Else what's a heaven for?

I got James Haller's Vie de France bc it's the only book of his the NYPL owns and jofish22 recommended him highly. Turned out to be a memoir of a month he spent with friends in a house in France. I'm glad I waited until the end to review it, bc I've been complaining the whole time that he sounds like the most naive person to ever leave the country: everything is so wonderful and so picturesque, I bet if he'd been mugged, he would have talked about what an authentic experience it was. Then I got to the last "chapter" and it turns out that this trip motivated him to quit the restaurant business and start writing the cookbooks jofish22 so highly recommends; I could see why a vacation that had such a large impact on his life might be viewed with rose-colored glasses.

I'm also highly motivated to buy his cookbooks after reading this book - he gives detailed menus for the meals he prepared for his housemates and most of them sound so simple, maybe even I could make them. It's clear from his descriptions that they are simple bc he has technique: he just buys what looks good at the market bc he doesn't have to think about a recipe, he knows chix get cooked at such-and-such heat for such-and-such time.

**

I'm dragging out the last Harry Dresden book for as long as possible bc it IS the last, but I did want to comment briefly on one of the anthologies. There are several Harry Dresden short stories in anthologies and after reading every single one (who me, obsessive?) I can state you don't really need to hunt them down: he's a much better novelist than short story writer. If anything, I think the plots in the novels are a little more convoluted than necessary.

For some reason, I ended up reading every story in My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding and oh wow was that a terrible idea. Some of them were entertaining - L. A. Banks' "Spellbound" put a different spin on the Hatfield-McCoy thing and Esther M. Friesner's "The Wedding of Wylda Serene" was fun if you like Victorian-style storytelling w/a big fat twist - but most can be summarized as "girl helping friend get married finds twu wuv". There's only so many times you can read that story in a row.

Several of the stories were set in already-developed universes - Charlaine Harris has a story in it - and some of the premises for the universes are so bad, I was dumbstruck. Come to think of it, the Charlaine Harris story is so bad, I can't understand how she ever got published. Then again, while I thought Rachel Caine's story in this volume was pretty silly, I read the sequel in My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon first, and thought her story in that volume was great - so entertaining, I've started looking for her books.