One of the surprises about my retirement life is that I am not reading as much as I thought I would. Prior to retirement, I imagined that I would read perhaps 4 or 5 books a week. The rate turns out to be much lower. I've also become much more selective. I'm not reading just any old thing. There needs to be a reason for reading it.

But the reason can be as simple as entertainment. Based upon a published review, I decided to read Search: A Memoir with Recipes by Dana Louise Potowsky: A Novel by Michelle Huneven. Compared with some of the grand space operas I like to read (think The Expanse -- review forthcoming), this is a small story. Rather than covering the fate of mankind as it expands beyond our solar system, this story -- told in first person by a restaurant reviewer for a local paper -- covers the search for a new minister for a Unitarian Universalist (UU) church in southern California. 

Being a lapsed UU myself, the novel provides many moments of amused recognition. The following quote strikes me as particularly typical:

"I contributed two articles I'd published in the Times: one was about my writing group's bouillabaisse. (One person made the fish stock -- the bouilla -- and everyone else brought a pound of seafood -- the baisse. Since we were UUs, no two people brought the same thing, making it a 'delicious union of diversity.'"

As I've already said, it is a small story and the stakes are small except that they are big for the search committee members and for their congregation. I won't reveal how the search turns out, but I will say that I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this little novel.