June 2025
Extra books/links/whatever from June 2025
I haven’t yet made many recipes from The Flavor Equation by Nik Sharma, but the ones I have made have turned out great.
Sabbatai Zevi was a Jew in the early-mid 17th century who claimed to be the Messiah, and was believed by many. After being arrested by Ottoman officials and getting the choice to either die or convert to Islam, he chose to convert, which mostly ended his Messianic reputation, although some of his followers did convert with him. One of these followers was his wife, Sarah, whose origin story was being forcibly put in a convent after a pogrom in Poland, escaping by miraculous means, and then having prophetic dreams that she’d marry the Messiah. Sabbatai heard of this, whereupon he said he’d had prophetic dreams of marrying a fallen woman, and the two met and in fact got married. (Romantic?)
I usually don’t like true crime, but Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry is quite good, if too long.
Quicksand by Nella Larsen. I also learned that Larsen was the daughter of a Danish mother named Pederline1 and a Carribean man named Peter, both of whom were immigrants in the US. Her parents separated before she was born, and her mother eventually married a fellow Dane in the US named Peter Larsen. Nella Larsen was thus a mixed race daughter of a white couple, who had other white kids and lived in white neighborhoods, which partly explains her fixation on racial ironies. (Note: this book is good, but Passing is better.)
Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp is a love-it-or-hate-it sort of book. So, of course, I thought it was pretty good, if only because the writing style should’ve grated much more than it did.
A dispatch from under the local rock
Israel attacked Iran with a goal of hindering their nuclear program, severely damaging Iranian military defenses and killing many top Iranian generals and nuclear scientists. Iran retaliated with bombing campaigns in Israel. Both countries seemed to focus on hitting military targets. The US got involved as well, attacking three nuclear sites in Iran. There is now a ceasefire.
Peder is an alternate Danish spelling of the name Peter.