I read Under the Tuscan Sun last week while at home. It's a autobiographical account of a creative writing professor from California who buys a rundown Tuscan villa and renovates it, travelling and cooking some amazing food along the way, all with the help of her long-term partner. I found out today that it's been made into a movie for September (this year) release by Disney. The plot? A 30-something lawyer leaves her job, moves to Tuscany, and finds romance. Perhaps "made into a movie" is rather strong language for such a plot. It's safer to say that the movie was "loosely based" on the book of the same name.

Speaking of movies based on books, Michael Crichton's Timeline, which I read thanks to my German teacher loaning it to me after she heard I studied medieval technology, will be coming out in movie-form in November. My hopes for the movie version are not high, but then again, Crichton writes his books so that they are easy to turn into movies these days. Trivia: one of my advisor's books is cited in Crichton's footnotes for the book.

I also reread the Dirk Gently books while I was at home since I hadn't read them in so many years that I couldn't remember the plots anymore.

Meanwhile, the postal service delivered the last of my outstanding Indigo book orders today: James Dyson's A History of Great Inventions. (Yes, that's the Dyson of vacuum cleaner fame.) It's actually fairly well done, given its target audience, as long as you ignore the dust jacket blurbs, and all the section titles, subtitles, and precise dates which are given for each and every invention on back into the far reaches of history past. And it has lots of pretty pictures.