Freewheeling Andy

Yeah. I filled it raw. I was using a US recipe, so apoligies for the units - I used 3 cups of fine flour - which is sort of one and a half pints, and five eggs mixed together , gently mixed them together and then kneaded the whole lot for about 10 minutes. The recipe set let the "dough" rest, covered, for half an hour, which I did. Then I just rolled it until it was thin - repeatedly turning it and keeping the surface well floured, chopped it into rectangles, put filling on one side, dabbed water around the edge to make it stickier, put the other side over and squashed the edges together. Really that easy. The filling was just a mozzarella ball, a couple of roasted peppers from a jar, three or four hot chillies from a jar, about 10 olives -all choped into small bits - and a couple of cloves of garlic, crushed, and a bit of salt and pepper. Boiled them for about 4 or 5 minutes, and was a bit careful when removing them from the water because they were looking pretty fragile. Delicious, though. I just had some leftover ones and they're still very good.

I made pasta for the first time last night. It tastes so much better than shop brought pasta. Very, very pleased about it. And the pasta side isn't too much like hard work, really. Just flour and eggs and a bit of salt, mixed and mixed and kneaded and kneaded and then rolled flat. Filling the pasta, which I did with a chilli, roasted pepper, garlic, olive and mozarella stuffing, though, was a right pain, and took forever. I think it was worthwhile, though.

Ooh! It's ages since I read it, but yes, The Tin Men was hilarious. It may not be to everyone's taste, but I found it hard to control my hysterics when reading Flann O'Brien's newspaper articles from the 30s and 40s that are collated in The Best Of Myles. And also At-Swim-Two-Birds by the same author, although that's slightly less "laugh out loud".

Oooh! That sounds damned good. More than just a hill of beans. I'll add that to my slightly obscure wanted list.

Ah. I'm glad you enjoyed it. I've just finished the Successor, which I didn't really enjoy so much (although I preferred it to Spring Flowers...). He sometimes writes these great, full novels, and sometimes seems to write these fragmentary things that are almost novellas rather than novels, like The Pyramid and Spring Flowers and Successor.

Thinking back on Yes Man, I think it actually perhaps gains by being less dramatic. In my mind I was expected wild, exciting things to happen to Danny, and it to turn out more like a novel; but perhaps the fact that most of the things are fairly low key (buy a car, get a girlfriend, reply to some e-mails, go to bars) actually make the book better, more enlightening. I've just finished The Successor. It's definitely a step up from Spring Flowers... but is still not great. I found it frustrating because it was written in a similar allegorical style to The Pyramid, and didn't seem to be a full novel, with full plot, and seemed more constructed as little fragments, more like an idea for a book. The idea is fascinating, as a psychological whodunnit set in communist Albania, trying to work out who is responsible for the murder of the designated succesor to a character who is clearly Enver Hoxha. I guess it was a worthwhile read, but I just thought it should have been better. I'm now properly starting on Due Preparations For The Plague by Janette Turner Hospital.

I never read A Scanner Darkly, although friends tell me that it could be Dick's best. I've read all five anthologies of the short stories, though, which I really enjoyed. At some point they get a bit samey, but I guess that's inevitable when you're writing for the SF magazine audience. You can really see the change in style as he gets older, though, getting more personal and moving further away from the traditional SF stuff. I think my favourite remains The Man In The High Castle, although Do Androids Dream... is also great. All of the written stuff is better than the films - I really didn't think much of Total Recall, and I've always thought Do Androids Dream is much better than Blade Runner - but that's one of those odd ones that polarises people, those who prefer the film and those who prefer the book, although they are completely different. Certainly one of my two favourite SF authors, both of whom operate(d) on the fringes of SF. The other being JG Ballard. Although very different, they both play much more with the psychological side of things than with the "ooh, look at the cool shiny new technology" or Space Opera stuff.

Yes Man was a fun little book. Not exactly deep, or serious, and maybe neither as profound, nor as adventurous and insane, as it might have been. But fun to read and a little enlightening none-the-less. Man has dull life, meets man on bus telling him to say yes more, which he does. Fairly interesting things happen. I've now started on Ismael Kadare's The Successor. I love Kadare's books, but the most recent I read - Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, didn't really strike home. Be interesting to see whether this is a continuation of the downturn.

Snow by Orhan Pamuk: Dull, boring, nothing happening, dreary, over emotional pointless hard to read tosh, set in Turkey, with a poet as the main character The Book Of Memories by Peter Nadas : Dull, boring, effete, almost impossible to read, nothing happening dreariness set in Hungary, with a playwrite as the main character everything I've tried by James Joyce Death in Venice by Thomas Mann : Dull, boring, effete, nothing happening dreariness The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien : The worst of the dreadful middle earth nonense

Snow by Orhan Pamuk I wanted this review to just go like this: "Aaaaaaaaargh!" Because that's how I felt. But decided that would probably be unhelpful to those interested in reading the book. My second thought was to write the review as follows "Zzzzzzzzz...." But, although that's more helpful, it's probably not enough. Both "aaaaargh! and "zzzzz..." describe my thoughts about this book, though, which took me three months to read. It's dense, and heavy and therefore does take a long time to read. But it's also utterly dull and un-gripping, and (if I'm allowed to use the word here), shhhhhhh. So I never wanted to pick it up to battle my way through seven long, turgid, dull, badly translated sentences. As for the book itself? It should be brilliant. Pamuk has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and is surely, therefore, a great author (although I've seen no sign of it in the two books of his I've read). This book is a tale of a revolution and coup in a city in eastern Turkey which has been cut off by snow. The central themes of the book are how secularism and religious fundamentalism clash, with the extremely topical subject of whether it's fine to wear a headscarfe in secular society (although we've gone beyond that and are arguing about the veil now). It's also a love story, the tale of a man infatuated and and trying to get a girl to reciprocate and run away with him. These are elements of what should be a brilliant book. If the brilliant book exists, though, it's not this one. The main protagonist is annoying, irrational, impossible to follow, spectacularly emotional and fragile. As, it seems, are all poets and authors in literature. I have a strong feeling that writers should never write about writers, or poets (or, for that matter, academia), because it shows a desperate lack of imagination, of ability to see anyone other than themselves, a lack of empathy. But this character is worse, and we get 500 dense pages of his agonising. Perhaps there's a deliberate, but I suspect it's accidental, irony that the protagonist is agonising, so Pamuk makes reading the book agonising for us. My feeling is, though, that the book is just rubbish. Some people love it, I will add. People whose tastes I trust. But my advice is to steer well, well, clear. There are better Turkish writers, there are better tales of extremism, there's a load of great literature written, and I'm sure more great literature to be written, on the clash between East and West, and Turkey is the center of the battleground. But this doesn't belong in the pantheon. It belongs in the bin.

Well, I've finally finished Snow. Good grief. It's a book that should have fascinated me. The subject matter itself is great. But they style of the book is horrible, the way the author imposes himself more and more into the book, but does it in such a clunky way. The long, tedious, moping descriptions of emotions, of the tender, oh so tender and delicate and fragile emotions. Please. ****ing please. Gah! And, instead of being a fun tale of a revolution or coup, it's all about a bloody poet. And the bloody poet has poems "come to him" yet we never get to see them. It's all created by deus ex machina, but with no explanation, and no point. It's meaningless. Bleh! And the bloody hyperemotional poet/main protagonist annoys me so much, with a page of "oh, how miserable he felt when he saw in her eyes that she didn't truly love him but wanted instead to show him compassion" followed by him doing something on impulse with no explanation. Book moved on by "He suddenly saw a man and felt he had to follow him". Aaaaaaargh! Thank god its over. I'm reading Yes Man by Danny Wallace now. Thank god for fluffy books.

I actually don't know what section it would be in. I guess if you have a dessert wine/sweet wine section, it would almost certainly be in there. It's definitely something worth trying once, because it's so different to anything else, but as muggle says it may not be to everyone's taste.

I've drunk quite a few Eisweins recently. The Canadian ones are expensive, as are, generally, the German ones you get abroad. But if you're in Austria or Germany you can pick up a half bottle for around 15 or 20 euros (which seems like a lot until you realise the Canadian stuff sells for $50 or so). It's incredibly powerful and sweet and rich and full. Don't drink it with anything savoury, really. It's dessert wine, and powerfully flavoured dessert wine at that. Sometimes it's truly lovely. Sometimes, though, it loses to subtlety of the best normal botrytis dessert wines.

My favourite breakfast is a Germanic one, with lots of nutty and seedy breads, butter, cheese and fantastic range of cured hams and salamis. And orange juice. And lots and lots of coffee. My normal breakfast is nothing, or bread and butter.

I think that probably backs up my opinion. There's enough in there to have made it into an interesting book, but the narrative is just completely flat, I think. The whole book should have fizzed, but was flat. My ongoing hatred for books about authors, and books, and poets remains thoroughly in place, with the exception of At-Swim-Two-Birds.

Ah-ha! Here's the review. I'll just add my tuppence worth: As Kell says, this is a really good book, all the more interesting for being a fun book with a basically optimistic positive message; and yet it covers some pretty grim ground. There's a brutality and shockingness to the India that appears in the book, yet the book is one of luck and good fortune and "things turning right in the end". It's a bit Forrest Gump, which annoys me; and perhaps the overarching "everything turns out wonderful" side is irritating. But it's easy to read, it's actually fun, and I kept wanting to read the next chapter. The conceit is marvellous, too, as it allows the use of a fairly post-modern structure, flitting around with time, yet it's actually key to telling the story. The very end, after the last question has been answered, does seem very simplistic, though, and could perhaps have been left more vague.

Was there a general concensus that the last chapter was just a bit too glib, or was it just you against a tide of other people happy with the happinness?

I'll write a review-let in a bit, although I guess I've already covered most of it. I like the fragmentary story telling style. The only things I was slightly unhappy with were the sometimes simplistic prose - although as a conceit for an 18 year old narrator that's no problem; it'll be a problem if the style continues in Swarup's next book; and the fact that most of the chapters have a basically happy, lucky ending, although again as the point of the story is of coincidence and good luck, it's a bit of a nonsensical complaint - it's just that when it all comes out in the wash that it makes sense. Before that it's a little irritating. Oh, and a final thing, the last chapter round up happy-ever-after ending kind of annoys me; I think I'd have liked it left more vague.

I generally Dawkins on religion tends to work along the lines of "well, religion is patently, obviously wrong, because it's based on faith and with no reason, and it's clearly utter nonsense, but dangerous and insidious nonsense. Now, I agree with all that, but it takes a paragraph to say. To say it over and over and over again, through several books, does begin to look like a dead horse massacre.

I kind of enjoyed Trainspotting, and Marabou Stork Nightmares has possibly the grimmest subject matter and scene in any book I've read. He definitely works the dark nasty underside of Scotland. I'm not sure, though, whether he's actually any good. The style of Glasgow/Edinburgh patois that he writes in gets very, very grating.

No. You don't need to read it. There's something just slightly frustratingly annoying about the book. Something not quite there to make it enjoyable. I'm not sure if it's the prose, or the detachment, or the ever annoying "protagonist is an author" stuff, or what. But it's definitely not a recommendation.

Well, the battle with Snow continues. I'm slowly becoming convinced that it is, actually, utter rubbish despite all the plaudits.And it has the other massive flaw of being about a poet, and I just can't deal with books about writers. I did, though, also just read Vikas Swarup's Q&A, which is fun and simple and rather wonderful, and interesting structure, but one with some meaning, that allows that book to slowly fill up the life of the main character, Ram Mohammed Thomas. He's a contestant on what is effectively Millionaire, wins, and is arrested; and how he knows the answers to the questions brings individual tales that fill out his life story. Sometimes the writing was simplistic, maybe too much so, but after Snow that was actually rather delightful.

Done India. I'm still desperately battling through Turkey. Gah.

I'm just back from Germany and have been drinking some lovely (and some indifferent) wine. Down in the Black Forest, near to Alsace. So the wine isn't typical German sweet white (although I like that, too). We did drink some fantastic eiswein and beerenauslese, but mainly it's crisper whites and reds, particularly weissburgunder, grauerburgunder and spatburgunder (pinot planc, pinot gris, pinot noir). It's also harvest season, and they have the just-pressed wine, called neuer susser, which is lovely. It's unfiltered, very slightly alcoholic, and changes flavour all the time. Not subtle, and rather cider-like, but very good stuff.

I find Dawkins to be a bit odd, because although I agree with almost everything he says, there's something in his hectoring style that really grates with me. Even when he's writing scientifically about evolution, he'll take a metaphor and thrash it to death rather than keep it within its limits. And when he's trying to debate religion his style is so agressive and vituperative that, even though he's right, I think he just annoys anyone he's debating with rather than leaves open a place for people to change their minds.