→ March 25, 2009
→ By

The City and the Mountains.

José Maria de Eça de Queirós is, according to several sources (including Encyclopedia Britannica and novelist Jose Saramago), considered Portugal’s greatest novelist, yet his works are apparently just now becoming available in English. He introduced realism to Portuguese literature and idolized Flaubert and Balzac while earning comparisons to Zola.

His novel The City and the Mountains, published in Portugal a year after his death and recently translated by Margaret Jull Costa, is a fable wrapped in a paean to natural and rural living. The story revolves around the narrator’s lifelong friend, Jacinto, who lives in luxury in Paris surrounded by high society and machines designed to make his life easier, yet who is miserable and dying of ennui until a chance occurrence recalls him to his ancestral home in the fictional countryside town of Tormes, Portugal.

The novel begins in in Paris (the City) and ends in Tormes (the Mountains), moving from a satire of the decadent and spiritually bankrupt Paris of the late 1800s to the pure, honest, yet feudal society of the still-agrarian Portuguese country. Jacinto’s life in Paris is one of misadventure more than adventure, especially as his machines malfunction, leading him to try to acquire bigger and more complex machines to replace them. Eça de Quierós lampoons the opulence and conspicuous consumption of Parisian society with depictions of over-the-top parties and empty-headed aristocrats as Jacinto drifts unwittingly into soul-crushing despair. Even the religion of the wealthy city-dwellers is perfunctory and perhaps faithless, more concerned with status and the religious hierarchy than questions of piety and charity.

Yet a chance event in Tormes beckons him home, a trip for which he tries to pack as many of his earthly possessions, fearing (ironically) boredom in the isolated hillside town where his family estate lies. After the comic misadventures of the multi-day train trip with the narrator, Zé Fernandes, they arrive in Tormes and Jacinto gradually rediscovers himself, according to Zé:

I forthrightly compared him to an etiolated plant that had been shriveling up in the darkness, among rugs and silks, but which, once placed outside in the wind and the sun and watered profusely, grows green again, bursts into flower and does honor to Mother Nature! … In the City, his eyes had grown crepuscular, as if averted from the World; now, though, there danced in them a noon-tide light, resolute and generous, content to drink in the beauty of things. Even his moustache had grown curly.

Yet Tormes isn’t quite the paradise Jacinto first believes it to be, as the income disparity that was hidden from view in Paris is out in the open on his family’s vast estate. Jacinto himself decides to take on the role of social reformer in the face of opposition from the caretakers, standing in as symbols of the old way of life. It is, in many ways, a call to action to readers who have lost their spirits in the great cities of the time: return to the country, to nature, to your faith, and to your humanity. Even if the setting is dated, the disconnect with nature and the emotional desolation of city life is more than ever a part of our society (and I say that as an unabashed fan in many ways of great cities).

Eça de Queirós litters the book with direct and indirect allusions to literary works, particularly Don Quixote (also a tale of two friends on a quest) and Homer’s The Odyssey (also a quest, one where the main character, like Jacinto, returns at the end to the place of his birth). The two main characters read and re-read these works, and Zé does comment on the parallels between their quest and those of the stories they read, but Eça de Queirós imbues his characters’ quest with a more urgent meaning while still bringing much of the comic brilliance of Cervantes, perhaps even more impressively since he doesn’t get to use the obvious dim-bulb jokes on which Cervantes could rely.

I was talking to We’ve Got Heart’s Kristen H. about the book, and she brought up The Alchemist. I found The City and the Mountains to be a better book overall, with a stronger plot and much better prose, while also offering a powerful message, one with both mundane and spiritual elements.

Next up: Our friend Joe Posnanski’s The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America, still just $5.99 hardcover at amazon.com.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ March 14, 2009
→ By

Pizzeria Bianco.

Links first – my blog entries on Team Japan are here and here, the latter featuring a writeup of Yu Darvish.

Last night, I finally made it to Pizzeria Bianco, perhaps the best pizzeria in the United States. Chef/owner Chris Bianco won a James Beard Award for “Best Chef in the Southwest” in 2003. His restaurant earned a 29 rating (out of 30) from Zagat’s. Food writer Ed Levine called Bianco’s creations the best pizza in the United States. Jeffrey Steingarten called it the best in the world. Peter Reinhart echoed these sentiments in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.

Who am I to argue? It was otherworldly.

The first bite I took of his margherita pizza – tomatoes, homemade mozzarella, and basil – was a Proustian moment, where memories of my last trip to Italy, made ten years prior, all came rushing back so fast that they were crowding each other out to take center stage in the theater of my mind. One bite and I was there, in Genova eating outside in an osteria, in Firenze in a trattoria one level below ground, in Rome, in Assisi, there and everywhere. I have never in my life had a food experience bring back such a torrent of memories.

The pizza nearly defies description; it must be tasted to be understood. The crust is amazing, puffy and blistered at the edges yet soft and airy inside, reminiscent of great naan in texture but thinner with that ideal near-cracker texture in the center of the pizza. The fresh mozzarella was firm, smooth, and – thank God – sufficiently salted, also the best we’d ever had. The tomatoes were bright red and sweet, and the olive oil that came both with the bread and with the insalata caprese was bright and fruity and drinkable straight from the bowl, although I admit I didn’t do this for fear of making a scene. We also tried the Biancoverde pizza, featuring mozzarella, Parmiggiano-Reggiano, and ricotta cheese and topped with peppery arugula; it was more of a knife-and-fork pizza because the dough couldn’t support all of the toppings, but the combination of creamy mozzarella, salty Parmiggiano-Reggiano, tangy ricotta, and spicy arugula was sublime.

The restaurant itself is tiny, with around a dozen tables and a bar with a handful of seats, and a good chunk of the real estate in the building is taken up by Chris’ kitchen and brick oven, which means that you can shower him with gratitude after you’ve experienced his pizza. From chatting with him and reading about him (here and here and here), I understand now that that is what he wants – to have you not just eat the food or enjoy it, but to experience it, to leave having had a magical experience that reminds you – as it did me – of how wonderful food can be.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 24, 2009
→ By

Manhattan: Cuban food and chocolate pie.

Had to go to Manhattan for a meeting on Monday and then walk ten blocks to do a TV hit, and in between the two was a Cuban place called Sophie’s, one of a chain of six in midtown and downtown Manhattan. It compares favorably to Versailles in Los Angeles, which (according to several of you) is itself a pretty good spot for Cuban food.

Sophie’s has a funny setup – the one I went to, on Lex between 40th and 41st, has a small seating area with table service, but also has a cafeteria-style line for people who want their food to go. I sat down and ordered one of their regular platters (as opposed to one of the four specials, which vary depending on the day of the week), the roast pork. Most of their platters include a meat and two sides for $8; I went with yellow rice and black beans, and then ordered a dish of maduros on the side for another $1.50. The pork had outstanding flavor and I got plenty of end meat, although the center was a little bit dry. The pork at Versailles came in a tart mojo sauce, which probably was the reason the meat there didn’t dry out in the middle. The yellow rice was … well, it was rice, but it was fresh rice, and didn’t have any hard or dried-out grains because it had been sitting for too long. The maduros weren’t hot, but were sweet and well-browned. They serve the fruit/dairy concoctions called batidas, but I was only willing to be so full before going on TV.

Also worth mentioning – the Mississippi Mud Pie from the Little Pie Company. It’s sort of like the darkest, richest brownie batter you’ve ever tasted, served in an Oreo cookie crust. A bit outrageous at $22 for an 8″ pie, but it is decadent and there’s no trace of milk chocolate (better known as “chocolate for people who don’t like chocolate” or “sissy chocolate”) anywhere in it.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 21, 2009
→ By

Ballad of the Whiskey Robber.

In a comment on my October 2007 post listing my 25 favorite nonfiction books, reader Dennis suggested Julian Rubenstein’s Ballad of the Whiskey Robber. Win.

The book tells the true story of a Transylvanian man who escapes Ceaucescu’s regime and ends up in Budapest, where he becomes a pelt smuggler, pen salesman, Zamboni driver, backup hockey goalie, and, in the end, the most successful bank robber in Eastern Europe, all while Hungary is undergoing the painful transition from communist rule to democracy and a market economy. It is a non-fiction novel of the highest order – by all accounts, completely true, and yet built around a character so rich and fascinating that he seems like he had to have come from someone’s imagination.

The “Whiskey Robber,” Attila Ambrus, was so named because he would get hammered on whiskey before each bank job, but was also a meticulous planner and athletic enough that his hockey teammates referred to him as the “Chicky Panther.” He’s the protagonist and hero, but isn’t entirely sympathetic; aside from the whole stealing thing, he’s a spendthrift, a gambling addict, and an alcoholic, and he becomes reckless with his gun in the last few robberies before he’s captured. He’s struggling to overcome a lousy start in life – his mother walked out when he was one, and his father was cold, distant, and would beat Attila when drunk – but also has strong powers of rationalization. He’s clever and charming – many tellers whose employers he had robbed wouldn’t testify against him or testified that he was kind and courteous during the robberies – but, of course, he’s a thief.

Rubenstein balances Attila’s story with that of the Budapest police force, which chased Attila for six years, during almost all of which time they had little idea of who the Whiskey Robber was. Rubenstein depicts the police force as undermanned and underfunded, a popular second-guessing target for politicians in Hungary’s ever-unstable governments, asking for help from above and from the FBI’s office in Budapest but never receiving it. Attila became a particular thorn in the police’s side thanks to Kriminalis, a popular TV show in the mid-1990s that discussed major criminal cases of the day, a sort of Hungary’s Most Wanted but with a more tabloid feel; the show made Attila into a folk hero, as did Hungarian rapper Ganxsta Zolee*, who (without realizing he was already friends with the Whiskey Robber) recorded a popular song that proclaimed “The Whiskey Robber is the king!”

*The video in that link isn’t for the song about the Whiskey Robber, which I couldn’t find, but Zolee’s entire look in that video is just priceless. I’m sure Cypress Hill would be flattered.

The book’s greatest strength is Rubenstein’s apparent thoroughness. To construct this narrative, covering six years of robberies plus Attila’s life before his first bank job (which was actually in a post office), he would have had to talk to an inordinate number of people involved in the saga, from Ambrus himself to his ex-girlfriends to his hockey teammates to the detectives who came and went while Attila kept on robbing. The level of detail gives the story a rich, novelesque feel and that plus its scoundrel hero are probably what has given the book such a strong cult following.

I listened to the audio version of Ballad, which was the subject of a story in the New York Times a a few years ago because it was a DIY project: The publisher of Ballad didn’t want to pay to produce an audiobook, so the author cobbled together a cast of famous fans of the book and some studio time and did it himself. In some ways, it’s a blast: The characters, particularly Attila, develop more personality over the course of the book because they’re voiced individually.

I hate to criticize Rubenstein, since he read the book himself out of necessity rather than choice, but his oral style is not ideal. He reads the book in a drab, descending tone, even during chase scenes or other exciting sequences. He also mispronounces a lot of English words, like victuals (he says it as it’s written), closeted (“cl?-ZEHT-t?d”), and the old Italian currency lire (“leer”), which had me wondering whether he’d mispronounced any of the Hungarian words and names as well. These things bug me. YMMV.

Incidentally, Attila now has a myspace page. He can’t use a computer or receive mail in prison, but he apparently updates this during his allotted phone time by telling whoever’s updating the page what to write. There’s not that much of interest on there other than a video allowing you to see what a Chicky Panther looks like. I do like that he lists I, Claudius as his favorite book; I wondered if the prison library also has the sequel, Claudius the God.

I don’t read enough nonfiction to update that top-25 list often, but if I was to redo it today, I’d slot Ballad second, behind only Barbarians at the Gate.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ February 20, 2009
→ By

Catch-22.

I’m going to bet that of all the books on the Klaw 100, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is one of the five most-read among dish readers. The book, which appears on several greatest-books lists (it’s #7 on the Modern Library 100, #15 on the Radcliffe 100, #74 on the Guardian 100, and on the TIME 100) certainly seems like a book that many of us read during our high school or college years, whether or not it was assigned reading, simply because it was so damn funny and its status as one of the “it” books of its era never fully went away, the same way Catcher in the Rye has maintained its cachet after forty years*.

*I’m going to steal a page from JoePo today and insert some asides. I was accused in chat in a question I didn’t post of being “anti-cliché” because I didn’t like Catcher. I don’t really know how those two things are connected – neither Salinger nor his novel seem clichéd to me – but, more to the point, is anyone actually pro-cliché? Romance-novel publishers? Slasher-film producers? Actually, a few mainstream sportswriters come to mind so I’ll stop here.

Catch-22 is now one of only a handful of novels I’ve read twice, a list that also includes Pride and Prejudice (didn’t like it in high school, read Emma as an adult and loved it, re-read P&P and realized I’d missed all the wit the first time), Things Fall Apart (first read it at 13, didn’t get the point at all), and The Great Gatsby (just because). I think Catch-22 earns the prize for the longest gap between readings – I first read it in the fall of 1989*, which means it’s been an almost-unthinkable almost twenty years since my first trip through the dystopian anti-war masterpiece.

*I can tell I’m going to beat this gimmick into the ground. I first read Catch-22 by choice, but as it turned out, it was an assigned book during that same school year in AP Lit. We actually had a choice of three novels – this one, Slaughterhouse-Five, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next – and while I eventually read all three, I took the easy route and wrote my paper on Catch-22.

The funny part of this story is that that class, taught by Mrs. Glynn, was a substantial learning experience for me beyond the books we were supposed to read. I skipped several of the books assigned in that class, including Tess of the d’Urbervilles (rented the movie, then read the book in 2005 and loved it) and An American Tragedy (800+ pages of tiny print and I know the SOB gets it in the end, I’m all set with that, used the Cliffs Notes), and consistently scored 5’s on the papers, which Mrs. Glynn graded on the AP scale. Catch-22 was one of only two books I really read word for word and cover to cover in that class, the other being Ellison’s Invisible Man. Unfortunately, while the paper was in Mrs. Glynn’s hands, she overheard me bragging to a classmate that I hadn’t read the majority of books in her class, and sure enough, on that paper, I got a 3. The lesson I took was that it doesn’t actually matter whether you do the work as long as you act like you did and present it well. I sleepwalked through college on this newfound confidence, only really working hard in math and foreign-language classes. There may also have been a lesson in my AP Lit experience in the value of keeping my mouth shut, a lesson I have never learned and promise you all that I never will.

My memory of Catch-22 was that it was a hilarious, often absurd anti-war romp, almost like an angrier, funnier Vonnegut. I remembered anecdotes, like Nately’s whore, Milo the entrepreneur, and cracks about flies in someone’s eyes. What I didn’t remember – or perhaps didn’t realize the first time through – was that it is a profoundly cynical book, satirizing and savaging more than just war, with democracy, capitalism, government, religion, and often just plain ol’ humanity all taking it on the chin and ending up bleeding on the floor. The plot is pretty thin; the novel itself is more a meandering collecting of anecdotes told in a nonlinear fashion, an effective technique for humor that left me often confused as to the order of events*, although to read and enjoy this book you don’t really need to worry too much about sequence.

*Well, except for when someone was killed – that sort of cleared things up a bit.

In fact, I’d argue that even considering the book’s deft wordplay and ironic humor, the book’s greatest comedy comes from Heller’s scene-shifting gimmick: In the middle of dialogue between two people about a third person, Heller will jump to the third person discussing the same subject without any transition whatsoever. The quotes themselves are usually funny, but the momentary disorientation – hey, he wasn’t in the room a moment ago – increases the humor.

I’ve read one of Heller’s other novels, the unusual God Knows, a sort of deathbed memoir of King David of Israel. It too uses a nonlinear storytelling device, but lacks the humor of Catch-22, and I haven’t felt compelled to read anything else by Heller.*

*From Heller’s obituary in the New York Times: “When an interviewer told Mr. Heller that he had never written anything as good as Catch-22, the author shot back, ‘Who has?'”

Next up: A collection of Raymond Chandler’s short stories, The Simple Art of Murder.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
→ February 11, 2009
→ By

The Dud Avocado.

I sat down and tried to read, but I couldn’t. After ten pages I was in a state of cold fury. Read! I didn’t want to read, it was just a substitute for living.

Funny words coming from an author (speaking through her semi-autobiographical protagonist) in the middle of her first novel, but Elaine Dundy wasn’t afraid to ruffle feathers or flout convention. Her debut (and by all accounts best) novel, The Dud Avocado, was a critical success and was popular in its day, but has fallen out of print at least once since its original publication and just returned to print in mid-2007, less than a year before Dundy died. The book earned her plaudits from Ernest Hemingway, Gore Vidal, and Groucho Marx, who wrote to Dundy:

I had to tell someone (and it might as well be you since you’re the author) how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream and guffaw (which incidentally is a great name for a law firm). If this was actually your life, I don’t know how on earth you got through it.

The novel follows American ingénue Sally Jay Gorce as she tries to make her uncertain way among the Bohemian set in Paris in the 1950s, “tries” being the operative word, as Sally Jay is hapless in just about every matter that matters, foremost among them love. She enters a tepid affair with a cartoonish and quite married Italian diplomat, falls in love with a smarmy American from her hometown, and goes on a mistake-prone jaunt with a man she’s never met but who has developed a crush on her after seeing her on stage. She has a tremendous knack for wearing the wrong thing, and is developing a habit of saying the wrong thing. Oh, and she loses her passport during a night on the town.

Dundy said in later letters and in the afterword to this most recent edition of the book that all of Sally Jay’s bad decisions mirror her own from her time in Paris, which I would imagine was a lot less funny to live through than it is to read about. The intimate connection with her scattered protagonist clearly helped Dundy infuse the character with the spirit for which she and the book are praised, but also a self-awareness that Dundy probably didn’t have as she lived through these misadventures:

Was I beginning to have standards and principles and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in the way?

There is an interesting plot beyond Sally Jay’s bad-luck-in-love escapades, and aside from the coincidence that drives the book’s final chapter or two (perhaps a comment on the inescapability of one’s destiny) the story is very tight. But it’s the humor that carries it into a class with Scoop, Lucky Jim, and your better Wodehouse novels.

Sorry to be rushing through these a bit, but I’m still two books behind what I’m reading; I’m probably a day away from finishing Rabbit, Run, after which I’m looking at a re-read of Catch-22.

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

The Quiet American.

Sooner or later one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

Graham Greene’s works are often divided into two categories which I believe were his own suggestions: his serious novels and his “entertainments,” the latter usually coming in the form of spy novels. My favorite Greene works seem to be the ones that blend elements of both styles; while The Heart of the Matter is probably his best-regarded work (it’s appears in the “second 100” in The Novel 100, made the TIME 100, and was #40 on the Modern Library 100), my favorite Greene work is Our Man in Havana, an entertainment that also satirizes the Cold War maneuvering of the great powers. The Quiet American (#67 on the Guardian 100) also straddles the line between the two forms, with a plot built around international intrigue during the Vietnamese war for independence that also poses two different questions around moral relativism.

Alden Pyle, the “quiet American” of the title, was, in life, anything but quiet; the title is twice ironic, both because Pyle was a talker and meddler and also because he’s quiet on a more permanent level when the book opens. The story then rolls backwards, told by English reporter Thomas Fowler, who recalls his first sighting of the American economic attaché:

I had seen him last September coming across the square towards the bar of the Continental: an unmistakably young and unused face flung at us like a dart. With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze he seemed incapable of harm.

Fowler becomes caught in two nets woven by Pyle, one as Pyle attempts to steal Fowler’s mistress (Fowler is married to a woman who won’t grant him a divorce, whereas Pyle is willing to marry Fowler’s mistress), the other as it becomes clear that Pyle is up to no good in his clandestine duties for an ostensibly economic mission in Vietnam. Fowler’s moral conundrum – what to do as he realizes Pyle might be dangerous – is further complicated when Pyle saves his life during a guerrilla attack on a tower where they seek refuge after their car runs out of gas.

Greene has Fowler eventually make a decision – circumstances all but force him to choose – about Pyle, but avoids casting Fowler as any sort of hero or even protagonist by making him a serial adulterer and a user of (at least) his Vietnamese mistress while having him owe his life to Pyle along the way. Even when Fowler does act, it’s passive, almost a hands-free approach that robs him of the benefit (or satisfaction?) of making a clear, morally unclouded decision.

Layered on top of the Fowler/Pyle plot is the broader and less morally ambiguous question of what the hell France and especially the United States were doing in Vietnam in the first place. Pyle stands in for the domino theory foreign policy of the United States; he’s an idealistic innocent, full of ideas he learned in school or from books (largely from his ideological idol, York Harding, of whom Fowler says, “He gets hold of an idea and then alters every situation to fit the idea”) and devoid of both real-world experience and any practical understanding of the people and culture of the country he’s supposed to save. Phuong, Fowler’s paramour and later the object of Pyle’s affection, represents Vietnam in a less than flattering light – naïve, opium-addicted, in need of protection (according to Pyle) or of economic assistance (according to Phuong’s sister), controlled by outside forces, inscrutable to both Fowler and Pyle.

It is nearly impossible to read the book now without seeing it as a powerful indictment of the U.S. war in Iraq, even though it was written fifty years prior to the 2003 invasion. (The 2004 edition, marking the centennial of Greene’s birth, includes a foreword by Robert stone that makes this connection explicit.) Greene inveighs against the involvement of a western nation in a part of the world it doesn’t know or understand where there is no direct relation to the western countries’ national interests, which parallels many arguments against U.S. involvement in Iraq. Greene oversimplifies or just misses one major argument for indirect engagement – forcing the Soviets to ramp up military spending on multiple engagements increased the strain on their economy, and may have led to the regime’s collapse in the 1980s – but is on stronger ground when he argues against grafting western mores on to non-western cultures, or when arguing that the assumption that our interests and those of local people in these foreign countries are aligned well enough to justify any military action we take or military support we provide.

I’m off to California this evening to see a high school showcase event at the MLB Academy in Compton (insert N.W.A. joke here) but should be free for one dinner in Los Angeles, so if anyone has a must-hit suggestion (sushi is always welcome – I could go to Koi, but it’s a bit out of my way) I’m all ears.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ January 6, 2009
→ By

Peter Reinhart’s bread-baking books.

Quick update first: I finished Kavalier & Clay today and hope to post a writeup before Thursday’s Klawchat, which will be at 1 pm. Also, my ranking of the top 100 prospects is tentatively scheduled to go up on January 22nd.

I got two bread-baking books by Peter Reinhart for Christmas: The Bread Baker’s Apprentice and Whole Grain Breads. Having read both and made two recipes from them, I can give both a very high recommendation.

I’ve made two recipes so far from the whole grains book: pizza dough and hearth bread, both with 100% whole wheat flour. The recipes worked as advertised, which, for bread recipes, is in and of itself remarkable. Pizza dough has long been a culinary bugbear of mine, as a pizza dough that can be stretched to authentic Italian paper-thin proportions must have excellent gluten development to avoid tearing during the stretching and shaping process. I’ve tried many recipes – including two stalwart sources, Joy of Cooking and Alton Brown – and none has worked; in fact, Reinhart argues that using table sugar in bread doughs is a waste of time, because it’s too complex for yeast to eat, which explains why Brown’s pizza dough (which includes 2 Tbsp sugar) doesn’t rise well and ends up very sweet. So for the last two or three years, I’ve bought white-flour doughs at Trader Joes and Whole Foods; I’ve tried Trader Joes’ whole-wheat dough, but it really lacks gluten and tears too easily to stretch it.

Reinhart’s whole wheat pizza doughs rolled thin enough that I could see light through them and they were almost cracker-like after baking, which is a very Italian-style pizza crust. (I do like New York-style pizza, where the dough is thicker and has a little more tooth, but Italian pizza is my favorite.) If that isn’t enough to sell you, consider this: Reinhart’s “delayed fermentation” method, which he uses for all of his breads, requires less kneading than any other bread recipes I’ve seen by relying on time, refrigeration, and the power of water to break down the starches and sugars in flour to give the dough strength and flavor.

The Apprentice book focuses on bread-making basics, with an emphasis on method and formula rather than just recipes. Reinhart discusses the twelve stages of bread-making; necessary (and unnecessary) equipment; and the science of bread, with explanations of the different types of yeast, flour, sweeteners, and so on. (The whole-grains book goes into more detail on the differences among ingredients.) He also walks you through creation of a wild-yeast starter and through the basic steps to create sponge starters like bigas and poolishes, on which he builds most of the breads in the two books.

The books include just about every yeast bread I could want to bake, including hearth breads, sandwich breads, rye breads, challah, brioche, bagels, English muffin, and baguettes, as well as several international breads with which I was unfamiliar. He also includes a few crackers, including graham crackers and seeded whole-wheat crackers, and corn bread, which is chemically leavened. Together, they form a reference work that gives a real education in the art and science of baking great bread. If you don’t care about whole-grain baking (it’s not just 100% whole wheat, but multigrain breads including all sorts of grains in flour and kernel forms), just get Apprentice, but I recommend both if you want to add more whole grains to your diet.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 29, 2008
→ By

Summer Lightning.

“Have you ever tasted a mint julep, Beach?”
“Not to my recollection, sir.”
“Oh, you’d remember all right if you had. Insidious things. They creep up to you like a baby sister and slide their little hands into yours and the next thing you know the Judge is telling you to pay the clerk of the court fifty dollars.”

I’ve waxed poetic about the joys of P.G. Wodehouse before, but I think I’m due to push those of you who haven’t dipped into one of the greatest comic writers in the history of the printed word to do so. I’ve actually started to change my opinion on Wodehouse; after years of seeing the Jeeves/Wooster series as his masterworks, I’m coming around to the Blandings Castle series as the funnier books.

Summer Lightning is the third novel in the Blandings series (although there are some short stories set in between the second book, Leave it to Psmith, and this one), although they don’t really have to be read in sequence. It might be the funniest one of the six I’ve read, because it includes all of the key characters – the Efficient Baxter, Lady Constance, Galahad Threepwood, and, of course, the Empress of Blandings – and provides enough other plot strands to move the story beyond the typical Wodehouse framework of two couples whose engagements are blocked by the poor financial prospects of the would-be groom and an eventual misunderstanding that causes one party to break it off.

The Jeeves/Wooster novels and stories are brilliant, but the Blandings Castle series’ ensemble cast gives more opportunities for humor and also avoids overtaxing characters that might seem a little thinly drawn if given too much stage time. In addition, the presence of a true villain in Lady Constance Keeble, who disapproves of every match, despises her brother Galahad and looks down on her other brother Lord Emsworth, gives the Blandings novels more narrative greed than the typical Jeeves story, where the biggest question is usually how Jeeves intends to extract Wooster from impending nuptials, although Roderick Spode and the pilfered cow creamer do stand as counterexamples.

Next up: As many of you have begged me to do, I’ve started Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 18, 2008
→ By

Nobody’s Fool.

Admin stuff for today: Chat 1 pm EST, and I’ll be on ESPN 710 in Los Angeles at 1:40 pm PST.

Sully had known Rub too long to believe this particular coincidence. He could tell by the way the young man was carrying his large head, like a medicine ball precariously balanced on his thick shoulders, that he was coming to see Sully and that he wanted to borrow money. In fact, Sully could tell just by looking at him how much Rub wanted (twenty dollars), how much he’d settle for (ten), and how long it would take for them to arrive at this figure (thirty minutes).

Sully is the ne’er-do-well protagonist of Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool, written before his Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls and something of a tune-up work, a funny and engaging novel where the reader can see the author working on his craft, particularly his prose.

Sully, né Donald Sullivan, is a sixty-year-old man living in a dying town in upstate New York, a ne’er-do-well in a community short of do-wells of any ilk, although his own brand of doing-not-well is as unique as a fingerprint. He’s surrounded by a cast of believably-crazy locals, from the dimwitted Rub of the above quote to his tightly-wound ex-wife Vera to his landlady Miss Beryl (who talks to her late husband’s picture as well as to the African mask on her wall) and her hyper-ambitious son Clive Jr. Yet Sully is most affected by one character who died before the book even began – his alcoholic, abusive father.

Russo unfolds a tableau more than he tells a straight story, although there is ultimately a central narrative thread revolving around Sully’s relationship with his father and reconnection with his estranged son, Peter, whose own marriage and career are falling apart through bad choices in a higher-rent variation of Sully’s life. The story is richer by far for the additional characters and subplots – although “subplot” sounds so perfunctory for the side stories Russo weaves so well into and around the main narrative – built around well-rounded characters living believable lives and facing difficult choices.

Many of those choices revolve around getting older, whether it’s the infirmities and occasional indignities of aging (faced by, among others, Sully and his wounded knee, and Miss Beryl and her slender threads of independence), or anticipating and then dealing with the death of a parent. Yet despite so many heavy storylines – among others, there’s a man who hunts down and nearly kills his estranged wife – Russo manages to infuse the book with humor, particularly in the dialogue. Sully is the perfect smartass, a lifelong class clown who never stops running his mouth, often to his own detriment – not that that stops him from running it.

Empire Falls is a more complete novel, with a better-rounded storyline and a more empathetic main character, but it doesn’t have the same degree of wit or slapstick as Nobody’s Fool; I preferred the former but would recommend the latter as well. And I credit Russo for acknowledging that life revolves around food by putting that most American of culinary institutions, the greasy spoon, at the center of both novels.

Next up: William Kennedy’s Legs, part one of the “Albany” trilogy that eventually earned him a Pulitzer Prize of his own.

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