Beat the Heat with a Cool Summer Salad

In the steamy Mississippi summer time, I often do not feel like cooking a huge, hot meal for myself.  What better way to enjoy your supper, and celebrate the lovely abundance of summer gardens, than by making yourself a beautiful salad for dinner!  50 Spectacular Salads by Steven Wheeler is a Step-By-Step book that shows the reader how to make fifty wonderful salads, from main courses to special occasion dinners and sweet salads for dessert.  Each recipe is on the left side of the page with a full color picture of the finished product on the right-hand side.  Each recipe step is numbered and clearly marked and includes tips on how to arrange the salad prettily on a plate.  Especially handy is a small set of pictures on the left-hand side of the recipe page, that show what the recipe items look like, in case the reader does not know what arugula, etc. is.  The book opens with sections on salad leaves, dressings, equipment and how to grow a kitchen herb garden.  This is a great book for the beginning chef or an experienced one and it is great for helping you plan your next salad adventure!

Maleability of Memory

I just finished Neil Gaiman's newest work, The Ocean at the End of the Lane and I must say that I was blown away by this short, but lyrically beautiful tale for adults. Neil Gaiman is a wonderful writer and he excels in creating modern fairy tales. When our story opens, the narrator (who is never named) is visiting his boyhood home in Sussex, England after attending a funeral. Fiftyish and looking for something he cannot pinpoint, he travels down to the end of the lane where he used to live. There he visits the Hempstock farm he thinks he remembers from when he was seven years old. It was there that he met his friend Lettie Hempstock, who, along with her mother and grandmother, tend the farm and its animals. The boy and his father walk down their lane to look for the family car that seems to have gone missing. In so doing, they find the body of their lodger slumped in the seat; an apparent suicide. So, the boy is shuffled off to the Hempstock farm so that the police can do their duty. Lettie shows the boy her "ocean"; a small duck pond behind the house. The boy cannot understand why Lettie calls it this, nor can he understand why she talks in riddles and seems to be wise beyond her years. The reason is that Gaiman has interwoven magic into this seemingly innocuous story about a young boy finding more adventure than he wants. Lettie and her family are not really human; they are ancient beings who look out for the world and raise cows and chickens and help little boys who get into trouble with monsters. Although the boy has great adventures and survives darkness and death, thanks to his friend Lettie, he doesn't remember any of it until he returns to contemplate his life beside the "ocean". And that is what this book is really about; how we alter our own memory as we age to gloss over painful and tragic times and to punctuate those glowing victories. If this all sounds a little confusing, it is. To tell you more would give away the ending and I wouldn't want to deprive you of the joy of reading this short, sweet tome.

Deeply Odd

Deeply Odd is the newest book in the Odd Thomas series, written by Dean Koontz.  Odd Thomas has the ability to communicate with restless spirits and help them find their own peace.  In this novel, Odd meets a sadistic truck driver and receives a vision of three innocent children burning as the truck driver sets them on fire.  Odd must intervene and save them, by figuring out who the children are and where they are being held, before the truck driver acts out his crime. When the help of Alfred Hitchcock's ghost and a few kind strangers, Odd rushes down the Interstate, using his psychic abilities to pursue the truck driver and his innocent quarry.  What Odd eventually finds is a world running parallet to his own, and a place so sinister, he may not return.  Odd Thomas is a strong character, a hero who is a "regular joe," and has had his own share of troubles.  Odd is sincere and humorous and he is in touch with the darker side of humanity.  I thoroughly enjoy reading about Odd Thomas' character and his books are always entertaining to me.  These books must be read in order, as the sequence of actions in each book builds upon the last one.  The first one is Odd Thomas.

New British Mysteries

I've just spent my weekend watching two of our newest British mystery series. First was Set 22 of the Midsomer Murders series. I love this series, but, as loyal watchers know, two seasons ago, the beloved Tom Barnaby was replaced by his cousin John Barnaby. I enjoy the second Barnaby, but no one can replace the wonderful performance of John Nettles as Tom. This newest series was very good and like the others, features the plethora of quirky small town personalities that have made this series so popular. There is no guts and gore here, so die-hard CSI fans may not like what they see, but if you can stand just a little blood, then this show may be for you. If you have never seen this series before, I would suggest starting at or near the beginning of the show, so that you can get a feel of how the dynamic between the senior detective and his plodding side-kick works. The library has just about all of the show starting with the "Killing at Badger's Drift".
The second show I watched was Series 6 of Inspector Lewis. For those of you who aren't familiar, this series is a spin-off of the Inspector Morse series based on the books by Colin Dexter. Lewis also features the wise lead detective and his long suffering sergeant, but instead of the Midsomer counties, these two muddle around the area of Oxford University. Unlike the sergeant in Midsomer, Sergeant James Hathaway is well educated and a bit brooding, but extremely wise for someone so young. Detective Inspector Lewis, himself, is a streetwise old-school copper who favors common sense and opera. From the way this series ended, I think it may be the last, or next-to-last for Inspector Lewis; which is quite sad, because I love the dynamic of these two characters and the wonderful characterization of the supporting cast. (It also helps that the young man who plays DS Hathaway is a cutie!)
We have several more different British series that our regular patrons adore, so if you want a good old murder mystery without the guts and gore, pick up one of these and give them a try.