Southeast Asia
Martha Gellhorn: Travels with Myself and Another
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Festive Tasks Door 10 – Peace, Book: Read a book in which the ending of a conflict is a major theme. Gellhorn is a sharp observer and she has a way with words — I’d just wish she’d liked people and, for that matter, the places she […]
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An Alphabet of My Likes and Dislikes: “A”
This is the first post of a new blogging project — the title is pretty much self-explanatory, I think; the project’s introductory post can be found HERE. Credit for the idea: BeetleyPete. Today’s entries both happen to be food items, but the only thing that links them in my mind is that they both begin […]
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Red Thai Curry
24 Festive Tasks: Door 7 – International Human Rights Day, Task 2: Cook a dish from a culture other than your own or something involving apples (NYC = Big Apple) or oranges (for the Netherlands, seat of the International Court of Justice & International Criminal Court). Dinner tonight was red Thai curry. Curry and coconut […]
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Spices!
The sort of online rabbit hole one is liable to fall down in lockdown times … There’s a company named Spirit of Spice that specializes in “whole seed” spice mixes all coming in their own little mills: I’ve been a fan of theirs for quite a while, though so far I’ve been buying their products […]
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Books Shipped Long Distance
24 Festive Tasks: Door 16 – St. Lucia’s Day, Task 4: The historic (3d century AD) St. Lucia was Italian; yet, like those of many other saints (including, e.g., St. Andrew and St. Nicholas), the most important celebrations of her holiday don’t occur in her place of origin but somewhere else in the world. List […]
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2019: The Year’s Greatest Book Catches from my TBR
24 Festive Tasks: Door 12 – St. Andrew’s Day, Task 3: St. Andrew was a fisherman by trade: Which book(s) from your TBR that you read this year turned out to be the year’s greatest “catch”? Of my favorite reads of 2019, surprisingly few already were on my TBR at the beginning of the year, […]
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Kofi Annan: Interventions: A Life in War and Peace
Mr. Annan was far and away the most influential and important Secretary General of the United Nations in its more recent history; his memoirs set forth with great passion and understanding how the experience of a lifetime, from growing up in post-WWII Ghana all the way to serving as Under-Secretary for Peacekeeping under Boutros Boutros-Ghali, […]
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Halloween Bingo 2019: Tracking Post — Blackout! (And bingos Nos. 12 and 13.)
Many thanks to Moonlight Reader and Obsidian Blue for hosting this game for the fourth year in a row, bigger and better than ever before! Witih today’s call, I’ve blacked out my card, in addition to collecting my final bingos (nos. 12 and 13). Somewhat to my surprise, after completing my books for my […]
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Halloween Bingo 2019: Tracking Post — Bingo No. 3 and Reading Blackout
* Triple Bingo Happy Dance * Well, that went by much faster than I had anticipated … Many thanks to Moonlight Reader and Obsidian Blue for hosting this game for the fourth year in a row, bigger and better than ever before! I’ll continue tracking my bingos of course — and since we now have […]
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Zen Cho: Sorcerer to the Crown
I knew early on that if it hadn’t been for Halloween Bingo I’d have DNF’d this book, and I was tempted to do just that right until the very end. When I began composing this post, I didn’t think I was going to write much more than “infantile drivel” in my summary of Cho’s book, […]
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Halloween Bingo 2019: The First Week
So, on the plus side, despite serious RL interventions progress on my card is well under way, with four squares (including the centre / free / raven square) marked “called and read”; three of these in a row — plus reading for the remaining two squares of that row also in progress — and several […]
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More Favorite / Essential Historical Fiction: Towards the 200!
OK, so I did get to another full list after all. Here goes, without any further ado: Virginia Woolf: Orlando I’m happy I’m getting another shot for this book alone — could have kicked myself for leaving it off my first list. I’m not a big fan of either time travel or main character sex […]
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BL-opoly: Dice Roll #4
Moving on after Memorial Day: I move to square 23: The Cape-to-Cairo Railway — read a book set in Africa or by an author from an African country. Kofi Annan’s Interventions: A Life in War and Peace is by an African (Ghanaian) author and covers U.N. peacekeeping missions all over the world, including in several […]
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Happy Independence Day – and, my Freedom and Future Library
Related Blog Post: Book Recs Solicited: Freedom and Future Library Reading Project: Freedom and Future Library Could there possibly be a better day on which to finally follow up on my Freedom and Future Library post? Truth be told, I’d been hoping to compile this much faster, but RL threw a major spanner in […]
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Book Recs Solicited: Freedom and Future Library
You’d have to be living under a rock buried somewhere halfway down to the center of the earth in order not to be aware that in recent years our beautiful world has been shaken up by a number of crises the likes of which I, at least, have not experienced in my entire lifetime — […]
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Birthday Monster Book Haul
… thanks to my mom, who gave me a bookstore gift card, my best friend, who raided my Amazon wish list (isn’t it nice to know your loved ones know just what you’ll be happiest about?) and a few odd things to which I treated myself: Die Briefe der Manns (The Mann Family Correspondence) — […]
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2015 Reading Recap, Part 2: The Self-Interview
Olga Godim came up with this creative way of summing up her reading year and challenged everyone to do their own. Well, while I’m back here … I’m in! Olga writes: “Creatively, I decided to interview myself about my reading in 2015. The answers could only be book titles I read […]
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Books With Numbers in the Title
Shout-out to URL Phantomhive for the idea! All of these are taken from my “Read” shelf. Sometimes, the numbers are in the subtitle. Books with several numbers (e.g., history books with a date range in their title) are entered for all numbers. Note: Updated as of March 2021. Zero / None Half […]
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George Orwell: Burmese Days
Pukkah sahibs An Assembly Such as This … Though uttered in much more genteel circumstances than the setting of this book, Mr. Darcy’s timeless put-down of Meryton society in Jane Austen‘s Pride and Prejudice can’t fail to come to mind when referring to the characters populating George Orwell’s first novel. Burmese Days is, down […]
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Lorenz Books: Around the World Cookbook
Around the World in 350+ Recipes “Holidays in far flung places have increased our awareness of different foods, and restaurants on every street corner now offer dishes that no so long ago would have been unfamiliar,” the editors of this volume say in their introduction. And indeed: This is nothing less than a lavishly illustrated […]
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