Category: Fiction

Perma Red

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Earling, Debra Magpie. Perma Red. New York: BlueHen Books, 2002.

Perma Red takes place in the 1940s on a Wyoming Indian Reservation where ancient customs prevail and old secrets hang heavy. Louise White Elk is a contradictory girl. Independent yet needy. Brave yet frightened. An orphan with family. Louise is also has attention of many men. The list of attendees is long: trouble maker Baptiste Yellow Knife; cousin Charlie Kicking Woman (Perma’s Tribal police officer); rich man Harvey Stoner; and mystery man Jules Bart. They all want something from her whether it be under the guise to own her or protect her. They all end up using her or abusing her. At one time or another they all get their way. It is a ruthless existence. Yet, Louise welcomes it in her own strange way. She perpetuates the vicious cycle of running away at the same time as being drawn to violent and needy men. What keeps Perma Red magical is its descriptive language. The landscape is as wild and as beautiful as untamed Louise White Elk.
Ages are vague. Charlie is at least seven or eight years older than Louise and Bapstiste is older by three years or so. The reader never gets a sense of how old Louise is supposed to be when her experiences are described as coming of age and womanly all at once.

Favorite sentences, “Louise sat down at the bar long enough so no one would recognize her broken heart” (p 43), “together their thinness made them appear stingy and dangerous” (p 64), and “I felt heavy with marriage” (p 114).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “American Indian Literature” (p 23).

Strange observation – the author’s name is a footnote on every even page. I’ve never seen that before so it seems a little hubris to me.

Nov ’10 is…

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October was a simply fantastic month for reading. Being on vacation and a few days to myself certainly helped. I’m not sure what November will be like, but here are the books I hope to get through:

  • The Harmless People by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas~ in honor of November being the best time to visit Africa
  • Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling~ in honor of Native American month
  • The New Well-Tempered Sentence: a Punctuation Handbook by Karen Elizabeth Gordon~ in honor of National Writing Month
  • The Healing by Gayle Jones~ in honor of Gayle Jones’s birth month
  • On the Road by (Hey) Jack Kerouac~ in honor of November being the best time to travel

In other news November is the very last Natalie show until who knows when. I’m looking forward to this one because it promises to be different from any of the others I went to this year. I really don’t know what else to expect from the month and maybe that is a good thing.

October ’10 was…

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Our nightly view

I spent the first eight days of October “stranded” on a remote, windblown island off the coast of Maine. Every morning was spent leisurely reading in bed, half listening to the sounds of surf and squabbling gulls. Cloudy afternoons were spent either hiking along rocky shores and overlooking cliff high vistas or combing seaweed strewn beaches for sea glass and shells. Quiet evenings were whiled away in front of a snapping orange glow fire with a good book in hand. It was a delicious way to end the day – just as I had started it, behind the pages of a book. Because of this simple routine it was easy to finish three books in eight days:

  • Messiah by Gore Vidal ~ in honor of Vidal’s birth month. This stayed with me as prophetic as it was.
  • The Poison Oracle by Peter Dickinson ~ in honor of October being special child month. Another futuristic story about a different kind of greed.
  • The Last Time They Met by Anita Shreve ~ in honor of Halloween. Probably my favorite book of the month.

After the vacation home I returned to the daily grind and was able to finish the following books:

  • Ways of Seeing by John Berger ~ in honor of Art Appreciation month. This took me a lunch break to read so I read it several times.
  • Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape by Frans de Waal ~ in honor of de Waal’s birth month and October being animal month. At first I was bothered by the graphic Bonobo photography but I got over it.
  • Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier ~ in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness month. I have to admit – the cover of this book cracked me up (simple, yet says so much).
  • Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering by Wendy Lesser ~ in honor of National Book Month. This was okay.
  • Bird Brains: the Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies and Jays by Candace Savage ~ in honor of Bird Watching month. A big, bold, beautiful book (loved the photography).

For LibraryThing and the Early Review program, two books:

  • Yes You Can! : Your Guide to Becoming an Activist by Jane Drake and Ann Love was waiting for me when I returned from vacation. Since it is only 133 pages long and written for young adults it took me just a few hours to read it cover to cover.
  • Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin was really, really good.

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Confession: Autumn has always been my private hell. People think I’m kidding when I say bad things always happen to me between September and December…until I start recounting the black clouds. This year while I had a few bad things roll in my direction it was nothing like what happened with friends and family. Losing fathers, losing jobs, losing lives. The walls came tumbling down. As one friend put it, “I’m having a hard enough time recovering as is and now this?” And now this. I bury my head in books to avert my heart.

Nothing Remains the Same

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Lesser, Wendy. Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.

The title, Nothing Remains the Same comes from a letter Mark Twain wrote to William Dean Howells in 1887. What he is referring to is also the premise of Lesser’s book – rereading a book at a different stage of life shouldn’t be the same experience as the first time. Twain argues that “nothing remains the same.” I am in agreement. When I was in high school I read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne for an English class. As a 14 year old I was guided through the pages like a blind girl. Six years later I reread The Scarlet Letter for a Women in Literature class. I was forced fed the ideals of a feminist faculty; seeing the story through her sense of self while struggling with my own. Finally, I reread Scarlet for me and myself last year. This time I read it without bias or guidance, without ulterior motive. No grade rested on my comprehension of text. It was like reading it for the very first time and oh so self indulgent. Lesser offers a literary criticism of a handful of books she has reread throughout her life. Each chapter of Nothing Remains the Same takes on a different well known book starting with Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Sprinkled throughout each chapter are details of Lesser’s life, some seemingly unrelated to the book in question, others all about the reading (using it in graduate school, for example).

Lessing spends a great deal of time quoting from the books she is remembering which can be nice if you have never read them yourself but slightly irritating if you know them well. (I was somewhere in the middle.)

Favorite lines, “I had constructed a life in which I could be energetic but also lazy; I could rush but I would never be rushed” (p 3), and “In the meantime, as is always the case, the process of winning the batle has slightly cheapened the prize for me” (p 208).

Small gripe – say what you mean, mean what you say. Why write, “I decided to leave Anna Karenina out of my book” when you go on to mention it five times and dedicate an entire section to it? Complete with a quote, the section was at least a full page. This decision to discuss a book you originally wanted to leave out seems self indulgent, contradictory and rambling.

Overall I enjoyed Nothing Remains the Same. I think I would have enjoyed it more had it not been for the initial tone Lesser took. Example – early on (page 9) Lesser makes the comment, “Twelve seems young for a first reading…” (of Don Quixote) but in the next sentence she adds, “…when I first read Don Quixote I was eleven.” I felt like Lesser could have added, “so there!” punctuated with a tongue sticking out. It felt condescending and made me very aware of how many times she mentioned her age. I half expected her to say something about reading War and Peace in kindergarten.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “Books About Books” (p 43).

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

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Franklin, Tom. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. New York: William Morrow, 2010.

Confession: I couldn’t put this down. A friend from Germany was in town, someone I hadn’t seen in almost three years and all I wanted to do was read Crooked Letter. I don’t normally want to ignore friends!

Crooked Letter takes place in rural Mississippi bouncing between the early 1970s and the late 2000s. From the very first sentence you are pulled into something sinister. Hints of evil lurk between the lines. Larry Ott has always been strange. A social outcast since grade school Larry pulls outrageous stunts, desperate to be noticed; bringing snakes to school, scaring girls with a grotesque Halloween mask. When a pretty high school classmate disappears Larry is suspected of murder. Unbelievably, he is the last person to be seen with her. While her body was never found and Larry’s guilt couldn’t be proven, he remained the town’s only suspect. Fast forward 25 years and another pretty young girl has gone missing. When she is found, raped and murdered, on Larry’s property it seems like an open and shut case. Except, Larry has a silent almost forgotten ally – Silas “32” Jones, a former classmate and one-time secret friend. Secret because in 1970s deep south Mississippi pockets of racism were more than alive and well. It wasn’t acceptable for white Larry to be seen with black Silas. As Chabot, Mississippi’s only constable Silas sets out to learn the truth, even if it means digging up the ugly past. Tom Franklin is very thorough with descriptions of each character’s personal life . You are pulled into Larry Ott’s mechanic shop and can smell the grease just as easily as riding along with Constable Silas Jones as he works his investigation. This is a story first and foremost about friendship and guilt and forgiveness. It is also a story about the harsh realities of racism and poverty and the scars that run deep.

I only found one bothersome discrepancy. Larry Ott is described as 41 years old. Miss Voncille is described as a woman in her “early 50s.”  That would mean at the very minimum there is a ten-year age difference between Larry and Voncille. But because they both attended the same high school Constable Silas asked Voncille if she knew Larry. Here’s the thing –  Larry would have been a toddler when Voncille started high school. If their ages had been reversed it would have allowed for the “legend” of Larry and his weirdness to be played up – Voncille could have heard stories of Larry despite the fact he graduated ten years ahead of Voncille.

In a way I could relate to Larry, especially his obsession with books. His father didn’t want him “wasting” the day by reading either.

Best line I hope is kept, “When he left, Larry lay amid his machines, thinking of Silas, how time packs new years over the old ones but how those old years are still in there, like the earliest, tightest rings centering a tree, the most hidden, enclosed in darkness and shielded from the weather” (p 251).

Last Time They Met

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Shreve, Anita. The Last Time They Met. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2001.

The story, divided into three parts, starts from the perspective of Linda Fallon at 52 years old. Widowed with two adult children Linda is a poet with a complicated past. Her tangled history is confronted when she encounters her former lover, Thomas Janes, at a literary festival. Thomas, also a poet, has gone on to become a legend of sorts after the drowning death of his young daughter drove him into seclusion. What the reader learns in Part I is that Linda and Thomas started a romance in highschool that ended badly.  Part II is from Thomas Janes’s perspective in Africa 25 years earlier than the festival. Linda, then 27, has married and is working for the Peace Corps when Thomas, also married, encounters her in an African marketplace. The fuzzy details of their teenage romance hinted at in Part I become a little more defined in Part II. The reader discovers a terrible accident allowed overly protective adults to separate the young highschool lovers and effectively dismantle their relationship by putting distance (and silence) between them. Part III is ten years prior to Africa. Thomas and Linda are 17 and in highschool. This final section brings the entire sage full circle. In all honesty my favorite way to read The Last Time They Met is front to back and then again, this time back to front. The tiniest of details become glittering and sharp when exposed by more supporting story.

Confession: this is a reread. As a rule, I have tried to read everything by Anita Shreve. She is definitely one of my favorite authors. Here’s the weird thing about rereading The Last Time They Met. I am remembering a scene that should have been in this book or at least I thought was in this book and there is another part to the story that sounds like something I read somewhere else. Confused? I know. I shouldn’t have said anything.

Favorite lines (and there are a few, bear with me), “The spirit sought and found the work, and discontent began when it could not” (p 5), “Thomas watched her walk away, all the blood in his veins following her” (p 125), and, “What’s imagined always worse than what is” (p 308).

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “Tricky, Tricky” (p 222). Pearl lists a few books that play tricks on you. In honor of Halloween I read The Last Time They Met.

Messiah

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Vidal, Gore. Messiah. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1954.

John Cave, as a professional embalmer, is intimate with death. While working on a client he has an epiphany of sorts. Suddenly he has deemed the act of dying a good thing. Cave is so taken with this revelation that he must share his idea with as many people as possible and without warning a new religion is born. His followers call it “Cave’s Word” or Cavesword. It’s strongest message is death is to be welcomed. As Cavesword spreads Cave establishes a following so large he needs a team to promote and protect him. Closest to him is Iris Mortimer, Paul Himmell, Clarissa Lessing, and Eugene Luther. Each individual has a different purpose for being part of Cave’s inner circle. It’s Eugene Luther who narrates the story of John Cave. With the help of Cave’s inner circle he develops and promotes a product to go with his message. Cavesway is a drug taken to make death even easier to initiate. As the world’s suicide rate rises, thanks to Cavesway, Luther’s perception of Cave and the cult-like message starts to distort and crumble. Messiah is prophetic and mesmerizing. I thought of it as “a hideous evil you can’t tear your eyes from.”

Favorite lines, “Stars fell to earth in a blaze of light, and where they fell, monsters were born, hideous and blind” (p 4). How’s that for a start? Other lines I liked, “The sky that day was like an idiot’s mind, wild with odd clouds, but lovely too, guileless, natural, elusive” (p 13), and, “We’ve finally made dying simply swell” (p 95), and finally, “Any direct statement of personal innocence has always made me feel completely criminal” (p 140). The last quote is probably my favorite.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “Gore Vidal’s Historical Novels: Too Good To Miss” (p 237). Obviously, Messiah is not a historical novel like Burr or Lincoln. Pearl threw it in the chapter as a personal favorite.

Oct ’10 is…

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For the first time in a long time I am taking an October vacation. Wait. I don’t think I’ve ever really taken an October V A C A T I O N before. Maybe a long weekend around Columbus Day, yes. A real, honest to goodness, week off in October? No, I don’t think so. Finally, something good to look forward to… Here is the month in books:

  • Bonobo by Frans de Waal ~ in honor of de Waal being born in October and in honor of Animal Month
  • Poison Oracle by Peter Dickinson ~ in honor of special child month
  • Ways of Seeing by John Berger ~ in honor of National Art Appreciation month
  • Messiah by Gore Vidal ~ in honor of Vidal’s birth month
  • Woman: an intimate geography by Natalie Angier ~ in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness month
  • The Ear, The Eye, The Arm by Nancy Farmer ~ in honor of National Fantasy Month

In addition I am still reading The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. The magic of this read is that I am savoring each and every word like it is the most expensive, the richest, most divine piece of chocolate I have ever tasted – simply because I don’t want it to end!

Heartbreak Hotel

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Siddons, Anne Rivers. Heartbreak Hotel. New York: Pocket Star Books, 2004.

Margaret Deloach (Maggie to her friends) is a good girl, a good, smart Southern girl who has everything going for her. She is popular and beautiful, a sister in the Kappa sorority and pinned to the ever handsome Boots Claiborne. Much is made of Maggie’s looks, her clothing, her sense of style. It isn’t until Maggie meets Hoyt Cunningham, a childhood friend of Boot’s, that Maggie’s moral compass and intelligence is exposed and challenged. Everything comes to a head when Maggie witnesses the brutal recapture of a black inmate from the county jail in Boot’s hometown. What makes this story so interesting is Heartbreak Hotel is a coming of age story set in the Civil Rights era South. It is lush with description, brimming with trouble. It is easy to see why it was a New York Times best seller.

While Maggie is admirable throughout the entire saga of Heartbreak Hotel I did have one small question. *Spoiler Alert* Maggie writes an opinion piece about segregation in Alabama. It coincides with the entrance of the state university’s first black student so racist tensions are already running high. Maggie’s piece strikes out at her finance’s family and the only way of life they had ever known for generations and generations. My question is this, how in the world did Maggie think she could write a front page article criticizing Boots and still have him as her husband? There is one scene that I find Maggie’s character to be completely unbelievable. Maggie’s column has made the front page only Boots hasn’t seen it yet. He has been away for a family funeral. When he returns they go to his fraternity for a party where Maggie is hopeful no one will mention the article to him. She even thinks she has a chance to tell him about it and “have a laugh over it.” I don’t know what she was thinking when everything up to that point indicates he will have a royal, violent meltdown.

Favorite lines: “And so reading remained one of Maggie’s small and constant rebellions” (p 11). I loved this line when I first read it and didn’t realize how much of a premonition it was to the tail end of the story. Another favorite line, “She passed a day in fitful, drugged sleep, in which deep snoring alternated with wild incoherent sobbings about guilt and blood and chewing gum and blonde whores and God” (138). That, my friends, is the epitome of a breakdown. Brilliant.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “Southern-Fried Fiction: Alabama” (p 206). Alabama became a state in the month of December but I chose to read Heartbreak Hotel in September as another Back to School honor book. I had a few days left in the month and this book was lying around the house so I read it.

Clock Winder

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Tyler, Anne. The Clock Winder. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

The Clock Winder could be seen as a cautionary take about what it is like to get caught up in situations beyond one’s control. It’s about what happens when someone lets his or her guard down and becomes too involved. Elizabeth Abbott is a twenty year old drifter. Having left her North Carolina home the summer before her last year of college Elizabeth finds herself in Baltimore, Maryland where she becomes the handyman for an elderly woman. The meeting is purely by chance but everything beyond that is not. Mrs. Emerson is struggling to put away lawn furniture after firing her gardener of nearly 25 years when Elizabeth walks by and offers to help. The longer Elizabeth stays in Mrs. Emerson’s employment and becomes involved with her seven children the more complicated Elizabeth’s life becomes.The Clock Winder is what happens when people make lasting impressions. Just as Elizabeth has made an impression on the Emersons they have changed her life as well.

Favorite lines: “Oh, everything she said nowadays was attached to other things by long gluey strands, calling up other days, none of them good, touching off chords, opening doors” (p 61), and “He felt burdened by new sorrows that he regretted having invited (p 123).

My least favorite part of the book was the ending. *Spoiler alert* I was disappointed Tyler used Peter to tell the last part of the story. Peter hardly factors into the most important parts, yet it’s from his perspective that we learn Elizabeth has married Matthew, has had two children with him and is now living in Mrs. Emerson’s house. We also learn that Andrew and Elizabeth have kissed and made up despite Andrew’s previous belief that Elizabeth killed his brother…Confused yet?

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “Real Characters” (p 197). Chosen for the eccentric characters within the Emerson family.

Optimist’s Daughter

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Welty, Eudora. The Optimist’s Daughter. New York: Random House, 1972.

Southern story broken into four distinct sections.
Part I – Laurel McKelva Hand comes from Chicago to care for her elderly father after eye surgery. Judge McKelva subsequently dies and Laurel is left to deal with her young, silly stepmother, Fay. Part I sets the tone for Laurel and Fay’s strained relationship.

Part II – Laurel and Fay bring Judge McKelva home for the wake and funeral where Laurel is heartily welcomed and supported by her friends and community. Fay’s family comes from Texas and brings out the worst in Fay. Part II illustrates southern charm and manners.

Part III – Laurel has to come to terms with her father’s new, young wife. As silly as she is, Laurel’s father adored her. Laurel also has to come to terms with the death of her mother ten years prior.

Part IV is all about Laurel’s introspective growth and acceptance of the future. The burning of her mother’s letters and the letting go of the breadboard are very significant.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in two different chapters. First, from “100 Good Reads, Decade by Decade:1970s” (p 178), then in “Southern Fiction” (p 222).

PS ~ I liked knowing a little about the authors I read. It was fun to discover Welty had connections to Smith and was a Guggenheim fellow (just like Robert Michael Pyle).

Tinker Tailor

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Le Carre, John. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1975.

I have seen this book peering out at me from my parents bookcase for years and years. I was always fascinated by the title, but scared of the plot. As a teenager I could never get into spy books. I don’t think it had anything to do with being a girl because I read the Hardy Boys just as readily as Nancy Drew. I think it was the fear of spies in general. I mean, think about it – a spy is someone you think you know, but don’t. A spy is someone completely different than who they appear to be. That scares the crap out of me.

To be honest Tinker Tailor was one of the most confusing books I have ever tried to read. For starters, it’s one of those start-in-the-middle-of-the-plot books. The only successful way to catch the reader up on what has been missed is a series of flashbacks. I kept getting the flashbacks confused with the here and now. Another thing I kept getting confused was the language. le Carre has a whole series of secret words to describe the Cold War spy game. For example, a babysitter is really a bodyguard.The plot itself is really straightforward inasmuch as an espionage thriller could be. George Smiley is pulled out of retirement as a British Intelligence officer. He is recruited to uncover a Russian mole deep in the BIA’s ranks. Of course, that it the simplest, dumbed-down plot synopsis I could make. Many reviewers have called Tinker Tailor “complicated” and I would have to agree.

I did manage to find a favorite line in the 50 pages I did read, “Only food could otherwise move him so deeply” (p 23). Go figure.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “Cold War Spy Fiction” (p 61).

Interesting sidenote: John le Carre is the pen name of David John Moore Cornwell.

Wild Life

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Gloss, Molly. Wild Life.New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

I suppose I could make some wiseazz crack about my college days, but I will refrain 🙂 for your sake.

Wild Life takes place in the wilds of Oregon/Washington state in the early 1900s. Charlotte Bridger Drummond is a feisty, independent, feminist, single mother of five (all boys) who supports her children by writing dime store novels. She has a bit of an ego and flies the feminist flag a little too frequently, but has a good heart. When her housekeeper’s granddaughter goes missing in the logging hills of the Oregon/Washington border she bravely joins the search believing her strength and savvy will bring the child home. To her utter surprise Charlotte gets lost herself and must depend on a group of shy Big foot-like beasts for survival. While the overall premise of Wild Life is fascinating and the strength of Gloss’s writing is intoxicating, the mishmash of storytelling misses its mark. Interspersed between Charlotte’s tale (in the form of a diary) of her search for the missing child and her adventure with the wild ones is a third-party narrative about barely related characters, short literary quotes, science related newspaper and journal clippings, and substantial excerpts from CBD’s current in-the-works novel. Much like I wanted to see the Ya-Ya scrapbook in The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells I think Wild Life would have benefitted from a scrapbookish approach (think Nick Bantock).

I am in love with how Molly Gloss writes. Here are a few of my favorite one-liners. First, “They wrestled daily over important matters such as whose arrow came nearest to killing a particular Indian or slavering wolf, and trivial matters such as who wiped whose snot on whose trousers” (p 25). I instantly thought of Silas and Atticus. Here’s another, “There is something about a lighted room when you are standing outside it in the cold night” (p 32); and one more, “I’m a notoriously poor friend where tears are concerned” (p 54).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “Companion Reads” (p 63). I’m reading Where Bigfoot Walks by Robert Michael Pyle as the companion to Wild Life.

Moo

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Smiley, Jane. Moo. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1996.

Moo had its moments of being incredibly bogged down, sluggish even. I found myself getting bored with the wordiness of some of the chapters, as if there were too many subplots.

Moo is an agriculture university somewhere in the midwest (my guess would be Iowa). Characters range from four in-coming freshmen girls to administrative bigwigs and everyone in between. Moo is a satire that is incredibly silly in places. Superficial relationships collide and somehow become meaningful. What makes the story so interesting is the drama, the scandals, and mischief the campus seems to promote. Everyone has a secret. Everyone has someone they would either like to kill or screw. The word everyone uses to describe Moo is “wicked” and it fits.

Favorite lines: “Diane wondered if Mrs. Johnson had understood that was making her pregnant” (p 12), and Under her own version of Ivar’s signature, Mrs. Walker had, over the years, authorized the library to buy as many available databases as they could. She had actually transferred funds out of the athletic budget into the library from time to time…” (p140). Don’t I wish!

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “Academia: the Joke” (p 3) and again in the chapter called, “Growing Writers: (p 107).

September ’10 is…

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September is the storm before the calm – literally since Earl is raging up the coast! School is back in session. A new hire is on the premises. Things are a little crazy right now. Here are how things look for books at the moment:

  • Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carre ~ in honor of the Cold War starting in September
  • Between Parent and Child by Haim G. Ginott ~ in honor of National Family Month
  • Where Big Foot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Pyle ~ in honor of Bigfoot being spotted on September 16, 2007 in Pennsylvania (yay for the Northeast Sasquatch!)
  • Wild Life by Molly Gloss ~ a companion read to Where Big Foot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide.
  • Moo by Jane Smiley ~ in honor of school being back in session

I’m also in the process of reading a few food books and an Early Review book. More on all of that later.