The prose was nice, I won’t deny that, and maybe why I bothered finishing it. It’s just that this should have been a slam dunk. I have a young boy myself, you’d think that pathos would sustain me… No.
I honestly can’t figure out the point of that novel. I’ve enjoyed plenty of literary fiction and usually I can figure out at least sort of what the author was going for. If it was a myth of Sysyphus kind of thing, then didn’t that ending totally undermine the point? Sorry.
The only other thing I can think of as a major disappointment is cotton candy. It looks delicious. It is not.
Weirdly, I don’t get the hate for Turkish delight. I love the flavour of rosewater and a decently-made lokumi is indeed delightful - the sugary crust, the softly gelled interior, the fragrance of rosewater - served alongside a little cup of coffee that is black and strong and bitter - I like it a lot.
Satin sheets: the pillows slide all over the place. Everything is inconvenient.
Convertibles: noisy, hot, leaky, and you can’t leave anything valuable in them. They look so darned good, but either it’s too cold outside or there you are roasting in the sun, the perfect “convertible weather” is not as common as one would hope.
And the one time I borrowed a Miata for a weekend, the top of the windshield came right straight across my line of vision, so I’m too tall for Miatas.
Oh, hell yes. I never had them as a kid. So when I finally tried a box I bought for myself when I was around 17 they were a profound disappointment. The filling was like a smear on a microscope slide .
Dunno about now, but back in the day Guiness in Ireland was better.
The export version was pasteurised. You have to be a connoisseur to notice the difference between pasteurised and unpasteurised beer, but the technology improved a lot 40 or 50 years ago.
We had one for about a decade, say 2002-2012, and we got a good bit of use out of it. We normally used a lager or a tangy sauvignon blanc as our alcohol, and probably used it every 2-3 weeks (my wife loves cheese). But it’s too much work and cleanup for two people, so when most of our friends moved out of state, we got rid of it. Plus, if you’re comfortable with paying attention, you can get nearly as good out of some careful work on the stove with a pot.
Oh god - yes. I think a few times in the last decade I’ve bought a pack because I was interested in a new flavor, or just something I could make in a moment (the dessert equivalent of fast food) and it’s always a major disappointment. Though I’ll quibble that there were something I “always wanted to try”, they do qualify as something “that always should be better”.
I have since done a few from scratch using Alton Brown’s option, or another that makes the crust like an actual, you know, TART crust, and where the amount of filling is chosen by me, with an eye to ingredients that didn’t taste of chemicals and “froot”, and they were actually GOOD, and reasonably long lasting when frozen… but it’s a lot of work, and I’d rather make something like chocolate chip cookies or brownies from scratch.
We have one (I’m pretty sure that it was a wedding gift). It gets used about once a year, often for Valentine’s Day, but we’ve only ever used it to do cheese fondue.
We go out to The Melting Pot (a chain fondue restaurant) occasionally, and there, they typically offer a three-course dinner, with three different fondues: a cheese for appetizers, an oil for meat and vegetables as the main course, and a chocolate for dessert.
I was thinking about whether I had something to contribute to this thread but I really couldn’t think of much. It’s partly about being an insufferable pessimist - if you have low expectations you aren’t often disappointed.
The one thing I did think of - which I’ve mentioned here before - is Portnoy’s Complaint. The story was that I was looking for something funny to read and looked up a bunch of “top funny novels of all time” lists. Portnoy’s Complaint came near the top or at the top of several such lists and it was one of the few on those lists I hadn’t already read, and it was in the company of books that I had found hilarious, so I was thinking I was in for a treat.
After the first chapter or two without a giggle I was thinking that it must all be a setup for when it got funnier later on. After halfway through without a joke I was wondering what the hell was going on. I literally finished the book without smiling.
Usually if I don’t find something funny that other people find funny I can understand why they find it funny even if I don’t. But I couldn’t even figure out what was supposed to be funny about Portnoy’s Complaint. It just seemed to be about a boy growing up in an oppressive if not abusive family. How hilarious. I’ve been told since you have to have grown up as a Jewish boy in NY in the mid 20th C to get it.
It’s poutine. No matter where you go, tourist trap or not, it’s going to be the same, and many people, including Canadians, find it disappointing at best and revolting at worst. Really, it’s nothing special: french fries, gravy, cheese curds. That’s it, that’s all. You can make it at home and end up with the same thing you could at the fanciest place in town. No matter whether you get it from a Mama et Papa diner in Quebec City, or a Swiss Chalet in Calgary, or Planet Hollywood in Niagara Falls, Ontario, it’s going to be the same, because it is so easy to make.
If you want a real Canadian meal, then you have a garden salad made from Ontario-grown produce, a steak from Alberta beef, a baked potato from Prince Edward Island, maybe fiddlehead ferns from Nova Scotia, vegetables grown in Ontario or BC, all complemented by a fine wine from BC, Ontario, or (sure why not? it’s got a wine region) Nova Scotia. Dessert is a Nanaimo bar or a butter tart or ice cream topped with maple syrup. That’s Canadian cuisine, and there are many more examples.
But poutine as an example of Canadian cuisine? It will always be underwhelming, if not disappointing, and there are many better examples of Canadian cuisine.
Montreal smoked meat on rye sandwich; a Persian sweet roll from Thunder Bay, Ontario; fish and brewis from Newfoundland; a Bloody Caesar from Calgary, a Calgary red-eye (a pint of draft lager beer into which you put a shot of clamato or tomato juice), Hawaiian pizza (invented in Winnipeg), Restigouche salmon from New Brunswick, Arctic char from the Northwest Territories/Nunavut territory, maple taffy and sugar and syrup from Ontario and Quebec, Canadian whisky, all our beers and wines …
Gosh, with so much to choose from, why would anybody think poutine was any kind of example of Canadian cuisine? Here’s a hint, Americans: If you try poutine, and are underwhelmed, then don’t give up on Canadian cuisine. I’ve given plenty of examples to try, all of which beat poutine by a mile.
To at least some extent, I think this is true of the books @CalMeacham was disparaging. I love The Face in the Frost, and I appreciated The Worm Ouroburos and Gormenghast; but you really do have to read them for the prose style and the descriptions and the atmosphere, and not just the storyline.
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