A Hundred Summers

A woefully belated recap of our end-o'-the-season BC hosted by The Doctor at the Autumn Chateau.  Methinks El Jefe was a little saucy that night, as the entire meal, start to finish, is hazy to say the least.  Ah yes, due to the fact that some of us started off the evening with Salty Dogs, note the plural (whose idea could that possibly have been??). Pretty sure that the hors d'oeuvres involved burrata and were lishy.  Less sure that dinner was a hearty Tuscan soup involving sausage. And drawing a complete blank on dessert, clearly just plain hammered by that point.  Thank goodness that El Jefe knows the holiday menu by heart after ten years, so have no fear for next month.

What is crystal clear in El Jefe's memory (ahem, notes) is the abysmal review of Beatriz Williams' A Hundred Summers.  Three 2's, two apiece of 4 and 5, and one 6, for an overall average score of 4.5.  Yowsa, but not the lowest rating in BC history! True to da Game scored a 3.6 so this book is well in the clear. Nonetheless, when an author writes stuff like "Her lips formed a perfect 'O' around his…."  you know we are not talking about great literature. Those at the low end described the book as "atrocious," "wretched," and "it made me angry." Another complaint was that the Kiki reveal was obvious (recall, Kiki was the love child of Lily's mom and Nick Greenwald's father).  And Red said that she would rather read F. Scott Fitzgerald than someone copying the voice of that era and doing a shitty job (maybe we should read him, then!). Those at the high end, as it were, found the book to be more silly than repulsive-- for example, all the characters riding on the doors of houses through the hurricane to safety-- and at least credited it with having some fun drama and intrigue (but really poor sex scenes, unfortsch). We all agreed that there was simply not much to talk about here, so let's leave it at that and look forward to Thursday's holiday BC where there will be plenty of discussion! Can't wait to drink many glasses of champagne with all of you, not to mention the added treat that Blondie will be in town for the festivities!

Two days to read The Dinner by Herman Koch if you haven't already.  xoej

P.S. Just remembered that the dessert was a caramel pie!

Fooling Houdini

Thanks to the Highlander for hosting the 10th annual Holiday BC!  Hard to believe, but true.  Love that it's become such a tradish, even down to the menu:  hot artichoke dip (the low calorie one), bruschetta, beef bourguignon over garlic mashed potatoes, LOTS of kale salad, haricots verts, brownies and blondies and those famous Heath Bar cookies from Logan's Run. Lots of champers. Lots.  Thank goodness we had enough food. 

Well, it looks like Alex Stone couldn't pull a high rating out of a hat for our December book, Fooling Houdini.

The book on average scored a 5.3.  From the critics, two main themes were repeated:  first, that the book was too "thin"--in other words, not enough tricks in the bag to fill 300+ pages (in fact, the 10th Member said the entire book should have been an 8-page article in Vanity Fair:  snap!)-- and second, the story didn't flow well, skipping around from physics to street hustlers to the author trying to pick up girls in bars using card tricks. While these readers found certain individual elements among this melange of topics to be intriguing (in particular, learning about New York's magic "underground" was a favorite), there wasn't enough overall continuity to keep the audience engaged. Others in our group (haters, all of them) said they just didn't care about the author and that the book got overly technical. This last point is ironic considering how much heat the author took for "revealing" magic tricks in his writing.  It would seem that your average reader doesn't really want that level of detail and certainly isn't going home and trying to replicate the Ambitious Card Routine. On the flip side, the non-haters appreciated the insights into the history of magic, the tie-ins to math and science, the play-by-play instructions on how to run The Monte, and the theory that Jesus Christ himself might have been a magician. Abracadabra, so much for miracles. One thing we all could agree on: the dork factor here was super high. Super. High. Magic Olympics, anyone?

Dai Vernon, a.k.a "the Professor"

Richard Turner, card manipulation expert (and blind!)

 Jim McBride.  Oh so Vegas

Not sexy, right?

Sexy

In related news, check out this blast from the past!  Our next meeting is at Chez Jefe on Tuesday.  We are reading Ms. Hempel Chronicles.  See you there and then.  xoej