Tweet in the New Year

Happy New Year!  I got some reading done over my holiday break, and my new year's resolution is to update more than once a month (on average, that is).

In my progression down the line of literature of questionable merit, I've gone from checkout line books and bargain books to clearance books.  The thing about consumerism is, even if it's destined to be a classic, or it is a classic, you can still find some version of it for less than $5 if you're patient.  I found Casablanca in the $5 movie bin at Walmart.  So, don't judge a book by it's price.

Instead, judge it by its reviews.  Most books only publish the most flattering segments of their best reviews on the literal first page or sometimes on the back of the dust jacket.  If the best they have are two word reviews, what you are reading is likely not the best summary of the reviewers thoughts on that book. And then there's the reviews for the book I just finished:

"Do you hear that? It's the sound of Shakespeare, rolling over in his grave." —The Wall Street Journal
"Sincerest apologies to Shakespeare, Stendhal, and Joyce: how were we to know it would come to this?" — Mashable.com
"A move likely to be greeted by book lovers with a mixture of horror and why-didn't-I-think-of-that jealousy." —Chicago Tribune

Well, the last one isn't so bad.  Clearly, this book must have to do with pop-culture and sensationalism.  Which is half right.  If you like the beyond Cliffs Notes, hyper-condensed versions of books and have a passing familiarity with the internet check out..........


......twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less.

Seriously.  And it gets better.  This book was written (presumably on Twitter, but seeing as I don't have an account...) by two college freshmen, Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin.  Not only are they more well-read than you, they are published in a work essentially mocking how much better read they are.  'Cause really, about a dozen of the works included I had never heard of.  Then again, I'm not an English major.

It is possible to use this book to get a feel for what one of the 83 works in the book is about.  However, judging from the ones I have read, don't expect Aciman and Rensin to stick too closely to the plot.  This is after all, meant to be a humorous book.  But if you haven't read a work, don't expect to fully understand the jokes.  Along those lines, it's possible this book could promote reading. Maybe. Nah.

This book breaks all the rules conventions.  The publishing of their bad reviews only kicks off the poking fun at the establishment.  Aciman hails Napoleon as his hero, while Rensin claims a love of all things Nixon.  The book is dedicated to the victims of the Titanic.  And all that before you even get to the introduction.

It's hard to quibble with the inclusion of poetry and plays in their list of great 'books,' but the final entry was surely intended to break their own rules—Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  And, helpfully, there's a glossary at the back for the lingo you may not be familiar with.

Well, I think it's awesome, at least.  And there's a valuable lesson to be learned.  All those plans hatched in your dorm room?  Shoulda followed through. Srsly.

Summer Classics- Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain

Mark Twain needs no introduction.  And fair warning, The Complete Short Stories took me a year to read, not a summer.  On the plus side, this collection took "complete" to heart.  Even stories that appear in longer books, but can be read stand-alone, are included.

The stories range from rambling, plotless tales to morality stories usually about the the perils of assumptions and misplaced faith.  Frequently, the story you start reading seems abandoned and you end in a completely different story altogether.  Almost all of the stories are told first person, ala the oral tradition Twain's prose mimics.  He also regularly interrupts the narrator as the author, giving his work an audited feel.

There are a few stories worth specific note.  Everyone familiar with Twain will know "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."  His first short story, it is classic Twain, but a poor representation of the breadth of Twain's style.  There are shockingly few stories that have the same countrified narration.  Twain satirizes every walk of life in America and Europe across history, and, although he brings a distinct Americanism to his writing, he comes off more cosmopolitan than you would expect.

"A Double Barreled Detective Story" is unusual because Twain interrupts to explain a joke, an interruption that lasts for several pages.  The reader is unsure if Twain's stated reasons are true (he says people wrote him about the paragraph, but there is no way to tell real author's notes from contrived ones) and why the story even needed the joke to begin with because the style shift is very dramatic for a single unconnected paragraph.  Here is the offending (yet brilliant) paragraph for your perusal (the less obvious contradiction is in bold).

"It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind Nature for the wingless wild things that have their homes in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of the woodland; the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere; far in the empty sky a solitary esophagus slept on motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of God."

Taken as a whole, Twain's short stories read like Aesop's fables, Grimm's fairy tales, and PG Wodehouse thrown in a blender, although even that doesn't hint at all the genres he spoofs.  While no single story compares to the finesse of plot and character found in his classic novels, there may not be a better Twain primer in existence.

A Written Cornucopia

Review of Secret Ingredients

As a rule, I find anthologies to be hit or miss.  Short story collections can be hard to “get into” and once I lose momentum, very hard to finish.  Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink is a winning recipe among anthologies.  Upon reading a review for this book in the Memphis Flyer, I knew I had to buy it.  Recent convert to cooking, I have long enjoyed Food Network programming.  I am also a fan of collections, liking their power to preserve knowledge in an easily referenced way, even if I have a history of losing interest halfway through.   And The New Yorker articles promised a good read. I wasn’t disappointed. 

The book is divided into 8 sections: dining out—food made by chefs, eating in— home cooking, fishing and foraging— food gathered from nature, local delicacies, the pour— wine and ketchup, tastes funny— humor, small plates— short articles, and fiction.

The way a culture prepares and eats their food speaks to their climate, terrain, traditions, history, economy, and technology.  Many of these articles, presented in chronological order within each section, draw a picture of the cultural history of the United States, France, and to a lesser extent Russia, China, Mexico, Cuba,  and Japan.  The reader experiences the change in journalistic style, food trends, advances in technology, and cultural responses to historical events like the Great Depression, all within a span of less than a hundred pages and then starts over with each section presenting different figures to tell the stories of the cooks and eaters of the past century whose influences echo into the present even when most of their names are unknown to the majority.  Secret Ingredients is a starting place for discovering classic cookbooks and movements in the world of cuisine.  Culinary celebrities like Julia Child, Escoffier, Waverly Root, Careme, and M. F. K. Fisher all appear briefly, enticing the reader to more in depth research into a field all participate in but few study.  Not to mention the great journalists, like A.J. Liebling, who introduce themselves through their work.  There is also a lot of practical advice in this anthology: which days restaurants get their food fresh, recipes for tripe, why rarer types of fruit may taste better than mega-mart standbys. 

A few of the highlights:

"The Reporter's Kitchen" by Jane Kramer illustrates how certain smells and flavors can evoke memory and even inspire a writer.  "A Forager" by John McPhee is a travelogue of a trip taken through the Appalacians woven with the personal history of his guide Euell Gibbons, a self-made naturalist via his passion for gathering wild food and a subsequent author.  "A Rat in My Soup" by Peter Hessler introduces the village of Luogang, China and its unusual restaurant specialty.

Throughout, there are numerous attempts at defining what it is that makes up good cooking.  Cooking is compared to Dada art, analyzed geographically and historically, and sexualized.  Fernand Point in Joseph Wechsberg's article states, "[T]he finest butter...that's the secret of good cooking. And time, lots of time." Time, at least, seems also to be a winning ingredient in this collection of some of the best writing about food in the last century.