Books Completed July 2023

 

 

 

Lackadaisy Essentials, by Tracy J. Butler - This was part of a Kickstarter campaign reward for backing the first animated short. I don't even remember how I heard about Lackadaisy but I feel like I've been following it forever. This is a fun book of extras that shows off Butler's expertise in conveying expression and emotion through illustration. A lot of it is reprints from web extras, but that's fine.

Baking Yesteryear, by B. Dylan Hollis - I was seized by a strange urge to get a new cookbook a few months ago. Not that I'm running out, mind you, I have a built-in bookcase of them. Well this was my runner-up, which I passed over for another, but then my mom happened to send it to me as a gift so that worked out well! I've only seen a couple of his videos that were the foundation for this book, and liked them well enough -- people who self-identify as "zany" usually aren't people I'd keep chatting with at a party. But these recipes are fun, even though I don't bake very much at all, and the little inclusion of select horrifying recipes from community cookbooks over the past century struck a special place in my own hording heart.

The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, by Sean Sherman with Beth Dooley - Now this is the cookbook I did choose. An educational (for me) exploration of foods and cooking methods native to North America. I don't know if I'll ever be able to actually cook any of these -- I get basically all my groceries delivered since the pandemic started, and most of the recipes call for things I've never seen available on stopandshop.com . I still really enjoyed reading it though, and it gave me a lot of ideas and things to keep an eye out for.

Marvels, by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross - Pulled off the shelf at random. I've read this many times over the years. I'm not a very big superhero comics fan, but the execution and scope of this one continues to impress. My favorite bit is still when the spread of mutants hits the "comfortable suburbs" by route of a throwback to a 50s horror comic that I actually remember happening to read as a teenager well before reading this.

Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning, by The Gardeners and Farmers of Centre Terre Vivante - No idea where I got this book. It's barely recipes, more a collection of techniques by a French food collective with a health food bent. Not recalling anything earth-shattering in this one, but I've read a few books on this subject by now. It would be a useful introduction to the subject probably, given its breadth. They do frequently do the health-food thing where they laud the value of one of these recipes for having "no added sugar", but proceed to concentrate some fruit to basically pure sugar through simmering or drying... it's all about the concentration, guys.

Because Internet, by Gretchen McCulloch - This one has been on my radar for years and I finally picked up a copy. The timing could not have been weirder - this book only came out 4 years ago, and it simply could not have been written now since it relied so heavily on Twitter having an API, which was burning down as I was reading. Separately from that I much enjoyed the history of emojis, and the closing arguments about viewing language as a communal process rather than some set of formal, inviolate decrees.

Nation, by Terry Pratchett - A little free library find by one of my favorite authors. I was only barely aware of the existence of this one, but I'm quite glad to have picked it up. It's a young adult book, so was a pretty quick read, but it touches on topics of nation building, faith, language, ancestry, and colonialism all with Pratchett's trademark wit and charm. I'm probably going to get my niece a copy for her birthday next month and start her down the Pratchett trail early.

Delicious in Dungeon Vol. 6-10, by Ryoko Kui - A birthday gift from my wife -- she gave me the first five last year. I'm still impressed by Kui's ability to portray such varied subjects with impact, from delicious looking food made with impossible ingredients to genuinely unsettling faces of doubt and anguish. It's a ride. Plus the plans the adventurers come up with really do remind me of the bonkers kind of stuff you can come up with at the gaming table. I hear the series is publishing its final issue in Japan soon and looking forward to seeing how this wraps up.

Cod, by Mark Kurlansky - Here's one with a bit of personal history. My senior year of college I found a copy of this in the trash in my dorm and read it. I then gave it to my girlfriend at the time (now wife), who found it so striking she changed the topic of her senior thesis towards maritime research. Anyway, it came up in conversation with a neighbor a while back so I decided to revisit. Kurlansky is really talented at weaving all these disparate threads of history into a cohesive narrative, all without having the book collapse into a glut of factoids, like a lot of popular history books seem to. This was published in 1997: I should go look at the state of the ecology he described as precarious back then. It's probably not great, is it?

Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett - Two Pratchetts in one month. For some reason bits and bobs of this one, which I last read I don't know how many years ago, had been bubbling up to the top of mind over the past year and change, so I pulled it off the shelf. Still holds up, though this is one of the earlier Discworld stories, and some rough edges show, at least compared to the later stuff. Specifically, the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions feel like real hollow villains compared to the introduction of The Auditors.