Sounds Good

Sabine Pass lighthouse lovers get their tasty read

The mere mention that the Sabine Pass lighhouse would be mentioned in a book drew lots of reader attention. We love our lighthouse.
“The American Lighthouse Cookbook: The Best Recipes and Stories from America’s Shorelines” is ready for your purchase from Sourcebooks. Look online for your copy, or maybe a better plan would be to visit the 47 lighthouses included and perhaps many have the book at a giftshop. Becky Sue Epstein and Ed Jackson remind readers that house keepers were isolated, had to work around the clock and cooked with bulk supplies. There were supermarket runs for a missing ingredient.
Try a peanut soup representing St. Simmons Lighthouse in Georgia or Thai fried rice representing Lahaina Lighthouse in Maui, Hawaii.
As for Sabine Pass, writers say keepers could augment their meager pay by living off the land, and the menu created to represent this area is grilled oysters in the shell, smothered okra, crab bake, alligator gumbo and pralines that authors “could not stop eating.”

“Death Lore”
A new book on death is anything but creepy. A tombstone cover sets the mood for October reading of “Death Lore: Texas Rituals, Superstitions and Legends of the Hereafter.”
Kenneth L. Untiedt edits the University of North Texas book full of the kind of stuff that could happen only to Texans. Cowboys want to be buried with their guns and rich women with their sports cars. Cats can get the last word from their graves and ministers can embellish the good deeds of a dead man so much that the widow could question if that’s really her own husband in the box. Writers tell of spiritual connections, growing up in funeral homes and funeral humor.
Death happens to all of us, so we might as well try to have a good time with it, seems to be the message.

“Inherited Sins”
This novel by Paula Paul, with a puckered apple on the cover, sat on my shelf too long. A modern woman finds herself with a metal box belonging to her dying mother. Inside she finds ‘40s-era journals of a West Texas preacher and his battle against sin with church member Johnnie Marie, the mother in question. Then the reader gets Johnnie Marie’s journals, which offer a different perspective. There are lots of juicy surprises, but I also like the details, like the fuss over the church youth seeing “Gone With the Wind,” which had been released years earlier but just got to the Muleshoe area.
ddoiron@panews.com