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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."

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.

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.

Bite-sized is truly bite-sized; between the tone and the lack of endnotes, it's impossible to know what to believe or research further.

i'm often a bit off-put by suddenly stopping for major world-building in the middle of a book, but i'm quite enjoying it here