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.

Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do ****

Traffic is a popular science book that explores a variety of topics related to driving: the mysterious causes of jams, why the other lane always seems to move faster, the theory behind metering lights, the underappreciated complexity of the task, the inescapable human factors that defy careful planning.

I first read this book in 2009. I remembered it as a fascinating collection of tidbits about traffic engineering, improving road utilization and safety. The introduction, for example, considers the question of what a driver should do when they see a sign announcing the imminent closing of the left lane; should you merge right as early or as late as you can?

In an effort to be comprehensive, Traffic also includes a lot of pop psychology to explain why we are worse drivers than we think we are, and the last chapter throws in inconclusive statistics about what causes accidents. (The subtitle hints at this, I suppose.) I found those parts trite and less compelling. The book is also starting to be dated, especially with the era of the self-driving car upon us.