Books read, early May

[mrissa]

Tanita S. Davis, A la Carte. Mainstream YA novel about a young woman who likes to cook and learns to make less crappy choices in friends. The cooking/baking stuff is all very vivid, but the (Wo)Man Who Learned Better plot is so very didactic that it’s not very much fun to read. It’s kind of like a Sarah Dessen novel that way, honestly. Not the

Comments

[brithistorian]

I'm familiar with Samuelsson from his time judging on Chopped, so I'll probably check out his book now that I know about it.

As for Tammet, I think you're right - I think he does think he's more unusual than he is. I first became aware of time around the time that Born on a Blue Day was published, and starting from the first of his writing that I read, I've have had an irrational, unexplainable dislike for him. ("Dislike" probably isn't quite the right word, but it's the best I can come up with right now.)

[mrissa]

Yeah, I don't really dislike the guy, I just...think that his default assumption is that he is So Weird And Wacky, and...you might want to do some research on that, dude.

[brithistorian]

Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm feeling. Sort of a "dude, you're not all that..."

[mrissa]

I couldn't remember whether you recommended it to me! That's the problem with my new computer system of getting library books. It's ten million times more convenient than the old way I had of having closely written pages with half the things on them crossed out and having to rewrite them and make sure I had them in my purse and like that. But in the old system I had annotations like, "Jo++" for "Jo really liked this" or "4th: PNH+ Elise~" for "this was mentioned on a 4th St. panel and Patrick liked it but Elise thought it was kind of meh." In this system, no annotations, just the books themselves.

[alecaustin]

I know it's been on my Amazon wishlist for a while, but we could well have encountered it via convergent evolution. As it were.

[ethelmay]

Yeah, I read A la Carte after I read about it on Rush-That-Speaks's blog ( http://rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com/449703.html ), and my reaction was much like yours.

[sam_t]

"...apparently had this dome, the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, planned without knowing how they were going to actually make it happen..."

Ahahaha. I think this attitude may have migrated to the software industry, although looking on the bright side, we don't usually have 'dome collapses, killing everybody' as a likely failure mode.