A year or so ago I checked in with my good friend Diane, who wanted to know how I had spent a recent afternoon without my children. To her approval, I shared that I had spent the afternoon at the local independent bookstore and had walked away with a treasure. A fellow reader, she got that twinkle in her eye as she asked me what I had brought home. "Two cookbooks" I said, having spent an hour or so in the bowels of the small bookstore basement, perusing, getting lost really, in their cookbook section. Her response was unexpected. "Oh," she said, her expression almost sinking. You did? It's laughable to me now, though at the time I felt a little bit of shame (though none was intended from her) at having spent my precious moments looking at cookbooks instead of poetry (what she expected me to have looked at) or fiction (what she would've liked to have looked at)...I felt a bit sheepish, like the good fiction student who goes through the whole of his graduate