Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs ** 1/2

Moore's collection of short stories, Birds of America, made me a fan of her sardonic writing style. The first few chapters of A Gate at the Stairs shared that quality, and I enjoyed them. About 75 pages in, however, the book started to lose its way. The writing began to sound self-consciously literary, and the narrator showed too much insight for a twenty-year-old college student fresh from the farm. For example:

Contents may shift during the flight, we had been told. Would that be good or bad? And what about the discontents? Would they please shift, too? And what if oxygen deprivation in the cabin caused one to think in idle spirals and desperate verbal coils like this for the rest of one's life?

Ick. What happened to the clever, funny prose of the early pages? After a strong start, the book was a definite disappointment.

Michael Brooks, 13 Things that Don't Make Sense ** 1/2

This book describes 13 experimental results that scientists can't explain and that could therefore be the seeds for future Kuhnian paradigm shifts in science. As the epigraph from Isaac Asimov says, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not 'Eureka!,' but 'That's funny...'".

It's a fascinating subject to me. I am a connoisseur of world views, and I'm intrigued by how world views change in the face of recalcitrant reality. Unfortunately, though, only a few of the chapters deal with persistent mysteries that pose real problems to our best theories. The others deal with results that can't be consistently repeated (cold fusion, life on Mars, signals from outer space) or with philosophical mysteries that don't challenge existing theories per se (free will, the meaning of death, the persistence of homeopathy).

The best chapters dealt with challenges to our theories of physics, because the anomalies are widely recognized and suggest that we might be missing (or misunderstanding) something fundamental. The final chapter, on homeopathy, was one of the weakest, but it did refer to some interesting research about the structure of water that I plan to follow up on.

For the record, the 13 things that don't make sense are:

1. The universe appears to contain only about 4 percent of the matter we'd expect it to based on our theories of physics.
2. The trajectory of the Pioneer spacecraft we launched in the 1970s suggests a force other than gravity is pulling on them.
3. The phase shifts in the light from distant stars suggest that some universal constants may actually vary in different parts of the universe.
4. Some experimenters have managed to create "cold fusion" reactions that appear to put out more energy than was put into them.
5. We don't know how to create life, or even define what the term means.
6. The Viking spacecraft initially found evidence of life on Mars, but was it valid evidence?
7. We once received a signal from an empty region of space that looked like one from an intelligent source.
8. A researcher in England discovered a giant virus that looks more like a bacteria.
9. We can't explain the evolutionary logic of death.
10. We can't explain the evolutionary logic of sex.
11. All scientific research suggests that we don't have free will. But we do, right?
12. We don't have a good explanation for the placebo effect.
13. Homeopathy is patently absurd, but it's still going strong after a few hundred years.

Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist ** 1/2

Nothing much happens in The Anthologist: a minor poet procrastinates instead of writing an introduction to an anthology of rhymed poetry. But nothing much happens in many of Nicholson Baker's books, and the lack of incident allows Baker to focus on the minutiae of everyday thinking. I love some of Baker's earlier examples in this genre, especially The Mezzanine. I think The Anthologist lacks the attention to detail of Baker's earlier work.

The book does exude a love of poetry and has a few interesting critical ideas in it. It made me want to read more poetry. Also, aptly for a book about poetry, the language is often beautiful.

Michael Sandel, Justice ****

Michael Sandel is a professor at Harvard, and Justice is based on his course in political philosophy. I think it's a great introduction to the subject. He identifies three main ways of defining justice — based on equality, freedom, or values — and illustrates the principles (and their complications) using contemporary examples such as the debate over same-sex marriage, government bailout of the banks, and immigration reform. Highly recommended.

I hope to write a more detailed summary of Sandel's arguments and my reaction to them soon and post it on our website, mike-n-evelyn.com.

James Ellroy, Blood's a Rover *** 1/2

Blood's a Rover is the third and final chapter of Ellroy's "Underworld U.S.A" trilogy, following American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. These books give an alternative history of America during the 1960s and 1970s, a history in which all conspiracy theories are true and the course of our nation is determined by violent, cynical men pursuing their obsessions and perversions. They are written in Ellroy's distinctive staccato style. To give you a flavor, here's a section from a page chosen completely at random (page 142). The action takes place at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago:

The Frogman slipped Crutch a hash brownie. Their driver was an on-duty cop. The riot-zone Chicago tour boded all-time blast.

It was Mesplede's idea. He ran into Crutch in the lobby. Crutch was up for it. Bowen was in jail. Buzz was working the listening post. Observe History, sure.

The red-flag boys. The no-bra girls. The cops with stubbed cigars. The nymph chicks tossing bouquets at National Guardsman.

The cop driver swigged Old Crow. His cruiser was air-conditioned. They got the picture show devoid of night heat. 

It's jarring at first, but eventually you succumb to its rhythm.

The characters are all typical Ellroy. Every man has an event in his past that haunts him. Because of it, he pursues some cause or some woman — most likely both — obsessively. But he keeps his obsession a secret from his compatriots, as they keep their obsessions secret from him.

Personally, I prefer Ellroy's "L.A. Quartet" to his "Underworld U.S.A." trilogy. Those earlier books, which included his most famous one L.A. Confidential, featured the same sorts of characters and the same general world view as the later books, and the last L.A. book, White Jazz, was where he refined his style. The "L.A. Quartet" books had more mystery to them, because the plots were more local and less concerned with incorporating real-life events. You wondered what was going to happen rather than how the story would explain the Kennedy assassination.

I liked Blood's a Rover better than the other two "Underworld U.S.A." books for the same reason: there is more personal story here than I remember in the previous two. In fact, the world-historical part of the story ends at the conclusion of Part IV, with three parts left to go.

If you are interested in James Ellroy, I recommend starting with Black Dahlia and working forward from there.

Jonathan Raban, Bad Land **** 1/2

As he did in one of my favorite travel books Passage to Juneau, Raban combines historical narrative, natural history, and personal observation in a seamless way to paint a vivid picture of a place and how it came to be the way it is. In Bad Land, the place is the plains of eastern Montana. In the early part of the 20th century, the railroads and the US government encouraged Montana homesteading, establishing towns every dozen miles or so along the railway and granting land that was essentially free. However, the romantic picture of honest toil converting the arid plains into a new Eden met with the reality of dry summers and harsh winters. Raban shows how the homesteading experience has colored the mindset of the western United States, much as the legend of the cowboy has. My only complaint is that Raban explicitly repeats his theme too many times — perhaps the chapters originally appeared as separate articles?

This book is a good companion to Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. It provides a ground-level illustration of the difficulties that John Wesley Powell warned about.

Ron Currie Jr, Everything Matters! ** 1/2

Even before Junior Thibodeau is born, he knows that the world is going to come to an end when he is 36 years old, when a comet smashes into Earth. How can he deal with this knowledge? Can he find meaning in his life?

The book got off to a strong start, with an eye for quirky detail and solid character development. However, it wasn't long before wild plot developments overwhelmed the basic realism. Every carefully delineated character underwent an event that transformed him or her into a completely different, more programmatic, person. Junior's brother becomes the best baseball player in the major leagues; Junior becomes the fourth smartest person in the world, who manages to create a world-saving device and cure cancer. I was much more interested in the real family at the start of the book  than the cartoons in the later parts. I'd rather know how a regular person would deal with the awful foreknowledge of impending doom.

The reviews quoted on the cover mention Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest as Currie's obvious models. That's definitely the company Currie wants to keep, but Everything Matters! is not as comic as Vonnegut nor as insightful as DFW, and the "final triumph that reconfigures the universe" is kinda lame.