Sunday Salon: Sidelined by illness

I didn't get as much reading done as I would have liked this week. Between Christmas and a bout of vertigo, I only managed to finish one book. Vertigo makes it difficult for me to focus my eyes on a book for very long, so I spent most of yesterday in bed listening to the TV and reading in short spurts.

READ THIS WEEK: I read Square Meals : America's Favorite Comfort Cookbook, a retro cookbook by Jane and Michael Stern. If you listen to A Splendid Table on NPR, then you have heard them reviewing restaurants. They tend to go for homey, old-fashioned diners and cafes, and this book is in the same style. The biggest thrill for me was finding instructions for making an egg cream, which my mom always said was a grown-up drink.

ABANDONED: I flipped through American Gourmet this week but didn't read it thoroughly. I could see from the recipes that it was too fancy for my purposes.

CURRENTLY READING: I am a little over halfway through Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality and I am still not sure whether I am going to finish it. One commenter on Goodreads said that this book reads more like a blog, and I agree with that. The author, Donald Miller, talks about his journey in the Christian faith without giving any background about who he is. It is just like visiting a blog without that blogger profile on the side, except that with a blog you can go back a few entries and get some context for the current entry. You can't really do that for a book. I could look this guy up on the internet, but what about a reader who picked this book up and doesn't have internet access?

Another similarity this book has to a blog is that the author rambles. Perhaps I shouldn't be bothered by that because the title does say "nonreligious thoughts". That should have given me a clue that the author would just be throwing ideas out there. I connect with some of Miller's thoughts because I have felt some of the same things, but he presents more questions than answers. I haven't read any philosophy books, so maybe they are all like that.

NEXT UP: Because I have so many library books by my bed at the moment, I'm letting due dates decide what I read next. That means the next two books on deck are The Marriage Benefit: The Surprising Rewards of Staying Together and Julie and Julia. I also followed one of my readers' suggestions from last week and checked out Poem a Day for a little poetry infusion. Here's hoping I can keep the vertigo at bay long enough to read this stuff!