→ July 22, 2007
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows full review.

So I’ll do my best to review this one without spoilers, although if you still intend to read the book, you may want to stop here to be safe.

Even after a good night’s sleep, I still think this book was the best of the series. When I evaluate a book, I focus on three things: plot, prose, and characters. I’ve always thought Rowling excelled at prose – more on that in a moment – which propelled the first two books through some fairly simple plots and characters that were a little one-dimensional. Whether it was part of a plan or just Rowling’s growth as a writer, her plots became significantly more involved, with multiple subplots and a number of additional characters getting more screen time. And her characters really started to develop in the third and fourth books, with most of the central characters becoming three-dimensional by books five and six. Deathly Hallows didn’t disappoint in any of these three criteria, although I did find it odd that the character who develops the most is one who’s already dead when the book opens.

Rowling’s prose has come under a little criticism recently, although it’s possible that this has been going on all along and I just missed it. (To see what I mean, Google “Rowling clunky prose” and see how many hits come up – it’s almost as if one writer used that phrase a few years ago and every blogger on the Internet has picked it up.) The CNN.com review said “Rowling has attracted much criticism for her often clunky prose;” I couldn’t disagree more: Rowling’s prose is straightforward and descriptive, evoking images in a way that no other writer I’ve encountered is able to do. When I read a well-written book, I “see” the action in the book, almost like a movie playing in my mind as I read. The clearer the movie, the better the prose must be, and I have never run into an author who produces such incredibly well-defined images with her prose. That doesn’t necessarily mean she spends the most time on describing the scenery – I’m pretty sure Charles Dickens has that title sewn up – but that she strikes a perfect balance between descriptive text and active text. I understand that J.R.R. Tolkien’s works are more literary, but for readability, Rowling destroys Tolkien, who hails from the Dickensian tradition of giving us too fine a level of detail. Clunky prose gets in the way, slowing you down, throwing you off of the story, whereas good prose lets the story stand for itself. A good story is like fresh fish or a high-quality steak: You don’t foul that kind of food up with a heavy sauce or with overrich side dishes or with less-than-fresh ingredients, so why foul a good story up with prose that gets in the way? You want clunky prose, go read James Joyce or Henry James – if you can stomach it. I’ll stick with Rowling’s because it gets the job done.

I don’t want to talk too much about the plot for fear of introducing spoilers, but I’ll speak a little in generalities. In the context of the entire series, I don’t think Rowling could have done much better. The resolutions for the main characters worked for me, although I echo one commenter’s post on the prior thread about the epilogue being a bit too sparse; the deaths Rowling promised/threatened were reasonable, and clearly a few of the “good guys” had to die for the plot to have any semblance of believability, even within the fictional world.

The action sequences were some of Rowling’s best, with none of the muddled details and running about that made book five my least favorite in the series (due to the entire sequence at the Ministry of Magic towards the book’s end). What really worked for me in book seven, however, was the way Rowling uses a couple of major anecdotes and a few recurring characters to give both the global view of what’s going on in the wizarding world and the local view of what’s going on with Harry in the search for the Horcruxes.

She also works heavily with a few major themes – including the related themes of disillusionment and of faith – making this probably the deepest of the seven novels. Harry learns some unsettling details about Dumbledore’s past while he’s struggling to formulate a plan for locating the missing Horcruxes, leading him to wonder about the wisdom of continuing to carry out the mission Dumbledore assigned to him before his death. Harry’s relations with Ron and Hermione and the relationship between those two vacillate for much of the work as the quest goes less than smoothly and the three spend an inordinate amount of time together in uncomfortable conditions. I’ll be honest – I’m not reading these books for their deeper meaning, and while I thought I sensed some allegory about faith and trust, I was too busy enjoying the story to worry about any of that.

The seventh book’s character development is middle-of-the-pack for the series, in part because the three major characters were already pretty well developed by the end of the sixth book. Ron does end up maturing during the seventh book, but the point where he loses faith in Harry wasn’t much of a surprise and I felt like I’d seen it in an earlier book. Harry himself shows some growth towards the end of the seventh book, although this was a necessary element for the plot to reach its denouement. The character who develops the most is Albus Dumbledore, who dies at the end of book six, but whose character and background were never fleshed out previous to this book, with him serving as more of a benefactor and protector than as a full-fledged character. What you see in the back half of book six is a taste of what Rowling offers on Dumbledore in book seven. We also get some more insight into Snape’s character, but like that of Dumbledore, it’s by flashback, rather than by the characters developing as a result of the action and dialogue in the book’s present. The fact that the Big Three don’t develop much, and that the necessary direction of the plot means we don’t get to see as much of the better secondary characters (the various Weasleys, Luna, and Neville), made the lack of character development and the very heavy focus on Harry and Hermione the one big disappointment for me, although I’m obviously very invested in those characters and still ended up completely engrossed in their actions.

As I mentioned at the top, if a book has good plot, clean prose, and compelling characters, I’m in. I’ve been hooked on Harry since book one and if anything, I’m disappointed that the series is over, and the characters I know so well have seen their stories come to a close. (I did spend today in my typical post-Potter melancholy, which always hits me after I finish one of the books for the first time.) But before I let the subject drop, let me throw one story at you about what that first Harry Potter did for me.

I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Rowling’s work from people (including Harold Bloom and A.S. Byatt) who say that because the Potter novels aren’t real literature, they’re not going to lead people to read the classics or to otherwise up the quality of their reading materials. I can only speak to my own experience, but for me, that is absolute bollocks. I was a bookworm when I was younger, but my tastes were typical teenaged-boy – science fiction with a strong dose of countercultural books like Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and any number of books by Vonnegut. The “great books” forced on me in high school bored me to tears, and as soon as I got free of those requirements, I stopped reading them altogether (which isn’t to say I read everything that was assigned to me, either). When I got into my 20s, I more or less stopped reading fiction for pleasure, period, reading nonfiction when I wanted a book for a long flight.

In the fall of 2000, my wife picked up the first two Harry Potter books, tore through the first one, and gave me the old, “You have to read this!” line. So I took it on a business trip to California and started it on the plane ride home – and I was hooked. In 2001, I read the next two books, but also found myself getting back into the reading habit; I discovered P.G. Wodehouse and started perusing used book stores for the first time in a few years. I read Goblet of Fire in January of 2002, and ended up reading 75 books that year, including Moby Dick, Silas Marner, and The Sound and the Fury. Since I read that first Harry Potter book, I’ve read over 300 books, hitting Tolstoy, James, Dostoevsky, two Brontës, Fielding, Hemingway, more Faulkner, Stendhal, Hardy, Nabokov, Morrison, Eliot, Foster, Defoe, Proust, Flaubert, and the entire catalogs of Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The universal statement that the Harry Potter novels will not lead anyone to read the classics is wrong. J.K. Rowling reminded me that I love to read, and I will forever be grateful to her for that.

Indeed, I think that the criticism of Rowling’s work is a bit of literary snobbery, a reflection of the dismay that the exclusivity once offered to those who put the time into reading “great books” is losing currency in a world where great storytelling trumps metaphor and symbolism and all of the other things that our English professors told us were important without ever telling us why. Reading the classics has become its own reward, rather than a prerequisite for graduating from Eton before moving on to Oxford and then a job in the City, and our definition of “classics” is likely to change as well, with verbose authors like Richardson and Trollope sliding from view while new voices emerge from outside the Western canon. I won’t deny that there is tripe to be found in the fiction section of every bookstore in the United States, but lumping Rowling’s output with that tripe is unfair to her and to those of us who have loved her work to the point that it kindled – or rekindled – a love affair with the novel.

UPDATE: JC Bradbury weighs in on the Potter book – and its possible effect on baseball attendance over the weekend – on the Sabernomics blog.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ July 22, 2007
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Finished!

Just finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I’ll write more tomorrow, but my brief review now is this: Best book in the series.

Filed Under: Literature
→ July 20, 2007
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Conrad, Le Carré, Greene, and Shelley.

Jospeh Conrad’s Nostromo represents his lone appearance in the The Novel 100, and it’s apparently considered his best novel. It is an intensely political and psychological work, a comment on the inherent and perhaps inevitable corruptibility of man when confronted with temptations of power or money. Set in the Sulaco province of the fictional South American nation of Costaguana, which sits on the brink of revolution at the novel’s start, the novel’s plot centers around the re-opening of the San Tomé silver mine, owned by an Englishman who has become a full-time resident of Costaguana, and that mine’s relationship to the ensuing power struggle.

The plot weaves several storylines together on top of this structure, including a doomed romance, several independent searches for redemption, and the shadowy presence of the folk hero and reluctant revolutionary Nostromo. (Although I don’t believe it’s ever spelled out, “Nostromo” is a contraction of the Italian phrase nostro uomo, meaning “our man.” In spoken Italian this would sound very much like “nostromo.”) Nostromo barely appears in the first section of the book, but his own corruption as he feels the betrayal of the people of Sulaco becomes the central theme and driving plot element of the novel’s final half.

Conrad’s stories are always strong, and his characters are well-developed, but his prose is a little slow, so I don’t think it makes sense for a reader new to Conrad to start with a complex novel that runs a little over 400 pages. Either the novella Heart of Darkness (the book that became the movie Apocalypse Now) or the more straightforward intrigue The Secret Agent would be better introductions to Conrad’s work.

John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is one of the better spy novels I’ve read, built around a simple deceit that folds back on itself repeatedly, leaving the reader to try to figure out who’s lying and which characters are the “good guys.” It revolves around a British spook who’s out on one last mission, ostensibly to try to eliminate one of the top men in the East German intelligence service. The spook, Alec Leamas, goes through an elaborate charade to make it appear that he’s lost his marbles and is ready to turn traitor, only to find himself embroiled in a power struggle between his target and that man’s top lieutenant, with accusations of treason flying in both directions. Leamas’s situation is complicated by his brief fling with a girl, Liz Gold, who ends up folded into the drama as well. I won’t spoil the end, but the entire meaning of the book hinges on what happens in the last five or six paragraphs, which also reveal just how deep the deception runs. Great airplane reading.

I’m a big Graham Greene fan, and Orient Express was the ninth of his works that I’ve read, and probably my least favorite. ( Our Man in Havana remains my favorite, the perfect blend of the styles of his serious works and of his “entertainments.”) Orient Express revolves around a group of people on the famous train, headed for Constantinople but largely sidetracked in Yugoslavia when one of them, a Communist returning from exile to face trumped-up charges and certain execution in Belgrade, is pulled from the train by the authorities. Each character is flawed, some more deeply than others, and while every character has a goal or set of goals, none of them is remotely admirable. I understood the novel’s themes of alienation and the fungibility of many of the relationship types we employ in our lives, but the lack of a compelling character and the somewhat awkward way the novel ends (failing to really wrap up the plot line of Carol Musker, perhaps the most sympathetic of the characters) overshadowed the novel’s depth.

And I finally read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein … I’m not sure there’s much I can add here, other than to say that I was surprised to find that it’s not a horror story at all, but a morality play that’s built on a horror story, and a generally sad and bleak book at that. Anyway, that brings my tally of Novel 100 books read to 61, which is about the best I can say about this particular book.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows review to come Sunday or more likely Monday…

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ July 15, 2007
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Those annoying Verizon FIOS commercials.

So in a past life, I worked for a couple of high-tech firms (mostly in the networking arena), so I’m a little bit familiar with some of the jargon – familiar enough that those new Verizon FIOS commercials, with their talk of “dB hot” and “true qualm” (whatever the bleep that is), set off my BS detector. And it turns out that I’m not alone. Turns out that Tom Wright-Piersanti thought the commercial was a little too slick, and he had enough technical knowledge to root out the truth behind those terms. It’s a good read if those commercials have gotten under your skin as they did mine.

Filed Under: Media
→ July 14, 2007
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San Francisco eats.

My first meal in San Francisco was a dud, a sushi/Japanese place called Hana Zen. The fish was fresh, but totally tasteless, and the prices were on the high side. Skip it.

Breakfast on Saturday was at an upscale but very tiny restaurant called Canteen that does a simple weekend breakfast. I went with my standard plate. The scrambled eggs were really perfectly cooked, not runny but still soft, and the eggs were obviously very fresh. The hit for me was the home fries, made from red potatoes that were parboiled and then finished on a flat-top with just enough oil (or butter) to keep them from sticking. They’re not home fries, but they’re good. The chicken-apple sausage was either homemade or locally made, but it was not cooked enough for me. They do get extra points for nice presentation and for having green tea available as an option.

Saturday’s lunch was a visit to a sushi joint I hadn’t hit in six years, and wasn’t even sure I knew how to find. I stumbled across it while wandered around on Friday afternoon. It’s called Akiko, and it’s on Mason Street, not far from the Powell Street BART station and near Union Square. The place is tiny – four chairs at the sushi bar and maybe eight tables – but the fish is really fresh. The salmon was awesome, deep pink with a great texture, soft but not too soft. The unagi was great, although I’ve rarely run into bad unagi. Even the miso soup was good, tasting fresher than any I’ve had in ages. Just when I thought I was too stuffed to eat anything more, the last item I’d ordered, a spicy tuna hand roll, arrived. The thing was enormous, a good four inches or so long, with a generous serving of spicy tuna that had just enough sauce to flavor the tuna without ever making me think, “ugh, mayo.” And their prices are reasonable for sushi.

Memphis Minnie’s – The smoked andouille sausage was to die for, easily the best Q’d sausage I’ve ever had. It was like butter, but it was still thoroughly cooked, and even though it was a little spicy for my tastes, I ate every last bit of it. The pulled pork was good, smoky, just lacking a little bit of that sweetness that I’ve had in good pulled pork in the South, although it was easily remedied with any of the three sauces (North Carolina vinegar, South Carolina mustard, and Texas red) on the table. The texas beef brisket was good, but definitely a little dry, and it was the only meat left on my plate when I was done. The sides were a little disappointing; the cornbread (comes with every meal) was very sweet and had coarse-grind corn meal, which has a great taste but really needs to be cooked thoroughly (like polenta) before it’s added to cornbread batter. The baked beans were solid, with a heavy smoke flavor, but light on the brown sugar. I went for the French fries because they were hand-cut, but they weren’t any better than, say, In-n-Out’s hand-cut fries. Oh, forgot one thing – the sweet iced tea, named the best in SF in the most recent issue of Where magazine (or whatever that thing in my hotel room was), was like candy. Granted, I like my iced tea unsweetened, but this was practically iced tea syrup.

Dottie’s – This place was worth the visit for one thing alone: The scone. They make their own baked goods and the varieties change every day. I went for an apricot oat scone and was treated to a piping-hot wedge the size of a slice of a deep-dish pie. It was unbelievable – just slightly moist (like a scone should be), with huge chunks of avocado and the nice, complex sweet/nutty flavor of an oatmeal cookie. The meal itself was so-so; the scrambled eggs were cooked properly but were light on salt, the bacon rashers were thick and a little undercooked (I like ‘em crispy), and the potatoes were really light on salt. All of their egg plates come with two slices of homemade buttermilk dill bread, which was a very high-quality bread with a dense crumb, although I’m not big on dill.

My last meal in San Fran was a bit upscale, at a place near my hotel called Fino. I ordered a special, a grilled salmon with artichoke hearts and mushrooms, served in a white wine sauce with whipped potatoes. The salmon was fresh, clearly Pacific, cooked perfectly, and the sauce was light and thin so the fish’s flavor could come through. The “chocolate Fino” dessert, however, was a complete waste of time. It’s a chocolate pudding on a little raspberry sauce, and it’s bruléed before it’s served. Aside from the fact that I burned my finger on the glass bowl, the chocolate pudding was milk chocolate. Why bother? If I wanted a glass of milk, I would have ordered one.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ July 14, 2007
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Bill Buford’s Heat.

Bill Buford’s book Heat is three stories in one. It’s the story of the author’s apprenticeship under celebrity chef Mario Batali and the learning process that goes on during that work experience. It’s also a mini-biography of Batali, the gregarious, slightly hedonistic TV chef and the man behind a half-dozen or so major restaurants, including his flagship, Babbo. And it’s an intermittent history of Italian cooking, albeit not a very complete one, with more of a focus on answering certain questions and tracing the lineage of certain dishes.

The book is largely fascinating, especially if you enjoy cooking or if you have interest in how restaurant kitchens really work. Buford’s follies as a kitchen slave – he uses a more vulgar term for it – are largely predictable, but the reactions of the people around him are always entertaining, and he has a talent for capturing the personalities of the various nut jobs populating the kitchen at Babbo.

The book slows down noticeably when the focus becomes almost entirely on Buford’s own personal quest to master Italian cooking, specifically his long trips to Italy to work under the most famous butcher in the world, Dario Cecchini, a man who “banishes vegetarians from his shop and tells them to go to hell.” Dario’s exploits and commentary are hilarious, and there are some solid passages that almost wax philosophical about meat, but after the frenetic back-and-forth approach of the first two-thirds of the book (bouncing from Babbo to Italy and back), the pace really slows down in Dario’s shop. But this book ends up rivaling Kitchen Confidential for its look inside a real restaurant kitchen, even beating it in some ways because of its emphasis on the least-salaried workers (including an empathetic look at the “Latins” in the kitchen, including one former Babbo worker who died).

I listened to Heat as an unabridged audiobook, which appears to be available only on Audible.com. The reader, Michael Kramer, does a hell of a Mario Batali impression, one probably forged from an all-night session of watching Batali’s TV programs. It’s exaggerated, but that’s necessary to distinguish between the voices in any audiobook. But Kramer’s big problem is a complete unfamiliarity with the pronunciation of Italian words. He stresses the wrong syllable all the time, as if he was reading Spanish words, and at one point pronounces the word “che?” (“what?”) as “chay,” rather than “kay,” completely changing its meaning. With all the Italian words Buford uses – too many, really, since they’re not necessary to tell the story – Kramer’s butchering of the language becomes a huge distraction.

Filed Under: Food, Nonfiction Tagged With:
→ June 30, 2007
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Sesame Street.

So a grand total of two people have emailed me since Thursday’s chat to correctly identify the reference to the classic Sesame Street sketch, “The Ladybug Picnic.” I was referring to the line “They talked about the high price of furniture and rugs/And fire insurance for ladybugs,” which my wife is convinced is a reference to the incredibly cruel nursery rhyme, “Ladybug, Ladybug:”

Ladybug! Ladybug!
Fly away home.
Your house is on fire.
And your children all gone.

All except one,
And that’s little Ann,
For she crept under
The frying pan.

Lovely.

Anyway, I have had the song in my head for a few days because I picked up the new Sesame Street DVD, Sesame Street – Old School, Vol. 1 (1969-1974) , ostensibly for my daughter but really for me. The set includes the first episode of each of the first five seasons (meaning that it includes the first ever episode), as well as select sketches from each of those five seasons.

The set is phenomenal. I can’t say that it has every sketch I wanted, but man does it have a lot of great ones. There are several classic Bert & Ernie sketches (Ernie gets bored with counting sheep, so he counts fire engines; Bert & Ernie are at the movies and the lady with the tall hat sits in front of Ernie). Cookie Monster makes lots of appearances, including the Great Cookie Thief (all-time classic), and a sketch with Kermit in the first-ever episode where Cookie doesn’t speak but gradually eats the letter W and eventually goes for Kermit. There are several great songs, including the Ladybug Picnic, the Alligator King (which they still show on occasion), Bert’s “Doing the Pigeon,” and “Bein’ Green.” There’s a Mumford sketch and a couple of Guy Smileys (Beat the Time!); Jesse Jackson leading a group of kids in reciting his poem, “I Am Somebody;” Johnny Trash – I mean, Cash – singing “Nasty Dan” to Oscar; and Bill Cosby in a split-screen with himself reciting the alphabet. Jackie Robinson recites the alphabet in an extra from the first season, less than three years before he died. We get Simon Soundman singing about how his RUFF! RUFF! chased a MEOW up a tree. And best of all, the Martians – whom they never use or show any more – appear in a sketch where they mistake a telephone for an Earthling.

There are a few disappointments. Some of the Muppets are a little weird to see in their earlier forms; Oscar was yellow, Big Bird’s head originally had no tuft around it, and Snuffleupagus is a scary-looking mope who sounds like he’s talking into a tin can. The first episode introduces the “Anything Muppets,” who have no facial features but talk to Gordon as he puts eyes, hair, noses, or mustaches on them; I can imagine that would be a little creepy for a two- or three-year-old. It was also interesting to see that Bob’s problem of never actually talking to the Muppets dates back almost forty years; Susan wasn’t all that much better.

And I suppose a few things are missing that ought to be here. There’s no “I Love Trash,” which dates back to the first season. I didn’t catch “Rubber Duckie,” also from season one. “Mahna Mahna” is best known for the two versions sung on the Muppet Show, but it also appeared in season one. We only get one News Flash with Kermit (Rapunzel, who apparently is from Canarsie), and only one Count von Count (although it’s a good one, with Bert & Ernie in it). Herry Monster makes one brief appearance. The number of the day in the full episodes appears to be two in every episode on the DVDs, which gets a little annoying. (I did get a kick out of Jim Henson doing the voiceover for the clumsy chef – “Two chocolate cream pies!”) And we’re generally short on celebrity appearances, although we do get two short Carol Burnett cameos and the few I mentioned earlier.

Of course, they do call this “Volume 1,” so I’m hoping there will be more sets to come – why not? It’s free money for Sesame Workshop – and I can’t say I’m dissatisfied with this set, which has definitely brought back some memories, even if my daughter is far more enchanted by that shrill he-harpy, Elmo, than she is by any of the old stuff. Maybe she’ll appreciate it when she’s older – say, maybe, two or three.

Filed Under: DVDs
→ June 27, 2007
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An interview with me.

The good folks over at Lion in Oil just posted an interview with yours truly. Check it out.

Filed Under: Chat
→ June 24, 2007
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Second Life.

In the Snow Crash review I briefly mentioned Second Life, which is a very weak implementation of Stephenson’s Metaverse. I downloaded Second Life in the offseason after reading a slew of articles about how popular it was becoming. I messed around with it for about 45 minutes. It sucked. It’s hard to use. It’s beyond irritating to look at. And there is absolutely no point to it. I uninstalled it around minute 46.

Anyway, I finally got some value out of those otherwise wasted 45 minutes, because without them, I wouldn’t have appreciated this hilarious parody.

Filed Under: Humor
→ June 24, 2007
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NECBL Eats, 2007 edition.

If you ever should find yourself in North Adams – and if so, I’m sorry to tell you that you’re probably lost – take heart, because despite your isolated location there’s an unexpected treat: a very good fine-dining establishment called Gramercy Bistro, which (conveniently for me) is about a ten-minute walk from the ballpark. Gramercy boasts a pretty substantial wine list, which of course is lost on me, but the food itself was excellent. I started with a green salad with champagne vinaigrette and fresh local goat cheese; the cheese was excellent, creamy with just a little bit of tang, and the dressing was very good but needed salt (remember that). For an entrée, I went with a seared halibut fillet with French lentils and asparagus, topped with a saffron beurre blanc. The fish was outstanding – very fresh, which is impressive given how hard it must be to get fresh fish in a place that’s a solid two hours from even a medium-sized airport. The saffron beurre blanc was also excellent, as were the sides – but again, we were a little light with the salt, especially on the fish, which I think always needs a heavy hand with the NaCl. Total cost, including a small bottle of sparkling water and a 20% tip, was $39, and I was in and out inside of 45 minutes.

The next morning I found myself in Brattleboro, Vermont – not sure how I got there – and went to Chelsea Royal Diner for a classic Vermont breakfast. They get massive points for their menu, which offered the sort of combo plate I always want when I’m having breakfast somewhere for the first time. Their Royal Feast comes with two eggs, bacon, ham, hash browns, two pancakes, and half a Belgian waffle. The waitress asked if I wanted real maple syrup – I said yes, because I couldn’t even believe this was a question – and it turns out that that costs extra ($1.25 for about a half-cup), which wouldn’t have deterred me from ordering it but struck me as really weird. Anyway, the rundown: the eggs (scrambled) were fine; the hashbrowns and bacon were excellent, with the bacon not overcooked and the hashbrowns still soft in the middle; the pancakes and waffle were fine, nothing spectacular, and both definitely needed the syrup for flavor and also because they were a touch dry. (I told them to skip the ham, because I can’t stand it.) That with a cup of tea (Lipton – meh) ran about $11 plus tip.

Next stop was Keene, New Hampshire, where I went back to a Thai restaurant on Main Street, Thai Garden, that I’ve been to several times before. I’d liked it in the past – nothing great, but solid-average, a 50 on the all-purpose scouting scale – but was really disappointed this time. They had pad see ew on the specials menu, so I went with that, and found the dish too sweet, and the chicken tasted a little past its prime. Main Street’s pretty hoppin’, at least by NECBL standards, so I’ll pick another place next year.

I stayed in Hanover the next two nights and ate two meals at Lou’s, a bit of a local legend and the kind of greasy-spoon place I really fall for. Their lunch menu is very heavy on hamburgers; I didn’t want to go that way, and my meal was so-so. I ordered a special, the “Chicken Philly Bomb,” a sandwich served on a warm ciabatta roll with marinated chicken, onions, peppers, and mushrooms (I had them hold the cheese). Everything was clearly fresh, but the sandwich tasted completely unsalted. I have no idea if there’s some law that says restaurants in tiny New England podunks have to hold the salt, but it was a recurring problem. I was tempted to stop by a McDonald’s and stuff my pockets with the little white-with-red-printing salt packets, fearing there might be an unreported shortage of sodium chloride plaguing the region. These fears were only partly assuaged the next morning at breakfast; I went with another special, the “Southern Country Breakfast,” which was a simple plate of eggs, bacon, sausage, a corn muffin that had been split and grilled, and grits. The grits had no taste, and, as you might expect, no salt, but I don’t like grits anyway so this was no loss. The muffin was delicious, and splitting and grilling a corn muffin is something I intend to try at home, but serving that sugar-filled corn cake anywhere south of Baltimore will get you shot. The eggs were clearly made to order, and only required a tiny bit of additional salt.

My lunch visit to Lou’s included an interesting run-in with two loonies. I was seated next to a professor and a grad student, who were bloviating in only the way that Ivy League professors and grad students can do. My personal favorite tidbit was the assertion that because the Microsoft Word spellchecker does not recognize the words “heteronormative” and “neoliberal” (I can now confirm this, as I now have two red squigglies mocking me for, as it were, making up words), the program clearly represents a right-wing bias on the part of the programmers and/or Microsoft. The grad student had a friend who was writing his dissertation on this very subject, which did little to restore any faith I might have left in American higher education. This silliness degenerated into a diatribe by the professor on how liberals are smarter than conservatives and therefore they use longer words in their works – setting E.B. White spinning on his axis at 800 miles an hour. (Oddly enough, Firefox’s spell-checker doesn’t recognize “heteronormative” or “neoliberal” either, so apparently I’m using a right-wing browser. It also doesn’t recognize “squigglies.” I’m not sure what that means.)

Torrington, the last stop on my tour, was a culinary dud. An Ecuadorian restaurant that used to be a five-minute walk from the ballpark has apparently closed, and its replacement wasn’t open for dinner. (The Ecuadorian place was an offshoot of a still-extant restaurant on Winsted Street, Northern Galapagos, so if you end up stuck in Torrington, you might not starve.)

One final note: At the Vermont Mountaineers’ stadium in Montpelier, there’s a concession stand that serves some pretty good barbecue – so good, as one local put it, that nearby residents will call in take-out orders during games without actually watching any baseball. I had a pulled-pork sandwich with their homemade “medium” sauce, which I thought was a little on the hot side. The portion was generous, and the meat was pretty tasty; the pork was finely shredded, so it got a little bit dry. I’ve had better Q down south, but this definitely wins the prize for the best Q I’ve ever had at a ballpark.

Filed Under: Food