Author: Glib Staff

Another last Friday of the month and another scramble to present ourselves as citizens of the world: growing intellectually and emotionally by exposing ourselves to the ideas and experiences of others to better understand that which exists outside of ourselves and empathize with those who think, feel and live differently than we do…and also a lot of genre fiction, mostly because of Brett.

SP

So I picked up Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe by Lisa Randall. With a title and subtitle like that, one might think this is going to contain groundbreaking research. This is, after all, written by someone who, “studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University.”

Well, here is what the author says just two pages in: “This book explores a speculative scenario in which my collaborators and I suggest that dark matter might ultimately (and indirectly) have been responsible for the extinction of the dinosaur.”

You know WHO ELSE had collaborators!

OMWC

Unpacking our books, I ran across one I hadn’t read in decades, Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark. In theory, this is a book about critical thinking, examining people’s beliefs regarding alien abductions, faith healing, ESP, spirit mediums, “recovered memory” as part of the Satanic Panic of that time, and many more. Sagan’s continuing theme is that we do not educate our kids well enough for them to develop an effective bullshit filter, and that they don’t learn science properly, it being taught as a collection of facts rather than as a process of arriving at truth (or at least a better approximation of truth). There’s a lot of good stuff packed in there, but it’s difficult to resist yelling and throwing the book across the room since it assumes that teaching must be done by government schools staffed by highly paid government indoctrinators. If only he had examined THAT assumption critically… Lot of gratuitous swiping at religion, much of it deserved, much of it just for effect and moral preening. And somehow, he skims over the evil Janet Reno’s role in sending innocent parents and teachers to jail for secret child sex rituals. Bleh. Read James Randi’s Flim Flam instead.

Twenty years ago, when Food Network was actually about cooking and teaching, there was a wonderful show called Taste, hosted by David Rosengarten. Each week, Rosengarten would take a single ingredient, teach about it, and demonstrate several dishes to feature it. It was stark, simple, no bullshit, and a delight to watch if you were serious about upping your cooking game. I bought his Dean & Deluca Cookbook, and it rapidly became of one of my go-to books when tackling something new. Something bad must have happened because Taste vanished without a trace. Rosengarten hasn’t, though, and I have been reading It’s All American Food for pleasure and to get ideas on things to cook and how to cook them. Like me, it’s divided into two main sections, the first being American takes on ethnic cuisines (where we twist, bend, and blend dishes into something unrecognizable to its native land, but somehow even more delicious because of the mixing of influences- appropriation, if you will), and the second being regional American cuisines, a concept foreign to non-Americans, who generally don’t understand the rich variety of our geographically diverse foods and cooking methods. Well fuck those Euro-weenie snobs, America is a food paradise, and this book is a celebration of that.

jesse.in.mb

Morieux and Tollman – Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexiy without Getting Complicated: Part of my friend’s “Ha, you’re in charge of people…well, let’s fix you” series. Six Simple Rules is short but dense and occasionally feels obtuse, but the ideas that landed have provided immediate paths forward for problems I’d thought were intractable. I see myself referencing the concluding chapter and the rule summaries repeatedly while I struggle through the implications of some of the denser sections.

Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, Switzler – Crucial Conversations I have mixed feelings about this one. It starts off overly self-helpy and frequently praises its own efficacy as part of the way it describes thinking about how you enter into necessarily intense conversations with others. I probably would not have read it if my friend (who has trained with this group professionally) had not pushed it as hard as she did (still trying to fix me), but I’m also glad that I did. It’s helped me avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of saying nothing to avoid conflict and being pushy when I think I’m right in both my personal and professional life and I’ve passed it on to a few friends and coworkers where appropriate. (I was almost done with this one last month but not quite there).

Recipes for the Cuisinart: Food Processor by James Beard: So I was trying to track down a brioche loaf recipe that I used to make when I first started baking. Everything goes in the food processor, rise, punch down, shape into a loaf and let it rise again. Apparently this recipe was ultimately James Beard’s fault from a midcentury cookbooks put out by Cuisinart. I had to have it. While I was messing around on this front I also picked up America’s Test Kitchen – Food Processor Perfection. I’d recommend the latter over the former although the recipes look solid in the Beard one, they’re also largely midcentury. The best bit was Beard takes a bunch of standard recipes and shows how the device can be more effectively used to speed it up rather than following the recipe as linearly. The ATK one seemed a bit obvious until I started hitting how to effectively slice and grind meat. The BF and I have done bulgogi from thinly shaved tritip, meatballs from short ribs and flap meat and a chuck roast lasagna that have each been spectacular. The food processor managed to steal precious counter space from the Kitchenaid this month.

Kevin Panetta (author) and Savanna Ganucheau (Illustrator) – Bloom: Cute gay bildungsroman centered on a family bakery in a small east coast town.

JW

Genji Monogatari by Murasaki Shikibu. Riven promised tentacles and busty women in school uniforms, but this is just an erudite exploration of the psychology of characters who are both alien in their setting, but contemporary and fresh in the way that the author addresses them as fully realized players in their world. While I’d conten-Oh! Beach volleyball. Later gators.

SugarFree

I read a lot of things here and there this month, but the highlight was definitely Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands, a novel that contains all the fluids a body can produce, and in excessive amounts. Either a brilliant dissection of the constraints patriarchy places of women’s bodies or a disgusto-porn novel put out by a respectable publisher, it is a pretty wild ride; Walt Whitman taken to the logical extreme:

Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with
doctors and calculated close,
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

Riven

Well, I didn’t manage to get to the books I said I’d hoped to read this month in our last “What Are We Reading.” Wah wah. But it was tax season! And my birthday! And other excuses! Also, I had some personality conflicts at work, which I complained about at length to jesse.in.mb. He said he had been reading this one book, and it had been really helpful for him. So, I also have been reading Crucial Conversations. I have not yet finished it but I’ve tried to using some of the things I have read about at work, and it has been massively helpful. I agree with jesse.in.mb’s thinking above: pretty self-helpy and self-congratulatory so far. I am hoping to actually finish it in May, but even if I don’t, I’m pleased with what I have taken away from it up to this point.

Can you believe JW believed me? I’m always promising tentacles and busty women in school uniforms–you’d think he would have learned by now.

mexican sharpshooter

This month the best book I read was about a cat named Pete, or Pete the Cat if you will.  Today he made a big lunch.  Most people think Pete is a child–he’s not.  He’s a total stoner and if you need proof, here is a photo of the stoned kitty.

Now Pete was hungry for lunch, and he discovered the sandwich he made was far too large for even Pete with the munchies.  He just kept adding things between two slices of bread until he realized he just had a giant stack of food between two pieces of bread.

So he invited a couple buddies over, and they each got a piece of the sandwich.

Has it been a month already? Where does the time go? Time flies when you’re having fun, I guess. It’s been a fun 30 days or so, right? … Right?

Heroic Mulatto

I am currently reading Thrawn: Alliances by Timothy Zahn. Compared to the first entry in his reboot of the Thrawn trilogy, Zahn does a better job with his characterization of Grand Admiral Thrawn. In the first novel, I felt that Zahn played up the ‘fish out of water’ angle too much and Thrawn’s rise read much more like the diary of an Imperial officer with Asperger’s Syndrome who took too much colloidal silver. With Thrawn: Alliances, we see a Thrawn capable of simple and routine social interaction without shitting his pants mid-conversation. That having been said, as a character, Thrawn now seems to suffer from competence porn syndrome. Zahn has yet to find the middle ground where Thrawn can demonstrate that he is the galaxy’s absolute master of military tactics and strategy while still having a realistic and suitable foible. In the end, it could be that despite having created the character in the medium of print, Zahn’s Thrawn cannot compete with the quiet menace of Thrawn as depicted in the Star Wars: Rebels animated series.

jesse.in.mb

Andrew Mayne – The Naturalist (books 1-3). Ran through these on Audbile pretty quickly. They are easy enough procedurals although the second and third books lost some of the charm that the first book had because the main character had blossomed from a nerd to a thrill-seeking serial killer hunter by the second book.

Arkady Strugatsky – Roadside Picnic. I’d been chipping away at this for a while but had mostly stalled out. I’m glad that I took the time to finish it. The enigmatic ending was perfect for the story (although there’s still something that throws me off about Russian genre storytelling). The afterward by one of the authors is a delightful sampling of what it took to get a bowdlerized Roadside Picnic through the publishing process in the USSR.

I power skimmed a few the books in Humble Bundle’s Eat Like a Geek bundle. Nothing super exciting there. Ice Cube Tray Recipes was a good reminder that I have everything I need to make jello-shots, but a lot of the recommendations were banal for someone who frequently portions and freezes things like homemade chicken stock or caramelized onions in ice cube trays as is. Chinese Street Food looked intriguing. I’m waiting to hear back on a few books with recipes featuring a recently legalized “herb.” I mostly picked it up for the Medieval feasts and Edwardian cooking books, which I’m putting off until I have the chance to dig into them. I really enjoy modern takes on historical cooking such as The New Art of Cookery, A Spanish Friar’s Kitchen Notebook.

JW

I’ve been super busy lately, but I am always ready to make time for my favorite author, Chuck Tingle. His latest works have really opened my eyes to the importance of continuous consent and learning to be comfortable with the occasional dry spell. Mr. Tingle is likely the most erudite commentators on contemporary sexual discourse and is absolutely probably not a pen name of SugarFree.

SugarFree

I read the Ray Electromatic series by Adam Christopher, a science fiction spin on the oft-imitated Raymond Chandler genre. Set in an alternate 1960s where robots–the clanking metal variety–were introduced and then rejected by the public, the lead character is the last of his kind and the only one programmed to be a private detective. Working in a cliched LA full of secrets, lies and sin, Ray untangles mysteries–when he’s not working his sidejob as a hitman.

Riven

Well, I haven’t been able to do much reading outside of investment/work-related articles, but I can tell you about what’s on my bedside stand! …Get your minds out of the gutter; it’s just a big stack of books. OK, it’s a small stack of comic books and two proper books. The first one is Black Jack by our very own Moriah Jovan. Not my usual sci-fi or fantasy, but I am looking forward to branching out while still staying in some familiar territory. (Jack is an “uncouth bond trader,” so maybe there’ll be some interesting finance-related subplot(s)?) I bought this book–and the next one–last August. So. Super busy, or at least too busy to sit down and read a paperback. This month, though! Maybe! The other book is The Very Best of Charles de Lint, which was recommended to me by jesse.in.mb. He had me at “crow girls.” I’m sincerely hoping I can get to each of these in the next month, and give you guys a proper review at the end of April. Wish me luck. Or don’t. You’re adults.

mexican sharpshooter

I read an actual book during my vacation in Ireland.  This time I picked 1491:  New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. Why would I do that?  As it turns out most of the B&B’s I stayed in happened to have a TV, and quite frankly Irish TV is disturbingly British which means they must love their game shows…

At any rate, this book is thoroughly researched and suggests many of the lessons we were taught about life in Pre-Columbian America is, to be blunt, wrong.  One of the myths that seems to perpetuate the most is that the Americas were an untouched, pristine wilderness when the first European settlers arrived.  Not so.  What is now postulated is the earliest Spanish explorers arrived in Florida and brought pigs with them.  Why pigs?  Because refrigerators weren’t invented yet and Spaniards like pork.  Pigs often carry diseases and since they are mostly domesticated a plague could’ve jumped from humans to the pigs, or vice versa.  Pigs escaped, became the invasive species they still are today, and came in contact with the Native Americans.  The Native American’s, of course, had little immunity to these diseases and died in biblical proportions.  The explorers left and decades later settlers arrived in time to find that nature had reclaimed most of the continent.

Its a thought-provoking point of view that if you are into history, I would certainly recommend.