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.