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Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled …
I found this touching and hopeful, I liked how poignantly the characters were drawn, and the themes of kindness and the vicissitudes of life.
My main complaint was that I think the simulation theory stuff was basically an unnecessary macguffin and didn't add to the themes (at least as far as they interested me).
I found this book a little disappointing because of how it's organized and how much of baking it tries to cover. It starts out with a ton of information about baking as a profession, tools, and technical information about baking (like tables of different gelling agents, and bread techniques and terminology). All of that information is really good, well curated, and clear, but I wished that the techniques specific to certain kinds of baking were placed with the recipes, rather than all together at the beginning. It also spends a lot of time, understandably, on professional bread techniques, and a lot less on pastry techniques. It feels at times like a bread book with some pastry recipes included.
There are tons of recipes, but often they are variants on a theme (like banana, chocolate, or lacenut tuiles) but no basic recipe and no information on how to modify the recipe …
I found this book a little disappointing because of how it's organized and how much of baking it tries to cover. It starts out with a ton of information about baking as a profession, tools, and technical information about baking (like tables of different gelling agents, and bread techniques and terminology). All of that information is really good, well curated, and clear, but I wished that the techniques specific to certain kinds of baking were placed with the recipes, rather than all together at the beginning. It also spends a lot of time, understandably, on professional bread techniques, and a lot less on pastry techniques. It feels at times like a bread book with some pastry recipes included.
There are tons of recipes, but often they are variants on a theme (like banana, chocolate, or lacenut tuiles) but no basic recipe and no information on how to modify the recipe yourself or what makes the modifications work. The pastry recipes aren't terribly well organized, not much time gets devoted to different types, and there are big omissions (like macarons).
I think it is just too ambitious to have a single book about "baking and pastry"!
After years of seeing her sisters suffer at the hands of an abusive prince, Marra—the …
hoping this will be engrossing enough to distract me from being sick
The Actual Star takes readers on a journey over two millennia and six continents —telling …
This was really good!! Wow
Anvi, Kate, Bette, Keiko, Gaia, and Day are six queer, mostly trans women surviving and …
I really enjoyed this, and was very impressed with how well the verse worked! Real "if you've read Nevada and Detransition Baby..." energy (although personally I enjoyed it more than the latter)
Y: The Last Man meets The Girl With All the Gifts in Gretchen Felker-Martin's Manhunt, …
Too scary for me
Qven was created to be a Presger translator. The pride of their Clade, they always …
I didn't think this was one of the stronger books in the series
Qven was created to be a Presger translator. The pride of their Clade, they always …
So pleased to be here
The Thin Man (1934) is a detective novel by Dashiell Hammett, originally published in the …
The movie is better.
Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned …
Dryly funny and endearing. I read this in one sitting last night and I've been thinking about how fun it was throughout the day
Piranesi's house is no ordinary building; its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls …
This is one of the few books I feel like I can re-read forever; this will be my third pass
The discovery of the fascinating and richly documented story of Sister Benedetta Carlini, Abbess of …
Somewhat surprisingly for a book randomly found in a thrift store, this was interesting, accessible, and short (about 130 pages minus appendices). It was a fun way to meditate on ins and out of trying to understand people in history, in general and specifically in regard to morality and sexuality, as a person who can't escape their own subconscious contemporary context and also as a person with a very conscious perspective.
The discovery of the fascinating and richly documented story of Sister Benedetta Carlini, Abbess of …
I have now been informed that there is a Verhoeven movie based on this book??
The discovery of the fascinating and richly documented story of Sister Benedetta Carlini, Abbess of …
This is really fun so far!
This really didn't do it for me! I think part of that is that I'm not wild about romances and this was a romance. A big complaint for me is that the romantic leads behave so constantly and consistently we've-been-to-therapy correctly towards each other that I found their interactions tedious and didactic. It felt moralizing to me ("observe, this is the correct way to handle an emotion"), but I think it was intended to be more of a wish fulfillment love story ("imagine if you dated someone this emotionally mature"). Also everyone is described as being super hot and I did not enjoy that.
The heroes behaved perfectly in every situation and the villains were over-the-top horrible in every situation, and even though the moral stakes were ones I agree with (don't sexually assault people, don't be homophobic, don't murder people), I was put off by the black-and-white-ness of the …
This really didn't do it for me! I think part of that is that I'm not wild about romances and this was a romance. A big complaint for me is that the romantic leads behave so constantly and consistently we've-been-to-therapy correctly towards each other that I found their interactions tedious and didactic. It felt moralizing to me ("observe, this is the correct way to handle an emotion"), but I think it was intended to be more of a wish fulfillment love story ("imagine if you dated someone this emotionally mature"). Also everyone is described as being super hot and I did not enjoy that.
The heroes behaved perfectly in every situation and the villains were over-the-top horrible in every situation, and even though the moral stakes were ones I agree with (don't sexually assault people, don't be homophobic, don't murder people), I was put off by the black-and-white-ness of the characters.
While the author has put a lot of thought into gender and sexuality, even if I found it ultimately shallow, I found the near total absence of a critique of power and class to be pretty uncomfortable.
That said, it wasn't hard to read, and if you wanted a comforting romance about healing from assault (which, fair warning, is very graphic, though not imo gratuitous), it might be for you. And I really liked that the protagonists spend the whole book trying to solve a mystery and do an absolutely abysmal job at it.