Cookbook review

I first became aware of Cowgirl Chef (aka Ellise Pierce) when I put the words 'green chile' in a well known search engine one night.  One of the first links was to her fabulous blog.  When I saw what kind of cuisine she specialized in and I saw the photos of her food, I instantly developed a culinary and blog crush on her.  Later when I saw her picture I developed a schoolboy crush on her.

I continued on for months reading her blog and from time to time I'd comment.  When I saw she was on Facebook, I friended her, and lo, and behold, she friended me back.  I was ecstatic.  Here I was now friends, at least in cyber space anyway, with a super cute well known food writer and chef.

When I started putting some of my art on Facebook, she bought two mixed media pieces right away, which made me love her all the more.  So when I read that her cookbook was coming out, I knew I had to get a copy as soon as I possibly could.  And that's just what I did a few days ago. 

I was super excited to get my very own copy and when it came via UPS, I tore the package open and began looking through it, I imagined all the recipes of hers that I was (am) going to make.  I fell in love with her easy writing style and the beautiful photos of her food.  It's a beautifully done book and it's full of beautiful photos of food and of the swoon worthy Ms. Pierce.

The recipes look easy to follow, and the one I made the other night was super easy to follow:

I made her Paris Chicken Fricassee recipe for supper the other night, although I didn't use a habanero, which is optional anyway, because sometimes I find them to be too oppressive.  Over all though, this dish is a home run.  It's got chicken, chorizo, fresh rosemary, tomatoes (I used half a quart of my home canned tomatoes), onions, garlic, salt, and pepper in it, so what's not to love?   I nearly made her cheesy rosemary olive flatbread to go along with it but I was out of cheddar and olives and I didn't want to go to the store.

Unlike a lot of cookbooks, this one is not intimidating.  There's not a shit ton of ingredients for each recipe and the steps to making these dishes are very easy to follow.  But best of all the food is packed with the flavors I love.  And you make most all of this food with fresh ingredients.

All in all this cookbook is a winner.  I look forward to making more of Ellise's recipes and sharing them with local friends and with you via this blog.  I recommend this cookbook highly, and I'd say that even if I didn't have a massive crush on the author.

Go, buy your copy today and support a great gal who makes great food.

Double review

Our love for BBC produced period dramas is well known so last year on her birthday I gave Sparky the first series DVD of Lark Rise to Candleford. Then wonder of wonders, my local library got the rest of the DVD sets for the other three series they made of this show and after seeing series 2 and 3 this summer we just finished series 4.

We both really liked this show. It has all the requisite things in a BBC produced period drama, great costumes, locations, great acting, sets, and this one had the added pleasure of being overtly political. The basic story is that Laura, the cute blonde in the center, is from Lark Rise, a poor working class village, and she gets the chance to move to Candleford to work in the post office which is run by her distant cousin Dorcas. The lives of the citizens of both the towns inter mingle and as time progresses all sorts of interpersonal dramatic and gentle comedic things happen. Lives grow complicated, love finds those who seek it, and everyone's lives are a bit richer and better because they all got close and folks had their back at one time or another.

I liked the fact that this show got political at times, it showed the plight of the working people and the indifference of the wealthy towards them. I also liked the many guest stars that it had and the fact that they didn't wear out their welcome. The show had several characters that it was built around and other characters came and went as needed. It was all very British and all very good. My favorite characters were Minnie the post office maid, the Pratt sisters, priggish Postman Brown, Alf, Twister and Queenie, and Robert and Emma.

After seeing all four series of this show I liked the first one best but all of them are worth the time. This one is highly recommended.

I read this slender hardboiled Mexican mystery in a three day span. It's only 162 pages long and the story flew by at break neck speed.

A one eyed gimpy legged private eye is hired to find out why a woman's husband and brothers got murdered and why she's being muscled out of the money left behind in her father in law's bank account. The private eye is an intelligent but world weary guy who has seen his share of the ugly side of Mexico City and it's corrupt government officials. He's also old friends with a criminal who's high up in the crime world. His investigation takes him to places he doesn't want to go and he finds out that his hometown of Mexico City is even more corrupt than he imagined. With the help of a couple of retired pro wrestlers and a novelist named Paco Ignacio he solves the case and helps to bring a little bit of justice to a town that needs it badly.

I loved this book. I loved how fast the story moved and how Taibo painted all his characters. I'm sure things in Mexico City aren't as bad as they sound in this book and I'm sure Mr. Taibo his taken literary license with other tings about his adopted country. I also love how he made himself a character in the book. I could see elements of the famed Latin 'magical realism' in this book and they added to my enjoyment of it.

I highly recommend this novel and I'll be seeking out more books by this author.

Reviews you can use (and a plug)

While I found this novel by Ms. French to be enjoyable on one level, on another I found it deeply disappointing. The novel is about a police investigation into a murder of a young girl who was destined to scale the heights of the ballet world. And one of the Irish detectives who is investigating the case was, when young, one of three children who were part of an unsolved murder/kidnapping/missing child case. As a youth he was found clinging to a tree in the same forest where the young ballet dancer was found murdered many years later.

So what we have here is ostensibly two parallel stories about two separate cases that took place in the same section of woods in Ireland. But what we get is one very good story about the murder investigation and one very sub par and unfulfilled story about the detective who tries to make sense of and piece together what happened to him when he was a young teen in those same woods.

Ms. French succeeds in telling one story but leaves the other to twist and ultimately die in a not satisfying manner. She creates a claustrophobic atmosphere that works well when she's writing about the murder of Katy Devlin, the young ballet dancer, but not so well in the underdeveloped story about the crimes that happened to the detective. I therefore recommend this one with many reservations. Had Ms. French reached satisfying conclusions to both of the cases in her novel then I'd recommend this one highly. It's a decent read.

Have you had enough of superhero graphic novels and collections where the superhero always wins? Are you tired of stories about the superhero who wears his or her undies on the outside of their costume, no matter how quirky or deconstructed? If so, then the wildly innovative and offbeat Chew is for you.

It's the story of a detective, Tony Chu, later a federal agent, who gets psychic impressions from the food he eats. If he eats a burger he can 'see' the life and death that that particular cow had. Same thing with all meats and anything he eats, except beets. So you can see how his 'talent' comes in handy in a world where the federal government has banned the cooking and eating of chicken due to 'bird flu.'

While investigating a murder of a government food inspector Chu bumps up against his estranged brother who is a former TV chef, the mob, chicken smugglers, Russians near the Arctic circle, his boss, and his own partner, who also shares Chu's weird talent. Chu also finds himself in love with a food writer who's talent is that she writes about food so well that people can taste whatever she writes about, which is great for Chu because he can finally taste food without having to relive all that happened to it before it became food.

I fucking love this character and this graphic novel collection. It's got quirky interesting characters, plenty of action, plenty of interpersonal drama, a smidgen of science fiction, and a super interesting story that is a wild ride full of surprises. I love the writing, the art, everything. I can't wait to read the second volume in the this collection, and thank goodness my local library has it.

This one I super highly recommend.

This book tells in plain and simple language, that the non scientist, can understand about the causes and effects of the man made climate change that we're currently experiencing. It's written by one of the leading international authorities on coastal issues, Orrin Pilkey, and his son, my good friend and confidante Keith Pilkey.

Even if I didn't know Keith and and if I hadn't met Orrin a few years ago, I'd give this slender yet info packed book a big thumbs up. It's easily readable and it gives you the stark facts surrounding global climate change, and it even has a chapter on debunking the doubters. The authors aren't bought and paid for by Exxon or by FOX Noise, so you get the real unvarnished truth.

I highly recommend and am glad to plug this book by my friend and his dad.

Quick book review

A down on his luck former space marine gets into more trouble than you share a Firestick 2 at and then his life goes down hill from there. He encounters an alien named Kenneth who needs to lay eggs in a host body before they go bad, a computer who absolutely loves humans, a spaceship full of cannibal business men, icy babes, and some of the baddest mo-fros this side of Alpha Centauri. And it's all funny as hell.

This novel is without a doubt the funniest, most entertaining novel I've read in a long, long time. It's the kind of sci fi novel that used to be de rigueur in the mid '70's, clever, well written, funny, and highly entertaining. But somewhere between the mid '70's and today sci fi novels got taken over by the authors of twee fantasy stories, the people who wrote ponderous allegories, and homophobic assholes like Orson Scott Card. So for me, Michael Rubens novel is a breath of fresh air, it's beacon of light it in the blackness of outer space, and if Terry Pratchett wrote novels that were one third as fun, funny, or entertaining as this one was then maybe I'd read more of his books. Sadly, Pratchett doesn't write novels that entertained and amused me as much as this one did, which is a pity.

I highly recommend this novel to everyone, even to those who don't like sci fi novels.

Four reviews with a view

Erin Boheme is a very good jazz vocalist and this CD of hers is very good. She's got a jazzy/smoky voice that is at home covering jazz and pop standards as well as her own original compositions. If you like the sultry blondes who sing the jazz, then you'll like this CD. Me, I really like it.
Let me say upfront that before I read this novel by TC Boyle I liked the previous novel of his that I read and I have liked all the short stories of his that I read as well. And I like the first two thirds of this novel, Talk Talk. But the last third, boy what the hell happened? It stank. It was like Mr. Boyle ran out of steam but he kept going anyway. By the time he had set up the final showdowns I wanted to strangle all his characters and then do the same to Mr. Boyle for ruining his novel. I'm glad I bought this book off the remainders table for a buck, at least I didn't waste much money on it. Not recommended.
One of the best things about the Vertigo series of comics from DC is that they take minor characters from DC's past and give them new life in grown up stories in the graphic novel format. This second graphic novel with the heretofore minor DC character Madam Xanadu, Exodus Noir, really rocks. It's two stories in one book, it tells a tale of Madam Xanadu's past along with a tale of her investigation into a series of murders in 1940's era NYC. The writing is crisp, the art is great, and the colors are eye popping. I devoured this graphic novel in two nights. I highly recommend it. (I'm reading the first one now and I like it a lot less than this one.)

This little noir thriller is claustrophobic and just when you think you have all the angles figured out, they zig when you think they're going to zag. I quite liked the whole thing, except for Forest Whitaker's horrendous accent and the fact that it takes place in some hellish looking high plains/prairie location, all that flatness gave me the willies. I liked all the machinations between Julia Stiles and Jeremy Renner's characters, I liked how they showed the big insurance company to be just as despicable as the people who are trying to con it, and I like all the close ups of Ms. Stiles, but for my money, there's never enough close ups of Julia Stiles. I highly recommend this one, especially if you like noir and con men films.

More reviews you can choose to use

The Proposition is an Australian western. It's a gritty, violent, at times absorbing film.

The movie centers around Guy Pearce, who plays the middle brother in a family of outlaws, and the man who is tasked with bringing him and his brother to justice, Ray Winstone, as the local police captain. Winstone captures Pearce and his younger brother in a shoot out and he makes him a deal, go kill your older brother (Danny Huston) and I'll pardon you and your younger brother. Off Pearce goes and once he finds his older brother things go down hill for all concerned pretty quickly.

This film, written and scored by Nick Cave, is a realistic gritty dirty western. It's the kind of western that Hollywood made for about 5 minutes back in the mid '70's but had to stop because they hated filming people with so much dirt and grime on them. It's the kind of western that I really like, it's full of action and interesting characters who aren't scrubbed clean when they should be filthy and hairy.

Standout performances littler this movie like diapers and beer cans litter yards in trailer parks. Winstone and Pearce are especially good. I recommend this one but be warned, there's violence and some of it is of a sexual nature.

This CD is a kick ass blend of dance music and rock 'n' roll. The sound of this band leans heavily on drum machines and other electronic devices but when coupled with their often cheeky lyrics and the cool sounding voices of the singers, it all works. I really dig it. I love the art they used in it as well.

And finally I just finished this book:
It's a great read and a very distinctive take on modern China by a westerner who has lived in China off and on for many years.
Ms. Dewoskin found herself not only working for an American PR company in Beijing for a boss who refused to speak or learn Chinese language and customs, she managed to end up starring on a Chinese night time soap opera. Her tale of how she managed to juggle those two jobs, her Chinese friends, the Chinese language (both written and spoken), other expats, and daily life in China bowled me over. I'm impressed by any westerner who lives and thrives in China, a country so radically different than our own, and the fact that did so while she was a young single attractive woman on her own was amazing to me as well. I applaud her courage and the way she stuck to her principles while living and working in Beijing.

I highly recommend this travel essay book. And I hope Ms. Dewoskin writes more about her other adventures in China soon.

A four fisted book review post in which I review four books I read recently

Amal Naj's book on peppers is one of the most exhaustive books on a single food item that I have ever read. He packs a lot in to this slim book. And trust me, you'll learn more about peppers than you ever knew before if you read it. Parts of it dragged a bit but overall I enjoyed it.

Somehow I missed this book when it came out in hardback but thank goodness I found it in paperback. I picked it up while at the beach and I just finished it last night. It's one heck of a wild ride through food the history of food, the history of many different cultures in relation to food, and it shows once again just how idiotic all those bronze age religions are, especially when they relate to food.

Mr. Allen gives you just enough interesting tidbits about his food topics to keep you interested but not overwhelmed. His best work is done in the sections where he writes about how religions have impacted our diets. And he spares no religions, he shows them all to be hypocritical when it comes to what their adherents are supposed to eat or not eat.

Some parts of this book were hard to stomach, har-dee-har-har, especially the ones about the cultures where dog is eaten and some of the more bizarre foods that are eaten in the world. All in all however, I loved this book to death. I highly recommend it.

Okay, I finally finished my first Terry Prachett novel. And my verdict on it is it was a fun read and I'll give another of his books a try. Some of my readers are nuts for Pratchett and some are lukewarm at best on his works. This is the second one I tried, the first I put down after getting only 20 pages into it because I did not like it but this one had me from the get go. How could a novel where the main character is named Moist Von Lipwig not be hold my attention?

What I really liked about this novel is that it is a thinly veiled attack on big corporations. The once vibrant postal system in Ankh Morpork is now moribund so con man Moist Von Lipwig is chosen to bring it back to life so that it can compete with the big corporate message service in the city. The corporate pigs complain about the government competition and they do their best to shut it down and the plot revolves around the battle between the private message company and the public post office.

It's a fun read and you don't have to have read any or all of the previous Discworld books by Pratchett to enjoy it. I recommend this one as well, especially if you like golems.

Drink is a fine information packed big ol' history of alcohol. It's a big book, it's well over 600 pages but when you consider that it covers the cultural history of drinking from the dawn of man to the present day, it has to be a big ass book. Thanks goodness Mr. Gately wrote it for the general populace and not scholars. Even though it's a big book it's very accessible and very well written.

I began it about two weeks before we left for the beach and I got through about a third of it before I took it back to the library. The parts I read covered the early years of drinking in the Greek and Roman empires, the rise of drinking in Europe, Asia, the pacific, and the Americas. I got to the part where rum had just been invented before I stopped reading it. One day I'll finish it and I'll be damn glad I did.

I recommend this one as well, even though the physical size of the book can be a bit daunting.

The reviews are in...

We watched this DVD last night:
The short review of this film is it's a very sweet movie.

It's not laugh out loud funny, but there are some laughs in it. It's not overly serious, but it has it's serious moments. It's more a character study than anything else and that's not a bad thing.

The film tells the story of a young man, Colin Hanks, who quits law school to go to work and the work he finds is being the road manager for a washed up mentalist, John Malkovich. The two bond, bicker, and banter as they ride the ups and downs of Buck Howard's career. It's based in part on the time that the writer/director was the road manager for The Amazing Kreskin.

Colin Hanks is mostly a blank slate in this film. He's got just a few expressions and he uses them all up within minutes so it's up to his co-stars to carry the film. Thankfully Malkovich does his job and he walks away with the movie. The movie crackles when he's in the scene but when he's not it drags. Hanks and his erstwhile female co-star Emily Blunt are, to put it kindly, meh, okay. To me they were the bland leading the bland. Malkovich and Steve Zahn stood out, as does Tom Arnold in his cameo.

Hanks and Blunt notwithstanding, this is a sweet little slice of life film and it was nice to watch once.


I just finished two books and here's what I thought of them:
Everything you know about Chinese food in America is debunked in Jennifer Lee's fine book. She lays bare the fact that most everything you eat in American (and Canadian too) Chinese restaurants is not really Chinese. Fortune cookies were invented by the Japanese. General Tso's chicken is unheard of in China. Sweet and Sour chicken/pork/beef, does not exist in China. Chop suey was invented in America.

Ms. Lee, the American born daughter of Chinese immigrants, speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese, and she tracked down all the stories behind the most famous dishes served in Chinese restaurants. She went to China, Taiwan, and to many other places to get the story behind the dishes, the restaurants, and the people behind the cuisine many Americans (and Canadians) know and love. Her book is highly entertaining and highly engaging as well. It's a fast fun read and you'll never think of Chinese food in the same way after you read her book.

I highly recommend this book.


I'm a huge fan of the history of early Australia, I loved Robert Hughes book The Fatal Shore, so I was eager to read this book when I first saw it. And after finishing it last night I can tell you it's a very good read.

This book tells the story of Mary Bryant a Cornish lass who was sentenced to death for a petty robbery she committed in England in the late 18th century. She had her sentence commuted to transportation to Australia, she was in the first shipment of female convicts to that country. What makes Mary's story extraordinary is that she survived the trip to Australia while pregnant, started a family with another convict, made a successful escape from Australia in an open boat that sailed to the country we now know as modern day Indonesia, was caught, sent back to England to face trial for her escape, became a folk hero for having done all that, and finally in the end got a pardon from the king through the help of James Boswell, the man who wrote the famous biography of Samuel Johnson.

Ms. Erickson tells Mary's story very successfully. She's brief, to the point, and keeps the narrative moving. You really get a sense of the hardships convicts like Mary went through in going to Australia, starting a new colony there, escaping from there, navigating the treacherous ocean, and having to stand trial again when she got back to England. It's a hell of a tale and this is a heck of a book. I highly recommend it.

"Yo, Dr. Monkey, what have you been reading lately?"

Well, since you asked so nicely, here's the run down on what I've been reading in the past few months:

I decided to read another in the Kurt/Linda Wallander series after seeing the BBC/PBS adaption of some of Henning Mankell's other books. I liked this one better than the other one I read but still this one has it's problems. Mankell is a master of pacing, tone, and atmosphere but when it comes time for the pay off he's weak, very weak.

This novel features Linda Wallander, Swedish police detective Kurt Wallander's daughter, who is about to follow in her father's footsteps and become a cop. When one of her friends turns up missing during a massive investigation of some gruesome murders and animal abuse Linda and her father start at different points of investigating the crimes but they end up working side by side in the end, even though Linda is not offically even a patrol person yet. Mankell builds the suspense and drops clues in tiny batches but when Swedes finally figure it all out, he muffs the climax. The ending was such a disappointment to me that I may not read another of his books again. Although I would love to see the Swedish TV adaptions of his novels just to see how they differ from the PBS/BBC versions.

I had high hopes for this book and they were cruelly dashed twenty five pages in. It looked like a promisingly off beat novel about a reporter who is into goofy monster movies and other nerdy stuff who is drawn into a crazy conspiracy but it ended up being one of those novels set in New York city that only New Yorkers could love. It was too insular and too suffocatingly New Yorky for me. I only paid fifty cents for it so I don't feel too bad about not finising it.

This late 1970's crime novel was good but if the author had cut the last fifty pages it would have been great. Lots of twists and turns and a few stereotypical characters as well, but it's a pretty fun read. It just goes on a little longer than it should. But by the time you reach the end of it it's more than worn out it's welcome.

This book is one of the finest crime novels I have ever read. It's fast paced, compellingly written, and it sucks you in from the first sentence. It was written in the 1940's so some of the references are a bit dated and when the characters complain about the high price of things it's almost laughable how low they are in comparison to today's prices. Over all though, it's a cracking good read and one of the landmarks of crime novels. I highly recommend this one.

Graphic Novel Reviews

Fables: Animal Farm is the second volume in the graphic novel series that tells the story of what happened to all the fairy tale characters after they got run out of their kingdoms by the mysterious 'Other.'

In this edition of the ongoing Fables saga we find out that the animals from all the famous fairy tales now live on a magically protected farm in upstate New York. But all is not well on that farm. Some of the animals resent having to be cooped up forever on a farm never to interact with humans out side it's borders ever again, because after all if talking animals were discovered then it might blow it for all the other fairy tale people who do live among humans. So the disaffected animals decide to revolt and they stage a revolution.

Into this this atmosphere step the feuding sisters Snow White and Rose Red. One of the sisters chooses to help the animals and the other chooses to try and stop them. One wins, the other doesn't. You'll have to read the novel to find out which one wins and which sister loses.

This edition of the Fables saga is just as good as the first one. It's a story well told with top notch art. If your local library doesn't carry this title like mine does then go buy it at your local comic book store, it's well worth the price you'll pay for it.

Some of you will be familiar with Ghost World from it cinematic adaption.

For those of you who aren't the bottom line on this graphic novel is that is tells the story of a couple of teen age girls on the cusp of graduating high school. That's it. I know, it sounds boring but honestly it's not. It's an amazing 'slice of life graphic novel.' It's even more amazing that a story about the lives of two teenage girls was written and drawn by a man, Daniel Clowes.

Clowes delves deep into their lives and he shows some funny bits, some futile bits, some fumbling bits, and at times the most disconcerting bits of these two girls lives. His graphic novel is very different from the film they made of it, which is actually a good thing. It's good because if they had made a film version of this novel with out changing anything then the film would have been a huge downer that nobody would have seen. They took the best bit out of the book and they expanded some others to get the movie version and in this case I liked the movie version a little better than the book.

I recommend both highly though.

********

I got both of these at my local library and I want to give a special shout out to the folks at the Johnson City Public Library, especially the new head of that august institution. I know he's been instrumental in bringing more and more graphic novels to our library and for that he deserves a high amount of praise. And I'd say that even if he wasn't a friend.

Two Reviews You Can Use!

I finally saw this the other night:
I thought the first two thirds of it was fantastic. It was the film adaptation of a comic book that someone like me, a recovering comic book geek, has always dreamed of. It had everything. It had action, well drawn characters, great cinematography, a decent script, cool gadgets, guns, babes, the whole nine yards.

And then they went and ruined it with the last third of the film. I hated the whole Harvey Dent/Two Face subplot. It was fine as long it took a back seat to the battle between the Joker and Batman but when they let it take center stage, it was a one way ticket to snooze town for me.

All in all though, I still recommend this movie for the following reasons:

• Heath Ledger.
• Heath Ledger.
• Heath Ledger.

You got a sense during his short career that this guy could act. He was good in things like Ten Things I Hate About You early in his career and by the time Brokeback Mountain came along you saw he'd graduated to the master class of movie acting. Then he went and turned in the best performance by anyone in a film in the past 30 years. I'm not shitting you. He's that good in this role. He's so good in this movie in fact that it drags like crazy when he's not in in the camera frame. I'd be surprised if he did not get a posthumous Oscar nomination for his performance. And if he gets nominated, he ought to be a shoo in to win.

Is this film worth your time? Yes. Will you love it? Probably not but you will be impressed by it.

I just finished reading this the other night:

I had read a review of this book when it first came out and I filed it away in the part of my brain that was supposed to remember book titles. Unfortunately for me that part of my brain took a vacation for many years and I forgot the title but not the premise of the book. So I searched in vain for many years for a book about dogs that could talk. I picked up one book by a female author about talking dogs but it wasn't this one, I ended up reading it anyway but I didn't really like it. Then as luck would have it I was in the foyer of the local used book store the other day and I saw the book I had been searching for for the past few years. I paid the two bucks they were asking for it and I took it home.

Monster Dogs is a quick though at times disturbing read. It tells the fictional tale of a group of dogs that have been bred to become more like us humans. They are bred for their size and intelligence and they are surgically altered beginning almost at their birth, they're fitted with arms and given voice boxes. The idea, hatched by their creator Augustus Rank, was to turn them into ultra loyal dog soldiers.

Their story is told in part by one of the dogs, a human female who befriends the dogs, through the diaries of their creator, and through an opera libretto of their early years as the dog/human hybrids. It's a fascinating story really and the author, Kirsten Bakis, tells it very well. Her writing is spare and elegant and her story telling, for the most part, is direct and engaging. Her novel is at times achingly melancholy, bizarre, and compelling. The only let down is towards the very end when she lets the story wander but I was willing to overlook it due to the strength of the rest of the book. I recommend this book highly but I want to warn all those pet lovers out there that there are parts to it that you will find very disturbing to read.

Book Report

I read on The Local where the BBC is adapting a series of films from the mystery novels of Swedish writer Henning Mankell. Kenneth Brannagh is set to portray Det. Kurt Wallander in the films so I figured I'd read one of the books before I saw any of the films. I wanted to see what the books were all about before Brannagh puts his stamp on the character, so I went to my local library and I checked out the first Kurt Wallander mystery to be translated into English:
I can honestly say while this is the finest Swedish mystery I have ever read, it left me kind of cold. Pun intended.

It was not so much a mystery as it was a novel about a Swedish cop who while trying to catch the murderers of an old Swedish farmer and his wife goes through some bad shit in his personal life. Wallander's wife has left him before the novel starts and he's wallowing in self pity over the break up of his marriage, his daughter is estranged from him, his father is teetering on the brink of dementia or Alzheimer's, he's got the hots for a married co-worker, and he's got drinking problems. And to top everything else off he's got to deal with a wave of anti immigrant sentiment that is sweeping his country.

You get a very acute sense of place in this book. Mankell's Sweden is one of small towns filled with lots of people with all kinds of secrets to keep. The rain, fog, snow, and ice hang over everything. When he writes about the warmer months in his book you get the sense that the harsh Swedish winter shapes things even then.

I liked this book not because I thought the plot and characters were all that great, in fact I didn't think they were that great at all. Nope, I liked it because it gave me a snapshot into a country that I'll probably never visit and because like foreign films tell stories in ways that are different than the way American filmmakers tell them, this novel was laid out and told differently than the way most Western mystery writers tell them.

I may not ever read another Kurt Wallander mystery but I'm glad I read this one.

"And what have you been reading over the past few months Monkey?"

I'm glad you asked. Here's what I've been reading over the past few months:


Blog buddy Jess Wundrun let me borrow this book and it's a very good read. It goes in depth into the wasteful ways coal is mined in this country and it also gives some of the history of mining. Overall it's very good but towards the end Mr. Goodell gets a too technical for me and I skimmed it. I do recommend this book though, especially to anyone who wants to pursue solar or other types of ways to power their home or business.


I saw this on Captain Karen's blog side bar and it looked interesting so I checked it out of my local library. I've read books about maritime stuff from this time period and they were always very good and this book was no exception. As a historian and writer Mr. Bown does himself proud with this fine history of how scurvy was beaten. It's a sometimes harrowing book, especially when you find out that hundreds of thousands died needlessly because the British government at that time did not want to spend the money needed to procure citrus fruit for it's ships. During the two weeks it took me to finish this book my vitamin C intake increased dramatically. I highly recommend this book.


Thunderbolt Kid is a funny fast read. Bryson was born about ten years before me so what was new and novel to him was old hat to me, i.e. TV, processed foods, other modern amenities. But despite that there was enough shared experience in his book to hook me. I may not have grown up in Iowa where he did but I went through a lot of what he writes about and I recognized places I lived when I was his age in this book. It's a very funny entertaining read.

The main things I learned form this book is that Mario Batali is a huge douchebag and that the author is a glutton for punishment. This one did not live up to it's hype at all and I say give it a pass if you are tempted to read it.

I was blown away by this graphic novel that was recommended to me by my buddy at the library, and not to brag or anything but my buddy is the big cheese at our local library, and by big cheese I mean he's the library director. So when a graphic novel lovin' dude like him recommends something to me, I jumped all over it. This graphic novel is a bout what happened to all those fairy tale characters you read about as a little kid. In this imaginative tale they've all been run out of their former kingdoms and dwellings and they've taken up residence in NYC. I'm not going to delve too much into the plot because to do so would spoil it for you but trust me when I say it's a good read. What I liked most about it is how the writer and artists brought the stale old fairy tale characters to not only life, but to a new and decidedly unfairy tale like life. There's more in this series and I may just have to look them up someday soon. I highly recommend this fine piece of literature.

The reviews are in

Read my review of Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari over at the Winter Reading Challenge blog.

Three short reviews

Since the League of Mullets will not be back until next week, they're currently in Oregon trying to score with lonely college coeds and drunken housewives, I'm going to give three short reviews of two movies and a book I just finished.

One of the nice things about getting free HBO/Cinemax on digital cable is being able to access the Premium On Demand channel. I'm watching all kinds of crazy movies that I wanted to see but would not fork over the filthy lucre to rent. Movies like this:

Loved it. I love funny horror/suspense movies and this one hit every nail on the head. The cast was perfect, the story was engaging, the horror was fun, and Elizabeth Banks is pretty easy on the eyes. I didn't expect to like this as much as I did but it was pure fun.

On the other hand this movie was just off the scale dumb, dumb in a good way but not near as good as Slither.

Everything was over the top, the acting, the effects, the props, everything. It seemed to me like they were trying a bit too hard to be clever and they missed the mark. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed most of it, except for the parts that were laugh out loud stupid. I dug Juliana Margulies, she's working that smoldering older Hispanic gal groove. Sam Jackson was fun in this movie but over all neither she or him could have saved it. It's no wonder it fizzled at the box office.

But one cannot watch stupid action and horror movies all the time. I started this book before we left for the beach and I finished it while we were there.

This is a fascinating book about two Canadian provinces that most Americans know little or nothing about, Newfoundland and Labrador. Gimlette, a British citizen, has a connection to these two provinces that you'll have to read the book to find out about, and he writes zippily about the time he spends there. He alternates between giving the history of the provinces with stories about his travels there, it's a technique he used in his previous book about Paraguay, which I also highly recommend. The stories about how the white settlers and government of Canada killed off and made dependants of the native peoples will break your heart, as will the stories and histories of some of the locals who still live there. If you're inclined to learn more about our neighbors to the north then I highly recommend you read this book, if you do you'll be highly entertained and you'll get more educated about Canada, eh.

Bottom line is Slither is wildly enjoyable, Snakes on a Plane fails to live up to it's hype, and Theatre of Fish is a damn fine book.

A Baby Timmy Book Review

Hi everybody. It's me Baby Timmy, the smartest baby in the world, and I'm back to give you a review of a novel I just finished. It's a Japanese crime novel written by a woman named Natsuo Kirino. and it's called "Out." Oh poop Dr. Monkerstein, just show them the cover.

Thanks.

Now this book has been out for sometime but I only just got around to reading it. What do you expect, I may be the world's smartest baby, but I still am a baby after all. Anyway, let's get on with the review:

This book is about a group of four women who work the night shift at a box lunch factory in Japan. One of the women, Yayoi, has a wayward husband who gambles and drinks away the family's money. When he comes home one night he and his wife argue and she ends up killing him. After she realizes that he is dead she is not quite horrified at the fact that she killed him but at the fact that she does not know what she is going to do with his body.

So she makes a call to one of the women she works with. Her friend, Masako, decides in a split second to help her and dispose of the body. Masako comes and picks the corpse up and takes it back to her house. There, along with the aid of two of the other women in their little group, the body of the wayward hubby is cut up and later disposed of. The book follows what happens as a result of this grisly action. Along the way to the pulse pounding shattering climax we meet low level Yakuza gangsters, illegal gambling club owners, Chinese bar girls, and others.

I won't tell you any more of what happens in the book because I do not want to spoil it for anyone who actually reads it later.

Over all this is a very good book. It is a eye opening picture of contemporary Japan and the cultural morays that pervade that island nation. It's also a fascinating portrait of these women who do a monstrous act and then try to struggle with the consequences of it. The author shows us just exactly what the old phrase 'the banality of evil' means in the lives of these women and those their lives intersect with.

I know full well that this novel is kind of grisly and due to the level of violence in it, it may not be everyone's 'cup of tea,' but I highly recommend it. It's not like an ordinary crime novel, it's in a different class all by itself.

I salute the author Natsuo Kirino and I salute the guy who translated it into English Stephen Snyder. She did a fabulous job coming up with the novel in the first place and he did a great job of translating this moody crime novel into English. My diaper is off to both of you.

Speaking of diapers, I got a full load, can someone change me?

Until next time, this is Baby Timmy, the smartest baby in the world, signing off and reminding you to keep your head full of knowledge and your diaper free of poo.

Adios amigos!