Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis ****

In advance of our recent trip to Memphis (and to Woodall Mountain the highest point in Mississippi), I reread this first book in Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis Presley. Guralnick does an excellent job of presenting Elvis' "complexity and irreducibility" while also placing him in the context of his time and place. In fact, to me the most compelling parts of the book are the details about the regional nature of the 1950s music business: someone like Sam Phillips from Sun Records had to personally deliver his records to DJs and local distributors, and most concerts were revues featuring an array of mostly regional performers.

Last Train to Memphis is similar in many ways to another of my favorite biographies, Naifeh and Smith's Jackson Pollock: An American Saga. Presley and Pollock are both insecure, larger-than-life artists who died young, and both biographies use their lives as an entry point for showing artistic worlds on the cusp of major changes.

Patrick O'Brian, The Nutmeg of Consolation ***

Book 14 of the Aubrey-Maturin series is a typical entry in the back half of the sequence. The prose washes over me like a warm bath as I follow our heroes through a series of low-key adventures. The book begins and ends at basically arbitrary points in the overall story, although the end does find the Surprise headed home to England from the penal colony in Australia.

I like the title of this one.  The British envoy in the The Thirteen-Gun Salute applied the title to himself; in this book, Jack Aubrey borrows it as the name for the former Dutch ship that he sails from Batavia.

China Miéville, Embassytown ***

My China Miéville binge continues with Embassytown, a prime example of linguistic science fiction. Embassytown is a city of mostly human inhabitants situated on a planet at the edge of the trafficked universe. The indigenous population of "Hosts" are mysterious creatures who speak a language that involves two mouths speaking simultaneously. Furthermore, they only recognize sound as language when both streams of sound come from a single mind: "A Host could understand nothing not spoken in Language, by a speaker, with intent, with a mind behind the words." The only humans who can communicate with the Hosts are Ambassadors, who are pairs of twins trained to have an empathic bond.

I liked the idea of dual-track language and was willing to suspend my disbelief about the Hosts being able to detect that the sound was coming from a single intelligence. I was less able to accept that the Host's Language was non-symbolic ("Words don't signify; they are their referents") and that Hosts were therefore unable to lie. What does it even mean to say that their words don't signify? Spoiler alert the Hosts learn symbolic language by the end of the book and it's a transformative experience.

As usual, Miéville creates an intriguing and convincing world, including its social mores and politics. Ultimately, though, I just wasn't able to embrace a couple of the fundamental ideas that drove the story.

Ted Gioia, How to Listen to Jazz ***

I don't know that How to Listen to Jazz succeeds in its goal to be a "lively, accessible introduction to the art of listening to jazz." Sure, its early chapters break down the key components that characterize a jazz performance (rhythm, phrasing, timbre, spontaneity, and so on) and offer friendly tips about how to listen for these elements. I suppose that a neophyte might track down Gioia's suggested recordings and listen to them carefully. To me, his analysis seems more suited to an existing jazz fan who wants to think more about how musicians create the effects they already appreciate.

In many ways, the first half of the book is a streamlined version of Gioia's History of Jazz: how jazz grew out of the blues and ragtime, how it differs from the classical tradition. The second half devolves into a list of jazz masters. I appreciated the concision in the first couple of chapters, but felt like the later chapters became too vague. I also needed a quick way to track down the recordings he mentions in the text.

David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System ** 1/2

I am a DFW fan, a near completist, but I'd never read his first novel, The Broom of the System. Now I have. While it doesn't quite qualify as juvenilia, it definitely lacks the depth of his mature work. A lot of his stylistic quirks are already in evidence (digressive structure, overabundance of detail, deadpan surrealistic comedy, allusions to high and low culture, characters tortured by their own convoluted thought processes; but no footnotes), but without the moral or empathetic depth of Infinite Jest or his later works.

I usually like DFW's digressiveness, seeing a thematic purpose to it, but I found it annoying here. I got engaged with the main narrative thread about the group of people missing from a nursing home and with the loquacious cockatiel Vlad the Impaler; Wallace dropped both threads quickly. Wallace was reportedly inspired by ideas from Wittgenstein and Derrida, but I found the book madcap without real purpose.

My favorite digressions are the story summaries from the main character's besotted boss, the editor of a failed literary magazine. I especially enjoyed the story of the woman with a tree-frog living in a hollow of her throat.

Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women ****

A Manual for Cleaning Women is a short-story collection from an author who never received the attention she deserved during her lifetime. (Berlin died in 2004.) Her stories are usually founded on autobiographical elements, so it's good that she lived a colorful life: raised in mining camps in the US and in Latin America, suffering from scoliosis and alcoholism, rearing four kids from three marriages, working in schools, hospitals, and as a cleaning woman.

It's probably the autobiography that makes her stories feel more palpable and authentic than most literary fiction, even fiction that takes place in similar low-rent circumstances. The connections between the stories become more prominent in the second half of the book, where multiple stories share the same characters and feature variations on events from the first half. These connections allow the stories to expand on each other, but at the expense of their strength as stand-alone stories. By the end, A Manual for Cleaning Women started to feel like a fragmentary memoir.

Jill Leovy, Ghettoside ****

This is a book about a very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic. African Americans have suffered from just such a lack of effective criminal justice, and this, more than anything, is the reason for the nation's long-standing plague of black homicides.

Leovy, a Los Angeles Times reporter, argues for this "simple idea" with a combination of general historical/statistical research and specific stories from her own reporting. The core of Ghettoside is an account of a single murder case, somewhat representative (a young black man shot by another young black man for questionable reasons) and somewhat not (the victim was the son of an L.A. detective). The book spans out from this one case to tell about the dangerous area "south of the 10," the detective squad, the victim's families, and recalcitrant witnesses. Leovy has a great eye for detail and an empathetic feel for the milieu; her tone often becomes indignant when she starts making more abstract arguments.

Leovy's story is consistent with her thesis, but I don't think she proves it. If nothing else, though, Ghettoside shows that you can be pro-police and still lament structural racial bias.