My Top Favorite Books of 2011

Of all the 144 books I read in 2011, some of the books were published in 2011 and some were from my to-be-read pile and those pubbed before 2011. As a result, I have a faves list of all the books I read in 2011 (some of them re-reads) and a Top Ten list of all the books pubbed in 2011 that I read in 2011. The items in the lists are in no particular order. (For a complete list of my books, go HERE.)

Pubbed in 2011

Silk is for Seduction by Loretta Chase
The Black Hawk by Joanna Bourne
The Other Guy's Bride by Connie Brockway
A Lady's Lesson in Scandal by Meredith Duran
Welcome to My World by Johnny Weir
Kissing Comfort by Jo Goodman
A Place Called Home by Jo Goodman
The Comforts of Home by Jodi Thomas
How to Bake a Perfect Life by Barbara O'Neal
Where Shadows Dance by C.S. Harris

Read in 2011

Spymaster's Lady by Joanna Bourne
The Black Hawk by Joanna Bourne
Sylvester by Georgette Heyer
Arabella by Georgette Heyer
No Man's Mistress by Mary Balogh
Silk is for Seduction by Loretta Chase
Miss Wonderful by Loretta Chase
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
The Falcon at the Portal by Elizabeth Peters
He Shall Thunder in the Sky by Elizabeth Peters
Lord of the Silent by Elizabeth Peters
Welcome to my World by Johnny Weir
Norwegian Folktales by Peter Christian Asbjørnsen & Jørgen Moe
Kissing Comfort by Jo Goodman
A Place Called Home by Jo Goodman
Where Shadows Dance by C.S. Harris
Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas
Lady Be Good by Susan Elizabeth Phillips
How to Bake a Perfect Life by Barbara O'Neal
As You Desire by Connie Brockway
The Other Guy by Connie Brockway
A Lady's Lesson in Scandal by Meredith Duran
Bound by Your Touch by Meredith Duran
Born of the Sun by Joan Wolf
The Road to Avalon by Joan Wolf
The Edge of Light by Joan Wolf
His Lordship's Mistress by Joan Wolf
A London Season by Joan Wolf
The Shadow and the Star by Laura Kinsale
The Prince of Midnight by Laura Kinsale
My Sweet Folly by Laura Kinsale
The Comforts of Home by Jodi Thomas
Candle in the Window by Christina Dodd
Heart of a Knight by Barbara Samuel

Picture Day Friday: Chocolate Cakes

Following Wednesday's post about a book featuring chocolate and chocolate recipes, here are two pictures of wedding cake confections.

By eWeddingCake.com...




By Charlys Bakery...

Comments on The Cocoa Conspiracy by Andrea Penrose

The Cocoa Conspiracy is the second installment in the Regency historical series featuring Lady Arianna and Saybrook. It's author Andrea Penrose writes these mysteries in the grand old tradition of cozy mysteries, but set in Regency England.

The central interest binding the two protagonists, Lady Arianna, Countess of Saybrook and the Earl of Saybrook is a deep-abiding interest in chocolate, in its medicinal and culinary properties, its biology, and its various edible forms. The stories include many recipes of baked goodness. Andrea has a brief history of chocolate on her website. For a more in-depth look at the history of chocolate, visit Chicago's Field Museum site.

I enjoyed reading Andrea's debut book Sweet Revenge, so I've looked forward to the release of The Cocoa Conspiracy. And it did not disappoint. The book launches right away into the storylines that have far-reaching effect into the Congress of Vienna in 1814 organized to parcel out Europe in the wake of Napoleon's exile to Elba. Leading from British diplomatic circles, the conspiracy whirls around French, Russian, German, and Austrian diplomats in layers of intrigue. Andrea has the writing chops to put the reader right in that maelstorm of emotions and skullduggery. Swashbuckling action and the changing relationship of the protagonists adds a fun dimension to an otherwise serious story.

Click HERE is read an excerpt of The Cocoa Conspiracy.

[Disclosure: I was sent a print copy of the book by a senior editor at New American Library, Penguin.]

Jokes the Romans Found Funny

Instinctively, we know that humor is nothing new, but finding evidence of graffiti and written jokes in stone thousands of years old provides solid confirmation of that.

Some of the earliest evidence of funny graffiti is found in Pompeii (an ancient Roman city that was covered with ash and pumice from the volcano Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD). Apparently, the Pompeian propensity for scribbling various funny stuff on walls was so common that an enteprising Pompeian commented wryly: "I am amazed, O Wall, that you have not collapsed and fallen, since you must bear the tedious stupidities of so many scrawlers."

The oldest surviving joke book of Western Europe is said to be the Philolegos, or The Laughter Lover in English. This book written in Greek is from 400–500 AD and contains 265 jokes that cover various stereotypes of the times: the "egghead" (intellectual) or absent-minded professor, the eunuch, toilet humor, people with hernias or bad breath, or certain types of foreigners like people from Abdera, a city in Thrace.

"An intellectual was on a sea voyage when a big storm blew up, causing his slaves to weep in terror. 'Don’t cry,' he consoled them, 'I have freed you all in my will.'"

"A man complains that the slave he has recently purchased has died. 'By the gods,' says the slave's former owner, 'when he was with me, he never did any such thing.'" (Note, the resemblance with the dead parrot sketch in Monty Python's Flying Circus.)

"A barber, a bald man, and an absent-minded professor take a journey together. They have to camp overnight, so they decide to take turns watching the luggage. When it's the barber's turn, he gets bored, and so he amuses himself by shaving the head of the professor. When the professor is woken up for his shift, he feels his head, and says, "How stupid is that barber? He's woken up the bald man instead of me."

"Wishing to teach his donkey not to eat, a pedant did not offer him any food. When the donkey died of hunger, he said, "I've had a great loss. Just when he had learned not to eat, he died."

"An egghead was writing a letter from Athens to his father. Wanting to show off over how well his studies were going, he added this postscript: 'I pray that when I come home I shall find you on trial for your life, so that I can show you how great an advocate I am'."

At a lecture in Newcastle University in March 2009, Mary Beard showed that The Laughter Lover "contains a number of recognizable one-liners, not a form of humor typically associated with the sober-sided Romans." Mary Beard is a professor in classics at Cambridge and classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

One key question Beard asked is: "When we laugh at Roman jokes—if we do—are we are laughing at the same things they did?" What people find funny depends on social mores, ethical mores, culture, race, gender, external events, education, and many more factors. Also what a person finds funny one day, he may not find funny after a few years. So it's quite likely that our interpretation of a joke's funny elements might not be the same reason the Romans found that joke funny.

[An aside: The oldest British joke dates back to the tenth century and reveals the bawdy face of the Anglo-Saxons: "What hangs at a man's thigh and wants to poke the hole that it's often poked before? Answer: A key."]

Picture Day Friday

A traditional look...



And a more modern look...

Picture Day Friday