Norman Rush, Mating ****

Mating has many of the same strengths as Mortals, the Norman Rush novel I discovered and loved earlier this year. The locale is the same, Botswana, and the narrator is an insecure, self-involved academic who overthinks and filters her experiences through a gauze of literary references. Rush seamlessly combines the story of a romantic relationship between a man and a woman with meditations on the relationship between Western liberal reformers and the Africans they help, discreetly drawing parallels between the two. The partners are more equal in modern relationships, but what aspects of paternalism persist?

Objectively, Mating is the more ambitious book, with a National Book Award to prove it. But even though Mating tosses off more ideas about love and society than Mortals did, I enjoyed it less. Probably because the female narrator's central obsessions -- about the role of (strong) women in relationships -- speak to me less directly than Ray's anxieties about his marriage in Mortals. This middle portion of the book dragged for me.

I'm working my way backwards through Rush's oeuvre. Next will be his first collection of stories, Whites.

Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers **** 1/2

This National Book Award winner and "best book of the year or maybe the decade" (Slate.com) nearly lives up to its hype. The narrative non-fiction charts the lives of several people living in a Mumbai slum tucked between the airport and the Hyatt, shielded from travelers' view by a wall covered with advertisements for Italian tiles that promise to be 'beautiful forever.' It's a sad story for the most part, about people barely surviving, but it captures the day-to-day struggles effectively.

Boo focuses on the details of the people, their story, and the place they live, leaving the larger lessons implicit. Her writing is quite beautiful sometimes, but always in a way that serves her narrative. She packs a lot into a comparatively short book (250 pages); in fact, my only complaint is that I wish she had provided a bit more sociological detail in a few places or filled out a couple of the minor characters.

Very vivid and moving, with a strong sense of place.

Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut ****

The cover of Mr. Peanut and the reviews chosen for excerpting promise meta-fictional hijinks and post-modern twists and turns. The book certainly has those, but the strongest sections are the more traditional narrative ones. The main theme is the difficulties of marriage: how spouses are often at a loss to understand what the other spouse needs, and how it's impossible to understand the dynamics of a relationship from the outside. The main plot is a detective story about whether David Pepin murdered his wife Alice (by means of her peanut allergy), and several characters fluctuate between wanting to resolve their marital difficulties through murder or through reconciliation.

The modern trappings of Mr. Peanut are not as compelling as they could be, but the book has more human feeling than such fictional exercises usually do. I look forward to checking out Adam Ross' next book.

Patrick O'Brian, The Fortune of War ** 1/2

The first truly weak entry in the Aubrey/Maturin series finds our two heroes sailing on other people's ships as spectators to real-life sea battles from the War of 1812. Between voyages we get unconvincing and uninspiring espionage in Boston. O'Brien's unique writing style is intact, and many of the usual elements are there, but the lack of agency from Jack Aubrey leaves the book feeling tired. Disappointing.

P.S. The War of 1812 ended up as a leitmotif of my reading this year, its bicentennial. I started with War and Peace in January, read Pierre Berton's history of the Canadian border war, and now The Fortune of War.

Benjamin Hale, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore ***

This ambitious novel is narrated by the world's first chimpanzee to develop the power of speech. Bruno doesn't just learn to speak, he develops a Nabokovian love for metaphor and colorful language. He narrates his life story with the verve of a raconteur.

My reference to Nabokov is not incidental. The early chapters of the book show the clear influence of Lolita: An eloquent murderer telling his story from prison; illicit sexual attraction; justifications of brutish behavior; a love of wordplay. Bruno also introduces many interesting thoughts about the role of language in human consciousness and how our experience of the world would be different without it.

The tone of the story shifts several times over the course of the long novel. Later sections are more straightforwardly comic, less Nabokov than John Kennedy O'Toole or Alexander Theroux.

Despite being littered with stray insights and clever turns of phrase, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore fell short of being the "brilliant, unruly brute of a book" promised to me by the cover. Too often I found myself tripping over an inability to suspend my disbelief. Bruno's narration is chock-full of literary and cultural references, right next to passages where he describes everyday activities that he doesn't comprehend, like riding in an elevator. Like, say, Forrest Gump where Forrest's apparent level of intelligence changes to fit the situation, Bruno's cultural sophistication is unbelievable and widely variable. 

Alistair Maclean, Ice Station Zebra *** 1/2

I went through an Alistair Maclean phase in high school, or possibly junior high school, and I remember Ice Station Zebra being my favorite. So I picked up a copy to read again to see whether it holds up after all these years. And it mostly does.

It shares a lot of the vices of popular action fiction: two-dimensional characters who are always the best in the world, embarrassing "clever" dialogue between them, and an Agatha Christie-style climax with the detective explaining the solution in the drawing room (in this case, the wardroom of a nuclear submarine). However, the action itself really engaged me, especially in the first half of the book.

The story involves a nuclear submarine traveling under the polar ice pack, trying to locate and rescue the meteorological research station Drift Ice Station Zebra. The logistics of the submarine, the navigational challenges, and the polar environment interested me enough that I forgave the expository dialogue. The tension felt well earned. The second half of the book, after they (spoiler alert!) locate the ice station, is still well executed but becomes more like a typical murder mystery. I enjoyed this section the most when it shifted its attention away from the mystery and back to a complication on the submarine.

Carol Birch, Jamrach's Menagerie ***

A Booker Prize finalist apparently, but to me Jamrach's Menagerie was a workman-like nineteenth-century adventure story. Well-written, entertaining enough, but nothing too original. The early part of the book, before our narrator hero Jaffy Brown heads to sea, felt like a static painting of colorful life on the London docks. The most compelling part of the story was the capture and transport of the Komodo dragon -- the dragon himself was the best character. 

Tristan Gooley, The Natural Navigator ** 1/2

I am very interested in the subject of The Natural Navigator. which is how to find your way using clues from the world around you. I even appreciate that Gooley promotes natural navigation as a way of looking at the world and enriching our experience rather than as a mere collection of survival tips. Nonetheless, I was disappointed with the book.

The main problem is with the level of detail. Too many of the sections essentially say, "With practice, you can train yourself to see which way the prevailing wind blows the sand, just like the Taureg do." Gooley tosses in an interesting technique every once in a while, but most of the text describes general principles that, frankly, I'm already familiar with.

I found the book to be more of an advertisement for a seminar than a standalone reference.

Alice LaPlante, Turn of Mind *** 1/2

A murder mystery in which the narrator and prime suspect is a woman suffering from dementia. She is a former orthopedic surgeon; the victim was her best friend and was found with her fingers surgically removed. Did you kill her friend? If so, why? And will she remember?

Frankly, the mystery is a gimmick. I didn't really care about it. The strength of the book is the voice of the narrator. She comes through as a fascinating character, and LaPlante is able to capture a convincing descent into dementia -- until the last few pages, when she has to wrap up the mystery with the typical exposition.

Pierre Berton, War of 1812 **** 1/2

"Being a compendium of the bestselling The Invasion of Canada and Flames Across the Border," this book describes the War of 1812 from a Canadian point of view. (Pierre Berton is a popular Canadian author and historian.) We invaded Canada, don't you know?

Berton is an excellent storyteller who can interleave the big-picture strategy with vivid narrative detail. He uses only primary sources in his quest to "tell not only what happened but also what it was like;... to picture the war from the viewpoints of private soldiers and civilians as well as from those of generals and politicians."   The book includes plenty of excellent maps too. The battles start to seem repetitive in the later stages of the war, as the combatants took and retook the same ground. As Berton says, "In all this [fighting at Fort Erie] there is a weary sense of deja vu."

The fact that I knew next to nothing about the war helped maintain the suspense about the outcome of battles. The occasional reference to the war Britain was fighting in Europe at the time reminded me that the action here was happening at the same time as the action in War and Peace; and one of the incidents sparking the war happened on a ship (Leopard) formerly commanded by the fictional Jack Aubrey. These cross-references were fun to notice.

Entertaining and informative. A perfect choice from browsing in Toronto bookstores.

Richard Ford, Canada ***

The new novel from Richard Ford is quite different from the Bascombe trilogy, one of my all-time favorites. It's far more plot driven (as opposed to character driven), and takes place in the West rather than the suburban Northeast. The main theme of the book is how remarkable, life-changing events happen right in among the mundane events of everyday living, and can themselves be rather mundane.

I really enjoyed the first half of the book, Part I, during which the narrator's mismatched but ordinary-seeming parents -- a former Army officer and a somewhat bohemian Jew -- get arrested for robbing a bank. The details of life for a 15-year-old boy in Great Falls, Montana in 1960 are vivid, and his confusion about how to square the parents he knew with the fact that they robbed a bank seems genuine. He remains a bit of a cipher as a character, but his observations are interesting.

The second half of the book was less successful. Our narrator is taken to a small town in Saskatchewan and put under the care of a mysterious hotel owner. The descriptions of the place remain solid, but I found the narrative and characters less interesting than in the first half.

Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites ** 1/2

This book, whose subtitle is America After Meritocracy, purports to show that our current crisis of public confidence results from the failure of meritocracy. Meritocratic thinking is fundamental to the American creed, but the disasters of the past decade -- the financial crisis, the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and so on -- demonstrate the bankruptcy of the approach.

That's what the author says the book is about, but he doesn't question the fundamental correctness of a meritocracy. He points out how difficult it is to assess merit in real life situations and illustrates the problems that come from the single-minded pursuit of limited goals, but his suggested solutions are the traditional liberal ones: progressive taxation, class solidarity, and government regulation.

Hayes' prose gets a bit overheated when he describes the crises, so that it's easy to lose track of his point. Ultimately, he attributes our lack of trust in social institutions to two factors: the unprecedented inequality in modern America and the inherently different interests of the elite and the rest of us. The role of meritocracy in  his analysis is that its individualistic bias sanctions the inequality and that people welcomed into the elite naturally take on the interests of the elite class. It seems to me that these issues arise regardless of the method used to choose the governing class, so that it's not a strike against meritocracy.

Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey **

I really like the idea of a book consisting of "alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions" of Homer's Odyssey, apocrypha if you will. But I was disappointed with Mason's execution of the idea.

First of all, the stories all have a modern feel to them with their meta-textual tricks and character psychology. At best they are contemporary understandings of the original, not alternative versions of the story. Mason also travels freely beyond the Odyssey, with some stories relating to the Illiad, the Agamemmon stories, and even Greek myths more generally. Finally, and most damaging, the stories just weren't that interesting. They reminded me of the book Sum: Forty Tales from the afterlives: very short vignettes, intriguing subject matter, only intermittently enjoyable.

Norman Rush, Mortals *****

Mortals tells the story of Ray Finch, a Milton scholar teaching at a secondary school in Botswana. His secondary job as a contract CIA agent puts him in touch with African politics, and his uxorious relationship with his possibly unfaithful wife Iris has him obsessing about love and marriage.

The things I love about this book are the things that many people would hate about it:

• The hero is an insecure, self-involved academic who overthinks and filters his experiences through a gauze of literary references.
• His mind keeps returning to his suspicions about his wife even during the life-threatening action in the second half of the book.

These two aspects of Ray's personality can make him an unpleasant character to be around, and they make the story move slowly even when bullets are flying. But the quality of the writing and Rush's psychological insights kept me engrossed and feeling painful empathy with Ray. (I've admitted before that I tend to like obsessed and overly analytical narrators.)

Probably my favorite section of the book comes when the political and intimate story lines collide. Ray has been taken prisoner by a band of mercenaries. After he has been tortured for several days, his captors toss another prisoner into his cell: the man he suspects his wife of sleeping with. Despite the urgency of their situation, Ray feels that he has to confront the man and get him to admit to the adultery. But he can't manage to come right out and ask; he spends pages trying a variety of circumlocutions while the other man tries to focus on the situation at hand. As a reader you want them to get on with the story, but I felt the building suspense as Ray circled ever closer to getting his answer.

R.J. Smith, The One: The Life and Music of James Brown ** 1/2

I was slightly disappointed with this biography of the Godfather of Soul. It touches on the many facets of James Brown -- music, dancing, bandleader, cultural icon, womanizer -- but it failed to make him into a solid three-dimensional character. I often felt like I was reading a collection of anecdotes about Brown, or the fleshed-out notes for a biography, rather than a "definitive" biography.

Smith gives especially short shrift to Brown's relationships with women. Several times we learn that Brown gets married, but his wives disappear from the story soon afterword. The same comment applies to many of his band members; they never develop the personalities they surely had.

Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time ***

The Devil All the Time has almost everything it needs to be a cracking good read: strange backwoods characters who show flashes of unexpected humanity, a plot riddled with violence and religion, and fine writing that straddles the line between hard-boiled and picturesque. (I also really like the physical feel of the Anchor Books paperback -- its heft, its font size, and so on.) However, the pieces don't fit together into anything bigger. The characters are well drawn but never develop; the narrative resolves without any build-up of complications or thematic resonance. The story kept me engaged throughout, but I kept hoping for something more.

Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science **** 1/2

Jackpot. I was casually browsing the Science and Mathematics section of the book store when I noticed Number with its recommendation from Albert Einstein ("Beyond doubt the most interesting book on the evolution of mathematics which has ever fallen into my hands"). I'm always interested in the history of ideas, especially the history of ideas we take for granted like the concept of number. Number presents this history well, showing how the concept derives from the practical problems we solve with it.

Beyond its specific focus on number, I think Dantzig's book provides a clear, concise, practical demonstration of how human interests and cognitive abilities shape the reality of the wold we live in. Plenty of philosophers present their views on the objective reality of the world and its relation to our conceptual understanding of it, but none with the specificity of Dantzig and the single fundamental concept of number. He's an entertaining writer too!

Alan Furst, Spies of the Balkans ***

Spies of the Balkans is a more conventional story than the other Alan Furst novels I've read, with somewhat less compelling atmosphere. The main character Costa Zannis is more aware of his role in the operation of which he is a part, and his motivations are less subtle or mundane than those of other Furst heroes. He also has a love affair that progresses in the instant fashion of novels, not the gradual manner of real life. In short, the book reads more like a traditional spy thriller than earlier Furst novels do, perhaps in an attempt to broaden his audience.

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns ****

The subtitle of this book — The Epic Story of America's Great Migration — is somewhat misleading. While the book is over 600 pages, its focus on the stories of three individuals makes it more intimate than epic. And it's better that way.

The Great Migration is the half-century period during which a huge percentage of black Americans moved from the South to the North and West. The migration changed the face of the country in numerous ways. Wilkerson uses the life stories of three people from different parts of the South to illustrate her general historical and sociological points. She is a journalist, but she describes her characters as well as most novelists. This approach makes her arguments more vividly than an academic approach would have. I was especially struck by the story of Robert Foster driving across the Southwest to Los Angeles. (Foster is the most sharply drawn character.)

On the down side, the book was rather disorganized and repeatedly repeated itself. I'm afraid I'll never be able to track down the place where she made that interesting point about how migrants followed the major train lines, so that you know where a person came from by where they ended up. Or how the end of segregation led to vibrant black communities becoming ghettos.

Definitely recommended.

Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination **** 1/2

An awesome illustration of the value of browsing in used book stores. I'd never heard of Harold Frederic nor of this novel, by I found a copy of a Modern Library edition at Moe's in Berkeley. The premise sounded interesting, and the cover copy called it "one of the four or five best novels by an American in the 19th century."

The Damnation of Theron Ware tells the story of an up-and-coming Methodist minister in upstate New York. Due to some church politics, he is assigned to a small town with a conservative set of church trustees, who don't care for his fancy preaching and fashionable wife. While laboring under the burden of their austere religious vision, he comes under the sway of the local Catholic priest and his rationalist doctor friend. They open Theron's eyes to his provincial ways, and he slowly abandons his beliefs. As the title indicates, the result is not positive.

The book gives a good sense of everyday small-town life and the role of religion in late 19th century America. It takes Theron's religiosity and ambitions seriously, and questions the goodness of adopting a scientific-rationalist view. I empathized with Theron and believed in his sincerity; the author does not stretch him to turn him into a comic character. I loved it!

Blake Butler, Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia ** 1/2

This unusual book has some fantastic passages in it. Butler's ability to capture dream states -- or more accurately, waking dream states -- is positively Lynchian. I'll remain haunted by the image of the man in the car outside of his house at night, with the engine running and his stare permanently straight ahead. And by the huge boulder slowly getting closer to falling on his not-sleeping form. And the recurring images of keys for hidden doors.

I also liked Butler's idiosyncratic way of phrasing ("The initial wanted instinct upon first hitting the pillow is to be blank"), including how he always refers to his body in terms of skin or meat, and his odd observations ("The bulk of any house is made of air"). His implicit comparison between the symptoms of insomnia and senile dementia was interesting.

I can't neglect to mention the thematically appropriate glow-in-the-dark Zs all over the cover of the book.

With all of this great stuff, why the poor rating? Because the parts between are filled with academic Deleuze-ian jargon and meaningless flights of pseudo-profound whimsy, during which my mind wandered so much that I may have missed some of the good stuff. The book would have been much more powerful at half of its current length.

Patrick O'Brian, Desolation Island *** 1/2

The fifth book in the Aubrey-Maturin series relies on familiarity with the characters and the milieu. I fully enjoyed it, but only because O'Brian hooked me with his inimitable style in the first four books. Desolation Island gives Stephen Maturin more of the plot than Jack Aubrey, and moves through its story at a leisurely pace: the only sea battle comes after page 200 and the titular island gets its first mention on page 297. Alas, the deliberate pace of the earlier chapters means that the exciting parts get short-changed a bit in the closing pages. In particular, I thought the scene of the Leopard crew fighting to save its sinking ship or abandon it was rushed.

No matter, though. I'll read The Fortune of War presently.

Yemina Ben-Menahem, editor, Hilary Putnam ****

Hilary Putnam is the philosopher who initiated me into contemporary philosophy. My undergraduate thesis advisor had me read “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (1975), and I was drawn in by the issues Putnam raises in that challenging and entertaining essay. I went on to read the other essays in his collection Mind, Language, and Reality, then works by the philosophers he referred to (such as Quine and Kripke), and on and on to this day. This book is a collection of essays about his philosophy.

None of the authors writes with the clarity or verve of Putnam himself, but by adding their perspectives together I was able to clarify some of my confusion about how Putnam's ideas changed over the years and how his philosophy differs from other contemporary philosophers. More importantly, the book presented ideas that changed, or at least deepened, my own views on the nature of reality.

For a more complete assessment of the philosophical points, see my summary on the Philosophy page of our web site.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Reticence **** David Orr, Beautiful & Pointless ***1/2

Here's proof that I'm a cliché of an over-educated elitist: A month ago, on our way to see a jazz quartet at the opera house, I bought two short books while browsing at a bookstore: an experimental novel from the Belgian literature series (Reticence) and a guide to modern poetry (Beautiful & Pointless). The show was excellent, and I enjoyed both books, which I read over the Memorial Day weekend.

The unnamed narrator of Reticence travels to a small Mediterranean village with his toddler son. It's off-season, so not many people are there. For reasons he can't explain, he doesn't feel like visiting his friend Biaggi who lives in the village. Instead, he wanders the town, visits the beach and the port, and wonders why he hasn't met Biaggi since the village is so small. He concludes that Biaggi must be avoiding him and spying on him. Then he sees a dead cat floating in the harbor and he's sure Biaggi is behind it...

Reticence is all atmosphere: the overcast weather, the secluded town, the lighthouse on the island sweeping its beam across the harbor. The narrator describes recurring events in a way that seems mysterious, and almost as if time is running backwards. It is full of lovely imagery. The dead cat reminded me of Witold Gombrowicz's Cosmos, which also has a narrator interpreting random events as pointing to a larger meaning, and also features a dead cat. The story in Reticence wraps up without coming to much of a conclusion, leading me to a review that uses the title of the next book: beautiful and pointless.

My favorite thing in Beautiful & Pointless is Orr's characterization of reading poetry as being like traveling to a foreign country:

It's not necessarily helpful to talk about poetry as if it were a device to be assembled or a religious experience to be undergone. Rather, it would be useful to talk about poetry as if it were, for example, Belgium. ... Consider the way you'd be thinking about Belgium if you were planning a trip there. You might try to learn a few useful phrases, or read a little Belgian history, or thumb through a guidebook in search of museums, restaurants, flea markets, or promising-sounding bars. The important thing is that you'd know you were going to be confused, or at least occasionally at a loss, and you'd accept that confusion as part of the experience.

Orr has a pleasant and clever writing style. Most of the points he makes apply equally to other specialized art forms (like jazz or experimental novels) as they do to poetry, but that doesn't make them less true. He gives a surprising amount of attention to the business of being a poet, of creating art that very few people outside of your mostly academic circle pay any attention to. It's an enjoyable little book, but frankly didn't make me feel like reading more poetry.

On the other hand, I probably will read other books by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. 

Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books *** 1/2

Marilynne Robinson is an unlikely author for me to enjoy, given her deep Christian themes and my solid atheism. However, first in her novel Gilead and again in this collection of essays, Robinson conveys to me a strong, hopeful worldview that takes seriously the richness of the human spirit. ("...Lacking the terms of religion, essential things cannot be said.") The word that always comes to mind when I read Robinson's work is "grace": she is a careful and subtle thinker whose prose is littered with quiet surprises.

My favorite essays in this collection argue forcefully against reductionist views of human nature, those that treat us as "mere primates" or driven by "rattish self-interest" and "essential beastliness," and for acknowledging human consciousness as "properly an object of wonder." Her approach yields novel arguments for particular social policies, regarding education especially.

When I Was a Child isn't perfect. Her essays are not well structured; they tend to wander over their subject. A couple of them are narrowly focused on issues of purely Christian interest. In moments of weakness Robinson can get strident about modern American society. But overall the book provides an attractive and compelling peek into a way of thinking very different from mine.

Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet *** 1/2

The Flame Alphabet offers a variation on William Burroughs' concept of language as a virus. In this experimental novel, language becomes toxic, causing people to become seriously ill and even die. Children are immune, so many parents do everything they can to ameliorate the symptoms and stay with their kids. The narrator belongs to a religion called "the forest Jews" whose members worship in huts hidden in the woods and receive rabbinical transmissions through underground cables. Some people blame the forest Jews for the epidemic; others think they may hold the key to a cure.

As in Notable American Woman, Marcus includes a personal tenderness not usually found in avant-garde novels of this sort. Sam's relationship with his wife and daughter provides a solid, relate-able foundation for the wild story. I wasn't always sure what Marcus was getting at, but interesting ideas shone through.

Bernadette McDonald, Freedom Climbers ** 1/2

Freedom Climbers recounts the golden age of Polish mountaineering, the 1980s and 1990s when Polish climbers set the standard in Himalayan expedition climbing despite their desperate financial circumstances. McDonald focuses on a few colorful characters in particular, especially Jerzy Kukuczka and the controversial Wanda Rutkiewicz.

As the title suggests, McDonald is more interested in the politics of climbing than the adventure aspects. She spends more time on how the climbers finance their expeditions and finagle their permits than she does describing the mountains or the climbing challenges. She covers interpersonal politics as well: who chose whom for which expedition and how that person felt about it. All of that could be interesting, but her psychological insights tend to be pedestrian and certainly don't make up for the abbreviated mountaineering action.

Geoff Dyer, Zona ***

The full title is Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room. The film in question is Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, one of my all-time favorites. The book basically describes the film and the author's interpretation/reaction to it. Here's how it starts:

An empty bar, possibly not even open, with a single table, no bigger than a small round table, but higher, the sort you lean against--there are no stools--while you stand and drink. If floorboards could speak these look like they could tell a tale or two. ... It's the kind of bar men meet in prior to a bank job that is destined to go horribly wrong.

I enjoyed the book because I love the film and appreciate the thoughts of a fellow admirer. Dyer captures the richness and ambiguity of Stalker well. His interpretation of the events is similar enough to mine that I trust his judgement, but different enough to give me new twists to consider.

If you're not a Stalker fanatic, skip Zona. If you've never seen Stalker, remedy that as soon as possible.

Julian Smith, Crossing the Heart of Africa **

Crossing the Heart of Africa follows what should be a foolproof formula: the author retraces the route of an explorer from the golden age of African exploration. In this case, Smith (roughly) follows the route of Ewart Grogan, the first person to travel the length of Africa from south to north. Why did Grogan make this trek? Officially, it was to scope out potential telegraph or railway routes, but he really undertook it in order to prove himself worthy of a rich woman he hoped to marry. His modern counterpart Smith goes on his journey in advance of his own wedding.

The combination of romance and adventure should be a winner, but it's not. On the romantic side, Smith asserts the strength of Grogan's feelings for Gertrude, but we never see them illustrated. The story of Smith's own romance is mundane, full of episodes that are surely meaningful for Smith and his wife but not interesting for us. And despite the presence of lions, elephants, head-hunters, dense swamps, and genocidal tribes, the journeys lack any narrative drive to tie together the events. I didn't get a sense of Africa, or of Grogan's character, or of how the Africa of today relates to the Africa of 1899.

Dan Chaon, Among the Missing ***

Among the Missing is a short story collection from an author whose novels I have enjoyed. The stories were written earlier than the novels, and I think it shows: while they share many of the strengths (and themes) of the novels, they seem constrained by the conventions of the literary short story. I also think that Chaon's character development skills are better suited to the longer form -- unless that's just my preference for novels over stories showing.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars *** 1/2

You can tell from the title that Wind, Sand and Stars is going to take a lyrical approach to its subject matter. Although the cover proclaims it as "a National Geographic Top Ten Adventure Book of All Time," Wind, Sand and Stars uses its author's adventures as a mere launching pad for musings on the nature of man, his place in the universe, and the meaning of life. In other words, don't read this book for its exciting aviation adventures, but for its beautiful imagery and engaging philosophy. It has the latter in abundance, although Saint-Exupery's prose is undeniably overblown at times.

Weekend Wodehouse ** 1/2

P.G. Wodehouse has a reputation as one of the wittiest and funniest writers of English. Weekend Wodehouse is a sampler of short pieces from the master, providing a taste of his various characters and styles.

Wodehouse's way with a sentence is undeniable and Wildean. But because he restricts himself to comic tales about the British upper class, his stories inevitably sound like anecdotes shared over a pint at a club in the 1930s. That's his intent, but I don't find them engaging.

I picked up Weekend Wodehouse in a used copy at Moe's Books. The pages had an appropriately musty smell.

Susan Casey, The Wave ***

The Wave is a surfing book disguised as a popular science book about giant waves. In her introduction, Casey says she'll investigate "freak" waves from the point of view of scientists, mariners, and surfers. And she does, but with a heavy emphasis on surfers. Most of the chapters describe awesome days out surfing with Laird Hamilton, the literary equivalent of a Warren Miller film or Endless Summer.

Casey is a very good writer, effectively capturing both the sense of an experience and scientific principles. I just wish she'd provided more of the latter.

Felix Markham, Napoleon ***

One encounters Napoleon Bonaparte in many different places. He is the villain in War and Peace, the background villain in the Patrick O'Brien Jack Aubrey novels, the self-satisfied emperor in the huge J.L. David painting at the Louvre. He fought the Turks when he occupied Egypt. He was exiled to the island of Elba, or was it St Helena? Trafalgar, Waterloo, Austerlitz, Josephine. How do all of these glimpses fit together? And how does the Napoleonic era relate to the French Revolution? I wanted to read a biography to find out, especially after our recent trip to Paris.

At 300 pages, Markham's biography is necessarily short for such an eventful life. It gave me what I wanted, although it did have plenty of exhausting paragraphs that were little more than lists of battles or political machinations. It felt well balanced in its opinions and was not without interesting insights, but it couldn't really give a sense of Napoleon as a person. Quite an amazing life, for sure.

Richard S. Wheeler, Snowbound ***

Snowbound tells a fictionalized version of John Fremont's fourth expedition, which sought a railway route across the Rockies at the 38th parallel... in winter. The expedition met with disaster, largely because Fremont interpreted all warning signs as merely impediments that would make his destiny more impressive.

At the heart of the story is the contradictory character of Fremont, "a man of considerable courage and ability who nevertheless was constantly getting into grave trouble, often from lack of judgment." Fremont inspired loyalty among his men; various of the narrators in Snowbound note with perplexity the blind obedience they all had to his obviously flawed decisions.

The first half of the story, leading the crew into disaster, has a certain repetitiveness to it: they should turn back, Fremont obstinately insists on continuing, mules die, the expedition members wonder why they don't speak up. Also, the various expedition members who narrate the story don't have distinctive voices, lending a sameness to their observations. I also felt a lack of sympathy, since the character's choices were so obviously wrong and so reversible. The drama was significantly more involving once their situation became apparently hopeless.

Fremont is an intriguing character, and I can imagine tracking down some of Wheeler's primary sources in the future,

Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs **** 1/2

These two excellent adventure/travel books describe the post-WWII years that Thesiger spent among the Bedu of southern Arabia and the Madan of southern Iraq respectively. The books give a strong sense of place, both the natural landscape and the culture of the people in these harsh environments. Arabian Sands in particular captures the diversity of the land that might seem at first like undifferentiated desert sands.

Thesiger has a talent for finding the telling detail that paints a picture and allows him to make a general point without interrupting the flow of the narrative. He has an obvious respect for the people and their way of life. In the course of his story he shows how the customs of the tribes fit into an ecosystem of mutually supporting cultures; in a later chapter of The Marsh Arabs, he makes a compelling case for the advantages of traditional ways of life over the apparently less burdensome modern life, including the double-edged sword of education.

These two books will forever color my mental picture of that part of the word.

Max McCoy, Damnation Road ** 1/2

This paperback Western starts out promisingly, in medias res, with a bleeding outlaw walking into a general store to buy ammunition. The author's strength is his action scenes, and he wisely starts with a long one. The author's weakness is his inability to build any narrative momentum. There's no urgency between the action set pieces, no sense of what the protagonist's goal is or what's driving his actions. As a result, the book feels very episodic, like a collection of stories instead of a novel. The plot developments described on the back cover don't start until half way through the book, and they sound more cohesive in summary than they do on the page.

Will Hermes, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire ***

They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but the cover of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever includes a quote on the back cover that sums up my experience of reading it:  "By simply putting things in chronological order, Will Hermes shows just how astonishing New York City's music was in the 1970s" (Luc Sante). Combined with the informative subtitle, this recommendation tells you what's good and bad about the book.

On the plus side, Hermes covers all of the various types of music that were vital in NYC from 1973 to 1977: rock, salsa, disco, rap, jazz, and classical. The down side is encapsulated in the word "simply" in the quote from Luc Sante: Hermes doesn't provide much insight into the musical innovations that were happening, nor into any cross-pollination between the styles. He pretty much records the facts in chronological order, and counts on us to say, "isn't it amazing that all of this was happening at the same time?"

I also think the subtitle is hyperbolic. While it's certainly true that a lot of classic music came out of this place and time (from Born to Run to Saturday Night Fever to Einstein on the Beach), I think only the first stirrings of rap/hip-hop qualify as "changing music forever." And one last skeptical question: couldn't you make similar arguments for, say, San Francisco in the 1960s or Memphis in the 1950s?

My favorite parts of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire turned out to be the personal recollections of the author, who was an outer-borough teenager at the time. His memories were vivid interludes between the sometimes gossipy descriptions of Phillip Glass meeting Lou Reed and the famous people who attended the Talking Heads' first headlining gig.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King *** 1/2

The Pale King is an unfinished novel that David Foster Wallace left when he died. It takes place at an IRS processing center in Peoria in 1985. Or perhaps it would be better to say that it revolves around the IRS processing in 1985, because many of the chapters describe prior events in the lives of the characters who eventually work there. The major theme of the book is boredom: how people deal with it and how central it is to life in the modern bureaucratic world.

Few ordinary Americans know anything...about the deep changes the Service underwent in the mid-1980s, changes that today directly affect the way citizens' tax obligations are determined and enforced. And the reason for this public ignorance is not secrecy.... The real reason why US citizens were/are not aware of these conflicts, changes, and stakes is that the whole subject of tax policy and administration is dull. Massively, spectacularly dull.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of this feature... The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities help insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a more effective shield than is secrecy. (Chapter 9)

It's important to read The Pale King as a collection of drafts and fragments rather than as a completed novel. For one thing, the book is all setup and no narrative payoff — although in the preface the editor suggests that DFW might have intended the final book to be like that too. Some of the extant chapters are impressive, and you can see where the author was headed. I think you have to be a DFW fan to appreciate the insights into how he worked, but if you are a DFW fan it's definitely worthwhile.

Mark Chisnell, Spanish Castle to White Night ***

This book tells the story of the eight boats that sailed the 2008-2009 Volvo Ocean Race. The writing style is exactly the style of articles in sailing magazines, which I found kind of annoying. On the other hand, Chisnell covers many interesting aspects of ocean racing over the course of many chapters: strategic planning, weather forecasting, food preparation, disaster recovery, race coordination, and so on — although with comparatively little in the way of actual sailing maneuvers. Interesting but not entirely compelling as a narrative.

Note that I read this book on my Kindle, where it didn't have any pictures. Pictures would have been good.

G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday ** 1/2

An intriguing introduction to this book appeared in The Ecstacy of Influence, and barely a week later I came across a copy in an airport book store. Kismet!

Alas, I didn't care for it. The Man Who Was Thursday is an allegorical spy story, for lack of a better description. An undercover police officer infiltrates the Central Anarchist Council, only to discover that most of the other ranking anarchists are policemen also. The initial chapters are strong, especially the chapter describing the background of our hero Gabriel Syme, but I lost interest as the book left realism behind for a farcical tone.

John Henry Patterson, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo ***

I followed up my first Kindle book with what appears to be my first print-on-demand book.

The Man-Eaters of Tsavo is a non-fiction adventure story written in 1907. The title refers to a pair of lions that terrorized a railway construction crew in East Africa until the author managed to hunt them down. Patterson was a railway engineer, and the book covers that discipline a little while focusing on his hunting exploits. Patterson is a good writer in the Victorian style, which means sentences like this one, which comes after his borrowed gun misfires:

Bitterly did I anathematise the hour in which I had relied on a borrowed weapon, and in my disappointment and vexation I abused owner, maker, and rifle with fine impartiality. (p 31)

The first third of the book, which describes the man-eater's reign of terror, is a taut, exciting story. The remainder, which covers the rest of his time in Africa, is interesting but less involving. I'd give the first third a four star rating.

I read the book in an edition that was remarkably free of any of the usual paraphernalia. No copyright page, no author bio, no introduction to provide context. The front cover has just the author name and title over a color picture that is unrelated to the contents. The back cover says, "This collection serves as a vessel to carry forth the light shed by the greatest writers the world has ever known," without any indication of what collection we're talking about. Finally, I noticed this on the bottom of the final page:

Made in the USA
Lexington, KY
17 December 2011

It felt appropriate to read this story from another world in an edition that preserved an element of mystery about its provenance.

One last note about this story. As it happens, back in 1974 at the age of 11, I read the Reader's Digest Condensed Book version of an obscure novel titled Lion in the Evening. It was the story of a railroad crew being attacked by a pair of man-eating lions. The surrounding plot didn't thrill me, but I've always remembered the mood that descended on the men as evening fell. (I also learned the word "escarpment" from this book.) Now I've read the true story on which that book was based. Coincidence, eh?

Steven Millhauser, We Others ****

The first book I read on my Kindle!

We Others is a collection of new and reprinted stories. Millhauser has a very distinctive writing style that combines old-fashioned prose with contemporary flourishes. Like his novel Martin Dressler, his stories tend to take place in the past — he is especially enamored of the late nineteenth century — and to move from a detailed realism at the beginning to over-the-top fantasy by the end. (Would a story like "August Eschenburg" be considered steampunk?) It's a joy to read an author interested in the pleasures of narrative.

I enjoyed most of the stories in the collection. My least favorite was the one that strayed farthest from Millhauser's typical concerns: the early story "A Protest Against the Sun," which seemed like faux J.D. Salinger. My favorites included most of the new stories (although not the over-long title story), "August Eschenburg," and "The Barnum Museum."

A major theme of the story "August Eschenburg" was the purpose of art and motivations of artists. One character asserts that "the proper end of a work of art was to arouse in the beholder a state of quiet reflection and not of astonishment." Despite the fantastic flights to which Millhauser's stories often lead, they do arouse in me a state of quiet reflection.

Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City *** 1/2

The Devil in the White City juxtaposes two fascinating stories that happened at the same time and place (Chicago, 1893). The "White City" is the World Columbian Exposition, an event that looms large in American history, especially architectural history; the titular devil is H.H. Holmes, a con man and murderer who may have taken advantage of the exposition to lure victims.

I was interested in both stories, but I was frequently annoyed by Larson's prose. Especially in the earlier chapters, he crammed random facts into the subordinate clauses of long sentences, effectively killing the flow of the narrative. His characters remain flat, with murky motives. He seemed to be at war with himself: as a historian, he wanted to stick to the documented facts, while as a narrative writer he wanted to describe the internal consciousness of his characters. In my opinion, he didn't get the balance right.

Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence *** 1/2

Jonathan Lethem is almost exactly my age, and apparently even worked at Moe's Books in Berkeley during the time I was a student at Cal. Which means that his cultural reference points, which turn up repeatedly in this collection of non-fiction pieces, are nearly identical to mine. His writing style is often workman-like, wearing its (explicitly stated) influences on its sleeve and failing to transcend them. All of which means that I can easily identify with Lethem as a doppelgänger for what my life could have been like if I'd become a novelist.

My rating for the book wavered between four stars and three stars depending on which section I was reading. I enjoyed his pieces about film and music more than the ones about art and books. (Low culture vs high?) Overall, though, the individual pieces work together to present a portrait of the writer (in the piecemeal style of Thirty-two short films about Glenn Gould) and to make an argument about an artist's position relative to his influences, centered around the title essay.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace **** 1/2

Now you know why it has been so long since my last post: as a palate cleanser following a series of modernist novels, I tackled the loosest of the loose, baggy monsters.

Starting War and Peace is intimidating, proverbially so. It is over 1200 pages long, not counting the inevitable critical apparatus surrounding it, and it deals with historical events unfamiliar to the typical American reader. Making it through the first hundred pages is tough — you're not fully committed yet, you don't know which of the many characters will turn out to be significant, and its largely in French! But fear not, your perseverance will pay off. With War and Peace, you get a strong narrative with characters you care about and an account of the Napoleonic Wars, plus a Schopenhauer-influenced theory of history and character.

Tolstoy's strengths as a writer are his ability to describe an event from a character's (often confused or self-contradictory) point of view and his remarkable way of switching seamlessly between points of view to create a three-dimensional image. The most annoying thing about his writing style is its repetitiveness, at all levels from the sentence to the chapter. I really didn't need to hear one more time about how Napoleon did not and could not determine the outcome of the battles.

Reading War and Peace was nothing like eating my spinach. I truly enjoyed it (after the first 100 pages). I'm also a fan of Anna Karenina, so I'm sure to read more Tolstoy in the future.