What I bought myself for my birthday: (1) Jeffrey A. Lockwood, Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect That Shaped the American Frontier (New York: Basic Books), 2004; (2) Dava Sobel and William J.H. Andrews, The Illustrated Longitude (New York: Walker Publishing), 1998; (3) Kevin Garvin and John Harrison, The Neiman Marcus Cookbook (New York: Clarkson Potter), 2003.
I’ve eaten a lot of lunches at Zodiac Tearooms over the years. I would look longingly at the cookbook while there, but never could bring myself to buy it. The Atlanta N-M tearoom closed for renovations this month; now I’ll be able to fix my own dainty lunch of orange souffle, cheese biscuits, fresh fruit, chicken salad, etc. Best served at midnight, of course, in true Mary Power style. And popovers aren’t all that far removed from vanity cakes, you know.
Two out of three books are “Little House” related. There are almost a dozen juvenile Laura Ingalls Wilder biographies on my amazon.com wishlist, but I’m tired of collecting books that are the same old, same old. I usually try to pick up one or two at a homesite museum while visiting. The next book two books on my wishlist are Simon Winchester’s The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology and John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History.
