janen--thanks for the suggestions. I'm not familiar with those authors but will check them out. mendocino_rose--Diary of a Rose Lover sounds interesting. Another one to add to my reading list. I think I caught an episode of Rosemary and Thyme once--really enjoyed it, but didn't realize it was a series. Maybe we can find out if it is being re-run on one of the channels. greenhaven--I really need to become better acquainted with Barbara Kingsolver's writings. So many people I know rave about her. Yes, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was the one my friend recommended. After listening to her enthusiasm, I almost wished I had a couple free spots in my garden where I could grow some cucumbers and tomatoes--but somehow my roses get all those spots. Food for the soul, I say. LOL Anyone else have a favorite? Kate

I want to thank you all SO MUCH for the book suggestions! I know I'm a broken record, but now that my younger son (he's two years-old) has gained more independence I've been able to read more (as I'm able to get chores done while he's awake [and he "helps" me] rather than waiting until he's asleep to tackle everything), and I am not kidding, I am in heaven. Heaven! I do most of book searching by reading Sunday book sections as well as Entertainment Weekly / Newsweek book reviews and Amazon recommendations (you know, people who've purchased this book have also purchased X, Y and Z). I haven't been able to happily browse in the library since my children became mobile (my eldest is four) -- they love books and reading (or being read to) as well, but I'm uncomfortable leaving them alone in the children's section while I peruse the adult books. I first read Bill Bryson when we were living in Australia: I read his In a Sunburned Country and fell in love with his writing! In junior high school I read Fannie Flagg's Coming Attractions and think she did a great job evoking the time and place and style. Plus she made me laugh aloud, repeatedly. I participate in PaperBack Swap, a place where you can post your books to send to other members (it's a free club) and you can request books, too. Like, I posted a handful of books I no longer needed to own (paper- and hard- back) and various members requested them. I sent the books to them. I requested books in which I was interested (doesn't matter whose they are -- you receive credits for posting books, and you use those credits to request books from other members). One I recently read and which made me howl was Trisha Ashley's Every Woman for Herself -- definitely old British manor house descriptions galore in that one! Oh, and I Capture the Castle (lovely, lovely story) by Dodie Smith in which a family castle plays a significant role. My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell takes place in Greece and besides being a delightful read also colorfully describes the family's home there. There was a horrible Katie Fforde I recently read (cannot recall the title at present ...) but boy did she do a terrific job describing the beautiful house, its wallpaper / furnishings, the kitchen and its set-up and the garden. Too bad the story itself was crap. I've never read or really read about Death by Inferior Design but I do love the title! I remember a few years ago reading a blurb about a nonfiction memoir by an American woman who married a Scots and how she rehabbed his family castle and had marital difficulties ... but I was never able to remember either the author or the title. I think I read about it in either House & Garden or Town & Country; searching online has yielded nothing (and I have tried). Maybe when my two year-old starts nursery school next year I can go to the library and comb through old issues of both magazines and see if I can come up with it. It sounded right up my alley!

My M-i-L watches the TV evangelists-one that she watches enjoyed the movie, becuase "it is all fiction-not one true word in the book or movie-it's a good story, that's all." Another one was highly offended by both the book and the movie. What I find interesting is that in the first book written about the main character, Angels and Demons, the Catholic Church is the innocent victim-in the DaVinci Code she is the perpretator of all nefarious deeds...Brown clearly just wanted to write thrillers, not necessarily attack the church. But we hear little mention of the first book. Mind you, it was as much a strain to the logic as the DVC...how he escapes so many death-assuring situations without super powers boggles the mind.

Usually I read five or six nonfiction books for every one fiction, but here lately I've gone through a spurt of novel reading. Fiction takes so much more effort for me that now I'm ready to kick back and pamper myself for a while with the following: The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville, the World's Greatest Traveller by Giles Milton - Sir John is suspected of being one of the biggest travelogue-writing frauds of all time; but was he really? The author attempts to find out by going himself to the places Mandeville claimed to have journeyed through. I just read a bit about Milton going to visit the Patriarchate of the Greek Orthodox Church in Istanbul (Constantinople in Mandeville's time) but he found himself in a seedy part of town and needed directions. Passing an Orthodox Church he stepped inside its door to find a woman in the vestibule. He asked her and after she told him which way to go, Milton asked her if she was a Romioi (a direct descendant of the Roman founders of Constantinople): "No," she said. "I'm Italian. From Bologna." She didn't look Italian, and I asked when she had moved to Istanbul. She paused for a moment, then said: "I think we moved here four centuries ago." If Milton keeps up this sort of thing, I'm going to love this book! The Degaev Affair by Richard Pipes (History, Biography) I'm not well-informed about Russian history, so this bio of an obscure-to-me political terrorist who witnessed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and then directly helped plot the assassination of the chief of Russia's security organization ordinarily would not have attracted me. But I read the back cover anyway, for some reason, and was instantly intrigued because this terrorist, Sergei Degaev, eventually wound up at -- of all places! -- the University of South Dakota as an avuncular mathematics professor known as Alexander Pell. "Jolly little Pell" and his pleasant wife were evidently great favorites of his students, the faculty, and the townspeople. This guy was a terrorist? Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood by Steven Mintz The romanticized notions and nostalgia for the halycon days of childhood can be dispensed with quite quickly when we realize that the whole idea of childhood as we think of it only goes back to around the first part of the twentieth century. Even Samuel Clemens who did more than any other American writer of his day to capture the essence of nineteenth-century boyhood was under no illusions that childhood, for the most part, was about one-tenth bliss and nine-tenths pure hell. This overview of the history of American childhood from the 17th century to the beginning of the 21st century looks to be fascinating -- I sure hope so.