I finished The Ritual
by Adam Nevill yesterday at the picnic table outside of work, on my
lunch break. I could not put it down. I am not
a horror books expert, but I think this was a really good one, if not a
great one. Mine is a bound copy, not an ebook, so I get to pass it on
to friends, and that is fun. If you keep a massive library and worry so
much about people returning books that you don't give them away, you
miss out. Similarly, it's possible to "loan" or "give away" an ebook,
but it's not the same as leaving a good book on someone's desk a work.
Last night I started The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey
Through The Wine World, by Lawrence Osborne. We’ve been drinking alot of wine lately, and have tried alot
of bottles, from the Provisions wine club, from Trader Joe's, at restaurants. It’s funny how there is a layer or two or
three with taste, when you’re dealing with wine. There’s what you like,
and there’s the feeling you’re not sure that what you like is good, or
that you are describing it properly. The poetry of wine profiling
usually entails a counter-intuitive combination of descriptors, some
from geology, some from the orchard and garden, some from the pantry, some, like “leather,” from Judas
Priest records. ("Kippy, this Malbec tastes like Rob Halford's codpiece!") These are fun to read but when I try to compose them
out loud, I feel like I am playing a baritone clarinet for the first
time. I.E. like a total honky wanker. As they said in college writing classes, "it's not earned."
There’s also the feeling that
what you like might be driven by the name, the label, the price, a vague feeling about Old Europe, or the stone cold foxy lady you are with. I know that I like the Bordeaux
region wines we get from Trader Joe’s.
The cabs that you first get for five dollars in college
are broad and raw and dark and flood the tongue, and they are sweet and
taste like they’ve got a reduced syrup of plum or dark cherry squirted in
them just before the cork goes in. Those cabs are the basis for alot of what I
think about wine--sort of like basing your literary opinions on a
couple of grandma’s Sydney Sheldon novels. I like a drier kind of red
than that, and that might be almost all I can intelligently say.
Later
that night I walked along the beach to the lonely church of Portonovo
and at a restaurant nearby I drank a cold green Verdicchio. Wine is 99
percent psychological, a creation of where you are and with whom. I sat
in the shadow of the odd mountain and drank my Verdicchio alone,
feeling the first snail-like tendrils of my own taste asserting
themselves through an unusual chain of associations: the Greeks, Visions
of Johanna, the Zen of juggling, and the incomprehensible postulates of
chaos theory. (from The Accidental Connoisseur, by Lawrence Osborne.)
I often say, “I really like this book.” And
that’s all. I liked every movie I saw when I was eight, as well. I
like the transitions between kinds of books, which is why I only read
one book at a time. A baseball book followed by a supernatural horror
book, followed by a long wine essay. The last book I was unable to
finish was by a vintage British mystery writer. It was the dullest book I have ever tried
to read. Yet, I know it was a
formative sort of mystery, written by a woman in a then very male literary world.
I almost always finish books. One sentence that appears and reappears in my journal is "I wonder what I am going to read next."
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| I like this wine. |
