Halldór Laxness, Independent People **** 1/2

To prolong the glow of our recent trip to Iceland, I reread Halldór Laxness' masterpiece Independent People. Perhaps I was inspired by seeing the book in the window of every book shop and souvenir stand in the country?

Independent People tells the story of Bjartur of Summerhouses, a sheep farmer living in a turf-roofed croft in the Icelandic highlands. His sole goal is to not be in debt to anyone, neither financial debt nor social indebtedness. It's an admirable goal, but it makes Bjartur difficult to get along with, especially for his wives and children.

Most of Independent People takes place at Bjartur's croft. We learn a lot about the sheep and about the harsh, beautiful moors that form his land. The outside world intervenes only rarely until near the end. Laxness' prose is sardonic and lovely. There are a few vivid chapters that I'll not forget: the night of terror that Bjartur's first wife Rosa spends alone in the croft, Bjartur's nearly fatal search for a missing ewe, the crofters discussing the stroke of good fortune provided by World War I. The relationship between Bjartur and his (foster) daughter Asta Sóllilja is well drawn and even heartwarming.

The book loses some of its power when it expands its borders in the final 50 pages or so. On the one hand, introducing the politics of wider Iceland helps put Bjartur's struggles into perspective, but at the expense of the focus on character and setting. It also felt a little rushed to me; I'd adjusted to the pace of Bjartur's life.

Michael Steinberg, The Fiction of a Thinkable World ***

The Fiction of a Thinkable World argues that Western philosophy and institutions presuppose a false picture of people as autonomous thinking subjects confronting stimuli that is external to the self. In fact, our conscious thinking is not independent from, but rather continuous with, our subconscious and social actions. However, modern capitalist society depends on the myth of independent autonomous individuals –– in economics, in the voting booth, in the marketplace –– and our everyday experience therefore reinforces the illusion of an integrated self.

The author takes a different approach to denying the mind/body distinction. The question is not whether thoughts are any more than brain states, but whether abstract thought is in any way distinct from the subconscious activities of our bodies. He also shows how deeply engrained individualism is in modern society, and some of the ways it is destructive to our well-being.

Unfortunately, though, he doesn't even attempt to describe an alternative way of thinking/acting. A couple of times he says that other social models existed before Western capitalism bowled them over, but he doesn't describe them beyond some vague hand-waving in the directions of Taoism. I was left with a compelling critique but nowhere to go with it.

Sjón, From the Mouth of the Whale ** 1/2

Not surprisingly, bookstores in Iceland promote Halldór Laxness and various Icelandic crime writers. I've read several Laxness books and wasn't interested in the crime genre, so I went for a book by Sjón, the Icelandic novelist, poet, and playwright.

As expected from a book by a poet, From the Mouth of the Whale is stronger in its imagery than its plot. The narrator is Jónas Palmason, a self-taught healer in the 17th century. His talent for curing "female maladies" and his obsession with examining dead ravens make him an outcast, suspected of witchcraft. He is banished to a deserted island off the coast, where he considers man's origins and his place in the natural world.

From the Mouth of the Whale has some striking passages, especially in its vivid depictions of the world from Adam's perspective, but it completely lacks narrative drive. Maybe I should have tried one of the crime novelists.

Patrick O'Brian, The Thirteen-Gun Salute ** 1/2

My least favorite Aubrey/Maturin books are the ones that spend more plot on Maturin's role as an intelligence agent than on nautical derring-do. Maturin as an intelligence agent is by far the least convincing aspect of these novels, so it's never good when a book dwells on it.

In The Thirteen-Gun Salute, our heroes escort a British envoy to Malay, where he hopes to woo the Sultan away from a treaty with France. Stephen Maturin works behind the scenes to undermine the French position.

The voyage to Malay is entirely routine. The finest set piece is Stephen's visit to the Kumai Crater in Borneo, where he visits a Buddhist monastery and communes with the orangutans. O'Brian ends the book in medias res with the crew stranded on an uncharted island, which perhaps bodes well for the next installment.

Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe *** 1/2

A terrible title for a book whose subtitle is "Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics." Masters of the Universe is a nice companion to George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America. Where Nash covers the various strands of conservatism in America, Jones focuses on the libertarian strand in both the US and Britain. ("Neoliberal" is the more common British term for the group.) Jones is also interested in the political movement: how did free-market ideology manage to replace the post-war Keynesian consensus?

Masters of the Universe does a very good job of explaining the neoliberal worldview, including both its economic foundation and the philosophy that earns it the name "liberal." Jones presents the view fairly, even though he is not a neoliberal himself. (His tone becomes more critical in the later chapters.) Turning to the politics, he shows that the shift to market-based approaches came in response to a perceived failure of the Keynesians in the late 1970s, and that it started during the liberal administrations before Reagan and Thatcher.

Jones' prose can be academic and repetitive, but it's an interesting story.

Neal Stephenson, Seveneves ***

The Moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.

Seveneves is a a typically ambitious epic from Neal Stephenson. Scientists determine that the breakup of the moon will make the surface of Earth uninhabitable starting two years hence, and the world comes together to plan for the continuation of the human race in space. Most of the action takes place on the International Space Station, which serves as the seed for an orbiting civilization.

Seveneves is definitely hard sci-fi, with more of its 800+ pages dedicated to technological explanations than to story. All of the world's scientists work together seamlessly to make amazing progress in two years, while politicians are all corrupt.

Half way through Part I, I started wondering why the scientific community hadn't applied their ingenuity to repairing the Moon. They made amazing progress on the much harder problem of building a sustainable civilization. Even I had some ideas about how to "fix" the moon (similar to the asteroid capture caper). Stephenson probably could have explained why it wouldn't work, but he didn't, and the missed option tempered my enjoyment a bit.

I also had issues with Part III, which (spoiler alert) takes place five thousand years later. Human civilization consists of seven races, each descended from one of the eponymous seven Eves. I had a hard time believing that the races would have stayed as distinct as they did given that they've lived (essentially) together for thousands of years. The sociology didn't feel realistic to me. Also, the story in Part III felt rushed by comparison to the previous parts and ends with an incident that felt like the start of something rather than the end. If I'd been Stephenson's editor, I would have recommended publishing Part III as a second book along with a Part IV that continues the story for another hundred pages and several years.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer ***

A Pulitzer Prize-winning espionage novel, "wrought in electric prose." It was inevitable that I would read The Sympathizer, and probably just as inevitable that I would be disappointed by it. Contrary to reviewers' adjectives like "blistering," "haunting," "audacious," and "darkly comic," I found the narrator's tone detached and his adventures mundane. He is a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist sleeper agent in America, but the extent of his spycraft is writing letters to a fake aunt in France about activities that the Vietnamese could surely follow for themselves.

The final 75 pages are far more intense and force reconsideration of the preceding 306 pages. It turns out the aloof tone was an intentional plot point. For me, though, it was too little too late.