Reading and Eating
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts! I’ve been eating plenty, but reading was slow for several weeks. Luckily all that changed with my “Christmas Book Flood.” I got five books for Christmas, and someone gave me an Amazon gift card which I used to buy three MORE books. I usually get my books from the library, so it was really fun to receive eight brand-new books in the mail (and most of these are books that aren’t available at my library anyway.) Let’s start off with Dover: Birchwood Pie recommended this series, and she described them as Agatha Christie-type mysteries, with the addition of humor. I knew I would love them! I got Dover One for Christmas, and got the second and third books with my gift card. These are fun mysteries, exactly as she described. Apparently Birchwood should just assign me a reading list from now on, because I took her advice and ordered this as well, with the last of my gift card balance: Birchwood says Nevil Shute is one of her favorite authors, and I can see why. I absolutely love his writing style. I would describe it as sparse and factual, but also extremely compelling. A Town Like Alice is about a young English woman’s experiences during World War II in Malaysia, and after the war in Australia. I want to read more by Nevil Shute, but my library doesn’t carry his books and most of them aren’t available on Amazon, at least not in the print version. I’m going to look into some online used bookstores. This brings me to a conversation I had recently with one of my clients, an older, slightly eccentric woman. She said she reads over 100 books a year and PURCHASES EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, mostly from Amazon. After she reads them she gives them away- either to friends (she’ll send boxes of books to out-of-town friends) or to Goodwill. I can’t even imagine how much money she spends on books. We both agreed that we only like to read physical books, as opposed to using an e-reader, or listening to audiobooks. She said she gets a lot of pleasure from holding a book, turning the pages, and then marking her place with a special bookmark. Yes, I get it!!! A Town Like Alice was the book I read in Tampa, and I bought this bookmark as a souvenir from Ybor City: Here’s another book from my book flood that I’m currently reading, and look at the bookmark I’m using: It’s an old library card- Engie sent me a bunch of them, and I love using them as bookmarks. Let’s move on to eating! You might recall I got an air fryer for Christmas. Here was our first air-fried tofu! I marinated it and then put it in the air fryer- I let it go a little too long because the tofu cubes were almost croutons, but live and learn. We still enjoyed it. Instead of celebrating on New Year’s Eve, we made a special “Orange Bowl” dinner on December 30th (unfortunately we were rooting for FSU- it’s been a disappointing end to the football season all around.) Our meal was good though- more marinated tofu, buffalo cauliflower, and vegan pigs in blankets. Yum! For my daughter’s belated birthday dinner (she was in Rome on her actual birthday) we went to a vegan restaurant called Planta, for their all-you-can-eat sushi night! Boy, they probably regretted letting us in the door. My son actually fasted all day to get ready for this event. Their vegan sushi is so delicious. They use things like hearts of palm and watermelon (!) to make their rolls. Here’s just a few of them: This was a really fun dinner- we ordered one of every roll, and then ordered more of the ones we liked the most. All the food at Planta is delicious, but it’s pricey. We save it for special occasions (and try to go on all-you-can-eat “Maki Mondays.”) What have you been reading lately? Do you like using special bookmarks? What else should I make in my air fryer? Header photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash