Average Girl Reads

Yesterday I was flipping through The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook: 101 Asian Recipes Simple Enough for Tonight's Dinner (gorgeous book!) and it occurred to me that my relationship with cookbooks has come to a stalemate. Just as I feel that there is nothing more that I can glean from diet books and budgeting tomes, I think I'm deluding myself when it comes to what I am going to get out of cookbooks. There is only a certain amount of money that we are willing to spend on food and we rarely go over that, so none of the fancy ingredients I see in new recipes are going to make it into my shopping cart. Since there are only so many ways to cook chicken breasts and frozen vegetables, reading cookbooks is window shopping for me.

Even when I am willing to splurge a little and try something new, I can't find it at my local market. It took two different trips for me to find a box of barley, and finding quinoa is a lost cause. Again, we are in a routine that my husband and I are loathe to stray from. Food Lion is the grocery store closest to the house, so that is where ABM goes. If I ask him while he is in a good mood, he may venture down the road to Bi-Lo, but as the main grocery shopper he won't make that a regular stop. Using mail-order and paying shipping to get groceries goes against my miserly ways, so that's out.

As frustrated as I am at the moment, I don't think I will give up on cookbooks totally. I noticed that Food Lion has gotten in some small bottles of hoisin sauce, sesame oil, oyster sauce, and a few other things. At $2.50/bottle they are affordable enough for me to try out a new recipe. So I may be able to branch out . . . at least a little.

Sophie's Dilemma by Lauraine Snelling

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On my TBR List: no
Genre: Christian fiction, romance, family saga

Book 2 of the Daughters of Blessing series; 11th book in Blessing, ND saga


Synopsis, from book jacket:

Certain she can't live without Hamre Bjorklund, the impetuous Sophie Knutson rejects her father's request to postpone her marriage until after graduation and convinces Hamre to elope. But life as a fisherman's bride in Seattle is not at all that Sophie had envisioned. Pregnant and lonely while Hamre's out at sea, she hires on at a fish cannery, only to be fired after fainting on the job. When tragedy strikes, heartbroken Sophie can think only of returning home to Blessing. But will her family welcome her after the way she's hurt them by her defiant behavior? And will she ever open her heart to love again?

Although it sounds like half the story is told on the book jacket, Sophie's Dilemma is still worth reading. I thought that the Daughters of Blessing series was going to be just like the other novels about the Bjorklund family, but I was wrong. Lauraine Snelling managed to give Sophie a much different voice than the other members of the family. Sophie wasn't as selfless and duty-bound as the others, and that made for a refreshing change. My favorite passages were the ones showing how confused Sophie was about certain things because she had left home before her mother could teach her all she needed to know about being a wife and mother. Snelling showed Sophie's growth throughout the novel in a way that felt natural rather than abrupt and forced as I have seen in other novels. I am definitely ready to spend more time with the inhabitants of Blessing, ND.



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For the past week I've been reading Sophie's Dilemma, a Lauraine Snelling book set in her fictional town of Blessing, ND. I've read all the previous books in the series, and halfway through this one it occurred to me that I could distill the basics of this series in a single line: "These are the stories of how the Bjorklunds found their spouses." There are lots of other events like births, deaths, barn fires, and graduations, and that keeps the books from reading like traditional romance novels. Still, the overall theme of each book seems to be getting two people together.

QUESTION: Can you come up with a single line or an "elevator pitch" for one of your favorite series?

Cook This, Not That!: Kitchen Survival Guide by David Zinczenko

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Genre: cookbook, nutrition


The basic premise of the Eat This, Not That! books is not to persuade you to exchange burgers for wheatgrass smoothies. Since the original demographic was the readers of Mens' Health magazine (thirty-something men with disposable income and not a lot of time who may be developing a budding pot belly), the authors assume that you are going to go to eat convenience foods. They use the books to show you how to do the least damage to your health and your waistline in the process.

Cook This, Not That! takes the premise a step further. Assuming that you have read the other books or the feature in the magazine and have become accustomed to making healthier choices, Zinczenko and his collaborators invite the reader to try cooking his own burger rather than going for the fast-food variety. They assert that by making your own food with basic natural ingredients instead of relying on processed foods and eating it in normal portions, you can stabilize your weight without resorting to fat-free anything.

Unlike many other books that focus on nutrition, I actually enjoyed reading this book. It is written in the same slightly irreverent style as Mens' Health. With its dynamic layout and easy-to-swallow tidbits of information, this and all the other books in the Eat This, Not That series entice even my children to pick them up and read about healthy eating.



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Through reading some books and removing others from the list, I have pared down my TBR titles from 2008 to four. Yippee! Of course, I'm prepared for this number to go back up if my library acquires some of the books that have been sitting on my "not at my library" list for a while. Picking certain categories of books to read through seems to be the most entertaining way for me to rotate fresh titles onto my TBR list. It keeps reading and updating this blog from feeling like a chore.

READ: I read More Than a Dream, which is the final book in Lauraine Snelling's trilogy-within-a-series called Return to Red River. With such a long ongoing series, I don't bother to reviewing anything after the first book. The first book gives you the tone of the entire series. Who would a review of the ninth book appeal to? If you are already that far into the series, you will probably read the book no matter what I say. If my review of the first book didn't convince you to read the series, then you probably don't care about a review of the ninth book.

Having said all that, I would probably pull the Return to Red River trilogy out of the larger series and hand it to a fan of stories set in the 1800s. Snelling makes enough references to the major events of the previous six books to keep a reader from feeling lost. As a bonus for the diet-conscious, you only get half as many long passages about cooking!

CURRENTLY READING: I often like to read similar books back to back, so I picked up another book in the series, Sophie's Dilemma. I was looking forward to getting to this part of the series because it is the first book where I don't have an inkling of what is going to happen. Snelling has divided her stories about Blessing, ND into different groups and names them as if they are different series. I didn't know this, so the first book I read was actually the 10th book she had written about these characters. I thought I would have no problem going back and reading the other nine, but I ended up knowing every couple that was going to end up together and how many kids they were going to have. It will be nice to follow these familiar characters into new territory.

UPCOMING: I've been thinking that I want to pick a genre and read all of the books in that genre that I have on my list. Another thought is that I would like to add more doctor or hospital stories to my list. I enjoyed the Sue Barton nurse books, and the Return to Red River books had a lot of medical drama, as well. Any suggestions would be welcome!

My daughter C1 spent the last week living a reader's nightmare. Well, that may be something of an exaggeration when the situation is viewed from an adult perspective, but it sure felt that way to her. It is the beginning of the school year. In this house that means no TV on weekdays, but the kids also don't have much homework yet. That means the kids fill their evenings with reading, drawing, or the occasional game. C1 carried her reading on into the weekend and ran through every book that I had checked out for her at the library, so by Monday she did have anything to read. ABM wasn't doing the library run until Friday. On top of that, the school library was being used for benchmark testing all week so she couldn't check anything out there. I have a small collection of books left from when I used to homeschool M, but C1 read most of those ages ago. You should have heard that child moan about being bored!

I tried to convince C1 to read one of my books, but she wasn't biting. I guess she wasn't quite desperate enough. When I was a kid, I read and re-read whatever was in the house between library runs, which were only once a month. I'll be quite happy never to see another Reader's Digest condensed version of anything as long as I live. C2 doesn't know how good she has it.

CURRENTLY READING: Well, I didn't trade in my library stack unread, as I was tempted to do last week. I finished off one of the Lauraine Snelling books and am almost done with the other. My children delight in calling them "large-print prairie romances". They aren't necessarily exciting reading, although Snelling has made me sit up straight a time or two. Reading these books is more like visiting old friends.

UPCOMING: C2 wants us to learn to cook with more of an Asian flavor, so I checked out
The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook: 101 Asian Recipes Simple Enough for Tonight's Dinner. To try to make a dent in my TBR list (which currently stands at 223 titles!) I also checked out a book of essays entitled Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd. It has been on my list for 11 months, and my library finally got it in. Perhaps next week I will do a post updating my quest to pare down the section of the list with books that have been on the list for over a year.

Love Soup: 160 All-New Vegetarian Recipes from the Author of The Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Genre: Cookbook
On my TBR List?: Yes, since Apr 2010


I have owned a copy of The Vegetarian Epicure since the mid-1980s. One of the recipes saved me from going hungry when I was living on my own and had my paycheck stolen -- but that is a story for another day. When I read in a Roger Ebert review that Anna Thomas had a new cookbook coming out and it was full of soup recipes, I couldn't wait for my library to get it in. As I wrote on my other blog, I always start craving soup this time of year.

Thomas paints lovely pictures of family and friends gathered at the table with warm bowls of soup and hunks of homemade bread. While Thomas' attitude inspired me to get in the kitchen, the recipes contained items that I never see in my local grocery store, like chard. Out of 160 recipes, I only found three that I appealed to my taste buds and fit my skill level. The collection is sectioned into warm-weather and cool-weather soups, so it would be great for someone who shops by the seasons. I would recommend this book to someone who has easy access to a farmer's market.



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Dramarama by E. Lockhart

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Genre: YA novel
On my TBR list?: Yes, since Dec 2008
Part of a series: No

Summary, from Goodreads:

Two theater-mad, self-invented, fabulositon Ohio teenagers.

One boy, one girl.
One gay, one straight.
One black, one white.

And SUMMER DRAMA CAMP.

It's a season of
hormones,
gold lamé,
hissy fits,
jazz hands,
song and dance,
true love,
and unitards

that will determine their future
and test their friendship.

My thoughts:

Dramarama is the story of Sadye and Demi, two high school juniors who live in a small town but don't fit in. They want to sing and dance and take the world by storm, but they are surrounded by workaday people who don't get them. So they apply to a summer drama camp to give themselves a break from the blandness, and the new environment tests their friendship.

It must be difficult to make the excitement and intrigue involved with putting on a show jump off the page, and this book is evidence of that. I love these sorts of stories but this book didn't have me holding my breath the way movies like "Fame" and "Camp" did or the way the TV show "Glee" does. This is one of E. Lockhart's earlier books that was published before the much-talked-about The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. It was a pleasant read, but it does make me wonder what all the fuss is about over this author. The prose seemed like standard YA fare to me. I'd set my DVR if it showed up as a movie on ABC Family, though.

I am willing to concede that my lukewarm reception of this book could be due to the fact that I am older than the target audience. C1, my 13-year-old daughter, enjoyed it and got a kick out of the fact that she knew all the musicals mentioned. Also, judging by how long I had to wait in the library queue for this book, there must be other teens in my area who identify with Sadye's feeling of being too big for life in a small town. This is one thing that Lockhart has done well; through Sadye she gives a perfect description of what it feels like to have an excitement inside that is waiting to burst out and no one around to appreciate it.

My biggest disappointment was the ending. I won't give it away, but it was too real-life for me. I'm not ashamed to say that I read for pure escapism, and I pick YA books because I am more likely to get a happily-ever-after. Perhaps I am spoiled by reading series books, but I wanted to follow these characters a little while longer and get the satisfyingly tidy ending that I prefer.


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For those of you who didn't know, I taught my eldest child M at home for first grade through fourth grade. After that I went back to work and turned her over to the public school system. Now that M is a senior, I feel like we are homeschooling all over again. The past several years I've tried to treat her like my other kids and trust her to do her own work, which resulted in her barely limping through high school. So this year, I am going back to a hands-on approach. This means that I will be familiarizing myself with classics that I didn't read in high school to help her get through 11th and 12th grade English (yes, she is taking BOTH classes this semester). Thank goodness for Sparknotes!

In other school news, I got the reading plan from C2's teacher last week and I am so happy with it. Instead of emphasizing Acccelerated Reader goals, this teacher will let the kids read any book they want as long as she approves it first. At the beginning of the month, she divides the book's total pages by four, so the kids are reading 1/4 of the book each week. She also has activities that are to be completed in the student's reading journal. Some examples are predicting what will happen in the plot based on the cover and the title or (later in the book) describing main events in the plot. I believe this approach will work much better for C2 since she is a slow reader; one book a month will be much more manageable for her.

CURRENTLY READING: I finally got my hands on Dramarama by E. Lockhart. There was a long queue for it at my local library. Not only that, once I checked it out C1 snatched it up. (That girl is on a serious reading jag this year!) I'm also flipping through Love Soup: 160 All-New Vegetarian Recipes from the Author of The Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas. It is the time of year when I start craving soup, but canned soups no longer satisfy me. I'm determined to start cooking soups from scratch, so you will probably see more cookbook reviews in the next few weeks.

UPCOMING: I have two pioneer romances by Lauraine Snelling on the horizon, a Brit chick lit novel, and a collection of Dorothy Parker's "Constant Reader" book reviews. However, I may send all of these back to the library unread and pick something else. They are all books that I want to read, but they don't appeal to me right now. Perhaps I need to find something else on my TBR list that will help me meet my goal of leaving the TV off on weeknights. Tune in next week to find out what decide :-).