The Book Thief by Zusak
This is a fascinating piece of young adult World War II fiction. Although written for a young audience, as an adult I found the story just as riveting. I thoroughly enjoyed Zusak’s use of literary devices as he describes the life of a young German girl in Nazi Germany as she learns to read and write, adjusts to a new family and neighborhood, and grows into an adult – all under the reign of Hitler. The Book Thief addresses the topic of humanity, love, and death and dying in a whole new way with Death as a narrator and a Jew in Nazi Germany hiding in the basement. I would definitely utilize as a supplement to a 12 year old’s World War II studies and I think it is also a great book for Books-on-Books collectors like myself!
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More Chickeny Goodness from Andi’s Kitchen
Lemon-Honey Chicken:
Layer into small casserole pan – lemon juice (from lemon), butter, sage, dill, chicken wrapped in onion slices, more lemon juice, honey, more butter.
Bake slowly until cooked and serve with rice and corn.
Italian Dressing Chicken:
In a small casserole pan – Pour Creamy Italian Dressing over chicken until the chicken is good and buried. Slice some onion and one small tomatoe over it. (Stir that into the dressing good so the onion slices don’t blacken in the oven, we want them to stay good and juicy as they bake!) Bake until cooked! Serve with buttered spaghetti noodles and garlic toast. I poured the excess juice from the pan over my pasta as well once it was in my bowl and sprinkled some parmesean cheese on top.
Ramses Volume 3: The Battle of Kadesh
A review on the third volume of the bestselling series by Christian Jacq:
The character development is poor and I’m definitely disappointed with the level of historical accuracy and shallowness of all the well-known figures. To me, it might be better to write a piece on Ramses from an unknown person’s point of view – character development can go as deep as the imagination, and the writing wouldn’t seem so lacking because what the character sees of Ramses would be based in what we find in museums and history books. Instead, Jacq uses redundant phrases and paragraphs to describe the relationships between characters – much like Nicholas Sparks whom I despise. But, it is an entertaining vacation read.
Family Recipes
I am due to have a kid in October. No, I don’t know the gender yet. Yes, I am going to find out – we just couldn’t tell at the last ultra sound.
With a new person coming into the house, my husband and I are committed to cooking more meals at home. I already have some staple recipes of my own, and I have some my Grandmother and Mother-in-law have promised me, but I want to have a vast collection. I could get cookbooks (which I have plenty of) and I could seek some out with google searches, but I wanted to at least feign some personal attachment to our home cooked meals.
So please, post your most famous, your most beloved, or just plain easiest recipes here – from dinner menues to baked goods. I want my kid to grow up with good eatin’!
What I have so far is listed below. This is just a list of meal ideas that are staples around our house or other family members, if something sounds good and you want a recipe let me know. I want to have at least 30 good recipes, preferably more, so that each thing would only be eaten once a month…
1) Venetian Pasta Rolls
2) My Crab and Spinach Pasta Rolls
3) Spaghetti (who doesn’t have an awesome spaghetti recipe?)
4) Chicken Alfredo (I make my Alfredo sauce from scratch, so easy)
5) Chicken Parmesean
6) My Mother-in-law’s Lasagna recipe
7) I have a badass Cayenne Chicken recipe if anyone wants it
8) Lemon Baked Pork with Carmelized Onions (courtesy of Rachel Ray)
9) Does anyone have a homemade pizza recipe? How do I make dough from scratch?
10) Grandmom Betty Rogers’ Stuffed Bell Pepper Recipe
11) Grandmom Betty Rogers’ Stuffed Cabbage Recipe
12) Chicken and Green Bean Casserole
13) Mother-in-Law’s Chicken and Dumpling Recipe
14) Grilled Cheese Sandwiches with tomatoe soup
15) I have an awesome Pork Orange Marmalade Recipe courtesy of Wally World
16) Peach Glaze Pork (great for holidays served with lots of sliced peaches on the side – I like fruity meat)
17) Mother-in-law’s Sloppy Joe recipe
18) Husband’s steak with my mashed potatoe/cheese casserole
19) Chili Cheese Dogs
20) Taco Salad/ Frito Pie
21) Chicken on Rice with Brocoli Cheese on the side (does anyone have a good brocoli cheese soup recipe? preferably one with jalepenos?)
22) Sherry’s Awesome Baked Chicken with French cut green beans
23) Mac and Cheese (add hot dog chunks)
24) Cheese Enchiladas
25) Chicken Enchiladas with green peppers
26) Grandmom’s meat loaf
27) Larry’s Corn Chowder
Ramses Volume 2: The Eternal Temple
The further into Ramses story Jacq gets the farther away he gets from history and truth. I like my historical fiction to be based in a little more fact and so much of the story and so many of the characters are off base. Its all rather disappointing.
Ramses: The Son of Light by Christian Jacq
This is a great kick start to the life of Ramses the Great. We are introduced to his throne hungry brother Shaanar, his father Seti, mother Tuya, obnoxious sister Dolora, and his two wives Iset the Fair and Nefartari. Moses is also introduced, which is slightly irksome because the book is written off the old school of thought that Moses was during the time of Ramses the Great due to the mention of the city of Ramses in the scriptures. I believe its highly likely that the name of the city mentioned in the bible was updated by an eager scribe and that the proper date of Moses’ lifespan would place him during the 15th century/18th dynasty about 200 years before Ramses. Generally, I enjoyed the book although I feel much is lost in the translation from the French (Jacq’s writing seems too simplistic and listy), but I am still excited about reading the four remaining books in the series to see how it all plays out from Jacq’s perspective.
A fabulous article on Moses and his placement in history: http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2009/02/27/Moses-and-Hatshepsut.aspx
Anna Karenina
I’m reading Anna Karenina right now, its clever and interesting. There’s a much different feel and mood than Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (which I just finished recently).
I don’t have a formal review as of yet, I am just now starting Part II, but I did find this fantastic article and wanted to point it out:
http://chaosandoldnight.wordpress.com/2007/02/22/tolstoy-happiness-and-objective-meaning/
“What’s Up?” The Twitter Version
My husband wanted a parody of “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blonds, so I gave it to him.
Twenty – five years and my life is still
Trying to get up that great big hill of tweets
For a good status report
And I realized quickly when I knew I should
That the world was made up of this brotherhood of tweets
For whatever that means
And so I cry sometimes
When I’m chilling online
Just to get it all out
What’s in my head
And I am feeling a little peculiar
And so I wake in the morning
And I get online
And I take a deep breath and I post my life
And I scream at the top of my lungs
What’s going on?
And I say, hey hey hey hey
I said hey, what’s going on?
Ooh, ooh ooh
And I try, oh my god do I try
I try all the time, in this institution
And I pray, oh my god do I pray
I pray every single day
For a revolution
And so I cry sometimes
When I’m sitting online
Just to get it all out
What’s in my head
And I am feeling a little peculiar
And so I wake in the morning
And I sign on quick
And I take a deep breath and get
ready to read posts and I type real fast
What’s going on?
And I say, hey hey hey hey
I said hey, what’s going on?
Twenty – five years and my life is still
Trying to get up that great big deal called the net
for more wasted time
The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Ruiz revisits the world of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books first introduced in Shadow of the Wind and presents us with a strangely philosophical mystery of life, death, love, and literature. Uniquely captivating from start to finish, the story unravels in such a way that in the end, like the narrator, I was still wondering who exactly had died and who had survived. I highly recommend The Angel’s Game (and The Shadow of the Wind) to any book lover.
Anakalian Whims 
Conspicuous Consumption by Thorstein Veblen – Lost in “Education”
June 27, 2010 at 5:52 pm (In So Many Words, Reviews, The Whim) (books, capitalism, conspicuous consumption, economics, education, essays, great ideas, historical document, marxism, reviews, social commentary, sociologist, source documents, veblen)
Why did we never read this for school? The relevancy is uncanny. The way the times haven’t changed is disturbing. I am definitely adding this to my required reading list for when I home school my child.
This book in reality is a 100 page essay or so, not long in the slightest and should take the reader a mere hour or two to digest and properly process (depending on the reader). What I plan to have my child address when I require this to be read are the following questions (and I’d like to know what you guys think too, if you’ve read this):
How do Veblen’s ideas tie into Darwin’s evolutionary theories?
How do they interact with Marxism and Capitalism?
How are his ideas relevant today?
How are the leisure class and ownership related, according to Veblen? What are the roots of conventional ownership and of marriage? Consider contemporary phrases like “trophy wife.” (How does this affect gender roles?)
Veblen sees “emulation” as a key feature of social life in “predatory societies.” How do the patterns of emulation change as predatory societies change?
What fundamental criticism does Veblen make of standard economics?
I actually have quite a few more that I have borrowed from other sites, essay questions and discussions to be had are all noted in a journal I am keeping of projects and assignments to remember. My point in posting the blog today, however, is this:
How did something so famous, so moving and so relevant – something Penguin even published in their Great Ideas series – get neglected in my own education? Not just high school with basic history, social studies, and economics, but also in college when half my life was filled with economic theory and consumer behavior as I earned a Marketing degree? I am realizing more and more the importance of not just reading about movements and theories, not just getting summaries from textbooks, but reading the original documents! How can your education be complete without going back to what started the ideas in the first place? How can you presume to know anything about anything if all your information comes from a summary in a textbook and you’ve never even heard of the essay that initiated the need for that summary?
Buy Here: http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=anakawhims-20&o=1&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=0143037595
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