Alex Honnold, Alone on the Wall ***

Alex Honnold is a rock climber whose claim to fame is free soloing -- climbing without protection. He climbs serious routes with this method, such as the north face of Half Dome. While he gets the most attention for these climbs, personally he is more proud of his speed climbing (he owns the speed record on El Capitan) and "link-ups" of multiple routes (such as the Torre Traverse in Patagonia).

The book feels a bit like a hodgepodge of material that David Roberts (Honnold's co-writer) pulled together from a variety of sources. Certainly Honnold never sat down and wrote a book.

My favorite parts tended toward the more mundane. I liked the description of living in his van in Las Vegas while climbing at Red Rocks, parking as close as possible to the Whole Foods so that he could use their wifi. The best moment of all was when he found himself struggling with a move just above Thank God Ledge near the top of Half Dome, and he can hear the crowds of dayhikers on the summit just above him.

Halldór Laxness, Iceland's Bell ****

Iceland's Bell is an ambitious, sprawling historical novel from the Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness. It takes place in the early 18th century during a particularly dark period in Iceland's history: the country suffered under Danish oppression, famine, and a smallpox outbreak that killed a third of the population. It's a comedy!

The book tells one story, but is divided into three major sections, each with its own protagonist and signature style. The first section is a picaresque that follows the farmer and alleged murderer Jón Hreggviðsson as he escapes to northern Europe and has colorful adventures on the road to visit the King in Denmark. The second section tells the story of the beautiful Snæfríður Íslandssól, her dissolute husband, and her love for a powerful envoy from the Danish crown. This section alternates between Shakespearean comic set pieces (involving the husband) and scenes that mimic the style of Icelandic sagas (including trolls and elves). The final section plunges deeply into political and legal intrigue, featuring the aforementioned Danish envoy and the Danish King looking to sell Iceland to German merchants. These characters are apparently all real people, burnished by Laxness into an allegory about Iceland's national spirit.

True to its stylistic models, Iceland's Bell does not delve into the minds or motivations of its characters. Nevertheless, Snæfríður and Arnas (the envoy) are remarkably interesting and complex. They both find their sympathies divided between the aristocracy and the common folk, between mercy and justice.

I pity the Icelandic middle-schoolers who read Iceland's Bell in class. The legal wrangling is interminable (especially near the end), and I wouldn't expect teenagers to appreciate Laxness' mock heroic and satirical tone; I'm sure most of them would find it a slog.

Ben Marcus (editor), New American Stories ***

I picked up this collection based on its editor. Ben Marcus is a writer whose taste runs to the unusual and avant-garde, to stories with outlandish narrative strategies. At least that's how I remembered the earlier collection he edited; I see now that I rated it a mere two-and-a-half stars. The list of authors whose work I know also promised off-kilter approaches: George Saunders, Donald Antrim, Robert Coover, Wells Tower, Mary Gaitskill, Kelly Link, Lydia Davis.

While New American Stories does include some experimental work ("Play", "Pee on Water"), they are outnumbered by fairly traditional stories ("Paranoia", "Fish Sticks", "The Diggings") and those seasoned with a small science-fiction element ("Madmen", "Standard Loneliness Package"). Given the book's title, a surprising number take place outside of the United States. Almost all of the stories have something to recommend them but none of them was great from front to back (except maybe the short "Going for a Beer" from Coover).

Tonally, my favorite stories were "The Deep" by Anthony Doerr, "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" by Denis Johnson, and "The Toast" by Rebecca Curtis.

The wedding, my sister said, would not be fancy. However, there would be a hair-metal band, a five-course local organic vegan dinner, and a life-size fair-trade chocolate baby elephant. I'm afraid that my sister went on explaining details about the wedding, and I stopped listening; this is because I caught Lyme disease five years ago and have neurological damage that makes it difficult for me to listen when people talk, especially when what they're saying isn't interesting.

Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk ****

I might have read this book just for its awesome cover art. It also appeared in many year-end lists of the best books of 2015.

H is for Hawk is a memoir, but an unusual one. When the author's father dies, she deals with her grief by training a notoriously challenging goshawk. As she works with her bird Mabel, she feels haunted by the ghost of T.H. White, who similarly turned to a goshawk as a way to address emotional issues. The result is a sui generis blend of personal confession, nature writing, history, and literary biography. With falconry tips.

H is for Hawk is a totally literary creation. It belongs to the genre of human/animal stories (like Ring of Bright Water) while also being a meditation on the power of such stories. Macdonald's bereavement feels exaggerated for literary effect, and of course there are long sections about T.H. White. But the story of training Mabel shines through.

Macdonald's descriptions of the natural world are vividly poetic. Mabel becomes a full-blown character without any anthropomorphizing. I learned some of the lore and lingo of falconry.

William Finnegan, Barbarian Days ****

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life is a memoir from a staff journalist at the New Yorker, focusing on his passion for surfing. It is similar to David Roberts' mountaineering memoir On the Ridge Between Life and Death in that Finnegan tempers his surfing adventures with lots of self reflection about what drives him to abandon his day-to-day responsibilities and endanger himself.

The early chapters provide an insightful picture of what Finnegan calls being a "mid-century kid." He grew up in suburban Los Angeles and Honolulu, and shows great sensitivity to the texture of that time of life. As the New York Times review says, Finnegan "combines the deep knowledge of a widely traveled hard-core surfer, the observations of a born ethnographer and the wry aplomb of a New Yorker staff writer."

He also makes clear how every surfing spot is unique and can reward lifelong study. After college, he and a friend travel the South Pacific looking for good waves by studying nautical charts.

Finding ridable waves with nautical charts was a long shot at best. We looked for south-facing island coasts that weren't "shadowed" by any barrier reef or landmass farther south. We looked for points and bays and reef passes where the shallow water showed, after one or two fathoms, a sharp drop-off to seaward... The angle of any promising patch of reef or beach was critical. The rough line along which waves might be expected to break needed to be canted away from... the open ocean to the south... We looked for offshore canyons that would focus long-interval swell... Our charts weren't perfect, and their scale was always too big to account for the individual boulders and chunks of reef that would finally make all the difference.

In the later chapters Finnegan starts to omit his non-surfing life from the story, and the book suffers for it. Overall, though, it is a clear classic.

Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members ***

Dear Committee Members is a comic novel that consists entirely of letters of recommendation written by a cranky and delusional English professor. It's an appetizer of a book that you can read in one or two sittings, breezing quickly through the short "chapters."

I found it amusing but not laugh-out-loud funny. The best bits came when our narrator Dr Fitger tries to communicate the opposite of a recommendation:

Professor Franklin Kentrell has a singular mind and a unique approach to the discipline. He is sui generis. The Davidson Chair has never seen his like before.

I also liked how so many of Fitger's students wrote stories about tentacled monsters, cannibals, gun-wielding arachnids, and so on. I was less fond of the pseudo letters of recommendation he wrote to his colleagues at Payne College: they stretched the bounds of the conceit past the breaking point.

John Seabrook, The Song Machine *** 1/2

The Song Machine describes the development of modern pop music, with its "track and hook" composition technique (as opposed to the traditional "melody and lyrics" technique). I was struck by how the current approach, with behind-the-scenes artists building the songs and finding appropriate singers to perform them, is quite similar to how popular music has almost always been constructed (cf. Motown or the Brill Building). The singer-songwriter-musician model, which defines the rock era, is actually the exception.

In the "track and hook" era, a producer puts together a track -- the beat, chord progression, and instrumentation -- and hires one or more "topliners" to write the melody or melodies. The melody comes last instead of first. This approach originated with reggae, and you can see how it applies in rap and hip-hip too.

The book has a lot of insights about the art and business of (pop) music making, and how they have changed and/or stayed the same in the 21st century. These parts are very interesting and a nice companion to books about other musical genres like Rip It Up and Start Again about 1970s and 1980s post-punk. However, The Song Machine also has gossip-y, People Magazine-y stories about the top pop singers like Britney Spears, Katy Perry, and Rihanna (all women, you'll notice). The circumstances under which Chris Brown beat Rihanna or Kesha sued her producer don't really contribute to our understanding of the music or the music business.