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The Arroyo Book Club will be reading the book All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot for our December meeting.
This memoir of the early career of an English country veterinarian is
filled with humor & warmth… just what we need for the holiday season.
“Consommés are exceptionally rich in flavor and are crystal clear, an effect achieved by combining a high-quality stock or broth with a clarification mixture. To assure a high-quality consommé, the chef must choose ingredients carefully, keep the clarification mixture very cold until it is time to cook the consommé, and monitor the temperature of the consommé as it cooks at a slow simmer. Once the consommé has developed a rich flavor and color, it must be carefully strained and degreased to produce a crystal-clear soup, with no traces of fat, and an intense and satisfying flavor.”
Adaptation by Malinda Lo is a sci fi-esque book that begins with a mysterious bird strike
event that brings down numerous planes, moves on to road trip nightmare, and
winds up in experimented on by the government territory – and that’s only in
the opening chapters. Once our heroine
is safely back home she must figure out what exactly happened & that is
what she proceeds to do. The book
supports the conspiracy theorists actually know what’s really going on
worldview a bit too much for my taste (which should clue you in on what the
experiment involves) but other then that it is an interesting read. I would recommend it to someone who likes
lighter science fiction.
In a Fix by Linda Grimes is
a book I definitely do NOT recommend.
The premise is interesting enough --- our main characters can read the
auras of people and then sort of project them so that to outside observers they
become the person they are projecting.
Our heroine has used this ability to create a business for herself where
she becomes her client and solves their problems for them, a really weird
version of life coaching where the client doesn’t really learn anything. The real problem with the book is the
characters. The heroine is the most
inane character I’ve run into in a long time.
She seems to take no action on her own, only reacts to the action of
those around her. The male characters
are egoistical, domineering, do as I say types that would make me vow to never
speak to another man in my life if I believed men were actually like that. I put the book down without finishing it
& suggest that you steer clear of it.
I actually enjoyed the Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith (pseudonym of J.K. Rowling) quite a bit. It is a straightforward mystery with a hard
boiled detective, a helpful secretary, and an assortment of suspects. The mystery centers on the suicide (or
murder?) of a young supermodel. Our
hero is hired by the supermodel’s brother to find out what happened. The author does not really play fair with
the clues by which I mean the detective learns things that the reader does not
so it’s not really a book where the reader is supposed to be involved in the
solving of the mystery. It is however
an interesting and enjoyable read.
Bill Bryson brings his deft style to his latest book, One Summer. In this book he goes into extraordinary
detail about the events going on in America during the summer of 1927. It is a fascinating look at life in America
during what is indubitably an incredibly busy time. Bryson’s writing style is generally very appealing to me & he
continues that trend here. He has a
knack for picking out small humorous elements when he writes that generally
leaves me chuckling. Let me quote from
a section where he is describing Jacob Rupper (owner of the Yankees at the
time) as an example:“He spoke with a German accent – he called Ruth “Root,” for instance – which was a little puzzling because he had lived his whole life in America, as indeed had his parents. He collected jade, books, ceramics, dogs, horses, and art, and had what was called “America’s finest collection of small monkeys.” …Ruppert’s most arresting peccadillo was that he kept a second home in Garrison, New York, where he maintained a shrine to his mother in the form of a room containing everything she would need if she came back to life. This may go some way toward explaining why he never married.”
This week’s
question was who said “April is the cruelest month…”? This quote from T. S. Eliot constitutes the first five words of
The Waste Land.
I spend the first 100 or so pages of the book New Earth really hating the characters. Then the
plot grew interesting and the characters mellowed a bit (though I never did
grow to like them) and I wound up finishing the story. New Earth, by Ben Bova, tells the story of
12 explorers sent from Earth to investigate a planet orbiting a nearby (8 lys
away) star. Once there they discover a
planet that is startlingly similar to Earth, peopled by aliens who are
genetically identical to humans. The
rest of the book is spent investigating what is really going on. I don’t want to spoil things so I won’t say
more.
![[Medium bookjacket]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_suGmCzHFaUAJtDY9LdruuuXarVuoySpZaObE_0fY51tw9aouc2BqpXB5qkIw5DGY5dQSxpQwMGgGWPA6wj-ZnAWvWVhOO5W1VYuZWpWvmpF_jtenJNRVRO-ITCeQw35np3CIIKCB-vjaQt3-iJxy-iwKZnJ0scTPK53RfZwuebL0MSuKP4-h9shai5uCDQF0x7z2vhvgpLLrnaMFCUPe2FM9OZMJLWIJKhXG14=s0-d)
Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson is a space romance featuring FTL travel, all kinds of (Earth
derived) sentience, quests for knowledge & quests for domination, and
hapless visitors from the past. This is
not a deep book, nor does it speak of a future that is particularly likely but
it does provide several hours of enjoyable diversion.
Hugh Aldersey-Williams writes a “cultural history of the
human body” in Anatomies. While the book was interesting it wasn’t
what I expected and it was very stream of the author’s consciousness. He basically takes the body piece by piece
and writes about it. He attempts to get
at some of the historical and/or cultural connections we make with the
particular body part but the result is less what the culture as a whole sees
and more what he personally thinks. The
section on the ear, for example, focuses solely on the ear in art. He also adores making literary references and will frequently
devolve into describing a story. He
describes Gogol’s story The Nose in his section on The Head, for example.
This week’s
question was where was Hazard’s Pavilion located? Hazard’s Pavilion was located at 5th and Olive
Streets from 1887 to 1906. It was a
3-story theater that seated 4,000. It
was the city’s first big concert hall and cultural center.