After a month and a half of moaning and groaning, I’ve finally reached the end of my backlog — the last four books I read in 2009, for a grand total of 244.

I realize the problem now– reading the 244 books is easy; reviewing every one of them is another matter. I’d be happy if I can blog half as fast as I read, but try as I might, it’s a tall order. I can multi-task reading, but blogging about them takes my full attention, and I try to squeeze it in when I have time to spare, a luxury I haven’t had much of since the year started. I’m definitely not complaining; blogging has its own rewards, and I’ve enjoyed a whole year of blogging about the books I’ve read; but I think I’ll have to strategize better to achieve my next goal: to catch up on blogging my January and February readings by March.

Here are the last four books for 2009 (and a big sigh of relief from me!), all of them comic in nature. As you may have noticed, I steered clear of text-heavy books towards the end of the year, and this is the last batch of them:  Chas Addams’ Half Baked Cookbook by Charles Addams; Fruits Basket by Natsuki Takaya (leftover from the October 24-hour readathon); and the first two volumes of the detective Conan manga, Case Closed 1 and 2 by Gosho Aoyama.

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After a tumultuous January, I’m now back to regular blogging, hoping to make up for lost time and eventually clear the blogging backlog, which is now down to twenty books, including those from January!

It’s been a while since I’ve done a foodie review (I really enjoy foodie books!), so today’s review covers two delightful foodie books I enjoyed last year: Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found by Bill Keaggy and The Breakfast Cereal Gourmet by David Hoffman (books 132-133 for 2009).

Both are fully illustrated foodie books that were awesome bargain bin finds, each of them roughly P70 (less than US$1.50).

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