BTT: Conditioning

Conditioning (from Booking Through Thursday)

Are you a spine breaker? Or a dog-earer? Do you expect to keep your books in pristine condition even after you have read them? Does watching other readers bend the cover all the way round make you flinch or squeal in pain?

I prefer my books to stay in pristine a condition as possible.  I have learned this the hard way.  I keep contemplating replacing my copies of the Harry Potter books because I made the horrible mistake of highlighting parts I thought foreshadowed events to come and wrote notes in the margins.  It HORRIFIES me to see it now.    I regret it so much.

Any curling of the paperback covers during reading will eventually be pressed out by being shelved generally tightly in my home library.

I am definitely not a dog-earer.  On the rare chance that I do not have a bookmark with me, I will use anything (a scrap of paper, kleenex, paper towel, any flat object) to use as a bookmark.  In fact, I am so not a dog-earer that I will un-dog-ear any dog-ears I find in books I'm reading.

Granted, this is how I feel about my books and this is my opinion.  But I still cringe when I see the way other people treat books.  Working in a library makes this a common occurrence when you see people return books ruined by food, drink, or other unacceptable substance and think that the book is perfectly fine for other people to read.  *shudder*

Read on,

Paula

Cookbook expectations

I borrowed "Gordon Ramsay's World Kitchen" by Gordon Ramsay and "Jamie Oliver's Food Escapes" by Jamie Oliver recently.  I have only ever seen a few episodes of each of their television shows and have formed an opinion of the men based on those shows.  So when I picked up these books, I was expecting Ramsay's to be pretentious and convoluted and Oliver's to use common ingredients.  Wow, was I wrong!  In fact, it was the opposite.

Jamie Oliver's book is more of a travelogue with food.  It focuses on the stories and photos of his trips.  The recipes stay true to the country's food culture and it was nice to read but I found no recipes I was interested in trying.  The recipes called for ingredients that I couldn't find because I live in a small town, not in London or the appropriate country.

Gordon Ramsay's book was more to my tastes since I found a few recipes I would like to try.  There was a French recipe for Brandade with Garlic Toast that sounded complex but is really just cooked fish shredded and mixed into mashed potatoes.  Perhaps it is the nature of cookbooks to seem more complex than it really is just because of the step-by-step process that is required.

I guess you could say that I have learned not to judge a cookbook based on the chef's personality.

Read on,
Paula