Books again

Not book-related, but I was surprised to hear that Roy Scheider died yesterday. I'm not the biggest fan of the Jaws movies, but I liked his work in SeaQuest DSV. At least the first season, anyway - it got dumbed down awfully fast, but the first season or so was good. The prehistoric crocodile and the man-eating plants didn't show up until the second season.


This being Tuesday, it's time for another book post.

First of all, I spent $8.50 at the library sale today and came home with Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon trilogy in paperback (Arthur, Merlin, and Taliesin), a book on water gardening, and four books about the Moon for El Burrito. The boy is a big moon fancier. The "Moon in my Room" that he got for Christmas is a hit, by the way. (He also got to have lunch with Dada while I ran to the library, since it's too cold here to drag him out for a short trip. And I had to return the Sesame Street video that our VCR ate.)

So, what am I reading these days?

Today I finished Willow Hill, by Phyllis A. Whitney, which I picked up at the last big paperback sale. It's an old teen-fiction book, written in 1947, about race relations in a high school. The main message is that we should think for ourselves and not follow others blindly. (Kind of timely for an election year.) It was a good read, although I'm still puzzled by the main character calling her father by his first name.

The Purrfect Murder, most recent addition to the Mrs. Murphy mysteries, which I bought at B&N a couple of weekends ago. I like this series, but the recent books seem to read so fast that I'm reconsidering my habit of buying them in hardback as soon as they're released. I may go back to the paperbacks, or just wait for the used hardbacks to hit Half.com.

Another mystery, Sweet Revenge, the latest Goldy mystery by Diane Mott Davidson. Again, a good series, but they're a very quick read (or I'm reading faster these days). Plus, a lot of the mystery series seem to fall prey to the Jessica Fletcher problem - wherever the main character goes, you know someone's going to die, and you wonder why the police don't just follow them around. :)

Babylon's Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo - non-fiction for a change, and a good story that isn't all gloom and doom. Although I wish there had been more information on the herd of Arabian horses.

Food Not Lawns - another non-fiction, picked up from the "New Books" shelf at the library. Not what I thought it was going to be. Instead of being an introduction to gardening in lawn-type areas, with information on good plants to start with as far as yield per plant and tolerance of lawn conditions, it ended up going off into some more-radical areas (advocating trespassing and some other minor illegal acts, along with "what to do if you're arrested during a protest").