Umm, it's got food in it?
Most of that food is not totally treif? It looks interesting.
The narrative parts and Sharma's reflections on how culinary ideas come to him are fun, but I am reminded in writing this why I don't usually bother trying to review cookbooks. 

Fonrobert's work here is amazing, although you have to already care a lot about Niddah, Talmud, and criticism.
There are a few things that stood out to me - 
1) The rabbis as priests and niddah as tzaraat insight was transformative.
2) The way Hargasha is often taught as opposed to the way Fonrobert reads it and the shift in understanding ״כח דהתירא״ as not really being about "making things permissible" but about the locus of power for who can do so.
3) What is the job and obligation of women rabbis in this discourse about (that displaces) women?

Also, incredibly readable by academische standards. 

So apparently it only takes me 6 months to follow up on book recommendations.
This book was hilarious in a way that was both warm and skewering. The characters were delightful, the plot was zany, and the point about monsters, battle, and victory was heartwarming. So much fun! 

I really loved the narration for this book and also I really needed it so thank you for that.

Darcie Little Badger is really good and her work is like nothing else, other than itself. It's so utterly embedded in the mythology that inspires it and also so fully consistent that it's hard not to fall immediately into it.
Also, I loved all of the characters basically immediately.
Sometimes it's just like looking at the list of accolades a book has and saying "yep, well deserved, not much else to add".

I appreciate a book that delivers exactly what the title promised.
Did I laugh? Obviously.
Am I convinced that these people should be running a kingdom? Ehh, not the point.

There's an interesting genre thing where it's not a romance in the sense that the endgame of the plot is not marriage/life together and if the fantasy plot resolved without them falling in love, it would still work...although be a very serious betrayal of the promise of the author to the reader. But the space that the story gives to the process of falling for another person is out of proportion to someone not writing a story about falling in love.
It definitely makes for better, or at least more expansive, possibilities of what constitutes a romance.It also strikes me as interesting that this one is also concerned with morality (in this case within the conversation about the right to rule and to dispose of others as you see fit) but not from an exploration perspective, but from a "you are meant to understand that these ideas are bad because they are held by bad people" and, like, it's not that that's not an interesting conversation, but that the book is not interested in it as a conversation. Which, again, often a limit of the romance genre and also super fascinating to me to look at romance novels

with sex that is both gay and kinky

as prescriptive morality texts.

I'm definitely showing my genre roots, but on a scale from this to the Martian, I want to be somewhere more in the middle.
A little more space and science, a little less metaphor for being human.
(Also, add this one to the pile of neurospicy main characters that I keep in my locker because, while June doesn't need a diagnosis, she's definitely autistic. It's slightly wild to me that this bright but difficult girl as character is both so prevalent and that no one talks about it as what seems—to me—as an obvious manifestation of autism.)
It is also possible that I might have disliked the focus on relationships less if the relationships themselves hadn't also bothered me, specifically James but also just like...idk, I wanted more from this book than was actually there and also it was a really good character study.

The misunderstandings to plot development ratio in this book did not slant in my preferred direction, but—on the bright side—extremely well drawn characters.
Also that rarity in romance - physically disabled hero! (I'm trying to remember the last one - I want to say it was Eli in Just Business, who also has his leg injured and uses a cane. Someone who does more disability studies than me has definitely thought thoughts about this.)
This is probably more on my mind than usual, given the book I just finished about Bujold, who thrives on disabling her heroes, but it's interesting to see one in the traditional romance.

 Compilations are inherently unrateable, theory and criticism doesn’t lend itself well to a 1-5 system and also this book is 16 years old and it shows. 
Which is weird. The Jane Austen companion isn’t out of date. But I keep thinking of all the fascinating authors not even in there yet. 
But wow do I have a reading list, especially from the feminisms and queer chapters. 

I don't think I ever read a work of theory this fast in my life. I was fascinated by the ways that people have read Bujold as a writer and as a person who upends narrative tropes and familiar arguments.
My absolute favorite essay was "Pain Made Holy" on Cazaril and disability and the complexities of the disabled experience as read into and out of his character.
I also really appreciated the ongoing conversation about Bujold, gender, and reconfiguring of masculinity (and would have loved for some of the ADS discourse at the end to pick up on that as another form of canon-compliancy.)
The theological reads of the Chalion was the most frustrating because of how Christian most theology is in the style of questions it asks about god/s. Look, I just want midrash on the five gods, is that so much to ask? 
(I mean, not to get too revelatory, but the reason that WotFG works is that it's doing theology in narrative. Midrash is a little more allegorical, when it isn't also doing a lot of other stuff. But it tells the human story and makes that also the story of the Divine, which is what the gods and souls of the holy family do. Idk, it's complicated, but the way that most theologians write is within the Christian tradition of talking about what God is, rather than the Jewish tradition of telling stories about ourselves and saying "you see that. God too." And the text itself is already doing that. The gods have no hands in this world etc.)
Look, it made me see books I already really like through a new lens and understand what the texts are doing (with or without authorial imprimatur) in an interesting way. What more could you want?
On that note - go check out John Lennard's essay on Sharing Knife as a critique of Lord of the Rings because it is ridiculously good.