Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs ****

The Woman Upstairs caused a bit of a stir recently among the literary critical community, when author Claire Messud objected to a question about whether her main character was likeable. Is there a double standard when judging books from male and female authors? Or for male and female characters?

Nora, the narrator of The Woman Upstairs, is nowhere near as unlikeable as I expected her to be. She is more open than most people about her (unattractive) neediness and self-involvement, but I think most people feel the same kinds of feelings. I know I do.

Nora is a third-grade schoolteacher who harbors dreams of being an artist. She meets Sirena, the mother of one of her students who is an up-and-coming artist, and her relationship with Sirena awakens her hopes for a more fulfilling life. It's obvious from the beginning that Nora invests more in the relationship than Sirena does. A profound disappointment is inevitable.

These kinds of asymmetrical relationships happen all of the time. Nora's story shows their benefits as well as their drawbacks. Nora does return to her art and has a season where life feels full of promise. The book documents a character struggling against feelings of regret and trying to live more fully; this theme always speaks to me, which probably reveals something unattractive about me.

Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass *** 1/2

Through the Language Glass addresses a question that has interested me since high school: does the language that you speak affect the way you think? The cover promises that the answer is "Yes, it does," making is a different and more satisfying answer than the one I got back in high school from Saussure's Course in General Linguistics. I looked forward to hearing what Deutscher had to say on the subject, and also a bit leery about my reaction since I have fairly strong educated opinions in this area.

I was mostly familiar with the linguistic research that Deutscher reports on. The book focuses primarily on color terms and spatial orientation, with a short speculative foray into gender systems. Deutscher does a lovely job of describing how these topics came to be at the forefront of the study of cognitive variation, especially in the case of color terms.

In the introduction, Deutscher promises to avoid the rhetorical excesses of Whorfians and stick to the data. In one sense, I think he kept his promise too strictly: I wanted more discussion about how the theoretical results relate to the fundamental question. On the other hand, the conclusions he does come to sound somewhat overblown and unjustified to me.

Andres Neuman, Traveler of the Century ***

Traveler of the Century has a lot of elements that should make me love it: a well rendered historical setting (Germany in the mid-nineteenth century), a Tolstoy-esque perspective that shifts between the personal and the sociological, philosophical and cultural conversations, some beautiful writing, and a believable love story. For some reason, though, the book never engaged me. I admire it, but the spark between us is missing.

Allie Bosh, Hyperbole and a Half ***

This book is a collection of blog entries from Hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com. It's a quick and entertaining read. My favorite moment comes when Allie is finally lifted out of depression by seeing a dried piece of corn under the refrigerator.

If someone ever asks me 'What was the exact moment where things started to feel less shitty?' instead of telling a nice, heartwarming story about the support of the people who loved and believed in me, I'm going to have to tell them about the piece of corn.

Andy Weir, The Martian ****

The title character of The Martian is astronaut Mark Watney. He is stranded on Mars after a dust storm forces his crew to evacuate the planet. They thought Mark was dead, but he survived... and has to figure out how to continue to survive with no communications and no more Mars expeditions for four years.

The Martian was written by a nerd for other nerds.  Nearly all of the action is realistic scientific problem solving: figuring out how to make water when you've got oxygen and hydrogen; determining how many calories you need; maintaining heat and air pressure; establishing contact with Earth. Mark uses what he has on hand to tackle these problems in turn. He tells us about it in a smart-ass narrative voice that captures exactly the "clever" and self-assured way engineers joke with one another.

Entertaining, especially if you're the kind of person who pedantically pointed out the scientific flaws in the movie Gravity.

Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat *** 1/2

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (to give it its full title) is about the eight-man rowing team from the University of Washington that ultimately wins the Olympic medal. It follows the team, and one member in particular, from their initial tryouts through their narrow Olympic victory.

It's an exciting sports story, very well told. Brown is especially good at capturing atmosphere -- the sun glinting on the water, the crowds on the observation trains -- and at showing how a quality team came together piece by piece. He also shows how it's not a straight line from bad to good -- the team rows poorly at times. He gives a pretty good sense of rowing strategy too.

At the same time, it feels like Brown is working too hard to shape the story into a conventional sports melodrama, with the boys as underdogs representing the grit and determination of working class folks during the Depression, thwarting the plans of the evil Nazis and stirring the pride of our nation. The cliches run fast and thick in these sections, and the prose gets overheated. (They weren't really underdogs, you know.) He should have omitted all of the stuff about Germany and the Dust Bowl and stuck with Joe Rantz's story. There's plenty of drama there.

Chris Barnard, Bundu ***

Bundu tells the story of one summer at an output hospital on the South Africa-Mozambique border trying to deal with an influx of starving people. The area has been in drought for nearly three years, and the situation is desperate. The narrator is a scientist doing his best to stay uninvolved, but he's fallen in love with one of the nurses. He enlists another eccentric loner in a bold plan to get the growing crowd of refugees to safety.

As you can tell from the summary, the book could have easily been overly sentimental or colorful. But Barnard's narrator sticks mostly to relating the facts, addressing the larger themes lightly and obliquely. It's underwritten in an effective way. It also features lots of enjoyable Afrikaans atmosphere, so that our hero drives his bakkie through dongas and tambookies to reach his kraal in the kloof.