Reading this book, I was reminded of a moment near the end of season 3 of Top Chef, when Casey presents her dish to the judges as a coq au vin inspired by memories of her grandmother. Tom Colicchio scolds her for calling the dish coq au vin when it wasn’t, but he also tells her it was a good dish and probably would have won the challenge if she had just called it what it was: chicken braised in wine. The moral of the […]
Good ole Nebraska U
This book took me completely by surprise. I mean, of course I knew I’d like it, since Rainbow Rowell is a favorite around these parts, but I had no idea it would hit so close to home. I added Fangirl to my wishlist along with a whole mess of other books at the beginning of my push to even out the male-female author ratio in my library. I knew the basic premise of the book but nothing about the author besides her gender, so when […]
Becky Chambers might be my new hero
Before I finished my last read, I started poking around in The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, trying to pick my next read, when I noticed the page “A special note from Becky Chambers” all the way in the back. I assumed it would be an acknowledgement page or maybe a teaser for an upcoming book or even just a note to her fans, but instead, Chambers included a note to encourage aspiring writers not to give up. The timing […]
Where I’m reminded expectations can kill
Ten years ago, I was preparing for summer calculus courses to fulfill prerequisites for graduate programs in biostatistics. Good times. I ended up getting in to a top (and very expensive) masters program on the east coast, and then I lasted two weeks into the second quarter before admitting I’d made a terrible mistake, packing my few possessions into a rental car, and driving myself back across the country to an unfamiliar Sacramento apartment my partner had rented after moving north from Los Angeles to […]
“I teach you to be warriors in the garden so you will never be gardeners of war”
After discovering that both my CBR 10 reading list and my personal library have been far-too-heavily skewed towards male authors, I was determined to make a correction, and I set out on my first trip away this year with a too-long wishlist that yielded a bonanza of books by women, sixteen in all, pictured here. I could easily have come home with twice as many but kept myself under control if only to avoid overweight baggage charges. After dinner on my second night in London, […]
Complexity should be your excuse for inaction
“The world is ending, as it always must. But the end of the world is getting faster.” This message is passed from a young girl to an elderly, dying Harry August late in his eleventh life. The trick is that Harry August can’t really die, at least not in the traditional sense. Each time he dies, he is reborn at exactly the same time and place to live his life again, recovering all memory of his past lives a few years into childhood. And he’s […]
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