Big Books Bad

After buying a US import copy of Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver almost as soon as it was released, I’m now ready to give up on it. I’ve read the first 200 pages, and I can’t stand the thought of another 800. It’s too damned dull.

Amazon is full of mixed reviews for the book. Plenty of people are of the same opinion as I am, namely that it’s a tedious slog. Others, who have liked the book, make macho statements like “recommended, but not to the faint-hearted” and belch tough-guy exhortations to “put in the effort.”

Well, nuts to that. The fact that they feel the need to trumpet their own heroic struggles to finish it is a) pretentious, and b) shows that no matter how worthwhile it may be in the end, it still is a slog. Don’t try to make me feel like a wimp for wanting to be entertained by a book I’ve laid out twenty quid for.

I’ve been stuck on it for four weeks now. Every time I want to sit down and read something, I take a look at its cover and ask myself: “can I really be bothered with another few pages, or will I just stare mindlessly into space instead?”

Staring into space usually wins. This is why I’ve only managed to get through 200 pages of it. And because I don’t like reading more than one (fiction) book at once, this is all the fiction I’ve read in that time. I feel constipated in the head. What a fucking waste of a month’s bus journeys.

This experience makes me less inclined to start reading any other big books. If I choose to invest my time getting involved with a set of characters and the world they live in, then I want a proportionate pay-back. I can easily make it through a short novel (300-400 pages, in the current publishing climate) in a week. I find that a nice, comfortable time to spend with a book. I love spending a lazy afternoon reading a novel cover-to-cover, but with a toddler running around the house that doesn’t happen very often. No, a week is fine by me.

But if I have to wade through six, seven, or eight hundred pages over the course of a fortnight or more, then that book had damn well better be extraordinary.

If the page count of a book were a measure of its quality, or of how much I am likely to enjoy it, then it would make sense to play those odds. I’d read more bigger books. But that isn’t the case. No matter how many reviews I scan or recommendations I get, I don’t know how much I’ll like a book until I actually read it. So by reading doorstops I’m actually reducing the average amount of enjoyment I derive from fiction. Hmm.

(If I take that argument too far, though, I’d end up reading nothing but short stories. That doesn’t work for me, either, so there’s clearly some happy medium to be found.)

My reading diet has recently consisted mainly of science fiction. I think it’s about time that I hunkered down with a few good 300-page mysteries. China Mieville’s 860-page Perdido Street Station is just going to have to wait. John Sandford has a new Prey book out, though, and Robert B. Parker has a new Spenser coming up next week. Reviews suggest that they’re good, but not the best in their respective series. But I know for certain that I’m going to enjoy them, and that their pleasure-to-effort ratio is going to be high. That’s what I want right now.

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Quiet time

I know I’ve been quiet here of late. Three main reasons for this: visitors, notice period, and Tiger Woods 2004.

Visitor-wise, we had Julian up from the far South the weekend before last, and right now we have Abi’s mom staying with us for a fortnight. Blogging is a social activity, but in a virtual context. My computer sits in our living room, and when I’m at the keyboard I have my back turned to the sofas. This is fine when Alex is off to bed and Abi is binding books at the dining room table, but it’s not terribly conversation-friendly when we have guests around.

Then there is the notice period. I handed in my resignation letter at work three weeks ago, and I still have one week of notice period left to work there before leaving. I don’t know how other people feel about it, but I hate working out notice periods. I’m not going to talk about the reasons for leaving my current job, save to say that I was experiencing a certain amount of dissatisfaction with it.

Knowing that I’m going to be starting a new job could have given me the mental resilience to just soldier on for those four weeks, knowing that I didn’t have to be dissatisfied forever, and that fresh challenges lay just around the corner. It didn’t, though. It just made impatient about having to wait four weeks before being allowed to leave all my niggles and gripes behind. It’s like winning the lottery, and then being told that you can’t access your millions until you retire in thirty or forty years’ time.

Well, maybe not that bad, but…WANT INSTANT GRATIFICATION NOW!

I could cultivate a “not my problem any more” attitude, and glide through every working day with the intent of achieving as little as possible, but that’s just not me. Forcing myself to come up with 100% every day, though, is turning into a struggle.

And so in my spare time I have been doing everything I can to leave work behind me. It’s a containment strategy to stop my 9-5 worries from dragging down the rest the hours in the day. Hence: Tiger Woods 2004. Man, that game rocks.

Tiger Woods 2004It’s easy to pick up and play, has lovely graphics and well-rendered courses, and above all is immensely absorbing. It usually takes me a little under half an hour to play round 18 holes. Tackling one of the 4-round PGA tournaments takes 2 hours. As you win more money in tournaments and other matches, you can gradually increase the statistics and abilities of your character. Also, there are hundreds of items to unlock throughout the game, from clubs that give extra power and accuracy to your shots, through to lucky shirts and socks that improve your chances of landing in favourable positions in the rough.

So I’ve been losing myself in the land of virtual golf for up to three or four hours an evening. Hasn’t left much time for blogging. But you know what? The rest of the web gets on just fine without me. Wow. Fancy that.

Two things

Toblerone, and Gran Turismo 3. What do they have in common? Well, yesterday I had “doh!” moments with both.

For Toblerone, it was noticing that the mountain emblem on the packaging contains not just a mountain, but also a silhouette of a mountain goat, or some other similar animal. To be fair, I only noticed it on a super-large special offer bin, where the normal logo was blown up to twenty times its normal size. Nevertheless, I was momentarily taken aback by this packaging revelation. (Draw whatever conclusions you like about my need to “get out more”.)

Secondly, while playing Gran Turismo for, oh I don’t know, maybe the five-hundredth time in the last two years, I discovered the button that pulls on the handbrake. All this time, I’ve been using just the accelerator and the foot brake, and wondering why I have such a hard time making it through the Complex Spiral course in under the target time. No wonder power-sliding was such a pain in the ass. Jeez.

Bacon. Baaaacon.

Modern bacon is generally extremely disappointing. “Standard” bacon is pumped full of salt water during the curing process. This reduces the curing time, and stops mass from being lost, which means that shops make more money from the same haunch. However, as soon as you cook it, the muscle fibres in the meat contract and squeeze out a flood of water and yucky white foam. Very disappointing.

Most butchers, and some supermarkets, will be able to sell you “dry cured” bacon. In theory, this is bacon cured the old-fashioned way, by covering it in salt and allowing osmosis to take its natural course. No water is added. In practice, the label “dry cured” means different things to different people, and the quality of such bacons varies greatly between brands and shops. (Safeway’s dry cured bacon, for example, only produces marginally less foamy liquid than their standard variety.)

And then there’s the “extra lean” bacon. Bacon without all the fat, rind, and, er, flavour. Folks, if you’re considering low-fat bacon, do yourself a favour and don’t buy it at all. Have a banana instead.

Here at Chez Martin, we have just adopted a new bacon policy: henceforth, we will only be buying absolutely the cheapest bacon we can find in our local supermarket’s meat department.

Why? Well, if we’re going to put up with water-cured bacon, we might as well pay as little as possible for it. A 300g pack of super-cheap-ultra-value bacon costs about a pound. A comparable pack of “branded” bacon will set you back two or three. Secondly, cheaper bacon is fattier bacon. Guess where bacon’s flavour comes from? It’s the fat. Fatty bacon just tastes better.

I think it was at World Science Fiction Convention in 1995 (Intersection) that I attended a talk where Joe Haldeman explained his technique for cooking perfect bacon: cook it in the nude. He reasoned that standing naked over a hit stove forces you to cook the bacon slowly, over a low heat, so that it doesn’t spit and spatter all over the place, speckling your delicate milky flesh with gobbets of hot grease.

I have tried this. It does work, provided that you get top-quality bacon that is really dry-cured, rather than just “dry-cured™”. If you use cheap, fatty bacon, however, you need to modify the technique slightly. First of all, toss it in a frying pan and give it a good hard blast on a very high heat. This makes the meat contract very quickly, expelling most of the stored-up water right up front. Pour off this water. (Don’t wait for it to cook and bubble away–you’ll just boil the bacon.) Then, you can either continue to fry, grill, or oven-bake the bacon as you would normally.

I prefer to fry it on a low heat (à la Haldeman). With most of the water out of the way, it cooks like higher-quality bacon. And because it’s cheap and fatty, it contains plenty of oils to make it as dark and crispy as you choose. Mmmm, bacon.

Abi on writing mainstream fiction

I’ve been steeped in genre fiction (science fiction and mystery/detective) for so long, that I got a little bit freaked out when I started thinking about plotting a “mainstream” novel. Fortunately, Abi had the answer:

“You start by not killing one of the main characters. Then you keep going until you don’t reveal who didn’t do it.”

Simple, really.