James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life **** 1/2

I picked up The Shepherd's Life expecting an immersive description of a rural lifestyle, as a respite from my suburban world. The book delivers on this expectation. It interleaves practical details about the day-to-day operation of a Lake District sheep farm with lyrical descriptions and just the right amount of shepherding jargon ("lowsing the tups"). The well-chosen photos add to the ambiance.

The fields are sliver-wet with a late-autumn dew, and where the sheep have run the grass has been shaken back to green.

The introductory section, titled with a nice piece of northern English dialect ("Hefted"), got me to approach the story with bigger questions in mind. On the first page, before any mention of sheep or fells, Rebanks relates a story of an assembly from his schooldays:

Sitting surrounded by a mass of other academic non-achievers listening to an old battle-weary teacher lecturing us how we should aim to be more than just farmworkers, joiners, brickies, electricians, and hairdressers. We were basically sorted aged twelve between those deemed intelligent (who were sent to a "grammar school") and those of us that weren't (who stayed at the "comprehensive"). ... This bloody teacher woman thought we were too stupid and unimaginative to "do anything with our lives." We were too dumb to want to leave this area with its dirty dead-end jobs and its narrow-minded provincial ways.

The rest of the section notes the gap between the (literally) Romantic view of the Lake District and the experience of its residents.

I don't believe that outsiders fail to recognize the dignity and pride of shepherds, joiners, and brickies –– many of us read books like this one because we feel that the lives portrayed may be somehow more authentic than ours. However, the attitude of the education system and of Lake District tourists shows how condescending our admiration is. By starting the book with these stories, Rebanks got me thinking about what makes a life or lifestyle meaningful, what constitutes success, how tradition interacts with progress, and my proper comportment as a tourist.

 

My Literary 2020: An Analysis

I read slightly fewer books this year than usual, due no doubt to the COVID-19 pandemic curtailing my shuttle commute. 2020 was a typical reading year for me in terms of the balance between fiction and non-fiction: a dead heat at 22 of each.

While the average rating ended up being about the same as past years (3.27, just above expectation), the variance was higher than usual. That is, I gave more 4+ star ratings this year and also more 2- star ratings. Is that due to the selection of books I read or to the circumstances under which I read them? Hard to say.

My favorite literary discovery of 2020 was The Island of Second Sight. I am also happy to have finally gotten around to Nobel Laureate Alice Munro and The Makioka Sisters, both of which proved the folly of my prejudice against "woman's lit."

Paula Fox, News from the World ***

 News from the World is a short book of short pieces from the novelist Paula Fox. The entries come in reverse chronological order, from 2011 to 1968; an interesting choice that makes them land differently than they would in the more traditional order.

The first several pieces are pure reminiscence about people and incidents from Fox's life. They are well written, but come across as engaging dinner party conversations rather than standalone narratives. Fox's style eschews interiority, so we learn little about her personality. I imagine these pieces would be more interesting to readers of her novels or those interested in the midcentury upper East Side milieu in which she lived.

About halfway through the book are two very fine stories: "The Broad Estates of Death," about a couple visiting the husband's dying father, and "Grace," about an unlikeable man who adopts a dog. The man in "Grace" often corrects people's grammar ("'Lovingly' is not an adverb that applies to literature"), which creates an interesting reflection when two of the next essays, from a few years previous, concern the use of language.

The pieces, both fiction and non, get shorter as the book comes to its close. The stories from the 1970s and 1980s count as "sudden fiction."

Jay Kirk, Avoid the Day ** 1/2

The subtitle of Avoid the Day is "A New Nonfiction in Two Movements," which hints at two aspects of the book: it has two distinctly different parts, and it uses music as one of its key tropes.

Avoid the Day starts out strong with an evocative chapter about Béla Bartók visiting Vermont in the 1940s. From its first paired image of a train's headlight piercing the forest and a car's headlight winding downhill to converge on the station, the chapter creates a gothic atmosphere, limns Bartók's character, suggests that his use of folk melodies makes him a vampire, and sets out the themes of the book (the relationship between authentic experience and meaning). The rest of the first "movement" describes the author's visit to Transylvania and his interest in a missing Bartók manuscript. 

In the second "movement," the author joins his friend on an Arctic cruise, where they attempt to make a guerrilla horror film. What does this have to do with the first part? Well, you see, the friends went to the Arctic in pursuit of authentic experience, just like Bartók went to Transylvania in pursuit of authentic folk music.

I learned a lot about Bartók and about the Romanian countryside in the first few chapters, but the author soon drifts off course with cut-rate Hunter Thompson-isms. One motivation for his trips is avoiding his father's deathbed, and stories of his relationship with his father become more prominent as the story goes on. Unfortunately, his descriptions of his supposed mental anguish fall flat and remain unbelievable. I hope that his eventual suicidal ideations are fiction, because I was unmoved by them.

In short, the book started as an offbeat five-star hybrid that slowly but surely got worse as it went along.

Binnie Kirshenbaum, Rabbits for Food ****

 A mordant novel about a woman dealing with depression. The first half describes the New Years Eve when Bunny's depression tipped over into a condition requiring hospitalization; the second half covers her first three weeks in the psychiatric ward. Interspersed throughout are Bunny's assignments from the hospital's Creative Writing activity, most of which are anecdotes from Bunny's childhood.

There's nothing too remarkable about Bunny's story; in fact, many of the incidents are nearly cliché for stories about mental illness. But Kirshenbaum captures something elusive in her prose. The early chapters, for instance, illustrate the fine line between a sardonic worldview and depression; the chapters in the hospital show tacit compassion for Bunny's fellow patients.

A few of my favorite parts:

• The story about when young Bunny opted out of a family Thanksgiving in favor of some alone time. Her sister came back to gleefully tell her that nobody even asked where she was. "In retrospect, that was my happiest Thanksgiving ever."
• In order to get the hospital staff to quit pestering them about joining in activities, a few of the patients set up a Monopoly board on the table between them, then did their own things.
• The story about the time when Bunny's husband Albie agreed to get her some cantaloupe without hesitation. It was a clear portrait of Albie's character in 300 words or less.

Brian Castner, Disappointment River ** 1/2

Well, I suppose the word is right there at the front of the title.

I am a connoisseur of books where an author retraces the travels of an historical explorer through a compelling landscape, such as Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau. This approach is a means for the author to color their descriptions of an exotic place with insights from their historical significance, and to show the present is shaped by the past. In Disappointment River, the place is the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories of Canada, the explorer is Alexander Mackenzie, and the historical context is the 18th-century fur trade and the quest for a Northwest Passage to Asian markets.

Disappointment River was well written but let me down in several ways.

First of all, there's no map. The story describes voyages through the pays d'en haut (Upper Country), but any time I wanted to get a sense of where they were –– which was often –– I had to pull out my atlas, which didn't always use the eighteenth century place names.

Second, Mackenzie's voyage and Castner's don't illuminate or enrich each other. Both explorers are so wrapped up in their daily struggles with weather and mosquitoes and logistics that they fail to capture their surroundings. For example, at one point Castner and his partner appear to be struggling in the wilderness along a tricky section of the river, when suddenly a barge nearly swamps them. So there is commercial traffic this far up the river? Chapters alternate between the trips, but they feel completely unrelated; even the country sounds different.

Third, the balance between adventure and historical context is off kilter. The first half of the book outlines Mackenzie's childhood and describes the business of the fir trade. Mackenzie and his modern counterpart don't arrive at the mouth of the river until page 138, almost exactly half way through the book.

Lastly, I think it's misleading to suggest that the Mackenzie River represents a Northwest Passage. First of all, it provides a passage only for the far northern section of the fur trapping area: the trip to the headwaters at Great Slave Lake remains arduous. Also, in Mackenzie's time the outlet in the Arctic Ocean was icebound.

Albert Vigoleis Thelen, The Island of Second Sight **** 1/2

 I had never heard of this book before encountering it on a display shelf at Half Price Books. "One of the greatest books of the twentieth century," says Thomas Mann, but it was the other blurb on the cover that hooked me: "Farcical, byzantine, and philosophical... One of the most unusual and entertaining books I have ever read" –– The New York Times Book Review. Farcical! Byzantine! Philosophical! The back cover revealed one more tidbit that convinced me I had to read the 750-page German novel: "Winner of the 2013 PEN Translation Prize."

The Island of Second Sight is a fictionalized memoir –– "a book of recollections shaped by poetic means" –– about the author's time as a German expatriate in Mallorca during the 1930s. The first half is largely about their adventures in poverty; the second about their travails as outspoken critics of the rising fascist regimes in Germany and Spain. The tone is comic; the entertainment comes from the elaborate cosmopolitan prose style. People will praise an actor by saying they would listen to him read the phone book; I will praise Thelen by saying I would read a phone book he had written. I can't comment on the accuracy of the translation, but it was certainly an impressive feat given the constant wordplay.

The book is composed of a series of incidents more than a developing narrative. It is divided into Books based on the author's residence at the time: his brother-in-law's home, a rooming house owned by a Count, a bordello in a converted stable, a mostly empty apartment. There are numerous comic set pieces (weaving through Palma to avoid their creditors; hanging their belongings from the rafters of their tiny bordello room to protect them from the rats; serving as an unreliable tourist guide) and colorful Dickensian characters both human and animal. Piece by piece, indirectly, the book paints a picture of Mallorca, Spanish society, and the German diaspora during the rise of the Nazis. The stakes get more serious as the years pass, culminating in a positively tense epilogue about avoiding execution as they negotiate departure from the island.

"Vigoleis can never stick to his subject. He's not a nuclear scientist, and always finds more interesting things going on at the margins." In a book this long and digressive, there are inevitably sections that drag, where the comedy falls flat and you want the author to return to the main story. I found that the entertaining sections far outweighed the leaden ones, but I suppose your mileage may vary.

Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror ***

 I was drawn to Trick Mirror by its subtitle, "Reflections on Self-Delusion," and sold on it by this part of the introduction:

When I feel confused about something, I write about it until I turn into the person who shows up on paper: a person who is plausibly trustworthy, intuitive, and clear. It's exactly this habit – or compulsion – that makes me suspect that I am fooling myself. If I were, in fact, the calm person who shows up on paper, why would I always need to hammer out a narrative that gets me there?

Trick Mirror is a collection of essays that circle around the idea that our self images are stories we tell ourselves, just as our public personas are stories we project to others, and that society dictates the range of available stories. The specific subjects and arguments are familiar ones – how the Internet substitutes "virtue signaling" for action, the seven scams that define the millennial generation, religion and drugs as paths to ecstatic experience, rape culture on college campuses, the wedding industrial complex – but Tolentino covers them with a smidgen more insight and a more personal touch than your typical magazine article.

For example, when talking about the gig economy, Tolentino notes that popular opinion is that millennials prefer the freedom of freelancing because "it's just easier to be think millennials float from gig to gig because we're shiftless or spoiled or in love with the 'hustle' than to consider the fact that the labor market is punitively unstable and growing more so every day." She follows this point with a story about her own professional life.

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead *** 1/2

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a murder mystery that takes place in a remote Polish hamlet near the Czech border. Our narrator Janina is one of the few year-round residents of the Plateau, and the story starts with the death of her neighbor Big Foot. He choked on a bone from a deer that he had poached, and Janina believes that the deer murdered him. When a few more local hunters turn up dead, she promotes the idea that the animals are seeking retribution.

The author is a Nobel laureate, so you know the book has more on its mind than just a whodunit. Janina is a philosophical woman whose aptitude in astrology reflects her interest in the workings of fate and a world out of balance. She is an advocate for the animals who may be granting humans their comeuppance.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is nowhere near as interesting as Flights, but it has a definite atmosphere and its philosophical concerns emerge naturally from the story.

But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.

Richard Kreitner, Break It Up ***

 Break It Up is a history of the United States told with an emphasis on the forces tending to dis-unite us. That is, it relates the incidents –– nearly continuous since before the Revolution –– when some portion of the population considered seceding from the Union. For instance, the area west of the Appalachians pursued secession in the late 18th century because they had greater economic and social ties to the Spanish Mississippi than to the eastern federal government, and New England pondered it just as the South did before the Civil War.

The revisionist approach provides a fascinating and challenging view of our history. The book is chock full of fascinating incidents, some of which I was aware of but were presented differently, others which I hadn't heard of. However, Kreitner covers most of them superficially. I was frequently frustrated when he glossed quickly past an inherently dramatic episode. Perhaps he tried to cover too much ground? In addition to draining the narrative excitement, it made it hard to differentiate between serious incidents and fringe conspiracies. I was also disappointed that the last chapter shifted to our political polarization (with a notably pessimistic liberal slant) rather than geographical secession.

I learned about a few events that I'd like to follow up on, such as the Haverhill petition (1842), when a town in Massachusetts requested that Congress dissolve the Union. John Quincy Adams came across as a particularly interesting character.

Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier ***

Two aging Irish criminals hang out at the ferry terminal in Algeciras Spain, hoping to find the estranged daughter of one of them. They ruminate about their lost youth, interrogate young people who enter the terminal, and engage in comic business. Chapters alternate between their vigil and flashbacks to their ignominious past.

Night Boat to Tangier would make a good play. The present day chapters in particular have a theatrical feel to them,  a riff of Waiting for Godot. All dialogue, a minimalist set, and actions that sound like stage directions:

Maurice lies back across the bench, as though laid out for the deadhouse, with his hands clasped decorously at the chest. Charlie Redmond drops an invisible set of rosary beads into his friend's palmed clasp.

The flashback chapters range farther afield but could be easily adapted for the stage. The story wouldn't lose a bit of its "dark humor and hard-boiled Hibernian lyricism."

Antonin Scalia, The Essential Scalia ****

Justice Scalia has a reputation as an excellent and sometimes funny writer. Of course, he is also known for his conservative views and his enjoyment of bantering with the other side. I'm always interested in having smart articulate people attempt to persuade me to their positions, and I'm always interested in good writers.

Scalia is indeed an excellent and sometimes funny writer. Justice Elena Kagan's forward ("I envy the reader who has picked up this book") builds anticipation. The editors chose and organized the selections so that they present Scalia's fundamental principles clearly. Scalia makes his arguments forcefully, mostly without legal argle-bargle although legalese does drift in (fittingly) to the pieces in the final section on administrative law.

I wish the collection could somehow incorporate a contrasting perspective. For example, Scalia says "originalism is the only game in town –– the only real, verifiable criterion that can prevent judges from making the Constitution say whatever they think it should say." This is patently false, and I wish there was some way to include a critic to explain why, something like the Philosophers and Their Critics books. Scalia liked to be challenged.

I found Scalia's articles about method to be mostly convincing, the articles and opinions about specific cases less so. It's like I always say about libertarianism: the principles are very attractive, but they quickly lead to crazy-sounding results when applied to real-life situations.

Adam Ross, Mr Peanut ***

A re-read that didn't hold up for me.

As I noted in my earlier review, the marketing of Mr Peanut emphasizes its post-modern trickery. For the first 90 pages, though, it is a straightforward murder mystery that hinges on the complicated dynamics of a married couple's relationship. David Pepin, the dead woman's husband, has realistically mixed feelings about his wife and her needs. He loves her and supports her in her failed efforts to lose weight, but often finds the effort exhausting. But did he kill her?

The narrative tricks start abruptly on page 90, when the detective on the case receives a copy of David's novel-in-progress, and its first lines match the first lines of Mr Peanut. Then it turns out that one of the detectives is Sam Sheppard, the real-life doctor convicted then exonerated for murdering his wife.

I appreciate the main theme of the story, which is that marriages are fulfilling but hard. However, there are two things that consistently frustrated me about Mr Peanut:

• It's too long. At every level of organization (book, section, scene, paragraph), Ross includes extraneous material. Over 200 pages in the middle recounts Sam Sheppard's story; when a minor character goes golfing, we hear about nine holes; a fireworks show includes an explanation of how fireworks function. Call the editor!
  
  
• The female characters are universally inscrutable, demanding, and uncommunicative. Alice repeatedly tells David she won't say what he's doing wrong; Detective Haskell's wife retires to her bed for unspecified reasons; Marilyn Sheppard insists that Sam just not talk with her. There's a meta-narrative reason for this recurring attitude toward women, but I found it unpleasant and misogynistic.

Annie Dillard, The Abundance *** 1/2

The Abundance is a collection of pieces from Dillard's non-fiction works, covering the breadth of her career. I picked it up as a fan of Dillard's novel The Living.

Annie Dillard's prose is like poetry –– not in the sense of having a lyrical cadence or figurative language, but by having vivid, expressive images surrounded by abstruse metaphysical pondering. Dillard looks to achieve ecstatic states through deep attention to the everyday world. For example, she'll spend a page describing the spider web in a corner behind the toilet and the insect "corpses" in it, which leads to a story about a moth that flew into a candle and began to act as a wick.

Her close attention pays off in beautiful and distinctive images, not to mention that it encourages similar attention from me. However, a perplexing abstract idea is rarely far behind. A couple of examples:

• She awakes to find that her cat has walked across her and left her "covered with paw prints in blood; it looked as though I'd been painted with roses." She also says "my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp." Nice, distinctive, concrete. Then: "What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain."
• She makes her leisurely way to an island in the middle of Tinker Creek, straddles a sycamore log, and settles in to read. "I'm drawn to this spot. I come to it as an oracle: I return to it as a man years later will seek out the battlefield where he lost a leg or an arm."

To quote Eudora Welty from her review of a Dillard book: "I honestly do not know what she is talking about."

Ultimately I'm willing to tolerate the abstraction to luxuriate in the lovely, relaxing, and though-provoking imagery. I may seek out Dillard's one other foray into fiction, The Maytrees.

Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist ***

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a bit of a misnomer for this short novel in which a Pakistani man tells the tale of how he abandoned his successful life in America in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The title is misleading because the narrator has a political awakening, not a religious one. His awakening comes not from the 9/11 attacks themselves, or from the treatment of Muslims in their aftermath, but from the United States' policies in Pakistan and India.

The book presents a revealing portrait of an immigrant's complex feelings about being an American and a Pakistani. Two events stand out in particular. In the first, Changez is in the Philippines as part of an elite group of American financiers and sees a jeepney driver staring at him hostilely. Changez identifies with both his colleagues and the driver. In the second, a man compares Changez to a janissary who had been raised and trained in the conquering army and "fought to erase their own civilization, so they had nothing else to turn to."

There is a lot to like in The Reluctant Fundamentalist –– for example, the scene-setting in Lahore is strong –– but my enjoyment was tempered by two distracting gimmicks. 

• Changez narrates his story as a monologue with asides directed at the man he's speaking to ("I observe, sir, that you are watching me with a rather peculiar expression").  This format had me focusing on the theatrical artifice rather than the subtle themes of the story. 
• In the United States, Changez falls in love with Erica, a woman who obsesses about a former lover. Erica did not come across as a real person but as a symbolic plot device. 

Richard Crawford, Summertime **

 I've been interested for a while in a biography of George Gershwin. As Crawford says in his introduction, there are "some two dozen strong." I bought Summertime because (a) I found it in the bookstore and (b) it promised to be an "account of Gershwin's life in music" by a musical scholar. I looked forward to learning about the development of Gershwin's style and how it differs from his contemporaries in both musical theater and classical music.

Unfortunately, Summertime tells me next to nothing about what makes Gershwin distinctive.  Many, many pages outline the (frothy) plots of Broadway shows, with only occasional sentences describing the music. What differentiates a Gershwin tune from a Jerome Kerns tune? No idea. Gershwin is said to have brought jazz into the realm of serious music, but what does "jazz" mean in this case? Syncopation? D7 chords? Clarinets? Crawford includes excerpts from reviews of Gershwin's classical output, from which I conclude that his work was more popular than respected. What aspects of contemporary serious music influenced Gershwin? On page 250, Crawford claims Alban Berg, "whose music differed go greatly in style from his own, as a "later influence," but never says how or mentions Berg again.

I would also have liked (and expected) to learn about the contemporary reaction to two white guys writing Porgy and Bess, an opera about the African-American experience. Some of the quoted reviews are embarrassing in the way they diminish the contributions of the cast: "The way in which [actors] have been instructed, directed, molded into a vast, responsive unit is little short of thrilling." It's a notable contrast to the credit given to, say, Fred Astaire in earlier productions. There's one short excerpt from a black reviewer, but it's passed over without commentary. Unacceptable for a book published in 2019.

The book is theoretically about Gershwin's music rather than his life, so I can't complain about the lack of information about George as a person. The anecdotes that do appear don't paint a very flattering portrait of the man, not matter if he was always the life of the party.

Frustrating. It's the rare book about a musician that makes me less interested in his work.

Mavis Gallant, Paris Stories *** 1/2

 Mavis Gallant is expert at conjuring a milieu, such as post-war Germany ("The Latehomecomer") or the French Riviera ("The Moslem Wife"). Her characters, major and minor, are effectively drawn. The narrative feels natural or, less charitably, secondary. Her sumptuous writing style sounds like it comes from the first half of the 20th century; it's always surprising when a story turns out to be taking place in the 1980s.

My favorite story was "The Remission," in which a British family moves to a small village in the south of France so that the father can "die on the Riviera." He doesn't fade as quickly as anticipated, and the family needs to adjust their plans to make a life in the new locale. An excellent portrait of the village, of the casual colonialism of the expatriates, and the sundry motivations of the characters. The story ends with an awesome moment at the (eventual) funeral, the lapse when:

every person in the room, at the same moment, spoke and thought of something other than Alec. This lapse, this inattention, lasting no longer than was needed to say "No, thank you" or "Oh, really" or "Yes, I see," was enough to create the dark gap marking the end of Alec's span. He ceased to be, and it made absolutely no difference after that whether or not he was forgotten.

John Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story **

 American Philosophy is a memoir and a survey of Harvard-based philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the midst of an existential crisis, the author stumbles upon the personal library of William Ernest Hocking, whose contents bring him solace and turn his life around.

The subject matter is off great interest to me: William James, links between American pragmatism and German idealism, the purpose of living, bibliophilia, beautiful libraries tucked into the New Hampshire woods.

The building was constructed of rough-hewn, multihued granite... From the outside I was able to make out the skylights in the roof, which probably filled the space with glorious reading light. ... It was one large room, partitioned into different working nooks by walnut built-ins... To my right and left, at opposite ends of the building, were two large marble fireplaces. ... Oriental rugs, mismatched and nearly worn through, covered the library's wide oak floorboards. The first-generation Stickley rocking chairs -- with their solid walnut slats and musty horsehair seats -- looked as if they hadn't held a visitor for years.

But man oh man, is Kaag a terrible storyteller! He can't convey a clear line of thought or action. On the first page, for example:

[Holden Chapel] was a place I became intimate with in the spring of 2008. I'd spent months scouring Harvard for the origins of American philosophy. ... The aisles at Widener Library, just steps from Holden, are altogether fifty miles long. In the autumn of that year, I'd walked their entire length. ... Still nothing. It was only November. ... But then, on an evening in the spring of 2008, I gave up.

Spring, then autumn and November, then back to the same spring? Just the first of many times Kaag jumbles together thoughts from before and after and now. He also builds paragraphs that drift randomly from descriptions of a philosopher's thought to incidents from that philosopher's personal life to Kaag's personal life. There are lots of interesting tidbits in the book, but it's not clear Kaag knows what to make of them. His ultimate conclusion -- that the great generation of American pragmatists cared deeply about how philosophy addresses the meaning of life and how they resisted the professionalization of philosophy -- is rather trivial.

Javier Marias, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me **** 1/2

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me is a prime example of a book I love but I expect would exasperate most other readers. It starts (and, spoiler alert, ends) with an unexpected death, and the narrator insinuates himself into the dead woman's family, but those coming to the book for its plot will soon get lost in the winding train of thought. The narrator ponders what it all means rather than what happened.

Let me quote Ema from Goodreads, who says it better than I ever could:

Marías talks about death, about memory, about guilt, about the power of names. He also talks about the life of a story, prone to be transformed with every additional mouth that will pass it on. The plot of Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me is merely an excuse for the writer to travel down the meditative path, to reach depths of thought that left me wondering and made me feel exalted. So many truths that I haven't thought of before, so many approaches that now seem obvious. He made me look at my possessions and ask myself: do these objects hold any interest to other people, or is it just me who justifies their existence and utility? And do I really need all these things around me?

I can't get enough of this kind of novel, where an eccentric or downright crazy narrator eloquently circles around his or her personal obsessions. I especially loved the first third, wherein our narrator haunts and is haunted by Marta (the woman who died).  

Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks ****

This is a book about the power of language – strong style, single words – to shape our sense of place.

I have picked up Landmarks in book stores several times in the years since it was published (2015), but knew that I'd need to be in the right state of mind to appreciate it. Sheltering in place in our backyard on a quiet summer afternoon: perfect.

The book doesn't have a narrative or complicated argument, just precise natural descriptions in colorful language. ("Even in high summer, snow still lies in the deepest corries, sintering slowly into ice.") Each chapter describes a piece of idiosyncratic literature that shapes the way people perceive a particular type of British landscape (moors, mountains, waterways, farms), and is followed by a glossary of regional terms related to that landscape ("didder  of a bog: to quiver as a walker approaches  East Anglia"). The glossaries can be as entertaining as the prose chapters, with their combination of fun-sounding words, vivid definitions, and technical terms alongside dialect.

Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage *****

In the introduction to my original list of book reviews, I made a dismissive crack about stories concerning "the intimate bond between sisters," suggesting that my masculine taste didn't cotton to accounts of characters' relationships and feelings. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage proves the folly of my prejudice. Only one of the stories in this collection features sisters ("Queenie"), but all of them are about relationships and feelings.

The turning point in a Munro story, the surprise twist, comes in an emotional reaction rather than an event. The title story, for example, has two teenage girls fabricating a correspondence between a housekeeper and a man who lives in far-off Saskatchewan, leading the woman to believe that marriage may be in the cards. You can see disaster approaching. But even though the plot goes exactly where you think it's going, the woman responds to the situation in an unexpected way. Resulting in a happy ending!

Munro's characters are navigating the competing needs for companionship, and independence. The narrative set-up often feels familiar from other writers, but even the weaker stories include an impressive a-ha moment. I wasn't enjoying "Post and Beam" until Lorna's bargain with the universe two-thirds of the way through; the adulterous plot of "What is Remembered" is clichéd but I loved how the inciting intimacies were comfortable spouse-like rapport rather than titillating glances.

I guess the Nobel folks were on to something.

Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace **** 1/2

The Price of Peace is advertised as a biography of John Maynard Keynes, which make is surprising when Keynes dies about two-thirds of the way through. It would perhaps be more accurate to call it a biography of Keynesian economics; the final third shows how economists of all stripes absorbed Keynes' ideas.

In the early parts of the book, I felt like the author was assuming we were familiar with Keynes' thought or had read the 30 volumes of his Collected Writings. Over time, though, I grew to appreciate Carter's clear summaries and how they showed where Keynes' ideas came from and how they evolved. He always teases out their implications.

For example, I always associated Keynes with the idea that governments should run deficits during recessions as a way of stimulating the economy. That is indeed one of Keynes' innovations. The Price of Peace taught me how this principle undermined previous economic orthodoxy (by focusing on demand rather than supply), how it fits into Keynes' worldview (which tried to balance a conservative view of property rights with a liberal view of social organization), and how it has been co-opted by economic theories that differ widely from Keynes' own.

The most fundamental Keynesian idea is that markets are not naturally occurring phenomena that automatically correct themselves, but are created and managed by governments. For any given economic issue in a society, there are multiple ways to ameliorate them, each of which favors different segments of society. In other words, economics is not a neutral science or toolset but rather is inherently tied up in political questions.

Carter presents Keynes is a sympathetic light and interprets his ideas generously. His descriptions of competing frameworks seems fair even if he clearly disagrees with them. The final chapter, though, is a paean to Keynesianism as "liberal internationalism" that blames all our current woes on neoliberalism. Someday, I would like to read a more detailed book about Keynes and His Critics.

I also enjoyed how the book told the story of the World Wars from an entirely economic point of view. Nothing about the Somme but plenty about how the Allies managed the world supply of wheat and their debts to each other.

Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters **** 1/2

Split the difference between Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy, then filter it through a Japanese attention to tradition and class. The primary concern of The Makioka Sisters is finding a husband for the third sister Yukiko while fretting about the dalliances of the fourth sister Taeko. So far so Austen. The story takes place in Osaka in the years immediately preceding the Second World War; dinner conversations hint at the looming crisis in Europe and the ongoing "China Incident." The characters are concerned about tradition, but we readers know that big changes are on the way very soon. (The story ends in April 1941.)

The characters are very well drawn, especially those of the four sisters, and the milieu feels authentic. The plot is fairly repetitive, consisting of repeated miai (matchmaking dinners) for Yukiko interspersed with questionable behavior from Taeko, but the thoughts and feelings of the characters are distinct enough each time to keep things interesting.

P.S. As a digestif, I watched the 1983 Kon Ichikawa film version. Not surprisingly, the film version compresses Yukiko's many miai into a couple and loses much of the subtle character work. Surprisingly, the film leaves out the most dramatic events (the flood, the critical illness, the pregnancy). It looks beautiful, especially the ladies' kimonos, but feels rushed to someone who just finished the 500-page book. Taeko suffers most in the transition; she comes across as merely petulant. The film adds erotic tension between Yukiko and Teinosuke, which gives their characters additional shading. The actress playing Yukiko (Sayuri Yoshinaga) conveys a lot about this enigmatic character with just her facial expressions. I'm not sure whether the film would stand alone, but it worked as an adaptation for readers of the novel.

Alain Bertaud, Order without Design ****

Order without Design is a book about urban planning written by a research scholar and published by MIT Press. You will not be surprised to learn that its prose and organization are academic.

I am fascinated by the way organization emerges from the interaction of simple principles, and that is what Order without Design is about.  If you think of a city as "primarily a labor market" whose success depends on the proximity of jobs and homes and on the ease of transportation between them, you can understand how cities end up organized the way they are. You can also see what determines land prices, housing costs, and usage of various forms of transportation.

Bertaud's stated purpose is to encourage collaboration between urban planners, who make normative policy recommendations, and urban economists, who analyze descriptive data about day-to-day operations. His more fundamental purpose, though, is to argue for a libertarian approach to land use regulation and transportation planning. The libertarian bent becomes pronounced in the last couple of chapters.

Viewing cities as simply labor markets works well as a way to focus the discussion in the early chapters. In the later chapters, however, it becomes clear that mayors and city planners have many more goals to take into account and that those other goals justify some of the practices that Bertaud rejects as hubris or counterproductive. For example, he objects to regulations that raise land prices and reduce affordability, but many of them are in place for reasons beyond the purely economic. He acknowledges the success of regulations in Paris designed to retain its historical character, but considers it an anomaly. He considers some slums in Indonesia as a success story because of their market-sensitive use of land.

Lew Bryson, Tasting Whiskey ****

Tasting Whiskey is a guidebook to whiskey whose name popped up several times in the footnotes for Bourbon Empire. Bryson writes in an accessible style with an encouraging tone, the illustrations are well-designed and clear, and the book covers everything from the art of distilling to the regional styles of whiskey (or whisky).

I was most interested to learn about all of the various factors that influence the taste and smell of the spirit. The source grains, obviously, the barrels, the age, and the blend, but also the amount of reflux during distillation, the location of the barrel in the warehouse, the strain of yeast. I'd never thought about the fact that distilleries need to make decisions about taste and amounts several years in advance of actually delivering the whiskey, a process made tricky by the fickle tastes of the public.

The chapters describing the major whiskey-producing countries (Scotland, Ireland, United States, Canada, Japan) gave a sense of what made each distinctive, but were spotty in their coverage. For example, the Scotch chapter identifies the different regions but only includes sidebars about Islay and Speyside. I would have liked more detail about Japanese whisky in particular.

Now to put Bryson's advice into practice. Sláinte!

Mariam Toews, Women Talking ***

Eight Mennonite women meet in a hayloft to discuss how to respond to repeated violations by the men of their community. When the men return from the city in two days time, the women will be forced to forgive their attackers unless they decide to leave.

I appreciate the concept of the story but feel that Toews made a few poor narrative choices. The most damaging is introducing an educated male narrator. August Epp de-centers the story from its proper place with the isolated illiterate women, and allows Toews to sneak in too many literary and worldly references. Also, the women's perspectives felt rather more modern than I would expect them to be.

Women Talking would work better as a play. It takes place in a single location over a short time period and consists entirely of dialogue. Actresses would be able to embody the diverse personalities better than dry descriptions.

Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai ***

The Last Samurai is an ambitious novel about an intellectually curious single mother raising her genius son. Applying parenting methods from the fathers of John Stuart Mill and Yo Yo Ma, she teaches her son several languages before the age of six, worrying all the while that she might make mistakes that thwart his potential. The son wants to know who his father is, and at age 11 goes on a quest to find him, a quest inspired by the gathering of the samurai in the film Seven Samurai.

I was very impressed with the first third of the book, told from the mother's point of view. Her perspective is intriguingly odd. The prologue, about how her parents' lives took unexpected turns, grounds her concerns about her son's development. I was especially interested in her thoughts about how Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony might apply to language(s).

I lost enthusiasm fairly quickly once the son took over as narrator. In the early going his thoughts are mostly about how impressed people are by his achievements; during his quest to find a suitable father figure, his interactions with candidates are unbelievable and all over the place thematically.

Nicos Hadjicostis, Destination Earth * 1/2

I was looking forward to this "New Philosophy of Travel by a World-Traveler," anticipating that it would alter my thinking about travel and enhance my future traveling experiences. The Foreword by Hadjicostis' traveling partner offered promise when it correctly noted that "errand days gave us a unique view into everyday life and ended up being just as fascinating as our exploration days." Not a new insight for me, but the kind of suggestion I was looking for.

Alas, the book was filled with proclamations that the author believes to be profound but which are trite, condescending, and entitled.

Hadjicostis takes a basically Buddhist approach to his subject, presenting travel (at least "four-dimensional travel") as transformative, allowing the traveler to live in the moment, connect with his fellow humans, and "capture the soul" of a country.

Wait, what's that last one? Sounds kinda colonial. for a free spirit like our traveler. His examples of soul capturing are cringe-worthy: he embodies the spirit of the Vietcong by arguing with his cab driver, gets in touch with his inner cannibal by properly eating the head of a roasted pig in the Solomon Islands, and climbs aboard an Indonesian truck to help students with the call to prayer and "have a unique interaction with Muslim youth!" He frequently defaults to the notion of the noble savage, for example explaining how cultures that eat with their hands are less mediated than ours.

Most of the time he extols the virtues of the whole world and its people, but then he says something like this:

Definitely not all regions of a country or the Earth are worth visiting. Athens is a sprawling metropolis of four million people, but its important attractions, architectural beauty, historical monuments, and cultural life are all concentrated in the four square kilometers around the Acropolis.

What happened to the spirit of the place? Now who is promoting "one-dimensional travel"? 

César Aira, The Hare *** 1/2

The cover of The Hare aptly calls César Aira "the Duchamp of Latin American literature." The story of an English naturalist searching the Argentine pampas for the possibly legendary flying Legibrerian hare, The Hare whipsaws between realism, symbolism, and absurdity in a disconcerting but entertaining manner. The language is a unique delight that never reads like a translation; full props to the translator Nick Caistor.

He sat motionless for a moment, lost in the contemplation of his own grandeur.

The narrative follows a wandering path and is filled with developments that feel like improvisations. The naturalist's search takes him to an Indian village, where he comes to suspect that the hare is not a creature but a metaphor; the village chieftain disappears and the Indians recruit the naturalist to help find him; the naturalist's guide turns out to be heir to a great fortune if he can reach his half-sister in the mountains before the month is out; and so on. Which made it quite surprising when the final chapter ("Happy Families") ties up all of the threads like the end of a romantic comedy.

Timothy Egan, The Immortal Irishman ***

Wow, there's a lot in this biography of Thomas Meagher. Meagher was a young Irish revolutionary who barely avoided execution in Ireland, escaped from the penal colony of Tasmania, led a regiment of Irish soldier in the U.S. Civil War, and served as governor of the Montana Territory. The author wants to place Meagher's story in context, so the book covers centuries of English oppression in Ireland, the history of the Australian penal colonies, the politics and major battles of the Civil War, and the settlement of the West under the Homestead Act. Egan crafts a smooth narrative with evocative details, but with so much ground to cover it's necessarily superficial.

Frankly, Meagher's story gets lost in the bigger picture. His personality remains opaque beyond his commitment to justice for the downtrodden, and supporting characters such as his wives get even shorter shrift. He is most famous as an orator, but the excerpts of his speeches are uninspiring.

Meagher led an impressively expansive life, and The Immortal Irishman enumerates the key events competently. However, the scope drained many incidents of their inherent drama. 

Hernan Diaz, In the Distance **** 1/2

In the Distance is a Western of sorts, about a Swedish boy who gets separated from his brother en route to New York, ends up in San Francisco, and sets out to cross the country to find his brother. The book is filled with remarkable images, starting on the very first page:

The hole, a broken star on the ice, was the only interruption on the white plain merging into the white sky. No wind, no life, no sound. A pair of hands came out of the water and groped for the edges of the angular hole. It took the searching fingers some time to climb up the thick inner walls of the opening, which resembled the cliffs of a miniature cañon, and find their way to the surface. Having reached over the edge, they hooked into the snow and pulled. A head emerged.

It's our hero, Håkan, who lifts himself from his ice bath and soon dons his "coat made from the skins of lynxes and coyotes, beavers and bears, caribou and snakes, foxes and prairie dogs, coatis and pumas, and other unknown beasts."

Håkan has many adventures, but the most notable thing about his lonely existence is how often it returns to unfeatured landscapes, usually white like the ice, the salt flats, or the mirror he finds reflecting the pitiless sun on the desert.

The tone of the story reminded me of the Jim Jarmusch film Dead Man. It's filled with the tropes of a Western, but they are used in an oblique and allegorical way.

Jill Heinerth, Into the Planet ***

The subtitle of this memoir is "My Life as a Cave Diver," but Heinerth's adventures are not limited to the water. A surprising amount of the book describes diving-adjacent activities, such as hiking in the jungles of Mexico, sailing the Southern Ocean to Antartica, and fending off burglars. Her descriptions of dives are engaging, especially the caves inside an iceberg and the honeymoon trip where she got the bends, but they aren't the part that made the strongest impression. Heinerth relates each story as if she's giving a Toastmasters speech, with its life lesson made explicit at the end:

But when we transcend the fear of failure and terror of the unknown, we are all capable of great things, personally and as a society. ... If we continue to trek purposefully toward our dreams, into the planet and beyond, we just might achieve the impossible.

I compared this book to the mountaineering memoirs I've read. The defining feature of world class mountaineers is their off-kilter personalities and value systems. Heinerth, on the other hand, comes across as level-headed and invested in rationalizing her decisions based on common values. I will say, though, that she and the other divers come across as surprisingly unconcerned about others' welfare: numerous stories show divers purposely turning a blind eye to their partners' difficulties. It's surprising in such a collaborative activity.

Cave diving: it's not for me.

Richard Powers, The Overstory **** 1/2

Richard Powers is an excellent writer. His prose doesn't draw attention to itself, but effectively communicates through deep-rooted metaphor. Knowing that its main characters are environmental activists -- and reading the two-page prologue -- I was afraid the The Overstory would become too righteous or mystical for my taste. But Powers is a scientifically-minded writer who keeps the tone grounded even when the characters get righteous or mystical. In a way, The Overstory is told from the trees' point of view, but it never feels as sappy or gimmicky as that sounds. Instead, it quietly manages to "decenter the human as the source of all meaning and value," as Michael Pollan is quoted on the back cover.

The first section, "Roots," introduces nine characters through their life stories, all of which feature a tree as a prominent element. The stories serve as a compelling background when the characters meet and interact in the second section, "Trunk." Personally, I found one of the characters, Neelay, far less involving than the rest. Neelay is a computer programmer; despite Powers' background as a programmer, the prose in the Neelay parts sounds like the author doesn't fully grasp the concepts. The natural sections are so much more authoritative.

The book is filled with strong images and is thought-provoking even though its overall environmental message is simple.

William James, Essays on Faith and Morals ****

Essays on Faith and Morals collects James' writings about ethics. The bulk of the essays come from the earlier book The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, supplemented from a few from other sources. Most importantly, it includes two essays from Talks to Teachers on Psychology, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" and "What Makes a Life Significant?", which contain one of my favorite passages:

Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological anaesthesia as regards Jill's magical importance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs are among the wonders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack realizes Jill concretely, and we do not.

Overall, I appreciated James' view that our subjective experience of life is richer than pure empiricism can justify. In fact, the feeling of wonder, mystery, and value derives from a part of us that is itself something of a mystery.

The first essay is titled, "Is Life Worth Living?", and James' answer is Yes, life is worth living so long as you believe that it is. The next essay, "The Will to Believe," notes that we don't have complete rational control over what we believe; we can't just decide to believe something. "The Sentiment of Rationality" argues that what we consider rational is largely based on a feeling of rationality.

Two of the extra essays, "The Energies of Men" and "The Gospel of Relaxation," felt like vapid Readers Digest articles offering commonplace life lessons.

I read a musty used copy of this book, which seemed appropriate whenever a contemporary (to the turn of the 20th century) cultural reference went over my head.

Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman ** 1/2

I think I understand, she said. Though not exactly. ("Tony Takitani")

I've read three Murakami novels (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, After Dark, and Kafka on the Shore). Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a story collection whose virtues and vices are similar to those in the longer works. Murakami has a unique blend of mundane details, such as outlet malls with the Gap, Toys R Us, and the Body Shop, with uncanny situations, like a woman with a kidney-shaped stone that moves off of her desk whenever she leaves the office. His characters often feel like something unusual is happening even when all appearances are normal. Several of the stories are told second-hand, with the narrator hearing a narrative from another character.

As is typical with a story collection, there were stories I really liked (the title story, "The Mirror," "Firefly," "Chance Traveler"), stories that didn't work for me at all ("A 'Poor Aunt' Story," "Crabs"), and those with intriguing elements that lost me partway through (the majority). That's the joy and frustration of reading Murakami: he's got something unusual on his mind, but it can be difficult to stay on his wavelength.

Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman ** 1/2

I am a fan of Siri Hustvedt, and particularly of her non-fiction. I especially like that she takes it for granted that there is no difference between the physical and mental, the psychological and the neurological, the mind and body.

In The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves, Hustvedt sets out to discover why her body frequently shakes uncontrollably when she speaks in public. This condition first manifests itself when she gives a eulogy for her father, after years of uneventful speaking engagements.

I was expecting the book to have as its backbone Hustvedt's journey to various medical doctors and psychologists. She describes giving a talk at a university program in Narrative Medicine ("attempts to illuminate the universals of the human condition by revealing the particular") -- I was expecting something like that. Instead, she tries to think through the problem herself, through reading and research. The result is frequently vague or off-topic, with little narrative drive.

Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life ***

According to his author biography, Chiang attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop in 1989. The first few stories in this collection are from the first couple of years after that, and they have the generic and derivative quality of a new writer. Chiang really came into his own around the turn of the century; "Story of Your Life," which the movie Arrival was based on, is from 1998, and the strong stories in the second half come from after 2000. His more recent collection Exhalation is even better.

My favorite story in Stories of Your Life is "Hell Is the Absence of God," which takes place in a world where angelic visitations are common and not universally positive occurrences. The original "Story of Your Life" provides a clearer scientific basis for the alien's abilities and a better sense of how humans might be capable of seeing the world from their perspective, but the denouement is still perplexing. It's not that learning their language enables time travel (the impression I got from the movie), but that it enables us to remember the future like we remember the past.

Richard Davies, Extreme Economies ***

Some of the most engaging and informative books I've read have been immersive reports from extreme economies: the slums of Mumbai (Behind the Beautiful Forevers), the Bronx (Random Family), Milwaukee (Evicted). Extreme Economies looks at nine outlier societies that are dealing with forces that promise to impact us all in the future, such as an aging population, increased automation, and economic inequality.

I really appreciate the approach, and each section has thought-provoking tidbits. However, the coverage of each society is superficial, about the depth of a magazine article, and the author frequently chooses to highlight one of the less compelling aspects of the situation. For example, the chapter on Tallinn focuses on the Estonian effort to automate government services, whereas the most interesting part of the story is the economic relationship between native Estonians and the huge numbers of Russians who settled here (or were moved here) during the Soviet era.

Davies quietly makes a case for conservative market-based economics. He never makes the argument explicitly, but most of his stories of failure involve ill-advised government intervention. This bias is most notable in the chapter about Glasgow, where the author exalts the social cohesion in the 19th century tenements then blames much of the city's current trouble on housing policy. One of his key conclusions is that we underestimate the importance of social capital when measuring wealth and setting policy.

Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station ****

Leaving the Atocha Station begins with a pair of set pieces that are simultaneously humorous and insightful. In the first, our narrator sees a man standing in front of a painting in the Prado museum crying; was he having a profound experience of art or experiencing grief he brought into the museum? In the second, his poor Spanish leads him to "form several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords."

I would say that the book is about how we look for profound experiences in both life and art, and try to justify ourselves when we fail to have them. The first part of the book feels brilliant; the latter part seems like a typical story of an insecure artist worrying about his talent, level of engagement, and girls. 

Derek Lundy, Godforsaken Sea ***

The titular Godforsaken Sea is the Southern Ocean, whose challenges Lundy describes through the story of the 1996 Vendée Globe race: a single-handed non-stop sailboat race around the world. Several competitors came to grief in the Southern Ocean that year, including one who vanished without a trace.

Lundy does an excellent job of detailing the numerous factors that contribute to a successful endurance race: boat designs, solicitation of sponsors, training, tactics, food and sleep planning, communication channels, emergency procedures, heavy weather strategy, psychological equanimity.

The inherent drama of a dangerous race should provide a propulsive narrative structure, but Lundy consistently manages to undermine the excitement by reporting on events out of order, stepping away to include interview material about before and after the race, and repeating paeans to heroism in the face of the awesome Southern Ocean.

The rescues at sea were sensational enough to resist Lundy's talent for sapping energy from the story. The friendship that developed between Pete Goss and Raphaël Dinelli is the happy ending.

Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell **

The premise and first few chapters of Fall led me to believe that it would be about what the experience of a disembodied consciousness might be like. Dodge is the ultra-rich founder of a gaming company who falls into a coma due to a mishap during a routine medical procedure. His health care directive insists that his heirs upload his connectome to the cloud. Pre-coma Dodge takes particular note of how his mental model of the world depends on kinesthetic awareness; he ponders the fate of the Ancient Greek shades on the other side of the river Lethe, with only vague memories of their previous lives. Can we even be conscious without our bodies or the stimulation of our senses?

I don't know, because that's not where Stephenson goes with the story. After a few hundred pages of tangential action involving internet hoaxes and increased polarization in the United States, Dodge's niece finally boots him up. The restored consciousness struggles to make sense of the digital chaos around it, but eventually settles into... creating a virtual world like a game designer would.

This doesn't make sense to me. A consciousness in a radically new environment would apply what it knows in order to find patterns in the input, but where is that input coming from? Assuming there is input of a digital sort, how would systems optimized for finding regularities in the real world possibly lend themselves to interpretation of online chaos? If we grant that Dodge is able to impose structure on the input, how is it that subsequently uploaded connectomes share the world Dodge fashioned? Why do avatars like trees, rocks, and mosquitoes act exactly like their stubborn real-world counterparts?

More deadening than my confusion is my indifference. I don't care about any of the undeveloped characters, either in Meatspace or Bitworld. The story develops into a retelling of Paradise Lost (with Dodge in the Satan role, hence the title) followed by a generic quest narrative. Stephenson doesn't even attempt to follow up on any of the knotty issues raised in the beginning, about consciousness, the legal implications of digital immortality, or our increasing dependence on digitally mediated experience.

Reid Mitenbuler, Bourbon Empire ***

This social history of American whiskey starts out strong. Because Mitenbuler is describing pre-history, before any colorful characters enter the story, the first few chapters focus on the larger forces that led to the creation of bourbon: the ubiquity of corn in the new world, the disrupted supply lines from the Caribbean during the Revolutionary War, the use of whiskey as currency and as a way to monetize excess grain, the barrel aging that occurred as whiskey traveled down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. These chapters reminded me of Nature's Metropolis in the way it described the interplay of natural and social processes.

Once we reach the historical record, around the time of the Civil War, Mitenbuler can't resist the lure of outsized characters, gangsters, charlatans, and political hypocrites. The story becomes much more anecdotal, although the author continues to paint the larger picture as the industry shifts and consolidates. The final chapter, about a visit to a two-person distillery in New York state, reads very much like the kind of magazine profile that earlier portions of the book have mocked.

Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police ***

The title and flap copy for The Memory Police suggest that the novel is "about the terrors of state surveillance," but I don't think that's a proper characterization. Objects are disappearing on an unnamed island—hats, birds, calendars—and the Memory Police come for those who don't forget the disappeared things. However, the disappearances appear to be a natural process not a state-sponsored one and the people are confused or apathetic rather than terrified.

The book introduces many ideas and images concerning our relationship with objects, for example the way objects cease to exist once our emotional attachment to them and their use is gone. Disappearances happen all the time in the normal course of change (pay phones, CD players, coworkers); are we supposed to lament these losses as a constricting of our souls? We also lose memories—and the objects they refer to—as we age. In The Memory Police, the narrator tries to conserve memories by hiding her editor in a secret room that soon becomes a repository of forgotten objects and a comforting retreat. Why does she do that, and why do the Memory Police care if some people don't forget things?

This enigmatic book offers many tantalizing allegories, but they never built into a larger whole for me. Is that intentional or did I miss somethings? Is it because of a cultural difference between me and the Japanese author? I'm tempted to say The Memory Police would be great for sparking conversation at a book club, except I know that most readers aren't interested in discussing unsolved mysteries.

Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor **** 1/2

The Spy and the Traitor is essentially a biography of Oleg Gordievsky, a highly placed KGB agent who provided MI6 with reams of valuable intelligence during the 1970s and 1980s, until he was "burned" by Aldrich Ames (the traitor of the title).

The story is dramatic, especially once the Russians suspect Gordievsky and he needs to escape from Moscow. The best thing about the book, though, is how it presents the day-to-day operations of the spy agencies and shows how they are offices like any other, with the same combination of high performers, slackers, and screw-ups.

Gordievsky is the hero of the story, and my one complaint is that he comes across as too one-dimensionally heroic. Macintyre doesn't probe Gordievsky's motivations much. A few of the spy's actions feel questionable, but the author gives them the most charitable interpretation. The afterward mentions some "bones of contention" and hint at a prickly personality; I would have preferred to have that personality show in the story.

And one final question: Why did the KGB leave Gordievsky free in Moscow when they were pretty sure he had betrayed them?

Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck ***

I read this collection of stories based on Evelyn's review.  "All the characters... were flawed in personality, but were living their lives as if they were not" -- sounds right up my alley.  In most of the stories, a character has an experience that forces him or her to suddenly see themselves from another person's point of view.

I think the stories in Thunderstruck would be great to analyze in a writing class, because they are very technically proficient in construction and in tone. All of the elements seem to be there, but for some reason they fail to engage me. The characters don't come alive. I enjoyed the stories as well built narratives but didn't feel them.

Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport **** 1/2

The nearly 1000 pages of Ducks, Newburyport contain the musings of an Ohio housewife, written in a unique stream-of-consciousness style with nary a period or paragraph break. It's an intimidating block of text, but the prose flows smoothly once you fall into its rhythms. Words and ideas pop up obliquely, their connection to the surrounding thoughts unclear, only to bear fruit many pages later. The two words of the title, for example, come to our narrator's mind a few times before she finally thinks more about the story of her mother nearly drowning as a child when she chased ducks into a pond in Newburyport. The larger themes of the book emerge in the same circuitous way.

The story has subtle and interesting things to say about maternal relationships, the necessary white-washing of history and how it impacts our attitudes, and how we carry on and find joy in the face of everyday fears.

Three things prevent me from giving Ducks, Newburyport the coveted five star rating:

• The length, while possibly necessary, is intimidating.
• The interspersed sections about a mountain lion feel increasingly contrived.
• The narrator doesn't have any epiphany or growth.