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emmadilemma

emmadilemma@book.dansmonorage.blue

Joined 1 year, 1 month ago

YA and paranoia, mainly. Can't Speak French but pretend to read French books anyway. If you get an out-of-the-blue follow, it may be that I saw you on bookrastinating, where I lurk. Also: sfba.social/@pootriarch / piaille.fr/@pootriarch

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Lonely Planet Pocket Bilbao and San Sebastian 3 (2022, Lonely Planet Global Limited) 2 stars

More rah-rah than your average Lonely Planet

2 stars

I'm normally quite happy with the Lonely Planet series, but their pocket Bilbao/San Sebastián guide reads like something straight from Marketing. For example, they show a photo of a pintxo (tapa) with callouts reading: "artful touches transform the pintxo into a delicacy", "careful cooking illustrates the Basque quest for perfection", "high-quality ingredients are the cornerstone of great pintxos", "freshly baked baguette-style bread forms the base of many pintxos."

A Brief Welcome to the Universe (Paperback, 2021, Princeton University Press) 1 star

A Brief Welcome to the Universe offers a breathtaking tour of the cosmos, from planets, …

Obnoxious and score-settling

1 star

Tyson is the most objectionable writer I've encountered all year. I'd like to fill in my science knowledge gaps, in an entertaining way, but he's picking fights with the New York Times (over Pluto as planet) and J.R.R. Tolkien (over the plural form of "dwarf"). It's tiring and self-centered. It's a very bad year when I give out two one-star reviews, but this is a very bad year.

A Brief Welcome to the Universe (Paperback, 2021, Princeton University Press) 1 star

A Brief Welcome to the Universe offers a breathtaking tour of the cosmos, from planets, …

They are extremely low in luminosity, so we call them white dwarfs. Some people in the UK (especially, perhaps, J.R.R. Tolkien) might prefer to write "dwarves." But in America we form the plural of dwarf as "dwarfs." Astrophysicists are not alone in their preference. Disney's 1937 film is "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," not "Seven Dwarves."

A Brief Welcome to the Universe by , , (Page 38)

This is the comment that gets me thrown out of the pub for smashing a pint glass into his shit-eating grin. Picking a dwarf fight is completely orthogonal to the discussion.