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69% complete! mouse has read 36 of 52 books.
It has a dark past - one in which a number of humans were killed. A past that caused it …
@fu@millefeuilles.cloud Any time I'm buttering something to eat I use salted butter, but for baking I like to control how much salt I add
@fu@millefeuilles.cloud nothing inherently, they just aren't ingredients I use at home or at work so I have to do a lot of mental math and guesswork to substitute them
every recipe using self-rising flour and salted butter is tiring me out
When the Guardian of the West Passage died in her bed, the women of Grey Tower fed her to the …
This work is an autobiography told in the third person, and includes coverage of his …
Zinsser writes his autobiography in the third person, playing both the somewhat disdainful biographer of "R.S." and R.S. himself. The conceit is characteristically weird, unnecessary, and extremely well done and funny, but I think it also is a distancing device for a man who doesn't really want to share anything personal about himself. Which makes for a frustrating autobiography!
In the rare moments when he does talk concretely about his life, the book is extremely fun (his account of his abortive attempt at a private medical practice, for example, is laugh-out-loud funny). But he spends most of the book and in long discursive discussions of the issues of his day, which unfortunately tend to end up either boring (unless you are very interested in his views on the state of medical pedagogy in 1940), or euphemistically "of their time." While the book is not surprisingly racist, sexist, or eugenicist for …
Zinsser writes his autobiography in the third person, playing both the somewhat disdainful biographer of "R.S." and R.S. himself. The conceit is characteristically weird, unnecessary, and extremely well done and funny, but I think it also is a distancing device for a man who doesn't really want to share anything personal about himself. Which makes for a frustrating autobiography!
In the rare moments when he does talk concretely about his life, the book is extremely fun (his account of his abortive attempt at a private medical practice, for example, is laugh-out-loud funny). But he spends most of the book and in long discursive discussions of the issues of his day, which unfortunately tend to end up either boring (unless you are very interested in his views on the state of medical pedagogy in 1940), or euphemistically "of their time." While the book is not surprisingly racist, sexist, or eugenicist for the era, and I do think Zinsser has some amount of critical thinking on these fronts, it is still ultimately racist, sexist, and eugenicist.
So, instead of the boring bits and the yikes bits, let us remember the part where he pretends to have rabies, bites a classmate, and is only stopped when someone dumps a tank of sea urchins on him. Or skip this one and just read Rats, Lice, and History.
This work is an autobiography told in the third person, and includes coverage of his …
All of which goes to prove that, as I pointed out in the first chapter, R.S. was really a quite ordinary person about whom it was hardly worth while to write a book.
— As I Remember Him by Hans Zinsser (Page 443)
incredible final sentence
"In a village at the edge of the wilderness of northern Russia, where the winds blow cold and the snow …
@Armavica They use a buttermilk based starter (at least for some of the recipes, others don’t use a starter at all), and there’s a separate multi day process for creating the starter. Since it’s dairy, I suspect it’s a different biome than a regular sourdough
It seems like the main idea in this book is leaving cake batter at room temperature for a couple days to ferment before baking it, I am extremely interested
"In a village at the edge of the wilderness of northern Russia, where the winds blow cold and the snow …
The first and most successful in the Baroness's series of books that feature Percy Blakeney, who leads a double life …
Amina al-Sirafi should be content. After a storied and scandalous career as one of the Indian Ocean’s most notorious pirates, …
@jamiemccarthy@mastodon.social @tikitu@mastodon.social I guess, but it's pretty hard to scan as donkey. "put him into a solemn-donkey mood"? the "ass intensifier" was in use prior to this so it's not impossible based on my cursory investigation
This work is an autobiography told in the third person, and includes coverage of his …
For prose, scientific or otherwise, as for riding horses, he believed one should be start sober; when he was writing essays on educational subjects, he felt that a spot of beer put him into the solemn-ass mood and thus a little closer to the state of mind of the professional pedagogue.
— As I Remember Him by Hans Zinsser (Page 291)
my whole life is shaken seeing "-ass" used like this in a book published in 1940
