When I started rereading this book, I was prepared to dislike the experience, thinking that the new me was out of sync with the old me.

The first time I read the Big Sleep, it felt like an explosion of energy, but a passage of a decade made it feel like the spazmatic tantrums of a frustrated man. Even though there are still some problematic passages in The Long Goodbye, and this book takes a while to get rolling, I found that it held up to my high regard over the past decade.

This book is a powerful, scathing indictment of the wealthy folks in “Idle Valley”. However, it also holds a certain charm. Chandler took an elegiac tone, musing upon the debasement of the upper class, mirrored in Phillip Marlowe’s relationship with Terry Lennox. In portraying the rottenness of the residents of Idle Valley, Chandler paints them as actors trapped within the circumstances of their making, birds of their own gilded cages. The players in the novel have created a dysfunctional microcosm within wealthy Los Angeles of mid-century America.

The book is a critique of our corrupt nation, the dynamics of our high society, and the individuals who create it. Chandler carefully walks the fine line between being sympathetic and judgmental towards the plights of his characters. As with much great art, the ambivalence is what makes this book such a lovely read.

While editing this post, I was reminded of the Robert Altman movie adaptation that I watched around the time I first read these books (rest in peace, Blockbuster). While I can’t remember any details except for one particularly violent scene, I recall that it was an intriguing counter-intuitive take on noir. I’m not surprised it did poorly in the box office. The movie was a slow burn that didn’t feel like it took you anywhere. Such moodiness made it feel all the more brilliant for a wannabe auteur like me.

The publisher Chelsea Green had a huge sale at the end of fall last year. My main goals were The Art of Fermentation and the Growing Things to Eat in a Hotter Drier Land, but I also picked up a few deeply discounted books that caught my eye.

While big books are naturally the publisher’s flagships, it was the selection of interesting quirky books like Cheddar and Landfill that cemented my admiration of Chelsea Green. I am normally quick to unsubscribe from newsletters, but I’ve kept my subscription because their catalog comfortably inhabits the intersection of ecology and personal activity, with their emphasis on cookbooks, natural building, and agriculture.

As in boardgaming, big publishers gobble up the industry but the niche publishers have a brand because they hold a point of view. Their imprint stands for something. Even though I don’t read their blog posts, I stay subscribed because I don’t want to miss hearing about a sale.

As for the book itself, my first thought is that the author was the perfect person to write this book. His role is to be a better version of a reader who would be interested in a book solely about one type of cheese. Like me, he comes from the city but really knows his knows cheese. He’s a professional but not totally divorced from agriculture. A foodie but renowned enough to be judging food competitions. He is interested in the world around us but isn’t a snob. He has opinions but is not dogmatic. His anecdotes nicely captures in the Bay Area, the fun, the cost, the tensions.

His writing style was bit more casual than I expected, but after getting comfortable with his voice, Cheddar was a fun quick read.

The book is highly recommended if you are interested in our society’s tense personal relationship with food. His ruminations on cheddar follow the journey of our nation, from its agricultural origins through factory development into pure full blown mechanization, and then back to the new pastoral agricultural foodie myth.

As with many good non-fiction books, Cheddar is ultimately a story about us.

The last paragraph in my first draft was, “Sure would be nice to get my hands on a cloth wrapped cheddar, but that would involve going into a grocery store right in the midst of a nasty pandemic.” Now that the vaccine has rolled out en masse in America, this statement would no longer be applicable for most folks. However my wife wants to stay in the cave until the kids gets their vaccines, pushing us to the end of the year. So my wait continues.

Unfortunately, my daughter got my genes for nearsightedness. In her teenage years, my wife managed to avoid getting glasses by doing a regular exercise of staring into a pitch black room.

Try getting a seven year old to do that regularly!

Now that I’ve broken forty and my eyesight seems to be on a second round of degeneration, I’ve been assigned this task, to sit in a dark room with the girl for twenty minutes a night.

Fortunately, technology.

We have been listening to audiobooks, courtesy of the library, and she has been plowing through the Magic Treehouse series. Having listened to several of these books, I have two notes.

First, it seems quite negligent for Merlin and Morgan le Fay to send the two children to gratuitously dangerous quests. For example, Jack and Annie were sent to Pompeii the morning before the volcano erupts. If Morgan was going to ship them back in time, couldn’t she have set the dial back a couple days?

Second, it is awfully convenient that the kids are able to communicate with whoever they come across. Obviously, such a conceit is necessary for the stories to work, but I wonder if an immigrant would have written these books. It requires a certain centeredness (or lack of otherness) from being part of the majority culture to have the imagination to ignore such a plot hole. At least the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had the Babelfish.

I should add a third note since these books aren’t for me. My daughter loves these books. She’d (visually) read them all in an afternoon, if we let her, but the whole point is to go through them in these night time sessions. Plus there are plenty of other books for her to read – including the non-fiction “Magic Treehouse Fact Checkers” which accompany many of these books.

I should add a fourth note several months later, having completed the series. These books truly aren’t for adults. The plotlines were so cringeworthy that I had to start listening to my own podcasts during these sessions. That said, my daughter still loved the books and they exposed her to plenty of moments in history that she wouldn’t have known otherwise.

She’ll still occasionally revisit the ebooks on her reader, so I think that ultimately remains an endorsement for the series. Fortunately, we’ve now moved on to Newbery Award books and that is much more palatable for me.

After finishing The Magic Treehouse series, I borrowing several Newbery Award winners for our audiobook listening sessions. My daughter read the synopses of these books and was intrigued with the idea of someone who could talk to animals. I was a little surprised by her choice, since she strongly prefers girls as her main characters. Then again, the other books with female protagonists were too scary for her preference (she doesn’t care for tense plots), and she sure does love animals.

At first, it was quite a bit of a shock to go from Mary Pope Osborne’s clear voice to the sounds of a deep, gravelly British man. However our ears caught on quickly and we both enjoyed the story. It was a wide ranging adventure, both in town and out in the world. Given its age, I was worried it would dabble with unsavory stereotypes, but Hugh Lofting managed to avoid such traps. In all, a good time.

My daughter certainly thought so, she borrowed all the Dolittle books from the library (there are quite a few) and plowed through them, even ones that without the illustrations. This book was a wholesome, delightful romp and I see why the Voyages of Dr. Dolittle continues to hold sway a century after its initial publication. The Magic Treehouse introduced our girl to chapter books, but this was her first true excursion into the deeper world of books. Not a bad way to start.

Any child who is not given the opportunity to [meet Doctor Dolittle] and all of his animal friends will miss out on something important.

Jane Goodall