October pleasure reading

This month I finished Heat Rises by “Richard Castle” and The Appeal by John Grisham.  Both books were enjoyable and I got through them really quickly.  A lot of that is because I was at Ethicon on Raleigh on Monday and Tuesday last week so I had a lot of opportunities to read because I don’t have access to the Internet while I’m there.  I finished them both over the weekend.

Anyway, Heat Rises is loosely based around the show Castle, so that automatically is a point in its favor.  This was one was a bit different because the roles were reversed from how they usually are in the show.  For example, in the show, one of them is seriously injured but in the book the other was seriously injured.  I’m sure it’ll turn out alright in the end, but it’s interesting to draw some connections between the show and the books.  I also like the sense of humor of whoever is this ghost writer that takes on the name of the author on Castle.  He had one quip about George Michael’s song “Careless Whisper” and another scene where some agent tells the author in the book that he “sorta looks like that guy who roamed outer space everybody’s so crazy about” to which the character in the book replied, “Malcolm Reynolds?”.  First of all, I LOVE Firefly, and secondly, the actor who plays the author character in the show is the same actor who played Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion).  Just a little humor for the hardcore fans I guess.

Now, I’m still entertained by the John Grisham books, but I’m noticing the theme that none of them ever ends well.  Not a single one.  You want that execution stayed?  No such luck.  You want that juror to survive?  Well too bad, she dies.  You want that appeal denied?  Today’s not your day.  I've started reading The Client and I feel like I should just go ahead and assume they never discover the body they’re looking for and the young protagonist is murdered by mobsters.  It’s not worth hoping it’ll turn out well.

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.

August pleasure reading, part 4

Maybe I read to escape acknowledging the fact that I'm a fourth year Ph.D. student, but I also read While Mortals Sleep, a posthumously-published collection of short stories by Kurt Vonnegut, Sphere by Michael Crichton, and Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas.  I guess technically I've read Funny in Farsi before, but I was in high school and there were several chapters I don't remember ever reading.

 

All the books were really good (obviously, since I got through them so quickly!) and I would recommend them to anyone looking for something to read that's not too involved.  I read a lot when I go to the fitness room (I usually run then either bike, walk on a steep incline, or (only as a last resort) go on the elliptical) so that's how I get through so many books I think.  I also enjoy reading before bed although lately that's been getting difficult because I've been getting up early to get to lab around 715 so I like to just go to sleep :)

I'm now reading Rising Sun by Crichton and one of my friends lent me the first book in The Hunger Games series, so I'm sure I'll get started on that pretty soon.

Anyway, lunch time over, back to work.

August's second and third new dishes: Baked chicken

Well baking chicken is not new for me, but I had some ingredients I wanted to use up as well as many pounds of chicken breasts that I bought super on sale and froze, so I looked for various baked chicken recipes.  The first one was just chicken breasts in cream of herb soup that was baked and we ate it with rice.  It was very yummy and really easy :)  My mom used to make something similar so it wasn't that new for me, but that doesn't mean it wasn't good!

On Wednesday I made chicken using this recipe; I didn't use Hellman's mayo and I didn't use as much as the recipe calls for, but that's okay.  I had the parmesan cheese and Food Lion brand light mayo that I used to make a feta cheese and artichoke dip I've made a few times and I wanted a recipe to let me use up some of that stuff.  I don't really like mayo that much, but in the dip it just tastes like creamy cheese (since there's so much cheese already in the dip) so in this recipe the mayo taste was more obvious, but it wasn't overwhelming, so the end product was really good.  Plus the small amount of bread crumbs gave the chicken just the right amount of crunchiness, mmm.

I also don't have any pictures because I haven't been charging my camera very regularly, but oh well, everyone knows what chicken looks like.

I'm excited for the seasons to be changing so that there will be new foods in season (and therefore on sale) so I can try to mix up what we eat some.  I think if we're going to buy some produce we've never bought before that I'll want to go to the farmer's market because I'm not sure how to tell if something is ripe and frankly sometimes the produce selection at Food Lion is really depressing and makes me miss Harris Teeter (except the ridiculously overpriced part).

August pleasure reading, part 3

Wednesday I finished Congo by Michael Crichton and I really enjoyed it!  I've also almost finished Sphere by him as well, but I'll write about that after I read the last 60 or so pages.  I had a lot of down time the past 2 days because I was at Ethicon doing some experiments that are mainly "hurry up and wait" types of experiments so I read in between.  I had some journal articles that I read too, but I also don't have internet access while I'm there so sometimes it's hard to read articles if there's something I want to look up.

Anyway, the book was really good!  Apparently it is also a movie, but I'd never heard of the movie.  Sphere is also a movie, but I'm glad I haven't seen them because that would ruin the suspense of the book.  Now that I've read a lot of John Grisham books I guess I'm moving on to another prolific writer.  What's next, James Patterson?

Congo was about a group looking for a valuable type of diamond in the jungle of Congo but all the groups that get close to their destination just vanish and are never heard from again.  The book follows one expedition team that is a follow up team sent in when their first team is destroyed (why you would send another group in seems stupid, but I guess business is business!).  Anyway, it was fun to read but not hard to read, which is nice sometimes when you're tired of journal articles.