F.S. Michaels, Monoculture **

Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything apparently won a few awards, but to me it seemed like a mediocre sophomore college paper. I had two basic problems with it:

• It argues that we live in a monoculture that views all of life through the lens of the "economic story," reducing all of life to markets and rational self-interested actors. While I agree that economic thinking has increased in the past couple of decades, I don't believe that it is the only "story" we use to understand our lives. For example, the "scientific story" remains strong, as does  the "spiritual story" for many people. So: no monoculture.
• The author's presentation of the "economic story" is jargon-y and not particularly insightful. Even if we were living in a monoculture, this book doesn't make a compelling case for how it shapes our world view.

Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands ****

The Riddle of the Sands is advertised as an "early example of the espionage novel," which is it, but it's also a sailing story, especially in its early chapters. Fans of action will find the story too slow moving. The characters spend weeks navigating the shallow waterways of the Frisian Islands trying to solve a mystery, but I was more intrigued by the navigational techniques than the mystery... until the last few chapters. The plot kept me guessing until the end. 

I enjoyed The Riddle of the Sands much more than other early spy novels that I've read, namely Conrad's Secret Agent and Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. 

Gordon Stainforth, Fiva: An Adventure That Went Wrong **** 1/2

Fiva is the name of a route up Store Trolltind, a mountain in Norway. In 1969, nineteen-year-old Gordon Stainforth and his twin brother John, in a burst of exuberance and misplaced confidence, set out to climb it. The subtitle reveals how it went.

Most mountaineering literature is written by established mountaineers whose well-planned expeditions fall victim to circumstance. The great thing about Fiva is how Stainforth tells the story (in the first person present) from the point of view of an under-prepared teenager. I was able to identify completely with his growing feeling that they were in over their heads, and the frustration at not being able to find the proper route. The adventure itself is less dramatic than other climbs, but that just makes it easier to relate to their predicament.

A true epic, exceedingly well told.

George Saunders, Tenth of December *** 1/2

I'm a big fan of George Saunders and his distinctively humorous writing style. The stories in Tenth of December continue his evolution from a writer of absurdist stories to a writer of more traditional stories with absurdist edges. The book includes stories like "My Chivalric Fiasco" that wouldn't be out of place in earlier collections, but also stories like "Tenth of December" that are more heartfelt than hilarious. The latter category are the strongest stories in the book.

Saunder's greatest strength is in his surprising choice of details:

Years ago at The Illuminated Body he and Molly had seen this brain slice. Marring the brain slice had been a nickel-sized brown spot. The brown spot was all it had taken to kill the guy. Guy must have had his hopes and dreams, closet full of pants, and so on...  Looking down at the brain slice Eber had felt a sense of superiority. Poor guy. It was pretty unlucky, what had happened to him.  He and Molly had fled to the atrium, had hot scones, watched a squirrel mess with a plastic cup. ("Tenth of December")

I love the "closet full of pants" representing the dead guy's promise, and the squirrel representing Eber's joie de vivre. I also loved the exchange about the Flemings and their Russian babies with harelips in chapter 3 of "Home."

Like all Saunders' collections, Tenth of December is too short!

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve ** 1/2

In The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt tries to make the case that Lucretius' poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) is (a) a supremely beautiful work of art and (b) a key influence in the development of Renaissance thought. In my opinion, he failed to show either of these things.

With respect to the aesthetic qualities of De rerum natura, Greenblatt asserts them repeatedly but never even attempts to give us a sense of the poem. The only chapter that deals with the poem directly gives a bullet-pointed summary of its arguments. Maybe it's only beautiful in Latin? At no time did I find myself itching to pick up a copy.

Most of the book is about the discovery of the poem in a monastic library in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini, and about the late Medieval world of the time. These are the best parts too, where Greenblatt's conversational writing style sounds like the narration to accompany a PBS miniseries. Once Bracciolini distributes copies of the poem to a few of his humanist friends, Greenblatt really has to strain to claim wide influence for Lucretius. The main "dangerous" ideas from De rerum natura were already in circulation — as Greenblatt acknowledges in his preface — and there's little evidence that the poem itself had much influence over the development of modern thought.

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending ****

This short Booker Prize winner is a subtle examination of how we construct the story of our lives from our memories, and how the story invariably fails to capture the full reality. The subtlety is both the greatest strength of the book and its biggest weakness: strength because the narrator's thoughts are precisely the kinds of ruminations that occur to us all, and weakness because very little actually happens beyond the mundane. (The exception is the twist at the end.)

Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, Writing Movies for Profit ****

Based on the authors (who are comedians), the title (which is actually Writing Movies for Fun and Profit) and the cover (which shows stereotypes of excess wealth), I expected a pleasantly humorous satire of Hollywood. The general tone is pleasantly humorous, but in fact this book really provides a valuable guide to writing and selling screenplays. If I'm ever inclined to start writing for studios, this is the first place I'll look for advice.

Underneath the sarcastic veneer, Garant and Lennon paint a realistic picture of the life of a screenwriter, with  very specific recommendations ranging from the correct length of a script (100 to 110 pages for a comedy) to evaluating how much the studio likes your script based on the parking pass you receive. I loved the level of detail, down to the fonts and margins that each studio requires and the page on which the "inciting incident" should occur. The number of juicy tidbits is awesome!