• (9/10) Vanishing Point by Judith van Gieson.
  
  Well, this is a first since I started doing this books page -- I read a really great book and then returned it to the library without writing down the title or author and then I couldn't remember what it was! Thankfully, a librarian who saw my initial posting asking for help with the title and author was able to track it down for me. Long live librarians!

  Anyway, this book is a really terrific mystery, the main character of which is an archival librarian who specializes in the writings of a young male author from the 70's who vanished into thin air while on a camping trip. Now, years later, his journal has been found by a graduate student digging around in the camp site where he was last seen. When the librarian and a park ranger go back to the site where the journal was discovered, planning to meet the grad student there so he can show them where he found it and the other things that were there with it, instead of the duffel bag they were expecting to find, what's there instead is the grad student, dead. This kicks off a pretty engrossing mystery -- was the grad student's death a murder? Was it accidental? Was he the son of the missing author? Is the missing author actually dead? And, possibly the most important question, what the hell is going on? A lot of fun and the perfect book for the week or two before your wedding, when it's hard to concentrate on anything with massive amounts of depth (like the Iris Murdoch novel I was supposed to be reading for this week's book club meeting -- whoops). Recommended!
  [MYSTERY]

  (9/5) The Travel Detective by Peter Greenberg.
  

  Well-written and informative book about how to make the most of your trips out of town. Focuses heavily on airline travel, but also talks about hotels, rental cars, and water travel. This book would be really useful for a frequent business traveler, but those of us who only fly somewhere once every two years or so won't get much out of it. Still, it's entertaining -- full of funny anecdotes and even a quasi-interview with Jay Leno.
  [NON-FICTION]

  (9/3) Failure to Appear by J.A. Jance.
  

  Another great installment in the J.P. "Beau" Beaumont mystery series. In this one, Beau traces his runaway daughter, Kelly, to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. He and his "lady friend" Alex decide to go down there to catch a few plays and see if they can talk Kelly into coming back home. But, when they arrive, Beau discovers that his daughter is actually all grown up -- holding two jobs, about to get married, and seven months pregnant. Even this Beau manages to take pretty much in stride, but when Kelly's friend ends up accused of two awful murders (and Beau himself falls under suspicion), things get slightly more complicated. How they all manage to work things out turns out to be quite Shakespearean indeed. This is only my second Jance reading, but I am as impressed this time as I was the first time. You can definitely count on seeing more reviews of her stuff here in the future. Recommended!
  [MYSTERY]

  (9/1) The Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver.
  

  Absolutely wonderful cookbook by Jamie Oliver, AKA Food Network's "The Naked Chef." Not only is this book packed full of simple, flavorful recipes, but it's also got great photographs, as well as pages and pages of narration by Jamie himself. The narration is fun not only because it consists of great cooking tips and funny stories from Jamie's past, but because it was truly written by the Nekkid Chef himself and is, therefore, witty, clever, funny, and just all around a pleasure to read. I love this guy! It's always nice to get a cookbook that you can sit down and read like a novel, and this is one of those kinds of books. I checked my copy out from the library, but the real thing will be on my Christmas list this year for sure.
  [NON-FICTION]

  (9/1) Bad Girl Creek by Jo-Ann Mapson.
  

  Very entertaining "chick" novel about a group of women who come to live together on a flower farm when the owner of the farm dies and leaves it to her niece, Phoebe, a young woman with a spinal injury that keeps her bound to a wheelchair. Knowing she can't keep the farm going by herself, Phoebe feels lucky when she meets Ness -- a newly homeless black woman with a horse who comes asking if she can board her animal on the farm in return for work. Instead, Phoebe takes them both in, and soon the two add two more women to the house, each with a past full of complicated and painful relationships, each looking for a way to stabilize their crazy lives, and each with a nutty or wonderful pet animal of their own (including a parrot that only speaks in cuss words). As the women work the farm and live together, they grow to love and need each other as sisters do. In the process, each one grows strong enough to let go of something from their past that was keeping them down.

  This is a funny, tender, and entertaining novel about the amazing love women can have for each other, and how profoundly that kind of love can change our lives. Only, really, it doesn't seem quite that cheesy, somehow, when you're actually reading it. Ahem. Ha ha. Recommended!
  [FICTION]

Book Archive | The Boyfriend