The Thin Red Line

I have to say right off, going in, that I really wanted to like Clifford A Wright’s Bake Until Bubbly– The Ultimate Casserole Cookbook.   But Wright in several ways made that very hard for me to do.    The first time in the early pages he decried using canned cream of whatever soups in favor of freshly prepared bechmael sauces.  All of what I would call the easy steps in casserole-preparation have been replaced with extremely labor-intensive recipes which seem as though designed to show just how much hard work is normally replaced by the use of canned soup in casseroles that by the end of the 450 page plus new 2008 release I was mainly seized by an imperative urge to hurl the bloody book across the room.   This one is Not Recommended.

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First, my thanks to Techfun for suggesting this one to me.   It’s taken me an awful long time to read it but I have and I’m glad I did.   In Friday’s post I pointed out that art can be much more effective than traditional in conveying complex realities.   I believe that A Thousand Splendid Suns is an excellent example of a novel that conveys the complex and messy truths of the real life story through novels that, imho, do a better job than history books sometimes in educating a mind about a particular place and peoples.    I previously posted about Gary Geddes’  Kingdom Of Ten Thousand Things which touches briefly on the plight of present day Afghanistan before rushing off to pursue a very different main theme.

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