Table of Contents: From Breakfast With Anita Diamant to Dessert With James Patterson - a Generous Helping of Recipes, Writings and Insights From Today's Bestselling Authors Read Online Free

and lived in a motel for two months, until the draft was finished. It was a dreamlike, surreal time that I utterly treasure.
    Readers Frequently Ask Readers often ask why I left quotation marks out of Those Who Save Us . The answer, along with much more information about both novels, is on my website ( www.jennablum.com ), but the short version is this: I wanted the novel, which is so much about the persistence of memory, to have an austere, almost sepia atmosphere. The quotation marks, which are very lively pieces of punctuation, were like little firecrackers on the page and disturbed the book's tone, so I left them out. Some readers loved this. Others are much happier that my second novel, The Stormchasers , has quotation marks in it.
    One of my favorite in-person reader questions was posed at an event for which I'd gotten a big swirly updo. A woman in the audience stood up and asked, “Is that your real hair?” There are absolutely no questions I won't answer! (Yes, it was and is my real hair.)
    Books That Have Influenced My Writing
    Sophie's Choice , William Styron: I aspire to be Styron because his novels wed beautiful writing with moral substance.
    The Stand , Stephen King: Actually I like any of the very early King works, not because of the horror component but because he does such a great job of portraying what happens to people's psyches under duress. His imagination is so vivid and so extensive — and the man knows how to tell a story. Without a story, you've got only a bunch of pretty words. What I aim to do is provide my readers with a good story well told.
    Shining Through , Susan Isaacs: I love this book about a peppy everygirl-turned-spy in New York City and Germany during World War II. Another example of great storytelling — not letting the telling of the story get in the way of the story itself.
L UVERNE J OERG'S R OMMEGROD
    Makes about 12 (1-cup) servings
    Traditionally made at Christmas, with lots of cursing and complaining by the cook that her arms are about to fall off.
    My recipe is for a Norwegian Christmas pudding called rommegrod (pronounced “room-a-grout,” and indeed it could be mistaken for and function as grout). Rommegrod appears in my recent novel, The Stormchasers , as a favorite dessert of the novel's heroine and hero, Norwegian twins, Karena and Charles Hallingdahl.
    Legend has it that, in pioneer days on the plains, rommegrod was served not only at Christmas but also as a strengthener and curative. Norwegian settler women would give birth, be given a bowl of rommegrod, then get up out of bed and resume working in the fields.
    I would think this story was apocryphal if I had not myself witnessed the miraculous powers of rommegrod in action. In her late eighties, my grandmother Luverne Joerg broke her hip while living in farm-town Minnesota. Of course, this unhappy event would normally be seen as the beginning of the end, and indeed my grandmother developed pneumonia while she was in the hospital. It was the first time I had heard firsthand what is known as a “death rattle,” which sounded like a bicycle chain in her lungs every time she took a breath. She was failing fast, so much so that she was not expected to live the night. We called the family members in from New York and Arizona, as well as other parts of Minnesota, to say their goodbyes.
    While we were waiting, I said to my mom, Luverne's daughter, “Why don't we go to Decorah and get some rommegrod for her and see what happens?”
    Decorah, Iowa, is a Norwegian town that prizes its heritage, and one of the cafés there still offers the pudding. We drove three hours from Rochester, Minnesota, bought a take-out bowl of rommegrod, and returned to the hospital.
    I crushed my grandmother's medicines, which she had been otherwise unable to take, and stirred them into the rommegrod. Then I coaxed her to eat a bite, and another bite, and another. She managed about half a bowl.
    By the next morning, when my aunts and uncles arrived