Erin

This book had pluses and some minuses.

The Good:
- I love a hyper-specific memoir that delves into a time, place, or subculture with a lot of detail and heart. Alvin absolutely achieves that.
- The sprinkles of political and philosophical questions in the sea of AIDS and glitter and New Wave are great, and give the memoir a sense of wider reflection.
- At the end, I really felt like this was a love story / elegy / processing of Alvin and Diet's relationship more than anything else. This is a good thing, and had the author dispensed with the rest and focused on this, it would have been just as strong a work if not stronger.
- There can never be too much queer memoir, and I treasure every added story.

The Less Good:
- The tone is a little to journalistic/flat in parts. I can understand the urge to document what happened in light of so few folks being left, but the strongest moments were the most interpersonal rather than the detailed descriptions of club nights.
- “Eventually, time worked its magic on my brain. My memories of the plague years faded to the point where they seemed like a chapter from a history text” - unfortunately, some of the resulting memoir read like said history text. I would have preferred Alvin cover less ground but dig a bit more deeply into certainly anecdotes. I know that this is a fraught suggestion for an author who seems to be quite earnestly enumerating memories for posterity. I liked the introspective, interpersonal, and philosophical (Antimony/Antinomy, Seven New Types of Sadness, etc) best of all, and more of these ruminations would have been welcome. I thought the more stylistic moments were great, but overwhelmed by the plodding through of time.


I would still recommend it, as it totally delivers on “Adventures in the Queer Underground: 1977-1997” it just didn't reach the level of being writing I enjoyed for its own sake. The stories here are good, the delivery is earnest but could be improved.

[Thanks for the ARC, Three Rooms Press and LibraryThing!]

While there are some gems in this collection and it serves as a good supplement to other Tolkien criticism / the 12 History of Middle Earth volumes, its index is quite limited in usefulness and the volume would greatly benefit from an updated organizational apparatus.

This was great. It made me cry. Yeah, it's a may/december romance between a 70-something and a thirty-something, but it's also just about loneliness, nostalgia, modernity, and being outside the flowing stream of society. The sex is one throwaway vague sentence, which suited me just fine. I'm here for the quiet vulnerability and the power of eating and drinking between humans. ¯

_(ツ)_/¯ can't explain why I liked it so much, but there it is. 

Poetic musing, subtle deadpan, a cohesive philosophy of living, and excellent cooking advice. Sure, there's a run of that holier-than-thou Chez Panisse privilege and ego, but not enough to fully turn me off. It's written by someone who clearly wants to be thought of as not just intelligent, but cultured. Take from that what you will.

Despite those pretensions, this was extremely my shit.

Tamar Adler is not, however, as some have claimed, the second coming of MFK Fisher. Sorry ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Fisher has this lightening-in-a-bottle wit that really invites the reader in, whereas Adler has some good things to say but over-mixes her writing to a too-stiff peak.

I feel a little bit conflicted about this book.

The magical mechanics were compelling, and I actually liked the I/we switching and didn't find it confusing (and it was enough to make the slow revelation sensical and not jarring). On the other hand, it was WAY too wordy; while fun enough to read, Griffin's no Hardy or Melville in the descriptive realm. This would've been much more satisfying at 300-400 pages instead of 610. It started interestingly enough, then sort of sagged, but Oda breathed some live and interpersonal conflict into the story and kept me from giving up a third of the way through. If anything, this book was too much plot and not enough characterization and personal interactions, but it got a bit more emotionally compelling towards the end, so I might as well give the second book in the series a good.

All in all, enough interesting magical details to keep me reading, but it made me long for a good character study.

This is a collection of already published essays, and largely a rehashing of what Prose covered in “Reading like a Writer” a decade before.

Zzz.

Uninviting. Too few photos, lack of (useful) recipe context and explanations, cutesy descriptions (really, girly jam?!), and just not really engendering a desire to experiment or make effort.

Meh.

Same thoughts as I have about Milk Street Tuesday Nights, but the Table of Contents structure is slightly less appealing.

I think this one suffers a bit in translation.

100+ recipes, and I flagged 15. To me, that's not a great proportion. The food in this cookbook isn't up my alley, and the writing is not as clear and engaging as cookbooks I've loved.

I was most taken my Meike's various bitter greens salads and dressings. The flavor combinations sound interesting, and they were the recipes in the book that most excited me.

ymmv, as there's quite a bit of meat in the middle, which isn't a fault of the book, jut not a good match for me.

very short. i wanted vastly more depth and more personal anecdotes.

I have previously talked a lot of shit about Christopher Kimball as a food personality and presumed that the stodginess of ATK was mostly his doing.

But by god the man did some traveling and with the help of his hardworking and too-subtly billed team has published a cookbook full of mildly international dishes with a fuck ton of anchovies, fish sauce, and other umami bombs.

This cookbook is super-high utility for a pescatarian with a little bit (but not too much) evening cooking time on her hands. Would recommend. Everything I've cooked so far has been good.

Way to go, dude.

DNF. Don't know if it's the writing or the translation, but the prose is so stilted and lifeless. The first chapter was especially painful. Gave up at the 50% mark. I just didn't care about the characters or the setting.

Really like the slow movement from red and black to full color. It was great. The translation felt a little bit stilted, but it didn't impact how relatable or enjoying I found this. Lucy reviewed it on her Instagram, which is how I found out about it. 

So funny, so dark, so timely (even now).

leeeeetle dated

Alright, so this dude has a little bit of the organic hipster Brooklyn sickness, but that doesn't take away from the quality of this cookbook's concept and execution.

1. Errything in a bowl
2. Asian/ish
3. Vegetarian
4. Seasonally focused.

I'm particularly down with his choice to have a spring/summer/autumn/winter version of most of the main recipes (ramen, pho, bibimbap, dumplings) - it's a good way to try to teach readers about variations on a theme. Having a basic recipe down and improvising based on seasonal ingredients is a winning strategy for making your learning stretch as far as possible.

But look, if you're not reallllly vegetarian, put bonito in yr dashi. it brings you closer to god. lol.

So funny, so dark, so timely (even now).

Read this immediately after [b:Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion 43126457 Trick Mirror Reflections on Self-Delusion Jia Tolentino https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1544069605l/43126457.SY75.jpg 66925717], and boy, what a contrast. Jenny writes with actual substance, and while her prognosis of the world is still (imo realistically) grim, her musings include some cause for hope and action. I thought this book threaded the needle of being both academic-adjacent and accessible rather well. At each moment where I began to roll my eyes at Odell's privilege, she headed me off at the pass and addressed it. A good read, recommend.

This was a great read, but also made me want to drink. 🙃

Given its time and place, this is a pretty good cookbook. Very thorough. Especially imagining it as a counterpoint to the often overly cheesy (literal and figurative) vegetarian cookbooks of the 70s an 80s.

Still, at this point, I think her translations are more than we need (Bean Curd vs. Tofu for example) – and can make googling for variations a bit of a chore.

I love Madhur Jaffrey, but this isn't my favorite of hers.

what can I say? i love animism and I love object curation.

Time track.
Waste less time.
Assess priorities.
Do important things in the morning.
Because willpower is a gas tank.

This sure as hell did not need to be a book.

really not into the many-page group interview as a format.

This is the only of her cookbooks I had yet to read, mostly because the whole “low fat lose weight” thing is hella fraught.

But as always, Isa has some damn good (and relatively easy to make) vegan recipes. I should have just read this on faith that it would align with her overall vibe and tone.

Some fun and interesting history tidbits, but this falls into the “extended wikipedia article” style of so many pieces of academic writing that have been edited for semi-public consumption.

Not an engaging writing style, and while it claims to be “a history,” it was still lacking in thesis/a narrative engine to drive it.