Aea Varfis-van Warmelo, Attention-Seeking Behavior ****

Attention-Seeking Behavior validates the continued value of browsing in bookstores. I'd never heard of this novel or its unlikely-sounding author before I came across it on the "New in Paperback" table. Nor do I know Anna Dorn, who wrote the blurb that sold me on the book: "I live for a protagonist who's both extremely self-aware and incredibly deluded, and Aea Varfis-van Warmelo nails that delightfully unnerving combo."

The narrator is a self-admitted pathological liar who takes an analytical approach to justifying her unreliability. She has fallen for a man she calls Normal Ben, who appears to be earnest and comfortable in his own skin. She starts to wonder how she can unravel the web of lies she has told him about who she is, to perhaps achieve a true intimacy.

The first half of Attention-Seeking Behavior is full five-star awesome. The couple's conversations are clever and funny, and the narrator has real insight into her motivations (mostly related to control).

I liked the process of getting to know new people, especially people I disliked on principle because of their jobs, politics, or taste, so I could understand a psychological framework that seemed foreign to mine, but I mostly liked the process of becoming known to new people and practicing different parts of my personality—displaying the worst parts and seeing how far I could go until they pulled back.

She also discusses the history of lie-detecting techniques as a way of complicating the question of what constitutes a justified lie.

I found Part Two a bit less effective. The fundamental problem is a lack of plot development. Aea researches an incident of workplace sexual misconduct that may or may not shed light on her own past. The story only returns to its emotional core (the relationship with Normal Ben) at the end. 

David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas ****

In anticipation of our upcoming cruise through the Panama Canal, I read this award-winning popular history of its construction. 

The book is exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting), covering the initial French attempt, the geopolitical intrigue, and the sociology in addition to the engineering. Construction doesn't start in earnest until page 500 of the 617-page book, and technical details occupy only the final chapter. In other words, McCullough focuses on the human side of the story.

Despite its comprehensiveness, there were still subjects I wish I'd learned more about.

• The first third of the book details the French attempt to build a canal across Panama and the resulting human and financial disasters. During the same time period (roughly 1870 - 1890), the Americans set out to build a canal across Nicaragua, but all we learn is that "it had been an underfinanced affair that collapsed with the Wall Street Panic of 1893."
  
  
• Ferdinand de Lesseps, the mastermind of the French canal, had to convince the Americans that his canal did not violate the Monroe Doctrine. What were his arguments? How skeptical was the America government?
  
  
• McCullough emphasizes the monumental scale of the problems the canal builders needed to solve, both technically and logistically. He also notes that many key decisions were still in debate as last as 1910 (including the fundamental one: sea-level canal or locks?) He then describes the impressive, unprecedented results. How did they manage it? Most of the planning and problem-solving takes place offstage.

Undoubtedly having read this book will enhance my experience when we travel through the canal. I will know what to look for and marvel at.

The Path Between the Seas is the first book I've read by David McCullough. I found his writing style to be a tad more academic than I expected from a popular historian. The story he has to tell is inherently dramatic and he organizes it well, but the prose often lacks the immediacy that would make the scenes come to life. McCullough's sentences tend to be too long and to eschew the simple past tense; in other words, he needs to follow my writing guidelines for accentuating the transitive (email me for details!). A brief example, chosen at random:

Phillippe Bunau-Varilla had gone directly from Hay's house to the station, had taken the next train to New York, and during the stop at Baltimore had sent a telegram...

This sentence would be so much more dynamic in the simple past tense: "Phillippe Bunau-Varilla went directly from Hay's house to the station, took the next train to New York, and during the stop at Baltimore sent a telegram..."

Lisa Scottoline, The Truth About the Devlins ***

The Truth About the Devlins is a solid example of what I call a "supermarket thriller." It is the literary genre that most resembles the crime procedurals that you find all over network TV. A whodunit murder mystery, characters sketched quickly through personal quirks, a resolution that ties together the various subplots. The Devlin clan are lawyers, so add in white collar crime and familial dynamics.

The book is well plotted, although I did guess the basics of the solution early on. I'm not sure I believe that the bad guys would resort to this level of violence, but hey, the story has to have stakes and clock-beating action. 

Scottoline avoids the most annoying tics that often mar the genre, like twists that depend on non-communication between characters. However, the dialogue does tend toward blocks of exposition rather than natural speech, and characters do form lifelong bonds of friendship or enmity based on a single encounter.

Brian Goldstone, There Is No Place For Us ****

When I learned to sail, the heart of the certification test was the person-overboard drill. Successfully retrieving a person who falls overboard requires coordinating all of the skills learned throughout the course. I happen to believe that the crisis of homelessness holds a similar position with respect to contemporary societal issues: successfully addressing it requires coordinating our responses to wealth inequality, racism, class prejudice, dwindling public services, gentrification, and so on. That's why I read so many books on the subject (see here, here, and here).

There Is No Place For Us has the subtitle "Working and Homeless in America," but it doesn't really focus on the fact that working people can't afford housing. Its larger purpose is to draw attention to people who are not literally homeless: families residing in relatives' living rooms and extended-stay hotels and unlivable buildings. This group far outnumbers the more visible folks living in tents and on the streets, and they often don't have access to the same support services.

The book follows several families in Atlanta as they struggle to find and retain housing. Their challenges are relatable and infuriating, and they paint a clear picture of the business and social service ecosystems. I will admit, however, that I had a hard time remembering which families endured which trials and who was living where at any given time.

I appreciate that Goldstone stays locked into the families' perspective, but I do wish he had found a way to acknowledge the perspective of the landlords and/or government officials. The bureaucracy seems clearly intended to frustrate and humiliate the homeless; I would like to have someone attempt to explain why the system is set up the way it is. I am inclined to believe that homelessness is a systemic problem but many readers will believe that it's a function of the individual's poor choices; Goldstone doesn't attempt to address those readers.

Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan *****

My favorite Vonnegut novel. The Sirens of Titan deals with issues of fate, free will, personal responsibility, and the meaning(lessness) of life in the inimitable Vonnegut style. The science-fiction plot is silly but its questions are profound.

I can't provide anything close to an objective opinion about the book because it was so formative when I  read it in high school. My journals from the time are littered with quotes from Salo and Winston Rumfoord. Vonnegut's outlook is rather dark despite the surface humor. It would be a fantastic book club book because it's short, easy to read, and philosophical.

As they say in the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent:

I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Dream Count **

The first 11 pages of Dream Count are an excellent evocation of the social dynamics of Zoom calls during the COVID shutdown. The narrator Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in Maryland, and this introductory section introduces her international network of friends and family.

On page 12, Chiamaka turns her attention to previous boyfriends, making a "dream count" of other possible lives. She sketches the male characters well, but I quickly lost interest. I learned very little about her.

The book has sections devoted to three other women in Chiamaka's orbit: Zikora, a Washington D.C. lawyer; Omelogor, a successful financier in Nigeria, and Kadiatou, a Guinean maid who works for Chiamaka. These descriptions make them sound like interesting people, but they never become full-bodied characters. In fact, their characters feel inconsistent.

There is a horrific incident at the center of the story, one that Adiche confirms is the "seed around which I would weave my imagination," but like so much of the intriguing background it gets buried under clichéd chatter about dating. I'm not sure what Adiche wants to say.

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.

Hisham Matar, My Friends ** 1/2

My Friends is a novel about three Libyan men living in England during Qaddafi's reign, and their differing responses when that regime begins to falter. As in his non-fiction book The Return, Matar effectively conveys the emotion strain of living in exile.

I find Matar's writing style to be overly ornate, with strained metaphors and a plethora of Conradian subordinate clauses. My Friends is organized as a series of memories as our narrator Khaled walks home after seeing off his friend Hosam at the train station, but the conceit is applied sparingly, making it disorienting when Khaled refers to his location in the present day.

Lastly, Khaled is a disappointingly passive character. His personality is ill-defined, making it hard to understand what attracts Mustafa and Hosam to him. I didn't feel his passion for literature.

Tove Jansson, The Summer Book **** 1/2

The Summer Book is a quiet, meditative novel about a six-year-old girl and her grandmother spending time together at their summer house on an island in the Gulf of Finland. The girl's father is there too, always in the background (he has a single line of dialogue, three pages from the end). Her mother has recently died, which no one talks about but which accounts for the existential undertone to many of the conversations.

The book consists of twenty-two "crystalline" vignettes about everyday life on the island, each one nearly a standalone story. Jannson's writing has lovely imagery that merely suggests the associated emotional depths. As Ali Smith says on the back cover, "Her sentences [are] simple and loaded; the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth."

Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire **** 1/2

How to Hide an Empire is "a history of the Greater United States," meaning that it looks at US history through the lens of its non-state territories. In the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, much of the West consisted of undigested territories, notably including the ever-shrinking Indian Territory. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the United States started claiming sovereignty over uninhabited islands (for their guano), then won several colonies in the Spanish-American War. We fancy ourselves a republic not an empire, so that status of these territories has always been murky.

The introduction talks about how we "mainlanders" talk about "Pearl Harbor" on "December 7, 1941," despite the fact that the Japanese attacked the much larger US territory of the Philippines at the same time... where it was already December 8.

The book is full of fascinating stories that I was only dimly aware of. Immerwahr shows how things look different from the provinces, and how the federal government has been able to take advantage of the murky legal status to act like other imperial powers (which is to say beastly).

After the Second World War, the US was in a position to greatly expand its empire but instead started divesting itself of many existing territories. Immerwahr argues that empires in the traditional sense are unnecessary in the modern world, where you don't need to control territory to secure trade routes or fight wars. He doesn't note it, but the other imperial powers also gave up their colonies after the war; see Postwar.

The only thing preventing me from granting How to Hide an Empire five stars is that the final chapters try a bit too hard to tie all aspects of recent history to our hidden empire. I felt like I had to do more work on my own to see the key points.

Satu Rämö, The Clues in the Fjord ** 1/2

If you gave an AI chatbot the prompt Write a crime thriller that takes place in Iceland, with characters who will recur in subsequent installments, you'd get something pretty close to The Clues in the Fjord. 

The prose is full of exposition that sounds like it comes from a travel guidebook ("The Westfjords made up a fifth of Iceland's land area, but less than 2 per cent of the population lived at the end of the narrow road"; "the maximum speed on Iceland's roads was ninety kilometres per hour"). The plot is designed to give opportunities to reference traditional foods and cultural touchstones. The main characters have colorful personal quirks—Hildur loves surfing, Jakob knits—and buried traumas to provide an ongoing background through the series of novels.

The (first) murder isn't discovered until page 110, one third of the way through. The police repeatedly pause their investigation to pursue personal agendas. The big break in the case comes from a random tip rather than from detective work. The title and tag line ("Death waits in the icy depths") are generic and have nothing to do with the story.

Overall, the book felt like a typical episode of CSI: Ísafjörður.

Randy Baker, Half Fast ****

Half Fast is an unusual cruising memoir in that it features comparatively few sailing adventures. The first chapters deal with onshore tribulations: riding out Hurricane Andrew anchored in the Bahamas, repairing the damage when their boat is blown ashore, tracking down outboard motor thieves in Honduras, working for a season in the Virgin Islands, refitting for more than a year in Trinidad. Even the on-water stories are harrowing: rescuing smugglers in Saint Vincent, dealing with an aggressive sea lion, nearly getting run down by a Chinese fishing vessel. The book ends with their boat nearly destroyed in a tsunami. Where's the poetry about the call of the sea and the freedom of the cruising lifestyle?

I would say the target audience for Half Fast is fellow sailors rather than people dreaming about sailing the world. Baker's stories are exactly the kind you would share with crew mates out on the water. 

In the final third of the book, Baker and his wife sail through the Panama Canal and cross to the South Pacific. This section features more typical content about life on board and the remote exotic places they visit.

The title, by the way, is a pun.

Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter *** 1/2

This novel features two couples living in the West Country of England in the winter of 1962/3. The Big Freeze forces them to confront their insecurities and dissatisfaction.

The writing style and subject matter make it read like a book written in the 1960s rather than a work of historical fiction published in 2024. It seems like a British variant of an Updike or Cheever novel, addressing the discontents of the suburban class.

Yoko Tawada, Exophony ***

The word exophony refers to the experience of "existing outside of one's mother tongue." Tawada is a Japanese writer who lives in Germany and writes many of her books in German. In this collection of essays, she celebrates exophony as a source of creative inspiration. Non-native speakers notice aspects of a language that native speakers are blind to.

My experience reading Tawada's non-fiction was similar to my experience reading her fiction. She offers interesting observations, but they don't add up to larger points.