Marielle

Equal parts entertaining and insufferable.

Reasonably comprehensive, but I did struggle a bit with the non-chronological way Shapiro covers the scene.

"We're so much in our minds, waiting for something to happen, acting it out, that the body and the outer world might as well not exist, for all it concerns us."

This one goes out to all my depressed girlies

Want to give this a solid 3.5. The overall narrative and themes (authoritarianism, dystopia, 1984 etc etc etc) are well explored territory but this still felt like a fresh take. Something in the English translation felt a little too bluntly styled to me.

2.5 stars - problematic parts aside this was a fairly boring book with occasional strokes of genius. Guess you had to be there.

Super bingeable. At times cringe inducing in a good way. Other times painfully bad dialogue.

Actually... 3 months on from forcing myself to finish this book. I cannot believe that I put myself through all 720 pages. This read like some kind of fucked up trauma-porn fanfiction: characters thrown around like dolls through the most unfortunate circumstances of life one second, and then made to kiss in their materially perfect lives the next.

Maybe that's the point and I simply don't get it, or don't like it. It felt pitying and unempathetic.

Expert writing on the timeless phenomenon of getting dumped, drinking too much and dying your hair blonde.

Idk just kept going on about service design in the meta sense way too much. Like we get it. Service design is important and new(ish). I liked the last essay but all of the icons and annotation systems felt unnecessary and distracting which is a little bit alanis morissette voice ironic.

Starts off kind of promising and then devolves into a pile of self referential garbage. Couldn't wait for it to be over.

Nice recipes however the author (and publisher) definitely should have done some fact-checking on claims made about the environmental impact of eating ‘local'.

At several points in the book the author seems to posit that eating local and reducing food miles is the best thing we can do to reduce our impact on the climate - even going so far as to claim that eating locally raised grass-fed beef would be better than eating a processed vegan sausage that's been flown into the country.

This is completely false. Beef is by far the most carbon-intensive food we can eat, wherever it's grown, whatever it's fed, not matter no how. The carbon footprint of transporting most foods is fairly insignificant compared to what is required to produce it in the first place. ESPECIALLY BEEF. (See https://www.co2everything.com/co2e-of/beef or https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local or the book ‘How bad are bananas')

Spreading misinformation like this is is both unhelpful and easily avoided in the 21st century. Eating local is great for a variety of other reasons but a very weak argument for climate action - I get the feeling the author is more keen on morally demonising processed foods than coming to terms with this fact. :)