SFist Reads
We finally paid off all our late fees accrued during an unfortunate incident invloving a badly overdue book under the passenger seat of our Civic. Now we're free to make online reserves again! Of course, our independent bookstore purchases have been picking up the slack -- but we're far more likely to reserve books we're not so sure about (like, say Everyone Worth Knowing) than to buy them. We're just frugal like that.
SFist Jer read the March 2006 issue of Cooking Light. He digs most cooking magazines, but C.L. seems to consistently have a lot of bang for the buck, and the recipes are pretty good. He made the Spiced Chicken and Greens With Pomegranate Dressing and took a picture of it (at left).
Antisocial fatties and weaklings will be delighted to hear that The Body Noble is a passable alternative to receiving physical fitness instruction from an actual person. The book assumes that the reader hasn't been in a gym since high school, and offers a crash course in weight-loss and muscle-building without boring us with the specifics. it's all very need-to-know -- you want big muscley arms? Here's the muscles you need to work, here's the stretches, here's the exercise, here's how to make sure your form is correct, and here's a diet and skin-care regime. The skin care we could've done without, but that's thankfully brief; the meat of the book are its systematic instructions for biohacking yourself into a sexy bathing suit. Will we be the ones kicking sand in shrimps' faces this summer, rather than the other way around? We'll let you know when we win our first Mr. Universe competition.
SFist Rita makes a rare foray into fiction and recently finished two books inspired by 19th century English literature and movies featuring Emma Thompson: Zadie Smith's academic comedy On Beauty (inspired by Howard's End and The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. On Beauty was better, but the ending was kind of contrived. SFist Rita hasn't read Howard's End and doesn't remember the movie, though, so maybe the ending in Howard's End was contrived too. The Jane Austen Book Club was pretty funny but SFist Rita found the characters kind of flat and didn't really get the point.