→ August 20, 2019
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Coffee Roaster.

There are so very many board games – more than a thousand new ones hit the market every year, not including self-published titles or ones that don’t get published in English – yet there are few games designed with solo play in mind. More new games come with solitaire modes, typically asking you to beat some specific score, but truly solo games, ones designed from the start with the single player in mind. I’ve reviewed three in particular, Friday, the best I’ve played; Onirim; and Aerion.

One of the top-rated solitaire games on BoardGameGeek is a Japanese game known as Coffee Roaster, which has been out of print for a few years but which is coming back in a new edition this fall from Stronghold Games, now available for pre-order. I just obtained a copy of the original a few months ago, right before word of the new edition leaked, and it more than lives up to its reputation: It’s fun to play, suitably challenging, brings lots of replay value, and its theme is as well-integrated into its gameplay as any game I’ve seen.

Coffee Roaster asks you to do just that: You’re a roaster asked to roast three beans out of a selection of 22 possibilities, trying to maximize your score over the three roasts, but you have to do well enough with each roast to get to choose a more challenging (and lucrative) bean in the next round. It’s a brilliant press-your-luck game that gives you a slew of choices and multiple ways to try to max out your score, with every bean – tied to the physical characteristics of the real coffee beans the cards depict – offering a new starting point and different paths to scoring.

For any bean you roast in Coffee Roaster, you’ll start with some combination of tokens that you’ll place in the bag, usually unroasted beans (roast level 0, or green beans that have to be roasted once to get to 0), moisture tokens, flavor tokens depicting aroma or body or acidity, and probably some bad beans you have to work your way around as you roast. As the game progresses, you’ll pull an increasing number of beans from the bag in each round, roasting some, spending the flavor tokens to gain bonuses on the board or to manipulate the roasting process, and, at two steps, gaining smoke tokens that go in the bag and can screw up your final scoring. You decide when to stop roasting and ‘cup’ your coffee, drawing tokens to fill the ten spots on your cupping board – with three spots on the tray to hold beans you don’t want to score – and then add up the points on your tokens.

Each bean has an ideal total roast level that gets you the maximum number of points; you get fewer points if you’re too high or two low. You get points for drawing the key flavor components for that bean, up to ten points if you hit all four on an Expert level bean. You also get points for consistency, drawing at least three tokens with the same roast number on them. You can then lose points if you draw and place bad beans or smoke tokens in your cup, or if you don’t get any of the key flavor components, or if you fail to get ten tokens into the cup. As I type that, I realize it sounds a bit more complicated than it is, but the game has an inherent rhythm to it that makes it go very quickly once you’ve got the process down. You have a lot of potential options on every turn, but they depend almost completely on what tokens you draw from the bag on that turn – and earlier in any roasting process you won’t get to draw that many tokens, so your choices will be somewhat limited.

My 22-point Kona roast.

I have played a handful of times, with (of course) varying levels of success, but have found that getting the wild-card flavor token and the permanent 3-point token (which goes directly into your cup) are essential, while for some roasts you will want to get the extra tray, which lets you discard two extra tokens in the cupping process. There’s a Sweetness token – whoa oh oh, oh oh oh – that is required for some Expert roasts, but can otherwise serve as a wild token in the cupping process. Other bonus tokens let you redraw during the roasting process but the random aspect makes their value too variable. There’s one space on the left side of the board that lets you discard one flavor token to trash all smoke, bad bean, or burned bean (roasted past 4) tokens you have drawn in that round, a very powerful move that you can use just once per bean. It’s nearly always useful, but the question of when to use it becomes a key strategic decision among several across the game.

We don’t have the rules for the new version yet, just cover art, so I don’t know if the game itself is changing or if we’re just getting new images and, I would hope, an improved translation of the original Japanese rules, as the translation in the original edition omits key words or mistranslates others at a few places. It’s also a bit dear at a list price of $45, more than just about any solo game I know of, but I am hopeful that will come down after the initial release satisfies folks like me who’d been looking for the game for years. It is worthy of a bigger audience than it got the first time around, and while Friday is easier to recommend for its simplicity, I enjoyed this game even more.

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→ August 6, 2019
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A Kiss Before Dying.

Ira Levin wrote seven novels in his long career, as well as the long-running Broadway play Deathtrap, garnering raves from critics and his peers for much of his output despite working across a broad range of themes, with novels as seemingly disparate as Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives. His debut novel, A Kiss Before Dying, was a straightforward noir thriller, a grim take on a ‘perfect’ murder that uses shifting perspectives to keep the reader guessing in the first half of the novel and raise the stakes for the second half. (It’s out of print; the link above goes to the Kindle version.)

The first third of the novel centers on Dorothy, the daughter of a very wealthy copper magnate, who is dating a charming classmate at her college and has just revealed to him that she’s pregnant, which does not comport with his plans to marry her for her expected inheritance. Assuming she’ll be cut out of her father’s will for becoming pregnant outside of wedlock, the boyfriend first tries to get her to abort the baby and, when that fails, decides to kill her and make it look like a suicide. He succeeds, at least at first, but Dorothy’s sister Ellen can’t believe Dorothy would kill herself – especially since no one knew she was pregnant – and decides to go investigate.

At this point, Levin switches the point of view and you realize that he never named the boyfriend in part one, so you enter the college town with Ellen and share her ignorance of the killer’s identity – just a very rough description of his appearance, which means it could be any of several men, and Levin utilizes that puzzle to ratchet up the tension for the first half or so of Ellen’s section. Once you find out who it is, which I didn’t see coming, the story flips, putting the reader into the chase and the mystery of whether anyone will catch Dorothy’s killer before he kills again while exploring the depths of his sociopathy, eventually introducing us to the girls’ father, Leo, and making him a central character in the story even though he tries to avoid accepting that Dorothy was murdered.

The book has been filmed twice, once in 1956 to positive reviews and once in 1991 to negative ones, although in both cases the screenwriters changed the story enough that I don’t think either could possibly match what Levin accomplished here in the book. The murderer here isn’t so much twisted as callous and insensate, viewing Dorothy as a mark to make himself wealthy, and viewing all of his victims as obstacles, with no apparent compunctions whatsoever about killing to protect his own interests. Levin also takes advantage of the author’s privilege of hiding key information from you that would have to be revealed on a screen, which raises the stakes for the reader, makes the reveal especially potent, and then lets him play with perspective throughout the third part of the book, where you’re unsure if the killer will get away with his crimes or if the ‘good guys’ will figure it out in time. It’s very classic, straight noir, with a dim view of humanity that leans a bit towards Jim Thompson but with more balance between the good and the bad.

Next up: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

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→ August 2, 2019
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Amity and Prosperity.

If you’ve heard of fracking at all, it’s probably for bad reasons; the practice of fracturing rocks to free and capture natural gas has caused substantial environmental damage, from earthquakes to groundwater contamination to air pollution, across wide swaths of the Midwest, down through Oklahoma and Texas. The practice was once hailed as a way for the United States to achieve energy independence, or at least reduce our dependence on oil from the Middle East, and was even embraced by some Democrats, including Barack Obama, who would have said in the next breath that they favored policies to protect the environment.

Eliza Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America documents the horrendous effects of fracking on one town, Amity, in western Pennsylvania, where the drilling company Range Resources ran amok, ignoring environmental regulations or simply lobbying the state to alter them, sickening local residents – possibly to the point of causing cancer – and making multiple homes unlivable. She reported for eight years on this story, getting close to two mothers in the area in particular whose children and animals were sickened by groundwater and air pollution from Range’s fracking and mishandling of waste materials, and won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction for this book. No Range executives were fined or charged; the company was only modestly fined, despite violations of environmental regulations and false claims in its advertising; and the homeowners most adversely affected received a pittance after years of litigation against Range and Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection.

The story all takes place in the northern Appalachian region, atop the Marcellus Shale formation of sedimentary rock, which it turns out contains a large quantity of natural gas that must be retrieved via hydraulic fracturing, now called “fracking” for short. This involves the high-pressure injection of a slurry of water, sand or other proppants, and various additional chemicals to hold the fractures open, reduce friction, lubricate the drill bit, prevent scale deposit buildup, or serve other purposes. The result of the process, in addition to copious supplies of natural gas, is a lot of wastewater that can contain hydrogen sulfide, ethylene glycol, arsenic (released from the rock that has been fractured), and other chemicals or elements that are harmful to human health when ingested or inhaled. The national desire for cheap domestic energy sources, the (mistaken?) belief that natural gas could serve as a “transitional” fuel between coal/oil and renewable energy sources, and extensive lobbying by the oil and gas industry have led to a regulatory environment that is, to a large extent, dictated by the companies the agencies, including Pennsylvania’s toothless DEP, are supposed to be monitoring and sanctioning. The DEP, in this case, was defanged by Democratic governor Ed Rendell, then further hamstrung by Republican governor Tom Corbett and the GOP-controlled legislature, which passed a law that was likely written in large part by the oil and gas lobby; it should surprise no one that the DEP completely whiffed on the Range fracking endeavor in the Marcellus shale region, but it should surprise and enrage you to hear that lawyers for the company and the agency worked together in the lawsuits filed by the sickened homeowners.

Fracking continues largely unabated in states controlled by the Republican Party, which touts their job-creation potential (and that isn’t in dispute) and potential to provide cheap energy from within our borders, although many, many Democratic politicians have gone along with fracking for their own reasons. What is clear, however, is that the process requires substantial regulation if it could ever be made safe for citizens anywhere in the vicinity of the wells. Any drilling within a mile of community water sources puts the water at risk of contamination, and that’s even if the fracking company handles its waste water correctly. Range, according to Griswold, used open waste “ponds” to store its toxic sludge, didn’t line them properly, and then ignored evidence of leaking while fighting any effort to get them to take responsibility. (Several Range executives Griswold named not only escaped any accountability, but have since moved on to better jobs in the industry.) One of the two mothers Griswold profiles, Stacey, kept diligent notes on the appearance of foul odors in the air (hydrogen sulfide, like the smell of rotten eggs, which can indicate bacterial contamination as well) and the increasing illnesses of her kids, one of whom missed a year of school because of fracking pollution, and the deaths of many of her animals. Yet despite all of this evidence, the state of Pennsylvania tried to pass a law, some of which was struck down by the state Supreme Court (but not all!), that would have prevented local governments from banning or regulating fracking in their area; prevented doctors from discussing poisoning cases possibly caused by fracking with each other; and excluded private water wells from pollution/leakage notification requirements.

Griswold’s telling of this story is fundamentally humanist – she never, at any point, loses sight of the people suffering from Range’s actions, the people who reside at the heart of the book – but it is also very much a story of institutional failure. Pennsyvlania, which was gerrymandered into another dimension, let many of its citizens down in the most basic way. We take certain government protections for granted, yet here, the people who were supposed to be protecting the state’s water, air, and land resources – it’s one of only three states with an environmental rights amendment to its state constitution – did no such thing; at best, they looked the other way when Range wanted to drill and frack, and at worst, they aided and abetted the polluters, including helping them fight against the state’s own citizens when the latter tried to assert their rights under the amendment. It bears repeating: Pennsylvania didn’t just do nothing. They worked against their own citizens. If you live there, you should be angry. If you live anywhere in the United States, but especially somewhere where there’s fracking, you should be angry. Once this garbage is in the groundwater, entire towns will become unlivable, maybe for generations. If you’re cool with wide swaths of Oklahoma looking like the Love Canal, I guess that’s your choice, but I wasn’t okay with it before I read Amity and Prosperity and I sure as hell am not okay with it now.

Next up: Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, the story of how he threw two consecutive no-hitters.

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→ July 22, 2019
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Billion Dollar Whale.

When I reviewed Bad Blood a few months ago, one of you recommended Tom Wright and Bradley Hope’s book Billion Dollar Whale, since it’s in a similar vein – another story about a con artist who took very wealthy people for a substantial ride. While Elizabeth Holmes got caught, and may even stand trial next year (although I hold out little hope of serious punishment), Jho Low, the “whale” at the heart of this book, remains a fugitive from justice, and still has a lot of the proceeds of his massive scam – maybe the biggest in world history.

Low was a Malaysian nobody with a little bit of family money who somehow talked his way into the good graces of Malaysian President Najib Razak and some of his myrmidons, and thus ended up in control of a new sovereign wealth fund in Malaysia called 1MDB. Low, with the help of other officials in Malaysia and co-conspirators in the United Arab Emirates, managed to loot the fund of several billion dollars, using the proceeds to party his way around the world, but also to invest in or start legitimate businesses. He invested in EMI Music, bought real estate in the United States and the United Kingdom, and even funded a Hollywood production company called Red Granite Pictures, co-founded by the stepson of President Razak, which produced the Oscar-nominated film The Wolf of Wall Street as well as Daddy’s Home and Dumb and Dumber To. Meanwhile, Low kept his position of power by providing Razak’s wife with millions of dollars in gifts and jewelry, while using state funds to drum up support to keep Razak in office. He did all of this with the help of major western investment banks, notably Goldman Sachs, which profited handsomely from Low’s looting of the Malaysian government’s supposed investment fund, as well as a Swiss bank called BSI.

Wright and Hope spin an unbelievable yarn here, going from Low’s childhood to his years at Wharton, where he already showed the sort of pretension and penchant for not paying his debts, through his rise and partial fall as the de facto leader of 1MDB. Low befriended Leonardo DiCaprio, giving him millions of dollars of art as gifts, and dated supermodel Miranda Kerr, giving her $8 million in jewelry. (DiCaprio and Kerr forfeited all of those gifts, voluntarily, once the FBI began its investigation into 1MDB.) He also hung out with Jamie Foxx and producer Swizz Beatz, the husband of singer & musician Alicia Keys; Swizz Beatz in particular continued to support Low even when it was clear that the latter had come by all his money via fraud.

Low’s con was really simple as cons go – he covered up his pilfering of the till with a series of paper transactions, doing so with the cooperation of other con men in Malaysia’s government and with the sovereign funds of Arab nations, all of whom took payouts to participate in the scam. What is hard to fathom, and what Wright and Hope spell out so well, is how thoroughly Low et al bamboozled western banks and accounting firms – or how little they cared about the provenance of the funds as long as they were getting paid. Billion Dollar Whale could be a textbook in a class on “Know Your Customer” rules, and what happens when banks fail to follow those procedures. Low skated repeatedly at points when someone should have told him no, simply because he could get someone else to forge a letter to support him.

Wright and Hope try to explain some of Low’s personality and choice to go into a life of fraud, but largely end up stymied by how bland he was – socially awkward and introverted, granted access to famous people and women by his money but still every bit as inscrutable. He also studiously avoided attention throughout his tenure with 1MDB, so there was minimal press coverage of him, and he didn’t start to appear in the media coverage of the scandal until after several stories had already appeared. So it’s not a biography of Low in any sense, but a story of a con – a completely fascinating one because of how many people either went along with it (to get rich) or failed in their fiduciary or legal duties to stop it.

A huge part of Low’s ability to get away with this scam for years was the tie to Razak, who was finally ousted from office in an election in 2018, after which he and his wife were arrested for corruption. Just this week, prosecutors in his trial showed that his wife spent over $800,000 in one day on jewelry, spending that went through the 1MDB fund; I assume this is the same story Wright and Hope tell of Low taking Razak’s wife to a famous jeweler. Low, however, fled to China and appears to still be running around the country with access to at least some of his ill-gotten gains, which means the Chinese government is, for some reason, okay with him doing so in spite of an Interpol warrant out for his arrest.

Next up: Laura Cumming’s The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th-Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece.

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→ July 18, 2019
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Never Look Away.

Never Look Away (iTunes • amazon) was the last film for me to see from this year’s Oscar batch; I like to try to see all of the films nominated in major categories, including acting and directing, which is often a challenge for the five films nominated in Best Foreign Language Film. Never Look Away, Germany’s submission for last year, took one of those nominations but also earned a nod for Best Cinematography, and writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck had won the foreign film award previously for the acclaimed 2006 film The Lives of Others, which I need to see (and is streaming on Netflix at the moment). The particular catch with Never Look Away is that the movie is 189 minutes long, which is well beyond what I think I can handle in a single sitting in the theater, so I missed its run in the art theaters of Philly. It’s really tremendous, in hindsight one of my top ten movies of 2018, and certainly deserved its spot in the Best Foreign Language Film category. I wonder if, had it been shorter and a bit easier to see, it would have had a little buzz for Best Picture, because it’s such a beautiful, high-minded film, anchored by two very strong performances.

Never Look Away is based loosely on the life of Gerhard Richter, a German painter best known for a particular style of painting photographs on canvas, hewing closely to real events of his childhood and his professional life. The protagonist here, renamed Kurt Barnert, is born just as the Nazis are gaining power in Germany, and is traumatized by seeing his favorite aunt, who encouraged his interest in art, suffer a mental health breakdown, after which the Nazis forcibly commit her and then put her to death in a concentration camp. In art school, he meets a young woman named Ellie – who reminds him of his deceased aunt – and falls in love with her, not realizing that her father, a gynecologist, had an important role in the Nazi regime. Kurt and Ellie survive the war, but in postwar East Germany he only gets to paint scenes of Socialist Realism, so the two defect shortly before the Berlin Wall goes up, allowing him to secure a place in an important art school in West Berlin, where he eventually has his creative breakthrough. The love story between the two characters, which is the movie’s major fictional aspect, is woven into the lead character’s artistic narrative, as the saintly Ellie serves both as the great love of Kurt’s life and also a major inspiration for his eventual success as an artist.

Never Look Away moves along shockingly well for a movie of this length and scope, in part because von Donnersmarck doesn’t linger too long over most scenes, especially after the fairly extended prologue of scenes just before and during World War II, which serve primarily to set up Kurt’s character and the ensuing drama with Ellie’s father. Schilling is very compelling as Kurt, appropriately brooding and intense, never truly at ease even with Ellie, while Sebastian Koch (who reminds me of the late Austrian singer Falco) is perfectly insidious as Ellie’s father, whose professional demeanor hides his machinations and drive for self-preservation.

Paula Beer plays Ellie as well as she can, but the character’s primary function is to stand still and look pretty, which is arguably the movie’s biggest flaw – there are no female characters here of any depth. There are various women who play critical roles in Kurt’s life, from his aunt Elizabeth to Ellie to Ellie’s mother (Ina Weisse, looking a lot like Cate Blanchett from Carol), but they’re all at the story’s periphery, and Ellie – who I think is a pastiche of Richter’s wives, but is clearly not a real, single character – gets virtually no exposition, no explanation of why she’s in love with Kurt, no description of her life outside of his view, and no function in the plot beyond the connection to her father and her trouble getting pregnant.

Once a film gets past 130-140 minutes, the question of need becomes salient – did the movie have to be this long? Did Never Look Away need to run a shade over three hours, and does it make sufficient use of that time? The answer is rarely yes, but in this case, von Donnersmarck doesn’t waste a minute; the pace is consistent, never dragging, but of course never rushing, and he uses some of the space he’s allotted to himself to express the struggle of an artist looking for his voice without boring the viewer. (The film has very little humor, but the scenes of Kurt trying out new ideas, and getting reactions from his colleague Günther, are the closest this movie comes to comedy.) The cinematography that garnered such praise is a function of different camera angles and shifting shots to compare the scope of art to the world around it, rather than the lingering landscape scenes I tend to associate with Best Cinematography nominees.

Roma was obviously going to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but in the competition for second place behind it, Never Look Away was clearly worthy of one of the four other nominations, and I think if the film were shorter it might have at least gained support in another category – perhaps Best Director, where Pawe? Pawlikowski got a nod for the Polish-language Cold War. I’d put Never Look Away over Cold War for a more credible story and its stronger exploration of the meaning of art, both to the public and to the artist himself, although I can’t put it above Burning, my #1 movie of last year, or Roma. Even with the lack of definition around the women in the film, it’s still riveting, and for me to say that about a movie of this length is more evidence of just how compelling it was.

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→ July 15, 2019
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Furious Hours.

Casey Cep’s Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee is more like three non-fiction novellas in one package, tied together by overlaps in the stories but not by any significant theme, so the inclusion of all three in a single tome feels a bit forced. Each of them is interesting and tightly told, none more so than the first of the three, as Cep has done substantial research, although ultimately she can’t create a conclusion where none exists.

Harper Lee did not write another book after the runaway success of the novel she would refer to as “the Bird” for the rest of her life, and barely wrote any words at all for publication, leading to a popular myth around her that she had said all she wanted to say – a myth into which her famously reclusive nature also played. Lee did try to write another book, however, about the story Cep unfurls in Furious Hours, that of the Reverend William Maxwell, a black preacher and timber worker in Alabama in the 1960s and early 1970s who took out numerous life insurance policies on family members, including two wives, and then killed at least five of them to collect the payouts. He was arrested and charged with one murder but acquitted mostly due to the lack of direct evidence, and the killings only stopped when the uncle of his last victim executed him point-blank at the funeral service. Lee heard about this story and spent years researching the Maxwell case, interviewing the man’s killer and Maxwell’s longtime attorney, Tom Radney, among others, but for reasons Cep tries to address in the final third of the novel, she was never able to finish it – or even submit part of a manuscript.

Maxwell’s story is a crackerjack, right up to his dramatic death. He wasn’t just a cold-blooded, calculating murderer, but a traveling, revivalist preacher, a longtime con man, and a hard worker on timber sites, respected if a bit feared by the men with whom he worked. His decision to kill off his first wife, and then continue to kill off several other family members, for no other apparent purpose than to collect insurance money, came fairly late in his life: he was around 44 when his first wife was found dead in her car – this was a common method for Maxwell, with four of the five corpses for which he is assumed to bear responsibility discovered in or under cars – and he was killed at age 52, right after delivering the eulogy for his last victim. Cep details the murders and how Maxwell managed to get away with so many, even as a black criminal in 1970s Alabama – although the fact that all of his victims were also black may also have helped him.

Maxwell spent a lot of time over those eight years in court, sometimes defending himself against murder charges but more often fighting insurance companies that tried not to pay him for deaths they thought he’d caused. His lawyer through all of those cases was a white man, Tom Radney, formerly an idealistic state legislator who came home to open up a private practice and made good money off Maxwell, since he was so frequently at war with the law. Radney’s story makes up the middle third of the book and it’s the weakest by far; he’s not as fascinating a character as Maxwell or Lee, nor is any part of his life as interesting as what they both did, but there’s also a reliability problem with Radney’s story that isn’t present in the other two – he helped Lee in her research, which then became part of Cep’s. History is told by the survivors, and Radney outlived Maxwell by over 30 years, while Lee was alive but chose silence.

The third section tells Lee’s story, not just the story of her work on the never-submitted book she titled “The Reverend,” but her whole biography – no small task given the author’s disdain for media attention and her nearly half-century of self-enforced silence. Cep does her best work here, because there is so much in the Lee section that I never knew about her – details from her childhood and adolescence, the extent to which she worked with Truman Capote on In Cold Blood (and perhaps wrote, or rewrote, parts of it), her reactions to the book’s enormous and almost immediate success, and some of the real explanations for the writer’s block that kept the world from ever seeing “The Reverend,” or anything else, in print. (The book that was released a year before her death, Go Set a Watchman, was her first manuscript, which multiple publishers rejected before J.B. Lippincott responded favorably but asked for major revisions; the revised book is the one we know.) Perhaps there isn’t enough material for a full-length biography of Lee, who wrote numerous letters but was obviously very protective of her privacy, but this is a very good use of the limited material that is available.

So Furious Hours is a good read – three good reads, really, or at least two, and the middle one is fine – but a disjointed one. The first section is a true crime story with lots of drama and salacious details; the last one is a thorough if short biography of a pivotal figure in American literature who, herself, was a flawed, regular human whose success contributed to her undoing. The through line of Furious Hours is a tenuous one: it’s the Maxwell case, but without Maxwell there, the connection feels forced. If you approach this book as three distinct reads that share a particular connection, it’s probably going to be far more satisfying than the series of loose ends left by trying to into the three a single narrative that isn’t quite there.

Next up: Sadegh Hedayat’s novella The Blind Owl, in its first translation.

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→ July 7, 2019
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On Spice.

I’m a longtime customer of Penzeys Spices, a massive mail-order operation that consistently delivers some of the highest-quality spices and dried herbs I’ve found anywhere. They offer some hard-to-find options, and sell just about everything in whole or ground form; I prefer to grind my own, so I buy many things (nutmeg, cloves, allspice, black pepper) whole from them, getting enough to last years. They also sell my favorite Dutch-processed cocoa, and the cost per ounce is more than competitive. It doesn’t hurt that the company is unabashedly progressive; their email newsletters have taken on a strident anti-Trump tone, especially when the issue at hand is human rights.

Caitlin PenzeyMoog is part of the family behind the company, and would help bottle or bag spices when she was a kid, although she’s since moved on to a career in writing – she’s an editor for the AV Club. Her first book, however, brings her back to her roots (and rhizomes): On Spice, a breezy, highly informative, yet still entertaining compendium of the best-known spices in your kitchen, as well as some lesser-known ones, and herbs, and alliums, and capsicums, and even salt.

On Spice is loosely organized by the flavoring agent she’s discussing, with each chapter or sub chapter telling you where the spice/herb/whatever comes from, and how it’s used, and perhaps notes on varieties or suggestions on storage or how to buy it. Her approach is evidence-based, even though so much of what she describes appears to come from her personal experience – and that is what makes the book so enjoyable to read. She has stories from three generations of Penzeys; her grandparents, who owned a store called The Spice House that inspired her parents to start the mail-order Penzeys business, appear frequently as side characters.

There’s also some actual, functional kitchen wisdom in the book, including a few things I didn’t know or simply never considered. The book itself came out of a piece PenzeyMoog wrote in April 2017 for The Takeout called “Salt Grinders are Bullshit,” which gets expanded within On Spice‘s chapter on salt. (The short version: We grind many spices to crack open a protective exterior shell and expose volatile, essential oils in the interior that provide flavor and aroma. Salt is a rock. If you grind it, it’s just smaller rocks.) I’ve been putting used vanilla beans in my giant sugar container for probably 15 years now, and I know it’s made all of my baked goods better; she explains the how and why – and also goes into why vanilla is so expensive. Why do we put bay leaves in stocks and soups, and why do we have to take them out before serving? How do you know if the saffron you’re buying is the real thing? You’ve probably never had true cinnamon; the spice we call cinnamon in the United States is nearly always cassia, a more strongly-flavored, and less expensive spice derived from the bark of a related tree. Real Ceylon cinnamon may actually not taste enough like cinnamon for you if you’re used to cassia.

There’s a ton of useful information in here if you’re cowed by the variety of spices available to you, whether it’s the spice aisle at your local supermarket (some of which may be quite stale), the bulk aisle at Whole Foods (better for buying small amounts of spices), or mail-order companies. PenzeyMoog explains the meaning of terms for spice blends, including za’atar, ras-el-hanout, harissa, garam masala, and curry. There are even some unrelated tangents in sidebars and footnotes, my favorite of which informed me that Angostura bitters (a nonpotable bitters that is an essential ingredient in an old fashioned) is named for the village where it was invented, but doesn’t contain any of the bark of the angostura tree.

PenzeyMoog’s writing style is fun and accessible, even when she veers off into slightly nerdier territory, explaining some of the science behind spices/herbs, or going into how to get the scent of garlic off your hands after you’ve handled it. (Those stainless steel things people keep by their sinks? Useless.) The stories from her grandparents’ shop keep the book light and easy to read, and she has the right balance of detail and brevity. I’ve been cooking and buying spices from Penzey’s for a long time, and I still learned quite a bit from it. On Spice even concludes with recipes for spice blends, dishes, and beverages if you’re looking for inspiration, although I got more than enough value from the text proper.

Next up: John Berger’s Booker Prize-winning novel G..

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→ June 25, 2019
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Downforce.

Restoration Games has brought back a half-dozen old board games since the company was founded a few years ago, including one of my childhood favorites, Stop Thief!, which was kind of a precursor to modern games that ask you to download an app to help you play. (The original Stop Thief! came with a battery-operated “phone” that would give you clues in the form of sounds to tell you if you’d found something or even located the thief – and, if he escapes, sounds of him running or breaking glass so you can guess where he went.)

One of their first redesigns was the game now known as Downforce, which has existed under multiple names going back to 1974, when designer Wolfgang Kramer released his first game, an abstract game called Tempo. He repurposed the basic mechanics of that game for a series of car-racing games, including 1996’s Top Race, which seems to be the last iteration of this game until Restoration brought it back in 2017. This new version has slick graphics and very simple to learn game play that still has the same core mechanic where players play cards to move six cars around the track, but where the card you play likely moves some of your opponents’ cars forward too, and you can win the race but still lose the game depending on how every player bets.

Players begin the game with a hand of cards that varies with the number of players – you deal out the entire deck of 42 cards, ditching any remainder if you have 4 or 5 players – and then use those cards to bid for the six cars in the ‘auction’ that ends with all cars assigned to players. When you win a car in the bidding, you get two additional cards: one that lets you move that car 8 spaces (and doesn’t require you to move any other cars), and a card with a special power unique to you for that game, with some more useful than others. (My favorite is the one called Tricky, where you have the option to execute the moves on any card you play from the bottom up, rather than from the top down, so you can choose which is most advantageous and may be able to use the card to create or clear a bottleneck.)

Each player then plays one of their cards on each turn. The cards have from one to six rows, each row showing a number and a car color; the player moves all of those cars the displayed number of spaces, going from top to bottom, if possible. (Cars can be blocked when the track narrows in the three turns; you can and should use that to your advantage.) Some cards have spaces marked ‘wild,’ which you can assign to any car not already shown on the card. Players go around the table playing these cards until all six cars have crossed the finish line or the remaining players with cars on the track have run out of cars.

The track has three yellow lines across it, roughly at the quarter marks, and when the lead car crosses each line, every player bets on which of the six cars will win the race by marking it on their scoresheets (in secret). This can give you an incentive to help a rival player win if you realize your car isn’t likely to do so, and creates a way for a player hopelessly behind in the race to at least have a chance to win the whole game. Your final score is your winnings from your car(s), ranging from $12 million for first place to $2 million for fifth, plus your winnings from the betting (you can get money if the car you bet on at each point finishes in the top three), minus the cost you paid at the auction. A perfect bet, where you bet on the eventual winner in all three betting periods, would get you $18 million, enough to win some games even if you get nothing from your car.

Games take about 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the number of players and how quickly everyone takes their turns. My seven-year-old niece had no problem keeping up with the game after she sat and watched the adults play once, just needing a little guidance on using the cards to her best advantage. (I think it took a little longer for her to grasp the way the cards worked when certain cars would be blocked partway through a move.) And who doesn’t love a race car game … especially one that doesn’t suck?

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→ June 18, 2019
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Magpie Murders.

Anthony Horowitz created one of my favorite television series of all time, the magnificent British mystery show Foyle’s War, which stands well on its own but also comes across as a loving homage to the golden age of mysteries, with its gentleman detective D.C.S. Foyle and solutions drawn as much from psychology as from unearthing clues. He’s also been tabbed by the estates of Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming to write novels using those authors’ signature characters, including the Sherlock Holmes novel Moriarty, which I found a quick read but unfaithful in style to the Conan Doyle novels and too reliant on a huge twist for its resolution. He’s also written three standalone novels of original characters, of which Magpie Murders is one, and it’s every bit as brisk and compelling … but this time, the twists work incredibly well, and the reader is rewarded with two different mysteries to solve.

Magpie Murders presents us with a Poirot-like detective, the Holocaust survivor Atticus Pünd, who has both the little Belgian’s dispassionate approach to solving murders and endearing arrogance, drawn against his first instincts into a pair of murders in a small English town full of eccentric but well-defined characters. Pünd is also dying of an inoperable brain tumor, and this is almost certain to be his last case, but this seems to motivate him further to solve it rather than dwell on his imminent death. The murders are linked more by place than by method or motive, adding to the complexity, and as is typical of mysteries of the era Horowitz evokes, everyone had a reason to want the latter victim dead.

The novel runs over 400 pages, which is quite long for the genre (in my experience, only Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels reached that length), but that’s because there’s a second mystery wrapped up in the first one, and I won’t spoil it here. The first narrative breaks right before Pünd appears ready to reveal the solution, and you’re plunged into a totally different story, written in a more modern tone and involving a new set of characters, one where it isn’t even clear that a murder has taken place. (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, yes, there was a murder, because otherwise why would Horowitz even engage in this bit of metafiction?) The gambit here is that the end of the Pünd novel is missing, and the new narrator has to find the absent chapters to solve the mystery, which leads to a discovery of a murder and a conclusion that is more conventional for mysteries set in the last few decades. The marvel here is that Horowitz has nested two distinct, connected stories told in two entirely different voices, each mirroring a particular style of mystery novels – one from the golden era, one more contemporary – without ever ripping the reader out of the spell of the entire enterprise.

The twin payoffs here – I guessed the identity of the murderer in the inner story, but not in the Pünd one – help justify the book’s length, and Horowitz, who has eschewed the idea that this is an homage to Agatha Christie (even though her real-life grandson, Mathew Pritchard, appears as a character in the inner story), does capture the essence of the grande dame’s prose and structure. Unlike Moriarty, where the gimmick relied on fooling the reader from the beginning, the twist here is unforced and gives the reader a fair chance to follow what’s happening. As a Poirot fan (over Miss Marple), I was particularly pleased to follow Pünd, who is very much a Poirot surrogate in the novel, although he lacks the flourishes of the fastidious man’s mustache or ze little grey cells. Perhaps Horowitz is better when creating his own characters, even those which clearly draw from the icons of the genre, than when trying to work with the icons themselves.

Next up: Still reading Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

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→ June 17, 2019
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Fates and Furies.

Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies was nominated for a National Book Award in 2015, losing to Adam Johnson’s short story collection Fortune Smiles, and was widely praised as her best work to date. This intricate, profound novel about a marriage as the intersection of two lives presents that intersection from two distinct and often contradictory perspectives, a story that is beautifully told and that gripped me more the further I read.

The first part of the book, titled “Fates” – ten points if you can guess the title of the second part – introduces us to Lancelot, nicknamed Lotto, born in the eye of a hurricane and in some ways a very lucky child. He’s wealthy beyond measure before he’s finished his first cry, and as time passes it will become clear that he’s blessed with good lucks and great talent as a writer, but even someone born lucky doesn’t get a life free of worry, sorry, or even some bad fortune too.

After years of diffident debauchery, with a handful of broken hearts among the many women who sought his company and only got sex, Lotto sees Mathilde walk into a party right near the end of his college years, walks towards her and immediately asks her to marry him. A few weeks later they do indeed wed, and then live as starving artists – his vengeful mother, more fury than fate to be sure, cuts him off when she learns of the marriage – while he tries to find work as an actor and she works in advertising and then in an art gallery to keep them afloat. A real stroke of luck reveals his talent as a writer, and he becomes an acclaimed playwright for going on two decades until the fairy tale and part one both end.

Furies tells the same story from Mathilde’s side, and the trees we could not make out while standing in the forest are clear and sharp when viewed from above. Mathilde’s childhood isn’t what Lotto believed, and much of what he thought was fate was anything but. She’s a stronger character than the subservient wife we see in Fates, and angrier at a life that did not give her any fortune other than perhaps some physical beauty. Mathilde had to scratch and claw for nearly everything she got in life before Lotto, and then had to work twice as hard as he ever did to keep them going during his lean years as an actor, and then plays far more of a role in his writing career than the first part lets on. The first part is the veneer, and the second the solid wood beneath. It is stronger, but it’s not as pretty. Once the revelations start spilling, they come fast, and they frequently upend your impression of one or both main characters.

The parallel structure of the two parts mirrors the dichotomy of the title, but also presents the “two sides to every story” bromide in a new light by giving primacy to Mathilde’s side. The Greek Fates were three goddesses who determined the length of a mortal’s life, but did not concern themselves with what went on during that life. Lotto’s story feels like one mapped out by the Fates – very little of his life appears to be directed by outside forces, and while there’s luck from the circumstances of his birth, reading part one gives you the sense that he is the prime mover in his own universe, right up until the thread spun by the Fates is cut.

That’s not true, of course, but Groff saves the explanation until Furies, when it becomes clear that Mathilde’s machinations were responsible for much of what happened to Lotto, right down to their not-coincidental first meeting, from college onward. So much of her life is driven by vengeance, whether directly aimed at someone else or in the vein of “living well is the best revenge,” which is a major part of the mythology of the Greek Furies. (Wikipedia describes them as underworld deities of vengeance.) Once widowed, she’s determined to become the protagonist of her own life for the first time, yet becomes even more driven by the desire for revenge, especially when she realizes that one longtime acquaintance went out of his way to try to sabotage her marriage to Lotto.

The plot itself is intricate and almost immediately compelling, with so much realistic detail that it’s hard to believe one person conceived both of these characters’ lives. Groff’s character development, even with several of the side characters like Lotto’s family and childhood friends, is superb, both in interest and credibility. Lotto being a playwright is a bit more of the writers writing about writers problem, and I found it hard to buy into the idea of him becoming so financially successful or even moderately famous in that line of work, but if you get past that, much of what follows is plausible, and his vocation allows Groff to work in endless literary references (only a few of which I caught).

Groff ends the novel with a revelation that explains much of what went before, and even casts doubt on some parts of the story, but in a way that also opens up a whole series of questions that you might have felt were answered by the two parts. It’s a gimmick, but she executes it well, and if anything it seemed to underscore some of the questions posed over the course of Furies around the choices Mathilde made in trying to create a far better life for herself than the one lowercase-f fate has offered her. It’s a brilliant, incisive, deeply philosophical work that moves like popular fiction but still has me thinking a few weeks after I finished.

Next up: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Acintya bheda bheda fatwa.

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