I've read a number of what amounts to cookbooks for alcoholic beverages recently, sort of how-to make your own, but the simplest and most enticing of the lot I just finished. It was Cordials from Your Kitchen: Easy, Elegant Liqueurs You Can Make & Give by Pattie Vargas & Rich Gulling. Many of the concoctions sound delicious; I'm anxious to give a couple a try, when next I have an afternoon or so free...not to mention the necessary hardware (though with
forestcats canning penchant, I'm pretty sure we have everything we could need).The second book was an SF novel by Allen Steele. It's the starting point for a rather long series of novels that he's been producing for nearly the last decade, called Coyote, about Earth's first attempt at an interstellar colony. There's a lot of interesting issues this novel brings up, and they don't all come together at the end, clearly setting up for the follow-on book. In this case, a sufficient number of issues ARE finished by the novel's end, and I found it overall to be very satisfying, so I look forward to getting to the next book of the series. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, I think I'll move it up a bit in the to-be-read stack...
