Is it life or is it a novel?

I was looking at the books on tape at the library the other day and saw The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline B. Cooney. I checked it out of the library and started listening to it.

It took me the first chapter or two to realize that it was a fiction book. It was interesting enough that I kept listening. I listened to seven chapters of it. Something jogged my thoughts and I read the back cover and found out that it is juvenile fiction. It's good so far and I may keep listening.

It doesn't bother me that I'm enjoying juvenile fiction. What bothered me was that I thought that the book was autobiographical. True, maybe the police finding kidnapped William Ownby and Shawn Hornbeck on January 12, 2007 may have been on my mind. It seems like there are a lot of news stories lately about kidnappings, murders and pedophiles.

It is a terrible time when the news is daily filled with multiple murders, rapes, and pediphiles.

Diving into sourdough

Due to my wife now being a prediabetic her doctor has told her that she has to cut down on her bread (as well as pasta, rice, potatoes) etc. I loved baking bread and have a bread machine. Now she is limited to 2 slices of bread a day, and they should be preferably whole grain and sourdough.

We try to keep a sense of humor with my wife having edema, needing to loose weight, having two artificial hips, and needing to avoid diabetes mellitus. We joke that the doctor reduced her diet to bread and water, and now he took that away from her.

I have been investigating sourdough for about a month, and tonight I will be baking sourdough with my newly activated Russian starter from Sourdough International. Look here in my blog for how things go, including recipes I try, new sourdough recipes I create, and old recipes I convert to sourdough.

The 9th of January was my birthday, and I asked if I could get a few bread books. I stopped at three. The books I got were Ed Wood's "Classic Sourdoughs", which is very interesting, Dan Lepard's The Handmade Loaf, which has wonderful pictures and recipes I am very interested in trying out, and The Laurel's Kitchen Bread book, which I have just glanced at. (Dan Lepard used to be a photographer before he became a baker as well, so there are some wonderful bread pictures in his book.)

Two versions of The Past Through Tomorrow

The other day I was thinking about how advanced that Star Trek (the original series) was in predicting science innovations. Too bad the more recent versions of Star Trek have not been as innovative. The original Star Trek series was like one version of The Past Through Tomorrow. (What we see now and what we may see in the future).

Some of the things science has come up with that were portrayed on TV are as follows:
*Dr. McCoy's hypo spray = needleless vaccination guns used in hospitals.
*Captain Kirk's handheld computer on the bridge = Microsoft's Tablet PCs.
*Captain Kirk's communicator = cell phones minus miniature bomb & locator.
*Motion sensors in ships doors = pocket doors in hospitals & grocery stores.

The other version of The Past Through Tomorrow that comes to mind is a book of short stories of the same name by Robert A. Heinlein. It is my favorite science fiction book and even though there are plenty of other things to read, I have to reread it every year or two.

The short stories in The Past Through Tomorrow work together as a timeline, and the timeline is published in some editions of the book.



Every time I read the book, I find myself sympathizing with the same characters, rooting for them, etc., even though I know about the final outcome of the stories I remember.

I do not like every story, but when was the last time you bought a music CD and liked every song on it?

Even though both the book and Star Trek are written from the perspective of being in the future when it was written, Star Trek is much more perceptive on scientific inventions to come. The Past Through Tomorrow is not only wrong in some cases, it goes in a different direction. Many of the stories are as much human interest stories as they are science fiction stories. The wrong directions really do nothing to detract from the stories.

In the US, as far as I know, the book has always been published in one volume. In the UK, the book was split and published in two volumes. When buying thy book you have to make sure whether you are buying the entire book, Vol. I or Vol. II.