Through Books

A game at least as long as Monopoly

2012-01-22T18:56:00.000-05:00

Martin, George R.R. A Game of Thrones. New York: Bantam Books, 2011.

My apologies for the length of time since the last post. I haven't been gallivanting: I've been working my way through the epic adventure (wait, make that the first leg of an epic adventure) in A Game of Thrones. At over 800 pages of small print, crammed with detail that makes it a no-brainer that a TV series or movie would result, the book requires a serious investment of time.

I could have done without the extensive set-dressing description of garments, sigils, and houses of this imaginary world. A shorter book without all that might have meant a week's reading over a few hundred pages. As long as that version retains what I really liked about the story--the careful development of a handful of characters that grab the reader's interest (the plucky tomboy Arya, the outcast bastard Jon, the crafty and undervalued dwarf Tyrion, the ever-strengthening exiled heiress Daenerys, and a few others) and the sheer magnitude of the world invented by Martin--I would recommend it in a heartbeat.

This version? It's a cliffhanger, and I do want to see how things turn out (and if my Big Theory is correct), so I imagine I'll read the rest of the series. I may just need to read another book alongside each so I don't have a posting blackout every time.

Rating: **1/2

He was also in things called "plays"

2012-01-07T10:32:00.000-05:00

Lithgow, John. Drama: An Actor's Education. New York: Harper, 2011.

I don't read many celebrity memoirs (I think the last was Rob Lowe's), so it's always a little hard for me to gauge if one is good. What sort of lasting value should a such a book have? Should I feel compelled to reread it? Is learning something necessary? What about just enjoying the ride?

John Lithgow's new memoir succeeds on at least the second and third parts. It's a quick read and full of enough interesting glimpses into worlds I'll probably never join (Harvard, London in the 60s, the New York theater scene) that it kept my attention quite well. (Writing that sentence made me wonder how I would react if transplanted into one of those environments, unmoored like the characters in 3rd Rock from the Sun. Too much Lithgow this week?)

Four things make this book worth the time I spent on it:

Lithgow offers the useful insight (from his nude-drawing teacher, of all people) that facility in some area can be both a great asset and a great drawback, allowing him "to get by with glib, hasty, lazy work." He observes that "[t]hings came easy for me, so too often [he] was perfectly willing to skip over difficult tasks." Ouch. It's a good reminder for me, and maybe others.
He has another insight later, when a bad professional choice took his personal life on a wonderful path that he would have missed completely otherwise. This is good to remember when we feel like we're making mistakes.
He got me quite interested in the book Tellers of Tales, which he loved as a child and which basically brought his ailing father back to life. If I can ever find a copy for (significantly) less than $75, I'm buying it.
He used one of the best materials-engineering-related metaphors I've seen in a long time, when referring to the effects of his infidelity: "Each time, my marriage would lose a little more tensile strength."

So maybe he drops too many names (or doesn't till the end of a breathlessly recounted story, then shocks us with the fact that it was MERYL STREEP or someone), and maybe he wastes a lot of time changing the names of people he doesn't want to insult (when it takes about 14 seconds on IMDB to figure out who they are), but I'm okay with that. I get the feeling that he, rather than a ghostwriter, wrote the book, and that's almost good enough for me. He tried, and he revealed a lot, and I'm not sad I read it.

Rating: **1/2

How to grip a reader (and how not to)

2011-12-26T09:44:00.000-05:00

Fish, Stanley. How to Write a Sentence: and How to Read One. New York: Harper, 2011.

Before I had finished, I knew this was a book I wouldn't write much about. In How to Write a Sentence, Stanley Fish describes the overall concept of a sentence without burdensome grammatical detail (something performs some action on something else), then goes through a few classifications of sentences with examples from his favorite literature. Problem is, I'm not a big fan of many of his favorites (especially droning passages from centuries-old writers), so I didn't learn too much. The only part I marked was the multi-clause sentence from Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which we actually did imitate with our own clumsy constructions in high school, much like the practice Fish recommends. (That first sentence? It's another of the imitations Fish suggests we could try, though I may have bungled it because I didn't go back and look.) It's not a bad book, especially read along with others in a concerted effort to improve one's writing, but not one I'll likely refer to again.

Rating: *1/2

A font of knowledge

2011-12-16T18:51:00.002-05:00

Garfield, Simon. Just My Type: A Book About Fonts. New York: Gotham Books, 2011.

Blogger offers seven fonts:

Arial, for a blog post that should remind you of work
Courier, in case you are a typewriter person at heart
Times (the default), for that traditional serif feel
Georgia, designed "as a modern take on ... Times New Roman"
Helvetica, one of the most popular fonts in the world (e.g., New York subway signs) and the title of a movie about fonts (oh, no, there isn't just a book)
Trebuchet, created by the person who gave us the much-maligned Comic Sans--and is apparently a choice font for helping dyslexic children to read
Verdana, the font that caused a stir when IKEA changed all of its signs in their SMOLSVIK-y glory to it from Futura

I was, of course, spurred to tell you that after finishing Just My Type, probably the most interesting boring book I've read in a while. It was fun to see and learn about the fonts we find in daily life, like American Typewriter on DVDs of The Office and Cooper Black on the side of an easyJet. I liked learning that there's another thing movie (and font) purists can complain about: fonts that hadn't been invented yet at the time the movie is set. And who knew that there were real font-designing people behind names like Caslon and Zapf?

Luckily, I can comfortably forget most of this stuff after having been amused once, since a key point in the book is that the best fonts are those that just work and don't make you pay attention. NO NEED TO SHOUT!

Rating: **

Team baby-care in Dublin

2011-12-05T20:27:00.000-05:00

Binchy, Maeve. Minding Frankie. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

Whenever I see a new Maeve Binchy book in the library, I jump on it like it's a life raft. Binchy has a knack for drawing the reader in to the lives of a huge number of characters in her Dublin world without overwhelming the brain or diluting the emotional connection to any individual one. I don't know how she does it.

In Minding Frankie, readers of previous books will recognize many of the characters and smile at the situations they get themselves into. There's a little bit of struggle and a few sad moments, but overall we can be assured of a heartwarming tale with a happy ending. Frankie is a newborn girl who transforms everyone around her as they band together in a "takes-a-village" approach to her care. Because she's a little baby, she doesn't get a lot of character development, but her minders certainly do, from the take-charge cousin from America (what would they have done without her?) to the recovering-alcoholic father to the unlucky-in-love graphic designer. Even the "villains" like the driven but lonely social worker and the self-centered chef aren't all bad.

It won't teach you a ton, and it's not a revolution in the art of novels, but Minding Frankie is a solidly enjoyable read that nobody would mind picking up.

Rating: ***

Another brain book--but bear with me!

2011-11-27T19:54:00.000-05:00

Aamodt, Sandra, Ph.D. and Sam Wang, Ph.D. Welcome to Your Child's Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.

Instead of whining this time about hearing yet another synopsis of the Iowa Gambling or marshmallow tests (both of which do appear in this book), I'm intrigued. In Welcome to Your Child's Brain, the authors use clear examples, interesting asides (such as busted myths, "did you know?" stories, and theories), and even cartoons to make detailed discussions of brain function and child development manageable for the masses. I found it extremely useful to know that at certain ages, a child's brain just doesn't allow him to suppress impulses or detect causation. That opens the door to appropriate behavior modification rather than reactive anger and punishment. I don't punish my cat for getting hairballs, after all.

While I wasn't quite riveted enough by the book (it's fairly technical, after all) to tab a bunch of exciting passages, there's more than enough here to make it worth a read whether you're a parent or not. If you don't have kids, you'll probably remember being one and some of the material will ring a bell. If you do, there are very practical tips that you could put in action tonight. It may be all in your head, but the results are real.

Rating: ***

Two imaginary lives, many important points

2011-11-20T14:32:00.000-05:00

Brooks, David. The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. New York: Random House, 2011.

If you only know David Brooks as one of the resident arguers on the PBS NewsHour Weekly Political Wrap, as I did, you might be pleasantly surprised by this wide-ranging, thoughtful, and frequently entertaining book about life, the brain, and what success really means. Near the end, for example, there's a nuanced discussion of how people adapt their views to a selected political party and how compromise is impossible when politics becomes a contest among identity groups, more like religion than opinion. This is an important concept today. Plus, the book is well written, with enough irreverence to lighten up what could be hefty.

If, however, you happen to have recently read some popular-science books on the brain such as Incognito, Moonwalking with Einstein, and How We Decide, and Outliers (as I have), you might find the material a little less fresh. There are only so many times in a year that I need to see the examples of practice leading to skill, chicken sexing, the rigged card decks that your brain figures out before you do, the marshmallow test, artificial rivalries at summer camp, and optical illusions (which are presented in an amusingly mocking passage on neuromapping, so I suppose that's a little different). What's new about this book is how the material is presented. Brooks uses the lives of two characters, Harold and Erica, whose superior social skills and drive gave them the success that raw IQ or upbringing might not have, to frame a broad discussion of the brain, culture, and social ties. The two characters make the topic especially approachable. It feels weird to see such finely developed characters in a non-fiction book, but it works.

My main complaint (since it's not Brooks's fault that I had read those other books) is that that the breadth of the stories means that the book seems to lack focus. Early in the story, Harold takes weeks to research and frame a term paper, sleeping on ideas and distilling thoughts until he has a narrow thesis. The Social Animal could have similarly sacrificed a bit of its breadth for a tighter point of view. Of course, this is a level of care that I don't apply to these blog posts (even if I should), so I can't whine too much.

Rating: **1/2

Don't worry, the rabbit doesn't talk much

2011-11-14T20:12:00.000-05:00

Winman, Sarah. When God Was a Rabbit. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.

When God Was a Rabbit is the weird, wonderful, moving story of a girl who would name her pet rabbit "god" and the family who would let her and love her. The reader follows main character Elly through a slightly jumpy but relatively thorough (like a hungry rabbit?) narrative of her life, from girlhood with trauma that maybe didn't feel traumatic to new friends in adolescence to a halting approach to adulthood. The rabbit isn't always around, but a sense of mystery and hope remains, right up to the last few pages when I was convinced at least three times that there was no way things would turn out well.

Multiple times as the story builds, Winman drives the narrative on with flashes of the future. In a description of an afternoon Elly spends with her brother, the reader is told "he would be gone by the following year, to finish his schooling in London, a sudden decision taken on a whim." I liked having these glimpses, confidence-builders that the characters were living their lives even when they weren't watching. Even more interesting is that when such foreshadowing isn't explicitly given, when the reader jumps to his own conclusions--as is nearly impossible when a tale drifts toward New York in September 2001--that guess is likely to be wrong. I loved this lack of cliche. Winman knows her readers deserve more.

I think the only thing that is keeping me from giving four stars to this book is the time it took me to read. I'm not sure if it's the book's fault or mine, but I think a four-star book would have gripped me just a bit more, driven me to the finish line quicker. In ounces of tears shed and millimeters of tentative, hopeful smiles, though, When God Was a Rabbit certainly measures up.

Rating: ***1/2

A lonely walk

2011-11-03T19:36:00.000-04:00

Keegan, Claire. Walk the Blue Fields. New York: Black Cat, 2007.

"Margaret Flusk had neither hat nor rubber boots nor a man." This sentence from the last short story in Walk the Blue Fields demonstrates the spare, practical, possibly harsh style of Keegan's collection. The Ireland she describes, vividly but calmly, is not the cliched character-of-its-own that appears in some stories. There aren't leprechauns or glistening green fields; rather, there's farm life, tough times, secrets, and love lost. That could happen anywhere; it happens to happen in Ireland.

I'm not usually much for short stories, preferring a larger investment for larger reward, but these seem complete somehow. Characters experience conflict and resolution before their pages end. It's just too bad (for them, at least) that the conclusions are often pretty grim: she still doesn't love you, she left you anyway, you escaped the home but likely not how it affected you. Don't dip into this book if you're looking for a jolly clog in a peat-smoke-filled pub. If you want stories that feel real, and more so because of the conviction of setting, go for it.

Rating: **1/2

Working through the flaws

2011-11-03T19:23:00.000-04:00

Edgarian, Carol. Three Stages of Amazement. New York: Scribner, 2011.

After all the whining I did recently about narcissistic fiction, this book might have worried a bit when I picked it up. It needn't have. Although the characters and their trials are relatively everyday, the way the story is executed is far from standard.

In Three Stages of Amazement, we meet the members of a storm-tossed clan: a husband and wife who deal with a struggling business, fractured family relationships, and one precocious and one very ill child; the wife's uncle and his wife, who, though related, seem like a completely different breed of powerful, empty human; the various people who serve these two families out of love or need. The richness of the story is also its main negative. Do real people experience this much turmoil in one year?

That may not matter. Like the film sequence with a hundred sunrises on fast-forward, the pain may be packed in for effect. Late in the story, one character tells Lena (the first wife above) about his grandmother: "she was always telling us, in her way, to make the best of things. To be tough. 'Life is a chipped cup,' she'd say. 'There's no fixing. You just learn to drink around.'" These characters' turbulent year helps them learn to drink from that cup, and it draws from the reader both a tear and a glimmer of hope.

Rating: ***

Obsessives in Narnia

2011-10-26T22:01:00.000-04:00

Grossman, Lev. The Magician King. New York: Viking, 2011.

I need to stop being lazy and get back to reviewing books the day I finish them. Over the last couple of days, as I became engrossed in other things, the bloom came off the rose a bit for me regarding The Magician King, the follow-up to The Magicians. I think that's my fault and not the book's.

As with The Magicians, Grossman describes a magical side to the world we know, alongside fantastic worlds beyond that whisper of Narnia and Middle Earth, but in a modern accent. The story pairs mentions of Segways and physics with incantations in ancient languages and talking animals. In this book, along with a Dawn-Treader-ish adventure, there's a wider view of magic, removed from the regimented teaching of the initial tale. How do magic and religion relate? The characters explore this question and experience significant consequences. And as with the previous book, it really doesn't make sense to describe more plot than that--you have to read it to get sucked in.

Somehow The Magician King just didn't grip me like the first book did. Once the freshness was off the idea, similar to the book sitting on my table for a couple of days after I finished it, the spell of the story fades a bit. Still, it's a good deal more interesting and exciting than the average book I might pick up, so I have to encourage people to read it more than I would for those. Hence the rating.

Rating: ***

Growing up is hard to do

2011-10-18T20:26:00.000-04:00

Espach, Alison. The Adults. New York: Scribner, 2011.

This is probably going to be one of my most boring posts in a while, because I returned The Adults yesterday and find today, without the crutch of the book to quote from, that I really don't have much to say about it. Nothing bad, but nothing glowing either, certainly not like the blurbs on the back cover.

The Adults is the story of an upper-middle-class Connecticut girl who grows from the adolescent observing her parents' friends at a party (adults say the darndest things!) to a grown woman who might (maybe) finally have things figured out. In the intervening ten or fifteen years, she has an on-again-off-again affair with one of her high school teachers. Does the fact that they still want to see each other years later make the statutory rape less of an issue? Certainly the relationship affects her choices in important ways, so at least it's not glossed over.

I read it quickly, and it was written in clear, interesting prose. That's not enough for me all the time. It took me five minutes of digging, but I finally found the transcript of a commentary I heard the other day on the radio, discussing why Americans don't deserve the Nobel prize in literature. That's a sweeping declaration I don't necessarily agree with, but the part about a trend toward narcissistic rather than imaginative fiction, the pitfalls of just going to a writing seminar and moving to Brooklyn to be a writer, resonated with me in reference to this book. I'd rather have the book I'm reading now (wait and see) over this one any day of the week, because I can't just go out and live it.

Rating: **

The promise of adulthood

2011-10-07T20:21:00.000-04:00

Robbins, Alexandra. The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive after High School. New York: Hyperion, 2011.

As someone who made most of her close friends in college, I sympathize with the premise of The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth. For teenagers, their parents, or their teachers--at least those who aren't particularly alert to the challenges of being different during middle and high school--the book provides some valuable lessons. For myself, I didn't really need the meticulous research that Robbins presents.

I did quite enjoy the true stories in the book. Some of the kids' struggles and triumphs actually brought tears to my eyes. Though they were all different, each dealt with feeling like an outsider and working on a challenge designed by Robbins to open them up a bit. When one had his first kiss or another made a new friend, I felt proud of these youngsters who might not have felt this hopeful in a long time. The author should feel truly proud of her role in these kids' brightened lives.

Here's the bottom line for those without the time to invest in the book: high school can suck, kids should stay true to themselves, and the adult world sucks less. If you don't have an author spurring you outward and onward, find someone who will. It's worth it.

Rating: **

It's not me, it's me!

2011-09-28T20:07:00.000-04:00

Eagleman, David. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.

Reading Incognito took me a while, partly because I was preoccupied and partly because I wasn't sure I'd get anything new out of it. Some of the material is very similar to that in other books I've read recently: the contribution of the emotional side of the brain in How We Decide and the chicken sexers in Moonwalking with Einstein. Looking back on those reviews, I see that those books reminded me of others. Is there a finite amount of brain knowledge to recycle?

Of course not, given the complexity of the brain. Accordingly, there's enough new in this effort to make it worth considering. There are simple points that surprise, such as the figure that demonstrates the "blind spot" in your eye and how smart your brain is to fill in an appropriate background pattern. Eagleman also sprinkles in funny bits with a purpose--how strippers' tips correlate to their fertility levels, for example.

The second half of the book brings the serious theses, examining how competing "programs" in the brain can make you not seem like you sometimes (e.g., when intoxicated or tumor-ridden) and how that concept and related ideas could help form a new means of dealing with criminals. I'm not sure what will come of Eagleman's ideas, but they definitely seem worth thinking about. We have these fancy brains, after all.

Rating: **1/2

A TV crime drama comes to the page

2011-09-15T19:40:00.000-04:00

Lupton, Rosamund. Sister. New York: Crown Publishers, 2010.

Sister is compelling, like a good episode of a crime drama. As main character Beatrice tells the British equivalent of a district attorney the story of her against-all-odds investigation of her sister's murder, the reader is sucked in. It's easy to overlook clumsier parts of the writing (or editing), like a character misnamed in one place, a few typos, or overuse of the word "intimate," when the tale grabs so forcefully. Who killed Tess and why? We need to know.

The answer, when it comes, is a little far-fetched, but certainly no more so that movies and TV shows we see all the time. It's a medical drama greatly personalized by the connection between the sisters and many characters' overwhelming desire for their future children to be healthy despite genetic inclinations. It's what happens after that answer that gives me pause. I would have thought that the whodunit gave enough of a jolt to the story's conclusion, but instead Lupton provides another twist. This diversion brings into question parts of the story that seemed important and doesn't seem to serve a greater purpose. I could have done without it.

Up till then, I was pleased with Sister and found myself looking forward to lunch and couch-time when I could give it some attention. That doesn't happen all that often, so I have to give the book credit. It's as tenacious as its main character.

Rating: **1/2

Form a strong image of this post--maybe you'll remember it

2011-09-09T09:23:00.000-04:00

Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: The Penguin Press, 2011.

Who knew this would be a "challenge" book? When I picked it up, I thought it would be a pop-science discussion of memory and how to remember more. It's that, but it also shifts swiftly into participatory journalism and the challenge as Foer (brother of author Jonathan) decides to build himself some "memory palaces" of his own to really understand the concept.

It's a very entertaining read, full of interesting facts. We can remember images way better than we think (test subjects flashed 2500 pictures can tell later whether they'd seen those photos before (versus a very similar photo) with about 90 percent accuracy). That's how the image-focused memory-palace tool becomes so powerful--don't remember these two cards, remember Pamela Anderson serving you a martini. When Foer first tries it, he describes it slowly enough that the reader can play along--and it seems to work, though I'm not too inspired to master it. I was also intrigued by the thought that leading a very full life makes time seem to go slower (in a good way), with a counter-example from a guy in self-imposed solitary confinement and darkness who lost track of time and thought only a month had gone by when two had.

There's an interesting connection with How We Decide, which I read earlier this year. That book's author described how the emotional side of the brain can process an overwhelming amount of facts quickly and make the right decision (e.g., a pilot who needs to get through a storm or a quarterback who throws a pass through a tempest of blockers). Foer approaches a similar concept from a memory angle, describing chicken sexers who have memorized enough bird-hindquarter patterns (that's as much detail as you need) to just "know" somehow whether a chick is male or female and SWAT team professionals who can tell in a flash whether a person walking up to a building is a threat. The brain has internalized all of the relevant images, and then the emotional side of the brain can snap to the right choice. (This also relates to the magical 10,000 hours of practice that makes an expert, as described in Outliers.)

Foer also spends some time discussing externalized memories: all of the smartphones and notepads and webpages and other crutches we have for remembering things these days. This blog is one of those tools--I don't have to remember details about which books I liked recently (including the two from the previous paragraph), as long as Blogger doesn't go down. It means that we don't bother to store a lot in our heads. Is that a problem? Not really, when it makes things easier, but by the end Foer suggests that the mindfulness that attention to memory brings is definitely a good thing, even if you don't become the U.S. memory champion.

Rating: ***

Snacking on a memoir

2011-08-29T20:51:00.001-04:00

Hamilton, Gabrielle. Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. New York: Random House, 2011.

As loyal readers know, I munch on a fair number of food-related memoirs, from Ruth Reichl to Julie Powell to Anthony Bourdain. So, when another comes along, especially one with such breathless praise on the covers ("Simply the best memoir by a chef ever. Ever." from Mr. Bourdain), how can I resist my appetite?

I don't really know what I think about this book. I'm certainly not flipping out cover-blurb-style. On the other hand, it's a different take on the industry than I've seen in other memoirs, and so honest that it's hard to dismiss. It makes me wonder what Hamilton's friends and family thought when they finished the book, seeing her mother pictured as a loathsome spider; her husband (ex now?) as a heavily accented, thoroughly detached iPhone-wanter; and herself as a formerly coked-out wild child who nonetheless has a serious work ethic and thrashed her way to the top of her profession at Prune. Did they recognized these characters? Only Hamilton's character is given the opportunity to surprise the reader much, but I suppose that's her privilege in her own book.

Hamilton has a master's in fiction, and her talent comes out in the calmer moments of the story. The image of her childhood visits to her father's stage-set-design business stuck with me:

Prying back the lid on a fifty-gallon barrel of silver glitter--the kind of barrel that took two men and a hand truck to wheel into the paint supply room of the shop--and then shoving your hands down into it up to your elbows is an experience that will secure the idea in your heart for the rest of your life that your dad is, himself, the greatest show on earth.

Or her description of a backyard lamb roast, with hissing drippings that "sounded like the hot tip of a just-blown-out match being dipped into a cup of water." As nostalgia wanes and things get more hectic, I stopped tabbing such evocative passages. Later, when Hamilton glories in a return to family life via her "Italian Italian" husband, imagery similarly resurfaces. She describes sgropino, "that lively dessert drink of prosecco and vodka and lemon ice cream which is so named because it describes the sneezelike sound a horse makes when she's shaking the flies from her nostrils. Because it makes you shudder just like that. And that's just how it felt to be introduced to Michele's family."

In addition to these rich descriptions, I liked learning about the insane stresses of commercial catering, and I particularly enjoyed one rage-filled vignette in which Hamilton MUST EAT NOW and finally sinks her teeth into an Italian sub, a far cry from the nice lunch she hoped for but just what she needed. I've felt that way.

I probably don't have the experience (other than reading other food memoirs and eating a lot) to truly appreciate this book--hence the blurbs from other chefs. I can see it as instructive for both people considering a career in the food industry and entertaining for those already in it. For me, it was worth reading but not life-changing: a three-star meal.

Rating: ***

Is this based on real people?

2011-08-22T21:20:00.000-04:00

McLaughlin, Emma and Nicola Krauss. Nanny Returns. New York: Atria Books, 2009.

This follow-up to The Nanny Diaries is not for the easily exhausted. In it, Nan Hutchinson, who formerly wore herself out nannying for the obnoxious "X" family, is sucked again into their rich, ridiculous world while also battling with other rich people as an HR consultant for a posh school and plenty of regular people as a new homeowner wondering why her contractor won't put her stairs back in.

It's 2008 in the book, so the reader knows that these hedge-fund honchos and money (spending) mavens are in for a correction. But, gosh, they don't know it, as they go from one outrageous behavior (siding with students who create websites full of lies about their teacher) to another (faking cancer to deflect from a husband's issues). There's a Madoff-esque moment at the end when things come tumbling down; those who realize that people matter more than things have some hope of turning out okay.

Readers who are prone to getting stressed out about fictional characters' imaginary problems might want to sit this one out. Those who want to gawk at the car wreck of some materialistic lives and maybe learn some lessons as a result could do worse than to pick Nanny Returns up.

Rating: **

Crime drama without commercials

2011-08-19T20:01:00.000-04:00

Malcolm, Janet. Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

I don't think I quite get this book, but I enjoyed reading it and finished it in just a few hours this Wednesday. At 155 pages, it was a breath of fresh air after the hefty novel I just finished. The richly descriptive depiction of a woman on trial for putting a hit on her husband (who had recently taken custody of their daughter) is refreshing as well, an episode of Law & Order on paper.

What I didn't get was the Iphigenia connection. Certainly the young girl in the case was wronged--possibly abused, jerked from one parent to the other, shuttled around once her mom was in jail and her dad was dead. There's certainly no good outcome for her. Maybe it's because I haven't studied Greek plays in years, but the situation doesn't cry out as (at least the Wikipedia version of) Iphigenia. I'm sure it's me.

I'm also not clear on the author's angle. Her journalistic tendencies mean that facts, interview segments, and trial excerpts form the bulk of the narrative. The reader is left to draw his own conclusions about the guilt of the mother and any potential miscarriage of justice. Certainly the narrative leans toward such questions, but given that the author was so obviously invested in the story, I'm surprised that she didn't go further. It's touchy stuff, though, so I can understand the reservation.

For a quick read on a topic I might not have considered, I applaud this book. It just makes me feel like I need to go back to school a bit (law, journalism, classics, whatever) to fully appreciate it.

Rating: **1/2

The elusive papery mammoth

2011-08-16T20:49:00.000-04:00

Auel, Jean M. The Land of Painted Caves. New York: Crown Publishers, 2011.

In the last book I wrote about, the fictional Thursday Next finds the real world bewildering because coincidences happen and not everything is meaningful, unlike in the purposeful novels she knows. The Land of Painted Caves isn't Thursday's type of fiction.

These 757 pages close the Earth's Children series that started with The Clan of the Cave Bear. It is obvious that the author spent years learning about ancient cultures and filling in a story between the lines; as in previous books, the attention to minute detail is striking. Since this book was published nine years after the last (and maybe because our attention is expected to wander as we read even this one book), however, mixed with that detail is what felt like an unnecessary amount of repetition and recap. A longtime reader of the series would only need a hint at previous events, and nobody but a long-time reader would pick up this tome.

The combination of this repetition, the numerous times the Mother's Song appeared, and the lengthy descriptions of painted caves (awesome in person, I'm sure) dragged down a story that, at its core, was probably about 100 decent pages of plot related to Ayla's journey to becoming a spiritual leader. Along the way, she raises a daughter and has a blowup with her mate. Alas, the copious copulation that made the previous books such guilty pleasures is down to two relatively tame marital encounters, a stumbled-upon liaison, and a drunken encounter that ends really badly. Though it was repetitious in its own way, it used to lighten up the books. Not here.

I think this series just tried to do too much. A tale about people and relationships that has some historical speculation thrown in--and that's how I recall the early books--should be pretty engaging. Instead, we ended up with a painstaking documentation of one possible history with a little human drama thrown in. That's too much reality for BookWorld.

Rating: *1/2

Now this is "through books"

2011-08-02T21:41:00.000-04:00

Fforde, Jasper. One of Our Thursdays Is Missing. New York: Viking, 2011.

I wrote a long time ago about The Eyre Affair as a gift-book. Looking back on that post, either Jasper Fforde has stepped his writing game back up or I've spent enough time away from the Thursday Next series to enjoy it again. I've certainly been gone long enough to forget most of the previous books' plots; luckily, this one explains enough that it can stand pleasantly on its own.

In this installment, we meet the fictional Thursday Next, who's doing her best to portray the real Thursday, avoiding crises that would have to be mitigated with a snooze button that makes the reader feel instantly nap-like at the cost of a sacrificed (fictional) kitten. In this Thursday's BookWorld, the fictional-physical landscape has recently changed because of a geographical reorganization of genres; the fictional-metaphorical landscape changes as well when Thursday is plunged into adventure because the real Thursday is missing.

Hijinks ensue, of course. The book is just jam-packed with the innovative detail and readerly in-jokes that won me over to the series initially. I didn't adore the book--it did take me almost a week to read, after all--but it was fun, somehow both familiar and refreshing, like having lunch with an old (smart) friend.

Rating: ***

You guessed it: there's shopping!

2011-07-26T23:05:00.000-04:00

Kinsella, Sophie. Mini Shopaholic. New York: The Dial Press, 2010.

Okay, so I'm taking a bit of a summer break from serious reading and letting the throughbooks audience see the books I used to pick up back when nobody was watching. As I have mentioned before, the Shopaholic series is frothy and fun, a bit sillier than the books Kinsella writes under the name Madeleine Wickham (not sure if that's her real name or another excellent pen name that sounds High Austen British). This latest installment fits with the rest.

In keeping with its predecessors, Mini Shopaholic follows frugality-challenged Becky Brandon through a new and ridiculous adventure. This time, it's planning a surprise birthday party for her husband while starting up a recession-proof "discreet shopping" (i.e., sneaking about with deliveries in computer-paper boxes and such) service at her personal shopping job, worrying that her toddler is too much of a handful, and generally flipping out about things. Despite the title, the kid is firmly in the backseat (rear-facing, of course) as the narrative focuses on Becky's attempts to make the best of various impossible situations without slipping back into the debt that plagued her in the earlier books.

It's hard to learn anything useful from the book (except maybe a few designers' names), and tears are unlikely, but the story pulls the reader along, if only to see the wreckage that seems unavoidable. There's a nice surprise at the end, and the conclusion is both happy and wide-open to sequels. Just like the next round of white sales, there's always a reliable event to look forward to in the Shopaholic series.

Rating: **

Procreating can be complicated!

2011-07-25T08:54:00.000-04:00

Weiner, Jennifer. Then Came You. New York: Atria Books, 2011.

Unlike Best Friends Forever, Then Came You manages to have a decent title along with Weiner's trademark easy-to-read story that's weightier than one might think. This latest novel deals with the panoply of reproductive choices that modern medicine allows. From the old-fashioned way to surrogates and egg donation, with terminated pregnancy in the distant past of one character's life and gay marriage in the future of others', it seems like these women have seen it all.

The story is told from the the perspectives of multiple women who don't have too much in common at first glance (other than being white and relatively bright), but who come to rely on each other in surprising ways by the end. I can't tell too much without giving away the ending, but the reader will figure out that ending fairly promptly. Just bear in mind that the initial emphasis on annoying detail (such as $300 running shoes) fades away as the story picks up emotional heft. Because of all of the "issues" dealt with, the plot is certainly not a formulaic chick-lit standard, but I found myself wishing that about half of those issues were jettisoned to enable a bit more depth of feeling. Still, as with all of Weiner's books, it's a worthy read for a summer afternoon.

Rating: **1/2

More Sam than Billy

2011-07-18T20:46:00.002-04:00

Lowe, Rob. Stories I Only Tell My Friends. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2011.

How do you know Rob Lowe? Is it as Sam Seaborn on The West Wing? Billy Hicks in St. Elmo's Fire? Not at all? Whether you associate his name with the excesses of the 80s Brat Pack or the highest tiers of primetime drama, Lowe's memoir will probably still surprise you.

I was drawn to the book through an excerpt in Vanity Fair. Otherwise, I doubt I would have known it existed. I'm sure the book promoter would be glad to know that worked. I liked the mix of insider Hollywood and emotional honesty in the excerpt, which dealt with the casting and filming of The Outsiders, and I'm pleased to report that it extends to the full book.

If Lowe weren't so famous, the book would feel like one big name-drop. It seems that he dated, drank with, or worked for just about every actor of the last half-century. He even watched his TV movie with Cary Grant in Grant's bedroom! Because he's both famous and surprisingly humble, it's not annoying. Instead, the reader gets both tabloidy gossip (secret tryst with Princess Stephanie of Monaco!) and a window into a life that's much more complicated than tabloids would indicate.

Despite the rough patches that might stick in people's minds, the real Rob Lowe turns out to be a politically minded A-student who took a long time to figure out how to live a life he could love. When he does--surprise again--it actually made me tear up a bit. For a "celebrity memoir," I'd say that's high praise.

Rating: **1/2

When Cupid goes on strike

2011-07-13T21:10:00.000-04:00

Wolitzer, Meg. The Uncoupling. New York: Riverhead Books, 2011.

The Uncoupling is a book that would make a better movie. It describes the lives of a suburb full of women whose desire for their menfolk is swept away by the cold breeze of a mysterious spell, all while the high school drama class is putting on Lysistrata. Long marriages and longer-held convictions fall apart. By the time things are explained (which wasn't really necessary--it's basically what you expected, but a little lamer), the spell has offered a chilly renewal to the town.

If you're confused, don't worry. The character development is actually quite good, so the lives discussed are interesting despite the preposterous premise. That's why the plot is well suited for a movie: we'd get the characters, and the spell business somehow seems less silly when you can see curtains trembling eerily. Or at least movies are supposed to be a little silly.

I did especially like one passage in book form, a tiny moment from everyday life that anchors the supernatural in the real.

She gooped a slug of green gel into the detergent maw of the dishwasher, then closed the door, letting the handle slap shut, which triggered the slow revving-up from inside. Two plates seemed to knock against each other in there, and would continue to do so for the next hour. ...the kitchen, in which a dishwasher churned and moaned, as if expressing all the effort it took to sustain family life.

I just searched for "uncoupling movie" to see if I was right and, though I didn't find one right away, I saw a similar thought in the preview sentence for a Chicago Sun-Times review. I promise I had mine independently--but it's nice to know I'm not alone.

That said, I liked it enough to put in a marathon session at the library this evening to finish it before it was due. I simply think I'd like the movie better.

Rating: **

Minutiae of maturity

2011-07-12T21:32:00.002-04:00

O'Nan, Stewart. Emily, Alone. New York: Viking, 2011.

As I read Emily, Alone, I kept trying to remember Olive Kitteridge. Both are books I liked, stories about older women; looking back on my review, however, it seems that the similarities end there. Where Olive was sharp but involved in her community in odd ways, Emily Maxwell is--as you might have gathered from the title--alone.

It's not that she's a recluse. She gets out; she talks to people. It just happens that the places she gets out to are the breakfast buffet, the vet, the doctor, her friends' funerals, and cemeteries. The people she talks to are her maid, her deceased husband's sister, and her children, with whom proximity and blood initiate the conversation rather than actual interest. So, Emily is pretty well alone. The surprising thing is that, despite her desire to get her affairs in order, she's not completely down in the dumps: her hobbies, obsessions, and still-active mind keep her from the brink.

O'Nan consistently shades in his picture of Emily through tremendously detailed descriptions of potentially ignored moments. In one brief chapter, she redistributes the tissue boxes in her house to put the fullest in the most trafficked locations, anticipating her daughter and grandchildren's visit. In another section, she brings some old stuff from her basement to her rummage sale, then mourns their loss. While some novels look at multiple characters through various viewpoints, the reader learns about Emily through these details, a single-faceted mirror held up to a long life full of joys and regrets. The end is more hopeful that I expected, but it's a quiet hope. After all of those funerals, it's going to be Emily, alone, for as long as it takes.

Rating: ***

Get off the couch and see your friends

2011-07-10T16:03:00.000-04:00

Friedman, Howard S., Ph.D. and Leslie R. Martin, Ph.D. The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study. New York: Hudson Street Press, 2011.

The Longevity Product describes intriguing research performed at the University of California, Riverside, over the last couple of decades. The investigators, hoping to understand what characteristics and behaviors lead to long life, painstakingly analyzed the wealth of data accumulated by Stanford psychologist Dr. Lewis Terman. Through questionnaires and interviews, Dr. Terman kept up with about 1500 people's lives as they progressed from gifted children to grandmothers. The UCR researchers added death certificates for the study participants, did tons of statistics, and cross-checked their results with modern studies.

Of the Terman children, some died young; some lived long. Although they all started from a "gifted" baseline, they ranged from mail carriers to Hollywood directors, suicidal to fulfilled, religious to wild as adults. Because there were so many people studied, the researchers could tease out justifiable trends. The surprises mentioned in the book's title mainly relate to the folklore of how we should be able to reach old age: chilling out, getting married, and thinking positive, for example.

Friedman, Martin, and their host of collaborators found that several traits and activities, rather than marathon-running per se, were most associated with longevity. The book is well worth picking up, if only to read the last 20 pages that summarize these findings (the rest is interesting too, and shows just how much work went into the study). In short: social, conscientious people who achieve their goals and find meaning in life seem to get both quality and quantity.

Throughout the book, the reader is offered assessments to see how he measures up against various characteristics, then "guideposts" of how to apply these ideas to daily life. In this way, the authors take what would be an interesting summary of their research and enhance it into a non-cloying self-help book. I gained some useful insights--for example, that positive thinking probably won't increase my hemoglobin level (despite what the Red Cross workers say!) and that I don't have to force myself to run as long as I get out of my chair in some way I enjoy (preferably with people). Only time will tell if I apply these and other recommendations in the book and live longer.

Rating: **1/2

It's all relative

2011-07-08T14:14:00.001-04:00

Auster, Paul. Sunset Park. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010.

I always groan a little when I see a sentence on a book jacket like "Sunset Park confirms Paul Auster as one of our greatest living writers." Oh, really, unbiased book jacket? Luckily, within just a few pages, I was sold on this book.

I know I'm reading an interesting book when I start thinking about themes and analyzing the novel as I would have in high school. Sunset Park, which peeks into the lives of several New Yorkers over an eventful six months, is unified by a need to withhold judgment and to make connections.

Judgment would be easy. Several characters date, marry, or otherwise dally with people who are much younger than they are. Yikes--statutory rape in a few cases! It's interesting to see how various circumstances make the age gap less alarming. There are several other situations in the book when laws are broken or choices are made with which the reader might not initially (or maybe ever) agree. All of this gets into more moral relativism than I feel qualified to discuss, but it's certainly interesting to think about.

Judgments aside, the characters in Sunset Park are longing to connect. They throw themselves into shady group-squatting situations, rekindle old relationships and maintain others, and cast about for romance. Throughout the book, the movie The Best Years of Our Lives, with war veterans out of place back home, keeps coming up. These characters have been through personal if not pitched battles, and they're trying to get home. The stories are so personal (one is even in second person, pulling "you" into the narrative) and the style so urgent (breathless two-page-long sentences that would be thoroughly annoying if they weren't wholly engrossing, plus dates mentioned so often that they must lead up to something) that the certain connection the novel makes is with the reader.

The main character's mother stars in a play called Happy Days, in which she is "buried up to her waist in Act I and then buried up to her neck in Act II." The image reappears when the main character wants to ease his girlfriend into experiencing New York, "like someone walking into a cold lake with a young swimmer, letting her tell him when she was ready to go in up to her waist, up to her neck, and if and when she wanted to put her head under." Like that swimmer's experience, it's not altogether clear whether the end of the novel--with the water above some of the characters' heads--is a drowning or a joyful if scary achievement from which they'll come up gasping and grinning.

There's much more I could relish analyzing about Sunset Park, but since nobody will be grading my paper I think I'll let future readers explore it themselves. Let's leave it at this toned-down version of the book-jacket blurb: a book that makes me think and feel as much as this one richly deserves its stars.

A deli and the characters who practically live in it

2011-07-02T15:07:00.000-04:00

Howe, Ben Ryder. My Korean Deli: Risking it All for a Convenience Store. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010.

Unlike other "challenge" book authors, Ben Ryder Howe did not buy a Brooklyn deli and work in it tirelessly with his Korean wife and mother-in-law for over a year as a gimmick for a memoir. (He makes this quite clear in the author's note at the end.) He did run the deli, though, and the outcome is similar to other challenge memoirs, even if the intent was different.

Howe learns a fair bit about himself, often through contrasts with the Korean immigrants, government inspectors, hard-working ex-cons, and food distributors that he deals with during this time. It's a far cry from his low-stress yuppie existence at the Paris Review. Stress is the key word.

This isn't the memoir to end all memoirs, but it's an interesting look into several different cultures that I don't usually see close up. I'm glad things were able to calm down by the end, avoiding to much tragedy. For a story as hectic as this one, that feels like success.

Rating: **

From Chaucer to Cartman

2011-06-29T20:03:00.001-04:00

Lynch, Jack. The Lexicographer's Dilemma. New York: Walker & Company, 2009.

In this description of "the evolution of 'proper' English from Shakespeare to South Park," Jack Lynch quotes David Crystal numerous times. It's appropriate given both Crystal's authority and his shared gift for making topics that might possibly be boring instead educational and accessible. Lynch certainly doesn't bring as many personal anecdotes into the story, so it's not quite as engaging, but a book that puts the work of Parker and Stone in his subtitle, anchors a chapter with Carlin, and defines lolcats for the Internet-illiterate is not your average dry English-usage tome.

I knew many of the basics from a decent education and recent attention to Crystal, but I still learned as I read. "Mob" was shortened in the 1600s from the Latin "mobile vulgus" (which, I must add, my iPad wants to autocorrect to vi Gus, as if that means something), meaning "fickle crowd." Horace Walpole made up "serendipity" because he liked a fairy tale about princes from Sri Lanka--in Persian, Serendip. George Bernard Shaw thought apostrophes in contractions were unnecessary. Texters win!

I just have one bone to pick, in the spirit of the historical complainers that Lynch quotes extensively. Read this: "But here we are, forty or fifty years after Cassandra's predictions of apocalypse, and still society has not collapsed." If he really meant Cassandra, that conflicts with most of the book, implying that there will be a problem and we aren't paying enough attention. Can we agree on Chicken Little?

That aside, Lynch's two main points are useful and easy to understand:

Language changes, so don't waste too much time whining about it.
Using "standard" English is a good call in some cases, so go ahead and learn it.

Oh, and dirty words are funny.

Rating: ***

Reading (and marrying) for love

2011-06-21T21:55:00.000-04:00

Márai, Sándor. Portraits of a Marriage. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

In my defense, this book basically told me not to finish it. In the first "portrait," a woman describes to a friend how she realized that her dear husband (who feels a bit smothered by her intense affection) had loved another for years. She remarks that "he read a lot, 'systematically' ... as though he were carrying out one of life's important duties. Once he had begun a book he wouldn't leave it until it was finished--not even when it annoyed or bored him."

Later, in the second portrait, that husband tells his side of the story to his friend, how he was captivated by his mother's maid, tried to live the life his status seemed to dictate instead, and later ruptured his marriage to join with this strong, elusive Judit. He describes his reading habits as well: "One day I noticed that the books I read had ceased to have anything properly to do with me. ... I read as if I were fulfilling an obligation: a new book appeared that everyone was talking about, so I read it. ... There had been a time when reading was an experience."

Before the third portrait began (this one, I think, is from Judit's perspective, and I'm betting there's another passage about reading, probably that her husband chose odd, random books and was frustrated that they didn't engage him any more than the steadfast selections he had previously made), I realized that I didn't want to be like the husband and feel obligated to read a book that didn't grip me. I didn't feel that Portraits of a Marriage was an experience; though I liked parts, it was something to get through. So I stopped.

I did find certain parts wonderfully pithy, such as the mother-in-law's statement (when the woman asks about marriages) that "[h]appiness, real happiness, tells no tales." Another good example is the man's description of his eventual realization that he had feelings for this maid who had been there all along: "If you live by the sea you are not always thinking that you could sail to India, or that you could drown yourself in it. Most of the time you just live there, read, and go in for a swim." Alas, that wasn't enough.

So, as I throw off this brief marriage to a book that I felt obligated to try, I look forward to future books that might be "like meeting someone new, an encounter fraught with risk." I'm hoping they work out better than the romance with Judit.

Rating: **

Narrow avoidance of a Pyrrhic victory

2011-06-13T18:52:00.000-04:00

Chua, Amy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. New York: The Penguin Press, 2011.

Amy Chua is girded for battle. But who is her opponent? For much of this book, a memoir of how she raised her two lovely, talented girls in the strict "Chinese mother" style, it seems like she's mainly fighting against American child-raising culture as a whole and her family's perceived desire for it in particular. By the end, Chua has turned her tiger's snarl on herself to some extent.

This possible change of heart--or at least slight melting of what might have seemed an icy clench on her family life--makes the book a little complicated. The mildly mellowed mom of today still has to write about a time when her parenting style seemed a few notches one side (you pick) of a dictatorship. The resulting comments and stories are over-the-top and funny as she fiercely defends her conviction that it was right then, if not now.

Is it deadpan humor when she demands "What are your dreams for Coco [the family dog]?" and doesn't understand what's funny when her husband laughs, cooling the argument? It must be, at least by the time she wrote the book, for this passage appears later:

It didn't upset me that I had revised my dreams for Coco--I just wanted her to be happy. I had finally come to see that Coco was an animal, with intrinsically far less potential than Sophia and Lulu [her daughters]. Although it is true that some dogs are on bomb squads or drug-sniffing teams, it is perfectly fine for most dogs not to have a profession or even any special skills.

This level of leniency may never be achieved for Chua's human dependents, but she's getting there by the end. Many of the strict-seeming list of things her kids are never allowed to do (page one, as well as the back cover) are dismantled or whittled down eventually. I guess that's part of the point. She's a mom, and I'm guessing all moms make rules with love and protection in mind that they later break with practicality in mind. Hers just happen to be about a zillion times more intense.

Rating: **

Think fast: try the book

2011-06-11T16:06:00.002-04:00

Lehrer, Jonah. How We Decide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

As I read How We Decide, I was reminded of the works of Malcolm Gladwell and David Crystal. Along with other outstanding non-fiction writers, they--and now Jonah Lehrer--are able to take complex subjects and make them both engrossing and informative. I can't think of a subject much more complex than the human brain, and Lehrer describes just one piece of it (decision-making) deftly through a series of stories and research summaries.

Some of the points are ones many readers may have heard before, such as loss aversion, the preference for immediate over delayed rewards, and our ability to eat whatever's on our plate, even if the plate is too big. What's new (at least to me) is Lehrer's thesis that both the rational and the emotional parts of our brains play key roles when we make decisions. If there is an overwhelming amount of information, as when a pilot rights a malfunctioning plane, a quarterback throws a pass through coverage, or we choose a car to buy, the emotional side can help turn the powerful subconscious processing of this information into what seems like a split-second decision. We just know. On the other hand, when the number of data points is small or the experience is new, our rational brain can, if uninhibited by emotions, chunk through the data to help us come to the right solution.

Lehrer outlines this view of decisions with a variety of situations: not only the football game and the car showroom, but also war, serial killers, and credit counseling. The variety keeps the reader interested; the number supports the theory. Like the research subjects who chose the worst strawberry jam when they had to over-describe their preferences, I'm not going to analyze this book too much--I'll go with my gut and say I quite enjoyed it.

Rating: ***

_Through Books_ turns two!

2011-06-06T21:39:00.001-04:00

The past year sure went by quickly! Year two was a little less productive for me in book-world. This year I read 60 books, about a third less than last year. Whoops--at least I finished all but three. Of this year's books, 60 percent were fiction and 40 percent were non-fiction. Of the non-fiction books, about half were memoirs.

Here's the breakout by star rating:

As with last year, the three-star category had the most books, and there were more books under three stars than above. Basically, it looks pretty similar, except that I read fewer books. It's conceivable that a smaller number of excellent books bummed me out and contributed to the smaller overall number. Or maybe I was just lazy. Or these books were longer. I'm not about to count pages.

The bottom line is that Through Books and its owner survived another year. Here's to the next year of reading. May the books be both numerous and wonderful.

There's a vampire book with the same title!

2011-06-06T21:06:00.000-04:00

Gordon, Jaimy. Lord of Misrule. Kingston, NY: McPherson & Company, 2010.

It's possible I tried to read this book at the wrong time, between chapters of The Tiger's Wife and in the same week that I watched Secretariat. These other pursuits raised my expectations of writing and racehorse-storytelling. Alas, Lord of Misrule did not meet those expectations, despite its National-Book-Award-winning status.

I was mildly interested in the characters, people working at and hanging around a lower-tier racecourse, hoping to strike it big or at least make rent. I'm guessing someone does, and someone doesn't. The style aggravated me, though. I decided at page 100, thirsting for a quotation mark, that I'd given it enough of a try and quit.

Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised--So Much for That was a finalist, and I didn't finish that either. I also haven't liked recent Man Booker Prize winners. I have to assume it's me, so people reading my reviews should probably temper their opinions accordingly. If I were one of the horseracing folk in this book, I'd probably start laying bets against myself.

Rating: **

Profusion without confusion

2011-06-06T19:23:00.022-04:00

Obreht, Téa. The Tiger's Wife. New York: Random House, 2011.

About The History of Love, I wrote that it takes a special talent to write a book from four different points of view. Similarly, it takes abundant skill to weave together several different stories in a way that keeps the reader interested, not confused. Obreht displays this skill in The Tiger's Wife.

There's an overarching first-person narrative, a young doctor who's off to give children immunizations in some remote town in the former Yugoslavia, but who at the same time must deal with her grandfather's death. There are two stories from her grandfather's life, both mysterious: that of the tiger that stumbled on the village of his childhood, and that of a man who can predict death. Then, there are a number of side stories, all of more-than-meets-the-eye characters, like the wandering bear-hunter with a middle-class upbringing (that's really as remote as the towns he or the abusive butcher who had wanted to be a musician. There are even smaller ones; even a sentence can captivate the imagination:

My grandma once told me about some man from Sarobor who had gone up into the hills after his sheep and found hiself eating with a house full of the dead, to which he had found his way by following a little girl with a white bonnet who turned out not to be a little girl at all, but something malicious and impossible to forget, something that changed him, preoccupied him until his own death.

And that's it for this story! Of course, if the whole book were like that it would be extremely frustrating. Sprinkled in occasionally, however, the side stories kept my attention. Obreht also does us the favor of making clear who's talking, and about what, with sensible narration and chapters and such. I appreciate that.

The writing is excellent, too. Obreht describes her scenes vividly: "a field of bristles and purple and red flowers scattered in tight clusters, out of which grasshoppers, black and singing, fell like arrows as we passed." She captures emotions: "I said: 'I'm sorry,' and regretted it immediately, because it just fell out of my mouth and continued to fall, and did nothing." She creates characters in just a sentence: "Back and forth he went through the house, latching and unlatching windows with useless determination, expecting, at any moment, to look inside the oven and find Death squatting in it--a man, just a man, a patient-looking winged man with the unmoving eyes of a thief."

Honestly, I'm not sure why I'm not going to give this book four stars. I suppose because I didn't love it, pat it on the back cover (or iPad edge, at least) as I finished it. It took me a while to get through. As a character asks just as the narrator tries to tie up one of the important stories, "what has that got to do with anything?" Because I certainly recommend it.

Rating: ***1/2

Mark your calendars

2011-05-26T20:54:00.001-04:00

I'm going to shock you with three posts today!

Yesterday I got an email from the Library of Congress that some of the authors for the National Book Festival had been announced. The festival will now extend to two days, September 24 and 25 on the National Mall. That seems appropriate to hold the list of authors mentioned, including Dave Eggers, Jennifer Egan, Garrison Keillor, Katherine Paterson, and Gregory Maguire. The festival website is still all last year's stuff, but I'm sure there will be more information posted soon. For now, it's a date worth saving.

A celebrity who eats real food and goes home to PA for Christmas

2011-05-26T20:48:00.000-04:00

Fey, Tina. Bossypants. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011.

Oh, Tina Fey, how the young you would be shocked to know that young women would one day aspire to have your wit and your haircut.

I wanted to read Bossypants so bad that I sprang for the Kindle version to read on vacation, and it paid off fairly well. From the first page, when she warns potential readers that she'll "use all kinds of elitist words like 'impervious' and 'torpor,'" Fey makes it clear that this will be a funny, frank, politically tinged book. It's probably 70 percent self-deprecating, with lots of funny pictures (childhood photos and a memorable hand-drawn chart of the stress level of various jobs), 20 percent practical advice for any old career, not just showbiz (e.g., ignore annoying stuff that doesn't actually get in the way of what you want), and 5 percent stuff you already knew, and 5 percent political.

The sum of those percentages is a fairly silly, occasionally sweet, memoir worth reading. I definitely chuckled (if not chortled) out loud several times while reading it. I probably could have used more of the career stuff--she's a role model despite all that self-deprecation--and fewer childhood anecdotes, but, hey, it's her book. If I ever obtain an imitable lifestyle and coiffure, I'd be quite pleased to do this well.

Rating: **1/2

Potatoes have flowers?!?!

2011-05-26T20:30:00.000-04:00

Kingsolver, Barbara. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.

Excuse time again: I started this book weeks ago, then got distracted by two others (one that you'll hear about today) while on vacation. As luck would have it, about 97 percent of my readership was on vacation with me, so I don't think the delay was too devastating. I'll leave you to guess how many people that was.

Part of that delay, however, was my uncertainty at the beginning of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle about whether I'd even want to finish it. After reading so many food books and challenge books, I felt like this one--a family's quest to eat locally for a year--would be the perfect match for me. But after reading so many food books and challenge books, would it have anything to teach me? Sure, the atrocities of CAFOs, virtues of organic, and hidden costs of plentiful produce were familar. What Kingsolver provides, however, is a good story around it.

There are really two stories. One is that of Kingsolver's family meeting its challenge. Could they give up bananas (whoops, I'm guilty) and other faraway foods and eat what's local and either seasonal or stored? Yes, of course, thanks only in small part to their not-too-strict rules, with coffee and blue-box mac-and-cheese pouring through loopholes. They managed to make big changes without an incomprehensible amount of effort--though more than most of us would be able to do--and preserve what mattered about them after the year of dogma was up.

The other story is one that is probably even less familiar to Kingsolver's readers, not to mention the general public. It's that of how food comes to be--something we don't often think about when it seems like we can have all varieties at all times. Wait, things grow? In a particular climate? And actual humans can make mozzarella cheese? Sounds dumb, but I'm certainly not as familiar with all that as I should have been.

Kingsolver keeps the book moving and not too preachy (the pieces by her husband and daughter handle that). To both stories, there are adorable parts (hatching baby turkeys), funny parts (trying to open various pumpkins), gross parts (poultry death sentences), and heartwarming parts (younger daughter's budding egg business). They make a whole that is as satisfying as the late-winter pesto dinner that Kingsolver's family creates from a summer's labor, stored snugly away.

Rating: ***

Suspense and sorrow

2011-05-04T22:12:00.000-04:00

Kennedy, Douglas. Leaving the World. New York: Atria Paperback, 2010.

I'm having a hard time figuring out what to say about Leaving the World. I don't think I could write a blurb as effusive as those on the back cover, but if I had to give a positive-sounding single word (as Colum McCann did on the front cover with "provocative"), I would probably choose "compelling." I was propelled through nearly 500 pages to find out what would happen to the main character, and I'm satisfied (at least on her behalf) with the result.

Jane Howard has a lot going on. I'm sure there are people out there who have, unfortunately, experienced this magnitude of crushing grief, horrible family members, career challenges, and random events. Most people, however, I would guess, have some awful times and some great ones and a lot of stuff in the middle. Instead, our main character gets a few paragraphs of joy (even then tinged with some kind of secrecy or doubt), an occasional glimpse of serenity, successes that come with a dark side, and otherwise general havoc. Her exhaustion was infectious.

A few tweaks could have made the book better. Kennedy, in keeping with the action-packed narrative, inserts a number of cliffhangers and "this happened... but it was much later" switchbacks that made me think of the young-adult thrillers I devoured long ago. Notable phrases like "boreal wind" and a "blink-once-you-miss-it" road (or Red Lobster) probably shouldn't be used multiple times in a novel. Oh, and people I know from the northeastern U.S. don't "ring," they call.

I don't want to be unnecessarily negative. Let me say that though I found Jane's busy life a bit much, almost all of the supporting characters were unique and interesting, like the tough-love psych ward nurse, the semi-wild friend who turned out surprisingly conventional, and the sad people who took actions more drastic than Jane was able to. A simpler story about almost any of them, written in the same compelling manner, would make a world the reader wouldn't leave.

Rating: **

A riot of color and theme

2011-04-28T18:29:00.001-04:00

Vreeland, Susan. Clara and Mr. Tiffany. New York: Random House, 2011.

The extent of my Tiffany knowledge prior to reading this novel was basically those pretty blue boxes and the derivative lamps that used to hang in Ruby Tuesday's. Thanks to a cache of letters and recent research, however, Vreeland was able to write this intriguing novel and give me a much better education.

The novel's central character is Clara Driscoll, lost to history until recently, hidden by her boss's narcissism and general prejudice at the time against women workers. With a different employer, she might have been able to claim her designs as her own rather than Mr. Tiffany's; on the other hand, she might not have had a job at all. It's a tough decision, one that she struggles with throughout the book. The detail of her creative process makes the reader hungry to see the real thing (hence my recent furious web-searching).

As Clara designs one piece (I think it was a clock), she crams in so many ideas and images that her friends reluctantly decree it a failure. I wouldn't say this book is a failure--I did enjoy reading it and learning--but it suffers from a similarly high level of excitement. Is it about women's rights, gay rights, workers' rights, immigrants' rights, love, accounting, work/life balance, turn-of-the-century New York, art, the phrase "23 skidoo," or management theory? It's about all that, but it could have been an even better book if it were only about some of that.

Rating: ***

Short views of many lives

2011-04-20T19:51:00.000-04:00

Evans, Danielle. Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.

I've mentioned my challenges with enjoying short stories before. There's only so much room in a short story to grab the reader and create a memorable event or mood. In this collection, Evans demonstrates that talent.

Her stories are brief windows into lives, and almost all end fairly abruptly, leaving the reader wanting more. What happened after the football field burned? Did Jasmine regret the night she spent with those older guys? Will Georgie ever see little Esther again? Which couples get or stay together? These are the questions I'm left asking, and that I care means that these stories must be pretty decent.

Impressively, Evans succeeds at writing in a number of styles--male and female narrators, first and third person, children and young adults. Her prose is engaging and easy to read; it's not the fanciest thing ever, but that wouldn't suit the material. It did yield at least one sentence worth tabbing: "Geena was a girl like sunlight: if you were a girl like I was back then, you didn't look at her directly." Luckily for us, these story-windows give us that indirect view.

Rating: ***

A complex, lovely history

2011-04-15T10:13:00.000-04:00

Krauss, Nicole. The History of Love. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005.

Every time I want to give a book four stars, I wonder about the criteria. How do I know? It turns out, I think, that loving a book, like loving a person, doesn't follow specific criteria. If, at the end, I close the book and pat the cover a couple of times, or give it a little hug and my eyes well up as I head upstairs to write about it, if those things happen, those are all the criteria I need. So, I loved this book.

It could have gone so wrong. It takes a special talent to write a book from four points of view: an elderly man who escaped the Holocaust, a smart teenage girl who misses her dead father, her quirky religious little brother, and a third-person account of another man. Add to that that there's a second book (the "actual" The History of Love), odd enough that it could be bad but well written enough that it's beautiful, woven into this multi-narrative, and there's a lot that could sour in this novel. But it doesn't.

The elderly man wrote a book; the other man published it as his own; the children's mother loved the book and the girl wants to find out more. There's more, but it has to be read, not summarized.

Krauss writes some unforgettable passages. In one, the elderly man describes how he directs his feelings elsewhere from his weakened heart. "Disappointment in myself: right kidney. ... The pain of forgetting: spine. ... Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all." Later, this precise description: "He looked suddenly like a child whose mother has been late to pick him up, and only now that she's arrived allows himself to give in to tears." She writes briefly about a child's disappointment when she realizes her father, an engineer, doesn't drive trains (will I similarly disappoint?). Krauss makes a cliche into something more:

He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn't choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him.

I patted this book on the cover. I hope others will.

Rating: ****

Forget Oscars, she had a meatloaf named after her

2011-04-06T19:46:00.000-04:00

Ephron, Nora. I Remember Nothing, and Other Reflections. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

Now here's a book you can zip through! In I Remember Nothing, screenwriter Ephron offers twenty-odd breezy observations and stories. Some are a little silly (hair-related weirdness) and some are weighty (family history, getting old, things to miss). It's all quite confessional, but with enough dry humor, like the list of "things I'm refusing to know anything about" (including Twitter), to deflect too much inquisitiveness. Bacon is discussed. On the serious side, I found the descriptions of her early journalism career particularly interesting, especially to understand how much things have changed.

The book is short, and so is my post. If you see it on a shelf and want to spend a pleasant hour, go for it.

Rating: **1/2

Above-ground cave, TV shadows

2011-04-04T19:34:00.003-04:00

Donoghue, Emma. Room. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010.

Another introductory apology, alas: the delay was all me, trying and returning a different book and (whoops!) attending to tasks other than reading and blogging. Room, when you get to it, and you should, only takes a few riveting hours to read. Even in the narrow category of adult novels with quirky first-person child protagonists (...T.S. Spivet, for one, or ...Dog in the Night-Time), Room is unique.

I don't get credit for thinking of it, because it pops up near the end of the book coming out of some annoying TV personality's mouth, but the story is along the lines of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, but thoroughly contemporary, terribly cruel, and thereby with far more impact. Like the chained inhabitants of Plato's cave, five-year-old Jack has grown up thinking that reality as we know it is an illusion. To him, an 11-by-11 room is home, full of fun stuff like a snake made of eggshells and a TV he can watch sparingly. To his mother, it's the horrific prison where she's been trapped for seven years since being kidnapped, where Jack's birth was the only bright light. She does her best by her son, though, who grows up intelligent and loving.

Jack isn't told and doesn't suspect that the people and places "in TV" are real--his mother and the personified objects in Room are enough for him. Escape (I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say they do) is essential for his mother, but a curiosity for Jack. Outside has so many rules and things that can hurt. Why can't they just go back to Room? The conflict this creates, and the tiny family's growth into their new life, drives the second half of the book.

It's amazing how a book written from a smart five-year-old's perspective can be non-annoying. The grammatical "slip-ups" come across as cute and appropriate rather than annoying, because what he says in his funny sentences is so interesting. His reactions to his environment drive the story, and what he hears from his mother and others around him provide the context we can't get from him alone (clinical terms, for example, and the the backstory of Room).

As with Plato's characters, these two will eventually acclimate and won't want to go back to their cave. They're better off, even if life is more complicated. Looking at things a different way, expanding our horizons even if it's painful--that's the journey these characters take, and one that (with much less drama, of course) we could learn from the philosophers as well.

Rating: ***1/2

The stories of science

2011-03-23T20:26:00.001-04:00

Kean, Sam. The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010.

This is the second book in a row I've had to race to finish in a relatively comfortable chair at the library, minutes before it's due. Bad trend. The book itself, however, is a delight, so the delay must speak more to me than to it.

In high school, I loved chemistry. It made sense; we made messes. Somewhere in college--I took plenty of chemistry, along with solid state physics and other related topics--the joy faded into routine and requirement. The Disappearing Spoon reminds me of those fun, interesting times.

Kean drapes his stories like colorful tapestries on the clammy walls of the periodic-table castle. Boring science? No way. If you would be amused and intrigued by the trick of a gallium spoon, molded like aluminum but melting at 84°F, vanishing in your unassuming friend's cocoa, this is the book (and title) for you.

One of the many tales relates the importance of iodine in salt. As "fancy" salts rise in popularity and packaged foods replace home-cooked ones that employ the shaker of Morton's, will iodine deficiencies increase? Something to think about. Another, in a more vivid illustration of crystal structure transformations than my college classes, describes "tin leprosy" and its possible link to a tragic Antarctic mission.

With stories like those, The Disappearing Spoon pairs facts and fascination. It's fun without being dumbed down. An author who tells these tales (and tosses in "mene, mene, tekel, upharsin" with only the faintest of context) has a lot in common with the playful, intelligent perpetrators of the melting flatware.

Rating: ***1/2

Quite a career

2011-03-11T15:56:00.000-05:00

Batuman, Elif. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010.

I had to whiz through the last half of this book in a chair at the library last night, so I can't be as detailed as I might like. The Possessed is pretty interesting, though, worth more than a half-finished toss onto the return desk. It's part memoir of grad school in comparative literature, part analysis of various Russian stories and novels, and part wacky.

How can you not like a book with cover art by New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast? From there, it gets more entertaining, full of interesting thoughts and weird trivia. Batuman's prose (true or not) is descriptive and funny: "Nathalie glanced over her shoulder, with the expression of a cat who does not want to be picked up." I also got to learn about the development of the Uzbek language, how a city rose from a swamp in St. Petersburg, an ice palace, and the Kunstkamera.

I'm not clear on how much of the memoir parts is true after this footnote: "There really was an accordion concert, although I have been unable to confirm the existence of a Lev Tolstoy Accordion Academy." But does it matter? Novels aren't true in a historical-record sense, but they can be true to life, and I think that's more what this memoir explores. Any snazzing up just makes it a better read.

Rating: **1/2

Piecing together a life

2011-03-09T20:26:00.000-05:00

Schiff, Stacy. Cleopatra: A Life. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010.

The cover image of Cleopatra: A Life shows a lovely-necked woman with pearls in her hair, on earrings, and around her neck--but turned away from the viewer. The poster for the Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra depicts the famous queen in profile, with Marc Antony behind her, facing the viewer. In the art for a miniseries version, she's facing us saucily with both of her menfolk looking on.

Besides being the fruit of some entertaining online "research," this imagery is important to what the new Cleopatra biography is attempting to accomplish. On the very first page, Schiff admits "[i]f the name is indelible, the image is blurry." There are few documents about Cleopatra written during her lifetime; later histories are colored by various political expediencies, biases, and good storytelling.

Despite this dearth of primary sources, Schiff meticulously pieces together a mosaic of Cleopatra's life from the time she defeated her co-ruling brother by conquering (or teaming up with, depending on your perspective) Julius Caesar until her suicide under uncertain circumstances, probably without the company of an asp. To flesh out the narrative, the author includes lush descriptions of scenes like what Cleopatra might have experienced. If we don't have her parade, at least we have a parade. There's also plenty of detail on the political strife of the time, much better documented than the Ptolemaic monarch's hopes and fears. All this grouts the story together.

I enjoyed reading about the contrast between Alexandria and Rome. I picture Rome cloaked in gleaming marble; at the time, Alexandria was the one in that garment. Schiff tells us that Rome "was still the kind of place where a stray dog might deposit a human hand under the breakfast table, where an ox could burst into the dining room." Oh, and some guy comes to a party as a sea nymph: naked, painted blue, wearing a fish tail. There might not be marble, but they had a good time.

Schiff's fierce attention to detail makes for a pleasurable, if exhausting, read. (I think there are only about 350 paragraphs in the 300 pages.) Artistic license has given Cleopatra more of a face in other tales of her life, but Schiff's biography gives her achievements other than beauty and a world to see through her veil.

Rating: ***

Apparently there is a purpose to differential equations

2011-02-28T21:42:00.001-05:00

Foden, Giles. Turbulence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

Excellent historical fiction is so detailed and compelling that the reader wants to rush out and learn more about the time. Is the story true (or nearly)? Turbulence is one of these books. After finishing, I did some quick "research" via web-search so I could post a few things here.

This is a story that, as its title suggests, is not straightforward. It starts out with the main character, Henry, as an old man aboard a seemingly impossible wood-and-ice Pykrete boat, living out a dream of long ago. Henry flashes back to the time when he first heard of this weird boat project, when he was a meteorologist contributing to the plans for the Normandy landings. At various points in the flashback, there are jumps forward to the middle, hints at the life Henry might build for himself after the war. An epilogue of sorts ties things together, but doesn't answer too many questions.

Somehow, the novel is packed with technical-sounding discussions of meteorology, turbulence, and the use of science in war--and is still very readable. The writing is often beautiful, lush with description of sights and sounds, from leisurely descriptions of a bustling harbor to staccato reporting of the view through a train window. Who knows how accurate it is. Pykrete does exist; a man who briefly mentors Henry is based on someone real; two intriguing female characters seemed authentic but aren't obviously so. Does it matter? The equations worked, the invasion succeeded, and the rest is history. The fictitious parts are just what make it fun.

Rating: ***

Thirsting for a good read

2011-02-25T21:16:00.007-05:00

Reardon, Joan (ed.). As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child & Avis DeVoto. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.
When I mentioned that I was reading a book of letters between Julia Child and a friend, my mother said something vaguely uncharitable like "they keep going back to that well, huh?" OK, so I've read Julie & Julia, My Life in France, and The Tenth Muse, but I was excited to get this extreme-first-person touch. Now, having worked my way through As Always, Julia, I kind of wish the well weren't as deep.

The trouble with a 400-page collection of back-and-forth letters spanning nearly ten years is that it's long and (on purpose) unedited. At first I found the tidbits about politics of the time and famous people with whom Julia and her friend Avis interacted very interesting. But it became clear why the footnotes are designated with symbols instead of numbers--there's just too much information in the letters and further annotation needed for readers in 2010 to understand it all. Getting up to number 200 or whatever would be seem a bit pretentious for a book of letters.

Certainly, there are charming parts. You can't help but love dear Julia, such as when she rails against home cooks who second-guess themselves and apologize too much. ("I make it a rule, no matter what happens, never to say one word, though it kills me. Maybe the cat has fallen in the stew, or I have put the lettuce out the window and it has frozen, or the meat is not quite done ... Grit one's teeth and smile.") Her personality leaps off the page, from using "balls" as an interjection to capitalized, underlined introductions to parts of her letters, often including excellent tips. It's also amazing to think how different our options are today, when they were discussing what shallots are and where to find mustard other than French's and I have a jillion varieties of everything within 15 minutes. I also liked Avis's discussion of getting "as good as you pay for" and not cheaping out on ingredients--appropriate considering my recent read.

I can happily recommend reading the first half or so of the book, as the two correspondents grow a relationship from a simple fan letter about Avis's husband's article on knives. My little page-tabbies died out significantly after that, though, so I suggest a brief spin through Wikipedia (or what you already know) to pick up the rest of the story, along with the political turbulence. This type of well water is clean and fresh, but doesn't need to be guzzled.

Rating: **

Unanswered

2011-02-20T09:11:00.000-05:00

Jacobson, Howard. The Finkler Question. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.

Who am I to disagree with the Man Booker Prize committee? I am entitled to my opinions, though, and The Finkler Question is the second winner in a row (2009's was Wolf Hall) that I couldn't get into and refused to finish. Unfortunately, I might need to use the award seal as a warning in the future.

I forced myself to get to page 100. Even so, I'm not really sure what's going on in the book. Main character Julian Treslove is obsessed with many things, including loving women whose names start with "J," worrying about events that might happen, and Jewish culture and people. It's not clear whether he wants to be Jewish, understand their customs, or just think about them in general--he even refers to people of that faith as "Finklers" (after his Jewish friend's last name) so he is more free to obsess about them without the word "Jew" racing around in his head. Oh, and he gets mugged by someone who might have been a woman, might have called him a Jew, and might be the love of his life.

Weird, yes. Engaging enough for me to read it, no. The writing is good--nice style and all--but I felt no connection with the characters and mainly annoyance mixed with confusion about the story. So, even though there's a chance it would get better, instead I was counting the pages from 60-ish on. I guess I'll never know the answer to the question.

Rating: *1/2

Cheap isn't always a bargain

2011-02-14T22:08:00.002-05:00

Shell, Ellen Ruppel. Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. New York: The Penguin Press, 2009.

Some recent experiences that make this book relevant to me:

Spending two whole weekends pricing out first a refrigerator, then a television, in half a dozen stores and online
Buying a television I hadn't researched at all because it seemed like a good deal and I was tired of looking
Throwing a Blu-ray player in the cart, too, because I was already spending a ton of money and it had some good features
Peering at a price tag for a wool coat and wondering if it was ever intended to be sold for $340 (now 60% off original price!)
Packing a lunch for a long train ride to save money, then having about $10 of high-priced coffee during my weekend trip without batting an eye because the money's already on the gift card

In Cheap, Ellen Ruppel Shell writes about the pitfalls and hidden costs of the cheap stuff that surrounds us all the time. She describes the changes in manufacturing practices that enabled the production of cheap goods and the labor costs that are suppressed to keep them even cheaper. Economic explanations and biological evidence help describe why it is so hard to resist that "great deal." Shell also reveals that many of those deals aren't really so good, with surrounding prices inflated, transportation costs hidden, and shoddier products substituted.

I wish the author had spent more time on toting up the actual cost of goods that seem cheap, especially in environmental terms. At one point, she marvels at the fact that Chinese garlic is cheaper than the local California stuff--but doesn't go any further than that. Also, at the end she praises Wegmans and Costco for the way they treat their workers, but could have focused on how their products are still so darn cheap. (Full disclosure: I'm a Costco member and am eagerly awaiting a Wegmans in my area.) An earlier chapter indicated that E.J. Korvette's status as a membership club helped the store avoid rules about discounting. Are there similar issues with Costco? I don't think we find out (although I wasn't reading every single word by the end so I can't guarantee it).

Even with those drawbacks, Cheap provides important cautions to all of us who must live among the pricetags every day. I know I'm going to keep looking for better value, not just lower cost--or at least packing my lunch to offset those coffees.

Rating: **

Too many mommies in the kitchen

2011-02-14T21:36:00.000-05:00

Grunwald, Lisa. The Irresistible Henry House. New York: Random House, 2010.

Nature or nurture? That's a familiar question. But what if there's too much nurture? The Irresistible Henry House explores this concept against the backdrop of a changing United States in the 1950s and 1960s.

Henry House, starting from a few months old, is in a position that seems very strange to our modern eyes: he is a "practice baby" in a "practice house" where college girls learn their future craft of home economics. He's no Pinocchio--he's a real boy, adorable and engaging and quickly the main obsession of the lonely live-in home-ec professor.

As the reader follows Henry from tiny orphan to accomplished animator, it seems that his early, innocent relationships with multiple "mothers" enhance his ability to charm while they dampen his ability to focus love. Or, abandoned by his mother and later struggling with the choice to build a relationship with her, do those experiences have more impact? It could also be that the cold, yet impulsive nature of his blood relatives explains his behavior.

Whatever the reason, it makes for a unique, readable story. Though the reader might not particularly like many of the characters, their quirks are realistic. We don't like everyone in real life, either, but it's interesting to think about what makes them tick.

Rating: **

Sane, flexible food advice

2011-02-08T22:34:00.000-05:00

Bittman, Mark. Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009.

When I finished The Food Matters Cookbook, I resolved to read its slightly less cookbooky (though still with recipes) predecessor. It only took me a month to obtain and read it--not bad. Food Matters (senior), as with the Cookbook, provides an up-front section about the overall philosophy (basically to eat less meat, more grains and vegetables, and no junk) followed by a bunch of pantry tips and recipes to help the reader implement that approach. This version has more of the former and fewer of the latter.

When I read these types of books, I get really horrified for a while (so much meat with such an impact on the environment!). Bittman's approach gives the reader something to do with this outrage. Since reading the Cookbook, I've used several of its recipes successfully. A quinoa, corn, bean, and shrimp mix was a hit when it became a burrito filling. Fajitas also worked well. I've stepped up my attention to meat outside the home: since at home at least I can control its quality, I try to avoid it elsewhere unless I believe the purveyor applied similar controls.

The Food Matters concern is more about eating less meat, with universally applied ethics possible only when production is scaled down; I'm trying to go for both when possible. But I'm not going to be militant about it. I was greatly amused by a sketch on Portlandia about "Colin the chicken," whose resume was offered to inquisitive diners. I'd rather not be a parody of myself!

Because I found The Food Matters Cookbook so useful (and I own it), I might not have needed Food Matters desperately. I predicted that "[i]t probably won't tell me much that this hefty book combined with the Pollan oeuvre hasn't. If this book's practical and engaging style are any indication, though, it'll be a pleasant read." I was right, and readers who don't have the Cookbook on their shelves already would be well served by this shorter, earlier version.

Rating: ***

Now I need some lunch

2011-02-05T11:27:00.000-05:00

Morais, Richard C. The Hundred-Foot Journey. New York: Scribner, 2010.

If you are the type to watch the Food Network, the Cooking Channel, and PBS cooking shows; to read Cook's Illustrated; to try all the restaurants in a dining guide; to fiddle around in your own kitchen--this is the book for you. It's basically a translation of those experiences into a short novel about a young Indian boy who grows up into a French chef.

The descriptions are deliciously detailed--what the blurb on the back cover calls "food porn" (which was recently mocked as a concept on South Park). I was reading it while waiting for my lunch yesterday and got super hungry. On a few random pages: "England's own rich vein of culinary deposits, wonderful-sounding creations like 'Duckling, Apple & Calvados Pie' or 'Beer-Marinated Rabbit loins' or 'Venison Sausage with Mushroom & Cranberry'"; "the spring lamb, its skin perforated with garlic slivers, dusted in cumin and herbes de Provence, all ready to enter the oven"; "[a]mong the heaps of lush fruit, we frequently placed a plate of smoke-blackened sausages, or delicate and flaky pastries of the day stacked under a smooth glass dome, all to create a mouthwatering contrast of hues and textures."

So, yes, yum. The story amid all that food is decent, if a little hard to believe. Hassan's restaurateur family leaves India in grief and tries England, then France, in search of a new home. They settle where their car breaks down in a cute little French village; unfortunately, it is already ruled by an autocratic chef who's out to get their little enterprise. Somehow she has a magical conversion, though, and takes Hassan under her wing, quietly guiding (though she denies it to the end) his rise to three-star Michelin fame. It's nice to root for the kid and have things turn out well; I liked the story. As for re-reading it, I'd rather go eat somewhere awesome.

Rating: **1/2

Sushi, yes; cheese, no

2011-01-29T12:05:00.000-05:00

Amster-Burton, Matthew. Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

While without much direct applicability to my (current) life, Hungry Monkey is delightful. Amster-Burton, a food critic and writer for various publications (and a blogger), takes a funny and unapologetic tone as he describes feeding his daughter Iris everything from donuts to chiles. The stories he tells are ridiculously cute. If his kid really talks like that, she is awesome.

Amster-Burton provides short chapters on a variety of topics, including vegetables, quick foods, stews, spices, and shopping. It's certainly not a manual for feeding your child, but through the tidbits about feeding that child, parents could probably get enough ideas not to go completely nuts. He provides lots of recipes that work for their family. The recipes might work for others, especially if they have access (as most do nowadays) to a variety of the world's ingredients and (as many don't) a fair amount of time.

I especially liked the story about being "snack dad" at preschool for three weeks, during which cheese was a hit and vegetable dumplings weren't (surprise!). As I mentioned, Iris's sayings perk up the book. I also enjoyed the tacked-on section at the end of "our favorite convenience foods": easy things to have on hand and what to do with them, shushing the food police who might object to frozen stuff or boxed wine.

I'm not sure if Iris is quite an "adventurous eater" yet--toddlers are picky, even when their dads are food experts--but, as with most quests, the fun is in the questing.

Rating: ***

An unfortunate climax

2011-01-27T20:23:00.001-05:00

Goodman, Allegra. The Cookbook Collector. New York: The Dial Press, 2010.

I was asleep. When steel squealed and glass crunched and fire boomed, I was asleep. I woke up before they fell. I woke up to a frantic all-caps message from a Brooklynite friend, exhorting me to turn on the television. It stayed on all day. We kept one eye on it and the other on the window, past which cars streamed, getting out of downtown DC as fast as possible. I wasn't there, I wasn't hurt, but I was around.

Did people of another generation feel similarly weird, then, when their major events (Pearl Harbor, perhaps, or the moon landing) filtered into books as plot devices? That's what I wondered as I finished The Cookbook Collector. I'm not going to give away much, but you can guess that any book that starts in late 1999 and covers a few years is going to pass through September 11, 2001, somehow. Although I'm sure that day's awful events spurred many real people to reconsider their lives, it still seems wrong in a book. Give them some other reason to change.

That aside, I liked the rest of the book well enough to plow through it. The story is anchored by two very different experiences--rooting through a trove of centuries-old rare cookbooks, learning about the personal histories behind them that (surprise!) have an effect on current lives, and the roller-coaster ride of technology companies just before and after that bubble burst. The computer stuff got a bit detailed for me, and it's hard to have too much sympathy for the quick-rich-quicker-poor tech titans, but the cookbook pieces were pretty interesting. The characters perusing the cookbooks got what we were rooting for, so that's nice.

I must say that Goodman writes well. Her style is clear and precise. The lengthy cast of characters might get confusing, except that she usually devotes several paragraphs to description and backstory when someone new pops up. It could be argued that the book is trying to tell too many stories from too many viewpoints, but I didn't get lost and thing summed up fairly neatly. I just wish they hadn't had to sum up for that reason.

Rating: **1/2

A story that doesn't just snap together

2011-01-25T20:15:00.001-05:00

Harding, Paul. Tinkers. New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2009.

I think I need to read this book again. I was just looking some things up to support my review and found the following.

Tinkers won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2010. (The library copy doesn't have the award seal on the front.)
Bellevue Literary Press "publishes literary and authoritative fiction and nonfiction at the nexus of the arts and the sciences, with a special focus on medicine. ... [authors] address the impact of scientific and medical practice on the individual and society." Now I begin to understand the importance of the illness and death so carefully described in the book.
The phrase "tinker's dam(n)" might refer to the foul-mouthedness of tinkers (itinerant tinsmiths or marginalized people) or to a disposable ridge they used to hold solder in place while hardening. I thought maybe dam in the sense of mother--if the tinker is marginalized, people probably wouldn't care where he comes from--but I don't see that sense coming up.

My first impression of Tinkers, which held about halfway through, was that it took the lessons of The Glamour of Grammar too much to heart, packing in seemingly every stylistic device into each page. So many sentences are compound, complex, starting with "but" or "and," splitting infinitives, heaping up examples, experimenting with punctuation, swapping tense and person, that I thought the author was going for some kind of prize. That worked out.

At some point, though, I kind of gave up on being annoyed and switched to getting through the book, letting it wash over me, skimming when needed. That was much more successful, and I found a lot to like. I learned a word: "scrieved." I admired the many vignettes about the lives of horologist main character George and his epileptic salesman father Howard. (Tinker: George does; Howard is.) For example, the description of looking for a doctor and finding his house riding down the street on logs illustrates a time long past, when possessions were much more permanent and meaningful. A brief story about a house fire--the unknown people who died in it and the sturdy door that survived--further shows the evanescence of life.

In one of many interludes that I didn't quite understand, there is this passage:

We sensed, finally, the foolishness of attributing the unknown to secret cabals, to conspiracies. Everything was almost always obscure. Understanding shone when it did, for no discernable reason, and we were content. We built our town, then, out of whatever came our way...

Parts of Tinkers made me think; parts were beautiful; parts were just interesting. I am content.

Rating: ***

A "hip" guide to writing well

2011-01-19T21:47:00.000-05:00

Clark, Roy Peter. The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010.

Don't get me wrong: this is a good book.

I'll mound up some praise to get things started. In a few hundred quick-reading pages, Clark provides fifty lessons on not just grammar (the potentially boring use of periods and clauses) but also excellent English usage. He gives the reader license to experiment after learning the rules, to adapt to changing times, to infuse writing with variety that will enchant the reader. He practices what he preaches, too. It doesn't take much sleuthing to notice that Clark's own writing includes examples of whatever he's discussing, along with the carefully chosen quotations that remind me of "A Close Read," a greatly missed former fixture of The Atlantic.

But the sprit of this book demands an honest review, so I must sift a few shortcomings onto the other side of the scale.

Clark should consider adding another rule to the book and following it--don't try too hard. Like your dad saying "I'm hip, right?", the author inserts some "lingo" in cringe-worthy fashion, referring to the positive use of "bad" in popular culture (recent popular culture?), comparing a Hawaiian custom to "'yo mama' jokes," and using (even in quotes) the term "mad skills." The book is good; it doesn't need to be cool.

Though the author tends to the permissive, the discussions of slang and dialect could use a clearer message. In the lesson on mastering "nonstandard English," Clark applauds a passage written as if by a country-styled former American Idol contestant, full of "howdy" and "ain't." He thinks that the fame of the "writer" means readers wouldn't be offended. Maybe not, but I bet they'd be annoyed by such overly slanged-up writing. I did, however, appreciate his observation of a book that used dialect for a Southern character but not one from Boston; if employed, it should be equal-opportunity. His reference to a Flannery O'Connor story is also useful; an author writing how she speaks is far different from one trying on a voice. (The Help provides a recent example of all this.)

Clark also misses two opportunities to reinforce his points. Near the end, he refers to to discussions about the President's religion, but doesn't loop back to the position in Chapter 29 (related to this same topic, no less!) that the use of the subjunctive can be important. Especially when people can be quoted out of context, "(so) what if he were?" and "what if he is?" are different. On the same page, two chapters after the one on denotation and connotation, Clark uses the word "tolerance" twice. Tolerance is one of those words that sounds great until you think about the other things you tolerate, like jackhammers outside your window or your cube-mate's motivational posters. It should be used with caution.

To get back to the opening sentence, don't take the criticism as condemnation. I would love for all young writers to read this book. I'm hoping to implement more of its tips. If I didn't like the book, I wouldn't have bothered to tab all those pages. I'm too lazy!

Rating: ***1/2

Too much of a good relationship?

2011-01-18T17:46:00.000-05:00

Glass, Julia. The Widower's Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010.

I'm pretty sure I've read at least two of Glass's previous books, but it must have been before I started this blog (see, again, why I started it as an extension of my memory?). I remember being extremely impressed with Three Junes and less so with whichever of the two followups I actually read. Regardless, I am back to impressed on completion of The Widower's Tale.

Interestingly, the tale is not just of the widower (Percy Darling, who has actually been a widower longer than he was ever single or married, if I counted right, as well as being a retired Widener librarian and the occupant of a historic if rough-around-the edges Massachusetts house) but also of a few other gentlemen in his life: his grandson Robert, a teacher named Ira from the preschool occupying Percy's barn, and a gardener/caretaker of questionable immigration status named Celestino. Percy gets first person, but the other men get almost equal play. The female characters have important roles to play, but often they seem just to be complicating the men's lives.

The tales are really about relationships. Percy feels the need to be everything to his daughters after their mother's death, but he connects with them more through their children than through adult friendship. He also explores a return to the romantic world with quirky, independent Sarah, but things get serious very quickly and, though it's hopeful at the end, it's not clear whether this experiment will succeed. Robert casts off a "normal" girlfriend relationship in favor of idealistic kinship (hero worship, maybe, but nothing romantic) with his whirlwind of a roommate. Ira, unfortunately, had to change jobs because of the rumor (thoroughly false, it appears and I hope) of an inappropriate relationship with a student and struggles to maintain the spark with his partner. Celestino mourns for a life and love that he glimpsed briefly when a Harvard professor plucked him from Guatemala as a child (with his parents' permission, let's be clear); at the end, it seems like he might get some of that back. The women in orbit around these men also strive for connections with their children, husbands, and society.

Beyond the personal connections and interesting characters, it seems like the book is trying to make several points, and they come off more condescending than successful. Robert and his roommate take caring about the earth and overconsumption to extremes; until their schemes affect characters we are supposed to care about, they're almost applauded. That might be realistic, but it's annoying. Celestino-of-the-immigration-status gets to be a bit more than a caricature, but we don't have much opportunity to imagine what kind of life he would have made for himself in Guatemala if he hadn't been yanked out of it. Maybe it would have been much worse, but did he have the choice? Ira heads toward it marriage at the end, a politically correct outcome that the book lobbies for throughout, but I can't tell if he is embracing it or giving in. Even insurance fraud is treated fairly lightly.

Overall, though, the book is well written and worth reading. For the first time in a while, I marked wonderfully phrased passages: a revolving door described as "stubbornly autonomous" (those ones you aren't allowed to push!), a man who looks "like he'd stepped from an ad for a Camry or premium cable." I just feel like there's about twice as much going on amid all that good writing as there needs to be.

Rating: ***

Historical confusion

2011-01-16T11:42:00.000-05:00

McCann, Maria. As Meat Loves Salt. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 2002.

Even through the last page of As Meat Loves Salt, I had very little idea where the story was headed. Predictable this book is not. Is that what makes it a "masterpiece," as the back cover suggests? I'm not sure. It's unique, but not particularly engaging or enjoyable. I'm not sure where I stand.

From the article I skimmed about the book, I thought I would be getting a salacious novel about an illicit gay affair in one of the armies engaged in the English Civil War. Something like Diana Gabaldon's works, but in a different time and sector of the British isle. There's some of that, but it's knotted up with the main character's mental issues (he hears a devilish voice and is plagued visions and fits of rage that may or may not be real) and sociopolitical debates of the time (should we farm the common areas in some just-outside-town utopia?). At the end of the book, there is very little resolution, and whatever hotness there might have been in the middle is long gone.

I do respect the clear amount of research that went into the book. McCann obviously learned a lot about the army practices of the civil war, that period's class struggles, and even simpler things like food and drink, which are the focal point of many scenes--the type of bread consumed gives an immediate profile of the people eating it, for example. I also appreciate how complex the story is: it's certainly not some tawdry romance tossed off in a weekend. But all that detail and complexity just makes it hard to read, which is why it took me more than a week to finish. The characters might have all kinds of seasoning-related urges for each other, but I never had that drive to consume the book.

Rating: **

Pithy stories of a faraway land

2011-01-07T09:20:00.001-05:00

Fallows, Deborah. Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language. New York: Walker & Co., 2010. [Note: Link to Amazon because I can't find it in the Library of Congress catalog. No endorsement implied.]

I don't think I realized when I put this book on hold that the author is the wife of James Fallows, whose dispatches from China and elsewhere I have read in The Atlantic for years. Well, she is, and she shares her husband's talent for engaging the reader and making keen observations. Dreaming in Chinese is short, fun to read, and well worth picking up.

Fallows provides 14 essays on her time in China (three years most recently), each of which could stand alone as a pleasant sketch, but which together provide an intriguing portrait of this country that seems so foreign. Her background as a linguist means that each section has a word- or language- related theme, and when she breaks down words into their historically relevant components or provides a phrase that ties together a few experiences, the stories become more meaningful.

I really enjoyed her playful but precise style. As I observed about By Hook or by Crook, it's really like sitting with the author while (s)he tells you some good language-related tales. Here's how Fallows describes the press of daily life that makes her frantic to learn more Chinese:

How do I buy tickets to Chengdu? Who is on the phone and what are they asking me? ... Is this chocolate or red-bean paste? [I've been there!] ... Uh oh, this is the toilet? How much should I pay? Is this ice in my drink safe? How do I work the TV remote? The Internet is out; no taxi will stop here; the bank card isn't working; this zipper needs repair; we are out of ibuprofen; I need a haircut; ... and well, the repair shop where I left my shoes was on this corner yesterday ...

Whew! It seems like (even if the air were clear and you wanted to) you'd never be able to take a breath in China. Fallows describes numerous warm and interesting personal interactions and u Kaye experiences, thought, that help the reader understand that China is an amazing place, even if you have no idea what is going on most of the time.

Rating: ***

I knew this stuff, but everybody should

2011-01-06T20:16:00.001-05:00

Seife, Charles. Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception. New York: Viking, 2010.

Proofiness is paradoxical. I'd bet that most people who would naturally pick this book up off a shelf are already aware that ads, politicians, and the media twist numbers to their advantage on a daily basis. The warning provided by the book isn't news to them. I really hope that it reaches a wider audience, though, because Proofiness presents important concepts in an accessible fashion.

What kinds of things are we talking about? For starters, things like the graph that my veterinarian proudly provided of my cat's weight last year and this year. Two data points, a single line connecting them, and a scale on the graph that made the pound-or-so increase look devastating. I'm not sure if there's a body mass index for cats, but I'd be a little more convinced by that, along with some comparison of my cat to the wider population. The book also covers picking out just the data that works for you, finding causes when only correlations are there, seeing patterns in everything and using them wrong (no, runners won't break the sound barrier eventually), and sometimes just plain making stuff up.

Seife provides a variety of examples. Eyelash "impact" is probably pretty hard to measure, despite that claim in the mascara commercial. One candidate doesn't really beat another by 213 votes when millions were cast. A pretty good test for a rare disease will have tons of false positives. Risk, in various forms, is hard to understand. I think he could have provided even more practical examples--things to watch out for every day--and spent less time on election details that, while relevant, were presented with a bit too much outrage. Also, I might have reduced the large number of footnoted asides (although I'm certainly sympathetic to asides).

Essentially, the book is an argument for better mathematical awareness in the population. I doubt that's going to happen any time soon. If 38 percent of people in the media, however, read it, the quality of reporting could improve measurably.* And those of us who do read it should continue to point out these ridiculous claims when we see them.

* This sentence is proofy garbage, but you get the idea.

Rating: **1/2

Finally, some solutions

2010-12-28T21:41:00.000-05:00

Bittman, Mark. The Food Matters Cookbook: 500 Revolutionary Recipes for Better Living. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010

I'll admit that I didn't read every word of this book--come on, it's a cookbook; I'll get to more of it eventually--but I read enough to know I should write about it here. Over the past couple of years, I have watched Food, Inc. multiple times and eagerly read Michael Pollan's treatises on food. (I wrote eight paragraphs on The Omnivore's Dilemma! I have really gotten lazy recently.) In response, I have changed some of my practices, choosing organic and local when I can and buying meat from sources that at least appear to be both cleaner and more humane. The trouble with some of these books (even the to-the-point Food Rules) is that they don't really lay out solutions very specifically.

This cookbook gives those specifics in a non-pushy way. In a few pages at the beginning, Bittman lays out his premise of eating less meat and more grains and vegetables. It's nothing new; in fact, it's eating in a way our great-grandparents (and everyone before them) would recognize much more than the packaged, processed products we consume now. Thomas Jefferson knew it: he ate meat "as a condiment to the vegetables which constitute my principal diet." The difference is that Bittman doesn't just tell you to trade meat for other stuff and stop there. He gives you a list of basics to keep in your kitchen at all times (a few pages after the introduction), then hundreds of recipes for appetizers, main dishes, and desserts that follow the premise.

I especially like two things about Bittman's approach. First, he gives tons of alternatives, both in the introductory material and in the recipes themselves. Don't like or can't find asparagus? No problem. Want to make this recipe vegan? Here you go. Bored with doing it the official way? Options for you. This makes the hundreds of recipes into a set limited only by the cook's imagination. Second, the approach is designed for real life. Bittman indicates which recipes can be made quickly or ahead of time, acknowledges when canned products can be helpful, and gives the reader leave to skip annoying steps such as soaking beans. The result is a book full of ideas that are both executable and flexible. I look forward to using them soon.

Surprisingly, I haven't read Food Matters yet; I may well soon. It probably won't tell me much that this hefty book combined with the Pollan oeuvre hasn't. If this book's practical and engaging style are any indication, though, it'll be a pleasant read.

Rating (tough for something so practical, especially since I haven't made the recipes yet, but I did look at every page): ***1/2

The difficulty with short stories

2010-12-27T10:55:00.001-05:00

Smith, Lee. Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2010.

Dear reader, this book is not a mystery sequel to Pride and Prejudice (oh, yes, they exist--I had just forgotten the author's name when I picked Mrs. Darcy up). The title comes from the final story in this collection of short stories ("new and selected," but all new to me since I hadn't read anything of Smith's before). Unfortunately, I was a little sleepy by the time that last story came around so it's the one I remember the least.

Short stories pose a challenge for me. I already have trouble remembering the books I read, hence this blog. Short stories are more numerous and, well, shorter, meaning they have fewer words to hook into my brain. That doesn't mean they're bad; I can just be bad at reading them.

This collection of fourteen stories has at least a few of those hooks. A day after finishing the book (what more do you want?), I remember:

"Tongues of Fire," about a girl who bargains with God and wants to speak in tongues (and, possibly more importantly, likes some of the same books I did at her age, such as Johnny Tremain and Gone with the Wind)
"House Tour," about a woman who reluctantly gives a historic house tour of her home and seems to have a turning point for the better
"The Happy Memories Club," about life in a retirement community and remembering life outside it

There are more, too, but I should keep this short in honor of the stories. Some of the characters are annoying, and the short stories don't allow enough time to learn to love them (although there are hints sometimes, like a mention of a car crash that changed everything--but no details). The main characters are usually women, usually from the southern part of the United States, but all fairly different. It would be funny to see them in a room together. Would there be enough Smith in them all for them to get along, despite different classes and ages and obsessions? I bet there might be. What book would they choose for their book club?

Rating: **1/2

One enigmatic legume

2010-12-23T17:20:00.000-05:00

Ross, Adam. Mr. Peanut. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw the movie Inception and loved it. I'm a sucker for complex stories like dreams within dreams (or books within books, dating back at least to the first time I read the splendid Sophie's World), and Inception had that out the ears, plus compelling characters, amazing effects (mostly non-digital, too!), and stirring music. I bring up something so seemingly off-topic because Mr. Peanut is also very complex--as with Inception, I feel like I need to go through it again.

It has been a long time since I read anything as layered as Mr. Peanut. There are at least four stories going on: that of main character David Pepin in a present in which he is suspected of killing his wife, David's past with said wife, one detective's current marital drama, and another detective's long-past marital drama commencing in his wife's death. Near the end, a Hitchcock class that David and his wife took in college is described. The concept of the MacGuffin, something that "gets the story rolling but then fades in importance after it's introduced," resonated with me (as I'm sure it was supposed to), but I can't quite figure out which of the stories is the MacGuffin. In the end, I'm not sure what's true or real, so I can't decide which part counts.

In one part of the book, a character states that he hates movies because they're "overdetermined," because "everything means something." Possibly because it's long and there is so much going on, Mr. Peanut is on the verge of being similarly overdetermined. So many themes keep popping up: Escher and similar paradoxes (interestingly, also important to Inception), dreams (ditto), remaking oneself, relationships and adultery, children, freedom, and even metaphorical and real peanuts. This surfeit of meaning is what makes the re-read seem necessary.

Inception, however, has everything I said after the "plus." I liked it and would enjoy watching it again while hunting for more clues. Mr. Peanut, with all its complexities and feats of novel acrobatics, lacks that emotional connection. Maybe if I were a man yearning to breathe free of his wife (or the woman subjected to such disdain), I'd get it. I feel bad for these people and their difficulties, but I would rather they get some counseling and move on. Nonetheless, returning to the story eventually, keeping an eye open to what I now think is more significant, would probably be worthwhile. That's more than can be said for many books or movies.

Rating: ***

Not to be judged by its cover

2010-12-19T07:49:00.000-05:00

Wickham, Madeleine. The Wedding Girl. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2009.

In case the only Wickham you know is the nasty elopement-fan in Pride and Prejudice, rest easy that Madeleine Wickham is the real name of the author who writes the "Shopaholic" series, Twenties Girl, and various other books as Sophie Kinsella. Her works as Kinsella are generally frothy and fun, with the guy getting the girl and the biggest challenges usually credit card debt. Writing in her real name gives Wickham the opportunity to address weightier subjects within a framework that's still roughly romantic-comedy.

In The Wedding Girl, a book that seems fairly light (with cupcakes and a cute girl in a white dress on the cover) manages to touch on illegal immigration, gay rights, class struggles, and abortion. Even those who picked up the book for a fun fondanty read probably can't help but feel a character's pain as he struggles with his sexuality or the tension between two characters who might have been married too long. Things work out in the end, maybe better than main character Milly deserves, but that's what you expect in this genre.

I was mainly pleased that, unlike the nice but totally predictable movie Letters to Juliet I mentioned a few days ago, I didn't call the entire plot at the beginning. Around page 23, I formed a smug opinion of what might happen--and I was completely wrong. I'm not sure if that's good, because my version would have been more of a twist (at least a romantic-comedy twist), but the characters seemed pretty happy with what happened. Making the reader actually want to read to the end is a fairly rare characteristic of books, so I suppose I should encourage that. I just don't think this book should get too many stars mainly for not being as bad as it looks like it should be.

Rating: **

Definitely makes you think

2010-12-14T21:50:00.000-05:00

Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger. 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010.

I'm not sure what to make of this book. It's part novel, part philosophical exploration. The first few pages seem like a book I wouldn't want to read; the story picks up after that and it becomes something I'm glad I stuck to. It takes a long time to read, but even so it probably deserves more attention that I gave it. It refutes (at least in the appendix) reasons to believe in God, but it also describes people and situations that make you hope the appendix is wrong. It's a work of fiction. Is everything?

The story is that of Cass Seltzer, a professor of the psychology of religion dubbed "the atheist with a soul" after his book (titled the same as this one) makes him famous. The official timespan of the story is a week or two, from when Cass gets a job offer from Harvard (the ultimate payoff of this new fame), through a period of reflection and sorting out of his life, to an end where he seems to find peace. The book frequently reaches back to other points in Cass's life, though, showing how he got to his position as an authority on religion (via an academic advisor who was fairly nutty expert on the subject) and providing a backstory for his relationships.

Maybe Cass is just overthinking things, an occupational hazard. He certainly puts too much thought into whether he should tell his girlfriend he loves her. And writing up and refuting three dozen arguments about God ("reproduced" in the appendix to the novel), even if he meant it as an appendix and wanted people to focus on his book, seems a bit much. It would certainly be simpler to espouse the thought from C.S. Lewis that I've mentioned before about how pretending to be good is better than not being good at all, and then not worrying too much about the rest.

So what's my point? I'm not sure. I liked the story. I liked the characters. I liked some of the concepts woven in, like proofs of prime numbers and the carefully thought-out arguments. I found the style annoying in places, especially the long quoted speeches by some characters and the paragraph-long sentences (the type we practiced in eleventh-grade English) that are used much less sparingly than they should be. I can definitely live without Cass's advisor, but so can Cass, so I'm in good company. People with a bent toward philosophy or religion or both would probably find it thought-provoking, and thinking more must be good.

Rating: ***

The club was not called that!

2010-12-03T17:12:00.000-05:00

McNeil, Gil. The Beach Street Knitting Society and Yarn Club. New York: Hyperion Books, 2009.

This book was a random pick-up from the library, which has been a bad gamble recently, and the title would sound particularly grim if I hadn't already enjoyed The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. But no! The title is the worst thing about the book, and oddly enough there is no such-titled club in the book; in the UK it was titled Divas Don't Knit, which is better). The rest of it is pretty good.

It's the story of Jo McKenzie, whose husband cheats on her, asks for a divorce, gets something thrown at him as you might imagine, and dies in a car wreck right after he storms off. So now she has two young kids to deal with alone and has to move to the seaside to be near her grandmother and run a yarn shop that is basically the only thing left to her name. Yikes. Hijinks ensue.

Although there's nothing much weightier than the lingering sadness about her husband and everyone's worries that they're a terrible mother, I appreciated that the year-in-the-life wasn't completely predictable. (Counterpoint: I just watched Letters to Juliet, whose entire plot I knew within the first few minutes--but I still enjoyed it. Things are funny that way.) I was a bit annoyed in the beginning by the style, which could be summarized as "first-person breathless," with tons of long sentences and words capitalized when they are Very Important. I got over that, though, as you might with the quirky mannerisms of a friend.

Score one for the new-book shelf at the library, I suppose. But I'm not about to take up knitting!

Rating: **1/2

People aren't perfect, but the book nearly is

2010-11-30T19:37:00.000-05:00

Rachman, Tom. The Imperfectionists. New York: The Dial Press, 2010.

Finally, I agree with the exhilarated blurbists on the back cover of a novel: this book is wonderful. Somehow, Rachman takes two things that can really doom a book, short stories (I'm just not a fan) and annoying characters, and makes something fantastic out of them. Instead of disconnected short stories that leave you wanting more, Rachman creates a whole out of a set of eleven character-focused vignettes by weaving them into a disjointed history of an international newspaper based in Rome.

Each of the characters has something to do with the paper--writer, editor, reader, accountant. As the title suggests, none is perfect. They all, however, surprise. Each has some sort of weird personal thing going on that the office doesn't quite know about. The most grating turn out to be sympathetic in some way, probably because Rachman spares us a story about the character that all of the others seem to hate. That seems very real.

I'm not sure what to think about the very last section, which uses the last interspersed history-of-paper section to neatly wrap up each character's life. It plays like the last scene of a movie: "Jane graduated summa cum laude and went on to win the Booker Prize." It's a little too convenient. On the other hand, the pleasant-enough-but-somewhat-disappointing descriptions again seem real. So I suppose it works.

Since it's a debut, and in keeping with the title, I'll leave a little room for improvement in my rating. The Imperfectionists, though, is definitely worth a read.

Rating: ***1/2

Raw experiences

2010-11-24T20:21:00.000-05:00

Powell, Julie. Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009.

Cleaving is more weighty than its predecessor, Julie & Julia. Powell, who now has turned to obsessiveness over butchery and men instead of Julia Child, splays open both animals and her personal life in this book. The butchery bits and her world travels are intriguing because of their foreignness; her life troubles are ones I hope to keep foreign. Also, I have to note that the title is great. I had completely forgotten the appropriately paradoxical nature of "cleave," which means both "to split or divide" and "to cling or adhere." The wonders of English!

I want to leave it at that. My challenge is that Powell is a real person, but not someone I know intimately. If she were a character in a novel, I wouldn't feel bad about raking her over the coals for her choices. If she were my best friend, I'd maybe shake her by the shoulders a bit and then be with her as she takes the next step. As she is, I already feel a little sick judging her. We're all human. It's not my life, and I don't know enough details to judge, but she puts it right out there, so what do I do?

Anyway, I certainly don't remember these issues with Julie & Julia. I do like books to be a bit challenging, but I also like to give them as gifts. This one, while interesting and a quick read, is too loaded down with the gore of dissected lives (the meat is no problem) to fit in a Christmas stocking.

Rating: **

Tee-hee! Excretions!

2010-11-22T21:28:00.000-05:00

Roach, Mary. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

What a weird little book. In Packing for Mars, Mary Roach gleefully taps into her inner 13-year-old boy and provides a stream of anecdotes about the unique challenges of space travel. I had to return the book to the library this evening, so I can't quote any passages verbatim, but suffice it to say that every possible human excretion and their impacts on the lives of astronauts is detailed with many a giggling aside from Roach. (One I do remember is when Roach is discussing a lab where they create space food and examine what (ahem) remains after it's digested. She hopes that the chocolate-pudding-cooking scientists never get their jars mixed up. It's like that.)

I found the book generally entertaining. Honestly, where else am I going to read about this stuff? I have my own inner child to satisfy. My outer adult, however, finds that the book lacks focus. The title is Packing for Mars, but a trip to Mars and its unique challenges is only mentioned occasionally--a sort of "You think that was bad? Try a WAY longer trip!" note--and in a final suggestion that it's probably worth it because we'd waste the money some other way anyway (not a strong argument). Mainly, it's a fairly non-linear progression through space history with many a footnote when Roach can't resist telling some other tidbit she picked up in her research.

With some editing and a clearer structural outline, this book could have been awesome, and I probably would have read it much faster. As is, it's probably good enough to get some snickering kids interested in science and the seemingly dated passion for space, assuming their parents aren't too shocked to let them read it. And that's got to be worth something.

Rating: **1/2

Worth a read (at least in part)

2010-11-13T08:21:00.000-05:00

Bourdain, Anthony. Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook. New York: Ecco Press, 2010.

I read Kitchen Confidential a few years ago and liked it; I've seen the TV show No Reservations a number of times. It was a no-brainer, therefore, to pick up Bourdain's latest book.

As the title suggests, the book is a bit bloody. Bourdain rants about lots of people he likes and dislikes, muses about his life, and uses the new book as a sort of "where are they now?" reunion for the one ten years ago. There's not a ton of structure to it, and it seems more like a collection of entertaining blog posts than a book. Most of it, even when funny or interesting, is not something I'd come back to.

Pages 233 to 252 are the exception. By themselves, these 20 pages make the book worth checking out of the library. This chapter is a beautifully written description of a morning in the life of an expert fish-cutter at Le Bernardin in New York, who fillets and portions at least 700 pounds of fish every day with artistic precision, but has never eaten in his own restaurant (at least until Bourdain comes along). Both food and human in this section are fascinating, and well deserving of a read.

Rating: **

More story than my taste requires

2010-11-05T20:13:00.000-04:00

Keyes, Marian. The Brightest Star in the Sky. New York: Viking, 2010.

Marian Keyes has a knack for taking what could be fluffy "chick lit" and injecting just enough serious issues (drug abuse, domestic violence, etc.) to make a meaningful but not overly grim novel. Her books are always very safe to pick up at random from a library shelf. By the way, that's in contrast to at least three books I picked since One Day and failed at even trying to read--names will not be revealed since I didn't even give them a chance, but they're why it's taken me forever to get this one (which I read in a couple sittings this week).

The latest effort from Keyes is a bit weirder. It's not just an Irish girl dealing with problems not obvious to the world (though there is one of those in the set of characters), but there's also a variety of mystical elements. Spirits are sniffing around on a countdown to doing something-or-other. Old ladies have either old-lady intuition or psychic powers, depending on your level of gullibility. Hot men pull situationally appropriate herbs out of their jacket pockets. (What? Who knew rue was a plant?)

I'm not sure that the supernatural bits added anything to the story. The characters are specific and interesting; the challenges seem real. That's classic Keyes. The rest is like icing on a chocolate-chip cookie--extra complication that some people might like, but I don't need.

Rating: **1/2

Novel as reunion

2010-10-19T20:33:00.001-04:00

Nicholls, David. One Day. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2010.

That's better. I am still capable of starting, enjoying, and finishing books!

The premise of One Day is pretty good: snapshots of two people's lives on the same day every year from college graduation to near middle age. The characters aren't too easy to love, though. Dexter is handsome, well-off, and accordingly pretty self-satisfied. Emma doesn't realize enough of her talents to get that level of self-confidence, so things look a little grim. Whether they're sniping at each other or kissing depends on the year.

The initial graduation setting brings up the concept of a college reunion (it's even mentioned early on), and that's sort of how the novel goes, except that the reunion check-in with Emma and Dexter happens every year and the storytelling is better than what you'd get over a brief cocktail. Life looks a little clearer viewed through such a strobe light. Mistakes are more obvious, but (when possible) repaired faster.

The style might mean something, or it might not. Most of it is in present tense, which generally annoys me, but it must mean something, because a few parts are in past tense. I think these are the parts when the characters are the happiest; given some things that go on later in the story, the tense adds a sense of longing. I suppose that's interesting.

I give out stars on overall merit, not just number of tears, so I can't give full marks. One Day isn't a classic I'll turn to over the years, but it's enjoyable, and the concept of examining my life periodically--having a reunion with myself--is one I'll continue to turn over in my mind.

Rating: ***

Still here

2010-10-14T18:54:00.000-04:00

For those of you who, like my mother, thought I might be sick or dead but didn't actually check: I'm fine. (Haha, poor mom--I don't really mind. Just poking you.)

I just have been in a total dry-spell book-wise while I wait for the things I put on hold at the library to come up. I think that I started a wholly unsatisfactory book (it's been so long now that I don't even remember what) after What the Dog Saw, then picked up a few things mostly at random at the library. That's always a mistake, because I'm not motivated to get through them.

Case in point: The Once and Future King, by T.H. White, which I've been half-heartedly reading for the last two weeks. The cover says it's "The World's Greatest Fantasy Classic," and I did find it quite charming. The author mixes all kinds of modern stuff (e.g., Bolsheviks) into the Arthurian plotline in a funny way. Some of it makes sense (at least as much as anything) because Merlyn goes through time backwards (or something), but some is just dropped in hilariously. I was struck by an ant-war that sounded suspiciously similar to World War II, which was starting up as the book was published.

But, charm aside, it's been two weeks and I'm only a third of the way into it. That means I don't want to read it. Part of it might be that I already know the King Arthur story--it's like going back to read the book after you see the movie. I just got an email this morning that one of my hold books is FINALLY ready, so I'm giving up and trotting off to return all of my random books and get the book I actually wanted.

(Oh, and it doesn't hurt that I've been plowing through seasons of True Blood and Weeds with Netflix. No commercials means no reading during commercials. Whoops.)

More soon--at least we hope.

Blogging as memory tool

2010-09-19T17:52:00.000-04:00

I just saw this article in The New York Times online--"The Plot Escapes Me," by James Collins (9/17/2010)--and had to share. Collins wonders in his essay why he bothers reading so many books if he remembers next to nothing about them. A professor of child development reassures him that he becomes the sum of all of these experiences, that he retains a "gestalt of knowledge" (giving me a great chance to look up "gestalt," a word I always have trouble with, again). Unfortunately for Collins, that doesn't help him remember some specific historical facts that he hoped to learn from a recent read.

The essay isn't particularly momentous, but it struck a chord with me, because a general feeling that I can never remember what I read is exactly why I started this blog. It has become my electronic memory bank of what I liked and didn't, as well as (if I attend carefully enough to my writing) something about what I learned from those books. Collins resists (as do I) the suggestion not to recline while reading for better retention; to him I recommend the blog as an easier, more comfortable solution.

Breaking a major pattern here

2010-09-19T17:34:00.001-04:00

Gladwell, Malcolm. What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009.

What makes a four-star book? Every time I'm reading a book I enjoy, I think about this. Especially if I've recently given a book four stars--since the trend is only one every few months--I'm particularly hesitant to do so and start looking for flaws. That's not fair, though. Search for "perception of randomness" or something similar and you'll discover that people think streaks are weird, that coin flips must alternate, and so on.

Forget that the very last book I read also got four stars, and let's be objective about why this one should. At a minimum, four-star books make you think, illuminate subjects you might not have cared about, and bear another read--you'd strongly recommend them to someone else or buy them as a gift. What the Dog Saw meets these criteria, and I'm going for it.

In this book, Gladwell (author of Outliers, which got three and a half stars) has collected many years' worth of thoughtful articles published in The New Yorker into one volume. I tend to think this sort of anthology is lame, an attempt to squeeze a bit more out of a drying sponge. Not so here.

First, I didn't read the original articles since I've never thought I had the time to read The New Yorker every week. This book, with the best-seller-ness of Gladwell's previous efforts to build on, is sure to reach that slightly lazy audience and more. Second, the articles (now chapters) are so freakishly interesting that they'd bear reading again even if you skimmed them in the magazine a few years ago. Gladwell has a gift for making potentially boring subjects (ketchup, intellectual property, job interviews) riveting. Finally, the short-story format keeps readers interested who might not have had the patience for a whole book about one potentially engaging subject. Ten or twenty pages is about all I want to spend on the pitfalls of mammography, but I know a lot more now than if I'd half-heartedly picked up a full-length book on the subject.

Another vote for four-star status is that I'm actually thinking about buying a copy. There are a few lessons in it that I think I could really apply at work and in life, and I'm not going to check the book out each time--it took months to get! Consider me convinced. The rest of you should read it and judge for yourselves.

Rating: ****

I'm glad I just taste cake

2010-09-10T22:15:00.003-04:00

Bender, Aimee. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Residents of Okinawa have a saying (at least according to the internet), "hara hachi bu," which means approximately "eat until you are 80 percent full." When I finished this food-focused book, wondering if I was disappointed that Rose's story seemed incomplete, it was this saying that came to mind. As it is, there is enough in The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake to think about for a while, to fill up the corners of the mind and fully satisfy.

First, there's that great title. What? Sad cake? That startling weirdness continues inside the covers as well. Rose learns early on that she has a sort of emotional synesthesia (my attempt at naming it--she just deals with it). When she eats, she can taste the feelings of whoever made the food. Not surprisingly, after learning too much about her mother, she becomes a fan of Doritos and other stuff that Michael Pollan would not call food. Factory robots aren't overly sad. By the end, against all odds, there's a chance that she'll be able to use this skill to make herself happy.

I wasn't sure about the story of Rose's brother, Joseph. Joseph is an antisocial genius. That might be enough of a problem, but it turns out he has his own weird "skill" that's at least as disruptive as his sister's. I didn't think this additional complication was necessary at first. We're already stretching it to buy into Rose's admittedly wacky-sounding problem. But there's a purpose. The nuttiness (which I didn't really need to buy for it to serve its purpose) gives her some hope by comparison. Joseph has to drop out of everything he knows to get relief; Rose realizes that her issue, while potentially painful, can be eased by a single happy chef.

I feel like this is all too cryptic to make anyone want to read the book. I don't want to spoil the story, although I'm not sure I could really explain it well enough to do so. Suffice it to say that the book has crisp and frank writing, sensitive character development, and more than enough in its unique plot to keep the reader thinking (maybe even to spur a second read). The crazy stuff, far from unnecessary, is the icing that holds the cake layers together.

Rating: ****

National Book Festival 9/25

2010-09-08T21:10:00.005-04:00

For those in the DC area: this year's National Book Festival is on Saturday, September 25.

I particularly noticed author talks by:

Diana Gabaldon of Outlander series fame
Julia Glass, who wrote Three Junes
Allegra Goodman, whose The Cookbook Collector is in my library queue
Jonathan Franzen, who's all over the book news
Katherine Paterson (classic!)
Margaret Peterson Haddix (I know kids who like her stuff)
Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama's brother

It looks like the specific times for these talks haven't been released yet, but I'll keep my eye out. Looks like enough to be worth a visit!

A novel of chaos theory?

2010-09-07T23:41:00.000-04:00

Waldman, Ayelet. Red Hook Road. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Like the families warily eying each other across the church aisle, doubting that the mere joining of their children's hands would be enough for them to give up years of assumptions regarding class and culture, I was unsure of Red Hook Road at the start. I already knew the basics of the plot: what I heard on The Diane Rehm Show, not to mention the book jacket, gave away the doom awaiting the bride and her new husband and the effects it will have on their survivors. I also knew the author, who wrote Bad Mother (among other things) and is married to Michael Chabon of Summerland and Kavalier and Clay fame. So when this novel started off a bit cruelly, criticizing the flower girl ("Altogether she had been something of a disappointment in her role." Ouch.) and various other members of the family, I didn't have much hope. I was wrong.

The tragedy at the beginning spares the reader some need for a shocking climax (though there's a bit of drama) and allows the novel to focus on the painfully calm aftermath of the initial shock. Things get better, a little, but mostly they get different for everyone, most significantly for the poor distracted flower girl. Through this slow process, we have time to begin to care about the characters as they try to figure themselves out. They're more than the snap judgments we might make in a hot wedding chapel.

There's a theme of "what if?" throughout. Unless we're to believe that fate would have taken our young couple some other way, Final Destination style, various things could have averted the events that shape this book. Although people might blame the limousine or the larger life decisions that kept the bride in town, the coda read on the radio points out many tiny moments (the time it took the wedding party to disperse, the photographer's hustle, the lovers' last dawdle on the beach), a change to any one of which might have made the accident a non-issue. Though the couple might have thought about cars or careers, they wouldn't have considered an extra photo life-altering. But it was.

What do I get from all that, besides a book that I truly came to enjoy despite early reservations? I think it provides some perspective on not worrying overmuch, given that little things we didn't even bother to worry about could effect the same--or the opposite--result. Not that there's no point to making choices (I can't be that fatalistic), but that owning and cherishing the moment should be natural, rather than corny. Now go hug someone.

Rating: ***1/2

I'm getting hungry writing about it!

2010-09-04T09:59:00.000-04:00

Alexander, William. 52 Loaves: One Man's Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and a Perfect Crust. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2010.

Although it took me a little while to get through (somehow I never read enough on vacation), I found this memoir thoroughly entertaining and a little inspiring. I'm not going to run right out and bake a loaf of peasant bread--much less grow my own wheat, build a clay oven, or teach baking to monks as the author did--but I can certainly appreciate the value of the challenge and the peaceful enlightenment that can come from study of a narrow subject.

Is that why people keep giving themselves these odd challenges and writing books about it? Do just what it says in the Bible. Read the Harvard Classics. Travel around the world without benefit of airplanes. Visit 1,000 places before you die. (I haven't read that one because it's telling ME to do stuff; instead I'll read the inevitable memoir 10 years from now by someone who conquered the list in record time with the fewest bouts of food poisoning.) Maybe we don't have enough unique ideas of our own, requiring us to follow a path charted out by others with some self-imposed time limit to make things interesting and a book deal to make things pay.

I wrote about this phenomenon before (in the Harvard Classics post linked above) so I won't belabor it. Hey, I watch reality television, with its even more arbitrary challenges. It's entertaining to watch people (preferably intelligent people who can write, like this book's author, rather than vapid beach bunnies) do stuff that you wouldn't or couldn't yourself. In this book version of a cooking reality show, you get the added dose of contemplation--one of the list of things the author learned is "[t]he only thing more unsettling than having your faith shaken is having your lack of faith shaken"--as well as some recipes in the back. Reading this isn't a bad way to spend a weekend, and much easier than building your own brick oven in the backyard.

Rating: ***

Long wait, not much payoff

2010-08-29T11:55:00.004-04:00

Tóibín, Colm. Brooklyn. New York: Scribner, 2009.

[Note: I've had a busy couple of weeks, and I spent some time trying to get into Bel Canto, but that didn't work out, so then I plugged through Brooklyn to have something to write about. Sorry for the delay--better things to come, I'm sure.]

I should have liked this book. I adored A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, with its intelligent, quiet main character growing up in poverty-mired tenements. I have Irish ancestors who probably had experiences similar to those of Brooklyn's Eilis Lacey, both in Ireland and in America. I appreciate a brief, well-focused, calmly written novel, which this is.

But no. I just don't understand what Brooklyn is trying to be. It's simply written, but the story still has too many distractions. It's already short, but it could have been another 30 pages shorter and just told the story of Eilis leaving home and making her way. That might have been a little boring, but I didn't need the Pride and Prejudice subplot of the haughty gentleman who comes around, or the weird attention she gets from a co-worker, or really her whole relationship with boyfriend Tony, which seemed to be an exercise in learning how to settle. The interaction that I thought might have been very interesting, between Eilis and her law professor, ended up being just a throwaway.

I suppose I can't complain that it's not the book I would have written, because I haven't noticed myself writing anything other than criticism. Still, I just feel that it's not fully developed. Eilis could have had so much more in the land of opportunity. At the end of this story, I picture a future for her in America that's not much different from what she might have had in Ireland. Considering the rush of misfortune she has to bear at the end of the book, I wish she ended up with more. Maybe this outcome is more realistic, but that just makes me sad.

Rating: **

I prefer my title!

2010-08-11T22:00:00.000-04:00

McKellar, Danica. Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail. New York: Hudson Street Press, 2007.

Let's be clear: it's been a long time since I was in middle school. I heard Danica McKellar (yes, Winnie from The Wonder Years) on Science Friday last week talking about her new book about algebra, as well as her earlier books (this is the first). Before inflicting the books on the kids I know, I figured I should give them a spin. And, hey, it's a book, so I'm going to write about it here.

It turns out I am just as happy with Math Doesn't Suck as the pleased parents who called into the radio show. Yes, the examples are super girly and sound corny to adults (and probably to boys, who really shouldn't be scared of reading the book). Oooh, math problems about lip gloss and halter tops! Those silly-seeming examples are useful, though--the book is crammed full of mnemonics, tricks, and stories that make math more manageable. I mainly skipped over the testimonials and rah-rah stories about girls who like math and don't care who knows it, but some of those tips really made sense.

Luckily, I didn't learn anything new. It would be pretty lame if I did. I can, however, picture learning a ton, and easily, if I were at the right age. I was also happy to see that McKellar includes some of why things work, rather than just commanding you to multiply the top and bottom of the fraction by the same number for no reason, for example. I'm guessing that the next couple of books get deeper into that explanation. We'll see. There are also lots more details (like divisibility tests for 7 and 11!) at the book's companion website.

So while it sucks that there has to be a premise that math sucks that necessitates this book's structured defeat of said premise, at least the book exists. I'd rather the title were "Math is Awesome, and Fairly Easy If You Pay Attention," but I think that would sell fewer copies.

Rating: *** (Honestly, how am I going to rate a math book for middle schoolers? It's not like I'm going to read it again, but they should try it!)

Things better not turn out like this

2010-08-09T18:48:00.000-04:00

Connell, Evan S., Jr. Mrs. Bridge. New York: The Viking Press, 1959.

When I wrote about Every Last One, I observed that the stuff that would make a boring book is life and shouldn't be ignored. After reading Mrs. Bridge, I'd like to suggest that this sort of statement might well apply to counting your blessings in real life, but that its use in creating an entire novel might not be ideal. It makes for a darn depressing read that makes you want to go back, count your blessings, and then take them on a vacation or to see a show.

Poor Mrs. Bridge. It took me a long time to figure out which decade she was in, because the story is mostly about her finding stuff to do during the day while the kids are at school and the housekeeper handles the tasks that might have been Mrs. Bridge's. The Nazis tipped me off eventually, but you certainly wouldn't know it's the Great Depression. Mr. Bridge makes a comfortable income as a workaholic lawyer, and this provides for the "I can't exactly complain about this" existence of his wife. She picks up and discards hobbies frequently, putters about with similarly idle friends, and specializes in equivocal statements.

Sadly, the couple of her friends who seem to realize the lameness of all this don't find a good way out. One is in analysis (which Mrs. Bridge thinks might be a good idea, about as good as Spanish lessons), and one commits suicide. Mrs. Bridge doesn't appear to learn much from this, or change her ways at all. Is she unhappy? Not particularly. She has checked off every box she was supposed to (education, husband, children, nice house, grandchildren) and avoided the inappropriate ones (mixing with people from other classes or cultures, putting elbows on the dinner table). What more could she want?

So. Ahem. Cautionary tale. We have more opportunities now, but there's still a tendency to get on the same treadmill Mrs. Bridge boarded. Let's observe her lonely predicament at the end of the novel and commit to enjoying our lives, not just deeming them satisfactory.

Rating: **1/2

No cake, but the butterflies were neat

2010-08-08T17:23:00.003-04:00

Crosley, Sloane. I Was Told There'd Be Cake. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

This is a dangerous sort of book. When I read some memoirs, I think "oof, am I glad I'm not that person," or "wow, that was neat--now I don't have to bother." Reading this brief set of essays, I thought "I could have written this stuff." I'm not sure if that impugns the quality of this book or not.

I'm not trying to say I have shared Ms. Crosley's experiences (never having been to an all-girls' camp in New England or worked at a magazine or mall), but that I could probably dust off fifteen moments from my similarly brief life and write about them in a fairly humorous fashion. I just wouldn't. Instead, I write about books I read and try to keep as much personal stuff out of it as possible. Cowardly, maybe, but I'm comfortable with it.

Though the stories didn't make me gasp or anything, I did laugh aloud a couple of times, and that's basically what I'm looking for in this type of memoir. For example, when she objects to an address of "Ladies:" in a bridesmaid email, she wonders if men's emails "go: 'Men: Meet for ribs in the shed after the game. Keg beer, raw eggs and death metal only.'" Ha. I suppose I have to stop using this salutation in work emails now. I also found her brief tale of microwaving (and thereby ruining) a thermometer to fake a fever quite hilarious.

And as a side benefit, the butterfly-exhibit story inspired me to see the one at Brookside Gardens this weekend. It was pretty awesome, in a wings-whirring-about-your-head kind of way, and one of the better weekend-activity ideas I've had in a while.

Rating: **

A satisfying wrap-up

2010-08-06T18:25:00.000-04:00

Larsson, Stieg. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

I'm trying hard not to be disappointed by the finale of Stieg Larsson's trilogy. It ties up all of the characters' stories nicely, and the plot continues to be complex and well executed, and the personalities are carefully drawn. Maybe it's just too resolved--the surprises of the first novel and the cliffhanger of the second don't appear in this one. I wondered what happened next--here you go.

In this novel, it becomes clear that Lisbeth Salander is the main character, and was probably always the main character. I suppose that's why the titles all begin with "The Girl..."--she's the girl. Although the other characters have their lives and are interesting enough, in this book they all pretty much exist to help her in her quest for justice. Oh, and there's a giant government conspiracy that they need to figure out and reveal. That's the part that seems far-fetched, but I suppose it could be completely plausible. I'd rather not know.

Luckily, the book recognizes this. One exchange after the tale is revealed to a new character:

"It all sounds a bit ... I don't know. Improbable?"

"I know. It's the stuff of a spy novel."

"How do you expect me to go about tackling it?"

That's how the trilogy basically runs. Suspend disbelief and tackle the thoroughly engrossing story. And I must mention that one character wishes he were eating Swedish meatballs with mashed potatoes and lingonberries. Yum. I've certainly had that (with unmashed potatoes) at IKEA!

Rating: ***

What's going to happen next?

2010-08-01T11:42:00.000-04:00

Larsson, Stieg. The Girl who Played with Fire. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

I'm going to dock The Girl who Played with Fire half a star compared to its predecessor because I didn't learn any new vocabulary words, but I am still greatly pleased that I rushed to read it after finishing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The hold time for the library was truly ridiculous (maybe a month for this book, but about 1600 people ahead of me in line for the third and final one) so I sprung for the e-book version. It was a good call, because now I'm pretty desperate to read the third one.

The e-version means that I can't really call it a page-turner, but it's surely a page-tapper. As with the previous book, there are mysteries within mysteries. Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander are back again, rampaging about Sweden in a quest for truth. Why did I call Blomkvist the main character of the last book? Lisbeth gets equal or even top billing in this one. Also as before, the plot is fairly gruesome, but unique and engrossing. I was concerned that the murderer was revealed with a long way to go before the end, but then it turned out that there were still more surprises to discover, culminating in a cliffhanger that, as I mentioned, makes a need for the third book inevitable.

Oh, and at the risk of continuing my potentially offensive stereotype of Sweden, but possibly in my defense, might I add that Lisbeth spends thousands of kronor at IKEA to furnish her new apartment? I told you IKEA was awesome.

Rating: ***

In which I reveal my complete ignorance of Swedish culture. Sorry, Sweden.

2010-07-29T22:44:00.000-04:00

Larsson, Stieg. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

Do people who shop at Walmart in other countries think they know a lot about the United States? Unfortunately, I've never been to Scandinavia, so my main knowledge of Sweden is from countless trips to IKEA. The country is apparently focused around delicious meatballs and practical furniture. Sweden-related ignorance isn't a problem when reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, though, because the country is just an interesting setting for an excellent novel that could probably take place anywhere.

I wrote "novel" because I didn't particularly want to call it a mystery. Sure, there's a mystery, and probably 70 percent of the book describes the main character's efforts to solve it, but some of the more engaging parts of the book are the more minor puzzles of finding out what makes people tick. After a fairly lengthy number of pages, we only have a decent idea of the characters' histories and motivations. It's very lucky that there are two subsequent books, because I definitely finished the first with an urge to continue.

The writing is precise and efficient, without unnecessary adjectives but with plenty of detail. At one point, main character Mikael is reading a long and well-thought-out police report. That's sort of how the book reads, careful not to miss anything or add too much prejudicial background information, except that it's much more entertaining than I'd imagine a police report to be. Plus, it made me look up two awesome words: gallimaufry and exiguous. I almost never bother to look things up while reading, so I applaud the translator for his careful, interesting choices.

So, I'm probably going to hunt around this weekend for the next two books--I don't want to wait too long and forget the intricacies of this one. Maybe I'll celebrate finding them by actually learning something about Sweden that doesn't involve gravy.

Rating: ***1/2

Sobbing in the suburbs

2010-07-19T22:21:00.005-04:00

Quindlen, Anna. Every Last One. New York: Random House, 2010.

It's a good thing a friend called as I was finishing Every Last One tonight, because she broke up an hour-long cry-fest that threatened to redden my eyes and dampen my couch cushions to a shocking degree. You wouldn't guess it from the way it starts, but the book is a serious tearjerker by the end.

The summary on the jacket teases that there will be "a shocking act of violence," so I was sort of prepared for something to happen, but not for the actual thing (similar to how I felt with Loving Frank). Through page 154--more than half of the book--it seemed like a well-written but forgettable story of a pleasant family in suburbia with a few surmountable trials. From the bottom of that page, it's a different story.

By the end I was thinking more carefully about the easily dismissed beginning. That's the point. The little stuff that's easy to take for granted, the stuff that would make a boring book if we wrote it down: that's life, and worth appreciating before it disappears. I also didn't pay attention to the tense for a long time. It's all written in present tense, told in the moment as life is lived.

Let's hope that our lives are never altered as drastically as these characters', but surely there will be a page in each of our stories that sharply separates the before from the after. The certain thing is that the present tense will march on, and the page will turn, and it will be our job to write the end--even if the pages are soaked.

Rating: ***

What won't publishers sponsor these days?

2010-07-11T12:30:00.000-04:00

Hely, Steve and Vali Chandrasekaran. The Ridiculous Race. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2008.

All of my NPR- and Times-approved books are still on hold at the library, so I went for The Ridiculous Race, which for some reason was on the librarians'-choice stand. "This looks like a fun, funny book," I said to myself. "Let's give it a go."

The book, which describes two comedy writers' travels around the globe in opposite directions with a rule (loosely followed) of no airplanes and a prize of some expensive Scotch, is fun and funny. Aggressively so. Like a book written by two comedy writers on hiatus.

Some of the experiences are unique and interesting (a freighter trip across the Pacific, weirder museums of the world), but a lot of the book is taken up with the rivalry between the two traveling gentlemen. It's travelogue meets playground taunting. While it's an enjoyable read, especially as the premise sets up, it gets a little old. There are much more useful and entertaining books to take along on your global circumnavigation.

Rating: **1/2

A Modern spin on the adulterous main character

2010-07-06T19:17:00.001-04:00

Horan, Nancy. Loving Frank. New York: Ballantine Books, 2007.

While I read Loving Frank, I thought of women to whom I was introduced in high school English: Anna Karenina, Edna Pontellier in The Awakening, and Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby. Their extramarital affairs didn't lead to good things, to say the least. Therefore, throughout this novel that brings life to the few facts known about Frank Lloyd Wright's lover Mamah Cheney, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop for poor Mamah.

When it drops, as those who know Wright's life story (I didn't) are aware, it drops hard, shocking the novel into a different style and a swift conclusion. Before then, despite the awkwardness of family tensions, money troubles, and lengthy waits for divorces, Mamah Cheney is afforded a surprisingly pleasant time with this genius who appreciates her brains as much as her body. Their interplay, as well as her interest in feminist philosophy, make the novel much smarter than a tawdry adultery story.

Like her English-class sisters, Mamah Cheney as rendered in this novel is stifled in life and love. She was a self-sufficient, masters-degreed librarian and teacher, but she ended up with an appropriately boring executive husband and a pair of children, with a few political meetings to stimulate her mind. It takes about half a second to guess what's going to happen between her and the architect of her new Oak Park, Illinois, home. Following her heart means leaving her children, a fate that would sound familiar to Anna Karenina, and one that never rests easily even with those who champion true love for novel characters. Some patching-up occurs as the estranged children are charmed by Wright, but in the end it is the children who will suffer for their mother's actions.

I'm not surprised that the author is a journalist writing her first novel. The prose is very clear and straightforward, with letters and news stories (some real) woven in as "sources." I didn't mark any passages that screamed "beautiful writing," but I didn't get frustrated, either. This style results in a sturdy and thoughtful book, in harmony with the clean lines of architecture that form its backdrop.

Rating: ***1/2

Touchy stuff in a tough read

2010-07-03T11:34:00.002-04:00

Hirsi Ali, Ayaan. Infidel. New York: Free Press, 2007.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali covers some seriously controversial topics in her memoir. I'm not even going to mess with them in this forum, because this book seems designed to make the reader paranoid. Her writing spins out so slowly, however, detailing specific conversations and experiences throughout her life alongside musings about Islam and her own beliefs, that it's difficult to be attentive.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali grew up in a world in which what we might view as child abuse and a lack of free choice were accepted. Still, she had it much better than many, I assume, because her father was a respected leader and she came from a clan that could financially support many endeavors. She was able to get out of all that and live a relatively free and influential life in the Netherlands.

I found her story unique and interesting, although I would probably have teared up more at a rags-to-riches story that was a little more ragged to start out with. I didn't love her discussions of how her beliefs evolved. Even though they changed, the other side of each stage of opinion gets little play, so the effect isn't very balanced.

A book that makes the reader think is valuable, and this book certainly does. I feel like it's two books, though, a memoir and a philosophical treatise. With some editing, there could be two fantastic long-form articles; as is, it's a challenge to get through.

Rating: **

A light at the end of a tunnel of dysfunction

2010-06-25T21:53:00.003-04:00

Heller, Zoë. The Believers. New York: Harper, 2008.

What a welcome change from the last couple of books I read: a novel that moves along briskly, with plenty of conflict, careful character development, and a satisfying resolution.

The Believers depicts a season or two in the life of a family that could probably only exist in the United States. Joel is the civil-rights-lawyer father, plunged into a coma by a stroke. In his wake are his stridently opinionated wife Audrey, his soul-searching daughter Rosa, his occasional-druggie adopted son Lenny, and his thoroughly overlooked other daughter Karla. Radicalism is a way of life, and any form of average-ness (especially religion) is immediately scorned.

Things aren't what they seem. The characters are given a chance to change their minds, explore their options, and maybe start over. I thought I hated all of them and still liked the book, but maybe I like them and the book. Will they lead better lives as a result of the revelations that occur in the course of the story? Who knows. But they're starting to think about what they really believe, not just what they've said all along they do. As one character puts it, "if the poet had wanted to say something that could be summed up in a sentence like that [analysis], he wouldn't have written a poem, he would have written a slogan."

Oh, and while we're on the subject of poetry analysis, I have to share this sentence, an excellent skewering of a minor character: "The act of intercourse had been a mere caesura in the truly erotic business of listening to himself speak." LOL, as they say.

Rating: ***1/2

Indeed...

2010-06-23T20:09:00.001-04:00

Shriver, Lionel. So Much for That. New York: Harper, 2010.

Around page 67 of So Much for That, I started sighing and told myself I'd give it at least 100 pages. Now I'm there, dear reader, and I'm not planning to continue.

The premise is enticing: man envisions a cheap and carefree third-world retirement, but has to give it all away when his wife falls ill. The reality, however--at least the first fourth of it--alternates between the unhappy thoughts of its characters and a tiresome lecture (often in lengthy dialogues) about health insurance, the duties of society, and the purpose of money. There's too much misery (two extremely rare diseases among one set of friends and family?), too much talking, and not enough sparkle.

I feel bad ragging on a book that I didn't bother to finish. It's altogether possible that I would have ended it having thought about some important issues and with a smile or a tear for whatever outcome the characters were given. Instead, I'll cut to the chase, take the lesson that I should count my blessings (and keep my insurance), and move on to the next book on the stack.

Rating: *1/2

If only it weren't "all this and more"

2010-06-22T22:03:00.003-04:00

Furst, Alan. Night Soldiers. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2002.

The blurb from The Seattle Times on the cover of Night Soldiers states that it is "a spy novel, a war story, an adventure, a survivor's tale ... all this and more." After spending more than a week on the novel, I'm not sure this is a compliment.

Night Soldiers is a carefully researched tale of a young Bulgarian man who spends his twenties crossing World-War-Two-torn Europe, spying for one organization or another. There's just too much going on for my taste; it could have been two-thirds as long and twice as engaging. I cared about the main character and a couple of the supporting actors, but most of the minor characters and sub-plots seem to distract from the story.

Certainly I liked the writing. It is smart and suspenseful from the beginning. If this sentence doesn't set up a dramatic and grim novel, I don't know what does:

In Bulgaria, in 1934, on a muddy street in the river town of Vidin, Khristo Stoianev saw his brother kicked to death by fascist militia.

This matter-of-fact attitude toward brutality and loss continues. Bad things happen in wartime; people make the choices that seem right to them. Some people make it; others don't. Maybe that's why, though it makes for a challenging read, the story is so complex. So is life.

I direct those who would rather read a fun spy novel to The Spy Wore Red, a true story of an American girl who spies, marries a count, and hangs out with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. (Shockingly, I've never read the author's other books--I'll have to fix that.) Those who have enjoyed Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy and watched their share of war movies, however, would probably quite like Night Soldiers. If so, carve out some time, because the back page's blurb from New York magazine states that "[i]f you like one, you have to read them all."

Rating: **1/2

The perils and wonders of signing (or never getting) that consent form

2010-06-13T11:01:00.002-04:00

Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown Publishers, 2010.

A great pleasure of choosing a non-fiction book basically at random is learning something that might not ever have otherwise crossed one's path. In this case, the randomness was inspired by an NPR interview (one of this list--I can't remember which), and the learning is something I might have heard in a college biology class, except that I didn't take college biology. I doubt the bio teacher would have told the tale in such an engaging and personal fashion, either.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks details the parallel stories of a phenomenally productive cell line used across the world for medical research and the long-dead woman from whom the cells were taken. It's not a cheerful history, because Henrietta Lacks and her family had a seriously tough life in the mid-twentieth century, disadvantaged by brief education, poverty, and skin color. Not until long after Lacks's death from the cervical cancer that her doctors sampled and replicated did her family find out that the "HeLa" cells were so widely experimented on, sometimes for profit. Without much science background, it's no surprise they were horrified to find out that bits of their mother were blown up in atomic bombs, injected with diseases, crossed with mouse-bits, and shot into outer space. Sounds painful.

The Wikipedia page for HeLa cells tells the cell side of the story. Skloot was persistent and passionate enough to become acquainted with the Lacks family as real people, not just hosts for biological gold. They were appropriately wary of her intentions at first, given that they had their own problems in conjunction with a lifetime of exploitation by the scientific and journalistic communities. This is a book 22 years in the making, from when Skloot heard about the cells in that biology class, through her slow acceptance by Lacks's descendants, to the writing process (which apparently took a while, since most of the story ends in 2001; I suppose she had a day job). The resulting pages are fascinating and filled with a frank, sometimes painful, attention to everyday life.

Another minor point I found interesting was the quiet importance of women in the story. I wouldn't have guessed that women would be running labs and culturing cell lines in the mid-fifties, but there they were. Skloot doesn't make a big deal about it, which is the right descriptive approach nowadays; though they're on the scary scientific side of the story, these women probably deserve a little applause even for existing.

Skloot's book is the extended version of a piece that might be found in The Atlantic or the Washington Post Magazine. Her point isn't to focus on the medical achievements or ethical dilemmas. Instead, these weightier aspects of the story are presented mostly as they affect the Lacks family; this choice also makes the book more palatable to the average reader. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks gives them their matriarch back as a real person whose experiences--not just cells--live on.

Rating: ***

An appropriate title

2010-06-07T19:18:00.000-04:00

Barr, Nevada. Borderline. New York: Berkley Books, 2010.

Appropriately, this novel sits on the border between books I do and don't like. Borderline is one in a series of novels about a crime-solving park ranger, Anna Pigeon. Most of what you need to know about Anna comes in this description: "the kind whose corpse would kick you three days after you shot her." In this installment, Anna is on an involuntary stress-induced vacation from the Park Service and spends it on a rafting trip that becomes scary and gruesome pretty quickly. The challenges posed and the reasons behind the scariness form the bulk of the novel.

It's a well-written, fairly suspenseful story, except that the alert reader figures out most of the mysteries way before the book gives the answers. I never enjoy doing that, which is why I usually keep my "duh, so-and-so is the killer" whispering to myself at silly movies. I still enjoyed Borderline because of its carefully drawn, realistic characters and its snappy pace. It'd probably make a decent movie, and I wouldn't mind reading another Anna Pigeon book if I came across one--I just might not cross the border to seek one out.

Rating: **1/2

Happy birthday, _Through Books_!

2010-06-06T10:26:00.004-04:00

Through Books is one year old today! I find it amazing that I stuck to it so long and still enjoy posting. I'm celebrating in appropriately nerdy fashion with some statistics and graphs, because I was wondering how many books I read over the past year and what other information I could tease out of the blog.

The answer is 92. (But what is the question? Oh, yeah, how many books I read over the last year.) That seems like a lot to me, but I've never kept track before, so who knows. In the shame department, I must admit that six of those (if I counted correctly) I didn't actually finish, but I read enough to review them in the blog. And now for the breakdown. Of those 92 books, 55 (or about 60 percent) were fiction, and the rest were non-fiction. Fifteen of the 37 non-fiction books (or about 40 percent) were memoirs.

The graph below shows what I thought of those 92 books. I wasn't too surprised by this distribution, because I felt like I was giving a lot of three-star ratings recently. For a reminder on what I mean by the ratings, look at the top-right of this webpage. Three stars means "liked--try it once," so it seems reasonable that a lot of the books that I tried once would end up in this category.

I think it's good that there are more below three stars than above. It should be difficult to find a huge number of magical, wonderful books in a single year, and there are a lot of duds out there. The distribution is skewed, of course, because I mostly choose my books based on the headlines I see in Google Reader of what's reviewed in The New York Times and on NPR. They don't bother reviewing too much junk, and I don't bother reading it, except when something catches my eye at a library or airport bookstore. It's interesting that none of the four-star books were non-fiction, but there's a respectable non-fiction showing in the other good categories, so I'm not too biased toward fiction. I need to learn something from time to time!

I also wanted to see what my monthly totals were, as shown in the graph below. This one wasn't a huge surprise, either. At the beginning, my excitement about the blog probably accelerated my reading pace; I also made 27 non-review posts during the first two months, something I haven't done much recently. Except for that, though, my reading rate settled down to about 8 books a month in 2009. In 2010, when I started driving to work and eliminated the reading-on-the-bus time, my pace slipped to about 6 books a month, which is pretty dramatic but expected. I knocked out a bunch of books in the last week, however, which proves that I can still read quickly when the books are good!

That got me thinking, though. Do I need to blame it on the bus? Or is there something else going on? The graph below shows the number of highly rated (4- and 3.5-star) books each month. There seems to be a glut in the early blog days and a serious drought in 2010. I don't want to make a correlation-versus-causation mistake, but it certainly seems reasonable that the quality of books read can affect enthusiasm for--and thereby the pace of--reading the next set of books.

I think this part of the hypothesis makes complete sense and is directly applicable to reading habits. If the books assigned in school are boring and the books available at home are sparse or poorly targeted, why would anyone bother to stick with reading? A good early experience, on the other hand, could have a lasting effect that pulls the reader along through some lame requirements without losing hope for a better book out there.

Basically, my sample size is too small (for now) to draw any real conclusions, but all of this is quite interesting. I just need to catch the wave of past successes, get into some more great books, and make it to the next reanalysis in June 2011! I hope you, loyal reader, continue to enjoy the ride.

Wishing I were back in I.B. English

2010-06-03T22:01:00.000-04:00

Martel, Yann. Beatrice and Virgil. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010.

Wow. Beatrice and Virgil is a spellbinding, fantastically original book from the author of The Life of Pi. It's also one of the most thought-provoking things I've read in a while.

What is it? It's more a story-collage than a novel. The main character, Henry, is a famous author living in a foreign city with his family, happily unknown, protected by his pen-name. He recently failed to sell the book-world on an essay and novel about the Holocaust, joined together upside-down in the middle like the English and Spanish parts of a VCR manual, such that the reader isn't forced into a single interpretation. That is not the weird part of this book.

Henry gets an odd piece of "fan-mail" with a copy of Flaubert's The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier and a wonderful scene from a play, in which one character describes a pear to the other. I was reminded of the exercises we had to do in writing class, telling the reader how to drive or make a peanut-butter sandwich, except that this version isn't totally lame.

Somewhat grudgingly, Henry seeks out the author of the play, finding him in a strange shop of natural-history taxidermy. The two make an acquaintance that is both enlightening and unpleasant at times. The play is haphazard but exciting; the author, neither. Symbolism abounds, leading to a shocking conclusion. Nothing about this story is predictable.

Is there any truth in the story? Is it a more successful reimagining of the Holocaust VCR manual? Where are Beatrice and Virgil leading their creator and reader? I could see a bright high-school class poring over this book, writing many an essay on its hidden meanings, so I won't spoil their fun here. It's been a long time since I had that wondering urge to dissect a work; appropriately, it comes in a book whose centerpiece is taxidermy.

Rating: ****