→ August 9, 2009
→ By

Charlotte’s Web.

TV on Monday: 2:40 pm EDT on ESPNEWS and 3 pm on Outside the Lines.

Between Then We Came to the End and The Magicians, I read the #13 book on the Radcliffe 100, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, which also appears at #63 on the Guardian 100. I’ve seen both the 1973 animated adaptation and the the 2006 live-action version – we own the latter on DVD and I’ve probably seen it in whole or in parts 50 times, as my daughter went through a phase where she wanted to “watch the pig” over and over again – but I don’t think I had ever read the book; if I did, it was when I was much, much younger.

The story is probably familiar to most of you – a spider and a pig form an unlikely friendship where the spider, Charlotte, comes up with an amazing plan to save the pig, Wilbur, from ending up the entree at Christmas dinner. Charlotte’s actions attract plenty of human interest, but it isn’t until her final web that she knows she’s saved Wilbur’s live, after which he has an opportunity to return the favor in some way by saving her egg sac.

What disturbed me most about the book was the discovery that the screenwriters behind the live-action movie had changed so much of the dialogue and story. In the book, the animals play a much smaller role, and there’s no horse or crows. Fern’s younger brother has more dialogue and is less of a brat, while Fern herself actually turns away from Wilbur when she develops a crush on a boy in her class – a fickle friendship that serves as a counterpoint to the friendship between Wilbur and Charlotte. When it’s clear that Charlotte’s plan has succeeded, Fern is more interested in getting more money to go on another ride with her new boy-toy. Templeton, the rat, isn’t quite so Steve Buscemi-like, with a little more personality and a little more interest in helping Charlotte. (A little, but not much.) And Wilbur is a lot less childlike in the book, with even a touch of sarcasm was wiped out in the film version.

But most of all, I was shocked by the book’s ending – Charlotte lives! How the hell could they change that?

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ August 7, 2009
→ By

The Magicians.

First blog post from the Area Code games is up on the Draft Blog. Second one is filed and should appear on Friday morning. I’ll also be on the telecast of the Under Armour Game on ESPNU on Saturday, making a few short appearances from the stands or the dugout if we can work out the logistics.

Friend of the dish Lev Grossman came to my attention because of his work (with Richard Lacayo) on the TIME 100, and when I asked them to do a Q&A for the dish about that ranking, Lev asked if I’d be interested in reading his upcoming book, The Magicians, which comes out in hardcover on Tuesday. I knocked off the book on my flight to California on Tuesday – all but 20 pages, to be exact, although I finished the book before I got to my rental car – and absolutely recommend it. (And no, I wouldn’t recommend it solely because Lev’s a Friend of the dish. It’s legitimately awesome.)

The Magicians will inevitably be called a grown-up rejoinder to Harry Potter, and Grossman does borrow from Rowling’s works while alluding to other giants of the fantasy genre, from Narnia to Middle Earth to Faerûn. The central character, Quentin, is a young, very bright, heartsick loner in present-day Brooklyn who dreams of a world like that in his favorite series of books, about a magical world called Fillory which is accessed through a grandfather clock in the house of a British family. Quentin is a skilled magician in the real-world sense of card tricks and disappearing nickels, but eventually discovers that the magic of spells and incantations is real and enrolls at a college for magicians that bears a few resemblances to Hogwarts. Unlike the innocent teenagers of Harry Potter’s world, however, Quentin and his classmates drink, smoke, swear, and screw, although I think they do more drinking than the other three things combined, and eventually embark on a sort of kill-the-big-foozle quest that defies their (and the reader’s) expectations.

Grossman manages to straddle the line between straight storycraft and outright parody brilliantly. One can read The Magicians as a retelling of the Potter myth with older kids, greater tragedies, and more complex interactions between characters, as well as several cliche-mocking twists in the final hundred-odd pages that skewer not just Rowling’s work but the standard plot devices of fantasy and science fiction. (There’s also a great shot across Rowling’s bow in defense of American magic.) Yet never does the book descend to the superficial, sneering tone that pure parody often has, as The Magicians‘ story stands strongly on its own, built around a complex, brooding central character, and an accelerating plot that grows from school-aged dramas involving crushes and difficult exams to life-and-death struggles in another world. He adds depth to two of the main characters with glimpses into their dysfunctional family lives, and ties up just about every loose plot strand or seemingly incongruous event as the novel speeds to a too-early finish – and the final two pages seemed word-perfect to me both as I read them and as I replayed them for hours after reading.

I do have minor quibbles with the book – there’s a “why do bad things happen to good people” discussion that seemed cursory and labored, and the way Quentin discovers a friend of his is gay was a little out of place and didn’t end up tying into anything else in the book. There is also one major event near the novel’s end that was like a slug to the chest to read, although I could see it as a counterpoint to Rowling, who largely skipped that sort of tragedy in Deathly Hallows (justifiably, given her audience). Grossman is also a big fan of the sentence fragment – “But still.” appeared at least twice – although I think that will only annoy the sliver of you who are as hardcore about grammar as I am.

Where The Magicians succeeds most is in Grossman’s creation of an immersive world within his book, and then a world within that world for his characters. Fforde, Rowling, and Murakami all have that ability to draw me into the pages of a book so that finishing the work is akin to waking from a pleasant dream. Grossman has achieved that same feat here.

Next up: Why not follow this with another book from the TIME 100? Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ July 20, 2009
→ By

The Grapes of Wrath.

The Grapes of Wrath is an angry, incendiary novel that blends poetic prose and sharp characterization with a severe downward-spiral plot and one-dimensional antagonists to incite a specific reaction in the reader, one of revulsion toward an economic system that, in Steinbeck’s view, was impoverishing an enormous class of Americans while enriching a lucky few. It’s a six-lister, ranking #10 on the Modern Library 100, #3 on the Radcliffe 100, and #54 on The Novel 100, and only missing from the Guardian 100. (I don’t believe any book shows up on all seven of the booklists I use, partly a function of their varying eras – such a novel would have to have been published between 1900 and 1950, in English – and partly a function of the Guardian‘s clear contrarian bent.) According to Daniel Burt’s essay in The Novel 100, it was banned and burned when first published due to its political perspective and controversial closing scene, while literary critics frowned on its preachy dialogue, thin characters, and bombastic plotting, but its reputation appears to have been rehabilitated over time, with the work now widely recognized as an American classic.

The family at the story’s center is the Joads, one of many Oklahoman families who lose their farms and head west toward the promised land of California, where jobs allegedly await these families if they can handle the trek across the southwest. The chapters alternate between those focusing on the Joads’ plight and general scene-setting chapters that provide background for the core plot and give Steinbeck a chance to wax poetically, as on the subject of Route 66:

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.

The Joads reach California but not entirely intact, and end up in a “government camp,” a squatter’s paradise with real buildings, clean sanitary facilities, and a fair but strong system of self-government that enforces cooperative behavior through social pressure and the rarely-used threat of ouster. The system works perfectly, and even an attempted coup by outsiders is quickly thwarted through teamwork. It is the idyllic view of communism common to much literature of the interwar era, although to be fair to Steinbeck, the camp was not a unit or system of economic production but a social safety net for the unfortunates swept aside by capitalist greed during the Depression. The Joads aren’t in the camp for very long, but the idea of a self-enforcing system like this one operating without a whiff of corruption among those in power is incredibly naive. Steinbeck’s commentary isn’t just limited to the scene-setting chapters, and one major criticism of the novel is that he puts his opinions into the dialogue, making characters sometimes seem like mouthpieces for his political views, like Uncle John’s comments on rampant consumerism:

Funny thing, I wanta buy stuff. Stuff I don’t need … Stuff settin’ out there, you jus’ feel like buyin’ it whether you need it or not.

Steinbeck’s prose didn’t seem bombastic to me, nor was I troubled by slightly preachy dialogue; perhaps the 70 years since the book’s publication have seen such widespread degradation in prose writing that what was overbearing in 1939 seems fresh and clever today. Most impressive to me, however, was the book’s pacing. The Joads lose their farm, travel west over sparse land, and end up in a Hardy-esque series of big and small calamities in California that leave the reader afraid to hope for anything, yet Steinbeck focuses on little details like repair work on the family’s car to keep the text moving even when the family isn’t. There’s also a clear faith in the goodness of man – at least, of poor man – encapsulated not just in the jarring final scene but in many small sacrifices made by and for the Joads earlier in the book.

I wondered on Twitter last week if Cormac McCarthy had any of this book in mind when writing The Road, a similarly what-the-hell-can-go-wrong-next story that also focuses on a parent trying to keep a family together against impossible odds. The Joads know the name of their destination on the desolate road, but don’t know what it holds; the Man doesn’t know the name of his destination, but has a similarly vague sense of what might be there to go with the strong sense that he must take the Boy there. Both books show the best and worst of humanity in horrible situations. Both authors put substantial focus on food – not just the search for the next source, but on the consumption of it. And perhaps the father and son in the barn at the end of Grapes inspired McCarthy to build a novel around a boy and his father.

I may have more to say on Grapes of Wrath, since it, like The Road, inspires so much thought after the first reading, but in the meantime, I’ve moved on to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
→ July 10, 2009
→ By

The Ticket to Ride board games.

I’ll be on ESPN Radio in a few minutes here, and on ESPN 1000 in Chicago around 9:25 pm CDT tonight.

Ticket to Ride is a series of board games from Days of Wonder, a U.S.-based game company that makes games that rival the top games coming out of Europe (mostly Germany). The original version of the game won the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award in 2004, spurring a series of expansions and spinoffs. Over the course of two months, I’ve played the original game with its main expansion, one spinoff, and a spinoff of the spinoff.

The original Ticket to Ride is the simplest, even with the 1910 Expansion. The game board shows the U.S. and Canada, with about 30 cities connected by train tracks of varying lengths. Each player receives 45 trains and begins with a handful of “destination tickets,” with two cities and a point value that represents the minimum number of trains required to connect them; if you complete a route between two cities on a ticket, no matter how convoluted the path, you receive the number of points shown on the card, but if you fail to complete it, you lose that many points. (You do have some flexibility around the tickets you keep.) The tracks come in different colors, and you have to collect train cards of each color to be able to lay trains on those tracks; the longer the track between two adjacent cities, the more points you receive for placing trains on it. Of course, the tracks between cities are limited, so you may end up blocked from your intended route. There’s also a bonus for the longest continuous route (regardless of tickets), and in the “Mega” game variant, a bonus for completing the most tickets. It’s a pretty simple concept and everyone we’ve introduced to the game has picked it up pretty quickly, but the game is completely different each time because of the mix of tickets you receive and the way the board develops. A complete game with two people takes 30-45 minutes; a complete game with four people takes an hour or so.

The first spinoff we got was Ticket to Ride Europe, which brings the same basic mechanics to a new map, that of Europe in the early 20th century, but with several twists to make game play more complex. The differences include routes through “tunnels” (where the exact number of train cards required isn’t known until after you start building, so you may have to use as many as three extra cards) and “ferries” (which require the use of locomotives, which are otherwise wild cards that represent every color), and train stations that allow you to use someone else’s route between two adjacent cities as part of your own larger route. I found it to be slower to develop, but it requires more route-planning strategy, and the flexibility of the stations means it’s easier to adjust on the fly.

We love both of those games and would recommend them, but the one I didn’t like was the Europe spinoff for Switzerland. This map is smaller, designed for two or three people using 40 trains each (you use the trains and train cards from the Europe set, so the Switzerland expansion just comes with the board and new tickets). It was obviously issued hastily, as the instructions are woefully incomplete. Many tickets are extremely short – some require just two trains – which means you end spending a lot of time pulling new tickets, and you will almost certainly end up blocked by an opponent at some point during the game. A smaller board for a quicker game sounded appealing to us, but this implementation didn’t work for me.

Filed Under: Games Tagged With: ,
→ July 3, 2009
→ By

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game.

Recent radio: My first-ever appearance on the BS Report; today’s hit on our Seattle affiliate; yesterday’s hit on Mike and Mike in the Morning (complete with goofy custom song).

I’ll be on KTAR Phoenix tonight at 7:10 pm local time, and on ESPN 1000 in Chicago at 9:40 pm local time.

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game is the second book in William Kennedy’s Albany cycle, which started with Legs (which I didn’t like) and continues with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed. Legs was a fictionalized story of bootlegger Legs Diamond’s rise and fall in the Albany underworld, but the use of a real person limited Kennedy’s ability to craft an actual plot, leaving him instead to fit his words around actual events. In Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Kennedy can create something from whole cloth – the story of the title character’s unwilling involvement in a major Albany kidnapping, his fall from grace, and his surprising redemption.

Although the setting is the 1930s, evoking thoughts of hard-boiled detective novels, Kennedy’s style is more expansive than the typical dry hard-boiled writer’s, from longer sentences to allusions to music, novels, and poetry, such as this passage where one character, a playwright, quotes Yeats:

Young people rode together in the summer in open carriages. They held hands and walked around the spectacular Moses fountain. Martin’s father stood at the edge of these visions, watching. This is no country for old men, his father said. I prefer, said Edward Daugherty, to be with the poet, a golden bird on a golden bough, singing of what is past.

The passage is a memory of Martin Daugherty, a friend of Billy’s and the second protagonist in two plot lines that intertwine throughout the book. Martin’s is more introspective and sentimental, while Billy’s has more action, relatively speaking, although the bulk of the big action takes place off-screen. Both characters face existential questions, revolving around family, both real and the constructed “family” of the McCall crime organization.

Kennedy’s prose is strong, and was markedly improved over that of Legs. He provides just enough imagery to set the scene and evokes that hard-boiled feel with text that’s one step above sparse. Billy Phelan’s also has more comic elements, and Kennedy is certainly not above a bit of slapstick or even bathroom humor, including the book’s funniest passage, one that has nothing to do with the main plot:

And Cottrell and Leonard and the mannequins in the window. Two bums broke that window one night, drunked up on zodiac juice, everybody’s bar dregs, beer, whiskey, wine, that old Lumberg kept in a can and then bottled and sold to the John bums for six bucks a gallon. When the cops caught up with the bums, one of them was dead and the other was screwing the mannequin through a hole cut in its crotch.

After fighting my way through Legs, I tore through this book, and was even satisfied by the unconventional (and slightly ironic) ending.

Next up: Back to the TIME 100 with Henry Green’s Loving, part of a three-book volume that includes his earlier novels Living and Party Going.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ June 12, 2009
→ By

Nine new-ish songs.

I’ll be on our Chicago affiliate with Chuck Swirsky tonight, but I’m taping it before the show so I’m not sure exactly when it will air.

Anyway, I have discovered that there is one substantial benefit to XM (Sirius XM, XM Sirius, whatever the hell they’re calling themselves this week) – an hour or so of their alternative stations usually gives me a half-dozen songs I like enough to purchase. Of course, listening for an hour a week is sufficient, so I’m not about to renew my subscription (which I let lapse in 2006), but I get it via DirecTV at home and occasionally in rental cars, which is how I came across these songs.

Ida Maria – “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked” (video)

Arresting title, for starters. Ida Maria is a Norwegian singer who has a smoky voice and exudes a woman-on-the-verge vibe throughout the song (“What the hell do I do that for?) and seems to have some issues to work through (“I like me so much better when you’re naked”). The unbalanced lyrics ride on top of an upbeat, sparse guitar/drum backing. Good luck getting this out of your head.

Tokyo Police Club – “Your English Is Good” (video)

The shoutalong intro is kind of menacing – “Oh give us your vote/give us your vote/If you know/what’s good for you” – and the generally obnoxious lyrics, complete with snotty delivery, are backed by an Arctic Monkeys kind of rapid Britpop/punk guitar riff.

Men Without Pants – “And The Girls Go” (no video, but the whole song is here)

Best band name I’ve heard all year, and it turns out it includes Dan the Automator (of Gorillaz, Handsome Boy Modeling School, and Dr. Octagon fame). It’s delightfully trashy rock, deliberately underproduced so it has a garage feel, with a guitar riff that never quite resolves so you’re given the sense that you’re listing to one side as you listen. That’s a good thing, by the way.

Rise Against – “Audience Of One” (video)

I was familiar with Rise Against from their acoustic song “Swing Life Away” but hadn’t heard any of their regular material until I heard this on XM. It’s solid-average, plays up a little with some good tempo changes and unusually sharp lyrics (not just for neo-punk but for rock in general), with the opening stanza, “I can still remember/the words and what they meant/As we etched them with our fingers/in years of wet cement” the first of a handful of strong images which, really, is about all it takes to rise above the lyrical level of the average rock song.

Living Things – “Oxygen” (video)

I had Living Things pegged as a one-hit wonder – and it wasn’t even a big hit or a particularly great song – after their terse and kind of juvenile anti-war song “Bom Bom Bom,” which hit #21 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart in 2005, but this is definitely a step up for them in the songwriting department. It has a stronger hook and a wave of sound behind a chorus that features some actual singing that wasn’t present on “Bom Bom Bom.”

Editors – “Blood” (video)

This song is actually from 2005, but I didn’t hear it at all until last year and didn’t think it worth buying until the second or third time I caught it. It’s very Joy Division/Interpol, and if you don’t like those bands, I don’t think there’s anything I could tell you about this song that would make it worth your while. Mostly I just wanted to mention that I was sure the first line in the chorus was “Blood runs through your feet,” when in fact, it’s “Blood runs through your veins,” so either the Brummie accent pronounces “vein” with a long “e” or my ears are shot to hell.

Franz Ferdinand – “No You Girls” (video)

They write good songs – I doubt you needed me to point this out. I was thinking the other day about how FF are kind of like Stone Temple Pilots in that, while you weren’t paying that much attention, they’ve racked up a bunch of good singles that would make a pretty strong greatest-hits album if the record company was in the mood for a money-grab. STP was there after four albums; FF might not even need that long.

Cage the Elephant – “Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked” (video)

CtE seems like your basic college jam band, which really isn’t my style, but the slide guitar riff and the vocalist’s half-rapped/half-drawled delivery had me singing the song to myself at the SEC tournament despite the fact that I didn’t think I even liked it. The lyrics aren’t especially clever – the singer meets a prostitute and a mugger and sees a crooked priest on TV, territory I’m pretty sure we’ve covered before. Apparently the song went top 40 in the UK last year but just started getting radio play here in the last few months.

Matt & Kim – “Daylight” (video)

Picked this one up a few months ago – I’m a sucker for a good call-and-response song, and this one comes with a shuffling percussion beat for a sort of minimalist punk-pop sucker-punch in just under three minutes.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , ,
→ May 8, 2009
→ By

Sacramento, Oakland, Palo Alto eats.

Klawchat is tentatively scheduled for 1 pm EDT Friday. I’ll also be on the Herd around 1:40 pm, which will be taped.

I bounced around northern California a little last week and found a few spots worth highlighting. The find of the trip was Bakesale Betty in the Telegraph/Temecula District of Oakland, a recommendation from a scout who shall remain nameless but whose culinary credibility went through the roof, because BB is a 70. They’re known for their fried chicken sandwich, which includes a large portion of perfectly fried chicken breast, about half the thickness of a whole breast, spicy, crispy, and not really greasy. It’s served with a big dose of a cabbage-based slaw in a mild vinaigrette and served on a slightly dense white mini-baguette. I told the cute girl taking my order that “I was told I need to order a fried chicken sandwich and a lemon ice,” but they were out of lemon ice. That may be why I got the to-die-for just-out-of-the-oven molasses spice cookie for free, although I prefer to believe that it was my stunning good looks and winning smile that sealed the deal. Sandwich + bottled Tejana iced tea were about $8.50. Srsly.

I also had two hits in Sacramento, one dinner, one breakfast. Dinner was at Kathmandu Kitchen, a Nepali restaurant on Broadway in the middle of a sort of ethnic restaurant row, two or three doors down from an Ethiopian place called Queen of Sheba that has a good reputation. At Kathmandu, I tried the vegetable sampler, which was, surprisingly, enough food to fill me despite the absence of meat. The platter comes with two samosas, five momos (a steamed dumpling with a thick doughy wrapper), dal (lentil soup), bhat (as far as I could tell, just white basmati rice), naan, green beans with a little chili pepper, and five different sauces/chutneys – one with mint, one with tomatoes, one with tamarind, one that was sweet like a fruit preserve, and one that was yogurt-based. The samosas, momos, and green beans were all intensely flavored, although the momos were too heavily flavored, with a fragrant (cardamom?) note that I didn’t like. The dal was thinner than what I’ve had at Indian restaurants, but I don’t know if this is authentic to Nepali cuisine. The naan was a little dry, but I don’t know if there’s a white bread product on the planet that I don’t like. The only real failure was the chai, which I found undrinkable, but again, may be suffering from a lack of acquaintance with authentic Nepali cuisine. Solid 50, leaning towards 55 for good service.

Breakfast – twice – was at Cafe Bernardo, a funky upscale bar/restaurant that does fancy breakfasts right but charges pedestrian prices. I tried the Belgian waffle, with a pecan butter that I could eat by the pound; the amaretto French toast, with very high-quality bread and toasted (slightly overtoasted) almonds, and a portion that exceeded my gastric capacity; and the chicken apple sausage, split in half and grilled, not dry and just a little spicy. Order tea and for $2.75 you’ll get a pot with loose leaves and at least four cups’ worth of tea in it. Street parking abounds but there are meters. It was just about full on Saturday morning at around 9 am, but half full the day before at around 8:30. It’s a 50/55 as well.

One bad meal in Sacramento came at New Canton, also on Broadway, a very popular dim sum restaurant. I had four dishes; two were good, two were hot, and if you did the Venn diagram on those the intersection would be the null set. I gave up for fear that dish #5 would be the one that poisoned me.

I was in Palo Alto for the Wheeler/Storen matchup and ate two meals there. The Counter is an upscale burger bar on California Avenue with a build-your-own shtick similar to that of Blu Burger in Phoenix, although the Counter uses Angus beef instead of American Kobe. It’s apparently a nationwide chain, although I didn’t know it at the time and have never seen one before. The ingredient quality was good, and the portions of toppings were generous (I’m going from memory but I believe I had their soft herbed goat cheese, sauteed mushrooms, roasted red peppers, mixed baby greens, and grilled onions), so much so that half of them slid off the burger as I ate. The problem was that I ordered the burger medium, which they say is their default option, and got one that was well-done. I mentioned this to the bartender, who called the manager over, who took one look at the burger and told me it was on the house. She mentioned that it was “two in a row” for the kitchen, so someone got in a little hot water that day. I might not have said anything, but the burger was pretty dry from the overcooking. I’ll give them some benefit of the doubt because the ingredients were good and the manager was hopping mad about the issue, so at least they take it seriously.

So, spending less than expected on lunch, I decided to go a little upscale for dinner and hit a fancy Cuban place on California, La Bodeguita del Medio for dinner, which was a dud. I ordered masitas, which is usually a dish of marinated pork shoulder chunks that have been slowly braised until tender; the chefs at La Bodeguita apparently feel that trimming the fat off the meat is for sissies, and the meat appears to have been cooked too quickly at too high a temperature, resulting in meat that fell apart but was dry. The meat and caramelized onions were sitting on the rice and black beans, which ended up swimming in sauce. I had asked the waiter how spicy the dish was, and he said “mild,” which was an outright lie. And the place isn’t cheap. I guess it’s a 40 – really, you want to find someplace better, but in a dire emergency it’s playable, like if your star restaurant is closed for 50 days for using a banned substance.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
→ May 2, 2009
→ By

First Among Sequels.

I’ve said many times that i’m a huge Jasper Fforde fan, but I tend to save his books for long flights because they make the time pass so much more quickly. I’d been saving the fifth Thursday Next novel (technically the sixth, but The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco is no longer available) First Among Sequels for over a year and finally tackled it this week, knocking it off in about four hours of active reading time. Fforde, after saying he was done with Thursday Next and banging out a Nursery Crimes novel, is back in top form.

First is, as the title implies, the beginning of a second tetralogy involving Thursday Next, the literary detective who has the ability to jump from our world to BookWorld, the parallel universe of books – all books, in fact, organized in clusters like galaxies in our universe. Fforde has expanded the range of subjects he’s either satirizing or borrowing, including international politics, global warming (England has a “stupidity surplus,” and one proposal is to buy offsets in particularly stupidly-run countries), reality television, tax policy, and astrophysics. At the same time, he continues to show and even improve on the breadth of books folded into his novel, with a meeting in a tea room from Summer Lightning, an escape through the core containment center (that’ll make sense when you read it) of Cold Comfort Farm, a potentially fatal change to an Agatha Christie novel, and conversation with two crickets (one the main cricket, the other his stunt double) from Pinocchio. Thursday takes on a trainee Jurisfiction agent and has to deal with corruption (as usual) in both BookWorld and in England. And there’s some carpeting to be done as well.

There is, however, a more serious streak to First than there was in any of his six prior books in this and the Nursery Crimes series. Fforde’s alternate-history timeline starts to mirror ours in an uncomfortable way, with declining book readership caused by shrinking reader attention spans and the concomitant rise of increasingly inane reality television shows. (The always popular Name That Fruit looks intellectual by comparison.) He also uses the emotional connections we develop with books and with characters to underpin a key plot twist, thus advancing an argument that books provide us with an experience that is hard, if not impossible, to achieve through other means.

Oh, and various entities try to kill Thursday throughout the book, and one of those plot lines isn’t resolved and (I imagine) will roll through the next three books in the series.

First is a glorious jumble of plot lines and twists with the usual mixture of literary rumor, bad puns (such as the researcher Anne Wirthlass), and snark (Harry Potter’s name comes up in one of the better gags). If you haven’t read any of the series before, go back to The Eyre Affair to start – and really, before you do that, you should probably take a spin through Jane Eyre (or, at worst, just rent one of the many film adaptations), since knowing that plot will make the key twist in Fforde’s book about eight times funnier.

Next up: I’m reading a collection of Chekhov’s short stories while also listening to an audio version of The Reader.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 11, 2009
→ By

Lonesome Dove.

Winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is a broad epic of the American West covering the hardships – many self-inflicted – of settlers and would-be settlers moving into the western plains. The focus is on a pair of former Texas Rangers – the original kind – leading a cattle drive from southern Texas all the way to the unsettled territory of Montana, with each of a half-dozen major characters getting his or her own storyline.

McMurtry’s great skill is in that ability to splinter the story without destroying the narrative greed of the novel. As a new major character is introduced, McMurtry carves out a new plot line, although they all eventually intersect and not always in credible ways. Each of the major characters is deep and complex and given adequate “page time” to give the reader the full sense of the man or woman – particularly Gus McCrae, who would probably make my list of the top 20 protagonists in any novels I’ve read, with a shot at the top 10 – and even the secondary characters were three-dimensional with perhaps the lone exception of the biggest villain, the murdering Native American named Blue Duck.

Lonesome Dove is mammoth – I think it’s the third-longest novel I’ve ever read* – but the variety of storylines and significant quantity of dialogue kept it moving. Where the novel was light, for me, was in what I usually call literary value. When reading most books I can pick up on themes or metaphors without really trying; my wife, an English major in college, always tells me that if you have to work that hard to find them, they’re probably not there at all. Without that, Lonesome Dove felt more like great popular fiction than great literature, which isn’t a bad thing, but it makes it hard for me to rank the book as highly as some of my favorite novels, which had the same evocative prose and intriguing characters as Dove but add more weight from the themes they tackle.

*My best guess at the longest novels I’ve read, going by pages since word counts aren’t available for some of the titles:

1. Don Quixote – originally published as two books, now sold as one; over 1000 pages
2. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – over 1000 pages
3. Lonesome Dove – roughly 940 pages
4. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling – 860 pages of tiny print
5. The Pickwick Papers – 840 pages of not-much-larger print
6. Vanity Fair – over 800 pages
7. The Sot-Weed Factor – around 750 pages
8. Anna Karenina – over 700 pages
9. The Woman in White – around 650 pages
10. The Three Musketeers – around 650 pages

Oddly enough, all of those books that I had read before assembling the Klaw 100 are on the list, and all ten will probably be on the next iteration.

Part of why McCrae was my favorite character was his slight obsession with food, not the least his ten-year-old sourdough biscuit starter. One wonders how cowboys lived so long on diets that would make the food Nazis at CSPI have aneurysms, but reading about them certainly put me in the mood for southern breakfasts.

Since I have nothing else intelligent to say on this novel, I’ll just move along and mention that I’m following up one of the longest novels I’ve read with one of the shortest, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ March 30, 2009
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The Soul of Baseball.

If you’re here, you’ve probably already read Joe Posnanski’s The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America (still just $5.99 hardcover at amazon.com), so I’m not going to belabor the point – it’s a great, great read, much more than a simple baseball book, but more of a biography of a human being.

JoePo followed Buck O’Neil around the country for a year as O’Neil stumped for the Negro Leagues Museum and more generally worked to preserve the memory of the Negro Leagues as real baseball, rather than the minstrel show of the Hollywood depictions of those Leagues. Along the way, the two men ran into a handful of other former Negro Leaguers and gave us a window into their memories, some told by the players themselves with others retold through Joe’s voice. Some are hilarious, some touching, some downright sad.

O’Neil’s personality – his soul, really – dominates the book, which at times seems to border on magical realism with the incredible effect that O’Neil has on other people, most of whom are complete strangers, and his perceptions of others even based on a look or a few sentences. At the book’s close, my overwhelming thought was, “Wow, I wish I had met him.”

It’s hard to compare it to Lords of the Realm, which I’ve always called my top baseball book, but I’d say I enjoyed The Soul of Baseball more – it’s a serious book but has substantial entertainment value, particularly from the stories about other characters like Satchel Paige, but also from the glimpses into the (then) current lives of Willie Mays, Monte Irvin, and the questionable Johnny Washington.

Next up: Lonesome Dove.

Filed Under: Nonfiction, Sports Tagged With: , , ,