→ July 14, 2015
→ By

Black August.

My latest boardgame review, of the family-friendly boardgame Flea Market, is now up at Paste.

Molly Knight’s fabulous book on the 2013-14 Dodgers, The Best Team Money Can Buy, is finally out today, and if you haven’t already bought it, click that link and do so, or buy the iBooks version here.

I cannot for the life of me remember how I heard about Dennis Wheatley’s novel Black August (currently $6.15 for Kindle), the first of about a dozen he wrote that featured the dashing journalist Gregory Sallust, who was apparently an inspiration for Ian Fleming’s James Bond. I’d had it on the amazon shopping list for ages, and had thought it was some other detective novel until I cracked it open and realized it was nothing of the sort. Black August is a violent dystopian adventure novel, highbrow pulp fiction with a significant body count, where Sallust ends up leading a core group of main characters through an utterly bombastic but entertaining trek through a collapsing United Kingdom.

Set before World War II, Black August begins with the accelerating fall of the British economy, coupled with a rise in Communist riots and sabotage that eventually bring down the state. Sallust is a minor character in the first quarter of the book, but ends up the leader of a band of refugees from London who first try to flee to the West Indies on a Royal Navy ship and eventually set up a sort of survivalist commune in southern England. None of their plans work out in the end, but it’s a cracking good time watching them try and fail, as long as you don’t mind watching a bunch of redshirts come to bloody deaths by gunfire.

Sallust quickly establishes himself on the page as a charismatic force, a man of bottomless optimism and an equally indefatigable supply of plans, typically illegal ones, although the question of law and order in a post-collapse England is a fair one. He’s brilliant, coldly rational, hellbent on self-preservation, and, unlike Mr. Bond, not the least bit romantic – he views the two women he takes into his motley crew as liabilities, at least at first. While there are some streaks of misogyny in the story, at least viewed from today’s vantage point, it’s a nice change from most novels of the sort to have the protagonist not just unable to get the girl, but flat-out uninterested. (Perhaps that’s part of why I like Nero Wolfe; the man loves his meals and his orchids, and that’s all.) There are romances within Black August; it would be unrealistic to run a group of people through this gauntlet without anyone coupling up. Wheatley just keeps much of that secondary to Sallust’s derring-do.

Like most popular fiction, there’s a bit of the ridiculous in how often the central characters in Black August survive their ordeals, especially with the sheer number of shell casings scattered across the book’s pages. Wheatley kills off a number of named characters, but the core half-dozen or so face lots of peril but always come out of it barely any worse for the wear. Characters who are shot but not mortally wounded seem to recover quickly as well. It’s the price you pay to read this kind of sophisticated adventure novel; the author has to give you danger, but he can’t kill off too many of the main characters.

I’d be curious if any of you have experience with Wheatley’s other works, some of which involved Sallust and many of which centered around the occult. While Black August was generally good fun to read, I didn’t finish it with any feeling that I needed to follow the character into the next book.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 13, 2015
→ By

Ringworld.

My Futures Game recap is up for Insiders.

I read six books on my vacation – fortunately, my wife and I both subscribe to John Waters’ philosophy on lovers and books – including four of my favorite authors/series (Poirot, Nero Wolfe, Flavia de Luce, and a standalone P.G. Wodehouse novel), as well as two new authors, including Larry Niven’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel Ringworld. Like Arthur Clarke’s similarly-acclaimed Rendezvous with Rama, Ringworld is a work of hard science fiction, in this case playing off a popular concept in physics and speculative science (the Dyson Sphere) and turning it into a lengthy adventure story involving the discovery of a distant world. It’s also surprisingly dull for a story that has as much action as Ringworld does, perhaps because most of the plot elements are so hackneyed.

Set in a distant future where man has explored a wider corner of the galaxy, encountering at least three alien races, the story has four explorers setting off on a mission to reach the structure of the story’s title, an artificial planet of sorts shaped like a ring around a distant sun. The crew is assembled by a two-headed creature called a puppeteer, who has deliberately selected three specific members – two humans, and one giant feline creature called a kzinti – for this mission, itself a response to the discovery that the Milky Way’s core is going to break down in a massive chain reaction in about 20,000 years. The puppeteers have already begun a massive migration, but it becomes clear that they want to see if copying Ringworld would accommodate them in another system.

Niven has explicitly said that he modeled the world after the Dyson Sphere, a hypothetical structure built around a star capable of capturing all of that star’s energy to supply the needs of the species that built it. Dyson recognized that per capita energy usage rises as a civilization becomes more technologically advanced – how many devices are you charging at the moment? – and conceived this structure as a totally crazy, speculative solution as well as a theoretical maximum on the energy available to that civilization, given that solar energy would dwarf any energy from nonrenewable sources. Niven has the unfortunate tendency to give the reader too much of the physics, generally in awkward dialogue between these impossibly-educated crew members, which doesn’t do much to help keep the story moving. Where Niven has to deviate from known or even hypothetical physics – the familiar “hyperdrive” of most science fiction gets stretched even further than normal – he spares us the details, which works much better because you’re only reading this book if you’re already willing to suspend your disbelief in things like travel at or faster than the speed of light. (Niven actually has an amusing bit of handwaving about this that I won’t spoil.)

Science fiction that relies this heavily on the science portion for seizing and maintaining reader interest worked for me when I was a teenager, but now it leaves me cold; I want fiction that tells me a story, preferably one that examines some fundamental aspects of human nature. (Granted, that’s tricky with a kzinti who might eat his shipmates or a puppeteer who rolls into a ball when scared as part of the crew.) Niven could have used his plot device as a way to consider the eventuality that we will fill the planet, or reach a point where we can’t increase our per capita energy consumption, but he blows right past that to get his quartet on Ringworld, where they find … well, not very much. And what they find is bizarre, often inexplicable, and impossible to picture with Niven’s rather stolid prose.

Ringworld isn’t a slow or arduous read, however – the writing isn’t complex, the sentences are pretty short, and most chapters function as self-contained stories. It may have been more praiseworthy in its day, but given some of the recent Hugo winners that have put storycraft over the sci-fi or fantasy elements, it feels very dated.

Next up: I just finished Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle and started Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours on the flight back from Humid City this morning.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ July 11, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 7/10/15.

No Insider content this week, since I was on vacation in St. Thomas.

We stayed at the Marriott at Frenchman’s Reef, which was fine, not as nice as the Marriott resort on St. Kitts in terms of the hotel itself, the service, or the food. Our main goal was rest and relaxation, and we got plenty of that, along with rum and swimming. We had one meal off campus, at Grande Cru in the Yacht Haven Grande shopping center in eastern Charlotte Amalie, and it was spectacular. The sauteed brussels sprouts with lardons of house-smoked bacon and shaved grana padano was superb, as was the special I ordered, seared duck breast (cooked medium, as promised) with local pumpkin risotto and local collard greens. Even the dessert, a flourless chocolate cake with sea salt, caramel sauce, and espresso ice cream, was better than expected, as the cake itself had a fantastic texture and a deep, dense chocolate flavor. Also, the hostess is a self-proclaimed “Mets girl.”

Also, here’s another reminder that The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse, Molly Knight’s fantastic book on the 2013-14 Dodgers, comes out on Tuesday You should buy it and read it and thank me when you’re done. It’s also available for users of Apple’s iBooks.

And now, the links…saturdayfive

  • The best longread of the week comes from the New York Times, on two pairs of identical twins in Colombia, separated at birth by mistake and raised as two pairs of fraternal twins.
  • The Washington Post’s magazine had this story on people who live in teeny tiny houses. I mostly think they’re insane, although something about the idea of simplifying my life to that extent appeals to me. The IKEA where we shopped in Tempe had a 250 square foot “apartment” set up in the store, and I was riveted by it – but they made the space work. There were even separate areas so that you weren’t always in one “room.” Of course, some folks truly do think tiny house residents are out of their minds, although I might have expressed the same without the emphasis on flatulence.
  • Another tremendous longread on one desperate father’s attempts to treat his son’s epilepsy with marijuana.
  • I loved Inside Out, so of course I loved this chart from Vox.com showing how the five emotions might combine to form 15 more complex ones.
  • This reddit question from a Canadian mom whose daughter got herself vaccinated is amazing – her original question is gone but if you scroll down you can see it. She wanted to know if she might have a right to sue the doctor who did it! Meanwhile, this week in vaccine denial brings us a post that claims that getting the measles is beneficial and that “germ theory itself is dead.” The anonymous (of course) author uses a lot of big words s/he doesn’t understand, an example of the argument by prestigious jargon fallacy. I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t click on that link.
  • Oklahoma is dead-set on proving itself to be America’s Backwater, including their unending fight to execute a man despite very shaky evidence of his guilt. The death penalty is a policy disaster (and, in my opinion, morally untenable) anyway, but the case against Richard Glossip is flimsier than the first little pig’s house.
  • Finally, a $1.99 Kindle Single from Chimamanda Ngoza Adichie titled We Should All Be Feminists, a transcript of a TEDx talk she gave that delves into the meaning of that particular F-word and some basic (if perhaps too obvious) advice on how to raise our children to eradicate the gender divide.
Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ July 3, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 7/4/15.

I wrote two Insider pieces this week, one with some All-Star candidate thoughts and one on Tyler Glasnow and Josh Bell. I also held my usual Thursday Klawchat.

There will be no Klawchat or any other content this week, as I’m officially on vacation now and won’t be online at all until next Friday at the earliest.

I contributed a paragraph or two on the term “umpshow” to a fun Rob Neyer piece on five bits of new baseball slang.

And now, the links…saturdayfive

Last, my favorite troll tweet of the week … I guess maybe this guy thinks Rob is a vaccine denier too? (He’s not.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ July 2, 2015
→ By

Mother’s Milk.

I have an Insider post up today on ten All-Star candidates, five who I think belong and five who probably shouldn’t make the cut. I’ll also hold a Klawchat today at 1 pm ET.

Edward St. Aubyn’s Melrose novels first came to my attention somewhere around five years ago in an email exchange with a blogger whose name I don’t remember, but whom I’d contacted because we seemed to have a significant overlap in our literary tastes. She was a particular fan of Graham Greene’s work, as am I, and I asked if she had similar authors whose work she’d recommend. She mentioned St. Aubyn and specifically the novel Mother’s Milk, which is actually the fourth in the five-novel sequence, although it’s quite readable without the background of the previous three novels, and, by what I could tell from reading interviews with St. Aubyn, not quite as dismal as the first.

These highly autobiographical novels revolve around Patrick Melrose, whose childhood and early adulthood greatly resemble those of St. Aubyn, including the physically and sexually abusive father and the complicit, emotionally detached mother. By Mother’s Milk, Patrick is married with two young sons: Robert, Patrick’s mini-me, with an impossibly advanced vocabulary and talent for sarcasm; and Thomas, an infant at the start of the novel and Patrick’s rival for the attention of Mary, Patrick’s wife. This roman á clef is full of mordant humor, with Patrick and Robert providing the kind of sardonic and often obnoxious observations that call Greene’s work to mind but with Waugh’s merciless wit. But amongst the ripostes is a serious examination of Patrick’s attempts to escape the life carved out for him by his parents, and then to try to give something better to Robert and Thomas than he was able to receive for himself.

St. Aubyn begins the book more from Robert’s perspective than Patrick’s, as Robert’s world is upended by the arrival of a baby brother, while we get glimpses of Patrick molding Robert into a younger version of himself: a spectator to his own life, brimming with clever arguments and incisive quips that often fluster the adults with whom he comes in contact. From there, the focus shifts (or, I suppose, returns, based on the three previous novels) to Patrick and his deteriorating marriage. Feeling abandoned by his wife in favor of their new child, Patrick first engages in a fairly stupid affair with an ex-girlfriend, then falls into the bottle, sabotaging most of the relationships in his life along the way … yet the story remains both humorous and surprisingly hopeful. This isn’t The Lost Weekend, where he has to hit some sort of bottom before he can turn himself around, nor is it a cautionary tale where he destroys everything before he has a chance to turn himself around. That lack of artifice gives the novel a base of relaism that makes the humor that much more effective: St. Aubyn, through his stand-in Patrick, cracks wise as a coping mechanism, but refuses to give up on his main character.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ June 30, 2015
→ By

June 2015 music update.

Huge month for new tracks and albums; I ended up cutting this list down (or, as I like to think of it, raising my standards) by dropping a few songs that didn’t hold my attention on multiple listens. By the way, I have a new Insider post from scouting Tyler Glasnow and Josh Bell last night in Harrisburg.

Cloves – Frail Love. A nineteen-year-old singer/songwriter from Australia, Cloves put out this debut single just two weeks ago, and it’s my song of the month without a doubt. It’s Bat for Lashes’ “Laura,” but more sparse, more emotional, and somehow more raw thanks I think to Cloves’ peculiar intonation (did she really say “twooth?”).

HAERTS – Animal. There isn’t enough Nini Fabi on this song for my tastes, but I love the huge drum fill that announces her arrival. This track was released along with a cover of Jeff Buckley’s “Everybody Here Wants You.”

Wolf Alice – You’re a Germ. The London quartet just released their full-length debut album after several EPs, and it’s a banger, with more influences than I could possibly count across a dozen tracks that explore multiple corners of modern rock. They’re a band, but it’s three guys backing up singer Ellie Roswell, whose charisma defines the album’s best tracks, whether she’s whispering or shouting – both of which occur within this, the best song on the album.

Beck – Dreams. The Beck I like is back; Morning Phase didn’t do it for me, sorry.

Beirut – No No No. Zach Condon’s world music/rock blend is back, with their first album in four years dropping in August. I’m mixed on this song, which is perhaps a little too deliberately weird (especially in the vocals) for my tastes.

Jamie xx w/Romy – SeeSaw. I loved “Loud Places,” I hated “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times),” and I like “SeeSaw.” I think Jamie xx has tremendous ideas, but the execution varies too widely from song to song. Perhaps that’s by design too. He’s already produced more songs I liked than the xx have over two albums.

Highly Suspect – Claudeland. I feel like I should be drunk in a dive bar when I hear this hard blues-rocker, which is funny because I’ve never been drunk in a dive bar.

Frank Turner – Get Better. Folk-punk icon Turner hit my radar in 2013 with Tape Deck Heart, one of my top 13 albums of that year, featuring the track “Recovery,” which hasn’t left my main playlist since I first heard it. “Get Better” is harder with more electric guitars, but the message is very similar and the lyrics are just as wry.

Kid Astray – Diver. The Norwegian indie-pop wackos have put out their proper full-length debut, Home Before the Dark, featuring their 2013 hit “The Mess” and this mid-80s alt-pop gem, a little time out of joint number with a swaying synth line at its heart.

Heartless Bastards – Gates of Dawn. I’d never heard of Heartless Bastards until hearing this song, but they’ve been around since 2003 and even appeared on Austin City Limits in 2009, so I’m just behind the curve. There’s a tinge of country and a shimmer of melancholy in their approach on this indie-rock track, which wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a college radio station in 1993.

Girlpool – Chinatown. I can’t decide if they’re annoying; “Before the World Was Big” is definitely annoying, but the harmonies the two members hit on the chorus here are strong. They remind me of Hinds (ex-Deers), critical darlings who don’t seem to play particularly good music, neither from a technical nor a melodic perspective.

Totally Mild – Move On. I mean, if you wanted to get my attention, you didn’t have to go as far as this album cover (real subtle with the symbolism in front there). This is soft, shimmering pop music, and you know it’s Australian because they have that same jangling Go-Betweens influence that every Aussie alternative act seems to have. There’s also a bit of early Lush, another band that had harder lyrical edges disguised by high-pitched female vocals.

Gardens & Villa – Fixations. The latest single from the Santa Barbara indie-pop outfit, who just missed my top 100 last year with “Colony Glen,” has a late ’70s soft-rock vibe, which is not normally my jam. In this case it works for me because of the hook in the chorus and the layered chorus (including the reverbed falsetto lead vocal) that make it better than the sort of pablum that made 10cc moderately famous.

Atlas Genius – Molecules. The first single from the band’s second album sounds a lot like the hits from their first album, but I’m okay with that.

Veruca Salt – Laughing In The Sugar Bowl. The Volcano Girls are back, and Louise and Nina have buried the hatchet. This song sounds like very little time has passed since Eight Arms to Hold You, and that’s a very good thing in my book. I don’t think the song’s title is coincidental, as their brand of hard rock always had a slightly saccharine edge to it.

The Maccabees – Marks To Prove It. Another runner-up to alt-J’s An Awesome Wave in the 2012 Mercury Prize voting, the Maccabees are about to release their follow-up album to their nominee from that year, Given to the Wild. This lead single has a harder edge to it, but if that’s not your thing, check out the electronic, ’80s-inflected remix by Public Broadcasting Service.

White Reaper – Pills. This is the second single from the Louisville punk-pop quartet’s upcoming album White Reaper Does It Again, due out on July 17th, that I’ve included on a playlist this year; it’s a little formulaic, but their music boasts strong hooks and an infectious energy that sets them apart from most of the neo-punk acts in the market right now.

The Kenneths – Cool As You. If I told you this was a secret punk band fronted by Elvis Costello, you’d believe me after listening to it. They are a punk band and they are British and this is catchy but Elvis is not in this particular building.

Desaparecidos – Golden Parachutes. Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes and a thousand other side projects has resurrected Desaparecidos, an overtly left-wing punk/hard-rock act who recorded an album in 2002 and then broke up, reuniting in 2010 for some concerts. They put out a few singles in 2012, both of which are on their new album Payola, which has a Hüsker Dü vibe to the music but with louder, angrier vocals.

Ghost – Cirice. So, here’s where the trio of metal tracks starts, and this one requires some explanation. As Ghost BC, this Norwegian band recorded two albums of dark metal that were overshadowed by their ridiculous image (the members are anonymous and appear in costumes) and their openly Satanic lyrics (which the band says are tongue-in-cheek). I have no use for any of this; it’s like they wanted to be the next Mercyful Fate or the heirs to Satyr and Mayhem, and instead turned out to be the Norwegian Slipknot. They’ve dropped the “BC” from their names, while this new song, the first from their upcoming album Meliora, sounds like a lost Diamond Head track, heavy in the way that underground British Heavy Metal acts of the late 1970s and early 1980s were before thrash and speed metal took over. I’m at least interested to see if the band ditches the ridiculous trappings of their old look and focuses more on the music as they appear to have done here.

Sons of Huns – An Evil Unseen. This Portland stoner-metal trio has deep roots in ’70s heavy metal with hints of Seattle grunge (more Tad and Mudhoney than Pearl Jam or Nirvana). Their second album, While Sleeping Stay Awake, comes out in mid-July and can be pre-ordered for $7 on their site.

Slayer – Repentless. Jeff Hanneman’s death left a large hole in Slayer, as he wrote or co-wrote most of their signature songs; it wasn’t immediately clear if the band would record again after alcoholism claimed him (due to cirrhosis) in 2013. “Repentless,” the title track from their twelfth studio album (due out in September), is a full-on thrasher with a vintage Slayer riff but subpar lyrics.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ June 29, 2015
→ By

Beneath the Skin.

Of Monsters & Men’s debut album, My Head is an Animal (amazon • iTunes), remains one of my favorite albums of the decade, a gorgeous blend of upbeat folk-rock tracks that crossed over to pop radio and somber songs that eschwed the poppier melodies of “Little Talks” and “Mountain Sound” for a greater emotional payoff and more nuanced instrumentation. I happened to love it all, although the hits were what allowed me to share my love of this album with my daughter, who was just short of six when it came out.

Their follow-up album, Beneath the Skin (amazon • iTunes) , came out earlier this month, a substantially more mature record that almost completely foregoes the pop inclinations in favor of slower, soaring pieces that better showcase lead singer Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir’s sweet, slightly raspy delivery while increasing the complexity of their arrangements. It seems like an album less likely to go platinum, as their debut did, but more likely to garner critical acclaim and, I’d assume, a more satisfying experience for the band to write and create.

My Head is an Animal earned favorable comparisons to the contemporaneous debut album from Mumford & Sons, as both artists folded traditional folk-music sounds into rock or pop/rock song structures, and both artists were somewhat criticized for repeating those structures throughout their albums. Mumford & Sons has gone backwards since that debut, whereas Of Monsters & Men, an Icelandic sextet led by a bearded elf and a smoky-voiced gamine, took over three years between studio recordings, and have chosen to pursue a more sophisticated, less overtly commercial direction with their follow-up.

While OM&M’s sound is unmistakable, in no small part due to Nanna’s voice, the musical predictability of their debut is absent on Beneath the Skin, along with all of the sing-along choruses from their first album. In place of those big harmonies are more ornate percussion lines and even the occasional empty spaces between notes. “Slow Life” has smaller harmonies in its chorus, but the verses have Nanna and the unusual drum line at the front of the sound, creating melody through layered instruments rather than blatant pop hooks. The lead single and opening track, “Crystals,” is the closest song on the album to a pop song, but it’s still more ornate than most of the songs on their debut album, driven by a heavy world-music percussion line, supplemented by brass when both singers join together on the bridge to the big chorus – the most prominent pop hook on the entire album.

OM&M’s lyrics have also taken a modest step forward on Beneath the Skin, with more concrete imagery and less of the vague faux-folktale motifs that characterized their debut album – think “Mountain Sound,” for example, which sounds like it’s telling you a really interesting story until you realize they’ve given you no details whatsoever on what’s happening. Beneath the Skin relies more on recurring themes and images (spines, blood, teeth, bodies of water), still light on storytelling, with frequent allusions to people acting on animal instincts or blurring the lines between the human and the lupine. Tracks like “Organs” even veer into more disturbing territory, transmuting regret or sorrow into images of self-harm. There are still some lyrical lightweights on the album – “I Of the Storm” puts Nanna’s voice front and center, but gives her vapid lyrics unworthy of her singing – but it’s an incremental step forward from their first output.

Ultimately Beneath the Skin feels like an album Of Monsters & Men made for themselves, as if this were the kind of record they’d wanted to make until the A&R man complained that he didn’t hear a single. It seems more personal, although it’s more that the musical style and increased prominence of Nanna’s vocals result in a sound that’s more introspective. Exchanging the exuberance of the band’s debut for a more subtle, lush sound creates a more unified, mature album, despite the lack of a hit to deliver to pop stations, a welcome if incremental step forward from the best artist to come out of Iceland since the Sugarcubes.

Since we’re around the year’s midpoint, here are my top five albums for the year to date (links go to reviews):
1. Courtney Barnett – Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit
2. The Wombats – Glitterbug
3. Sleater-Kinney – No Cities to Love
4. Of Monsters & Men – Beneath the Skin
5. Drenge – Undertow.

I’ve still got a few recent albums I have yet to hear in their entirety (Wolf Alice, Bully) so this list will probably shift well before the year is out.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ June 27, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 6/27/15.

My Insider pieces this week included a post on some Red Sox prospects, including Yoan Moncada; one on the Arizona/Atlanta trade involving Touki Toussaint; and a reaction to the release of the Futures Game rosters. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the reissue of the modern classic Tigris & Euphrates, designer Reiner Knizia’s best game, now back in print with better graphics and clearer rules.

My good friend Molly Knight has a book coming out on the Dodgers, The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse, next month, and it’s so good I even gave the publisher a quote to use on the back.

And now, this week’s links…saturdayfive

  • We’re getting so much closer to vaccine sanity, as California is set to end religious and philosophical exemptions to vaccinating school-age children. The science is clear and unequivocal, and making the wrong, anti-science decision can affect hundreds of others’ lives.
  • A young widow’s heartrending letter to her late husband, who committed suicide a month ago after a long battle with depression.
  • The Moringa oleifera tree may lead to an inexpensive process for purifying drinking water in developing countries.
  • On a Tokyo coffee roasting master still roasting at age 100.
  • A former president of the American Humanist Association writes in Psychology Today that anti-intellectualism is killing America. I’m not sure I agree with the premise, nor do I think such unreason as racial hatred is “anti-intellectualism” per se, but I still found it an interesting read.
  • Roxane Gay wrote in the New York Times that she can’t forgive Dylan Roof, and why should she? Forgiveness means releasing your anger. If we forget to be angry, why would anything ever change?
  • The first segment of Thursday’s episode of BBC Outlook, on Canada’s abused aboriginal children is harrowing listening, but also makes a superb case for “truth and reconciliation” commissions to address past historical wrongs.
  • Common sense from VOX.com: People with mental illness are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violent crimes. Yet we don’t hear calls for greater mental health treatment options when the former is true, only the latter.
  • A recent meta-study has found that the phenolic compounds found in olive oil may help prevent neurodegenerative diseases, although it would be nice to see empirical evidence (via clinical trials) to back this up. Still, olive oil is delicious and may be really good for you.
  • The guys behind Animal and Son of a Gun have opened a pizzeria in LA, and it sounds amazing, of course.
Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ June 26, 2015
→ By

Bruges.

My latest game review for Paste covers the must-own reissue of Tigris and Euphrates, Reiner Knizia’s best game, now back in print in a beautiful new edition. You can get it buy it from amazon for about $45 (or about £39).

The 2013 boardgame Bruges is one of the more successful titles in the new subgenre that I think was at least launched by the success of Agricola – games where you can deploy cards from a very large deck in certain combinations to maximize your abilities to do more things and/or score more points. Each individual card gives you some special ability – one-time, once per round, or throughout the game – and most cards then give you an incentive to acquire certain other cards or types of cards. In Bruges, you don’t have to know the deck that well to play it effectively, and you don’t have the gating factor of Agricola or Le Havre where you must feed your family every round or lose points, so it’s lightweight relative to many games in the genre. It’s also long enough for you to build something and have a real strategy that plays out before the final round, unlike Elysium, which combines card-stacking with set collection in a game that is over before you can get anything going. So it’s good, but not groundbreaking – a solid implementation of a popular mechanic, yet nothing particularly novel.

In Bruges, players are local merchants or nobles who are trying to do a couple of not entirely connected things to score points. Each player has two five-segment canals to try to build over the course of the game, scoring three points for a canal that has three completed segments and earning a statue worth two to seven points for a canal that is fully completed. Players also can buy their way up the reputation track, which is worth one to twelve points at game-end depending on the player’s progress. And, most central to the game, players build houses in front of them, each of which can then hold a “recruited” artisan – a card whose powers are then available to the player. Each house is worth a point at game-end; each artisan is worth 1-4 points at game-end. There are also bonuses of four points available to any player who ends a round leading the other players in canal segments completed, number of artisans recruited, or reputation points. Once you earn one of those bonuses, it’s yours for the rest of the game even if some other player passes you. It’s a little weird.

Bruges has three types of payment for all of this stuff. Cards come in five colors, and to build a canal segment, you must discard a card in that space’s color and pay from one to five guilders (coins). To build a house, you lay a card face-down and discard one of the little worker meeples in that card’s color. (You start the game with five meeples, one per color, and can acquire more as the game goes on.) To recruit an artisan, you pay the cost in guilders on that card – multiples of three from zero to twelve. You can also discard a card on your turn to acquire two workers of that color, to gain one to six guilders (depending on the result of the rolls of the five colored dice for that round), or to discard a Threat token – more on that in a moment. Your hand will have five cards in it to start each round, during which you’ll play four of them. When the supply of cards, which is tailored to the number of players, runs out, that’s the final round.

The Threat tokens take the place of the “feeding your family” aspect of Agricola. Those five colored dice are rolled each round. Any die showing five or six delivers a Threat token in that color to every player; get three Threat tokens and you suffer some sort of penalty, such as losing a house or canal token, losing points, or losing a recruited artisan. These penalties are nuisances but in the grand scheme of things not a huge detriment, but discarding a card to remove a Threat token in that color also gets you one victory point, which is the only justification I’ve found for using a card to do this.

Bruges plays two to four and works well with any number, although I think you can get a little further with your strategies if you have more players. You can also vary the number of cards in the start decks to let the game play out longer, which I recommend because the deeper you go into the game the more fun it is to see your plans play out. But the game doesn’t offer that many chances for interaction, other than a few cards in the Underworld category that let you steal from an opponent or stick everyone else with a Threat token. You’re primarily building on your own, making Bruges closer to a solitaire game you play with friends. It’s a good-looking game and fairly simple to learn; I just see more complexity in the scoring than it needs, with no real connection between the different scoring paths.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ June 25, 2015
→ By

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair.

My latest Insider post breaks down the MLB Futures Game rosters. I also held a Klawchat today.

Joel Dicker’s The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair has been a global bestseller, garnering enormous critical praise even from sources typically more hostile to mass-market potboilers. Dicker’s novel is better than your average pageturner, a book with loftier, more literary aspirations that manages to get much of the way toward its goals without losing any of the narrative greed that made it very hard for me to put the book down. (I read its 640 pages in six days, and that’s without a flight where I could spend a few hours of uninterrupted reading time.)

QbertDicker has wrapped a standard detective novel in layers of other story templates, so that the resulting book is complex and textured even though no individual plot line is all that involved. Harry Quebert is a famous novelist whose magnum opus, the 1975 book The Origin of Evil, made his name in literary circles, landed him a teaching gig at Burrows College in Massachusetts, and, as we learn early in the book, was actually written about his love affair with a 15-year-old girl named Nola (while Quebert was 34), who disappeared without a trace just before the book was published. Quebert’s protég&ecaute; Marcus Goldman, himself mired in writer’s block following the runaway success of his first novel, has reached out to Harry for help in working on his second book when Nola’s body is discovered, buried in Harry’s garden, spurring Marcus to try to solve the mystery of her murder, clear Harry’s name (assuming he deserves to be cleared), and write that second book so his publisher doesn’t nail his head to a coffee table.

That gives us a detective novel wrapped in a mentor/pupil story wrapped in a book about writing, around which Dicker sprinkles the forbidden love story between Harry and Nola, with most of the book set in the seaside town of Somerset, New Hampshire. That town is populated with the various suspects in Nola’s disappearance and a contemporaneous murder, as well as various other crimes that come to light as Marcus’ investigation progresses. The side characters are well-formed with serious back stories, very reminiscent in form and location to the best of Richard Russo’s novels, most of which are set in New England towns albeit ones in economic decline. It’s remarkable since Dicker isn’t American by birth; he spent summers in a town similar to Somerset, but by and large he captures the American idiom well and has the rhythm of New England town life down better than many authors who were born here.

The copious praise was met with some inevitable backlash, and the latter does have some merit as The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is smart popular fiction but hardly up to the loftier standards of some of Dicker’s obvious inspirations. The natural comparison is to Philip Roth, as Goldman strongly resembles Zuckerman (including Goldman’s mother, a horrible caricature of a meddling, overreacting Jewish mother who makes Sophie Portnoy look like Mother Theresa) in character and involvement in the narrative he’s unfolding for us. In case the parallel was strong enough, Dicker names Quebert’s lawyer Roth. Nola is Lolita (a diminutive for Lola) in age and precocity, but whether she is temptress or innocent isn’t clear till the final two chapters of the book. (Of course, Lolita herself may not be the vixen Nabokov depicts her to be, as the story is told by the thoroughly unreliable Humbert Humbert, whose name isn’t that dissimilar from Harry’s – and Harry’s reliability isn’t rock-solid either.) The whole murder in a small town motif is very Agatha Christie, although the prose is more sparing, in line with Hammett or Chandler, just not quite in league with either.

At its heart, however, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is a detective novel, and a ripping one at that. Dicker has built an elaborate web of deceit through Somerset’s Twin Peaks/Broadchurch-esque populace, and starts peeling back layers slowly at first, picking up the pace dramatically at the end just as Quebert’s writing advice to Marcus advises him to do so. The resolution, while horrifying, is impressive in its tidiness and thoroughness. It fits the facts, yet I didn’t see it coming at all.

What this isn’t, however, is a great work of literature: It may be great fiction, but some of the praise for the book seems to place it in league with masters of the genre like Chandler or on par with the works of Roth and Saul Bellow. (The BBC had an interesting piece last summer, asking whether this could be the Great American Novel, which is how I first heard of the book.) The prose survives translation well and isn’t choppy or antiseptic like Stieg Larsson’s, but it’s pedestrian: Dicker tells the story, but there’s nothing special in his phrasing or rhythm. The advice from Harry to Marcus is often laughably hackneyed, and those brief interludes introducing each chapter are one of the book’s biggest weaknesses, along with Marcus’ mother and the cliched backstory on Luther Caleb. It’s the construction of the house of plots and the pacing of the main story that makes The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair more than your average bit of pulp fiction, a choice for leisure reading that will move at high speed without causing your brain to decay from disuse.

Next up: Edward St. Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk, a recommendation I got years ago from a fellow fan of British literature. It’s currently out of print, but you can get a new copy of the 2007 printing for over $2000 on amazon.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,