What Noisy Cats Are We

This has been a stay at home weekend mostly filled with relaxing, kitchen cleaning, and book reading.  (Okay, and a quick trip to the Blue Shirt Cafe over in Davis Square for lunch.)  I managed to finish off two books that I had been in the middle of.  The first one was the mass market paperback of Dan Brown’s ‘Angels And Demons‘.  I picked it up because I assumed everyone else would be talking about it due to the movie’s recent release.  I liked ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and ‘Digital Fortress’ somewhat, but they just seemed to ‘romance novel-y’ (for the lack of a better description) for me.  This one was much the same, with great information about the Vatican (hugely embellished, I assume), but still caused me to cringe often when he wrote as if the characters should have been named Fabio.  Cheesy to the max.  I think that the same story could be written in a way that appealed to me, but that was not the intent of the author.  I don’t think I’m alone in this opinion.  Nonetheless, it’s worth a read, and you can get through it in a day or two.

The second book I finished is one that I enjoyed much, much more.  Though Mark Kurlansky’s books are occasionally boring to the point of passing out after reading a page, I love them nonetheless.  I started out with picking up ‘Cod‘ in 2000 or 2001 when on a trip to Tahoe.  I loved it, and really enjoyed the style that the author used to cover the subject.  He followed up that book with ‘Salt‘, and I read that on vacation a couple of years ago and liked it just as much.  With ‘The Last Fish Tale‘, a book about Gloucester, MA and it’s fishing heritage, he delves into a place as much as he did with an object as he had in the other two books.  It’s written with many interviews of locals, and many different stories of Gloucester past.  A great read, and I can’t wait to pick up Kurlansky’s other books soon.

I can’t decide what to start with next.  I did snag both ‘Julia & Julia‘ and Julia Child’s ‘My Year of Cooking In France‘ just like EVERYONE else, and will probably start on both of those before catching the movie.