Koreatown: A Cookbook by Deuki Hong
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Let me start with the good:
- The photography in this book is beautiful
- The interviews with various celebrities and chefs are great
- The narrative style of the recipe intros work well
- the section on the the Korean pantry is important and well-written

The neutral:
- Even my wife, who has been cooking for our family (and previously, her family) for somewhere around 35 years (mostly off the top of her head without a recipe) found that once you’ve experienced America’s Test Kitchen recipes, everything else is substandard. We tried to make the Pajeon (seafood pancakes) for dinner and there were lots of assumptions that made it come out less than ideal.

Head First Go by Jay McGavren
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I will admit that I just skimmed over the web server part. I barely write web backend stuff in Python, I’m not about to do it in Go any time soon. My main goal with this book was to finally learn Go after having heard about it for 2-3 years now. This book turns out to be a very good resource for that. I have no idea how well it would work for someone who’s never programmed before, but for me it’s my 4th or 5th programming language and for most languages the basics are all the same (just like most languages have nouns, verbs, articles, etc) and it’s all about learning the details. I’ve been able to use what I’ve learned here to solve some problems for Advent of Code (a December programming set of puzzles) although I did have to go out to the official documentation a little to figure out things not covered in this book (like regular expressions).

The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I recieved this book as part of the Hugo 2021 nominations packet

This book was GREAT! I can definitely see why its series was up for a Hugo nom this year. I wasn’t able to get past the first book before it was time for Hugo voting, but I looked forward to reading this book every day. There was never a time where I felt I had to push through the book. It even had such a great start:

Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading this book. I left the rating the same

When it comes to the Anhk-Morpork based books, Pratchett lays in the final brick in the foundation for all that will come. The Night Watch is elevated to full Watch. We get more interactions and elaborations on how the Guilds work and how Vetinari pulls all the strings. Carrot grows a little, even as he retains his essential “Carrot-ness”. Pratchett builds on adding in all the fantasy and horror characters that he started back with Reaper Man and introduces Angua, our werewolf watch-person. We also have the return of Gaspode and Detritus from Moving Pictures. Reading all of these in a row and thinking about them critically for these reviews has made me realize that Pratchett has moved towards really making Anhk-Morpork (and greater Discworld) seem like more real, lived-in places as he settled into it as a long series. It feels as alive as Gotham, especially as written by Scott Snyder.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! by Miran Lipova?a
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Learn You a Haskell (or LYAH as it’s known on Stack Exchange and other parts of the internet) is the most often recommended resource for learning Haskell. I think it has a lot of things going for it.

1. It’s available on the net for free if you don’t want to (or can’t) buy it
2. It’s got a conversational tone that reminds me of what I love most about the Perl O’Reilly books
3. The author does a good job comparing and contrasting with imperative programming languages (almost all the ones you’ve heard of, if you’re heard of any programming languages).

The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received this book for free as part of the 2021 Hugo Voting Packet

This was a great, fun book. The only point I really had against it is that eventually with all the fantasy names and locations and history, things eventually got a little convoluted to where I couldn’t remember who was related to whom and it really starts to matter in the last quarter of the book. The book has an interesting framing device - one of the book’s characters, Thurvishar, has written a report to the Emperor to document what happened. The introduction even includes a bit of lampshade hanging about the fact that he’s going to have to tell the real-world reader some things that the in-world reader (the Emperor) would already know.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is the story of the beginning of computers, written in the 1980s. I’d already read about many of the events portrayed in the book via other books or magazine articles. But this was nice and detailed. I like Steven Levy’s style. He really brings the people profiled to life. Knowing where computers have ended up - which companies and movements have won - makes it an especially interesting read compared to when it was first published and people weren’t sure where the industry was going or if it would crash like the Atari crash of the 1980s.

This year I was able to attend the Paul and Storm / JoCo concert that COVID stole from me last year. While there I bought the entire Paul and Storm discography, but I think because I listened to it so much on Spotify in the past, I didn’t listen to it as much as I thought I would.

This was not one of those years where I came out ahead by not paying for Spotify. I bought a lot of albums, including starting on my quest to get the entire MxPx back catalog from the time I stopped listening in high school until now. (This is reflected in this year’s numbers)

In these last two months of the year I only worked on Advent of Code.

November

In November I worked through part of the 2016 problem set. I didn’t get too far because of how many languages I was doing at this point. Eventually I decided to allow myself to get a bit further in Python and then catch up with the other languages. Whenever I’d get stuck I’d go back to the other languages. Overall, once I’d figured out Python - Ruby, Perl, and Golang would be pretty easy. Haskell would still be hard, but I started getting the hang of it near the end of the month.

This strange, COVID-filled year was the year WorldCon was local to me, so I figured it was the best time to check it out. I didn’t need to pay for a hotel or flight, just a few days of parking and metro line fees. Overall, I thought it was fine. I enjoyed the panels I attended, especially when Scalzi read from his upcoming book, Kaiju Preservation Society. But I didn’t become a convert like the folks at the First Time Attendees panel who have been attending for decades. Outside of that, I had a few thoughts about my experiences this year: