Just started Ruhlman's Ratio book on cocktails. As expected, everything in cocktails reduces even more easily than the foods in his previous books. He's a great teacher and I hope most people interested in mixing cocktails at home pick this up.
It's a lot better, IMO, to be taught how cocktails work and be sent out to go make stuff up than to obsessively follow recipes that don't explain how or why they work.
Just started Ruhlman's Ratio book on cocktails. As expected, everything in cocktails reduces even more easily than the foods in his previous books. He's a great teacher and I hope most people interested in mixing cocktails at home pick this up.
It's a lot better, IMO, to be taught how cocktails work and be sent out to go make stuff up than to obsessively follow recipes that don't explain how or why they work.
I've been tempted by this. If I can find it used, or on sale.....it shall be mine. Though, really, I just mix stuff that works usually.....so maybe not?
I've been tempted by this. If I can find it used, or on sale.....it shall be mine. Though, really, I just mix stuff that works usually.....so maybe not?
I hit a wall with my pulp reading. Dropped the Doc Savage entirely, shrinking the list of TBR pulps by a whopping 180 novels. Leaving about 320 The Shadow pulps to read. That cut alone took my 10 year quest to read the entirety of both titles down to a 6+ year quest to read all of The Shadow pulps. Might take me a bit longer. That assumes one pulp a week. Not sure I'll be hitting that mark.
In my other weird quest to learn from video game design, I picked up two game design books, Level Up! and Rules of Play. They're both very well reviewed books on the topic. I'm reading Level Up! now and it's absolutely singing.
Just finished Foxglove Summer. It's less serialized than many of the Rivers of London books, which I was happy about, but Peter was unaccountably dumb for far too long in the middle. I'm not a professional British magician and I knew that we were talking about changelings pretty early on. And then the book suddenly wrapped up, as though the author realized he had somewhere else to be.
Still, none of the Rivers of London books have been bad so far, and this was another enjoyable story in the series.
I liked Foxglove Summer a lot because the British summer vibe is tremendous but yes it's kind of the first one (but not last, sadly) where Peter seems to be almost "playing dumb", because given how sharp he is in earlier books, it seems like he'd have been more on the ball. And yes It also has an extremely sudden ending as you say, and whilst I think there is an intentional joke in terms of exactly what happens (spoiler: a goddess very literally stepping out of a machine hohoho), it's not the most satisfying or thematically appropriate-seeming.
Having read all of the Rivers of London books now, most twice, I think the one consistent issue for me is that, despite admonishments against romanticization of the past, and strong awareness of the negatives of empire in-text in the books, Aaronovitch does rather romanticize/valourize the Romans/Roman Empire in the earlier books. The way in which Boudicca's rebellion is discussed (particularly largely or entirely omitting the brutal rapes and murders that lead to it), and Roman conquest outright praised and apologia offered for, for example, seems to sit very uneasily with the quite reasonable critiques of the British empire, which was basically operating on an identical pattern with identical excuses/apologia (particularly "we're bringing culture and well-being to barbarians!").
Spoilers for the next book, The Hanging Tree, so don't click on this until you've read it:
This comes up again here, where the Faceless Man turns out to romanticize the Dark Ages, which I have to say, is wholly unbelievable. I'm from the same general social background as him, and I know so many people from that background, with those sort of views - and universally they romanticize the Romans, and see the British as the heirs to the Romans, and the British Empire as the Roman Empire reborn in a good, non-Italian way (don't ask me). But unfortunately Aaronovitch had totally written himself into a corner here by having Peter basically romanticize the Romans endlessly in earlier books. So he has to pick something fundamentally implausible for a man of the Faceless Man's background, but which would counterpoint Peter.
The Hanging Tree also features the only outright mistake known to me in Aaronovitch's usually-great partially fan-sourced research - he thinks St Paul's Girls school has boarders, and it does not, and never has (not this century, anyway). Presumably this is a confusion with St Paul's Boys, which does have some in the way he describes. They are separate schools which are in the same general area of London. I only know this because I'm from a very specific background I must admit.
Fortunately this weird pro-Roman stuff rather tapers off in the later books, though we then have a struggle with another more magic-centric issue stemming from the earlier books.
Minor spoiler, probably fine if you've read the first two books.
Beverly and relatives' casual and rather horrific use of mind-control (often wonderfully described by Aaronovitch), which is critiqued and questioned a fair bit in the earlier books, quite rightly, gets increasing excuses and retcons offered for it, to try and make out it's less horrific than it is, seemingly so Bev et al can be purely positive characters, rather than the extremely alarming supernatural beings they're initially portrayed as. Most of the excuses and retcons come from Beverly rather than Peter though, I note, so it's possible this is setting up a later conflict - I certainly hope so, otherwise it's a bit gross and conflicts strongly with the themes of the series.
All that said, I'd strongly recommend pretty much the entire series to almost anyone who likes genre novels (fantasy or crime) with two caveats:
1) If you don't like the first book Midnight Riot/Rivers of London (US/elsewhere names), you won't like the rest, don't keep going.
2) The third book, Whispers Underground is by far the weakest on every level. It has some cool London history, but kind of nothing happens and so almost nothing from it matters later. It does introduce a recurring character, but she's kind of the worst because she's extremely cliche and basically personality-free (as a result of a failed attempt to subvert cliches by leaning into them), and you can just sort of take her for granted in other books. If you liked the first two, especially the first one, but Whispers Underground bores you, just skip to the next book, Broken Homes.
Also strong recommend for the Audible versions of the books - Kobna Holdbrook-Smith does a really great job and I'm pretty sure the books after Whispers Underground are written on the assumption that he'll be reading them out to you, based on what Aaronovitch has said in interviews.
I really liked the real world history of Whispers Underground. I'm familiar with a lot of the history of U.S. cities, but the buildings described in that novel, and the infrastructure they support, was just fascinating to me.
I think it's interesting that both the Rivers of London series and the Lovecraft Country books in the U.S. center Black characters and Black stories, with what reads to me as real sympathy and empathy and a good deal of actual research (especially in the Lovecraft Country novels) while being written by White authors. I think they both appear to be doing a good job of it, but I wonder what the books would have been like if they were written by Black authors.
I gave up on the Dragon Lords. 170 pages in and we still haven't gotten to the main action? If I want action that slow I'll just lobotomize myself so I can manage to read The Wheel of Time again.
I have switched to Eye of the Sh*t Storm (the actual title, I'm not censoring it myself) by Jackson Ford. I failed to check the inside of the book, and I thought it was the first Teagan Frost novel, but it turns out to be the third. I expect I will survive.
Oh, and for folks who liked Lovecraft Country, the second novel, Destroyer of Worlds, is also very good, although it's very much like a sequel, rather than a set of new adventures. This book is almost entirely about dangling threads from the first book, other than an interesting early adventure in the Great Dismal Swamp. It also reads much faster than the first book, which wasn't exactly a slow read.
I hit a wall with my pulp reading. Dropped the Doc Savage entirely, shrinking the list of TBR pulps by a whopping 180 novels. Leaving about 320 The Shadow pulps to read. That cut alone took my 10 year quest to read the entirety of both titles down to a 6+ year quest to read all of The Shadow pulps. Might take me a bit longer. That assumes one pulp a week. Not sure I'll be hitting that mark.
In my other weird quest to learn from video game design, I picked up two game design books, Level Up! and Rules of Play. They're both very well reviewed books on the topic. I'm reading Level Up! now and it's absolutely singing.
Up to volume 20 (of 33) of Ngaio Marsh's Inspector Alleyn series. She can really write... except I hate almost any part where she has characters romantically interested in each other (which isn't often). Maybe it's my secret fear that real people sound that bad and think that poorly when they're twitterpated.
