Shelved

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

2012-02-08T19:16:00.002-07:00

Normally I would not be drawn to a book about baseball and statistics. I like statistics well enough, but I tend to shy away from books about math and statistics partly because I spend all of my working day thinking about such things. And baseball has just never really grabbed my attention.

But I heard really great things about the movie, and when I failed to find anyone to see it with me,* I thought I'd read the book. About which I'd also heard really great things.

I was a bit surprised how quickly I got sucked in. Yes it's about statistics, and baseball, and mostly baseball statistics. But it's also about ideas that extend well beyond baseball, and it's even more about people. The book is about Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's, and how he strategized to outsmart big money teams like the Yankees by relying on statistics to draft players no one else would have given a second thought. And the book is also about some of those players and the chance they got, and about Billy himself and how his dreams reflect his own failed experience in the major leagues, and about the fans outside the establishment who changed the face of baseball statistics out of little more than a passion for the game.

It kind of made me want to love baseball.

I don't think I'm going to go out of my way to watch a game anytime soon, but I do feel like I have a better appreciation of the sport itself having read this book, and I'm willing not to dismiss it offhand. And whether or not you like baseball. I would really recommend this book. If you think it sounds interesting, you'll probably love it. If you don't think it sounds particularly interesting, you might be surprised. There's a fair amount of information, but also a fair amount of narrative, and it's pretty compelling.

* Meaning I suggested it once to a friend who immediately suggested three different movies, after which I didn't bother suggesting it again to anyone. So I can't really say I tried all that hard.

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

2012-02-08T18:59:00.002-07:00

Speak is the story of a teenage girl (and I think it was written around the time my sister was in high school, so it's not quite my era but it's also not completely new) who experienced something over the summer that turns friends against her as she enters high school, and causes her to pull inside herself, away from her friends, away from her parents, away from most of her teachers. She doesn't stop speaking entirely, but she avoids it as much as possible, and for a long time there are few people to even notice.

I don't know if there was supposed to be a Big Reveal about why the main character of Speak (Melinda) has essentially stopped talking to her parents, friends, and teachers. If so, I guessed it long before the reveal was made, and so as awful as it was, it carried no huge emotional weight that I hadn't already felt as I read the chapters leading up to the reveal. I think the book is better for that, though. It's not meant to shock or appall, but to put the reader in the head of the teenage character and let the reader experience what she is experiencing. Anything Laurie Anderson fails to tell you until the right time is analogous to Melinda's avoidance of confronting the reasons for her own depression.

Speak is not a happy book, but it's also not an unhappy book. It's also by no means perfect, but it feels believable enough, and Melinda's voice feels real. The story drew me in, and as dark and difficult as it was to see the the character's story through the screen of her depression, the entire book is peppered with hopeful moments. It's very much a YA book, meant to appeal to a young adult audience, and it feels enough like a Big Issue book that I don't really feel the need to go read anything else by Laurie Halse Anderson. With Big Issues authors (like Jodi Picoult, for example) I can let them pull it off once before it starts to lose impact. But this book had impact. I wouldn't recommend it universally, but if you think it sounds worth reading, it probably is.

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

2012-01-20T21:17:00.002-07:00

When I was in junior high or thereabouts I loved Agatha Christie mysteries. The local library had a pretty extensive collection, and I read half a dozen or more before my interest waned and I moved on to other novels. I preferred Miss Marple to Hercule Poirot, though that was mostly because I read two Miss Marple novels before I read a single Poirot novel, which bred familiarity. And because I didn't know how to pronounce Hercule (Her-cyool? Her-cyool-ee? or something more French-sounding?). My favorite, though, was And Then There were None, and I practically begged to stay home and babysit my sister while my family went to a Dodgers game (not a hard sell) just so I could rent and watch the 1945 movie.

I have lots of fond Agatha Christie memories, and I've often wondered if her novels would hold up for me now that I'm older. So I threw a novel I'd never gotten around to into the mix when I was guest book-chooser for my book club, and when another one of my selections won the vote, I decided to read it anyway.

Maybe I should have chosen another novel, because although I'd never read Murder on the Orient Express, I had seen the movie, and I'd forgotten enough of the plot to enjoy the story but not enough that I didn't predict/remember the solution to the mystery before we got there. (I actually like being able to guess the ending of a mystery before the actual end, as long as it's not too obvious, because it makes me feel smart, but I also like to guess it on my own, not with the help of subconscious memories.)

In spite of that, I thoroughly enjoyed the read. It was fast, it was fun, and it felt like watching an old Hollywood movie (again, my memory may have been intruding). I'm not a big mystery reader, but Agatha Christie tells a good story. Had I been traveling, it would have been a good travel book. I don't know that I'm dying to clean out the shelves of the library again, but maybe I'll pick up another next time I have a long flight ahead of me.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

2012-01-19T21:03:00.005-07:00

Of all the book choices I put up for vote the month I got to be guest book-chooser in my book club, this was probably the most book clubby. Usually I don't think of that as a good thing (though I'm not really sure what I have against a book being book clubby), but this was a book I'd really wanted to read for awhile. Book clubby isn't my thing. Memoirs aren't my thing. Books about precocious children growing up in difficult circumstances aren't my thing. But I'd heard nothing but good about this book.

If you've heard of this book, you've probably heard the back story. Jeannette Walls and her three siblings (two sisters, one brother) were raised by their unconventional (to the point of being dysfunctional) parents, parents who ultimately ended up homeless in New York City by choice. The children spent childhood wandering with their parents from place to place, living in their car, in run-down houses that probably could have been condemned, or wherever they could find a place. Their father assured them that this was all temporary, that he was working on grand ideas and that, when they came through, he would build them a glass castle to live in. He had even drawn up architectural plans. But their father was also an alcoholic, and their mother considered herself an artist and sacrificed money and good parenting to pursue her painting, and the children were mostly left to fend for themselves (and often their parents).

The Glass Castle is, at times, a painful book to read. A lot of the members of my book group expressed anger with the parents for their selfishness and its effect on their four children. And yet they also managed to raise intelligent, resourceful children, three of whom managed to lift themselves into successful, happy adult lives. The book leaves you thinking about nature and nurture and the effects of circumstances on people and the effects of parents' choices on children. It is sometimes appalling, sometimes difficult, but also sometimes lovely, loving, and straightforward. I was drawn into the story and felt invested in the lives of all six members of the family.

After hearing so many good things about this book, I'll add my own voice and recommendation. If you've read the book (or even if you haven't) and haven't seen this, I'm also including a video blip that shows Jeannette Walls, her mother, and some of her mother's art:

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

2011-10-22T20:24:00.002-06:00

I wouldn't really have expected myself to pick up a book about zombies, but this was one of those books that I saw over and over again on the Borders "Buy One Get One 50% Off" table (once upon a time when there was such a thing as Borders). And in the wake of season one of The Walking Dead on AMC, I decided to give it a try. The Hypothetical Zombie Apocalypse is, after all, sort of the cultural phenomenon of the moment.

This isn't really a novel. It's written as a series of interviews (by the author) with politicians, ordinary citizens, soldiers, etc., in the aftermath of a zombie plague that decimates humanity in the not-terribly-distant future. Through the interviews, the story of the war unfolds but only in bits and pieces. There's no purposeful grand narrative - it's assumed that the readers themselves have lived through the war and already know the basic timeline. So since, of course, we don't, the timeline unfolds through a series of only somewhat connected anecdotes.

I almost didn't make it through the book. I was intrigued for a chapter or two, but then after 50 or 60 pages I kind of got bored and put the book down for several months before I decided to try again. I found the narrative device intriguing, but I had a hard time getting over the fact that each interview sounded like the same person (which they were, of course, because they were all Max Brooks), and the fact that no interview actually sounded the way someone would talk in real life.

But when I picked it up again several months later, it was easy enough to dive back in without rereading what had come before, and this time I got over the stylistic elements that had bothered me at first and found myself pulled in. I was impressed by the history Max Brooks created. It wasn't entirely realistic because, you know, it's about a zombie apocalypse, but it was amazingly intricate, and he managed to tell his fictional history on a grand scale through intimate and detached accounts. I was thoroughly impressed with the book. And I also wanted to know how it ended.

This feels like an uncharacteristic book for me to recommend, but it was just really interesting. So there you go. I recommend it.

Interview with the Vampire by Ann Rice

2011-10-22T20:24:00.001-06:00

This sort of falls into the category of my going-back-to-my-high-school-roots theme, but this time I never read the book. Instead, it was the book that everyone (in my little honors English circle) was reading that did not, at the time, interest me in the least.

It was popular back then, of course, because it had just been made into a movie, and also because it's about vampires. Vampires are never really out of fashion, although the nature of the vampire genre is pretty fluid (see: Twilight). The interest among kids in my age group with Interview with the Vampire was spawned by the movie, I think, (which, incidentally, had been written long before the movie came out, before any of us were born), and it followed followed on the heels of their interest in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the movie) back in junior high. I didn't really understand, and until a few years ago the closest I got to vampire fiction was Bunnicula in elementary school.

Several years ago, though, I read The Historian, which was long and complex and eerie and enthralling. Then I read Twilight, which was fast-paced and hormone-y and not particularly well-written and fun. (But just for one novel. Not five. Sorry.) Then I watched seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV show) over the course of just over a year, which was awesome. And finally I caved and picked up the vampire book that first made me shun vampire books, but only because I stumbled into it while searching for something easy to read on my new Kindle on the elliptical machine during the cold winter months of not running outdoors.

After having read it, I understand why it was so popular. I don't know if I can say that I liked it, but I enjoyed it, if that makes sense. It was definitely intriguing. I felt like Ann Rice (via the narrator, the vampire Louis) tried a little too hard to hit the reader over the head with what the novel was about (the nature of evil, the complexity of characters, etc.), but there was still a lot of interesting stuff going on that made you think about, you know, the nature of evil, the complexity of characters, etc. And there was some good storytelling.

Awhile back I read most of a book called How to Read Literature Like an English Professor, not because I want to read literature like an English professor, but because the author had some interesting things to say about things to look for when you're reading. One of the chapters was all about vampires, and how books about vampires are really all about sex. I have to admit, this book more than any other vampire novel/movie/television series I've encountered (and admittedly, there haven't been all that many), made me agree with his assessment. Yes, even more than Twilight. The descriptions of vampires sucking blood (and they happened often, in great detail) were surprisingly scandalous. And I think what made them so was precisely the fact that they were not sex scenes. It may seem counterintuitive, but you can say a lot more in greater detail when you don't outright tell the reader what you're really talking about. As with any subject in any art form, metaphor can be a lot more powerful and explicit than outright description.

To be honest, I sincerely doubt I would have picked up on this had I read the book when I was fourteen years old. But it's no wonder my peers (many of whom were probably much more capable of picking up on such things) devoured the novel. Of course some of them, I'm sure, were probably just reading for the story. Don't get me wrong - this didn't have the feel of a dirty novel at all, and it was certainly no paperback romance. The story was what drove the novel, but there were definite undertones, and that itself added an interesting layer of complexity to the story. In fact, overall I would say the novel tries a bit too hard to be deep and complex, and is at the same time a bit more rich and complex and thought-provoking than it seems after you've realized that it's trying a bit too hard. It didn't make me want to go out and read more Ann Rice vampire novels (she has plenty), but I feel like I did my cultural duty in reading this one.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

2011-10-22T20:24:00.000-06:00

This was our October book club selection, and I kind of wasn't thrilled by it. We read Fahrenheit 451 for our first book about a year ago and for me it was a disappointing high school revisit, partly because in high school I loved Ray Bradbury. Also, I had read this book, years and years ago, and so far there have only been two book club choices that were new to me.

But I dutifully read the book. Actually, I put off reading it until a few days before book club and therefore I kind of speed-read my way through the novel. And on (speed) reading the book, I still wasn't thrilled by it. Ray Bradbury is a very flowery writer. He crams metaphor after metaphor into his sentences, to the point that it gets a bit exhausting and annoying. I don't think my issues with Ray Bradbury have anything to do with whether or not he was talented. I just don't care for his style like I once did. His style bugs me.

That being said, we still managed to have a great book club discussion. Ray Bradbury's style may bug me, but he gave us an awful lot to talk about.

Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem

2011-09-20T20:31:00.001-06:00

A month or two ago I turned on NPR in the middle of a superhero-themed "Three Books" segment on NPR. I don't know why, but the paragraph-long blip on Men and Cartoons caught my attention, enough so that I went onto Amazon a couple days later to find myself a cheap used copy.

I really didn't know what to expect. Seriously - the blip told me almost nothing about the book. And I'm not really an avid short story reader. I'm not sure why I felt compelled to buy this. But I enjoyed it. I liked that when I finished I could go back and scan the titles and still remember every single story and the thoughts and emotions and atmosphere it evoked. I liked that Lethem mixed everyday with absurd or fantastical in very natural ways and in widely varying proportions in each one of his stories. I liked that he didn't write like he was trying to hard. Except for the last story. I didn't like that the book ended on my least favorite of the stories.

But I can forgive that. I'm not sure I feel wildly inspired to go read more Jonathan Lethem. Like I said, I'm just not really a short story person. I'm also not sure the book merited the powerful urge I felt to go buy it, but I'm still digesting what I read and rolling it all around in my head, so maybe it did.

Superfreakonomics by Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner

2011-09-20T20:31:00.000-06:00

I read Freakonomics (or maybe I listened to it, I can't remember) and liked it, and so I figured eventually I'd read Superfreakonomics and that I'd probably like it in about the same way. And I was right.

I find it hard to say much more about it. There's not really a general theme to the book, other than that data analysis can turn up surprising patterns and conclusions about interesting questions. The book is well-researched, jauntily (but not annoyingly) written, and nicely blends broad issues, number-crunching, and stories of individuals.

I think maybe my favorite chapter, and the one that exemplifies what I like about the book, was the chapter that began with the case of the callous New York City neighbors. It's the story everyone has heard, in sociology classes and pop science podcasts, about the woman who was murdered while dozens of neighbors looked on and did nothing. Levitt and Dubner revisited the story and essentially reconstructed the events, painting the scene in an entirely new (and much more plausible) light. Conventional wisdom always comes from somewhere, and in this day and age we're prone to attribute much of our conventional wisdom to scientific study. But the world is a complicated place, and the study on which we place our faith one day can be thrown into question or seen from new perspectives or reevaluated. Faith in science can also be misplaced.

Of course, Levitt and Dubner's intention was not to discredit science, but rather to turn a more critical eye on the science of human nature and encourage a finer grained analysis. It's the kind of smart reading of data that I try to develop when I teach basic statistics in my courses, a recognition that the world is a complex place and that everything is always worth a second look.

Désirée by Annemarie Selinko

2011-09-20T20:30:00.000-06:00

This book came to me as a recommendation from my uncle Jonathan. Although I picked it up on my Kindle right about the time he sent the recommendation my way with the intention of reading it eventually, it took some time before I finally got around to it. I have to confess that I'm not much of a historical fiction person. I can't really put a finger on why. It's just not what I usually go to. When I read the first chapter or so, I quickly saw that it was a fictionalized historical account of a young woman during the French revolution. It didn't turn me off. It just didn't inspire me to pick it up when I had other books waiting on my bedstand.

But over the summer I had some time on airplanes and in hotels, and it seemed like a good time to pull out my Kindle and give the book a fair chance. When the author put the fictional young girl in the path of a young Napolean, and them gave them a love story, it felt like a stretch to me. Napolean's a big name. I didn't buy it, historically. Clearly I hadn't read the fine print - it took several chapters for me to realize that this was a fictionalized book about a real person, Napolean's jilted fiancée Désirée Clary, who went on to have a rather interesting, high profile life herself.

I think realizing that this was a real person, but I real person I actually knew nothing about, was what finally drew me in to the story. I have to admit that I'm still not a historical fiction person. It wasn't my favorite book ever. But I did enjoy it, and I found it fascinating from a historical perspective. The French revolution and the campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte are important pieces of European history about which I have a surprising lack of knowledge, and it was kind of fun to learn something while I read. The book was well told, too. I could relate to the characters, and I was interested in their well-being and their story. So I welcome the recommendation, and I'm glad I read it. (Thanks Jonathan!)

Room by Emma Donoghue

2011-08-14T18:13:00.000-06:00

Note: There are minor spoilers in this review. I don’t consider them book-ruining spoilers, and I wouldn’t direct you away from this page if you intend to read this book, but consider yourself warned.

I’d read a lot of reviews of this book before I picked it up myself. It earned praise from reviewers and readers alike, and while the premise sounds sinister (a man is holding a young woman captive in a room with no access to the outside world; her son was born there, and it is the only world he has ever known), I didn’t get the impression that the book itself was sinister. I did get the impression that the entire novel took place in that one room, though, and so when I first started reading I felt kind of claustrophobic. I found the first fifty pages or so very engaging as we got to know the space from the child's perspective, and to see how his mother had provided him with a surprisingly rich life within such an awful and constrained situation, but I didn’t know if I could spend 300 pages in that same space.

So I was surprised when the author suddenly removed the characters, and the readers, from that space only partway into the book. It was a relief, but it happened faster than I was expecting and I found it disorienting (in a literary sense). Since most of the first part of the book is spent setting up a world in great detail, you kind of expect that you'll be staying in that world for awhile. The narrator is the five-year-old, who doesn’t even know that a world exists outside the room, and Donoghue does a remarkable job of creating an authentic voice for the boy and his perspective is convincing. Removing him suddenly from the only world he knows is beyond disorienting for the boy, and so I suppose that it ought to be disorienting for readers as well. But it took me some time to get past the abruptness and to buy into the change. Maybe if I had expected it from the beginning I would have made the transition more easily.

Still, overall I really enjoyed the book. The book was less about the story than about the perspective from which it's told, and I thought Emma Donoghue handled the perspective incredibly well, if not faultlessly. To write from the perspective from a child without sounding too adult is difficult. To have that child tell a story that speaks to adult perspectives is more difficult still. And to write from the perspective of a child whose entire known world is constrained to a single known room, then thrust him into the world that all of us know and see what happens, takes a level of creativity that I really admire.

The story was dark at times, and sad at times, but it was also hopeful. I'm glad I read it.

The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales by Edgar Allen Poe

2011-08-14T17:52:00.000-06:00

I don’t think I’ve read anything by Edgar Allan Poe since high school. I’m not quite sure what inspired me to pick up a book of his short stories, other than that I saw it, and it seemed to fit in nicely with my reread-stuff-I-read-in-high-school project, and it wasn’t too much of a commitment when my summer life started getting busy and I started reading less.

What I remember about my high school encounters with Edgar Allan Poe was that I didn’t think he was nearly as creepy as I thought he was going to be. I think maybe I was expecting ghosts and unsolved mysteries, but instead I got . But my conclusion the second time around, with both familiar and unfamiliar stories, was different. He’s creepy. Part of the change in my perception is that I read fewer Edgar Allan Poe stories in high school than I realized. There’s a gruesome double murder in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" that, while described with police report detachment, is as gory as any prime time television crime drama, but I never read that story in high school, nor had I read "The Pit and the Pendulum" or "The Fall of the House of Usher" (this was news to me - the names are so familiar that I just took it for granted that they were part of the high school reading list).

But I also think that in high school I didn't have quite enough life experience to understand what makes the skin crawl. Edgar Allan Poe's stories, with some exceptions, don’t require blood or putrefaction or the supernatural. They are psychologically unnerving.

But not all of them. I was surprised to find out that Edgar Allan Poe wrote more than just creepy. The first story in the book was a mock newspaper article written in the spirit of speculative fiction, and another piece later in the book could only be classified as humor, a bit satiric and not in the least dark. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter" read like Sherlock Holmes. Poe's fiction was a lot more diverse than I knew.

Reading the stories made me want to know more about the man who wrote them. I read the introduction to the book (something I always intend to do with classics, but rarely get around to), and a month or two after finishing the stories I got to visit the Edgar Allan Poe memorial (and his grave site) in Baltimore, the city he claimed as his home, but I can't say I know much. Still, after reading this book I feel like I know Poe a little better than I did in high school, and better understand his place in literature and history and culture.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel

2011-07-19T21:20:00.001-06:00

This is kind of a hard book to review, because I read it for different reasons than I normally read for, and so I've been putting it off. But I'll do my best.

Now that I'm a working woman, I actually have to think more about my finances than I used to. As a graduate student, I just tried to make enough money to live, but now that I'm entering into a permanent position, I can finally start thinking about money not just from month to month, but in terms of the future. I asked my dad, who is a corporate banker, for some advice, and he recommended this book.

I'm going to admit that there was a lot in here that I didn't understand, about investing and markets. But there was also a lot that I did understand - things about human behavior, some basic principles. I tend, unfortunately, to shy away from most things financial. I mean, I'm very capable of handling my own money, staying out of debt. And with my math background, I am capable of understanding basic statistical analyses and compound interest and growth patterns. But it doesn't mean that's where my mind naturally wants to go, or that I feel an intense personal interest in finance. I just don't.

What this book did for me, then, was to give me a rudimentary understanding of what goes on in financial circles. It's more information than I probably need, but written fairly clearly, and with an eye to grand principles and wise investment. When I received my retirement plan pamphlets in my campus inbox last month, shortly after finishing the book, I read through them and felt pleased that I actually mostly understood what they were telling me - something I hadn't felt about a year ago when I first perused the BYU benefits webpage.

I have a lot more to learn. My finances have been incredibly uncomplicated thus far because I have always been a student, but now I have to be an adult and I'd prefer not to make choices blindly and hope for good outcomes. This was a nice start in that direction.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

2011-07-19T21:20:00.000-06:00

A few months ago when the organizer in chief of my book club put up a poll for the month, this was my choice. Instead the members of the book club chose a different book that was long and unwieldy and got horrible reviews on Amazon, and which I quite frankly didn't feel like reading. So I didn't. But I kept this one on my list and picked it up not long ago and read it without the motivation of a pending book club discussion.

The novel takes place in New York City in the 1970's, and revolves around the day that Philippe Petit strung a wire between the Twin Towers and walked the wire well over a thousand feet above the streets below. This was what intrigued me originally about the book, especially after watching Man on Wire a couple years ago (a movie I'd highly recommend, although I'd warn anyone afraid of heights that there are moments that may make you queasy). Petit himself is never mentioned by name in the novel, although he is given a few small sections and a voice in the story. Rather, McCann slowly weaves together several narratives of other citizens of the city. They seem unrelated at first, but slowly come together over the course of the book while maintaining their individual voices and narrative integrity.

There were a few points in the book where I felt like McCann's prose tried just a little too hard, enough to be distracting, but most of the time I was impressed with his ability to jump from one voice to another, to inhabit such different characters. Some of the ways that the characters' lives intertwined seemed as though they should have been a leap, but they didn't feel like it, at least not to me. And New York of the 1970's took on a life of its own in the book. I could see and feel and hear the characters' surroundings. I was drawn in almost from the beginning, and I enjoyed the book quite a lot.

CAVEAT: I would warn potential readers that, being New York in the 1970's, parts of the book are quite gritty. There was even a large section that I skimmed because there was language and description that I didn't care to be reading. But it never felt unnecessary or gratuitous (and I've read books where it has).

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

2011-07-19T20:46:00.000-06:00

Back in May my brother Sean accompanied me on a drive down to southern Utah so that I could help out at a small outreach conference for math teachers. He brought gear to go for a run up in the mountains while I was at my conference, and he also brought along his copy of this book. When I told my brother that I'd never read it, he told me that he'd read it about twenty times, and that he'd lend it to me the next weekend when he'd finished it (again).

True to his word, he brought the copy to our next family dinner. It's a slim volume, only 200 pages, and a fast read, so it didn't take me long to finish once I started. I wasn't reading it just because my brother loaned it to me, but also because I know that the story in this book is one that has struck a deep chord with many, many people, my brother included, and I was interesting in seeing why.

I already knew the basic synopsis. Into the Wild is an expansion of an article Krakauer wrote about Christopher McCandless who, after graduating from Emory University, cut ties with his family, hitchhiked across the United States, and eventually made his way to the Alaskan wilderness. He spent several months there living successfully off of the land, but then died of starvation before he could return.

Apparently both the original article and the book inspired strong reactions from people. Some strongly identified with McCandless's desire to escape civilization, his search for something more that he couldn't find in his sheltered suburban childhood. Some were upset that McCandless was, in a sense, being glorified for going off into the Alaskan wilderness, foolish and cocky and ill-prepared. Of course the story is complicated, and a lot of it is pieced together from secondhand accounts and sparse written notes.

I did find the story intriguing, but I don't know that it resonated deeply with me. That's not to say I didn't enjoy it, and I'm glad I read it because it does resonate with some people who mean a lot to me. I may not always be the most adept people-person, and while I have decided introverted tendencies, but I've never felt the urge to leave civilization. There are lots of ways that people seek meaning (and I'm not talking so much about religion or philosophy, because I think faith and beliefs can embrace and encompass all of these). Some people seek meaning in nature, in isolation and solitude. And some people seek meaning in much more human endeavors, like art and music and literature. There's an overlap, but while I love nature and can find peace in isolation, I tend to seek meaning in embracing culture rather than isolating myself from it. I think Into the Wild is about someone who sought meaning through isolating himself, but I think the desire to find deeper meaning, to feel more, to understand one's life is the same that most of us feel to greater or lesser degrees, and that I was able to understand.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

2011-06-03T17:14:00.000-06:00

I first heard about this story on an episode of Radiolab last year. It was a fascinating and moving episode, with Radiolab's characteristic blending of science and human narrative and philosophical inquiry, and so when I started seeing the book pop up in bookstores and reviews, I filed it away as something I thought I'd like to read eventually.

Eventually finally came last week. I've been reading a lot of book recommendations and gifts and book club books lately, and while I love getting book recommendations and gifts and being in a book club, I was feeling the need to drop it all for a moment and lose myself in something I had chosen.

And boy did I lose myself. I finished the book in less than a week, not because I had lots of time on my hands (which I kind of did once I got past the weekend), but because I haven't been this drawn into a book for a very long time.

Henrietta Lacks was a poor black woman who, in the early 1950s, was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Cells that were removed from her tumor at Johns Hopkins were found to be incredibly robust. They multiplied like no other human cells that had been seen, and produced a virtually immortal cell line, nicknamed HeLa, that has contributed to countless advances in science and medicine. But the story of the cells is only a very small part of this book. The story is about Henrietta herself, who for years remained virtually unknown while her cells gained fame and notoriety. And it's the story of her family, particularly her children, who barely knew their mother and knew nothing of what had been done to her cells. When the knowledge finally reached them, it shook them deeply, particularly her daughter Deborah who wanted more than anything to know her mother and to understand what the fame and proliferation of her mother's cells meant for her mother and for her family and for herself. The story is about the ethics of research on humans, and about it's about history and race and poverty and culture. It's fascinating and occasionally uncomfortable and heartbreaking and hopeful.

The book was absolutely enthralling. There's a point in the book where Rebecca Skloot tells of a conversation she had with Deborah in which Deborah told her that she wanted everything to be known about her family and their story, the good and the bad, and that's exactly what we get. Rebecca herself, though she is a primary character in the quest to know the family and know their story and the story of the cells, fades into the background, and paints a very honest picture with detailed prose and candid dialogue and carefully research and an incredible breadth of scope. It's sometimes borders on uncomfortable, and yet is very respectfully told.

I loved this book. I felt emotionally bound up in it almost from the first page to the last, and it's a book I feel will stay with me for a long time.

The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson

2011-06-03T17:00:00.000-06:00

I hate to admit it, but I got bogged down in these books. After finishing the first, and starting the second, I felt compelled to finish off the whole trilogy before really diving into anything else. But where the first book was engaging and entertaining, in spite of not really being my genre, the second didn't hold my interest as well, and the third was just a slog for the sake of finishing.

It's not that I hated the books. I just didn't care the way I want to care about a book. It's not that I didn't feel any investment in the characters. I did. Just not a deep investment. It's not that I didn't want to know what happened. I did. But sort of in the way that I wanted to know what happened in the last book in the Twilight series (in spite of only having ever read the first book) enough to go skim the Wikipedia entry on it. I would have been satisfied with reading the Wikipedia entry for this one too.

I know that there are an awful lot of people out there who love these books, who feel like the trilogy finishes even stronger than it starts. I think part of my feelings might be that I'm just not familiar with the genre. I read the first book as though it were a mystery, and it kind of was. So I expected that of the second and third installments, but they weren't. It was about halfway through the third book when I was feeling resentful that we knew everything - what the bad guys were doing, what the good guys were doing, and all of their motivations - that I finally realized that I was reading the book wrong. It wasn't a mystery at all, it was a crime drama. Which is even less my thing than a mystery.

So I'm putting this out there as just my opinion. I might recommend the first book as a fast, engaging summer read, and for the purpose of knowing what all the fuss is about. But you can probably pass on the other two. But I did finish.

Silas Marner by George Eliot

2011-05-23T08:02:00.000-06:00

This was a book club read, although I was out of town when they met to discuss it and didn't get to participate in the discussion. All the books so far have been great for discussion, but this is the first one since the book club started up back in November that I can say I truly enjoyed. Yes, there are a few criticisms I could offer, but it left a good taste in my mouth and I'd rather talk about that.

Silas Marner seems like a moral tale, in which wrong is punished and good is rewarded, and a quick google search on themes in Silas Marner suggests that "Is Silas Marner just a simple morality tale?" is a pretty common high school English essay question, which in turn suggests that the "right" answer is that, no, Silas Marner is not just a simple morality tale. I'd agree with that. My very first thought upon finishing the book was that everything had worked out awfully well in the end, but for all that I believe about complexity and ambiguity in life, the ending still felt right and I was very happy with it.

This thought led me in two directions. The first is that Silas Marner does have strong moral themes and the characters really do get their just rewards in the end, but it's by no means simple. The characters are not as complex as in some novels I've read, but they are not one-sided either. And Eliot tackles issues of class and industrialization and agency and community - the theme of reward and punishment is only one of many.

But the other direction that the thought led me was that the idea of "everything works out in the end" absolutely should resonate with me. It's true that I have certain limits. I've read books and stories or seen movies or TV shows where I think it all just worked out a little too conveniently. But my worldview, shaped and formed by my religious beliefs, is one where everything does work out in the end. It might be complex and messy and it might sometimes take longer than we hope or happen in unexpected ways, but ultimately I do believe that our honest and good but imperfect efforts are rewarded, and that our deliberate mistakes and unkindnesses do take their toll. I don't see any of this as simple or easy or naive. That "everything works out" ending to Silas Marner took years and years of the characters lives and there was a lot of unjustness and unhappiness along the way. Nor did the ending leave any guarantee that the future of the characters would be all roses and sunshine thereafter. But things were put right that needed to be put right, and I really, truly believe that of life.

I also think that most novels reflect some moral view. An author is creating a world, not letting a world come into creation, and has to set up implicit rules of "how things are" to decide how the story will come together. Even when the rule the author chooses is that there are no rules, that's still a reflection of a particular worldview. The implied worldview of a few stories that I read/watch/hear run counter to what I believe about the rules of the world I actually live in, but most speak to me on some level, and a few resonate so deeply that they stay with me for days or weeks or even years afterward. I don't know that Silas Marner is one that will resonate for years (like Cry the Beloved Country or Les Miserables, for instance), but it definitely resonated.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

2011-04-02T16:26:00.000-06:00

It turns out I really had no idea what this book was about when I started seeing it everywhere and made the completely uninformed decision that I just wasn't interested. And as I started seeing it not just everywhere, but everywhere else as well, I started to think that maybe I should revise my decision. But I also heard a lot of mixed reviews - mostly that there were plot inconsistencies and some clunky writing, but it was still an awfully fun read. My book snobbery kicked in and I paid attention to the first part, but not the second, until my brother and sister-in-law gave me the book (and its sequel) for my birthday, and when someone gives me a book I can't not read it anymore.

So I did. And the reviewers were right. It's not perfect. I couldn't always tell if it was the writing that felt clunky, or if it was just the translation. Some important characters were more fleshed out than others. And when Larsson starts describing character interactions with technology, I felt like I had just stepped out of the story and into an Apple commercial.

But the story pulled me in. And like I said, the story was not at all what I thought it was. I think I was imagining sort of an action-hero movie in book form, but it's not. The main character (who is not actually the titular girl with the dragon tattoo, but a middle-aged journalist) spends most of his time in a small, sort of isolated Swedish town doing research. The story is really about about an aging tycoon who hires the journalist, Mikael Blomkvist to write a family history, and to secretly investigate the 50-year-old unsolved murder of his beloved...granddaughter? niece? grandniece? I can't quite remember, because the family tree is complicated and full of Swedish names, and while I had fun imagining that I was pronouncing all the names and places and phrases in perfect Swedish, it was also a challenge to keep everything straight in my head.

In fact, for that very reason, I had a hard time getting into the book. The action doesn't really pick up until about halfway through, and the first half of the book takes a slow pace and throws out a lot of complicated background information without giving the reader much help in sorting out what's going to be important to the story later in. But it works, and there's a payoff. This is definitely an airplane novel - it doesn't require too much deep thought or analysis or concentration. But it's a good airplane novel. Favorite novel ever? Probably not. But my interest is definitely piqued enough to read the next two books.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

2011-04-02T12:48:00.002-06:00

Speaking of things that were once new becoming commonplace, Wilkie Collins opens his novel The Woman in White by basically telling the reader, “I’m about to do something no one to my knowledge has done,” and then explaining that he will jump back and forth between different characters' perspectives as he tells the story. Wilkie Collins was conducting a literary experiment that he was pretty sure no one had ever tried. Now whether or not he was actually the first, I don’t know, but that particular literary device doesn’t seem so new and daring anymore. Everyone tells stories from multiple perspectives these days. I guess I'd never really thought about the fact that this must have started somewhere. And Collins didn’t just use the device haphazardly. He very carefully crafted a way to make the telling of the story from several different perspectives natural, necessary, and integral to the plot. The main character had important reasons to collect the accounts of other involved characters, and then intersperse his own account with theirs, in the forms of letters, journals, and even one long, delightfully annoying exposition in which a sinister character takes great delight in laying out the entirety of his dastardly plan.

I don’t know that I have anything much deeper to say about the book, but I definitely enjoyed it. Collins wove a good tale, but (okay, I guess I do have something deeper to say) I think the strength of the book was the characters, who had very distinct personalities, almost to the point of being exaggerated, but not to the point of being unbelievable. Some were likeable, some were unlikeable, some where a mix of both.

In fact, the only character, major or minor, who had no well developed personality was the main love interest. This was the only thing I can actually say I disliked about the book. She was beautiful and helpless and therefore the main character fell madly in love with her, while her cousin, who was plain, but intelligent, resourceful, loyal, pragmatic, and interesting, just accepted that her lot in life was spinsterhood. I kept rooting for the main character to suddenly wake up and realize that she was a much better match for him, but alas, the thought didn’t ever seem to cross either of their minds. I liked seeing a strong female character, but I disliked seeing that she got the short end of the stick in her society.

Still, it wasn’t enough to make me dislike the book. It was a good read. I have to thank my mom for this recommendation, and for giving me the book for Christmas so that I could actually get around to reading :).

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

2011-04-02T12:15:00.000-06:00

I watched The Maltese Falcon (the movie) for the first time not that long ago, so when the book was picked for the March read of a book club I'm in, I was sort of intrigued...and sort of not. I'd actually seen the book in the downtown Ann Arbor Borders once and picked it up and flipped through it and decided that it was probably a dated, pulp-fictiony novel that was only still in print because it happened to be made into a movie that became famous.

And now that I've read it, I can say that that's kind of what it is. It reads like a dime store novel from the 1930s. The plot isn't terribly complex, the characters' motivations aren't well developed. There's mystery and snappy dialogue peppered with sex and violence and rough language (1930's style - it's pretty tame by today's standards), and while it was engaging enough that I didn't dislike reading it, it is a bit dated in style and tone. I found the movie easier to appreciate and enjoy.

I don't think it's that The Maltese Falcon is a poorly written book. I think there are a lot of interesting things in there (gender roles, the falcon as a MacGuffin, historical context, the importance of place) and our book club discussion, which covered some but not all of those, was long and interesting. But one of the things we talked about in our discussion was about how popular genres change over time, and how this book reflected that change. We talked about how themes and tropes and storytelling elements that seem trite or cliché originated somewhere, and weren't trite or cliché at the time. This book is a different read now than it was 80 years ago when it was written, and while it didn't really resonate with me, there was something historically and culturally interesting in reading it. I wouldn't go out and read more Dashiell Hammett detective novels, but it was kind of fun to read just one.

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

2011-02-13T17:04:00.000-07:00

Other than the story or two I'm sure I read in my seven years of Spanish classes, this was my first real introduction to Borges. It's a slim volume, less than 200 pages, and most of the works are 10 pages or less, but each takes some time to read and digest, and I had to pick it up a few times over the course of several months before I could finally really get into it and just read.

Ficciones is a really nice name for this collection of short works by Jorge Luis Borges, because they are not so much short stories as "fictions." In each one, Borges takes an idea and imagines it into being and then tells it, sometimes almost academically, as if it were a fact: an infinite library containing every book that could ever possibly exist, a dreamer who very systematically dreams a new man into being, a man who wishes for an extra year of life when he steps before a firing squad and is granted it when time freezes, and he along with it while remaining entirely conscious. I especially loved the final story, "The South," which I took (rightly or wrongly) as a commentary on all that had come before, and on the relationship between fiction and reality. As I've said here before, my final impression of a book is one of my strongest impressions. As for all that had come before, however, while some of the stories baffled me, and I wouldn't call most of them emotionally resonant (Borges' style is very intellectual, and that doesn't always appeal to me), they almost all fascinated me at some level. For that I enjoyed each one of them, with very few exceptions.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

2011-02-13T16:34:00.002-07:00

I just like Neil Gaiman. I think I once had the impression that he was a very dark writer, and it turned me away from picking up his books for a long time. But while it's true that even his children's books have dark themes, he is also funny, playful, and a bit absurd. In my mental categorization of books, Neil Gaiman goes with Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, but he's darker than either, and his absurdness is not quite as over-the-top.

So Neverwhere didn't blow me away, but it was a delightful read. It was the kind of read where you skim over a sentence and then laugh two seconds later because you just caught the joke - not because it was obscure but because it was written in absolute earnestness. It was also the kind of read where you are surprised to find that events that seemed written for the joke or the play on words actually factor into the plot in subtly important ways. It was a quick read, which made it nice for balancing out my foray into Borges territory.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

2011-02-05T22:10:00.000-07:00

I'm often amazed how an ending can make or break a book. I felt sort of lukewarm about Cutting for Stone for most of the read read (and it's a longish read), and as the book rolled around to the climax I still wasn't certain. But the very last chapter, the denouement (thank you 8th grad English!), really did it for me, and left me with a good, happy, satisfied feeling about the entire novel.

The novel centers on a medical clinic in Addis Ababa, which is located in Ethiopia, if you did not know this (and I'm a little embarrassed to say that I could not have told you this fact before reading the book). It begins in the 1950s, with a back story that stretches back a little further, and spans a few decades to end in the 1980s. The narrator, Marion, is one of two twin boys born to a nun who worked in the small hospital, who no one knew was pregnant until she went into labor, dying and leaving the boys to be raised by their adoptive parents, Ghosh and Hema, who are also physicians at the clinic.

The story follows Marion from his childhood with his brother Shiva, to his young adulthood as a doctor in New York, but while it might be considered a coming of age story, the story centers just as much on his parents, both his birth parents (largely absent from the narrative but important nonetheless) and his adoptive parents. In fact, even though they don't even enter the narrative until several chapters in, it is Hema and Ghosh who hold the family, the clinic, and the novel together.

The organization of the novel is interesting. A full third of the novel is devoted to the day the twins are born (although interspersed with backstory), and then the remaining two-thirds of the novel covers several decades. I thought this should feel imbalanced, and yet that first day set everything into place and the telling of the story felt absolutely necessary. Even so, my interest in the novel ebbed and flowed as I read. I was drawn in by the story of the twins' birth, but felt my interest wane at times as the story progressed beyond into the subsequent years. There were times that I felt I couldn't relate well to the narrator. There were times that the medical details were more technical than they needed to be (Verghese himself is a physician, and can be forgiven for wanting to teach his trade). There were even a few times that the story felt tedious. But there were also times when I was drawn in, or when the characters felt particularly compelling, and I found the historical details about Ethiopia in the 50's and 60's and 70's to be really interesting. I know so little about that part of the world.

So in the end, particularly after the final chapter, I didn't begrudge the 600+ pages (and it was on my Kindle, so I actually didn't even know I'd read 600+ pages until after I finished). I don't know if I would recommend it or not, but I liked it well enough that if you were inclined to read it in the first place, I'd say go ahead.

Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt

2011-02-05T22:05:00.001-07:00

I have two things to say about this book. First, the content is really, really interesting, and I think the reason it's really, really interesting is that most of us spend a lot of time on the road, and that makes it really easy to relate to. When the author talked about why roundabouts are safer than intersections, and why increased safety measures (counterintuitively) can make things more dangerous, I wanted to photocopy the chapter and send it to the designers of the Roundabout of Many Traffic Signs down the street from my apartment in Ann Arbor. When he talked about why none of us is as good a driver as we think we are, I found myself becoming a lot more vigilant on the road, and a lot more wary of other cars. When he talked about the complexities of traffic jam, I felt some consolation in understanding my recent experience of coming to a near standstill on the I-15 for twenty minutes and then speeding up to full speed without any sign of what had caused the delay. And when he talked about the difficulty of coordinating traffic lights, I felt a little more forgiving of Provo traffic planners. A little. It was a fascinating read.

The second thing I have to say about the book is that, on the level of the writing, it felt just a little clunky. It may be that I'm hyper-attuned to the organization of writing (after all, I've spent the last seven years writing and evaluating academic papers), and so maybe it wouldn't be distracting to everyone. But I felt like, while each chapter was organized around a particular topic, the information within the chapter drifted. Not from the overarching topic, but from a coherent organization within the topic. It didn't feel like Vanderbilt always knew what he was doing, just that he had a lot of cool stuff to say.

That being said, he did still have a lot of cool stuff to say, and his tone was engaging and conversational, and I'd still recommend the book. In fact, while I wouldn't say that everyone should read this book, I would say that there's information in the book that everyone who drives a car, or lives around cars (which, okay, is everyone) should know. We put our lives on the line every time we get in our car but it all feels so mundane, and it's a little unnerving how much we don't know.

The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance by Elna Baker

2011-01-13T16:17:00.000-07:00

I read this book several weeks ago, but have had a really hard time writing the review. I just deleted what was (I think) my fourth draft because, once again, it was getting too long and complicated, and I finally decided just to make it as simple as possible. Reading over the final result here, I feel like I didn't say anything substantial. But at least it's now publishable length and I can move on with my book-blogging life.

Although the title of this book sounds like something I might have stumbled across in the BYU Bookstore, I actually learned about it from Ira Glass on This American Life. This is an autobiographical book by a young single LDS woman in New York City about her experience of being a young single LDS woman in New York City. It's written for a general audience, and her religion is not incidental to the story. In fact, it's kind of the central theme. She's very candid, and if you read this book on my recommendation I have to warn you in advance that it's not Sunday School reading. There are some scandalous bits. Just so you know.

Usually I feel like I have to review a book on two levels: the literary level (was it well-written? did it have interesting themes?) and the personal enjoyment level (did I like reading it?). One of the reasons it's been so hard for me to write this review is that I feel like I have to review it on two more levels: how did I react to this book from the perspective of my own faith? And what are my thoughts about the book's portrayal of the LDS faith and community to a broader non-LDS population? But since I keep getting bogged down, I'm not even going to try to cover all the bases, although I have much to say about each aspect (particularly the last two).

Instead, I'll first state simply that I liked the book. It was a quick read (I made it over halfway through in my first sitting) and it was entertaining. Even though the author is very unlike me (she's only a little younger, but we greatly differ in personality, life experiences, and our choices in how we live our life and our faith), I could identify with her. Sometimes I was surprised how strongly I identified with her. There was a lot in this book that really resonated with me. But knowing that most of the readers of this blog haven't read the book makes it hard to explain in more detail. There were also things in the book that bothered me, and things I wasn't sure how to react to. This is also hard to explain in detail if you haven't read the book.

More than anything, though, it gave me a lot to think about. Would I recommend this book? Honestly, it would have to be on a case-by-case basis. For some people, definitely not. For others, absolutely - I'd be interested to hear what you thought and to share more of what I thought.

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

2011-01-12T18:34:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I get to the end of a book and the last two or three pages feel perfect. This is one of those books. For a book with such a wide scope, spanning generations, it was remarkable how well those final pages drew everything together, and when I closed the book I wanted to just sit there and think for a little while.

The House of the Spirits is Allende's first published, and she's gone on to write a great deal more since it was published in 1982. A few years ago I read Zorro, one of her more recent novels, which was as beautifully written and epic as House of the Spirits, but to me The House of the Spirits feels more personal.

The novel follows a single family in a South American country that is never named. (I think it's modeled on Chile, but I don't think it was necessarily meant to be Chile specifically. I could be wrong). The story follows the patriarch of the family, Esteban Trueba, but it weaves around all the members of his family enough that he is not the protagonist. Trueba himself is impassioned, violent, and stern, and Allende's treatment is both unforgiving and compassionate. That there is the strength and the heart of the book.

There's not really a story for me to summarize. We see the family through the social changes that are occurring in their nation, but the story is about the people and not the politics. There is no beginning, middle, and end; the narrative progresses in the way that life progresses. Allende incorporates elements of magical realism into her writing, and I found that the first chapter reminiscent of the writing of Gabriel García Márquez. Although it is present through the very end, the magic becomes gradually less prominent as the book progresses, and I think this transition was very deliberate, to mark the passage of time from past to present, memory and myth to modern lived experience, without ever setting one end up as less true or valid than the other.

I loved this book. There was so much to uncover in the language and writing and story and characters, and even though it took me some time to finish, I felt entranced as I read. It's certainly not an airplane book, but I would highly recommend it.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

2010-12-11T17:26:00.000-07:00

When I was young, I used to step into our hall closet, the one where my parents hung up winter coats and which was, therefore, as close to a wardrobe as I could get, and press my way to the back and wish very hard that someday when I tried this it would actually open up into Narnia, or somewhere fantastical. I think I was old enough to know that children’s fantasy novels were only that—fantasy—but I also think I was young enough to hope that I might still be wrong. It’s the same kind of hope that made me decide to briefly believe in Santa Claus again even after I’d figured out that he wasn’t real. That was a step of logic that doesn’t make sense to me as an adult, but the logic of childhood is not really the same as the logic of adulthood.

The Magicians is an interesting book because it plays on the childhood wish so many of us had that the fantastic could turn out to be real, whether it was Narnia or Harry Potter or our own made-up world, and brings that wish crashing into the adult world. The story begins when Quentin, a teenager mostly concerned with deciding which Ivy League school to attend the next year, learns that magic really does exist, and that he has the opportunity to enroll in a college for magicians. Still later (and this is a little bit of a spoiler, but one that you’d probably guess anyway if you read the first chapter of the book) he also learns that the magical land of his own childhood reading, Fillory, also exists, and eventually he finds himself there.

And yet, as you might expect from a book written solely for adults, the magic and the magical worlds that Quentin stumbles into are far darker and far more ambiguous than anything J.K. Rowling or C.S. Lewis or E. Nesbit ever dreamed up.

That right there is what I both liked and disliked about the book. I thought that Grossman did a brilliant job of creating, describing, and letting his characters run loose in a world that seemed to maintain so many elements we recognize and understand from our childhood reading, while simultaneously making this world appear real and almost unfantastical in its reality. I think what makes this book so interesting and so different is that Grossman is not trying to construct a fantasy novel for adults, he’s constructing a fantasy novel for adults who were once children who read fantasy novels for children. That’s a very different task, and I thought he was quite successful.

But like I said, that’s also what I didn’t like about the book. In some ways it was almost too adult, of the most depressing kind of adult. There was a lot of drinking and swearing and sex of the sort that one probably does find among certain groups of young adults, and I find this all sort of unfamiliar and depressing. It wasn’t really explicit or graphic, it was just kind of present in the background of the characters’ lives, and there was a corresponding sense of futility and deep unhappiness among the characters. They just weren’t really pleasant people to spend 400 pages with. The narrative and the writing were enough to draw me in—there was only a brief period somewhere in the middle when I lost the motivation to keep reading, and it only lasted a short time. But it wasn’t a book that could leave me feeling satisfied.

So that’s my mixed review. I wouldn’t not recommend this book. Like I said, I found it a really engaging read, and it was a fascinating novel. If I had disliked it, I wouldn’t have finished it. But I also have a hard time straight up recommending it. Just be forewarned.

1984 by George Orwell

2010-12-11T17:02:00.000-07:00

After Fahrenheit 451, it felt like I had to reread 1984. And in most ways, I felt like 1984 held up better. Descriptions of the novel like to claim that it's as timely as when it was written in 1949, but I don't think I quite agree with that. To me, it read very much like a book that had been written in 1949. But it also didn't feel dated. That is, whatever Orwell actually intended, it felt like it was supposed to be a reflection of the time in which it was written instead of a prediction of the future. And so even though the real 1984 (the one I lived through but which, strangely, a small handful of my readers did not) was nothing like Orwell's dystopian vision, the novel still feels more real and relevant to me than Fahrenheit 451 did.

That being said, I had forgotten how little story there actually is in 1984. The main character, Winston, actually does very little, and very little happens to him. The plot is remarkably uncomplicated, and there's not much character development. Even Winston himself isn't terribly fleshed out. He basically lives to give George Orwell a medium through which to describe the world he has imagined, and how it functions, and why it exists. The novel felt to me more like a thought experiment than a story. Orwell seemed quite eager to pull us out of the story in order to explain it all, from his lengthy academic (but linguistically interesting) appendix on Newspeak, to the long pamphlet on the history of Oceania that we readers get to read along with Winston, word for word.

I actually don't think I had realized this when I read the book back in high school. I remember being really engaged, all the way up to the end (which, spoiler alert!, is a very depressing ending). But this time around, I found myself fascinated for the first hundred pages, and then, to be perfectly honest, I got a little bored. I mean, it was still interesting. It's just that, for a novel, it was a bit didactic.

Still, it was fun to read again, and it still made me think, and I still think it's one of those books you should probably read at once in your lifetime.

I probably ought to read Brave New World now to round it all off, but I think I'm a little dystopia-ed out...

Selected Stories by Anton Chekhov

2010-11-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

In the improv class I took a couple years ago, one of our activities involved creating scenes around lines from Chekhov plays. Two people would be given some sort of theme to begin a scene and then at some unspecified point, our instructor would give a signal and we'd have to stop in the middle of our action or dialogue, pull a slip of paper from our pocket, recite the line written on that slip of paper (which we had not seen beforehand, and which was always from a Chekhov play), and figure out how to work it into the scene so that it made sense.

So, for example, you and your partner might improvising a conversation between two people standing in line at the grocery store when all of a sudden the signal sounds, and you pull a slip of paper out of your pocket and find out that your next line is: "You have found your way, you know where you're going, but I'm still drifting in a chaos of images and dreams." And suddenly you have to work that existential business into a conversation about carrots.

When our instructor first explained it to us I was dubious about using Chekhov instead of someone more contemporary, but it turned out to be one of my favorite activities. It also made me curious about Chekhov. When I was in Seattle, I stumbled across a little used bookstore where I stumbled across a book of Chekhov plays, and remembered that I was curious, and picked it up. But I don't do so well with reading plays and I never made it past page 5. Months and months later I came across a book of short stories at the BYU Bookstore and decided that this was my in.

I actually really enjoyed the stories. They're they're mostly plotless. I think we modern readers take it for granted that short stories don't necessarily have a plot, but my understanding (I may be on shaky ground here) is that Chekhov wrote at a time when stories that were more about place and character than about what happened were kind of novel. And that's what his stories are. They paint pictures of places, or of people, that are rich enough and interesting enough that you care less about what happens. It's interesting to read the stories chronologically (which is how my book was organized) and to see how he moves gradually from telling his stories as an outside observer, to really getting into the head and heart of his characters.

Chekhov isn't a total downer, but his stories aren't really happy portraits of happy people. In fact, I found some of the stories absolutely heartbreaking, particularly "The Kiss" and "Three Years." These were the stories where I think Chekhov was most adept at putting the reader into the mind and circumstances of the characters. And even in the stories that lacked the same strong empathy with the characters, I enjoyed the picture that Chekhov painted of Russia coming up on the turn of the 20th century, and how he seemed able to capture people in a wide range of life circumstances.

Overall, though I'm not much of a short story reader, I really enjoyed these stories. And I think maybe it gave me the motivation to pick up that book of plays again and give it another try.

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

2010-11-23T09:26:00.003-07:00

I already wrote a long email to a fellow Hunger Games reader with my thoughts about Mockingjay and a lot of this review is copied word for word from that email, because it just seemed too time consuming to do it all over again. Fortunately, that means it will only be a repeat for one person.

My first reaction when I finished was to think, "Wait, what was this series about?" It has the makings of a hero's journey, except it's not - Katniss doesn't really emerge as a hero, and part of the whole point of the books was to show that her apparently pivotal role was mostly orchestrated by other people, and she doesn't really rise above being the pawn she recognizes herself as (at least, not significantly). And it's not really a story about Katniss's growth and redemption because a) she doesn't have a whole lot to redeem herself from (other than being kind of selfish), and b) she doesn't even really rise above the selfishness or learn a lot from her experiences. And the series is not even about the people of Panem conquering oppression because the people's battle is always sort of in the background, and the end is kind of ambiguous on that front.

And so I had a hard time really judging the series as a whole because I had a hard time getting a handhold on what I was supposed to be judging.

That said, I didn't feel dissatisfied by the end. I felt happy that Katniss ended up with Peeta, because it felt right that she and Gale would drift apart and she and Peeta would come together. I kind of liked that they ended up back in a District 12 that was the same but different. To some extent, I liked the ambiguity of the change in governing powers because that seems true to life.

But it was pointed out to me that a lot of plot movement happened very abruptly. Collins has this way of keeping us in Katniss's world and making us feel like that's where the important stuff is happening, and then suddenly jerking Katniss (and therefore us) out of whatever Katniss is doing and telling us what's been going on in the meantime, implying that the story has been going on elsewhere, but that we haven't really been privy to it. The first time I really noticed this, at the very end of Catching Fire, I thought it was kind of an interesting storytelling device, used to emphasize that Katniss really is a pawn being (unfairly) kept in the dark. But then when it kept happening in some way or another in Mockingjay, it just started to feel like Suzanne Collins was being unfair to the reader by constantly leading us to believe that story was one thing when it was actually something different.

Other things were also abrupt. This includes the resolution with Snow, for all the buildup it got. And the shooting of Coin, though it was not surprising. (I also couldn't quite figure out Katniss's motivation for this one, and in fact by the end of the book it felt like her motivation for everything was just that she was tired and grumpy.) And Prim's death, which didn't have the emotional resonance I would have wanted it to have.

Mockingjay seems to get much more mixed reviews than either of the two preceding books. Within just the last couple weeks, I've had a conversation with someone who didn't just dislike it but hated it, and with someone who absolutely loved it and thought it was the perfect end to the trilogy. I feel like I land somewhere in the middle. I didn't love it, but I also didn't hate it. Actually, when I closed the book after the last page, I felt pretty content, but I also felt the need to keep mulling it over (whether you like or dislike a book, the need to keep thinking about it generally means something good). It was in mulling it over that I was able to articulate my qualms, but they are not enough to make me dislike the series as a whole or to keep me from recommending it.

For those of you who read it already, what did you think? I'm really interested in knowing, whether or not you agree with me.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

2010-11-10T20:31:00.000-07:00

Catching Fire is very definitely a middle-of-a-trilogy book. Hunger Games could stand alone, but Catching Fire is meant to lead into the final book, and that makes it a little difficult to review. Still, I wanted to write the review before I got too deep into Mockingjay because I wanted to review it for itself, even if the review is short.

I actually liked Catching Fire better than I liked Hunger Games. I didn't expect this, partly because long before I even considered reading Hunger Games a friend of mine blogged about how she loved Hunger Games but really didn't care much at all for Catching Fire. But when I read it myself, I liked that the characters were more fleshed out, that world itself took on more character, and that the stakes were bigger.

And although it took some time for me to process the end (if you've read the book you might understand why), once I did process it, I liked what it said about Katniss and her role in the events leading up to it and her perception of her role in the events. It shifted my perspective a little, and I liked that it shifted my perspective. It made the story feel more complex.

All in all I thought it was well-written, well-crafted, and interesting, and now I feel like I can jump on board with the Hunger Games trilogy.

Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie

2010-11-10T20:28:00.000-07:00

I picked up this book at some used bookstore or other awhile ago out of curiosity, and when I finally got around to reading it, I felt like I'd been missing out on something my whole childhood. My exposure to Peter Pan is all through its later cultural incarnations - the Disney movie (and Disneyland ride), Hook, Finding Neverland, and so reading the book inevitably called to mind images from all these sources, but also made me appreciate them anew.*

But I also fell in love with the story itself, and with the telling of the story. I thought the book was rich and nostalgic and wise and innocent, and even funny. I really loved it. It turns out that children's stories told for the kids on one level, and the parents on another, are not a new phenomenon. Peter Pan is definitely written for children, but it's also very definitely written by an adult looking back on childhood, and as I read I felt like maybe I didn't actually miss out in childhood, because it is a book best appreciated by people who have already been children and are no longer. That felt very appropriate to Peter Pan.

* I know a lot of people don't like Hook, but it's a late-childhood favorite of mine, and reading Peter Pan just made me like it more for its surprisingly faithful interpretation of the story and setting.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

2010-11-09T18:14:00.000-07:00

I have to confess: I didn't want to like this book. I read it for a book club, and it just felt too book clubby to me. Amazon has 2,726 reviews posted (and counting). If you carry the book around in public, you're guaranteed to be stopped by another woman who has recently read and loved the book, or who has heard from all her friends that she should read this book. Naturally, the contrarian in me wanted very much not to like it.

But I did. I found it really engaging, and very evocative of a time and place that is far removed from my own experience, and yet not so far removed from the culture and history that ground my experience. I would come home every evening and look at the book and want to pick it up and read it. I'd be willing to recommend the book to other people.

The Help is set in the 1960s and revolves around the project of a recent female college graduate, Skeeter (it's a nickname) to record and write the life stories of the Black maids who work for her own family and the families of her friends. The novel is told in three voices: Skeeter's, and the voices of two of the maids, Aibileen and Minny, and touches on themes ranging from personal relationships to racial tension. I kept waiting for it to turn heavy-handed or one-sided, but for the most part the characters and their relationships with each other remained complex and interesting, and I quite enjoyed the read.

That said, the contrarian in me still found things to take issue with. At least one of the important characters was, I though, too much of a caricature, and became more so instead of less as time went on. And I never completely got over the book-clubby feel of the book, although that's a little harder for me to define or explain. Still, no book is perfect, and none of that got in the way of what was just a really good read. Sometimes when everyone and their mother loves a book, it's because there really is something to like about it.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

2010-11-09T17:54:00.004-07:00

Not long ago I had a conversation with the owner of a used bookstore about re-reading the books you read in high school. I said that I had read a few recently and found that I enjoyed and appreciated them more, and he replied that there were also some books that don't hold up as well. "Like Catcher in the Rye," he said (although I've never read that book, so I can't confirm his assertion).

I hate to say it, but Fahrenheit 451 is one of those books for me. I remember quite liking it in 9th grade English, but I haven't been dying to pick it back up again. Still, when a friend started a book club with the purpose of revisiting classics, and when the first book was announced, I didn't mind the idea of reading it again now that I'm twice the age I was when I read it before.

Unfortunately, I think I appreciated it more as a 14-year-old. I felt like the book said nothing new to me, even with another decade and a half of life experience under my belt, and in fact maybe it said less. It felt more dated and more improbable, and I was overwhelmed by Bradbury's excessive use of metaphor and simile (and the fact that it brought out a little junior high/high school voice in my head saying, "that's metaphor, and that's simile). It felt like the kind of flowery almost-stream-of-consciousness language that you're drawn to as a teenager when you first start feeling like you want to break free of convention, and then get over once you get to college.

I'm sorry if you really like this book. It may just be me. It may just be that it's that this is the kind of thing I liked to try to write when I was 15 - flowery, hopeful-depressing dystopia stories. Fahrenheit 451 is certainly better-executed than anything I wrote at 15, but it's still a remnant of my teenage years, and I've moved past that, and I don't care to return. To me, it just didn't stand the test of time in terms of style, or narrative, or social implications.

But at least it was short, so nothing lost, right?

The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

2010-10-21T20:49:00.003-06:00

One of the downsides of keeping a book blog is that occasionally I have to write a review for a book that was given to me as a gift, but that I just didn't enjoy as much as I think the giver did.

So I'll start off by saying that I didn't dislike this book. It won several awards (as you can tell from the book image) and it's a novel idea. Mat, the main character, is the clone of El Patron, the dictator of a small country called Opium lying between the United States and Mexico in a dystopic future. That in and of itself immediately introduces a number interesting themes about identity, and that's the books' strength...

...except that I don't think these themes were really explored to the extent they could have been. Instead the novel became a story about escape and rebellion and change. Glimmers of a typical dystopia novel...

...except that it felt like the novel didn't know that's what it wanted to be from the beginning, and so the climax and resolution to the dystopia story came almost like an afterthought. And the world itself was hard for me to buy into. A lot of dystopia novels don't fully explain how the world became what it is, even if they allude to it. While that often leaves the reader wanting to know more, it's probably a good strategy. Best to keep some mystery and some distance from real life, for the sake of believability. Here, Nancy Farmer explains it all. The explanation is part of the plot, in fact - Mat acquires a written history of the nation of Opium and we read bits and pieces of it along with him. It's set up as though it were a plausible future, but to me it just didn't feel plausible. (Also, I found the world rather depressing. I mean, I guess that's how dystopias are supposed to be, but this was a particularly depressing dystopia.)

Okay, here's another problem with writing book reviews. When the balance tips even slightly in favor of my liking the book, I feel like what I want to do is articulate why, and so I just end up talking about the good things. When the balance tips slightly in favor of my not liking the books, I also want to articulate why, because there obviously must have been something, even if I don't see it immediately. But then the review comes off as overly negative. So I don't mean this to be a scathing review, but I do have to be honest and say that as far as YA fiction goes, there have simply been many books that I've liked better.

(And in spite of my feeling that I'm just not all that in to YA fiction right now, I also seem not to be able to break my streak right now - stay tuned in a few weeks for when I finish Catching Fire. Which means I will probably then have to read Mockingjay. I'm a little behind the bandwagon on this one.)

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

2010-10-21T20:22:00.003-06:00

I haven't read much Charles Dickens. I read Great Expectations in high school, of course, and I read A Tale of Two Cities during a summer temp job that involved hours and hours of sitting at a desk and occasionally delivering a fax from the fax machine or signing for a UPS delivery.

But I feel like not reading Charles Dickens leaves a big hole in my cultural literacy, and so awhile back I paused by the Charles Dickens section of Barnes and Noble, and then on a whim I picked up Bleak House (why that one, I'm really not sure), and then put off reading it because it was 890 pages long and I knew that after picking it up I wouldn't be reading much else for awhile.

I finally started, and then finally finished, all 890 pages, and I really enjoyed it. I think I had this idea in my head that Charles Dickens novels were all about exaggerated characters and the social ills of 19th century London, and Bleak House doesn't fail on that score. But I also found a very real and sympathetic portrayal of individuals. I found the characters (even the exaggerated ones) to be believable and complicated, and even when it was clear that Mr. Dickens was very purposefully twisting our heartstrings, I felt willing to go along with it and let my heartstrings be twisted.

I have a hard time saying what the plot is. In fact, for the entire first half of the book (and keep in mind that half of the book is almost 450 pages) I had no idea that there was a plot. I felt like Bleak House must just be about introducing a whole lot of interesting characters with intertwined lives for the sake of introducing a whole lot of interesting characters with intertwined lives. Obviously these characters were engaging enough to keep me reading for 450 pages, but I hoped that something more was going to come up. And then it did. By the end all of the characters and their stories (except for one small subset comprising a family who, as far as I can tell, appeared in the novel as little more than a social statement and some slight comic relief, but I liked them, and I didn't begrudge them being there) came together slowly and satisfyingly.

Bleak House is a very 19th century novel - the happiness of the happy endings and the tragedy of the tragic endings are all a little too tidy for real life, but the characters and their stories are real enough, and if storytelling always reflected life perfectly, and if fiction didn't somehow still reflect something about real life, we wouldn't tell so many stories.

I liked Bleak House. I would read another Dickens book, though given the length it might be a little while yet :).

Thunderstruck by Erik Larson

2010-09-27T21:00:00.000-06:00

The obvious comparison here is to The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson's nonfiction bestseller from several years ago. In that book, Larson tells two stories in parallel: the story of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and the story of H. H. Holmes, a serial killer who took advantage of the fair to stage many of his killings. I found the book fascinating and engrossing, and I thought that the account of the creation of the World Fair was every bit as interesting as the real-life murder story told simultaneously.

I was slow to pick up Thunderstruck because I knew ahead of time that Larson had essentially recycled the successful formula of The Devil in the White City. This time, the two stories told in parallel were the tale of Marconi's invention of wireless telegraphy, and the tale of a man who was captured for the murder of his wife because of the new technology. From everything I had heard, the connection was more of a stretch, and the stories didn't weave together nearly as well as in the first book.

Still, I enjoyed The Devil in the White City enough that I finally decided I couldn't not give Thunderstruck a try. And I was pleasantly surprised. Although Larson followed the same formula, it didn't feel like he was trying to pull off the same trick twice. It was just a formula that worked really well to tell the kind of story he wanted to tell.

First, my criticisms. It took me much longer to get into Thunderstruck. For the first half of the book, I didn't find either story line as interesting as the two story lines in Devil in the White City. The story of Dr. Crippen's marriage was tedious, and the story of the invention of wireless was confusing (no one really understood how it worked as it was invented, and Larson didn't bother to try to help the reader understand) and suffered from an unlikeable protagonist. While I found myself rooting for the architect Daniel Burnham as he sought to bring the World's Fair to Chicago, it was hard to really care that Marconi achieved success before any other inventor, or that he earned his due credit.

And there was no obvious connection to the two stories.

And so about halfway through the novel, being committed but wanting to free myself up for something else, I decided to dig in and push through the rest as quickly as possible. And right about then, I finally got caught up in the stories. I still expected that they wouldn't come together nicely in the end (based on reviews I'd read), but I was finding them both interesting in and of themselves. The book became a page-turner. And when the two stories finally did intersect, in two or three short chapters that served as the climax of the entire book, I was struck by how momentous and important and relevant that brief intersection actually was. Suddenly, to me, the book seemed to have been about something entirely different than what I was expecting.

Would I recommend this book? If you have any interest at all and haven't yet read The Devil in the White City, I'd recommend that one first. Then, if you really enjoy that book, sure, pick up Thunderstruck. It's sort of fun to get absorbed in an era, and I think that's what I liked about both of the books. Just be prepared to do a little work to get absorbed with this one.

The Likeness by Tana French

2010-09-27T20:37:00.005-06:00

I had just finished In the Woods when I went to the bookstore with my parents, which sometimes means I walk out of the bookstore with a free (to me) book (I love having parents who are just as tempted by bookstores as I am). The Likeness caught my eye this time because I had enjoyed Into the Woods enough (with some caveats that I already wrote about in my review) to be intrigued, but probably wouldn't have bought the book on my own for awhile.

I actually enjoyed The Likeness more than In the Woods, at least in some ways. I thought the plot was stronger, and Tana French didn't try to pull off that thing she did in her first novel that I won't say for fear of giving spoilers. That was a good thing. I thought the story was engaging, the mystery was intriguing, and the end was satisfying.

The story follows one of the characters from In the Woods, Cassie, some time after the first novel has ended. We already know that Cassie has a history as an undercover detective, and in The Likeness, she finds herself drawn back into that world when a young woman, almost identical to herself, and bearing ID with the name of her former undercover identity, is found murdered outside of a small town near Dublin. Before the death becomes public, Cassie takes on the young woman's (or the young woman's assumed identity) and integrates herself into her life in the hopes of both discovering her killer and discovering who she really is. It's an intriguing idea for a mystery, an idea that stretches credulity a little, but I think Tana French pulled it off fairly well.

Still, it didn't really make me want to continue to read the novels Tana French seems now to be churning out at the pace of a proper mystery novelist. The problem, for me, was the characters. One of the things that drew me into In the Woods was the depth of the characters and the emotional attachments between them. It felt very real to me, very humanly complex. But in The Likeness, that same depth of character and emotional attachment felt overdone. In the Woods, I realized, was an exploration of intense friendship, the likes of which I have never experienced myself, and when the same exploration of equally intense friendship permeated The Likeness, and involved one of the very same characters, it stretched my credulity even more than the story. People, I think, are not like that. Either that, or my own friendships are woefully shallow and inadequate. (They don't feel that way to me.)

So overall I did enjoy the read. I wouldn't not recommend it, especially if you like mysteries. But I just wasn't totally sold.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

2010-09-03T11:22:00.004-06:00

Everyone was talking about this book, so I guess I had to break down and read it eventually.

For those of you who have missed the hype, The Hunger Games (and the rest of the trilogy, the final installment of which just came out and has been popping up all over my Facebook newsfeed) are about the biggest thing in YA lit since (sorry male Hunger Games fans) Twilight. The Hunger Games takes place in a dystopian North American civilization some unspecified time in the future. As punishment for a past uprising, the ruling city forces its twelve outlying districts to send two teenagers each year, chosen by lottery, to compete in an elaborately constructed fight to the death, which is then broadcast to the districts who are forced to watch. Katniss, the narrator, volunteers herself to take the place of her younger sister, and the story follows Katniss through to her victory (I didn't give anything away - you know from the beginning that she's going to come out alive).

My reaction?

First, it was definitely the engaging, easy read that I needed to counterbalance Heart of Darkness and Bleak House (commensurate with the page count, that review is going to be a long time coming...). It didn't lose my interest, even though people wandering around in the wilderness has never really been my thing. It helped that the wandering-in-the-wilderness was embedded in, constructed by, and overshadowed by* civilization.

Second, it was definitely a YA dystopia novel, which means that if you like that sort of thing you'll probably like this book, and if you don't, you probably won't. These days I bounce back and forth between like and indifference, but I thought this particular book was well-constructed and interesting, and that the characters were well fleshed out.

But third, while I enjoyed the read, there was something that rubbed me wrong throughout the whole book about the premise of children being forced to fight to kill. I knew about this premise ahead of time, and I have to admit that I found it less gruesome and gritty and more thoughtfully treated than I expected. It's neither overly dark nor unnecessarily violent, and all of the characters (all of them) received sympathetic treatment. I liked that. But the premise still made me uneasy, and in retrospect I think it's because it should have felt more horrible than it did.

Will I read the rest of the trilogy? Probably. Eventually. They're quick reads, and I'm interested enough to find out where it goes (though I've heard mixed reviews about Mockingjay). Would I recommend the book? Yes, but only if YA fiction is up your alley. If it is, it's worth reading, at the very least to find out what everyone's talking about.

* It sounds so awkward to use the same preposition twice, but "overshadowed over" sounded at least ten times more awkward.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

2010-09-03T09:15:00.000-06:00

I hated this book in high school. Which seems like an odd reason to return to it a dozen-odd years later, but it really is because I hated it that I felt the need to go back. Especially since I'm in kind of a revisiting-high-school-literature phase at the moment.

Plus, it's short. Which meant up front that even if I hated it again, I would still probably be able to plow my way through. Except that I was pretty sure I wasn't going to hate it. When I read this book in high school I lost the storyline almost immediately, and since it was a school assignment and I was busy with other things I had almost no motivation to go back and try to pick it up. So I ended up wading through the 80 or so pages without a clue what was going on, and by the end I was driven to skimming, which certainly didn't help. Since then, I have taken as a given that Heart of Darkness is a completely incomprehensible work of fiction.

And I know that's not the case, and that's why I was pretty sure that if I gave it a fair chance I wouldn't hate it anymore. What surprised me was how much I liked it. It did take concentration, but every time I realized that I hadn't caught the drift of a sentence or two, I made myself go back and refocus. And even then, there are still bits and pieces that I know I didn't quite get. But because I had to really immerse myself in the book, I felt sort of transported.

It's hard to do a plot synopsis for Heart of Darkness. It's a journey into the jungle, via river, in search of an ivory trader named Kurtz. But the story is more psychological than anything, about how a place acts on people and how people act in consequence of being in a place. I found it sort of fascinating.

I got my copy of the book at a used bookstore in Ann Arbor, and when the owner struck up conversation and I explained why I was getting Heart of Darkness, he said, "Some books age well." He didn't mean that the book itself stands the test of time, but rather that there are some books that some books do better as we ourselves age. Heart of Darkness, he said, was one of them. I agree. In fact, I suspect that most of the books from my high school days would age well. As I grow older, I just see and interpret the world differently, and it affects the way I read.

Everlost by Neal Shusterman

2010-08-27T21:35:00.004-06:00

I haven't been reading much young adult lit recently, and I've never been much of a fantasy person (with some exceptions). But I've kind of always had a waxing/waning affinity for YA fantasy. I love it when an author can create an entirely new world, a world that is entirely different from the reality I know and yet makes such perfect sense that it seems like it ought to exist. When I was little, I wanted to be able to step through the back of our coat closet into Narnia so much that it was almost painful, and even though I no longer feel a longing for the books to become reality, I still love watching an author create an entire world.

The world of Everlost is not the kind of world you'd like to find on the other side of your coat closet. It's a space between life and death, populated by children (no adults) who haven't quite crossed over and find themselves in a shadowy reality that coexists with the world itself. They are basically ghosts, unable to interact with, or even walk around, the living world that surrounds them, except for the bright, solid places that have, for various reasons, passed into the in-between world: long-dead forests that once inspired poets, for instance, or the two bright, solid towers that still stand in the New York City of Everlost.

Nick and Allie are two young teenagers who are thrust into Everlost when they fail to survive a head-on car accident, and the story follows their two, interconnected journeys. The book is intended to be the first of a trilogy, but is a strong first installment in that it can stand entirely on its own. It lays out the world and its rules, introduces complex characters, and takes surprising turns. Children's and YA novels have become much more morally ambiguous than they once were (and as a consequence, much more believable), and Shusterman handles the motivations of his characters particularly well. His characters learn and grow and find themselves at odds with each other and make poor decisions for good reasons, and good decisions as well.

My sister and I read Everlost aloud in the car on our cross-country road trip. It was a perfect road trip book, and I think we both really enjoyed it. It was creative and interesting and well-crafted. I liked how the book ended, and didn't feel the need to complete the trilogy, though I wouldn't be opposed to doing so if I ever get around to it.

Collected Novellas by Gabriel García Márquez

2010-08-27T21:22:00.005-06:00

I read 100 Years of Solitude several years ago. I think I understood something like 57% of what was going on over the course of the 448 pages and I was fascinated by it and I couldn't put it down and it was one of the best books I had ever read.

When I read a really good book, I usually want to seek out something else the author has written. But when I read something really transformative, I hesitate. I feel like it might disturb waters that I don't want disturbed. So it took me a long time to get back to Gabriel García Márquez, and the length of time it took was kind of on purpose. In the end, it was a Christmas gift from my brother that did it, a paperback of three novellas: "Leaf Storm," "No One Writes to the Colonel," and "Chronicle of a Death Foretold."

To say I'm glad to have gotten back to Gabriel García Márquez, and that these waters were worth disturbing, is an understatement. I think what I love about all three of these novels, and what I loved about 100 Years of Solitude, is that the storytelling is unconventional, but doesn't call attention to the unconventionality. In fact, Gabriel García Márquez's style is almost journalistic, straightforward and literal about things that are not at all literal. At the same time, the language is rich and descriptive, but rich and descriptive in a way that makes you feel like he's not really trying all that hard to be rich and descriptive.

The stories are interesting and beautifully told and unfold so gradually that you don't really know what the story is about until you reach the end. When I finished these stories, I wanted so much to talk about them afterward because there was just so much in them. Sometimes I wish books weren't such a solitary endeavor...

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

2010-07-28T19:55:00.004-06:00

A Passage to India is one of the most interesting books I have read. It takes place in colonial India, and what fascinated me about the book was how Forster mingles different perspectives. There is not really one central character - instead the story centers on several whose lives and paths converge and diverge around a single event, a trip to the Marabar Caves, which happens about halfway through the book. There is Miss Quested, who has recently come from England to India for the purpose of feeling out the possibility of marriage to Ronnie, a British official. There is her travel companion, Ronnie's mother, Mrs. Moore. There is Mr. Fielding, a schoolteacher who has made more of an effort to comingle with the Indian natives than most of his fellow countrymen. And there is Dr. Aziz, a young Muslim physician, whose idea it is to take Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore to the Marabar Caves.

It is the incident at the caves that drives the story, both before and after, but the book is a character study more than anything. What makes it such an interesting character story is the ambiguity. No one is particularly likable, nor unlikable for that matter.* Nor is it really easy to entirely understand the characters' motivations. In real life, people are complex and confusing and prone to misunderstanding and miscommunication, and Forster brings this complexity into the story, along with the addition of cultural differences.

In fact, it was the cultural differences that really fascinated me. Many characters acted and thought in ways that should not have entirely make sense to me, and yet they were written in such a way that I could understand them even where I could not relate to them. It made me wonder about Forster himself, who as an Englishman could not possibly have written with the perspective of an Indian. Was he particularly astute, or is he simply able to sound particularly astute? Does he really have great insight into the culture he was writing about, or does it just ring true to people like me who are far removed from that culture? There's no way of really knowing, I guess, but it made me think.

Overall, I liked the book. It was not as clear and straightforward as, say, The Great Gatsby, but it was descriptive and complex and interesting. It had slow and beautifully written passages, and fast-paced and engaging passages, and it was a very satisfying read.

*At least among the central characters. Many of the British colonists are quite unlikable, and I think the weakness of the book is that in being sympathetic to the people of India, Forster is sometimes overly unsympathetic to the British. Although I know that this book was, in some ways, an indictment of the British colonial society, it sometimes comes across as too harsh.

In the Woods by Tana French

2010-07-28T19:55:00.003-06:00

It's hard to write about this one for people who haven't read it, because the thing that left me most dissatisfied at the end is something I can't reveal up front. I mean, it's a mystery novel. I can't give away the end of a mystery novel.

First, the good. Several people have actually asked me what I thought of this book, and I never know how to answer, but what I will say is that I did enjoy it. I wouldn't not recommend it to someone who already had their eye on the book. I thought it was well-written, and felt realistic, and had me engaged from beginning to end. The story is about Rob Ryan who, as a child, disappeared with two of his friends, and was later found in the woods under mysterious and slightly gruesome circumstances, with no trace of his friends and no memory of what had happened. The book picks up years later. He has managed to disconnect himself from his childhood and is now working as a detective, when the body of a girl is found in the same woods. His own history and the current case intermingle as he and his partner, Cassie Maddox, work to solve the new murder and seek a possible connection to his childhood. It was a good summer take-my-mind-off-my-dissertation book, and a good airport read.*

That said, I also think the novel had unfulfilled potential. I understand the author's intent now that I've finished, but I just don't think she was capable (yet?) of effectively pulling it off. There are some scathing reader reviews on Amazon, among lots of glowing reviews (don't read these if you plan on reading this book), but while I wasn't as enamored with the book as many readers, my dissatisfaction also didn't turn me away completely as it did some. I enjoyed the ride and have actually picked up the next book. This was Tana French's first published novel, and after reading it I think I can expect better from her, so I'm willing to try.

* Which is where I picked it up in the first place, greatly discounted at a Powell's shop in the Portland airport - I couldn't pass it up because of the discount, and because it was at Powell's, the one place I was most disappointed not to have visited during my short stay.

The Great Gatsby

2010-06-09T09:45:00.000-06:00

I've read The Great Gatsby before, way back in high school, but reading it as an adult was a completely different experience. It felt at once familiar and new - I remembered the giant billboard eyes and Gatsby's extravagant parties and the geography of West Egg and East Egg. But there was much about the story and the characters that felt as though I were encountering them for the first time. And much of that newness was not an "I've read this but it's been a long time" newness. Rather, it was an "I'm pretty sure I've never read this before."

Now, it's possible that there were whole passages of the book that I had not actually read before. I was a good student, and the book was short, but even I occasionally forgot to finish my reading, or skimmed because I had a big biology assignment, or got my dates mixed up, and good high school students learn to get around that sort of thing and still get A's on assignments. Still, whether or not I skimmed or skipped parts of the book on the first go-around, I had the distinct impression on this second go-around that there were things in the book that I just related to much differently with another 13 years of life experience under my belt. And I loved it.

I've been trying to think how to explain what it was that mesmerized me about The Great Gatsby. Books draw me in for different reasons - they are beautifully written, they tell a compelling story, they have characters I can relate to unusually well. None of those really stand out to me as being true of The Great Gatsby. What stands out to me is that it is all so simple. It was candid and straightforward. There wasn't a lot of background information or flowery description, and yet Fitzgerald still managed to evoke time and place and character so well and effortlessly that I couldn't help but immerse myself. Maybe part of this was because it was so simple. I could just be there, without distraction.

There are many things that I liked about the novel, but one of the things I liked most was the narrator, Nick Carraway (though he is seldom actually named). I liked him as a person from his first description of himself, but I liked him still more as a plot device. On the surface, Nick plays no immediately necessary role in the drama, centered on his neighbor Gatsby, that is unfolding around him. And yet he is absolutely crucial to the story. The entire novel rests on the existence of a peripherally involved and partially detached narrator with compelling reasons to be involved in the "action," whose choices don't actually affect the action itself - and one has the sense at the end that it could not possibly have been told, meaningfully, in any other way.

In the end, I found The Great Gatsby deeply sad in a way that I don't remember feeling entirely as a teenager. I had forgotten before the final chapter that Gatsby is a tragedy, and in the final pages the tragedy of the novel felt very real and very sad.

I never made it to the book club meeting that I read this book for (dissertation deadlines got in the way), but I'm glad I had the chance to return to this high school novel anyway. I don't do that very often, and I think that by assuming that I have already experienced a book because I read and discussed it as a fifteen-year-old high school student, I am missing out. There really is something to be said for your perspective changing as you grow older. Maybe I should pick this one up again in another twenty or thirty years.

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

2010-03-21T08:30:00.000-06:00

I would not have expected a dystopia novel from Jasper Fforde. His previous books have all been mostly-fantastical off-kilter police dramas with literary undertones and overtones, set in present-day worlds that are just like ours, except very decidedly not. He does this really well, and I think his books are some of the most fun and clever books I have ever read.

But after reading Shades of Grey, I think Jasper Fforde was exactly the author to do something fresh and different and interesting with what I think can be a tired genre. The distant future of Fforde's novel is as delightfully off-kilter as the present worlds of the Thursday Next or Nursery Crimes novels, but everything feels weightier. In this novel, the fate of the world is at stake, not just the fate of the next-door neighbors. Except the world also includes the next-door neighbors, and we care about them, too.

Like most dystopia novels, however, the main character (in this case 20-year-old Eddie Russett) does not think much about the fate of the world in the beginning. He is more concerned with getting through the Chair Census he has been assigned to conduct in East Carmine, a town on the outskirts of society, as retribution for pulling the "elephant prank" on a friend back home. Once finished, he can return to his life in Jade-Under-Lime and marry into the prestigious Oxblood family. There's nothing overtly sinister at the outset, other than an awful lot of rules (ranging from dress codes to a strange ban on spoon manufacture) and a dismaying shortage of loganberry jam.

The society Eddie is a part of is a "colortocracy," in which one's social standing is based entirely upon one's perception of color. No one in this society can see the full color spectrum. Eddie has a very strong perception of red, and if he can marry into a purple line that has begun fading to the blue end of the spectrum he can bump himself up in the world. But when he meets Jane, a Grey with limited color perception, but with a proclivity to question what others take for granted, his perceptions and priorities begin to change and pave the way for...well, I don't know what. Apparently there are two more novels to come.

Shades of Grey is very clearly setting up a story rather than finishing one, but I didn't feel at all dissatisfied at the end. Like all of Fforde's books, most of the payoff comes from the journey itself, from exploring the world he has created. Fforde likes to tell his stories quite matter-of-factly, as though you actually understand his premise to begin with. It can leave you feeling bewildered, but it also draws you in. You want to understand what's going, and Fforde never really tells you. You just spend so much time in his world that you eventually come to feel like you're a part of it.

I'm anxious for the next installment. I think Fforde stretched himself by going outside his normal genre, and in my opinion the result is one of his strongest efforts yet. If you have read Jasper Fforde or if you have not, I highly recommend giving this one a try. It's funny, immensely clever, and compelling all at once.

The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

2010-03-21T07:23:00.004-06:00

The House of the Seven Gables was a hard one for me to get through, but I didn't dislike it. It's just very densely written and the drama is more of the psychological sort, so it takes the kind of concentration that I don't always have at ten o'clock at night when I'm winding down for bed with a book.

I can't even remember why I picked this one up. I think I saw it in the bookstore, and realized that I haven't really visited 19th century American literature since high school, and remembered liking The Scarlet Letter better than Moby Dick, and thought that since I had actually seen the real-life inspiration for the seven-gabled mansion on a visit to New England I ought to finally read the book. It took me awhile to get through, and subsequently put a lot of other reading on hold, and although I wouldn't necessarily add it to my favorites I enjoyed it well enough and am glad I read it.

As the title would suggest, the story is about the house, and about the ghosts that have been haunting the house and its resident family, the Pyncheons, for almost two hundred years. There is not much in the way of page-turning plot. Rather, the book is about how the last remaining members of the dwindling family each deal with these ghosts and how the family's past haunts each individual's present.

The ghosts are only figurative, and to me one of the most interesting things about the book was Hawthorne's treatment of the supernatural. I once had the impression that The House of the Seven Gables was a ghost story, but it is not. Hawthorne never even tries to let the reader believe that events mysterious or portentous have anything other than natural origins. But at the same time, he does not discredit the supernatural. The meaning ascribed to strange circumstances is very real and nontrivial to the characters who might ascribe meaning.

For example, at one point in the story the strains of a piano from somewhere in the house hark back to a tragic figure in the family's past, one Alice Pyncheon. Could it be the ghost of Alice, returned to her music? wonders Hawthorne for the reader's sake, before he assures us that the abrupt end to the music is unlike what we would have heard from Alice when she was living. This music could only come from Clifford, one of the house's living residents. Still, the allusion to Alice tells us something about the weight of the stories of prior generations on the stories that are playing out now. And the juxtaposition between Alice and Clifford shows the tragedy of Clifford's own life in a way that a simple description would not.

This novel is no Tess of the D'Urbervilles. There is sadness and there is tragedy, but there is also an undercurrent of hope that will pay off for the patient reader in the end. Hawthorne's character development and psychological analyses are a reflection of an era, and some of them did not resonate with me the way they may have with readers in the mid-18th century. But the characters nevertheless felt very real, and I cared about them. The language sounded a little pretentious for modern ears, but Hawthorne wrote the book over a century and a half ago and I was willing to let him get away with it. In fact, when I was able to give my full concentration to the text, I really enjoyed his use of words that I rarely see in context, and even a few that were completely new to me (eleemosynary anyone?).

I have no problem taking issue with classics. But while this one was kind of a slog for me to get through, the more I think about it, the more I like it. Would I recommend it? I'm not sure. You have to really be in the right mood. But it was definitely an interesting read, and I think a worthwhile one.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

2010-01-24T20:05:00.000-07:00

My aunt saw me reading this when I was in Utah for my brother's wedding a couple weeks ago and she said, "Oh, you're reading Jane Eyre again?" She was a bit surprised when I admitted that I had never read it. This is one of those books that almost any girl who loves reading has read fairly early in her reading career. But about the time I should have been falling in love with the Bronte sisters and Jane Austin, I was going through a dark Russian literature phase, and I missed out.

But I've had Jane Eyre on my shelf for awhile, and when I was trying to see if I could enjoy Jane Austin earlier this year, and engaging in a little bit of Anglophilia in preparation for my trip to the UK, I thought I'd give Jane Eyre a try. Seven months later I remembered what I had started, and decided to make an effort to finish.

I have to admit, I had a hard time getting into the book. For the first 100 pages I felt like I was making my way through by sheer force of will for the 100 pages. It was a little too English-romantic for me, with schoolgirls dying of consumption and all that, and I couldn't see where any of it was going. But once Jane left her boarding school, I got sucked in and was no longer just trying to get through it. When I put down the book each night, I looked forward to the next time I'd be able to pick it up.

One thing I like about reading classics is that I can let down my critical guard a bit, and read some of the things that seem strange or unwieldy as a product of the time period. My critical eye is not completely dormant (like I said, schoolgirls dying of consumption didn't do it for me), but I was able to overlook a lot of the flowery language and overly dramatic elements of the book and just enjoy the story. In the end, I found that I loved the middle section, but didn't care much for 50-100 pages at the front and back ends (schoolgirls dying of consumption was counterbalanced by fires and blindness and uncanny fortuitous coincidences). That wasn't enough to turn me away. I came away with an overall positive impression.

I found Jane to be a compelling narrator, in part because she is narrating from the future and offers her commentary on what she was thinking and feeling and doing in the past. She was pretty astute in her analysis, and I found that I could relate to her very well as a character. I had some interesting thoughts about how Charlotte Bronte portrayed love and marriage and set up an ideal for what these should be, but I won't go into those here. And I wanted things to go well for Jane, and appreciated the foreknowledge that it would all end happily (this made for much easier reading than, say, Tess of the D'Urbervilles).

Overall I liked it, and I'm happy that I read it. It makes me feel a little less traitorous to my gender after my attempt at Jane Austin earlier this year.

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super Athletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Ever Seen by Christopher McDougall

2010-01-24T20:04:00.000-07:00

This is a great book for someone who loves to run, because at the very center of it is the idea that running is something humans were built to do.

I sit here nursing a running injury as I write this (one that's mostly my fault for not listening to my body and trying to run through a little bit of pain until it became a lot of pain), and it's things like running injuries, or just simply the feeling that running is not fun, that convince a lot of people that humans were not meant to run, not like other animals (my dog bounding joyfully across the tennis courts comes to mind). The author, a sports writer by profession and an amateur, oft-injured runner felt the same way, and so went in search of a tribe of Indians in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico who are known for their mythic ability to run fast and far and practically barefoot.

The book is part the story of his search and the people it led him to and the race in the Sierra Madres that he helped organize as a result of his experience. It is also part a scientific treatise on why humans were built to run, and to run for a long time. As a runner, I found the book to be incredibly inspiring. Not in the sense that an underdogs-take-the-day sports story is inspiring, but in the sense that it presented all sorts of reasons that this pastime of mine is something I was built to do, and therefore I can do it even better and, more importantly, enjoy it to a greater extent than I already do. It was a good book to read at a time when I feel like my running has been at a bit of a low point.

Beyond that, it was also just fun to read. I had a hard time relating to the ultramarathoners he profiled on a personal level (these are, after all, people who run 50 to 100 miles on a regular basis). So I didn't read it as a character study, but that's not really what it was meant to be. It was a piece of journalism, with a really engaging story and angle, and as such I found it to be well written and interesting. I blew through it in about a week, partly because I borrowed it from my dad over the break and wanted to return it to him when I returned back west for my brother's wedding, partly because I had two cross-country flights in which to read it, but also partly because I just liked the book.

The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

2009-12-29T20:14:00.001-07:00

P.G. Wodehouse has been on my list for years. I've always enjoyed my run-ins with British humor, and Wodehouse's most well-known creations, Jeeves and Wooster, have the advantage of existing both on paper and on screen. I've also had several friends over the years speak highly of both the written and television versions of the duo. My bout of Anglophilia earlier this year, prior to my UK trip, convinced me that it was finally time to join in the fun.

Except I didn't get around to it until my flight home for Christmas about eight months later. But get around to it I did, and I didn't regret it. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Wodehouse's characters, Bertie Wooster is a young English gentleman, and Jeeves is his personal valet and right-hand man. Code of the Woosters is only one of many stories and books that Wodehouse wrote featuring the two, and it isn't the first, but I had no trouble getting into the swing of the story or picking up on the background.

I laughed the whole way through. The ridiculousness of the situation in which Wooster finds himself is made all the funnier by the earnestness with which he explains it to the reader. In this case, it involves a marriage (not Wooster's) and an aunt and a nabbed policeman's helmet and a cow-creamer, and that's about all you need to know. And Jeeves calmly and quietly helps Wooster extricate himself from that situation with an equally-matched seriousness...and an amused smile that is never once written directly into the text, but shines through the subtext at intervals. That hidden smile brilliantly complements that earnestness with which Wooster is weaving his tale, and I think this is what I loved most about the book. Wooster is the narrator, and Jeeves is the interested onlooker, and as readers we can legitimately step into and relate to either role. Combined with Wodehouse's wit and clever writing, it makes what is really a slapstick comedy at heart into something much funnier than the already funny surface story.

I'll probably pick up another book at some point in the not-to-distant future, and I already put a hold on a couple DVDs at the local library. I'm looking forward to more.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

2009-12-29T20:08:00.000-07:00

I've generally liked Neil Gaiman. I haven't been reading much children's/YA lit lately, and admittedly Neil Gaiman is not at all a strictly children's writer. He's got a dark sense of humor that I enjoyed in Anansi Boys and his collaboration with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, both of which are written for an adult audience. But his writing style translates really well to books for younger audiences if, you know, you're an adult reading his books for younger audiences. I've lost the ability to read books from the perspective of a kid.

The Graveyard Book itself is not as dark as Coraline, which is the obvious comparison, even in spite of the opening scene in which a very young child escapes a knife-wielding killer who has just slaughtered his entire family and winds up in an old graveyard. Here Bod (short for Nobody) is taken in by the ghosts of the graveyard, who together bend the rules of the graveyard to protect their young ward.

A good portion of the book seems to be just about the life of a boy who is raised in a graveyard by ghosts. As far as I know, no author has ever explored this premise before, and this is where Gaiman has the chance to really excel. It's a novel premise, and it allows him to be creative, and sometimes quite funny. In the meantime, all the little vignettes are quietly adding up to the real story, and the finale in which Bod confronts his family's killer.

And that's the strength of the book. There's not real surprise lurking on the horizon, but the pieces come together subtly, so that you don't fully realize that as a world is being created on the pages, a story is being created as well. Still, I found myself wishing that Gaiman put a little more time into creating his world without as much concern for story. My favorite moment in the book was the Dance Macabre, in which living and dead alike came together for one brief night. The chapter did very little, if anything, to advance the plot, and yet it felt very purposeful in creating and exploring the relationship between the dead and the living, a relationship that was at the center of the novel. I wanted more of these moments, more exploration of the strange mythology that Gaiman created for the purposes of the novel.

Still, I liked the book. It's unlike anything I've read before, and those are the kinds of children's or young adult books I like best.

The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti

2009-12-09T19:43:00.000-07:00

The Good Thief takes place in New England, 19th century-ish (I think - I could go back and look this up, but right now I'd just like to get this review cranked out). Ren, a 12-year-old orphan with a missing hand (and no memory of the incident that caused the loss), is adopted by Benjamin Nab, who claims to be his long lost brother, though even if the reader had not read the back cover of the book it would become apparent that Benjamin is not who he says he is. The story is a little bit about Ren's adventures with Benjamin and Benjamin's partner in petty crime, Tom, and a little bit about Ren discovering who he really is in the literal sense, and a little about Ren discovering who he is in the literary coming-of-age sense.

There's really nothing not to like about The Good Thief. The characters manage to be characters while still feeling real. The plot is well-paced and engaging (I use that word a lot, engaging). The story is well-constructed, with particular elements coming together while never really feeling forced. The author's prose is strong in that she has an ability to construct surprising detail out of apparent simplicity - as I read, the plot flowed by quickly, but when I forced myself to slow down I was often delighted by word or a sentence. I genuinely liked the book.

But at the same time I was not particularly blown away by it - not by the writing, or the story, or the characters. When I turned the last page it was not with a sense of sadness or finality, just happy completion, and then I went onto whatever my next task was without really looking back. Clearly I didn't feel immediately compelled to write my review, since it's been several weeks. It was a nice book, and I wouldn't not recommend it. If you happen to read the back cover or my synopsis and it sounds interesting to you, you will probably have no trouble finishing it, and you will probably enjoy it. I did. It was a good read. It just didn't grab me and shake me the way some books do, and I don't know that it will take up permanent residence on my bookshelf.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

2009-12-02T19:27:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. The story itself was certainly interesting enough, but reading it also made me curious about the time and society and personality that produced it. I picked up the book for The Picture of Dorian Gray, but continued on and read Lady Windemere's Fan and Salome, just because they were there in the same novel. I haven't yet gotten to his two most famous plays (The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband, both of which I have seen in movie form), but I'm falling behind on my book blog and wanted to get my review posted sooner rather than later. Or later rather than much later, I guess.

You might already know the story of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian is a young man whose friend and admirer paints him a remarkable portrait. In a thoughtless moment, Dorian wishes that all the imperfections that will mar his youth over time will appear on the portrait instead of himself, and then is surprised (and unnerved) to find that the portrait really does take on these properties. At first Dorian sees it as a blessing. When one callous action leads to tragedy, the portrait takes on the sin for him, and Dorian is faced with a physical reminder of what he has done. This ever-present physical reminder, he believes, will help him to stay away from the misdeeds that would mar the portrait further.

Of course, it wouldn't be a good story if the portrait didn't instead lead to the exact opposite. After all, even though the consequences of his actions are more directly visible to him than to most people, they are also easier to hide from view, and don't directly touch his life or other people's opinions of him. I don't know that Dorian Gray read as a particularly deep book, but it's nevertheless substantial, and provides a lot to think about in terms of character and human morality.

Oscar Wilde himself was a character and a celebrity in his day, and his writings reflect this. At some point it gets to be almost overwhelming. In both Dorian Gray and Lady Windemere's Fan, there is one inevitable character whose every word is a pithy one-liner. The lines are often insightful, but coming one after another as they do it gets just a little wearying. And occasionally Wilde drifts into long, flowery tangents, in complete and casual disregard of the reader. And yet I was still drawn into both the story and the writing. I'm sure I'll make it through the rest of the book eventually.

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

2009-10-04T21:10:00.001-06:00

I loved this book. I felt completely absorbed every time I sat down to read it. I'm not quite sure how to review the book, though, because I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. It's 561 pages long, not counting notes and index, and packed with musical terminology (much of which went over my head), and it's just really not for every reader. Just like I wouldn't be all that inclined to pick up a book on, say, legal history or motorcycle maintenance or chemistry.

But this book was great for me. I have always had an interest in music, and as far as "classical" music goes, the twentieth century has always drawn me. A lot of 20th century composers are as inaccessible to me as they are to most people, but I also think the 20th century has produced some of the most interesting sounds, many beautiful pieces, as well as pieces that challenge my ear and force me to pay attention in a way that Bach and Mozart do not. Plus, it's surrounded by a fascinating context. Alex Ross begins with Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler and progresses through the beginning of the 21st century, placing composers and their compositions in all the complexity of their historical, social, and political contexts. Music blends and clashes with regimes and governments and the public and popular genres and wars and technological innovations, and by the end of the book I felt like I had a much better understanding of the twentieth century in its entirety (well, to be fair it was mainly the western part of the world in the twentieth century).

The only thing this book lacks is a soundtrack. Ross does an admirable job of describing the pieces he is writing about; I was able to understand the shape and texture of the music without ever listening to it. But I also felt that I was missing out on a great deal by reading the book in silence. I found myself actively seeking out pieces I was reading about. I listened (or sometimes re-listened) to Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Mahler, Villa Lobos, Milhaud, Messiaen, Bartok, Copland, Cage, Glass. I was taken back to the honors Survey of Music class I took my sophomore year, one of my absolute favorite classes at BYU, and I wanted the book to be like a deeper cut of that class, with the auditory experiences interwoven throughout. But it was too much and too fast. It would have taken years to give everything a proper listen, and of course one of the purposes of the book was to condense everything down so that you don't have to. I feel like it was meant to whet your appetite to learn more and to listen more. That is certainly what it did for me.

I think the reason I enjoyed this book so much is that it engaged me on so many levels - intellectual, aesthetic, literary, emotional. Reading it was fun and fulfilling at once, and completely worth all the time I put into it.

City of Thieves by David Benioff

2009-10-04T20:12:00.003-06:00

Once upon a time a Borders salesperson gave me a glowing and completely unsolicited review of this book. "You should read this," she said. "If you don't buy it today, you should buy it next time. Or get it somewhere else. It's really, really good." She was so earnest that it was hard not to take notice. I looked at the book, and put it back for another time, but it stayed on my radar, and I heard more good things about it, and I finally did get around to reading it.

And I just could not get into it.

The premise is this. Lev, the main character, and Kolya, a deserter from the Red Army, are facing execution during the Nazi invasion of Russia. But the colonel's daughter is getting married, and his wife can't find a single egg in the city to make the wedding cake, and in a moment of benevolence he promises to release to two if they can locate a dozen eggs within the week. Their quest for eggs takes them through a bombed-out and starving Leningrad, and out into the countryside where they encounter all the horrors of war that you would expect, amid surprising moments of humor and even sweetness.

It had all the makings of a good story. The characters were endearing, the setting was gripping, the plot was novel, the writing was well-executed. And yet it never grabbed me. I always felt like I was reading it to get through. For a brief moment at the climax of the novel I felt drawn in, interested in the outcome and the characters, but the moment faded almost in the moment of the climax, and the heartbreaking end didn't really feel so heartbreaking, and the happy postscript didn't make me feel all that happy. I just felt indifferent about it all.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I felt this way about the book. It just didn't engage me but it seemed like it ought to. The conclusion I've come to is that there is just too much vulgarity throughout the book - from foul language to too-explicit sexual conversation to unnecessary talk about bodily functions. Maybe such vulgarity is accurate to the setting of the book. Maybe. But it's effect on me was distracting. I was skimming over words and sentences and occasionally entire passages so much that I could never quite lose myself in the story.

It's unfortunate, but this is the first book on my blog that I just wouldn't recommend. I usually don't even make it far enough into those books for them to merit a review. Ah well, a first for everything.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

2009-08-26T19:12:00.000-06:00

One of the honors English classes at my high school (not mine) read Rebecca when we were in 10th grade. I remember being surprised to see a friend carrying the book around with her. It looked like a romance novel, with the red silk and swoopy writing, but it clearly wasn't if it had been assigned reading in an honors English class. As I heard classmates talking about the book, I was intrigued enough that for years, whenever I would see the book on the bookstore shelf, I would pull it off and read the back and think, I should read this sometime. A few months ago, I found a used copy for less than a dollar, and decided that this was my chance.

Rebecca started off a little slowly, but was still interesting enough that it didn't lose me. The main character is not Rebecca, but the young and unsure narrator (never named) who, after a surprising whirlwind courtship in Monte Carlo with the wealthy Maxim DeWinter, becomes his second wife and returns with him to the family estate, Manderley. She finds Manderley haunted by memories of the beautiful, gregarious, and much-loved Rebecca, Mr. DeWinter's first wife who drowned a year earlier. The life and death of Rebecca takes on mysterious and ominous undertones as the novel progresses, heightened by the strange and foreboding presence of the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, and ultimately culminating in a suspenseful climax worthy of Alfred Hitchcock, who directed the 1940 film adaptation.

I really liked Rebecca. I liked that the suspense of the novel did not rely on a sudden, dramatic, big reveal. There was a reveal, but the reveal itself didn't feel like a storytelling gimmick - the story had been building to it all along, and the story did not end there. I also liked that the story was told entirely from the point of view of the narrator. She entered the marriage young and naive, but much of her naivete was at the hands of the people around her. No one, neither her husband nor her husband's family nor the servants of the house, was completely forthcoming, and she was left to guess at the reasons behind people's behavior - behavior that often seemed strange and contradictory without the background knowledge that others possessed. She constantly told herself stories, about what she imagined people saying or doing (or what they had said and done in the past), stories that sounded reasonable in light of what she knew with the very little information she had, stories which left her insecure and which threatened her relationship with her husband.

In a way, I could relate to the narrator's personal storytelling, though my own life and its missing background information is (I assume) not nearly as dramatic. We all live inside our own heads, but we have to interact with other people and guess at what they are thinking and feeling and doing, and I have learned that quite often what I imagine is far from the truth. It doesn't stop me from imagining, and acting on what I imagine, because sometimes that's all I can do. But what Rebecca seemed to suggest was that sometimes we cannot even guess at what is going on behind the scenes.

And all her guessing, and the truth that she is finally told, make for an awfully good story.

Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson

2009-08-26T19:11:00.000-06:00

The epic fantasy genre is one I have had a hard time letting myself get into. I read (and yes, enjoyed) Lord of the Rings, because I had to read half the trilogy for my honors freshman English course, and because I figured I might as well finish once the movies started coming out, and because it's essentially the epic fantasy that started them all. And I have no problem with tongue-in-cheek fantasy authors, like Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman. But for the most part, the standard hero-rises-from-humble-beginnings-and-saves-the-world books are hard for me to swallow.

Still, as a child I loved fantasies, and still quite enjoy fantasies written for children and young adults. I devoured Harry Potter in my twenties, and when I was younger, I loved C.S. Lewis and Brian Jaques and Robin McKinley. My favorite book of all time was The Island and The Ring, by Laura Stevenson, which had magic and a brave heroine and an evil Lord and forces of good and evil, or chaos and order - all the makings of a standard epic fantasy. Books like these drew me into a world, and when they ended, they left me craving more. Closing one of these books meant not just leaving behind the characters, but leaving behind the whole world that they inhabited.

My friend Brady finally convinced me that, if I was ever going to try to dip my toe into fantasy, Brandon Sanderson (an up and coming fantasy author and, incidentally, BYU graduate) would be worth my time. Over winter break, I finished the first book in his Mistborn trilogy, and this summer when I found myself once again with ample reading time, I polished off Well of Ascencion and Hero of Ages. Quickly. Because what I found was that reading these books brought me back to my childhood when reading meant getting lost in a good story.

It's not that I never get lost in a good story anymore. I do, all the time. But this was sort of different - I got lost in the story and the characters and the mythology and the world itself. I found the third book surprisingly satisfying. It tied together things in the previous two books that I didn't even realize could come together, introduced interesting philosophical and moral and even religious questions, and concluded in such a way that I felt perfectly satisfied - I wished the story could go on longer because I enjoyed it, but I felt like everything had been told that needed to be told, and no more.

I honestly can't say I was converted to the fantasy genre. I wouldn't be above giving it another try someday, but I was content with my little foray and will now step back into my own reading comfort zone. But it was a really good story. I had a lot of fun reading it, and I was invested in it, and I'd be willing to recommend it to other people who either like fantasy or are willing to give it a try.

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

2009-07-12T08:39:00.000-06:00

This is the third book by Jhumpa Lahiri that I have read (after her novel, The Namesake, and her collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies), and I have very little to say except that I loved this as much as I have loved everything I have read. Lahiri writes primarily about Indian-American families. She writes most often of the children of parents who have emigrated to the United States for work and education, but her characters and stories ecompass a wide range of human experience. Her prose is beautiful and simple, yet simultaneously detailed, and it opens up onto complex inner worlds.

I don't read many stories. Just as with television I am more engaged by the development of characters and story arcs over long periods of time, so too I tend to prefer a novel where I grow into and become attached to the people and to their stories. But reading Jhumpa Lahiri's book makes me feel like I want to give short stories more of a chance. Each is it's own, detailed little world, in which I get a small glimpse and then move on, but enjoy every moment.

The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart

2009-07-12T08:10:00.000-06:00

It's been a little while since I've done a children's book. This was one I got on a whim. I think I had seen it on bookstore shelves before, but I knew very little about it. I was in the Philadelphia airport on a long layover, very tired, and in need of a book that wouldn't take too much out of me for the rest of my trip home. So I checked out the Young Adult section of the little airport bookstore, thought this one looked promising, and decided to give it a try.

The premise, more or less, is this. Reynie, Kate, Constance, and Sticky have been hand-picked by the mysterious and benevolent Mr. Benedict to save the world from an impending disaster that he and his assistants do not yet fully understand. To do this, they must go undercover to Nomansan Island and enroll in the school there, where children are being trained to broadcast cryptic messages by the sinister Mr. Curtain.

I'm not quite sure how to review this book. I think books for younger readers fall into three categories. There are the books that are really just meant for the kids to read on their own and would bore or baffle most adults (The Babysitter's Club series comes to mind), books that are great reads for adults and kids alike (like Harry Potter), and books that are fun books for adults to read to their children. Since I have no kids to read to at this time in my life, I'm most interested in the second category, and I feel a little bit like The Mysterious Benedict Society should have been in the second category, but was actually in the third. I enjoyed it, it was entertaining, and sort of clever. But reading it with my adult eyes made me feel skeptical.

The problem was that I could never completely buy into the story, and could never completely believe the characters - that is, with the exception of the four children at the center of the plot. I thought they were excellently developed and endearing. The book, however, seemed stuck between reality and strangeness. Children's books don't have to be realistic. Exaggeration and absurdity work wonderfully well in, say, The Phantom Tollbooth, or Alice in Wonderland, or A Series of Unfortunate Events. But even fantastical books often benefit from a sense of reality. I think of Harry Potter, or A Wrinkle in Time, or the John Bellairs books I used to devour when I was younger. I felt like The Mysterious Benedict Society struggled to be one or the other, a little to absurd to be real, and a little too real to fully accept the absurdity.

It wasn't a bad read, just one I would have enjoyed more if I were reading it to a child. It's the first in a series (the third comes out soon), but I'm not particularly inspired to continue on. At least not yet.

Heat by Bill Buford

2009-07-07T09:28:00.000-06:00

When this book first came out about three years ago, I heard a lot of good things about it and saw it everywhere in the bookstores. I diligently waited a year for the book to come out in paperback, but then once it did I kept putting it off and putting it off. I still wanted to read it, there was just always something else I wanted to read just a little more. The problem is that, while I like to cook, the world of the high-end kitchen is really foreign to me. In fact, my own cooking knowledge is more rudimentary than I care to admit. No matter how good anyone said this book was, I was uncertain that I'd actually relate to it.

I finally picked up the book when I saw it shortly after watching the season finale of Top Chef. It still took me awhile after that to begin reading it, but I'm glad I finally did. Heat is an account of Bill Buford's experience integrating himself into the kitchen of Mario Batali, a chef you may know of if you are a dedicated follower of the Food Network (I don't have cable so the name was new to me). The book is partly about Buford's experience as a budding chef, working his way up in the intense kitchen environment, a strange and stressful environment that I have really only seen through cinema (Mostly Martha, Ratatouille, etc.). Reading convinced me that I would absolutely hate working in a kitchen, but was nevertheless fascinating in the same way reading about other things I would hate doing, like climbing Mt. Everest or hiking the entire length of the Appalachian Trail or experiencing a volcanic eruption, is equally fascinating.

But Buford is also very clealry a journalist, and the book is also about his journey to learn as much as he can learn about what he has set out to do. He writes about the life stories of the people he is working with, not just Mario Batali, but other members of the kitchen. He journeys to Italy and learns about pasta, and about polenta, and about meat. He delves into the history of Italian cooking, and examines historical texts for the elusive turning point when the first cook began adding egg to pasta dough.

The result of all of this is a book that is both interesting, and highly engaging. I love cooking and eating, but at the end of the day food is mostly just functional for me. The fun part of reading this book was that it provided a window into seeing food as a science and an art, as well.

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

2009-07-07T09:27:00.000-06:00

This is a recommend from Jessica, who in turn read it on the recommendation of Bishop Connett, who recommended it to her because she had read and loved The Book Thief, which I'm pretty sure I recommended to Jessica. That's a full circle of recommendations.

I got it because I ran out of reading material five days before I left the UK. That was an unexpected development. I brought three books with me, and had only barely started one of them before I left, and I thought three books was plenty for three weeks. But we had a lot of reading time in those three weeks, and by our last Sunday I was done. Thus began a surprisingly difficult search for a bookstore, something that seemed like it should have been easier given that we were visiting Stratford-upon-Avon (the birthplace of William Shakespeare), and Oxford (one of the great academic centers of the world).

We did finally locate a bookstore in Oxford, and I bought my British edition of Suite Francaise, and it lasted me to my layover in Philadelphia a few days later, where I was once again left bookless with the prospect of a four-hour layover and two more hours on a plane. (Enter Book #5.)

Irene Nemirovsky intended this work to be much longer, a cycle of five novels, but she died in Auschwitz after completing only two. It is these two novels that make up Suite Francaise. The first recounts the experiences of a handful of people during the German invasion of France, and the second takes place in a small town during the occupation.

One of the things that was difficult for me in reading the book was that, particularly in the first part, Nemirovsky takes a rather cynical view of human nature. Many of the characters are selfish, and not particularly likeable, written in such a way that it was hard to relate to them. The story was about people and their experiences, but I found it difficult to place myself in the circumstances, that the novel was more a commentary on society, and a rather scathing one.

Still, I did enjoy reading the book. What I found most fascinating about it was the fact that Nemirovsky had written the novel almost simultaneous to the events that were taking place. And while she intended the work to be a cycle of five novels, the events that would have shaped the remaining three had not yet occurred. She herself did not know where the story would end, and she was living out the story as it happened. I have never read anything like that. And for all the books and movies and documentaries and history lessons on World War II that I have been exposed to, I know very, very little about the role of France and the French people. This book gave me insight into the experiences of these people, and into a society that I ought to know more about than I do. It was a good book, and a good recommendation.

Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin

2009-06-12T12:30:00.001-06:00

For the record, in my review of this book I'm going to take it as a given that human beings did, indeed, evolve from fish. You may or may not agree with this, and you may or may not agree that believing this is a possibility fits in with a gospel perspective. Personally, I love learning about what science has told us about the world, and I've never really found anything that can't coexist alongside my religious beliefs. So, okay - I'll accept that the fossil record suggests we all evolved from fish. In which case this is an absolutely fascinating book, and it caused me to look at the human body from a very different and very interesting perspective.

Neil Shubin is a paleontologist, and in Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body he takes the reader through tools that are used to study the human body without actually studying the human body itself, tools that widen our understanding by showing how we are related to other living organisms, and to the organisms that have populated our planet in the past. These tools include studying the fossil record, observing animal embryos, and playing with DNA. Shubin's purpose is to show how our bodies came to be what they are, and to show that this sort of knowledge is not just intrinsically interesting, but incredibly useful.

The book has a big idea to get across, but it is also sprinkled with all sorts of fun little facts, like what causes hiccups or motion sickness, and why people have trouble walking in a straight line when they are drunk, and how to cause a fly to grow an eye on its leg (eww). It's well written, and well organized, and simultaneously informative and entertaining, like a good popular science book should be. It wasn't as explanatory as I felt it promised to be - it showed how more than it told why. But it was a really interesting look at a field I honestly don't know much about.

Bell Canto by Ann Patchett

2009-06-12T12:30:00.000-06:00

The book begins with a dinner party, thrown in the home of the vice president of a South American nation that is never named. The president of the nation was supposed to be present at the dinner party, but opted not to come because it would mean missing his favorite telenovela. Unfortunately, a group of armed terrorists from the jungle fail to learn of the president's absence, and when they break into the dinner party in the hopes of kidnapping the president, they instead find themselves with a household of hostages and their plan devolves into something else entirely.

In reality, the terrorists are little more than boys, led by three older generals who desperately want to right what they feel are injustices that have been done to their family and people. Believing, or hoping, that they have the upper hand, they hold onto the hostages, and hours drag into days, then weeks, and even months. And while the relationship between the captives and captors is an uneasy one, bonds develop and lives change.

Bel Canto is a beautifully written book. But that’s actually the problem. At times as I read, I suspected that Bel Canto, while beautifully written, was actually written to be beautiful, and that nagging suspicion got in the way of my completely letting go and losing myself in the novel.

But that being said, I’m still going to give the book a good review. The story engaged me, the characters interested me, and the novel was very well-crafted. What I loved most about the book was the way in which the reader’s relationship with the characters and with the storyline developed in tandem with the experiences of the characters themselves. The opening scenes were filled with unnamed persons, each one earning a sentence here, a paragraph there, and creating a picture of a very believable confusion. Some of these characters are released early on, or never have an important role, but others come into focus over the course of the novel, and we learn to care about them as they themselves come to know and care about each other. The story never leaves the home, and as readers we are caught in the same surreal life that the hostages and hostage-takers find themselves in, cut off from almost any knowledge of the world outside of the house. There were story elements that my logical mind wanted to have a hard time buying into, but these were woven so seamlessly and believably into the storytelling that I found myself almost immersed in the world that Patchett had created, even if that little nagging feeling at the back of my head kept me from diving all the way in.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the story was that we are told the end nearly from the beginning. I didn’t realize what an interesting choice this was for Patchett to make until nearly the end. Because Patchett tells us, almost offhandedly, what is going to happen within the first few minutes of the novel, the story is never driven by a suspense about how things will end. Rather, the story itself resides in the details and in the moment-to-moment existence of the hostages and their captors. This is completely appropriate to the situation of the prisoners, cut off from the world, and, in many ways, from a normal linear existence. The story is something of a dream-like interlude, but at the same time it feels completely real and believable. Or at least believable enough.

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

2009-06-07T19:49:00.003-06:00

As I started reading this book, I thought it felt a bit like reading a soap opera. When I learned that The Mayor of Casterbridge had been written as a serial novel, it made sense - chapter by chapter, Hardy had to keep the narrative moving along to hold his readers' interest from one installment to the next. And the plot did move along at a rapid pace. Every time I finished a chapter, I was ready to move on to the next so that I could find out what was going to happen.

But while the plot was engaging, I thought other literary aspects suffered bit. We were never really held in suspense for more than a few pages, and Hardy seemed intent to tell us, rather than to show us, the sentiments and motivations of characters both major and minor. There was less room than I would have liked for me, the reader, to experience the story.

One natural comparison that I made as I read was to Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which I read maybe three years ago. Just as in Tess, Hardy centers the story around a single character spiraling down into ever-deeper depths of misfortune. And as in Tess, this downward spiral is punctuated by moments where it appears that everything will be made right. Except that it isn't.

But unlike Tess, here the downward spiral of the central character, Henchard, is driven largely by his own self - his character, faults, fears, responses - as they collide with circumstance. In Tess, the downward spiral was almost entirely due to circumstances external to the central character's ability to influence change. This difference dramatically changed how I read the book. I found that the hopelessness coupled with the helplessness of Tess made it difficult for me to read, no matter how engaging the writing or the story. But I never experienced that same difficulty with The Mayor of Casterbridge. (Admittedly the effect was also helped by the existence of a secondary character to whom were were made sympathetic and whose fortunes were not doomed to tragedy from the beginning.)

The second comparison I made was one that I did not make until quite suddenly in the final chapter. It was then that I realized that the story bears resemblance to the story of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, a book that moved me deeply when I read it a number of years ago. Though Mayor is nowhere near as grand in scope, it is, like Les Miserables, the story of a young man who makes a mistake, turns around and changes, acquires a daughter, and then encounters his past and cannot escape it, carrying his mistakes with him to his deathbed. Interestingly, it was the dissimilarity of the death scene that caused me to notice the core similarities of the rest of the story. And the differences between the two stories turned Mayor into something deeper and more thought-provoking than it had been during my reading. If I had the time and energy and any sort of reasonable motivation, I think it would be really interesting to write some sort of comparison between the two novels. But, you know, this is why I didn't become an English major...

Maskerade by Terry Pratchett

2009-04-20T11:09:00.004-06:00

My official statement is that I like Terry Pratchett. I have several Terry Pratchett books that I've liked well enough to keep on my bookshelf at home, and I'm always happy to recommend them. They're quick reads, and a clever sort of funny, the type of quirky British humor I've also enjoyed in Douglas Adams or Jasper Fforde. I often turn to Terry Pratchett if I'm in need of an airplane book or an easier read.

But I also have to admit (sorry to other Terry Pratchett fans - in spite of what I'm about to say I really am one of you) I have a hard time saying I love Terry Pratchett. His Discworld books are intentionally over-the-top. Discworld both parallels and parodies our own world, and Pratchett relies on a lot of exaggeration and absurdity to tell his story. Usually this works pretty well, but it can be a hard type of humor to pull off consistently, and it sometimes falls into silliness that isn't really funny. Pratchett does a lot of very clever things with the plots and the characters and the rules of Discworld and the dialogue. But I'm always nagged by the sometimes-subtle and sometimes-overt silliness that I see as a cheap and easy way to get a laugh. I find it a bit distracting. Going Postal is my favorite Terry Pratchett book because, in it, Pratchett manages just the right balance that I'm not distracted and annoyed by the silliness. That's why I keep coming back.

Terry Pratchett usually chooses to satirize something or other, and in the case of Maskerade it was opera. I began reading the book right around the time of the spring opera here at the university, and hanging around Brian and Ashley and various other singers and collaborative pianists who have done their time in the Hill Street Ward has given me quite a bit more exposure to opera than I had had before moving to Michigan. So there were a few points during the book that I felt like Terry Pratchett was being just a little unfair to the genre, and few more points where I begrudgingly admitted that opera (in general) probably deserved the satirical treatment Pratchett was giving it, and still more points where I just laughed almost-out-loud because the satire was genuinely funny. It also satirizes Phantom of the Opera, but I feel less qualified to pass judgment on that one.

Still, the story is not really about opera, or about Phantom of the Opera, and you don't really have to know much about opera in order to enjoy the story. It's a story about witches and murder and parenting and running a business and finding your way in the world and finding your way back to where you came from.

Brady was the one who lent Maskerade to me. I had mentioned that Going Postal is my favorite Terry Pratchett book, so he thought I should read his favorite. I didn't enjoy it in the way I enjoyed Going Postal (sorry Brady), but I did enjoy it the way I enjoy most other Terry Pratchett books. He tells a good story, and says things in a way that no one has ever said them before, which often turns out to be really funny. I am always interested in knowing how things are going to turn out - I usually feel like I can guess the end, and then am surprised to find out that I was wrong. Maskerade was a really fun read.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

2009-04-16T15:05:00.000-06:00

I'll admit that my first thought when I put this book down was, "Huh?" I spent most of the book feeling unsure about what was going on, and I concluded the book without really understanding what had happened.

I came into this book cold. Most of the time I at least have some idea what I'm getting into when I pick up a book, but all I knew was that The Turn of the Screw is famous, has been made into a movie or two (more, it turns out, now that I've looked into it), and is on my unwritten list of books/stories I feel like I should read at some point in my life.

For those of you who don't know, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898) is a ghost story of sorts. The narrator, who remains unnamed throughout the story, is the new governess for two children, Miles and Flora, who are under the care of the uncle in London. The two children appear to the governess as the sweetest, most innocent of charges, but early in her stay she detects something amiss, something sinister. As it turns out, the children's former governess died under mysterious circumstances, and the narrator subsequently experiences the horror of seeing apparitions of the former governess and her illicit lover wandering the grounds of the estate. Confiding in the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, the narrator/current governess strives to protect the children from what she is certain are the evil intentions of the two ghosts, while fearing that the children have already been lost.

I was interested enough to be able to finish the novella, but can't say I really cared for it much. Still, the thing that made it difficult for me to read and enjoy is also exactly what intrigues me now that I've finished it. The story is deeply ambiguous. It is a first person narrative, and the narrator is left to draw her own conclusions about the events. Because of this, the reader cannot know for certain if her conclusions, her leaps of logic, and even her strict observations, are to be taken as trustworthy, or merely as her perceptions. Truth about what actually happened is very hard to come by in the narrative.

But it's not the ambiguity itself that bothered me, it was not knowing how much ambiguity I, as the reader, was actually supposed to read into the narrative. It wasn't clear to me if I was supposed to trust or question the narrator, and therefore it wasn't clear to me how I was supposed to read the narrative.

But like I said, it's also this ambiguity that now intrigues me. Now that I've finished the book and seen how much is left unresolved, it's hard not to think back on what I read. When I got to within one page of the end I had no idea how the story could resolve in just a few more paragraphs, and when I finished those few paragraphs I felt frustrated because I didn't think the story had resolved. But it's left me thinking, particularly about the narrator. What did she experience? What don't we know? If the ghosts were indeed real (apparently there has been some healthy literary debate over this in the last century), what was the nature of the evil they portended?

This is one I feel like I should read again now that I know what I was getting myself into. But I don't know that I actually will.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

2009-04-16T15:00:00.000-06:00

I started this book in the summer when my then-roommate Jessica lent it to me. But I must have gotten distracted by other books, because I set it aside at some point and then never got back to it. After finishing Persuasion last month, which I admit had been a bit of a chore for me, I felt like I needed something I could read quickly. So when I was cleaning my room and found Things Fall Apart sitting half-read on the floor in my reading corner, I decided now was a good time to finish it completely.

The story is of a man named Okonkwo, a member of the Umuofia clan in what is now Nigeria. The story, absent most direct references to western civilization, was difficult for me to place in time until the second half, when Christian missionaries appeared in the villages, and even then I could only narrow it down to about a hundred-year period. The society described in the story is one that is foreign to me, and something that has drawn me into so many very different books is finding the common threads of human experience while at the same time trying to understand that which is very different from my own experience. That's what I most enjoyed about reading this book.

There is no real narrative in Things Fall Apart, at least not that I can pick out. Although Okonkwo and his family lie at the center, there are frequently discontinuities in character, theme, and even chronology from one chapter to the next. But gradually what seems to be a series of vignettes comes together into a wider story of one man living a life amid changes that eventually culminate in tragedy.

I enjoyed the book during the read, but it wasn't until the last two pages that I decided that I really, really liked it. There's an abrupt change in the narrative voice in those last two pages that for some reason really struck me, a shift in the perspective that suddenly highlights the perspective in which the entire preceding narrative had been written and which created a contrast that shook me a little bit. It's subtle, but for some reason it really grabbed my attention and left me thinking after I had finished. I like books that leave me thinking like that.

Frindle by Andrew Clements

2009-03-11T18:58:00.003-06:00

Frindle was a delightful little book.

I really like children's and young adult books, but I'm also pretty picky about them. Not every children's book is a great book. There are many that are incredibly well-written and clever and appeal to children and adults alike, but for each one of these there are also a at least a dozen that are best left to the fourth graders to read on their own. I have many great books that I remember from my childhood, but I have an increasingly hard time finding new children's books that I want to add to my collection.

Frindle, though, is one that I would put on my bookshelf.

It's short. It took me maybe an hour to read, maybe not even that, but was quite satisfying. It's about coining new words, a subject near and dear to my heart. The word being coined is frindle, a word that NIck, the main character, attempts to spread as a replacement for the word pen. The book is at its heart the kind of elementary school tale I remember from my own childhood. It's funny and earnest and never over the top. The characters are believable and likable, even Nick's nemesis, his language arts teacher, Mrs. Granger. And it has a touch of linguistics, but doesn't overtly force the educational aspect on its readers. It's fun and short and well-deserving of the praise it's received.

Don't let the brevity of this post fool you. In fact, I think the strength of this book is that this is really all that needs to be said. I recommend it.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

2009-03-11T18:50:00.005-06:00

I am not really a Jane Austen fan. I like the movie versions of Pride and Prejudice, and I think I remember enjoying the book when my mom read it to me years and years ago. But I haven't been very successful at reading or watching or enjoying other Jane Austen books or movies.

Still, in light of my upcoming UK trip, I thought it was probably time to give Jane Austen another chance. I chose to read Persuasion because a) several Jane Austen fans I know told me it was one of their favorites of hers, and b) it was one of the shortest books on the Jane Austen section of the shelves at Borders when I went looking.

I finally finished Persuasion, so I'm about to give my honest assessment. Like I said on my regular blog, however, I was biased against Jane Austen from the beginning, and I am really interested in hearing what other people like about this book. I think it might help me to like it better.

It's not that I disliked Persuasion. It just didn't jump up from the pages and grab me and pull me in. So that said, here is what I did like. I think one of the reason Jane Austen still appeals to people (women especially, I think) is that the feelings of her characters in regards to relationships are surprisingly universal. I really could see some of myself in Anne, especially in constant analysis of her encounters with Captain Wentworth. In fact, though Jane Austen writes from a very different time and place and society than I am familiar with, people are still people, and the emotions and personalities she captures do seem very real to me.

But I still struggled to make it through the book. First, I felt like there were too many similarities to Pride and Prejudice. People who have read many Jane Austen books probably find it easier to see what distinguishes one from another, but because this is only my second it was hard not to focus on what made them the same, and it sort of got in the way of my reading.

Second, the romance between Anne and Captain Wentworth was not compelling to me. I know things were done differently back then, and I also know that there was a history between Anne and Captain Wentworth that we as the readers were not privy to. But we always observed Captain Wentworth from Anne's eyes, and usually from afar, and often acting cryptically. I was rooting for him by the end, but I still feel like I never got to know Captain Wentworth. He was there in the background and in Anne's mind, but what happens in the background and in a woman's mind does not always translate to reality (believe me, I know).

Which actually leads to the third reason I had a hard time with this book, and that is that, in some ways, I could relate to Anne so well as to make me feel uncomfortable. As a first time reader, I didn't know if Captain Wentworth felt the same way toward Anne as she felt toward him, and because I really did not know the outcome any better than Anne did, it made me almost as uncomfortable to read about her guesswork, her hopes and disappointments based on the most inconsequential details, as it has made me in the past when I have done the same thing myself. I was relieved when she finally got to speak with Captain Wentworth and hear his side of the story, and it all came together nicely, and we saw how all the pieces fit, but I didn't like the process of getting to that point.

So that's my take, but it's just my opinion, and my opinion of a first read at that (and my impression is that many people feel Jane Austen books are even better upon multiple readings). I really would like to hear from people who liked the book, because I'd like to know what I was missing. I think I need people to teach me how to read and like Jane Austen :).

What is the What by Dave Eggers

2009-02-05T06:11:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I love reading is that books have the ability to transport you into the world of another person, and help you to begin to understand what it is like to live in a different place or a different time or an entirely different set of circumstances. We are all human, after all, and we have the same basic needs and desires and fears, though differences in language, culture, appearance, socioeconomic status, etc., sometimes make it hard for us to see that.

That is what this book did to me. It took an experience that is vastly different from my own and put me there, leaving me feeling as though I really knew the narrator, and understood him. At the same time, however, it also made visible to me the incredible chasm that exists between my life and the lives of such a large chunk of population who have experienced atrocities and deprivation that are unfathomable to me, and very much outside of their own individual control. I put down the book feeling as though I really needed to read it, but also not quite sure what reading it meant for me and how I live my life. I just felt that it must mean something.

Valentino Achak Deng is the narrator of the story, and he is a real person. He told his story to Dave Eggers, who transformed it into a novel of grand scope while still remaining true to Deng's voice and experiences. Although it is marketed as a novel, I think the line is blurred, and Eggers and Deng make it known that the things that seem most incredible in the book are all real (the two of them talk about the process of writing in an interview here).

The result of a three-year collaboration driven by Valentino Achak Deng's desire to share his story to the world begins with his boyhood in Marial Bai, a village in southern Sudan, from which he is driven at a very young age in the midst of conflict between the Arab north and the African south. Valentino joins thousands of young boys, with parents missing or dead, who walked across Sudan to Ethiopia, facing starvation, violence, lions, recruitment as child soldiers, eventually ending up in the refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya. From there, many of them were finally resettled in the United States, with hopes of gaining an education and returning as a new hope for their homeland of Sudan. Valentino's story in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya is woven almost effortlessly with the story of his life in the United States. The contrasts in circumstance between these two stories are stark, but the parallels in the very personal and very human story that is being told bind the novel together, and bind the reader to Valentino himself.

I cannot recommend this book enough. Now that I've finished the book, I can't get it out of my mind. It addresses terrible events and themes, and yet it is not dark. It is both eye-opening and incomprehensible, and in the end it is profoundly hopeful.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling

2009-02-05T05:40:00.003-07:00

I'm going to admit right here that I didn't think a whole lot about reading this book when I learned it was coming out. I didn't get excited when I saw it appear on bookstore posters, or count down the days until it hit the shelves. Harry Potter was enough for me. I loved the books, I was happy with how they ended, and I didn't feel any need to add to them.

But then around Christmastime a handful of people I knew began reading the book, and then talking about the book, and I was hearing pretty positive things. I don't know if I would have sought it out on my own eventually, but by the time a copy of the book fell into my hands, my curiosity had already been piqued.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is not a very long book - the spine is thin and the print is large. It probably took me under an hour total, reading a story at a time before bed for several nights. For those who are not in the know, the Tales are sort of like the Grimm Brothers' fairy tales of the Harry Potter world, and five stories are interspersed with commentary by Dumbledore about their historical significance, their connections to wizarding lore, and what they say about the wizard and human spirit.

You definitely have to be a Harry Potter fan to enjoy the book, but I am and I did. The stories and commentary are engaging. I think including commentary, even fictionalized commentary, the way Rowling did was a little risky. It created the possibility of closing off interpretation, and telling us what to think about the stories instead of letting us think for ourselves. But I thought Rowling handled it quite well, and the stories actually do make you think. It is still children's literature at its heart, but just as with the Harry Potter books, there is a surprising depth and darkness to the stories, that still doesn't overshadow the fact that this is also just a fun, quick read.

I imagine it must be great fun to create a world in order to tell a story, with not only characters, places, and rules, but its own culture and history, its own legends and even fairy tales. It occurred to me as I read that I'm just a little envious of J. K. Rowling.

Cesar’s Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems by Cesar Millan

2008-08-17T06:36:00.003-06:00

When I become interested in something, I often seek out information like crazy. When I first started running more than just casually, I checked out books from the library obsessively, subscribed to Runner’s World magazine, bought a Women’s Guide to Running and read it cover to cover, went online and sought out training plans from multiple sources. That’s just how I am (and I think it might be a family characteristic based on the number of skiing and cycling books at my parents’ house).

So when I started thinking seriously about getting a dog, my reaction was to spend hours doing my research. I whipped out my mad Google skills to learn about adopting, breed characteristics, costs, training. I visited the local library and browsed through the shelf of dog books. And I went to Borders with the intent of beginning my own reference collection. I got two books. One was a largish book with about everything I could possibly want to know about getting and keeping dogs, the kind of book I wouldn’t necessarily sit down and read from beginning to end, but could pick up and skim a section at a time as necessary.

The second was Cesar’s Way, which I got partly because I wanted a book I could just sit down and read from beginning to end, and partly because Cesar Millan (the “dog whisperer”) had come up in discussion the day before and I was curious—I had heard about him, but didn’t know much, and when I skimmed the book standing there in the pets aisle, I was intrigued.

So I took the book home with me, and in two days flat I had devoured the book, cover to cover, and it changed my life. Well, okay, not my life, but it did completely change the way I think about dogs. One of Millan’s basic premises is that we (Americans especially) have a tendency to think of our dogs as humans instead of dogs, and so we don’t understand our dogs’ behavior, especially their problem behavior. But when you start to understand how a dog sees the world, and particularly their pack mentality, then you can have a much healthier, happier dog, and a much better relationship with your dog. I can’t really do his argument justice in a short book review on my blog, but this book more than anything else I read has influenced how I am thinking about the dog I might or might not get in the near future—and has alleviated some of my worries about problems that might develop.

The book itself is very readable. It's partly a book about Cesar Millan himself, how he came to be doing what he is doing. It's also a book about dog psychology, what dogs do, why they do it. It's a book about Millan's experiences working with dogs. And it's a book about how to work with your own dog. It's certainly not a step-by-step manual for training your dog, because the focus of the book is not just what to do but also why. But that's what makes the book feel so practical. If you know what to do (and the book does address that) you can handle certain situations, like the first time you bring a dog home with you, or taking your dog on a walk. But if you know why, then you can feel confident in all situations.

This book not just helpful, but incredibly eye-opening. I wish I could write this review having had the chance to put what I learned to use (maybe soon I will), but even so, I honestly think every dog owner, or potential dog owner, should read this book.

First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde

2008-08-17T06:26:00.003-06:00

I have waited a long time to read this book. It is the fifth in the Thursday Next series of books that Fforde originally churned out on a yearly basis. I picked up the first when there were already three published, and had to wait less than a year for the fourth to come out. But then Fforde turned his attention to a new series (which was also delightful, don’t get me wrong) for two years, and then when First Among Sequels came out last year I held myself back for a full year, waiting for the paperback edition to come out.

It was worth the wait. Trying to describe these books to other people is difficult. Thursday Next exists in a parallel universe in which home cloning kits allow people to own their own formerly extinct animals (like dodo birds) as pets, the supernatural (ghosts, werewolves, vampires) are a part of everyday life to be dealt with, Wales is a military state, intercontinental transportation takes place via Gravitubes that travel through the center of the earth, and the ever-paradoxical Chrono-Guard monitors the continuity of the timeline using time travel technology that hasn’t been invented yet, but presumably will be sometime in the future (they don’t quite know when). Most importantly, books are not just paper creations, but exist in a complex Bookworld, with characters acting out their parts and complex technology to aid in reader transferal, and intergenre disputes. Thursday Next is an outlander who can jump to the Bookword and is a member of Jurisfiction, the policing agency responsible for keeping order in Bookworld.

In the latest book the series, Thursday encounters the written (and not-quite-true-to-life) versions of herself in the Bookworld, a crisis in the Chrono-Guard who are nearing the end of time and still haven't found the invention of time travel, a recurring appearance by the ghost of her Uncle Mryon who has something important to tell her but can't remember what, and a plot to boost readership rates by turning English classics (beginning with Pride and Prejudice) into "reality book shows" where readers read as the characters engage in preset tasks, and then vote the characters one by one out of the books.

The plots of these books are complex, incredibly clever, and extremely funny. Part of the fun of the series is the literary references, even if you haven’t read the literature Fforde is referring to (I have yet to read Jane Eyre, and I still loved the first book, The Eyre Affair). I admit that it took me a couple chapters to get into the newest book, because some of the humor is downright silly and I had to remember the spirit of the books, and then let the plot unfold. Some of what seems to be pure silliness at the beginning comes to play an integral role later on.

I don’t know where Fforde gets all his ideas, but I’m glad to know he intends to keep writing them out for us for years to come, and he hasn't disappointed me yet.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

2008-08-06T10:08:00.003-06:00

Lest you get the wrong idea, I want to start out by saying that I liked this book. It just took some time before it grew on me.

Like a lot of people, I love books. But there are different kinds of book lovers. I like brightly-lit and well-organized Borders bookstores, trade paperbacks, authors who write well but without frills or pretensions, copyright dates within a few years of the present. Other people like classics, searching for gems in small and cluttered floor-to-ceiling used bookshops, solidly-bound hardbacks, first-editions. These are far from the only categories—every reader has his or her own preferences. But the reason this book was difficult for me to get into was that it seemed to speak to that second category of reader, a category that I definitely am not. I have read my fair share of the classics, to be sure. It’s usually for the sake of being well-read, but I also usually really enjoy what I read (Les Miserables is what I claim for my favorite book of all time). But that’s not what I naturally gravitate towards.

The whole book had a feeling of oldness to it, literary oldness. The primary setting was in the present day, but the narrator lived in a world of old dusty volumes and handwritten letters and dampness and deep sorrow, and it was just difficult to relate to that. It evokes the English gothic novel (think Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre), and this is a genre/period that I’m particularly unfamiliar with. I’ve tried to read Wuthering Heights three times now and just can’t get past the first 50 pages. Older English literature in general has never really appealed to me for some reason (though I’m a huge fan of British humorists like Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams or Jasper Fforde).

All this is why when I first began reading the book, I wasn’t sure I’d like it. In fact, if I hadn’t read so many great reviews beforehand, and if I hadn’t bought it specifically for the purpose of reading on the airplane, I might have given up altogether after the first several chapters. Several months ago I picked it up in the bookstore and almost gave up after the first chapter.

But because I had all the time in the world on my flight from Detroit to Los Angeles to become engrossed in the story, I did become engrossed in the story, and while I never quite shook my discomfort with the style and general feel of the book, the story was too compelling to put it down. I still had a hundred or so pages left after two cross-country flights, but when I got home I finished in just a couple sittings.

Vida Winter is a famous novelist, made even more famous by the fact that she has kept her past a secret for decades, telling a new (but inevitably fictional) tale to every potential biographer. Now she is dying, and is at last ready to tell her story, to Margaret Lea, a young woman and book lover who Vida Winter has specifically sought out for the task. But the telling does not come easily, and even as Ms. Winter narrates a gothic account of her troubled childhood home at Angelfield Hall, complete with ghosts, tragedy, dark secrets, and twisted family relationships, there are pieces missing that Margaret (and the reader) are left to puzzle out. Although the full story only becomes clear at the very end, I never felt like the author was deliberately hiding it from me—I was free to puzzle it out myself, and when I figured things out a step before the narrative, I never felt cheated, nor did I feel like I had cheated. The clues were all there and half the fun was trying to put the pieces together.

So in the end, although I had my doubts initially, I enjoyed the book, and I think I would recommend it.

Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz

2008-07-28T15:15:00.004-06:00

I honestly can’t remember how I stumbled across this book, but it was a fascinating read. Marriage, a History is exactly that: a history of marriage. Coontz began researching the book in response to the apparent turmoil that exists around marriage in the United States today, ranging from divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births, to same-sex marriage and shifting sexual standards among teenagers. The purpose of the book is to look back on marriage throughout history in order to understand the role of marriage in society and individual lives today. Coontz gives a detailed (and very readable) account of the place of marriage in communities and nations and individual lives, of gender roles and family relationships, and shows how social forces came together in the last couple hundred years to cause an upheaval that is in some ways for the worse, but in others very much for the better.

One of the main premises of the book is that marriage based primarily on love and personal fulfillment is an incredibly recent phenomenon, that even though people have been falling in love with each other as long as people have been around, the idea that this should be central to a marriage relationship was unthinkable in most eras of history. The love-based marriage combined with an increase in personal choice and gender equality, as well as social acceptance of singlehood and more lenient divorce laws, mean that marriages today are less stable, and yet have far greater potential, than at any time in the past. “The historical transformation of marriage over the ages,” writes Coontz, “has created a…paradox for society as a whole. Marriage has become more joyful, more loving, and more satisfying for many couples than ever before in history. At the same time it has become optional and more brittle. These two strands of change cannot be disentangled.” The book is about how these conditions came to be. And while much of the book focuses, rather discouragingly, on how marital stability has been unalterably undermined by much larger social forces, it also ends on a positive note, showing that these changes have also paved the way for much stronger relationships and greater fulfillment in marriage than have been generally available in the past.

Although I read this book because social trends, the cultural aspect of history, and human relationships all fascinate me in general, I like to think that understanding the larger context has some value for the individual as well. Reading made me think about my own expectations regarding marriage and relationships, family, friendships, even life and career goals. It also gave me a different perspective on a lot of societal concerns that we hear about today. My favorite books to read these days are the books I enjoy reading, but that also make me feel like I have learned something, not in the sense that I can now quote back a few facts and figures, but in the sense that the book causes me to look at some aspect of the world differently than I did before. This book did that for me, and so I loved it. And yes, I recommend it.

The Host by Stephenie Meyer

2008-06-26T09:45:00.002-06:00

If you don't already know, Stephenie Meyer is the author of the hugely popular young adult vampire romance novels, beginning with Twilight and followed by two (soon to be three) sequels. Vampire romance novels aren't really my thing, but when I learned that Stephenie Meyer is also a BYU grad, I thought maybe it was worth seeing what the fuss was all about. I read Twilight and it was surprisingly entertaining - I had some issues with the writing, but not so much that I couldn't enjoy the book. I had a harder time getting into the sequel, so I made it about 70 pages in and haven't managed to get farther than that.

The Host is Stephenie Meyer's first book written for adults. I was curious, but not curious enough to shell out for a hardcover that I didn't necessarily know I would like, so I got it on "Zoom Lend" at the library. This meant that instead of putting a hold on the book and waiting for likely a very long time, I paid $2 up front for a 2-week loan. This in turn meant that I had exactly two weeks to finish the book, and so I stayed up a little late last night to make it through the last 50 pages before I had to return the book.

It took me a little time to get into the book, and I attribute this in part to the fact that I didn't quite know how to read it at first. I know Stephenie Meyer as a writer for young adults, and the book had a sort of largish font that made me feel like I was reading YA literature. But the book was about adult characters and being marketed for adults. I just didn't know if I should compare it to YA literature or adult literature, and neither comparison seemed to quite fit so I didn't have a reference point for knowing if it was good or not.

But I finally let myself get drawn into the story. The novel takes place on earth in the not-too-distant future. An alien species (the "souls") that live only by taking control of the bodies of sentient beings (but are nevertheless quite peaceful) has overtaken the human race, except for pockets of resistance. One soul, Wanderer, is given a human body and finds that the mind that once lived in this body still lives and communicates with her, and the soul (who, as all souls, acquired all the memories of her host) finds that she wants nothing more than to return to find the people her body loved as a human. (Does that even make sense? I'm not quite sure how else to explain it). The story revolves around her experience joining a small colony of human resistance, all of whom initially distrust and fear her, for good reason.

I actually really enjoyed the book. It wasn't a challenging read by any means (the writing is solid, but simple), and I sometimes feel like Stephenie Meyer goes into emotional overload (the emotional overload wasn't nearly as dramatic in The Host as it was in the teenage vampire love novels, but it was still there). And given the subject matter, it wasn't quite as thought-provoking as it might have been. But it was entertaining, and fascinating to me to see how she created and then melded this alien world with the human world, and was able to make the alien souls residing in human bodies quite distinct from the humans, yet still believable. In fact, her treatment of the host species and their experience was the most interesting and believable part of this book for me.

I think it's pretty amazing that Stephenie Meyer had not written anything before a few years ago and has taken the market by storm the way she has.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

2008-06-10T15:41:00.004-06:00

The premise of this book is that we all make decisions, but, being human, we often make decisions poorly and end up doing things that are not in our own best interests. This ranges from poor eating habits to poor (and sometimes disastrous) financial decisions. In an ideal world, everyone makes decisions that maximize their own self-interests, but we don’t live in an ideal world and can’t expect to.

The authors’ solution is a sort of “choice architecture,” in which the policies and circumstances around important decisions that people make are carefully designed to help people make the decisions that will lead to the outcomes that they really want. They apply this idea to an incredibly wide variety of economic and social issues, from retirement plans to health care, education, energy consumption, and marriage. Their ideas (to me) seemed really intuitive by the time I finished the book, and they cite many examples of how the ideas have actually worked in real-life contexts. But it is not how things are generally done, and what makes this book so interesting is that by the time you finish, you wonder why not.

I can't quite do justice to the idea in a limited space, but I think it might be easier to see with an example. One of the examples they give that really struck me is organ donation. Although it’s hard to argue that having more viable organs available for patients who need them is anything but a good thing, you would never want to enforce organ donation. Many people have valid and well-thought-out reasons for not becoming organ donors, and forcing people to be organ donors, or even making it very difficult for them not to be organ donors, would seem to violate ethical and democratic principals.

But there are also lots of statistics showing that a lot more people are willing to be organ donors than are actually registered as donors, and one of the reasons for this is that we have to go out of our way to make that choice. This hits me really close to home. There was a time in my life when I was hesitant about being an organ donor, but since that time I have thought quite carefully about it, and have decided that I am comfortable with the idea - I hope it never comes to that, but if it does I want my organs to go to someone who needs them if at all possible.

But I am not an organ donor. And the reason I am not an organ donor is only because I keep forgetting to sign the part of my drivers’ license that says I wish to be an organ donor. That’s all.*

Thaler and Sunstein’s choice architecture would take into account people like me by making it so that we wouldn’t have to consciously go out of our way to make the decision we already know we want to make. As it is, to be an organ donor you have to opt in, and the default is to opt out. But it would be incredibly simple for the DMV to require that you choose to either opt in or opt out at the time you get your license. That would have taken care of my problem immediately because I could have made the decision right then and there and never had to think about finding the right kind of pen to sign the back of my drivers' license.

Or another option is to make organ donation the default, which makes more sense than making non-organ donation default, if you think about it. If people have to make a conscious effort, whether it's to opt in or opt out, the people who feel most strongly are going to go ahead and make that decision—it is the people who don’t really care much either way who will end up with the default option. And if people who go with the default are okay with either one, then you’d probably want to make the default option the one that will most benefit other people—in this case, organ donation.

There are an awful lot of other interesting ideas floating around in this book, and I’d be really interested to hear other peoples’ take on it. I sometimes don’t have a lot of faith in either government or the free market to make a genuinely positive (and intentional) impact on people’s lives, but this book gave me some optimism, as well as plenty to think about. Whether or not I agree with everything the authors suggest, the ideas are really compelling, and the writing is quite readable. I highly recommend this book.

*For the record, in the course of writing this post I realized that I finally needed to just do it, and signed the back of my license.

Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Piccoult

2008-06-01T10:16:00.005-06:00

I would not call Jodi Piccoult a brilliant writer, in the technical or artistic sense of the word. I love books that can draw me into the story because the writer is able to make everything feel completely real, but with Jodi Piccoult, it is hard for me to forget that I am reading a work of fiction and lose myself in the story. There are clunky moments of dialogue, or descriptions that just don’t quite work, or slightly incongruous time lapses.

But what I will say is that she is a good story teller. I have read two of her novels, and part of a third, and if the writing doesn’t draw me in, the story does. My biggest gripe with Nineteen Minutes was that I guessed the end almost from the beginning, and felt cheated of my surprise as a reader, but knowing the end also didn’t cause me to lose interest. Nineteen Minutes was a good story because the point of the story was not to get to the end, but to tell what happened along the way.

The center of the book is the nineteen minutes of the title, in which a teenage boy sets off a car bomb, walks into the high school, and opens fire on students and teachers. From there, the plot moves both forwards and backwards, gradually constructing not so much the events as the characters—the shooter, a childhood friend who has gone her separate way, the mothers of both of these teenagers, the detective leading the investigation, the defense attorney. To me, the most compelling purpose of the book is that of taking an act that is incomprehensible to most normal human beings, and to try to understand it. The book does not just take you along for the ride—it also asks you to think, and to see yourself in the characters that populate the pages.

Uglies and Pretties by Scott Westerfeld

2008-05-06T09:54:00.004-06:00

There are some young adult books that I have a hard time saying I like, but which I nevertheless have a hard time putting down. One of these is Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, which I read after learning that the author is a BYU grad, and that the books are wildly popular among teenage girls right now. I didn’t think it was well-written enough to set it above any other standard teen lit, and after talking about it with several other women around my age who got just as swept into it as I did, I decided that maybe the reason I couldn’t put it down and finished it in two days flat was because it so blatantly played into every teenage girls’ fantasy. It was not my adult self reading it so much as my junior high self, and from that perspective the story was deeply satisfying. (For the record, I was unable to make it through the sequel, and at this point will probably never make it to the third book at all.)

I think Uglies was like that in a way. I have plenty of gripes with the book. There are too many story elements that have been overused in other works of fiction. But there was still a freshness and energy to it that made it highly entertaining. My junior high self absolutely loved it even as my adult self took up the position of back-seat critic all the way through.

The story is basically your prototypical future-dystopia story: at some point in the past, humans have gone and destroyed themselves, whether by nuclear holocaust, epidemic disease, or (in thise case) vulnerability through oil dependence. The new generation of humans appears more stable, but at a cost—minds and memories are being carefully controlled by an elite group of leaders. Our protagonist inadvertently becomes involved with the few renegades who know the truth, and finds him- or herself drawn into a plot to reclaim humanity. This is a book I feel like I have read dozens of times.

Still, the world of Uglies is credible, and the writing is clean and fast-paced, if not particularly sophisticated. The characters are likeable, and while the basics of the story are no different from other young adult dystopia stories, the details are unique enough that I felt compelled to finish the book. In the world of Uglies, humans grow up with their parents, and then spend their awkward teenage years in dorms preparing for a much-anticipated operation at age 16 that will make them “pretty” by erasing the characteristics (like big ears or freckles or boniness) that cause feelings of envy and superiority. They will then inhabit their scientifically perfected bodies, spending several years enjoying endless parties before settling down as more responsible (but still beautiful) adults, with jobs and families, at harmony with the environment and each other.

Tally is our heroine, and shortly before her sixteenth birthday her friend Shay reveals the existence of a secret colony of people who have refused to undergo the operation, and have chosen to run away and remain “ugly.” This new knowledge leads from one hard decision to another, and to plenty of action and a few surprises. The book doesn’t involve much thinking, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who is not in the habit of reading youth fiction, but it is entertaining enough.

By the time I finished I was itching to pick up the sequel, but although I finished it, I found that it was much harder for me to get through, and left me with little desire to finish out the series of four books (originally meant to be a trilogy). Although the first felt fresh and new, by the time a second book started the ideas were old, and the clichés and overused plotlines were a lot harder to ignore. I’ll probably finish the trilogy at some point. After all, they’re quick reads, and I can probably pick up the third book at the public library. But I’m not on the edge of my seat waiting to know what happens next.

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser

2008-05-06T09:52:00.002-06:00

I read Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma almost simultaneously, though it wasn’t on purpose. I was already reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma when I went home for winter break, and I’d been intending to read Fast Food Nation for a very long time. So when I found myself alone at my brother’s apartment with some time to kill before everyone got home and saw it sitting on his bookshelf, I picked it up and started reading, and was engrossed pretty quickly.

There are some common themes between the two books, which may be one of the reasons I was engrossed so quickly. The structure is very different, however. Fast Food Nation is a lot more journalistic, whereas Omnivore’s Dilemma is much more personal. Omnivore’s Dilemma was probably the book I would label as more enjoyable, whereas Fast Food Nation was fascinating and, sometimes, horrifying. Both were eye-opening, just in different ways. And both made me think a great deal about the food I eat.

I hate to write this entire review from a point of comparison, but it’s hard not to compare the two books. The main difference is that Omnivore’s Dilemma is about the entire food system in the United States, and Fast Food Nation is about fast food (obviously). This means that Fast Food Nation talks more about the people who are part of the institutions than does Omnivore’s Dilemma which is heavy on the biological impact (in both the ecological and human sense) of different ways of producing and consuming food. In Fast Food Nation we go inside the restaurants, the schools, the corporations, the slaughterhouses. While you have to take some of it with a grain of salt—the author clearly had an agenda, but then, how do you write a nonfiction book without an agenda?—it’s very thought-provoking.

I really do feel like my attitude towards food in general has changed after reading both of these books, although I’m not sure that it’s made a noticeable (enough) impact on how I shop or how I eat. And I think what both of these books did for me was to make me more aware of how much we don’t know in a society where the size of the population and our dependence upon people, states, and nations that are far-removed from us (none of which is necessarily a bad thing) mean that we are also far-removed from many aspects of life, such as the gathering and preparing of food, that were once an integral part of everyday living. It certainly gives you pause.

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

2008-04-03T12:38:00.002-06:00

I had read a review or two of this book, but didn’t care to read it until after a friend recommended it last summer, around the time it came out in paperback. It still took me some time to actually pick it up, but right before Christmas break I bought it at the bookstore, and was completely absorbed almost from the first page.

The major premise of the book is that in our current society we have departed from all prior human experience in that we know almost nothing about where our food comes from, and subsequently face an increasingly confused relationship with food—what Pollan calls our “national eating disorder.” His solution: take a close look at as many parts as possible of the production of four different meals.

Pollan begins the book by taking a look at the preparation of a fast food meal, then at “Big Organic” (like Whole Foods) and what sets mass-produced organic foods apart from the non-organic mass-produced counterparts…as well as what doesn’t. The third section discusses much smaller-scale, sustainable, local agriculture, and in the fourth section Pollan goes through the experience of creating a meal entirely out of ingredients he himself has grown, collected, or hunted.

Reading this book made me want to recommend it to everyone I know. Although Pollan's tone remained intelligent and non-alarmist throughout (which greatly helped his argument), I can no longer look at my food the same way I once did. I feel like it ought to have changed my eating habits more than it actually did, but at the very least it made me a lot more aware of what I am eating and where it comes from, and made me aware of just how much we don’t know when so much of our food (even what we prepare ourselves!) is mass-produced at some level. Pollan’s writing is not just eye-opening—he is also very good at convincing readers that we really do need our eyes opened.

Straight Man by Richard Russo

2008-01-06T07:56:00.000-07:00

Eric has been trying to get me to read Straight Man for well over a year, and finally gave it to me as a Christmas gift, which pretty much ensures that I will read it, and read it soon (I don't know why, but gift books spend less time on my to-read shelf than other books). I began reading it on Christmas day, and finished on the flight home the day after New Year's.

William Henry Devereaux Jr. (Hank) is the chair of a bickering English department at West Central Pennsylvania University, beset with budget problems and long-standing personal grievances. It sounds like sort of a dry premise, but the events that unfold over the course of the book (which I don't think takes place in much more than a week or two) are surprisingly funny. And yet it's not a comic novel - the story is told with great sincerity.

The first thing I'll say is that, having read Russo's Empire Falls just a couple months ago, I found Straight Man to be entirely different. On reflection, it's clear that they're by the same author - the writing style, the characterization, some of the humor. But in many other ways they are nothing alike. Empire Falls sucked me in from the very beginning, but it took a bit longer for Straight Man to grab me. It was interesting and well written, but it wasn't until about halfway through that I suddenly discovered how attached I was to the characters, and how interested I was to see how everything turned out. Once I reached that point, however, Straight Man became a page-turner. It was funny, I cared about the characters (even the unlikeable ones), and it turned out just the way it needed to.

Better by Atul Gawande

2007-12-25T11:42:00.001-07:00

Complications by Atul Gawande made my top ten list last year, and I've had my eye on this book for awhile now. Since it is still only available in hardback I'd resigned myself to waiting until the paperback version came out, but I found it at the public library right before I left for the break and thought it might make a good airplane read.

I think Complications is still my favorite of the two, but I still thought Better was very interesting. It is a little like a collection of essays, although there is a definite organization and underlying theme to the chapters. The book is about medicine in general (with an emphasis on surgery, given that Gawande is a practicing surgeon), and inside looks at medicine are always fascinating to me. For a very long time I thought of science, including medicine, as being a relatively certain and stable thing, that the complexity lay in the sheer amount of information, and that shortcomings arose because of the fact that we didn't always have all the information. Over time, I've come to realize that there is far more to the complexity, and to appreciate the human side of medicine, and the fact that knowing generalities doesn't always translate to knowing what is going on in specific situations.

The subjects of Better range from the ethical dilemma facing doctors who are called upon to aid in administering the death penalty, to the innovations that have made childbirth so much safer for mother and child, to cystic fibrosis treatment centers and what makes some hospitals and specific programs so much more effective than others that still put great effort into improving their treatment. I find it difficult to put my finger on a specific point that Gawande was trying to make, but the chapters were well-written and interesting, and I would easily recommend it to almost anyone.

Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler

2007-12-25T11:29:00.000-07:00

“Once upon a time there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”

This is the line that sets up the novel, and it’s a remarkably good opener for what is about to come. Middle-aged Rebecca Davitch one day finds herself looking at her family and at herself, and at the person she was before her marriage over thirty years ago, and begins to wonder about the life she might have had instead. What is most interesting to me about the premise is that she is not looking back on an unhappy life and wondering if it could be better—her life is as happy and full as any life could be. And yet she has been shaped and molded into a very different person than the person she began as, and she wonders if somehow she has become someone she is not.

For some reason, this premise spoke to me. I have noticed the tendency in myself and others to sometimes allow ourselves to become a different person in reaction to what we believe other people like about us or expect of us. And so at first I saw this book as sort of a thought experiment about what happens when you when, over time, you allow yourself to become someone who is no longer yourself. But the end reached a different conclusion, and it made me think—about how we shape our lives and selves, and how others shape our lives and selves.

I think what I like most about Anne Tyler is that her books are about the characters, and while Tyler can sometimes overwhelm me with their sheer personality, the characters still feel real to me. The reader gets to spend the book figuring out life and human relationships along with the main character. We spend time inside the characters’ heads, but not so deeply inside that we cannot see just a little more than they can.

Sometimes when you read several books by the same author, they all begin to sound the same, and that’s beginning to happen a bit for me with Anne Tyler. I picked up another a few weeks after finishing this one, and I’m struggling to get into it. Still, Back When We Were Grownups was probably my favorite of her books that I have read so far because more than other books I was able to see just a little bit of myself in the protagonist, and so the book really made me think about my own perceptions. I’m not sure it would speak to everyone in the same way (and in fact, it’s not her most highly-rated of her books on Amazon), but I really enjoyed the read.

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

2007-11-11T12:51:00.001-07:00

It took me a long time to finish this book—I’ve been working on it since my last book review and, for maybe the first time in my life, I haven’t been reading any other books simultaneously. But my slowness in finishing has nothing to do with the length of the book or the quality of the read. Had it been Christmas break, I think I would have devoured the 483 pages in a matter of days; it sucked me in from the very first page, and I’ve been reading bits and pieces in all the little spare moments I can get. Last night I had an early bedtime goal after a week’s worth of late nights, but I was 60 pages from the end, and ten pages in I found that I couldn’t put it down.

What I loved most about this book was the character development. The novel itself was not entirely character-driven—there was definitely a story, though I’d be hard pressed to tell it back to you. Things happened, and everything that happened was important to the story (though you didn’t necessarily see it at the time), and all the events rolled forward to a natural, but not necessarily expected, conclusion. But the characters did drive the plot, and Russo’s handling of the characters is what makes the book what it is.

Miles Roby is at the center of the novel, a middle-aged man who has spent most of his life in the struggling Maine town of Empire Falls where he now runs the local diner. But although the story is ostensibly about Miles, the character development radiates outward to his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Janine, and daughter, Tick, who Russo paints almost as clearly as Miles himself, and then from there to everyone else who plays a role, any role, in Miles’ story. It’s not just that we meet these characters, it’s that they all have their own story, and as the reader we are able to see a little bit of each of their stories. Russo’s strength is that he allows us not just to see the characters, but to know them—the minor ones as well as the major ones, the unlikeable as well as the likeable. And he doesn’t just take the time to tell us about the characters—we get inside their heads, even if it’s just for a chapter or two, and see how they understand the world and why they do what they do.

I have to give credit to Eric for this one—he’s been trying to get me to read a Richard Russo novel for awhile, and the copy of Empire Falls that I read was his (which means I don’t have the satisfaction of sliding it into place on my bookshelf). And I’m glad he recommended it—it’s the kind of book that makes me hesitant to pick up my next read because I know it just won’t quite live up.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

2007-10-16T18:50:00.000-06:00

When I first heard about this book I didn’t particularly want to read it. I took the premise to be that humans are inherently (if unintentionally) destructive and self-serving and that the world would be infinitely better without us. This is an attitude that rubs me wrong on many levels, not because I don’t think humans have a harmful impact on the environment (I’m pretty sure we do) but because I don’t think it’s a constructive attitude, and because I think the world is far too complex a place for us to make sweeping generalizations without qualification.

But a discussion with the author on Science Friday on NPR a little while back piqued my curiosity, because the book is the result of a rather interesting thought experiment. You can’t question the assertion that humans have impacted the earth—our structures and systems and agricultural endeavors cover an awful lot of land. And most of these things require occasional-to-constant upkeep. So what would happen to everything we’ve put on the earth if we were to suddenly disappear? A lot of us have played this game before—we look at the ruins of past civilizations and try to imagine what some archaeologist thousands of years in the future would make of our own. Weisman’s game is just the extreme version. If all humans were to suddenly disappear from the face of the earth, what would become of everything that we have created for better or worse? How long would it take nature to reclaim what we have built up or torn down or tamed? What would stay around, and for how long? How might other life forms thrive or perish or change and adapt in our absence?

The process of exploring these questions leads to some interesting, sometimes scary, sometimes hopeful, observations. New York City, for instance, requires almost constant pumping to keep from flooding, and the waters would take over quickly if no humans were left to keep the pumps running. Cats, it turns out, are bad for the environment (or at least the bird population), and dogs are not and would probably not do well in our absence. Plastic never really breaks down completely and there is a huge, unintended junkyard in the middle of the ocean where all our plastic bottles and bags and bits and pieces gradually make their way. Nuclear meltdowns, like Chernobyl, have particularly scary effects, and yet the wildlife around Chernobyl, while changed, seems to be adapting and even flourishing.

I did take some issue with the writing. The book was very carefully divided into chapters within sections, but I was never able to figure out what differentiated one section from the next, and even the chapters were sometimes only loosely organized around a theme. Weisman jumped from location to location, and topic to topic, so that I felt like I was reading a string of mini-essays rather than a well-formed narrative. Although I enjoyed the read for the most part, the writing made me a little impatient at the beginning and the end, and is probably my biggest complaint with the book.

But The World Without Us made me think, and I learned some things I didn’t know, and those are never bad things.

Rules by Cynthia Lord

2007-09-23T19:44:00.000-06:00

I think Cynthia Lord took on a tough project. First, writing from the perspective of a child or young adult is difficult. Most kids don’t write as adeptly as an adult writer would, and the ones who come close are often too precocious to actually represent how a normal kid thinks or feels. To try to capture a kid’s perspective, an adult has to remember what it was like to be a kid without completely projecting their adult self into the kid’s self-analysis. And then the adult has to write it in such a way that it’s readable and insightful, without sounding precocious and unbelievable. The adult has to become invisible, but still control the action.

Second, it’s tough to write about disabilities. Even describing these disabilities must be difficult because it’s outside our standard experience. Jerky movements or quirky behaviors or voice inflections have to be captured because they can’t be assumed. And then there’s the handling of the subject itself. How do you write about autism or severe physical or mental disabilities? It’s an easy subject to make uncomfortable—not necessarily because of the disability, but because of characters’ feelings and reactions around it. I remember reading a book when I was young which I still remember because from the very beginning you could see it barreling toward embarrassment and hurt and downright meanness, and that prospect (which was fulfilled about halfway through the story) created cloud of discomfort over the entire book.

With all these balances to keep, Rules comes off brilliantly. The rules of the title refer to the list of rules that 12-year-old Catherine has made for her 8-year-old autistic brother David, to help him learn how to act in a world that he does not naturally understand. The book revolves around Catherine’s relationship with her family, with an unexpected new friend, wheelchair-confined and speech-impaired Jason, and with the new girl next door who she desperately wants to befriend. The story has all the potential of lapsing into cliché, but it never does. Lord has an autistic child of her own, and the descriptions of David and Jason make them into individuals rather than stereotypes of a condition. And Catherine has concerns that seem very real for a twelve-year-old. The writing is clear and engaging, as is the story. It was a quick read—perhaps two or three hours, spread over the course of two days—and surprisingly satisfying. I had my doubts about actually purchasing the $15 hardcover book (well, $15 minus my 30% off coupon from Borders)—but turned out to be a wonderful find, and I’m happy to add it to my growing children’s collection.

New Ideas from Dead Economists by Todd G. Buchholz

2007-09-22T17:30:00.000-06:00

I really, really liked this book.

I’ll preface my review with an explanation of how I came to be reading a book about economics in the first place, because I have to admit that a year or two ago this would have looked like the one of the most boring books I could pick up from the nonfiction shelves. In fact, however, that’s sort of why I ended up with it in my hands. I have said for years and years that I don’t care much for economics. I have never believed that it’s a worthless subject to know, but I took one required economics class in high school, learned nothing except supply and demand, and never had any desire to revisit the subject.

But I’m self-aware enough to realize that the reason I dislike economics is not because there is anything inherently disklikable about economics itself. Rather, I don’t like economics because I don’t know much about it and therefore I don’t really understand it. That’s why, when I began reading and enjoying nonfiction books not that long ago, I started to think that maybe I ought to pick up a good, informative, well-written, and preferably entertaining book on economics written for a popular audience (if there was such a thing). I did an Amazon search (which includes browsing books and customer reviews and Listmania lists and So You Want To… guides), and found a few promising selections, but it took awhile before I was in the right mood to actually pick one and start it.

The right mood came a few weeks ago. I took advantage of the moment and tracked down one of my choices at the local Borders. New Ideas from Dead Economists was not this choice, actually, but it was on the same shelf, and once I actually held it in my hands and read the back cover and skimmed a few pages, I was convinced that it was precisely what I was looking for. And I was right.

What I like about this book is that it doesn’t just explain current understanding of economic principles. It follows economic thought chronologically, from Adam Smith to the present day (in fact, the book was revised and updated in 2006 so it is quite current). There’s a little bit of biographical detail about each of several major economic thinkers, enough to add some human interest but not so much that it gets in the way of the ideas, which are the real subject. Each trend in economics is explained, along with its historical context, and how it applies to or has repercussions in today’s economy. Buchholz gives a broad picture of the history, ideas, and relevance of economic thinking, and by the time I had finished the book I felt like, although there were many, many details I didn’t understand (no one has ever mastered economics, let alone by reading a single book), I had a much better understanding of what economics is as a discipline, what its relevance is, and also the places it falls short.

On top of all of that, I really enjoyed the actual reading. I wouldn’t call it an easy read for someone who has very little economics background. I had to concentrate, and put more effort into understanding than I normally do in my personal reading. But it was also very well and clearly written. It was a bit like a story, too. I would finish one section and I genuinely wanted to move onto the next. When Buchholz said, “we’ll get to that in the next chapter,” I would anxiously await the next chapter. And he talked very clearly about the contradictions and complications that have arisen over the course of the history of economics as a discipline. It reminds me a bit of reading Complications last year—I spent a whole book learning about the mistakes that surgeons make and still came away with a greater faith in medicine because knowing what doctors can't do also gave me a better picture of what they can. Similarly with this book I spent three hundred pages learning where economic theory has encountered its limits (and, granted, successes) and came away with a greater faith in the relevance and explanatory power of economics. And it also gave me a good reference point for discussions about the economy or politics or monetary policy - all sorts of things that pop up in the news every day. I find it all very interesting, and I also feel like I don't know nearly enough. Maybe it's time for another Amazon search for another economics book.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

2007-09-19T07:30:00.000-06:00

I won't hesitate to say that this is the best nonfiction book I have read this year so far. Although I've long claimed an interest in history, I don't usually get around to reading it. But once I picked up The Worst Hard Time, I had a hard time putting it down. The Dust Bowl is an event in American history that, as a high schooler a decade ago, I learned about in a paragraph or two, as something of a footnote to the wider story of the Great Depression. Timothy Egan more than fleshes out this footnote. He tells the broad story, of government policies and masses of people and agricultural practices. But just as important to his narrative is the human tale. We are introduced early on to a handful of everyday people, and throughout the book, Egan follows each of their stories, showing us not just what happened but what it was like to live through it. I rarely connect to a history book in the way I connected to this one. And while I occasionally shed a tear at the end of a novel, this may be the first time I have closed a book of nonfiction with teary eyes.

The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue

2007-09-18T20:10:00.001-06:00

The basis of this book is the changeling myth, in which faeries, hobgoblins, devils, or some other not-quite-human creature steal a human child and replace it with one of their own. Changelings pop up in fairy tales, and in history, where parents were sometimes exonerated of infanticide based on the claim that the child had been taken by a devil, that the child they killed was not really their child or not really human.

In Donohue’s novel, however, the changelings are real, and in many ways they are as human as the rest of us. The Stolen Child is two tales told in parallel. Henry Day is the stolen child, taken by the changelings and replaced by one of their own who molds his own features into those of the child and attempts to take on a new human life in place of the one that had been stolen from him a hundred years before. The changeling becomes seven-year-old Henry Day, son of an unsuspecting mother and suspicious father; and the young Henry becomes Aniday, the newest of a tribe of twelve ageless faeries, trapped in children’s bodies and roaming the forest, gradually forgetting their past but always looking forward to the day when it will be their turn to make the change and reenter the world they left behind. And yet neither Henry nor Aniday can complete leave his past, and their stories diverge and come together again as they seek, respectively, to hide and to find their own origins.

I heard of this book before it was published, when Amazon ran a sort of advance promotion. It looked intriguing, and received good reviews, so I added it to my mental list of books to read but put the actual reading on hold at least until the paperback version came out. Even then, it took awhile before I finally went ahead and bought the book, but once I did I finished it in six days flat. The story is engaging, and the changelings themselves are utterly convincing. I have long held that I am not a fantasy reader (at least, not adult fantasy), if by fantasy you mean dragons and wizards and elves and prophecies (as far as I’m concerned, Tolkien is the only one who pulled it off, and that was only because he was the first). But as Eric has pointed out in conversations about this matter, a genre is not confined to its stereotypes, and I have to admit that nearly all my favorite books contain some element of the fantastic. I have the greatest respect for an author who can do something new with something old, who can create a world (or, as in this case, a race of beings) and make me feel that their creation is every bit as real as the world I live in, who can seem to let their imaginations run wild without ever stretching my credulity. The highest compliment that I can ever give a book is that it feels real. I am a sucker for a good story or intriguing plot twist, but none of this matters much if I can’t relate to the characters and the situations in which they find themselves.

The Stolen Child feels real—the changelings as much as the humans. The story draws you in without leading you on. The end is exactly what it ought to be. And yes, there were even tears at the corners of my eyes when I closed the book. It was entertaining and beautiful and sad, all at once.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin

2007-09-18T20:02:00.000-06:00

I went through a phase (several years long) in which I liked the books on my bookshelf to be clean and new and unblemished. Then I discovered my now-favorite used book store, and learned the strange satisfaction that comes from handling a well-worn paperback. Recently I began browsing the science fiction section for classic sci-fi. I wouldn’t call myself a science fiction fan, but I’ve picked up a science fiction book here and there, and have been pleasantly surprised to find several well-written and thought-provoking works. Classic sci-fi is ideal for used book store acquisitions. The paperback books with their yellowed pages, creased binding, and campy cover illustrations give my sterile bookshelves a little character, and I’ve been happy to add a couple to my collection.

The most recent one of these secondhand paperbacks to migrate from my to-read shelf to my bookshelf is The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin. Published in 1969 and winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, this book certainly qualifies as a classic of science fiction, and I’ve had it on my shelf since shortly after I read Changing Planes earlier this summer. The Left Hand of Darkness is the third Ursula LeGuin book I have read (I read A Wizard of Earthsea a couple years ago) and her style seems to have a decidedly anthropological bent. The Left Hand of Darkness has very little in the way of story. There is enough narrative to hold the book together, but her purpose is not to tell the story. Rather, she uses the 300-odd pages to explore the social ramifications of a unique geology and biology. The geological question is slightly interesting—what would society look like if the entire habitable range of a planet lay at the coldest extremes of human habitability. The biological question is even more so—how does society change when there is no such thing as gender?

I found the premise extremely interesting. I don’t know that I’d recommend the book to everyone. It is certainly not story-driven, nor is it particularly character-driven, and while I didn’t think it was a hard read, it did require a little patience. There is some shifting back and forth among points of view without notice, and some inconsistency in the passage of time, and some ambiguity in the purpose of the narrative and the motivations of the characters. All of this is entirely consistent with the style of the book (and therefore not a flaw in the story), but it’s a style that takes some getting used to. Still, the description of the world drew me in. I turned each of the 300 pages not because I wanted to know what happened, but because I wanted to know more about this world LeGuin had imagined.