All Things Wise And Wonderful, Next

All Things Wise And Wonderful, James Herriot - A good finale to the series. Overall, I'd have to say this was the least-good of the books, but it was still quite a good book. The only faults were that the individual stories seemed much shorter, and there was some repetitive nature of the types of stories, when compared with the other two books.
In the first two books, while there were lots of 'funny' stories, and plenty of 'touching' stories, the details were always different. In this final book, there was a lot more "injured animal recovers and teaches me a life lesson", and such, where the specific story is almost the same, just the name, specie, and lesson have changed.
All in all though, it was a decent book, and I feel good to have finished the trilogy.

Next, Michael Crichton - Though he takes some steps that I'm pretty sure are beyond our current level, such as successful retroviral gene-slicing in an adult organism (though the rats/people all eventually die), the overall message is really good, and amplified by the Author's Note at the end, where the content of the judge's ruling is recited and expounded upon.
Crichton's basic argument is that genes can't be owned or patented, because they are a fact of nature, and not anybody's invention or idea in any form. It'd be akin to me patenting the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium, and thereby demanding royalties from everyone for using a product derived from my patent (sunlight).
The many narratives are very interesting, and all relate to a different facet of the coming social and legal problems. One short one that stuck with me was a woman who was birthed using donor sperm tracks down her supposedly-anonymous donor father, and accuses him of giving her her heroin addiction, because his genes included ones that promoted that behavior, even though he had donated in the 70s, when such a thing was unknown.
The two aspects of the sciene that I think Crichton glosses over too much are that - first the general problem - genes have been proven to only cause a predisposition, or an increased likelihood of any correlated factors to occure. I can't give the Dalai Lama gene therapy and give him the "murder gene", and have him start running around killing people. Nor can I give someone the (actually discovered) "heart attack" gene, and know that that's how he'll die. You can have all the genetic markers for - and family history of - heart disease, but if you run a mile a day and eat no HDL, especially if you take that to extremes to counteract the predispositions, you might never have a heart problem, and die from a pedestrian-car accident instead.
The other issue specifically relates to one of the storylines, so if you're actually planning on reading this based on what I've actually read, stop here. A company previously won a court ruling saying that Mr. X's cell line belonged to them, not him. The cells that the company possessed ended up getting destroyed. Mr. X has mysteriously left the country. They decide to have a bounty hunter arrest his daughter and/or grandson for "stolen property", since they have the same cells as Mr. X.... only they don't! they share some of the same genes, but as even one of the attorneys pointed out, they don't own the genes, just the cells. Mr. X's daughter has approximately half of his genes, and his grandson has approximately one quarter. As such any cells they developed would be unique from his own. It seemed as though Crichton - or at least all of his geneticist and lawyer characters - had never heard of basic Mendelian genetics.
Is it weird that my two favorite characters were the two non-human ones? Gerard just because he was such an alien intelligence; it took me a while to realize how smart he was supposed to be. Dave was just awesome, doing both the cute, poor-speech little-kid thing, and also the bad-ass defensive monkey-attack.

Rye Bread

This is the NKB Rye recipe from www.breadtopia.com. I've only had one slice so far, since I literally just finished baking it. It is delicious; like the recipe says, I wouldn't really call the carway seeds "optional", and they're not expensive.

Because of my smaller pot, I made two loaves. The first one I did at 500°F for the covered 30 minutes, then 450°F for the 15 minutes uncovered. It made for a taller loaf, and the tips are a little blackened, but so is the bottom. I haven't tried this loaf yet. As Gina pointed out, it's the 'pretty' one. It's picture is at the bottom.
The second loaf I did at 450°F for both cooking period, and it made the shorter loaf that you can see above, but I like the color better.

Here is the recipe. The only thing I did differently, is that I used cornmeal for the coating during the 2 hour sit, and before I placed the seam-side down, I put a liberal sprinkling of caraway seeds on the cloth, to make a nice seed topping. I really like how it turned out.

No Knead Rye Bread

Ingredients:

3/4 C Dark rye flour (Light rye will also work fine)
2-1/4 C All purpose flour (I use unbleached)
1-1/2 t Kosher salt (other salts are fine)
3/8 t Instant Yeast (that’s 1/4 t plus half of that again)
1-1/2 T Caraway seeds (Optional, although I don’t know why you’d leave it out)
1-1/2 C Water

Directions:

Mix and bake as any other no knead bread recipe.

All Things Bright and Beautiful, James Herriot

This is a very good sequel of the first book. It doesn't feel like he's trying to milk the popularity of the first book or anything, it's just a very natural progression from where the first book ended with him getting married, through to the end of the 2nd book, when his draft it pulled for WW2.
The stories are grouped in much the same way as in the previous one, with there being a rough sense of temporal progession given, but more care to share similar stories together. I look forward to reading the third and final in the series.

I also finished listening to an abridgment of Rainbow Six today. Mneh. I read it way back in 10th grade, but this was just way too short. I think I'm gonna try and listen to his other old ones now though, unless someone has some suggestions.

The beginning

The goal of this is to blog about the books I read and the food I make, so that I can go back and remember these things, because I'm horrible at remembering. I'm not going to constrain myself to that, and will just set a goal of writing here at least weekly, even if I'm horribly off topic.

To start with, a recap of the past few weeks:

Food:
Kalamata Spaghetti: Delicious, but made WAAAAY too much. Check the servings, and think about how much 30 bloody ounces of fettuccine really is. Has a very good flavor. Never made a pesto before, and it's been a while since I've eaten one either, so I didn't really know what kind of consistency to go for. This ended up being on the meatier side, but not chunky. Every few bites gets a distinct taste of walnut, and I really like the variation.

No-Knead Bread: I really had no idea this had become a major phenomenon until I started looking for variations on it yesterday. I heard about it through the Personal Finance blogs I read, and even got an enameled cast-iron 3.5qt casserole pot to make it in for Christmas. I know that bread can be very tricky, and wasn't expecting much for a first attempt.
It was delicious. I was very proud of myself for having such a good first attempt. My only difficulty is that since my pot is about half size, I cut the dough in half between its first and second. This works fine, but it takes 2 hours to get it all cooked, and there's not a lot of sandwich-sized slices in each loaf. The picture is of my very first loaf, and was taken with my phone. In the future I plan to use my Elph, and therefore have significantly better quality.

I'm hoping to figure out a way to fix this. My cheap-o solution is to get an unglazed clay pot of a size to be able to invert it over my loaf pans, and maybe a stone slab to put under the loaf pan, effectively creating a mini-oven within the oven, to hold the moisture in, then just take the pot off for the 2nd cook.
Yesterday, I bought some light rye flour, some 12% protein bread flour, some King Arthur brand Whole Wheat flour, some cornmeal, and some stone cut oats. Experiment results will be posted.

Books:
All Things Bright and Beautiful, James Herriot: The 2nd in the series, will post once I finish.

All Creatures, Great and Small, James Herriot: I think I started to read this once, back in my early teens, if not before. I just finished reading it last week, and I greatly enjoyed it. I finished all the fantasy and sci-fi books I've been wanting to read lately, and decided to find some country/survivalist books to read. This is a memoir-ish collection of his adventures during his first year or two as a post-graduate assistant veterinarian in 1930's Britain. Some touching moments, a good bit of funny anecdotes, overall very enjoyable. Something I could read to my (nonexistent) kids as bedtime stories. The individual anecdotes make good stopping points, and he makes extensive use of the English language without being verbose. There were a number of words that I had only seen in my "A Word A Day" newsletter perviously, but they really felt like they fit, and not that he was trying to be showy. Just goes to show you how far the English language has come in the last 40-50 years...

World Made By Hand: A Novel of the Post-Oil Future, James Howard Kunstler: I found this book suggested on a list of survivalist literature. It's the only one from taht list that I've read; everything else seemed a little too out there. This was a very good story. It starts about 5 years after the "fall". When I first started it, I compared it too Alas, Babylon, but picking up a bit after that book ends. The protagonist lives in small-town Vermont, and he and his neighbors are making do with chickens, pigs, a little bit of specialization and bartering. The basic premise of the story is moving past the 'survival' mindset, and forward into restarting civilization, actually thriving instead of just subsisting. There's a little side-story that I think was quite poorly developed, some kind of supernatural thing that never got picked up or even explained. The ending had a very "this looks like a good place to stop" feel to it, but I think with this kind of story, that's about the only way to go, sicne there was no "rescue" to have happen, such as did in Alas, Babylon.

Dreamcatcher, Stephen King: I listened to this on CD, but it was unabridged, so I think it counts. This was enjoyable from beginning to end. King's books always end up being a lot longer than I initially think they will. Even though this was 20 discs long, it didn't really click how long it was until the story was getting the guys out of the woods, and I wasn't even a third of the way through. If you like anything sci-fi/horror/King, then this is recommended. Then again, if you enjoy King at all, I imagine you've already read it.

Salem's Lot, Stephen King: see above.