DISHING

The January issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...features this year's picks for "The 101 Best Dishes in the Valley." Your Humble Narrator is proud to have been one of the authors; see if you can guess my six contributions.

Below, for anyone who might remotely care, is the list of books I finished over this past year. It's an embarrassingly short list this time--not even a book a month!--and for a rather embarrassing reason: I found that my maturity level, already questionable, regressed this year, and I started devouring old comic books to a degree that cut into more substantive reading (I also lost most of a month due to an illness that left me unable to focus on reading, including a weeklong hospital stay in isolation with no reading material).

Still, there were some rich experiences; I finally got around to Babbitt, for instance, having come across an old Signet Classics copy in the take-a-book-leave-a-book shelf at a Rita's Italian Ice joint. What an extraordinary work, and later I came across a fascinating detail about the book's influence. Apparently J.R.R. Tolkien, of all freaking people, was among its admirers; he claimed that the word "Hobbit" derived from "Babbitt" because "Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place." 

Anyway, here's my limited reading list:

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

1922 by Stephen King

The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

The Son of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

The Gnomobile by Upton Sinclair

Calendar of Crime by Ellery Queen

Later by Stephen King