1) In-N-Out (animal style cheeseburger)
2) Los Altos Arts & Wine Festival (I love you Bay Area)
3) California Academy of Sciences (4-story rain forest and Steinhart Aquarium)
4) Garage sales (I love you Bay Area)
5) Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (release date August 24!)

Saving my thoughts on The Hunger Games trilogy for another day, suffice to say, I LOVE the series. Amazing on so many levels. I haven’t been so excited for the release of a book since the last Harry Potter.

I’ve decided to try writing a haiku every day, a form I haven’t written since I learned about it in middle school. Not only was I rusty, but I was stumped for inspiration until…I was rereading Catching Fire (Book Two) and in this read, came down squarely in the Peeta Camp. Who doesn’t like Peeta? He’s such a good guy. And nice guys shouldn’t finish last!

So I wrote a character haiku series for Peeta from The Hunger Games as a warm-up for the haiku exercise. Other than keeping to the 5-7-5, I played fast and loose with the haiku guidelines (even by haiku in English standards). No season word. Ok, here it goes, Ode to Peeta:

Peeta the bread boy
Not like pita pocket bread,
but Peter the rock.

Which makes me think of
The “Like a rock” commercial
For Chevrolet trucks.¹

Heaves heavy objects
Icing skills are camouflage
Plus, smooth talker too.

Decorating cakes
Is just like painting face
Katniss is in awe.

¹ See: Bob Seger’s “Like A Rock” ad campaign for Chevy’s pick-up trucks in the ’90s

I love book art, so I was super excited to find American mixed media artist Nina Katchadourian’s The Sorted Books Project. She goes to collections of both private and public libraries, browses the titles, and pulls a set of books down and arranges them so they can be read in order, top to bottom.

In her own words, Nina writes:

Taken as a whole, the clusters from each sorting aim to examine that particular library’s focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies.

The project began in 1993, and yes, it runs along similar lines as Jane Mount’s Ideal Bookshelves series. I have no idea when Jane Mount began her project (I think after). Sorted Books focuses primarily on the titles, while the Ideal Bookshelves emphasize the art of the book spine.

Nina Katchadourian, Shark Journal

See: The Sorted Books Project

Little Doodles are scribbles by professional illustrator Kate Wilson. I love pretty much everything she draws, but especially the drawings for foodies. (See: anatomy of a sundae, beans, and herbs.) Her fashion art is awesome too – she’s designed for Marc by Marc Jacobs.

Her prints are available at her etsy shop.

And speaking of food, I recently signed up for an account at One Tsp, an online recipe storage box. Until I found One Tsp, I’ve been handwriting recipes into a lined, hardcover Moleskine. I’m still going to keep up with that, but it’s nice having an organized system (tags) by which I can quickly locate recipes.

Anyway, although there is room for improvement, One Tsp is fantastically easy to use. So far I’ve only uploaded a few recipes I found online (you know, in case the blogs ever get defunct or whatever), but the other day I wrote in a family recipe (orange marmalade chicken) and uploaded a picture to go with it.

One example is probably – one reader likes a story because she connected with it b/c of her personal experience. Her friend on the other hand merely appreciates the author’s skill in telling it, but isn’t especially moved. Or maybe one reader loves great narrators, the ones that are downtrodden but still full of good-humor. Meanwhile another reader doesn’t care for the voice of the narrator, and so probably wasn’t very taken with the work. And so on.

I can’t say what my mystery block is, but I do know that in fiction, in good fiction that really just gets me, there is one component that my favorites all share. (This is more incidental than personal preference.) And that is, as I read and once I finish, I think, my god that was fanfuckingtastic, there is no way, absolutely no way that writer made that shit up. No way the writer just pulled it out of the air and imagined it. It’s gotta be real, it has to be the author’s personal experience, but fictionalized.

Here are two pieces I found while on my reading rounds that I’ve felt that way about:

A Field Guide to New England Fathers by Brian Hurley.
Sanger’s Grocery Store sold binoculars, bows and arrows, canoe paddles, and whittling knives. I pulled down one of each and shoved them at my mom. This was our new rule: she always had to check the price.

And one from my alma mater:

I’ve Been Looking by Anna Zucker.
The first time I lost her was in the flowers. I was eight and she was four, and we still lived in the Ukraine. We were playing hide-and-seek in a field of tall grass and wildflowers. It was our favorite game. But Lily was too good at it.

And usually when I find myself wondering how much of what I just read was true, how much of it was pure fiction, I also always think of two things:

1) My journalism profs always emphasized the importance of details, that the best articles were written by journalists who would interview again and again, etc. Example: “Metal to Bone, Day One: Click” by Anne Hull.

2) Two quotations: Truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

This came to me through my Google Reader, which I find myself relying on more and more each day. Graphics designer and illustrator Icoeye has come up with some brightly colored book jacket and matching bookmark designs as a way to “expand a book’s space.”

His concepts/illustrations are clean and straightforward, and cute in a clever way. Simply put, they’re literal and fun. I love them, especially the Sherlock Holme’s and pipe bookmark set.

On the subject of book jackets, it breaks into two directions for me. I like book jackets, but only passingly because the truth is, they don’t actually register for me. Other than a few notable ones (whoever does the covers for Andrew Clements books, and Roald Dahl’s), they’re not something I dwell on, or remember, unless they’re hideously ugly. By “ugly” I mean, the cover makes me depressed/uncomfortable/induces eye rolling.

(Incidentally, I do not like the Twilight series covers, and it is very unfortunate that many YA novels since have followed the trend of some ambiguous object drifting aimlessly/languishing on a black background.)

(Actually, there is one book illustrator I know of. John Howe did the covers for Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb, which I am only aware of because a good friend insisted on that I buy the series with the Howe covers.)

On the other hand, I like the idea of having some uniformity with books; it appeals to the part of me that regularly feels compelled to launch week-long cleaning blitzes. Plus, it would be a way of getting rid of the unattractive book covers.

See: the rest of the collection!
See Also: Faceout Books

New year, new desktop! This time, featuring one of the shelves from the Ideal Bookshelf series by Jane Mount. The painting I chose is her children’s literature bookshelf, which has titles like Winnie The Pooh, Pat the Bunny, Goodnight, Moon, and The Little Prince.

What Jane has to say about it:

For a while, I’ve been documenting people’s bookshelves as a form of portraiture; you can actually learn a lot about folks by their books’ covers. Now, I’m working on a series of “ideal” bookshelves: sets of favorites—mine or someone else’s—amalgamated in a picture, even if they don’t usually live on shelves anywhere near each other.

First off, Jane Mount’s Ideal Bookshelves are fantastic; I love each piece and want to hug the paintings. Second, the series really speaks to me on several levels, but mostly this one: As obsessive as I am about organization, my personal bookshelves would probably appear unusually disorganized, but there is a system.

(In California, we had a fantastic wall of bookshelves. As Librarian, I used to task my siblings with cleaning up the shelves about once a month. By publisher, and then alphabetical by author, and then by book order if it came in a series. There was no alphabetizing of titles.)

My own personal bookshelf (as opposed to the family one) holds all the books that are, well, near and dear to my heart, for various reasons. My bookshelves are designed as 12 cubbyholes, and the space breaks down like this:

1 shelf – reference books (Webster’s, AP Style Guide, Scholastic Rhyming Dictionary etc.)
1 shelf – mysteries/suspenses/thrillers
1 shelf – photo albums
1 shelf – academic (a couple test prep books, but mostly books assigned for a class that I really enjoyed – Heart of Darkness is not on this shelf, or anywhere near my room, it was banished to the second floor bookshelf over the fax machine)
2 shelves – books people give me
2 shelves – sentimental books (Great Expectations, Edward Eager’s Tales Of Magic series, The Puppy Who Wanted A Boy, The Bronze Horseman, Les Misérables, The Rainmaker.

And the remaining four cubbyholes keep documents and miscellaneous things (like my collection of restaurant business cards). On a semi-related note, I’m not a fan of bookends (even though these adorable pillow bookends by Djenya are awesome, I would never buy them for actual use) because they seem so precarious to me. Slotting a new book in between bookends is always this really treacherous feat where an entire line of books threatens to explode out of the orderly line. Okay, maybe I’ve just never used bookends properly, or I cram too many books between them. But I like my straightforward and plain cubbyholes.

Since I’ve been putting off tackling the closet, and I wasn’t in the mood to cook/bake, I decided to do something crafty.

It’s not done yet, but I’m calling this the Lunchtime Sweethearts Pouch. Put all your ziplocked cookies, pasta salad in tupperware, bento boxes, etc. in it.

The Christmas celebration finally arrived at our household. We opened gifts before dinner and made gingerbread bears after. I got books for Christmas, of course: Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott from my sister, Cindi; Harlen Coben’s newest Myron Bolitar book, Long Lost, from my brother Paul; Dad gave me Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Sadly, I did not reclaim the title of Best Gift-Giver this Christmas; that’s a tie between Cindi and Paul. Which means I have lost out two years running now :( But! I definitely won Best Single Gift, which was a 36-page Snapfish photo album for the parents. To say it was a massive hit is an understatement. That’s right, siblings! Still got it.

Anyway, Cindi brought back a gingerbread making kit. Yes, it comes from Crayola (of all companies! I had no idea Crayola made such things, but yay!), and it had two sets of directions (for adults and kids) on the back. I’ve never made any sort of gingerbread before, but I love it – the spice of cinnamon, the soft chewy goodness. Generally speaking, I love all Christmas food, especially peppermint/mint.

After we squeezed vanilla frosting out of a bag, we painted the gingerbears with the Crayola provided edible watercolors.

The eyes are all wonky because I stuck the sugar eyes onto the frosting not knowing or noticing that they came in different sizes. We made six gingerbears, and I did not pair up the eyes right for a single gingerbear.

Now, the box says we can make 8-12 bears. But they only provided us with 10 eyeballs. What is up with that, Crayola? Did you think the kids couldn’t do the math? Even I can do the math! Anyway, so instead of having a sightless bear, we decided to make cyclops bears. Then I realized the cyclops eyes in fact resemble bear noses and mouth. Okay, in a very vague way, but still.

We’re saving the gingerbears for when we watch Up! I am an open-minded person, and will, at the very least, admit to exceptions and such – but there are three issues on which there is no compromise. If you’ve know me, you know what they are. One of them is Pixar vs Everything Else, or more specifically, Pixar vs Dreamworks.

Around the time I was tired of working on applications, and my sister was sick of studying for her Princeton finals, we both started craving for these red bean pastries that Mom used to make when we lived in California. I remember juggling the hot golden pastry ball from fingertips to fingertips, blowing on them, holding them outside the front door and waving it around in the air, and still burning my tongue because I could never wait to eat them.

The recipe, transcribed into my Moleskine for recipes. (Being a recipe book, my handwriting is much neater than what it usually is.)

Adapted from this recipe, which made flat pastries, but the ones Mom always made were round golden balls, so that’s what we went with. Instead of sandwiching the red bean paste (which we made, instead of buying a pre-made pack as recommended by the recipe), we just folded up the edges into a ball.

We added a lot more flour than was recommended on the recipe; it was way too sticky for us to roll at first. So it was less “pinch” and “sprinkle” of more flour, more, “shake out the bag of flour on this wet lump,” plus putting it in the fridge for 5 minutes.

We used the rim of a glass to cut the dough.

My sister bought a bag of red beans and beat them into “paste” with an egg beater. While not as smooth as pre-made red bean paste, it didn’t taste bad at all. Other than texture, red bean paste was good.

Since we made round pastries instead of flat ones, we disregarded the original recipe’s 15 minutes on each side and instead they were in there for just under 45 minutes, which is about how long it took for the egg yolk to really turn the tops golden.

And they were good! Not as good as Mom’s – but she came back from the airport just as we were sliding the tray into the oven, which is why we didn’t work off her recipe. Apparently, Mom put cream cheese into her red bean pastry creations, which accounts for the difference.