Kliekjes
Just a quick notice, because I've still got three books by DLS to write about and a Wodehouse, and because this was a book I finished in under an hour.
This book collects columns first written for publication in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Joep Habets writes about food, and around food, in an easy, engaging way. Sometimes witty, sometimes a little smarmy, if smarmy means what I think it means, but mostly with a love for his subject. It
The last little column is perhaps the weakest, for Joep Habets shows him to be like the people who never read a book because they had to read books for school; he became an atheist because some, apparently not very clever or well educated, people from a church choir made a bloomer in their choice of songs for a so-called beat-mass.
Now I do think, of course, that the very idea of a beat-mass is, well, a Bad Thing, let alone the implementation of that idea in real life, but someone who lets himself be thrown out of his religious beliefs because of that is perhaps, just like the non-readers I talked about above, someone copping out, diverting the blame from their own responsibility.
Still, the column about bread and cheese was particularly nice. And there were many like those.