(Note: This post includes a spoiler regarding the book “The Ramen King and I” by Andy Raskin.)

On Sunday evening — or maybe it was Monday morning, I’ve got a serious case of beach brain after a week, and can’t be trusted with such details – I sat down at the desk with the corner-of-the-eye ocean view out the window of the hotel room my parents have stayed in each summer for more than 20 years, and opened my laptop.

That’s where I saw the giant squid, in the lead story on Yahoo. I’d felt the earthquake Saturday morning, just a pleasant shaking so mellow I didn’t mention it to anyone (I went to college in southern California; I’ve felt worse) but giant squid?

Yes, on La Jolla Shores. Possibly as a result of the earthquake, which hit in the ocean, many giant squid had washed ashore. I looked out the window, which offers a view of, basically, the entire beach called “La Jolla Shores”. It’s not a long stretch, but a pretty one, beginning, for my purposes at least, at the Marine Room at the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club, and stretching north to the Scripps Pier.

I didn’t see any giant squid. This was the first any of us had heard of this at all. For someone afraid of the sea and everything in it (don’t ask why I so enjoy this annual beach trip; I can’t explain it), the description in the NBC story was horrendous: Gigantic (hence the name) creatures with parrot-like beaks, suckers and claws. And my nephew had been swimming in that water for days. Ray took Annabelle out in it, in a kayak.

Shudder. But we hadn’t seen hide nor claw. Maybe they were much farther down the beach; perhaps NBC had the wrong beach entirely? Feeling it safer to stay indoors at this point, I called the hotel front desk.

“Oh yeah! We had ‘em!” the clerk said jovially. “But they were nowhere near you. More like near Room 130, not your room.”

I swooned. That put them mere yards from us.

But here’s the thing. We never saw a giant squid (we’ve got a couple hours left before the plane, so I suppose there’s still time). I thought about writing a blog post about giant squid — a much more interesting one than this, in which I trick you into believing I did encounter one of the beasts and then wait til the last minute to tell you that well, actually, no I didn’t.

That, however, reminded me of Andy Raskin. His new book, ‘The Ramen King and I,” literally topped my beach reading pile. I picked it up first and finished it in two days. Funny, after reading “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles,” I desperately wanted Chinese food. But though I love ramen, I didn’t much want any after Raskin’s book. I was left  feeling a bit cheated. He spent the entire book letting me think he was going to meet the guy who invented instant ramen, a guy he credits with turning his life around.

Here’s the thing: It’s a really well-written book. I don’t want to dis Raskin; he bared his soul. But even in this day and age (and I know I’m a hypocrite, as I blog and blog and blog), um, TMI. This guy wanted to tell the world that for years, he cheated on his girlfriends. Mission accomplished. But he also wanted us to believe the solution was whimsically tied to his obsession with meeting the Ramen guy.

Call me a cynic, but at that point, I didn’t smell soup. I smelled a book proposal. The truth is that Raskin did what amounted to a 12-step to overcome his addiction to breaking hearts. (That’s the abbreviated version, to be fair.) The ramen stuff was a conceit. A cute one, but a conceit. And he never got close to the ramen guy, or even close to convincing me that it was anything about that guy and his teachings (if you can call them that) that convinced him to keep it in his pants.

I want to be clear: I loved the parts of this book about Japanese culture and history and food. It was worth reading for that. And the entire thing was well-written. But as I read, I kept turning to the book jacket and looking at Raskin’s doleful photo and wincing.

I won’t tease you, I’ll just tell you: no giant squid for me, and I’m thankful. The only creatures I saw this week were the two-legged, familial kind.

As for beach reading, I finished with ramen and turned to “America America,” Ethan Canin’s latest. I can’t recommend it enough — a terrific piece of somewhat-historical fiction set in 1970s American politics, but with issues ringing true today. I won’t give you any spoilers; I’ll just tell you to read it. Unlike “The Ramen King and I,” it’s out in paperback, which is nice.

There’s no more time to read, but I think I’ll risk one last walk down the beach. I’ll dig out my close-toed shoes first. The ramen king is dead (Raskin actually sort of pretends he’s writing about the funeral for the New York Times in order to sneak in; tacky!) but the giant squid? Who knows.