Growing Some Things and Reading Others

::Garden Update::
We went out to water the garden and guess what? There are tiny peppers!

I imagine the purple peppers are ready as soon as they turn completely purple, but I'm not sure about the sweet banana peppers. I don't know if there's a specific size they're supposed to be before they're ripe.

There's no sign of the tomatoes and the eggplants have blooms but no actual eggplants yet. I waited until they were super tall and falling over before I finally staked the tomatoes. There are still a couple shorter ones that I'll need to stake soon. Most of the spinach seemed to sprout quickly and then die off just as quickly so I don't think we're going to be seeing much of it in the future.

In other news, I've finally finished The Art of Manliness and I've started my next book.

Yes. It's a kids book. Or young adults? Whatever. It uses a huge, easy to read font. It's not very long. It's about a kid. It has pictures inside. You know what? I'm okay with all of those things. In fact, I'm pretty excited about some of those things. I love young adult fiction. I love how imaginative it is. I love how it mostly turns out how you expect. Not because I don't appreciate some good twists and turns, I actually really love them, but sometimes I love something that wasn't written with the express purpose of screwing with my mind. Some books and movies get so in to pulling one over on you and doing something unexpected that they become contrived. Real life doesn't always fool you. Sure it does sometimes, but a lot of times things happen exactly as you'd expect, and when you're already trying to convince me that there are magical skulls or flying machines or time traveling phone booths it's helpful to have some reality to connect to.

Illustrated by Chris Riddell

It doesn't have a lot of art in it, but it's there, and I'm glad. Why wouldn't I be? Why do adults think it's somehow juvenile to have art in a book? We build monolythic buildings to house art just so we can walk around feeling pretentious looking at it, but heaven forbid it be in a book! I like art in books.

I'm only a couple chapters in so I don't know if this one will be any good, but it has a pretty good start. I think it's the second in the series, but I don't think this is one of those series where you really miss out from reading them out of order. It could prove me wrong. I'll keep you updated on whether or not it's any good. If you're interested in reading a good young adult series with some really cool art check out Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. It's the first of three in a steampunk retelling of World War I.

The cover art in the subsequent books unfortunately went downhill

 Have you read any good books lately? Did any of them have art in them? Do you share my love of young adult fiction?