Gaito Gazdanov, The Spectre of Alexander Wolf ***

During the Russian civil war, a young man gets separated from his unit and kills a soldier in the remote forest. The killing haunts his life. Many years later, he reads a short story which recounts the killing from the victim's point of view. He sets out to find the writer of the story.

The plot of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf involves a short story, and I think the book would have been stronger as a short story itself. The setup and the narrative are good, but the characters' musings about fate and guilt are too repetitive and the romance is not totally relevant.

Simon Singh, The Code Book *****

The Code Book is a history of encryption, from the simplest ciphers (Caesar shift) to public key cryptography. It moves step by step, explaining how each innovation addresses a weakness of the earlier system then showing how codebreakers found new patterns that enable them to decipher the more sophisticated cipher. It places all of this work in context through historical episodes where codes and ciphers played a central role, such as the trial of Mary Queen of Scots and the breaking of the Enigma during World War II.

The book has exactly the right balance between narrative, technical detail, and puzzles. It was fun to read about a new coding strategy that seemed impossible to break, then see how creative cryptanalysts manage to figure it out. There's a chapter about deciphering hieroglyphics and lost languages, which links cryptography to linguistics. I even love the size and weight of the book, the font, and the illustrations.

Entertaining and informative.

John Casey, An American Romance *** 1/2

The attributes that make An American Romance great are inseparable from the ones that make it insufferable. The first two parts of the book do an amazing job of showing how two very different people fall in love because their differences fit exactly what the other person needs, and the whole book is filled with insights about personalities and interpersonal relationships. However, the prose is painfully overwritten in exactly the way you might expect from a writer who spent several years at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Nearly every paragraph starts with a concrete description but ends with abstract twaddle. From a randomly selected page (103):

She said, "That summer when Henry was in the hospital, I went to music camp. You asked me if I was happy. I think I decided then that happiness was a passive, and, therefore, vulnerable state, so I started to prefer excitement..."

All of the characters, even the non-intellectual Mac, articulate this kind of generalization every time they think or speak. The generalizations are sometimes insightful and sometimes baffling, but the density of them is exhausting.

In its later parts, An American Romance portrays Iowa in a way that seems loving but condescending (cf. Anya's film project Iowa Girl).

I love An American Romance for Anya and Mac and the theater converted from a barn, but the over-educated tone finally defeats me.

Lorrie Moore, Bark *** 1/2

I love Moore's sardonic writing style, and she is a master at creating believable, relatable characters. I thoroughly enjoy reading her stories, even when I lose interest in the narrative.

My favorite story in this collection was the first, "Debarking": when Ira starts dating after his wife leaves him, he tries to ameliorate his personality flaws while seeking to understand the funny strange woman he's seeing. My least favorite stories were the two with dated Bush-era plots.

3 x 33 1/3 (= 100!) ***

A couple of months ago, Slate.com ran an article about the 33 1/3 series of books about classic record albums. I'd read a couple of the books, including the awesome Let's Talk About Love, but the article reignited my interest. When I found a shelf full of 33 1/3 books at Atomic Books in Baltimore, I bought the ones they had at the intersection of the 10 best 33 1/3 books and albums I know well.

I ended up with Aja (Steely Dan), Tusk (Fleetwood Mac), and Fear of Music (Talking Heads). Coincidentally, all three albums came out in the span of a couple of years in the late 1970s.*

The books, like the albums they describe, are very different from one another. Aja, by Don Breithaupt, uses musicological analysis to explain how Steely Dan's music is jazz fusion without being, you know, "jazz fusion"; Tusk, by Rob Trucks, barely talks about the music at all during tangents about going your own way; for Fear of Music, Jonathan Letham channels Greil Marcus.

Both the Aja and Tusk books offered nearly forgotten tidbits about the music industry in the late 1970s. Breithaupt reminds us about the diversity of styles on Top 40 radio stations by providing an impressively broad list of singles on the Billboard charts of March 4, 1978: everything from Lynyrd Skynyrd to the Close Encounters theme song, with "Peg" at #11. Trucks has this to say about the infamous failure of the Tusk album:

Consensus sales figures total 4 million for Tusk... Consensus sales figures cluster at 23 million for Rumours ... Rumours to Tusk represents the largest drop from one album to the next. Ever.

The 4 million copies of Tusk which represent the ground side of the drop from dizzying heights would now qualify as the best-selling album of the year. 

I enjoyed all three books, each in their own way, although none of them truly deepened my experience of the albums.

* It's not really a coincidence, is it? I was in high school in the late 1970s, so a preponderance of "albums I know well" come from the late 1970s.

Aleksander Hemon, The Lazarus Project *** 1/2

Aleksander Hemon often gets compared to Nabokov and Conrad, because he's a gifted prose stylist for whom English is a second language. He seems to derive great pleasure from the wide range of adjectives and descriptive verbs available to him; it gives his descriptions of people and places a wonderful specificity and richness.

However, neither the narrative nor the themes of The Lazarus Project have the same depth as the prose. The book interleaves the (true) story of a Ukrainian immigrant in 1908 Chicago who was shot by police as a suspected anarchist with the (fictional) story of a Bosnian immigrant in 2008 Chicago who wants to write about the earlier immigrant. The idea is to say something about the immigrant experience and about the United States' attitudes toward immigrants. I found the story somewhat clichéd and the ideas not too insightful.

Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory ***

The subtitle is a pun. The book doesn't promulgate any specific conspiracy theory, but rather lays out a theory about conspiracies. Walker summarizes numerous conspiracy theories from the colonial era to today, and proposes a taxonomy based on the identity of the "folk devil" behind the conspiracy. He also shows that these theories occur at all times from all points along the political spectrum, not just during contentious times from the lunatic fringe.

Walker's main argument is that conspiracy theories "reveal something true about the anxieties of those who believe and repeat it." I don't doubt that at all, and it's not news to me. I found the argumentation to be a bit sloppy, and the book covers some topics that aren't really conspiracies at all. The entertainment value of the book comes from learning about historical conspiracies, like the one at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. (The United States was founded by a conspiracy!)

While Walker explicitly demurs from claiming whether individual theories are true or false, I found his most interesting insights in the final chapter (about post-9/11) where he violates this principle and demonstrates how the "facts" get constructed.