46. Sci-Fi Private Eye, edited by Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg

The stories in this anthology run the gamut from Sherlock Holmes pastiches (Poul Anderson’s too precious by half “The Martian Crown Jewels” and Philip Jose Farmer’s more inventive “A Scarletin Study”) to noir/SF hybrids ranging from the hard-boiled (Tom Reamy’s “The Detweiler Boy”) to the half-baked (Wilson Tucker’s “Time Exposures”) to selections that have only the most tangential relationship to the SciFi PI theme (Robert Silverberg’s “Getting Across” as well as the two best stories in the book, Donald Westlake’s “The Winner” and Philip K. Dick’s “War Game”).

45. Up in Honey’s Room (Haiku Review), by Elmore Leonard

Nineteen Forty-Five
Butchers, cops, Nazis and spies
Chase around Detroit

44. Put a Lid on It, by Donald E. Westlake

(or, this is what happens when you start browsing casually at the library. You end up reading two books by the same author back to back. When that author is Mr. Westlake, this is by no means a hardship, but at times it makes for a less that diverse reading list)

When a presidential reelection campain is threatened by an October Surprise, the campaign committee recruits incarcerated burglar Francis Xavier Meehan to steal incriminating evidence from the other party. In exchange for his services, the committee members offer to take care of Meehan’s current legal woes. What follows is a story of robbers, politicians and spies, double crosses, star-crossed romance, and the realization that while burglars break the law it takes serious connections to get away with the really good crimes.

43. Money for Nothing, by Donald E. Westlake

Josh Redmont receives a check for $1,000 from an outfit called U.S. Agent. He cashes the check. The next month, he receives another check, which he also cashes. This continues for seven years, at which point, he is activated, and discovers he is a sleeper agent for a foreign power. What follows is a story of political intrigue, assassination plots, and Josh’s efforts to get out from under the burden of his own bad choices. A fine Westlake plot, although I would have liked to have seen more than the few offhand mentions of the young firebrand radical Josh who was unwittingly recruited into the sleeper agent ranks.

42. The Worst Movies of All Time, or: What Were They Thinking?, by Michael Sauter

Michael Sauter, you are my sworn enemy. Talking trash about Hudson Hawk made you so. That your interpretation is perhaps not wholly indefensible does not change the fact that we obviously have radically different, even conflicting, worldviews. Were we ever to meet, I imagine we could eventually find common ground in a shared appreciation of bad movies — for who could write so much on a subject he didn’t love? — although our respective definitions of “bad” would surely make for some lively disagreements. Indeed, your extensive summary of bad B movies makes you a sworn enemy with whom I might forge an uneasy peace. Plus, your book turned me on to the film Skidoo, which sounds so gloriously, all-star castardly bad, that I must track it down and experience it for myself. I figure this will either redeem you in my eyes, or fan the flames of my Hudson Hawk fueled enmity. Time will tell.

Why are you here?

Every now and again, I check the blog stats page of the WordPress dashboard for the ol’ Bowleg. Since pretty much nobody I know aside from The Lovely Wife knows about this little bit of real estate, I’m always curious how — and more importantly, why — people out there in the wide world happen to stumble across this

Yesterday, for example, I note that I had one hit, based on the search terms “robert crais, watchman.” Now, being that Mr. Crais is a reasonably popular writer, this is the latest installment in his Elvis Cole series, and there are plenty of people who log and or review books online, I’m actually somewhat surprised that it only takes 614 Google hits before one finds the link to my particular log of Mr. Crais’s The Watchman. This puts me in the top 1% of all references to the book. Take that, hit number 783!

But that’s not my point. I’m curious why someone looking for information about Mr. Crais’s latest book would dig a minimum of 624 hits in, and click through to read my pointless little trifle about the novel. Is there really anything that requires 624 hits or clickthroughs to get a comprehensive picture of what has been written about any subject? Isn’t that taking obsessive compulsiveness to an obsessive compulsive degree?

So, welcome, reader, to the 624th most relevant thing said to date about The Watchman. Onward to 623rd place!

41. It Must’ve Been Something I Ate, by Jeffrey Steingarten

See, now this book is damn funny. Still as OCD as all get out, but legitimately hi-freakin’-larious to boot.

In this follow-up to The Man Who Ate Everything, Mr. Steingarten – who I’m sure would be simpy rapturous to learn of this — cements his place as my favorite food writer of the moment. In particular, his essays on dry-aged beef, designer table salts, wedding cakes, and the proper way to prepare (and the proper critter with which to prepare) coq al vin are indispensible and supremely engaging.

40. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling

A few years back Jim’s Big Ego, one of my favorite bands, produced a New Year’s Eve song — “New Lang Syne” — appropriate for the current millennium. The chorus of the song features the lyric:

Thank god it’s over, thank god it’s over
Thank god it’s over, it’s over now

Which, it seems to me, is about all there is to say about this book, and this series. I don’t mean this negatively, merely pragmatically. It hits all the beats you would expect — triumph and tragedy, love and loss, secrets and lies and revelation — and comes down, as was inevitable to a final, and definitive, showdown. Plots and subplots are resolved, background details and characters from earlier books have moments of prominence, and as happened throughout the series, certain elements of the story feel artificially and unnecessarily protracted, while others flash by far too quickly that I might have hoped.

Without spoiling details, I will simply note that no onion rings are consumed over the course of this novel.

39. The Man Who Ate Everything, by Jeffrey Steingarten

By 1900, in Midwest farming areas, pie was obligatory at least twice a day.

Clearly, I was born in the wrong time, and in the wrong place.

In this collection of essays, Vogue magazine food critic Jeffrey Steingarten tackle everything from how to bake bread and make piecrust, to judging the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, to how to ensure you’re eating properly ripe (and ripened) fruit, and many points gastronomic in between. Along the way, he offers a contrarian’s — or perhaps it’s more accurate to say a realist’s — view of popular culinary fads and trends, from low salt and low fat to the dangers lurking in a plate of salad. He doesn’t so much debunk fads as subsitute actual knowledge for received wisdom.

The essays range from the late 1980s to the mid to late 1990s, which means that some of them show their age. A 1988 piece about cooking fish in the microwave is an remnant of its time, while his essay about the Paris bistro moderne scene in 1996 likely bears little resemblance to the current landscape. Small matter, though, for whether it is innovative and affordable French food, or Kyoto cuisine, or the mysteries of perfectly smoked pork, Mr. Steingarten’s talent is to transport the reader into the scene, and to instill in them the passionate desire for a seat at whatever table he should happen to discuss.

In reading this book, I also experienced a mini-epiphany of sorts where nonfiction books are concerned. The cover copy calls this an “outrageously funny book.” While I certainl chuckled at points, my sides remained decidedly un-split, a common experience when I read what are purported to be hilarious books. While it’s possible that this simply means I have less capacity than I believe to appreciate humor, I think it’s a somewhat different matter: I suspect that many readers who find writing like Mr. Steingarten’s “hilarious” are reacting to his obsessive-compulsive “bake dozens of loaves of bread to get it right” tendencies. To the unafflicted, this may seem funny; to someone with similar leanings, it seems all to comfortably (and occasionally uncomfortably) familiar.

38. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

This book reminds me of the Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Badge sequence from the movie A Christmas Story. There’s a whole lot of buildup and tension, culminating in a climax that more or less boils down to a post-apocalyptic version of “Don’t forget to drink your Ovaltine.”

In between, this is an oppressively bleak book about two characters walking through a post-apocalyptic world. How do you know it’s post-apocalyptic? Because the collapse of civilization apparently obliterated every comma in the known world, and most of the apostrophes as well. I’d note that the book is entirely joyless, but that goes without saying. I think it’s meant to be hopeful, or perversely inspirational, but I found it merely exhausting and overwrought, which is something of a dubious accomplishment given how spare Mr. McCarthy’s prose is.

37. The Last Colony, by John Scalzi

While I requested this book through interlibrary loan* at the same time as The Android’s Dream, I did not intend to read these books back to back. What happened is the book I intended to read between TAD and The Last Colony was so deathly dull, so unspeakably tedious, so “things you want to pound and pound with a shovel” irritating that I dropped it about eighty-five pages in, and turned to a second helping of Scalzi.

The books are different enough that I needn’t have worried about repetition or overkill. Where TAD presented new characters and situations, TLC was the conclusion of the story cycle** Mr. Scalzi began in Old Man’s War and continued in The Ghost Brigades.

Where the first book is about war, and the second about secrets (and lies), TLC is about politics and diplomacy. That is to say it’s about war and secrets and lies all rolled into one, and how the interplay of these dynamics variously costs and saves lives, maintains and shatters the status quo.

These dyamics all coverge on the shoulders of John Perry, the hero of Old Man’s War, and his wife, ex-special forces officer and The Ghost Brigades protagonist Jane Sagan. They are recruited to lead a new human colony which, unbeknownst to them is not yet another home for humans among the stars, but the linchpin of a plan to force a conflict between the human Colonial Union and the alien Conclave. Moreover, as the story progresses, Perry and Sagan learn that the plan they’re serving benefits more from their colony’s obliteration than from its success. This information makes them…unhappy…and drives them to search for a way to thwart the destructive ambitions of opponents on both sides of a game of empires.

Although this is a science fiction novel — you can tell by the space ships and the genetically engineered human warriors, and the aliens with eye-stalks — The Last Colony is a novel of ideas and situations set against a futuristic backdrop rather than a simple space fantasy. The ideas and situations advance through the actions of interesting characters and strong dialogue, but the larger issues of colonization and hegemony, expansion and isolation, war and diplomacy are timeless.

*Let’s hear it for the Western Massachusetts public library system shall we? In fact, let’s hear it for public libraries in general while we’re at it.

**I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a trilogy. While the books feature the same major characters, the situations are different enough, and the stories self-contained enough, that they can stand alone without too much reader confusion. While a reader of The Last Colony will benefit from knowing what happened in Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades, the story doesn’t depend on familarity with these details, except to the degree that a reader possessed of such familiarity may have a richer appreciation of the details behind the context information Mr. Scalzi references.

Cooking class

Entertained and inspired by Pixar’s Ratatouille*, The Kid asked me to teach her to cook. After talking it over for a bit, we agreed we would begin by trying to cook one meal a week together.

For our first foray into the world of gastronomic education, we pored through a children’s cookbook by a certain ubiquitous culinary celebrity. In our defense, I’ll note that we acquired this book at a time prior to this celebrity’s ubiquity crossing over the line into full-scale overexposure. After rejecting a few promising candidates, we settled on cold sesame noodles as our inaugural dish.

Admittedly, this was an exercise in measuring and stirring more than actual cooking, but it’s always good to begin by learning, and ultimately mastering, the fundamentals. Making the dish was educational for both of us. The Kid learned how to measure and mix and pour. She learned that sesame oil smells really good on its own, and that you can identify the distinctive taste of the oil in the finished dish. I learned that if you’re using a cookbook from someone famous for quick and convenient cooking, you have to account for the trappings of convenience.

For example, we’re a natural peanut butter household; although the recipe didn’t specify this, I must assume it was formulated using processed peanut butter. The noodles were terrific, and nicely peanutty, but they were lacking the hint of sweetness I expected from the dish. As a result, the saltiness of the tamari was a bit more assertive than I expected without any sugar to balance it out. Next time, we will either use the processed, hydrogenated oil-laden and besugar’d stuff made by the nice folks at Skiff or Jippy, or else we will add a little bit of sugar or honey to the dressing. Or a dash of duck or plum sauce maybe. Hey, I bet that would work aces.

The recipe we used called for about a cup of shredded cabbage to give the noodles some added crunch. Again, the author being a fan of speed, convenience, and short cuts, the recipe recommended using prepackaged cole slaw mix to get the job done. It worked fine, but it also left us with the better part of a package of shredded cabbage and carrot.

As it turned out, I had a fend for myself evening last night. As I was pulling a piece of leftover chicken out of the fridge, I noticed the slaw mix. In a burst of inspiration/improvisation, I created the following East-meets-Southwest fusion dish:

Bart Modern’s Barbecue-Shu Chicken

2T vegetable oil
1 medium yellow onion, sliced thin
1/2t Kosher salt
1t chili powder
1/2-1t crushed red pepper flakes
1/4c cider vinegar
2 cups shredded cole slaw mix
1/2c homemade barbecue sauce (or your favorite store-bought sauce)
1 barbecued chicken leg quarter, skinned and meat shredded off the bone. (Note: grilled pork or beef or tofu would work just as well, I suspect)

Heat the oil in a large skillet. When heated, add the onion, salt, chili powder and crushed red pepper flake. Cook over medium heat 3-5 minutes, until the onion softens and starts to brown. Add the vinegar (stand back from the pan to avoid inhaling the nasal passage scouring steam that rises when the vinegar hits the hot pan). Throw in the cabbage, stir to combine, and allow to wilt down, another 3-5 minutes, add the barbecue sauce and the chicken, and simmer until the chicken is heated through.

Serve with warm flour tortillas (I think. Didn’t actually have any on hand when I created the dish, but I think they would work fine. Of course, everyone knows that you never get enough pancakes for all the mu-shu when you order it at a restaurant, so eating it as is would be perfectly acceptable. It certainly worked for me).

*Highly recommended for animaniacs, cinephiles, and foodies alike. Should you happen to be all three, then ooh la la! We’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of the line “I killed a man…with THIS thumb!” ever since we saw the film.

36. The Android’s Dream (Haiku Review), by John Scalzi

A series of farts
Sets off a Maguffin chase
To prevent a war

The Illusionist (2006)

Here we have the other magician movie of 2006. Where The Prestige tells the story of a game of “cat and also cat” between competing magicians, the core of this film is the the interplay between Edward Norton’s Eisenheim the Illusionist and Paul Giamatti’s Chief Inspector Uhl.

Giamatti is fantastic in this role. He plays Uhl as a cross between a thinner, less corrupt Sidney Greenstreet and a non eye-poppingly intense Brian Blessed. The result is an incredibly powerful character who is both a dedicated public servant (with all the compromises to higher authority that entails) and an individual of great personal integrity. When those conflicting aspects of his character get called into conflict, Uhl’s dissipation of this tension drives the climax of the film.

Edward Norton, as Eisenheim, is solid. His motivations are simple:

love, for Jessia Biel’s Sophie, a noblewoman he has known [and loved] since childhood, but who is betrothed to Rufus Sewell’s Crown Prince Leopold;

ego, which drives him to try and win Sophie from the Crown Prince, and to use his skills as a performer to first embarrass, then challenge, and ultimately attempt to destroy, the Prince;

and loss, which drives him to make contact with the dead.

Just as Uhl navigates the shoals of his own complex character, so Eisenheim charts a course through his own motivations.

And, of course, as with any film about magicians, nothing is precisely as it seems. The problem with The Illusionist is that the things that are not what they seem that are integral to the plot are telegraphed in such a way that it becomes possible to see the trick as it is happening. So, instead of appreciating the story, the film becomes an exercise in looking behind this curtain. This is a shame, as the sloppiness of the craft detracts from the impact of the performances, and this in turn blunts Giamatti’s final scene, as Uhl puts all the pieces together.

35. Gun Shy, by Ben Rehder

It’s kind of like Christopher Buckley’s Thank You For Smoking, only about guns instead of cigarettes. It’s also got more intersecting storylines and characters than Mr. Buckley’s novel. Mr. Rehder plays fair with characters on both sides of the Second Amendment debate. Fair in this case means he satirizes the extrimism on both sides, but also that he allows characters representing a variety of viewpoints to make relatively cogent arguments about their points of view. It’s not polemical, and it likely won’t change anyone’s mind, and all of this is subordinate to Mr. Rehder telling a light, entertaining story, but it works.

34. How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, by Toby Young

This memoir recounts Mr. Young’s five years as a British expatriate journalist in New York City during the late 1990s. He came over for a job with Vanity Fair, and dreams of taking the New York social scene by storm. He proved to be wholly unsuited to both his job and his dreams. The book recounts his foibles, his failures, and his fish-like drinking habits.

Reading the book, I found Toby Young, or rather the character “Toby Young” depicted in this autobiographical story, to be fundamentally unlikeable. The problem is he isn’t compellingly unlikeable so much as he is whiny, pretentious, and childishly pleased with his own unlikeability. And yet, for all that, I finished the book, so the writer must have succeeded in winning me over just enough.