I really like The Last Unicorn, though I think it helped that I first read it as a child in California, with zero exposure to Yiddish or New York Jewish culture. At the time I liked The Sword of Shannara series, but as with most of the fantasy I read as a pre-teen / teen, it did not age well once I had better reading and writing skills.
I also really like poutine, so long as the curds are actually curds and not just mozzarella.
What I didn’t like was concerts. I remember going to my first concert when I was in college, and it was awful. The music was fine, but the volume and the crowds made it such an unpleasant experience that I couldn’t (and don’t) understand how anyone could enjoy such a thing. Hearing live music in a venue where people sit down and shut up and earplugs are not required? Nice. But concerts, as they exist now, are hell.
I think that the “craze” is over, but the craze also was formative for lots of folks’ taste. So, we’re in the long tail of a market where the people who got excited by beer during the IPA craze are still the people who are the primary consumers. In America, there are two kinds of beer: “Craft” IPAs and mass market lagers. Everything else is a quirky also-ran.
Cormac McCarthy “The Road”. I had it heavily recommended by several people–groundbreaking, life-changing, brilliant, etc. As one who has grown up on sci-fi, apocalypse, horror et al novels my whole life, The Road felt simplistic and cliche. Like a Golden Books “My First Dystopia”.
Oh boy! What flavors did it have other than bleu cheese and burger?
I really love bleu cheese burgers but some places do too much. A local restaurant I go to has one and it’s a “blackened” burger - meaning just Cajun spice - and bleu cheese. I get it w/o the spice, just a plain burger, and it’s great. My friends always get the blackened and they love it too.
I used to get one at Red Robin all the time which I think was a bleu cheese sauce, onion straws and a BBQ sauce but I’d get it without the bbq (because I hate bbq sauce and I think it overwhelms everything). That one was great.
To me a good bleu cheese burger has bleu cheese sauce (not just crumbles), caramelized onions and mushrooms. I think those flavors together rock!
I see Red Robin now has a bacon bleu cheese burger…with ranch. You don’t need/want ranch with bleu cheese. Seems like it would not complement the flavor at all.
Twinkies. Just not available here in England for most of my lifetime, yet I saw them eaten and notionally enjoyed in a lot of American media; then they started to be imported here (and were expensive), so I had to try one. Just overly-sweetened, oily sponge with a weird synthetic flavour, filled with some white fluff that might as well have been sweetened shaving foam.
It kinda tastes like the ocean smells. I was meh. I dont like Eel, and I wont eat Octopus anymore. But we had a cool sushi place next door, I got to be friends with him, and I’d sometimes walk in and say “surprise me” and he enjoyed trying stuff out on me. Oh, and i dont like goop on top. I want to taste the fresh fish, not that mayo stuff, etc. A little “wasabi” and (yes i admit) a bit too much (low sodium) soy sauce.
The first book was weirdly atmospheric, but the next one was unreadable to me, I never read the 3rd.
Bellairs is a good writer, and i thought the book was pretty good. I prefer his YA light horror- The House with a Clock in it’s Walls (the film was okay, but why not a chubby boy to play the part?)
The best poutine i had was at le Cellier in Epcot. That was great, otherwise, I prefer chili-cheese fries.
I have had some Blue cheese stuff mixed with butter, garlic etc served on the side of a good steak, and I enjoyed it.
They were global by my time but Twinkie and manufacturer Hostess carried a bit of local pride here in Chicago and I agree with every word you said. Even as a kid, the forbidden superiority of rival Little Debbie within the snackcake segment were obvious to me.
I’m sorry that you were unlucky and got an inferior example. It was probably out of season. I lived in Malaysia for 2 years and ate durian every time the season came around (twice a year, if I remember right). You could tell it was in season because suddenly the vendors were all over the streets. Ah, bliss!
The Turkish delight I’ve had was basically like if my grandma made the world’s most sophisticated gumdrop. Gumdrops are fine and good, but I don’t find they’re much improved by effort or complexity.
I had read the Black Company books by Glen Cook and enjoyed them a whole lot. Every recommendation pointed me at Steven Erickson’s Malazan as something I’d love.
Couldn’t stand it. Like stopped and started three separate times and never got into it.
My parents used to make cheese fondue. Gruyere, Emmenthaler, and kirsch give it its distinctive taste. Their fondue pot is probably still in the house and would become mine some day.
Shannara’s plagiarism upset me as a middle schooler.
The Road was annoying genre fiction bysomeone who doesn’t write that genre well.
I had excellent pistachio and rosewater Turkish Delight in Andalucia.
I found the Dubai stuff crunchy without pistachio flavor, with milk chocolate that was too soft and cloyingly sweet. Seemed like a lot of fuss and $ for no reason.
I haven’t read it yet, but I have the impression that if you’re reading McCarthy, you’re doing so as much for the way he uses the language as for the ideas he’s conveying.
So if you’re not one for that sort of thing, you might come out disappointed. Kind of like how some musicians’ work isn’t about the quality of the singing and performance, but about the meaning of the lyrics and vice-versa. I mean Dylan is a fairly awful singer but it’s not about his voice or technical singing chops. Same with McCarthy and other “literary” writers.
I agree with this, and read a lot of more literary fiction, but found the worldbuilding in The Road caused rather than susprnded disbelief, and the ending was, IMHO, an unsatisfactory, unbelievable, and overly sentimental failure.
Same, and I absolutely hated that book. I’ve enjoyed plenty of dark fiction so don’t anyone go saying I just can’t handle dark themes. It’s so. Boring. There’s a scene where the guy discovers a boat and he’s there for like ten pages or more and nothing happens. It was also so desperately dark I couldn’t really take it seriously. When it got to the roasted baby, I’m not gonna lie, I laughed my ass off. The only part I found genuinely disturbing were the cellar people.
It also seemed written by someone who had never read post-apoc fiction because it tread every cliche so heavily.
This was my first attempt at this author and it’s going to take a lot to talk me into reading anything else.
I don’t, but back in the 1970s, our family had one (in groovy 70s Harvest Gold, yet!). We used it with oil, for meat and veg. A fondue meal was a family favourite.
I never had a desire to try cheese fondue, but I did have the chance to try it, years later. It was okay, nothing wrong with it, but I’m glad that I hadn’t really, really wanted to try it for ages. It would have been disappointing.
