Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time ***

The Devil All the Time has almost everything it needs to be a cracking good read: strange backwoods characters who show flashes of unexpected humanity, a plot riddled with violence and religion, and fine writing that straddles the line between hard-boiled and picturesque. (I also really like the physical feel of the Anchor Books paperback -- its heft, its font size, and so on.) However, the pieces don't fit together into anything bigger. The characters are well drawn but never develop; the narrative resolves without any build-up of complications or thematic resonance. The story kept me engaged throughout, but I kept hoping for something more.

Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science **** 1/2

Jackpot. I was casually browsing the Science and Mathematics section of the book store when I noticed Number with its recommendation from Albert Einstein ("Beyond doubt the most interesting book on the evolution of mathematics which has ever fallen into my hands"). I'm always interested in the history of ideas, especially the history of ideas we take for granted like the concept of number. Number presents this history well, showing how the concept derives from the practical problems we solve with it.

Beyond its specific focus on number, I think Dantzig's book provides a clear, concise, practical demonstration of how human interests and cognitive abilities shape the reality of the wold we live in. Plenty of philosophers present their views on the objective reality of the world and its relation to our conceptual understanding of it, but none with the specificity of Dantzig and the single fundamental concept of number. He's an entertaining writer too!

Alan Furst, Spies of the Balkans ***

Spies of the Balkans is a more conventional story than the other Alan Furst novels I've read, with somewhat less compelling atmosphere. The main character Costa Zannis is more aware of his role in the operation of which he is a part, and his motivations are less subtle or mundane than those of other Furst heroes. He also has a love affair that progresses in the instant fashion of novels, not the gradual manner of real life. In short, the book reads more like a traditional spy thriller than earlier Furst novels do, perhaps in an attempt to broaden his audience.

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns ****

The subtitle of this book — The Epic Story of America's Great Migration — is somewhat misleading. While the book is over 600 pages, its focus on the stories of three individuals makes it more intimate than epic. And it's better that way.

The Great Migration is the half-century period during which a huge percentage of black Americans moved from the South to the North and West. The migration changed the face of the country in numerous ways. Wilkerson uses the life stories of three people from different parts of the South to illustrate her general historical and sociological points. She is a journalist, but she describes her characters as well as most novelists. This approach makes her arguments more vividly than an academic approach would have. I was especially struck by the story of Robert Foster driving across the Southwest to Los Angeles. (Foster is the most sharply drawn character.)

On the down side, the book was rather disorganized and repeatedly repeated itself. I'm afraid I'll never be able to track down the place where she made that interesting point about how migrants followed the major train lines, so that you know where a person came from by where they ended up. Or how the end of segregation led to vibrant black communities becoming ghettos.

Definitely recommended.

Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination **** 1/2

An awesome illustration of the value of browsing in used book stores. I'd never heard of Harold Frederic nor of this novel, by I found a copy of a Modern Library edition at Moe's in Berkeley. The premise sounded interesting, and the cover copy called it "one of the four or five best novels by an American in the 19th century."

The Damnation of Theron Ware tells the story of an up-and-coming Methodist minister in upstate New York. Due to some church politics, he is assigned to a small town with a conservative set of church trustees, who don't care for his fancy preaching and fashionable wife. While laboring under the burden of their austere religious vision, he comes under the sway of the local Catholic priest and his rationalist doctor friend. They open Theron's eyes to his provincial ways, and he slowly abandons his beliefs. As the title indicates, the result is not positive.

The book gives a good sense of everyday small-town life and the role of religion in late 19th century America. It takes Theron's religiosity and ambitions seriously, and questions the goodness of adopting a scientific-rationalist view. I empathized with Theron and believed in his sincerity; the author does not stretch him to turn him into a comic character. I loved it!

Blake Butler, Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia ** 1/2

This unusual book has some fantastic passages in it. Butler's ability to capture dream states -- or more accurately, waking dream states -- is positively Lynchian. I'll remain haunted by the image of the man in the car outside of his house at night, with the engine running and his stare permanently straight ahead. And by the huge boulder slowly getting closer to falling on his not-sleeping form. And the recurring images of keys for hidden doors.

I also liked Butler's idiosyncratic way of phrasing ("The initial wanted instinct upon first hitting the pillow is to be blank"), including how he always refers to his body in terms of skin or meat, and his odd observations ("The bulk of any house is made of air"). His implicit comparison between the symptoms of insomnia and senile dementia was interesting.

I can't neglect to mention the thematically appropriate glow-in-the-dark Zs all over the cover of the book.

With all of this great stuff, why the poor rating? Because the parts between are filled with academic Deleuze-ian jargon and meaningless flights of pseudo-profound whimsy, during which my mind wandered so much that I may have missed some of the good stuff. The book would have been much more powerful at half of its current length.

Patrick O'Brian, Desolation Island *** 1/2

The fifth book in the Aubrey-Maturin series relies on familiarity with the characters and the milieu. I fully enjoyed it, but only because O'Brian hooked me with his inimitable style in the first four books. Desolation Island gives Stephen Maturin more of the plot than Jack Aubrey, and moves through its story at a leisurely pace: the only sea battle comes after page 200 and the titular island gets its first mention on page 297. Alas, the deliberate pace of the earlier chapters means that the exciting parts get short-changed a bit in the closing pages. In particular, I thought the scene of the Leopard crew fighting to save its sinking ship or abandon it was rushed.

No matter, though. I'll read The Fortune of War presently.