Okay, so, the first question you may have is, "Did she really read a cookbook from the beginning to the end?"

Yes, yes, I did.

I read this book from cover to cover. I marked up recipes I had to try immediately, the ones I had to try soon, and pretty much just read the ones that were uninteresting. I pondered with a number of those if I could change the coffee out for chocolate, but figure I'll have enough joy with the previous two categories of recipes that modifying recipes can wait.

This book is a wonderfully delicious collection of make-at-home non-alcoholic drinks. One doesn't need to be a recovering alcoholic to decide not to drink, one can simply decide one is done drinking for the day, week, month, year, decade. When one decides it, having a collection of recipes that make drinks that can be sipped over a conversation, that have a heavy-enough mouth feel to be pleasant, that aren't just a flavored simple syrup with soda water, is a fantastic way to keep to that decision.

I adore this book. I like it so much that I will buy you a copy, it is amazing. I knew that you could have non-alcoholic drinks and be just fine, but this cookbook has so many delicious recipes without the alcohol, it'll make you see that mind-altering substance (read: drug) differently.

Okay, fundamentally, this is an incredibly difficult book to read. It starts with a smack upside the head with how women are historically dismissed, ignored, not believed, undercounted, gaslit, and written out of history. It continues with the data to support the claims, then examines the various areas and ways women are invisible through out history, today, and likely for a long time.

Despite being roughly half the population, women do not have the representation in government, access to opportunities, power, or resources that men do. Accomplishments by women are often ascribed to men, or dismissed as luck.

Worse, women are considered "inferior men," who should "just be more like men." Instead of recognizing that women are fundamentally different, we are dismissed as "too messy," told to "be less emotional," instructed to "not be a bitch" after asserting ourselves.

Truly, being a woman is a no-win situation.

This book should be required reading for any researcher, hard or soft sciences, that deals even remotely with people. This book should be required reading for EVERY machine learning researcher.

I want you to read this book. Buy one at your bookstore. Check your library. If they don't have a copy, let me know. I will buy you a copy I want for much for you to read this book

Similar to How to Do Nothing, this book (full title is "Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving") is a woman's journey into the realization that, hey, hamster on the hedonic treadmill is not the way to a happy life, and neither is killing ourselves for our capitalist overlords (my phrasing, not Headlee's).

This book goes through Headlee's journey to, not slowing down per se, more like recognizing that all of this attention grabbing stuff is adversely affecting your well-being. I appreciate that Headlee also specifically calls out luck for her success: there are millions of people working hard to be successful, and it's the good luck that springs them over the top into success. The parts where Headlee says, "this is true for me, so it is true for other people," well, I unsurprisingly both noted that and disagreed with them.

Also similar to How to Do Nothing, there's the history of work: how we used to work less, Industrial Revolution changed the economic landscape, labor fought for fewer hours, labor negotiated fewer hours for us, we drifted back into longer hours. And talk about longer hours: Headlee completely dismisses women's unspoken, unregistered, unpaid workload. While reading this book, I wanted to mail her a copy of Invisible Women and ask her to rewrite the book. As a single mother, I was hoping Headlee would not have been as dismissive of the unpaid work women do, as, as above, she has a "this is true for me, so it is true for other people" elements. Maybe she didn't recognize that the overwhelming amount of work she did includes that unpaid work, and that the workload is different for men and women? I don't know.