18. About Alice, by Calvin Trillin

Once again, I find myself wrestling with the question of whether the item I’m choosing to log is, technically speaking, a book.

Cover, dust jacket, pages? Check.

Words on the page, arranged in a more or less logica sequence, combining to communicate a series of ideas, to paint a textual picture, to sum up a life? Check.

Perhaps I’m thrown by the size of the volume. Seventy-eight slim pages, and that’s a generous tally once you factor in the, shall we say liberal, margins. At that size, we’re dealing with something book-ish, but an actual book? I’m still not sure.

On the other hand, it does meet the technical definition of a book. I did read it, no matter that I knocked it off in about forty minutes. So, a book it is, then.

This is not normally the sort of book I would read. It’s more sentimental than my ususal fare. It’s a summary, in a few short chapters, of what made Calvin Trillin’s late wife, Alice, so unique and important to him. Indeed, I never would have read it but for a funny domestic coincidence.

I recently picked out Trillin’s Travels with Alice at the library. Aside from an occasional New Yorker piece over the years, I’ve never read much Trillin. I know he’s well-regarded as a writer, so I decided to rectify my deficiency and give one of his books a try.

I happened to leave the book on the table. When The Lovely Wife noticed it, she called me into the kitchen and pulled About Alice from her latest library haul. Great minds, and all that. Or perhaps this was a development more in line with what’s bound to happen when you set the proverbial infinite number of monkeys to work at their infinite number of typewriters? Either way, it’s the sort of thing that happens every now and then in a marriage.

It’s the sort of silly moment Trillin might celebrate in thinking about Alice. I suspect it’s the sort of moment he misses in the wake of her passing.

Ultimately, while every human soul is unique, and every marriage doubly so, love and loss are universal, as are the obligation to appreciate the fact that every day we draw breath is a gift, and the charge to live life to its fullest, no matter how much time we have in which to live.

Hopefully, it doesn’t take a book to teach us any of that, but it’s sure nice to get a reminder every now and then.

As for the rest, @#$% it. If it meets the technical definition of a book, and I find something to say about it when I’m done, then it is a book for my purposes.

Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965)

It’s the little things that matter. As a long-standing fan of the BBC version of Doctor Who, I was less bothered by the large-scale changes in this first cinematic adaptation of the television series than I was about the little touches.

It was easy to accept the convention of calling the main character (played with dotty, if underutilized, aplomb by Peter Cushing) “Doctor Who” instead of merely “The Doctor,” as was established in the series. It was harder to accept the notion that this Doctor was a human of the absentminded scientist variety rather than a myserious and irascible alien. Both interpretations have an air of the unworldly about them, but Cushing’s ethereal demeanor seems less suited to galactic crusading than the superiority — larded with a host of other qualities in greater or lesser proportions by the host of actors who have assayed the role over the past four decades — of the television Doctor.

It was easy to accept the TARDIS as something cobbled together by a lone genius tinkering in his garage workshop. It was harder to accept the sight of the TARDIS without the accompanying TARDIS dematerialization sound effect.

It was easy to accept the Daleks as armored killing machines bent on the eradication of their enemies. It was harder to accept that they would go about the killing without uttering their familiar battle cry “Ex-ter-min-ate!”

Regardless of these small differences, the film version captures the spirit of Doctor Who, or at least the spirit of the original programs. That is to say it is a children’s program first, and a rollicking intergalactic adventure second. It’s easy to tell the good aliens from the bad aliens, even if it does take a few moments to adjust to the alien-ness of the good aliens. Adults are variously kind, bumbling, or background nuisances. When watching the film with The Kid, it was suggested that Susan, Doctor Who’s precocious granddaughter, has a lot in common with Lucy Pevensie from the C.S. Lewis Narnia books. It’s a good comparison, both in terms of character and intention.

Forty years on, the film shows its age. The internal logic — or lack thereof — of the film is shaky at best. The characters are two-dimensional, and that’s being generous. But despite it’s many shortcomings, the film still manages to have a tremendous amount of kinetic energy and a sense fun that carries it over the rough spots, provided the viewer is willing to grant Doctor Who and the Daleks some leniency.

17. A Taste of Murder, by Jo Grossman and Robert Weibezahl

I’ll confess I’m somewhat hesitant to include this on my book log for this year. Cookbooks are not exactly linear narratives. Even if one reads them straight through from cover, there is much in any cookbook that is eminently skimmable, unless one happens to be using a particular recipe. I pretty much know that most baked good recipes will begin with butter and sugar being creamed together, for example. I understand the general process by which one assembles a marinade. Unless I happen to be doing this things, I’m unlikely to give the details my full attention.

By the same token, this is a novelty — perhaps it is more accurate to call it a vanity — cookbook, which means it contains content over and above the recipes in question. Not much content, I will grant you, but enough to mean that this book involved actual engagement, and actual reading.

My own self-imposed ethical quibbles notwithstanding, this is a disappointing book. It doesn’t succeed terribly well as a cookbook. As a marketing tool for the contemporary mystery genre, it is a miserable failure.

As a cookbook, it never rises above the level of one of those self-published church fundraiser compilations. That is to say, there are a few recipes here and there that look interesting enough to try — one for coq au vin, and another for Cincinnati chili come to mind, and I’m enough of a fan of Harlan Coben’s writing that if I ever had a need to make potato latkes, I might give his version a try — but these are few and far between. The chaff to wheat ratio is depressingly high.

A good cookbook can be literature. It has an energy, and a flow, and an inexorable momentum. A vanity cookbook is merely a collection of information, loosely organized and slightly repellant. I mean this in the magnetic sense, to be sure. There is no attraction between or among recipes that helps to carry the reader along. There is no unifying voice or controlling culinary aesthetic that makes the collection make sense.

And as for the contributors, they are variously precious, self-referential, or just plain annoying. While I have no doubt author/editors Jo Grossman and Robert Weibezahl approached this book as a labor of love, I don’t imagine many readers or mystery fans approached it in the same way. I argue that the function of a book like this is to introduce potential readers to new authors whose work those readers — who are theoretically disposed to try new things in the genre — might be inclined to check out.

Unfortunately, the author/editor blurbs try too hard. Readers encounter too many variations on “My character, so and so, hates to cook, but if they had to, here’s what they might make…” or “Well, when I, the author, decided to get all cutesy and meta and ask my character for their favorite recipe, here’s what they said…” or an implicit “Here’s something that has nothing to do with my work, but since it’s easier to send you something pointless than it is to blow you off entirely, here you go, and I know you’ll use it despite it being not entirely appropriate because you have pages to fill…” The result is a collection that tells the readers nothing of substance about books and characters they might enjoy, and does it in a way that may actively turn off potential new readers. Indeed, the book is so poorly constructed that it may go so far as to turn off faithful readers based on the annoying persona adopted by their favorite authors.

All except, of course, for Anthony Bourdain. Anthony Bourdain is a badass in any medium.

16. Company, by Max Barry

Company is a well-written satire that demonstrates an honest — if exaggerated — understanding of how modern corporations work. Or don’t work, as the case may be.

Barry hits almost all the notes you would expect: clueless executives, jargon-heavy communication, interoffice romance, and managerial intrigue. In Stephen Jones, Barry gives readers a postmodern Horatio Alger hero, one who is simultaneously caught up in, and fiercely resistant to, the dynamics and machinations that surround him. And, of course, Barry populates Jones’s working world with the requisite compliment of screwball sitcom style coworkers.

The problem is that like the working world it satirizes, Company doesn’t cover any new ground. It repackages the ideas Barry developed more compellingly in Syrup and Jennifer Government in an attempt to pass them off as innovation. It’s fine as an escapist fantasy, a study of every dis- or even less than wholly-gruntled employee who ever dreams of bucking the system. It’s 1984 without the rats. It’s The Office without the cringe-inducing realization that we’ve been there, we know, may even be, those people.

The result is a book that has too much in common with far too many corporate meetings: It goes on too long. It glosses over the surface of issues, leaving too many important things unsaid. There’s a disproportionate emphasis on doughuts. Once you step away from the book, you’re not left with much to justify the investment of time you made in participating.

Haiku Review: Venture Bros., Season 2

Awesome, awesome, awe-
Some, awesome, awesome, awesome
Awesome, awesome, awe…

Haiku Review: Bullitt (1968)

Crime procedural
Great score by Lalo Schifrin
Terrific car chase

Haiku Review: Patton (1970)

Bastard? Hero? Both?
A warrior out of time
Flawless work by Scott

Brick o’ Harryhausen: The 3 Worlds of Gulliver

With this film, my grand tour of The Fantastic Films of Ray Harryhausen – Legendary Monster Series comes to an end. With The 3 Worlds of Gulliver I come to understand the phrase “not with a bang, but with a whimper.”

Eighteenth century social satire offers a poor canvas for Ray Harryhausen’s talents, at least when ranked against the scope of Greek mythology or tales from the Arabian Nights. Tricks of scale, and the occasional stop-motion crocodile simply can’t compete with centaurs and griffins and skeletal warriors and Hydrae. This would be fine if the social satire were presented in an engaging manner, but this is not the case. Jonathan Swift was a fine satirist, but not a particularly subtle one. The filmmakers adapted the content of the story, but not the intent, and the result is a flat, tedious film.