My Literary 2016: An Analysis

As you can see from the Blog Archive to the right, I read 46 books this year (the 2016 total minus this meta-post). That's a decent number of books, but it represents my lowest total since 2012. It also includes a surprisingly high number of second readings: I re-read seven novels and two non-fiction books, representing 15% of the total.

I did a pretty good job of balancing fiction and non-fiction, reading 24 works of fiction and 22 of non-fiction. My highest rating went to a novel (Being Dead) as did my lowest rating (The Sellout, which later won the Man Booker Prize!). But overall I preferred the non-fiction: my average rating for non-fiction was 3.65 stars, which is a half-star higher than the 3.16 average for fiction. I read some disappointing novels this year, but all of the non-fiction got at least three stars.

Walter Mosley, The Man in My Basement *** 1/2

The Man in My Basement is the second book in a row that I've rated lower than I did the first time I read it. I still appreciate its approach and its believably unpleasant characters, but the vagueness that I found tantalizing the last time I found annoying this time. The element of surprise was gone, and the book didn't set my mind a-buzzin' the way I hoped it would.

Robert Coover, Pinocchio in Venice *** 1/2

I'm rating Pinocchio in Venice one star lower than I did the first time I read it. I stand by everything I said in my earlier review, but the high rating really only applies to Part I ("A Snowy Night"). The rest of the book is a bawdy picaresque full of wordplay, which recapitulates the original adventures of Pinocchio. (It's amazing how many English expressions involve wood.) I found it tiresome and repetitive at times.

I really liked the first part, though, especially its Venetian atmosphere.

Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land **** 1/2

Arlie Russell Hochschild is a liberal sociologist from Berkeley; in Strangers in Their Own Land, she attempts to climb over what she calls the "empathy wall" and understand the world view of Tea Party conservatives. She visits communities in southwestern Louisiana and starts with a focus on one issue: environmental regulations. Louisiana has high levels of pollution from the oil and gas industries, but its people consistently vote against regulation. If she can understand this paradox, maybe she can understand the conservative mindset.

If you know me well, you know that I love to "try on" different world views. While Hochschild's approach is basically anecdotal, she does manage to present a compelling and sympathetic conservative worldview, and to identify areas where conservatives and liberals might find common cause if they talk in a collaborative way. (Other areas not so much, since the two sides can't even agree about the basic facts.)

So why are Louisianans against environmental regulation? Because they see it as ineffective, wrongly targeted, and an excuse for government overreach.

Take this bayou. If your motorboat leaks a little gas into the water, the warden'll write you up. But if companies leak thousands of gallons of it and kill all the life here? The state lets them go. If you shoot an endangered brown pelican, they'll put you in jail. But if a company kills the brown pelican by poisoning the fish he eats? They let it go. I think they overregulate the bottom because it's harder to regulate the top.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea ** 1/2

I felt an existential crisis coming on, so I decided to lean into it by reading Nausea. (Although, admittedly, my feeling was more ennui than nausée.) As befits a novel from a philosopher, Nausea is rich with ideas, but I thought it lacked the visceral impact suggested by its title.

Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis ****

In advance of our recent trip to Memphis (and to Woodall Mountain the highest point in Mississippi), I reread this first book in Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis Presley. Guralnick does an excellent job of presenting Elvis' "complexity and irreducibility" while also placing him in the context of his time and place. In fact, to me the most compelling parts of the book are the details about the regional nature of the 1950s music business: someone like Sam Phillips from Sun Records had to personally deliver his records to DJs and local distributors, and most concerts were revues featuring an array of mostly regional performers.

Last Train to Memphis is similar in many ways to another of my favorite biographies, Naifeh and Smith's Jackson Pollock: An American Saga. Presley and Pollock are both insecure, larger-than-life artists who died young, and both biographies use their lives as an entry point for showing artistic worlds on the cusp of major changes.

Patrick O'Brian, The Nutmeg of Consolation ***

Book 14 of the Aubrey-Maturin series is a typical entry in the back half of the sequence. The prose washes over me like a warm bath as I follow our heroes through a series of low-key adventures. The book begins and ends at basically arbitrary points in the overall story, although the end does find the Surprise headed home to England from the penal colony in Australia.

I like the title of this one.  The British envoy in the The Thirteen-Gun Salute applied the title to himself; in this book, Jack Aubrey borrows it as the name for the former Dutch ship that he sails from Batavia.

China Miéville, Embassytown ***

My China Miéville binge continues with Embassytown, a prime example of linguistic science fiction. Embassytown is a city of mostly human inhabitants situated on a planet at the edge of the trafficked universe. The indigenous population of "Hosts" are mysterious creatures who speak a language that involves two mouths speaking simultaneously. Furthermore, they only recognize sound as language when both streams of sound come from a single mind: "A Host could understand nothing not spoken in Language, by a speaker, with intent, with a mind behind the words." The only humans who can communicate with the Hosts are Ambassadors, who are pairs of twins trained to have an empathic bond.

I liked the idea of dual-track language and was willing to suspend my disbelief about the Hosts being able to detect that the sound was coming from a single intelligence. I was less able to accept that the Host's Language was non-symbolic ("Words don't signify; they are their referents") and that Hosts were therefore unable to lie. What does it even mean to say that their words don't signify? Spoiler alert the Hosts learn symbolic language by the end of the book and it's a transformative experience.

As usual, Miéville creates an intriguing and convincing world, including its social mores and politics. Ultimately, though, I just wasn't able to embrace a couple of the fundamental ideas that drove the story.

Ted Gioia, How to Listen to Jazz ***

I don't know that How to Listen to Jazz succeeds in its goal to be a "lively, accessible introduction to the art of listening to jazz." Sure, its early chapters break down the key components that characterize a jazz performance (rhythm, phrasing, timbre, spontaneity, and so on) and offer friendly tips about how to listen for these elements. I suppose that a neophyte might track down Gioia's suggested recordings and listen to them carefully. To me, his analysis seems more suited to an existing jazz fan who wants to think more about how musicians create the effects they already appreciate.

In many ways, the first half of the book is a streamlined version of Gioia's History of Jazz: how jazz grew out of the blues and ragtime, how it differs from the classical tradition. The second half devolves into a list of jazz masters. I appreciated the concision in the first couple of chapters, but felt like the later chapters became too vague. I also needed a quick way to track down the recordings he mentions in the text.

David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System ** 1/2

I am a DFW fan, a near completist, but I'd never read his first novel, The Broom of the System. Now I have. While it doesn't quite qualify as juvenilia, it definitely lacks the depth of his mature work. A lot of his stylistic quirks are already in evidence (digressive structure, overabundance of detail, deadpan surrealistic comedy, allusions to high and low culture, characters tortured by their own convoluted thought processes; but no footnotes), but without the moral or empathetic depth of Infinite Jest or his later works.

I usually like DFW's digressiveness, seeing a thematic purpose to it, but I found it annoying here. I got engaged with the main narrative thread about the group of people missing from a nursing home and with the loquacious cockatiel Vlad the Impaler; Wallace dropped both threads quickly. Wallace was reportedly inspired by ideas from Wittgenstein and Derrida, but I found the book madcap without real purpose.

My favorite digressions are the story summaries from the main character's besotted boss, the editor of a failed literary magazine. I especially enjoyed the story of the woman with a tree-frog living in a hollow of her throat.

Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women ****

A Manual for Cleaning Women is a short-story collection from an author who never received the attention she deserved during her lifetime. (Berlin died in 2004.) Her stories are usually founded on autobiographical elements, so it's good that she lived a colorful life: raised in mining camps in the US and in Latin America, suffering from scoliosis and alcoholism, rearing four kids from three marriages, working in schools, hospitals, and as a cleaning woman.

It's probably the autobiography that makes her stories feel more palpable and authentic than most literary fiction, even fiction that takes place in similar low-rent circumstances. The connections between the stories become more prominent in the second half of the book, where multiple stories share the same characters and feature variations on events from the first half. These connections allow the stories to expand on each other, but at the expense of their strength as stand-alone stories. By the end, A Manual for Cleaning Women started to feel like a fragmentary memoir.

Jill Leovy, Ghettoside ****

This is a book about a very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic. African Americans have suffered from just such a lack of effective criminal justice, and this, more than anything, is the reason for the nation's long-standing plague of black homicides.

Leovy, a Los Angeles Times reporter, argues for this "simple idea" with a combination of general historical/statistical research and specific stories from her own reporting. The core of Ghettoside is an account of a single murder case, somewhat representative (a young black man shot by another young black man for questionable reasons) and somewhat not (the victim was the son of an L.A. detective). The book spans out from this one case to tell about the dangerous area "south of the 10," the detective squad, the victim's families, and recalcitrant witnesses. Leovy has a great eye for detail and an empathetic feel for the milieu; her tone often becomes indignant when she starts making more abstract arguments.

Leovy's story is consistent with her thesis, but I don't think she proves it. If nothing else, though, Ghettoside shows that you can be pro-police and still lament structural racial bias. 

Rachel Cusk, Outline ***

Outline recounts ten conversations that the narrator has during a visit to Athens to teach a summer writing course. We learn very little about the narrator herself -- by design, as we learn from the title and from one interlocutor's insight:

While he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her... a sense of who she now was.

Each chapter feels like a (very successful) writing exercise, with the author conveying ideas in an oblique fashion. Most of the conversations concern relationships between husbands and wives, or rather ex-husbands and ex-wives, and how those relationships affect a person's understanding of life.

I started Outline expecting monologues from a variety of characters, each in their own distinctive voice. However, the narrator describes most of the dialogue in the third person, which gives all the characters an unfortunate sameness.

John McWhorter, The Language Hoax *** 1/2

This book is a manifesto. I will oppose... the idea that people's languages channel the way they think and perceive the world. ... The idea that grammar channels people into thinking of time as cyclical is catnip.

Catnip indeed. My original motivation for studying linguistics was the tantalizing possibility that I could glean secrets about people's world views from the way they speak, and I've been an avid reader of books purporting to rehabilitate the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The Language Hoax presents a convincing case that the tantalizing possibility is false. A person's language does indeed influence his or her thinking to some degree in experimental settings, but not in any interesting way.

I appreciate how McWhorter highlights the fact that linguistics reveals the diversity of languages in ways that are interesting in and of themselves. I also liked his close reading of a randomly overheard English sentence ("Dey try to cook it too fast, I'm-a be eatin' some pink meat!"). I wasn't as happy about the amount of time he spent railing against the well-intentioned paternalism inherent in much of popular Whorfianism: it's a good point, but it's independent of the question of the truth. 

Benjamin Markovitz, You Don't Have to Live Like This ** 1/2

A group of friends who met at Yale, led by a friend with political ambitions, try to single-handedly gentrify the outskirts of Detroit. Their naive idealism brings them into conflict with the existing residents, because neither side really understands where the other is coming from.

Everything about the book cover -- its aerial photo of Detroit, the quotes from the Washington Post and Literary Review, the tone of the author's bio -- promises a sardonic but nuanced examination of class conflict and inner-city life. ("The Wire scripted by J.M. Coetzee," says The Independent.) But the book does not fulfill this promise. Once every fifty pages or so there's an interesting insight about how different people experience life differently, but the majority of the story is like our narrator Greg Marnier: aimless, passive, and superficial. Almost all of the action happens in the last couple of chapters.

It's a squandered opportunity, because the setup offers a wealth of material.

Rachel Kushner, The Strange Case of Rachel K ****

A literary amuse-bouche: three impressionistic sketches from Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers. Kushner has a mesmerizing prose style, and these short pieces are a wonderful way to appreciate it.

China Miéville, The City and The City ****

Yes, another China Miéville book so soon. I enjoyed his story collection Three Moments of an Explosion enough to send me almost immediately to one of his novels.

The City and The City is fundamentally a noir-esque detective novel. The narrator is a detective who catches a murder case involving a young woman who was studying at a controversial archeological dig. His investigation leads him into dangerous subcultures and suggests larger forces at work. As I say, a detective novel.

The fantasy element comes with the locale. The detective lives in the (Eastern European?) city of Besźel; the murder victim came from the city of Ul Qoma. Besźel and Ul Qoma are neighboring cities with distinct clashing cultures, but they happen to occupy the same physical space. Citizens of each municipality learn to "unsee" everything about the other municipality. Our hero has to solve the case without "breaching" the boundary between the city and the city.

It's a great concept, impressively pulled off. It was tough going early on as I tried to imagine the logistics of unseeing, but I eventually settled into it and got engaged with the plot. The book's imitation of the detective genre extends to the resolution: our narrator spouts a bit too much exposition when he faces off against the perpetrators.

Mike O'Connor, Crisis, Pursued by Disaster, Followed Closely by Catastrophe ****

When Mike O'Conner was a kid, his family would often sneak away from their home in the middle of the night for reasons that he and his sister never understood. The parents would tell them that their trip to Mexico was an adventure and golden opportunity, but the kids knew it was something else.

I was fascinated by the mundane details of this memoir of life on the run from a child's point of view, and I was kept guessing about the nature of the family's crimes -- even though I was reading the book for the second time. (I'd forgotten how it turns out! Because you know what? It doesn't really matter!) The final section, which solves the mystery and tells the parents' story, is anti-climactic and written in rather flat prose.

Crisis, Pursued by Disaster, Followed Closely by Catastrophe would make a great double feature with Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, another memoir about growing up with problematic parents who tell their kids stories to justify their odd behavior.

China Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion ****

I read Perdido Street Station many years ago and still remember how impressed I was by Miéville's world-building. I picked up Three Moments of an Explosion to see how he might apply that skill in short bursts in a story collection.

As varied as they are, the stories all take place in variations on our own world. Nonetheless, Miéville's sociological acuity shines though. It often takes a while before the fantastical element of the story kicks in, by which time I was fully invested in the setting and character psychology. His prose is far more artful than is typical for the science fiction and fantasy genres. The therapeutic jargon in "Dreaded Outcome," the island life in "In the Slopes," the romantic getaway in "Säcken": they're all totally convincing and wouldn't be out of place in a more literary setting.

I wasn't a fan of every story –– has that ever happened? –– but I really enjoyed a majority of them, and the book has an impressive range.

There are a couple of big bookshops in town which stock a bunch of [specialist magazines]... Me and Mom would stand together and pick up some publication, the only rule being that it had to be about something neither of us had any interest in or knowledge of. ... Within seconds of browsing we were learning the jargon and terminology, we had a sense of the big controversies, the pressing issues, even the micropolitics of a hobby. ... I'd become a firm supporter of one side or other in a debate the existence of which I'd had no clue of seconds before.  –– "The Bastard Prompt"

Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances ***

I really like the first section of this novel, but it starts to lose me about a third of the way through. The narrator, a psychiatrist named Leo Liebenstein, believes his wife has been replaced by a simulacrum, and he sets out to find his real wife. He is also looking for one of his patients, who believes himself to be a secret agent able to control the weather.

When Leo is dealing with his wife (or her simulacrum), the story has a strong emotional core under Leo's psychosis. When he ties his wife's disappearance to meteorology and heads off to Argentina, it is far less grounded and loses my interest. I think it was a mistake to introduce two crazy people and two largely distinct delusions.

In other words, I like Atmospheric Disturbances to the extent that it is an experimental novel "about the mysterious nature of human relationships," and I'm disappointed in it to the extent that it wanders away from that central theme.

Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question *** 1/2

Frank Wilczek is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and the question he asks is, "Does the world embody beautiful ideas?" Not surprisingly for a physicist, his answer is "a resounding Yes!"

The title and the theme of this "meditation" suggest a New Age-y approach, and the cover has a blurb from Deepak Chopra to complete the impression. However, Wilczek's hard science background keeps his speculations grounded in fact. The book discusses Pythagoras, Plato, Newton, and Maxwell before plunging into his specialty of quantum theory. His aesthetics for theories comes down to one principle above all: symmetry.

I wasn't particularly captured by Wilczek's question nor his attempts to answer it. However, I was very intrigued with his unconventional (idiosyncratic?) presentation of the theories of gravity and electromagnetism. I feel like I understand them in a new way, and that I even made progress toward conceptualizing the crazy world of quantum theory. It's all fluids!

Halldór Laxness, Independent People **** 1/2

To prolong the glow of our recent trip to Iceland, I reread Halldór Laxness' masterpiece Independent People. Perhaps I was inspired by seeing the book in the window of every book shop and souvenir stand in the country?

Independent People tells the story of Bjartur of Summerhouses, a sheep farmer living in a turf-roofed croft in the Icelandic highlands. His sole goal is to not be in debt to anyone, neither financial debt nor social indebtedness. It's an admirable goal, but it makes Bjartur difficult to get along with, especially for his wives and children.

Most of Independent People takes place at Bjartur's croft. We learn a lot about the sheep and about the harsh, beautiful moors that form his land. The outside world intervenes only rarely until near the end. Laxness' prose is sardonic and lovely. There are a few vivid chapters that I'll not forget: the night of terror that Bjartur's first wife Rosa spends alone in the croft, Bjartur's nearly fatal search for a missing ewe, the crofters discussing the stroke of good fortune provided by World War I. The relationship between Bjartur and his (foster) daughter Asta Sóllilja is well drawn and even heartwarming.

The book loses some of its power when it expands its borders in the final 50 pages or so. On the one hand, introducing the politics of wider Iceland helps put Bjartur's struggles into perspective, but at the expense of the focus on character and setting. It also felt a little rushed to me; I'd adjusted to the pace of Bjartur's life.

Michael Steinberg, The Fiction of a Thinkable World ***

The Fiction of a Thinkable World argues that Western philosophy and institutions presuppose a false picture of people as autonomous thinking subjects confronting stimuli that is external to the self. In fact, our conscious thinking is not independent from, but rather continuous with, our subconscious and social actions. However, modern capitalist society depends on the myth of independent autonomous individuals –– in economics, in the voting booth, in the marketplace –– and our everyday experience therefore reinforces the illusion of an integrated self.

The author takes a different approach to denying the mind/body distinction. The question is not whether thoughts are any more than brain states, but whether abstract thought is in any way distinct from the subconscious activities of our bodies. He also shows how deeply engrained individualism is in modern society, and some of the ways it is destructive to our well-being.

Unfortunately, though, he doesn't even attempt to describe an alternative way of thinking/acting. A couple of times he says that other social models existed before Western capitalism bowled them over, but he doesn't describe them beyond some vague hand-waving in the directions of Taoism. I was left with a compelling critique but nowhere to go with it.

Sjón, From the Mouth of the Whale ** 1/2

Not surprisingly, bookstores in Iceland promote Halldór Laxness and various Icelandic crime writers. I've read several Laxness books and wasn't interested in the crime genre, so I went for a book by Sjón, the Icelandic novelist, poet, and playwright.

As expected from a book by a poet, From the Mouth of the Whale is stronger in its imagery than its plot. The narrator is Jónas Palmason, a self-taught healer in the 17th century. His talent for curing "female maladies" and his obsession with examining dead ravens make him an outcast, suspected of witchcraft. He is banished to a deserted island off the coast, where he considers man's origins and his place in the natural world.

From the Mouth of the Whale has some striking passages, especially in its vivid depictions of the world from Adam's perspective, but it completely lacks narrative drive. Maybe I should have tried one of the crime novelists.

Patrick O'Brian, The Thirteen-Gun Salute ** 1/2

My least favorite Aubrey/Maturin books are the ones that spend more plot on Maturin's role as an intelligence agent than on nautical derring-do. Maturin as an intelligence agent is by far the least convincing aspect of these novels, so it's never good when a book dwells on it.

In The Thirteen-Gun Salute, our heroes escort a British envoy to Malay, where he hopes to woo the Sultan away from a treaty with France. Stephen Maturin works behind the scenes to undermine the French position.

The voyage to Malay is entirely routine. The finest set piece is Stephen's visit to the Kumai Crater in Borneo, where he visits a Buddhist monastery and communes with the orangutans. O'Brian ends the book in medias res with the crew stranded on an uncharted island, which perhaps bodes well for the next installment.

Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe *** 1/2

A terrible title for a book whose subtitle is "Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics." Masters of the Universe is a nice companion to George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America. Where Nash covers the various strands of conservatism in America, Jones focuses on the libertarian strand in both the US and Britain. ("Neoliberal" is the more common British term for the group.) Jones is also interested in the political movement: how did free-market ideology manage to replace the post-war Keynesian consensus?

Masters of the Universe does a very good job of explaining the neoliberal worldview, including both its economic foundation and the philosophy that earns it the name "liberal." Jones presents the view fairly, even though he is not a neoliberal himself. (His tone becomes more critical in the later chapters.) Turning to the politics, he shows that the shift to market-based approaches came in response to a perceived failure of the Keynesians in the late 1970s, and that it started during the liberal administrations before Reagan and Thatcher.

Jones' prose can be academic and repetitive, but it's an interesting story.

Neal Stephenson, Seveneves ***

The Moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.

Seveneves is a a typically ambitious epic from Neal Stephenson. Scientists determine that the breakup of the moon will make the surface of Earth uninhabitable starting two years hence, and the world comes together to plan for the continuation of the human race in space. Most of the action takes place on the International Space Station, which serves as the seed for an orbiting civilization.

Seveneves is definitely hard sci-fi, with more of its 800+ pages dedicated to technological explanations than to story. All of the world's scientists work together seamlessly to make amazing progress in two years, while politicians are all corrupt.

Half way through Part I, I started wondering why the scientific community hadn't applied their ingenuity to repairing the Moon. They made amazing progress on the much harder problem of building a sustainable civilization. Even I had some ideas about how to "fix" the moon (similar to the asteroid capture caper). Stephenson probably could have explained why it wouldn't work, but he didn't, and the missed option tempered my enjoyment a bit.

I also had issues with Part III, which (spoiler alert) takes place five thousand years later. Human civilization consists of seven races, each descended from one of the eponymous seven Eves. I had a hard time believing that the races would have stayed as distinct as they did given that they've lived (essentially) together for thousands of years. The sociology didn't feel realistic to me. Also, the story in Part III felt rushed by comparison to the previous parts and ends with an incident that felt like the start of something rather than the end. If I'd been Stephenson's editor, I would have recommended publishing Part III as a second book along with a Part IV that continues the story for another hundred pages and several years.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer ***

A Pulitzer Prize-winning espionage novel, "wrought in electric prose." It was inevitable that I would read The Sympathizer, and probably just as inevitable that I would be disappointed by it. Contrary to reviewers' adjectives like "blistering," "haunting," "audacious," and "darkly comic," I found the narrator's tone detached and his adventures mundane. He is a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist sleeper agent in America, but the extent of his spycraft is writing letters to a fake aunt in France about activities that the Vietnamese could surely follow for themselves.

The final 75 pages are far more intense and force reconsideration of the preceding 306 pages. It turns out the aloof tone was an intentional plot point. For me, though, it was too little too late.

George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 **** 1/2

The title says it all: Nash gives an epic history of the conservative movement from 1945 to 1975, with a postscript from 2006. He focuses on the ideas of conservatism rather than its political successes and failures. His protagonists are the likes of William Buckley, Russell Kirk, and Milton Friedman, not Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.

Nash shows how the movement is a coalition of partially incompatible strands: originally libertarianism, traditionalism, and anti-Communism, joined later by neoconservatism and the religious right. Libertarians disagree with traditionalists about individualism (natural rights versus natural law) and with anti-Communists about foreign policy; traditionalists can be more comfortable with government programs than the other two; and so on. But they all fundamentally disagree with some aspect of the liberal program.

The book explicitly lays out the philosophical underpinnings of each conservative approach, and shows how they reject liberal ideas that are often taken for granted in modern America. Even some conservatives suspect that America is fundamentally a liberal country. The history also illuminates the reason for some conservative obsessions, such as with the South and the Constitution. (Conservatives are drawn to defend the pre-Civil War South and African colonialism for reasons that are separate from the racism that unfortunately comes wrapped up in these subjects.)

Fascinating and thought-provoking, if a little repetitive.

Frederick Exley, A Fan's Notes ** 1/2

I really want to love this book. It is a cult classic among literary types, unknown outside the boundaries of its cult. "Written by a self-pitying autodidact for consumption by self-pitying autodidacts," as Walter Kirn puts it in his review. A mocking narrator, a sui generis story about failure, pretentious literary references, a cover in the classic Vintage Contemporaries style, passionate fans among a tribe I want to belong to - what's not to like?

Alas, it doesn't speak to me. The narrative meanders and repeats itself rather than developing its theme (what happens when you reject bourgeois values but still measure yourself against them). Everything I said the first time I reviewed it still applies, but I'm docking it a star for failing to meet my expectations... in a thoroughly Exley-like fashion.

William James, Pragmatism / The Meaning of Truth ****

I've said it before: If I could have dinner with one historical figure, it would be William James. The first argument in Pragmatism is that people choose a philosophy based on their temperament, and James' temperament (and ergo his philosophy) largely matches mine. Also his prose is clear and enjoyable -- at least in works written after 1904; the articles from the 19th century collected in The Meaning of Truth fall short in both departments.

The back cover promotes Pragmatism as "the most famous single work of American philosophy." Like James' masterpiece The Varieties of Religious Experience, it derives from a series of lectures. He seeks to define the nature of the doctrine and show how it provides a middle way between the dogmatic views of idealists and empiricists. He hopes to defuse some fundamental disagreements between them.

I gained new perspective on several points despite being well acquainted with pragmatism and with William James. I see more clearly how the pragmatic method relates to James' view of evolving reality and how he defines 'truth' as a relation whose details differ in each concrete case. One insight that stands out is a new understanding of Bishop Berkeley's philosophy:

So far from denying the external world which we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the scholastic notion of a material substance unapproachable by us, behind the external world, deeper and more real than it, and needed to support it, which Berkeley maintained to be the most effective of all reducers of the external world to unreality. Abolish that substance, he said, believe that God...sends you the sensible world directly... (p 47)

James is not the most rigorous of thinkers, and so the book suffers when he tackles abstruse philosophical disputes. His prose becomes less clear and gains an edge of defensiveness. This happens more frequently in The Meaning of Truth, which unlike the Pragmatism lectures is targeted at professional philosophers. The Meaning of Truth acts like a set of detailed footnotes or essays in a Norton critical edition.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant ***

The Buried Giant is a fairy tale, with ogres, dragons, sprites, and knights. Like all fairy tales, it uses its fantastical elements to make a point about the real world. Unlike many fairy tales, the characters in this one don't live happily ever after.

In the years following the reign of King Arthur, an elderly couple sets off to visit their estranged son. A strange mist has spread amnesia throughout the land, so Axl and Beatrice can't quite remember how to get to their son's village or why they haven't seen him for so long. They meet various characters along the way, including a Saxon warrior and a former Knight of the Round Table, and become entangled in a quest to kill the dragon whose breath is the cause of the mist of forgetfulness.

Ishiguro allows the true story to emerge slowly from the mist. It turns out that the mass amnesia is a mixed blessing, since it causes the Britons and Saxons to forget the horrible deeds they committed against each other during the earlier wars. They've been living together peacefully for years, but what will happen when they remember their former grievances? Is forgetting atrocities enough of a balm, or do they demand retribution? If the cost of forgetting pain is also forgetting happiness, is it worth it?

Paul Theroux, O-Zone ** 1/2

Around 1990, based on the one-two punch of Riding the Iron Rooster and The Mosquito Coast, I went on a Paul Theroux binge. O-Zone is one of his books from that time period, his only stab at science-fiction as far as I know. It didn't stand up too well to re-reading.

The story is a transparent allegory about class. A group of rich New Yorkers spend a weekend in O-Zone, a quarantined wilderness about which they have only heard rumors, and find themselves transformed by their contact with the natives. The characters are less well developed than the setting: except for the awkward young genius who falls in with the "aliens," everyone's personality is defined by a single oversimplified motive. The prose is needlessly repetitive, as if Theroux were expecting us to read each chapter individually.

Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One ***

I enjoyed this slim volume for the opposite reason than I expected to. I expected to enjoy Fish's appreciation of finely crafted sentences more than his advice about writing, but his writing exercises are actually fun. Replace the nonsense words in Jabberwocky with good English words; transform a simple sentence into a hundred-word monster; pile on clauses to imitate the styles of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, or Philip Roth.

I was less impressed by his chosen example sentences and his literary analysis of them. His taste differs from mine, apparently. (Shouldn't be surprising, I suppose, given that his typical writing style is stereotypically academic.) I did appreciate his analysis of "the additive style," which I associate with Jose Saramago and his endless sentences.

Immediacy, not linear reflection leading to a conclusion, is the goal here, and to reach it [the author] must at once write sentences and somehow defeat the deferral of meaning -- the sense of building toward a completed thought -- that is the very nature of a sentence. Usually a sentence does not deliver its meaning until the end, and only at the end do its components acquire their significance and weight. But what [the author] wants is meaning to be present at every instant, to be always the same in weight and yet different as each word is different.

Diana Athill, Stet: An Editor's Life ***

Evelyn read Diana Athill's memoir Somewhere Towards the End and thought I might enjoy this earlier book about her career as an editor. Athill has a wonderfully chatty style that makes her a pleasurable companion as she gossips about about writers and publishers in post-war England. I have to say, though, that I would probably find her less charming if I had to work with her. As she warns us on page 6:

Although for all my life I have been much nearer poor than rich, I have inherited a symptom of richness: I have a strong propensity for idleness. Somewhere within me lurks an unregenerate creature which feels that money ought to fall from the sky, like rain. Should it fail to do so -- too bad: like a farmer enduring a drought one should get by somehow, or go under, which would be unpleasant but not so unpleasant as having blighted one's days by bothering about money. ... although I never went so far as to choose to do nothing, I did find it almost impossible to do anything I didn't want to do. Whether it was 'cannot' or 'will not' I don't know, but it felt like 'cannot'...

I would find this attitude infuriating. I would also be driven mad by much of the behavior Athill reports from her publisher Andre Deutsch and the writers Jean Rhys, Brian Moore, and V.S. Naipaul. But when Athill reports on writers behaving badly, she demonstrates the virtue that surely made her a great editor: she describes their motivations in their own terms rather than judging them from hers.

One thing the book made me conscious of was how many great books there are that few people ever hear about. Based on Athill's recommendations, I might consider Striker by Michael Irwin and Azadi by Chaman Nahal.

Jim Crace, Harvest *** 1/2

Just a few weeks ago in this very forum I said, "I read an interview with Jim Crace as I neared the end of Being Dead. He came across as rather obnoxious and arrogant, making me think I might not like his other work." Yet I've already read some of his other work.

And I liked it. Not as much as I liked Being Dead, but more than I predicted way back three weeks ago. Crace has an unusual way with descriptions: he uses unexpected words to create a poetic effect without sacrificing naturalism. The simultaneous realism and tinge of the fantastic is what makes Crace's prose so enjoyable. It overcomes a certain weakness in creating full-bodied characters: the narrator of Harvest, Walter Thirsk, never fully transcends his symbolic status as the outsider who wants to join the insular village, and the main characters in Being Dead were, of course, dead.

Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise *** 1/2

Nate Silver is the statistician who received a lot of attention for correctly predicting the winner of the 2012 presidential election in all fifty states. His blog FiveThirtyEight (named after the number of electoral votes) is a treasure trove of analysis and predictions for politics, sports, economics, and culture.

I expected The Signal and the Noise to describe, for a general non-mathematically inclined reader, the mechanics of statistical prediction and how to interpret statistical forecasts. The book does include some of that, but most of its chapters explore areas where we try to predict the future -- the stock market, elections, sports, the weather and climate, earthquakes, national security -- and why we mostly fail to make good predictions. We fail to distinguish the signal from the noise due to bias, overfitting small samples, or pure complexity.

The through-line of Silver's argument isn't always clear, but ultimately his more tangible approach is rewarding. Wouldn't I rather think about real-world applications than abstract theory? Well, I'm not sure actually, but the book always held my interest.

Frederick Barthelme, The Law of Averages **** 1/2

Objectively speaking, my four-and-a-half star rating for The Law of Averages is too high. For some reason, though, Barthelme's style appeals to me. His stories are immediately recognizable for their settings (apartment complexes and Gulf Coast casinos), characters (passive Southern blue-collar men and the women who drive them), plots (nearly non-existent, everyday events), and tone (dryly funny).

The IHOP was empty. It reeked of maple syrup, air freshener, cigarette smoke. The workers, all refugees from better times, loitered at the serving counter, looking sticky. ("From Mars")

 He hung up and thumbed the remote on the television, going through the channels, looking for an update [on the weather]...Wallace tried to punch the button to unmute the sound, but he missed and had to punch a couple other buttons, and when he finally got the sound turned up, the station was in the middle of a bean commercial.

The Law of Averages is a short-story collection, presented in chronological order. It's interesting to see the development of Barthelme's style over time. The protagonists of the early stories are sad passive men who get taken on a ride by strong women; the middle stories often feature strange relationships between brothers (Barthelme's brother is the more famous Donald Barthelme); everything comes into balance in the later stories.

Anyway, I can't justify it, but I love Barthelme's stories.

Jim Crace, Being Dead *****

Being Dead is well titled. It is about being dead. The book starts with the murder of a middle-aged married couple amid the dunes of an isolated bay in England. They are killed just after consummating a return to the scene of their first passion, thirty years before. The story moves forward and backward from there, chronicling the decay of their bodies, the day leading up to their death, and their courtship.

What I really like about Being Dead is how Crace manages to emphasize the physical (and aggressively non-spirtitual) details while also showing how human thoughts and feelings bring meaning to them. His prose is poetic and naturalistic at the same time.

Calcium and water usurped the place of blood and oxygen so that her defunct brain, almost at once, began to swell and tear its canopies, spilling all its saps and liquors, all its stored immersions of passion, memory, and will, on her scarf, her jacket and the grass.

I read an interview with Jim Crace as I neared the end of Being Dead. He came across as rather obnoxious and arrogant, making me think I might not like his other work. 

Alex Honnold, Alone on the Wall ***

Alex Honnold is a rock climber whose claim to fame is free soloing -- climbing without protection. He climbs serious routes with this method, such as the north face of Half Dome. While he gets the most attention for these climbs, personally he is more proud of his speed climbing (he owns the speed record on El Capitan) and "link-ups" of multiple routes (such as the Torre Traverse in Patagonia).

The book feels a bit like a hodgepodge of material that David Roberts (Honnold's co-writer) pulled together from a variety of sources. Certainly Honnold never sat down and wrote a book.

My favorite parts tended toward the more mundane. I liked the description of living in his van in Las Vegas while climbing at Red Rocks, parking as close as possible to the Whole Foods so that he could use their wifi. The best moment of all was when he found himself struggling with a move just above Thank God Ledge near the top of Half Dome, and he can hear the crowds of dayhikers on the summit just above him.

Halldór Laxness, Iceland's Bell ****

Iceland's Bell is an ambitious, sprawling historical novel from the Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness. It takes place in the early 18th century during a particularly dark period in Iceland's history: the country suffered under Danish oppression, famine, and a smallpox outbreak that killed a third of the population. It's a comedy!

The book tells one story, but is divided into three major sections, each with its own protagonist and signature style. The first section is a picaresque that follows the farmer and alleged murderer Jón Hreggviðsson as he escapes to northern Europe and has colorful adventures on the road to visit the King in Denmark. The second section tells the story of the beautiful Snæfríður Íslandssól, her dissolute husband, and her love for a powerful envoy from the Danish crown. This section alternates between Shakespearean comic set pieces (involving the husband) and scenes that mimic the style of Icelandic sagas (including trolls and elves). The final section plunges deeply into political and legal intrigue, featuring the aforementioned Danish envoy and the Danish King looking to sell Iceland to German merchants. These characters are apparently all real people, burnished by Laxness into an allegory about Iceland's national spirit.

True to its stylistic models, Iceland's Bell does not delve into the minds or motivations of its characters. Nevertheless, Snæfríður and Arnas (the envoy) are remarkably interesting and complex. They both find their sympathies divided between the aristocracy and the common folk, between mercy and justice.

I pity the Icelandic middle-schoolers who read Iceland's Bell in class. The legal wrangling is interminable (especially near the end), and I wouldn't expect teenagers to appreciate Laxness' mock heroic and satirical tone; I'm sure most of them would find it a slog.

Ben Marcus (editor), New American Stories ***

I picked up this collection based on its editor. Ben Marcus is a writer whose taste runs to the unusual and avant-garde, to stories with outlandish narrative strategies. At least that's how I remembered the earlier collection he edited; I see now that I rated it a mere two-and-a-half stars. The list of authors whose work I know also promised off-kilter approaches: George Saunders, Donald Antrim, Robert Coover, Wells Tower, Mary Gaitskill, Kelly Link, Lydia Davis.

While New American Stories does include some experimental work ("Play", "Pee on Water"), they are outnumbered by fairly traditional stories ("Paranoia", "Fish Sticks", "The Diggings") and those seasoned with a small science-fiction element ("Madmen", "Standard Loneliness Package"). Given the book's title, a surprising number take place outside of the United States. Almost all of the stories have something to recommend them but none of them was great from front to back (except maybe the short "Going for a Beer" from Coover).

Tonally, my favorite stories were "The Deep" by Anthony Doerr, "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" by Denis Johnson, and "The Toast" by Rebecca Curtis.

The wedding, my sister said, would not be fancy. However, there would be a hair-metal band, a five-course local organic vegan dinner, and a life-size fair-trade chocolate baby elephant. I'm afraid that my sister went on explaining details about the wedding, and I stopped listening; this is because I caught Lyme disease five years ago and have neurological damage that makes it difficult for me to listen when people talk, especially when what they're saying isn't interesting.

Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk ****

I might have read this book just for its awesome cover art. It also appeared in many year-end lists of the best books of 2015.

H is for Hawk is a memoir, but an unusual one. When the author's father dies, she deals with her grief by training a notoriously challenging goshawk. As she works with her bird Mabel, she feels haunted by the ghost of T.H. White, who similarly turned to a goshawk as a way to address emotional issues. The result is a sui generis blend of personal confession, nature writing, history, and literary biography. With falconry tips.

H is for Hawk is a totally literary creation. It belongs to the genre of human/animal stories (like Ring of Bright Water) while also being a meditation on the power of such stories. Macdonald's bereavement feels exaggerated for literary effect, and of course there are long sections about T.H. White. But the story of training Mabel shines through.

Macdonald's descriptions of the natural world are vividly poetic. Mabel becomes a full-blown character without any anthropomorphizing. I learned some of the lore and lingo of falconry.

William Finnegan, Barbarian Days ****

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life is a memoir from a staff journalist at the New Yorker, focusing on his passion for surfing. It is similar to David Roberts' mountaineering memoir On the Ridge Between Life and Death in that Finnegan tempers his surfing adventures with lots of self reflection about what drives him to abandon his day-to-day responsibilities and endanger himself.

The early chapters provide an insightful picture of what Finnegan calls being a "mid-century kid." He grew up in suburban Los Angeles and Honolulu, and shows great sensitivity to the texture of that time of life. As the New York Times review says, Finnegan "combines the deep knowledge of a widely traveled hard-core surfer, the observations of a born ethnographer and the wry aplomb of a New Yorker staff writer."

He also makes clear how every surfing spot is unique and can reward lifelong study. After college, he and a friend travel the South Pacific looking for good waves by studying nautical charts.

Finding ridable waves with nautical charts was a long shot at best. We looked for south-facing island coasts that weren't "shadowed" by any barrier reef or landmass farther south. We looked for points and bays and reef passes where the shallow water showed, after one or two fathoms, a sharp drop-off to seaward... The angle of any promising patch of reef or beach was critical. The rough line along which waves might be expected to break needed to be canted away from... the open ocean to the south... We looked for offshore canyons that would focus long-interval swell... Our charts weren't perfect, and their scale was always too big to account for the individual boulders and chunks of reef that would finally make all the difference.

In the later chapters Finnegan starts to omit his non-surfing life from the story, and the book suffers for it. Overall, though, it is a clear classic.

Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members ***

Dear Committee Members is a comic novel that consists entirely of letters of recommendation written by a cranky and delusional English professor. It's an appetizer of a book that you can read in one or two sittings, breezing quickly through the short "chapters."

I found it amusing but not laugh-out-loud funny. The best bits came when our narrator Dr Fitger tries to communicate the opposite of a recommendation:

Professor Franklin Kentrell has a singular mind and a unique approach to the discipline. He is sui generis. The Davidson Chair has never seen his like before.

I also liked how so many of Fitger's students wrote stories about tentacled monsters, cannibals, gun-wielding arachnids, and so on. I was less fond of the pseudo letters of recommendation he wrote to his colleagues at Payne College: they stretched the bounds of the conceit past the breaking point.

John Seabrook, The Song Machine *** 1/2

The Song Machine describes the development of modern pop music, with its "track and hook" composition technique (as opposed to the traditional "melody and lyrics" technique). I was struck by how the current approach, with behind-the-scenes artists building the songs and finding appropriate singers to perform them, is quite similar to how popular music has almost always been constructed (cf. Motown or the Brill Building). The singer-songwriter-musician model, which defines the rock era, is actually the exception.

In the "track and hook" era, a producer puts together a track -- the beat, chord progression, and instrumentation -- and hires one or more "topliners" to write the melody or melodies. The melody comes last instead of first. This approach originated with reggae, and you can see how it applies in rap and hip-hip too.

The book has a lot of insights about the art and business of (pop) music making, and how they have changed and/or stayed the same in the 21st century. These parts are very interesting and a nice companion to books about other musical genres like Rip It Up and Start Again about 1970s and 1980s post-punk. However, The Song Machine also has gossip-y, People Magazine-y stories about the top pop singers like Britney Spears, Katy Perry, and Rihanna (all women, you'll notice). The circumstances under which Chris Brown beat Rihanna or Kesha sued her producer don't really contribute to our understanding of the music or the music business.

Paul Beatty, The Sellout **

Is it a black thing?

The Sellout reads like a 1970s relic, with wild characters and a ridiculous plot right out of early Tom Robbins or Rob Swigart, although it crucially takes place in Obama's post-racial America. I've lost my taste for the style. The narrator never comes together as a character, but most importantly Beatty's caustic humor mostly doesn't land for me. (There's nothing more painful than a comedy you don't find funny.) The word play feels juvenile, and the "outrageous" racial insights aren't very insightful.

In short, it just didn't work for me.