→ December 24, 2010
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Reiner Knizia’s Samurai app.

It’s up about $20 from yesterday, but The Wire: The Complete Series is still over half off at $96.49 on amazon.com.

—

I mentioned the other day that I’ve become extremely addicted to another iOS app, Reiner Knizia’s Samurai, by the prolific designer behind my favorite two-player game, Lost Cities. Samurai is based on a board game ranked in BoardGameGeek’s top 100, but I’ve never played it (I’ll be buying it after the holidays) so my impressions of the app won’t include any comparisons to the original.

The board Samurai includes an island or set of islands representing Japan and broken up into hexes, some of which have one or more icons representing peasants, soldiers (helmets), or buddhas. The object of the game is to capture as many of those icons as possible, but the victory condition is more based on capturing a plurality of each icon type than on the overall total of icons captured – you can, in fact, capture more icons than your opponent in a two-player game and still lose if he captured more in two of the three categories.

You capture an icon by surrounding it with tokens that influence it in your direction, placing one regular (“slow”) token per turn. Your slow tokens include peasant, soldier, and buddha tokens of varying strengths (1 to 4 points) and samurai tokens that influence all icons. You also receive “fast” tokens, of which you can place several each turn in addition to your one slow token; the ronin token is worth one influence point and goes on land, ship tokens are worth one or two points and go on sea hexes adjacent to land, and special tokens allow you to replay a slow token you’ve previously played or to switch two icons on the board to snatch one out from under your opponent’s thumb. When a hex bearing an icon is surrounded on the land side, it is captured by the player whose adjacent tokens exert the most influence. The game ends when all tokens of any single type are captured, or when four tokens are surrounded but uncaptured because of a tie in influence.

Samurai plays very differently as a two-player game versus a three- or four-player game. In the two-player game, it’s much easier to set up your next move or try to force your opponent to make a specific move, as well as to deduce some of your opponent’s strategy. With three or four players, your degree of control is so much less that your moves are more turn by turn rather than part of a larger game-long strategy, since it’s harder to predict what two or three opponents will do before your next move, leading to shorter setups for captures and more thought required in how your one move will push your opponents to do (or not do) something specific. It’s a simple mechanic that plays out in complex ways, yet with short turns still moves very quickly.

The iOS implementation has outstanding graphics and a very clear tutorial to get you started. I’ve found the AI to be very strong, especially in two-player games; in three-player games I’ve run into the occasional less-than-best move (unless I just didn’t understand what the AI was doing) but would never say I’ve had an easy win. Knizia is a mathematician by training, so his games are highly mathematical in nature, and I think that lends itself to stronger AIs because the programmer can model the game more easily. In Samurai, not only does that lead to more optimal moves by the AI, it also means the AI won’t miss a complex opportunity to end the game early by capturing the final icon in one category.

How addictive is Samurai? I had to leave my iPod Touch uncharged at one point to stop myself from playing the game when I should have been packing for our trip. I can’t seem to put it down unless I’ve won at least one game, because often I know I lost because of just one wrong move. I’ll have to pick up the board game, but I have a feeling this will be a top ten board game for me, maybe top five, given how phenomenal the app is. And I’m not the only ESPNer to think so – Jorge Arangure tweeted that he’s a fan too.

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I may post again this weekend, but if I don’t get back before Saturday, Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate it, and please be careful if (like me) you’re out on the roads.

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→ December 23, 2010
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Turn, Magic Wheel.

Today’s chat transcript is up. No chat next week between the holidays.

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“Would a woman like Effie Callingham, a fine woman like her, would she fall in love with a plain bounder?”
“Why not?” said Dennis with a shrug. “When did women ever fight over a Galahad?”

Dawn Powell has, in the last twelve months, become my favorite female American novelist, a writer whose books consistently deliver unusual and interesting characters, featuring Manhattan in its literary golden age, written with a sardonic wit male writers would be hard-pressed to match. She is the Queen of Snark, more than happy to turn her acerbic eye on her own social scene, and in Turn, Magic Wheel, she is positively savage.

Drawing its title from “The Sorceress,” a bucolic poem by Theocritus that includes the repeated line “Turn, magic wheel, draw homeward him I love,” Turn, Magic Wheel covers a group of writers, wannabe writers, publishers, and hangers-on in New York around the time that Dennis Orphen, a fictional writer who made a cameo appearance in The Wicked Pavilion, has written a fictionalized biography of his friend, Effie Callingham, long separated from her famous, Hemingway-like husband Andy Callingham, now presumed in Europe with the woman for whom he left Effie. The book is days from publication and Effie is just learning that it’s about her, too thinly disguised to fool anyone, which will put her at the center of a storm of publicity.

In addition to the phonies and schemers are the lovers, including Dennis’ married lover Corinne, whose husband, Phil, is the most oblivious cuckold imaginable, while Corinne herself is unaware she’s just a physical thing for Dennis, who comes closest to actual affection for Effie. Meanwhile, Effie is pulled to the hospital when Andy’s second wife – not that he ever divorced the first – turns up in New York with terminal cancer, having left Andy (before she knew she was ill) because he took up with a Swedish chorus girl.

Powell inserts herself more into this book than the four other novels I’ve read, through the Orphen character and through her sendup of New York publishers, including the fatuous publisher Mactweed and his ambitious associate Johnson, always fearing for his position while he tries to gauge the direction of the literary wind. Orphen is the anti-romantic chronicler of his New York life, but had to fill in some missing gaps in Effie’s history for his novel, only to find himself confronted with the real-life analogues to his fictional characters and settings:

He shouldn’t have come in here, anyway, he thought, for there was in his novel no role for Dennis Orphen; he had no business following his heroine brazenly through her own secret story. Wells wouldn’t do such a thing. Proust wouldn’t have. No decent author would step brashly, boldly into his own book.

Step he does, of course, often leaving him dissembling about his identity and connection to Effie to avoid detection as the parodist of his hosts, but also to chase Effie when she abandons him (never for long) over some slight … like turning her life into a satirical novel without asking her first.

Turn, Magic Wheel rivals her best work, A Time to Be Born, for its cynical view of love. But it’s inarguable that love can be born and die as a living organism, beyond the control of its owners, and for Powell the writer, the end of love means an honest exploration of emotional pain. When Effie hears Andy’s second wife, slightly delirious from the cancer, echo as her own Effie’s wish that she had borne Andy a son so she would still have something of him, Powell writes:

There are words that cannot be borne, suggestions so burning with anguish and despair that no heart can endure them, so Effie, her lover stolen, her dream of a son now stolen, got to her feet and motioning, speechless, that she was leaving, found her way out of the intolerable room.

I’d still suggest that anyone who has yet to read any Dawn Powell novels begin with A Time to Be Born, which is a lock for the next Klaw 100, a wicked satire that functions more completely as a novel with real narrative greed and a protagonist you can actually support (even if she’s not completely innocent herself). Turn, Magic Wheel might be too biting for some readers – although I suppose if you’re here you’re not opposed to heavy use of snark – and doesn’t have as strong of a central character, with the city perhaps the real star of the book. It is, however, more evidence of the greatness of Dawn Powell, one of the most under-read authors I’ve ever encountered.

Next up: I finished Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers (just $5.98 right now, although I should warn you I didn’t love the book) on the train yesterday, and started Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

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→ December 22, 2010
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Carcassonne app.

My wife bought me an iPod Touch 4G for Christmas – we exchanged gifts early because we’re visiting family for the actual holiday – and, as you might imagine, the first thing I did was load it up with board game apps. I’ve already mentioned the incredible adaptation of Carcassonne (EDIT: my #1-ranked board game), which I purchased for my wife when she got her own iPod Touch a month ago, but they’ve tweaked the app since then and now offer a higher-resolution version compatible with the iPad as well. If you’re a fan of the original board game, or if you’re interested in all these games I discuss but haven’t had a chance to try any, this is an outstanding app to buy.

Carcassonne itself is a tile-laying game with no actual board; players build the board tile by tile as the game progresses. Players take tiles one by one and place them, with no stored tiles in anyone’s hand. Each tile contains some combination of road, city, and farmland, and the player must place it adjacent to one or more existing tiles while ensuring that any shared edges line up – if the new tile has a road on one edge, it can only be placed next to a tile with a road on the shared edge. Players earn points by placing “meeples” on cities, roads, and farms; city points are doubled when the city is closed (that is, the city walls are complete), while farms only earn points based on how many closed cities they abut. The catch is that you must have the most meeples on any city, road, or farm to earn points for it. The majority of the time that won’t be a problem, but a player can force a merger of two or more structures to try to take over the points that another player might have earned from it.

The iOS implementation is phenomenal. The graphics are dead-ringers for the board game, but also bright and clear for easy reading on the small iPod Touch screen. Placing tiles is intuitive – slide into place, tap to rotate, click and hold to relocate. Any legal placement for the tile is shaded so you can survey your options much more quickly. Once you’re happy with where you’ve placed the tile, click on the meeple in box on the right, after which you’ll have the option to place the meeple in any legal spot on that tile. Areas on the board that can’t be filled by any remaining tile are covered with a large X. Most impressive is the easy screening – the zoom level will change automatically as the board expands, and you can modify it manually if you want to see more or less of the board.

The app comes with nine different AI players – two each at easy, hard, evil, and “weird” levels, plus a simple AI I haven’t tried. There are even local ELO scores, so you can watch yours increase if you beat either of the hard AIs. The easy players are not awful or stupid and won’t make moves obviously against their own interest, but aren’t quite as aggressive about trying to horn in on cities and farms you’ve already created. I’ve found the hard players to be an ideal challenge – beatable, but only with effort, which is all you can ask from what is essentially a spreadsheet and a decision tree. And the game’s mechanics, with tiles appearing in random order, mean that playing the same AI doesn’t get old as quickly as it might in other games.

The app also includes multi-player capabilities, both locally and over the Internet, as well as a solitaire version I haven’t tried. The only thing it’s missing right now is the ability to play with any of the board game’s numerous expansions, but the developers have said for some time now that they intended to work on adding those as in-game purchase options once this month’s major update (including iPad compatibility) was released. I imagine the AIs will require some tweaking for certain expansions that alter or enhance the point-scoring rules, but either way look for the game to continue to improve over the coming months.

I’ll review some more apps over the next week, but the next one will be a Reiner Knizia game, Samurai, that has proven similarly addictive and is faster to play than Carcassonne. And apparently my colleague Jorge Arangure is just as hooked.

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→ December 20, 2010
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One – the seventh Potter film, covering the first half of the final book of the series– is by far the best Harry Potter movie yet, with better acting, better effects, and, most importantly, much better pacing so there’s no more feeling that we’re racing through the story (while hitting as many fun details as possible) to get to the ending before the 180-minute mark.

The pacing results from the overdue decision to split any of the Potter books into two movies, rather than to pack one of Rowling’s detail-dense stories into a fairly short movie. Five of the six previous screenplays took the same tack: Try to make the movie look as much as possible as the depiction in Rowling’s text, adding in the most fun or memorable details, while skimping on back story and compressing or omitting key plot points. The exception was the third film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, directed by Y Tu Mamá También director Alfonso Cuarón, who went after the spirit of the book rather than just another faithful yet rote translation. The Gothic look and more rational pacing produced a film that was watchable even if you weren’t immersed in the Potter mythology with imagery that stuck with me long after the film was over.

Deathly Hallows Part One takes its time getting through what is still a dense 400-odd pages of text, assuming that by now you know the back story, ripping through a very tight, effective, emotional intro sequence to set up the almost immediate jump into action-film territory – and there is a lot of action in the movie. There are several major fight and/or chase sequences, and since you know Harry can’t die in this film (there’s a Part Two already on the schedule, which is sort of a clue), developing true tension when he’s in peril comes down to timing on the parts of both the director and the actors. The more natural pacing of the film also helped, as I could sink more into the story as opposed the arm’s-length perspective of the earlier films, where things happened so quickly and without explanation that my investment in the underlying plot was never very deep.

The stars of this film, as in the book, are Harry, Ron, and Hermione, getting their greatest chance to stretch out as actors and succeeding across the board. The acting in the earlier films in the series was often paint-by-numbers – parts were handed out based on appearances, or the fun of having a big star appear in a role, with the actual performances secondary. Rupert Grint (Ron) was probably the best actor of the young troika at the start, but Emma Watson has made the most strides as an actress from start to finish, to the point where she’s able to carry a few scenes in this film.

(Unrelated to the film, I’ve been very impressed with how Watson has handled herself and her career over the last few months, setting an example for taking control of your life and your work that more young women, famous or not, could follow. Watson has made an aggressive move into the fashion arena and attached herself to a bleeding-edge cause, fair-trade clothing – an uncontroversial affiliation, but one that’s several steps beyond where the public consciousness is on fair-trade anything right now. Given the vicissitudes of the film industry and the short times in the limelight for many young actors and actresses, this looks like a savvy business move to extend her personal brand and increase her own control over her career.

And then there’s the hair. I can’t remember the last time a non-insanity-induced change in hairstyle produced such a reaction – Jennifer Aniston on Friends? – but Watson’s decision to cut off her locks in favor of a pixie cut seems like more than just standard-issue rebellion, but a retaking of her own image distinct from that of the only character she’s played on the big screen to date. Again, there’s control at work; Watson described doing it on the sly, but as a planned, thoughtful move, as opposed to, say, showing up in an airport barbershop and shaving her own head. It helps to be cute enough to pull off such a short haircut, but as a way to transform her image on the fly and make positive headlines for something unrelated to the Potter film – although I’m sure Warner Brothers was thrilled for the added bit of publicity around the time of the film’s release – looks to me like a shrewd maneuver that establishes her as her own boss while promoting her careers in film and in fashion.

The risk of pigeonholing is huge for the handful of actors who played the kids in the Potter films – this Collider interview with Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy) gets at that issue as well – and the only practical solution is for the actors to take control of and develop their own brands independent of the characters to whom they’re so closely tied. It looks like Watson is doing so aggressively and intelligently, staking out territory for herself beyond acting; tying herself to a good, underplayed social issue; and stating unequivocally that her image is hers, not Warner Brothers’ or Hermione Granger’s or anyone else’s. In a world where young actresses and celebrities typically make headlines for bad or even self-destructive behavior, I worry about being able to show my daughter positive role models beyond those in our immediate circle – women who still bring the natural appeal of celebrity but are also smart, successful, and responsible. So far, at least, it looks like Watson is on her way to becoming that kind of person, and if that helps her achieve her own career goals, it’s just a virtuous circle where everyone benefits.

That said, I’m guessing that, like Watson’s father, I will someday be quite upset when my own daughter decides to cut off her curls.)

Daniel Radcliffe had settled comfortably into the Harry role a few films ago, and despite the fact that he’s front and center for almost the entire film, he has very little latitude within the role – he’s usually being chased, being attacked, or attacking someone else. He gets a bit of comic relief up front when various Order of the Phoenix members take Polyjuice Potion to resemble him, and there’s a fun (and apparently improvised) scene where he dances with Hermione to relieve the tension after a spat with Ron. Rumor has it that the Harry/Voldemort confrontation is even larger in Part Two than it was in the book, so I’m hopeful we’ll get to see more of Radcliffe’s range when he’s not under assault.

That comic relief I mentioned is necessary in a film that’s dark and foreboding and filled with action and mayhem, as well as two deaths of named characters. They don’t feel forced, but comfortable, similar to the scene in Prisoner of Azbakan when the Weasley twins intercept Harry while he’s wearing his invisibility cloak. (And this would be a fine time to point out that the actors playing the twins, James and Oliver Phelps, have been criminally underutilized throughout the series of films. Oliver, playing George, has a hilarious moment in this most recent film where he doesn’t speak a word, but just stands against a kitchen counter with a cup of coffee in hand.) That relatively seamless quality has been lacking throughout the series; often it would seem like a joke was inserted because it was a highlight of the book and the screenwriter couldn’t omit it even if it didn’t flow with what preceded and followed it.

The scenery in the film is remarkable, both indoors and out. I was sure they’d shot some of the film in New Zealand given how much it reminded me of parts of the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but Wikipedia (which we know is never wrong) says it was all shot in the United Kingdom; if someone in London is paying attention, they’ll use footage from the film in future U.K. Tourism adverts, because many of the landscape shots are breathtaking. The Ministry of Magic, which you’ve seen before, remains one of the crowing achievements of Harry Potter set design with its mix of mundane (seemingly century-old elevators) and magical. The Malfoy mansion represents the best in abanoned-property chic, dark, desolate, and appropriately eerie. Even the Lovegood shack is – as so much in the films has been – strikingly like Rowling’s descriptions.

As a part one of two, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One ends without full resolution, but doesn’t seem the least bit unfinished, nor does its status has half of a greater whole hang over the film in any way. There’s a gradual crescendo that will certainly accelerate in Part Two, but the longer format means we get more meaning, more detail, better dialogue, and more chance for several actors – notably Grint and Watson – to stretch out. I’ve watched the first six Potter movies out of a sort of obligation, but the success of this film has me avidly looking forward to the finale.

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→ December 19, 2010
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More from Dominion designer Donald X. Vaccarino.

By now you’ve probably seen my piece on the Zack Greinke trade. I want to thank all of you who’ve reached out to me to comment on the section on Greinke’s battle with anxiety disorder. I have been bothered by the way Greinke, Joey Votto, and other players with mental illnesses have been depicted, and this seemed like the appropriate time to discuss it.

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I talked via email to Donald X. Vaccarino for last week’s mental_floss article on the making of his hit game, the Spiel des Jahres-winning Dominion, but ended up with far more material than I could use in that one piece. Here’s some bonus footage from the email exchange, covering some game details like cards, strategies, and which expansion to buy first. (Anything in bold/italics is mine; the rest is Vaccarino.)

Anything specific about the game that you love?

Dominion has a really nice solution to a classic game problem – or rather, a classic problem of the kind of game I tend to make. You have games where you play a card with a rule on it each turn, and it sits around in play for the rest of the game. And there are say four players. So after five turns, there are twenty cards in play. It’s impossible to pay attention to everything, to even make sure the rules are being followed. And well there are several things you can do to address this problem. Dominion’s solution is to hide away those cards in your deck. This is just a great solution. It drastically lowers the complexity of the game in this trivial way. Of course it’s not a solution I can generally use, without the game ending up as a Dominion variant.

How about your favorite cards?

My favorite cards from each set so far, as of this moment: Throne Room, Pawn, Smugglers, Apprentice, Peddler.

Thoughs on the so-called Chapel strategy?

Chapel is a powerful card; probably no other card will get to be as powerful for its cost. This was not a secret when working on the main set; I felt that the card added a lot to the game and was worth doing. The differences between it costing $2 and $4 were small, and favored it costing $2.

Note: The Chapel strategy involves using Chapel cards to strip down your hand so you’re running a very small deck stacked first with Silver and later with Gold cards, so you can buy a Province card on nearly every turn. It’s controversial because it’s you’re deck-destroying while you’re deck-building, and it can be tough to defeat without certain Kingdom cards available to opponents.

Recommendations for rookies?

For new players I recommend having a strategy, and not neglecting treasures.

Which expansion should people buy first?

Intrigue was specifically groomed to be the first expansion. I’d get it first. If for some reason you don’t want it, get Seaside (53% off at amazon right now) first. Both sets are simpler than Prosperity and Alchemy. I expect Prosperity to be more popular, but the changes it makes to the game are more exciting when you’ve already played the game without them for a while.

—

Coming Monday: My review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One.

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→ December 15, 2010
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The Little Sister.

I’m back at mental_floss today with an article about the designing of the game Dominion, based on an email exchange I had with designer Donald X. Vaccarino.

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“Do you drink, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Well, now that you mention it–”
“I don’t think I’d care to employ a detective that uses liquor in any form. I don’t even approve of tobacco.”
“Would it be all right if I peeled an orange?”

Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe isn’t just hard-boiled – he’s dry, sarcastic, self-effacing, and mercurial, making him one of the most compelling protagonists I’ve found in any novel in any genre. Consigning Chander’s novels to the detective-fiction bin does him a great disservice, as his greatness is in his mastery of the language; not only is the prose itself readable and rich with metaphor, but it becomes the tool by which Chandler creates well-rounded characters through a handful of seemingly effortless lines.

I understand that The Big Sleep is considered Chandler’s best work, and it is phenomenal … but there’s little to no difference between that and Farewell, My Lovely, or the work I just finished over the weekend, The Little Sister. They’re all superb, all following the basic Chandler template of putting Marlowe in a situation where the line between solving the case and saving his life is blurry.

In The Little Sister the titular character – quoted above – shows up in Marlowe’s office, asking the gumshoe to help find her older brother, who has disappeared in Bay City not long after leaving his family in Manhattan, Kansas. Marlowe takes the case against his better judgment (S.O.P. for him), even though he believes the girl is holding back information. With a modest amount of investigating, Marlowe ends up in the middle of a blackmail scheme, a dope ring, and a lot of questionable identities – something Chandler creates in his usual economical way, with just a handful of new characters outside of a few corpses.

I picked the wrong time to read The Little Sister by starting it on day one of the winter meetings, which left me very little time to actually read the book until the meetings ended on Thursday – frustrating when it’s a book you never want to put down in the first place. I found it moved more quickly than The Big Sleep, but the plot was a little less complex – it was relatively easy to figure out what most of the characters were up to, and I say that as someone who almost never figures things out in books – so the question of which is the better book is one of personal taste. (It’s possible that The Big Sleep enjoys its status at the top of Chandler’s canon because of its film adaptation, directed by Howard Hawks with Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe.) No matter where you start, though, if you haven’t given Chandler at least one shot, I can’t recommend his work highly enough.

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→ December 14, 2010
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The U.S.A. Trilogy.

My Cliff Lee analysis from last night is up for Insiders, as is a piece from earlier on Monday on Scott Downs, Brendan Ryan, and Ryan Theriot, featuring a TOOTBLAN reference.

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John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy – The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money – is considered a landmark in American fiction, ranking 68th on the Novel 100, 23rd on the Modern Library 100, and 55th on the Brit-lit-skewed Guardian 100. Leading literary lights from Jean-Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer have praised Dos Passos’ writing in U.S.A. and the influence the work had in bringing modernism to the American novel. Taken in sum, this series of interconnected stories presents a panoramic view of the United States from the start of the Great War to the end of the Roaring 20s, where the main character is the scene and setting rather than any individual in the book. It’s not an easy read – more on that in a moment – but it is an important read if you read as a student rather than just for pleasure. (Not that there’s anything wrong with reading just for pleasure, of course.)

(Aside: The Novel 100 is back in print after several years out of it. The book, by literature professor Daniel Burt, ranks the 100 greatest novels ever written with an essay on each, and features a bonus, unranked list of the “second 100” after those. It’s been a great reading list for me, and I enjoy Burt’s analyses and comments on each book’s influence, even if I don’t always agree with his selections.)

Each book in the trilogy includes lengthy chapters following a dozen or so characters whose lives intertwine and whose paths cross with major historical figures, such as the young idealist who ends up working publicity on the campaign to save Sacco and Vanzetti. These chapters, heavy on descriptive prose, are bookended by two types of mini-chapters, the Newsreel and “The Camera Eye.” The former is a list of clipped fragments from newspaper and magazine articles of the time, anchoring you to a specific year or month while also setting up some of the emotional framework for the chapter to follow; the latter is a somewhat indecipherable stream-of-consciousness, worm’s-eye view of society that I found myself skimming because it gave me bad memories of struggling through Ulysses last winter. Dos Passos also inserts short, stylized biographies of important Americans of the time period, from Henry Ford to Woodrow Wilson to Frederick Taylor to now-forgotten names like dancer Isadora Duncan and labor activist Joe Hill, written with an opinionated voice that also seeks to inform.

Dos Passos also based large chunks of the books on his own experiences in World War I as part of the volunteer ambulance corps in Paris – a role that seems to have required a lot more drinking and carousing than actual ambulance-driving, but one that also seems to have fueled the book’s derogatory portraits of upper-class American twits in Europe, chasing money or skirts or good times while there was a war going on around them.

What I didn’t like about U.S.A. was the lack of a central story, or even set of stories. The existential nature of the trilogy means characters wink in and out of the book and Dos Passos gives a lot of time to mundane matters without investing the reader at all in anyone’s fate or happiness – because, I presume, that wasn’t his point. Dos Passos set out to provide a slice of life, and I’m not sure any American writer has done it better – but it makes for a more academic read than a leisurely one, a trilogy you might pick up to help you better follow the transition in American literature from the 1920s to the 1940s, but not something you’re going to grab to get you through your next long plane ride.

My other regret about U.S.A. is that Dos Passos didn’t use more dialogue, because he was pretty sharp with it and could have given more depth to his characters just by having them speak more often, such as in this banter from 1919 regarding the League of Nations:

“It’s not the name you give things, it’s who’s getting theirs underneath that counts,” said Robbins.
“That’s a very cynical remark,” said the California woman. “This isn’t any time to be cynical.”
“This is a time,” said Robbins, “when if we weren’t cynical we’d shoot ourselves.”

Baseball does come up a few times in the book, as one character is a serious fan (right around the time of the Black Sox scandal, after which baseball earns scant mention – you’d think Babe Ruth would show up in some Newsreels, right?) while the section in The Big Money on Frederick Taylor claims that

At Exeter he was head of his class and captain of the ballteam, the first man to pitch overhand. (When umpires complained that overhand pitching wasn’t in the rules of the game, he answered that it got results.)

And if you’re into food, U.S.A. introduced me to “smearcase,” which can refer to a sort of farmer’s or cottage cheese among the Pennsylvania Dutch, but which in the Baltimore area refers to something more akin to cheesecake. (The name comes from the German Schmierkäse, meaning smear-cheese.)

Next up: I’ve finished Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister and am most of the way through Dawn Powell’s Turn, Magic Wheel. Both authors are among my favorite American writers, Chandler for his phenomenal prose, Powell for her sardonic wit.

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→ December 13, 2010
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Cookbook recommendations (plus Top Chef thoughts).

Before I get to the books (and magazine), a thought or two on last week’s Top Chef: All-Stars.

First, I found it interesting that no chef stood up for Jamie and even indicated that they understood, let alone approved of, her decision to leave for stitches on her thumb. If that’s the ethic of the kitchen, I feel like I should defer to that. And Tony Bourdain had no sympathy either. (Hat tip to Dave Cameron for pointing me to Bourdain’s blog.) Plus the stakes are even higher in this competition than they are in a restaurant kitchen.

But more importantly, how did no one ding her on bad cutting technique? Where the hell was her thumb that she ran her knife directly into it? I hate the parallel-to-the-board cut anyway because it’s dangerous, but when I must do it, my main priority is ensuring that if the knife moves forward faster than I expect, it will do nothing but slice the food I’m cutting. Fingers up. Thumbs up. Wrist angled up and sharply away from the food. If you don’t want to send Jamie home for malingering, send her home for poor knife skills.

Also, I tweeted a link earlier to the Chicago Tribune‘s interview with week 1’s unconditionally-released chef, Elia, in which she completely loses her mind and goes after Tom Colicchio. Tom’s response, while clearly dripping with disrespect, stays on point in an impressive manner – he answers the charges while keeping the deprecation subtle. It’s a model of angry writing. And as he and Bourdain and others have said, raw fish is raw fish. If it’s not meant to be raw, and it’s raw, you can’t pin that on the judges.

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I was asked on Twitter today to suggest some cookbooks or magazines, and I haven’t updated my old list of recommendations in a while so I figured I’d throw a new post together. I tend toward more specialized cookbooks now because I’m more interested in ideas than in techniques, but I’ll start with the staples to which I keep returning even though I’ve owned some of them for years.

Joy of Cooking. The gray lady of the kitchen – still reliable if somewhat staid, with a level of completeness that few rivals can approach. If you need a recipe for a basic or common dish, it’s probably here, with clear instructions and lots of information on ingredients. I learned to cook from two sources above all others: Alton Brown and Joy. I’m partial to the 1997 edition myself, as I understand the last revision (for the book’s 75th anniversary) introduced some best-forgotten sections on semi-homemade meals while removing some of the professionally-written material that makes the ’97 version so indispensable. The new revision does include cocktail recipes, but I have The Official Harvard Student Agencies Bartending Course for that.

Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. You cook, and you don’t own Ratio? I don’t think I’ve added any cookbook to my collection that changed my thinking on food as much as Michael Ruhlman did in his concise, almost engineering-like book that reduces recipes to their master formulas. From biscuits to pâte à choux to stocks to custards, Ruhlman gives you the framework and lets you build up from there. If you’re like me and cook better when you understand what’s happening in the bowl or pot, you must own Ratio. And it’s just $10 on amazon.

Baking Illustrated. The one book that I can say has truly supplanted Joy, at least in its niche; if you can get past the cloying prose and descriptions of the strange substitutions they tried (“then we replaced the sour cream with motor oil … but that killed four of the testers”), the recipes are extremely reliable, and the lengthy prose does give you the insight you’ll need to know where you can tweak. Their pumpkin pie recipe remains the best pumpkin pie I’ve ever tried, and it worked perfectly the first time I made it.

Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, Whole Grain Breads, and Artisan Breads Every Day. I love bread, real bread, just baked, best eaten in a day or two after which you bake some more. Reinhart helped me crack the code of good bread, and his books are tremendous references that cover many of the directions in which you might go as a baker. Artisan Breads Everyday is the beginner’s book of the collection, if you’re just getting started with the joys of autolysis and the overnight soak, while the other two books are still accessible but presume a little more skill – and they include the best pizza dough recipe I’ve ever used.

How To Cook Everything. I do not own this book, but the reviews from those of you who do have been uniformly positive, and it seems like a good companion to or – perish the thought – substitute for Joy. The author, Mark Bittman, is a longtime food writer for the New York Times who is often credited with bringing no-knead bread to the attention of the masses. (I still knead my bread, though. Even a minute of kneading makes a huge difference.)

Good Eats: The Early Years. The first of three books – I do not own the second one yet – has Alton going back through every episode of his seminal TV series and reworking recipes to address problems or user concerns, all while providing a lot of background information on each episode or the food it covers.

Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom. I do own a copy of the first part of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking … but it feels dated to me, and I’m never likely to do much classical French cooking at home. That’s just not how we eat on a day to day basis. Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom distills the core techniques and ideas from her experience in the kitchen into a slim, bright volume that I have always found far more relevant to what I might cook on a Wednesday evening. The book contains many recipes, but as with Brown, Reinhart, and Ruhlman, Child is pushing comprehension, not repetition. This was the book that pushed me to make more vinaigrettes.

For magazines, I’m partial to Fine Cooking, which takes that scientific approach of Good Eats and packs every issue full of recipes, with reference information on ingredients and tools, a card with nutrition data for every dish in that issue, and an emphasis on extensibility (such as the “nine cookies from three doughs” article from several years ago that was a staple of my Christmas cookie regimen). Of course, my subscription keeps lapsing because I’m disorganized, but this is the only cooking magazine to which I’ve subscribed since my daughter was born; I gave up on Bon Appetit because they repeated recipes and ideas, and I can’t deal with the writing in Cook’s Illustrated, which is even sillier than the writing in Baking Illustrated.

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→ December 7, 2010
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Edward Trencom’s Nose.

I’ll be writing up every significant trade or signing over on ESPN.com, including Adrian Gonzalez, Jayson Werth,, Marcum/Lawrie, Mark Reynolds, and
J.J. Putz.

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Before moving on to the last two thirds of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, I read the first novel by Giles Milton, whose nonfiction works include one of my favorite books in that genre, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg. The novel, Edward Trencom’s Nose:, looked right up my alley, promising in its subtitle a tale “of history, dark intrigue, and cheese.” A historical mystery/detective story revolving around food, by an author I’ve read and liked? Sign me up.

You might infer from the introduction that I did not care for Edward Trencom’s Nose. That is an incomplete inference. It might be the worst novel I’ve read in the last five years. Milton’s sins are many. The book has zero suspense – you don’t find out what’s going on until the final few pages, and the way Milton unfurls the story yields no dramatic tension. The relevance of the food to the plot is minimal, and it seems more like a chance for Milton to flex some cheese knowledge than anything else. The protagonist is an aloof, self-centered idiot, and there is no three-dimensional character to be found in the book’s pages. And while the book’s jacket and reviews promised a funny book – the marketing copy on the back calls it a “mouth-watering blend of Tom Sharpe and P.G. Wodehouse,” for which the Wodehouse estate should sue – the book is terribly unfunny, crowded with obvious, futile attempts at humor and some of the worst descriptions of sex I have ever seen in any book. (Sex in Milton’s world appears to be a foul, violent act; he actually uses the word “pummeled” to describe one particular bout of coitus.)

So, since that book sucked, let me use this space to talk a little about Milton’s Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: Or the True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History, a book I can actually recommend to you without hesitation. The book is the history of that titular spice, one that was once the most expensive foodstuff in the world (an honor that I believe now falls to saffron, at least on a per gram basis) and that played a heavy role in European colonization of the western hemisphere and southeast Asia. When doctors in seventeenth-century England claimed that nutmeg was the only reliable cure for the plague, the spice – itself the dried seed of trees of genus Myristica – became more valuable by weight than gold, spurring a rush to obtain and trade in it … if only anyone could figure out where it came from.

Nutmeg at the time was found only in the Banda Islands (in the Maluku archipelago) of present-day Indonesia, and its best source was a tiny island called Pulorin (or Puloron) by its natives but just called “Run” by Europeans of the time. It was hard to reach, hit twice yearly by powerful monsoons, and populated by unfriendly locals. The Portuguese visited the Spice Islands nearly a century before the English reached Run, but had no luck with the natives and could do little more than trade with middlemen. Beginning around the year 1600, the English and Dutch – who came to Indonesia loaded for bear, and stand accused in this book of some unspeakable acts of violence in the name of securing their nutmeg supply – began a decades-long dispute over Run Island, one that wasn’t settled until the 1660s.

Nathaniel Courthope was a factor in Borneo who led an expedition in 1616 to Run to try to break the Dutch monopoly on nutmeg. The islanders warmed to Courthope and the English, only to find themselves subjected to a brutal siege by the Dutch that lasted nearly four years, a feat Milton credits largely to Courthope’s cunning and bravery. The Dutch won the battle eventually – I won’t spoil how – but lost the larger war, eventually securing their hold on Run and all of the Banda Islands in an agreement with the English that ceded New Amsterdam to the occupying English forces. That is, we speak English today in large part because the Dutch wanted a 3 km long island in Indonesia that was the world’s main supply of nutmeg. And, in a bit of a last laugh on the Dutch, to recapture Run after the British briefly held it in 1664, the Dutch pulled a General Sherman on the island, nearly killing their own golden-egg-laying goose.

Courthope makes an ideal hero for a nonfiction book, right up to his hero’s demise, and the story of Dutch brutality against Englishman and native alike should not be lost to history just because now they’re nice people and cheer really loud for their long track speed skaters. Milton sprinkles the story with the history of nutmeg itself (and a little on its poor sibling, mace, the dried aril that covers the nutmeg seed, lacking the potent flavor of the nutmeg proper) and the prior history of the Banda Islands, but the star of the show is Courthope, giving the book some of the narrative greed that I particularly like in my nonfiction reads.

So start with Nathaniel’s Nutmeg and skip the cheese course entirely.

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→ December 2, 2010
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Tangled.

Chat today at 1 pm EST/11 am Arizona time.

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We took our daughter to the movies for the first time the other day to see a movie she’d been asking about for weeks: Tangled. It was a big deal for us beyond the movie, since it was a family outing, and the first time my wife and I had been in a theater together since before our daughter was born. The day planned around the child turned out to be a bigger hit for the adults, as we thoroughly loved Tangled but our daughter’s feelings were more mixed.

The story is only loosely based on the Rapunzel myth, but is updated in a way that gives the film’s two central characters (Rapunzel and her accidental savior, the thief Flynn Rider) much more to do while also increasing the opportunities for merchandising. Rapunzel is now a princess, stolen from her royal crib shortly after birth because her hair has healing powers that the film’s villain, Mother Gothel, wants to use to continue to keep herself eternally young. So, of course, she keeps Rapunzel in an inaccessible tower in a hidden part of the forest, convincing her that to leave the tower and enter the cruel, dangerous world would be sheer lunacy. (I imagine a psychologist would have a field day here.) Flynn Rider, himself on the lam after stealing the crown Rapunzel’s grief-stricken parents have set aside for her hoped-for return, stumbles upon the tower and eventually sets off with Rapunzel … at which point the real movie starts.

And it’s some movie – not a princess movie by any stretch, but a Disney adventure flick, with thugs, fights, chases, trickery, and, in the best trick of all, some actual plot tension even though you know more or less how the story is going to end. It took about a third of the movie to get to the point where Rapunzel leaves the tower, but after that, the movie flies, with three different parties chasing Flynn and Rapunzel, leaving (thankfully) less time to dwell on the budding romance between the two characters. I feel like Disney gave the Pixar gang minimal directions – “make a movie about Rapunzel, and put her in a purple dress*” – and Pixar did what they do best: They turned it on its head and wrote a fantastic, fun, energetic story.

*So my daughter is completely caught up in the princess stuff, which means my wallet is caught up in the princess stuff as well. We were last at Disneyworld in November of 2009, right as they introduced the Tiana character from The Princess and the Frog. Her dress was green, which, I noticed as we walked through that massive store at Downtown Disney, left only purple as the likely color for the next dress, since we already have pink, blue, turquoise (twice), yellow, and green, not including the fairies. I’m wondering what color is next – orange? Magenta? Some other blue? This stuff matters when you know it’ll be on the Christmas wish list a year from now.

The animation in Tangled is absolutely absurd, the most impressive I’ve seen so far, even exceeding the normally high expectations I take into any Pixar-made film. You would expect that, in a film about Rapunzel, the main character’s hair would be superbly animated, but it’s not just her hair – Flynn Rider’s rakish hairdo and Mother Gothel’s curls* look rich and textured, more real than real, if that makes sense. But there’s a scene where a torrent of water breaks loose and heads towards the camera (I assume for the 3-D version) where I couldn’t get over how un-animated the water looked – clear, glassy, almost like I could see the drops of water making up the flood. And my wife and I both noticed that the Rapunzel has realistic-looking feet, something you almost never see on an animated character (and important since she’s barefoot through the whole movie).

*Figures that they give the film’s main villain curly hair.

The Wikipedia entry on the film explains that the animation style was inspired by a rococo painting called The Swing, although I can’t say I would have noticed the difference if I hadn’t read that beforehand. I know nothing about art, though, which is probably the reason.

Tangled was scary for my four-year-old, who particularly disliked “the bad woman” (Mother Gothel), I think in part because that character separates Rapunzel from her parents and then is increasingly wicked as the film goes on. I was more disturbed by the extent of comic violence, especially that involving blows to the head. Some of the physical comedy is brilliant, such as Rapunzel’s trouble stuffing the unconscious Flynn into a closet, but one of the best running gags in the movie involves whacking people in the head or face with a cast-iron skillet. I use one of those almost every night I cook, and a blow to the dome from one of those won’t just knock you out – it would probably fracture your skull. And in Tangled it happens over … and over … and over, to the point where I couldn’t sustain my suspension of disbelief. It lost its humor for me, until Flynn’s one great line about it near the end of the film. There’s other violence in the film, including a stabbing and an implied death by defenestration, that probably makes this inappropriate for younger viewers. It is an action flick, Disney-style, and while I’m glad they didn’t just make a dull princess movie, I don’t think we’d have taken our daughter to see it if we knew just how much of a grown-up kids’ movie Tangled was.

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