September's What are you reading?

My reading this past month will not surprise anyone. I’ve been listening to Andy Sirkis read J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring; my reading has been mostly non-fiction. While attempting to hold onto myself while eventually climbing out of my despair, I leaned heavily on my favorite inspirational and spiritual writings with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance & Other Essays. It is an old friend and constant companion. Through the years, I’ve dipped into Emerson’s thoughts often, but lately, I needed to wrap myself in them.

A new cookbook always excites me and offers me possibilities to expand my horizons. Last week, I noted that when switching to a vegan diet, I wondered what I could possibly eat while respecting the lives of animals and not imposing my desire to eat meat on them by stealing their lives—and their rights on the way to the butcher shop. (The humor in this is that other than a frying pan and soup pot, my only kitchen tool was a George Foreman Grill.…