→ January 28, 2011
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Breakfast at Tiffany’s & Fludd.

My list of sleeper prospects for all 30 teams went up this morning for Insiders.

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Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a novella-length character study of the iconic Holly Golightly, the chameleonic protagonist whose ability to reinvent herself and manipulate people to her own benefit charms the milquetoast narrator.

Holly is a very young, independent-minded woman who takes a flat in a Manhattan brownstone where the unnamed narrator, dubbed “Fred” by Holly, also lives. She fascinates him through her force of will, her expectation that people will jump to meet her every whim (they often do), and through how men just fall hopelessly for her like dominoes in a line. (Fred’s affection for Holly always seems to be of the arm’s-length variety, and I thought the character, like Capote, was gay.) Her anchorless life hits a snag when a piece of her old life shows up out of the blue to try to drag her out of her high-society ways to a backwoods existence she never wanted in the first place.

Capote was a prose master, with Norman Mailer issuing the oft-repeated statement that he “would not have changed two words in” this story, but the line that caught my eye was because it reminded me of a television program:

…I noticed a taxi stop across the street to let out a girl who ran up the steps of the Forty-second Street Public Library. She was through the doors before I recognized her, which was pardonable, for Holly and libraries were not an easy association to make. I let curiosity guide me between the lions…

I’ve tried to find out of the makers of the children’s show Between the Lions took their name from the book, but have had no success. Naming a show about literacy after a phrase from an American literary giant seems fitting, though.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is usually sold along with three Capote short stories: “House of Flowers,” “A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory.” The first two are ordinary, the first about a prostitute in Haiti who finds an escape to what might be a better life, the latter about two unlikely friends at a southern prison camp (one of whom is named Tico Feo, which means “ugly Costa Rican.”) The third story is a marvel, a peer to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s canon of short stories, a sweet but wholly unsentimental tale about the friendship between a young boy and an cousin in her 60s, and how the two would make and sell fruitcakes every Christmas season. We often praise players who recognize their skill sets and their limitations by saying that they “don’t try to do too much.” In “A Christmas Story,” Capote didn’t try to do too much. He lets the story do it for him.

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Hilary Mantel’s Fludd is a strange piece of fiction, a short novel about a curate assigned to a small, backwards English town where Catholicism is practiced by means of superstition rather than faith and the priest has lost his own belief and probably his marbles as well. The curate, however, isn’t what he at first seems to be, and as the novel goes along one of the nuns emerges as the real central character despite being little more than a stock extra for the first half of the book. That character, Philomena, turns out to be the only character with any depth of anyone who populates these pages – even Fludd, the possibly-supernatural being named after a long-dead alchemist and mystic, is barely revealed, with nothing on his motives or actual thoughts – and her decision between life in the convent (which was chosen for her by her deranged mother) and the fearful world outside of it is the only major event in the entire book. There’s an anti-Catholic undertone to the book, which may bother some readers, and a subplot around idolatry and statues that went right over my head.

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Next up: Hugh Laurie – yes, that one, House, Wooster, Jools, and so on – wrote a comic novel in 1996 called The Gun Seller. I have incredibly high expectations for this one.

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→ January 26, 2011
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Alphabet Juice.

The 2011 organizational rankings are up on ESPN.com for Insiders. The two most upset fan bases are Cleveland, because I ranked them 17th; and the Yankees, because I didn’t rank the Red Sox 30th.

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> special
“It’s good that they don’t make many players like Albert Pujols, because if there were more, he wouldn’t be so special, and Albert Pujols is very special.” – Murray Chass, The New York Times. See special.

Roy Blount, Jr., humorist, former sportswriter, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me… panelist, and word-lover, takes aim at etymology and bad writing alike in Alphabet Juice, a book organized like a dictionary and aiming both high and low with its targets. If you like words and get equal joy from a malapropism and an explanation of how livid (which means furious, with a connotation of red-faced) comes from the Latin word meaning “to be bluish,” this is a book for you.

In Alphabet Juice, Blount chooses words with interesting stories or for which he can offer a brief quote (like the one above) or quip or (regrettably) some light verse. The anecdote that constitutes the entry for “TV, on being on” runs from William Ginsburg to Saul Bellow to Designing Women to Kathleen Sullivan to Claude Monet, all inside of four pages. Blount sneaks in some memoir-ish material as well, such as an entry for “Wilt: A Tall Tale,” that starts out with musings on whether Wilt Chamberlain could really have slept with 20,000 women (Wilt: “Well, there was this one birthday party…”) but ends with Blount mediating between an angry Wilt and Blount’s drunken editor.

Some of the entries reveal Blount as a Lynne Truss-ian grammar stickler, a bent of which I approve:

> unique
I have to be firm on this: unique is not to be modified. Adding very or absolutely is like putting a propeller on a rabbit to make him hop better. It won’t work, and he won’t be a rabbit any more.

I’ve always been partial to the analogy that something can be “almost unique” in the way that you can be “almost pregnant.” There is a word for the idea expressed by “almost unique” – unusual. Use it. Please.

Blount’s love of words (aside from a love of language – these are two different afflictions) even brings this fun entry that should appeal to the anagrammists and Scrabblers in the audience:

> transposition game
Rearranging the letters in one word of an existing title or well-known phrase. Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception becomes The Odors of Perception. The Continental Army becomes the continental Mary. I’m told that Burt Bernstein, then a writer at The New Yorker, learned of this game and found himself to be good at it. He hastened to his brother Leonard, who had always been better at everything than Burt, but now, finally, maybe … Burt explained the game. Leonard looked up from whatever major thing he was doing and said: “Icy fingers up and down my penis.”

If there’s a flaw in Alphabet Juice, it’s that it’s a book to be perused rather than read. There’s no narrative, and the themes and jokes to which Blount returns again and again are scattered throughout the book. You could follow his suggestions to see other entries, but would risk never reading everything in the book, a risk I was unwilling to take. I could also have done without the meditations on each individual letter – Blount is supporting an argument he makes that the relation between a word (its sound, that is) and its meaning is not, as some scholars would have it, arbitrary. That’s an interesting debate, but not one Blount is going to solve in 300-word essays on each of the 26 letters of our alphabet.

At heart, though, Alphabet Juice is a vehicle for Blount’s ruminations not just on language but on culture and cultural literacy, on politics (he was apparently not a fan of the most recent President Bush), on music, on food, and so on. If you like his smart-folksy style, you’ll love the book.

P.S. Tender is the Thing.

Next up: Hilary Mantel’s Fludd, which I’m reading at the rate of roughly 15 pages a day because of all the writing.

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→ January 25, 2011
→ By

Race for the Galaxy.

Race for the Galaxy is a card game for two to four players that uses the same basic engine as San Juan while borrowing more heavily from San Juan’s parent game, Puerto Rico. Race junks the colonization theme in favor of a space-exploration one, where players settle worlds and build developments to create the top-scoring civilization. It’s a rich game, different every time, but ultimately has two drawbacks that prevent me from giving it a full recommendation.

Each player starts with a home world that has one or two powers, and then lays other cards representing worlds or developments along side it. Players acquire points for the cards they lay and for producing and consuming any of the four types of goods, represented by cards laid face-down on production worlds, then removed during the consumption phase in exchange for more cards or for points. The game ends when the supply of victory point chips is exhausted or when any player lays his 12th card.

In a turn, each player simultaneously chooses a role from the seven options: Two “explore” roles that allow for card draws; a “develop” role that allows a player to place a development card by discarding a certain number of cards from his hand; a “settle” role for placing a world card in the same way; “consume-trade,” where the player trades in one good in exchange for more cards, then consumes the rest (if he has cards with consume powers on the table) for victory points; “consume-x2,” where the player consumes goods for double points; and “produce,” where each empty card with a production ability produces exactly one good. All players use all selected roles in that round, but receive some extra ability or bonus for the roles they chose themselves – for example, the developer can develop at a cost of one fewer card than the regular price.

Nearly all cards bring some special ability to the table. Some cards allow the player to consume a good for a specific gain – usually a victory point, a new card, or one of each, with a handful of cards offering higher bonuses. Others take a point off the cost of developing or settling a world, or give the player a card draw when he does so. There are “windfall” worlds that only produce goods when the player chooses to be the producer or if the player has another settled world or development that has a windfall production power. So when players have 10-12 cards down, there’s a lot to track, and I’ve found it’s easy to overlook a bonus you might have on one of your cards.

If all players have some experience with the game, it’s going to move fairly quickly. But the first drawback to the game is that it takes many plays to learn the game’s strategy, because you can’t map out a strategy if you don’t know the cards well, and you have to play several times to get to know the deck. I downloaded a free version with strong AIs and played at least 20 games (they take a few minutes), after which I knew the key cards for the two main strategies I use. That’s a lot to ask a newbie to do, especially one who’s playing for fun rather than with the goal of reviewing it. And without those games on the computer, I doubt I would have grasped some of the badly-written rules as quickly as I did. (It’s also extremely helpful to have the computer handle the scoring and keep track of Consume powers for that phase.) The cards also express their abilities in icons unique to this game, which seems to be a frequent criticism in online reviews, although I thought they were pretty straightforward once I learned them (and it’s fair to say that learning them is a time commitment not everyone will want to make).

The second is that there’s one strategy that will win the majority of the time, pointed out to me by Tim K. – the produce/consume-x2 strategy. Beating it requires a fair amount of luck in card draws; I’ve won with a military strategy twice, but needed to nail a couple of key cards to pull it off. There are many more production and consumption cards in the deck, meaning a produce/consume-x2 strategy is more flexible and more likely to work, especially if no other player tries it. (Your strategy choice is somewhat set by your start world; if you get the military world New Sparta up front, you’re at a disadvantage if you want to try the produce/consume-x2 strategy.) I’ve read descriptions of Trade and Develop strategies, but I think the extent of luck in card draws required to pull those off must be very high. And if another player shoots for produce/consume-x2 using low-cost blue good cards, he’ll probably finish before the Develop strategy can lay its first big-bonus development.

With some of your recommendations for Race for the Galaxy and its very high rating on Boardgamegeek (#13 as I write this), I was predisposed to like the game, but the combination of high randomness in card draws and high complexity in resolving consume phases doesn’t validate the high ranking. San Juan is simple when compared to this, and I understand that it’s too simple for some people, but the simplicity means that the randomness of card draws has a much lesser effect. Everyone has the same fundamental strategy because San Juan doesn’t allow for as much variation. Race for the Galaxy gives you the variation and thus the multiple strategies, but one strategy can rule them all, and keeping track of all those abilities and bonuses starts to feel a little like work. It’s good, better than most games out there, but I have high standards and Race doesn’t quite meet them.

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→ January 24, 2011
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Hot chocolate.

Quick break from boardgame reviews – I think I have six or seven in the queue to write up – and from prospect writing (the top 100 goes up on Thursday) to talk about one of my favorite beverages: Hot chocolate.

Now you might be thinking about hot cocoa, which is often incorrectly labelled “hot chocolate” by … well, by morons, because hot cocoa doesn’t contain chocolate, and cocoa and and chocolate are not the same thing. If you’ve had good chocolate – I don’t mean Hershey’s, which is to chocolate as gas stations are to coffee – then you know what I mean.

And that’s not to say that hot cocoa has no place in the beverage pantheon – hot cocoa is more of a quick warm-you-up, while hot chocolate is dessert in a cup. Hot cocoa does have the advantage of being easier to make, even without resorting to packets of sugar, guar gum, and “natural flavor.” Here’s how I do it:

1 Tbsp Dutch-processed cocoa (or 2 tsp cocoa and 2 tsp shaved bittersweet chocolate)
1 tsp sugar, or to taste
8 oz milk

Put the dry goods in your mug. Heat the milk to a bare simmer – in a microwave, try a minute on high, stir to prevent a skin from forming, then another minute – and pour just enough into the mug to moisten the cocoa. Stir or whisk until you have a smooth paste, then gradually stir in the remainder of the milk. If you find yourself with lumps of cocoa powder in the finished product, try sifting it after measuring. Add a shot of espresso for a mocha where both the coffee and chocolate stand in front, with the sweetener playing rhythm as it should be.

Hot chocolate, in a general sense, is what it sounds like: Chocolate, heated until it’s pourable, mixed with milk or cream or a combination thereof, and perhaps with accent flavors layered on top of it. If you’ve seen Chocolat – which, by the way, was much better than the book – you know what this looks like. It’s the best chocolate delivery system known to man, viscous and smooth and full of antioxidants, but who the hell cares about that because it’s chocolate!

I’ve tried a number of recipes for hot chocolate (also called “drinking chocolate” in some sources), and all were good because, again, we’re talking about chocolate. If the chocolate you put in is good, the finished product will be good. Callebaut is my favorite major brand, but these days I use the Pound Plus 72% bar of Belgian chocolate from Trader Joes, which is a lot more affordable when you go through the stuff as quickly as we do. (Valhrona is fine, but what they charge is in no way justified by some superior quality or smoothness. Callebaut is usually 60% of the price and as good if not better in texture and flavor.)

For my birthday last year, my wife bought me a small book called, appropriately enough, Hot Chocolate, by restaurateur and food writer Michael Turback. I find most little food books to be more novelty item than useful resource, but Turback approached this like a researcher, talking to dozens of pastry chefs around the globe and reproducing 60 of their recipes for hot chocolate, some of which incorporate unusual ingredients like chili pepper, ginger, key lime, cardamom, chestnut paste, matcha, or sake. Most work on the same general principle, however: Begin with a ganache (roughly equal parts cream and bittersweet or semi-sweet chocolate), then use that as the base for a beverage by adding milk and other flavors.

My favorite recipe so far is from Top Chef judge Tom Colicchio’s ‘wichcraft chain, which Turback says is known for the hot chocolate served in 12-ounce paper cups, a quantity I find hard to fathom because it’s so filling. Its key ingredient is fresh bay leaf, although I have made it several times with dried crushed bay leaves and can report excellent results. The recipe in the book makes six servings, but here is my adaptation for one:

Sisha Ortuzar’s Bay Leaf-Infused Hot Chocolate

1.5 ounces (40-45 grams) bittersweet chocolate, 60-72% cacao, finely chopped
2.5 fluid ounces (5 Tbsp) heavy cream
1 cup milk
1 dried bay leaf, crumbled
Pinch salt (optional)

Bring the milk and bay leaf to a simmer and let steep for at least five minutes, until the leaf is fragrant. Keep it warm as you make the ganache, but don’t let it boil or reduce.

Place the chocolate in a heat-proof bowl or directly into a mug. Heat the cream to a bare boil – be careful, as cream boils over fast, and fat burns easily – and pour over the chocolate. Let stand for two minutes, then stir to make a smooth paste.

Strain the milk into the ganache and stir until the mixture is smooth and homogeneous. Add a tiny pinch of salt if desired and serve.

–

I find salt intensifies the chocolatey flavor of chocolate, but the drink is still rich, deep, and satisfying without it. You can also boost it with coffee or rum or a liqueur like Amaretto or Chambourd, but I prefer it au naturel because it’s like mainlining cacao. Much credit is due to Ortuzar, chef and co-founder of ‘wichcraft with Colicchio, for the bay leaf/chocolate pairing, a less-than-obvious combination that works even better than chocolate and chili pepper.

Turback’s book is about hot chocolate, not hot cocoa, so all of the drinks included are rich and probably high in calories, not that there’s anything wrong with that. He includes a section on alcoholic hot chocolates, as well as a few white chocolate beverages that are just a waste of space. (Really, Michael, a book with 57 or 58 recipes wouldn’t have been enough?) Towards the back of the book are pairings, recipes for a chocolate drink and for a pastry to go with it, like a cinnamon-almond hot chocolate and cinnamon-dusted churros from David Guas, a former pastry chef turned consultant and author of DamGoodSweet, a book of New Orleans-inspired desserts.

Hot Chocolate isn’t an essential cookbook but it’s the sort of cookbook to which I’m gravitating these days, books that can inspire me with new ideas for flavor combinations rather than instruct me on the mechanics of a recipe. However, making hot chocolate is about making ganache, and anyone with a stove and a whisk can do that, so a non-cook can get some value from the book as well.

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→ January 18, 2011
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Catan app.

My latest column for mental_floss, a conversation with prolific board game designer Reiner Knizia (the man behind my favorite two-player game, Lost Cities), went up today.

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Settlers of Catan remains the top board game on my rankings, even though it requires at least three players; it’s a great game that has simple mechanics, requires players to plan and have a strategy, includes mechanisms to reduce the odds of one player routing the others, and has helped forge a new segment in the U.S. board game market. You can’t overstate its value.

The Catan iOS app costs a reasonable $4.99, with colorful and slightly goofy graphics and an AI good enough to help you learn the game or pass the time, but no AI player strong enough to challenge an experienced player on a consistent basis. The app allows you to play two or three AI players, or to play another person who’s sitting with you, but lacks an online play option. The developers just released the first in-game expansion, Seafarers, today, and I purchased it but have yet to download it.

The Catan app itself works well if you fine tune the options to speed up the graphics and reduce the fake chatter from AI players. The app provides statistics on dice rolls and resource gains for all players, so you see for yourself that the computer wasn’t cheating when it made you roll a 7 when you had 13 resources and were about to build two cities and win the game. The map itself is extremely clear even with the colors and textures on the various tiles, and you can zoom as needed.

On your turn, once the die roll occurs, you click a somewhat-hidden menu buton on the right side of the screen to pull up your options: Build something, buy or use a card, initiate a trade, go to settings, or pass the dice. Building is straightforward, and only items you can build are highlighted, although it would be simpler if it snapped right to the first thing you can buy. Buying a card is simple, but using one requires scrolling to the right until you find the card you already have, at which point the question mark (for a description) changes to a check mark.

The trading engine is simpler to use, and AI players do make frequent trade offers. There’s also an option to decline all trade offers until your next turn, which can be useful when you’re receiving a slew of offers for a resource you know you won’t trade at any likely price. The trade engine screen presents all five resources in a row in the center, and you slide up or down depending on whether you want to give or receive a certain resource in the trade.

The game comes with a half-dozen or so AI players that vary in overall skill and in style of play, some aggressive, some focused more on building internally. But no AI player does much in the way of blocking the human player’s strategy, and they all have a tendency to hold resources too long – I’ve won a few times when the AI players each had 9-13 resources, and there had to be something they could have built with those resources to gain some points.

The Seafarers app doesn’t seem to have added any new AI players, and the game requires that you play a few of the basic scenarios before unlocking the Seafarer ones, even though I’ve played the First Island numerous times before buying the expansion. I’ll report back on that once I’ve had a chance to play it a few times.

I’d recommend the Catan app to anyone who’s been listening to me rave about the board game for years but hasn’t had a chance to try it, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking to improve his play. For me – and I am far from an expert at Settlers – it’s more of a fun diversion, not as challenging as some other apps I’ve tried but still fun, probably because I enjoy the underlying game so much. The fact that they’ve issued a major expansion also gives some hope that they’ll continue to develop for it, adding new features and maybe other expansions or AI players along the way.

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→ January 17, 2011
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Forbidden Island.

Forbidden Island is another cooperative board game by Matt Leacock, designer of the fantastic cooperative game Pandemic (reviewed earlier this month), with similar mechanics and a similar goal. It’s more visually appealing than Pandemic, coming in a tin box rather than cardboard with nicer artwork on the island tiles, but is a little simpler to play and definitely simpler to win, making it a better family game than Pandemic but perhaps a little less challenging for a group of 3 or 4 adults.

In Forbidden Island, two to four players take on adventurer roles to capture four relics on the titular island and attempt to escape as a group before the island sinks. As the game goes on, the water level rises, making certain tiles flood and, if they flood again while already flooded, sink permanently, after which they’re removed from the game; players must therefore choose between capturing relics and running around the island restoring flooded tiles.

The island itself varies in each game, similarly to Settlers of Catan – the set of tiles is drawn randomly to build a 3-4-5-5-4-3 island, and no fixed position for any of the nine critical tiles, the tile required for departure and the eight tiles for the four relics. To capture a relic, one player must possess four cards showing that relic (within the hand limit of five cards) and then move to either of the two tiles with that relic on their corners, using one action to take the relic. When the team has captured all four relics, the players must all go to the departure tile and play a special Helicopter Lift card to lift all four players off the board and into victory.

On each turn, a player has four actions to use, including moving to an adjacent tile, restoring (“shoring up”) a flooded tile adjacent (horizontally or vertically) to where he’s standing, giving a card to another player on the same tile, or playing four cards to capture a relic. Diagonal moves are prohibited, so most of your actions will go to moving around the island, with a fair amount of thought going to positioning yourself for future moves. But because the board is fairly simple to navigate, it doesn’t have the same critical-path modeling feel as Pandemic, which may be good or bad depending on your point of view. I prefer Pandemic’s operational complexity; your mileage may vary.

Each player plays one of six roles giving him special abillities. The Engineer can shore up two tiles for a single action. The Pilot can use one action each turn flying to any tile anywhere on the island, regardless of its distance from his starting point. The Explorer can move or shore up a tile diagonally. The Messenger can give a card to another player even if they’re not on the same tile. The Diver can move through multiple flooded tiles or even the empty spaces where removed tiles sat for a single action. And the Navigator can move another player up to two adjacent tiles for a single action to set him up for his next turn. The key to winning is, of course, figuring out how best to use the special abilities of all players, using them as often as possible; most roles are helpful although the Diver isn’t as useful as the others in a two-player game.

A few island tiles are flooded at the start of the game, and each player completes his turn by drawing two to five cards from the Flood deck. Each Flood card shows an island tile; when a player draws an island’s card, he flips the tile over to show that it’s flooded or, if it’s already flooded, removes it from the game permanently. As in Pandemic, several times during the game, the stack of used (played) Flood cards is shuffled and placed back on top of the Flood deck, so an island that has already been flooded is going to be flooded repeatedly as long as the game goes on. The timing of those shuffles depends on when the Waters Rise! cards are drawn from the master Treasure deck that includes relic cards and five special ability cards: three Helicopter Lifts (move one player anywhere on the island, with no action required) and two Sandbags (shore up one tile immediately, also for no action). A player draws two Treasure cards at the end of her turn, discarding if she’s over five cards in her hand.

There are several ways to lose Forbidden Island, although we only lost via one method. You lose if both island tiles that show a particular relic sink before you capture it, thus leaving you unable to do so. You lose if the departure tile sinks. You lose if an island tile sinks with a player on it and he’s unable to swim to an adjacent tile because those have already sunk. And you lose if the water level rises a certain number of times – nine times if you play the Novice level or just six times if you play at Legendary level. We lost when the departure tile sank too quickly for us to shore it up because we drew Waters Rise! cards on consecutive turns; other than that, we played up to the Elite level (one below Legendary) and finished the game with plenty of time left on the theoretical clock.

The relative ease of winning with two players didn’t make the game less fun to play, but it wasn’t as challenging or frustrating as Pandemic. I prefer the higher level of difficulty, even though I can still say “Bogota” to my sister and her husband they’ll remember exactly which session of Pandemic I mean and how aggravating that loss was. If you’ve played neither game and want to try the cooperative concept, Forbidden Island is under $13 on amazon, or about half the cost of Pandemic, making it a great introduction to this style of game and this designer’s mechanics.

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Thanks to a reader recommendation, I’ve set up an amazon.com aStore that includes all board games I’ve recommended and that will eventually include the entire Klaw 100 (I think I’ve added 30-35 titles so far). It’s also linked permanently on the Amazon link above.

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→ January 12, 2011
→ By

The Billionaire’s Vinegar.

Benjamin Wallace’s The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine is the best nonfiction book I’ve read in almost two years, since reading The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber in February of 2009. Vinegar is a bit of literary pinot noir, starting with the auction of a bottle of wine allegedly owned by Thomas Jefferson and left in Paris when he fled the Revolution, a sale that smashed the previous record for a single bottle and helped accelerate the trend of high sale prices for ultra-rare wines. Of course, we wouldn’t have a book about it if there wasn’t an underlying controversy. Was the wine legitimate, or was Hardy Rodenstock, the German who purportedly discovered the cache of wines, a fraud and a forger of the highest order?

The ability to make money through doctored wines wouldn’t exist with a market willing to pay top dollar for what those wines purported to be, and Wallace documents the role of auction houses, particularly Christie’s, in marketing and selling rare wines and troves to a changing market, one that saw collectors bidding up bottles as investments or trophies rather than as libations. The man who built Christie’s wine-selling business over a period of four decades, Michael Broadbent, is a central character in the book for his role in selling the Rodenstock/Jefferson wines and impact on the rare-wine industry. (Michael’s son, Bartholomew, makes a few cameos, and has become a successful importer of fine wines.) The rich men who chase these wines also become significant characters in the book, including millionaire scion and America’s Cup winner Bill Koch, fellow scion Kip Forbes, and wine merchant Bill Sokolin, who bought one of the Jefferson bottles only to damage it and have most of the wine leak out on a restauarant floor as he carried the bottle to show off during a tasting.

The is-it-real storyline is paramount in Billionaire’s Vinegar, but, as an oeneophyte, I found the lay descriptions of wine chemistry fascinating, particularly explanations of how wine’s character changes over time, which also ties into how someone might alter a wine to make it seem older than it is – and how difficult it was until very recently to test a wine to determine, even within a narrow range, its age. The book also dabbles in the politics of wine manufacturing, culture, marketing, and the culture of wine connoisseurs, including massive tastings like “verticals” (many different vintages of a single wine) or “horizontals” (many wines, one year).

But at heart, the book is a mystery, starring Rodenstock and Broadbent, both eccentrics given to showmanship and bravado, one a dealer, the other an auctioneer, one a German of unknown background, the other a Brit of impeccable credentials. (Other eminent authorities on wine also gave their imprimatur to Rodenstock’s Jefferson wines, including Robert Parker, the most influential American wine critic of the past three decades and creator of the now-ubiquitous 100-point scale for rating wines.) The answer to the question of the wines’ provenance isn’t that hard to figure out, but Wallace plays it straight, only gradually revealing more information as the people involved the story themselves would have learned it, giving the book that mystery/detective feel – not to mention a surfeit of narrative greed – that sets it apart from most nonfiction books I read. I needed to put this book down so I could do other things, but found myself picking it back up repeatedly, finishing it inside of 72 hours.

Of note: the book is actually not available for sale in the U.K. because Michael Broadbent sued and wrangled a settlement from Random House, although he didn’t name Wallace in the suit and, having read the book, I’m hard-pressed to understand Broadbent’s complaint from a my non-lawyerly perspective. Wallace himself stated that U.K. libel laws are “notoriously plaintiff-friendly,” and I have to say that Broadbent might only have brought more bad publicity for himself by drawing attention to the book. He hardly comes off worst of the many shady characters populating the book’s pages.

Next up: Humorist and erstwhile sportswriter Roy Blount Jr.’s Alphabet Juice, a compendium of mini-essays on various words and their etymologies.

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→ January 10, 2011
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A Pale View of Hills.

Kazuo Ishiguro is best-known today for Remains of the Day, which really means he’s best known for making the book that they turned into that movie, although another one of his novels, the dystopian heartbreaker Never Let Me Go, was recently made into a movie starring the human dimple. (Both books are on the Klaw 100.) His debut novel, A Pale View of Hills, was critically acclaimed at the time of its release but has been obscured by those two later works, although it showcases both Ishiguro’s strong yet beautiful prose and his ability to create dreamlike settings that keep the reader off balance through shifts in time or realistic unrealism.

The narrator of A Pale View of Hills is Etsuko, a Japanese widow living in England after the suicide of her older daughter, Keiko, her only child from her first marriage, to Jiro, a traditional Japanese man. Her younger daughter, Niki, from her second marriage, comes to visit from London, triggering a series of flashbacks for Etsuko to when she was pregnant and struck up a relationship with the peculiar widow Sachiko and her daughter Mariko shortly after the end of World War II. Sachiko and Mariko have an odd relationship; Sachiko leaves the ten-year-old Mariko home alone for long periods and doesn’t require her to go to school, while Sachiko herself pursues a lopsided relationship with the American serviceman known as “Frank.” Mariko appears to be bright, but is scarred by horrors she witnessed during the end of the war, and her mother appears unable to help or even cope, escaping instead into her alternate reality with her paramour.

Those flashbacks are intertwined with another series of reminiscences to a time when Jiro was alive and his father, Ogata-san, came to visit Jiro and Etsuko for several days. Jiro himself was fairly cold and distant with his father, who seemed at that stage to have a stronger relationship with his daughter-in-law than he did with his son, as the latter is poisoned by the gap between Ogata-san’s views on the loss of Japanese culture with their defeat in war. (Ishiguro explored that topic, of coming to terms with Japan’s imperialistic, jingoistic past after World War II, in An Artist of the Floating World, a book I found less successful and less enjoyable than Hills.)

Ishiguro enjoys creating layers of mystery, then revealing only some of the answers as the book nears its end, a habit that covers this book from start to finish as well. One of those mysteries is left up to the interpretation of the reader, and I’m going to discuss my own belief, so consider this your spoiler warning.

Near the end of the book, Etsuko shifts without warning when relaying a conversation between herself and Mariko from referring to Sachiko in the third person to speaking in the first person – that is, she is suddenly Sachiko. Their two stories have substantial, if slightly imperfect, parallels, but Mariko could easily be Keiko, sharing her alienation and depression, since Keiko is depicted through memories as withdrawing herself gradually from her family and life, eventually doing so completely to the point where her body isn’t discovered for several days because she lived alone with no contact with family and apparently little or none with friends. Sachiko-Etsuko is convincing herself that she’s acting in her daughter’s best interests when she is attempting to smother her grief through this chase of a foreign man whose interest in her is mainly sexual; if you believe the two women are one, the strongest interpretation is that the American, Frank, is not the man Etsuko eventually marries, not just because of the different nationalities but because of Frank’s irresponsibility.

In this interpretation, Ishiguro’s overriding theme is that of guilt and regret, something he covered again in Remains and Floating World – our difficulty or even inability to come to terms with the past, with our own actions and those of others that affected us, with the hurt we dealt to others (with or without intent) and with how our choices crippled our own chances for happiness. Etsuko’s dissociation from her memory of Mariko-Keiko is her way of coping with her own guilt: As she grieved the loss of Jiro, her quest for her own happiness (or simply a facade of normalcy) forced her daughter’s best interests into the background just when she needed more of her mother’s love and attention. Etsuko acknowledges at one point that she knew the move from Japan to England would exacerbate her daughter’s problems, but clearly she made the move anyway, for what must have been purely selfish motives. Neither Japanese society of that time nor English or American societies since then accept selfishness on the part of the mother relative to the needs of the child, and Etsuko has to whitewash her own memories to live with them.

A Pale View of Hills includes Ishiguro’s usual digressions about music and art, and Etsuko and Ogata-san have an exchange on the art of cooking that spoke to me:

”Are you really planning on becoming a cook, Father?”
“It’s nothing to laugh at. I’ve come to appreciate cooking over the years. It’s an art, I’m convinced of it, just as noble as painting or poetry. It’s not appreciated simply because the product disappears so quickly.”

When Ishiguro was writing the book, in the very early 1980s, he probably couldn’t imagine our modern culture of celebrity chefs, who earn far more than painters or poets, although I think his point about the lack of respect for a product that is consumed rather than observed or read is a sound one.

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→ January 9, 2011
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A Mercy.

Toni Morrison’s most recent novel, A Mercy, is extremely short, somewhere between novel and novella, and feels as wispy as a short story with both scant character development and a frenetic jumping backward and forward in time and across multiple narrators. And Morrison’s use of an apparently invented English dialect made a slow book even harder to read, leading me to the unfortunate conclusion that, as much as I loved her books Beloved and Song of Solomon (both among my 101 favorite novels), she hasn’t produced another novel that I truly enjoyed.

A Mercy is primarily about the young Angolan slave Florens, whose mother effectively gives her up to save her from potential abuse at the hands of her current owner, only to have Florens find new trouble with her next owner, the farmer and eventual trader Jacob Vaark, when she meets the unnamed free black blacksmith and falls into a torrid affair with him. She finds herself scorned by the main slave on the property, Lina, herself once used and rejected by a man; ignored by the distant, space-cadet slave named Sorrow, herself pregnant ny an unknown father; and loved then rebuffed by Jacob’s wife (and, early in the book, widow) Rebekka, who survives a bout of smallpox only to become cold and robotic after adopting the views of a Calvinist sect.

When Morrison is good, she’s superb, with long sagas that illuminate African-American history through broad metaphors and heavy use of symbolism, right down to peculiar character names like the legendary Milkman Dead of Song of Solomon. Those metaphors take time to develop over the course of many chapters and episodes, but A Mercy is so brief – when you fold up all of the narratives, very little time passes in the book – that there’s virtually no development of metaphor or character, with the only significant change affecting Rebekkah, who moves from one extreme (compassionate, freethinking, mostly independent-minded housewife-farmer) to another after losing her husband and nearly losing her own life.

White folk generally don’t come off well in Morrison’s books – when slavery is a recurrent theme, it’s hard to paint us Caucasians as anything but the enemy – but in A Mercy, the primary villain is not white skin but the Y chromosome. Man is faithless and violent and a serial user, using the various women in the book for sex and labor and little else. There is no love between man and woman in this book; the only love is that of a mother for her child, and even that goes awry more often than not. I have no inherent objection to a book with the theme of the oppression of women by men throughout the history of civilization, but to a book that attempts to tell that story without giving me a male character who exists in as many as two dimensions.

Morrison’s two magnum opi – Beloved is $9 at that amazon link above, and I doubt you could find a better novel for under $10 new right now – are among the towering achievements not just in women’s literature or African-American literature, but in literature, period, the sort of complex, emotional works that speak to multiple fundamental aspects of our existence with poetic prose, layered meanings, and narrative greed. Jazz and Sula hinted at that greatness, but in general I’ve found the rest of Morrison’s bibliography to fall sadly short. Perhaps those two great works were all that Morrison had in her. It’s more than most authors could produce in a lifetime.

Next up: So I’m a bit behind here – just tore through Kazuo Ishiguro’s marvelous debut novel A Pale View of Hills inside of 24 hours, and am already knee-deep in Benjamin Wallace’s nonfiction thriller The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine.

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→ January 6, 2011
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Jaipur (game).

If you missed it yesterday, I chatted right after the Hall of Fame announcement.

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Back in July when I complained in my review of Lost Cities about the shortage of good German-style two-player games, two of you recommended the card game Jaipur, an Indian-themed trading game with a solid mix of luck and strategy. The recommendation was spot on, as it’s one of the better pure two-player games we’ve tried, not quite as good as Lost Cities but perhaps our second-favorite in that category.

In Jaipur, each player is a trader looking to collect and sell cards of six different types of goods, ranging from jewels to leather. Each good sold brings in a token worth 1 to 7 bonus points, with the first goods of a type sold within a round worth more than the same goods sold later. But there are also bonuses for selling 3, 4, or 5 goods of one kind in a single transaction, so there’s a tradeoff between selling early to get the best goods tokens or waiting to collect more cards and receive a bonus for a larger trade. There’s also a 5-point bonus for having the largest herd of camels (also cards), although camels have some strategic value beyond their points.

Each player begins the game with five cards showing goods or camels, and the market opens with five cards as well, three camels and two randomly drawn from the deck. Players place their camels in a pile in front of them, so they don’t count against the hand-card limit of seven. On his turn, a player may take one card from the market; exchange as many of his own cards (hand or camel) with the same number of cards from the market; take all of the camels from the market at once; or choose to sell goods to the Maharaja (what you’d call “the bank” in other games). The round ends when the deck is exhausted or when three of the six piles of bonus tokens for goods are exhausted.

Because cards are drawn from the shuffled deck, there’s a relatively high degree of randomness involved in Jaipur, and you may go through a round where you just can’t get cards of a certain good – but the fact that there are more cards of each good in the deck than there are tokens of that good on the table mitigates that and allows you some flexibility. We found that there is a strong strategic element to Jaipur, including deciding when to sell and how many to sell, when to go for a bonus and when to try to steal the highest tokens out from your opponent who might be collecting the same good, and when to exchange several cards even though doing so may restock the market for your opponent. It’s light strategy, but enough that there are clearly better and worse ways to play the game, and on every turn you’re thinking about your options or watching what your opponent is taking so you know what she’s collecting and what cards are left in the deck.

Jaipur, like Lost Cities, is also extremely compact, with just the single deck of about 60 cards and a handful of tokens that you could just throw in a zip-top bag, so I imagine it would travel well. Even in the box, it’s one of the smallest game packages I own. If you care about graphics and art, everything’s done in bright colors and the images are appealing in a cartoonish way, although I would gladly play this game with bad art and dim colors.

I interviewed Reiner Knizia recently for an upcoming mental_floss article, and brought up my affection for his game Lost Cities. He said many people call it “the spouse game,” because in many couples you find one game-player more serious about gaming than the other, but Lost Cities seems to sit perfectly in between those two poles. That’s not the case in our house, as my wife likes about 90% of the games I like, but I love the “spouse game” description because it gives such a concise description of where Lost Cities and Jaipur are on the strategy scale. I’d still recommend Lost Cities first, but if you liked that and are looking for another game in the same general area of strategy, ease of learning, and fun, I’d recommend Jaipur for your next two-player purchase.

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