→ July 3, 2008
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Chat/radio.

There will be a KlawChat today over at the Four-Letter at 1 pm EDT.

I’ll be on WZON in Portland, Maine, today between 4 and 6 pm (we’re pretaping in the 3 pm hour); on WKNR 850 in Cleveland at 4:10 pm; and on the Thom Abraham Show on ESPN 106.7 in Nashville after 4 pm CDT, although I’m waiting to hear a specific time from them.

I’ll also be on Miami’s 790 the Ticket with Jonathan Zaslow on Friday at 11 am.

Filed Under: Appearances, Chat
→ July 2, 2008
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The Next Food Network Star, week 5.

Notes on episode 5:

  • The first challenge was even more inane than usual. Asking a cook to describe someone else’s dish and then docking them for not guessing all the ingredients correctly is more than a little absurd. At the end, the judges criticized a few contestants for not “owning” the dishes, or “taking ownership.” Hey, news flash, they didn’t cook the dishes they were describing. I have more ownership of the Taj Mahal than they had of those dishes.
  • Cat Cora is a verbal train wreck – “your describing skills,” “the reason I’ve chose you” – and I’ve seen shorter roots on a hundred-year-old tree. Having her judge the candidates on presentation was not a good decision. Seriously, when Aaron said “coq de vin,” I’m sure she thought, “Yeah, that’s right.”
  • Adam’s decision-making sucked; bone-in chicken breasts can be cooked in 45 minutes in an oven, but not on a grill, and polenta takes a solid 45 just to cook, plus a few minutes to finish it.
  • The key to the second challenge was deconstruction. For the coq au vin, I would have done roasted chicken breasts wrapped in some form of cured pork (probably bacon or pancetta) with a sauce of red wine, butter, shallots, and thyme. Lisa’s idea of duck confit for the turducken was great, as was using a poultry sausage, although I would have used the sausage gambit to get credit for chicken, which has the least flavor of the three meats involved.
  • “I can’t believe that happened” … no, Jen, I can’t believe YOU did that. Who the hell bangs a glass jar on a cooktop – or ANYWHERE – to get it open? You have heat sources everywhere. Run the lid under hot water for ten seconds. It’s not that hard. If she bangs glass jars all the time, I’m surprised she has any blood left in her system.
  • The complaint about the white onions and beige pastry was the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I cancelled my Bon Appetit subscription four or five years ago because their recipes were slipping, and this is probably why: They care more about colors clashing on the plate than, you know, how the freaking food tastes. Unbelievable. I’m not sure what world they live in; maybe a world where Andrew’s hair is actually stylish.
  • Shane and Kelsey won this in a walk; I have to give Shane credit for coming off as older than nineteen every time he’s on camera. Still not sure I could stand 22 minutes of Kelsey.
  • The judge who made the point (to Aaron, I believe) about self-editing was spot on: You can’t do that while you’re on camera. It’s not writing, where you can go back, delete, re-word, and so on. You have to just keep going, even if what you just said was wrong or stupid or boxed you into a corner. Fight your way out if you have to, but don’t stop or pause or think about what you just said. The camera is still rolling while you think.

Unrelated link: Starbucks to close 600 stores. I wonder if this location is one of them.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 1, 2008
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Viva la Vida, or Death and All His Friends.

Coldplay’s Viva la Vida, or Death and All His Friends is the first full album I’ve bought in at least two years. I have always been a singles guy, whether those were songs released as commercial singles or just deep album tracks that I liked. The idea of the album as a cohesive artistic unit rarely succeeded for me, and I always interpreted it as more marketing/finance than art, since it was not terribly economical to sell songs individually when that involved moving physical product.

Then came the compression algorithm behind MP3 files, which allowed for delivery of single tracks at virtually no cost to the vendor, with some loss of audio quality to the consumer (although much audio quality had already been lost with the move to CDs, and most of us can’t hear the difference or just don’t care). The record industry decided to stick two fingers in its ears and one up its ass in a rather stunning combination of physical dexterity and willful ignorance, continuing to push albums and refusing to unbundled them for digital distribution for several years. I have always wondered why this didn’t constitute tying, a type of antitrust violation where the purchase of one product is predicated on the simultaneous purchase of another product even though the two products could be sold separately. Even to this day, some labels and artists refuse to allow their albums to be sold as individual tracks, which, in the existence of a significant black market for music, is like leaving the keys in your car on an urban street with a “steal me” sign in the window. (I have, in fact, done this, without the sign though.)

I bought Coldplay’s new album with the idea of reviewing it, rather than out of any specific desire to have the entire album. I loved Parachutes from start to finish, but felt that A Rush Of Blood To The Head was far less consistent (and we all know how important consistency is), with a fair bit of filler. I didn’t bother with X&Y because I don’t like the type of Coldplay song that my friend Nicole refers to as “mopeysuck,” like “Fix You,” and probably would have bought new Coldplay material as each single came out if it wasn’t for my intention to review the album.

Of course, that’s a long intro to lead up to the obvious point that I am glad I bought the entire album, because it’s good. It is an extended bit of experimentation by a band trying to break out of the musical corner into which they had boxed themselves, and while bits of it dance over the line into pseudo-prog-rock and there is one moment of undeniably twee music perhaps better suited to now-defunct fey Britpop bands like Geneva, Viva la Vida feels more like a transitional album for a band on its way to an extended run of commercially and artistically significant music.

Most of the middle tracks on the album involve multiple movements, a risky maneuver that can leave the listener liking half of each song. On “42,” a mopeysuck intro leads to a more uptempo instrumental transition followed by the peculiar but catchy singalong chorus of “You thought you might be a ghost/You didn’t get to heaven but you made it close.” Similarly, the two-part, seven-minute track “Lovers in Japan” starts with a driving background reminiscent of Mercury Rev’s “Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp” (also uneven yet fun), but around the four-minute mark switches to the second part, a mopeysuck ballad with no apparent connection to the first movement, although I imagine they would just be split if released as a single. Every one of these songs has a great sequence in it, but only the two-part “Yes” – actually the song “Yes” plus a hidden track, sold as a single song in the downloadable version – delivers in both halves, although the transition is jarring and the connection between the two pieces is not evident.

The album kicks into high gear when “Yes” is followed by “Viva la Vida,” which should put Coldplay into Record of the Year territory (especially since they’ve won the award before – and you thought the baseball writers were predictable). It’s a classic combination of upbeat music as an ironic background to an extended lament, this time with a deposed monarch (or tyrant?) as narrator. It’s probably the closest Coldplay has ever come to putting an actual groove into one of their tracks. “Viva” is followed by the lead single, “Violet Hill,” a dark, almost gothic ballad carried by a Bonham-esque drumbeat – you might wonder if they’re on Violet Hill because the levee broke and they had to head for higher ground – with a distinctive modulation behind the chorus’ final line that provides a sinister contrast to the words (“If you love me/Won’t you let me know”).

What elevates the album despite the trademark strain of melancholy that always infects Coldplay’s music is the way that nearly every song possesses a sort of musical greed that drives it forward, or perhaps pulls the listener in and forces you to want to come along for the ride. There’s more layering than ever before, almost a 180 from the sparse arrangements of Parachutes and much of X&Y. There’s also a lot of what I could only call prog-rock leanings, like the Russian-sounding, minor-key violin solo in “Yes,” or the heavily syncopated transitional movement in “42.” If this is a sign that they’re heading full-on into Yes or King Crimson territory, then this is my stop and I’m getting off, but I’m hopeful that Viva la Vida is more of a sign of maturation in their music, and that we’re about to get their equivalent of The Joshua Tree or Revolver the next time out.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With:
→ June 30, 2008
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Monday stuff.

I did a Q&A on the Cardinals’ draft over at Future Redbirds. The first commenter made my day.

The dish is the blog equivalent of a cool indie band. Nice.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at 3:40 pm EDT, and after that I’m off to the doubleheader at Lowell in case any of you will be in attendance. Feel free to say hi.

If you can read Italian, check out .144, a blog written by a diehard baseball fan in Italy (and a great supporter of the growth of baseball in Italy, and the associated site PlayItUSA, with articles on US-based sports all written in Italian. It’s a good resource if you’re trying to improve your Italian vocabulary, which I’m doing right now in advance of the August visit of one of my cousins from Genova.

Filed Under: Chat Tagged With: ,
→ June 29, 2008
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Skirt steak fajitas.

I have no idea if fajitas are Mexican food, Tex-Mex food, or something invented by the New York City-based marketing department of a casual-dining chain looking for a way to get rid of less-desirable cuts of beef.

I don’t care. I love ’em.

I should clarify: I love fajitas when they’re done right. They are, however, almost never done right. Gummy tortillas, overcooked and underseasoned meat, tasteless veggies, and a side platter of undefinable cheese, rotten sour cream, and limp lettuce do not qualify as “done right.”

This recipe for steak fajitas works best over a grill, but if you have a grill pan, you can fake it, and on a rainy day I have made these on a cast-iron flat-top grill that sits over two burners on my stove. I turned the fan on high and had a fair amount of cleanup to do afterwards, but the steak came out fine.

First up, make the steak rub. This is the same homemade spice mix I use as taco seasoning and just about anywhere else that a chili powder mixture is called for.

2 Tbsp ancho chili powder
2 tsp cumin (toasted & freshly ground)
2 tsp coriander
½-1 tsp cayenne pepper (depends on your heat tolerance)
½ tsp sweet paprika
½ tsp smoked Spanish paprika
1-2 tsp dried oregano

Whisk those together and set aside. There is no salt in the rub, because we’re going to salt the meat before we apply the rub.

For the fajitas, you will need:

Flour tortillas
1 lb or more of flank or skirt steak (I prefer skirt because it’s cheaper and tastes just as good)
2 red/yellow/orange bell peppers, seeded and cut into strips
1 green bell pepper, seeded and cut into strips
1 onion, sliced very thinly
1 serrano pepper, seeded and finely chopped
1 clove garlic, minced

1. Trim the meat of any fat you can cut off without destroying the steak. Much of it will pull off with a little encouragement from a knife. You might see silver skin on a flank steak. Make sure you remove it, as it’s very tough and can cause the meat to curl as it cooks. (You can render some fat from the bits you cut off the steaks and cook with it. It’s not good for you but delivers great flavor to French fries if you fry in a mixture of beef fat and vegetable oil.)
2. Salt the entire surface of the meat, then liberally apply the ancho chile rub.
3. Light your grill. If you’re using charcoal, make a narrow mound over which your steak can sit. If you’re using propane, you’ll need one burner cranked up to 11.
4. Meanwhile, put a heavy skillet over medium-high heat on your stove. When the skillet is hot, add about a tablespoon of olive oil and add the bell peppers and as much of the Serrano as you like. Season with salt. Cook about five minutes until the bell pepper strips are softened and a little browned.
5. Add the onions and more salt and stir thoroughly. The goal now is to cook the onions down and let them caramelize a little, which will take about 15 minutes. Stir this mixture from time to time to prevent anything from burning or sticking. When the veggies are nearly done, add the minced garlic clove and about a tablespoon of the chile mixture (assuming you have some left).
6. When the grill is ready, place the steak directly over the heat. This is direct heat cooking – cook for about two to three minutes per side, then flip, cook for two to two and a half minutes more, and take it off. You don’t want to cook either of these cuts of steak past medium or they will become tough. Let the steak rest for five minutes.
7. While the steak is resting, you’ll need to heat the tortillas. (Yes, the best tortillas are homemade, and I’ve done it many times. It takes almost an hour just to roll and cook them, never mind making the dough ahead of time and letting it rest. I haven’t had that kind of time since I joined ESPN and became a dad within a two-week span.) You have two options: You can heat them one at a time in a hot dry skillet, 20 seconds per side; or you can heat them in a stack wrapped in aluminum foil in a 300 degree oven for about five minutes.
8. Slice the steak thinly on the bias. Serve with the pepper/onion mixture and any side items you desire.

Suggested sides: I’m partial to a simple guacamole of mashed avocado, lime juice, salt, cumin, pressed garlic (the rare occasion when the use of a garlic press is acceptable), and chopped cilantro. Cotija cheese or queso fresco both play nice with fajitas. And if you really want to kick it up, try adding a little of this habanero crema:

1 cup crème fraîche
1 habanero, seeded, ribs removed, stemmed, minced finely. (Note: Do this with latex gloves on. If you handle a cut habanero with your bare hands and then touch your eyes … well, it hurt like a motherf—– when I did it with a jalapeño and I couldn’t see out of that eye for fifteen minutes. I believe a habanero is almost fifty times hotter than a jalapeño. So wear gloves.)
1/8 tsp white pepper
Pinch of salt

Combine all ingredients in a small bowl. Cover and refrigerate for at least one hour.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ June 29, 2008
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Mediocy in food.

So CNN runs these occasional articles on healthy eating, and they’re just about always inane, like today’s article on “food pairings.” To wit:

DO mix grilled steak and Brussels sprouts

“It’s always best to cook meat or fish at low temperatures until it’s done,” says Kristin E. Anderson, Ph.D., a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health and Cancer Center, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “And if there are burned pieces, trim them off.”

So apparently “cruciferous” vegetables (members of the cabbage family, by and large) help the body eliminate potential carcinogens found on charred meat. That’s fine. But Dr. Anderson’s solution, don’t cook over high temperatures, is hilarious. You shouldn’t cook over high heat, so cook over low heat? So now what – no more Maillard reactions?

Here’s a tip: Don’t overcook your food. Two to three minutes over high heat gives you a nice crust and no char. Just make sure that if you invite Dr. Anderson over, you poach her steak to a nice soft gray instead of grilling it. Yum.

DON’T mix coffee and breakfast cereal

Most cereals sold in the United States are fortified with iron. … Problem is, if you sip coffee while eating your Wheaties, polyphenols, an antioxidant in coffee, can hamper the body’s ability to absorb the iron.

The article says black and herbal teas also have high levels of polyphenol. That’s as may be, but the article omits a pretty major problem: The calcium in the milk you put in your cereal has the same effect as the polyphenols, binding with the iron in the cereal and dragging it right out of your body. (Here’s a PDF version of a brief article from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, saying the same thing in fancier terms.)

In other words, the tea I am drinking with my breakfast cereal now isn’t doing anything more than grabbing the sloppy-seconds of iron that the calcium in the milk left behind. And by the way, if you take a multi-vitamin with iron, it probably has all the iron than your body needs in a given day, so say nothing of the iron you might take in via red meat, legumes, or figs. Just don’t take a calcium supplement along with that multi-vitamin.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , ,
→ June 27, 2008
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The Klaw 100, part five.

Part one (#100-81)
Part two (#80-61)
Part three (#60-41)
Part four (#40-21)

I doubt there will be too many surprises here, as I’ve discussed most of these last twenty books somewhere before. The complete list of 100 is available as a spreadsheet at Google Spreadsheets. But don’t click now or you’ll spoil the top 20…

20. Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett. Dark and violent and completely gripping, Red Harvest was Hammett’s first novel and established the format of the hard-boiled detective novel with its sparse style and unblinking descriptions of bloodshed. It may have been the basis for Kurosawa’s Yojimbo as well.

19. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. Perhaps the archetype of the brooding male hero, although I kind of felt Heathcliff was just an asshole. It’s a tremendous story of anger, vengeance, and cruelty, unfolding in layers as one might peel back an onion. Also available in a much-beloved semaphore version.

18. If on a winter’s night a traveler, by Italo Calvino. If you love inventive or just plain weird books, this is for you. The subject of the novel is the reading of a novel. Alternating chapters show a dialogue between the Author and the Reader, interlaced with opening chapters from various fictional novels. Calvino, one of the great fabulists of the twentieth century, takes his inspired silliness to a new level.

17. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s all about the green light. Jay Gatsby’s ill-fated chase of the American Dream, set in the Jazz Age as the automobile begins to make its presence felt on our culture. It ranked first on the Radcliffe Publishing Course’s list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century, and second on the Modern Library’s own list.

16. The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford. A classic English novel of betrayal, The Good Soldier describes a web of infidelities that destroys the lives of five people, with incredible dialogue and the powerful, recurring symbol of the human heart. I’m pretty sure that at $2.50 it’s the cheapest book on this list.

15. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter , by Carson McCullers. Full review. An amazing achievement of prose and of literary introspection. McCullers looks into the human soul and finds a lot of dusk, if not dark night.

14. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. Like stepping into a lucid dream, and indeed, the protagonist finds the line between reality and dreams blurring while searching for his wife, who has either left him or is being held against her will. You’ll have a hard time putting it down, although there is one scene of graphic torture that was tough to get through.

13. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. Ignatius J. Reilly with his dyspeptic valve is one of the great hero-antiheroes in American literature as he’s forced to get his lazy ass a job. The book was published posthumously after Toole’s suicide through the persistence of his mother, who is portrayed in an unflattering light in the book, and novelist Walker Percy; twelve years after Toole’s death, Confederacy won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

12. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy. Hated it in high school … okay, that’s not fair, I hated the first twenty pages and rented the movie. I went back for a re-read 16 years later and saw what I’d missed: One of the greatest ironic novels I’ve ever read. It’s bleak in its portraits of English society and its strictures, of human emotions, and of fate, but Hardy (who also was a noted poet) writes beautifully and slips numerous bits of wordplay into the text.

11. The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins. Collins, a protégé of Charles Dickens, believed that nothing in the novel was more important than the plot, and he wrote perhaps the first suspense novel in this story of mistaken identities, ghost sightings, and the unctuous, nefarious villain Count Fosco. Its use of multiple narrators was revolutionary for the time, and while it has the potential to be confusing, it’s critical for the way Collins wants to unfold the plot before the reader

10. Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh. Full review. A hilarious and absurd satire of the news media that was written in the 1930s but is just as relevant today, as a man who wants no part of the job becomes a foreign correspondent to an African state on the brink of civil war.

9. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by Henry Fielding. Fielding made his bones as a novelist by parodying Samuel Richardson’s Pamela with his own work, Shamela, and then moved to a broader satire with Joseph Andrews before stepping out with an entirely original work, the comic picaresque Tom Jones. The story is built around Jones’ romantic pursuit of the daughter of Squire Western, who is constantly trying to pair his daughter up with the villainous son of Jones’ foster parents. Along the way Jones is arrested, accosted, consorts with prostitutes, and runs into no end of conniving, selfish secondary characters.

8. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez. The history of Colombia told as the history of one family, with a heavy dose of magical realism and the sweeping feel of an epic despite the focus on individual characters. The Buendía family plays a role in the rise of the fictional town of Macondo until a banana plantation, owned by foreigners, arrives and triggers a lengthy and ultimately complete collapse.

7. Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner. The history of the American South told as the history of one family, mostly limited to the decline of the region after the Civil War. Patriarch Thomas Sutpen builds his fortune, but sets the seeds for his family’s downfall through his greed and racism. Told in Faulkner’s usual style of multiple perspectives and winding prose.

6. Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton. The best book ever written about Africa was written by a white South African, decrying the country’s apartheid system while offering threads of hope for its future once the system is dismantled. Preacher Stephen Kumalo leaves his rural village to go to the city to help his dissolute sister, Gertrude, and find his son, named Absalom, who went to help Gertrude earlier but never returned and ends up in jail.

5. Beloved, by Toni Morrison. And here we have African-American history, dating back to their emancipation from slavery. Sethe and her daughter Denver are trying to establish a live for themselves as free women when a young woman, known simply as “Beloved,” arrives at the house. Is she the reincarnation of the child Sethe killed to keep her out of slavery? Sethe’s obsession with Beloved opens the door to a host of questions – are African-Americans held down by the weight of their past, or are they complicit in allowing their past to weigh them down? No one writing today does so with prose like Morrison’s or with as much literary depth.

4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. The greatest one-hit wonder in literature and perhaps in the arts. The story alone makes it a classic, but Lee’s use of language, combining a Southern dialect with the unmistakable voice of a child, elevates it to its legendary status.

3. Emma, by Jane Austen. Austen herself wrote that she didn’t expect anyone to like her meddling, imperious protagonist, but nearly two hundred years after publication the book remains extremely popular, and the title character is a major reason. Character development was never Austen’s strength, but Emma grows up across the book’s 400-odd pages, with the usual cast of comic-relief supporting characters, including her worrywart father and the garrulous Miss Bates.

2. Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. To the reviewer who called Lolita “the only convincing love story of our century,” I submit Tender is the Night, the story of the gradual, inexorable breakdown of the seemingly perfect marriage between two beautiful people by way of infidelity, drink, and mental illness. If Fitzgerald had to go out early, he could not have gone out on a higher note.

1. The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. An absolute masterpiece, banned by the Soviets for decades for its subtle yet severe indictment of communism’s many, many failures. The Devil comes to Moscow and exposes its society for all its vapidity, running into the frustrated author The Master and his faithful girlfriend Margarita, a story intertwined with a dialogue between Pontius Pilate and Jesus, all stacked with allusions to the Bible and major works of 19th century Russian literature. It is a work of unbridled genius, of acrimonious dissent, and most of all, of hope and faith in humanity.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
→ June 26, 2008
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The Next Food Network Star, week 4.

Just playing a little catch-up here…

  • I said last time that this show is about humiliating the contestants, and this week was no exception. How exactly did the first challenge – do a one-minute instructional video on a topic you may or may not be familiar with and have only seconds to prepare – relate to the challenge of being a TV chef? Are the instructional videos we see on FN.com unscripted? Are they all successfully shot on the first take? Giving the contestants a few minutes to think or jot down some notes would have been perfectly reasonable and avoided a lot of the ugly things that we saw, like Aaron going totally off the rails on presentation.
  • I thought he had the easiest task, too; dismantling a pineapple is a snap. Hardest was either Kelsey’s – she totally cheated by taking the bone off, since Frenching means leaving the rack intact – or Shane’s, since you can’t dismantle a coconut in sixty seconds. Alton Brown even suggests baking them for 20 minutes.
  • Nipa needed to go, clearly, but she caught a pretty raw deal this week, since she clearly doesn’t cook much with seafood, and may not really need to if her idea is to bring Indian cooking to the masses. That said, she didn’t carry herself well, had poor presence, and like Michael Symon I was offended by the way she wasted most of the meat on that trout.
  • Symon said one of the most profound things you’re going to hear on this show when he pointed out that even if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you need to act like you do. We all know that the air of authority can cover up the stench of ignorance.
  • The frustrating part about watching Jennifer is that her problem is totally fixable: When you’re on camera, don’t think. If you start to think through what you’re saying – or worse, what you just said – you’re lost. And it goes pear-shaped very quickly after that.
  • Kelsey’s pretty clearly taken the lead, not just because she won both challenges, but because the judges are saying that they liked her new persona this week. I thought from the start that white chocolate would be my choice of the bullshit Iron Chef ingredients, since it’s full of cocoa butter, a fat with great mouth-feel. She made another good call with tilapia, which is pretty versatile.
  • Adam: Crepes plus halibut cooked two ways in sixty minutes? What are you on? A crepe takes at least 75 seconds to cook, and doing two at once in adjacent pans still means almost 20 minutes just to cook the crepes. Bad idea.
  • I distinctly remember saying “stop crying,” but no one listened.
Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , ,
→ June 26, 2008
→ By

Chat today.

At 1 pm EDT over at the Four-Letter.

Filed Under: Chat
→ June 26, 2008
→ By

The Klaw 100, part four.

Part one (#100-81)
Part two (#80-61)
Part three (#60-41)
Part five (#20-1)

40. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. I’m not sure I buy into Vanity Fair‘s oft-quoted review (“The only convincing love story of our century”), but as a study of obsession, arrested development, and rationalization, it’s powerful and cheerfully unapologetic.

39. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh. One of the strangest books on this list, as it starts out as a story of drunken revelry at an English prep school and ends up as a story of a romance torn asunder by theological disagreements (also explored in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair). Think of it as a fictional memoir that intertwines nostalgia for a bygone era of English culture with a re-examination of the narrator’s spiritual emptiness.

38. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. Major Major, Nately’s whore, Milo’s cotton schemes … and the flying missions that never end in a serious war with some very un-serious behavior. A sharp satire full of madcap laughs.

37. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. The first novel in the Western canon, and the first comic novel, Don Quixote is actually two novels now published as one; Cervantes wrote a sequel in response to the flood of knockoffs and unauthorized sequels that followed the enormous success of the first volume of his work. If you’ve read it, check out Julian Branston’s The Eternal Quest, a funny homage that includes Cervantes and an unnamed “errant knight” as major characters.

36. My Ántonia, by Willa Cather. Never mentioned in discussions of the Great American Novel, but isn’t a tale about immigrant families working to create better lives for themselves and their children an integral part of the American story?

35. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë. The consummate Gothic romance, with a little magical realism (although it was written a century before the term existed) and a couple of absurd coincidences, still captivates readers and, of course, gave us Thursday Next and The Eyre Affair.

34. The Trial, by Franz Kafka. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

33. The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal. Sort of a French picaresque novel, but with a heavy dose of the realism that characterizes most great French 19th-century literature. The protagonist, Fabrizio del Dongo, is a slightly dim young nobleman who sets off on a Quixotic quest to fight with Napoleon’s army (even though Fabrizio is Italian) and become a hero.

32. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini. Full review. The history of Afghanistan, told as the tragic story of two childhood friends separated not by war, but by a child’s severe error of judgment. Whether he finds redemption as an adult is left to the reader, but unlike, say, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Hosseini’s work at least opens the door.

31. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner. The toughest read on the list, because Faulkner – never an easy read – wrote the first fourth of the book from the perspective of the severely developmentally disabled Benji, who senses all time as now and drifts in his rambling narrative from the past to the present without warning. The four parts describe the decline of a Southern family – and of an entire stratum of Southern society – from four different perspectives. And by the way, the book’s title comes from Macbeth: “It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing.”

30. Empire Falls, by Richard Russo. Full review. A bit rich for such a recent book? I won’t deny it, but despite being set in contemporary America, Empire Falls harkens back to the storytelling of American literature from the first half of the last century, following a cast of ne’er-do-wells around a failing Maine mill town as they wait for something good to happen.

29. A Dance to the Music of Time (series), by Anthony Powell. Full review. Powell’s twelve-part sequence follows Nick Jenkins as he moves from boarding school to college to the army to the publishing world, with him serving as our wry tour guide through the follies and life events of a wide-ranging cast of characters.

28. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess. Full review. A dystopian novel about the simple things in life, like free will.

27. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. A great romance and a commentary on first impressions and, of course, how our pride can get in the way. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and the unctuous William Collins rank among Austen’s best comic creations.

26. Appointment in Samarra, by John O’Hara. Full review. A Fitzgerald-esque novel about one man’s self-destruction through alcohol as he rebels against the confines of the small town where he and his status-conscious wife live.

25. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury is better known for his science fiction – the dystopian masterpiece Fahrenheit 451 just missed the cut for this list – but this old-fashioned gothic horror story uses fear to drive the narrative forward as a sinister circus comes to a small Southern town and two kids find that their curiosity may do more than kill a cat.

24. Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene. Although it doesn’t have the gravitas of Greene’s serious novels (like The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair), Our Man in Havana is the most serious of his “entertainments” that I’ve read. It’s a rich satire about a vacuum cleaner salesman who is recruited as a British spy and fulfills his duties by sending in blueprints of vacuums and passing them off as new Cuban weapons systems.

23. The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens. Full review. Dickens’ first novel and perhaps the first true best-seller in English literature, Pickwick is a classic picaresque novel that showcases the sense of humor Dickens apparently lost somewhere on the way to two of the banes of my high school years, Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities.

22. The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton. Full review. Another Pulitzer Prize winner, two years after The Magnificent Ambersons won, Age combines a love triangle, biting but hilarious commentary, and the stifling social norms of the Gilded Age for one of the greatest American novels ever written.

21. Persuasion, by Jane Austen. Anne Elliott was persuaded by her father and Lady Russell to decline an “unfavorable” match with a poor sailor when she was nineteen. Now twenty-seven and apparently headed for spinsterhood, she learns that her suitor has returned to England a wealthy captain. Austen’s last novel is the tightest and brings the most tension without skimping on the wit provided by, among others, Anne’s complete fathead of a father.

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