Book Review: Word by Word

2/33: Word by Word by Kory Stamper. What a delight. Highly recommend. 

As a kid who sometimes read the dictionary for fun, who is now an adult linguist, this book checked off so many boxes for me. I loved learning about the process of writing a dictionary; I loved knowing that there are other people out there who care so deeply about style guides as I do; I loved her humor. I loved that even though she was quite obviously invested in the dictionary, and wanted it to be good and right, she didn't take herself or her fellow lexicographers too seriously. 

Here are some quotes: 

"[Old English] looks like drunk, sideways German with some extra letters thrown in for good measure." She's not wrong. 

"Adverbs look like everything else; they are the junk drawer of the English language (like so)." They're the junk drawer of every language, really. 

Describing a conference room: "...a small table, around which four editors can sit comfortably and six in introverted terror..."

xo, 

Devo

Book Review: A Natural History of Dragons

Prepare yourselves for many short book reviews because I have to read 33 more books to reach 1,000 on my read-list and I'm ready to knock that out.

So, here we go. Book 1/33. [1] A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan.

It's pretty much what it says on the tin: A naturalist's look at dragons. Oh sure, there's a little drama and some plot, but I'm thinking that's not really what Brennan wanted to write about. She wanted to write about science and taxonomy and discovery, and she did.

It was...fine. Not really my taste, but the dragon-lore and dragon-science were well put together.

Mostly it made me realize I'm getting tired of female protagonists who don't fit the social mold of the times - instead they are BRAZEN and SMART and PRAGMATIC. Just...give me a girl who likes to knit sometimes, y'know? Credit where it's due though, this protag had a little bit more social understanding, and realized she really couldn't be effective if she eschewed conventions entirely.

The illustrations were pretty.

xo,
Devo

[1] Yes, I know it's a totally random number. Sometimes life doesn't fit neatly into boxes.

The orange books

Here they are, in all their glory: 

The great thing about a home library is that you can arrange it however you want; its sections and shelves can be as idiosyncratic as you. So as you can see, even though this is the orange book section, not all orange books are orange (and some covers-that-are-orange are not, in fact, "orange books"). Orange books are about facts (What If?, Do Fish Drink Water?), economics (Undercover Economist, Freakonomics, When to Rob a Bank, The End of Poverty, An Economist Gets Lunch), and data-driven ways to change your life or surroundings (Barking up the Wrong Tree, Predictably Irrational, Reality is Broken, Nudge, The Design of Everyday Things, The Power of Habit [1]). Somehow this categorization makes sense to me.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is on the outer edge of this category, as it's very orange and full of facts, but more of a "just so" ethnography than truly an "orange book."

(Maybe it's real, maybe it's confirmation bias, but pop economics books seem to get orange or yellow covers, nearly without fail. If you have one that's not orange, please tell me!)

What ways do you organize your shelves? Do you have peculiar arrangements like mine, or are they all nicely alphabetized by author?

xo, 
Devo

[1] The Power of Habit is out on loan, but rest assured, it's yellow and goes in this section. 

Does it work? 13: Dan Dan Noodles

This cooking post is going to be different from the rest, because I went really far off-book with this meal. So far, in fact, that I'm going to post what I actually did in its entirety. All my cooking idiosyncrasies/preferences came to bear on this recipe adventure: my desire not to buy a bunch of new spices; my dislike of complicated procedures; and my health-mandated moratorium on meat.

Here's what I'm usually looking at when I cook:

I transcribe recipes into a short, easily scan-able form, leaving out all the faff. [1] This one is especially abbreviated, because it's essentially a stir-fry and a sauce, both of which I've made a bunch of times. 

Source recipes:

1 (link) is the most authentic, and therefore the most complicated. I used it to get an idea of what the real thing was supposed to taste like, and to guide my guessing/substituting.

2 (link) is a sort-of authentic looking vegetarian version; this is the one I relied most heavily on. Notably, I did not do her frozen-and-then-defrosted tofu thing because, well, I can't be bothered. I am curious about it, though, so maybe someday. 

3 (link) looked the least authentic, and the easiest. I used this in comparison to 1 to see how far afield I could go and still approximate something like the original dish. 

My recipe, interpreted:

Step 1: Combine listed sauce ingredients in a bowl.
- Used the Sambal Olek chili paste I had from making hot & sour soup. 
- I didn't feel like buying a bunch of roasted Sichuan peppercorns when I needed less than a teaspoon. According to the internet, black pepper and a little coriander is the closest approximation. This is probably the biggest hit to flavor (aside from the lack of pork, of course). 
- Making it again, I'd probably use slightly less soy sauce, just because it was plenty flavorful and soy sauce isn't the most healthy thing. 
- Used a little canola oil to thin it out. 

Step 2: Stir-fry the veg and tofu on med-high heat.
- I pressed the block of tofu under a giant book [2] for a bit while I made the sauce - that makes it easier to stir-fry. 
- Used about 4 shiitake mushrooms and 2 heads of bok choy, but the sauce and noodles could definitely have handled more. Every opportunity to throw in more leafy greens should be taken.  
- Yacai is pickled mustard greens, which I got from my trusty Asian market [3].  It was like, a dollar, so I was willing to take a chance on it.
- I didn't end up using spinach, but it would have been a fine addition. I didn't add extra chili oil either. 

Step 3: Cook the noodles. 
- I used whatever kind of rice noodles we had [4], and cooked them in a separate pot while stir-frying. 

Step 4: Put it all together and top with green onion. Serve and eat immediately.

My Franken-version was delicious: fresh and fragrant, easy, and healthy. I'll definitely make it again. 

xo,
Devo

[1] I have a deep desire to one day write a cookbook in this style - though Eat Tweet may have beaten me to it. 

[2] The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed., for the curious.

[3] Usually I wander around the store three or four times looking for a new ingredient. But this time I took the advice from An Economist Gets Lunch and just asked the cashier. I pointed to my shopping list, said, "I don't know how to say this, but do you sell it?" and she took me right to it. Delightful. 

[4] I'm not trying to be coy here; I really don't know what kind they are, since I took them out of their original packaging. 

Les Mis in a Month: Final week

Finished on Saturday! It took a lot of listening and a little bit of skipping [1], but I made it through!

Am I glad I did it? Yes. Am I glad to be done? Double yes. I think if I ever read something this big again, I'll break it up into chunks: read for a few weeks, break, read some more. Hopefully it would help the reading fatigue. I'm afraid the second half of Les Mis didn't get a fair shake from me, since I was just so tired of reading it by page 700. 

That said, Hugo is dramatic as heck. Sometimes I couldn't help but laugh at Marius, Cosette, Valjean, Eponine - all of them, really. I know their lives were hard, and it's an epic tale told epically, but geez. 

Some thoughts: 
- Name play an important role; the main characters all get at least a few
- The story's really about saving Cosette, isn't it? 
- The sewer tangent was really not as bad as people make it out to be. Granted, I skipped it, but I think it was only 15 or 20 pages, instead of the 50 pages of the Waterloo tangent. 
- Marius is very irritating there at the end, forbidding this gentle, loving man from seeing his daughter. And he's not even man enough to do it directly! No, it's all, "take away a chair here," "don't light a fire" there. Passive-aggressive nonsense. He reminds me of Claudius from Much Ado in a lot of ways - jumping to conclusions, being extra, overwhelmed by love. 

xo, 
Devo

[1] For a regular book, I would have skipped a lot - about a hundred pages or so. When your book is 1400 pages, though, 100 is hardly anything. 

Les Mis in a Month: Week 3

I'm a little late, but here's the Les Mis thoughts for last week.

- Made it past page 1000, which feels like a milestone...can I count this book as like, 4 books on my read-list, seeing as how it's so long? I learned that it's 1900 pages in the original French to which I say: Slow Your Roll, Victor Hugo.
- I'm starting to get a little bored/fatigued. It. Just. Keeps. Going. The plot has drawn away from Valjean and towards Marius & Cosette, who I cared very little about in the musical and continue to care little about in the book. Their love scenes are hilariously dramatic in the book, though, which is a certain kind of entertainment.
- Find myself enjoying the minor characters more in this second half: Gavroche (who knew he was Thenardier's son??), Monsieur Mabeuf (seriously, I love him so much; his having to sell his books just about broke my heart), Marius' grandfather.
- I still have no idea what the revolution is about, why it's happening, or why Les Amis are invested in it. Seriously, I know more about Mabeuf's motivations and feel more strongly for him than for Enjolras.
- Hugo's tangent about argot was both fascinating and ridiculous.
- Still no sewers.

xo,
Devo

Les Mis in a Month: Week 2

I just rounded page 700, which means I'm halfway through and pretty proud of myself. Still haven't hit the infamous sewer section, though. 

Progress/Thoughts
- Gotta love Hugo: At one chapter's end he's all, "Let me tell you about Marius" - and then immediately begins the next chapter like, "So this Monsieur Gillenormand..."
- Names for the main [1] character, so far: 1) Jean Valjean; 2) Prisoner 24601; 3) Father/Monsieur Madeleine; 4) Monsieur le Maire; 5) Prisoner 9430; 6) Ultimus Fauchelevent; 7) Monsieur Leblanc
- Hugo is a fan of physiognomy 
- I care a lot less about this second half of the book, at least so far. 

xo, 
Devo

[1] YMMV on who's the main character, Hugo sure does