→ December 5, 2008
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The Color Purple.

Listen, God love everything you love – and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration.
You saying God vain? I ast.
Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

I’ve mentioned before that I haven’t cared for most of the Jewish-American novels I’ve read, but in fact, I have the opposite feeling about most of the African-American novels I’ve read: With one exception (James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain), I’ve loved all of them. And Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (#5 on the Radcliffe 100, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983) may have helped me realize why.

Purple is narrated by two poor, black sisters, separated in their teenage years by their spiteful father and the new husband of Celie, the “ugly” sister, because he wanted to marry the younger, prettier Nettie but found his advances spurned. Separated by oceans both literal and metaphorical, the women write to each other about their experiences and their struggles, Celie’s in poverty in rural Georgia, Nettie’s on a decades-long mission in Africa. The novel is more Celie’s than Nettie’s, both because Celie’s letters get more airtime, but also because her struggles are more mundane, while Nettie’s letters are there in part to show parallels between the oppression of native Africans and that of African-Americans in the American south.

Celie’s story is also much more compelling than Nettie’s. Celie bears two children by the man she believes is her father, who begins raping her at a very early age and who, each time she bears a child, takes the baby away without telling her where he went or what he did with the child. She marries “Mr. _______” to save Nettie, who is both prettier and more intelligent in Celie’s estimation, from becoming trapped in the same cycle of bad marriages to abusive husbands in which her mother and stepmother were trapped. Through Celie, we hear the stories of her stepson’s wife, Sofia, who is unsatisfied to live the doubly-subservient life of a black woman and pays a heavy price for her defiance; the libertine singer Shug Avery, Mr. ______’s sometime mistress who becomes a confidant/lover to Celie; and eventually see the male characters earn some redemption, albeit only after their women have in some way rejected them.

Despite the fact that the women of The Color Purple (other than Shug Avery, who refuses to be oppressed but has a strong sense of self-preservation) are oppressed in just about every way, from rape to abuse to violence to poverty to lack of education to an instance of female genital cutting in the African branch of the story, the novel is dominated by their love of life, an optimism in spite of themselves and their situations that drives them forward and lets them appreciate little details and blessings even in a life that seems stacked against them:

Nobody cook like Shug when she cook. She get up early in the morning and go to market. Buy only stuff that’s fresh. … By one o’clock everything ready and she call us to the table. Ham and greens and chicken and cornbread. Chitlins and blackeyed peas and souse. Pickled okra and watermelon rind. Caramel cake and blueberry pie.

(I admit that it is not an accident that I chose a quote about food.)

Walker omits most of the normal methods of building narrative greed, aside from a late and almost superfluous question about when and how Nettie will return from Africa, instead letting the characters themselves – particularly Celie and Shug – drive the story forward. You become invested in Celie almost from the beginning as the underdog who doesn’t know she’s an underdog, or perhaps just doesn’t have time to worry about being the underdog because she has to cook and clean and fight and live.

(As for those serious Jewish-American novels I don’t seem to get, the overwhelming sense I get of those novels is of cynicism and ennui – the inability to see life for its better aspects in the face of its struggles. That common theme only became clear to me as I was considering why Walker’s novel, which should be sad in so many ways, was uplifting.)

Next up: It only took a day or so to read Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, another Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, so I should have that review up before the holiday.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Dana Point eats.

I did breakfast both days at Harbor House, a diner right on PCH in Dana Point, going back on day two because day one’s meal was so good. That first meal was scrambled eggs with chorizo, home fries, and toast. The eggs/chorizo were probably the best I’ve ever had – not overwhelmingly spicy (seriously, I can only take so much heat at 8:30 a.m.), obviously made to order rather than as part of a huge batch – and the home fries were just a pinch of salt away from perfection, with no grease, plenty of crispy browned bits, and soft interiors. The second meal was pancakes, bacon, and eggs; the pancakes were solid-average, good but unremarkable in flavor and – like most pancakes – a little heavy, and while the bacon came in thick slices that could have been fried a little longer to get some crisp to them.

I had one lunch at R.J.’s in Dana Point Harbor, although they’re also open for breakfast and seem to have a local following. The turkey sandwich with feta is pretty much just that, turkey roasted in-house with lettuce, tomato, red onion, and a sprinkling of feta cheese, plus mayo if you’re so inclined (I wasn’t). The turkey was excellent, nothing like the cheap previously-sliced stuff you get in too many restaurants, and the bread (a French roll) was obviously fresh. The sandwich comes with soup or salad; you might want to try the soup, as the salad was drowned twice over in dressing. Getting into the place was kind of tricky; the best way seems to be to go westbound on Dana Point Harbor Drive and pull into the lot just past the intersection with Golden Lantern.

My other lunch was too much of a good thing, a Mexican place called Olemandi right across from the beach. The food was amazing, but the portion sizes were absolutely over the top. Their carnitas are among the best I’ve ever had, moist but with some browned ends, deeply flavored but neither too acidic nor too spicy, allowing the flavor of the meat to still take center stage. The dish comes with a small amount of very good Spanish rice, a large serving of refried beans, plus tortillas, guacamole, sour cream, and so on. All of that plus easily 3/4 pound to one pound of carnitas makes a great value for $16, but it’s also ridiculous to send that much food back when, like me, you have no place to which you can take leftovers. Oh, and the meal comes with tortilla soup, which was very rustic (just a delicious broth and tortilla strips with a little diced tomato) but sort of added to the gluttony. I can’t really complain about having too much food, but sending that quantity of food to the disposal/trash does bother me a lot.

I had one very, very bad meal on the trip, sushi at Gen Kai in Dana Point. The fish was bland, boring, slightly tough, and way too cold. I wouldn’t say it was bad in the sense of going bad, since I wouldn’t have eaten it, but it was unacceptably low quality fish. Even the green tea was a mess (way too hot – green tea should be brewed at around 160 degrees). I did make it up to myself by stopping in Seal Beach en route to the airport and having my last meal of the trip at Koi, amazing as usual and relatively quiet for a place that usually offers a wait for a seat at the sushi bar.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Top ten boardgames.

So I saw a link on the Big Lead to some other blog that listed the writer’s five favorite and least favorite board games, which was interesting if only to show that the writer (who listed games like Sorry! among his favorites) hadn’t played any new games since he turned eight. I’d been toying with the idea of doing a top ten board games list for a while now, and I guess I just needed some incentive.

10. Risk. Used to love this game, and the simplicity of it leads to a fair amount of strategy in the setup, but the gameplay itself is pretty heavily determined by luck. It’s probably the most dated of the games on my list, but has the advantage of being very easy for kids to learn.

9. Acquire. Haven’t played this one in a while, unlike the others on the list. The Acquire game board is a grid, on which you place tiles (hotels) to form chains. You can also buy stock in chains and engineer mergers or takeovers by placing tiles that connect certain chains. Once all chains on the board are “safe” – meaning they’re too big to merge – or one chain has reached 41 or more tiles, the game ends, shares are liquidated, and whoever has the most money wins. The version I have includes a two-person variation, but Wikipedia says the newest edition of the game only includes the standard 3-6 person rules.

8. Babel. We bought this game on a trip to Austria in 2003, which meant getting the German rules, which meant I had to translate them … so who knows if we really played it correctly. But it was fun. It’s a fairly simple two-person game where each player is trying to build temples using five “tribes” at his disposal, but at the same time that you’re building, you’re using those tribes to try to slow down your opponent’s building or knock down his temples entirely. Our favorite move was the “Wanderung,” where you can make one of your opponent’s tribes wander off.

7. Monopoly. Tough not to include the granddaddy of them all. I hate all the “special editions,” though. Leave Boardwalk alone.

6. Taboo. Different type of game entirely from the others here – this is a “party game,” and maybe the only one I really liked. For those of you old enough to remember the TV game show Password, Taboo takes that general format (one person gives clues, the rest of his team has to guess the keyword), but adds the twist that there are five words the clue-giver can’t say. The challenge of trying to describe something without saying the five most obvious words is what makes Taboo fun. Our friend Pete was a whiz at giving clues because he had an endless supply of bad pop songs and commercial jingles on which to rely.

5. Diplomacy. Described by one friend of mine as “Risk for grownups,” Diplomacy requires seven players, but removes the luck element entirely after the initial setup. Players represent the seven “great powers” of Europe, set in 1900 (although there are endless variations), and must scheme, ally, attack, and backstab their way towards control of at least half of the map. The rules are incredibly simple, and there are a few thriving online communities of “Diplo” players, although playing online means that the normal etiquette of live play (such as “don’t stab the guy you just allied with thirty seconds ago”) goes out the window.

4. Wise and Otherwise Board Game. I guess this is part party game, but it’s more clever than most games in that genre. On each turn, one player becomes the “reader” and reads the first half of an incredibly obscure (but real) proverb. The other players have to fabricate plausible or funny second halves, while the reader writes down the real conclusion to the proverb, after which, all players must guess which conclusion is the correct one. You get points for getting it right, and for fooling other players, while the biggest bonus goes to the reader who reads all the completions so convincingly that no one gets the right answer. It’s like Balderdash, but the opportunities for silly answers are greater, and the problem with Balderdash is that you can often guess the definitions by looking at word roots.

3. Metro. Another German board game – Germany seems to be where all the good games are designed these days – Metro is almost comically simple. Players compete to build the longest subway lines on a grid that represents the city of Paris. There are different types of tiles, some of which include straight tracks, while others include all manner of twists. You can extend your own tracks on your turn, or you can use a tile to screw someone else. The game ends when all tiles are played; the player with the longest total track lengths across all of his lines wins.

2. Orient Express. This is the only game on this list that is out of print, although the designers have told me they’re considering a reissue. Orient Express takes those logic puzzles you saw on the LSAT or in GAMES magazine and turns it into a murder mystery: You have to walk around the two train cars, interviewing suspects and crew members, searching cabins, and – when possible – sending telegrams for background info on the suspects. You must come up with a suspect and a motive to solve the crime, although you may also glean clues about the weapon or other factors. There are at least 30 cases available through the publisher’s website, and the original game itself comes with 10 cases.

1. Settlers of Catan. It’s not the simplest game on the list, but it’s the smartest, and it’s simple and quick enough to teach someone by playing a game with them, after which they’ll probably be hooked. Three or four players compete to settle the island of Catan, which involves tough decisions about placing settlements, trading for resources, developing units or towns, and overall strategy. There’s not much confrontation, and players are never eliminated. The first player to reach 10 “victory points” – achieved through a combination of building towns or cities, building the longest road, raising the largest army, or special one-point cards – wins. The game was such a success that there are multiple add-ons, including 5-6 player expansion, as well as a very good two-person card game (since the board game requires three players).

What’s missing? I’ve played Axis & Allies and its sister game, Conquest of the Empire, but the gameplay in both games is too complex. I hate Scrabble with a driving passion, since it’s not a game of vocabulary but of obscure two- and three-letter words. I might hate Cranium even more; the idea that that game somehow requires a brain is the biggest case of false advertising since The Neverending Story. I’ve heard great things about Puerto Rico and Carcassonne, and I see that Agricola is the hot new German game of the year, but haven’t played any of them (yet).

For another perspective, here are my wife’s top ten, unordered:

  • Taboo
  • Wise & Otherwise
  • Pictionary
  • Scattergories
  • Settlers of Catan
  • Yahtzee!
  • Mancala
  • Balderdash
  • Orient Express
  • Dungeon
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→ December 5, 2008
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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

If books were players, I’d probably grade them out on just three tools, plot, prose, and characters (“personalities” if you want to keep on the alliterative tip). The plot must be credible, tight, and interesting, providing the “narrative greed” to which I often refer, that desire to know what happens next (or last) that keeps you moving through the novel. The prose can’t get in the way, at the least; the dialogue must be believable, the sentence structures can’t impede your comprehension of the topic, and if there’s room for clever turns of phrase or literary devices like metaphors, so much the better. There should be at least one character with whom the reader can connect; whether or not that’s the protagonist isn’t a big issue, but I need some sort of empathetic connection with one of the major characters for the book to hold my interest. For example, if the main character is an asshole, he’d better be a funny one, or I’m checking out before Chapter 3.

I rarely run across books that would earn scores of 80 across the board. The Master and Margarita is an obvious one. The Harry Potter books are probably 80s in plot and characters, although even I (a defender of Rowling’s prose) would have a hard time pushing that score above 60. To Kill a Mockingbird is a three-80s book, as are Emma and Tender is the Night (Fitzgerald’s writing might be the definition of 80 prose). At risk of standing accused of slapping high grades on a book too quickly – the literary equivalent of one-looking a player – I’ll add Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel to the list.

In the book, author Susanna Clarke has given us two compelling characters, the magicians of the book’s title, the conservative, brilliant, condescendingly paternalistic Mr. Norrell, and the exuberant, handsome, and wild Jonathan Strange, who becomes Mr. Norrell’s tutor and later his rival. Both are richly drawn, with complex personal philosophies of magic and magical ethics, and, in Strange’s case, a marriage to help flesh out his character even further. Clarke is deft at imbuing even her secondary characters with deep colors and rounded edges to make them more real, yet never floods the book with so many personages that the core story gets lost in descriptive language.

The prose is very Victorian-Brit lit, with shades of Austen (remarked upon by most reviewers of the book, it seems) but also the gothic novelists of the time, such as Radcliffe and Brontë. Although the book has its share of laugh-out-loud moments, Clarke’s prose is suffused with dry wit throughout, and she melds it with strong descriptive prose, including countless brilliant images to evoke scenes in the reader’s mind:

She did not rise at their entrance, nor make any sign that she had noticed them at all. But perhaps she did not hear them. For though the room was silent, the silence of half a hundred cats is a peculiar thing, like fifty individual silences all piled one on top of another.

If any of Jonathan Strange‘s grades was to fall below 80, it would be the book’s plot, and perhaps that is the inevitable consequence of the book’s length (1003 pages in mass-market paperback) and lengthy gestation period (Clarke wrote it over a period of ten years). The story does meander, and many digressions appear to be just that – digressions into character histories or side stories that don’t necessarily advance the plot. Clarke did employ a clever solution, using extensive footnotes to sequester some of her stories from the history of English magic from the body text, helping to speed the plough, and to be fair many seeming digressions end up tying into the main plot once the book heads into its final inning. Clarke’s use of the hoary “prophecy” plot device did exceed expectations both because of how she resolved it and the way she unfolded it in stages, almost giving us a coarse outline for the second half of the novel. If the plot doesn’t get the highest possible score, it couldn’t get lower than a 70; I flew through what is probably the second-longest novel I’ve ever read, and that doesn’t happen if the plot isn’t fantastic.
I wonder how the book will be perceived by the academic community in time – as simply a well-written work of popular fiction, capitalizing on the recent mania for all things magical as long as it’s not too far into fantasy-nerd territory; or as a thoughtful, clever story of two finely-developed characters, meditating on the natures of friendship and on morality, with a fair quantity of nature-based symbolism for deconstructionist-leaning graduate students to analyze to the nth degree for college theses and dissertations with ultimate audiences numbering in the low single digits. I’d like to think that it’s the latter, but there’s a sort of Nichols’ Law at work in literary academe, where the more popular and accessible a contemporary work is, the less it is esteemed by denizens of the ivory tower.

Next up: Back to the TIME 100 with Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (Kosinski, Jerzy).

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→ December 5, 2008
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“Grilled” Baby Bok Choy.

Again, just the recipe here.

2 heads baby bok choy, rinsed and roughly chopped (leaves and upper stems)
1 clove garlic, slivered
1 small dried chili pepper
1-2 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 tsp honey
Salt & freshly ground black pepper to taste
Toasted sesame seeds

1. Toss the bok choy in a bowl with all remaining ingredients except the sesame seeds.
2. Place the bok choy mixture in the center of a large sheet of heavy-duty aluminum foil. Fold up the edges of the foil to enclose the bok choy in a packet, crimping all edges to seal it and then poking two or three small holes in the top of the packet to allow steam to escape.
3. Place the packet on the grill just barely off of the heat (somewhere between direct and indirect heat). Grill for 8-10 minutes until the bok choy stems are tender, although you’re going to have to guess at when that is.
4. Open one small end of the packet and drain off any excess liquid. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and serve.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Chocolate-Bourbon Pecan Pie.

I’m a big fan of recipe triangulation. I see a recipe I want to try, but something doesn’t sit right – a method, an ingredient, whatever, there’s something there that I don’t believe will work, and I don’t believe in wasting time or food on poorly constructed recipes. So I find other recipes for the same dish and try to combine them, identifying similarities and isolating the differences, then either picking and choosing methods from all recipes, or just splitting the difference when we’re talking about something like a discrepancy in oven temperature. This recipe for a rather heavenly pie is the result of just such a triangulation. It’s largely adapted from Bourbon and Chocolate Pecan Pie Recipe, with an assist (the heated-filling trick) from the plain pecan pie recipe in Baking Illustrated.

(Next time out, I’m going to see how much chocolate I can stuff into the filling, but I’ve had two requests from readers for this recipe who saw my update on Twitter.)

Chocolate-Bourbon-Pecan Pie

One pie dough for a 9″ pan

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate
3 large eggs
¾ cup dark brown sugar
¼ cup white sugar
¾ cup dark corn syrup
½ tsp vanilla extract
3 Tbsp bourbon
¼ tsp salt
1½ cups coarsely chopped pecans

1. Blind-bake the dough at 375 degrees for 25 minutes, covered in foil and weighted down with pie weights or dry beans or whatever you have that won’t melt at 375. Remove the foil and weights and bake 6-7 minutes more until the crust just starts to brown.
2. Set a skillet with about ½” of water over a burner and bring to a simmer. Melt the butter and chocolate together in a heatproof bowl set over the simmering water. Stir to combine and set aside to cool. Do not overheat or the butter will break.
3. While the pie is baking, take a large heatproof bowl and whisk the three eggs together until frothy (meaning you can see some air bubbles and the mixture’s volume is increasing). Add both sugars and whisk until completely combined.
4. Add all remaining ingredients except the pecans and set over the simmering water (you didn’t pour it out, right?), whisking constantly, until the mixture reaches 130 degrees on an instant-read thermometer.
5. As soon as the pie crust reaches that light golden brown stage, dump the pecans into the filling, then pour the whole thing into the crust. Drop the oven temperature to 300 degrees and bake until the top is cracked and the center is just barely set – it should wiggle when you shake the pie dish, but should not slosh. Start checking it around 25 minutes; mine was done at 30, although my oven holds its temp well because I have a pizza stone and some unglazed quarry tiles on the oven floor.
6. Set on a cooling rack and allow to cool completely before cutting, 2½-3 hours.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Beans: to soak or not.

(Repost)

Man, I hate when there’s no clear answer to a cooking question.

The question is whether or not it makes sense to soak dried beans before cooking. You have three options: Soak overnight in cold water (they’re actually fully soaked after about four hours, but can stay in the water for up to eight hours); soak quickly in one hour by starting with boiling water; or don’t soak and increase your cooking time and cooking liquid.
Here are the arguments I’ve found for and against soaking:

  • Soaking frees up minerals and vitamins in the beans. Beans contain a chemical called phytic acid, which “can form complexes with some minerals and make them insoluble and thereby indigestible,” a process known as chelation. Some phytic acid is destroyed in cooking, but more is removed (an extra 15.4% up front, according to the American Chemical Society) if you soak overnight before cooking.
  • Soaking cleans the beans. Got that from Miss Vickie’s, the best site around for pressure-cooking tips. She says there’s a lot of nasty stuff on the outside of dried beans. I think that a really good rinse should take care of that nasty stuff, and besides, letting the beans sit in water that has absorbed undesirable compounds sounds like a bad idea. But what do I know.
  • Soaking reduces cooking times. It does – by maybe a half an hour. Doesn’t bother me. Might affect people who have office jobs, although I’m guessing you’re still not making two-hour beans on a Tuesday night.
  • Soaking cuts down on “ze tummy music.” I’m pretty sure this is bullshit, but then again, everything gives me ze tummy music, so how the hell would I notice?
  • Soaking means softer beans. I know this is bullshit, because I’ve tried it both ways, and soaking did not help the texture of the cooked beans one iota. You know what helped? Cooking them longer.

Arguments against soaking beans:

  • Soaking leaches out flavor. Well, you have my attention there. Alton Brown has suggested soaking and then using some of the soaking liquid in cooking, although in this season’s red beans and rice episode (a good recipe, BTW), he dispensed with soaking entirely. I have made beans both ways, but I’m usually putting so much other stuff in the pot that I would never notice a 10% flavor loss through soaking. My beans tend to taste like other things, such as bacon.
  • Soaking removes the phytic acid. Yeah, how about that: Phytic acid is an antioxidant. I found a few studies discussing phytic acid’s antioxidant properties, although none seem to argue strongly in its favor. It has been mentioned as a potential anticancer compound, and it definitely plays a role in preventing bean spoilage.
  • Soaking leaches out nutrients. So perhaps we’re even – soaking takes out nutrients but gets the phosphate out of the phytic acid so that the remaining nutrients are more accessible; not soaking leaves the phytic acid but the beans start with a higher nutrient content. I have no idea how that nets out.
  • Soaking is not traditional. I know it’s just a forum post, but this caught my eye: You’re probably all bored to death with my saying this, but I have lived in Mexico for nearly 26 years. I do not know a single Mexican cook who soaks beans. Naturally, YMMV. Rick Bayless, who knows a thing or two about Mexican cuisine, also advises against soaking. Not a nutritional argument, of course.

Usually I can at least offer an opinion based on a preponderance of evidence, perhaps mixed with personal experience or observation, but on this one, I just don’t know. You might have a tradeoff between tradition and nutrition, or between convenience and flavor.

I can only tell you what I do, or what I don’t do: I’ve stopped soaking beans. I never found a cooking benefit, and I was unaware of a nutritional question until shortly before I started writing this post. I did find something interesting in, of all places, Wikipedia – and, oddly enough, it comes from a bona fide academic source:

Probiotic lactobacilli, and other species of the endogenous digestive microflora as well, are an important source of the enzyme phytase which catalyses the release of phosphate from phytate and hydrolyses the complexes formed by phytate and metal ions or other cations, rendering them more soluble ultimately improving and facilitating their intestinal absorption.

That indicates to me that popping a couple of L. acidophilus pills before chowing down on some (unsoaked-before-cooking) beans might help you get the best of both worlds. But beyond that, I’m as confused as ever.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Blog trouble.

So you may have noticed some problems on the site today – a corrupted database was at fault, and right now, the last five weeks of posts and comments are gone, and I can see that a good chunk of comments from before that are toast as well because the backup file was partly corrupted too. I can restore some, if not all, of the posts, but the comments are probably gone. C’est la Web 2.0, I guess.

If there’s something you know I posted since 10/30 that you want to see restored, leave a comment on this thread. You may also want to ignore some of what shows up in your RSS reader for the next day or so.

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→ October 30, 2008
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Swaptree.

UPDATE, June 2012: I no longer recommend Swap.com (formerly known as Swaptree), as their customer service is nonexistent. They have lost their BBB accreditation in part for failing to respond to a complaint I filed.

—

Last December reader Robert asked me if I’d tried the bartering service Swaptree, which I had not. I signed up that week and now, about 40 trades later, I can offer a pretty strong recommendation.

The site’s concept is very simple: You enter a list of books, CDs, DVDs, or video games that you own and would be willing to trade, entering ISBN/UPC info plus a note on the item’s condition. Then you enter a list of items you wish to receive in trade. Swaptree looks for matches between users – direct one-for-one swaps as well as three-person swaps – and notifies all parties when it finds one, giving you a chance to reject the deal if you don’t think it’s fair. You pay the shipping cost, and can print labels directly through swaptree (media mail unless it’s not a book or the package is so light that first-class is cheaper), usually running between $2.20 and $2.80. I send all items in padded envelopes, so my cost per item runs to around $3.50, but some people just wrap books in brown paper or take other shortcuts.

My wife and I went to clear some stuff out of our storage space on Saturday, and I went through a few boxes of books, pulling 20-25 with which I was willing to part. By Wednesday, I’d swapped 15 of them.

I’ve only had one bad experience on swaptree, with an item that was (allegedly) lost in the mail. The sender didn’t use swaptree or another trackable service, so we can’t confirm that the item was ever sent, and there’s really no recourse for me – I was just SOL, having sent a book but not received one. Swaptree’s customer service was close to nonexistent: they contacted the other user, and I guess they’ll suspend someone who has too many complaints, but after receiving their initial automated response to my “I didn’t receive an item” complaint, I didn’t hear back from them again. Looking at feedback for other users, I don’t think non-receipt is a big problem, and I haven’t had any problems with other trades.

Swaptree doesn’t do much to help you browse the often lengthy list of items you can get in trade but that aren’t on your “Items I Want” list. There’s no way to filter books by genre or to tell the system that you already own a book, and since the most popular books on swaptree are, of course, popular books by James North Patterson and Patricia Cornwell and Nora Roberts, browsing really means sifting through a lot of crap in the hopes that you’ll find something that catches your eye. In fact, right now, I can get Snow Falling on Cedars in trade, which is stupid, since I’m reading the book now and I already entered the book as one I own but don’t wish to trade.

On the plus side, I’ve executed some rather absurd swaps that worked out great. I traded an old computer game someone bought me a few years ago – a very bad RPG called Temple of Elemental Evil – for a Janet Evanovich book for my wife. I traded a brand-new Angelina Ballerina DVD that we already had (and watch every night…) for a copy of Lonesome Dove: A Novel (Lonesome Dove). I traded Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus (my least favorite of his novels, which I haven’t touched in over a decade) for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. And so on.

It’s worked out well for us so far – we’ve gotten rid of a bunch of books that we didn’t want, which is good, since our book collection is rather out of control, while we’ve gotten a number of books that we might otherwise have bought new or not bought at all. It’s easy to use, at least in terms of entering your “have” and “want” lists, but you’re relying on the honor system to some degree to get your books, and it can easily take a week or more for a book shipped media mail to traverse the country. (This doesn’t matter to me, since I usually have a backlog of at least a dozen books to read.) Item conditions have nearly always been at or above what was promised. And the cost is slight, even including the $1 monthly fee swaptree charges in months where you use their shipping-label service. They’re currently running a promotion that gives you a free shipping credit if you invite a friend to swaptree who then makes a trade by the end of November. So give it a whirl.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With:
→ October 29, 2008
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J.P. Howell.

If anyone can explain to me why you don’t pinch-hit for J.P. Howell there in the 7th inning, I’m all ears, because the mere sight of it made my brains start to leak out my nose.

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