2015 Book Log

Does anyone read these? Eh, I don't even care, I just like to keep track of what I read.

Also at some point I should do a "various media I enjoyed in 2014 and want you to get into so that we can squee about it" post.

Fiction
1. The Alchemist's Son: Doctor Illuminatus, Martin Booth
2. The Long Tomorrow, Leigh Brackett
3. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin
4. Once a Witch, Carolyn MacCullough
5. The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, Irvine Welsh
6. Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution, Ann VanderMeer
7. The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson
8. Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie
9. The Broken Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin
10. Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
11. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
12. The Cat's Table, Michael Ondaatje
13. Indexing, Seanan McGuire
14. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
15. Parasite, Mira Grant
16. Going Postal, Terry Pratchett
17. The Borrower, Rebecca Makkai
18. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Marina Lewycka
19. My Experiences in the Third World War, Michael Moorcock
20. Midnight Riot (Rivers of London), Ben Aaronovitch
21. A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews
22. The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford
23. The Circle, Dave Eggers
24. Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
25. Moon Over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch
26. Three Moments of an Explosion, China Miéville
27. The Midnight Games, David Neil Lee
28. Whispers Under Ground, Ben Aaronovitch
29. Broken Homes, Ben Aaronovitch
30. Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel, Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor
31. The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross
32. Falling In Love With Hominids, Nalo Hopkinson

Non-Fiction
1. End This Depression Now!, Paul Krugman
2. TARDIS Eruditorum: An Unauthorized Critical History of Doctor Who, Volume V: Tom Baker and the Williams Years, Philip Sandifer
3. Kill the Messengers: Stephen Harper's Assault on Your Right to Know, Mark Bourrie
4. The Haçienda: How Not To Run a Club, Peter Hook
5. Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth L. Cline
6. Stalin: A Political Biography, Isaac Deutscher
7. Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution, Anna Geifman
8. Vladimir Burtsev and the Russian Revolutionary Emigration: Surveillance of Foreign Political Refugees in London, 1891-1905, Robert Henderson
9. Come Hell or High Water: A Handbook On Collective Process Gone Awry, Delfina Vannucci and Richard Singer
10. Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story, Robyn Doolittle
11. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America, Barbara Ehrenreich

Comics
1. Toronto Comics Anthology, Steven Andrews, Nelson da Rocha, and Miike Something (eds.)
2. Saga: Vol. 1, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
3. Saga: Vol. 2, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
4. Saga: Vol. 3, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
5. Saga: Vol. 4, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
6. Ms Marvel: Vol 1: No Normal, G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona, and Jake Wyatt
7. Lumberjanes: Vol 1: Beware the Kitten Holy, Noelle Stevenson and Grace Ellis
8. Ms Marvel: Vol 2: Generation Why, G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona, and Jake Wyatt

Answer for question 4581.

[Error: unknown template qotd]The funniest one is eggplant.

So when I was a kid, I had this teacher who would bring in unusual (for our whitebread town, anyway) foods and not tell us what it was until we'd all eaten some. Nowadays you couldn't do that, of course, but it was kind of a cool mind-broadening exercise. That's why I've eaten escargot, and the only reason I've eaten escargot.

Anyway, one time she brought in octopus, and I was just horrified by the texture. For whatever reason, I developed this notion that cooked eggplant would have the same texture as octopus, and I refused to eat it as a result. This continued well after I became vegetarian, even though eggplant is pretty much a lifesaving ingredient if you're vegetarian.

Eventually, I guess I was hungry and it was the only option, and to my surprise and delight, it tasted nothing like octopus and had a very different texture, and it's now my favourite vegetable.

For the inverse, see my post about attempting to cook sweet and sour meatballs using my family's old recipe.

In praise of dead trees

You know what's great?

Books that are printed on paper.

You know why?

Because I can open up a 100-year-old paper book and it will still work the way it's supposed to. Unlike, say, my three-year-old Sony Reader, which now does not work because it's incompatible with Adobe Digital Editions and the Sony Reader software is incompatible with the new Mac OS, and Calibre, which is open source, can't manage library e-books. The device can't download from the library directly because it's full of garbage that Sony put on there and slow as shit to boot.

So now I can only read e-books that I steal or buy. Which is not something I'm in the habit of doing.

Thanks, capitalism!