What I'm Reading in 2015: August and September

And I will start out with a big old "Oops!" that I never got around to posting up what I was reading last month.  It's been busy around here and then on top of that I've been reading through so many books that it's been hard to keep track of them all.  I can safely say that I think my brain got a lot of wrinkles the last couple of months, though *laugh*.

The first book is the book I finally got to read from cover to cover this month...

 Ration Book Cookery: Recipes and History (Cooking Through the Ages)

This book is small (I mean literally, it's like five inches tall by five inches wide), but it's actually jammed with quite a bit of information and recipes.

 I've got a few rationing cookbooks in my collection (this one too is British in origin), but the thing that stands out with this one, to me, is PICTURES (in color no less in some cases)!  Sure, some of the dishes aren't that appetizing looking, but when you are looking at recipes for mock goose and things I was really intrigued with what they would come out looking like.

I bought this book on kind of a whim as I was pretty much getting any book on rationing I could get my hands on and this book doesn't disappoint.  It has a timeline of rationing in Britain, old vintage product pictures and advertisements and even propaganda posters from the Ministry of Food.  There's even cooking times for how long to cook food in a hay box (it's like a thermal cooker made with hay, a box and a pillowcase).

If you are interested in rationing, how it worked in Britain, how people coped and cooked with rationing in place, even how it effected the battlefront, this is a great book to start with as it jams a LOT of information into a small package.

And now, on the lighter side of things, is a book I've read a lot this month as it is the highlight of my daughter's bedtime since I got the book for her....

 Splendiferous Christmas (Fancy Nancy)

This is, by far my daughter's favorite book series, ever (mind you I haven't started reading her Harry Potter yet *laugh*).  This series follows Nancy Clancy, who likes to be fancy in everything she does.  This includes speaking as many French words as she can (because French, as we all know, makes things more fancy), dressing up in frills and baubles and doing everything she can to live fancy (including walking around in ballet slippers or running her own spa).

These books are great.  They not only have expanded my daughter's vocabulary (for instance in this book the word pleading is used and Nancy explains what pleading means in a cute way), but it also is giving her a limited French vocabulary.  The artwork in these books is really nice and VERY detailed for children's books (for instance the cover you are looking at is a good sum up of what the artwork is like in the rest of the book).  The writer really captures what it is like being a little girl in her writings, which makes it a really fun read as well.

This book follows Nancy and her family (she has a little sister and her mom and dad) as they find a Christmas tree, wait and wait for her grandpa to show up so they can decorate the tree, a small childhood tragedy occurs and how it is fixed and leads to a very merry Christmas indeed.

I'd definitely recommend this series of books.  I've never run into a bad one yet, and we so far have about five in our collection on top of the ones my daughter has pulled out of her school library (thank goodness for Swagbucks to help me buy all of those).