Elizabeth Cook, Achilles ***

Achilles retells the story of Achilles in prose that is as close to poetry as you can get. It's a small book that I (re-)read in a single sitting. It offers several beautiful passages, with the best being its account of Odysseus' visit to the underworld at the very beginning.

Cook focuses our attention on the sensual and emotional aspects of the scenes, thereby supplementing the epic narrative in the classical sources. You need to know the outline of the story already. The last third of the book drifts away from Achilles himself to consider Helen, the centaur Chiron, and, most surprisingly, the poet John Keats.

Jenny Diski, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? ***

The early essays of this collection are delightful. Diski has an insouciant style that conveys her singular personality and leads to mordantly funny insights. Many of her topics are obscurely British, like Denis Thatcher or Lillie Langtry, but I still found myself laughing at her perfectly phrased wisecracks. Her more purely personal essays made me appreciate her attraction to indolence.

Diski wrote these pieces for the London Review of Books, so many of them are nominally book reviews, often of biographies. She often notes how the biographer tries to build an enobling narrative about his or her subject but is foiled by the inevitable complexity of human lives.

The pieces are in chronological order, from 1992 to 2014. I felt like Diski lost her unique spark around the turn of the century (roughly page 160). Her essays were still pleasant, but I felt a lack of her personal voice and offbeat observations. 

I would be interested in learning more about Diski's mentorship with Doris Lessing, but she didn't write much about it until her final book In Gratitude, which came long after she lost her flair.

Alexander Douglas, Against Identity **

The introduction to this book of philosophy acknowledges the importance of one's personal identity:

Each of us is born with a deep biological urge for self-preservation. But consciously pursuing self-preservation requires some notion of what our self is. ... Some believe that we can find out by introspecting and looking within to find our true self. But ... there is no map highlighting which qualities truly define us: which are our defining traits and which our fleeting states. Nor does who you happen to be right now define who you essentially are. 

While our basic appetites are biologically determined, our desires beyond these basic appetites arise from a fundamental psychological drive for identity—a drive to be a certain sort of person.

You decide who you are, and then this determines how you want to act, what you want to possess, who you want to connect with, what you want to believe. ... In making value judgements, you define who you are, more than through any other human activity.

The author emphasizes that the existential importance of identity leads us to violence when our identity is threatened. He promises to examine the thought of three very different philosophers (Zhuangzi from ancient China, Benedict de Spinoza in the 17th-century Dutch Republic, and René Girard in 20th-century France) who counseled us to abandon our identities.

This introduction reinforces the idea that we (necessarily) construct identities to understand ourselves and fit into our social environment. How can we possibly do without them? 

In the early chapters, Douglas seems to suggest that we simply accept our internal multitudes and stay open to change. Later, it sounds like he is recommending Buddhist-style detachment. In the end, he settles on proposing "communion in a shared identitylessness. If I see that you and I are both identityless expressions of superdeterminate being then we are not simply as one in shared identity; We are one."

Douglas' descriptions of other philosophers' ideas are notably vague, and his conclusion waffles between saying we should transcend our identities through spirituality and telling us to choose better exemplary models for our identities (like Christ perhaps, or Spinoza's God). None of it provides a viable alternative to identity.

For a much better treatment of this topic, see Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Ethics of Identity. I believe that I myself have written a more insightful essay on this topic.

Laurent Binet, HHhH **** 1/2

HHhH is a historical novel about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, founder of the Nazi SS and mastermind of the Final Solution. It charts Heydrich's rise and describes the Operation Anthropoid that led to his killing at the hands of two Czechoslovakian agents. The author also documents his struggles in writing the book, trying not to go beyond the known facts.

So, basically, the film [Patton] is about a fictional character whose life is strongly inspired by Patton's, but who clearly isn't him... Everybody finds it normal, fudging reality to make a screenplay more dramatic.

Has there ever been a biographer who did not dream of writing, "Jesus of Nazareth used to lift his left eyebrow when he was thinking"?

What Binet reveals, though, is how our understanding of any story necessarily depends on embellishing the historical record. Both the author and the reader contribute to the embellishment. For example, Binet  knows the difference between Czechs and Slovaks because of tennis. "Ivan Lendl was Czech while Miroslav Mečíř was Slovak." His sense of their playing styles informs his impression of the character of the two assassins. (He later knows one of the smaller Czech towns because the hockey goalie Dominik Hašek is from there.) He imagines the creaking of the tram outside of Jozef Gabčík's room because he has spent time in Prague.

In addition, the author inevitably shapes the story into a narrative by choosing what information to include. 

I can't tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect—and these people, these real people who actually existed. I'm barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts.

Binet regularly equivocates over whether to include particular incidents, based on whether they are relevant or well-attested. Meanwhile, he quietly includes true facts that provide verisimilitude:

The Sten was concealed in a bag that Gabčík had filled with dry grass... If the police checked him, how would he explain the fact that he was walking around town with a bag full of hay? Well, actually, that's easy: all he'd have to say is that it's for the rabbit. In those days, many Czechs bred rabbits at home in order to improve their daily diet, and fed them on grass taken from the city's parks.

No matter how much we know about a person or event, we still need to apply our experiences and assumptions to make it into a compelling narrative.

Despite its dark subject matter and postmodern trappings, HHhH was entertaining and informative.

Marcus Willaschek, Kant: A Revolution in Thinking ****

I knew Immanuel Kant as "the most important philosopher of the modern era" based on his work in metaphysics (Critique of Pure Reason) and ethics (the categorical imperative). Kant: A Revolution in Thinking gave me a more complete picture of Kant, both as a person and as a thinker. I learned, for example, that more than half of Kant's published works are about natural science!

The book has a unique organization, one that is thematic rather than chronological. Willaschek starts with Kant's less well-known ideas regarding politics and history and gradually works his way toward the more abstruse metaphysics. Each chapter includes information about Kant's ideas, his life, and the contemporary context.

I was concerned when reading the first few chapters. They felt like a disorganized collection of thoughts that didn't support Kant's reputation, and the language sounded like overly literal translations from the German. As I continued, it became clear that each section was like a puzzle piece, and the big picture came into focus once I had more of the pieces in place.

Willaschek identifies three important aspects of Kant's genius.

• He found ways to reconcile seemingly contradictory positions, such as idealism/epiricism and determinism/free will
• He shifted the focus of debate about objectivity and epistemology so that it takes seriously the nature and limitations of human understanding
• He approached natural science and moral reasoning in the same way.

Sarah Bakewell, The English Dane *** 1/2

The English Dane tells the true story of Jorgen Jorgenson, a 19th-century man whose adventures intersected with some of the major currents of the times. He commanded a ship in the Napoleonic wars, helped establish the British colony in Tasmania, attracted powerful British patrons, ruled Iceland after participating in a coup, spent time in debtor's prison, got transported back to Tasmania as a convict, played a notable role in the Aboriginal clearances, and was a prolific writer on a wide range of subjects. Jorgenson was a charming man of great talents who invariably undermined himself through impulsiveness. When he lacked a clear purpose, he descended into drunken dereliction.

Jorgenson is a rich complicated character whose exploits introduce us to fascinating historical events, and Sarah Bakewell can write compelling biographies. However, this book lacks je ne sais quoi. It reads like a recitation of events, somehow missing the inherent drama. I found myself thinking "how interesting" while simultaneously pondering how to make it more gripping.

Nicholas Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea *****

The Cruel Sea is one of my all-time favorite books. It follows the crew of the corvette Compass Rose as they provide protection for merchant ship convoys during the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II. It's an impossible job, fighting against the elements and the ever-increasing threat from U-Boats.

The story rarely strays from the crew's point of view, but Monsarrat manages to include a sense of the strategic development of the conflict by filtering it through their eyes. The prose style is generally earnest and matter-of-fact, which actually enhances the emotional impact. As a war novel, it's got plenty of adventure, quiet heroism, gnarly injuries, and sudden death.

The final third of the book flags compared to the rest. Our heroes move to a larger ship where they can't possibly know their crew mates as intimately, and the business of escorting conveys settles into something like routine. The tide of the war turns in their favor. ("If I were writing the story of this contest, this is where the book would tail off, because we've reached the moment where nothing happens—we're just winning the war, and that's all there is to say.")

This one gets my highest recommendation. No fancy literary technique, just good old-fashioned immersive adventure, with some history to boot.

Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination ****

I stand by my original review for this forgotten classic, although I shaved a half star from its rating. Rereading (and re-enjoying) it, I realized how many of my favorite books deal with character development rather than plot development. The plot of The Damnation of Theron Ware serves to lead us through his intellectual progress; it doesn't have any suspense or narrative interest beyond that.

Two shortcomings lead me to reduce my original rating.

• Theron has a reputation as a fine orator, and this skill is important to the story. However, the author does not include examples of his sermons despite a few obvious opportunities to quote them.
  
  
• The book carefully charts Theron's intellectual engagement with the progressive ideas that lead to his damnation or illumination. By comparison, his shifting attitude toward his wife is woefully underdeveloped and felt too abrupt.

Aea Varfis-van Warmelo, Attention-Seeking Behavior ****

Attention-Seeking Behavior validates the continued value of browsing in bookstores. I'd never heard of this novel or its unlikely-sounding author before I came across it on the "New in Paperback" table. Nor do I know Anna Dorn, who wrote the blurb that sold me on the book: "I live for a protagonist who's both extremely self-aware and incredibly deluded, and Aea Varfis-van Warmelo nails that delightfully unnerving combo."

The narrator is a self-admitted pathological liar who takes an analytical approach to justifying her unreliability. She has fallen for a man she calls Normal Ben, who appears to be earnest and comfortable in his own skin. She starts to wonder how she can unravel the web of lies she has told him about who she is, to perhaps achieve a true intimacy.

The first half of Attention-Seeking Behavior is full five-star awesome. The couple's conversations are clever and funny, and the narrator has real insight into her motivations (mostly related to control).

I liked the process of getting to know new people, especially people I disliked on principle because of their jobs, politics, or taste, so I could understand a psychological framework that seemed foreign to mine, but I mostly liked the process of becoming known to new people and practicing different parts of my personality—displaying the worst parts and seeing how far I could go until they pulled back.

She also discusses the history of lie-detecting techniques as a way of complicating the question of what constitutes a justified lie.

I found Part Two a bit less effective. The fundamental problem is a lack of plot development. Aea researches an incident of workplace sexual misconduct that may or may not shed light on her own past. The story only returns to its emotional core (the relationship with Normal Ben) at the end. 

David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas ****

In anticipation of our upcoming cruise through the Panama Canal, I read this award-winning popular history of its construction. 

The book is exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting), covering the initial French attempt, the geopolitical intrigue, and the sociology in addition to the engineering. Construction doesn't start in earnest until page 500 of the 617-page book, and technical details occupy only the final chapter. In other words, McCullough focuses on the human side of the story.

Despite its comprehensiveness, there were still subjects I wish I'd learned more about.

• The first third of the book details the French attempt to build a canal across Panama and the resulting human and financial disasters. During the same time period (roughly 1870 - 1890), the Americans set out to build a canal across Nicaragua, but all we learn is that "it had been an underfinanced affair that collapsed with the Wall Street Panic of 1893."
  
  
• Ferdinand de Lesseps, the mastermind of the French canal, had to convince the Americans that his canal did not violate the Monroe Doctrine. What were his arguments? How skeptical was the America government?
  
  
• McCullough emphasizes the monumental scale of the problems the canal builders needed to solve, both technically and logistically. He also notes that many key decisions were still in debate as last as 1910 (including the fundamental one: sea-level canal or locks?) He then describes the impressive, unprecedented results. How did they manage it? Most of the planning and problem-solving takes place offstage.

Undoubtedly having read this book will enhance my experience when we travel through the canal. I will know what to look for and marvel at.

The Path Between the Seas is the first book I've read by David McCullough. I found his writing style to be a tad more academic than I expected from a popular historian. The story he has to tell is inherently dramatic and he organizes it well, but the prose often lacks the immediacy that would make the scenes come to life. McCullough's sentences tend to be too long and to eschew the simple past tense; in other words, he needs to follow my writing guidelines for accentuating the transitive (email me for details!). A brief example, chosen at random:

Phillippe Bunau-Varilla had gone directly from Hay's house to the station, had taken the next train to New York, and during the stop at Baltimore had sent a telegram...

This sentence would be so much more dynamic in the simple past tense: "Phillippe Bunau-Varilla went directly from Hay's house to the station, took the next train to New York, and during the stop at Baltimore sent a telegram..."

Lisa Scottoline, The Truth About the Devlins ***

The Truth About the Devlins is a solid example of what I call a "supermarket thriller." It is the literary genre that most resembles the crime procedurals that you find all over network TV. A whodunit murder mystery, characters sketched quickly through personal quirks, a resolution that ties together the various subplots. The Devlin clan are lawyers, so add in white collar crime and familial dynamics.

The book is well plotted, although I did guess the basics of the solution early on. I'm not sure I believe that the bad guys would resort to this level of violence, but hey, the story has to have stakes and clock-beating action. 

Scottoline avoids the most annoying tics that often mar the genre, like twists that depend on non-communication between characters. However, the dialogue does tend toward blocks of exposition rather than natural speech, and characters do form lifelong bonds of friendship or enmity based on a single encounter.

Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place For Us ****

When I learned to sail, the heart of the certification test was the person-overboard drill. Successfully retrieving a person who falls overboard requires coordinating all of the skills learned throughout the course. I happen to believe that the crisis of homelessness holds a similar position with respect to contemporary societal issues: successfully addressing it requires coordinating our responses to wealth inequality, racism, class prejudice, dwindling public services, gentrification, and so on. That's why I read so many books on the subject (see here, here, and here).

There Is No Place For Us has the subtitle "Working and Homeless in America," but it doesn't really focus on the fact that working people can't afford housing. Its larger purpose is to draw attention to people who are not literally homeless: families residing in relatives' living rooms and extended-stay hotels and unlivable buildings. This group far outnumbers the more visible folks living in tents and on the streets, and they often don't have access to the same support services.

The book follows several families in Atlanta as they struggle to find and retain housing. Their challenges are relatable and infuriating, and they paint a clear picture of the business and social service ecosystems. I will admit, however, that I had a hard time remembering which families endured which trials and who was living where at any given time.

I appreciate that Goldstone stays locked into the families' perspective, but I do wish he had found a way to acknowledge the perspective of the landlords and/or government officials. The bureaucracy seems clearly intended to frustrate and humiliate the homeless; I would like to have someone attempt to explain why the system is set up the way it is. I am inclined to believe that homelessness is a systemic problem but many readers will believe that it's a function of the individual's poor choices; Goldstone doesn't attempt to address those readers.

Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan *****

My favorite Vonnegut novel. The Sirens of Titan deals with issues of fate, free will, personal responsibility, and the meaning(lessness) of life in the inimitable Vonnegut style. The science-fiction plot is silly but its questions are profound.

I can't provide anything close to an objective opinion about the book because it was so formative when I  read it in high school. My journals from the time are littered with quotes from Salo and Winston Rumfoord. Vonnegut's outlook is rather dark despite the surface humor. It would be a fantastic book club book because it's short, easy to read, and philosophical.

As they say in the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent:

I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Dream Count **

The first 11 pages of Dream Count are an excellent evocation of the social dynamics of Zoom calls during the COVID shutdown. The narrator Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in Maryland, and this introductory section introduces her international network of friends and family.

On page 12, Chiamaka turns her attention to previous boyfriends, making a "dream count" of other possible lives. She sketches the male characters well, but I quickly lost interest. I learned very little about her.

The book has sections devoted to three other women in Chiamaka's orbit: Zikora, a Washington D.C. lawyer; Omelogor, a successful financier in Nigeria, and Kadiatou, a Guinean maid who works for Chiamaka. These descriptions make them sound like interesting people, but they never become full-bodied characters. In fact, their characters feel inconsistent.

There is a horrific incident at the center of the story, one that Adiche confirms is the "seed around which I would weave my imagination," but like so much of the intriguing background it gets buried under clichéd chatter about dating. I'm not sure what Adiche wants to say.

David Bather Woods, Arthur Schopenhauer ***

The subtitle of this book is "The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist," but it's not a biography to read to learn about Schopenhauer. Woods assumes the reader is largely familiar with Schopenhauer's core ideas—by which I mean he doesn't explain them—and acknowledges up front that Schopenhauer could be an unpleasant character. The book will mostly interest people who are already Schopenhauer fans. It emphasizes how Schopenhauer's pessimistic worldview led him to have a great deal of compassion for his fellow sufferers.

In the first chapter, Woods notes that Schopenhauer had a bigger influence on creative writers than on philosophical protégés. The reason for the lack of followers, I would say, is that he never held a powerful academic position and instead alienated other philosophers. (He particularly hated Hegel.) The reason for his literary admirers is his clear and entertaining writing style, unusual among German philosophers of the period.

My favorite story comes near the end, when Schopenhauer rents rooms from a family with small children. He appears so grumpy and intimidating that the parents discipline their kids by threatening to report their misbehavior to Herr Schopenhauer. Pretty quickly, though, little Lucia fell in love with Schopenhauer's poodle and ended up spending long hours in his rooms cuddling with the dog.

Daniel Kraus, Angel Down ***

Angel Down has a fantastic premise (in both senses of the word): Soldiers fighting in France during World War I save a fallen angel from the battlefield. It tackles the story with an audacious stylistic gambit: the book starts with the word "and" and consists of a single sentence.

I applaud the author's ambitions but his execution was merely serviceable. The various characters' reactions to the angel were predictable and shopworn. The single sentence was just a lot of normal sentences connected with "and." The prose is laid out in paragraphs that imply a poetic intention, like a modern Illiad, but the vivid brutal violence lacks a spiritual or metaphorical dimension, save for a visit to hell in the late going.

Tom Newlands, Only Here, Only Now ****

Only Here, Only Now is a coming-of-age story narrated by a Scottish teenage girl in the mid-1990s. She lives in a rundown former coal-mining town and dreams of moving away to the big city of Glasgow.

I was a bit bored in the early going, due to a lack of dramatic action. The introduction of a new stepfather felt rather clichéd. What kept me going was the colorful Scottish dialect and the sense that the people in Cora's life genuinely had her best interest at heart—meaning I wasn't in for the miserabilism so common in this type of book. On the contrary, Cora seemed to recognize the virtues of the people she interacted with even as she felt disappointed in them. This sense of positivity increased as I grew fond of Cora and her milieu.

My one complaint is that the author leans too hard on the idea that Cora is not neurotypical. The first words in Tom Newlands author biography are "multiply neurodivergent," reviewers compare it to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, and the book finishes with a note about the rate of ADHD diagnoses in the UK in the 1990s. Cora frequently cites diagnostic phrases from "printouts" she got from the school counselor.

The emphasis on ADHD bothered me for a few reasons. First, I felt that most of Cora's actions and responses seemed appropriate for any discontented teen, and that attributing them to a condition made them less relatable. Second, Cora is too self-aware and articulate about her behavior. Third, Newland expects us to believe that Cora's mam and her stepfather Gunner are unaware of her ADHD despite the explicit diagnosis from the school counselor. I think the story works better if we don't read it as being about "loss, resilience, and undiagnosed ADHD in 90's Scotland."

Allegra Goodman, Isola ****

Inspired by a true story, Isola is about a sixteenth-century French woman whose guardian squanders her fortune and abandons her on a small island in the Gulf of St Lawrence. 

The first half of the book paints a convincing picture of our heroine's privilege and her powerlessness. The machinations that determine her fate all happen elsewhere, at court, only whispered about in the rumors of servants. The settings—her childhood château, the guardian's house in town, the merchant ship, the island—are well drawn. Overall, I found the novel engaging.

My only problem with Isola was the anachronistic attitudes of the heroine and narrator. I found most of the characters' actions to be appropriate for the period (1531 - 1545), but Marguerite's reactions to them are conspicuously modern. The cover of my paperback edition calls the book "a feminist castaway tale about love, faith, and self-actualization"; feminism and self-actualization are twentieth-century notions which would have made no sense to a sixteenth-century noblewoman. I appreciated the times when Marguerite struggled with her faith, and cringed when she demanded respect for things to which she felt she was entitled.

 

Nancy Lemann, Lives of the Saints ** 1/2

I sought out Lives of the Saints after it was lauded by multiple reviewers of Lemann's new book The Oyster Diaries. The reviewers note the narrator's "frank, sardonic, bookish, self-absorbed and neurotic" voice and the story's New Orleans setting. Sounds right up my alley!

Comedy, when it does not strike you funny, feels curiously flat. You can see the jokes and why they might be funny, but the timing or something seems off. The same goes for wry narration. I could see that Lemann's style was unique and "as witty as it is melancholy," but I couldn't enjoy it.

I met someone the other day who was just like you—he yearned after vague things. You could tell, when you asked him about his job, that what he really liked to do was just to yearn after vague things.

The (meta-)vagueness of this description is clever and almost funny, but in the end it is too nebulous and too repetitive. Those are precisely the adjectives I would apply to the writing style overall.

When I hand out a two-star rating to anyone other than Dean Koontz, I feel compelled to clarify that my rating relates to my enjoyment of the book and to the likelihood that I would recommend it to other readers. I certainly don't want to suggest that Lives of the Saints is an objectively bad book; I just didn't connect with the narrative voice.

Ben Lerner, Transcription ***

Transcription is short enough and slight enough to count as a (long) short story rather than a novel. It riffs on how our relationship with smartphones shifts our experience of the world, but doesn't offer real insights. The individual incidents are well drawn but don't enrich each other.

Lerner retains his "impressive if over-intellectualized writing style." I was impressed by how vividly he painted the character of Thomas, the 90-year-old artist, with very few strokes outside of dialogue. In the short middle section, he nails the atmosphere of an academic conference.