Is the French word légume masculine or feminine?

Who's asking: An anonymous Google searcher

Masculine; it's le légume, though one usually sees this noun in the plural (vegetables). People do come here looking for the oddest things.

Driving south tomorrow rather than today, as I'm still catching up on work and taking the car in for repairs this afternoon. The weather's lousy, so I'm better off driving tomorrow, anyway.

This week's major reading has been a 600+ page manuscript clean-up, plus a couple of smaller jobs. I also read some things that were not to my taste, which I'll skip over. But I read two books I liked:

What I Read This Week

Chris Mooney, The Missing. Darby McCormick becomes a criminalist with the Boston police after surviving an attack as a teenager that resulted in the disappearance of one of her best friends. Twenty years later, another young woman goes missing, and a woman is found -- the two events are related, and may even be connected to Darby's own attack. Lots of twists and turns, in the tradition of Kiss the Girls and Silence of the Lambs, though not as graphic. Darby's an excellent character, and I always admire male writers who write believable female protagonists.

Kerry Greenwood, The Green Mill Murder. I was talking about Australian writers earlier this week; here's a good one. Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series features an independent woman in 1920s and 1930s Australia, who flies her own plane and does what she likes. This time out, she's investigating a murder at a dance hall, which leads to a hunt for a long-missing Great War veteran. The murder becomes almost irrelevant to the story, but the plots of these books are so much less important than the chance to hang out with Phryne.