Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow ****

Wolf Willow's subtitle is "A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Frontier," which reveals the book as a hybrid. In part, it is a memoir about Stegner's childhood on a Saskatchewan homestead from 1914 to 1920, but he expands his focus to include the (natural and cultural) history of the northern Great Plains and inserts a novella set during the horrible winter of 1906. The pieces work together to paint a rounded portrait of a place that looks to most people like a huge blank area on the map.

The first few chapters, in which Stegner returns to the town and ponders the significance of his memories, are totally five-star awesome. The broader historical chapters are more conventional and somewhat less compelling, but the fictional story of the T-Down cattle outfit makes me cold just thinking about it.

P.S. I first read Wolf Willow many years ago, and my copy has chew marks from our first basset hound, Lolita, to prove it.

Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies ***

Meh. I liked the idea of Fates and Furies –– the story of a marriage told from the very different perspectives of the husband and wife –– and the reviews were solid, including a recommendation from Barack Obama. However, I found both perspectives to be too obviously literary with dramatic characters instead of realistic ones. (The mythological names and references didn't help.)

The book falls firmly in the John Updike / New Yorker school of fiction. The main characters come from privileged New England schools and pursue careers in the arts. Numerous sex scenes are used to reveal their temperaments. Highbrow cultural references mingle with lurid plotting.

Patrick O'Brian, The Letter of Marque ***

The placeholder 12th entry in the Aubrey-Maturin series, The Letter of Marque moves the story forward without an undue amount of excitement. The main distinction of this book is that the Surprise is now a privateer rather than a Navy ship, due to Aubrey's expulsion from the service in the previous book. The daily routines shift accordingly.

The naval action is concentrated in a long sequence where Aubrey and his men sneak into a French-held harbor and "cut out" an important ship (that is, board it, cut its anchors, and sail it away). This feat of derring-do, preceded by the taking of a big prize and followed by Aubrey inheriting his father's estate, sets the stage for a return to the service and to the series status quo.

The book ends with Stephen Maturin visiting his estranged wife Diana, so they can at last work through the misunderstandings that have piled up over the past few books. The unlikelihood of Maturin's character (surgeon, naturalist, and spy) notwithstanding, I have to say that Diana and her relationship with Stephen are the least convincing aspect of these books.

John Richmond, Dead and Alive *** 1/2

The cover description and first chapter of Dead and Alive lead you to expect a murder mystery. The protagonist Will comes home to find an unknown man dead on this couch. The dead man's hands are purple, his face is white with a bruise on his forehead, and there is a glass of whiskey on the coffee table in front of him.

But Dead and Alive is not a murder mystery. Whole chapters go by without any mention of the dead man. Will repairs his relationship with his girlfriend, goes sailing on San Francisco Bay, and goes to work as a "quant" at a trading firm. The real mystery is not who killed the man but rather who exactly is Will. Will's motivations are a mystery even to himself. We see him struggle to understand why he feels the way he does and wonder if he should be doing things differently. Dodging the persistent detective and researching the dead man's life are just part of it.

I found the character study far more engaging than a simple murder mystery would have been.

Kourtney Heintz, The Six Train to Wisconsin ** 1/2

Kai is a telepath, and her husband Oliver worries that New York City is overwhelming her. All those people, all that misery; Kai even works at child protective services, giving her an extra dose of pain and helplessness. She is understandably suicidal. For the sake of her sanity, Oliver "kidnaps" her and takes her back to his hometown of Butternut, Wisconsin. Kai is angry that Oliver has pulled her away from her life's work, but eventually settles in to the slower pace of life. But of course there's drama: a secret in Oliver's past...

Ultimately, The Six Train to Wisconsin is about Oliver and Kai's relationship, and it stands or falls on how well it presents that relationship. Alas, it falls. A couple that can communicate telepathically should have a deep understanding of one another, but Oliver and especially Kai have a very immature relationship. Each character feels only one emotion at a time, repeatedly going "from hearts-to-hatred in fifteen seconds." The central emotional conflict is when Oliver kisses his old girlfriend during a difficult event and Kai responds by flirting with another guy. Both parties treat these events as existential threats to their marriage. Come on! That's teenager stuff.

Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User's Guide ***

Economics does a remarkable job of mimicking the format of a high-school textbook. Every page or two has a summarizing subtitle ("Transaction costs and institutions: the rise of New Institutional Economics"), key terms are highlighted in bold face ("the theory of comparative advantage"), and vast subject areas are dispatched in one or two paragraphs. As I read the book, I imagined the questions that would appear on the quiz.

The book is an introduction to the field of economics. The most interesting chapter summarizes the various schools and describes their strengths and weaknesses. The history of capitalism is pretty interesting too.

Chang claims that most public economic discourse is dominated by the Neoclassical school, which is not the appropriate approach in all situations and which smuggles in certain political assumptions.

Economics is a political argument. It is not –– and can never be –– a science; there are no objective truths in economics that can be established independently of political, and frequently moral, judgements. 

On the one hand, Chang argues that we need to choose different approaches and assumptions depending on the problem we're considering. On the other hand, he casually advocates specific positions that sound mostly Keynesian and developmentalist, certainly left-leaning.

Errol Morris, A Wilderness of Error *** 1/2

Years ago, I was involved in a murder case in Dallas that I was able to resolve. This case, often I don't know what to make of it. – Errol Morris

A Wilderness of Error revisits the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret doctor convicted of murdering his wife and daughters in 1970. Morris has two major arguments: that MacDonald was convicted because the prosecution told a better story than the defense, and that the full set of evidence supports at least reasonable doubt about MacDonald's guilt.

I read Fatal Vision back when it was published – indeed, I'm a huge fan of the book. Fatal Vision is infamous for the way author Joe McGinniss started out supporting MacDonald but ended up portraying him as guilty. That is the strength of his book: you start out thinking there's no way MacDonald could have done it, and your doubts build slowly until the shocking denouement. McGinniss makes a convincing case, but I'm not at all surprised that it's somewhat fictional... or let's say speculative. The narrative works too well in literary terms, and MacDonald's protestations of innocence have always given me pause.

Morris makes a convincing case for reasonable doubt and the unfairness of MacDonald's trial. His analysis of the weakness of the physical evidence – the "impossible" coffee table, the holes in the pajama top, and so on – is especially compelling, because it is the physical evidence that provides the clinching arguments in Fatal Vision and ultimately doomed MacDonald.

Morris spends many, many pages on Helena Stoeckley, the woman who repeatedly confessed to being the "woman in the floppy hat." The judge ruled her testimony inadmissible, which seems prima facie prejudicial. However, the sheer number of pages dedicated to Stoeckley's confessions and retractions makes me sympathize with the judge's ruling that the "probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice, ... waste of time, or needless presentation of cumulative evidence" (Rule 403).

Finally, Morris ridicules the idea that MacDonald had a psychotic break. Both versions of the story agree that MacDonald's prickly personality is a factor in people's conclusions, but MacDonald has never shown any sign of the type of personality disorder necessary to support the prosecution's version of the crime. I wish Morris had delved deeper into this aspect of the story.

The organization is a bit of a mess: Morris creates a fog of doubt rather than a reasoned argument. That's all a defense needs to do. I still wonder, though: Why was there so little evidence of four people trampling around the house on a rainy night? That's the question that started it all, the reason the prosecution never seriously investigated who the four people might be.

Tom McCarthy, Satin Island ***

From the first chapter to the last, Satin Island is filled with colorful metaphors about how connections create meaning and how we imbue things with meaning by positing connections. The narrator hopes to devise what he calls Present Tense Anthropology™, where you can understand the connections (and therefore meaning) in real-time, as you live. He wants us to understand our actions while they are happening.

The narrator's desire for real-time meaning shows his kinship with the narrator of Remainder, one of my all-time favorite books. However, Satin Island remains more abstract and academic than Remainder. The metaphors are entertaining and sometimes funny, but they aren't grounded to an actual plot. The stories "radiate with a prospect, with an overwhelming promise, of significance" -- very Remainder-ish.

David Vinjamuri, Operator and Binder ***

Operator starts out promisingly. The instigating mystery is refreshingly modest (Did Michael Herne's ex-girlfriend kill herself?), and the story of Herne's motivations for joining the military ring true. He currently works as an intelligence analyst, and that life too sounds realistic. But it doesn't take long before we learn that Herne is the best there ever was, beating top snipers during training, learning martial arts from a secret sensei in Japan, and speaking multiple Afghan dialects flawlessly. Of course his former girlfriend had stumbled onto a vast Russian conspiracy (based in a small town in the Catskills?) involving human sex trafficking and the blackmailing of government officials. And of course Herne single-handedly bests dozens of the most dangerous criminals in the world.

As befits a sequel, Binder features a more global conspiracy and wilder action sequences. At one point, Herne escapes from the white supremacists who tortured him on a motorcycle, jumps the cycle off of a 1000-foot high bridge, lands on top of a BASE jumper's parachute, and lands in the whitewater river below. That's a small part of what he does to thwart the supremacists' plot, which involves operations in a South African nuclear power plant, several coal mines, oil refineries, and a runaway train.

The author writes action well, especially hand-to-hand combat. The over-the-top stories conform to the conventions of the genre, albeit with more product placement than usual. (Is Blackhawk! military gear a sponsor?)

Michael Chabon, The Final Solution *** 1/2

A palette cleanser following two long books. The Final Solution is a novella, a long short story really, about an 89-year-old Sherlock Holmes tracking down a stolen parrot and incidentally solving a murder.

The story is unabashedly typical of the genre and is nothing to write home about. However, Chabon's prose makes it a fun and worthwhile read. You can swallow the whole thing in the course of an afternoon.

Balashov and Rosenberg (ed.), Philosophy of Science ****

This collection of "Contemporary Readings" is a solid overview of the major issues in the philosophy of science. Nearly all of the selections are clearly written and not too technical. The readings are not the primary sources (except for Quine's Two Dogmas), but are often shorter summaries from the original authors (such as Nagel and Kuhn).

The key takeaway is that the relationship between scientific theories and the actual operation of the world is complex and controversial. Do the abstract entities such as electrons and the electro-magnetic force actually exist, or are they conceptual models? What do we mean when we say that science "explains" a phenomenon? Can we observe anything without presupposing a theory of what we're looking at? How do we know that our current understanding is (mostly) right, especially considering the long history of discarded theories?

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. (Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism")

I enjoyed reading this book for three reasons. First, I like considering the world from different perspectives, what I usually call "trying on different world views." The philosophy and history of science is littered with theories that explain the same phenomena in different ways. Second, I felt well educated because I was familiar with most of the topics and precedents covered. The philosophy of science has a kinship with the philosophy of language. Lastly, Philip Kitcher's essay "Theories, Theorists and Theoretical Change" defends a view similar to my own about how to reconcile the meaning and reference of terms, and provides a clear mechanism for handling its content-sensitivity.

Terry Hayes, I Am Pilgrim ***

Terry Hayes can write a killer set piece. I Am Pilgrim starts with an excellent description of a murder scene in a seedy New York hotel, and Part II vividly evokes the city of Jeddah as it recounts the formative event in the villain's childhood (the public beheading of his father). He also writes exciting action sequences, at both large and small scales. But you know what?

I've lost interest in stories that pit a master detective against a master criminal. In this genre, the characters invariably have nearly magical powers that make them the best in the world at their craft. The subsidiary characters stare at them in disbelief and admiration, while I share only the first reaction. Hayes' dialogue scenes also feature the ridiculous tonal shifts that are typical in the genre.

In I Am Pilgrim, not only are Pilgrim and the Saracen the greatest hero and villain respectively, but the supporting cast includes a New York cop/9-11 hero who is able to track down the "best intelligence agent there's ever been," a colorful and infallible hacker, "the best case officer of his generation," and even the "highly intelligent, personable, and modest" businessman who became the reluctant dream President of the United States. It seems like everyone does their job perfectly, after overcoming some trauma that they tell you about in detail when they first meet you in the midst of a crisis.

I Am Pilgrim is 600 pages long. That's because it contains enough story for a whole series of Pilgrim novels: a perfect murder in New York, a terrorist's coming-of-age story, several episodes from Pilgrim's spy past, a plot to release weaponized smallpox in the United States, both 9-11 and the Holocaust, a billionaire plunging to his death in Turkey, and backstories for many of the characters. Of course they all turn out to be related, and the book ends with chapter that brings together all of the characters Pilgrim has bonded with for a triumphantly sappy conclusion. But not before hinting about his nemesis in the sequel!

Drew Beisswenger, Fiddling Way Out Yonder ***

Fiddling Way Out Yonder is a sociological study of the West Virginia fiddler Melvin Wine. Melvin is an acclaimed "old-time music" fiddler, 90 years old when the book was published (in 2001). The author is a local music librarian and folklorist.

The book is a work of academic sociology with a thin veneer of narrative added to entice a more general audience. It gives a biography of Melvin and a portrait of mid-century life in rural West Virginia, but Beisswenger is compelled to explicitly put every point into proper academic context: historical population data for Braxton County, Appalachian barn styles, moonshining, and lots of references to other studies of Appalachian culture.

The saving grace was generous quotations from Melvin himself. His voice comes through loud and clear in transcripts from interviews.

I liked the descriptions of West Virginia life best. Melvin's biography, which takes up the first chapters, is much more interesting than the musical chapters, which primarily offer a detailed catalogue of features (keys, time signatures, bowing direction, and so on) without any analysis of how Melvin's style compares to other fiddlers or other styles.

Evie Wyld, All the Birds, Singing ** 1/2

All the Birds, Singing takes place in a compelling and well-described milieu – two of them, actually, since the story is split between the present and the past. The present-day story is on a remote sheep farm on a rainy Scottish island; the flashbacks are in the Australian outback at hot, dry sheep stations. Wyld creates an effective mood in both places: a dark dread in Scotland and a desperate exhaustion in Australia.

Unfortunately, these great settings are populated with stock characters from genre fiction. Most detrimental is that our narrator, Jake Whyte, has no personality beyond the stereotypical closed-off-because-damaged woman (cf. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Dark Places). The action in the present day story doesn't feel realistic to me, and the reverse-chronological flashbacks felt purely like a literary gimmick.

Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth ****

The 1936 film version of Dodsworth was a gem that Evelyn and I discovered working through a critics' list of the best American films. I was impressed by its perceptive and chilling depiction of a retired couple drifting apart as they travel through Europe.

Sinclair Lewis, author of the book Dodsworth, is a Nobel Prize winner who no one seems to read or talk about anymore. His biographer says, "He was one of the worst writers in modern American literature..., " which is rather discouraging. However, I was impressed enough by the film that I craved the added depth of the novel.

The biggest difference between the book and film is the scope of Sam Dodsworth's plight. In the book he has a full-on mid-life crisis, leading him to question his success, his place in the world, his Americanism. The movie, wisely, focuses on the frightening (to me) chasm that opens between Sam and his wife Fran; it turns out they want entirely different things from life. It's enough to make me reluctant to retire.

I expected Lewis' prose to be clunky and staid, but it was fine and lightly satirical. The story could stand to lose a few repetitive incidents, some characters do make thematic speeches, and the ending felt rushed after the leisurely pace of the rest of the book. But overall I enjoyed the writing and found plenty of insights. The descriptions of 1930s Europe were a bonus.

Sam Low, Hawaiki Rising, and Ben Finney, Hokule'a: The Way to Tahiti *** 1/2

When I was reading We, the Navigators, my sailing crewmate Bohun Kinloch said that he too was reading about Polynesian navigation techniques. These two books focus on one voyage in particular: the 1976 trip from Hawaii to Tahiti aboard the traditional Polynesian canoe Hokule'a, sailed without instruments. Hawaiki Rising also describes a follow-up voyage four years later.

While they include some navigational lore, these books are more about the overall Hokule'a project. The emphasis is on the construction of the canoe and especially its role in the resurgence of Hawaiian culture. The project became embroiled in cultural politics, which lead to significant conflict among the crew during the voyage.

There were tensions onboard from the start. Mau Piailug, the navigator, didn't get along with David Lewis, the Western expert, and there was another native navigator on board from Tahiti. The captain didn't command the respect of the crew, many of whom were surfers chosen for their cultural prominence not sailing experience. They grumbled about the food and accommodations, smoked pot, smuggled a radio on board, set a Western-style jib, and generally threatened the experiment at every turn. It all culminated in a fistfight and public recriminations when the reached Tahiti. Mau quit in disgust.

In short, effective navigation isn't necessarily the biggest challenge on long-distance voyages.

Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace **** 1/2

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace is the biography of a man who grew up in the poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods of Newark, received a degree in molecular biophysics from Yale, and returned to Newark to teach biology at the Catholic high school he'd attended. The author is one of Rob's Yale college roommates. The title is a spoiler for how it all turns out.

By its nature, the story touches on sociological and philosophical questions about the psychological impact of growing up in poverty, what it means to succeed in life, and how our decisions affect our fate. However, the author made the wise decision to stick closely to the facts and to present Rob's life as it might have appeared from his point of view.  Rob's decisions and actions always seem perfectly reasonable and understandable, even when we start to watch him make bad ones.

Hobbs does a very good job giving realistic characters to the various people in Rob's life, to Rob and his parents most of all. He also makes insightful points about the bigger questions without getting too abstract or preachy... although, I have to say that there are some sections, especially later in the book, that sound like cliched college essays. (In the Author Q&A at the back of the book, Hobbs says he started by writing personal essays to help himself understand Rob's story; I'll bet these weaker sections come directly from those essays.)

I loved reading a biography about a basically normal guy. I got a vivid sense of him as a person, and was deeply disturbed by his squandered potential and tragic end.

Ron Rash, Something Rich and Strange ***

Ron Rash is an author and poet from western North Carolina, and I read most of this story collection during a visit to the region. Rash's stories are well written with clear narrative structure, and were perfect for reading on vacation. 

But, I have to say that none of them surprised me or attempted anything other than straightforward literary short fiction. I didn't get a particularly strong sense of place, nor would I have guessed that Rash is a poet. 

In short, Something Rich and Strange is enjoyable but generic.  Since Rash is a Southern short story writer, reviewers compare him to Flannery O'Conner. I've read Flannery O'Conner and you, sir, are no Flannery O'Conner.

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle *** 1/2

Although in form and shape the thing before her could have been nothing but a submarine, it looked instead like some kind of symbolic sign — or an incomprehensible metaphor.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a strange book, and I mean that as a compliment. Murakami's style blends mundane details with uncanny incidents. The story starts with a commonplace search for a missing cat, but already on the first page our narrator receives a phone call from a mysterious woman trying to entice him into phone sex. The ratio of ordinary events to extraordinary events tilts in favor of the latter as the book continues.

The English edition consists of three sections, which were published as separate books in Japan. In the first two sections, I felt a connection between the narrative and recognizable metaphorical themes (section one: "How much do we really know about our family and friends?"; section two: "How much do we really know about our own nature and motivations?"). In the third and longest section, events start to feel untethered and somewhat random. I think Murakami means to explore the role of fate, but as I said the first time I reviewed The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I "started to lose track of the theme, which made it all seem strange without a purpose."

Well, finally, the events I've been through have been tremendously complicated. All kinds of characters have come on the scene, and strange things have happened one after another, to the point where, if I try to think about them in order, I lose track.

It's too bad, because there are scenes and stories of great interest spread throughout the book.

Jeffrey Frank, Ike and Dick ***

I was hoping and expecting that this Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage between Dwight David Eisenhower and Richard Nixon would show how the two men misunderstood each other due to their vastly different temperaments. However, the book mostly describes how Nixon interpreted Eisenhower's passive/aggressive conflict avoidance without a counterbalancing account of Eisenhower's interpretation of Nixon. And since Ike and Dick is about their feelings, the descriptions of the political events themselves is perfunctory.

The story is strongest during the episodes that most clearly and directly relate to Eisenhower's non-committal public statements: the "fund episode" that led to Nixon's Checkers speech; the choice of VP for the second term (with Eisenhower trying to convince Nixon to take a cabinet post instead); and the 1960 election ("If you give me a week, I might think of one [policy that Nixon spearheaded as VP]"). There is also the time when Eisenhower wanted Nixon to fire his chief of staff Sherman Adams, which showed the same behavior applied to someone other than Nixon.

When describing his sources, Jeffrey Frank notes that historians now consider Eisenhower "a man skilled in the art of forceful indirection... [and] a leader who had patience and purpose, particularly in foreign affairs." You would not get that impression from Ike and Dick. It omits any discussion of his accomplishments, and the general comes across as an amiable timid jerk. 

Paul Jaskunas, Hidden ****

On page 1, Maggie Wilson barely survives a violent assault. She accuses her husband, who goes to prison, but six years later another man confesses to the crime. Maggie spends the rest of the book trying to reconcile her memories with the apparent facts of the case.

I first read Hidden in 2005 when it came out in paperback, and I stand by everything I said in the four-star review I gave it then. I would add that the descriptions of the Indiana backroads are strong, and they complement Maggie's introspective nature. Overall, the book has a hushed tone, as if it's being told around a picnic table in the summer twilight. My only complaint is that Maggie and Nate's marital troubles seem to develop too quickly.

I ended my 2005 review by saying, "I look forward to Paul Jaskunas' next book." Alas, Jaskunas has yet to publish a second book.

Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy **** 1/2

Wondrous things do happen here, but they take place amidst great tranquility.

If I may use cinematic analogies to describes this lovely, odd, short book, it reads like a collaboration between Terence Malick (for framing the story with quiet beautiful natural context) and Jean Pierre Melville (for its objective distance and focus on routine) with a dash of Tarkovskian spirituality.

A rabbit skitters forward in the priest's garden and twitches a radish leaf with its nose before tearing it loose. Ears tilt as it hastily chews and settles over its paws.  

The story takes places in 1906 at a convent in upstate New York. Mariette is a 17-year-old postulant whose attractiveness and fervent piety inspire diverse reactions from the other Sisters of the Crucifixion, even before she starts to show signs of ecstatic contact with Christ.

Hansen maintains the meditative spirit of life in the convent even as events grow more "wondrous." He conveys the personalities of the nuns and their differing reactions to Mariette with very few words, using the same kinds of telling details as he does for the natural descriptions.

John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers ****

The Mapmakers is a history of cartography. It explains the technical innovations of mapmaking in the context of the contemporary worldviews and the adventures of discovery. It nicely balances concise scientific explanations with personal tales about the innovators to tell a compelling story of progress. The prose is classic technical writing: clear presentation that you never notice.

The book becomes less interesting once it reaches the 20th century. The advances are almost purely technological at that point, so the story loses the momentum and interest that came from the adventures of early explorers. The loss of narrative balance makes you notice the incompleteness of the technical explanations.

B. Catling, The Vorrh ***

The Vorrh is "easily the current century's first landmark work of fantasy" (says Alan Moore) and makes Terry Gilliam "realize how little imagination I have." The title refers to a vast, sentient, magical forest that sounds like the planet in Solaris, and the back cover promises a story that will "rearrange the molecules of your being." Cool and possibly difficult, right?

I'll grant that The Vorrh is imaginative and that it is chock-full of sensuous imagery. The author is particularly fond of ascribing concrete adjectives and verbs to abstract nouns.

[His mother] would come to say good night while he was in the bath...but she never stayed, and the nanny was always left to dry his cooling hope and dress it for sleep. (p 54)

One section that demonstrates Catling's strengths comes when a formerly blind character gains her sight. He describes how her perceptions changed, not entirely for the better. An interesting perspective comprised of distinctive imagery.

One of her favourite times was the evening, when the city's sounds folded down to allow the distant forest its full voice. She loved to feel the exchange, the tides of human and animal sounds passing each other in the growing dominance of the night... High above, the swallows turned into bats.

However, the individual scenes don't pay off in longer narrative threads. For example, one character is a Cyclops living under the care of robots under an abandoned house. (Robots made of Bakelite and filled with a milky fluid.) A mysterious cabal provides material for the robots to educate the boy... to what purpose? We never find out. Another character dispatches the robots, and the Cyclop's character arc has nothing to do with his unknown origins. The same concern applies to Peter Andrews and his bow made from the remains of the prophet Irrinipeste, the tribesman sent to intercept Andrews, and the Scottish foreman who oversees the mindless Limboia in their forestry.

The Vorrh is apparently the first book in an intended trilogy. Is it all just an elaborate origin story for the Cyclop's unborn baby?

Patrick DeWitt, The Sisters Brothers ***

Eli and Charlie Sisters are hired killers, headed to San Francisco and the gold country for their latest job. Eli, our narrator, is questioning his choice of profession and showing compassion for his slow, one-eyed horse Tub. His laconic, off-beat, and humorous musings set the tone for this pleasant Western story. 

Eli is most concerned with the question of what makes a man's life good. His vision of the perfect future is the quiet, orderly life of a shopkeeper; Charlie would like to become a rich, dissolute man like their employer the Commodore. Over the course of their travels, the Sisters brothers encounter a number of people who offer other potential models, such as their current target Hermann Warm who lifted himself up by his bootstraps using his own ingenuity. Eli's consideration of the various lifestyles provides the thematic underpinnings to the story.

Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World ****

The artist Harriet Burden conducts an experiment in perception: she recruits three male artists to present her work as their own, to see how the art world reacts to the work differently coming from a man. The experiment goes a bit awry when few people believe she is the true artist behind the masks.

The Blazing World deals with questions about personal identity. How much of our self-image is affected by gender norms? How do our family relationships change us? Why does our personal feeling of accomplishment depend on recognition from others? How do others' perspectives influence the way they feel about you?

This is a very smart book that makes a lot of subtle points. The premise is interesting. Most of the characters are intriguingly enigmatic; they come across differently depending on who is describing them. The story runs out of steam before the end, although the chapter with Harriet's death has a domestic tone that contrasts nicely with the earlier chapters.

Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs ***

Ronald Dworkin is a legal scholar and philosopher. Justice for Hedgehogs is his admirable attempt to present and justify his entire worldview. He mentions justice in the title, but the book explains his positions on a full range of philosophical topics from the nature of truth and the status of ethics to living well and forming legitimate governments. I would love to write this sort of book for myself, showing how my thoughts fit together and discovering the foundational beliefs.

In brief, Dworkin believes that science and ethics/morals are non-overlapping magisteria with distinct ways of assigning truth. In the unified value-laden realm of ethics and morals, concepts are interpretive and irreducibly evaluative. Ethical propositions can be TRUE, however, and the two most fundamental are:

• "We each have a sovereign ethical responsibility to make something of value of our own lives"
• "The objective importance of your life reflects a universal importance" and dignity that you must respect in all others.

Dworkin tries to justify his more specific beliefs – which are largely stereotypical American liberal beliefs – by arguing that they follow from properly understood versions of these premises. His ultimate goal is to argue for the legitimacy, nay, necessity, of moral values in legal analysis:

Law includes not only the specific rules enacted in accordance with the community's accepted practices but also the principles that provide the best moral justification for those enacted rules. (p 402)

As much as I admire the attempt, I think Dworkin overreaches by trying to prove that his worldview is the uniquely true one. Far too much of the book makes unconvincing arguments against respectable alternative philosophies. In sections that cover topics I know well, like the fact/value dichotomy, I can see Dworkin's oversimplications or misunderstandings of the alternatives. I would also need more information to see how his view differs from Rorty's pragmatism and Quine's holism.

I think Dworkin's worldview is a viable one, not that it is the uniquely true one. A more humble presentation would have been more compelling.

Paul Theroux, The Lower River *** 1/2

I read a number of Paul Theroux's novels and travel books back in the 1990s, but lost track of him by the turn of the century. The Lower River, from 2012, is just the second of his recent books I've read (along with Blinding Light, which I didn't care for).

Like much of Theroux's best work, The Lower River takes place in a remote part of the world and has autobiographical overtones. The protagonist, Ellis Hock, send his critical formative years in the Peace Corp in Malawi. When his marriage falls apart at age 62, he decides to return to the village where he was stationed, since he remembers it as the happiest time in his life. Life there is just as he remembers it, except that it is not really. The locals have become a lot more cynical in the forty years he has been gone, and they start exploiting him right away.

The themes and narrative structure are quite good, and Theroux writes natural description well. I had two issues, though. First, Hock's character is a bit too nice and monochromatic: one of the things I used to love about Theroux was that his characters -- including himself in the travel books -- were inevitably prickly. Second, the back half of the book is repetitive as Hock's attempts to leave are repeatedly thwarted.

David Lewis, We the Navigators **** 1/2

My most substantial souvenir from our recent trip to Hawaii, We, the Navigators explores The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific. In other words, it explains how South Sea islanders navigated their watery world without instruments. How does one sail 1000 miles across open ocean and arrive at a tiny atoll?

The book provides practical details about many specific techniques, such as using star compasses, reading swells, identifying land clouds, and following birds. (Flying fish always head into the current just before re-entering the water!) More impressively, it presents the conceptual worldview of the traditional navigator, which is quite different from the modern Western approach.

Lewis writes the book in a very academic style. He culls data from many sources, but the clearest and most entertaining illustrations of the techniques come from voyages he undertook himself with actual practitioners of the art.

Like Thinking in Jazz, We, the Navigators elucidates a complex and esoteric skill in a way that makes it simultaneously less mysterious and more impressive. 

Harry Brandt (Richard Price), The Whites *** 1/2

The Whites differs from a typical crime pot-boiler by having Richard Price's signature touch with gritty realistic urban settings and peerless dialogue. It differs from a typical Richard Price novel by having a somewhat preposterous plot with multiple connected murders.

Billy Graves is a cop on the Manhattan Night Watch, an assignment he ended up with when he made a mistake as part of the Wild Geese, an aggressive anti-crime unit back in the 1990s. Murders start popping up that seem to connect to his former unit. Meanwhile, another cop sets out for revenge on the person he holds responsible for his brother's death.

The experience of reading a Richard Price novel is immersive, and he creates unique individual characters even for minor players. The Whites has too many characters to keep track of though: there are the cops on the Night Watch, the retired members of the Wild Geese, the families of the former Wild Geese, the criminals that each Wild Goose continue to obsess over and their victims. (The criminals are the Whites of the title.) All of these characters have clear traits and motivations, but it gets hard to keep track of all the names.

If you're going to read a Richard Price novel -- and I recommend that you do -- I'd start with Clockers, Freedomland, or Lush Life. The Whites isn't bad by any means, but it doesn't measure up to Price's best (hence the pseudonym?).

Patrick O'Brian, The Reverse of the Medal ***

The immemorial sequence of cleaning the upper decks in the earliest morning, pumping ship, piping up hammocks, piping hands to breakfast, cleaning the maindeck, ... the solemn observation of noon, hands piped to dinner... the immemorial sequence, punctuated by bells, was quickly and firmly restored...

Reading a Patrick O'Brian book is like settling back into the immemorial sequence, a comfortable routine. The Reverse of the Medal unfortunately has very little sailing action, but its land-based action is more interesting than it was in The Fortune of War, for example. It also felt like O'Brian explained things a bit more explicitly than he usually does. Another notable feature of this episode is that it clearly sets up the action of the next book. 

Halldór Laxness, Under the Glacier ** 1/2

Halldór Laxness is Iceland's only Nobel laureate. He won the prize in 1955.

Under the Glacier is a modernist novel with a satirical tone and Beckett-esque dialog. A young unnamed narrator travels to a town at the base of Snæfellsjökull on behalf of the bishop to investigate rumors of odd behavior from the local pastor. He meets a collection of odd and unlikely characters, with whom he speaks at cross purposes about their religious practices. The town practices a faith that is an amalgam of Christianity, paganism, and pretty much every world religion, and they may be preparing for a resurrection.

Many years ago I read and really enjoyed Laxness' early masterpiece Independent People (from 1934). I've tackled other Laxness books since then, but none have come close to Independent People, or even been similar in style or tone. To be fair, the other books are from much later in his career (The Fish Can Sing from 1957, Under the Glacier from 1968), and they seem to have more insider Icelandic references. Maybe I should try Salka Valka from 1932?

John McPhee, The Control of Nature *****

The Control of Nature comprises three accounts of man against nature: constraining the route of the Mississippi River, saving an Icelandic harbor from volcanic lava flows, and catching debris flows from the San Gabriel Mountains outside of Los Angeles. Engineers and scientists deploy a variety of creative and ambitious strategies against the powerful forces of water, lava, and rock.

All three sections feature clear explanations of the natural forces, the attempted solutions, and the escalating complications. They offer dramatic human-sized stories of individuals caught in the crossfire, such as the Genofile family nearly crushed in their home by a huge flow of debris. Fascinating details abound; for example:

As lava moves, under the air, it develops a skin of glass that is broken and rebroken by the motion of the liquid below, so that it clinks and tinkles, and crackles like a campfire...

All of it it told with John McPhee's idiosyncratic sense of organization, jumping between past and present unpredictably and occasionally confusingly.

Awesome all around. I learned a lot and enjoyed the drama.

Renata Adler, Speedboat ***

Speedboat is stylish, elusive, aphoristic, and funny. All it lacks is a narrative. I thoroughly enjoyed the individual incidents and stories, but I lamented the lack of an overarching structure. On the plus side, it'll be a great book to dip into for enjoyable anecdotes. 

Thomas Hurka, The Best Things in Life ***

The Best Things in Life is a short philosophical treatise on making the right choices for the best possible life. I was a bit surprised to find that Hurka means "best" in the ethical sense, for a life with the highest level of virtue rather than the most fulfilling.

The consideration of the possible candidates for highest good – pleasure, knowledge, achievement, moral virtue, love – is clear and practical but fairly familiar to anyone who has thought about the issues before. Hurka's two most interesting arguments are about how pleasure and pain are not equal in value (an "equivalent" amount of pain is worse) and how knowledge and achievement are complementary aspects of a proper connection between ourselves and the world (knowledge is our mind conforming to the world; achievement is the world responding to our will).

Rene Denfield, The Enchanted ** 1/2

The Enchanted is well written, but I feel like there's a fatal mismatch between its form and content. The story takes place in a dilapidated old prison and follows a death row investigator hired to help inmates escape execution. The narrator is an inmate with selective mutism who views the story though the prism of his madness and the books he reads. His perspective imbues everything with wonder and enchantment, making the story sound like a fable. The main characters don't get names; they are just the lady, the fallen priest, the warden.

The author has worked as a death row investigator, and it shows. The best aspect of the book is the details about life in prison. But her goal is to celebrate "the human capacity to transcend even the most nightmarish reality," so the realistic details get overlaid with luminous mumbo-jumbo.

The yard smells when it rains in the summer... and I think about each clod of mud and how it contains the history of the world: shards of mica and stone, glossy ribbons of clay too faint to see, the arm and leg of Eve, the pulsating pull of Adam... With every exhalation, I find a way out of this enchanted place.

I also question Denfield's choice of narrator. She probably had in mind Chief from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but our unnamed narrator has no way to know (or understand) most of what he describes.

P.S. I bought The Enchanted along with Boy, Snow, Bird and The People in the Trees from the "3-for-2" table at Powell's Books. Coincidentally, all three have female authors and sprinkle elements of fantasy over basically realistic premises. The Enchanted was the weakest of the three, so I'll consider it to be the one I got for free.

Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees ****

The People in the Trees is the faux memoir of a Nobel Prize-winning doctor who discovers a possible secret to immortality among the people on a remote Micronesian island, only to fall into disgrace when he is accused on sexually assaulting some of the dozens of children he adopted from the island.

Our unreliable narrator Dr Norton Perina is a wonderfully prickly literary creation: arrogant and disparaging of others, always with solid reasoning. Once he arrives on Ivu'ivu, his physical descriptions are outstanding but offbeat:

...feeling the floor [of the jungle] beneath me gently buckling and heaving with unseen layers of worms and beetles as I placed my feet upon them; it could feel like treading on the wet innards of a large dozing beast.

The story of the Ivu'ivuans and of Perina's discovery are interesting and well-told, and the ultimate consequences for the island nation are unfortunately realistic. I was surprised that the book was more about cross-cultural contact than it was about the lure of immortality.

For all of its strengths, I have two reservations about The People in the Trees, two lost opportunities, I think. First, Perina's colleague Rob Kubodera, who wrote the preface and edited the memoir, sounds too similar to Perina: he doesn't have a distinctive voice. Second, the chapters relating to Perina's children are comparatively sketchy and don't really add to our understanding of the characters or the themes of the book. They could have been much stronger.

Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird ***

The back cover of Boy, Snow, Bird says that it "recasts the 'Snow White' fairy tale," but that's not quite true. The story does have a central character named Snow Whitman whose stepmother sends her away, but it also has allusions to other fairy tales like the Three Blind Mice and Cinderella. The fairy tale elements provide color rather than an organizing principle.

Once every few chapters, all of the pieces come together beautifully: the prose, the themes, and the plot. The first chapter is wonderful, as is the chapter introducing the first major plot twist. Between them, however, I felt like the story drifted aimlessly. And the last plot twist was a twist too far, in my opinion.

Stripped of its fairy tale trappings, Boy, Snow, Bird is a story about the ethics of "passing" -- light-skinned blacks passing as white. The saddest incident came when Boy, the obviously colored daughter who reveals the family's race, dresses as Alice in Wonderland for Halloween but everyone sees her as a housekeeper or washerwoman. This episode clearly relates to the fraught relationship the characters have with mirrors.

I was also intrigued by the characterization of the "evil" stepmother as being evil "not powers of darkness or something you can protect yourself from with crosses and holy water... [but she would] find someone who was unhappy, and once she'd found them she'd use her gift to make it worse." She avoided happy people.

I should also mention that the cover of the paperback edition is beautifully designed.

Diarmaid MacCullough, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years ****

Why did an atheist read an 1100-page history of Christianity? Because it provided a different perspective on the history of Western civilization, with which it is basically co-extensive, and because I often wondered about how the various Christian denominations relate to each other: Lutherans, Baptists, Armenian Orthodox, African Methodist, Pentecostal.

The author has a sympathetic understanding of the faith without being unduly bound to it. He offers intriguing interpretations of well-known events, such as Luther's protest, and captures how history is driven equally by theology and pure chance. For instance, he suggests that the center of gravity for Christianity was poised to be Constantinople or even Bagdad but for the swift rise of Islam.

The most significant history I learned was about the very existence of Eastern "Miaphysite" Christianity. I always thought the split in 400 - 500 was two-way, between Catholic and Orthodox. I admit that my eyes glazed over during certain eras with their litany of popes, patriarchs, and princes. Inevitable in a story with the scope of this one. I was more interested in the big picture anyway. The book includes an extensive bibliography, so that I can pursue topics that captured my interest (such as the development of Pentecostalism).

Gina Arnold, Exile in Guyville (33 1/3 series) ****

This recent entry in the 33 1/3 series is inspired by Liz Phair's acclaimed but controversial 1993 album. The book addresses the context in which the album came out and the reasons that it provoked so much passion (negative and positive). The pages describing the music are the weakest part of the book.

Arnold starts by recalling the state of the music scene at the time, "in the days before MP3s, iTunes, Smartphones, YouTube, Facebook, ... and other digital technologies swept the conventional music industry aside." The only way to hear new music was to buy records or see bands live, and the only way to learn about new music was to read the critics in alternative weekly papers... like Gina Arnold, who I used to read -- and disagree with -- in the East Bay Express. Her descriptions take me right back to that time and make me think, for the first time really, about the nature of the changes these past two decades. (I also realize that grabbing an issue of the alternative weekly is still one of my first impulses when visiting a new city.)

Arnold also teases out some of the foundational tenets of the indie rock community, such as the inherently male nature of its value system and the importance of obscurity. She makes a convincing case that the elders of the community felt threatened, or even betrayed, by Phair's feminist critique of their cozy, liberal worldview.

Like the book Let's Talk About Love, Exile in Guyville had me feeling very self-conscious about my musical tastes. 

D.W. Wilson, Once You Break a Knuckle *** 1/2

This collection of stories is similar to another book I read recently, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake. Both collections feature blue-collar characters living in remote rural areas (in this case, the Kootenay Valley in British Columbia), are written in strong stoic prose, and have individual stories that gain resonance when read together.

It's important to say that the protagonists are "bluecollars" and not "hicks -- the right-wing gun-toters who exploit our unemployment system, who pop welfare checques on dope from the Native reserve, who think beef jerky and Coke constitutes a decent lunch to pack their kids... [and] who find genuine humour in the suffering of others."

The stories didn't feature as much of the landscape as I would have liked. The stories are about the toughness of the people, My favorite piece of color was old man Crease's T-shirt that said, "Pain is only weakness leaving the body."

The book is well-titled: every story includes references to knuckles. 

John Porter, One Day as a Tiger ** 1/2

The subtitle of this book is "Alex MacIntyre and the birth of light and fast alpinism," which suggests the biography of a mountaineering pioneer, does it not? The author sets us straight in the Preface, saying "this story of Alex is not in any sense of the word a pure biography." I would go farther and say that it's not a biography at all. Rather, it is John Porter's thoughts and memories of a time during which he often climbed with Alex MacIntyre.

If you met John Porter in a bar and spent all night talking about climbing, I imagine you'd hear something like this book. He tells a wide-ranging story, covering everything from the history of mountaineering to equipment design and the politics of British adventure clubs. He wanders from topic to topic and from past to present, mostly staying superficial. His accounts of climbing are only intermittently compelling.

Other books have given me a sense of the adventure of mountaineering or of the strange psychology of its top competitors. One Day as a Tiger left me with a sense of how irresponsible climbers tend to be: wandering off from base camp, smashing train speakers during an illicit trip through the USSR, forging permits, abandoning crashed cars, gaming donors. Does this mean I've gotten old?

As for the purported protagonist, Alex MacIntyre comes across as a talented climber during a time of change, but no pioneer. 

Kevin Barry, City of Bohane ****

This novel is well named, since the city is more vivid than its characters or plot. Like New Crobuzon in Perdido Street Station, Bohane comes alive. I feel like I could find my way around the place, from "the Arab tangle of alleyways and wynds" that make up the Bohane Trace, up the 98 Steps to the "bleak, forlorn, .. violently windy" Northside Rises on the bluffs over the river, across the footbridge to Smoketown, and along De Valera Street into New Town.

In the year 2053, the Harnett Fancy (Trace blood-and-bone) prepares to feud with the Cusacks (from the flatblocks on the Rises) for control of the city. Meanwhile, the Gant Broderick, boss from twenty years gone, wanders back from the Big Nothin' along the High Boreen.

The story is told in a colorfully concocted patois that is fun to read. And, oh, the costumes!

Silver high-top boots, drainpipe strides in a natty-boy mottle, a low-slung dirk belt and a three-quarter jacket of saffron-dyed sheepskin.

Jacques Ranciere, Moments Politiques ***

As a collection of "occasional pieces" (newspaper articles, magazine interviews, radio broadcasts), this book feels fragmented, without clear, solid argumentation. I was able to construct an impression of Ranciere's views from isolated tidbits but I don't feel at all confident that it's an accurate impression.

The theme that resonated most with me is how the categories we use to classify people -- immigrants, citizens, working class, and so on -- arise as part of a problem statement instead of being naturalistic, and that frequently all sides in a political debate implicitly agree to the classifications. (Ranciere refers to this as "consensus," even when parties disagree violently about how to address the problem.)

I was marked in my youth by Satrean existentialism, and there received the impression that every identity is an imprisonment in a role. ("Politics and Identity")

Ranciere indulges in plenty of Continental philosophical jargon ("an activist as a subject faithful to collective decision, who works as a member of a kind of collective interiority"). However, his ideas frequently come through clearly; I highlighted numerous aphorisms throughout the book. 

The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake *** 1/2

Breece D'J Pancake is a writer from West Virginia who published a handful of stories before committing suicide. This book contains his entire output of twelve stories along with three appreciations from other writers.

I'm afraid that my experience of the stories was negatively impacted by the foreword from James Alan McPherson. McPherson tells about meeting Pancake at the University of Virginia. The picture he paints of Pancake as an outsider who cultivates his image as a hayseed is so clichéd that I briefly thought Pancake might be a fictional character. The afterword from Andre Dubus III is far more effective at conveying the strengths of the stories.

Nearly all of the stories take place in the dying coal mining towns of West Virginia, and Pancake captures the region well using carefully chosen details. His protagonists are men who feel tied to the land but pine wistfully after others who have left.

Many respectable critics rave about Pancake, comparing his stories to Hemingway's. They reminded me more of Alistair MacLeod with their focus on working-class characters living in out-of-the-way towns. (MacLeod's territory is Cape Breton Island.) Dubus captures the appeal well in his afterword: these are not typical literary characters. However, they aren't very distinct from one another; the names and circumstances change, but the men all seem like the same guy to me.

I would say Pancake was a very promising writer. His prose style and sense of place are fully formed, but the plotting and thematic development revealed his youth.

Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution **** 1/2

This book provides a history of the ideas that lead to the American Revolution -- about sovereignty, representation, and of course liberty. It doesn't cover the events of the Revolution; in fact, it assumes that you are familiar with them already.

The reader's experience is in many ways the reverse of the colonists' experience. Bailyn deconstructs notions that we now take for granted and shows how they developed from earlier assumptions; the older ideas are the ones that seem new to us.

The two things that surprised me most were the extent to which English opposition writers influenced American public opinion and the respect everyone had for the English constitution. We really wanted to remain British citizens! If only there weren't a conspiracy in the British government to topple the balance of forces between the Crown, Parliament, and the people.

I was also surprised by how forcefully Bailyn presents the anti-federalist case when discussing the ratification of the Constitution. Forming a federal government really did feel like a repudiation of the achievements of the Revolution, and it was not at all clear the system would work.

Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation **** 1/2

Antelopes have 10x vision, you said. It was the beginning or close to it. This means that on a clear night they can see the rings of Saturn.

This first paragraph hooked me: an interesting "fact" followed by a thought-provoking and somewhat humorous commentary. The whole (short) book consists of these sorts of lapidary tidbits.

I found a book called Thriving Not Surviving in a box on the street. I stood there, flipping through it, unwilling to commit.

Dept. Of Speculation tells a conventional story about marriage and parenthood using unconventional means. The style reminded me of Wittgenstein's Mistress, although applied to a traditional plot. Reviewers keep mentioning Renata Adler's Speedboat, which I suppose I'll have to check out.

Of course it [parenthood] is difficult. You are creating a creature with a soul, my friend says.

Despite the detached prose style, Offill manages to convey both positive and negative emotions strongly.  

Jo Nesbø, The Son ***

My first taste of au courant Scandinavian crime fiction, from its most popular author. It has all the trademarks of the genre: the serial killer, the cop struggling with personal demons, the mysterious conspiracy, the woman who falls in love with the doomed protagonist, the overly complicated plot mechanics that rely on poor police work. (During a nationwide manhunt, they never consider checking the killer's family home?) As you might expect from the title, it also features unsubtle Christian iconography -- there's even a character named Pontius!

I'm getting tired of the genre.

Richard Ford, Let Me Be Frank with You ****

The four stories are slight, and they feel like excerpts from a longer novel, but it's a great pleasure to hear Frank Bascombe's voice again.

Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle ****

In the first chapter of this memoir, Walls is in a taxi on her way to a fancy party in New York City when she sees her mother scrounging through a dumpster. Her parents are homeless while she lives on Park Avenue. She meets her mother for lunch a few days later and asks how she can help. Her mother suggests that she, the author, is the one who needs help. "You're way too easily embarrassed. Your father and I are who we are. Accept it."

This story captures the tone of the memoir as a whole. Walls tells an entertaining tale of her itinerant childhood with her unsuitable parents. She is honest about the sad facts, but presents her parents' views in a sympathetic light. They always have a rational argument for why their way is best!

Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things ****

The Book of Strange New Things shares a premise with Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow: a religious man travels to an alien world to minister to its inhabitants. The similarity provides an added layer of suspense, given how things go bad in The Sparrow -- and in most accounts of cross-cultural contact.

Faber is not interested in the science part of his science fiction story, but he does create an intriguingly foreign world. He also captures his protagonist's uneasiness, which comes from him not being sure about his fellow humans' motivations much less the aliens'. The story raises questions about our ability to communicate in the absence of shared experience. Peter wonders how his flock understands God, and he becomes increasingly estranged from his wife who is experiencing travails back on Earth.