Before I discuss a non-food related novel with you, let me just mention how much I absolutely adore Jane Mount’s Ideal Bookshelf Series.  Here’s one of my favorites: Ideal Bookshelf 506: Cooking (the link is to where you can purchase your very own copy on 20×200, not an affiliate link!) I own almost every cookbook on this shelf. When I can afford to commit, I’ll be inquiring about a custom one of her work.

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Reading is one of my favorite competitive sports. Every year I make a resolution to read 52 (or more books). Usually the competition is with myself (although admittedly I’d always try to win the reading competitions at my library): I have a finite amount of time on this earth, and there is a seemingly infinite amount of reading I’d like to tackle. I find that it helps to set goals, rather than throw my hands up in defeat.

Curiously, I don’t “count” my reading of cookbooks, and since I read so many like novels, this would put me well above my yearly quota. For each novel or non-fiction book, I like to write a paragraph or two in summary, sometimes about the book, or sometimes about the things that reading it reminds me to think about. I started this practice because I wanted to find a way to pause, record, and acknowledge the book I read, rather than just consume it. Over time it became a form of gratitude for the author – someone spent months, years, or decades of work on this project, and reading aimlessly and moving on seemed thankless, and too abrupt of an ending.

Usually these notes find themselves in my Goodreads account, or a personal blog, or even just written in a moleskin. But since this blog has become so much more than just food, I figure I’ll stick them here until I get bored, or someone convinces me otherwise.

#1.The Woman Who Died a Lot by Jasper Fforde
Hardcover, 384 pages
Published July 12th 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton
(US edition published October 9th 2012 by Viking Adult)
Read on Kindle, review copy provided by NetGalley

This is the seventh book in the Thursday Next series. To my best recollection, I started reading these after finding a copy of the third book ‘The Well of Lost Plots’ in my house, collecting dust. The purchase was an ill-fated attempt by my mother to find something that my brother would enjoy to read. (My brother, who voraciously consumes media in the form of blogs, news articles, and television, is the only member of our nuclear family who doesn’t particularly enjoy the printed word. We’re not sure where he came from.)

Fforde, a master of literary puns, succeeds again in writing something that makes me laugh the entire way through. The main character, Thursday Next, is an aging ex-special ops detective, forced into semi-retirement as the chief librarian of Swindon. Though not my favorite edition of the series, Thursday is a great female lead, and I always enjoy coming back to her adventures. (I should note that newcomers to the series would be much better off starting at the beginning – I accidentally read the third book in the series first, and backtracked, and you’d be missing a lot if you started out here.)

“Do I have to talk to insane people?” “You’re a librarian now. I’m afraid it’s mandatory.”

Please note the UK cover, left, (via Jasperfforde.com) vs. the American version, right – I’ve yet to find a situation where I don’t prefer the British cover art. The UK version includes a fast car driven by the likeable aging protagonist, an explosion, and an escaping dodo – a generally fun cover. The US version, has a design which I admittedly like the look of, but is heavily stylized, and misses the opportunity to represent the strong female lead of a certain age by replacing her with an attractive young woman. Meh.