John Williams, Stoner *** 1/2

The website Vulture occasionally asks actors, musicians, or artists for their ten favorite books. I learned about Stoner from Michael C. Hall's list. It is a portrait of an unremarkable English professor in Missouri during the first part of the 20th century. He grows up on a farm, finds his mind expanded by literature, falls in love with a banker's daughter, and experiences career setbacks.

It sounds strange to say, but the greatest strength of Stoner is how it doesn't explain the characters' various epiphanies. The author allows the experience to be as mysterious to us as it is to the characters. For example, Stoner's transformation from a farmer to a scholar happens after he fails to answer a question in class. Williams describes the incident and Stoner's dazed stroll after class, but doesn't attempt to plumb the depths of his motivations. The book is as inarticulate as the characters are when they are asked to explain themselves.

Another strength is Stoner's quietly positive attitude. Many apparently bad things happen to poor William Stoner, but as he says late in the book, he sees the events as his life and he can't regret them. He remains stoic-ly optimistic.

Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World *** 1/2

The title, the unusual author's name, and the flying saucer on the cover all conspired to make me expect "eerily unsettling... delightful and funny" science-fiction stories. Not at all. Moshfegh's stories are firmly of this world, with characters who are unapologetically depraved or cruel. A drunk who keeps a sleeping bag in the classroom where she tries to teach high-school math; a women whose summer house is in a town she despises except for its meth dealers; an old man scheming to make a move on the young woman who moved in next door.

I find unselfconscious cruelty hilarious, because of how surprising it is when you're used to conventional characters. I liked these stories for the same reason I like reading Schopenhauer: great writing whose bitterness is over-the-top funny.

On the other hand, most of the stories lacked the narrative shape that would make them more than sketches. I'm definitely going to read Moshfegh's Booker-Prize nominated novel Eileen, in hopes that it pairs her dry humor with a complete story.

Donald Richie, The Inland Sea *** 1/2

The cover refers to The Inland Sea as "a masterwork of travel fiction by the West's finest writer on Japan." I think it's misleading to call it a travel book even though Richie does take a trip through the islands of the Inland Sea between Osaka and Hiroshima. (It's only as I'm writing this review that I notice the word "fiction" in there.) Richie is more interested in trying to convey something about the Japanese spirit than about Japan; the folklore and sociological generalizations are far more vivid than the physical descriptions. Its tone often reminded me of Sebald's The Rings of Saturn.  Richie's own peculiarities start to take over in the later pages, about the time he realizes that travel is really an attempt to find yourself.

Brian Doyle, The Plover ***

The Plover has a lot of elements that I really like. It's the story of a sea voyage, written with aplomb in an additive prose style, whose optimistic theme is the connectedness of all people and creatures. One character has a vision of a nation called Pacifica, which gives Doyle a chance to describe the Pacific Ocean from an interesting new perspective. Each chapter has a nice little woodcut illustration.

Unfortunately, though, the characters and the plot are underdeveloped. The Plover is the kind of novel where every character has a quirky trait -- the large silent deckhand, the finance minister who makes up words, the father with the long thin beard, the young girl who can communicate with birds -- and is completely defined by that trait. Not much happens in the plot, and what does happen depends on coincidences and "magic realism." None of this would be a problem if the outlandish elements interacted and added up to something, but they don't. Plus there's very little sailing talk.

Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer, eds., Into English *** 1/2

I absolutely love the idea behind Into English: A translator or poet picks a poem written in a language other than English, chooses three English translations of the poem, and discusses how the different translations approach the original and differ from each other. The theme, obviously, is the impossibility of translation. Noting the differences helps us triangulate toward the original.

It is indeed fascinating to see how word choice and differences between languages affects the impact of a poem. The translations are often quite different from one another, as the translators try to capture different aspects of the original.

As the editors say in their introduction, the rules dictate that only well-known poets are represented. (Less famous poets wouldn't have been translated into English at least three times.) Unfortunately, too many of the poems were not to my taste, and the commentators read more into them than I can see.

Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn ***

The high-concept description of Motherless Brooklyn is that it's a detective novel where the detective has Tourette's syndrome, and it's a strong novel for as long as it stays true to this concept. Unfortunately, it spends over a third of its pages on set up -- the story of the murder victim Frank Minna and the four orphans he takes under his wing -- and the set up lacks verisimilitude and character development. The resolution to the mystery is a bit outlandish too, but that's par for the course with detective novels.

Calvin Trillin, Killings ****

Killings is a collection of short pieces, originally published in The New Yorker during the late 1970s and early 1980s, about regular Americans who suffered a sudden death. A Kentucky landowner shoots a documentarian filming on his property; a Native American activist attempts to kidnap the mayor; a successful Iowa farmer (probably) kills his wife after starting a late-in-life affair.

Trillin packs a lot into fifteen or so pages. Each story has all of the elements you might expect in a novel. Many of them are more why-dunit than who-dunit, and Trillin is more interested in what the killings and their aftermath tell us about the communities than in the details of the killing itself. Solid bite-sized portraits of 1980s America, and fantastic source material for any writer looking for inspiration for a crime novel.

Akira Yoshimura, Shipwrecks ***

Shipwrecks has the feel of a fable. It takes place in a remote Japanese fishing village and tells of their timeless customs. The prose is simple and unadorned. The people cross a moral line in their quest to survive and suffer retribution for it.

During the winter months, the villagers light fires along the beach to distill salt from the sea. Their real purpose, however, is to lure ships onto the reef outside of the bay so that they can collect the bounty of their cargo... and kill any surviving crew.

Shipwrecks is a fairly short book, but it could have been more effective as a short story or novella. Many pages are dedicated to the village rituals and fishing techniques, described over the course of three years, and there are a few extraneous subplots. This material provides a richer sense of the subsistence-level life of the villagers, but it dilutes the power of the main story.

Stanley Fish, Winning Arguments ***

The title and packaging of Winning Arguments suggests a manual for prevailing in fights with your spouse, but I've read enough Stanley Fish to know that's not what it offers. The quote from Richard Rorty on the dedication page nicely summarizes the book's theme: "There is no such thing as non-discursive access to truth." Or, as Fish puts it in his introduction:

Knowledge and truth rather than presiding over the field of argument are what emerge in the course of argument, and because it is argument and not Reality with a capital R that produces them, truth and knowledge are always in the process of being renegotiated. 

Fish outlines numerous attempts across the ages to escape from this conclusion, because transcending it is a fundamental human desire.

Fish's writing style has become less thickly academic in recent years, and he draws examples from pop culture to supplement his references to Milton. So Winning Arguments may be better targeted at a general audience than his earlier books. However, its arguments are less forceful as a result. 

Ben Lerner, 10:04 **** 1/2

It's hard to say what 10:04 is about, even harder to say what the title means. The book has a plot of sorts, but it approaches its true subject obliquely, like The Rings of Saturn. I'd say it's about the interplay between art, memory, and personal identity. Sounds pretentious, no? I suppose it is, but it kept my mind buzzing as I read it.

The book is filled with subsidiary stories in which characters find the world rearranging itself around them. A woman becomes an Arab-American activist to honor her Lebanese father, only to learn that he isn't her real father; the narrator was motivated to become a writer by seeing the Challenger explosion live, but realizes he couldn't have; a man supports his girlfriend through her cancer treatments until she admits to never having cancer at all. Our personal identity derives from stories we tell ourselves about our past, which are just as constructed as any other art.

For me, the first two-thirds of 10:04 were a full five-star affair. The final sections, starting with the narrator's visit to Marfa, weren't bad but they lacked the flair of the earlier sections.

Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, Causation ** 1/2

I like Oxford's Very Short Introduction series for the way that they present the basic research topics in a subject area concisely and entertainingly. I've been impressed by the clarity of many of them, even in subjects I know well enough not to need an introduction.

Causation introduces the fundamental questions about the nature of cause and effect, but in a way that makes them feel academic (in the sense of not being relevant for anyone but professors). It presents arguments for the various points of view, but not very clearly.

Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar's Guide to the City ** 1/2

Based on the title and semi-academic cover design, I was hoping that A Burglar's Guide to the City would provide a distinctive new way to look at buildings and urban design, the way Edge City or Infrastructure did. Instead, it is largely anecdotes about wild burglary techniques with an overlay of pseudo-Jameson architectural argle bargle. The only part that approximated what I was looking for was the burglar who could determine the interior layout of a building by looking at its fire escapes (and the city fire code).

Manaugh talks about a Canadian artist named Janice Kerbel whose work sounds intriguing. Her piece called 15 Lombard St. explores what it would take to rob a bank in central London, resulting in notes that span from floor plans to London traffic patterns. 

Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost *** 1/2

Independence Lost is a history of the American Revolution told from the perspective of people living just outside of the thirteen rebelling colonies, on the Gulf Coast. Florida was a non-rebellious British colony; the Spanish has recently taken Louisiana from the French, and various Indian Nations were trying to maintain good relations with the various empires that surrounded them. How would the rebellion affect the livelihoods of all these constituencies?

This unique perspective provides an enlightening contrast to traditional accounts of the war. For one thing, it reminds us that the revolution was part of a wider war between the European powers: Spain took advantage of Britain's distraction to win back parts of its empire. It also shows how unlikely American success was, even after the war was over.

On the downside, however, DuVal's writing style often sounds like a high-school textbook. Lots of sociological generalization ("Men and women depended on a web of economic, social, and political connections that provided stability and opportunity even as they limited complete freedom of action") and fact clusters that sound like the answers to questions on the weekly quiz ("Behind Galvez's back, Pollock urged Congress to use Willing's brief 1778 seizures of Natchez and Manchac and Captain Pickles's success on the lakes to claim ownership of what Spanish troops had just taken..."). 

Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief *****

The author biography on the last page says, "Martin Seay is the executive secretary for the village of Wheeling, Illinois. The Mirror Thief is his first novel." Seay's lack of literary pedigree makes The Mirror Thief an even more impressive achievement.

The Mirror Thief tells three connected stories. In 2003, an ex-Marine named Curtis checks into the Venetian in Las Vegas on a quest to locate a gambler who owns his employer money; in 1958, a younger version of that gambler has come to Venice California in search of the author of a mysterious book (called The Mirror Thief) that has captured his imagination; in 1592, the titular character plans to steal the secrets of mirror-making from the Republic of Venice. The stories echo each other both in terms of plot and of incidental images. Lots of reflections, silver, and water.

It's a long book (572 pages) with a complex structure, ambitious themes, and colorful prose littered with obscure vocabulary. This description makes it sound difficult, but I found it very readable. Many readers may feel like there's not enough action, but I enjoyed its world- and character-building. Almost every page had a sentence or image that caught my attention. Seay is particularly good at choosing metaphors that paint a vivid picture and deepen a character at the same time. 

Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity *** 1/2

In this Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, Neiman suggests that the modern left in the United States has ceded talk of ideals to the right.

They've seen too many frameworks abused. Rules conceived as universal values have too often been used as sugarcoated ways of forcing one people's will on another. ... The resolve not to impose your moral worldview by force often ends with the resolve to make no judgments at all.

Conservatives base their worldview on Hobbes and his raw power struggle of all against all, and liberals have largely accepted this base view of human nature as well. Neiman believes that this situation drives people to fundamentalism, because fundamentalism provides a vision of transcendence missing from everyday lives: "if our need for transcendence isn't satisfied by the right kind of ideals, we may turn to the wrong ones."

And so she recommends a return to the key Enlightenment values of happiness, reason, reverence, and hope. I was inspired by the section where she discusses these ideals, mostly because of how her tone embodied the ideals. Her portrait of Kant is quite different and more joyful than any I've seen before. Unfortunately, though, when she comes to apply her principles in contemporary scenarios, she comes across as naive and judgmental in a way she promised we would not.

Josiah Thompson, Gumshoe ** 1/2

Josiah Thompson was a forty-something philosophy professor when he had a midlife crisis of sorts and decided to become a detective. Gumshoe is his account of learning the trade.

I read this (now out-of-print) book back when it was published in the late 1980s. I held onto it for its descriptions of real-life detective work: surveillance, custody disputes, serving subpoenas, and so on. The stories from his early day especially made it easy to imagine doing these activities myself.

I didn't remember how awkward Thompson's writing is. One particularly annoying tic is a confusing treatment of time. An example from near the end:

Before Dick arrived, [Asha] sat on the floor making chapatis for the Indian meal Neva and Ruth had prepared. Nancy and I tried to help but ended up getting in the way. Asha circled the table, chattering nonstop as she doled out chapatis, while the rest of us worked on the curry and sauces, washed down by the champagne Dick brought. Then she handed a jar of chutney to Dick.

Dick's arrival is in the future for the first two sentences, in the past for the last two. In his attempts to start stories in medias res he frequently stutters back in time two or three levels. He's in a restaurant talking to a woman... who his partner introduced to him in the office three days before... to discuss something that happened a month before that. It's confusing.

The aspect I liked the first time I read the book –– the mundane details of detective work –– was less compelling now due to the passage of time. If I were to become a detective today, or write a story about a regular guy doing detective-y things, I wouldn't need to think about whether I should stop watching a suspect's apartment long enough to find a public pay phone.

Robert Coover, The Brunist Day of Wrath ** 1/2

Coover published this sequel to The Origin of the Brunists near fifty years after the first book, although it takes place just five years later. It shares some of the original's strengths –– especially Coover's talent for pulling together multiple perspectives and narrative threads –– but it is waaaaaay too long (1100 pages) and the characters and incidents drift too far into satirical hyperbole.

Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage ****

It has been a while since I last read an espionage thriller even though it used to be one of my favorite genres. Istanbul Passage was an enjoyable return. The spy business was not as convoluted as it often is, allowing the story to focus more on the characters and the setting. As the author says in the interview at the end of the book, Istanbul Passage is "not genre fiction, but character-based literature set in the world of espionage."

I appreciated that the characters' decision-making always seemed reasonable instead of plot-driven. No one said, "I have something vital to tell you, but wait until tomorrow." The only element that felt like a plot contrivance was the medical condition of Leon's wife. I remember Istanbul well enough that I could picture the major locales.

I definitely recommend it.

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, Mo'Meta Blues ****

Questlove has a nice casual writing style, first demonstrated in his liner notes for Roots albums. Mo'Meta Blues is a memoir of sorts, although the best parts are when he uses an incident from his life as a springboard for more abstract musings. He has insightful views on the music business and on the role of hip-hop in culture. He relates fun anecdotes about meeting other artists, most notably a visit to Stevie Wonder's hotel and roller skating with Prince. Tantalizing record reviews too.

The book is full of interesting asides; in the first few pages, for example, he refers to the Roots as "the last hip-hop band" because:

Twenty-five years ago, rap acts were mostly groups. You had Run DMC and the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, ... but today it's all solo acts.

Another one from near the end: The day after Michael Jackson died, the Roots played his songs on the Tonight Show.

Usually, they would be too expensive to use, but there is a special stipulation, a death memorandum, that grants a 48-hour grace period where songs can be used for a standard rate for news purposes.

The book starts to feel fragmented as it approaches the present, and even includes a chapter from the co-writer admitting that "there's less perspective" (part of the meta- from the title).

Paul Kingsnorth, Beast ****

Beast is the new book from the author of The Wake, my favorite book that I've read so far this year. The narrator has come, alone, to an abandoned farmhouse in the high moors of England, for reasons that aren't entirely clear but resemble the reasons most people might undertake such a pilgrimage. As the story begins, he has been there for just over a year.

In the first two-thirds of the book, the narrator presents a vivid account of meditative experiences. One minute he is paying strict attention to his natural surroundings, the next he is noticing the feelings swarming inside himself, and the next he's dissolving into a communion with the world. When he reaches this last state, he sees something move out of the corner of his eye: "It was big and long and dark. It seemed to be a couple of yards in length it was low to the ground and it was black." It disappears when he turns his attention to it.

And so he sets off in search of the beast. What is it? Where does it live? And should he really be pursuing it since it may want to devour him?

I was less fond of the final third of the book, when his search gets more mystical.

Noah Hawley, Before the Fall ***

I had high expectations for this novel from the showrunner of the TV show Fargo. "One part Dennis Lehane, one part Dostoevsky," says Michael Cunningham. It's a competent page-turner that avoids most of the annoying pitfalls that plague the genre, but it failed to create characters that transcend their function in the plot.

I found the rich characters particularly formulaic. The two wives who were killed in the plane crash were so similar as to be indistinguishable. The unrelated Wall Street financier and Internet heiress have very similar thoughts about how money reduces friction. 

Geoff Dyer, White Sands *** 1/2

White Sands is a collection of short essays or stories loosely on the subject of travel. I picked it up after reading a funny excerpt from the title piece on the back cover: Geoff and his wife pick up a hitchhiker in the New Mexico desert, then see a sign warning them not to pick up hitchhikers because of nearby detention centers.

The first chapter follows Geoff on a trip to Tahiti "in the footsteps" of Gauguin. It raises interesting questions about why we travel to the places that we do, and it captures the traveler's balance between interest and disappointment. In fact, these are recurring themes in several of the chapters.

I liked the first half of the book better than the final half. The pieces were more thematically related and had a better tonal balance.

Robert Moor, On Trails ****

Like many nature writers, Robert Moor starts exploring a concrete part of our outdoor experience (hiking trails) and eventually finds that it is central to human experience. If often find such writers overly metaphysical, but Moor manages to keep his prose and ideas down to earth by often returning to the fundamental experience of the outdoors.

I was particularly intrigued by the idea of trails as externalized intelligence, which Moor first introduces when discussing insect trails. The trails themselves capture knowledge that none of the individuals have. It reminds me of a philosophical question about the status of written language: do books have ideas in them or just instructions for reconstructing ideas?

Jose Saramago, The Elephant's Journey ***

I thought I was done reading Nobel-prize winner Jose Saramago. I loved his earlier work but was disappointed with books from his later years. But I came across The Elephant's Journey in the Milan airport bookstore, and it seemed like just the kind of trifle to occupy me during a nine-hour flight to New York: a fact-based fable about an elephant traveling from Lisbon to Vienna in 1551.

And indeed it was. The story was pleasant, written in Saramago's signature digressive style. It featured too little of the titular elephant, in my opinion, but it was a light "beach read" perfect for travel.

Francise Prose, Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern ***

I picked up this biography of Peggy Guggenheim in the gift shop of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, in preparation for visiting Peggy's home and art collection in Venice. The author never met Peggy, so her portrait is based on written sources, primarily memoirs from Peggy and her colorful circle of friends. She (Francise Prose) is a novelist, and she organizes the story thematically rather than purely chronologically.

Peggy was an interesting character, although not a particularly pleasant one. The book was a nice complement to our visit of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni and the Guggenheim Collection.

Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists *** 1/2

The Origin of the Brunists is a surprisingly traditional novel from the usually postmodern Robert Coover. It tells the story of a coal mining disaster and the rise of a religious cult around one of the survivors. Coover is able to tell the story from multiple perspectives at once, resulting in a realistic portrait of a small town. The mine accident is also well described.

I truly enjoyed the first half of the book, but felt like the second half could have used editing. I see that the sequel, written almost a half century later, is more than twice as long. Hmm, we'll see.

A random insight from page 254:

True knowledge is the discerning of pattern, and wisdom is its right interpretation.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic ****

I've been scouring used book stores for years for a copy of Roadside Picnic, and I finally found a (new!) SF Masterworks edition at Half Price Books. Roadside Picnic is the source material for one of my favorite films, Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker.

Not surprisingly, Roadside Picnic is the source for Stalker in the same sense that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the source for Blade Runner. The films take place in the same universe as the books and cherry-pick certain details, but they tell fundamentally different stories. Stalker is about human desire and faith; Roadside Picnic is about our lack of understanding and agency.

Thirteen years before, aliens visited a half-dozen sites on Earth. No living humans saw them, but they left behind a variety of artifacts and strange phenomena: inseparable disks that float 18 inches apart ("empties"), perpetual motion bracelets, sticks that reflect light on a delay, areas of intensified gravity ("bug traps"), drifting clouds of intense heat. The Visit sites are sealed off, but there's a robust black market in alien artifacts lead by stalkers, who sneak into the Zone to bring them out. In fact, there's an entire social system based around this trade.

The action is well presented, but the most interesting thing about Roadside Picnic is that it deals with the aftermath of alien contact rather than the contact itself, and with the effect on everyday folks rather than experts. We learn how the alien artifacts work but have no idea what they actually are, and we live our lives based on social forces instead of personal desires.

Steve Erickson, Shadowbahn **

I used to be a huge fan of Steve Erickson. As time goes on, however, his books have less of the vivid dreamlike imagery that I like and more of the overblown pretentiousness that I don't.

Shadowbahn starts with a very Erickson-like image: the World Trade Center towers reappear in the Badlands of South Dakota, and everyone hears music coming from the empty buildings... but different songs for different people. Most of the story, however, is an alternate version of the past in which Jesse Garon Presley survives rather than his twin Elvis Aron Presley, causing significant changes in cultural history. The bulk of the text is Greil Marcus-like rumination on songs and how they reflect America.

He heads toward a west that is the dreamer's true north, where the desert comes looking for us and curls at the door, a wild animal made of our ashes; hijacking the sun halfway, Jesse leaves his shadow at the crossroads.

Ooof. Has Erickson's writing changed or has my taste? I'll have to go back to his earlier books at some point. 

Chuck Klosterman, But What If We're Wrong? ***

I am deeply interested in the question that Klosterman discusses in this book: What if some of our "deeply engrained cultural and scientific beliefs" turn out to be false? For example, in the introduction he quotes the physicist Brian Greene:

There is a very, very good chance that our understanding of gravity will not be the same in five hundred years.

Unfortunately (from my perspective), Klosterman spends more time pondering our cultural future than our scientific one. What authors and musicians will people remember five hundred years from now, and based on what critical principles? It's an interesting thought experiment, but the fact that our aesthetic judgments change over time is not surprising. The fact that future humans might declare a currently obscure artist to be the most important of our era is not as mind-blowing as the idea that we might completely misunderstand the laws of physics.

In fact, Klosterman largely denies the possibility that our current scientific beliefs could be fundamentally wrong. The scientific method, mathematization, and the pure utility of our knowledge argue against it. But I think this answer misses the point. I don't doubt that the equations governing gravity or quantum mechanics are fundamentally right, but I do doubt that our conceptual understanding of the underlying system is correct. I'm sure that's what Brian Greene means in the quote above.

My favorite chapter turns out to be about the future of American football. It shows subtle insight into the operation of culture.

Patrick O'Brian, The Truelove ** 1/2

A placeholder episode in the Aubrey-Maturin saga. The entire book concerns an uneventful cruise in which the Surprise suffers from internecine tension due to the presence of a woman on board. (The original English title, Clarissa Oakes, is far more suitable.) The strain creates a hitch in the usual smooth cooperation of the crew, and a concomitant hitch in the usual smooth flow of O'Brian's prose. They - both the crew and the prose - still get the job done, but it's not as pleasant as it should be.

Stephen knew that he had said all this before, off the many, many islands and remote uninhabited shores they had passed, irretrievably passed; he knew that he might be being a bore; yet the tolerant smile on Martin's face, though very slight indeed, vexed him extremely.  

Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs *** 1/2

Despite its explosive title and the dramatic adjectives on its cover ("unpredictable," "breathtaking," "devastating"), The Association of Small Bombs impressed me most with its portrayal of everyday middle-class Indian life. Mahajan doesn't go out of his way to describe the characters and locations where his story plays out, but they felt very real.

The plot kicks off with a terrorist bombing in a small Delhi market. Two young brothers are among the dead, and their Muslim friend survives with injuries. The story follows the boy's parents, their surviving friend Mansoor, and the terrorists who planted the bomb. The bomb changes them all.

On this particular day, [the boys] had gone with a friend in an auto-rickshaw to pick up the Khurana's old Onida color TV, consigned to the electrician for perhaps the tenth time. But when Mr. Khurana was asked by friends what the children were doing there...he said, "They'd gone to pick up my watch from the watch man." ... Why lie, why now? Well, because to admit to their high-flying friends that their children had not only died among the poor, but had been sent out on an errand that smacked of poverty... would have, in those tragic weeks following the bombing, undone the tightly laced nerves that held them together.

I found the mundane details more compelling than the major events, and was similarly impressed by the way that ordinary trains of thought led some characters to terrorism. (This aspect reminded me of Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist.)

 

Robert Harris, Pompeii *** 1/2

In advance of our summer trip to Italy, I read this fictional thriller that takes place around the Bay of Naples over four days in late August A.D. 79. The new aquarius deduces that there is a rupture in the mighty Aqua Augusta aqueduct, somewhere between Pompeii and Nola. He hurries out to repair it, but gets embroiled in power struggles between the city fathers of Pompeii. He solves the mystery of his predecessor's disappearance and fixes the water flow, but you know what happens next.

The disrupted water flow provides the plot with a clear narrative motor. The story is well designed to introduce details about the impressive Roman aqueduct system and the harbingers of the Vesuvius eruption naturally, without undue exposition. Plenty of historical color, too, such as a feast that features Roman delicacies like "mice rolled in honey and poppy seeds." When the climax comes, Harris does a great job of showing what the eruption looked, felt, and sounded like from various perspectives.

Knowing how the story ends made the middle section a bit less compelling: why wonder about the motivations of a character when you know that character is doomed?

Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned *** 1/2

The very nice cover of We, the Drowned advertises it as an "epic tale of the sea." Its 675-page heft marks it as epic, and it does include several seafaring adventures, but the book is really the (fictional) story of a (real-life) town: Marstal, Denmark. The men of Marstal are sailors, which influences all aspects of town life. In the first half of the twentieth century, they had to adjust to the coming of steamers and engine-powered ships -- and one widow attempts to move the townspeople away from the dangerous sea entirely.

Although We, the Drowned is a multigenerational saga written partly in the second-person plural, Jensen keeps the focus on individual stories. I enjoyed the adventure and was intrigued by the widow's quest to re-orient a traditional town toward safer pursuits. However, her quest just kind of fades away in the final section of the book, and the final scene (at the end of World War II) reminded me far too much of the Ewok dance party at the end of Return of the Jedi.

Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful ***

This slim book contains Dyer's impressionistic meditations about jazz. Each chapter is an imagined scene from the life of a jazz master like Duke Ellington, Lester Young, or Chet Baker, described in a manner intended to capture the feeling of the man's music. It's beautifully written and contains passages of insightful music criticism. The cumulative effect is a bit too monochromatic though: every one of the musicians is closed off and dealing with an addiction or mental issue.

My favorite chapters were the first two, about Lester Young and Thelonious Monk. The Young chapter best describes the artist's life in musical terms, and the Monk chapter has the best description of his music.

Sometimes the song seemed to have turned inside out or to have been constructed entirely from mistakes. ... But a logic was operating, a logic unique to Monk: if you always played the least expected note a form would emerge, a negative imprint of what was initially anticipated.

Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries ***

This winner of the 2013 Mann Booker Prize takes place in New Zealand, 1866. A cross-section of society in the gold-rush town of Hokitika tries to explain several events that took place on 14 January: a hermit was found dead with a fortune hidden in his house; a popular local whore apparently tried to kill herself with an opium overdose; the richest man in town vanished without a trace. How do these events relate to the politician who arrived in town the same day? Or to the ominous sea captain who may or may not be related to the hermit?

The Luminaries is an amalgam of a hard-boiled detective novel (its twisty plot recalls something like Farewell, My Lovely) and a nineteenth-century "loose baggy monster" (for its locale and loquacious prose style), with a dash of modernism (characters and chapter titles based on signs of the zodiac). It is entertaining, although I'm not sure it justifies all of its 830 pages. I was disappointed that Catton resolves the final mysteries of the plot through flashbacks instead of the detective work of Hokitika's citizens.

Ruth Anna Putnam (editor), The Cambridge Companion to William James *** 1/2

William James is my favorite philosopher. There is almost no view he holds that I agree with. ... Why do I love him? ... Simply put, the attraction of James the philosopher is that he is the best example I know of a person doing philosophy; there is no hiding the person behind the work, no way of discussing the work without the person, no way to make believe that there is a way to do philosophy that is not personal. ... He wanted and worked at a picture of the whole thing. - Owen Flanagan

Most of the time, The Cambridge Companion to a philosopher offers articles that clarify the work of a great philosopher whose own prose is daunting (Kant, Hegel, Nietzche). William James is different because James' own writing is so inviting and seemingly clear. This companion shows how James' modern professional peers view his less rigorous approach.

The one word that best summarizes James' philosophy is pluralistic. He wants to account for the richness of human experience and emphasizes the many different ways we make sense of the world. In all of his philosophy, he focuses on the effects of ideas rather than on their origins.

If reality is not that economical and systematic universe that our logic likes to represent, if it is not sustained within an intellectual framework, truth of an intellectual order is a human invention the function of which is to utilize reality rather than introduce us to it. ... Reality does not form an ensemble, if it is multiple and mobile, composed of criss-crossing currents...  - Henri Bergson

James' unflagging devotion to the ideals of plurality and tolerance is as relevant and inspiring as it was a century ago.  - Ruth Anna Putnam

For many philosophers, it can be best to start with the secondary literature before attempting the original works. Not so for James. His own writing is the best introduction.

 

Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake *****

"A post-apocalyptic novel set one thousand years in the past," The Wake takes place in England at the time of the Norman Invasion (1066). The narrator Buccmaster is a landowner from the fens who loses his sons, his wife, and his home, and seeks to wreak havoc on the invading French. He straps on his grandfather's sword and takes to the forest with a motley crew of followers.

Buccmaster is a fascinating, fierce, and increasingly unpleasant character. He is sensitive to slights from the start and never lets anyone forget that he's a important landowner. He believes that the old gods of England have chosen him as their vessel to free England from the French and from Christianity. His very particular views about what's right bring him into conflict with his men.

The most notable and noticeable aspect of The Wake is that it's written in a pseudo-Old English. It sounds like a gimmick, but it works. It enhances the authenticity of the period drama, and keeps the reader's attention focused on the lovely natural setting. 

Paul Tough, Whatever It Takes ****

Whatever It Takes is an account of "Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America." Canada is the founder of the Harlem Children's Zone, which is a linked collection of social services aimed at lifting the children of Harlem out of poverty by transforming the neighborhood. The group runs two schools (kindergarten and middle school), parenting classes, afterschool programs, and more.

I read a very positive review of this book when it was published in 2008, and kept an eye out for it ever since. I finally came across a copy at Powell's Books.

The author does an excellent job of balancing high-level discussions of pedagogy with specific incidents to illustrate the challenges. The second chapter nicely summarizes the history of anti-poverty programs and the changing assumptions that underlie them. The scenes in the classrooms feel real and not cleaned up in the interest of making a point.

The book is honest about Canada's mixed results and the difficulty of accessing success. I felt a little uncomfortable about how the parenting classes promoted American middle-class practices as the "right" ones, but the author ultimately addresses this discomfort. Overall, the book is thought-provoking and doesn't claim to have all of the answers to the issues it raises.

Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things ****

I'm Thinking of Ending Things is a deliciously creepy book. Reid's prose is flat but he sure knows how to set an uncomfortable scene. 

An unnamed woman is driving through the countryside with her boyfriend, going to meet his parents. She is thinking of ending things, and her thought processes are off-kilter enough that you have to wonder what things she is thinking of ending. Should she tell Jake about the Caller who keeps leaving her cryptic phone messages that Caller ID says are from her own phone? I worried about poor Jake and what might happen to him.

Once they get to Jake's parents house, though, you have to start worrying for the girlfriend. Jake shows her dead lambs in the barn, the parents act strangely, as does Jake, and she finds primitive paintings in the dank basement. The story started out a little creepy, but kept upping the ante.

Inevitably, though, the resolution is not as satisfying as the journey.

Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty *** 1/2

Not all of the personal essays in this collection from (former) poet Donald Hall are about aging. There are pieces about eating, exercising, facial hair, New Hampshire, and being a poet. The title essay is about the joys of writing, especially rewriting, and about how "poetry abandoned me" around the time he turned eighty. (He is now 88.) 

As befits a book from a poet, Essays After Eighty is lyrical, intimate, and brief. The first essay, "Out the Window," sets the stage well. It is about aging, and about melancholy joy of watching the world recur and change from the window of his New Hampshire farmhouse. I also enjoyed "Three Beards":

My present hairiness is monumental, and I intend to carry it into the grave. (I must avoid chemotherapy.) ... During the Civil War, beards were as common as sepsis.

Jim Crace, Quarantine **** 1/2

Around this time last year, I read my first Jim Crace novel, Being Dead, and I loved it. Quarantine is the book he wrote just before Being Dead, and it shares many of the same virtues. I'll quote my earlier review, substituting the title:

What I really like about Quarantine 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.

 Quarantine takes place in the Judean desert and features Jesus as a character, so the emergence of spirituality through an emphasis on the physical is part of its theme. There's something unique and satisfying about the way Crace puts together a sentence or description.

Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to be Wrong *** 1/2

Jordan Ellenberg is a mathematics professor who writes on mathematical subjects in the popular press. The subtitle of the book is "The Power of Mathematical Thinking."

Ellenberg has a clear, relaxed writing style and a talent for choosing clear examples of real-world situations where mathematical thinking comes in to play. I found the book both entertaining and informative. The only reason I haven't given it a higher rating is that its scope is mostly limited to probability and statistics, with only small forays into the more certain areas of math. (Admittedly, the study of uncertainty applies more commonly to everyday issues.) The discussion also wandered a bit.

His examples drive home the point that small sample sizes show greater variance, and that studies often focus on the outliers so that regression to the mean is a likely explanation for changes. I also learned about the asymmetric domination effect.

Elizabeth McKenzie, The Portable Veblen **** 1/2

In this low-key and quirky novel, Paul and Veblen get engaged then start wondering whether they are doing the right thing. They are both young enough to still have doubts about their own value and about whether their idiosyncrasies are compatible. Veblen is a freelance translator who talks to squirrels and worries about her passive-aggressive mother; Paul is a doctor who has invented a tool for treating traumatic brain injuries and resents his parents' coddling of his mentally challenged brother. Can they and their families overcome their differences and live happily ever after?

McKenzie's prose reminds me of Lorrie Moore's with its light insightful touch regarding family relationships and off-kilter observations that make perfect sense. (Moore: "She was trying to tease him, but it came out wrong, like a lizard with a little hat on." McKenzie: "In it gleamed a diamond so large it would be a pill to avoid for those who easily gag.") I especially enjoyed her character-establishing anecdotes.

Tim Wise, Under the Affluence *** 1/2

I agree with Wise's premise –– that in our culture "the conditions of the impoverished, the underemployed and the struggling are justified as the inevitable result of inadequate effort on their part, or of cultural flaws, while the wealth and success of the rich are likewise rationalized as owing to their superior talent or value systems" –– and I believe that this misconception underlies our biggest issues as a nation. He is preaching to the converted with me. But would his book convince a less liberal reader?

Alas, I think the answer is no. Wise musters a lot of data to support his argument, but he would be less than fully compelling for three reasons:

• While explaining how the poor's condition is not the result of laziness or a lack of values, he buries his conceptual points under an avalanche of statistics.
• While arguing that it's the super-rich who have a value problem, he resorts to the anecdotal claims that he rightly derided when they were targeted at the poor. ("It's entirely the norm, it seems, for rich parents to pay psychologists thousands of dollars for a 'learning disability' diagnosis for their kids, so those children can get extra time on standardized tests.")
• He recognizes that progressives need a compelling counter-narrative if they're going to overturn the myth of the meritocracy, but he doesn't supply one or even the outlines of one. His thoughts on the subject sound naïve and utopian.

Blake Crouch, Dark Matter *** 1/2

Dark Matter is a science-fiction action story. The narrator is kidnapped by a masked man, taken to an abandoned power station, and injected with a mysterious drug. He wakes up in a different reality where people treat him as a returning hero. He escapes into an alternate version of Chicago, and tries to figure out what's happening. (It takes him a little longer than it takes the reader.) Soon he is traveling through many alternate realities and outwitting numerous enemies in a quest to return to his "real" life.

The heart of the book is in its chase and fight scenes, which are frequent, well executed, and keep you turning the pages. The scientific elements are largely there to motivate the action sequences, although they also serve to introduce questions about personal identity. Crouch surely wrote Dark Matter with a movie in mind.

Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World ** 1/2

Peter Singer is an influential and controversial philosopher, best known (to me) for his strong views on animal rights. Ethics in the Real World is "82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter."

Unfortunately, the essays are too brief to give me any sense of why Singer might be influential or controversial. They are really more like blog posts than essays, and for the most part they merely have time to introduce a subject from the news (abortion, organ sales, euthanasia, religious liberty, climate change), show how they raise an ethical question, and state his position on that question, which is inevitably the stereotypical liberal one. I got no sense of Singer's unique or well-argued point of view, nor did I learn anything about moral reasoning. Disappointing.

Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle ****

The Mortmain family lives in arguably romantic poverty at a ruined English castle. The father wrote a famous book years before, but now spends his time reading detective novels in the gatehouse; eldest daughter Rose laments her lack of prospects; our narrator Cassandra, a well-read and introspective teenager, writes in her journal. Their landlord dies and leaves his estate to his two American grandsons, whose arrival Cassandra immediately recognizes as similar to Mr Bingley's arrival in Pride and Prejudice.

There's not much plot in I Capture the Castle, but the story is thoroughly enjoyable because of Cassandra's charm. She is more insightful than a rural 17-year-old girl would be, but her feelings and actions sound genuine. The title alludes to her ability to capture the mood of the time and place. The book is is one of the few romance novels where the proper match for the heroine is not totally obvious from the beginning: Cassandra has complex feelings for multiple men. I also appreciated her observations about the differences between Americans and Englishmen.