As always, I'm reading more than one book at a time. Andy laughs at this, but some days I feel like humor, some it's history, and at other times I want a murder mystery with lots of

Problem book number 1: Two For The Road by Jan & Michael Stern. While the Sterns are funny, charming, and a sheer delight, their tale of when they were reviewing diners across America in order to write their first book, Roadfood, just really revolts me. It isn't the food that they're eating (although I can't say I share their love affair with deep frying and/or fat), it's the amount they eat that keeps forcing me to put down the book because I am literally nauseated. Eating 12 meals a day, and not in a "sampling" sort of way--they clean their plates. It turns out that hearing about someone eating so much food is almost as repulsive as seeing someone eat that much. I'm not sure if the charm of their wit and writing is enough to get me through this thing.
Problem book number 2: No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting. History AND knitting--what else could I ask for? Well, maybe less tedious detail. Right now I'm bogged down in how early American education was knitting & other "domestic arts" for girls and anything resembling intellectual subjects was left mostly for boys--which sums up several pages of the book without losing much. Still, this has gotten very high reviews on Amazon, so I am determined to slog through this thing....and really hoping that it becomes more interesting somewhere along the lines.
Problem book number 3: 52 Loaves: One Man's Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and The Perfect Crust. Another title might be "How to take something basic that people have been doing for thousands of years and make it really fussy and difficult." The premise is that the author sets out to recreate the "perfect" peasant bread that he tasted once in a restaurant. Not that I wouldn't applaud such a quest, but it seems to fit into a recent trend that really gets on my nerves: take something that people have done for a long time and tell them that it's really very difficult and that it needs lots and lots of specialty products/techniques that--Oh my! How very shocking!--will be yours if you ONLY buy the author's book/product/whatever. I have seen this over & over with knitting, riding horses, sewing, cooking, gardening, and obviously baking. It gets on my nerves. Seriously, I'm supposed to believe that someone who is doing something as a HOBBY knows more about something that others in the past did day in & day out for a living????? This book is--in case you hadn't guessed--the one that is most likely to be jettisoned. Today I did read about an interesting trip to a yeast factory, and the author made me laugh several times in the introduction, but I sincerely hope no one ever reads this book without having first baked bread and realized that it isn't even CLOSE to as difficult as this author makes it out to be.
I am SO CLOSE! I need 3 more books, and I am reading 3 books now. This could be so easy!!!!