It’s Thursday, so it must be time to pick an ancient unread book from the bookcase and bake some cake.
The lucky winner this week is Haunted, a short story collection by Joyce Carol Oates. This is a collection of horror stories published in various magazines:
It’s time for a shocking confession: I’ve never read anything by Joyce Carol Oates. She publishes about 75 books per year, but I’ve still somehow managed to avoid all of them. And it’s weird, because I enjoy reading her essays in The New York Review of Books, but it’s just not… happened.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve had two of her books sitting unread on my bookshelves since 1996.
But still, I didn’t know what to expect here at all. And this turns out to be a pretty grisly collection of horror stories. Let’s give you a flavour:
Spooky, Gothic, unnerving, and it’s sometimes a bit on the horrific side for me, and I used to be a horror movie enthusiast. But still, thrilling, and I’m looking forward to reading the other book of hers that’s on that shelf.
I don’t have anything interesting to say about the book, though, so let’s get to the cake:
Eek. That’s whole lot of cream on the cake.
But it’s banana-ey deliciousness from Betty Crocker. And it’s delicious. Mmm. Bananas, banana bread, banana frosting…
And look how well it pairs with the book. Excellent.
Banana.