Books: Various-Just For Fun

Here are a couple of books I'd recommend just for fun reading.

1. The Best American Essays 2005 by Susan Orlean (Edited by)

A long neglected literary genre, essays are really coming on. They have a power to question, inform, color and move us to emotion and action. I particularly enjoyed the piece on boiling lobster from the lobster's perspective, a love affair with sentence diagramming and the competitive undercurrent of bird watching. Enjoy one each night before bed or pour over them on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

2. Dragon's Lair by Sharon Kay Penman

This New York Times Best Seller was my saving grace on the plane to Romania. I have long been a fan of mystery novels, having discovering Sherlock Holmes and Mary Higgins Clark in High School, but it took an unusual literary setting to recapture my attention. The book is set in the summer of 1093, during the early Crusades. It is all about court intrigue and yet it's told through the eyes of a commoner. Don't start unless you have time to not put it down.