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Very cool survey of dim sum in an innovative taxonomy format listing variations on each dish. Chinese characters and both Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations included.. The illustrations are fun but maybe not as helpful as actual photos.

A good variety of detailed recipes for classic dim sum and some helpful tips at the beginning (a tea advisory is always useful!) but sparse on the anecdotes, I like my Chinese cookbooks with some history and personal stories and the Chinese names for each dish.

This is a cute and colorfully illustrated book with thick cardboard (I don't know the proper term) pages, so it's a great coffee table type of book that at first glance looks like it's targeted to kids, with just a few pages and simple sentences and big print, but it doesn't really explain anything, so it could be applicable to adults who like big print books and just want to see a few words of Chinese (after reading, you might retain the character for fish but probably not the dozen characters for the first page sentence "There's so much to see in Chinatown." But it effectively imparts that message, so go check out Chinatown!

My fortnightly newsletter is out, and it's about what I enjoyed reading this year, with a focus on computer science but also some general fiction and non-fiction. https://systemsapproach.org/2024/12/23/holiday-reading-2/

A new beta release of novelWriter 2.6 is available for testing. It fixes a number of identified issues from the beta 1 release, and also adds a complete rewrite of how the project tree is implemented.

The rewrite is mostly for internal consistency, but the project tree should function at least as good as the old version, with improvements to drag and drop. Especially when dragging and dropping multiple items. You can also drop documents on the editor to open them.

https://novelwriter.io/releases/release_2_6.html

Took me a while but last night I finished "The Majesties" by Tiffany Tsao. A pretty devastating family saga, with a haunting ending that I did not see coming. Can't remember when I've been so affected by a novel.
Often for holiday gifts I give my favorite books of the year. It's too late for this one to make that list unfortunately but I will remember next December.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-majesties-tiffany-tsao/7400725?ean=9781982115517
#bookstodon

A holiday gift to myself. Thanks @violetblue

Would you like some candy? We've been around for 85 years. If you don't know #BonnettsBooks, who's the real stranger here? Stop in and get acquainted!

12/23/24 — Open 6-10p Mask recommended. No open drinks, please.

If you're looking for bookish gifts & stocking stuffers, stop in Monday night! Serious stuff for fun people, fun stuff for serious people, and vice versa!

Closed Christmas Eve & Christmas Day. Same for New Year's Eve & New Year's Day. Closed Sundays.

On thinking of books like software, treating them as evolving artifacts, and URLs versus paper book publishers: https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Memos/Books-as-Software/