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.

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.

When I started this book-reading project, Moby Dick was the white whale in the room. I hadn’t read the book, I didn’t want to read the book, and when I chose my list for the first year, I deliberately ignored it. When I came up with the second year’s list, I knew I couldn’t put it off forever: it was the one novel almost everyone asked me about.

In fact I had no actual reason to avoid it because I knew nothing about it besides the usual cultural touchstones. If someone had told me, “Hey you should read this highly metaphorical Romantic novel criticizing man’s hubris in his quest to defeat nature, featuring wild style shifts and random asides about marine biology,” I’d say hey sign me up. Plus the opening narrative is pretty engaging so I thought this was going to be a breeze.

…they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.

I always enjoyed high school literature class but I was often skeptical that the metaphors we uncovered were the product of authorial intent. Put in the context of this project, I can see that probably many of them were, but that was largely a consequence of reading so much 19th century American fiction. I’m happier decoding the repressed passion expressed in English aristocratic pleasantries than worrying about the symbology of Ahab’s, uh, pipe (if you know what I mean). It’s probably litcrit blasphemy but for the most part I gave the allegorical stuff a miss and just kept reading.

The biology digressions are probably interesting to history-of-science types but mostly I found them tiresome because I know it’s all wrong. Also I realize this is lame of me but I could not stop being annoyed by Ishmael calling the whales fish.

I did get a kick out of the Gothic Romanticism of it all: the more heavy-handed, the better. For example, I loved this:

For all [the whale's] old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.

I give Melville props for rolling this all into one sentence: compassion for animals, criticism of organized religion, and “gay bridals.” In fact I loved the style of the prose throughout, but it just wasn’t enough to carry my enthusiasm: less ambergris, more action.

I didn’t watch any adaptations but apparently there’s a 1998 TV movie version starring Patrick Stewart. One of the few user comments on IMDB is, “She blows.”

I read this entire review of Middlemarch feeling kind of stupid that I didn’t quite follow it, didn’t recognize all the described authors, and baffled by the book’s characterization as “the narrow English provincial life of forty years ago.”

It wasn’t until I got to the end that I realized it was written in 1873.

“Well, it’s all right anyway, Jim, long as you’re going to be rich again some time or other.”

“Yes; en I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’ want no mo’.”

Visiting Nashoba Valley Winery during apple-picking season is the closest that eastern Massachusetts gets to the wine tourism madness of Napa. There are too many tasters, not enough cashiers, and like a lot of stops on the California wine buses, the ratio of human density to wine quality is not favorable. But our vintner choices out here are limited: there’s the excellent sparkling wines of Westport Rivers (previously reviewed in Wine Sediments) and a few other wineries that are part of the Coastal Wine Trail in southeastern New England, but the only sizable winemaker within 50 miles of Boston is Nashoba Valley.

[ More in Wine Sediments ]

Items available from the venerable Christie’s auction house as part of their upcoming Star Trek memorabilia auction:

1. TASHA YAR’S ALTERNATE TIMELINE UNIFORM
   
2. PIN CUSHION MAN
3. DATA’S ENGINEERING OVERALLS
   
4. WORF’S OLD WEST COSTUME
5. KLINGON FOREHEADS
6. SAAVIK’S OFF-DUTY BLOUSE
   
7. KIM CATTRALL’S STARFLEET SHIRTS AND PANTS
8. ED BEGLEY JR’S JACKET AND AWARDS
   
9. “CHATEAU PICARD” WINE BOTTLES
   
10. RIKER’S “BOY TOY” COSTUME
    
11. DATA’S BARMAID COSTUME
    
12. LEONARDO DA VINCI’S MONA LISA
13. TWO VULCAN HATS
    

I’ve started writing for The Well-Fed Network, a series of food-related blogs. My first article was published today: Oh sherry! In keeping with their editorial policy I’ll be attempting to post once a week or so, primarily on their wine blog.

Thanks to various people for their editing help.