Book Sale Purchase as a Snapshot of My Life, Part 2

 

I wrote this other blog post three (three!) years ago after attending the annual library book sale in my other town. In it, I talk about how my pile of books had changed in the 8 years between the first time I attended the sale and the time I attended the sale as the mother of a 1.5 year old.

Well, now I have a 4.5 year old, and the pile has changed yet again. Three of those books up there are for me to read. (There are only three, mostly because my tastes have become... niche? You can check out my Amazon book wish list to see the kind of stuff I'm looking for and why those might not just materialize at a book sale.) The rest are for the young lady of the house. I was going for some solid reference type books that she can browse through over and over. And Mo Willems, of course. Always Mo Willems. She can read the Elephant and Piggie books by herself, so... yeah. The days are long, but the years are short, as they say.

A list of this year's books (because these are some great finds! look them up for your own kiddos!):

If You Take a Mouse to School

The Magic School Bus Kicks Up a Storm

Hold On To Your Kids

Curly Girl

Eat This Book

What I Believe

I Am Invited to a Party!

There is a Bird on Your Head!

The Pop-Up House of Inventions

If You Give a Pig a Pancake

First Human Body Encyclopedia (shout out to Cousin Liesl for mentioning this series on Facebook)

Piece = Part = Portion

The Dangerous Book for Boys

Edwina: the Dinosaur Who Didn't Know She Was Extinct

Gods, Goddesses, and Monsters

Atlas of Africa

The question is, have I read the books I bought three years ago? :-) 

Of the 15 books in the pile in the first post, I read (or tried to read) eight nine, four three are still in my to-read pile, and I've gotten rid of three of them. I think. Two of them became two of my favorites: The Teenager Liberation Handbook and Flipped. I list book reviews as public notes on my Facebook page, so please check them out. I love to hear what other people think about books!

Resolutions, Part 2

I just wanted to share here a follow-up to last year's post about New Year's resolutions.  Last year I said that, although I'm not much of one for New Year's resolutions, I would be trying for the third time to read through the Bible in one year.

Well, I did it!  I'm super proud of myself.  How many of us know the guilt of going however many years as a Christian without having read the whole Bible?  I think I started having that guilt when I was about 12.  (Although to be fair, I was attending an Evangelical Christian school at that time...)  I'm glad to have that behind me, and I look forward to many re-readings in the future.  Although not in 2012.  I need a breather.  I think instead I'll try to get through the Apocrypha and a book about how the Protestant canon came to be.

[I looked a little like this sometimes...]

I guess I wanted to mention two things here.  One is the manner in which I finally accomplished my goal.  Since my daily Bible reading was coming to my Google Reader via an RSS feed, I decided that my rule would be that I couldn't read any posts in my Reader before I read the Bible reading for the day.  This gave me some leeway (I could go several days without doing my reading if I needed/wanted to), but also some urgency to get the readings done eventually (I didn't want to get too far behind on my favorite blogs!).  It was the perfect mixture and the perfect motivator.  I think the furthest behind I ever got was 5 days and 300+ blog posts, but I eventually caught back up.  So, I'm not saying that method will necessarily work for everyone -- it's definitely one suited to my particular personality and interests.  But I am saying that you should keep trying to reach your goals using different methods and incentives until you eventually get there.  Never stop starting!

I guess I also wanted to share a bit about what reading the whole Bible has meant to me and some of my thoughts about it.  I'm certainly not going to write a book review on the whole thing or anything!  And a year is a long time to hold anything in one's head, but I had some general impressions as I read:
1.) I was often surprised to read what it actually said, without all the commentary and preconceptions and opinions swirling around the text.  A lot of the time I found it to be a lot more straightforward than people act like it is.
2.) ....and other times I had to admit that I had no idea what was going on.  None.  Now, I'm a mystic (as defined by my husband on his blog -- check the link), so I'm more okay with that than some others would be.  But people have opinions and commentary and preconceptions about those parts too, which also surprises me, since the text is so seemingly inscrutable.
3.) ...so as a result, yeah, I think I'm more liberal than I was at the beginning of the year. That's a weird sentence to type.  But honestly, I think that's partly due to the fact that I've also been reading Rachel Held Evans's blog all year, and...
4.) ...the most specific observation I had about the Bible was... ::drumroll:: .... Yahweh was upset at Israel because they were cruel and unfair to orphans, widows, immigrants, and poor people.  That seems to be His most common indictment against them.  Second would probably be engaging in religious sex rituals.  But, yeah.  Dang.  That observation really got to me.  How often do I think of treating poor people with kindness and justice as even in the top 10 of things I should work on in my spiritual life?

So anyway, there ya go.  Bible read.  Goal achieved.  Marathon finished.  I win!

This Week in Thrifting Scores (and a question about ethnic slurs...)

I go to thrift stores on Thursdays. Not every Thursday. Probably 2 out of 3 Thursdays on average. I don't always buy something, but I usually do. (This might be part of the reason that the hypothetical prospect of living in a basement-less, garage-less 2-bedroom apartment is freaking me out a little...)

This week we checked out the new Goodwill store in Norman. It's at E 12th and Alameda, across from the Mazzio's, in there. I just spotted it on Monday, so I have no idea how long it's been there, or if they closed the other one in town, although I know they closed the one in Moore.

It's nice! It's pretty big, lots of space, and things are pretty well organized. The books are organized by genre, and the fiction is organized alphabetically by author's last name! This is practically unheard of in thrift-store-dom.

I picked up all of the following for a little over $10.

[Adorable footie pajamas. Not flame-retardant! Woohoo!]

[A Scrabble game (missing 7 tiles) and a Clue game (missing all the little metal pieces! Gypped!!). But the Clue game has this cool 1979 board.]

[A tie for Norman -- oddly cool.]

[A tie for crafting -- Fox hunt!!]

[Three books -- one of which I had been looking for, and two which I didn't know I had been looking for. I'll leave you to sort out which is which.]


This now means that my "to read" pile looks like this:
[Ridunkulous. "Buried Alive", indeed!]

Side question: is the use of the verb "to gyp" (as in to rip someone off, to give someone less than what they expected or paid for) offensive? I know it originally referred to Gypsies, but I don't think of it that way. Does it strike you as an ethnic slur?

Book Sale Purchases as a Snapshot of My Life

Thursday evening I went to the Norman Public Library's book sale. It was the pre-pre-sale, as I had paid my dues in the form of 4 volunteer hours in order to get in on Thursday.

In that stack are the books I bought (a few of them are from the JBF sale last week). I also bought 4 toddler books and a giant collection of A.A. Milne.

I was surprised by the stack. I thought of how 8 years ago as a college freshman, I had attended the same book sale and had bought just as many books, but the subject matter was so different! Back then it was linguistics, foreign languages, and travelogues and geography books about Vancouver. Now, apparently, it's crunchy parenting, unconventional schooling, and liberal hipster Christianity. My, how times have changed.

Sandra's Congri

On Sunday, I finished reading a book called Hungry Planet: What the World Eats by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio. I loved it. As soon as I read about it (and saw some of the photos from it), I wanted a copy. Almost immediately I found one at a children's consignment sale for $6.00! (Not really sure what it was doing there, but I'll take it!)

It is a large coffee-table-type book of photos of 30 families around the world with one week's worth of food. (Here are some of the photos.) It also has other photos of the families, some of the authors' observations and remembrances, statistics on each country featured, and a detailed breakdown of the food and how much it costs. The photos are clear and gorgeous. It's amazing how much variety there is in the types of foods people eat, what kind of houses they live in, and what they can afford. The book features families ranging from a single mother of 5 living in a refugee camp in Chad (who spends $1.23USD per week on food), to a family of 4 in Germany (who spend $500USD).

Each chapter also features a family recipe from each family. This really caught my fancy. Many of the recipes contain ingredients I wouldn't be able to obtain, or seafood/fish, or both, so I won't make every recipe in the book, but I intend to make the ones I can, or the ones I think I might enjoy. I started with the recipe from Cuba:


Sandra's Congri (rice and beans)

1/2 lb red beans
2 aji (yellow hot peppers)
5 cups water
1/4 t cumin, ground
1/4 t oregano, ground
1/2 lb pork, cut into 1" pieces
2-4 T lard
1/2 lb onion, diced
3 cloves garlic
4 T salt (or to taste)
1 lb rice
2 oz bacon


Rinse and soak beans with 1 hot pepper for a few hours or overnight.

I bought one jalapeno, instead of two aji. I soaked the beans, starting in the morning, with half of the jalapeno.

Cook beans over medium-low heat in soaking water until soft. Drain beans, saving 3 cups of the liquid.

I started cooking the beans before sitting down for Lucy's nap, so they got a little mushy. But hey, when the baby sleeps, you let her sleep, potentially mushy beans be damned!

Lightly toast cumin and oregano in a pan, stirring constantly, until fragrant.


I actually did this. It seemed rather pointless to me, but by gosh, I did it.

Starting with 2 T lard, saute pork over medium heat until it releases liquid. Add onion, garlic, and remaining pepper and saute until onion is translucent; if pan gets dry, add 1-2 T more lard.


I don't have a source for good lard, but I did have some chicken fat I saved from the last time we made cracklings. Worked like a charm. I left out the other jalapeno after tasting the beans. We're just not used to the spiciness!


Add beans, saved cooking liquid, oregano, cumin, and salt; bring mixture to a boil.

I actually added the beans and the liquid to the rice in the next step -- there wasn't enough room in my skillet. Oh, and I forgot the salt, which explains why the finished product needed salt. Ha.

Meanwhile, wash rice and fry uncooked over medium heat with 1 oz bacon.


I should have chopped the bacon, but I was too lazy. Frying uncooked rice with two whole strips of bacon is awkward. I had to add chicken fat.

When bean mixture begins to boil, add rice and bacon. Cover and cook over medium heat until rice is soft.


I was going to leave the beans out of this so they wouldn't get even mushier, but I decided to throw them in anyway. It worked out fine.

Saute remaining bacon; coarsely chop and use for garnish.

I skipped this, again, out of laziness.

[And instead, took a break to eat a slice of my fresh-baked bread machine bread with copious amounts of butter.]

Variation: prepare as above, substituting black beans and fried crumbled pork rinds for red beans and bacon.

There you have it! Quite an adventure, using techniques I'd never heard of before, and preparing a recipe with no cooking times. That was scary. The rice took a surprisingly short amount of time to soften. Yay!


The final verdict?

PS - The same authors have another, older book called Material World, in which they photograph 30 families from around the world outside their homes with all their belongings. Sweet! (I suppose there's something you should know about me -- I'm endlessly curious and nosy. I take great pleasure in seeing what other people have in their grocery carts at the store, and in being able to see the insides of people's houses at night as I ride by them in a car. Hopefully my tendencies will not escalate. But if I were you, I'd close my blinds.)

PPS - Through reading this book, I was reminded that I would like to see India before I die, and discovered for the first time that I would like to see Cuba before I die. Hm. Who knew?

PPPS - I gave some to Lucy because I want her to try and be used to all kinds of flavors. I should have remembered that she often rubs her eyes. She did it after eating some of this, and oh my -- that poor baby! The wailing! This stuff was seriously spicy hot, even with half a jalapeno instead of two aji, and it did her eyes no favors.