What are you reading?
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I just finished rereading Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.
I’ll be in Barcelona twice this fall, both for scientific conferences.
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It’s largely a chronicle of his life (hippie surfer baker chef) up to when he opened the Tartine bakery. It’s a good story. There’s also a good bit of it dedicated to recipes that use day old bread - fancy ones! - and various permutations like baguettes, English muffins and brioche.
But in the middle of all that is the base recipe and how he developed it. How it’s supposed to look (big holes, baked very dark), how it’s supposed to taste (not sour. Chad doesn’t like sour).
Also pictures. The soupy mess that I get when I use his recipe is not a failure - it’s how it’s supposed to look! It’s what gets you the big holes! He goes on to tell how to make it come together again, something not in the base recipe.
Read it straight through in one sitting. I’ll read the part with the method again before my next bake.
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A lovely book containing amusing and thoughtful poems that will delight any gardener.
If you can find it! I've failed to find another copy to buy worldwide...
My 50p thrift shop copy looked near mint in its dust jacket, but on opening the book
the 1994 spine binding is terrible quality. Cracked, repaired, come away from the hard cover again, a page loose. Close it and it looks fine again
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@jon-nyc Have you read The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón? Novel set in Barcelona, 1945. Murder, madness, doomed love…
My friend said it was a must-read. I enjoyed it, but maybe not as much as she did.
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Just finished listening to this:
I really enjoyed it. Hearing about how he grew up poor in the projects and made it to Harvard than HLS and then how he stumbled into Goldman through the back door was interesting. And his inside take on the great financial crisis was interesting and brought back a lot of my own memories.
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I just finished listening to the audio book version of the Piano Tuner, by Danial Mason. (I actually thought it was recommended by someone here at WTF, but a quick search didn't turn anything up, so I may be misremembering).
It's story about a British piano tuner in the 1880s who gets enlisted by the war office to go to Burma to tune an Erhard grand piano. There's a bit of music and a bit about tuning in it, lots of sub-plots and lots of intrigue. I really enjoyed it. Don't read too much about it beforehand, after I finished it, I was reading around and noticed that some review articles (maybe it was one in the Guardian) gave away too many details.
I also highly recommend the audio book, it's fun to hear it in the narrator's voice, and he changes the different characters voices just enough.
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I just finished listening to the audio book version of the Piano Tuner, by Danial Mason. (I actually thought it was recommended by someone here at WTF, but a quick search didn't turn anything up, so I may be misremembering).
It's story about a British piano tuner in the 1880s who gets enlisted by the war office to go to Burma to tune an Erhard grand piano. There's a bit of music and a bit about tuning in it, lots of sub-plots and lots of intrigue. I really enjoyed it. Don't read too much about it beforehand, after I finished it, I was reading around and noticed that some review articles (maybe it was one in the Guardian) gave away too many details.
I also highly recommend the audio book, it's fun to hear it in the narrator's voice, and he changes the different characters voices just enough.
I actually thought it was recommended by someone here at WTF
I passed along bachophile's recommendation of Mason's book.
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I actually thought it was recommended by someone here at WTF
I passed along bachophile's recommendation of Mason's book.
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Im listening to Regime Change, the new bestseller from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan about the first year+ of the second Trump administration. Very deeply reported, Bob Woodward style. Interesting if at times a little depressing reliving some of the lowlights of 2025.
I hope they write another about the Iran war.
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