March Mystery: Aunty Lee's Chilled Revenge by Ovidia Yu

There are a couple of copies of Aunty Lee's Chilled Revenge up for grabs in the early review section of Library Thing and I would so like to snag one because I know it's not going to show up in my local library any time soon. (My local library is so strapped for cash that you're kind of out of luck if you don't want the new James Patterson or Debbie Macomber or Stephen King).  To be fair, it's available in a trade paperback priced under $15, which is about what it costs to go to a movie at my local theater, so one way or another, it's on my TBR list.

The book is set in Singapore where Aunty Lee is a widow who runs a "home cooking" restaurant. This is not the first of her adventures and I've already ordered Aunty Lee's Deadly Specials and Aunty Lee's Delights. I've always been a fan of feisty, crime-solving widows, from Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Pollifax to Cabot Cove's Jessica Fletcher.

Decadent Asparagus Saute

Courtesy of freeimages.com

I never used to like asparagus. The lovely thing spears cost a fortune in Los Angeles and by the time the price came down, the stalks were thick and woody and just not that tasty. But here in the Pacific Northwest, those thin stalks are available virtually year round and the vegetable finds it ways to my plate a couple of times a week.

You may be saying to yourself, ugh, asparagus, but trust me. If you make it this way, it's so yummy you'll find yourself looking at the produce section a different way. And it's super easy.

Slice one yellow onion thinly and place in a large skillet along with two tablespoons of olive oil.
Saute the onions until they're golden and translucent (about ten minues.)
Slice the woody parts off the asparagus and cut them into pieces. When the onions are soft, add the asparagus peces to the oil.
Sprinkle with salt if you use it.
Sprinkle with garlic powder or add a spoon of minced fresh garlic.
Slosh some hot sauce over it. (I used Cholula with lime.)
Saute until the aspragus starts to get soft/crispy.
Add about a half-cut of chopped walnuts and continue to saute.
Divide in half and serve over brown rice OR simply eat the whole lovely pan yourself. It's incredibly filling and very satisfying in an "I can't believe this is good for me" kind of way.

Why yes, I do judge a book by its cover

I'm a big fan of BuzzFeed Books (and you should be too) and I just now got around to looking at 34 of the Most Beautiful Book Covers of 2015." As promised there are 34 stunning covers, although the one I liked best was this one for Satin Island by Tom McCarthy. It was designed by Peter Mendelsund, He's also done some stunning covers for New Yorker Magazine, and his work is elegant, minimalist, classy, timeless. He's also a writer, and his book, What We See When We Read, is a book that's now on my TBR--a study of why words evoke images.
their "
I thought thr Satin Island cover was so gorgeous I looked the book up and to my surprise, there's a totally different cover on the book listed on Amazon. It's the one below left. I thought that was odd, but decided it must be a variant cover for a foreign edition. I checked on Amazon.co.uk and found yet a third cover.It has something of the watercolor feel of the original cover I saw and I like it better than the first variant but I don't like either as well as the cover that was used in the BuzzFeed article. I have to wonder. Was the publisher doing A/B testing with the cover?

I know which book I'd pick up first. How about ou?

R.I.P Ray Tomlinson--inventor of email

Tomlinson is not that common a surname. It means "son of little Tom" and according to "Behind the Name," it is the 315th most popular surname in England. (It's below Norris and Morton and Bibi --258th). David Tomlinson, the noted British character actor, was in Mary Poppins, and as far as I know, that was the first time I'd ever seen my last name in a context unrelated to me and my family. The gorgeous Eleanor Tomlinson plays Demelza on the rebooted Poldark series, and of course, there's football player LaDanian Tomlinson. There's also perennial TMZ darling Louis Tomlinson, the One Direction singer who is mostly known at the moment for his nasty custody fight with his baby mama. Sigh.
None of these people are related to me. Nor was Ray Tomlinson, the man credited with "inventing" email. I love email. I remember before there was an email and email is better. Really.  (And I say this as someone who still handwrites "thank you" letters.) I wish I'd written Ray Tomlinson a "thank you" letter or at least a "thank you" email, because his invention changed my life. Rest in peace cousin.

A Romance for St. Patrick's Day

I found myself wondering if there were any fantasy romances out there involving leprechauns and as it turns out, there's a really good one, Kathy Bryson's Feeling Lucky. The book won all kinds of awards when it was published in 2014, and earned a ton of praise from reviewers for being sweet as well as sexy and also for being something different.

Kathy Bryson has written several more books and I wish she lived in the PNW instead of Florida, because her author profile says she's a Shakespeare geek too and I'm looking for someone to go to plays with. You can follow her here.

the Best Urban Fantasy Short Story You'll Read Today--and it's free

I found this short story listed in "The Best Short Stories You've Never Read" from HuffPost Books and it sounded so engaging I immediately clicked over to it. King Oberon and Queen Tatiana in the modern age. Look for "A Tiny Feast" on the New Yorker's site.

What is it?

There are times when I can't buy a creative idea and there are times when I honestly can't turn it off. (Mostly when I'm on deadline for some chore I find tedious.) But there's been something going on in my backyard for a while that is just fascinating to me.

The house we rent was built in the seventies, but we live in one of the oldest neighborhoods on this side of the city. So who knows what was here before we were. (Pretty sure it's not a graveyard but hear me out.)

About a week after we moved in, we found a single rusted razor blade lying in the grass. So ... was someone out here shaving one day, letting the rain wash off the lather? About a month after that we found a small, olive green "plastic soldier" of the sort made memorable in the W.D. County short story "Plastic Soldiers." (If you haven't read "Plastic Soldiers," you need to spend 99 cents right now and go buy Speedloader, an anthology that also contains stories by Nigel Bird and Matthew C. Funk, whose writing is also always worth reading. But "Plastic Soldiers?" It's a one-of-a-kind story. Brutal to read and absolutely unforgettable. I've read a LOT of short stories, and it's probably in my top five, right up there with Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and "the Rockinghorse Winner" by D.H. Lawrence, and Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder." "Plastic Soldiers" should be taught in high school English classes.) But I digress.

Over the year we've lived here, various things have shown up in our lawn, sort of like dinosaur skeletons uncovered by scouring winds in the western states. Today this thing showed up.  It's made of wood and about the size of a gobstopper candy. It's made of wood and the spikes unscrew.  It's hard to tell how old it is but the scientist in the house thinks it could be many decades old. Wood decays at different rates. It'll take a downed pine tree 200-300 years to decompose, a spruce tree (what you find a lot of in the Pacific Northwest) will only last 50-100 years. So--what was this thing? A child's toy? Nowadays, we'd keep something like this out of a kids' hands for fear of choking hazards. But it doesn't seem strong enough for any industrial application.
But what it DOES seem good for is a story prompt.
"The Yard of Lost Things."
What would you do if things suddenly started appearing in your yard, dug up by your dog, or revealed by a hard rain? Would some of those items be valuable? Would some of those items be dangerous? Would some hold clues to murder? Or a wedding ring lost by a woman gardening 100 years ago?  I find the possibilities endlessly seductive. I want to write that story. But as it happens ... I'm on deadline. So it's going to have to go into the file for now.