More Reading

So, after watching a couple of shows on tv last night, (well, and taking the dog for an evening walk) I ended up staying up an hour later than I should have because I was reading more of Julie Powell's book. I was hoping to finish Julie & Julia, but at midnight decided that I just needed to go to bed and the last sixty or so pages would have to wait until morning. I'm still surprised that so much of the commentary about/by Julie's friends didn't make it into the movie. There are a bunch of great lines in the book - unfortunately I haven't yet remembered to have pen/pencil and paper handy when I'm reading, so I haven't been able to record them. Oh, well - maybe I'll just have to read it again. Or I could page through and find them, but that's more work and time than I'm willing to give at this point. Although I caught on rather quickly, a few of the acronyms Julie Powell uses still catch me a bit by surprise: MtAoFC (Mastering the Art of French Cooking) and JC (Julia Child). Also, I've been intrigued to see that in his letters Paul Child (Julia's husband) always calls her Julie; similarly I was intrigued to learn that Julie Powell's name is actually Julia, but as she doesn't feel the name fits her, she goes by Julie instead. This reminded me of a book I read in high school (for anyone who has one of my senior pictures it's the book I'm reading in it): When Christ and His Saints Slept by Margaret Pargeter (who also wrote under the name Ellis Peters). Two of the characters are Empress Maud and Queen Matilda - apparently Maud and Matilda are the Latin and English versions of the same name - but having King Steven eat dinner with Maud throughout the descriptions of his battle with Maud for the English throne was just going to be too confusing, so King Steven's wife got one version and his cousin got the other.

As soon as I finish this book, I'm going to move on to the one that would have been read before Julie & Julia, if that hadn't been on the shortened availability due to high demand. I will be starting Lifelinesby CJ Lyons. This is a book that I found misplaced on a shelf while I was shelving books a couple weeks ago - it looked intriguing enough that I wanted to read it instead of shelving it - after I checked to make sure someone hadn't reserved it after an unsuccessful attempt to find it. It looks to be a medical mystery - although the mystery part might not be too strong as it's not in the mystery section. That doesn't necessarily mean a lot, though, because having read the book, I would have put Terry Goodkind's The Law of Nines in fantasy, or maybe science fiction (but probably fantasy to keep it with the Sword of Truth series).