Erica Simmons
This is such a great cookbook! I love the premise: an ode to Krishna's mother, and to the types of Indian food that an Indian American family would make, with practical substitutions based on available ingredients and relatively quick, easy recipes for a working family. So far all of the recipes I have tried have been delicious: basic dal, sag “paneer” with feta cheese, aloo gobhi, and roasted cauliflower with green pea chutney. Most of the recipes are vegetarian, and a great way to clear out the vegetables in your fridge.
I had never heard of Alison Roman before this past month, when I kept seeing her referenced among key cooking resources during quarantine times. So I ordered her cookbook from my local independent bookstore. And it is... fine, but disappointing. A lot of the recipes are good but unnecessary - duplicative of what you'd find in Samin Nosrat or Ottolenghi books, but with a more minimalist Instagram aesthetic to the book design. Other recipes seem very basic - wow, let's cook asparagus in olive oil, salt, and pepper - or else unbalanced, with too much of some trendy ingredient (for instance, beets drowning in greek yogurt).
But beyond how unnecessary this book seems, I really didn't like Alison Roman's narrative persona. Starting the vegetables chapter with a photo of her, beautiful and blonde, walking through a produce market with the bold text, “When I was about seven or eight, I had a thing for supermarket shoplifting,” seemed to telegraph the entitled dilettante experimenting with others' livelihoods. And starting the chapter on fruit salads with the sentence, “Before you skip this chapter because of the idea of out-of-season berries, cubed melon, and halved grapes all tossed together really turns you off, just know that it turns me off, too,” also just came off as obnoxious and disdainful of how others eat.
My reaction to this book is of course heightened by her recent negative comments about other cookbook and lifestyle authors, but frankly her book already rubbed me the wrong way, and I think she should look inward before talking ill of others. Not saying I won't use any of her recipes in the future, but I've been reading a lot of cookbooks recently, and this one seems like the least necessary on my shelf.
One of my quarantine cooking projects is to utilize my cookbooks more systematically and explore them in depth. This has been my go-to for the past few weeks, and I've made some tasty dishes from it. I question how simple the recipes really are - maybe just less complex than Ottolenghi's typically lengthy ingredients lists - but paring down shopping lists is appropriate at the moment.
Now this cookbook I really did read cover-to-cover, and yet I haven't made anything out of it yet! I loved the comic book form - what a great way to provide visuals to illustrate complex cooking processes and the complex mix of flavors, temperatures, and textures that comprise a bowl of ramen. I learned so much about the history and culture of ramen, as well as how to understand everything that goes into a dish. And I do plan to try making some of the recipes myself!
I don't know what it means to have “read” a cookbook, but during this pandemic I've decided to go through my cookbooks more methodically. Instead of making a recipe here or there, I'm actually reading the introduction, and trying to be more systematic in making (and recording) a bunch of recipes from one cookbook.
Genius Recipes has been a go-to for me for a long time. The recipes tend to be simple but delicious, often with unique insight into flavor combinations or cooking techniques. A few of my favorites are Heidi Swanson's Chickpea Stew with Saffron, Yogurt, and Garlic and Moro's Warm Squash and Chickpea Salad with Tahini.
As a compilation cookbook, this book provides recipes from a bunch of different sources - which has the benefit of variety, but the downside that there isn't a common set of ingredients that the recipes share. Overall, this cookbook is a great resource with some of my favorite go-tos!
Okay, I thought this was an interesting book, but I'm really curious (and kind of disturbed) about why my very banal status updates regarding this book - and only this book - have been getting a ton of “likes” by people I don't know. Why have so many strangers liked that I added this to my “Want to Read” list, or that I added it to my “Currently Reading” list, or that I listed it as “Read” but did not rate it or give it a review? (And still, over a month after I finished the book?) WHY ARE SO MANY BOTS INTERESTED IN MY READING OF A BOOK ABOUT THE DYSTOPIAN INTENTIONS AND IMPACTS OF AUTOMATED SOCIAL SERVICES? Has anyone else noticed this? It's really creeping me out...
As a weird, only child from coastal Maine with a job I love that sends me traveling all over the country, the book makes me feel very seen. From observations about the video game / faux-family psychology of airline frequent flyer programs and becoming a “regular” at a hotel (and the simultaneous exhiliration and alienation of an itinerant lifestyle) to John Hodgman's life lessons from odd jobs, this memoir has a lot of insights that I related to. This book made me think critically about my own life in the way a great memoir can.
And to clarify, although this book is hyper-relatable for my own weird life, the book's larger messages - about kindness, empathy, curiosity, and being open to adventures but also honest with yourself and not letting yourself get too carried away from the relationships that really matter in your life - are much more universal.
Oh boy. What I knew of the premise of this book intrigued me - a dystopian future exploration of agriculture and biotechnology politics. What I did not know was how gruesomely violent and rapey it would be - in ways that felt unnecessary and exploitative. As in, not just depicting violence necessary to move the plot forward or adequately set the context, but eroticizing it.
At first I was confused - this book has gotten so much praise and awards, how could I hate it this much? And then I remembered this book was published in 2009, at a time when prestige TV was almost universally hyper-violent, around when a critic I follow said, “this is the golden age of television if you don't mind watching someone getting shot in the face,” and I opted for less prestigious comedies instead. So for the same reason I tapped out of Game of Thrones after watching 10 too many beheadings in the pilot (I didn't even make it to the gratuitous rape scenes in that show), this book is not for me. Maybe for other people, but not for me.
When I was in middle school, I spent many hours playing the computer game Where in Space is Carmen San Diego, and I voraciously memorized trivia about the planets and moons of our solar system (as well as the mythologies they were named after). This book - a stylish, beautifully designed fictional travel guide to the solar system - brought back fond memories of that game. This book is gorgeous and has some fun information in it. I definitely learned some new facts and got inspired by the crazy variety of environments that revolve around our sun.
My big complaint with this book is that it shares a shortcoming with a lot of “ain't it cool” science books and TV shows: it shares a lot of interesting facts about the solar system without really explaining why (what scientific forces or concepts explain these phenomena) or how we know about them. I suppose I'm asking for a drier, less approachable book, but I found the level of explanation lacking and want to look up more.
Oh, also - this book has amazing NASA images, but I wish they had included more. These were some of the best parts of the book!
A very deep dive into what it would be like to colonize Mars - the science, the engineering, the environmental politics (to terraform or not, and if so, what are the limits), the economics, and the interpersonal relationships. This book was fascinating, and at times very moving, but also very... long. Each section of this book is told from a different colonist's perspective. Some of those colonists I loved spending time with, and others I had a hard time tolerating. Overall a fascinating book, with depressing commentary on our own condition on Earth.
Oh boy, I did not like this book. First, the title - which almost put me off from reading the book entirely - and was weirdly never addressed in the book itself, but instead seemed like a catchy title cooked up by a publisher who thought it would sell. Which really reflects how weirdly tone-deaf this book can be. Although Troost provides a portrait of a place very few people have written about, and at times can be insightful about the challenges that Pacific nations like Kiribati face, his description of the nation and its residents is ultimately one-dimensional, and his tales of personal suffering as the husband of a foreign aid-worker getting by in this place seemed... insensitive.
I have such mixed feelings about this book. Mainly, I kept being confused: is this really a book extolling the progress of modern (19th century) life, or a satire of self-satisfied Victorians who think they've figured everything out, when really they're only a few decades away from owning slaves themselves, and will also appear deeply flawed in the long view of history? Or both? I think both, but really I found the narrator so much of an arrogant boor that it was a slog to get through.
I listened to the audiobook, which was very skillfully narrated by Nick Offerman, so I'm giving him an extra star.
I picked this book up because it combines a few of my interests - fisheries management and comic books! - without realizing it was written specifically for middle school / high school students. I'm not sure it really succeeds as a comic book - the illustrations didn't always feel very well integrated into what felt much more like a text book - but it was in informative explanation of the magnitude and complexity of global fisheries challenges. Reading a book like this makes me so sad, though, about the world we are leaving for our children.
This book is depressing and infuriating, but an important summary of the many ways that government actions at the federal, state, and local level supported or enforced housing segregation throughout the country. This book helped me understand my own neighborhood / city better, and the ways that systematically barring African Americans from the benefits of post-World War II housing and social programs has created injustices that perpetuate to this day.
Read on a weekend trip with a friend's family. I used to love Choose Your Own Adventure books when I was a kid and even got away with writing book reports about them in middle school! In this outing, I successfully turned myself into a unicorn, but it's not clear whether that actually saved my village, or if I'm happy about it. I did have to abandon all wishes to achieve this, so I guess this is a very neutral ending. ;-)
I was just in Skagway for work and figured it would be fun to read a contemporary description of the Klondike Gold Rush, in the form of this high-school-summer-reading-list-staple of a dog coming of age and discovering his wild, primordial self through kidnapping, abuse, enforced labor, and eventual freedom in the arctic wilderness. The politics of this book are... interesting? And much of the dog's-eye-view philosophizing is... verbose? But it is a fun glimpse into the crazy world, characters, and brutal exploitation of the gold rush, and what “the last great adventure” in “the last Frontier” meant for a rapidly industrializing Victorian public.
As a mediocre endurance athlete, I identified with a lot of this book, and it inspires me to get out there, even on bleh days. Murakami incisively describes the personality traits that motivate people who run crazy distances, and how it informs our approach to life and work (in his case writing). But it also could feel rote and banal, and at times like Star Trek's Data describing human behavior. Overall a good read.
