I’ll be on ESPNEWS some time between 2:30 and 3 pm EST on Monday, topics TBD.
Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams
Alice is a girl of about twenty who has struggled to make a good marriage because of her unwealthy, working-class parents. While not poor, the family can’t indulge in frivolities like new clothes for every dance or fresh corsages from the florist – hey, I said the plot was nothing special – and Alice’s romantic prospects suffer. She finds herself courted by a newcomer to town, Mr. Russell, and ends up spinning yarns for him about herself and her family for fear that the truth will drive him away, even though, of course, she only makes matters worse through her deception. Meanwhile, her shrewish mother hounds Alice’s temporarily invalid father to leave the comfortable but low-status job he has to strike out on his own by modifying or stealing a company secret that he was involved in developing, a move that puts him into inevitable conflict with the maybe-sorta-benevolent company president. Alice’s smartass brother, Walter, is in his rebellious stage, socializing with blacks and outcast whites while making increasingly shrill demands on their father for a fast sum of money.
Tarkington sprinkles the first half of the book with cutting observations that both define the characters and provide a farcical element to the drab setting and the depressing acts of those higher up in the caste system, such as his description of one of the few men in the circle to pay any attention to Alice:
They danced. Mr. Dowling should have found other forms of exercise and pastime. Nature has not designed everyone for dancing, though sometimes those she has denied are the last to discover her niggardliness. But the round young man was at least vigorous enough – too much so, when his knees collided with Alice’s – and he was too sturdy to be thrown off his feet, himself, or to allow his partner to fall when he tripped her. He held her up valiantly, and continued to beat a path through the crowd of other dancers by main force.
Unfortunately, the wit dissipates in the back half of the book, and there’s this sense of impending romantic and financial doom over the book, both through the obvious setup of the novel – I couldn’t escape the feeling that I’d read this story before – and through Alice’s vocalized expectations of an unhappy ending. The resulting structure, where Mr. Russell doesn’t appear until roughly the one-quarter mark and Mr. Adams doesn’t get out of bed till past the midpoint, is awkward and ineffective at building up a good head of steam for the plot. I read it just waiting for the other shoe to finally drop, and when it did it was incredibly predictable and tired.
Next up: The Guardian put Roald Dahl’s The BFG
. We bought this game on a trip to Austria in 2003, which meant getting the German rules, which meant I had to translate them … so who knows if we really played it correctly. But it was fun. It’s a fairly simple two-person game where each player is trying to build temples using five “tribes” at his disposal, but at the same time that you’re building, you’re using those tribes to try to slow down your opponent’s building or knock down his temples entirely. Our favorite move was the “Wanderung,” where you can make one of your opponent’s tribes wander off.
. Different type of game entirely from the others here – this is a “party game,” and maybe the only one I really liked. For those of you old enough to remember the TV game show Password, Taboo takes that general format (one person gives clues, the rest of his team has to guess the keyword), but adds the twist that there are five words the clue-giver can’t say. The challenge of trying to describe something without saying the five most obvious words is what makes Taboo fun. Our friend Pete was a whiz at giving clues because he had an endless supply of bad pop songs and commercial jingles on which to rely.
. Described by one friend of mine as “Risk for grownups,” Diplomacy requires seven players, but removes the luck element entirely after the initial setup. Players represent the seven “great powers” of Europe, set in 1900 (although there are endless variations), and must scheme, ally, attack, and backstab their way towards control of at least half of the map. The rules are incredibly simple, and there are a few thriving online communities of “Diplo” players, although playing online means that the normal etiquette of live play (such as “don’t stab the guy you just allied with thirty seconds ago”) goes out the window.
. I guess this is part party game, but it’s more clever than most games in that genre. On each turn, one player becomes the “reader” and reads the first half of an incredibly obscure (but real) proverb. The other players have to fabricate plausible or funny second halves, while the reader writes down the real conclusion to the proverb, after which, all players must guess which conclusion is the correct one. You get points for getting it right, and for fooling other players, while the biggest bonus goes to the reader who reads all the completions so convincingly that no one gets the right answer. It’s like Balderdash, but the opportunities for silly answers are greater, and the problem with Balderdash is that you can often guess the definitions by looking at word roots.
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(which I haven’t played), San Juan is a hard game to explain but easy and quick to play. Using only cards, each player builds a small settlement of various types of buildings, producing goods using them to build faster and better structures. There’s some luck involved, as in all card games, but the deck is big enough and diverse enough that you’re unlikely to be buried by bad luck; you’re just forced to consider different strategies.
. Another German board game – Germany seems to be where all the good games are designed these days – Metro is almost comically simple. Players compete to build the longest subway lines on a grid that represents the city of Paris. There are different types of tiles, some of which include straight tracks, while others include all manner of twists. You can extend your own tracks on your turn, or you can use a tile to screw someone else. The game ends when all tiles are played; the player with the longest total track lengths across all of his lines wins.
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. It’s not the simplest game on the list, but it’s the smartest, and it’s simple and quick enough to teach someone by playing a game with them, after which they’ll probably be hooked. Three or four players compete to settle the island of Catan, which involves tough decisions about placing settlements, trading for resources, developing units or towns, and overall strategy. There’s not much confrontation, and players are never eliminated. The first player to reach 10 “victory points” – achieved through a combination of building towns or cities, building the longest road, raising the largest army, or special one-point cards – wins. The game was such a success that there are multiple add-ons, including 
, as well as a very good 
(since the board game requires three players).
, implying that he’s not going to credit human existence or history to rum the way other authors have to cod or salt or other mundane foodstuffs. That’s all to the good in my opinion, as he sticks mostly to the history of rum and various people and products associated with its rise from “the distilled essence of industrial waste” to a top-shelf liquor commanding premium prices for aged varieties as you might pay for whiskey or brandy. (It’s also available on 
for $5 this week. I believe that this will also get you a year of Insider.
, by Evelyn Waugh. 
, by Larry McMurtry. 
, by Richard Russo. 
, by Don Robertson. 
, by Graham Greene. 
, by José Maria de Eça de Queirós. 
, by Elaine Dundy. 
, by Kazuo Ishiguro. 
, by John Steinbeck. 
, by Susanna Clarke. 
, by Stella Gibbons. 
get published, would it have received the same fawning critical reaction? After reading the book, I have to doubt it. It’s a brisk read, sometimes gripping, but it’s a lot closer to your average mass-market pot-boiler than the serious novel of ideas that the pull quotes I’ve seen would indicate.
, when it comes out in paperback, although I can’t say I’m dying to do so. (Larsson does end with a small personal cliffhanger for Salander, which struck me as a little unrealistic and not a driver towards the next book.) Having read so many better novels even within the space of detective stories, though, I found The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to be like empty calories.
is the first in the “Mobile Library” series of pseudo-detective novels, but wasn’t good enough to get me to attack the second book (which one of you mentioned in the comments on the last post was unreadable anyway). The story revolves around sad-sack librarian Israel Armstrong, a Jewish vegetarian from London who takes a librarian job in a rural Irish town, sight unseen, only to find that the job has changed to one overseeing a mobile library, and that all fifteen thousand books have gone missing. This leads Israel to play detective – badly – to try to find them.