Saturday, April 16, 2005
On the bookshelf
Merton's The Wisdom of the Desert, which I brought with me to St Louis for the Gateway Liturgical Conference.
From the library, Alton Brown's Gear For Your Kitchen, which I'm simply going to have to get for my own. We have some kitchen remodelling coming up this summer. I have some serious gear-updating to do too. Another cook who uses tons of nutmeg, and why didn't I think of that before?
I strongly recommend Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife, which was simply enchanting.
Yesterday I finished Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon. I've had a paperback of it for years, but it's one of those reads I've never gotten around to. Nobody's writing post-atomic war stuff anymore. S.M. Stirling writes Dies The Fire in which all of the world's electricity just turns off one day. I guess I'll give it a try since another friend or two seem to really like it. Books like that just worry me. I wonder how long my daughter would last without modern medicine. (Before 1985, she would have just died shortly after birth.) But Alas, Babylon was quite good. For some reason, I was wondering how long it would have taken MLB to resurrect itself in a post-war US. (Let's see: the AL is toast; the Twins are absorbed into the NL to play the Cardinals, the Reds and various AA and PCL refugees.) And baseball's not even my favorite sport.
We've been invited to an out-of-town wedding this summer. Anita commented that the wedding day is also the release day of the new Harry Potter book. She won't be able to wait in line at B&N or Borders or wherever she's advance-ordered Half Blood Prince. Maybe Brit and I will end up in a New York wedding while my wife whiles away a summer's week at Hogwarts.
Any good suggestions for good reads?
