In Honor of the Books I Read Before 2012

As all you devoted readers of this blog know, I've posted about books religiously since March 2012, based on the dare a fellow RateYourMusic user sent me (and her, but she never completed it) to read a book a week in 2012. It's not as though I went from being a non-reader to being a power reader overnight, though. Here's one of many examples I'll feature on this blog of a fantastic book I read before that fateful January 2012 date:

A Great and Fateful King: Edward I and the Forging of the British Empire by Marc Morris

My post on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Out-of-all-English-monarchs-who-had-the-most-interesting-life-I-m-currently-going-through-reading-about-them-all-on-Wikipedia-in-lockdown-to-learn-about-them-Which-one-would-you-recommend-I-definitely-check-out-I-m/answer/Matthew-Gordon-7

Edward I of England (1239–1307; r. 1272–1307) was destined for greatness. He scored an early victory while crown prince in the grisly Battle of Evesham (1265), which established him as the main force standing between rebellious nobleman and his father, Henry III. Edward became king while on the Ninth Crusade, which he aborted early in order to attend his own coronation ceremony. From there, he went on to conquer substantial portions of what is now Southwestern France, conquer Wales, land a decisive blow against the Scots at the Battle of Falkirk (1298), and set off reforms of the English legal system. Refreshingly for the time, his marriage to Eleanor of Castile appears to have been a genuine love match.

More controversially, he increased the use of drawing and quartering, especially in the wake of the conquest of Wales. He also expelled the Jews from England in 1290, which modern historians have understandably listed as the worst act during his reign; to show how much times change, it was one of his most popular acts at the time.

If you want a lengthy but fast-reading book that follows one of England’s most iconic rulers through swashbuckling battles and diplomatic tensions, this one’s your bet.

I read this book 12 years ago, but it’s still so vivid to me I just wrote the above summary off the top of my head. It’ll be available on pretty much any online retailer.

If you want a biographical slice of medieval England, Morris's book is a great place to start.

A Word on New Literary Journals

As someone who's considered launching a literary journal from time to time, who follows a number of them, and is generally active in Toronto's literary community, I have a thought on new journals.

When authors look to submit to a literary journal, whether it's fiction, nonfiction, poetry, a one-act play, or a photograph they took of their favourite peony, there are only three ways to tell whether a journal is worth the effort (and/or cost) to submit:

Past issues.

Ultimately, literary journals live and die on the content they produce. While this may seem obvious, it's not as simple as saying "this journal is a SF journal, and I write SF, so I should submit" or "this journal publishes stories about the Pacific Northwest, and I write stories set there, so I should submit". Everything from the typical word count (which is often different from the maximum word count on Submittable) to the author bio format play into whether a submission is the right fit for that particular journal. There's also the niggling background question, constantly out there, as to whether any given literary journal is publishing material that is good.

The submitter's question here, that the journal has to answer, is: Do I want my story to be one of these stories?

Aesthetic.

Website design, layout and visuals are even more important in the artistic (including literary) world than anywhere else. A website like Pro Football Reference or Basketball Reference doesn't need to look good because it's an aggregation of data meant to be used by sports analysts, bettors and fans. That said, the Flash attack approach of a website like NBA.com is enough to crash a laptop. I've used sports websites here to avoid drawing attention to any particular literary journal. A good literary journal website, in its layout and its art, will draw in the reader. An additional stylistic point: typos look especially bad when you're telling your prospective authors to submit their best, most edited, work.

Self-plug time: my website, Matthew Gordon Books, is a good example of the balance between stripped-down and spiffed-up.

The submitter's question here, that the journal has to answer, is: Do I want my story to look like one of these stories?

Masthead.

The editor(s) of a literary journal are presumably living people, not bots. Their names should be on the website, either under a Masthead heading or on the submission page. Being able to Google the editor(s) allows a prospective author, or even a prospective reader (literary journals get purchased sometimes!), to see what else the editor has written and what else the author likes. For example, if I were listed on a masthead somewhere, you could quickly see, from my Quora posts and from my short story "The Aviary", that I like experimental, punchy fiction that gets straight to the point and is at or under 1,000 words. My educational and professional backgrounds are also easy to find if you dig a little. If you graduated from my alma mater, tell me that!

The submitter's question here, that the journal has to answer, is: Do I want my story to be published by these people?

The above three criteria are especially important when a literary journal is either set to release its first issue, requires payment along with submissions, or especially both.

If you have no past issue to show, and no one can tell who you are, yet you are expecting money along with submissions... I can't imagine who would even fork over $5 because some unknown person might publish a literary journal at some point. You can buy a sandwich for that.

The Bacon Pepper Bind

In the spirit of my ongoing and updating COVID-19 menu, I invented a new dish yesterday. Self-isolation and sheltering in place mean more slow-roasting; who has the time to leave a roast in the oven for hours on a workday? This time, I've concocted a cross between a jalapeno popper and a turducken.

The Bacon Pepper Bind

Ingredients:

• 1 bell pepper
• 1 jalapeno
• 2 bacon strips
• Cream cheese in enough quantity to line the inside of a bell pepper
• Pepper and/or other spices to taste (I used cardamom)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil.
2. Cut the top off the bell pepper. Cut the inside out of the bell pepper so you have a bowl. Punch the stem out of the top of the bell pepper but leave the rest intact so it looks like a ring.
3. Line the inside of the bell pepper with a thick layer of cream cheese.
4. Insert the jalapeno (keep it whole) into the cream cheese-lined bell pepper so that the jalapeno’s stem looks like it could be the stem of the bell pepper. If you need to cut part of the jalapeno off to meet this height requirement, do so as necessary.
5. Put the bell pepper ring on top of the jalapeno. At this point, you should have what looks like a whole bell pepper with a conspicuous-looking stem.
6. Wrap the bacon strips around the bell pepper so that it is mostly covered. Ensure that there is bacon sealing the cut you made during step 2 above.
7. Place the bacon-wrapped, stuffed bell pepper onto the foil-lined baking sheet. Bake for 45 minutes or until bacon is crispy.
8. Let sit for 2–3 minutes before serving. It should be steaming at this point. Enjoy!

You can also find this recipe in a Quora answer I wrote yesterday.

Coincidentally, the sunset from my balcony was roughly the colour of my cooking:

In the spirit of this blog, and my predisposition to assign rankings and ratings,

Ease of Cooking: 8

Nutritional Content: 5*

*The bacon and cream cheese add fat, including saturated fat, but the bacon pepper bind is gluten-free and effectively no-carb. I also used Longo's in-store-made light cream cheese, for whatever fat content that saves. The bell pepper and jalapeno, of course, are as healthy as can be.

Bonus Book! Call of the Wild

Call of the Wild by Jack London

Literature (1903 - 83 pp.*)

In Call of the Wild, Buck, a St. Bernard/Scottish shepherd mix, is kidnapped from his home in Santa Clara to be sold up north as a sled dog in Alaska and Yukon during the 1897 gold rush. Buck is sold numerous times, from French-Canadian prospectors Francois and Perrault, to incompetent fortune-seekers Hal and Charles, to John Thornton. Finally, in one of the few spoilers I will ever deliver on this blog, Buck finds that he belongs with a wolf pack in the wild despite being a lifelong pet with not a drop of wolf blood in him.

People new to Call of the Wild, perhaps from the movie released earlier this year, will probably be surprised while reading this book. According to the Rotten Tomatoes critics' consensus of the 2020 film, "It's undermined by distracting and unnecessary CGI, but this heartwarming Call of the Wild remains a classic story affectionately told." Much as I compared White Fang to a slasher movie back in 2012, Call of the Wild has some gory scenes, such as the brutal gang murder of Curly early on, or when Buck and his fellow sled dogs fend off some starving, mangy mutts who are after their meat: "Buck got a frothing adversary by the throat, and was sprayed with blood when his teeth sank through the jugular. The warm taste of it in his mouth goaded him to greater fierceness." (218) The scene in the book in which a sled, its passengers and its dogs fall through the ice, killing them all, (250) is a less bloody but no less evocative vision of doom in Jack London's world. (Buck was supposed to be pulling that sled, but John Thornton bought him just in time. The whole scene has a Dion DiMucci during "The Day the Music Died" feel to it.) Buck's killing spree near the end of the book goes unsaid; this apparently was omitted from the new Disney movie.

Like any good dog, Buck responds to Pavlovian conditioning. He initially fails to understand why he is being clubbed, which obviously never happened at his house in Santa Clara, but learns quickly. Later in the book, when he is hungry for a slab of bacon, he takes it when the prospector's back is turned and then lets a less cunning dog take the blame. Buck is most upfront about his learning process when he sees the other dogs keeping warm by burrowing in the snow: "Another lesson. So that was the way they did it, eh?" (210) Buck applies his lessons when his rival, Spitz, is the one receiving the clubbing instead of him.

Buck's lessons turn him wild, in his observations, in his traits, and even in the way his fur feels to the touch. In an uncharacteristic one-liner, London notes: "Mercy was a thing reserved for gentler climes." (228) In contrast to Santa Clara, where Buck was the ruler of the demesne (London's word) and the other dogs seemed barely capable of pulling a popsicle stick wagon, the Klondike turns Buck into a literal ball of energy: "When Thornton passed a caressing hand along his back, a snapping and crackling followed the hand, each hair discharging its pent magnetism at the contact." (270) Buck is shown to be faster and smarter than huskies who had spent their entire lives up north. In these few tender moments, Buck is a true companion, a cross between a pet and a sentinel. London anthropomorphizes Buck most when Buck processes the outside world in a way no other dog can: "Buck possessed a quality that made for greatness - imagination." (228)

My favourite part of Call of the Wild, a scene I'd never heard discussed, is when John Thornton bets on Buck being the strongest dog in the town. Other prospectors bet on their dogs being able to pull 500, 600 or even 700 pounds on a sled; Thornton, in a fit of enthusiasm, bets that Buck can pull 1,000 pounds. (Thornton's overenthusiasm is evident in his failure to bet on 750 or 800. If you ever have a chance to select a teammate for The Price Is Right, don't pick John Thornton.) London tracks each inch of Buck's Herculean effort to pull the sacks of flour. (259-262) The whole time, the reader is spirited away from the harshness of the wild and cold in order to root for Buck.

Eight years later, finally returning to Jack London was even more fun than I thought it would be. Call of the Wild is an extremely fast read, clocking in at about an hour and a half for me, including a break to get my morning coffee. London is nowhere near what 2020 audiences would call politically correct, especially in his treatment of the Yeehats, although in the world of Buck, virtually everyone except him or Thornton is a bad guy anyway. The north is cold and isolating, but a dog like Buck, part hero, part victim, part avenger, finds his home there.

Ease of Reading: 10

Educational Content: 2

*My edition of Call of the Wild is a two-part compendium that also includes White Fang (1906), which I reviewed back in 2012. Call of the Wild's pages run from 195-278.

2020 has been a fun year for this blog so far. In keeping with my tradition of not reviewing the same author twice in the same calendar year, I've accidentally punted or forgotten some of my favourite authors. During the venerable Book a Week of 2012, I last read H.G. Wells (In the Days of the Comet) and first read Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; I also read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe in 2018).

Last month, I read Life, the Universe and Everything, raising my Douglas Adams count to 3. Earlier this month, I read The Food of the Gods, raising my H.G. Wells count to many more than that, although most of my Wells reading far predates this blog.

April's Book: The Post-Office Girl

The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig

Literature (1982/2008* - 257 pp.)

The Post-Office Girl follows the life of Christine Hoflehner (b. 1898), a young woman in interwar Austria who lives with her mother in poverty after the family business collapses during World War I. Christine's life is forever changed by an invitation by her mercurial and largely absent aunt, a former dress model who has moved to America and married into money. They vacation together in Switzerland in Part One, after which Christine can no longer be content at the post-office again. Curmudgeonly in her home village in Part Two, where everyone takes note, she soon meets Ferdinand, who may be the love of her life - or play a different role entirely.

One of Zweig's immediate strengths is the way he builds the dark, crushing atmosphere of provincial Austria during and directly after World War I. Only two hours outside Vienna, the veneration of the Habsburgs and the cult of militarism are absent, whereas the reader feels each vivid family crisis: Christine's father's illness and destitution, her brother being drafted, and then, especially, the ominous letter from her brother's commander on the front lines. Much of the first thirty pages discusses the robbery of Christine's childhood, how she brims with simultaneous contempt and jealousy at the carefree nature of the postwar generation, how she feels, at age 28, like her only missions are to work her loathsome job at the post office and to care for her ill mother.

Then her aunt Klara invites her to Switzerland for a vacation. Christine is initially intimidated by the high society she encounters when she leaves the train: "Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated". (36) After Christine's return from Switzerland, her old appearance revolts her to the point that she does not know how she could have ever endured it before: "She got up furiously, got dressed furiously: the old underthings, the repulsive black dress." (153)

A wardrobe and a makeover later, though, she sees herself as their equal because she can look like the people she meets at the hotel. She undergoes a 1930s-era version of What Not to Wear, in which Klara refits her, and then she feels alive: "Now the eyes are quite openly and proudly laughing at her, and the parted red lips seem to acknowledge with amusement: 'Yes, I am beautiful.'" (55) Christine's lack of experience in luxury settings shows when her gambling victory initially confuses her, (80-81) but she also forgets to check her mail from home, showing that she is not succeeding in either of her worlds. The irony that Christine's slight improvement in life upon returning home is due to her gambling winnings is not lost on her.

The greatest question The Post-Office Girl asks, though, is: Who am I? Much as anyone who's taken a high school English course has heard that William Shakespeare mastered "the human condition", Zweig constantly forces his characters to consider their own identities. In turn, the reader does too. In Switzerland, Christine becomes so consumed by discovering how she relates to her suitors, clothes and new name of Christiana van Boolen that "She's discovered herself for the first time in twenty-eight years, and the discovery is so intoxicating she's forgetting everyone else." (91)

When Christine meets thirty-year-old Ferdinand, he is wondering the same thing about himself. He concludes, and she agrees, that staking his own place in life is all that will satisfy him:

Christine was taken aback. The man beside her had just said what she'd been thinking all this time; he'd expressed clearly what she'd dully felt - the wish to be given one's due, not to take anything from anyone, but to have some kind of life, not to be left out in the cold forever while the others were warm inside. (184)

Ferdinand's words near the end of the book show the choice he has to make,** that Christine, by being with him, has to make as well. Whether Christine is at home in her village, which she hates, or in Switzerland at the whim of her aunt and uncle, she is either in thrall to her precarious finances or to the opinions of everyone around her. Ferdinand directly, correctly, associates accomplishment with making one's own decisions:

There [the world] was, so bright and beautiful, so full of warm and sunny life, and there I was, still fairly young and quick and spirited. I reckoned everything up and asked myself what I'd actually accomplished in this world, and the answer was painful. Sad to say, I haven't acted or thought for myself at all. (239)

Zweig's wordsmithing is crisp and witty, especially during Christine's introspections, but parts of the book are dragged down in exposition. A discussion of the future of socialism dominates a portion of Part Two, to the point that after page 191, there is no paragraph break until page 194. Opening the book to pages 192-193 reveals a perfectly rectangular block of text, which would be difficult enough in a science textbook but is eye-popping in fiction.

Sadly, Zweig was never able to see The Post-Office Girl's legacy. Although he wrote The Post-Office Girl in the 1930s, it was not published until 1982, forty years after his death. It has lived on most notably in Wes Anderson's 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is one of my favourite movies of all time.

Ease of Reading: 8

Educational Content: 4

*I use a double publication date whenever I review a translation. The first date is the original publication; the second date is the English-language edition I'm reading. Recently, I have reviewed three other Central European translations:

• March 2019 Bonus Book: Babylon Berlin by Volker Kutscher (German)
• December 2019: The Holy Roman Empire: A Short History by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (German)
• January 2020: Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk (Polish)

My German and Polish are nowhere near advanced enough to read full-length texts like those, especially not an academic history text, so I greatly appreciate the work of the translators whose affinity for multiple languages brings these great works to life for English-speaking audiences.

Aside: All three fiction translations I've read in the past thirteen months take place in the 1920s, at least in part, although all three were written in subsequent decades. After World War I but before the Great Depression, the 1920s left an indelible mark on fiction across continents.

**As much as I would love to write about this part of the book in more detail, I would be violating my (almost) no spoiler policy. I was stunned by the book's last few pages. I hope future readers are just as surprised by the twist as I was.

Happy Earth Day! With Comets and Monkeys!

Once again, April 22nd is Earth Day.

Happy Earth Day!

If there are two things to share, they're uplifting nature photos and wacky environment-related news stories.

I took all of the below pictures today.

Conifers in the background

CNET is reporting that Borisov, a comet, is "strange": Interstellar comet, visiting from deep space, is stranger than we thought

Both studies [Hubble and ALMA] show Borisov is extremely rich in carbon monoxide. It's not strange to find carbon monoxide in a comet, but the levels seen by Hubble and ALMA are off the charts, measuring about three times higher than comets from our home solar system. Because carbon monoxide only freezes at extremely cold temperatures, the research teams suggest it likely formed at the dark, outer edges of a distant star system before being flung toward us.

Comets in our solar system are extremely rare, but we're lucky enough to see Borisov as it enters our solar system, meaning we should be able to see its entire sojourn here. That makes me want to dust off my old telescope...

Rushing river

The month's worth of news on how COVID-19-related self-isolation measures have diminished air pollution appears to have come to a head. Fewer people on the streets also means more wildlife on the streets, as the Associated Press reports: As people stay home, Earth gets wilder and cleaner

As people across the globe stay home to stop the spread of the new coronavirus, the air has cleaned up, albeit temporarily. Smog stopped choking New Delhi, one of the most polluted cities in the world, and India’s getting views of sights not visible in decades. Nitrogen dioxide pollution in the northeastern United States is down 30%. Rome air pollution levels from mid-March to mid-April were down 49% from a year ago. Stars seem more visible at night.

People are also noticing animals in places and at times they don't usually. Coyotes have meandered along downtown Chicago’s Michigan Avenue and near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. A puma roamed the streets of Santiago, Chile. Goats took over a town in Wales. In India, already daring wildlife has become bolder with hungry monkeys entering homes and opening refrigerators to look for food.

As someone who lives in an upper-floor apartment, I have no worry about my building being taken over by goats. My fridge is full, though, thanks to the magic of online grocery ordering, so I may have to monkey-proof.

Macro needles!

Happy Earth Day again.

The COVID-19 Menu So Far

I've been self-isolated for a month today. I haven't entered a store in that time. (Hooray for online groceries!) I haven't been on public transit in that time. Some days, I go little farther than the dumpster outside my apartment building.

I've been reading extensively, although I've only written one review so far. (More to come! Soon!) 

What I have done is cook a lot more recipes that need time to bake, roast, simmer or otherwise absorb all their great flavours. The advantages of being stuck at home...

Chicken leg with okra and maple BBQ seasoning:

Hot dogs with sautéed onions, Dijon mustard and sriracha:

Schnitzel with brown butter sauce:

Moroccan lentil and rice soup:

Cheese dreams:

Bacon mac 'n' cheese:

Black bean curry soup:

May your social distancing be tasty!