We've all heard it a million times: baking is precise and cooking is loose. Cooking is jazz, baking is classical. Cooking has room to improvise, but with baking you have to follow the recipe to the letter.

This is, of course, nonsense. For one thing, you can't control every variable every time. If baking required everything to be utterly precise, it would never work, because air temperature, pressure, and humidity all vary; you have to be able to work around those major variables. If it was true, you'd never see experienced bread bakers frown and throw another handful (or three) into the recipe. And most importantly, if this was true......how would we ever get new baked goods?

I think this is a mistake we make too often when we're thinking about bringing light into dark times for each other. We think of it has having to be precise and perfect for it to work. If we're not winning every struggle, we must be doing something wrong and should just quit. If we can't come up with the perfect phrasing to offer comfort to worried or grieving friends and neighbors, why even try? Maybe tomorrow we'll be warm and witty and precisely right. Or someone else can do it. Surely someone else has the right answer, and we can just use that.

So yeah, the lussekatter--you know what day it is--rose despite the plummeting temperature (and with it the plummeting humidity, oh physics why do you do us like this). They rose and rose and rose. Friends, they are mammoths. They are lusselejon this year. I forgot the egg glaze--I told you last year that I shouldn't mention that remembering it was unusual, and ope, it was an omen, I did not put egg wash on. They are still great. They are still amazing. What they are not--what they don't have to be--is perfect.

Last week one of my friends wrote to me to say that she'd made calzones but they'd turned out denser than usual. And you know what I thought? I thought, "Ooh, her family got calzones, I should make calzones one of these days!" And not in the "I'd do it better than that loser" way, either. Just: yay homemade calzones, what a treat. I watched her doing it. I remembered that I can do it too. Dense or not. Egg washed or not. Perfect or--let's be real, perfect isn't available, what we have is imperfect, and it turns out that's what we need. Lighting one imperfect candle from another, all down the chain of us, until the light returns.

2024: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=4078

2023: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3875

2022: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3654

2021: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3366

2020: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2953

2019: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2654

2018: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2376

2017: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1995

2016: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1566

2015: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1141

2014: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=659

2013: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=260

2012: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/840172.html

2011: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/796053.html

2010: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/749157.html

2009: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/686911.html

2008: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/594595.html

2007: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/2007/12/12/ and https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/502729.html

2006: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/380798.html — the post that started it all! Lots more about the process and my own personal lussekatt philosophy here!...oh hey, this is the twentieth year I've posted about this. Huh. Huh. Well, isn't that a thing.

Sam Bloch, Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource. Interesting natural and social history--and present assessment--of the uses and needs of shade in sunny climates. Very much the sort of environmental study we need more of. Yay for this weird little book.

Meihan Boey, The Formidable Miss Cassidy. Structurally slightly odd but extremely good. "Some weirdos make friends; hijinks ensue" is one of my favorite shapes of plot, all the more so when there's more than one culture and a bunch of magic stuff going on. More from this author please.

Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence. This is a good introductory book if you haven't already read a lot of stuff about the lead-up to the American Revolution. It's not actually one of the ones I'd put very high on my list if you have, but not everyone has.

Martín Espada, Jailbreak of Sparrows. I feel like these were longer and less punchy than his previous poems, but that could be genuine or could be a result of my own mood, hard to guess without more intense study. "Not my favorite Espada collection" is still a pretty good thing to be.

Margaret Frazer, The Stone Worker's Tale. Kindle. This is another of the mystery short stories in the same continuity as her novel series, slight but entertaining as most of them are. Sometimes you can watch mystery authors try to figure out some twist that will entertain them to write, and I think this was one of those times.

Howard W. French, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide. This is a good place to go deeper on recent Ghanan history but also a good place to start if you don't feel like you know very much about 20th century West Africa. A very interesting read.

Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World and Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman. I got interested in the first of these when I saw it in a bookstore, and it did not disappoint: it's a history of the US and Latin America, rather than focusing on the US's relationship with Europe as most such histories do. It was good enough that I requested the second one based on enjoying his work, and I'm not sure that "enjoy" is the right word for a whole book about Kissinger, but then I'm not sure it should be. Grandin's view of Kissinger is relentless, and I don't think he should have relented. And at least it's not terribly long, it doesn't make you spend more time with Kissinger than necessary to study his sociopolitical effects.

Adam Hochschild, Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes. Hochschild is generally good, and I like to see closer-focus histories. Rose Pastor Stokes definitely is interesting enough for a whole book. I do feel like he wanted to be doing some things with her marriage as emblematic of things that didn't quite get there, but it's still worth the time.

Marina Lostetter, The Teeth of Dawn. The last in its series, and I finished it from momentum rather than enthusiasm for where the series went. I really liked the earlier ones, it's just this two-timeline narrative felt labored at points. I generally enjoy her ideas and writing and will be glad to see what else she does next.

Premee Mohamed, The First Thousand Trees. Another third volume. This one was a bit more genre-standard than its two predecessors, but well-executed on that, fitting it into the established worldbuilding and characters.

Trung Le Nguyen, Angelica and the Bear Prince. A sweet YA love story in graphic novel form. Cute to look at as well as cute storyline, won't take long.

Yasuhiko Nishizawa, The Man Who Died Seven Times. This is a time loop novel that's also a murder mystery, and I really liked that the looping character was attempting to prevent the murder in the process of solving it: how can I make this better. The twist in the ending was not entirely satisfying to me, and there was enough problematic alcohol use that even I, who don't usually flag that, feel like it's worth noting for people who really dislike that as an element in fiction.

Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman, eds., A Thousand Beginnings and Endings. Retellings of Asian mythologies by Asian diaspora authors, somewhat varied but generally quite satisfying. I read this for book club, and it gave us a lot of happy fodder for discussion rather than the more annoyed kind we sometimes have.

Hache Pueyo, Cabaret in Flames. Discussed elsewhere.

Jonathan Slaght, Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China. There's a lot about field work with Amur tigers in this. A lot. If you like that kind of nitty gritty about how the science gets done, good news, this is a book for you. I do like that sort of thing, so I was very pleased. My one complaint is that there is almost nothing about China and very little about the cross-cultural relationship work here. For having it in the subtitle, it's...really a Russian book. And that's okay! Just some clarity there.

Seamus Sullivan, Daedalus Is Dead. I thought this was going to be a completely different shape of thing, which is my fault and entirely on me. The cover and title made me think that Daedalus was going to be a metaphor. Nope! No metaphors here! Very literal retelling of Daedalus's experiences in life and afterlife! For some reason Sullivan decided that what he most wanted to do here was Daedalus as unreliable narrator in ways that have nothing at all to do with him as a technologist; there's stuff to be done with complicity in science/technology work, but very little of it was done here, most of Daedalus's flaws were...generic unpleasant dude flaws, I would say. It's written quite well, but I ultimately did not want to spend even a novella's worth of time with this character.

Ann Vandermeer and Jeff Vandermeer, eds., Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology. Some very familiar, oft-reprinted stuff in here, plus some stuff I've never seen before. A very mixed bag, the full spectrum of my responses as well as the full spectrum of types of feminist SF.

Ellen Wayland-Smith, The Science of Last Things: Essays on Deep Time and the Boundaries of the Self. Wayland-Smith leans very heavily on similes in this essay collection, which often didn't work amazingly for me because the similes felt...fine? rather than genuinely illuminating. I feel like a cad saying that her best work was about her own mortality, but, well. Better than her worst work, I suppose? Still. This was fine enough but not a favorite.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Like Pueyo's debut, this is an extremely well-done example of something that is very, very much not my thing. This is another monsterfucking book! I am using that term as a genre term of art rather than a pejorative: there are guls, they eat human flesh, the main character ends up romantically/personally entangled with one despite or perhaps because of her complicated history.

There's vivid writing here--which if you are not interested in stories of human flesh being eaten is not necessarily going to appeal to you--and there are cultural touchstones I wish we saw more of in things published in the US. It's great to see a really Brazilian speculative novella--and the politics of contemporary Brazil give this speculative story weight and deep roots. It's done so well. It's just so beautifully written. But also, and crucially for me, it is body horror basically start to finish, so: approach with care, depending on your tastes.