In high school I gave up eating red meat. I was interested in becoming a vegetarian, but I didn’t really see how it could work. I didn’t eat a lot of different kinds of foods and I was smart enough to know that cheese fries and milkshakes, while delicious, did not constitute a meal plan.

In college I was introduced to Thai and Indian and sushi and chiles and everything else that’s awesome about food. Eventually it occurred to me that, hey, I could swap tofu for chicken in most of what I liked and not notice the difference. So I became a vegetarian — specifically, a lacto-ovo-vegetarian, as opposed to a vegan.

Anyway, I think that lasted a few weeks until I realized that this plan omitted sushi so I switched to being a pescetarian. Specifically, a lacto-ovo-pescetarian, and that’s where things stood for about ten years.

I was never extremely exclusive about it. I know that if a restaurant doesn’t say its soup is vegetarian, it’s got chicken broth, and probably even if it does say it’s vegetarian. As long as it didn’t explicitly say “made with chicken broth,” I considered that lacto-ovo-pescetarian and went with it. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

In my late twenties I got more serious about cooking. I started learning more about the traditional cuisines of places like Italy and Spain and Southeast Asia. Once in a while I let some fancy pork products into my diet, if I was in a restaurant. Then I started buying them. Then I included regular bacon. It’s a slippery slope.

Just before the New Year I took stock of the situation. I was still sort of considering myself to be a vegetarian, except I ate fish, chicken broth and cured pork products, or anything if I was eating at Babbo. I realized that there’s a word for this, and it’s not lacto-ovo-pollo-porco-babbo-pescetarian. It’s neurotic.

So, that’s it. I don’t want to be one of those crazy women with food issues and a borderline eating disorder. I’ve come to believe that the environmental load of a soy burger made in an industrial farm — processed and heavily packaged — is worse than some local organic lamb. Maybe it’s just an excuse.

After I made my decision we went to Christopher’s in Porter Square and I ordered a burger (made with natural beef, of course). I don’t think I’d had a burger since I was 16. You know, it was really good.

The rest of the week I ate eggplant and beans and cheese and salad.

D.H. Lawrence’s novel is more famous for its sexual content than its quality of writing. Hey, fine by me.

So as not to overshadow this still-respectable work of literature, I will present my review of the 1993 BBC miniseries as a pictoral essay. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some signs that a book is going to suck:

1. Pages 1-6 are the usual title pages and fawning quotes from reviewers.
2. Page 7 is a dedication, followed by a quotation (in Greek).
3. Page 8 is an illustration.
4. Page 9 has two more quotations.
5. Page 10 is a list of maps found in the text, with page numbers.
6. Page 11 is a note “To My American Readers”
7. Pages 12-13 contain a glossary.
8. Page 14 is the Preface, which mentions that some of the characters in this work of fiction are actually the author’s friends.
9. Page 19, finally, is the first page of the first chapter, except they are not called chapters, they’re Fits.

This is from The Plague Dogs, by Richard Adams, author of Watership Down. I am about to completely spoil it.

The novel concerns two dogs who escape from an animal research lab in northern England. The purpose of the lab is to torture animals for no obvious medical reason. The researchers themselves do not seem to especially remember the ostensible purpose of each experiment, and so frequently have conversations like this:

“Oh, but what about the guinea-pigs, chief?” said Mr. Powell, returning his note-pad to the ready.

“The ones receiving tobacco tar condensates, you mean?” said Dr. Boycott.

Adams uses this transparent rhetorical device constantly. “Those dogfish–the ones you wanted for experiments on how they’re able to change their coloration to match their backgrounds, remember?” Who the hell talks like this? He wants to pack in so many crimes against animals in a single conversation that he barely leaves room for the sadistic sniveling:

“The first one’s that humane trap for grey squirrels that Ag. and Fish. sent us for trial.”

“What about it?”

“Well, it’s not turning out all that humane, really,” said Mr. Powell, with a giggle of embarrassment.

But the real zinger for the bad guys is this casual gem:

“Do we ever use anaethestics?”

“Good God, no,” said Dr. Boycott. “D’you know what they cost?”

Get it?? Dr. Boycott?? And the name of the research facility gets abbreviated to A.R.S.E. This guy just kills me.

Like in Watership Down, there are animals and they talk to each other. The device doesn’t work as well with dogs. It’s interesting to imagine docile rabbits as militaristic, savage beings with superstitions and societies. Dogs are already understood to be social and to exhibit complex behaviors. Communicative dogs, though, start to fall into an uncanny valley where they remain too dog-like to be believably alien but become too human-like to be believably normal dogs. An author needs to make his or her talking animals recognizably animals, as in We3, or just go all the way into the animal’s world, as in Watership Down or Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Speaking of which, the latter is a way better novel about animal research.

Just when I thought I’d seen it all — illustrations, chapters in rhyme, characters musing “for no reason” about the Holocaust — we come to the last chapter (which ought to be “Fit 11″ but is instead, ominously, “Envoy”). Two characters (who are among the real people mentioned in the preface) are having an idle conversation during a day of boating:

“Well-intentioned amateurs like that chap Richard Adams — fond of the country — reasonably good observer — knows next to nothing about rabbits –”

Following which they happen upon the two dogs in the sea, nearly drowned but desperately paddling out to an imaginary island where humans are nice to animals. The men effect a last-minute rescue, bring them to shore where the fox terrier’s (thought-deceased) owner is waiting to greet them. Our heroes force back paratroopers sent to shoot the dogs. The government that sponsored the lab is humiliated. The giggling Mr. Powell has a change of heart and liberates a monkey. One of the paratroopers opines, “These experimental animals are just sentient objects.” A sleazy tabloid reporter finally finds a story that he cares about. The owner adopts both animals and they live happily ever after. And I, the reader, have never been so disgusted with a book that made me sob so pathetically in relief.

I have this weird phobia about apartments I used to live in. I hate the thought of going back into them if I’ve moved my things to the new one. For a while, I don’t even like going to the neighborhood. There’s this paranoia that, I dunno, someone’s going to accuse me of trashing the place or leaving the oven on or throwing out my domestic garbage in the public receptacles.

I think it’s mostly derived from numerous experiences in which I didn’t so much move out of a place as flee it. First, moving would be a big hassle, and I wouldn’t have time to clean up after the movers left because I was following them to the new apartment, and plus I always had to leave the iguana behind for awhile waiting for a new cage or for someone to help me tear down the old one. Invariably the landlord would hear that I moved and decide to come in and start renovating or whatever, even though my lease hadn’t yet expired and legally I still occupied the space. Then a day later when I came back to feed Trendy there would be some hateful note taped to the wall (next to the notice that I was still in the process of leaving) and the cage door would be swinging open and I’d have to run around the dirty apartment looking for my lizard who was apparently set free in retribution.

I guess it’s not really a phobia if there’s a rational reason to dislike something.

It’s become so ingrained in me that even though my iguana’s dead and my last move was totally flawless, I was still pretty freaked to go back to the downtown loft and clean it after we moved. I hadn’t been back to my old block since, but it had been awhile and it was a beautiful warm night and we were running out of ingredients that can only be bought in Chinatown, so tonight I swung by.

I had no problems — the phobia’s faded. But it’s weird how a homeless guy humping a trashcan is actually a little disturbing when it’s no longer your neighborhood.

“His designs were strictly honourable, as the phrase is; that is, to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage.”

Next to Ivanhoe, there was no other book on my 2004 list I was less excited to read than Tom Jones. It’s one of the first English novels. It’s long. It rambles. But it’s also really, really funny, and sweet, and nasty, in a good way.

The novel is a ruthless critique of hypocrisy and deceit in the upper classes, which may lead a modern reader (like me) to see Fielding as an early champion of the ideal 20th century classless society. In fact, he agreed with his contemporaries that social stratification reflected the intentions of the Creator. This led him to hold the educated wealthy to a higher ethical standard in a kind of moral noblesse oblige. The poor, in effect, did not know any better, making them unfit for satire — though in life Fielding campaigned relentlessly to reform the British judicial system in their favor.

“What is commonly called love, namely the desire of satisfying a voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human flesh.”

One exception to this moral rectitude is his liberal treatment of sex and love, not all that surprising for a guy who married his maid when she was six months pregnant and eventually died of cirrhosis. Characters in Tom Jones have unmarried sex all the time, although naturally this is okay for the hero and unthinkable for the heroine. The 1997 BBC miniseries (and, I understand, the 1963 movie) are duly respectful of this tradition and feature quite a lot of male and female nudity flouncing about in straw beds and strategically hiding behind furniture when caught.

“There is perhaps no surer mark of folly than to attempt to correct natural infirmities of those we love.”

The miniseries is a lot of fun — I really liked the device of having “Henry Fielding” as a character who wanders in and out of scenes quoting either from the prose or from the prefaces to each book (which have titles like “A Wonderful Long Chapter Concerning the Marvellous” and “Containing Five Pages of Paper“). Also, as mentioned, there’s lots of nudity (one Amazon reviewer calls it “very repulsive to people of high moral standards,” although they may have just been quoting from a 250-year-old review of the book).

The best thing about the miniseries, though, is that it has Brian Blessed.

Never before has an actor reached such great heights of hysterical over-acting. This guy literally chews the scenery, in one case shoving armfuls of strawberries into his face while bellowing “RARRGH!!” When Brian Blessed walks into a scene bearing a tray full of anything, that is an indication to immediately start giggling, because there is a one-hundred-percent certainty that the tray and everything on it will in short order end up hurled against the wall, onto the floor, or into his gaping maw. It is fucking awesome.

He is also in the otherwise forgettable 1983 television adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles. I liked the book, but hey, Sherlock Holmes stories are pretty hard not to like.

So I finished Robinson Crusoe the other day, which was the last book on my 2005 classics list. I realize this wasn’t my original order, but I got a little desperate after Tom Jones and buying a house and all, so I skipped ahead and knocked off a bunch of the easy ones before going back to Ivanhoe and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, both of which turned out to be easy anyway.

Obviously I haven’t quite caught up on my write-ups. I will. But I wanted credit for finishing in time, so here I am, bragging.

Meanwhile I’ve been giving some thought to my 2006 personal-enrichment program. Part of the program is that I’m going to take Calculus I, for credit, because I’ve never taken any college math and that’s kind of embarrassing in a computer programmer. The other is that since I actually really enjoyed this reading list, I’ll do another.

At first I thought I’d try something different, like works in translation or works from 1900 on, but then I decided I still had a lot of classics in English to read (and I seriously slighted the Americans in the first round). Here’s my 2006 list, same rules applying (with a bonus book to make it a baker’s dozen, because I am daring like that) presented in no particular order except that Tristram Shandy is first in order to finish it in time before the Michael Winterbottom film adaptation is released in the US, which looks awesome and features Gillian Anderson, making it a movie of great interest to nearly everyone I know.

Sterne, Laurence – Tristram Shandy
Trollope, Anthony – The Way We Live Now
Stevenson, Robert Lewis – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Butler, Samuel – The Way of all Flesh
Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
Lewis, Sinclair – It Can’t Happen Here
Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
Collins, Wilkie – The Woman in White
Forster, E.M. – A Passage to India
Woolf, Virginia – Mrs. Dalloway
Cather, Willa – My Antonia
Sinclair, Upton – The Jungle
Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn