Posts by Laurie King
Laurie King, e-dinosaur
Well, friends, we’re one step closer to this: To my great consternation, the 21st century is nipping at my heels. All these years, I’ve done copyedits on actual pieces of paper: I’ll finish a book and send my editor a lovely clean copy, spa she can take up her pencil and slash it to pieces, adding questions…
Read MoreLaurie amidst the coffee plants
I got married during a time when I had been deeply immersed in setting up a coffee store called Kaldi’s (see Monday’s post.) Our honeymoon was an academic journey into the South Pacific, eight months through Papua New Guinea, the Australian outback, and island-hopping across the ocean from Tonga to Easter Island. And in many of…
Read MoreCoffee: rocket ships or old socks?
So, you have some freshly roasted, gorgeously brown beans, from Ethiopia or Costa Rica. What to do next? Mahmoud Hazr has one approach: Mahmoud set the mortar and pestle to one side and reached for the incongruously homely English saucepan of steaming water that Ali had set to boil, filled from a skin hanging off…
Read MoreCoffee, nectar of the underslept
Over the years, I’ve introduced any number of people to the contagion of excellent coffee: a pound of some excellent beans and a decent grinder, I’ve created an addict for life. Beans: what kind? Any beans you get in a coffee store is going to be Coffea arabica (the big, low-altitude robusta are only used…
Read MoreWinner
Our winner for the ARC of Jane Steele is…Alison Skier! Alison, I’m sending an email to let you know. Thanks everyone for showing interest, Lyndsay is happy to hear that people are eager! The book is out in April, which will just give you time to finish The Murder of Mary Russell first…
Read MoreCoffee week: 2, the Coffee Cantata
In the 1730s, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a sort of miniature comic opera about a young woman devoutly addicted to coffee, and her despairing father who would do anything to break her of her habit. Because coffee is certainly not a habit suited to a lady. I met this cantata in the seventies, when I…
Read MoreCoffee week: 1
My husband was a tea man. He drank proper tea, from a pot, and although he was a truly and creatively dreadful cook, Noel made a better pot of tea than I did. Coffee, though: that was all me. I have a long history with coffee. When I was putting myself through university, I worked in…
Read MoreJane Steele: Reader, I murdered him.
We loves us some Lyndsay Faye here on Mutterings. Her Timothy Wilde trilogy has been one of my favorite worlds to explore in recent years, while the author herself has become one of my favorite people. Lyndsay now has a new world, publishing next April: a deliciously wicked tale that starts as a riff on Jane Eyre…
Read MoreTea and the Death of Civilization
I start my day with two (large) cups of camellia sinensis, which has a fraction of the caffeine that coffee does, and allows me to ease into the day rather than hit the ground running. Yes, this is black tea (as opposed to herbal tea, which M. Poirot calls his tisane, or Mma Ramotswe’s bush…
Read MoreDrought’s toll
Here in California, we watch the skies as if the collective pressure of our gazes could press moisture from the thin clouds. Four years of drought are taking their toll: This live oak came down a few days ago, just crashed to the ground without a breath of wind. Five trees have come down on…
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