My go to book was 'The Happiest Baby On the Block'. I got it when our 1st was about 4-6wks old and I was having a kind of difficult time. I spent a snowy day reading it from cover to cover. Passed it on to DH and he recommends it to everyone he talks to even now that DS1 6yrs old. W/ the birth of each subsequent baby I re-read certain portions of it. I gave it to my sister after the birth of her 3rd baby and she was having some issues. She raved about it and said how much it helped her and has passed it on to others. I recommended it to a first time mom I work w/ who gave birth this summer and was at wits end w/ some things. She, too said how much it helped her, her husbamd and baby. Did I follow it 110%? No - I picked what worked best for us and I can honestly say that we have 3 kids who began sleeping straight through the night from 8PM - 6, 7 & 8AM w/ the oldest age that it happened for one being 3months. Naps were 2X/ day for 2-3hr stretches each up to 18mos old. Oldest gave up his 1 nap/ day at 5yrs old and 3yr old is still taking a 3hr nap each day. Youngest at 1 yr is still doing AM nap for a 2hr. stretch and a PM nap for 3hrs. 1 was solely formula fed, 1 was both formula and breastfed and 1 was solely breastfed. I got my best sleep tricks and techniques from Happiest Baby. The people I recommended the book to all tell me how much better the sleep is after reading and utilizing what worked for them from the book.

Chris Bohjalian, who's been mentioned already, also had a book out of compilations from a column he wrote when he moved to Vermont. It's called "Idyll Banter," and I really enjoyed it. Right now, I'm reading "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society," which is a few years old. I'm enjoying it. "The Distant Hours" -- (fiction) about a letter posted in 1941 that reaches its destination in 1992 -- is one of the titles on my to-be-read list. "A Vintage Affair" I read a few books back. Really liked it. A mystery to go along with your cruise theme? Mary Higgins Clark's "Santa Cruise."

Is this the right book?

Our job took 3 slabs so 2 of them were a bookmatched pair and the third one was the next one in sequence (the one that had its rough face against the rough face against one of the pair. Since its polished face was 4 cm away in the block of granite from the polished faces of the other two, its pattern was very similar to theirs but there was some drift. Our L counter has a sink leg that was longer than the long dimension of the slabs and longer than twice the short dimension. The other leg was longer than the short dimension of the slabs. That means there was no way to lay it out on the slabs so that all seams were bookmatched. (If both legs are no longer than the long dimension of a slab, they can lay it out with a diagonal bookmatched seam in the corner. Our kitchen fabricator doesn't like to do the diagonal seam, but in our case it didn't matter because of the long leg.) The only way to do our counter with only one seam was for the seam to be at the sink or dishwasher. Fabricators seem to be divided on whether a seam at the sink is good or bad, but over the dishwasher is more of an issue because there is no cabinet front for support. We wanted the seam at the sink because it let us have just one seam and our fabricator preferred that as well. Our granite is 2 cm with a plywood underlay so it is well supported at the sink by the plywood and cabinet. Our granite is very active, but the grain doesn't have a strong direction - in some areas, it slants across the slab and in others it was pretty swirly. We spent a couple of hours with the fabricator laying out the templates on the slabs. We were doing granite backsplashes and wanted a good match between the counter and backsplash and also had to fit long pieces for our window sill and counter outside the kitchen window. We chose a placement where the two sides of the seam were in a swirly part of the granite. I can see the seam when I look for it, but I don't notice it otherwise even though the color match at the back of the sink isn't perfect. Recently we had a surround made for a new fireplace from the remnants from our kitchen. The top and one side came from one piece and the other side came from another piece because those were the only remnants long and wide enough. I think the fabricator did a good job of positioning the pieces on the remnants so that the seams aren't jarring even though the long direction of the top piece was parallel to the long direction of one of the side pieces on the same remnant. BTW, the left and right side pieces came from the same part of the slab on the two slabs that were back to back - you can see that they are close to mirror images of each other around the white smile-shaped mark but the darker area a foot or two below the "smile" shows more differences.