The Philosophy of W.V. Quine *** 1/2

I coveted this book for many years before I finally found a copy on the shelf at Moe's Books in Berkeley. I love the approach of The Library of Living Philosophers: each volume includes a short autobiography from its subject, a sample of his or her handwriting, a complete bibliography, and numerous critical papers from peers, each with a response from the guest of honor.

Overall the book fell short of my lofty expectations for it, primarily because of the uneven quality of the commissioned papers. Even Quine's responses were mostly devoid of his trademark wit. I didn't gain as much new insight into Quine's work as I would have liked. On the other hand, I was proud to feel that I understood Quine's point of view better than some of the professionals.

For more details about the philosophy contained in this book, see the Quine page on our Web site.

Shusaku Endo, Scandal ***

Scandal is a later novel by the author of Silence. An aging Christian novelist hears rumors that he spends his free time in the seedy districts of Tokyo, and that there's a portrait hanging in an establishment there. His curiosity leads him to track down the portrait and his apparent doppelgänger, and ultimately leads to him question his own nature.

The story is well constructed, and it tackles Christian themes from a unique angle. It implicitly compares the artistic idea of finding beauty in ugliness with the religious idea that every sin contains the seeds of salvation. The main character struggles with the idea that he, and perhaps everyone, has a dark side.

The writing is very stiff and awkward. It that Endo or is it the translation? Either way, it detracts significantly from my enjoyment of the book.

Gaito Gazdanov, The Spectre of Alexander Wolf ***

During the Russian civil war, a young man gets separated from his unit and kills a soldier in the remote forest. The killing haunts his life. Many years later, he reads a short story which recounts the killing from the victim's point of view. He sets out to find the writer of the story.

The plot of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf involves a short story, and I think the book would have been stronger as a short story itself. The setup and the narrative are good, but the characters' musings about fate and guilt are too repetitive and the romance is not totally relevant.

Simon Singh, The Code Book *****

The Code Book is a history of encryption, from the simplest ciphers (Caesar shift) to public key cryptography. It moves step by step, explaining how each innovation addresses a weakness of the earlier system then showing how codebreakers found new patterns that enable them to decipher the more sophisticated cipher. It places all of this work in context through historical episodes where codes and ciphers played a central role, such as the trial of Mary Queen of Scots and the breaking of the Enigma during World War II.

The book has exactly the right balance between narrative, technical detail, and puzzles. It was fun to read about a new coding strategy that seemed impossible to break, then see how creative cryptanalysts manage to figure it out. There's a chapter about deciphering hieroglyphics and lost languages, which links cryptography to linguistics. I even love the size and weight of the book, the font, and the illustrations.

Entertaining and informative.

John Casey, An American Romance *** 1/2

The attributes that make An American Romance great are inseparable from the ones that make it insufferable. The first two parts of the book do an amazing job of showing how two very different people fall in love because their differences fit exactly what the other person needs, and the whole book is filled with insights about personalities and interpersonal relationships. However, the prose is painfully overwritten in exactly the way you might expect from a writer who spent several years at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Nearly every paragraph starts with a concrete description but ends with abstract twaddle. From a randomly selected page (103):

She said, "That summer when Henry was in the hospital, I went to music camp. You asked me if I was happy. I think I decided then that happiness was a passive, and, therefore, vulnerable state, so I started to prefer excitement..."

All of the characters, even the non-intellectual Mac, articulate this kind of generalization every time they think or speak. The generalizations are sometimes insightful and sometimes baffling, but the density of them is exhausting.

In its later parts, An American Romance portrays Iowa in a way that seems loving but condescending (cf. Anya's film project Iowa Girl).

I love An American Romance for Anya and Mac and the theater converted from a barn, but the over-educated tone finally defeats me.

Lorrie Moore, Bark *** 1/2

I love Moore's sardonic writing style, and she is a master at creating believable, relatable characters. I thoroughly enjoy reading her stories, even when I lose interest in the narrative.

My favorite story in this collection was the first, "Debarking": when Ira starts dating after his wife leaves him, he tries to ameliorate his personality flaws while seeking to understand the funny strange woman he's seeing. My least favorite stories were the two with dated Bush-era plots.

3 x 33 1/3 (= 100!) ***

A couple of months ago, Slate.com ran an article about the 33 1/3 series of books about classic record albums. I'd read a couple of the books, including the awesome Let's Talk About Love, but the article reignited my interest. When I found a shelf full of 33 1/3 books at Atomic Books in Baltimore, I bought the ones they had at the intersection of the 10 best 33 1/3 books and albums I know well.

I ended up with Aja (Steely Dan), Tusk (Fleetwood Mac), and Fear of Music (Talking Heads). Coincidentally, all three albums came out in the span of a couple of years in the late 1970s.*

The books, like the albums they describe, are very different from one another. Aja, by Don Breithaupt, uses musicological analysis to explain how Steely Dan's music is jazz fusion without being, you know, "jazz fusion"; Tusk, by Rob Trucks, barely talks about the music at all during tangents about going your own way; for Fear of Music, Jonathan Letham channels Greil Marcus.

Both the Aja and Tusk books offered nearly forgotten tidbits about the music industry in the late 1970s. Breithaupt reminds us about the diversity of styles on Top 40 radio stations by providing an impressively broad list of singles on the Billboard charts of March 4, 1978: everything from Lynyrd Skynyrd to the Close Encounters theme song, with "Peg" at #11. Trucks has this to say about the infamous failure of the Tusk album:

Consensus sales figures total 4 million for Tusk... Consensus sales figures cluster at 23 million for Rumours ... Rumours to Tusk represents the largest drop from one album to the next. Ever.

The 4 million copies of Tusk which represent the ground side of the drop from dizzying heights would now qualify as the best-selling album of the year. 

I enjoyed all three books, each in their own way, although none of them truly deepened my experience of the albums.

* It's not really a coincidence, is it? I was in high school in the late 1970s, so a preponderance of "albums I know well" come from the late 1970s.

Aleksander Hemon, The Lazarus Project *** 1/2

Aleksander Hemon often gets compared to Nabokov and Conrad, because he's a gifted prose stylist for whom English is a second language. He seems to derive great pleasure from the wide range of adjectives and descriptive verbs available to him; it gives his descriptions of people and places a wonderful specificity and richness.

However, neither the narrative nor the themes of The Lazarus Project have the same depth as the prose. The book interleaves the (true) story of a Ukrainian immigrant in 1908 Chicago who was shot by police as a suspected anarchist with the (fictional) story of a Bosnian immigrant in 2008 Chicago who wants to write about the earlier immigrant. The idea is to say something about the immigrant experience and about the United States' attitudes toward immigrants. I found the story somewhat clichéd and the ideas not too insightful.

Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory ***

The subtitle is a pun. The book doesn't promulgate any specific conspiracy theory, but rather lays out a theory about conspiracies. Walker summarizes numerous conspiracy theories from the colonial era to today, and proposes a taxonomy based on the identity of the "folk devil" behind the conspiracy. He also shows that these theories occur at all times from all points along the political spectrum, not just during contentious times from the lunatic fringe.

Walker's main argument is that conspiracy theories "reveal something true about the anxieties of those who believe and repeat it." I don't doubt that at all, and it's not news to me. I found the argumentation to be a bit sloppy, and the book covers some topics that aren't really conspiracies at all. The entertainment value of the book comes from learning about historical conspiracies, like the one at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. (The United States was founded by a conspiracy!)

While Walker explicitly demurs from claiming whether individual theories are true or false, I found his most interesting insights in the final chapter (about post-9/11) where he violates this principle and demonstrates how the "facts" get constructed.

V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas **** 1/2

There are many reasons why I shouldn't like A House for Mr Biswas. It covers a long time period (Mr Biswas' entire life), the main character is helpless and often obnoxious, and the subsidiary characters are overly broad for comic purposes. Despite the odds, though, I really enjoyed it.

The book has two major virtues. First, it paints a vivid (and savagely comic) portrait of life for Indian emigrants in colonial Trinidad. It travels from the poor countryside to the capital's high society, meeting people from the whole spectrum. Second, Naipaul has fantastic control over the tone even as the story veers between comedy, tragedy, and pathos. I hated Mr Biswas, I felt for him, I didn't understand his decisions, and I rooted for his success, sometimes all at the same time. I had the same range of reactions to most of the characters over the course of the novel. For example, Naipaul describes the sad state of the titular house and emphasizes how the seller swindled Mr Biswas, but that doesn't contradict the pride Mr Biswas feels in owning it.

In many ways, A House for Mr Biswas feels like a Dickens novel set in the West Indies, with its large cast of colorful characters and its sardonic view of an entire society. 

Richard Henry Dana Jr, Two Years Before the Mast *****

I put off reading this sailor's classic for many years because of its reputation -- and self-proclaimed purpose -- as an exposé of the dreadful conditions for common sailors in the 19th century. I expected a grim and indignant tale. But that's not at all what Two Years Before the Mast is like. It is an exceedingly well-written account of the sailing life and of pre-gold-rush California. It may not be an adventure story, but it offers plenty of memorable adventures nonetheless.

I imagine that many readers would find its details about shipboard life and the cattle-hide trade tedious, but for me Dana paints a complete portrait of a way of life. I found surprising insights throughout the book, all the way to the very end where Dana notes that:

The soundings on the American coast are so regular that a navigator knows as well where he has made land, by the soundings, as he would by seeing the land. Black mud is the soundings of Block Island. As you go toward Nantucket, it changes to a dark sand; then, sand and white shells; and on George's Banks, white sand...

Sailing around Cape Horn among the icebergs, carrying hides on his head through the Santa Barbara surf, curing the hides on the beach in San Diego, dodging the boarding-house touts in Boston Harbor, hauling in the weather cross-jack braces -- it's all fascinating.

Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Google Works **

Eric and Jonathan promote an "obligation to dissent," so I feel free to opine that How Google Works is weak, disorganized, and doesn't fulfill the promise of its title.

The authors' intent is to describe new managerial principles that apply in "the Internet Century" using examples from Google's remarkable success. However, the book fails to provide actionable details for running a company, or much insight into how Google is different. Instead, it compiles well-rehearsed bromides (respond quickly to email; have an owner for every meeting), identifies traditional business practices you don't need (business plans; market research), and suggests that all you need to do it hire "smart creatives" and let them loose. It doesn't say anything about the magic of managing all of these smart people with their great ideas.

For many people, the main attraction will be the inside stories from Google. The stories are there, but they often don't support their points. For example, the key takeaway from the chapter on decision-making is to "decide with data," but the introduction is the story of Google's withdrawal from China in 2009, which was decided on moral grounds rather than data.

Overall, I think the Founder's IPO Letter presents the case more clearly and succinctly.

Ben Marcus, Leaving the Sea *** 1/2

Leaving the Sea is a collection of stories from my favorite experimental writer. It's structured like an avant-garde sandwich, with surprisingly traditional stories at the beginning and end and the well-nigh incomprehensible ones in the middle. Although the stories come from many different publications over the course of a decade, they work together quite well.

My favorite stories were the ones that most resembled Marcus' novels Notable America Women and The Flame Alphabet. Many of the stories treat bodies as disposable costumes and heads as empty bones filled with air and bad thoughts. Characters often speak into bags or fabrics.

"First Love" has just the right balance between creative language, off-kilter ideas, and emotional warmth; "Origins of the Family" strikes a similar tone. "Rollingwood" is my favorite of the loneliness quartet that comprises Part 1.

The Stanley Fish Reader ****

Stanley Fish writes on a wide range of topics -- John Milton, contract law, deconstruction, campus politics, free speech, affirmative action -- but his argument is always the same: our understanding and values derive from a set of historically constructed background assumptions, and that's nothing to be alarmed about.

Reading Fish is a lot like reading the philosopher Richard Rorty. They are both fervent anti-foundationalists with clear and entertaining prose styles (for those with a tolerance for academic writing), and both come across as too proud of being provocative. I agree with most of what Fish says, even when it is frustrating. (It's frustrating to be stuck without a neutral bias-free perspective.)

My introduction to Fish was his collection There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (and it’s a good thing too), and I would recommend that book over this one. The Stanley Fish Reader may provide a wider and more accurate portrait of Fish's career, but it's not as thought-provoking. The introductory notes for each essay are uniformly weak; I would much prefer a book titled Fish and His Critics (on the model of Rorty and His Critics), where Fish responds to original critical essays.

Max Barry, Machine Man ** 1/2

Barry's most recent book, Lexicon, led me to believe that he was an above-average thriller writer who can make wild scientific plots sound plausible. So I was anxious to read Machine Man, which is about an engineer who starts replacing his body parts with improved mechanical ones.

The first chapter is an excellent start. It introduces our narrator, Dr Charles Neumann, as he wakes in the morning and can't find his phone.

I didn't know how warm it would be today. It might rain, it might be humid, I had no idea. I had a desktop but it took forever to boot, more than a minute. I would have to choose clothes without information on the environmental conditions. It was insane. 

The chapter is funny and clearly outlines Neumann's off-kilter perspective as an engineer above all. (He sees another character wearing earrings and thinks she must favor appearance over efficiency, poor girl.)

Alas, it's downhill after that. The other characters are cartoonish, with names like Cassandra Cautery and Lola Shanks (which retrospectively made me notice the narrator's last name). The action sequences are nowhere near as compelling as the ones in Lexicon were. Most damning, Neumann's personality shifts around according to the dictates of the plot: sometimes he's the odd duck making logical but surprising decisions; other times he's the hapless victim of the ruthless company he works for.

Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read ** 1/2

Yeah, what do we see when we read?

If I said to you, "Describe Anna Karenina," perhaps you'd mention her beauty. If you were reading closely you'd mention her "thick lashes," her weight, or maybe even her little downy mustache (yes--it's there.) ... But what does Anna Karenina look like? ... What does her nose look like? ... How did you picture her before I asked? Noseless?

It's a great question, but unfortunately What We See When We Read doesn't provide much insight into the answer. The author successfully problematizes the issue -- that is, he demonstrates how mysterious the process really is -- and he knows that it relates to the broader question of how we comprehend the world ("The practice of reading feels like, and is like, consciousness itself: imperfect; partial; hazy; co-creative"). It all just makes me want answers!

Andrea Barrett, Archangel ****

Andrea Barrett has a gimmick. As the New Republic put it in their review: "As surely as Woody Allen writes about anxious intellectuals and John le Carré writes about spies, Barrett writes about scientists." Her stories always revolve around a professional or amateur seeking to understand the natural world around them. They usually take place in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

Barrett's focus on science and scientists makes her stories unique and gives her characters the attractive qualities of intelligence and curiosity. The stories always inspire me to develop new interests and pay attention to the world around me. On the other hand, they do tend to repeat the same themes. The five stories in this book all deal with an insecure protagonist torn between loyalty to an established scientist and a new theory rejected by that scientist.

My favorite story was "The Ether of Space," which is also the messiest story. Somehow its ideas kept swirling around in my head after I finished it. Objectively, "The Particles" is probably the best story, with an action-packed ocean disaster to complement its story of scientific rivalry.

Norman Rush, Subtle Bodies ** 1/2

I am a major fan of Norman Rush's previous two novels, Mating and especially Mortals. Subtle Bodies is a less ambitious work, and it also manages to be less successful.

Ned travels to an estate in the Catskills to memorialize the recently deceased ringleader of his group of college friends. The friends have grown apart over the years, and Ned ponders what it was that brought them together in the first place. His wife Nina joins them, providing an outsider perspective on the group.

Rush's greatest strength is creating full-bodied educated characters who think just as much as they feel. He also captures the subtleties of relationships well. Subtle Bodies retains these strengths: Ned and Nina's marriage is realistically supportive (if a bit schematic), and the friends' nostalgic reminiscences about college shenanigans feel genuine. But the characters are caught in a contrived plot. I didn't believe any part of the present-day action.

Mark Miodownik, Stuff Matters ***

Miodownik is a materials science professor at University College London. The book takes a look at several materials that appear in a photo of the author drinking tea on a rooftop: steel, glass, plastic, and so on. Miodownik includes personal stories, to make the point that we all have relationships with these materials even as we typically ignore them.

The book was entertaining, and I learned a variety of cocktail-party facts about the ubiquitous materials. (For example, stainless steel has a thin, self-repairing coat of chromium oxide, which prevents it from rusting and also makes it tasteless and ideal for cutlery.) However, I was hoping to learn about materials science a little more deeply.

Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove ****

These stories invest their fantastical premises with surprising emotional resonance. The collection is full of wild beasts like vampires, scarecrows, women turning into silkworms, equine former presidents, and magical tattoos, but I remember the feelings more than the fantasy. The strongest stories are metaphors for self-empowerment.

Russell's stories are very traditional in structure, in fact they often felt like variations on stock "creative writing program" narratives. She's such a strong writer, though, that they transcend all of the genres they partake of.

 

Howard W. French, China's Second Continent **** 1/2

The titular second continent is Africa. More than a million Chinese have emigrated to Africa, the Chinese government has provided a vast amount of infrastructure for African countries, and Chinese businesses are prospering. The author traveled in southern and western Africa, interviewing Chinese immigrants and local Africans about their experiences.

French constructs his book as a mosaic. Rather than presenting a carefully structured argument, he describes his meetings with individuals almost in the manner of a travelogue and allows his conclusions to emerge from there. I found intriguing insights throughout, not just about the Chinese program in Africa but also globalization and national development more generally. African governments sure have their work cut out for them!

China needs natural resources to fuel its growth; it also needs new markets for its products and new horizons for its people. Africa is famous for its natural resources; it also has the fastest growing population and the highest amount of fallow arable land. China would say that they have a mutually beneficial relationship with African countries: They provide valuable infrastructure in exchange for resources, and gain a new market as a side benefit. But a growing number of Africans are unhappy: The Chinese hire other Chinese rather than local Africans, and the most of the profits are lost to corruption in the often short-lived governments.

Although the author spent time in China and speaks Chinese, China's Second Continent ultimately has an anti-Chinese tone. China is taking advantage of the inexperience and instability of many African governments to advance its own interests. On the other hand, plenty of Africans blame their governments' shortsightedness and corruption.

Max Barry, Lexicon ****

Lexicon is a fast-paced thriller whose science-fiction elements come from the science of linguistics. There is a group of people called poets who can identify which of 238 personality types you are and know the words to make you perfectly compliant to their will. 

The premise and plot of Lexicon are no less preposterous than those in a Dean Koontz novel, but Barry sells it for much longer.  No huge intuitive leaps that turn out to be right on target! (Longtime readers of my reviews know that Dean Koontz has many stylistic tics that drive me crazy.) Barry is especially good at writing action sequences: the long fight to capture Wil Parke is exciting and cinematic. He also makes his "scientific" ideas as plausible as possible.

I really enjoyed the first three quarters of Lexicon. I was less enamored of its end game, which introduced an extraneous super-villain when Wolfe herself would have been sufficient and more thematically fitting.

Robert Perisić, Our Man in Iraq ****

I bought this novel, part of "The Best of Croatian Literature" series, from the bookstore on the Stradun in Dubrovnik. The title and the helicopter silhouette on the cover led me to expect a glorified genre story, with a Croatian journalist tracking down his missing cousin in Iraq. Instead, I got something I liked better: a literary novel that explores modern Croatian society. The war in Iraq is a MacGuffin.

The narrator of Our Man in Iraq is Toni, the economics correspondent for a Zagreb newspaper. He and his actress girlfriend are considering buying a flat, which leads Toni to consider how he can grow into responsibility without succumbing to conventional stereotypes. His search for a suitable identity -- and his relationship to his "redneck" relatives -- is a metaphor for Croatia's post-communist situation.

I appreciated that Our Man in Iraq works as a personal story even if you ignore its larger concerns. Perisić writes perceptively about relationships and how people define their personal identities. I found insightful passages with some regularity.

It all ran by itself, without any particular plan. We enjoyed that experiment. We went on our first summer holiday together, then there were autumn walks in Venice, the Biennale, Red Hot Chili Peppers in Vienna, Nick Cave in Ljubljana, a second summer holiday, a third, Egypt, Istria, and so on. Mutual friends, parties, organizing things. Everything rolled along nicely as if nature were doing the thinking for us. And then we reached an invisible point.  At a particular moment, ... we started to wait -- waiting for things to keep happening all by themselves like before... (page 19) 

Most of the time the social commentary flows naturally from the story; for example, Toni's attitudes toward his rural background are revealed during a visit to his girlfriend's parents' home. Sometimes, though, Perisić makes his point more directly:

 Listen, Yugoslavia was a sum total of small nationalisms which united to fight the big ones. That's how we got rid of the Italians on the coast and the Germans on the continent. We couldn't have done that by ourselves. Once we'd done that, we got rid of Yugoslavia too... (page 152)

The story moves rather slowly until events speed up (and go a little over the top) in the last 100 pages. Our Man in Iraq won't satisfy action junkies, but I enjoyed it and appreciated it as a souvenir of our trip to Croatia.

Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon, Faraday, Maxwell, and Electromagnetic Field ****

As the title clearly states, this book tells the story of the discovery of the electromagnetic field through the biography of the two men most responsible for it. As tradition has it, Michael Faraday was a brilliant researcher who discovered many of the shared properties of magnetism and electric currents, and James Clerk Maxwell formalized Faraday's insights into mathematical language, making them clear and persuasive to the scientific community. This conventional view has some truth to it, although it downplays how creative both men were as theoretical thinkers.

The authors are especially skilled at prose descriptions of theoretical insights and their consequences. For example, they manage to clearly explain Maxwell's dynamical theory with nary a mathematical formula, as well as convey its major impact on physics:

Some of nature's workings in the physical world not only do not need a mechanical model, but they cannot be explained in a mechanical way. For example, a current-carrying circuit "held" energy. This energy was real; it could be used in an electric motor to do mechanical work, but where was the energy? Not in the wire, but in the field -- distributed through the surrounding space. ... Maxwell was doing nothing less the changing our concept of reality. He was the first to recognize that the foundations of the physical world are imperceptible to our senses. All we know about them -- possibly all we can ever know -- are their mathematical relationships to things we can feel and touch. We may never understand what they are; we have to be content to describe them in an abstract way, giving them symbols and writing them in equations. (Chapter 13)

 The book also gives a good sense of how scientists in the nineteenth century worked, not to mention how general their scientific knowledge was. 

Javier Marias, The Infatuations ***

A woman visits the same cafe every day, mostly to observe a perfect couple who frequents the same cafe. When the husband is murdered in an apparently random act of street violence, she speaks to the widow and ends up having an affair with the dead man's best friend. This friend may know more about the man's death than he is letting on...

The Infatuations doesn't get the balance quite right between plot and philosophical musings. The latter overwhelm the former. Our narrator speaks in discursive sentences that always deal with the emotional questions before the logistical ones. She thinks about the influence of the dead over the living, the responsibilities we have toward our partners, the role of chance, and how to move on after tragedies. There is a thriller element to the story, but Maria seems mostly unconcerned about it.

Benjamin Curtis, A Traveller's History of Croatia ** 1/2

Obviously I chose this book in preparation for our upcoming trip to Croatia. Knowing the country's history increased my enjoyment when we visited Istanbul, and granted me opportunities to impress my wife.

I was able to extract the gist from this book, but too much of it is the fact-listing that gives history a bad name.

The dynastic problems started in 1301, when the Arpad dynasty died out. The Subic supported the Anjou family, from Sicily and France, in their attempts to gain the crown. By 1308 this new Angevin dynasty had established itself in Hungary and Croatia under King Karoly Robert. Ironically, Karoly Robert's son, Lajos the Great (ruled 1342-82) very successfully strengthened the monarch's hand at the expense of the noble families ... The ascension of the Angevins was short-lived, however, since when Lajos died in 1382 Hungary and Croatia were plunged into a new dynastic conflict...

I think I was able to see the broad outlines through the thicket of details. The book includes a few nice historical maps showing the evolution of the country. However, I would have preferred a collection of targeted essays to the attempted comprehensive chronology.

Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue ****

I was truly impressed with Michael Chabon's prose style, which manages to be gorgeous with feeling too showy. His metaphors are unexpected but apt, his characters are well drawn, his themes develop naturally, and he incorporates telling details from various subcultures (used record stores, midwifery, blaxploitation movies, fatherhood). Lastly, he captures the feel of the titular area of Berkeley/Oakland.

The only way in which Telegraph Avenue falls short is its plot. There isn't much of it, and I never felt engaged by the dramatic stakes of the story. Will the new megastore cause Brokeland Records to close? Will the midwives lose their hospital privileges? Will the broken-down blaxploitation star expose the youthful indiscretion of his successful old friend? I didn't really care about these questions. I loved many of the individual incidents, but the story didn't pull me on to the next one.

David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not *** 1/2

This posthumous collection of essays is, like The Pale King, best for DFW fans only. None of the essays is embarrassing (with the possible exception of the oldest one), but neither do they measure up to his non-fiction work in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again or Consider the Lobster. Go read those books now.

For DFW fans, Both Flesh and Not is notable for the way you can see his inimitable prose style developing. Except for the title essay, the pieces are in chronological order. The oldest one, "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young," is conspicuously sophomoric; the writing gets stronger as the book goes on. As it happens, the best pieces are the two about tennis, especially "Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open" which effectively captures the full experience of attending the tournament.

Even second-tier DFW non-fiction serves up nuggets of inspiration that make me feel smarter and want to be smarter. I also liked the vocabulary words between essays.

Patrick O'Brian, The Far Side of the World *** 1/2

As a palate cleanser after the disappointing Orphan Trilogy, I returned to an author whose prose style invariably delights me. The Far Side of the World is Book 10 in the Aubrey-Maturin series, which means I'm nearly half way through!

The distinctive feature of this chapter in the saga is that our heroes sail into the Pacific, resulting in South Sea adventures to complement their more typical assignments in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. O'Brian crams in a few too many plotlines perhaps: he didn't need to cast them away on desert islands twice, and he squanders the dramatic opportunities presented by a group of lunatics assigned to the boat's crew. But the book was entertaining as always. And as always, the story starts slowly and builds to a frantic, in medias res finish.

James and Lance Morcan, The Orphan Trilogy * 1/2

Referring to a book as a "young adult" novel usually means that it is written for teenagers. I would call The Orphan Trilogy young adult fiction because it sounds like it was written by a teenager. The writing sounds exactly like stories I wrote in high school, the plot is childish with tinges of tittering about girls, and the characters swing wildly between the ruthless efficiency of trained espionage agents and the aggrieved petulance of middle-schoolers.

The fugitive agent reminded himself it was imperative he presented a different face to the world each time he ventured out. He made a silent vow to make good use of his vast array of disguises. ... As he glued the last of the stubble to his face, Nine's internal pain overwhelmed him. ... A year or so after giving birth to him, Nine's mother had escaped from The Pedemont Project. Naylor ordered Kentbridge to have Annette killed before she could expose Omega any further. Kentbridge refused - something to this day Nine remained unaware of.

The Orphan Trilogy proves that you can't trust the Internet. Every online review rates the books highly and praises exactly the weakest parts, such as the "depth and complexity" of the main character Nine. The books weren't written by a teenager, but by a father and son team from Australia. Their latest book is a "non-fiction" exploration of the various conspiracies that get mentioned in the Orphan books.

Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt ***

This collection of stories falls squarely into the category of experimental fiction. A typical Aimee Bender story starts with a clearly stated surrealistic premise, which the characters deal with in a fairly realistic manner. Here are a few opening paragraphs:

One week after his father died, my father woke up with a hole in his stomach. It wasn't a small hole, some kind of mild break in the skin, it was a hole the size of a soccer ball and it went all the way through. You could now see behind him like he was an enlarged peephole. ("Marzipan")

Steven returned from the war without lips. ("What You Left in the Ditch")

There were two mutant girls in the town: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice. ("The Healer")

The narrators are young women coming to terms with their sexuality or their familial responsibilities, which gives their stories an emotional depth that balances their formal inventiveness. My favorite stories were "The Healer" and "What You Left in the Ditch."

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt collects Bender's early stories. I'd be interested in reading her more recent work to see how it has developed.

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace **** 1/2

Remarkable, for two parallel scenes in particular. In the first, professor David Lurie pleads guilty to sexual harassment but is unwilling to satisfy the university ethics committee with proper expressions of remorse. In the second, David's daughter Lucy refuses to report the details of a violent attack against her. In both cases, the characters maintain their principled stands in the face of much reasonable pressure. As a reader, I got great pleasure from puzzling out the subtle nature of those personal principles and considering how far I could sympathize with them.

Remarkable also for the way it uses the story of a student affair as a metaphor for the racial complexities in the author's native South Africa. Disgrace would work beautifully in a literature class for the deft by clear way Coetzee uses literary technique.

Disgrace is a short novel with a straightforward plot, making it all the better as a focused setting for the David's casuistry. Coetzee's style is spare but lovely. 

Takashi Hiraide, The Guest Cat *** 1/2

I picked up this short, meditative story based on a short review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. The Guest Cat comprises anecdotes about a cat that visits a Japanese couple in their quiet rental cottage, and about the couple's efforts to find a place they can live more permanently. Not too different, really, from the kinds of stories any cat lover would tell, but written in lovely poetical prose (from an actual poet) that conveys a very Japanese sense of the beautiful tentative transience of life, and of the permanent effects of that transient beauty. The vivid descriptions of houses and gardens and cats induce a contemplative state and suggest deep meaning behind the mundane events.

Thomas Bernhard, The Loser **

I've been meaning to read Thomas Bernhard for quite a while. His reputation as a difficult, formal, and unpleasant writer made me expect deliciously corrosive misanthropy along the lines of Schopenhauer or his fellow Austrian (film director) Michael Haneke. The cover of The Loser refers to its "obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator" –– catnip to my ears!

Alas, I didn't find the narrative voice witty, compulsive or "outrageously cantankerous." And since the narrative voice is pretty much all there is to the book, I never engaged with it. Everything I'd heard about Bernhard made me expect to love his work, or to be challenged by it; instead I was bored by it.

Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night ** 1/2

Norwegian by Night is a misleading novel. From the cover and the prize it won, it appears to be a Scandinavian crime novel of the sort written by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, or Jo Nesbø. In fact, it's a character study of an aging American Jew and an exploration of how our cultural pasts influence our behavior. The simple crime plot is merely a slight frame to hang the story on.

Sheldon Horowitz is an 82-year-old American Jew struggling with guilt over the death of his son Saul in Vietnam. (He believes Saul went to war at Sheldon's prompting.) He lives in Oslo with his granddaughter and her Norwegian husband. He witnesses a domestic dispute that ends in murder, and goes on the lam with the murdered woman's son. The killing turns out to have been a legacy of the Serbia - Kosovo war.

I found Sheldon to be a stereotypical Jewish character. Sheldon's family believes him to be suffering from dementia. This plot device annoyed me, because Sheldon's showed no symptoms of it. His fantasies were clearly his means of coping with his son's death. I was also annoyed when the author introduces a standard thriller character -- the mysterious fixer who lives undetected as a model citizen until his violent skills are called for -- in Chapter 20 of 23. 

Patrick O'Brian, Treason's Harbour *** 1/2

We recently watched the classic HBO series Deadwood. When I started this ninth book in the Aubrey-Maturin series, it occurred to me that the two series offer similar pleasures. They are both immersive historical dramas featuring a large cast of fictional and real-life characters, and their characters speak in entertainingly theatrical ways. Indeed, distinctive language is the chief delight in both cases.

The other chief delight of O'Brian's books is sailing adventure; the individual episodes wax and wane based on how much time Aubrey spends at sea. (A well-established trait of Jack Aubrey is his supreme competence at sea and his bumbling ineptitude ashore.) Treason's Harbour spends a bit too much time in Malta, but the sea voyages to Suez and the Adriatic are more exotic than some of Aubrey's previous assignments. Sandstorms, a diving bell, and Turks! The treacherous French reappear for a quick engagement in the closing pages.

As far as I can recall, Treason's Harbour is the first time that O'Brian gives us readers important information that neither of our heroes has (the identity of a traitor in the Royal Navy). It enhances the suspense of the spy business even if it does feel like cheating.

Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today *** 1/2

Two factors motivated me to read this short book, based on a series of lectures. First, it's a contemporary response to William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, which is a favorite book of mine (and also based on a lecture series). Second, it's written by Charles Taylor, a philosopher whose magnum opus A Secular Age has tempted me many times. Varieties of Religion Today provides an accessible introduction to his ideas and writing style.

I enjoyed the first two sections, which analyze James' approach and situate it within Taylor's more expansive view of "religious experience." Taylor points out that James focuses entirely on the psychological aspects of religious experience at the expense of the social aspects of religious experience, and furthermore on its emotional components rather than its intellectual components. Taylor identifies the benefits that James gains from this approach -- drawing attention to the moment when a person decides what to believe -- but he (Taylor) is more interested in looking at the social aspects of religious experience.

In the third section of the book, Taylor looks at the evolution of modern belief as it relates to the link between religion and the community as a whole. In medieval times, the church was the community, and the legitimacy of the government flowed from the same source. In modern times, people choose the denomination to which they belong, but most still think of their larger community (such as their country) as having a special relationship to God's purposes. I found Taylor's ideas suggestive, but this section felt sketchier than the earlier ones. Maybe I need to plunge into the massive A Secular Age to learn the details.

Tanis Rideout, Above All Things ***

Mountaineering adventure for ladies. This fictional account of George Mallory's 1924 attempt on Mount Everest injects a love story into the adventure by alternating chapters between Mallory on Everest and his wife Ruth back home in Cambridge. Rideout privileges the characters' feelings over their climbing: in their tents and on the mountain, the climbers' thoughts inevitably drift homeward. Only Ruth's chapters are written in the first person, revealing where the author's sentiments lay.

Most of the mountaineering action takes place during evenings in camp, with the Mallory and Sandy Irvine dealing with the various discomforts of high-altitude climbing (freezing cold, difficulty breathing, nausea, hallucinations). Above All Things vividly captures the physical and mental toll of living in the "death zone." It is less successful with the mountaineering details, which Rideout is clearly less interested in.

Ultimately Above All Things is a tragic love story, with a foregone conclusion for those who know the fate of George Mallory.

G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen ** 1/2

Alif the Unseen starts out as a very different book from the one it ends up being. The first few chapters are in the realist mode, telling us about the Arab-Indian hacker Alif and how he provides security services for clients who want to evade surveillance. The story includes compelling details about life in a Persian Gulf state (cell phone shops with their names in Tamil; marriage certificates printed from the Internet as cover for having sex; why low-class girls who wear a veil are considered "uppity") and reasonable programming details.

However, the book takes a significant turn once Alif comes under suspicion from the State. Before you know it, he's on the run with wise-cracking jinns and building elaborate metaphorical computer programs that make no sense. The realism turns on a dime into cartoonish action, with the kind of "clever" dialog and plotting that I'd expect in a young adult novel or Dean Koontz book.

The author has an ambitious plan in Alif the Unseen. First of all, she is a Westerner trying to write an Eastern book -- something one of the characters suggests has never been done. She also wants to explore how the new online world relates to social change, and how cyberspace is similar to the unseen world of the jinn. In my opinion, though, she fails to meld these ideas into a coherent style. The book-cover comparisons to Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, and Neal Stephenson are overly generous.

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby ** 1/2

The Faraway Nearby is an impressionistic memoir/essay collection about a few difficult years in the author's life. Her mother was fading in an Alzheimer care facility, she was diagnosed with possible breast cancer, and she traveled to Iceland. (The last one is part of her recovery rather than one of her difficulties.) Because of Solnit's discursive style, she covers a lot of ground (apricots, Frankenstein, Che Guevara, lepers, Eskimos), but her primary theme is how we understand our lives through stories.

I typically enjoy writers who can't resist digressions, but most of Solnit's musings are too vague for my taste. Unlike, say, Nicholson Baker, she doesn't ground her abstractions with details, and they drift away.

The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.

The best chapters are the ones dealing with her trip to Iceland, because the specific details outweigh the academic New Age fiddle faddle. (The first chapter made me want to go to Iceland immediately!) The weakest chapters are those about her mother, because she implies stereotypical conflicts between mother and daughter but never makes them clear. 

Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs ****

The Woman Upstairs caused a bit of a stir recently among the literary critical community, when author Claire Messud objected to a question about whether her main character was likeable. Is there a double standard when judging books from male and female authors? Or for male and female characters?

Nora, the narrator of The Woman Upstairs, is nowhere near as unlikeable as I expected her to be. She is more open than most people about her (unattractive) neediness and self-involvement, but I think most people feel the same kinds of feelings. I know I do.

Nora is a third-grade schoolteacher who harbors dreams of being an artist. She meets Sirena, the mother of one of her students who is an up-and-coming artist, and her relationship with Sirena awakens her hopes for a more fulfilling life. It's obvious from the beginning that Nora invests more in the relationship than Sirena does. A profound disappointment is inevitable.

These kinds of asymmetrical relationships happen all of the time. Nora's story shows their benefits as well as their drawbacks. Nora does return to her art and has a season where life feels full of promise. The book documents a character struggling against feelings of regret and trying to live more fully; this theme always speaks to me, which probably reveals something unattractive about me.

Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass *** 1/2

Through the Language Glass addresses a question that has interested me since high school: does the language that you speak affect the way you think? The cover promises that the answer is "Yes, it does," making is a different and more satisfying answer than the one I got back in high school from Saussure's Course in General Linguistics. I looked forward to hearing what Deutscher had to say on the subject, and also a bit leery about my reaction since I have fairly strong educated opinions in this area.

I was mostly familiar with the linguistic research that Deutscher reports on. The book focuses primarily on color terms and spatial orientation, with a short speculative foray into gender systems. Deutscher does a lovely job of describing how these topics came to be at the forefront of the study of cognitive variation, especially in the case of color terms.

In the introduction, Deutscher promises to avoid the rhetorical excesses of Whorfians and stick to the data. In one sense, I think he kept his promise too strictly: I wanted more discussion about how the theoretical results relate to the fundamental question. On the other hand, the conclusions he does come to sound somewhat overblown and unjustified to me.

Andres Neuman, Traveler of the Century ***

Traveler of the Century has a lot of elements that should make me love it: a well rendered historical setting (Germany in the mid-nineteenth century), a Tolstoy-esque perspective that shifts between the personal and the sociological, philosophical and cultural conversations, some beautiful writing, and a believable love story. For some reason, though, the book never engaged me. I admire it, but the spark between us is missing.

Allie Bosh, Hyperbole and a Half ***

This book is a collection of blog entries from Hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com. It's a quick and entertaining read. My favorite moment comes when Allie is finally lifted out of depression by seeing a dried piece of corn under the refrigerator.

If someone ever asks me 'What was the exact moment where things started to feel less shitty?' instead of telling a nice, heartwarming story about the support of the people who loved and believed in me, I'm going to have to tell them about the piece of corn.

Andy Weir, The Martian ****

The title character of The Martian is astronaut Mark Watney. He is stranded on Mars after a dust storm forces his crew to evacuate the planet. They thought Mark was dead, but he survived... and has to figure out how to continue to survive with no communications and no more Mars expeditions for four years.

The Martian was written by a nerd for other nerds.  Nearly all of the action is realistic scientific problem solving: figuring out how to make water when you've got oxygen and hydrogen; determining how many calories you need; maintaining heat and air pressure; establishing contact with Earth. Mark uses what he has on hand to tackle these problems in turn. He tells us about it in a smart-ass narrative voice that captures exactly the "clever" and self-assured way engineers joke with one another.

Entertaining, especially if you're the kind of person who pedantically pointed out the scientific flaws in the movie Gravity.

Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat *** 1/2

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (to give it its full title) is about the eight-man rowing team from the University of Washington that ultimately wins the Olympic medal. It follows the team, and one member in particular, from their initial tryouts through their narrow Olympic victory.

It's an exciting sports story, very well told. Brown is especially good at capturing atmosphere -- the sun glinting on the water, the crowds on the observation trains -- and at showing how a quality team came together piece by piece. He also shows how it's not a straight line from bad to good -- the team rows poorly at times. He gives a pretty good sense of rowing strategy too.

At the same time, it feels like Brown is working too hard to shape the story into a conventional sports melodrama, with the boys as underdogs representing the grit and determination of working class folks during the Depression, thwarting the plans of the evil Nazis and stirring the pride of our nation. The cliches run fast and thick in these sections, and the prose gets overheated. (They weren't really underdogs, you know.) He should have omitted all of the stuff about Germany and the Dust Bowl and stuck with Joe Rantz's story. There's plenty of drama there.

Chris Barnard, Bundu ***

Bundu tells the story of one summer at an output hospital on the South Africa-Mozambique border trying to deal with an influx of starving people. The area has been in drought for nearly three years, and the situation is desperate. The narrator is a scientist doing his best to stay uninvolved, but he's fallen in love with one of the nurses. He enlists another eccentric loner in a bold plan to get the growing crowd of refugees to safety.

As you can tell from the summary, the book could have easily been overly sentimental or colorful. But Barnard's narrator sticks mostly to relating the facts, addressing the larger themes lightly and obliquely. It's underwritten in an effective way. It also features lots of enjoyable Afrikaans atmosphere, so that our hero drives his bakkie through dongas and tambookies to reach his kraal in the kloof. 

Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised ***

The book about the most recent "golden age of television" provides entertaining summaries of the shows usually considered to be its standard-bearers (The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Lost, Mad Men, and so on), even if fans of these shows have probably heard the stories before.

However, Sepinhall doesn't provide any real analysis about the causes or effects of this golden age. He mentions a number of classic shows that preceded the canon and also several recent failed attempts to replicate the new formulas. So what made the early 21st century distinct? Conventional wisdom says it was The Sopranos,  but what about it? Sepinhall suggests that The Sopranos was successful because it combined something men like to watch (mob drama) with something women like to watch (family drama), but later attributes the failure of Friday Night Lights to reach a mass audience to the same reason.

I personally think that it was the proliferation of cable channels that led to the golden age. Lots of TV executives needed programming that would distinguish their channels, and they gave creators unprecedented freedom out of desperation or a lack of knowing any better. Other contributing factors were the availability of DVD and film studios getting out of "the $40-50 million good drama business."

Rafael Bernal, The Mongolian Conspiracy ****

A rough-hewn Mexico City hit man investigates reports of a plot to assassinate the presidents of Mexico and the United States. He might be in over his head with the international intrigue, but he knows the locals in Chinatown who appear to be at the heart of the plan.

The Mongolian Conspiracy is very much like a Dashiell Hammett book, if Hammett were writing in Mexico in the late 1960s and had a fondness for the word pinche. The story structure, the shifting alliances of our hero, and the questioning of authority all reminded me of Red Harvest. The only thing I didn't care for was how the writing shifted constantly and awkwardly between the third person and first person:

Garcia was going to say that he'd never used one, but then he remembered the one time he had. It was in Huasteca, and I was carrying out orders.

Within its solid thriller plot, The Mongolian Conspiracy sneaks in ideas about the rule of law versus the rule of action. Garcia is a former revolutionary who laments the bureaucratic nature of modern Mexican society and recognizes himself as a throwback and as a necessary evil for his superiors. As the story unfolds, though, he gains some respect for the rule of law.

John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven ***

In the preface, the author says that he intends to paint a portrait of Bach, the man, using evidence drawn from his music.

Part of my aim in this book is to show how clearly Bach's approach in his cantatas, motets, oratorios, Masses, and Passions reveals his mind at work, his temperamental preferences as well as his wide-ranging philosophical outlook.

I don't think he does that, though. The first half of the book describes the context in which Bach lived and worked, the second half gives a detailed musicological analysis of Bach's vocal church music, but Bach's personality remains unknown.

I am not really the ideal reader for this book, being neither a musician nor a superfan of Bach's cantatas, Passions, and masses. However, I really enjoyed the sections about life in seventeenth century Germany and the latest musical styles of the Baroque era. Gardiner does an excellent job of explaining the actual day-to-day practice of a musician/composer in those times. Like Thinking in Jazz, the book identifies the many ingredients that go into creating "inspired" music. When listening to a Bach cantata, you need to keep in mind the Lutheran beliefs, the loud socializing in the pews, and the divided balconies where the choir sang hidden from most of the congregation.

Gardiner is a conductor who recently led an ensemble through a Bach Cantata Pilgrimage: a year-long tour during which they played Bach's cantatas during the week for which they were composed. (For two years, Bach wrote a new cantata every week related to the pastoral subject for that time of year!) He knows his Bach. If I were a musician performing any of the church music, I would study the relevant chapters immediately. He assuredly overanalyzes them ("God descends and takes on human form, symbolically represented by the last minute swerve to C major"), but in so doing he fulfills the conductor's role:

The primary role of the conductor is to identify and transmit [the shared] vision to all those involved. At every instant he needs to know where the music is headed; and he has to be able to convey to each musician how individual lines fit into the overall pattern.

Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song ****

The Executioner's Song is an exhaustive 1000-page "true life novel" about the last nine months of Gary Gilmore's life. It starts with Gilmore's release from prison for an armed robbery conviction and ends with his execution for a pair of murders in Utah. Mailer tells the story from the perspective of the many people who encountered Gilmore during that time, using a simple declarative writing style that reflects the point of view of the person whose thoughts are being reported.

The exhaustiveness of the book occasionally leads to it being exhausting -- how many times did Gary steal a six pack of beer? How many lawyers filed suits to prevent the execution? However, Mailer does an excellent job of choosing mundane details and turns of phrase that bring the story and its characters to life. The cumulative effect of all the overlapping perspectives is powerful.

Mailer's flat, unsentimental style really pays dividends in the chapters describing the day of the execution. Things happen fast once the final appeal is rejected, and the characters' emotional states all try to keep up. After the execution itself, we follow Gary's body to the morgue and his friends to a memorial service. The juxtaposition of the brutally physical autopsy and the emotionally spiritual eulogies implicitly makes me think about the meaning of a man's life.