The introduction for the 2005 edition, rushed back into print to capitalize on the novel’s prescience, praises Sinclair Lewis’s achievement (of course) but only in spite of the book’s “loose melodramatic pot, flat and even corny characters, weak cliched dialogue, padded political discourse, awkward sentimentality, and heavy-handed satire.” All of these criticisms are true. I loved it.

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In the Whole Foods produce section a man in his late 40’s is standing, inert, with an empty shopping cart. A woman of the same age, perhaps sensing prey, asks him if he needs any help finding something. “I’m just trying to remember a recipe,” he replies.

“Oh?” she says. “What kind of recipe?”

“It’s, uh, complicated,” he answers, in a tone that indicates he’s not interested in her cooking advice or anything else. Then, perhaps thinking he was too brusque, adds, “I’m a raw-foodist.”

“A raw-foodist.”

“Yes, I don’t eat cooked food.”

“People who eat raw food call themselves ‘raw-foodists.’” It’s not a question.

“Only to people who eat cooked food,” he replies sourly.

To me she says, “Welcome to Cambridge.” Then she pushes off into Seafood.

Long noses fit into human drinking glasses, when you aren’t looking.

Coming soon in the Short Cuts series from O’Reilly Media: Next-Generation Web Frameworks in Python, by me.

To answer the most important question in advance, I don’t know if I get to pick my animal.

This Robert Louis Stevenson novella is told largely from the point of view of Jekyll’s friend and colleague Utterson, who slowly and painstakingly uncovers the twist that every modern reader already knows. So with the plot pre-spoiled, most of what the story has to offer is moody Victorian atmosphere. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s only about a hundred pages of it. Many of the adaptations expand the original story or tell it from Jekyll’s perspective instead. It’s a good candidate for that sort of treatment because much of the exciting stuff is discreetly glossed-over or told in letters rather than “real time.”

This only took me a few T trips to read, which is good because I’m scrambling to finish the last three books before the end of the year. I liked the pseudo-Freudianism and the addiction metaphors and the author’s prissy reluctance to describe Hyde’s actual deviant behavior, but that’s about all that’s to be had here. Oh, and the Wikipedia article is pretty interesting.

It’s harder to write about the books that I loved. I started reading this, years ago, and stopped, losing interest almost immediately. The initial idea behind this book-reading project was going to be “supposedly-great novels I never got around to finishing,” and Mrs Dalloway would have been first on that list (One Hundred Years of Solitude is another one). Instead I put it off until this year, and now I will count it as of my favorite books of all time.

I read the same copy I’ve had lying around for years, and when I reached to dog-ear a passage I particularly loved, I saw that I had already done so once before. I can’t imagine, then, why I put the book down — I find this so beautifully Modernist.

Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turn at Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination, thought Mr Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory — away the aeroplane shot.

I just wrote an application for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in which you must guess the holiday themes connecting various people. The people are revealed day-by-day as an advent calendar.

OUP deliberately didn’t give me the answers so I could figure it out myself (but obviously I did have access to all the identities at once). So beat my score:

1. Competition 1 (red): Got it after 4 people
2. Competition 2 (green): Got the trick in 2, the answer in 4
3. Competition 3 (blue): Tried for 30 minutes to get it in 2, eventually got it in 4

So, three or better, people. You’ll just have to keep checking the page.

(For the curious, this is a single JSP page which loads an XML data file and some XSLT. Java tells XSLT whether today is before, during or after December, because XSLT 1.0 has no date handling and my EXSLT implementation was limited. This way the XSLT only needs to worry about the day value in December, which it can treat as a plain integer, and compute which doors are open accordingly.)