Purchasing power

No cooking today. I did, however, bake snickerdoodle cookie bars to bring to a friend's birthday party tonight. Andy and I sampled one warm from the oven. They are delicious, especially the cinnamon sugar crust on the bottom. But they're cakier than I expected them to be from the recipe's description and from the way the photo looked. I probably should have guessed based on the fact that the recipe called for three eggs. Anyway, since these were ostensibly "blondies" and thus should have had a chewier texture, I am not going to post the recipe until I can fiddle with it to my heart's content. I have a lot of sour cream left over, so there's room to experiment. I might make sour cream coffee cake instead. The world is my baking oyster.

Pathetically hipster in my skinny jeans, knock-off
Converse, and trendy apron. Sigh.

As to today's other activities... For a total of $14.02, we acquired at the Strand the following: The Three-cornered World (Soseki), Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Bach), La symphonie pastorale (Gide), a whimsical book on the history of pirates that I intend to give the pirate-loving birthday girl tonight, All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy), The Cunning Man (Davies), Nervous Conditions (Dangarembga), Gossip from the Forest (Keneally), The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (Holmes), The Colonel's Dream (Chesnutt), Kiss of the Spider Woman (Puig), The Principles of Electrochemistry (MacInnes), Bodily Harm (Atwood), The Cancer Ward (Solzhenitsyn), Spoon River Anthology (Masters), and The World According to Garp (Irving). There were also five or six copies of The Three-cornered Hat, on which de Falla's opera was based, but I had a sneaking suspicion that the opera was more fun than the story and so did not purchase one.

On a related note, I have been meaning to read The Recognitions for some time now. I even started it over the summer, but never finished. I've decided to attempt to read at least five pages of it per day until I have completed it. I have to finish The Zahir, which Andy gave me when I last visited him, but then I will start to chug my way through all 956 pages of Gaddis's tome. Of course, it would take me about 191 days to complete the book if I only read 5 pages per day, so let's see how this goes.