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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Kingsnorth, Beast ****

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

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

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

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

Noah Hawley, Before the Fall ***

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

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

Geoff Dyer, White Sands *** 1/2

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

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

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

Robert Moor, On Trails ****

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

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

Jose Saramago, The Elephant's Journey ***

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

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

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

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

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