Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos ****

Strange and abstract, indescribable, but I really like it. As befits its title, Cosmos has something to say about man's place in the universe. In the first half of the "story" I am intrigued by how the narrator seeks meaning in the connections between random events; in the second half I like Leon's approach to living a private mental life in full view of his family.

This is the second time I've read Cosmos. The first time I read a version that was apparently an English translation from the French version of the story. This time I read a new translation that comes directly from the Polish. While the new translation is surely more accurate to the original, I must admit that I prefer the earlier translation. I see how Gombrowicz's repetitive, list-based prose suits the subject matter, but I found it distracting.

Sam Lipsyte, The Ask ***

Lipsyte is a very funny writer who smuggles insights into his caustic descriptions. I loved the first chapter of The Ask, whose main character works in the fundraising department of a small arts university. ("Mr Ramadathan had mortgaged his electronics store so his son could craft affecting screenplays about an emotionally distant, workaholic immigrant's quest for the American dream.") But alas, the story was weak and many of the characters too quirky by half. It was especially disappointing given the strength of the writing on a paragraph-by-paragraph level. I'm sure I'll check out Lipsyte's other books after adjusting my expectations accordingly.

Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler ****

I read (and reviewed) Martin Dressler once before. I stand by my comments from that earlier review, but I had to add one more star because (a) the tone and atmosphere of the book stayed with me in the years since I first read it and (b) I enjoyed it more the second time around, probably because I knew in advance that it was going to take a turn into magical realism.

Martin Dressler actually resonates well with the book I read immediately before it, Tom McCarthy's C. Like C, Martin Dressler features a character whose main defining feature is the way he thinks. Serge Carrefax saw the world in a two-dimensional "plan" view; Martin Dressler sees everything as "a great, elaborate structure, a system of order, a well-planned machine." Neither book attempts much more characterization than that.

The tone and atmosphere of the book are its greatest draws, and they derive largely from the accumulation of 19th century period detail, an "internal eclecticism."  The greatest drawback is a static quality to the prose and to the story, which I mentioned in my earlier review. Martin didn't really develop as a character, resulting in a certain repetitiveness; for example, the development of the New Dressler Hotel wasn't much different from the development of the original Dressler Hotel and probably could have been omitted.

Tom McCarthy, C *** 1/2

C is the latest novel by Tom McCarthy, whose previous book Remainder is one of my all-time favorites. C didn't speak to me in the same (inexplicable) way, but it shows McCarthy's range and confirms that he is a very good writer.

The main character is Serge Carrefax, born around the turn of the 20th century on an English estate where his mother produces silk and his father runs a school for deaf children. The story follows Serge from his childhood through his tour as a pilot during World War I to his post-war adventures.

Despite spending so much time with Serge, we don't really get a good sense of his character other than his tendency to see the world in a two-dimensional "plan view." However, I did get a good sense of the places Serge goes to. McCarthy creates several impressive set pieces: at the estate, at a German health spa, on the war front, in post-war Egypt. He has some grand themes just below the surface of the story, but even if you ignore (or miss) them, the settings were interesting and entertaining for their own sake.

I look forward to McCarthy's next book.

Robert Hellenga, Snakewoman of Little Egypt ** 1/2

This novel has an intriguing premise, with a middle-aged academic at a crossroads in his life renting his extra room to a woman just released from prison for shooting her husband, a snake-handling minister. They are drawn to each other despite their very different backgrounds.

My major complaint is that the woman, Sunny, doesn't seem to come from a different background at all. Her ideas, her interests, and her manner of expressing herself all give the impression of a slightly naive middle-class college student. Her young life in rural Illinois as the straying wife of a pastor seems not to have shaped her world view at all. The man, Jackson, doesn't fare much better as a believable character. He has some mysterious rough edges in the first chapter, but after that he's a two-dimensional anthropology professor. His existential crisis doesn't last beyond the first two pages.

Jackson and Sunny find themselves drawn not only to each other, but each to the other's former life too. Over the course of the book, it's almost as if each of them is taking over the expected future of the other. That would be an interesting development if I cared about either character.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The Cloudspotter's Guide **** 1/2

A beautifully packaged, engagingly written introduction to "the science, history, and culture of clouds." I learned a lot about how clouds form and what types of clouds there are, but just as importantly I learned about the seedy world of sixteenth-century cloud pornography and about William Rankin, the only man to have personal experience of the interior of a cumulonimbus cloud (aka a thunderhead).

There is a cloud identification quiz in the middle of the book, and it asks you to differentiate between cirrus and stratus clouds, but it also identifies one cloud as "an Abominable Snowman who is upset that his pet seahorse is ignoring him." Very enjoyable and informative all around.

Dan Chaon, You Remind Me of Me ****

It surely says something about me that I enjoy books whose protagonists struggle to keep their regrets and disappointments at bay. I like to think of myself as having a fairly optimistic outlook, but my literary tastes suggest an undercurrent of dissatisfaction.

You Remind Me of Me alternates between three characters who suspect their lives could have been better. The relationship between them is revealed gradually: a young mother and her two sons, one of whom she gave up for adoption. The most interesting character is Jonah, the son who stayed with his mother. As a young adult, he tracks down his adopted half-brother in the hopes of learning how his life might have turned out.

I discovered the author Dan Chaon a couple of years ago when Evelyn gave me his most recent novel, Await Your Reply, for Christmas. Like You Remind Me of Me, Await Your Reply is concerned with questions of personal identity. The books are similarly constructed too, with separate stories that slowly come together. (Chaon started as a story writer.)

Chaon's writing style is quietly vivid and his characterizations nicely subtle. His books will stand up to re-reading, because the complexity of the characters is more important than the surprises of the plot.

Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder ****

The Age of Wonder is a history of the Romantic period in England, which Holmes defines as the period between Captain Cook's first voyage in 1768 and Charles Darwin's voyage on the Beagle in 1831. Conventional wisdom says that the Romantic poets staged a rebellion against science — a view I most recently encountered in The Master and His Emissary — but Holmes aims to show that Romantic literature and science developed together.

He states his thesis in the Introduction, then leaves it implicit during the rest of the book. The main characters are the major natural philosophers of the period: Joseph Banks, William Herschel, and especially Humphrey Davy. The Romantic writers Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats make prominent appearances as well. The scientists write poetry and the poets add scientific footnotes to their poems.

An enjoyable read and a fine corrective to the simplified vision of the period.

Patrick O'Brian, The Mauritius Command ****

I enjoyed the fourth book in the Aubrey-Maturin series just as I have the previous three. The way O'Brian works sailing lingo into the story without stalling the plot remains unparalleled.

In The Mauritius Command, Jack Aubrey serves as the commodore for a squadron of ships trying to wrest a pair of islands in the Indian Ocean from the occupying French. Aubrey expresses ambivalence about the fact that he is overseeing the battles rather than fully participating in them, and as a reader I had a similar ambivalence about the battle scenes which didn't seem as vivid as in previous books. Partly that's due to Aubrey's position and partly it's due to the sheer number of different ships involved in the campaign. It wasn't always easy to keep track of them all.

As compensation for the weaker fight sequences, the book has interesting subsidiary characters in the captains serving under Aubrey. Captain Lord Clonfort and Captain Corbett were possibly painted a bit too broadly, but it was fascinating to see how their personalities affected their command styles, and how those command styles affected the functioning of their ships.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary ** 1/2

I can sum up the theme of this long-winded 500-page book in one paragraph:

Human experience involves the interplay of two fundamentally opposed modes of reality, which we can refer to as rationality and mysticism, Apollonian and Dionysian (as Nietzsche would call it), scientific and religious (as Bertrand Russell says in A History of Western Philosophy), or analytic and integrative. The structure of our brains reflects this fundamental opposition, with the left hemisphere corresponding to the first mode and the right hemisphere corresponding to the second mode. Over recorded history, and especially in the past century, the left hemispheric version of reality has taken on undue precedence.

Thinkers throughout the ages have commented on the basic opposition; McGilchrist's novel contribution is the claim that it maps to the asymmetries between the brain hemispheres. It's an interesting claim, and the early chapters where he describes the neuroscientific results are the most compelling — although even in these chapters, he seems to beg the question (in the traditional meaning of the phrase) of whether each hemisphere has its own worldview. Starting a few chapters in, he simply substitutes the terms "left hemisphere" and "right hemisphere," without further argument, in places where other philosophers would use one of the other pairs of terms. He piles on the "evidence" in a repetitive and not very original fashion. He doesn't really argue for his position so much as provide a mountain of facts that are merely consistent with it.

In the end, I was left to wonder what difference it makes whether he's right about how the distinction maps to the structure of the brain: as he carefully points out in the introduction to Part II, he's not claiming that the structure of the brain has changed over the course of recorded history, so how is his view different from a purely cultural explanation of our tilt toward scientism?

I think McGilchrist has an intriguing idea, but I found his presentation of it exhausting and unconvincing. The longer the book went on, the more it seemed like a mere plea for recognizing the importance of mysticism in opposing the sterility of a purely rational world.

Jack Pendarvis, Your Body is Changing ***

I picked up this collection of stories at Red Lodge Books in Red Lodge, Montana, based on a cover blurb from George Saunders. Pendarvis has a humorous narrative voice similar to Saunders' although his plots hew closer to reality. The greatest strength of the stories is the dialogue, especially the ways in which people take pride in the things they claim to dislike about themselves.

"Isn't that funny, I don't even know what Jay Leno looks like," said Mandy. "That's just how little television I watch.... Isn't that just dreadful of me? People become intimidated when they realize that my opinions are so uninformed when it comes to television."

My favorite story is "Outsiders"; it consists almost entirely of this type of dialogue.

Paul Theroux, Blinding Light ** 1/2

I'm a fan of Paul Theroux's work, but it has been a while since I read one of his books. Unfortunately, the one I chose to end my hiatus wasn't very good.

Blinding Light tells the story of Slade Steadman, a writer who 20 years before had a huge success with a gimmicky travel book but has published nothing since. He travels to the jungles of Ecuador in search of inspiration, and he finds it in the form of a rare drug. The drug enables him to write again, ecstatically, but also renders him temporarily blind.

The first section of the book, describing the trip to Ecuador, is wonderfully full of Theroux's trademark travel descriptions and misanthropy. Once he discovers the drug and returns home to Martha's Vineyard, though, the book goes off the rails. Slade is an unlikable narcissist, but that's not what bothers me. I couldn't fathom his motivations or those of his girlfriend Ava, and their conversations were repetitive.  

My favorite character was an exceedingly minor one: a friend of Slade's first wife who appears for a few pages (starting on page 216) to contradict everything Slade says. Her dialogue is hilariously realistic.

Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place * 1/2

Let me admit up front that I skimmed this book rather than reading it in its entirety. This approach is unusual for me, but whenever I dove into a new section I quickly found myself bored or annoyed.

This non-fiction book extols the multifarious virtues of "third places," which are public places where people gather informally outside of work or home. The author is a sociologist writing in "plain English," although I would characterize the prose style as "academic abstraction drained of academic rigor or detail." To choose an example at random, here's the beginning of Chapter 3:

Precious and unique benefits accrue to those who regularly attend third places and who value those forms of social intercourse found there. The leveling, primacy of conversation, certainty of meeting friends, looseness of structure, and eternal reign of the imp of fun all combine to set the stage for experiences unlikely to be found elsewhere. These benefits also derive from the sociable and conversational skills cultivated and exercised within the third place.

Ray Oldenburg is well-named given that the book pines for the good old days when small-town Americans gathered on Main Street for practical joking and Protestants and Catholics lived in harmony (p 106 -7). For evidence that the book is a screed against modern suburban living, consider the amount of time it spends discussing topics unrelated to third places: cohabitation ("a far from ideal arrangement in a society that continues to value marriage despite its problems"), avarice ("salaries running to six and even seven figures are paid to Neanderthals named Bubba"), over-scheduled kids who can't play poker, and so on.

I started skimming the early chapters because Oldenburg didn't seem to have anything new to say about the hackneyed vision of suburban, TV-watching mall rats. Later, I grew annoyed at the oversimplified nostalgia. The turning point may have been when Oldenburg admits that he'll simply ignore any contravening data:

At the risk of sounding disingenuous, I would insist that any third place is pretty much as I've described it, or it is not a third place. The description presented in the initial chapters is not derived from speculation. It is built from observations, my own and those of others. Thus, it is not sanitized from life but based on careful observation of it.

Translation: Possible counterexamples are excluded by fiat. I know a third place when I see one.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers ****

Robbe-Grillet's experimental fiction works for me in a way that the Oulipo writers' work does not. It's something about his approach, which Wikipedia describes thusly: "Methodical, geometric, and often repetitive descriptions of objects replace (though often reveal) the psychology and interiority of the character."

The Erasers is Robbe-Grillet's first novel. As such, it is more traditional than later novels such as Jealousy. For example, it has a plot. A man travels to a provincial city to investigate the latest in a series of murders. Who is the murderer? What's the motive for the string of murders? Why does the investigator buy several erasers during the day? The novel works as a thriller and as an experimental novel.

Michael Krausz (editor), Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology ***

I am fairly well acquainted with the philosophical issues considered in this anthology, having read a lot of pragmatism and Richard Rorty. In fact, I consider myself a relativist — an ontological or epistemological relativist to be more precise.

On the plus side, this anthology includes some classic articles on the subject followed by discussion of the issues those articles raise. On the down side, many of the newer articles rehash the same arguments in less colorful language than the classics; couldn't the editor find a wider range of reactions? For the most part, the most intriguing articles to me were written by philosophers I'm already familiar with: Rorty, Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson.

The book is divided thematically into four sections. My favorites were section II, "Relativism, Truth, and Knowledge," and section IV, "Relativism, Culture, and Understanding." I was less interested in section III, "Moral Relativism, Objectivity, and Reason," because the objectivity of morals is a dead philosophical issue for me.

Harry Mathews, The Conversions ***

I'd never heard of Harry Mathews or The Conversions when I picked up the book at Moe's based entirely on the plot description and the blurbs ("The tragi-comedy of human ingenuity, which insists upon interpreting the facts of experience even when they are senseless, baffling, or banal..." -- Edmund White).

The narrator receives a gold adze at a dinner party and sets out to learn the meaning of the seven engravings on it. On his quest he meets a variety of colorful characters with fanciful stories to tell: a woman who discovered a sexual position in which it is impossible to get pregnant; a drug dealer who deals in the spines of a particular cactus; a composer with a collection of cowrie shells. Their stories seem to be leading the narrator to his answers, which relate to a suppressed religion.

The tone and story of The Conversions reminded me very much of the French Oulipo writers like Georges Perec, so it didn't surprise me to learn that Harry Mathews was a friend and translator for that group. As with Perec's Life, I enjoyed many aspects of the book but it didn't cross the threshold to a favorite.

Timothy Egan, The Big Burn ** 1/2

The Big Burn is a non-fiction account of the largest wildfire in US history. It occurred in 1910 in northern Idaho and Montana, just a few years after the founding of the Forest Service, and it destroyed a huge swath of the newly protected forests. Egan describes the fire and the efforts to contain it, and also puts the event in the historical context of the conversation movement started by Teddy Roosevelt. The hyperbolic subtitle of the book is "Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America."

The story has its share of adventure and heroism, but I think Egan oversells the importance of the fire in "saving" America. (What he means is that the fire came at a politically difficult point for the Forest Service and may have saved its existence.) More generally, Egan is a good prose writer but not an organized one. I often felt like he lost the narrative line of the incident he's describing (cf. page 126). His characters are either all good or all bad.

Benjamin Black, Christine Falls ** 1/2

Benjamin Black is a pseudonym of the Irish author John Banville, a Booker Prize-winning writer known for the richness of his prose. Benjamin Black is the name he uses for writing thrillers, which Graham Greene would have called "entertainments" as opposed to serious novels.

The prose in Christine Falls is definitely a cut above most crime thrillers, as is some of the character development. Unfortunately, though, the plot is a cut below most crime thrillers. The first problem is that Black lets the reader know about the underlying conspiracy early on, which robs the story of a compelling interest. The second problem is that the conspiracy itself is not very interesting.

Christine Falls is the first of a series of novels featuring the pathologist Quirke. I think I'll skip the rest.

Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever ****

This book, subtitled "An Aural History of Recorded Music," covers the history of recording technology in broad strokes. It's real concern, though, is the question of the real relationship between a musical performance and a recording. As the author says in the preface, "Ultimately, this is the story of what it means to make a recording of music -- a representation of music -- and declare it to be music itself."

The story starts with Thomas Edison and his rivals at the Victor Talking Machine Company. The goal in the early days of recording was fidelity: accurately capturing a real-world event. But this seemingly straightforward goal is not so simple on further examination. If you record a musical performance in a music hall, which is a more accurate representation of the music, a recording that captures the feel of the hall or one that captures the music without the "distortion" of the hall's acoustics? You can record an orchestra with greater dynamic range than any person in the hall could hear (softer pianos, louder violins); is that cheating?

Nowadays, of course, most recorded music doesn't capture an actual live performance. The recording is built from disparate sounds, recorded at different places and times, many of which are electronically generated or altered. So what criteria of perfection replaces fidelity?

I find these questions interesting, and incidentally I think they can give perspective on so-called "correspondence theories of truth" (with the world as the live performance and our concepts as the recording).

On top of the philosophical questions and the history lesson, Perfecting Sound Forever also gives the reader new things to listen for in their favorite music: the "dry" sound of 1970s California, the ambiance of Columbia 30th Street Studio, the compressed range of the Loudness Wars.

Very informative, thought-provoking, and enjoyable.

Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories ** 1/2

Similar to my experience with Barry Hannah's story collection, I read The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis with high expectations that almost guaranteed some level of disappointment.

Because her stories tend to be very short and to focus on a feeling rather than a narrative, I felt almost like I was reading a book of poetry, even though her prose style is not notably "poetic." I expected her to experiment with the form more than she does. Most of the stories were fundamentally traditional in nature, albeit with the compression of poetry.

Andrew Mango, Atatürk *** 1/2

Although advertised as a biography of Atatürk, founding father of the Turkish Republic, the book works best as "the best account...of the decline of the Ottoman Empire." The author does not attempt a psychological biography of the man, but rather describes Atatürk through his actions on the public stage. The result reads more like a history book than a biography. Mango does a good job of describing the large-scale political context for the action -- most notably the rise of nationalism in Europe and the complications it caused in the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire. I didn't have the patience to keep track of the nitty-gritty details or the large cast of characters, but I feel like I understand how the Republic came about and why.

The book covers Atatürk's rise more thoroughly than his years as (basically) a dictator. I would like to know more about how he managed to leave behind a functioning democracy where most others would have left a failed state. The secret, I suspect, may be his relationship with İsmet İnönü, another war hero and prime minister to Ataturk's president. I'd be interested in reading a biography of İsmet, whose tenure in Turkish politics extends beyond Ataturk's into the early 1970s.


I bought this book in Istanbul, from a bookstore on Divan Yolu.

Annie Dillard, The Living ****

The Living paints an astonishingly clear and poetic picture of life on Bellingham Bay in Washington during the second half of the nineteenth century. Every page has at least one beautiful image; the edition I read even has a great photo on the cover. It's one of those books that gives such a sense of (time and) place that the plot barely matters to me. Which is a good thing, because The Living barely has a plot, and the story it does tell peters out almost 100 pages from the end of the book.

Susan Kandel, Dial H for Hitchcock **

None of the characters in this mystery novel act like real people would act, least of all our heroine Cece Caruso. I recognized the various Hitchcock movie references, and I was surprised by the surprise twist, but I couldn't get past the contrived decisions that Cece makes or the dialog that has working cops and gardeners arguing with a stranger about whether the secret to the tortilla soup at the Bel Air Hotel is the tomato base or the masa flour.

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks *** 1/2

I read nothing but raves about this scientific bestseller, which recounts the story of the poor black tobacco farmer whose cells established the first line of human cells used widely in research.

Skloot interweaves the stories of Henrietta, the cell line that bears her initials, and her family. All of these stories have fascinating elements, but it is the present day story of Henrietta's children that stands out. Skloot is remarkable in her ability to capture the texture of their lives and their speech. The scientific portions of the book were less detailed, leaving me with a lot of questions, and the ethical questions raised by Henrietta's story are relegated to an afterward. But the very specific story of the Lacks family kept me interested throughout.

Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence ****

In advance of our upcoming vacation in Turkey, I read the latest novel from the Nobel Prize-winner. The story takes place in Istanbul during (mostly) the 1970s, and the sense of the place is one of its finest features. The narrator Kemal has an obsessive love for his distant cousin, and over the years he collects countless mundane objects that relate to his beloved, such as the salt shaker she uses at dinner one evening.

I really enjoyed the first 150 pages, during which Kemal meets Füsun and begins his affair with her. Pamuk tells the tale with a great deal of specificity but also manages to make it a commentary about Turkey's conflicting desires for tradition and European modernity. After Kemal and his fiance Sibel's engagement party, though, Kemal's obsession kicks in and the book becomes far too repetitive. I am usually a fan of obsessive narrators —cf. Remainder, Theroux's An Adultery, Gombrowicz's Cosmos — but Kemal repeated the same thoughts rather than exploring his situation from all angles. Nonetheless, I remained engaged by the little details of the milieu like the outdoor cinemas where people eat pumpkin seeds while they watch Turkish melodramas. (The fact that I'd recently been pouring over Istanbul guidebooks surely factored into my enjoyment.) The plot resumes in earnest in the last 100 pages, and the book comes to a strong finish.

As I said in my review of his earlier book Snow, something about Pamuk's writing style reminds me of Paul Auster. The Museum of Innocence is a more traditional book than Snow, with rounded characters and less obvious parables, but the Auster-ity of it was underlined by the car accident that happens near the end. I couldn't help but think of The Music of Chance.

Otto Penzler (editor), Agents of Treachery ***

I am a fan of spy fiction. Many of its virtues -- compelling settings, ambiguous characters, complex conspiracies -- would seem to demand book-length narratives. This book, however, is a collection of short spy stories from a range of contemporary writers. Although they lack the depth of novels, most of the stories are entertaining.

My favorite writer was Stephen Hunter, whose story "Casey at the Bat" takes place during the late stages of World War II. I enjoyed his work both for its insights into the political climate (with the Russians, knowing that the Allies would win the war, supporting intra-group rivalries within the French Resistance to favor the socialist ones) and for its action sequence descriptions. Andrew Kalvin's story "Sleeping with My Assassin" had the best literary qualities. The weakest story was James Grady's "Destiny City." The ham-handed prose made me wonder what I'd find if I went back and re-read Six Days of the Condor. 

If you are a fan of spy fiction, Agents of Treachery is a nice beach read.

Steve House, Beyond the Mountain ****

Like many of the best mountaineering books, Beyond the Mountain is as least as much a character study as it is an adventure story. Steve House is straightforward and unapologetic about his mountain climbing obsession, stating up front that:

When I stood on the greatest summit I ever achieved, success evaporated. As many before, I learned that the moment we think we have attained the goal, we lose it. Success is empty. (Prologue)

The first chapter grabbed me right away, not with the Himalayan adventure of climbing Nanga Parbat, but with a moment that illustrated House's decision-making process. At nearly 25,000 feet, House and his partner have started on their summit bid. Before they set out, he'd vomited up his last meal. He has a severe headache from altitude and dehydration.  His partner asks him whether he's okay, because he has only taken five steps in the last 40 minutes. House says he's okay, but his partner says he wants to go down rather than continue. Retreating is clearly the prudent thing to do, probably the only life-saving option, but House's reaction is to think he chose his partner badly.

Beyond the Mountain includes plenty of high-altitude adventure, well illustrated with pictures, and House is a very good writer (if a bit too fond of flashback structures). More than anything, though, I was fascinated by House's psychology.

Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood ****

This book is composed entirely of questions. You know how you'll sometimes get an email message where even the positive assertions are in the form of a question?

How can I describe the experience of reading this book? It doesn't tell a story. Although you can detect patterns in the types of questions that the narrator asks, they are not enough to create a full character. Nonetheless, I was delighted by the experience, especially by the oddball specificity of many of them.

If you yourself are not a coward, do you look upon a coward with sympathy or with disgust? If you yourself are not a murderer, do you look upon a murderer with disgust or sympathy? Why have I altered the position of "sympathy and disgust" and "disgust and sympathy" so? Did you ever try to raise two flying squirrels by getting up every three hours and feeding them cow's milk and stimulating their genitals with a tissue to get them to pee as your mother instructed you and seeing them die three weeks later of fever and bloat and fecal poisoning because the cow's milk had so constipated them that they had not, in all that peeing, ever pooped? And did you wonder later how your mother would know to stimulate them to pee but not that cow's milk would cement them up like that?

I was fascinated by how I actually did have opinions about some of the crazy things he asked about. ("Would you rather be trapped in a closet with a large cat or an anaconda?") Could I perhaps learn something significant about myself by analyzing my answers?

Nicholas D. Hayes, Saving Sailing **John Otterbacher, Sailing Grace ** 1/2

Despite their titles, these two books are not really about sailing. They both use sailing as props in a general argument. Hayes admits as much in his introduction: "For all practical purposes, I could make the case using fishing or knitting or playing an instrument, or any other activity that brings us joy by helping us to pass on what we know and love about life."

Hayes is a business consultant, and his book is about the social changes that have resulted in fewer people engaging in socially oriented active pastimes. His remedies are the usual ones: more unstructured play time for children, less TV, more mentoring and full-family activities. I think he underestimates the cost (in money and time) of sailing. The most interesting thing in the book are the statistics near the beginning; for example, the fact that 43% of sailors are over 55 years of age. 

Otterbacher is a psychologist, and his book is about the value of having a life goal. The first two-thirds of the book are about his serious heart problems and how he didn't let them deter him from his family's plan to sail across the Atlantic. Whether you think he is admirably audacious or selfishly irresponsible depends on how much you idealize difficult goals. When they ultimately set out on their sailing trip, Otterbacher describes their (apparently frequent) difficulties in such detail that it makes sailing sound like a dangerous trial rather than a rewarding experience. The best parts of this book are the ones that portray the day-to-day challenges of living with a bum ticker.

Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders **** 1/2

A wonderful collection of linked short stories that take place in modern Pakistan. The stories are traditional in style, no fancy experimental approaches. I was particularly impressed by how Mueenuddin's authorial voice managed to seem reserved while still communicating the character's emotions. My only complaint is that a few of the stories seemed too similar: for example, "Saleema" and the title story tell essentially the same story at two different levels of society.

Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters ***

The back cover of this book refers to it as a "compendium of monsterology." The word "compendium" is well chosen, because the book covers a lot of ground but doesn't really make a consistent argument. The early chapters provide a history of the social purpose of monsters, later chapters focus on how we define monsters, and some chapters in the middle simply list famous monsters. Especially in the final chapters, Asma makes many points that are tangentially related to this main argument — evolutionary theory, Freudian psychology, Cartesian dualism. He makes the points well, but I lose the thread of his argument. It seems like he didn't want to omit any of the interesting material from his research notes.

Reed Farrel Coleman, The James Deans ***

Despite the awards and the acclaim and the forward by Michael Connelly, The James Deans is a solid but unspectacular example of the reluctant private eye genre. It's all there: the pseudo-clever witticisms, the quickly sketched characters, the oblique references to events in other books of the series, and the plot where everything that happens to the hero relates to the case. The only surprising things about The James Deans are (a) that the title doesn't come into play until after the initial mystery is solved and (b) [spoiler] the bad guy isn't punished at the end. It's a perfect example of a three-star book in my rating system: not disappointing, but not exciting either.

David Eagleton, Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives ** 1/2

Sum is a collection of 40 vignettes about possible versions of what happens after you die. For example, from the version that gives the book its title:

In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together. You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.

 Each "story" is two or three pages long, basically long enough to establish its premise and toss in a last minute twist that is meant to be thought provoking. It's a good idea, but in practice most of the pieces stop before they get to the part about what the experience would be like. And many of the setups were vague and/or sophomoric.

I read the book aloud to Evelyn, and only a few of the stories sparked interesting discussions. The most successful one was "Narcissus," in which humans were designed as devices for collecting data about the Earth, but our makers are frustrated because we only collect data about ourselves.

Roger Scruton, Beauty *** Carl Wilson, Let's Talk About Love **** 1/2

Two small books on the subject of aesthetics. Roger Scruton, a philosopher, defends the very traditional view that true beauty is that which ennobles the human soul. Carl Wilson, a music critic, explores the question of where our personal tastes come from.

Beauty is an elegantly written book whose main argument I find unconvincing. I enjoyed Scruton's analysis of particular art works more than I did his philosophical musings (similar to the way I felt about Kierkegaard's Fear and Loathing).

Nominally, Let's Talk About Love is a book about the Celine Dion album of that title, the one containing the Titanic theme "My Heart Will Go On." But Wilson really just uses the album and the artist as a case study to investigate the question of "whether anyone's tastes stand on solid ground, starting with mine." This concrete approach makes the abstract question of objectivity quite vivid. Wilson starts with the polarizing case of Celine Dion, but he quickly gets to the point where he is quoting Kant and talking about "cultural capital."

One of Bourdieu's most striking notions is that there's also an inherent antagonism between people in fields structured mainly by cultural capital and those in fields where there is primarily economic capital: while high-ranking artists and intellectuals are part of the dominant class is society thanks to their education and influence, they are a dominated segment of that class compared to actual rich people... And this opposition between cultural and economic capital carries down into less-privileged class strata, perhaps helping to motivate school teachers to vote for Democrats (currently the party associated with cultural capital) and auto workers to vote Republican (symbolically the party of economic capital). — page 94

The book paints a sympathetic, rounded portrait of Celine and the origins of her music, although a true Celine Dion fan would likely find it condescending.

Let's Talk About Love inspired introspection about my own (musical) taste, making me wonder whether they derive from anything other than my social class and the persona I want to convey to others. I like to think that it does — and Carl Wilson agrees with me, although the one weakness of the book is that he doesn't present his own ideas about the X factor in taste. Why do hipsters find subversion more compelling than sentimentality, and favor complexity over being crowd pleasing?

Barry Hannah, Long, Last, Happy ** 1/2

I had high hopes for this collection of stories. Over the past few years, Barry Hannah's name kept popping up next to the names of several authors whose prose styles I love, with everyone calling him things like "the most thrilling, vital stylist in American fiction." When his collected stories were published (unfortunately on the occasion of his death), I snatched up the book.

I was disappointed. While it's true that Hannah can write sentences that are funny, insightful, surprising, and entertaining, very few of the stories worked for me. I paid attention to the prose, but lost the thread of the story.

My favorite stories were "Testimony of a Pilot," "Hey, Have You Got a Cig, the Time, the News, My Face?", and "The Evening of the Yarp."  My favorite sentence came from the early story "Love Too Long":

I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out.

(What a surprising world! Four stars for Keith Richard's autobiography and two and a half for "the best fiction writer to appear in the south since Flannery O'Conner"!)

Keith Richards, Life ****

Keith Richards' Life is far more intriguing than I expected from the autobiography of a prototypical junkie rock-and-roll star. Sure, it has its share of excess and debauchery, but it also has numerous musical insights and a complex main character.

The secret to the success of Life is that it captures Richards' voice and shows his contradictions.

[Mick's women] end up crying on my shoulder because they've found out he has once again philandered. What am I gonna do? Well, it's a long ride to the airport, honey; let me think about it. The tears that have been on this shoulder from Jerry Hall, from Bianca, from Marianne, Chrissie Shrimpton... They've ruined so many shirts of mine. And they ask me what to do! How the hell do I know? I don't fuck him! (p 294)

Keith rarely seems to recognize the distance between his self-image and his behavior. He imagines himself to be a disciplined junkie who is in complete control of his addiction...except for when he isn't. He says he never puts the make on a woman, then tells a story about tracking down the German model Uschi Obermaier. Many paragraphs start with a proclamation that he appears to contradict by the end.

I've never been able to go to bed with a woman just for sex. I've no interest in that. I want to hug you and kiss you and make you feel good and protect you. I'd rather jerk off than just have a piece of pussy... Usually I was more interested in chicks who weren't slavering and falling all over me. I'd be hanging out and go, let's try the wife of the banker... (p 349)

The next page contains a paean to the wonder of groupies.

Even more than the entertaining conundrums of Keith's rationalizations, I enjoyed the musical insights: how he got the sound of "Jumping Jack Flash" from acoustic guitars and a crummy cassette recorder overloaded to the point of distortion (p 239); how American artists played their Sears guitars using banjo tuning; and how the secret to the classic Rolling Stones riffs is open tuning.

Jimmy Reed produces a haunting refrain, a melancholy dissonance...At the 5 chord, instead of making a conventional barre chord, the B7th, which requires a little effort with the left hand, he wouldn't bother with the B at all. He'd leave the open A ringing and just slide the finger up the D string to a 7th...Believe me, it's (a) the laziest, sloppiest single thing you can do in that situation, and (b) one of the most brilliant musical inventions of all time. (p 106)

The compelling strangeness of the book can be summarized with a story near the end. Keith is living on an island in the Caribbean, next door to Bruce Willis, when Paul McCartney comes strolling down the beach. The two legends start spending time together. Their conversations start with music but quickly take a wild turn.

We talked about [how] the Beatles were a vocal band because they could all sing the lead vocal, and we were more of a musicians' band -- we had only one front man....We even started composing a song together... We got into discussions about inflatable dog kennels designed like the dogs inside them -- spotted ones for Dalmatians and so on. Then we went off on one about a special project we were going to develop, sun-dried celebrity turds, purified with rainwater -- get celebrities to donate them, coat them with shellac and get a major artist to decorate them. Elton would do it; he's a great guy. George Michael, he'll go for it. What about Madonna? (p 538)

Ken Kalfus, Thirst *** 1/2

I judged this book by its cover. When I came across it in Moe's Books, I was unfamiliar with the author. I bought it based on endorsements from David Foster Wallace and the New York Times Book Review.

Thirst is a collection of short stories, some of which are experimental in the vein of Italo Calvino (especially "Invisible Malls," which even uses the verb calvinoed) and some of which are traditional (such as "No Grace on the Road," narrated by a character caught between his Western education and his Asian heritage). My favorites spanned both types: "The Joy and Melancholy Baseball Trivia Quiz" is told in a question-and-answer format and captures how extreme experiences transcend the rules of the game; "Among the Bulgarians" captures a young man's ambivalence about his summer abroad.

I didn't know Ken Kalfus when I bought this book, but now I will seek out his other books.

Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World *** 1/2

The Post-American World makes a fairly simple argument: soon the United States will not be the uncontested superpower in a unipolar world, not because it has done anything wrong but because of "the rise of the rest." Zakaria uses an analogy of tennis:

In the 1970s, about twenty-five countries sent players to the U.S. Open. Today, about thirty-five countries do, a 40 percent increase. Countries like Russia, South Korea, Serbia, and Austria are now churning out world-class players... In the 19070, three Anglo-Saxon nations — America, Britain, and Australia — utterly dominated tennis. In 2007, the final-sixteen players came from ten different countries. In other words, it's not that the United States has been doing badly over the last two decades. It's that, all of a sudden, everyone is playing the game.

Or, to put it another way, the perceived problems of today are the result of success in helping the rest of the world.

The most enjoyable aspect of the book was viewing the world situation from its perspective. Zakaria looks at the various concerns of modern doomsayers and casually shows that the United States remains in a good position. With respect to education, for example, Americans are frightened by surveys showing that U.S. teens are less skilled at math and science than teens in other nations. Zakaria points out that "the difference between average science scores in poor and wealthy school districts within the United States is four to five times greater than the difference between the U.S. and Singapore national averages... The large cohort of students in the top fifth of American schools rank along with the world's best" (p 192).

The book is easy to read and makes an interesting and compelling argument.