→ December 5, 2008
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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

If books were players, I’d probably grade them out on just three tools, plot, prose, and characters (“personalities” if you want to keep on the alliterative tip). The plot must be credible, tight, and interesting, providing the “narrative greed” to which I often refer, that desire to know what happens next (or last) that keeps you moving through the novel. The prose can’t get in the way, at the least; the dialogue must be believable, the sentence structures can’t impede your comprehension of the topic, and if there’s room for clever turns of phrase or literary devices like metaphors, so much the better. There should be at least one character with whom the reader can connect; whether or not that’s the protagonist isn’t a big issue, but I need some sort of empathetic connection with one of the major characters for the book to hold my interest. For example, if the main character is an asshole, he’d better be a funny one, or I’m checking out before Chapter 3.

I rarely run across books that would earn scores of 80 across the board. The Master and Margarita is an obvious one. The Harry Potter books are probably 80s in plot and characters, although even I (a defender of Rowling’s prose) would have a hard time pushing that score above 60. To Kill a Mockingbird is a three-80s book, as are Emma and Tender is the Night (Fitzgerald’s writing might be the definition of 80 prose). At risk of standing accused of slapping high grades on a book too quickly – the literary equivalent of one-looking a player – I’ll add Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel to the list.

In the book, author Susanna Clarke has given us two compelling characters, the magicians of the book’s title, the conservative, brilliant, condescendingly paternalistic Mr. Norrell, and the exuberant, handsome, and wild Jonathan Strange, who becomes Mr. Norrell’s tutor and later his rival. Both are richly drawn, with complex personal philosophies of magic and magical ethics, and, in Strange’s case, a marriage to help flesh out his character even further. Clarke is deft at imbuing even her secondary characters with deep colors and rounded edges to make them more real, yet never floods the book with so many personages that the core story gets lost in descriptive language.

The prose is very Victorian-Brit lit, with shades of Austen (remarked upon by most reviewers of the book, it seems) but also the gothic novelists of the time, such as Radcliffe and Brontë. Although the book has its share of laugh-out-loud moments, Clarke’s prose is suffused with dry wit throughout, and she melds it with strong descriptive prose, including countless brilliant images to evoke scenes in the reader’s mind:

She did not rise at their entrance, nor make any sign that she had noticed them at all. But perhaps she did not hear them. For though the room was silent, the silence of half a hundred cats is a peculiar thing, like fifty individual silences all piled one on top of another.

If any of Jonathan Strange‘s grades was to fall below 80, it would be the book’s plot, and perhaps that is the inevitable consequence of the book’s length (1003 pages in mass-market paperback) and lengthy gestation period (Clarke wrote it over a period of ten years). The story does meander, and many digressions appear to be just that – digressions into character histories or side stories that don’t necessarily advance the plot. Clarke did employ a clever solution, using extensive footnotes to sequester some of her stories from the history of English magic from the body text, helping to speed the plough, and to be fair many seeming digressions end up tying into the main plot once the book heads into its final inning. Clarke’s use of the hoary “prophecy” plot device did exceed expectations both because of how she resolved it and the way she unfolded it in stages, almost giving us a coarse outline for the second half of the novel. If the plot doesn’t get the highest possible score, it couldn’t get lower than a 70; I flew through what is probably the second-longest novel I’ve ever read, and that doesn’t happen if the plot isn’t fantastic.
I wonder how the book will be perceived by the academic community in time – as simply a well-written work of popular fiction, capitalizing on the recent mania for all things magical as long as it’s not too far into fantasy-nerd territory; or as a thoughtful, clever story of two finely-developed characters, meditating on the natures of friendship and on morality, with a fair quantity of nature-based symbolism for deconstructionist-leaning graduate students to analyze to the nth degree for college theses and dissertations with ultimate audiences numbering in the low single digits. I’d like to think that it’s the latter, but there’s a sort of Nichols’ Law at work in literary academe, where the more popular and accessible a contemporary work is, the less it is esteemed by denizens of the ivory tower.

Next up: Back to the TIME 100 with Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (Kosinski, Jerzy).

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ December 5, 2008
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“Grilled” Baby Bok Choy.

Again, just the recipe here.

2 heads baby bok choy, rinsed and roughly chopped (leaves and upper stems)
1 clove garlic, slivered
1 small dried chili pepper
1-2 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 tsp honey
Salt & freshly ground black pepper to taste
Toasted sesame seeds

1. Toss the bok choy in a bowl with all remaining ingredients except the sesame seeds.
2. Place the bok choy mixture in the center of a large sheet of heavy-duty aluminum foil. Fold up the edges of the foil to enclose the bok choy in a packet, crimping all edges to seal it and then poking two or three small holes in the top of the packet to allow steam to escape.
3. Place the packet on the grill just barely off of the heat (somewhere between direct and indirect heat). Grill for 8-10 minutes until the bok choy stems are tender, although you’re going to have to guess at when that is.
4. Open one small end of the packet and drain off any excess liquid. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and serve.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , , ,
→ December 5, 2008
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Chocolate-Bourbon Pecan Pie.

I’m a big fan of recipe triangulation. I see a recipe I want to try, but something doesn’t sit right – a method, an ingredient, whatever, there’s something there that I don’t believe will work, and I don’t believe in wasting time or food on poorly constructed recipes. So I find other recipes for the same dish and try to combine them, identifying similarities and isolating the differences, then either picking and choosing methods from all recipes, or just splitting the difference when we’re talking about something like a discrepancy in oven temperature. This recipe for a rather heavenly pie is the result of just such a triangulation. It’s largely adapted from Bourbon and Chocolate Pecan Pie Recipe, with an assist (the heated-filling trick) from the plain pecan pie recipe in Baking Illustrated.

(Next time out, I’m going to see how much chocolate I can stuff into the filling, but I’ve had two requests from readers for this recipe who saw my update on Twitter.)

Chocolate-Bourbon-Pecan Pie

One pie dough for a 9″ pan

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate
3 large eggs
¾ cup dark brown sugar
¼ cup white sugar
¾ cup dark corn syrup
½ tsp vanilla extract
3 Tbsp bourbon
¼ tsp salt
1½ cups coarsely chopped pecans

1. Blind-bake the dough at 375 degrees for 25 minutes, covered in foil and weighted down with pie weights or dry beans or whatever you have that won’t melt at 375. Remove the foil and weights and bake 6-7 minutes more until the crust just starts to brown.
2. Set a skillet with about ½” of water over a burner and bring to a simmer. Melt the butter and chocolate together in a heatproof bowl set over the simmering water. Stir to combine and set aside to cool. Do not overheat or the butter will break.
3. While the pie is baking, take a large heatproof bowl and whisk the three eggs together until frothy (meaning you can see some air bubbles and the mixture’s volume is increasing). Add both sugars and whisk until completely combined.
4. Add all remaining ingredients except the pecans and set over the simmering water (you didn’t pour it out, right?), whisking constantly, until the mixture reaches 130 degrees on an instant-read thermometer.
5. As soon as the pie crust reaches that light golden brown stage, dump the pecans into the filling, then pour the whole thing into the crust. Drop the oven temperature to 300 degrees and bake until the top is cracked and the center is just barely set – it should wiggle when you shake the pie dish, but should not slosh. Start checking it around 25 minutes; mine was done at 30, although my oven holds its temp well because I have a pizza stone and some unglazed quarry tiles on the oven floor.
6. Set on a cooling rack and allow to cool completely before cutting, 2½-3 hours.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , ,
→ December 5, 2008
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Beans: to soak or not.

(Repost)

Man, I hate when there’s no clear answer to a cooking question.

The question is whether or not it makes sense to soak dried beans before cooking. You have three options: Soak overnight in cold water (they’re actually fully soaked after about four hours, but can stay in the water for up to eight hours); soak quickly in one hour by starting with boiling water; or don’t soak and increase your cooking time and cooking liquid.
Here are the arguments I’ve found for and against soaking:

  • Soaking frees up minerals and vitamins in the beans. Beans contain a chemical called phytic acid, which “can form complexes with some minerals and make them insoluble and thereby indigestible,” a process known as chelation. Some phytic acid is destroyed in cooking, but more is removed (an extra 15.4% up front, according to the American Chemical Society) if you soak overnight before cooking.
  • Soaking cleans the beans. Got that from Miss Vickie’s, the best site around for pressure-cooking tips. She says there’s a lot of nasty stuff on the outside of dried beans. I think that a really good rinse should take care of that nasty stuff, and besides, letting the beans sit in water that has absorbed undesirable compounds sounds like a bad idea. But what do I know.
  • Soaking reduces cooking times. It does – by maybe a half an hour. Doesn’t bother me. Might affect people who have office jobs, although I’m guessing you’re still not making two-hour beans on a Tuesday night.
  • Soaking cuts down on “ze tummy music.” I’m pretty sure this is bullshit, but then again, everything gives me ze tummy music, so how the hell would I notice?
  • Soaking means softer beans. I know this is bullshit, because I’ve tried it both ways, and soaking did not help the texture of the cooked beans one iota. You know what helped? Cooking them longer.

Arguments against soaking beans:

  • Soaking leaches out flavor. Well, you have my attention there. Alton Brown has suggested soaking and then using some of the soaking liquid in cooking, although in this season’s red beans and rice episode (a good recipe, BTW), he dispensed with soaking entirely. I have made beans both ways, but I’m usually putting so much other stuff in the pot that I would never notice a 10% flavor loss through soaking. My beans tend to taste like other things, such as bacon.
  • Soaking removes the phytic acid. Yeah, how about that: Phytic acid is an antioxidant. I found a few studies discussing phytic acid’s antioxidant properties, although none seem to argue strongly in its favor. It has been mentioned as a potential anticancer compound, and it definitely plays a role in preventing bean spoilage.
  • Soaking leaches out nutrients. So perhaps we’re even – soaking takes out nutrients but gets the phosphate out of the phytic acid so that the remaining nutrients are more accessible; not soaking leaves the phytic acid but the beans start with a higher nutrient content. I have no idea how that nets out.
  • Soaking is not traditional. I know it’s just a forum post, but this caught my eye: You’re probably all bored to death with my saying this, but I have lived in Mexico for nearly 26 years. I do not know a single Mexican cook who soaks beans. Naturally, YMMV. Rick Bayless, who knows a thing or two about Mexican cuisine, also advises against soaking. Not a nutritional argument, of course.

Usually I can at least offer an opinion based on a preponderance of evidence, perhaps mixed with personal experience or observation, but on this one, I just don’t know. You might have a tradeoff between tradition and nutrition, or between convenience and flavor.

I can only tell you what I do, or what I don’t do: I’ve stopped soaking beans. I never found a cooking benefit, and I was unaware of a nutritional question until shortly before I started writing this post. I did find something interesting in, of all places, Wikipedia – and, oddly enough, it comes from a bona fide academic source:

Probiotic lactobacilli, and other species of the endogenous digestive microflora as well, are an important source of the enzyme phytase which catalyses the release of phosphate from phytate and hydrolyses the complexes formed by phytate and metal ions or other cations, rendering them more soluble ultimately improving and facilitating their intestinal absorption.

That indicates to me that popping a couple of L. acidophilus pills before chowing down on some (unsoaked-before-cooking) beans might help you get the best of both worlds. But beyond that, I’m as confused as ever.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , ,
→ December 5, 2008
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Blog trouble.

So you may have noticed some problems on the site today – a corrupted database was at fault, and right now, the last five weeks of posts and comments are gone, and I can see that a good chunk of comments from before that are toast as well because the backup file was partly corrupted too. I can restore some, if not all, of the posts, but the comments are probably gone. C’est la Web 2.0, I guess.

If there’s something you know I posted since 10/30 that you want to see restored, leave a comment on this thread. You may also want to ignore some of what shows up in your RSS reader for the next day or so.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With:
→ October 30, 2008
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Swaptree.

UPDATE, June 2012: I no longer recommend Swap.com (formerly known as Swaptree), as their customer service is nonexistent. They have lost their BBB accreditation in part for failing to respond to a complaint I filed.

—

Last December reader Robert asked me if I’d tried the bartering service Swaptree, which I had not. I signed up that week and now, about 40 trades later, I can offer a pretty strong recommendation.

The site’s concept is very simple: You enter a list of books, CDs, DVDs, or video games that you own and would be willing to trade, entering ISBN/UPC info plus a note on the item’s condition. Then you enter a list of items you wish to receive in trade. Swaptree looks for matches between users – direct one-for-one swaps as well as three-person swaps – and notifies all parties when it finds one, giving you a chance to reject the deal if you don’t think it’s fair. You pay the shipping cost, and can print labels directly through swaptree (media mail unless it’s not a book or the package is so light that first-class is cheaper), usually running between $2.20 and $2.80. I send all items in padded envelopes, so my cost per item runs to around $3.50, but some people just wrap books in brown paper or take other shortcuts.

My wife and I went to clear some stuff out of our storage space on Saturday, and I went through a few boxes of books, pulling 20-25 with which I was willing to part. By Wednesday, I’d swapped 15 of them.

I’ve only had one bad experience on swaptree, with an item that was (allegedly) lost in the mail. The sender didn’t use swaptree or another trackable service, so we can’t confirm that the item was ever sent, and there’s really no recourse for me – I was just SOL, having sent a book but not received one. Swaptree’s customer service was close to nonexistent: they contacted the other user, and I guess they’ll suspend someone who has too many complaints, but after receiving their initial automated response to my “I didn’t receive an item” complaint, I didn’t hear back from them again. Looking at feedback for other users, I don’t think non-receipt is a big problem, and I haven’t had any problems with other trades.

Swaptree doesn’t do much to help you browse the often lengthy list of items you can get in trade but that aren’t on your “Items I Want” list. There’s no way to filter books by genre or to tell the system that you already own a book, and since the most popular books on swaptree are, of course, popular books by James North Patterson and Patricia Cornwell and Nora Roberts, browsing really means sifting through a lot of crap in the hopes that you’ll find something that catches your eye. In fact, right now, I can get Snow Falling on Cedars in trade, which is stupid, since I’m reading the book now and I already entered the book as one I own but don’t wish to trade.

On the plus side, I’ve executed some rather absurd swaps that worked out great. I traded an old computer game someone bought me a few years ago – a very bad RPG called Temple of Elemental Evil – for a Janet Evanovich book for my wife. I traded a brand-new Angelina Ballerina DVD that we already had (and watch every night…) for a copy of Lonesome Dove: A Novel (Lonesome Dove). I traded Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus (my least favorite of his novels, which I haven’t touched in over a decade) for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. And so on.

It’s worked out well for us so far – we’ve gotten rid of a bunch of books that we didn’t want, which is good, since our book collection is rather out of control, while we’ve gotten a number of books that we might otherwise have bought new or not bought at all. It’s easy to use, at least in terms of entering your “have” and “want” lists, but you’re relying on the honor system to some degree to get your books, and it can easily take a week or more for a book shipped media mail to traverse the country. (This doesn’t matter to me, since I usually have a backlog of at least a dozen books to read.) Item conditions have nearly always been at or above what was promised. And the cost is slight, even including the $1 monthly fee swaptree charges in months where you use their shipping-label service. They’re currently running a promotion that gives you a free shipping credit if you invite a friend to swaptree who then makes a trade by the end of November. So give it a whirl.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With:
→ October 29, 2008
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J.P. Howell.

If anyone can explain to me why you don’t pinch-hit for J.P. Howell there in the 7th inning, I’m all ears, because the mere sight of it made my brains start to leak out my nose.

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→ October 28, 2008
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I know that voice…

So my daughter is two-plus now and she’s around the age for potty-training. She loves Elmo and most things Sesame Street (that’s my girl), so my wife bought her a DVD called Sesame Street – Elmo’s Potty Time. And we’re sitting here watching it when they cut to a rap song about toilet paper … and I’m thinking, “I know that voice.”

Long story short, it was MC Front-a-Lot, the greatest nerdcore rapper of them all and the man behind “Which MC Was That?” which is both catchy and hilarious. (Sample lyric: “Was it MC Pain-in-my-ears-just-to-listen? (If it was him I wouldn’t miss him.)” Maybe you just have to hear it.) IMDB confirms that it’s him, as MC Front-a-Lot is just the nom de mic of Damian Hess.

There’s no real point to this other than to express to my surprise at hearing MC Front-A-Lot on a Sesame Street DVD, but I guess someone at Sesame Workshop has good taste.

Filed Under: DVDs Tagged With: ,
→ October 27, 2008
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Learning languages.

I have to break some bad news to you.

You are not going to Teach Yourself Arabic.

You are not going to Learn German in Your Car.

You are not going to speak Japanese in 7 Days.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Spanish will leave you much as it found you: as an idiot who doesn’t speak Spanish.

The fact is that there is no product you can buy that will make you fluent or even conversational in any language.

Which brings me to the Rosetta Stone, a fast-growing company marketing language instruction software that promises that it is the “fastest way to learn a language. Guaranteed.”

The idea sort of sounds good: Children acquire vocabulary by attaching names to objects (and later to abstract concepts). My daughter sees something, we tell her the name, and after some repetition, she has a firm connection between the word and its target. Rosetta Stone tries to mimic that learning process.

The problem is that their system is deeply flawed. It’s vocabulary instruction, but uses pictures rather than English words to teach you the foreign words in question. You see a picture with the foreign word superimposed on it, and you hear the word spoken by a native speaker. There’s little rhyme or reason to what words are presented – the first lesson of each language usually includes the word for “elephant,” which, I don’t know about you, I use about forty-three times every day – and the pace is slow, about forty words per lesson, with the intent that the learner will do one lesson per week.

But here’s the big catch: You can’t learn a language that way. Forty words per week is about 2000 words per year. A native speaker of a language has a vocabulary of at least 30,000 words, with 50,000 the norm. Fluent doesn’t necessarily mean native, but in my experience, fluency requires a minimum vocabulary of about 5000 words, or two and a half years of faithful usage of the Rosetta Stone product, assuming it even goes that far. Oddly enough, that part isn’t on the box. And it wasn’t clear to me that the word-target system works for adults; my retention was significantly lower than it is for the “word-translation” system that underlies most other methods.

But there’s more. Fluency is more than just vocabulary. You may acquire some grammar along the way, but at some point, you’re going to have to get a textbook that actually teaches you the rules. (Good luck learning the subjunctive just by saying “elephant” over and over.)

Fluency also means learning the style of the language. I can’t think of a worse way to learn vocabulary than learning words in isolation. Context provides meaning and gives you clues as to when it’s appropriate to use a certain word.

Learning a language on your own is a lot more time-consuming than any of these products want you to know. Working one to two hours a day, it took me about ten months to become fluent enough in Spanish to pass a first-level certificate exam in 2006, and that was accelerated by the fact that I could already speak some French and Italian, giving me a big leg up on Spanish vocabulary.

The sad truth is that there is no product out there that will teach you a foreign language, or that by itself will let you teach yourself a foreign language. The only way I’ve found any success, whether getting to the bare minimum of fluency or just developing conversational ability, is by combining several methods and products.

  • I’ve recommended Pimsleur products many times. They offer 30-lesson “Comprehensive” courses in 28 languages; for three of those, they offer a second set of 30 lessons, and for nine others, they offer a third set for a total of 90 lessons. (If you’re curious, those nine languages are French, Italian, Spanish, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Eastern Arabic, and Russian.) It’s an all-audio system that uses techniques developed by the late Paul Pimsleur designed to increase retention rates. Unlike Rosetta Stone, the Pimsleur lessons tend to present sentences over individual words, and by and large the words are presented in a reasonable order. (There are exceptions; I’ve used the Mandarin courses and don’t know why I needed to know the word for “peony.”) The foreign-language parts are spoken by native speakers, so if you have an ear for accents at all, you can pick up a very good one through Pimsleur.
  • Pimsleur alone won’t help you learn to read or write in the language, which is why I suggest using flash cards. I follow the suggestion offered by Barry Farber in his How To Learn Any Language: Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and on Your Own, using a foreign-language newspaper, one article at a time, to acquire vocabulary. You highlight words you don’t know, look them up, and add them to your flash cards. He also details Harry Lorayne’s mnemonic trick for remembering foreign-language vocabulary, for which I can vouch wholeheartedly.
  • When learning Spanish, I reached the point where I wasn’t getting enough new vocab from newspapers, so I moved on to tackle a novel and listened to the audiobook as I read the text. A 300-page novel gave me around 2000 new vocabulary words, including – just by luck – a ton of cooking terms.
  • You’ll need a decent English-target dictionary – I start with something small, then upgrade to a $50 “complete” or unabridged dictionary once I get far enough along – and a textbook or grammar. You don’t have to do the exercises in the grammar if you don’t want to, but it helps. I’ve never found a decent non-textbook learner that I liked; I had good success with Italian in 32 Lessons (The Gimmick Series) in college, but their Spanish book had a lot of mistakes in the answer key. On the plus side, the Gimmick books offer more exercises than similar books from other publishers, and their grammar overviews are good.
  • You need to lose your fear. If you run into someone who speaks your target language, talk to him/her. Just do it. I have never, ever received a bad reaction from someone to whom I spoke in his/her native language. They’re thrilled. The more uncommon the language, the better the reaction you’ll get. I got a 20-minute lesson in Portuguese on a bus in Somerville. I’ve gotten the fastest auto inspection in Massachusetts history because I could exchange pleasantries in Armenian. I’ve had dozens of people help me with a word or a phrase in Spanish because I’m not afraid to ask them if they speak Spanish.

Finally, there is no substitute for time. At my peak while teaching myself Spanish, I was devoting two hours a day to it: reading/listening, creating new flash cards, reviewing the cards I’d already made (which eventually included over 5000 words). Granted, I had a less demanding job and didn’t have a two-year-old running around the house, so it would be hard to replicate that today, but if you’re not going to give language-learning at least an hour a day, you’re probably going to end up more frustrated than fluent.

EDIT: One book I should have mentioned earlier is indispensable for learners of Spanish: Correct Your Spanish Blunders by Jean Yates. It helps point out the key style and grammar points where straight word-for-word translation from English will screw you up, and has the best description I’ve seen of the use/purpose of the
“personal a“.

Filed Under: Languages Tagged With:
→ October 27, 2008
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The true cost of panic.

A must-read op ed today from economist Arthur Laffer, probably best known for the Laffer curve. Laffer argues that the economy would bounce back nicely if the government would just stay the hell out of the way:

Whenever the government bails someone out of trouble, they always put someone into trouble, plus of course a toll for the troll. Every $100 billion in bailout requires at least $130 billion in taxes, where the $30 billion extra is the cost of getting government involved.

If you don’t believe me, just watch how Congress and Barney Frank run the banks. If you thought they did a bad job running the post office, Amtrak, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the military, just wait till you see what they’ll do with Wall Street.

He has harsh words for just about everyone involved, crossing party lines, and points out that the stock market doesn’t seem to believe either Obama or McCain is capable of providing a solution. It’s sobering, but unlike 99% of the gloom-and-doom you’ll read, it’s grounded in sound theory rather than a desire for attention. In fact, perhaps if Laffer got more attention, we’d have better solutions.

Filed Under: Economics Tagged With: , , ,