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"!)