The Soup Club Cookbook: Feed Your Friends, Feed Your Family, Feed Yourself


Courtney Allison - 2015
      The Soup Club began when four friends (who, between them, have four husbands and ten hungry kids and several jobs) realized that they didn’t actually have to cook at home every night to take pleasure in a home-cooked meal. They simply had to join forces and share meals, even if they weren’t actually eating them together. Caroline, Courtney, Julie, and Tina happen to be neighbors, but a soup club is for anyone: colleagues, a group of workout buddies, a book club. All you need are a few people who simply want to have more home-cooked food in their lives.In a soup club each person takes a turn making soup—and sometimes other dishes for sides or for when everyone needs a break from soup, so if a club has four people, in a month each person will have dinner delivered three times—a dish that can start as a full meal and stretch into more dinners or lunches or even morph into a sauce. Soup is forgiving, versatile, and perfect for sharing; it can be spiced to taste, topped elaborately or not at all, and dressed up or down. It travels well and reheats beautifully.  The Soup Club Cookbook also has dozens of tips for cooking in quantity and for tailoring soup to individual tastes and needs. Here, too, are simple guidelines for starting your own soup club, anecdotes, and a few cautionary tales  that will inspire anyone to share food and eat well.  Recipes include quick and easies, classics, twist on favorites, and dozens of flavor-rich new crowd pleasers:     • Carrot Coconut and Chicken Chili,    • Senegalese Peanut Soup    • Faux Ramen    • Red Lentil Curry Soup    • Potato Cheddar Soup    • Sun Dried Tomato Soup    • Jeweled Rice Salad    • Cheddar Cornbread,    • Summer Corn Hash    • Soy Simmered Chicken Wings

The Signs: Decode the Stars, Reframe Your Life


Carolyne Faulkner - 2017
     For thousands of years, people have looked to the night sky for guidance. Yet these days it's so easy to lose touch with the universe and the important direction it can provide. In The Signs, astrologer and life coach Carolyne Faulkner reveals how the ancient wisdom of the stars can empower you to get the most out of life. Faulkner's method is not about nebulous predictions or fate. It's about discovering the qualities, good and bad, associated with your natal chart--the position of the planets at the time of your birth--and using that knowledge to inform your decisions and relationships. Easy to use and designed as both an introduction for the cosmically curious and a deep dive for experienced spiritual seekers, this guide shows you how to interpret your chart, find balance, and reconnect with yourself.Consult The Signs to learn what to do when:- You're an inflexible Taurus, resistant to change. (Create things. Even a home-cooked meal will heal you in wondrous ways.) - You live with an argumentative Aries. (Never fight fire with fire. Wait till your partner calms down to discuss your feelings.) - You have Capricorn influence. (Shed the need to conform. Structure is important, but it needs to be flexible enough to change as we grow.)

Random Acts of Kindness


Danny Wallace - 2004
    As a result, his thousands of followers (dubbed the Karma Army), without warning, made people happier the length and breadth of the country. Now in Random Acts of Kindness Danny and the gang bring you a hilarious, well-meaning book to encourage you to perform Random Acts of your own. 'Now, at last, the secret to a happier world! You have the power to make it a nicer place! All over the planet, thousands of people just like you are performing Random Acts of Kindness for complete strangers- Buy an old lady a hat! Give a policeman a helium balloon! Pat a dog! Hand a stranger your umbrella! Applaud a lady who's clearly made an effort! This book contains 365 real Random Acts of Kindness real people have done for real strangers- so read it, learn it, and start making your world the nicer place, today!'

What Would Satan Do?


Anthony Miller - 2011
    But life on Earth is tricky for an ex-angel with a short fuse and no impulse control. When a parking attendant mysteriously bursts into flames and a weight-challenged woman somehow ends up in low-Earth orbit, Satan finds that he has attracted the attention of several meddlesome federal agencies. Even worse, there are signs that the governor of Texas has somehow gone ahead and started up the end of the world without him.The Prince of Darkness heads for the Lone Star State, where he tangles with a megalomaniacal televangelist, joins the Militant Arm of the American Geriatrics Association, and wields the Flaming Shotgun of Divine Justice at a guy whose hobbies include invading churches to denounce ritualized cannibalism. Through it all, one thing is clear: Someone has to put a stop to Judgment Day. Now, having spent millennia trying to wreck the place, the Devil may be the world’s only hope.

A Reader’s Delight


Noel Perrin - 1988
    Only two rules applied in selecting the books covered: “No book less than about fifteen years old was eligible;” and “no book that more than two or three of my colleagues had read got considered.”

Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars: Astrology, Our Icons, and Our Selves


Claire Comstock-Gay - 2020
    The stars and the planets then are more like mirrors that show us who we are, that give us an understanding of how to be and how to move through the world; how certain people do it differently, and what we can learn by studying them.In Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars, Claire Comstock-Gay brings the sky down to Earth and points to our popular “stars”—from Aretha Franklin to Mr. Rogers, from poets in Cancer to punk singers in Scorpio—to reveal what the sky has to teach us about being human. In this wise, lyrically written guide, she examines the twelve astrological signs, illuminating the ways each one is more complicated, beautiful, and surprising than you might have been told. Claire suggests that actually it’s okay, and even important, to be a seeker, to hunger for self-knowledge, and if astrology is the vehicle for that inquiry, so be it.Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars offers a clear introduction to the basics and an innovative new framework for creatively using astrology to illuminate our lives on earth. It’s a road map to our internal world, yes, but Claire also reminds us that it’s still our job to navigate it. Combining both heavenly insights and the earthly wisdom of writers like Cheryl Strayed and Heather Havrilesky and the poetry of Patricia Lockwood and Mary Oliver, Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars offers a fresh, profound, and fun way to look at ourselves and others, and perhaps see each more clearly. And in that way, this book is not just beautiful, but transformative.

The Lazarus Prophecy


F.G. Cottam - 2014
    When the murderer switches from unknown prostitutes to Julie Longmuir, a beautiful actress at the height of her success, no woman feels safe. As the press begin to draw uncomfortable comparisons with Jack the Ripper, Jane Sullivan, heading up the police investigation, grudgingly has to agree. But the religious writing, scrawled on the wall in Julie Longmuir’s blood, is outside Jane’s area of expertise. Roping in Jacob Prior, a disillusioned theologian, they attempt to pick apart the demonic delusions of this Ripper copycat. They must act quickly, as events are spiralling out of control, and Jane is next on the killer’s list.Jane will be tested beyond the limits of standard police work, as the esoteric insinuates itself into the investigation. For events are linked to the clandestine Priory in the Pyrenees, the home of a secret Christian sect that pre-dates the Knights Templar. Jane and Jacob are faced with a deeper mystery than they had ever dreamed of; are they simply dealing with a psychopath, or is this something bigger, is this The End of Days?

Eight of Swords


David Skibbins - 1957
    He certainly didn't believe in the tarot. He was a businessman, setting up a folding table on a Berkeley street where a stream of passersby could bring him as much as a hundred dollars a day when the weather was right. But he was beginning to notice more and more that what he had learned to predict from his cards seemed to be coming to pass with an unsettling regularity. It made him do odd things. Like stop teenage Heather Wellington's tarot at nine cards instead of ten. The first eight had been ominous, the ninth more upbeat, so Warren simply stopped the reading there. It was only after Heather had let that he looked at number ten -- it was the Death card.The Death card does not automatically doom the person whose tarot it turns up in. But it doesn't mean there are good things ahead, either. So Warren, the scoffer, couldn't help feeling horror later that day, to see Heather's face on a pizza parlor TV screen with the word Kidnapped! slashed across the top. Guilt, that was what gripped him, as though he could have done something, warned her -- but didn't."Warren Ritter" is not the name he was Christened with. He is a fugitive of sorts. Everyone, including his family and the New York police, believes he died in a mysterious incident thirty years ago, and he has no intention of changing that. Now, on top of the guilt he lives with, is the feeling that somehow he is responsible for young Heather Wellington's capture -- that it is his call to find her and to get at the people who took her.Eight of Swords is an astonishing debut novel, and a very different novel from the old notion that a traditional mystery is along the lines of "a dead vicar in the library." Warren's exciting and often dangerous quest through the streets -- some of them quite mean -- of Berkeley to find the girl and rescue her is more than just a suspenseful tale, it is also a moving portrait of a man returning to the world he had turned his back on three decades earlier.

Free to a Good Home


Eve Marie Mont - 2010
    Noelle Ryan works as a veterinary technician at a New England animal shelter, helping pets find homes. If only it were as easy to find one for herself. After discovering she can't have children-and watching her marriage fall apart after a shocking revelation by her husband-she feels as sad and lost as the strays she rescues. She can't seem to get over her ex, Jay. Unfortunately, all Jay wants from her is a huge favor: serving as caretaker for his elderly mother, who blames Noelle for the breakup. While Jay heads off to Atlanta to live the life of a bachelor, Noelle is left only with her Great Dane, Zeke, to comfort her. But when a carefree musician named Jasper tugs at her heartstrings, giving her a second chance at life- and at love- Noelle comes to realize that home is truly where the heart is.

Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell: The Dangerous Glitter of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed


Dave Thompson - 2009
    When Lou Reed and Iggy Pop first met David Bowie in the fall of 1971, Bowie was just another English musician passing through New York City. Lou was still recovering from the collapse of the Velvet Underground, and Iggy had already been branded a loser... Yet within two years they completely changed the face of popular music with a decadent glamour and street-level vibe. With Bowie producing, Reed's Transformer album was a worldwide hit, spinning off the sleazy street anthem Walk on the Wild Side. Iggy's Raw Power, mixed by Bowie, provided the mean-spirited, high-octane blueprint for Punk. Bowie boosted elements from both Iggy and Reed to create his gender-bending rock idol Ziggy Stardust. Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell is the story of this friendship and the incredible productivity and debauchery that emerged from it. Presented here for the very first time are their stories interwoven in a triple helix of sexuality, glam rock, and drugs - as seen through the eyes of the people who made it happen.

Everything You Need to Know to Feel Go(o)d


Candace B. Pert - 2006
    Pert shares the answers she’s found, both in the biomedical laboratory of mainstream science and in the laboratory of her own evolving life. Her amazing journey documents how mind, body, and spirit cannot be separated; and that we’re hard-wired for bliss, which is both physical and divine. Feeling good and feeling God, she believes, are one and the same.From beginning to end, this book takes us on an entertaining romp through the many bodymind avenues, separating the woo-woo from real science and pointing the way toward using new paradigm therapies, detoxing our food and environment, forgiving and healing our relationships, understanding depression, staying young, and creating the reality we want to experience. Consciousness, mind, emotions, and God are all factored into the mix, resulting in a lot of beneficial advice and self-development insights that will empower us toward health, well-being, and feeling . . . Go(o)d.

Zolar's Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Dreams: Fully Revised and Updated for the 21st Century


Zolar - 1963
    Looking at new cultural trends, work and social patterns, technologies and means of communication, Zolar reveals the meanings of dreams about cell phones, computers, cyberspace, beepers and much more. His concise and incisive explanations of such classic dreams as meeting a redheaded stranger, flying without wings and trying to comfort a crying baby are here as well, while obsolete subjects -- like girdles, gleaners and grenadiers -- have been eliminated. To complement each dream category a lucky number has been added for this new edition. With interpretations for more than 20,000 dreams, Zolar's Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Dreams offers you the opportunity to uncover the secrets hidden in your dreams and to act on the wisdom -- or respond to the warnings -- they contain.

Under Shifting Glass


Nicky Singer - 2012
    Its surface swirls with iridescent colors, like something's inside, something almost like a song, something with a soul. No one else sees anything under the shifting glass, but Jess is convinced there must be some kind of magic in there. And when her twin brothers are born critically ill, Jess begins to believe that the force within the flask just might hold the key to saving her brothers-and her family. In this emotionally rich novel, award-winning author Nicky Singer crafts a world of possibility that is steeped in hope and the power of love.

If I Could Fly


Jill Hucklesby - 2011
    It will keep you guessing until the final page. Calypso Summer. Yeah, that really is my name. 'A girl with such a name is on a journey. She will have adventures,' my mother used to murmur in my ear. And I now I am on a journey. I'm running from something terrible - but I don't know what. It's like my brain has blocked it out. For now, I'm learning to survive: to break the System and not get caught. I've found a friend I can trust. Next stop, freedom. Somehow, somewhere..."If I Could Fly" is a story you'll never forget.

What Planet Can I Blame This On?


Ellie Pilcher - 2021
    This year: * Her boyfriend finally proposed after six years of dating (only for her to find out he cheated on her for five and a half of them)* She landed her dream job as a writer at Craze magazine (which swiftly fell into administration)* She moved into her dream flat overlooking the city (just for the pipes to explode making the place unliveable)As she mourns everything wrong in her life, her best friend mutters the dreaded words: Saturn Return. The time in a woman's life where Saturn returns to the position it was in on the day of their birth, 29.5 years ago, and, according to legend, everything goes to shit. Krystal has never bought into astrology but maybe it's time to re-evaluate - because if the stars got her into this mess, they can get her out of it. And she only has six months to make things right.Loaded with crystals, horoscopes, tarot cards and a carefully aligned chakra or two, Krystal's determined to have her life back on track by the time Saturn returns. No longer shall she brand herself a 'human disaster' because this time it's not her fault, it's written in the treacherous stars. It's Krystal versus the universe in a fight for her future that she's determined to win.