Adam is a Digital Creation Specialist - Children who never has enough shelf space for his board game collection, wall space for his photographs, or stomach space for his baking. Once he’s got a book in his clutches (preferably a fantasy, or humorous non-fiction one) absolutely nothing else is getting done that day. Working in a library is a blessing and a curse to his free time.
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Meet the team
There are only four1 of us, and I’m going last, so ‘surprise’ Sumayyah! I’m your HOTS Secret Santa. I hope I can live up to the standards you set when you kicked off this initiative, which our fellowwriters have upheld for the past couple of weeks. So now I have three tough acts to follow, and poor Sumayyah has had to wait most of a month to get her Secret Santa shelf picks. This post is also going live on Christmas Day, so I’m too late for the rest of our readers to get physical copies of any of these books before we reopen on the 27th. To that end, if we have both a digital and physical copy of an item, the picture will be a link to the digital, while the text will be to the physical. A final note before we dive in: it will probably shock you to the core2 that I haven’t read every book I’ve ever recommended on the HOTS blog3. There are too many books and not enough time. I do read/watch/listen widely, though, so to give proper Secret Santa recs to Sumayyah, everything in this post is something I’ve gone through myself at one point or another. This has the added benefit of improving the recs for the rest of our readers, which is a lovely side effect. So read on for some reading recommendations tailored to Sumayyah, but hopefully relevant to your interests as well.
It’s thattime again! Apparently, it’s been a while since the last one, and I’ve discovered more nerdy cookbooks on our shelves that deserve some time in the spotlight. This time around, I’ve accidentally hit on a theme, and rather than filling your stomach with food, I’ll be quenching your thirst with tea and cocktails1. There will still be some nibbles to start, but I’ll primarily focus on the libations today. Before we get too far into this, I should probably warn my readers that I’m by no means an expert on cocktail mixing or even cocktail drinking. I enjoy a nice cider once in a while, but alcohol has never been something I’ve gone out of my way to partake in, and mixing drinks sounds like a lot of work. That said, I have family and friends who enjoy a nice mixed drink, and just like with making coffee for my wife, I’m happy to pick up a new skill to show off with make their life more enjoyable.
I’ll start sober with one of the tea books. Thanks, Maya, for setting up beautifully for this section with your ways to hide from winter, though I’ll contest that tea is a year-round drink. Admittedly, The Official Downton Abbey Afternoon Tea Cookbook has more to do with food than tea, but given that it’s all food meant to accompany an afternoon tea, I’ll give it a pass. To the surprise of (probably) none of you, I know nothing about Downton Abbey beyond that it was a TV show with a rather large following. Is it particularly nerdy? The audience might prefer to avoid hearing this, but yes. British (and world) history mined for what is essentially late-Edwardian early-modern era fan-fiction? Nerdy as all get out2. So what’s in this book? Surprisingly little tea. Pages 15 and 16 cover Tea at Downton Abbey, including TeaEtiquette, Preparing the Tea, Serving the Tea, and Types of Tea. There’s also some talk of British tea history in the preamble, but most of the recipes are for sweets and treats, which makes me think that tea time was just an excuse to indulge one’s sweet tooth. Dish names here are surprisingly standard; they didn’t name a single one after a character from the show, though pictures and quotes are scattered throughout. Will the book make you feel like you’re enjoying afternoon tea at Downton? Probably not, but does that matter when you’re scarfing down English Toffee Shortbreads or Sticky Toffee Pudding3 in a very un-Edwardian fashion? Not one bit. Before moving on, I want to point to Royal Teas, which also has very little to do with actual tea and is more about the food eaten during tea time. I’m tossing it in here since an obsession with royalty is its own kind of nerdery.
My colleagues have covered variousspooky topics recently, so allow me to cover something that strikes a different kind of fear in people’s hearts. It’s a fear that changes depending on which side you stand on. Are you worried about getting through a tough stretch for proper dues down the line? You may be thinking about lost revenues and how to get things moving again at the table. Optics could be your primary concern, and you’re out to bring attention to some larger issue. If you’ve missed the picture on the left and the title didn’t clue you in, I’m talking about labour strikes.
But I hear you asking, why am I talking about strikes? In large part, it’s because they seem to be in the news in one form or another all the time these days. Air Canada Pilots narrowly ratified a deal earlier this month, with 67% voting to take the contract, but 98% voted to strike in August. They’ve secured 42% pay increases over 4 years, bringing them in line with their American counterparts, and that’s just with the threat of a strike. Of course, who knows what would have happened if the pilots hadn’t struck a deal. It played in the pilots’ favour that Air Canada is… I’ll go with not well-liked, to put it mildly, which helped put public support behind the workers. If a strike disrupted people’s travel plans, though? Its harder to say where public support would have gone in that case.
