This book is *old*. Like, it was written in the mid-80s, and it really shows. For a book so concerned with the evils of fashion and specific fashions, it's almost ... sad? Hypocritical? of it, to have dated this badly. But also, well, what can you do? It's kinda interesting, though - I wouldn't have known anything about that time or place without it (early 1980s England). It's probably not *good* insight, though, since the book is kinda incomprehensible high-art, or it wants to be. It's ... concerned about a lot of things which are still relevant today re - evil corporations, people who care more about fashion, than personal pleasure/well-being, than actually improving the world.

... wait, did I say what it's actually about.

nope.

What it's *actually* about, is people's relationship with food, I guess, as conveyed by a series of high-concept short stories. Some of them are tedious, some of them are stupid, some of them are really interesting. One of them is supposed to be stream-of-thought from a waitress and has literally not punctuation or grammar for it's entire length, just syntactically undifferentiated sentence fragments. Most of them are more normal than that.

... would I recommend it. I have no idea. It's damn weird. I ... enjoyed reading it, mostly, and it makes for interesting conversation, I guess. But there are probably better books to spend your time reading. It's kinda of a literary edge-case. I certainly wouldn't have read it if it was longer or it wasn't dumped on my lap by my mother while she was sorting books for house-moving. And the author came across as a bit of a dick.

... maybe it would make more sense to someone with more historical context.

p.s. It says something about this book that it's about food, and that made up all of one line of this review.
Things You Have Eaten In Norway

Is a short cookbook about Norwegian food. Via 1950s british food. The recipes are mediocre, poorly explained, and generally uninspiring. It doesn't tell you more than the bare basics about what the intended outcome of the recipie is or why that's good, many steps are elided ("Then smoke your ham" in a recipe for smoked ham).

It's kinda interesting as a historical artifact, and very small - less than 55 pages of text at small paperback page-size. But I won't cook anything out of it. Not wholly sure I could. Well, maybe the ham sandwich.


97 Things Every Programmer Should Know.

Is a collection of 97 two-page essays on coding good practices. Mostly solid advice, nothing that stands out as noteworthy to me except the two essays which said "Stop reading this and go read some actual good code". Beyond that, it felt like 10% advertising their new gimmick, 30% "test your bloody code", 50% "write code other people can read" in various flavors, and 10% misc. The misc was, of course the best. Overall, it seems like good but bland advice - no real hot takes (that I remember as standing out).

(To be clear, both the test-code faction and the write-code-other-people-can-use faction had a bunch of specific advice which is pretty helpful, but still not worldshaking.)

All in all, solid advice that every programmer should know, but the most important lessons are stuff that any person giving you coding advice will say. You can get this from 101 programming course, you can get this from blogs (and like 80% of the essays were sourced from blogs or bloggers), you can get this from literally any conversation on basic coding good practice (though some such conversations may assume you already get this and merely have these ends as core assumptions - you do X to make it easy to test, and Y to make it easy to read). But you've got to start somewhere. And this seems like a decent somewhere.

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