Deirdre Mask, The Address Book ***

I picked up The Address Book in hopes of insights about how an address can reveal a lot about the person or business at that location -- consider a seven digit address compared to a two digit one, 14th Street versus Elm Avenue, Park Street as opposed to Park Avenue -- and what these patterns reveal about our society. However, the book took a wider and more superficial view of addresses.

Mask takes a discursive approach to the topic, following every tangent a little away. The chapter on street names in post-apartheid South African is largely a history of the period; much of the section about "block addressing" in Japan concerns the influence of their writing system; the chapter with Iran in the title spends more time in Ireland. The book contains fun tidbits about different countries' addressing practices but no sustained arguments.

Two key themes recur throughout the book.

• "House numbers were not invented to help you navigate the city or receive your mail, though they perform these two functions admirably. Instead, they were designed to make you easier to tax, imprison, and police."
• "Street names do more than describe; they commemorate. ... Arguing about street names has become a way of arguing about fundamental issues in our society at a time when doing so sometimes feels impossible."

These are some fairly weighty and fundamental societal tensions: between freedom and convenience and between different groups' vision of our history. Organizing the world's information, even when done with the best intentions, can be a tool of the status quo. Changing the names of streets (or schools or towns) can send a powerful signal. Mask mentions these topics in a breezy tone that belies their seriousness. I would have preferred a more focused discussion of "What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power" (per the subtitle).

Special Report: Author adopts my review!

Back in 2013 I read the true adventure story Fiva, about a pair of brothers attempting to climb a mountain in Norway. (The book was a Christmas gift from Evelyn.) I gave it a very positive review.

Recently, I was trying to get to this blog on my phone, and the Google search results included a page not from my site at all.

Gordon Stainforth, the author of Fiva, quotes my review on his own site!

Ruth Ware, The Turn of the Key ** 1/2

You might think that adding mystery on top of mystery would be an effective way to enhance suspense in a thriller, but The Turn of the Key proves otherwise. It features a haunted house in the Scottish highlands, creepy modern surveillance technology, a narrator with secrets, malicious children, a poison garden, parents with puzzling motives, and suspicious servants who appear at unexpected intervals. Rather than harmonizing into an atmosphere of dread, the various elements work against each other. What caused all of the lights and the loud music to turn on in the dead of night? Ghosts? Technical glitch? One of the kids? The housekeeper? A "butt dial" from the mother to the smart house? The surfeit of possible explanations makes each incident less creepy.

One additional explanation the reader needs to consider for some discrepancies is sloppy writing. The narrator talks about how the young and handsome handyman flustered her; four paragraphs later she is "shy for no reason I could pin down." A sign of an unreliable narrator or a missing editor? There are enough examples of sloppy writing (such as Rowan not putting her top back on after washing it [p 65]) to make it a real possibility.

Phillip Lopate (editor), The Glorious American Essay ***

I was attracted to this collection of "One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present" by its scope, with essays from 1726 through 2008, and its list of authors, a mix of the well known and the forgotten, of my favorites and those I know only by reputation.

Like nearly every essay collection, The Glorious American Essay starts with a preface defining the term. Lopate's inclusive definition ("I have taken the position of opening it to every type of beast") is the book's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. On the one hand, the collection includes sermons, (auto)biographical sketches, philosophical articles, book reviews, polemics––basically any non-fiction piece of appropriate length. On the other hand, this very eclecticism makes the anthology feel unfocused and random. Selections of historical importance such as Washington's farewell address appear alongside trifles like Edgar Allan Poe's "The Philosophy of Furniture," and Lopate's introductions are too brief to provide context. How do these selections collectively manifest the glory of the American essay?

Frankly, I would have preferred more traditional "familiar" essays, which show off the writer's style and temper of mind as they meditate on a subject the reader may not have considered before –– the kind of thing Lopate himself specializes in. (His essay "Against Joie de Vivre" is for me the epitome of the form.) Most of the pieces in this collection have strong writing, but relatively few of them show off the writer's personality or lead me to think about things in a different way. I was especially hoping to get a sense of character or style from writers I know mostly by name, such as Lewis Mumford, Adrienne Rich, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Paul Tillich. The oldest pieces show their age by making passionate arguments on long-settled topics such as equality of the sexes and races.

I was attracted to the book by the wide time horizon and unread authors, yet my favorites turned out to be written in my lifetime by authors who have impressed me before: Wallace Stegner's "The Twilight of Self-Reliance" and Marilynne Robinson's "Puritans and Prigs." I was struck by images from various nature writers: J Hector St John de Crevecoeur hunting bees, John Muir climbing a tree in a wind storm, Loren Eiseley empathizing with the mouse burrowing into his houseplants. Herman Melville's recommendation of Mosses from an Old Manse was fervent enough for me to add Hawthorne to my reading list.

This 900-page anthology contains thought-provoking ideas and images at regular intervals, but few sustained classics. What to do with a book like this? I can imagine wanting to return to, say, Eudora Welty's description of Ida M'Toy's secondhand clothing shop or Audubon's account of the massive flocks of passenger pigeons, but how would I wade through the less engaging pages? There are too many items to copy out into a highlights document; too few to justify reading the heavy tome again. These fine ideas and images are going to fade from my experience, aren't they? That is the fate of nearly all my reading (and IRL events!) as the past gets buried under the constant press of new material.