Southern Living, New York-Style

I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence by Amy Sedaris

In the first of this book's three increasingly loopy introductions, Amy Sedaris writes, "This is not a joke cookbook. I don't like joke cookbooks because I can't take them seriously." This is at once true and not true of I Like You. Turn to any page in this book, and you're sure to encounter an image or a line that makes you shoot Scotch out of your nose*. But at the same time, almost every recipe, craft idea, or entertaining tip that appears here is pure gold.

The food sections contain an appealing mix of traditional Greek cooking, comfort food, and accessible haute cuisine, as well as a collection of recipes from Sedaris's lucrative side job -- selling cupcakes and cheese balls out of her apartment. I've got a zillion index cards sticking out of the book right now, and two dishes on the menu for this week (Brady's making Dimpleton's Pan-Fried Steak and I'm making the simply-named, but delicious-sounding Chicken on the Stove).

But more than that, this is a book that will make you want to throw a dinner party. I've always been a better party guest than host**, but after reading this book, I feel that the deepest, mistiest secrets of throwing a good party have been made known to me, and that I could maybe pull it off.

Reading this book also made me think about the great dinner parties I've been to, and how, while the basic tenets of hospitality were the same, it was the unique quirks in party-hosting styles that made things memorable and reflected the hosts' personalities. That said, if you ever find yourself in Madison, Wisconsin for an extended period of time, you should make it a point to endear yourselves to Nathan and Abby, and get asked to their house. Hosts with the most, 'nuff said.
_____________________
* for example, the sheet cake with "Come Home Dad" written in chocolate sprinkles or the instructions for making a cat toy our of a tampon
** Mary's Tips for Being a Good Party Guest (and Getting Asked Back)
1. Bring booze or a pumpkin log.
2. Take your turn engaging the party guest who a) has had too many drinks and wants to talk at great length about Pancho Villa, b) has not had a conversation with anyone except their children in a month, or c) is smoking outside, alone.
3. If the host leaves the party to do dishes, relieve him/her of these duties, or at least help clear and scrape plates.
4. Use a coaster.
5. Always stay one drink behind the host.
6. Know when to leave, and say 'thank you.'

Pretty! Pretty!

I realize that, to anyone who doesn't read them, fashion magazines seem pretty much interchangeable. They are not.

Cosmo is written for 21-year-old women with the emotional maturity of 14-year-old girls; Vogue is no fun unless you make six figures; Allure is the K-Mart of fashion magazines; and Jane is like the girl at my high school who threw on a Cure t-shirt and started calling herself "alternative," oblivious to the fact that Bust and Venus were giggling and whispering behind their hands about what a poser she was.

But Glamour is different, and this is why:

1. Jennifer Connolly is on the cover this month, and they did not airbrush out her crow's feet.
2. Mariane Pearl does an insightful, smart monthly feature about women activists around the world.
3. You know how "sexy curves" is usually a euphemism for "fatty fat-fat" in most women's magazines? This month's issue features a fashion spread with America Ferrera that makes absolutely no mention of her weight.
4. And along those lines, realistic and attainable beauty goals. Recently in Glamour, I read something along the lines of: "All you really need is a moisturizer with SPF, a moisturizer to wear at night, and something to wash your face with." I'd always suspected that microderm abrasion and at-home chemical peels were a racket. How nice to be validated.
5. And believe it or not, they plug really good books (this month, Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield).

I'm not saying it's the New Yorker or anything, but still, credit where it's due. Not once has reading an issue of Glamour ever made me feel guilty or vapid, and occasionally, I learn something interesting about Darfur or breast cancer. I can't think of a better way to spend the occasional half an hour.

A Book With Braaaaaaaaiiiinsss

Every couple of years or so, I watch Night of the Living Dead. It always goes like this:

1. The credits roll, and I am all "Woo hoo! Zombies!"
2. The first horde of the shambling undead lurches over the horizon, and I am suddenly quiet and still, lest they see me.
3. The first arm gets bitten into, and I begin scoping out the exits of the theater while keeping an eye on the mass of undead extras on the screen, because I am not entirely sure that they are going to stay in there. Zombies, after all, care not for the distinction between cinema and reality. Zombies care only for eating people.

Zombies also seem to enjoy skeeving me out such that I always regret watching a zombie movie before the third reel starts, and freaking me out so completely that I dare not stop watching, in case they come to my house later that night and ask me why I didn't stay for the end.

I tell you all of this so that when I say to you that I devoured (heh) Max Collins' World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War in two sittings, pausing only (and grudgingly) for sleep, you appreciate the extent of my enjoyment of this book.

In WWZ, Brooks apes the format of all of those hastily written world geo-politics books that you see waiting to ensnare your dad in large piles at the front of Barnes & Nobles. It's written, a la Studs Terkel or Douglas Brinkley, as a series of interviews with key players and everyday survivors set a few years after the dead started rising and things went to hell.

(FYI, it started in China. It also turns out that China was not the best place for such a thing to start if we, as a planet, had hoped to contain the zombie plague before it spread to too many people.)

Happily, Brooks never winks at the reader by having a President Romero or any other clumsy references to Barhhrbarhah, and anything that may or may not have come to get her.* He keeps his future history firmly grounded in reality - except for the walking corpses - and as a result the horror stuff takes a backseat to the policies, international jockeying, and containment strategies that eventually brought humanity back from the brink. It is both suprisingly un-gory and extremely inventive, as when a U.S. Military grunt points out the difficulty of making headshots after years of being trained to shoot at the chest.

These little details - like the way the grunts call the undead "Zack" in the tradition of "Charlie" or "Ivan" - are engaging enough, but the plotting is where Brooks shows a surprising facility for the format that he's chosen. The fictionalized responses of international organizations, militaries, and nations are all-too believable, and you probably can guess which side they err on.

In other words, this is a zombie novel for those who never thought they'd have cause to read such a thing. It takes a clever conceit and runs with it; WWZ outstrips its own premise without sacrificing the attractions of the genres that made the conceit clever in the first place.

If you liked Shaun of the Dead, or any of those books that detail the often sluggish responses of policy wonks to an outbreak of Ebola or some natural disaster, this book is for you.

------------------------
* Take, for example, the blurb on the dust jacket, which proclaims "Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.")

Giving Nancy Pearl a Run for Her Money

If you or someone you hold dear will be in the vacinity of downtown Los Angeles this Thursday, January 11, stop by the Central Library, and I will give you your very own pony.

However, if I have run out of ponies by the time you arrive, stick around anyway for "Morris and McCoy On Books," a new monthly book discussion group at Central Library co-hosted by yours truly.

This month, we'll be talking about reading resolutions for 2007, aka, how to read 52 books in a year without hating all incarnations of the written word by April. Lots of fun recommendations, everything from Pinsky to pulp fiction - come on down, it'll be magical.

Central Library - Meeting Room A
January 11, 2007
12:15-1 pm

And As Promised... The Best of 2006

2006 will stand in my memory as the year I finally stopped worrying and learned to love the genre fiction. This turned out to be a happy discovery, considering that so much of this year's literary fiction let me down (The Thin Place*, The End of Mr. Y), bored me silly (Wickett's Remedy), and/or annoyed me to the very core (Special Topics in Calamity Physics).

It was a year of Dashiell Hammett and Ross MacDonald and Megan Abbott, whose remarkable L.A. noir Die a Little would surely have made this list had it not been published in 2005. So, in keeping with that spirit, this list includes two murder mysteries, a fantasy, and a boxing novel. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

And in the spirit of one of my favorite book blogs of 2006, I'm keeping it short.

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril: I've found it impossible to describe this book to anyone without including the phrases "crackerjack tale" or "ripping good yarn" in the voice of a 1930s radio announcer.

Pound for Pound: F.X. Toole spent years working as a boxing cut man, secretly writing stories and sending them off. After 40 years of rejection letters, he publishes Rope Burns. Then, just as his writing career is taking off, he drops dead, which is exactly the kind of thing that would have happened to one of his characters. But check this one out - gripping fight scenes and a surprisingly big-hearted story.

Sharp Objects: Creepy, twisty, bleak, and impossible to put down.

The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast: Salon tore this book a new one, but well, they were wrong. A balanced and astonishingly detailed account of how it all went so wrong, who was to blame, and who stepped up.


Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!: I'm serious - it belongs here. Why? Because it's not every day that a book about a television game show gets you choked up on an airplane.

The Lies of Locke Lamora: A fantasy novel involving several nifty long cons. Intricate, dazzling plotting.

The Night Gardener: Like watching an episode of Homicide: Life on the Streets. Like, one of the ones from season 3.

Happy reading in 2007, my dears. And if you find anything good, tell me about it. Ta.
_________________
* Which I realize was loved by everyone but me.

I'll Take Game Show Memoirs for $200, Alex.

Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy by Bob Harris

While doing some Christmas shopping at the local bookstore, Brady went all "Ooooh, Navy SEALs!!!" on a number of titles of which I was skeptical. But when he picked up a book written by a five-time Jeopardy champion, and said, "I'd like to read that," I feared my sweetie had lost his damn mind. Nevertheless, I shrugged and forwarded this request to my sister, who dutifully purchased it for him.

A few weeks later, I found myself completely head over heels in love with this book, which I assure you, is about far more than a simple game show. It is a memoir about discovering that you have not panned out as a very good adult. It is also about falling in love, getting your ducks in a row, and learning to become a good friend/son/daughter/person. And it is also about Jeopardy, which as game shows go, is a '57 Mustang in a parking lot of Escalades.

Harris's writing is funny, ingenius, and, at times, incredibly moving. Not only are you in for a good memoir, you'll also learn about how memory works -- why certain tidbits stick and others get lost in the gray matter. And you'll probably be a little bit smarter when you finish it, too. Maybe even smart enough to get on Jeopardy.

I feel icky about inserting this detail, but it's easily obtained elsewhere and it's also the thing that made me pick up the book in the first place. Harris is Jane Espenson's* sweetie, and I figured that anyone she lurved was probably good people.

If you like...: Jeopardy, Buffy, or would totally clean up on the Daily Double in Midwestern Culture & Norms, this book is for you.
-------------
* Writer for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, The O.C., and Firefly, to name a few.

Where I'm Calling From

It was not my intention to take such a long holiday break from the blog, but somehow, the last days of 2006 were lost in a blur of out of town guests, cross country travel and other adventures. Among them:

1. Johnny Depp sighting at Amoeba Records. He's very short.
2. Made my folks fans of both Oaxacan food and Veronica Mars.
3. Went to the Rose Bowl to watch people build floats for the Tournament of Roses Parade, where Brady proved that he is not too old to eat an entire funnel cake.
4. Began 2007 by running from one end of this island to the other and back again - 12 miles. This served the dual purpose of getting in my marathon training and balancing out the epic eating I would go on to do in Mobile.
5. Hung out with a blacksmith at Fort Gaines. Discussed merits of gas forges versus coal ones.
6. Went to Biloxi to gamble at the recently rebuilt casinos. This is just about the only thing in Biloxi that has been rebuilt. Grrr...
7. Luggage lost at LAX. Current whereabouts unknown.
8. Returned home to find there had been a windstorm in L.A. that had blown most of our windows open and knocked out a screen. One cat was at large. We found her cowering under our neighbor's window and surmised that she must have fallen from the second story sometime during the storm. Not sure how long she'd been there, but when I brought her inside, she proceeded to eat for twenty minutes straight.

I've read many books in the past few weeks. Reviews of The Night Gardener, Prisoner of Trebekistan, I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence (which I DID get for Christmas... hint-dropping was not in vain!), and many many more to follow, not to mention the previously promised and severly overdue Best of 2006 list.

But plans for tonight: pour bourbon into glass, repeat as necessary.