September's new dish: Flaxseed meal pizza

This month I made pizza following the crust in this recipe that was recommended by one of my friends.  It was delicious!  I added garlic to the crust, also following the recommendation of my friend, and that really made it even better.  I have never had flax seed before but I've read health articles where people add it to yogurt and other food to boost its fiber content to fill them up quicker and I can DEFINITELY see how that would work.  There is so much fiber in this that I was practically bursting at the seams by the time I ate a quarter of the pizza and I ended up bringing the rest of my portion of the pizza for lunch the next day.  For toppings I used some of the spaghetti sauce we have around as well as shredded mozzarella cheese.  As a treat I bought some turkey pepperoni (which is delicious) and we used that as a topping (although Keegan used a lot more pepperonis than me!)  Maybe next time we'll branch out and add green peppers or spinach or something. 

I've actually made this recipe twice this month, including on Keegan's birthday on Monday because that's what he requested specially.

September pleasure reading, part 2

So I have read quite a few books in the past couple of weeks – I hope I don’t leave any out of my recaps here!  I read The Great Train Robbery, Jurassic Park, and Travels by Michael Crichton and I read Catching Fire and Mockingjay (the second and third books of The Hunger Games trilogy) by Suzanne Collins.  I really liked all of these books except for Travels, which turned out to be autobiographical.  I guess if I had known it was not a fictional story I might have enjoyed it more, but because I was expecting something different, this story let me down (a lot of the books in Duke's library have been recovered so I had no idea what the book looked like or any ideas about what it was about, even though the picture shown here makes it pretty obvious that it's about Crichton).  I really enjoyed Jurassic Park and I’m going to look for The Lost World when I get the chance.  I was surprised by how very different the book is from the movie!  I know that is to be expected when books are made into movies, but a lot of people died in the book that didn’t die in the movie, and several people lived in the book that died in the movie.  It seems like those are things you shouldn’t mess with when you’re making a movie, but whatever. 

The Hunger Game series was a bit depressing and ended on a bittersweet note but the stories really sucked me in, and that’s what counts for me when I’m reading.

I’m not sure what I’ll look for today when I go to explore Duke’s library, but I’ll probably end up in the New and Noteworthy section again.  I’m already reading The Count of Monte Cristo, so there’s one on my list.  I'm pretty sure I've read it before, but I'm not sure if I finished it, or maybe I read it once half-heartedly in school (we were required to read books outside of our coursework and take quizzes on them and we had to earn a certain number of points from these quizzes each semester, so I might have skimmed the book because it was worth a  lot of points on the quiz or something).  Also, one of the shows I really enjoy, Castle, has books that are written by the fictional author on the show and I'm pretty sure another one came out either this week or will come out sometime this month.

September pleasure reading

Last week I read the first book in the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins (the book is also called The Hunger Games).  This series has come highly recommended to me from various friends, so I thought I would check it out (plus I was able to borrow it from one of my friends, score!)  I read the entire thing in one night.  Seriously.  I started around 8 and I stayed up until 1 to finish it.  This was bad seeing as how I am already missing out on sleep, and should have gone to sleep around 10 that night, but that’s okay.  I need to learn to pace myself with reading books that are part of a series (ex: reading the first 6 HP books in the span of a week, knowing there were only going to be 7 books) and despite the really depressing content of the books, it was hard to put it down.  I guess it’s like HP in that there’s a main character who everyone is rooting for and even though you know that (s)he’s not going to lose (because that would make the entire series lame), you still want to see how it turns out.  Anyway, the book was a quick read, but also enjoyable.  I’m looking forward to borrowing the second and third books in the series!

Yesterday I finished a book called Rising Sun by Michael Crichton.  This was not as good as the other books I’ve read by him, but that’s okay.  They can’t all be winners.  It was sort of interesting because the premise of the story is about the US and its business relationship with Japan.  I’m not sure how accurate his information is (but I’m assuming quite accurate because he includes references) but it makes me want to understand more about our economy and our trade laws with other countries.  I’m not sure how we expect to turn our economy around if we continue to buy things made in China over things made in the US, but I really would like to know more about those sorts of relationships.  I only had to take basic macroeconomics in undergrad, so my exposure to those sorts of things was quite limited.  Back to the story: to me (at least) the murderer was really obvious from the beginning.  Still well-written, but I’d recommend Congo and Sphere before I’d recommend Rising Sun.