Horseradish:  Prepared horseradish has nothing to do with horses and it is not a radish (it’s a member of the mustard family).  The name may have come from an English adaptation of its German name.  In early times the plant grew wild in European coastal areas; the Germans called it meerrettich, or sea radish.  The German word meer sounds like mare in English.  Perhaps mareradish eventually became horseradish.  The word horseradish first appeared in print in 1597 in John Gerarde’s English herbal on medicinal plants.  Green Goddess Dressing:   mixture of mayonnaise, anchovies, tarragon vinegar, parsley, scallions, garlic, and other spices was created at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel in the 1920’s for actor George Arliss, who stayed there while performing in The Green Goddess, a play that later became one of the earliest "talkie" movies.  Thousand Island:  Made from bits of green olives, peppers, pickles, onions, hard-boiled eggs and other finely chopped ingredients, this chunky dressing is said to commemorate the Thousand Islands in the Saint Lawrence River.  Salad:  Comes from the Latin herba salta or "salted herbs", so called because such greens were usually seasoned with dressings containing lots of salt.  Salad Days:  Refers to a time of youthful inexperience, a term coined by Shakespeare, whose Cleopatra characterizes her long-ago romance with Julius Caesar as one occurring in "my salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood."  Source: Ladyfingers & Nun’s Tummies--A Lighthearted Look at How Foods Got Their Names by Martha Barnette  https://www.dressings-sauces.org/history-salad-dressings 

Russian dressing is a salad dressing invented in Nashua, New Hampshire, by James E. Colburn, likely in the 1910s.  Typically piquant, it is today characteristically made of a blend of mayonnaise and ketchup complemented with such additional ingredients as horseradish, pimentos, chives and spices.  It is unknown either in authentic or modern Russian cuisine.  A variation is known as red Russian dressing, and is very much like Catalina or French dressing.  In Russia it is originally known as ketchunaise (mixture of words 'ketchup' and 'mayonnaise').  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_dressing

Gene Luen Yang is a graphic novelist and cartoonist whose work for young adults demonstrates the potential of comics to broaden our understanding of diverse cultures and people.  Yang has produced full-length graphic novels, short stories, and serial comics, many of which explore present-day and historical events through a contemporary Chinese American lens.  In American-Born Chinese (2006), Yang integrates tropes from American comics, Chinese folklore, and the Chinese immigrant experience.  In an ambitious two-volume work of historical fiction entitled Boxers and Saints (2011), Yang chronicles the peasant uprising against Western influences in China in 1900.  The story of the Boxer Rebellion is told from two contrasting points of view.  Having written much of his work while employed as a high school computer science teacher, Yang recognizes the instructional value of comics.  He is currently writing a series of graphic novels, Secret Coders (2015­– ), that cleverly introduces computer coding within an engaging mystery plot.  In these and other projects, such as the New Super-Man series, Yang is leading the way in bringing diverse characters to children’s and young adult literature and confirming comics’ place as an important creative and imaginative force within literature and art.  Gene Luen Yang received a B.S. (1995) from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. (2003) from California State University at East Bay.  From 1998 to 2015, he taught computer science and served as director of information services at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland, California.  His additional publications include The Shadow Hero (2014) and Level Up (2011), and he has written for Avatar: The Last Airbender.  Yang has taught in Hamline University’s MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults since 2012 and is currently serving as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature (2015–2016).  https://www.macfound.org/fellows/975/

Authors the Muser is grateful for:

Barbara Pym  (1913-1980)

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Richard George Adams (1920-2016)

Barbara Kingsolver (born 1955)

Walter Isaacson  (born 1952) 

John Tracy Kidder (born 1945) 

Laura Hillenbrand (born 1967)

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)

Mario Vargas Llosa (born 1936)

Gabriel García Márquez  (1927 or 1928-2014) 

NOTE that Mario Vargas Llosa called One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, published in Buenos Aires in 1967, a "literary earthquake."

More than 27,000 images from Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez’s archive are now online.  A significant portion of the archive is accessible, including materials from all of García Márquez’s works of fiction, 22 personal scrapbooks and notebooks, a memoir, screenplays, photographs and ephemera.  View at http://hrc.utexas.edu/ggmdigital.  “Anyone with access to the internet can have an in-depth look at García Márquez’s archive,” said Jullianne Ballou, Ransom Center project librarian.  “Spanning more than a half century, the contents reflect García Márquez’s energy and discipline and reveal an intimate view of his work, family, friendships and politics.”  Since the archive opened for research in 2015, it has become one of the Harry Ransom Center’s most frequently circulated collections.  This digitization and access project, “Sharing ‘Gabo’ with the World:  Building the Gabriel García Márquez Online Archive from His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center,” was supported by a Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).  The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  The online archive is available through the Ransom Center’s digital collections portal, which makes accessible more than 80,000 images from the Ransom Center’s holdings.  For more information, contact:  Jennifer Tisdale, Harry Ransom Center, 512-471-8949; Suzanne Krause, Harry Ransom Center, 512-471-6406.  https://news.utexas.edu/2017/12/12/images-from-gabriel-garc-a-m-rquez-archive-now-online

The 100 Best Novels in English by Robert McCrum brings together all the entries in the very popular Observer series which ran for over two years, finishing in August 2015.  In chronological order the book lists those works which the author judges to be the best 100 novels in the English language (spanning the entire world) from the 18th century to modern times.  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/17/the-100-best-novels-written-in-english-the-full-list

100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time, Robert McCrum's guide to the 100 greatest nonfiction books in English.  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/31/the-100-best-nonfiction-books-of-all-time-the-full-list  "Many of these books can be found in or via public libraries.  In fact I hope that libraries up and down the land will use this list to create related displays of books from which users can borrow immediately.  If the libraries are to be saved they need to be used.  An excellent way to start 2018 would be for many people to drop in and borrow a few from the list and the comments.  Use the libraries or lose them."

The Greatest Books is a list generated from 114 "best of" book lists from a variety of great sources.  An algorithm is used to create a master list based on how many lists a particular book appears on.   http://thegreatestbooks.org/

Find recipes, ideas, tips quotes, and book recommendations from Jessica Wode at  https://www.pinterest.com/jessicawode/books-reading/

A tautological name has two parts that are redundant, or synonymous.  Tautological place names usually come about when more than one language goes into the name.  Some California examples that mix Spanish and English are Laguna Lake (Lake Lake) and Lake Lagunita (Lake Little Lake).  The Pendle in Pendle Hill is derived from Pen-hyll, a combination of the Cumbric word for hill and the Old English word for hill.  So Pendle Hill is really Hill Hill Hill.  Find Minnehaha Falls (Waterfall Falls) and Sahara Desert (Deserts Desert) plus other redundant place names at http://mentalfloss.com/article/50004/11-totally-redundant-place-names

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1820  January 3, 2018  On this date in 1749, Benning Wentworth issued the first of the New Hampshire Grants, leading to the establishment of Vermont.  On this date in 1749,  the first issue of Berlingske, Denmark's oldest continually operating newspaper, was published.  On this date in 1861, Delaware voted not to secede from the United States.  On this date in 1870, construction of the Brooklyn Bridge began.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_3  Thought for Today  Not all those who wander are lost. - J.R.R. Tolkien, novelist and philologist (3 Jan 1892-1973)