous recipes and gorgeous food photography and amusingly breathless writing about solving the problems of the world: Bands of grey overcooked steak between the browned crust and the rare interior! Rapidly-coagulating Sauce Alfredo! Omelettes that get too brown on the bottom while they are still runny on the top! Oh the humanity! Never fear, Cooks’ Illustrated is here. We went through 275 pounds of ground beef to bring you the perfect all-beef meatloaf. It’d be funny, except that if you try the recipe, you’ll discover that they succeeded.
- A biography of Joseph Smith lent to me by one of my LDS friends. I’m only a couple of chapters into it, and I think it won’t take me too long to finish. The author has drawn a fascinating portrait of life in early-1800s New York State for sure.
- Dawn Eden’s Thrill of the Chaste. Not too applicable to my current life, but a quick and enjoyable read nonetheless. I got it because I like her blogging and I got tired of reading all the bits about it on her blog without having read the book to know what she’s talking about. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but I guess if Mark is ever run over by a bus I’ll dust it off in case I am ever tempted to turn in my grief to looking for a hot young drummer to sleep with.
- The Divine Comedy. DarwinCatholic has been posting some commentary on it, and that got me interested in reading The Purgatorio and The Paradiso — I have long had a copy of Ciardi’s translation of The Inferno lying around, but not those other two. So I bought Ciardi’s translation of the whole shebang. I continue to be annoyed by annotated books that put all the annotations at the end of a section so I have to keep flipping back and forth. Footnotes, people.
- The Lord of the Rings plus The Hobbit. I read it every year or so. All four ragged paperbacks are on my nightstand right now.
No links, because if I don’t do no-frills blogging today, I won’t do it at all.
bearing blog 