Reviews and Comments

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.

Growing up, English ivy was an acutely troublesome invasive species -- in the region generally and in my family's yard specifically. My neighbors had, foolishly, planted it, and it would grow up trees and deprive them of their nutrients, and send vines into crevices of buildings, damaging them. At a formative age, I learned about this: how ivy sends these little creeping tendrils into all the small holes it finds. And I would sit in the back yard, imagining the ivy crawling up my body, planting little roots in my pores and feeding on me until I was a desiccated husk.

The point being, I had a hard time with the fact that ivy showing up was a good thing in this story, because to me the appearance of an inexplicable ivy leaf could not be a more ominous sign. So if you have my extremely specific aversion to the plant, be aware I guess?

I found this book a little disappointing because of how it's organized and how much of baking it tries to cover. It starts out with a ton of information about baking as a profession, tools, and technical information about baking (like tables of different gelling agents, and bread techniques and terminology). All of that information is really good, well curated, and clear, but I wished that the techniques specific to certain kinds of baking were placed with the recipes, rather than all together at the beginning. It also spends a lot of time, understandably, on professional bread techniques, and a lot less on pastry techniques. It feels at times like a bread book with some pastry recipes included.

There are tons of recipes, but often they are variants on a theme (like banana, chocolate, or lacenut tuiles) but no basic recipe and no information on how to modify the recipe yourself or what makes the modifications work. The pastry recipes aren't terribly well organized, not much time gets devoted to different types, and there are big omissions (like macarons).

I think it is just too ambitious to have a single book about "baking and pastry"!

This really didn't do it for me! I think part of that is that I'm not wild about romances and this was a romance. A big complaint for me is that the romantic leads behave so constantly and consistently we've-been-to-therapy correctly towards each other that I found their interactions tedious and didactic. It felt moralizing to me ("observe, this is the correct way to handle an emotion"), but I think it was intended to be more of a wish fulfillment love story ("imagine if you dated someone this emotionally mature"). Also everyone is described as being super hot and I did not enjoy that.

The heroes behaved perfectly in every situation and the villains were over-the-top horrible in every situation, and even though the moral stakes were ones I agree with (don't sexually assault people, don't be homophobic, don't murder people), I was put off by the black-and-white-ness of the characters.

While the author has put a lot of thought into gender and sexuality, even if I found it ultimately shallow, I found the near total absence of a critique of power and class to be pretty uncomfortable.

That said, it wasn't hard to read, and if you wanted a comforting romance about healing from assault (which, fair warning, is very graphic, though not imo gratuitous), it might be for you. And I really liked that the protagonists spend the whole book trying to solve a mystery and do an absolutely abysmal job at it.

I think on some spiritual level, even though this wasn't published until I was an adult, I feel like I read and loved this as a young teen. Reading it now felt like wrapping myself in the coziest blanket of imaginary nostaliga. I stayed up late reading this and read it instead of doing other things I needed to do. It's been a very long time since I have felt this immersed in a world.

It reminded me a little of The Goblin Emperor in its depth of humanity, and its portrayal of cruelty that doesn't make light of it, and, weirdly, I feel like there's some backstory parallels with Gideon the Ninth, although it couldn't be more differently tonally.

There were times were I did find it a little moralizing, and when the writing rang a bit off, but I loved it very much and if you don't like it I don't want to hear about it because it's been retrconned into my cherished childhood lore.