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.