Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey **

I really like the idea of a book consisting of "alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions" of Homer's Odyssey, apocrypha if you will. But I was disappointed with Mason's execution of the idea.

First of all, the stories all have a modern feel to them with their meta-textual tricks and character psychology. At best they are contemporary understandings of the original, not alternative versions of the story. Mason also travels freely beyond the Odyssey, with some stories relating to the Illiad, the Agamemmon stories, and even Greek myths more generally. Finally, and most damaging, the stories just weren't that interesting. They reminded me of the book Sum: Forty Tales from the afterlives: very short vignettes, intriguing subject matter, only intermittently enjoyable.

Norman Rush, Mortals *****

Mortals tells the story of Ray Finch, a Milton scholar teaching at a secondary school in Botswana. His secondary job as a contract CIA agent puts him in touch with African politics, and his uxorious relationship with his possibly unfaithful wife Iris has him obsessing about love and marriage.

The things I love about this book are the things that many people would hate about it:

• The hero is an insecure, self-involved academic who overthinks and filters his experiences through a gauze of literary references.
• His mind keeps returning to his suspicions about his wife even during the life-threatening action in the second half of the book.

These two aspects of Ray's personality can make him an unpleasant character to be around, and they make the story move slowly even when bullets are flying. But the quality of the writing and Rush's psychological insights kept me engrossed and feeling painful empathy with Ray. (I've admitted before that I tend to like obsessed and overly analytical narrators.)

Probably my favorite section of the book comes when the political and intimate story lines collide. Ray has been taken prisoner by a band of mercenaries. After he has been tortured for several days, his captors toss another prisoner into his cell: the man he suspects his wife of sleeping with. Despite the urgency of their situation, Ray feels that he has to confront the man and get him to admit to the adultery. But he can't manage to come right out and ask; he spends pages trying a variety of circumlocutions while the other man tries to focus on the situation at hand. As a reader you want them to get on with the story, but I felt the building suspense as Ray circled ever closer to getting his answer.

R.J. Smith, The One: The Life and Music of James Brown ** 1/2

I was slightly disappointed with this biography of the Godfather of Soul. It touches on the many facets of James Brown -- music, dancing, bandleader, cultural icon, womanizer -- but it failed to make him into a solid three-dimensional character. I often felt like I was reading a collection of anecdotes about Brown, or the fleshed-out notes for a biography, rather than a "definitive" biography.

Smith gives especially short shrift to Brown's relationships with women. Several times we learn that Brown gets married, but his wives disappear from the story soon afterword. The same comment applies to many of his band members; they never develop the personalities they surely had.

Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time ***

The Devil All the Time has almost everything it needs to be a cracking good read: strange backwoods characters who show flashes of unexpected humanity, a plot riddled with violence and religion, and fine writing that straddles the line between hard-boiled and picturesque. (I also really like the physical feel of the Anchor Books paperback -- its heft, its font size, and so on.) However, the pieces don't fit together into anything bigger. The characters are well drawn but never develop; the narrative resolves without any build-up of complications or thematic resonance. The story kept me engaged throughout, but I kept hoping for something more.

Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science **** 1/2

Jackpot. I was casually browsing the Science and Mathematics section of the book store when I noticed Number with its recommendation from Albert Einstein ("Beyond doubt the most interesting book on the evolution of mathematics which has ever fallen into my hands"). I'm always interested in the history of ideas, especially the history of ideas we take for granted like the concept of number. Number presents this history well, showing how the concept derives from the practical problems we solve with it.

Beyond its specific focus on number, I think Dantzig's book provides a clear, concise, practical demonstration of how human interests and cognitive abilities shape the reality of the wold we live in. Plenty of philosophers present their views on the objective reality of the world and its relation to our conceptual understanding of it, but none with the specificity of Dantzig and the single fundamental concept of number. He's an entertaining writer too!

Alan Furst, Spies of the Balkans ***

Spies of the Balkans is a more conventional story than the other Alan Furst novels I've read, with somewhat less compelling atmosphere. The main character Costa Zannis is more aware of his role in the operation of which he is a part, and his motivations are less subtle or mundane than those of other Furst heroes. He also has a love affair that progresses in the instant fashion of novels, not the gradual manner of real life. In short, the book reads more like a traditional spy thriller than earlier Furst novels do, perhaps in an attempt to broaden his audience.

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns ****

The subtitle of this book — The Epic Story of America's Great Migration — is somewhat misleading. While the book is over 600 pages, its focus on the stories of three individuals makes it more intimate than epic. And it's better that way.

The Great Migration is the half-century period during which a huge percentage of black Americans moved from the South to the North and West. The migration changed the face of the country in numerous ways. Wilkerson uses the life stories of three people from different parts of the South to illustrate her general historical and sociological points. She is a journalist, but she describes her characters as well as most novelists. This approach makes her arguments more vividly than an academic approach would have. I was especially struck by the story of Robert Foster driving across the Southwest to Los Angeles. (Foster is the most sharply drawn character.)

On the down side, the book was rather disorganized and repeatedly repeated itself. I'm afraid I'll never be able to track down the place where she made that interesting point about how migrants followed the major train lines, so that you know where a person came from by where they ended up. Or how the end of segregation led to vibrant black communities becoming ghettos.

Definitely recommended.