Tasty Bible Stories: A Menu of Tales & Matching Recipes

Grade 2-6--This tempting book gives readers more than just food for thought. Hip retellings of the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Sarah, and other figures are each accompanied by two or three recipes, for example, "Barley & Onions" for the story of Ruth and "Persian Kebab" for the story of Esther. The language is modern and approachable, as when Deborah says, "I call the shots," and Moses tells his people, "Listen up, we ve got important work to do." Color illustrations, many of them full page, are animated and boldly rendered, and the recipes are surrounded by pictures of tasty-looking ingredients. A recipe index and table of metric conversions are included.

Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

The Sufi mystic Rumi has sold more than half a million volumes of his poetry-no small feat, considering that he lived in the 13th century. In this collection, poet Coleman Barks offers a funny, iconoclastic preface in which he attempts to tease out the reasons for Rumi's contemporary renaissance. He also warns readers that what follows will not be a pretty, happy book of love poetry: "This is not Norman Vincent Peale urging cheerfulness, conventional morality, and soft-focus, white-light, feel-good...New Age tantric energy exchange. This is giving your life to the one within that you know as LORD, which is a totally private matter." Rumi, he writes, is not the stuff of greeting cards.

The Regulators

The Regulators is a novel published in 1996 at the same time as its "mirror" novel, Desperation. The two novels represent parallel universes relative to one another, and most of the characters present in one novel's world also exist in the other novel's reality, albeit in different circumstances.

The story takes place in the fictional town of Wentworth, Ohio, a typical suburban community. On Poplar Street, an autistic boy named Seth has gained the power to control reality through the help of a being known as Tak. Soon, Poplar Street begins to change shape, transforming from a quiet suburb into a wild west caricature based on what Seth has seen on his television.

Nona

The story is the account of an unnamed man being held in prison, recounting his life as a college dropout who had met and fallen in love with a beautiful girl named Nona while aimlessly hitchhiking on a snowy winter's night in Maine. That night, he was pretty swiftly seduced into murdering several people who had the misfortune of crossing the duo's path as they speed towards an unknown goal.

Hyperion

Hyperion is a Hugo Award-winning 1989 science fiction novel. It is the first book of the Hyperion Cantos, and is the only book in it to extensively employ the literary device of the frame story (although arguably The Fall of Hyperion also uses it, but to a lesser extent). The plot of the novel is highly complex, featuring multiple time-lines and characters whose behavior changes dramatically.