Richard Dansky's Blog, page 20

When Life Gives You Citrus Other Than Lemons....

So, my parents bought a case of band fruit. They did this for several reasons. They like citrus. They're nice people. They remember when I was in high school band and had to flog crates of Indian River oranges and grapefruits in order to make the annual band pilgrimage to Disney or wherever. And, uh, they like citrus.
Of course, what they bought is far too much for them to eat, so when I visit at this time of year, I get asked, "Do you want some fruit?" And now that they've discovered my sorbet making habit, it's "Do you want some fruit for sorbet?" 
There's really no way to dodge that one. All you can do is dress it up, and hope you eat enough oranges and grapefruits to make a dent in the pile before the grow-your-own-penicillin experiments really get rolling.
Of course, straight citrus sorbet tends to have some issues. One is that there's not really a lot of body to it, as citrus is mostly water and doesn't have a lot of pulp to firm up the matrix. What you do get is connective tissue that's narsty tasting, and hard to break down, and prone to getting wrapped around the sorbet-making paddles. So, if you want sorbet with some body, you need to mix something else in.
This, incidentally, is where it gets silly. Because I went to the supermarket, and I went to what can basically be called the Weird Fruit Section down at the end of the produce corner, and I got Fruits That Del Monte Don't Mess With. Starfruit. Kiwis. That sort of thing, all with the intent of committing sorbet upon them.
First up was orange-starfruit. Well, really, orange/tangerine/starfruit. I'd had starfruit for the first time in Brazil, when the nice ladies in charge of a con green room were gracious enough to ply me with everything Brazilian in order that I might get a taste, figurative and literal, of the country. I rather liked them, and in sorbet-making context I liked the fact that they were suitably pulpy to potentially thicken the citrusy madness I was otherwise brewing.
So, three oranges. Two tangerines. One starfruit. Some Grand Marnier. Slightly less sugar in the simple syrup than usual, as A)there was a possibility this one was going to my folks, and Dad's not supposed to have too much sugar, and B)we didn't have that much sugar.
Like most citrus sorbets, this one came out a little slushy. The good news was that the starfruit and tangerine flavors meshed well and stomped all over the rather bland oranges (side note: the bigger the orange, the duller the flavor generally is. These oranges could be used for flotation cushions.) to make something genuinely interesting. The color was nice, too - a rich, deep orange tinted by the yellowish-green of the starfruit, rather than the unsettling swampwater green of the Orange Brutus from a few weeks back. 
And next up: strawberry-grapefruit, and blueberry-kiwi. Because I can.

The Last Storytellers Unplugged Post of the Year

I give to you The Reading Corner, With Additional Sasquatches.

Three Nights on King Street

First Night:

Dinner with my coworker Navid at an Asian fusion restaurant called Dazzling, part of the strip of aggressively cuisined and priced restaurants across from the TIFF Lightbox. We'd eaten there a couple of times on my last trip up - it was a block over from my hotel - and he'd developed an unseemly affection for the sweet'n'sour soup, so it seemed like a good after-work option. So we went there, and the hostess recognized us - I'm guessing not too many odd couple like us come stomping in on a semi-regular basis - and Navid got his soup. We sat, we talked, I occasionally got distracted by the basketball game on TV, and it was a lovely meal.

A few tables down, one of the guests was declaiming, loudly, about basketball. Maybe he was inspired by the television. Maybe he just liked basketball. Who knows. What he knew, on the other hand, was that it had been the best thing in the world for Stephen Curry to go to Davidson, where he could be the man, as opposed to Duke. At Davidson, you see, he got to do whatever he wanted. If he screwed up, no big deal. He'd get the ball back, because, hey, it was Davidson and it wasn't like they had any other options. His brother, on the other hand, was at Duke, and if he hoisted up two bad shots in a row, Coach K would nail his ass to the bench and leave it there. 

Se declaimeth our neighbor, with great enthusiasm and great surety. His table companions seemed amused; I know I was, as I fed Navid running footnotes on the guy's commentary. Navid's not a basketball guy, so trying to boil down Stephen Curry, Davidson's unlikely rise, Duke's stretch of dominance and why everyone who knows what a foul looks like loathes them unconditionally, and the uncanny similarities between Coach K and Destro left his head spinning. "I'll stick with hockey," he said when I wound down.

We finished before the folks in basketball central did. And for no reason I could think of, I went over to their table. The gentleman who had been declaiming looked over at me and said, "Yes?" I told him, "I live ten minutes from Duke. You're absolutely right. About all of it."  He laughed. He was still laughing as I walked out, grinning.

Second Night:

Dinner by myself. I seriously considered the hot dog stand on the corner, but wanted to sit down someplace that wasn't the hotel room for a few minutes, so I wound up at what looked like the safe choice: Duffy's, or Dusty's, or some variant on that. The menu in the window promised burgers. The sign in the window promised pub food. The view through the window promised flat surfaces, chairs, silverware, and no live music. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I was seated at a two-top, by myself, in a relatively dim section of the place. I took out my iPad, fired up Carcassonne, and looked at the menu. And then I realized I had company.

Not at my table. At the next table. Four of them. Two men, two women, all blond. All very clearly having a good time, all very clearly impressed with their acumen, all very clearly impressed with each other, and all very clearly unaware there was anyone else in the restaurant.

They talked. They talked a lot, and they talked very loudly. They talked about Facebook, and how you had to be careful what personal information you put up on there or you might get in trouble. They wondered what the big deal was about this "Twitter" thing. They talked knowingly about how violent it was, right across the border in America, where all those violent Americans were. And they discussed how awesome it was that they'd all been at the same Phil Collins concert and not known it. 

The Phil Collins talk went on for about half an hour. I ate fast, paid my check, and left quickly. Down the corner, at the coffee shop where I settled myself in to recover, two guys were talking baseball, arguing Jays catching prospects. I just sat there, and listened.

Third Night:

Got out of the cab I was sharing with Navid - he was headed home, but my hotel was en route. We'd joined a few other coworkers for dinner and a dram at a Scottish pub with a fine whisky selection, and then headed homewards semi-responsibly. I got out of the cab, waved to Navid, and nearly tripped over a teenaged girl.

The reason I nearly tripped over her was that she was unconscious, on the sidewalk. A guy, clearly another teenager, clearly bombed out of his gourd, was trying to pick her up off the ground. Another friend, this one a girl, was screaming "Becca don't be dead!" and wandering around looking for shoes. The shoes were in her hand; the unconscious girl was barefoot.

I helped drunk kid get her up. "We just need to get some coffee in her," he said, and then she slipped off her shoulder and onto the ground again. The other girl sobbed, the drunk guy freaked out, and I tried to pry her out from under the chained bicycle she'd rolled  underneath.

The commotion was attracting attention. The folks closing down the Indian restaurant nearby stopped to see what was going on. A couple of passers by stopped. He dragged the girl out and got her up off the ground, letting her feet rest on top of his shoes. The folks from the Indian restaurant got a chair for her and set it out, got her some water, too. The woman who'd stopped to watch reamed the two drunk kids out, telling them they were idiots and that their friend was in danger. The drunk teenaged boy got defensive. The drunk teenaged girl started crying. They walked off a storefront length to confer. I picked up the unconscious girl's jacket, which had her phone in it, and gave it to her girlfriend. She was waving around an armband, clearly from a club they'd been to. Her guy friend told her to shut up. I went back over to the unconscious girl, who was being hovered over by various well-meaning folks, and started trying to get her shoes - now liberated from her friend - back on her feet. She woke up, sort of. Her eyes opened, and her head lolled, and she puked. Mostly cola came out. Some of it got on me, but most of it pooled around her feet and headed down the sidewalk, toward the street.

The paramedics arrived then. One tended to the girl, who said that she'd just been over to a friends house and hadn't had that much to drink. Another, an older, gruffer gentleman, talked to her friends. "Where has she been?" the guy asked. "At a friend's house." "How long have you been with her?" "We just got together." "What has she been drinking, and has she been taking any drugs?" "We don't know." All bullshit, all drunken self-preservation. The paramedic addressed his questions to the girl; every so often, the guy would try to chime in, and the paramedic would tell him in no uncertain terms that he wasn't the one being spoken to. He got belligerent after a while, the kid did. Tried to pick a fight with the paramedic, who told him where he could stuff it. I stepped in between the two; the paramedic had better things to do than have some seventeen year old drunk try to wail on him. The kid got defensive, as all inexperienced drunks do, backed off a couple of steps, then knocked my glasses off my face. When I bent to pick them up, he told me they were his. 

"They're mine," I told him, and put them back on. He stared at me for a moment, then backed off, saying loudly how it was cool, and he was cool, and we were cool, weren't we, and as he did I thought about my first beer, lo, these many years ago. After a minute, the kid and drunk girl started arguing again. A minute later, they were gone, heading up the street as fast as their wobbly legs could carry them. They took their friend's jacket with them, and her phone, too. The rest of us, the strangers, stayed behind until she was safely on board the ambulance. Then we drifted off; the other couple, the folks from the Indian restaurant, me. No names exchanged, no handshakes, no high fives. The scene dissolved, the restaurant closed, the observers walked off into the crowd. I'd caught the girl's name from her friends; I don't know if the other folks ever did. Not important, really. 

The ambulance started up, the spinners whirling but sirens silent. After a moment, it pulled out into traffic and sped away.

 

Because I Had To Make At Least A Little Sorbet While I Was Home

Tonight's concoction fell squarely into the "I have fruit. It's going to go bad. I should do something with it" category. Working title was "Orange Brutus", because I had a couple of oranges and my family's from Brooklyn and Dad's fond of talking about what an Orange Julius was like in the old days when they could use raw eggs in the recipe and Julius was the first name of Caesar who got stabbed by Brutus and...you know what? I'm going to shut up now.

So, Orange Brutus - orange, kiwi and lime. Color-wise, it got progressively more orange as it set up, which is kind of weird - that sort of green-to-orange progression hasn't been seen around Chez Dansky since they stopped making Fruit Brute. The overall taste is dominated by the kiwi, but it's very tangy - not as tart as Citrus Domination, but definitely more a palate cleanser than a dessert sorbet. Then again, that may be because I ran out of sugar while making this as well, so your mileage may vary. Texture-wise, it was very slushy coming out of the ice cream maker, but it set up nicely in the freezer. Scooping out a spoonful was easy, which was nice - I was afraid that slushy sorbet + freezer was going to give me something the consistency and appearance of a Horta. 

Note - if you get that joke, you are old. And a nerd. And an old nerd.

In any case, that's the first sorbet in ages, mainly because I've been on the road pretty incessantly of late. I'm not sure, but I think this year sets the record for travel. Some of it's been family related, some of it's been voluntary - when  you get asked to give a talk in Vienna, Ray, You Say Yes - and some of it's been work, but all of it's meant that I've rarely been home for more than a week or two at a stretch. That, in turn, has a big impact on my grocery shopping, which is to say "I'm unlikely to buy fruit when I'm going to be out the door in a couple of days". And if there's no fruit, there's no random agglomerations of "fruit that needs to get transmogrified before it grows ears."  

So. I'm on the road again tomorrow. But tonight? Sorbet.

New Storytellers Unplugged Essay

I know, you're deep into the third tier of turkey leftover recipes, but here's my Thanksgiving essay over at Storytellers - a list of a few of the books and people I'm thankful for as a writer, reader, and reviewer. 

Enjoy.

Some New Reviews

Wrote a passel of 'em up in Toronto, and now the first few are going live over at Sleeping Hedgehog. If you're in the mood, here are my takes on:

Maureen McHugh, After the Apocalypse
Christopher Fowler, Bryant and May Off the Rails
Adam Hall, The Striker Portfolio

There should be a few more in the pipeline, both at SH and its sister publication, Green Man Review.

The Muppets

It is hard for me to say this about a performer whose work has been of deep and sentimental importance to me for at least thirty five of my forty one years on this rock, but after seeing The Muppets tonight, it must be said. With all due respect, affection, and admiration, Frank Oz is wrong.

There are any number of ways The Muppets could have gone horribly, horribly wrong. It could have gone Shrek-wards, relying strictly on pop culture references bound to become dated by the time the movie hit theaters. It could have followed in the footsteps of the last few Muppet TV movies - various Christmasy bits and a painful take on the Wizard of Oz - and wallowed in unearned, saccharine sentimentality. It could have pretended that it hasn't been a long time since the Muppets were, well, THE MUPPETS, "Bohemian Rhapsody" and suchlike aside. 

Instead, it is a love letter. It's a love letter to the Muppets, from people who clearly loved them and loved getting the chance to work with them. Wayne and Wanda are here. Marvin Suggs and his Muppaphone. Link Hogthrob. Bobby Benson and his Baby Band. These are not Muppets you put onscreen if you're just looking to maximize the brand. For God's sake, Uncle Deadly - Uncle Deadly! - gets serious screen time. It's clear that Muppet fans, people who knew and watched and loved the Muppets made this, and they're simultaneously respectful and innovative with the characters so many of us grew up with. 

It's a love letter to us Muppet fan types, stuffed chock full of sights and sounds and images and props that we remember, gags that made us laugh made fresh again. Piggy's old dressing room is where it always was, upstairs top right. The stairs Fozzie went roller-skating down. It's the stuff that lets us get instantly comfortable, seven years old all over again and breathlessly waiting for Crazy Harry to blow something else up because by God, puppets causing explosions is funny.

It's a love letter to the kids we dragged along to the theater as an excuse to see The Muppets in the theater. It tells them, yeah you might not know who the Muppets are, but you're gonna love 'em, just like your mom and dad (and Uncle Rich) did. It's funny and silly and goofy and never, ever condescending. It understands that Kermit isn't on every kid's top ten list these days, and it's OK with that - but it's going to show the kids a good time and hope they honestly get a kick out of it. It works hard for its laughs, and it earns them.

And it's a love letter to the characters. These really are the Muppets, even if they aren't quite the same as we remember - Fozzie's new voice, in particular, is jarring - but all the things that made them who they were, their essential Muppetness is there. One of the big mistakes so many attempts to resuscitate the Muppets have made is that they've mistaken a central sweetness for sap, for pure saccharine sentimentality. The Muppets always had their sharp edges, and if they were always sentimental, they were never cheap about it. The film recognizes that, and doesn't let them off the hook. Yeah, they do get together. Yeah, they do put on a show. Yeah, they drag out a few of the greatest hits, and they do it in a way calculated to loosen tear ducts. But they don't make it easy for Kermit, but then again, when did Kermit ever take the easy way?

That's not to say the film doesn't have its flaws. There are slow bits. There are cheap jokes. There's a montage set to "We Built This City", for God's sake. Sam the Eagle doesn't get to express his disapproval of the goings-on. Miss Piggy doesn't karate chop nearly enough people. But really, to complain about the bad here and there when there's a lot of good to love is to be un-Muppety. After all, it was never perfect backstage at the Muppet Show, but they show always went on, and it was always great. (OK, maybe not the Twiggy episode. That one, not entirely great.)

There were moments when I laughed hard enough to get popcorn stuck in uncomfortable places in my sinuses. There were moments where my eight year old nephew cackled with delight. There were moments when he just snuggled up next to me and put his head on my shoulder, and we just watched together, or his sister climbed up in my lap and whispered in my ear "That's my Piggy". You could hear kids laughing in the theater. You could hear grownups laughing, too. You could hear whispered conversations as grownups explained some of the jokes, the shaggiest of the lot, to the kids. And occasionally you heard sniffles.

So. The Muppets. Yes, they are.

Notes on Notes

I picked up a CD at the HMV just north of Dundas this weekend - Jason Isbell, Live at the Twist and Shout. It's a short live disc, a half dozen or so songs from the beginning of his solo career, and half of it's DBT songs Isbell wrote in his time with the band. (The sixth song is a Van Morrison cover. When I sat next to Rumer's drummer on a flight a few months back, he confided in me that one of the tricky parts is always finding the right cover versions to fill out a full set with when the album's not long enough). It's not exactly where I would have expected to find the disc, which I'd been searching for sorta-kinda- in an off-and-on-scrounge sort of way for a couple of years, but hey, they had a pretty healthy selection of Isbell's music that someone had stuck a Janet Jackson CD in front of, so I bought the live disc and moved the Jackson and that was that.

A few weeks back, Melinda and I saw Isbell and his band, the 400 Unit, in Raleigh with James McMurtry and a local act whose name escapes me. Melinda's not much of a concertgoer for reasons that go all the way back to Missouri, and when the opening act - which was perfectly passable, and had a decent mandolin solo here and there, and had a bassist who was a dead ringer for Terry Pratchett and looked like he'd wandered in from another band entirely - launched into their set and she obviously wasn't feeling it, I got a little worried. One likes one's wife to enjoy this sort of thing, after all, and if she wasn't having fun, it was going to be a long night, or maybe a short one.

Then James McMurtry came on stage, and did a few warmup chords, and so help me God, my first thought was, "Ah. The grownups are here now." And I looked over at Melinda, and she was feeling it. Because when a man that much in control of his craft favors you with "No More Buffalo" and "Just Us Kids" and between-songs patter about how he's going to lay some country music on us, except all the country folk he knew growing up were KISS fans, that's what you do.

McMurtry played, wrapping up with a bring-down-the-walls version of "Too Long In The Wasteland", and life was good. Then Isbell and the 400 Unit went on, and blew out what was rest of the structural supports of the theater while taking turns executing a bottle of Jack Daniels onstage. The bottle died before the end of the set, but the band kept going - this was before their gear got stolen in Texas - and we stayed to the last, dying note. "Outfit". "Alabama Pines". "Try". "Never Gonna Change". Good old stuff, good new stuff, and an REM cover rounding things out. The contrast in the sounds of the performers was interesting; McMurtry's was more muscular and direct, all focused on his vocal-guitar combination, with lots of space around the edges. Isbell's was bigger, louder, bolder; it hit you in the face from the first note and never let up.

A good night. A good show. A good memory. That's why I shelled out for a 6-song disc at full price, not just for the music on it, but because in a way it's a piece of that night, a connection to Isbell onstage and making instant friends out of strangers in the crowd and hearing a single chord go through a room like an electric current and change everything.

And because "Danko/Manuel" still kicks ass, and always will.

The Night Run to Troy

The last time I went end to end on New York state, driving, I was twenty years younger and living in Boston. Friends from college were getting married in the wilds of Cleveland, so I packed up the car and headed west after work, headed straight on I90. Stopped out in Hadley (Holyoke/Amherst area, for those of you not up on your Chicopees-and-qs) to pick up my friend Rob, and we tag-teamed it west as long as caffeine would carry us. Near Buffalo we pulled in for a couple of hours' worth of sleep at a rest stop, put the seats back, and snoozed. Sunlight woke us up, an we took ourselves the rest of the way.

****
Thursday I was set to do an appearance at RPI at the invitation of Lee Sheldon, speaking to his students about what the life of a game writer is really like. Mind you, I'm not sure I know yet, but Lee was very generous to me when I was just getting started with advice, and I am happy to pay that forward. Also, I had been forced to bail on another invite a couple of years back, enmeshed in the coils of Splinter Cell:Conviction, and so it seemed like a good way to even those karmic scales, or something.

originally I had been slated to fly in Thursday morning - Toronto to Boston, Boston to Albany, then a quick jaunt up the road to Troy and RPI. The margin for error was not huge on this one, and when I checked the weather forecast on Wednesday, I saw snow for Toronto in the AM, and rain for Boston.

Rain in Boston generally does not mean "on time connection". So I thought about it, and I talked with folks at Ubi Toronto, and I came up with a dumb idea. It wasn't the dumbest thing I have ever done. That involved sticking both hands in a vat of liquid nitrogen when I as 16, and it sort of set a benchmark I don't think I will be able to eclipse without actually killing myself. But it was up there.

The idea was simple. Rent a car Wednesday night. Drive to Troy. Do the thing. Drive back. Be at work Friday.

***

I cut out of work at 6:30 on Wednesday. The rental car place was nearby, but it closed a 7. Cleverly, I took a cab. It went roughly nowhere - traffic and a cautious driver who, despite his GPS, refused to believe my destination existed. I finally told him to let me out, then spent the moments from 6:40 to 6:55 frantically trying to find street addresses amidst the skyscrapers. Tried to use the iPad to ID the location; Ipad chose that moment not to want to talk to the cell network. Last minute, I found it, a gleaming corporate tower. The rental car joint had been banished to the basement with the food court and the other retail morlocks.

Eventually, I got the car. Went back to the hotel to load up my overnight bag and a couple of bottles of caffeinated beverage. Brought along the iPod, in hopes that the USB plug in the car stereo dash wasn't cruel hoax - there's nothing like listening to podcasters interviewing people who honestly believe in Nazi flying saucer bases in Antarctica to make the midnight miles speed by. No joy, though. I found a radio station and headed for the water.

****

Most Americans, I suspect, don't think about the setup of Niagara Falls. I mean, it has water going down a falls, and it's between two Great Lakes, and Canada is on the other side, and that's that. The somewhat more complicated actual geography comes as a shock.

****

Buffalo is all construction, freeways, and strange odors. I rumble through it, still dialed in to a Toronto station that plays bands like The Kooks and no Bachmann Turner Overdrive. 90 is waiting for me near the airport, a long straightish run past the Finger Lakes and east into the night. The names along the way are familiar: Rochester, Syracuse, side routes to Binghampton and Schenectady. There's family history in upstate New York - my great-grandparents' farm, where my mother and her siblings spent their summers. One sister went to Skidmore, one got double educated in Poughkeepsie. An uncle went to RPI. It isn't entirely unfamiliar territory, or it shouldn't be. I stop for a late dinner at a rest stop Tim Hortons, wash it down with Diet Pepsi and a Five Hour Energy, and put the hammer down.

****

Radio fades out near Rochester, and I go station hunting. In summer, this is easier - there is always a baseball game coming in from somewhere. Now I cruise the FM dial, and stop down in the low numbers when I hear AC/DC, "Mistress for Christmas". The stations in the 80s are always interesting, college or public broadcasting or oddballs just hanging on to the edge of the dial. This one is out of U of R, and the show I've stumbled onto is the metal-themed "Academy of Shred", with the genial host genuinely excited about introducing Piledriver's venerable "Witch Hunt" and the like. The selections tend to veer more toward the black metal/wizard rock school of things, which means I get a healthy dose of what sounds like Cookie Monster's D&D campaign. But it keeps me going.

Eventually, the metal goes. I jump over to a Classical station, and get a triple play of French female composers. One of the selected pieces is a "Lullaby". I rage at the radio for the irony, but I don't change the dial. As lullabies go, it isn't particularly effective.

I drive. I check mile markers. I estimate how far I can go in the morning and still make it in time, if I have to stop. And I drive.

****

The long run down into the Mohawk Valley feels like falling. There's nothing visible off the side of the road - impossible to tell if you're careening through rock or forest or swamp or just plain darkness. And it is down, down, down, all the way down a long slope, trucks throwing on the flashers and dashing for the shoulder, the smell of burning brake pads. I lose the radio here, and don't find anything else that comes in consistently. The last song of the night is Blue Oyster Cult singing "Burning for You", it fades into static halfway through.

I start looking for places to stop at this point. Close enough to Troy to make it in the morning if I get up early, or so the GPS says. I see one exit with hotels, but can't find my Thruway ticket. I decide to keep going, to find a rest stop and locate it, then take the next exit. No luck. I find the ticket - it had drifted under the seat - and get back on the road. Next exit, no hotels. The one after - no hotels. The one after...the same, just interstate interchanges. Eventually I'm at the turnoff for I87. I'm there. I find a hotel near the Albany airport, and I check in.

After all that, I can't sleep. ESPN is rebroadcasting Miami of Ohio-directional Michigan. The announcers ramble on about how MoO is a "cradle of coaches". They mention Paul Brown and Ara Parseghian. They are very careful to keep the topic to football.

Eventually, I fall asleep.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

On Reading Lots of Books In Toronto

I've been in Toronto for a week and a half. In that time, in addition to various bits of writing and lots of work, I've read six books. This is mainly due to the fact that I've finally figured out the relative location of my hotel to the subway, not to mention the amount of time it generally takes to get from said hotel, through the mall-shaped maze outside College Station, and over to the Lansdowne stop so that I don't feel compelled to hail a cab in blind oh-Jesus-don't-let'me-be-late-because-of-strange-Canadian-subway-customs panic.

Also, I keep losing the tokens I buy. Tiny little things, they are. Like Twoonies that someone turned Reducto's shrink ray on.

But I digress. Lots of train time means lots of reading time. And since the last few packages of review books I've been sent have largely been anthologies, that means I largely packed anthos with me. All of which means that I've probably read more ARCs on the platform at Yonge and Bloor than any man living has a right to, one story at a time.

It's been a while since I've been able to do this much concentrated reading. Work's been particularly ravenous of my time this year, and the uptick in book reviews I'm writing means a downtick in the number of books I actually get to read. Yes, careful reading and re-reading takes longer. It was a surprise to me, too.

But all of this concentrated reading has led me to some thoughts about, well, writing. And about writing, too, as regards reading. And first and foremost among those thoughts is this: God help you if you've got a short story in an anthology with something that is genuinely, certifiably brilliant, because "good" and "elegant" and "clever" just ain't going to cut it. Next to transcendence, mere superb craft is pitifully exposed, which is worse than it deserves.

I read the Joe R. Lansdale-edited Horror Hall of Fame collection, chock full of Stoker winners, and after I read Jack Cady's "The Night We Buried Road Dog", I had to put it down for three days. Not because the story was disturbing, not because I didn't like the book. It was because I was so thoroughly blown away by that story that I knew that I wouldn't be able to give anything else in that book a fair shake until my brain had been given enough time to cleanse its palate.

Which, I suppose, leads to the other thought I had, which is that sometimes the best way to read a book is to not read it. To let it sit until you can appreciate everything in it, instead of having one story or one chapter reflexively outshine the rest. It's slower, yes. But it makes for a better and more generous reading experience. And besides, there's something right and proper about giving greatness its space, and its due.