litlover12

I promised to answer the questions you posed me sometime this weekend. And I've got a lot of writing to do, which means I've got some serious procrastination going on, so now's a good time. :-)

jenny_wildcat asked, "If you could recommend only one restaurant to take a group of friends to lunch, what would it be?"

We've got a lot of good restaurants around here, but I think I'll go with Mike's American Grill. It's close by, the prices aren't bad if you're all up for a nice meal, and the food is excellent. Plus there's something for almost everyone, which is important when you know as many picky eaters as I do. ;-) You can get steak or chicken, seafood, pasta, a huge salad, soup, etc., not to mention some great desserts! My best friend always begs to go there whenever she visits; she's crazy about their salmon. I don't care much for fish, except shellfish, but I love the roast chicken salad, or, if I have a few extra calories available, the Louisiana pasta. (Mike's is one of the Great American Restaurants, which is sort of a chain around here -- that is, their restaurants all have some things that are the same, but some things different. We took my mom to Artie's, another one of them, this Mother's Day weekend. Whichever one of these restaurants we go to, she always gets the crab cakes, which she swears are the best anywhere. I'm pretty fond of them too!)

sonneta asked, "If you could recommend only one Dorothy L. Sayers book, what would it be?" 

I'll have to go with Gaudy Night, even though it's next-to-last in the series. It was the first one of hers I read -- for a college course -- and the one that made me fall in love with her books and start reading every one I could get my hands on. And it wasn't too difficult to pick up on what had gone before. And it had Harriet Vane. I fell in love with her when she cursed (to herself) at some noisy students outside her room -- which is odd, because I never curse. But in my own college experience, it seemed as if people were allowed to make all the noise they wanted, whenever they wanted, and you were supposed to politely pretend it wasn't happening -- so I just loved how honest she was. :-) Besides all that, the Oxford setting was wonderful. When I got to go to Oxford, I went all over looking for locations that had been featured in the novel.

If you like to read a series from the beginning, you'll want to start with Whose Body?, but if you want to go for the best one first, Gaudy Night is my recommendation.