Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I have snacking issues.

I didn’t used to, particularly.  It was creeping up on me, but I had it mostly under control until my hubby took me to the Utah Shakespearean Festival and we bought snacks for our hotel room.  Now, I do 99% of the grocery shopping, usually with a child or two in tow; they see what I buy, and that serves as a pretty good built-in restraint.  My hubby, on the other hand–let’s just say he did nothing to save me from myself.  Suddenly there were all of these delightful snacks, and ever since then I’m been struggling to try and reign myself back in, because a snacking habit gathers momentum frighteningly fast, especially when combined with a curiosity about how new things taste.

On the other hand, I can offer you some suggestions, if you’re looking for something snacky and coming up dry.  If you want savory, I have to say that the new Smoked Gouda Triscuits are tasty, and the Fire Roasted Tomato and Olive Oil variety continue to be delightful; the Mediterranean Style Olive ones are a bit much for me, but if you love Kalamata olives, you probably want to give them a try.  The new Lays Smoked Gouda and Chive chips are delightful as well (although the Korean BBQ kind are strange and the herby ones are a little much).

If you want sweet, on the other hand, may I suggest the Dark Chocolate Covered Coconut Almonds at Costco?  AND the Lemoncello Almonds, although I’m not sure they’re available at all locations. Cinnamon Bun Oreos are tasty as well (as are the Red Velvet ones, although they may just be a Valentine’s thing).

What are YOUR favorite snacky foods?

In this case, the author of Bearskin went to high school with one of my favorite of my hubby’s cousins, and so she (the cousin, not the author) asked me if I would like to read it and review it on my blog.  I hesitated initially because I don’t read a ton of youth fantasy anymore, but I am fond of fairy tale retellings, and so I said yes with the disclaimer that I might not get to it right away.

Which I haven’t.

It did make its way up my to-read list, however, and so I finally picked it up with the intention of doing a bit of a speed read.  (Because I really don’t read a lot of youth fantasy anymore.  Unless, of course, it’s written by Robin McKinley, but since her husband died in December, I’m not expecting to see anything new from her any time soon.)  Interestingly, while I started out at an almost-skim, the book ended up thoroughly engrossing me in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible.  The first several scenes took me by surprise (I am in no way familiar with the original fairy tale), and while I wondered just how invested I would become in the fate of the witch’s children (both step and biological), I ended up lost in the story. The journeys of the three young people were not at all what I expected, and while the endings of two of those journeys were relatively predictable (there is a certain structure to fairy tales, after all), the evolution of the third surprised me from beginning to end.

Okay, I’m not sure how much more I want to say; I don’t want to be guilty of spoilers, and some stories are hard to describe without any.  What I will say is that while it’s not perfectly written, the quality of the writing surprised me.  I noticed on Goodreads that several people thought it started out too slowly, but that didn’t bother me.  It took me a bit to get emotionally involved with the characters, perhaps, but enough was happening in the meantime to keep me reading.  Bottom line?  If you like fairy tale retellings, I wholeheartedly recommend this one.

Several months ago my friend Britt picked Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict for our (extremely casual) book club; in the last couple of weeks, we both finally got around to reading it.  Sadly, neither of us loved it, although you’ll have to go to her blog to see what she thought of it.  (Google “Confessions of a Book Habitue”.  She does pictures.)  The narrator just seems on the vulgar side for someone THAT into Jane Austen, and some of the plot elements didn’t–quite–work for me.  Its companion novel, Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, was actually quite a bit better, but unfortunately, that just made it between “okay” and “good” on my book scale.  Confessions tells the story of a girl from LA who wakes up in the body of a woman in 1813 England, while Awakenings gives us the story of the displaced English girl in LA.  If this seems totally your thing, you might enjoy them (especially the second one), but I can’t advise you to rush out and read them today.  (Although I did enjoy the second one a good bit more.  I can’t imagine what it would be like to read that one first, however, because I didn’t, and it’s so difficult to un-know in hindsight.)

Anyway.  It’s up to you on these two.

On the one hand, it’s good to be back; on the other hand, it means my sister’s family has gone home already and my parents are leaving tonight.

Sigh.

To add insult to injury, I found Bryn Barnard’s Outbreak:  Plagues That Changed History to be ultimately disappointing.  I had such high hopes!  It’s not that it wasn’t interesting, you understand.  It was accessible and provided fascinatingly gory details about the Black Death, cholera, smallpox, and a few other diseases.  My problem was that as the book went on, it became increasingly obvious that it wasn’t a meticulously researched, well-presented work of nonfiction in the tradition of Jim Murphy, Susan Campbell Bartoletti, and Russell Freedman.  Instead, it felt anecdotal; there was a lot of fact there, certainly, but the presentation had a definite bias, and when I looked into a claim that I’d never heard before, I found that it had been a theory, but had been abandoned because the science didn’t support it. Barnard spent a decent portion of the book talking about what we can do to curtail current and future outbreaks, but his solutions felt mostly one-sided and oversimplified.

Bottom line?  There are good storytellers who are also excellent authors of intermediate nonfiction; Bryn Barnard is one, but not the other.