Zuppa!

Last week's book group meeting was at our place. This was the first time I did not actually finish reading the assigned book, despite the fact that I had two months to do it. It somehow took us long to get it at the library and once I started reading, it dragged on and on and I was more than happy to hand Josephine B. over to Jfer. I did read the minimum 100 pages so I don't feel like a total dead beat.

This time we witched our book group hosting jobs so I was responsible for book selection while Jfer was cooking. Jfer planned to make an Italian mushroom soup that proved a great success before, but of course she had not written down the recipe, so we needed to get the soup book, Zuppa!, from the library again. As is my custom, I didn't start looking at books until Sunday before the meeting. After reading a bunch of reviews online, I came up with five books that had a middle eastern theme (for some reason, all but one non-fiction).

On Monday I tried to look up their availability at the Austin Public Library and discovered that the library was closed for MLK Day and that for some bizarre reason they shut down their Online Catalog (but not the website) on holidays. The catalog search would take a long time and then report that the book could not be found (as opposed to telling you that the DB was down). Maybe they feel that the DB server needs a day off or something.

So on Tuesday I looked up all the books in the catalog and visited four library branches to get three of my selected books and two cookbooks called Zuppa! (by different authors). I also had to stop by Border's to buy a couple of books that weren't in.

In the end, people voted for Persepolis closely followed by Reading Lolita in Tehran. These were the two books I actually bought, so I'm looking forward to reading them. Right now, I'm actually reading Jarhead which was also an option, but which I didn't really expect to be picked.

The soup turned out great, as did the Italian bread that Jfer and I baked the night before. And we had the special treat of Cynthia who was visiting at Elizabeth's and joined us at the meeting. I'm only sorry that she didn't get to come when we had a better book to discuss.