Reviews and Comments

Before the Coffee Gets Cold was nothing like the other books in my TBR pile. Tiny and softspoken, entombed in a cacophony of big-mouthed, big-font hardbacks, it waited its turn and made itself known gently but poignantly.

You may have read that this book involves time travel, but really only in the same way that The Lord of the Rings was about a ring. It's about people, humanity really. For me to try to explain better is to waste words. This is not my kind of book. But it is now.

Cute concept, but could have been a blog post.

I shall have to reread Chapter 7 with a dictionary at hand. These witches are wearing a ton of vocabulary that I don't know.

This looks to be an engagingly told overview of environment and industry in BD form. All of the copy being handwritten made it slow going for me, with French being a very, very distant second language. I ended up flipping through it and couldn't review it fairly.

I learned a good deal from this book - I'm no prepper but I live in an area prone to earthquakes and power and water problems. Some of the advice here is eye-opening (e.g., 'don't store emergency water in flimsy store-bought gallon jugs'). My main issue is that whenever the author mentions another group of humans, he's doing so to take potshots - at the CDC, at other preppers, at CB and ham radio operators, just to name the most recent three. The narrative becomes 'only I know what I'm talking about' and then I go looking for receipts. Footnotes are thin on the ground and often support these group snarks.

So if you know something, you can learn often-important nuances. But if you don't know it, taking his word as authoritative is difficult.

[transferred from temporary instance to primary]

Hitting a wall and losing traction is very common for me. But never before has the cause been that I wasn't done re-reading the first-kiss scene.

Less a view of falling cats through a science lens, this is more of a survey science course seen through cat eyes. Most of the sciences are touched on: Newtonian physics, darkroom chemistry, anatomy and physiology, quantum mechanics. There's a tremendous amount of history; my eyes glazed over from all the Important Old White Guys. It's worth flipping through if you like science, particularly if you like cats. It's a less compelling read if you just wanted to understand the cat trick.

There are others in this Secret series that I've liked much better (such as L.A.), but that could be more about the subject than the author. The most compelling tidbit for me was Banksy's Umbrella Girl, but that stencil has been vandalized since this book was published.

A great, breezy read on internet language history and culture, from stopping people SHOUTING ON USENET to the lolcat bible. With an important message: Language isn't static; it's not passed down from elders to children, but grown collectively, with each generation taking it in a new direction. This is not corruption. It's evolution.

Read this for a history of The Man holding women down with a dictionary; an explanation of vocal fry and upspeak, the roles they fill in female communication, and how vilifying them is part of a hate as old as time; the many grammatical roles that an f-bomb can play; why gay guys often sound gay but lesbians don't sound 'lesbian'; and the word 'slut'. A lot. Just read it.

Edit: I originally rated Wordslut at four stars, but on reflection, its combination of outrage and history, delivered with disarming humor, sets a bar that should be considered the gold standard, not the silver standard.