Book reviews, 2008

Diz -- Robert Gregory

Biography of Dizzy Dean and a history of the Cardinals teams of the thirties.  I sort of got the feeling I wouldn't really have liked Dean if I'd known him; he was incredibly full of himself.  He'd totally have his own reality-TV show if he were around now.


Prince Otto -- Robert Louis Stevenson

Historical adventure, following the "incognito prince makes honest friends among the peasantry while back at the palace his courtiers plot against him" trope.  Skillful prose but not very memorable.


The Box -- Marc Levinson

Excellent book on the history of container shipping.  Did you know that for a long time they couldn't unload shipping containers on the docks of Central American countries, because people would steal the containers and use them to live in?  Or that the guy mainly responsible for the change to container rather than break-bulk shipping was also the guy who invented the leveraged buyout, and ended up bankrupt?  Or that the reason shipping containers are all the same two sizes is that the US Army used them to ship war materiel to Vietnam, and the Army quartermasters demanded standard sizes?  Great stuff.


The Moonstone -- Wilkie Collins

One of the first detective novels.  T.S. Eliot thought it was the best English mystery story, and it established a number of archetypes: the crime takes place in an English country house with a large number of suspects; it's investigated first by a bungling local cop and then by a sharp professional detective from London, and finally solved by an amateur; and mysterious foreigners hang about the fringes of the action.  I liked it, though the ending probably seemed more original in 1870 than it does now.  I also didn't like the behavior of the genteel protagonists, who snootily refuse to cooperate with the lower-class police, although Collins obviously expects the reader to admire them for it.  Different times.


The Peacemaker -- C.S. Forester

Forester's only science-fiction story, about an unworldly scientist in the twenties who falls in love with a University peace-movement radical and decides to impress her by using his brilliant invention to force the world's governments to stop fighting, which turns out about as well as you'd think.  Not very good.


Mauve -- Simon Garfield

Very interesting book about William Perkin, who invented aniline dyes (mostly by accident while looking for uses for coal tar.)  Perkin was pretty much the first real industrial chemist, and for once a hard-working inventor was rewarded with both worldly success and a happy life.  A rare case where bread went to the wise, and riches to men of understanding, and favour to men of skill.  Maybe because the mauve dye really was something new under the sun.


Adventures in the Skin Trade -- Dylan Thomas

Posthumous collection of short stories.  I didn't really care for them.


The Economic Naturalist -- Robert H. Frank

Very good book that uses the economic theory of incentives to explain those questions that Steven Wright was always asking.  Why is there Braille on drive-up ATMs?  Because it would be more expensive to make two different kinds of ATM keyboards, and it doesn't hurt the drive-up ATMs to have Braille on them, even though it's not necessary.  Why do 24-hour stores have locks on the doors?  Same answer.  Industrial doors are all made to standard, and a door with no locks would have to be custom-made, which would be more expensive.  Cheaper to just use the standard doors, even though they have a feature you don't use.  The whole book is full of that stuff, and it also includes a very lucid and useful explanation of the concept of "opportunity cost".


Babe Ruth's Own Book of Baseball -- G.H. Ruth

Ghost-written how-to book on baseball.  The ghostwriter was probably Ford Frick.  More interesting as a period piece than for any insight into baseball.


The Leaky Establishment -- Dave Langford

Very funny comic novel dealing with the adventures of a press officer at a nuclear power plant in western England.  Spends a lot of time lampooning the insane bureaucratic procedures of the British nuclear power administration.


The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Burglar -- Maurice LeBlanc

This is the first collection of the Arsene Lupin stories. Lupin is sort of the French Raffles, a master thief who suavely loots high society while cleverly outwitting the police.  Leblanc wrote about twenty books about him from around 1910 to 1940, and they remain very popular in France.  The stories are both clever and funny.


Hard Times -- Charles Dickens

This is Dickens' most openly reformist novel, an attack on the factory system, the rote-learning education system, and the general mechanization of society, whose end, Dickens argues, can only be the transformation of humans into joyless, selfish cogs in a soulless, brutal, machine-like world.  There's a great scene where the teacher Mr. Gradgrind is forced to plead for mercy from his own former student, who, true to his teaching, is completely without compassion or humanity.  (I am certain this was the inspiration for the scene in Doctor Who where the dictator Davros, who has deliberately designed the Dalek war machines to be without any human weakness, finds that they turn on him, and he pleads with them for pity, and they reply that they have no concept of "pity" and kill him.)  I was assigned this in high school, but I didn't read it, so now I feel a bit less guilty.


The Apprentice -- Jacques Pepin

Autobiography of Jacques Pepin, an early "celebrity chef".  Gives a really good picture of what it was like learning to cook in an old-fashioned French restaurant before the war.  Pepin and the other apprentices lived in the restaurant from the age of ten or twelve, working sixteen to eighteen hours a day, working every station in turn and winding up knowing every last thing there is to know about cooking and how to run a restaurant.  I don't think that happens any more even in France.


Redburn -- Herman Melville

This was a very odd novel, a bildungsroman without any bildungs to it -- that is, the hero does no growing up at all; he's exactly the same callow fool at the end of the book as he was at the beginning.  I suppose Melville's point is that if you're self-absorbed enough, you can travel around the world without ever seeing or learning anything.


On the Wrong Track -- Steve Hockensmith

This is a sequel to Holmes on the Range; it manages to be very different from the first book while at the same time not trying too hard to be different.  Our two heroes, inspired by the Sherlock Holmes stories in Strand magazine, have left off being cowpokes and gotten jobs as railroad detectives.  It's a good mystery, and also very funny.


Did Lincoln Own Slaves? -- Gerald J. Prokopowicz

A book full of frequently-asked questions about Lincoln put together by a curator at the Lincoln museum, named for the most frequent question he gets.  (For the record, no, Lincoln did not own slaves.  Interestingly, there are a significant number of museum visitors who insist that Lincoln did own slaves, and won't be told otherwise.)  Pretty well put together.


Dreaming in Code -- Scott Rosenberg

Very interesting book.  The author was a fly on the wall for a few years while Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus, started a new company to create an open-source email/calendar/PDA application, and promptly spent five years and millions of dollars making every mistake it's possible to make designing software.  The book serves as an excellent how-not-to for software projects.


Kingship and Ideology in the Islamic and Mongol Worlds -- Anne F. Broadbridge

Well-laid-out book on the relations between the Mongol Khans and the Mamluk sultanate circa 1200-1440.  I liked it.  It's interesting to see how small the world was even then.  I sort of knew that the Golden Horde must have had dealings with the Russians, what with the common border, but it certainly would not have occurred to me that the Great Khan carried on correspondence with the Pope, never mind the kings of England and France.
Odd piece of synchronicity: a couple months before I read this, I was reading about the Russians finally overcoming the last remnants of the hordes in the nineteenth century, and I remember that the last independent ruler in Central Asia to call himself "Khan" (Yaqub Beg, ruler of Kashgaria, who began his career as a bandit in the Ust-Yurt, apparently) claimed to be a lineal descendant of Timur.  Interesting that even in the 1860s, it seems the best way of giving yourself legitimacy was to claim lineage from Timur (and from the Golden House through him, I suppose.)  I also remember my archaeology professor at Harvard telling me that people in the Altai even now will come to blows over whether Timur was technically a Mongol or a Turk.


Pirate Tales from the Law -- Arthur M. Harris

Short biographies of lesser-known pirates like Tom Green and John Gow.  Interesting, but marred by the self-righteous tone.


Laments for the Living -- Dorothy Parker

A collection of short pieces from the New Yorker.  They were funny, but actually the best piece in the book was another Parker story that had been torn out of a New Yorker magazine, folded up, and stuck in the book at some point eighty years ago.


The Beautiful Cigar Girl -- Daniel Stashower

A good book about Edgar Allan Poe and his life in journalism, focusing on his investigation of an early "celebrity murder": a young woman named Mary Rogers who was found beaten and strangled in a river.  Poe, then making his living as a reporter, spent a great deal of time investigating and eventually concluded that Rogers died from a botched abortion, and the strangle-marks were caused by the cord the abortionist used to drag her body to the river to dispose of it.  This is still the generally accepted explanation; Poe also used it as the basis for his short story "The Mystery of Marie Roget".  It's also a really good picture of just how crazily self-destructive Poe was.


The Diary of a Nobody -- George Grossmith

Funny Victorian novel cast as the earnest diary of the endearingly boring Mr. Pootle, a man to whom nothing ever happens, and who manages to say a great deal about that nothing.  I liked it a lot.


Waiting -- Debra Ginsberg

Pretty good exegesis of what it's like to work as a waitress for your whole career.  I personally think the writer protests too much when she insists that wait staff never, ever get back at mean customers by spitting in their food, though maybe she just worked in different restaurants than I did.  (Like, really different.  Don't be mean to the wait staff, that's all I'm saying.)


Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain -- US State Department

This is an interesting period piece I bought in London.  It was written for the use of G.I.s stationed in England in World War Two, to help farm boys who'd never been ten miles from home before get along in a different culture.  I don't know how well it worked for the Americans, but apparently it was very popular among the British, as an unusually direct view of how they looked to outsiders.  A London Times editorial said it did a better job of explaining England to Americans than Emerson or Hawthorne.  Also a very interesting snapshot of wartime Britain.


Instructions for American Servicemen in Australia -- US State Department

Kind of the same thing, but written by someone with more of a sense of humor, who included a glossary of Australian slang and appended helpful notes along the lines of "note that most Australians consider "bastard" a term of endearment."


The Candlemass Road -- George Macdonald Fraser

Very good historical novel dealing with the Scots border reivers in the 17th century.  Fraser said somewhere else that a good piece of fiction can give a much more vivid and essentially correct idea of a period in time than a chronicle or history can, and this book is an excellent example.


The Reavers -- George Macdonald Fraser

And yet, eighteen years after writing The Candlemass Road, Fraser decided, for some reason, to take the characters and plot and re-use them in a silly farce, meant to be in the same vein as his excellent 1971 novel The Pyrates, but flopping heavily.  It's neither original nor funny.  Also it has an annoying preface in which Fraser, as was his wont as he got older, congratulates himself on how free from political correctness he is.  (Honestly, "politically correct" is just a buzzword that means nothing.  Have you ever heard anyone, ever, say that he *was* politically correct?)


The Shakespeare Riots -- Nigel Cliff

An ambitious and well-executed book about America breaking away from British cultural imperialism.  It mostly concerns Shakespeare -- who many 19th-century Americans felt had really been adopted as the American national poet -- and it tells the story of the feud between the two leading Shakespearean actors of the day, which climaxed with the great Shakespeare Riot of 1849, when the fans of the rival actors confronted each other in Astor Place in New York and started a fight that grew to involve thousands of people, throwing paving stones, lighting fires, calling out the militia, and twenty-odd people dying with hundreds more injured.  People took literature more seriously in those days.


The Haunted Bookshop -- Christopher Morley

A well-written book, but one of those stories that doesn't age well because behavior that seemed admirable to a British writer in 1915 seems both fat-headed and arrogant now.


Tamerlane's Children -- Robert Rand

A very readable study of contemporary Uzbekistan.  The author notes that he was once pulled over in Tashkent because he was wearing his seat belt; the cop assumed he must be driving drunk, because why else would anyone wear a seat belt?  The US needs Uzbekistan as almost its only ally in the region, and uncomfortably overlooks the corruption, organized crime, and oppression.  Uzbekistan has also adopted Timur (Tamerlane) as its national hero, since he was born there, although he was either a Mongol or a Turk or both, depending which fistfight you want to get into, and not an ethnic Uzbek.  There's a statue of him in Samarkand now where the statue of Marx used to stand.


Black Ajax -- George Macdonald Fraser

Historical novel about the real-life boxer Tom Molineaux, a former American slave who came to England in 1810 and challenged Tom Cribb for the heavyweight title.  Very little is known about Molineaux, so Fraser had a pretty free hand; the story is cast as a series of interviews with everyone involved except Molineaux himself, who remains an enigma even while the whole story revolves around him.  Well-written; the boxing scenes are excellent.


Poetical Sketches -- William Blake

Blake's first book, which I believe was not published in his lifetime.  This was one of the ones he didn't illustrate.  It's not bad, but he definitely got much better later in life.


Somebody's Luggage -- Charles Dickens et al.

From 1851 to 1866, Dickens annually published an extra double-size Christmas edition of the magazine he edited (first Household Words and later All the Year Round.)  Each of these Christmas numbers was a collection of stories by Dickens and his friends (Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, and numerous others) all set within an overarching structure provided by Dickens.  (He also re-wrote many of the contributors' stories to some extent.)  This one is the Christmas number for 1862, the device being that a hotel waiter has found a pile of unpublished stories in a guest's abandoned luggage, and is reading through them.  The stories vary in quality; unsurprisingly, the ones by Dickens and Collins are the best.


Don't Try This at Home -- ed. Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Freeman

This was supposed to be a collection of "worst-nightmare kitchen disasters", but most of the cooks they interview don't actually have very good stories.  The exception, not surprisingly, is Anthony Bourdain, whose story of the banquet that was doomed from the start and got worse and worse as the night went on is worth the book by itself.


The Expedition of Humphry Clinker -- Tobias Smollett

An epistolary novel covering the journey around England of the irascible but essentially good-hearted Matthew Bramble.  (Humphry Clinker, an ostler he hires as a servant, doesn't actually show up until a third of the way through.)  Smollett uses Bramble's letters to his friends as he makes his journey to make vicious satire on 18th-century England, particularly the city of Bath.  It's good but it starts to feel kind of long after a while.


The Mythical Man-Month -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

This was written in 1974 but it's still the definitive book on managing large software projects.  The author worked at IBM and oversaw the OS/360 disaster from start to finish.  It's got a lot of useful stuff in it, but probably the biggest lesson is that since every individual on a project needs to have complex communication with every other individual, adding more programmers to a late project only makes it later.  Brooks calculates that adding N programmers to a task  increases the necessary effort as N(N-1)/2.


Under Vesuvius -- John Maddox Roberts

Murder mystery set in Pompeii in about 55 BC, long before the eruption.  The action and dialogue are good, but the mystery was kind of weak.


Made to Break -- Giles Slade

Interesting study of the history of planned obsolescence.  Slade points out a general rule that I have found to be true: whenever you get a new piece of electronic equipment, the one thing you can say about it with certainty is that you will not own it as long as you owned the one it's replacing.


Dombey and Son -- Charles Dickens

Excellent book.  There is no Dickens novel I've read that doesn't have a child die in it, but this one had the least pathetic but most touching.  Poor kid.  Also the secondary characters are really excellent.  I sympathize with Solomon Gills, who says, "I have fallen behind the time, and I am too old to catch it up again; and even the noise it makes a great way ahead confuses me."


Smoot's Ear -- Robert Tavernor

Kind of dry and turgid book on measurements and the relation of the human body to measurement systems.  Would have been more interesting if it were better written.


Oliver Twist -- Charles Dickens

This was Dickens' second book and his first real novel, and you can tell.  His genius is occasionally visible in it, but, shall we say, the tide of his powers was not yet at the flood.  I think the most common criticism of the book -- that Oliver is "unnaturally good" -- is unfounded.  It's not really unbelievable that at the age of ten Oliver is reluctant to steal.  Far more ludicrous is the way everyone Oliver meets hates him on sight and will not believe anything he says.  People even take Bill Sikes's word over his, even though Sikes is an unapologetically brutal villain.  It gets ridiculous after a while; by halfway through the book I was expecting the entire House of Lords to descend from the sky in a balloon and swear in a body that Oliver was behind the Gunpowder Plot.  (Actually, I think Bill Sikes is the best-drawn character in the book and the parts where he appears are the best written.)


Wildside -- Steven Gould

Science-fiction adventure story, where some teenagers find a tunnel that leads to an uninhabited duplicate of the Earth where primates never appeared.  I admit if I were in that situation it probably would not have occurred to me to head into the duplicate Earth and mine for gold.  It's a bit marred for me because Gould obviously learned a lot about planes for this book -- he probably actually got his pilot's license -- and he couldn't resist showing off every single thing he knows about how to fly a small plane, which honestly was really boring.  


The Blueprint -- Christopher Price

A book on the success story of the New England Patriots, one of the unlikeliest transformations in sports history.  The author, a newspaper sportswriter, recalls that the Pats held their press conferences in a big room with lots of windows that really heated up on a sunny day, and that plus Bill Belichick's expressionless monotone literally put reporters to sleep.  He also says one of Belichick's pet phrases is "The strength of the wolf is the pack"; the author seems not to know that that's a quote from Kipling, but I bet Belichick does.  I think the idea of the book was to try to wrote a Moneyball for football, but it wound up being more of a "here's how this incredibly bad team remade itself" story.  It was pretty good.


The Letters of Gustave Flaubert and George Sand -- trans. Aimee L. McKenzie

A decades-long correspondence between two unlikely best friends.  Flaubert and Sand were about as different as it's possible to be; Flaubert never married, lived quietly at home with his mother and sister, never travelled, and was an obsessive perfectionist about his writing -- he would take five days to finish one paragraph.  (As a result he only ever wrote five books.)  Sand, on the other hand, was an outgoing woman who dressed in men's clothing, had a long happy marriage and numerous grandchildren, and wrote over a hundred novels and plays, all in a sentimental vein that was the exact opposite of Flaubert's gritty realism.  And yet each was the other's biggest fan.  Since this was the middle of the 19th century and Flaubert lived in the country while Sand lived in Paris, they rarely met -- maybe once every few years -- but they obviously loved each other deeply, in a Platonic way, and luckily for us they had a lot to say to each other.  I really regret the disappearance of written letters.


Bleak House -- Charles Dickens

Probably Dickens' best book, dealing with the never-ending probate court case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.  It's unusual in many ways: it's his only book told in the present tense, and the only one where the chapters alternate between the heroine's first-person narration and an omniscient narrator.  It also has one of Dickens' most lovable good people, Mr. Jarndyce (Nabokov called him the best and kindest man ever to appear in a novel.)  He draws a great contrast between the awful Mr. Skimpole -- an adult who lives as a monstrous parody of a child -- and the orphan Charlie, a nine-year-old child who has to live like an adult to feed her two younger brothers.  It's also a mystery, and introduces one of the first fictional detectives, the splendid Mr. Bucket.  I loved it.


Programmers at Work -- Susan Lammers

Series of interviews from 1986 with guys who worked on significant programming milestones -- VisiCalc, DOS, MAC OS, and so on.  There's a lot of interesting detail, and some parts that are almost comical -- like the extended interview with a guy who quit Apple because he hated the mouse and hated the whole idea of the graphic interface, and as of 1986 was launching his own business based on the principle that the graphic interface is a terrible idea and no one will adopt it.  Yeah, how'd that one work out?


The Map That Changed the World -- Simon Winchester

Very, very good book about William Smith, the father of geology, who spent over twenty years charting the geological layout of Britain, and finally produced a vast map, the first geological survey map ever drawn, that showed the distribution of strata all over the island; it was also the first real visual evidence of the new "Deep Time" theory, the revolutionary idea that the Earth was a great deal older than people had thought.  It was an incredible achievement, though the achievement was all he got out of it, since his work was plagiarized by a rival who got all the credit while Smith went to debtor's prison.  He did finally get a pension from the government long afterwards, and geology's equivalent of the Nobel Prize is called the William Smith medal.


Baseball and Men's Lives -- Robert Mayer

Book about a New Yorker who moves to Colorado and abandons the Mets for the new Rockies.  Not very interesting.


Lord Jim -- Joseph Conrad

Very good book, kind of a reverse tragedy -- the hero commits a terrible act of cowardice right at the beginning, and then spends the rest of the book trying to redeem himself.  Good story.


Follies of the Wise -- Frederick Crews

This is a series of essays attacking Freudian psychoanalysis, alien-abduction stories, and the concept of repressed memories, all of which the author considers fraudulent, all for the same reason: none of them rely on objective empirical evidence.  Well-written.


Man's Search for Meaning -- Viktor Frankl

Half of this book is taken up with Frankl promoting some new interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis, and actually I didn't even read that part, but the rest of it is a vivid and scary Holocaust memoir.  I was most struck by the story of how Frankl saw a fellow-prisoner twitching and writhing in his sleep, and realized he must be having a nightmare -- but he didn't wake him up, because however bad the nightmare was, waking up in Auschwitz would be worse.  
I confess that long before I actually read this, I pretended to have read it in order to impress this girl who mentioned it when I was a freshman.  I bought it at Valley Books so I could read it for real in case the subject came up again, but she wound up blowing me off so I never did read it, and it sat on the shelf for twenty years until I finally got around to it.


Tooth and Claw -- Jo Walton

A fantasy novel with a fairly engaging conceit -- it's a 19th-century novel, except all the characters are dragons -- that could have been executed better.  It wasn't bad, but I think its failures can be explained by the author's amazingly myopic preface in which she says that 19th-century novels don't really pass muster because "people aren't like that".  (Right, because the people who lived in England in the 1850s were just like the people who live in the author's neighborhood in the 21st century!)


The Meaning of Everything -- Simon Winchester

A really well-written book about the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary, which the editor expected to finish in under ten years but which wound up taking almost seventy-five.  Very good book.


The Life of Our Lord -- Charles Dickens

A prose retelling of the life of Jesus for children.  It isn't very good, but it's unfair to judge it since Dickens wrote it specifically for his own (very young) children and never intended it to be published.  (In fact it wasn't published until 1934, after the last of his children, who all objected to publishing it, died.)


The Old Curiosity Shop -- Charles Dickens

Dickens' third novel, and probably the most popular during his lifetime.  It's the story of the fourteen-year-old Nell Trent (she is never actually called "Little Nell" in the book), who along with her bankrupt grandfather is driven to wander the Midlands of England as a beggar by the evil Mr. Quilp.  Quilp is the strangest of Dickens' villains; not only is he physically deformed and also clearly insane (he actually throws himself on the ground and kicks his feet, literally screaming with laughter, when he concocts his evil scheme), he's like Iago in that he has no reason to do any of the things he does.  He goes to an immense amount of trouble to help Nell's worthless brother track her across England, though he has nothing to gain by it; he only wants to delight in the misery of everyone involved.  Luckily for Nell she encounters a legion of good-hearted people who help her on the road.  It's a good book, though there are a lot of mistakes in construction.  For example, the book starts with an unnamed first-person narrator who disappears after chapter three and is never heard of again; the rest of the book is told by an omniscient narrator.  It's also strange that we never learn the grandfather's name, or the name of his brother, who turns up unexpectedly in the last part of the book; and that Nell's brother, one of the two main villains, vanishes from the story half-way through and never returns.  These problems were all caused by the fact that Dickens kept changing his mind about how the story should go, but couldn't go back and re-write because he was serializing the book in a magazine, so the book began to be printed before he was done writing it.


TTL Cookbook -- Don Lancaster

Technical study of transistor-transistor logic (TTL) and digital circuit design.  Well written, though aimed at kind of a narrow audience.


A False Spring -- Pat Jordan

Jordan's memoir of his career in baseball in the fifties as a pitching phenom who didn't make it, since he simply lost his command and could never get it back.  There's good detail on playing in the early days of integration, the angry tension among minor-leaguers all competing for the same jobs (he once got into a brawl with Joe Torre), and other stuff.  It's kind of a downbeat book, since (at least at the time he wrote it) the author clearly considered his life a failure.  There's some great descriptions of the vast meals you used to get at eating-houses in the fifties that made me really hungry.


The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan -- ed. Alex Belth

Jordan wound up as a writer for Sports Illustrated, and possibly because of his own experience he always seemed to get assigned to write stories about failure.  There's some really great stuff here -- his profile of Steve Garvey, where Mrs. Garvey spent hours telling Jordan how unhappy their marriage was even though he reminded her repeatedly that the tape recorder was running (the Garveys sued him and lost); the first profile Steve Carlton ever agreed to, in which it gradually became clear that Carlton was bat-shit insane, dug in in his mountain-bunker house cleaning his guns and waiting for the helicopters from the international Jewish conspiracy to attack him; the three-day interview with OJ Simpson where Jordan only got to ask two or three questions because Simpson absolutely never stopped talking -- he eventually just held up his tape recorder, leaned on the car window, and took a nap.  Terrific read.  (Although the book is very badly copy-edited, with mistakes on almost every other page, which bugged me.)


Reading Lolita in Tehran -- Azar Nafisi

This is really more of a women's-studies book than a book about literature, though literature figures heavily in it.  It's the story of the women's book group the author ran for some years in Tehran, while she was barred from teaching at the university because she wouldn't wear the chador.  Naturally a lot of her interpretations are shaped by her circumstances, and naturally I don't agree with a lot of them.  (Like, the bit where she says the most interesting characters in the Thousand and One Nights are the nameless women who are executed before Scheherazade comes on the scene.  In my opinion, the reason these women only get two or three sentences is that their only function in the story is to make the danger Scheherazade is in more scary.  They're just a plot device.  That's why we don't learn anything about them, because the story is about Scheherazade, not about them.)


Up in Honey's Room -- Elmore Leonard

The first of Leonard's books I've read that I didn't like, because not much happens and what does happen is kind of a rehash of stuff he's written before.  Also, when six people gather in a room and every single one of them knows the meeting is a setup and a trap, isn't it kind of unlikely they'll all get taken by surprise?  And why didn't the gunman just shoot them all?  Why would he care that blood would get everywhere, he's going on the lam anyway.  I thought it wasn't well thought out.


The Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 10: Parliamentary Debates 1740-1

In his early thirties Johnson made some money reporting the debates in Parliament for a magazine.  The thing was, the debates were closed back then and no spectators were allowed, so the magazine's editor got friends of his who were members of Parliament to tell Johnson what questions had been raised, who was for and against, and the gist of the arguments on each side.  From that, Johnson reconstructed the debates, inventing the speeches himself.  Not surprisingly Johnson's version of Parliament was immensely more august and dignified than the real thing.  Voltaire -- who didn't know the speeches weren't genuine -- expressed his amazement at the great eloquence and intelligence of the British politicians, comparing them to the Senators of Rome.  Even now, in books of quotations, you see quotes attributed to various Augustan politicians that were really written by Johnson.  They make excellent reading, not only for Johnson's brilliant prose style but to see the shape of political argument in those days; I don't know whether to be reassured or depressed that it was exactly the same then as it is now -- the party out of power accusing the party in power of corruption and slavery to special interests, the party in power fear-mongering and accusing the party out of power of supporting the country's enemies.


The Last Season of Weeb Ewbank -- Paul Zimmerman

Zimmerman's diary of a year spent following the 1973 New York Jets, whose head coach (Weeb Ewbank) announced before the season that he would retire at the end of it.  The book is mainly about Ewbank, and that's worth reading, but what I found really interesting was the differences in football between 1973 and now.  Back then the draft was in February, and the teams wanted to have their rookies work out right away.  The Jets played at Shea Stadium then, but they didn't have the money to clear the field for practice or to turn on the power when they didn't have to, so they had the rookies work out in the Shea Stadium parking lot (in February!)  They also played a preseason game at a neutral site where there were no locker rooms, so the players had to go into the bushes to change into their uniforms.  (Never mind the bit where Zimmerman drives into the airport fifteen minutes before his flight leaves, can't get past the snow at the parking lot entrance so he leaves his car next to the landing strip, and runs straight from his car to the plane.  Try that now and see how far you make it before getting shot.)


The Great Influenza -- John M. Barry

Good book on the flu pandemic of 1918.  I had always thought it was called the "Spanish flu" because it came from Spain, but in fact it seems to have first broken out in Kansas.  It became associated with Spain because Spain was neutral in World War One and so the only country not censoring its newspapers.  The author argues persuasively that Woodrow Wilson probably did not have a stroke in 1919, because his symptoms are much better explained by a severe case of the flu, particularly his impaired mental state afterwards (this pandemic had a terrible after-effect, since the high fever sometimes caused brain damage.  That actually happened to my great-grandfather Archie.)  There's also a sobering section on how likely it is that another strain of the flu will cause another pandemic -- and how totally unprepared we would be if that happened.


The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana -- Umberto Eco

An interesting novel about a book dealer who has a stroke and wakes up with an odd kind of amnesia -- he remembers nothing about himself or his life, but he can remember all the details of every book he's ever read.  He uses his memories of books to try to reconstruct his life.


The Soul of Baseball -- Joe Posnanski

I was disappointed by this book, because Posnanki is an excellent writer and his subject -- Negro Leagues great Buck O'Neil -- couldn't be more charismatic and interesting.  Should have been a home run.  But in fact the book is kind of flat and dull.  I have a hard time putting my finger on just why -- maybe it's because Posnanski was too close to O'Neil, and the book was more about "how much I, Joe Posnanski, love Buck O'Neil" than it was about O'Neil himself.  Maybe you just can't write well on any subject without at least some detachment.


I'm A Stranger Here Myself -- Bill Bryson

Pretty good collection of short columns Bryson wrote for a British newspaper about what it was like to come back to America after living in England for twenty years.  Bryson is really at his best when writing short pieces.


The Cosmic Rape -- Theodore Sturgeon

A good science-fiction novel from the fifties.  The setup is that a homeless bum gets infected by an alien spore, which takes over his brain; it's part of an alien collective intelligence that uses these spores to infect and conquer the galaxy.  However, it turns out that humans are the first race the alien has ever encountered that does not have a hive mind.  It can't conceive of individual intelligence so it decides humanity must have been a hive mind that deliberately dispersed itself as a defense against the alien infection.  Logically, then, the alien needs to force humanity to re-form its collective mind so it can be conquered.  Of course, the alien has no idea how to go about doing that.  This leads to some funny scenes with the alien-controlled bum staggering around accosting people at random and asking "How can we all get back together again?"  The ending surprised me, too.


Mr. American -- George MacDonald Fraser

A fish-out-of-water story about an American gunfighter, train robber, and gold miner emigrating to Edwardian England and buying a country house with his gold-strike wealth.  He falls in with high society, socializes with the King, and marries into impoverished-respectability, and for a while his only worry is keeping his new friends from finding out that he used to ride with Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch.  Naturally his old life turns up to complicate his new life, just as World War One is beginning.  It's a well-told story.  A character from Fraser's other novels (Harry Flashman) turns up occasionally for comic relief.


Notes from a Small Country -- Bill Bryson

Bryson's reminiscences about moving to England from the US twenty years ago.  I admit I was prejudiced against this book as soon as he said Samuel Johnson was "tedious", but even beyond that I thought the book didn't succeed -- the impression the book gives is that Bryson didn't like England at all and thought everything about it was boring, which is probably the opposite of what he intended.  I guess the lesson is that irony only works if you use it well.


Big Bang -- Simon Singh

Very readable history of cosmology and the introduction and evolution of the Big Bang theory.  Good book.


The King's Gold -- Arturo Perez-Reverte

Perez-Reverte's fourth novel of his 17th-century Spanish soldier, el Capitan Alatriste.  I really like the narrative structure of these stories; they're cast as the late-in-life reminiscences of Alatriste's sixteen-year-old apprentice, so we see Alatriste through both the young boy's hero-worship and the old man's cynicism.  This serves the plot well: Alatriste is hired (through middlemen) by the King of Spain for a morally-ambiguous scheme whereby he gathers a crew of cutthroats to pose as pirates and attack one of the royal treasure ships and steal the gold, because the King knows that the people in charge of shipping it are under-reporting how much gold there is; this way the King gets all the gold without having to pay the normal shipping percentage and also kill the embezzlers (and deliver an implicit warning to all such plotters.)  Of course the crew of the ship as well as other innocent bystanders all have to die for this to happen.


Over To You -- Roald Dahl

A collection of short stories involving Royal Air Force combat missions in World War Two.  Dahl was a WWII RAF pilot himself so they're pretty authentic.  They were mostly very good.


My War With the United States -- Ludwig Bemelmans

Bemelmans came to New York from Germany at the age of sixteen to work as a waiter.  When World War One started he enlisted in the US Army, and this is his memoir of it; he draws a good picture of a very free-and-easy, undisciplined peacetime army trying to get itself organized for a major war (he notes that soldiers would just wander off base when they felt like it, and return a week or so later to face only token punishment.)  Naturally he gravitated to the kitchens.  It's both funny and well-written.


The Baseball Uncyclopedia -- Michael Kun & Howard Bloom

Waste of time.  I admit I bought it in a fit of absence of mind, when A) I misread the second author as Harold Bloom, and B) I failed to consider that if Harold Bloom wrote a book on baseball it would not look like this.  Only have myself to blame for this one.


Last Night at the Lobster -- Stewart O'Nan

Probably my favorite book of the year.  An excellent contemporary novel set in a Red Lobster restaurant, on the last night before it closes.  It's a very accurate picture of what working in a restaurant is like.  It also asks what I think is an important question: if you have nothing to gain, is it still worth doing a good job?  The plot really revolves around seeing how different people answer that question.  I really liked it.


The Relation of My Imprisonment -- Russell Banks

Bizarrely strange novel.  It follows the structure of those 17th-century memoirs written by Puritans, describing their experiences while jailed for their religion, and emphasizing their survival through faith and prayer.  (Many of them have similar titles.)  This book is the invented first-person story of a man who lives at an unspecified time in an unspecified country, and who is arrested for following a Puritan-like religion that involves building coffins (which are against the law for some reason that is never explained.)  It reads, basically, like a memoir written by a zealot of an imaginary religion who had a good prose style; but except as a sort of writing exercise I can't see why the author wrote it, or what it's trying to say.  It left me puzzled.  


Kiss Kiss -- Roald Dahl

A collection of mostly very good short stories.  I hadn't known until this year that Dahl ever wrote any fiction aimed at adults.


Life Class -- Ludwig Bemelmans

Somewhat-fictionalized stories about Bemelmans' youth as a waiter at the Ritz-Carlton in New York and how he became an artist.  (Apparently he sometimes settled bar bills by drawing illustrations on the bar walls; some of them can still be seen in New York.)


Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland

Good novel about life in the Silicon Valley around 1990, centering on a group of nerds working at Microsoft who eventually leave to form a start-up.  I liked it a lot.


Almuric -- Robert E. Howard

A 20s pulp novel about a boxer who, on the run from the law, encounters a mysterious scientist who uses an experimental machine to transport him to a distant planet, which it turns out is a savage wilderness peopled by barbarians, and since our hero is a throwback who never belonged in a civilized culture in the first place he fits right in.  Gives Howard a lot of room to descant on his favorite theme that barbarism is mankind's natural state and civilization is only a temporary aberration.


The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea -- Yukio Mishima

Violent and disturbing novel about a young Japanese boy in the sixties who leads a gang of kids, twelve or thirteen years old, and harangues them with Japanese right-wing politics; the gang eventually decides to murder the hero's mother's boyfriend, a sailor, because they're offended that he decided to leave the sea (and by implication the service of the Emperor) to marry.  A strange story, made more so when you remember that the author was, if not actually insane, definitely unbalanced -- he was a fierce nationalist and eventually led an attack on a Tokyo military base that was intended to be the first stage of a coup d'etat aimed at restoring all power to the Emperor.  (He committed ritual suicide when it failed, and he is in fact the last person known to have gone through the full samurai suicide ritual.)   


A House to Let -- Charles Dickens et al.

The Christmas number for 1858.  The conceit involves a nosy neighbor keeping an eye on the house across the street, advertised for rent, and learning the stories of the people who come and go.  Includes a dreadful poem by one of Dickens' friends, but the stories are pretty good.


Rope Burns -- F.X. Toole

Authentic and well-written short stories about boxing.  Includes a very good story called "Million $$$ Baby" that was made into a so-so movie a few years ago.


A Thread Across the Ocean -- John Steele Gordon

Interesting book on the laying of the Transatlantic Cable.  Good read.


Brideshead Revisited -- Evelyn Waugh

This is kind of an anti-egalitarian novel.  It's set during World War Two, but most of the story is a flashback to the narrator's younger days, when he went to Oxford and became involved with an aristocratic family.  The stories contrast the narrator's memories of the Marchmain family and their estate, Brideshead (now being used as a barracks) with the lower-class and (to the narrator) inferior people whom the war has brought into prominence.  It's also an unsubtle piece of propaganda, as the Marchmain family is Catholic (Waugh was a convert to Catholicism, which was even more unpopular in England then than it is now) and the narrator, Charles, is a strident agnostic, who is eventually humbled and overshadowed by the spiritual strength of the Marchmain family.  Essentially the whole point of the novel is one sentence near the end, when Charles crosses himself upon visiting the Brideshead chapel and it's revealed that he has become a Catholic.


The Voyage of the Annie Marble -- C.S. Forester

A journal of Forester's honeymoon, a trip up and down the rivers of France in a small boat in the early twenties.  In those days you could just putter around the rivers and canals all you wanted, tying up the boat wherever you felt like it.  Forester (who spoke good French) found that everyone he met was generally friendly, especially the operators of the river locks, who were always hungry for news, and the crews of the family-business heavy river-boats, who would sometimes give him a  tow.  He tied up for a week in a river-harbor near Paris, where he got along famously with all the other boaters -- except for the one other boat there whose crew were English.  That boat and Forester's boat never spoke to each other because there was no one to introduce them.  (It probably also had a lot to do with the extreme English class-consciousness, which was much stronger ninety years ago; outside the rigidly-defined class structure of their home ground, the English just didn't know how to interact.)  It was pretty good.


Are You Hungry Are You Cold -- Ludwig Bemelmans

This was the first of Bemelmans' books I've read that was an actual novel, rather than a book about restaurants.  I didn't like it at all -- I thought the child protagonist was selfish and awful -- and in fact I didn't finish it.


God Save The Fan -- Will Leitch

A collection of entries from a blog called Deadspin, which alternates between snarky sports coverage and attacks on ESPN.  Actually the ESPN-ripping, which is both well-informed and accurate, is the best part of the book, including a savage piece on how ESPN's book division (which has only ever had one successful book) published a badly-ghost-written memoir of a fringe NBA player who came out of the closet after he retired, and when nobody bought the book, ESPN sent provocateurs to every NBA team to try to prod a current player into saying something homophobic, and when one of them said something about not being comfortable around gay people, ESPN ran it as the top story every day for a week and brought in the gay retired guy to be the expert commentator on the story and pimp his book on prime time every day.  It was pretty sleazy.


The Exchange Artist -- Jane Kamensky

Interesting book on America's first banking collapse, which took place in Boston around 1809.  Back then there was no central bank; people used notes drawn on country banks, discounted at a rate that increased the farther you went from the issuing bank.  So a guy named Andrew Dexter founded the Boston Exchange, which took notes from all the other banks and issued its own based on them.  Which was fine as far as it went, but then Dexter sent employees to found branches of banks in the most distant parts of the US -- like Detroit, which was just a collection of shacks back then -- and issue notes from them, which no one could check up on because the banks were so far away, and the Boston Exchange would accept them at face value.  The Detroit branch -- which had about a hundred dollars in specie -- issued notes for over a half million dollars.  Eventually the fraud collapsed and Dexter had to flee, leaving a mountain of unpaid debts and ruined creditors, and spent the rest of his life on the run.  It so happened that I walked through Boston's financial district a couple days after I read this, right past where the Exchange building used to be.  There were a lot of conservative financiers, the early Brahmins, who would have nothing to do with Dexter's scheme, and I noticed that those names are still on buildings in Boston, while the get-rich-quick guys' names are nowhere to be seen.  The book had an a propos epigraph, by the way:

Rags make paper;
paper makes money;
money makes banks;
banks make loans; 
loans make poverty;
poverty makes rags.


The Drunkard's Walk -- Leonard Mlodinow

Very well-written book on randomness.  Gives a very clear and lucid explanation of the Monty Hall problem, which is so counter-intuitive that even math professors often get it wrong.  It also spends some times showing that for a playoff series in baseball to be statistically significant it would have to be extended to best-of-29 games; and even then, assuming Team A is 50% better than Team B, Team B would still win about 40% of the time, just from random chance.  I liked it a lot.


The Player on the Other Side -- Ellery Queen (ghost-written by Theodore Sturgeon)

I bought this just because Sturgeon ghosted it, but I didn't like it -- the mystery was lame and there was nothing about it that made it seem like Sturgeon.


The Panda's Thumb -- Stephen Jay Gould

Collection of Gould's columns from Natural History magazine.  The title piece is a famous one in which he argues compellingly that a good piece of evidence in favor of evolution is instances of bad design in Nature, like for example the panda's "thumb", which is actually a bone spur that the panda uses to strip bamboo leaves, and which serves that function pretty badly.


The Warden -- Anthony Trollope

An anti-reform novel of the 1850s.  Trollope had a great prose style, and the book is well-written, but after all he was his mother's son and he believed that all change is change for the worse.  He opposed the Reform Bill, and the book contains lengthy attacks on Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens, whom Trollope disliked for their zealous attempts to reform the abuses of Victorian England.  In a Trollope novel it always turns out that everything would be better if everyone would just leave well enough alone.  In this book the champions of reform are hard-hearted lawyers, self-serving newsmen, and greedy, ungrateful peasants, while the establishment is represented by the gentle and inoffensive Mr. Harding, and the lesson of the book is that there was nothing wrong with the old way of doing things and anyone who thinks it's unfair should just be quiet.


Mugby Junction -- Charles Dickens et al.

The Christmas number for 1866, and the last one.  Dickens seems to have gotten tired of doing them.  The conceit of this one involves a traveler befriending a sick child who lives near a train station and taking long walks down the various railway lines to bring back stories for her.


Jhegaala -- Steven Brust

Kind of a downer when you say about a book "This one didn't suck like his last one did."  This is the latest in a series of fantasy novels that Brust has been writing since the late eighties, and I wonder if he's getting kind of tired of them, since the anti-hero, Vlad, has been getting more and more unlikable as time goes by.  It's a dark and sometimes brutal story, well-told, but weakened by the fact that none of the bad guys really have any reason to make the unfounded assumptions they make, upon which all their actions and thus the whole story depend.


The Black Stranger -- Robert E. Howard

Collection of some of Howard's excellent suspense and horror stories from the pulp magazines of the twenties.  I like the fantasy-setting ones better, largely because the ones set in 20th century America are appallingly racist (Howard grew up in Texas in the teens, after all.)


The Triumph of Numbers -- I.B. Cohen

A book about, not exactly the history of statistics, but how statistics came to be used in demographic studies and sociology.  There's a lot of very interesting stuff in it, but I believe the author died before he was finished, which may explain why the book feels somewhat unfocused.


On Murder -- Thomas De Quincey

De Quincey wrote a satirical paper, "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts", which argues that a murder, while acknowledged to be a bad thing, can be judged aesthetically, in the same way that people flock to watch a house burn and say afterwards "That was a good one".  This book also contains the sequel to that essay as well as De Quincey's excellent essay on Macbeth and a murder-suspense short story.


The Haunted House -- Charles Dickens et al.

The Christmas number for 1859.  This one involves a group of people staying over the winter holidays in a house believed to be haunted, and telling the stories of the ghosts associated with the several rooms.  Contains another dreadful poem, but if you skip that the rest isn't bad.  The Dickens parts are the best.


How's Your Glass?  -- Kingsley Amis

I'm not really clear on why Amis decided to publish a book of dozens of trivia quizzes on the subject of booze, but it made better reading than I would have thought.


Harry Hooper -- Paul J. Zingg

An interesting biography of Hooper, who was a very good player for the Red Sox ninety years ago and the only player on all four World Series-winning Sox teams of the teens.  He makes a good subject because unlike may other baseball figures there's really no body of myths or emotional arguments involved with him, so you can just let his career speak for itself.  The author does go a little overboard at the end, arguing that Hooper clearly belongs in the Hall of Fame (he clearly doesn't) and choosing to ignore the fact that Hooper's offensive numbers skyrocketed at age 33, when the live-ball era began.


Pool Cues, Beer Bottles, and Baseball Bats -- Marc MacYoung

Fairly engaging book on fighting with improvised weapons.  I got the impression that the writer was a smart guy who was deliberately trying to sound like a dumb guy.


Martial Arts Instruction -- Lawrence Kane

Kind of a blah book on approaches to teaching martial arts classes.  Neither well-written nor interesting.  Also the author gives some bizarrely incorrect translations from Japanese.


The Man Who Loved China -- Simon Winchester

Fairly interesting book about Joseph Newman, the eccentric British academic who laid out (and wrote most of) the massive multi-volume work Science and Civilization in China, which revolutionized the way the Western world looked at China.  Honestly, I found Newman to be a rather repellent person, and I would have preferred a lot less information on him and a lot more on China.


The House of the Seven Gables -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

A suspense/horror story involving Hawthorne's favorite subject of ancestral guilt and the sins of the fathers being visited upon the sons.  There are some slow parts but overall it's pretty good.  Judge Pyncheon's death scene is excellent.


Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue -- Mark Kurlansky

I bought this because Kurlansky's non-fiction is outstanding, but it looks like his talents don't extend to fiction.  It was drawn-out and dull, and I didn't see any real point to it.


The Accidental Time Machine -- Joe Haldeman

Science-fiction story about an MIT grad student whose project -- thanks to a defective part -- turns into a forward-only time machine.  Good prose and strong dialogue kept me reading, but it's one of those stories that just doesn't work for me because I keep saying "Wait, that doesn't make sense."  When the hero feels out of place after jumping 15 years into the future, he decides that the solution is to jump 100 years further on?  Really?  How dumb is this guy?  Also, if the artificial mind running the future Los Angeles complex really wants to die, why doesn't it just blow itself up instead of trying to hijack the time machine?  


Team of Rivals -- Doris Kearns Goodwin

A really excellent biography of Lincoln, centered around the fact that Lincoln filled his cabinet with his own political enemies, people who had run against him for office, who openly looked down on him and called him a dumb baboon.  Goodwin makes the point that everyone in the cabinet thought he should be President, and every one of them thought he was the smartest person in the room...but Lincoln was in fact the smartest among them, and the best politician, and that's why he was self-confident enough to give high positions of power to capable, independent men who disliked him.  Terrific book.


Edinburgh -- Robert Louis Stevenson

An extended appreciation of his home town.  Well written.


Fables -- Robert Louis Stevenson

A collection of funny short pieces, often surreal -- there's a great story, three or four pages long, that's supposed to take place between chapters in Treasure Island, where Long John Silver and the Captain, who are aware that they are characters in a book, take a smoking break and argue over which of them the author likes better.  Great stuff.


Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) -- Jerome K. Jerome

Very funny comic novel from the 1880s.  Three lazy hypochondriacs decide to take a boating trip on the Thames, bringing the narrator's dog along, and, as they say, hilarity ensues.  


The Mind at Work -- Mike Rose

Badly-written and dull.  I didn't finish it.


Letters From Samoa -- Robert Louis Stevenson

Collection of letters Stevenson wrote, mainly to the New York Times, on conditions in Samoa (where he was living at the time) in the late nineteenth century.  Interesting as a period piece, but the letters were written mostly to correct what Stevenson considered errors in the press, and since I haven't read the Times editorials on Samoa from the 1880s it kind of read like a transcript of one half of a conversation.


The Wreck of the Golden Mary -- Charles Dickens et al.

The Christmas number for 1856.  This one involves a group of shipwreck survivors telling stories in the lifeboat to keep each other's spirits up.  Not bad.


Thunderstruck -- Erik Larson

This book tells the story of Marconi and the wireless, and also the story of the Crippen murder, and since these two stories have nothing whatsoever to do with each other the author tries to make a labored connection out of the fact that the ship Crippen was arrested on had a Marconi radio on it.  It doesn't work, and it would have been better as two separate books.  Still, there's some interesting stuff in it, and the author makes a pretty strong case that Crippen actually didn't murder his wife.


Nature Girl -- Carl Hiaasen

I usually like Hiaasen a lot, but this one felt kind of forced.  Too many characters who were bizarre for the sake of being bizarre, too much asking myself "Wait, why would they do that?"  Just not a memorable story.


To Cork or Not To Cork -- David M. Taber

I wouldn't have expected a whole book about nothing but wine-bottle closures to be engrossing, but I found this book fascinating.  It's a history of corks, and the fungus by-product (2,4,6-trichloroanisole) that causes cork taint, the nasty taste you sometimes get in wine.  (Apparently it's so potent that an ordinary person can detect amounts as low as six parts per trillion.)  The wine industry has tried all kinds of alternatives, from synthetic cork, to sandwiches made of two disks of cork with sawdust and glue in the middle, to screw-tops, to glass stoppers.  All have their champions, but the general opinion is that natural cork still gives the best combination of cheapness, ease of removal (also ease of insertion, a strong consideration), and preventing oxidation, and so efforts had to be made to force the cork producers (mostly small family businesses in Portugal) to take more care harvesting and storing the sheets of cork (made from the outer bark of the cork oak.)  Many vintners believe that screw-tops are actually superior to corks, but they shot themselves in the foot on that one, since screw-tops were originally introduced on jugs of cheap wine -- because that's what winos buy, and winos don't own corkscrews so they had to be able to open the bottle by hand.  But because of that, now everyone associates screw-tops with cheap rotgut, and many restaurants won't accept bottles with screw-top closures.


The Hollywood History of the World -- George Macdonald Fraser

This was pretty interesting.  Fraser was a great movie lover, and he wrote the book to argue that the great historical dramas he grew up watching were actually very accurate, and gave a better idea of what the events they depicted were like than most histories.  He makes a good case.  Naturally, this being Fraser, he has to digress on how movies suck these days and how in general everything was much better and morally superior when he was young, but I guess you take the good with the bad.


Tipping the Velvet -- Sarah Waters

My friend Lucy lent this to me, saying "You have to read this Victorian lesbian porn, it's awesome!"  That's a hard sell to resist.  Actually I don't really care for erotica, so this book didn't do a lot for me -- honestly, I just skimmed through most of it.


A History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times -- Donald Hill

A little dry, but has a lot of interesting stuff on heavy construction in Rome and in the medieval Islamic countries.  Cairo in the thirteenth century had a strict building code and a municipal building inspector, just like we have now.


Everyday Drinking -- Kingsley Amis

A collection of columns from a British magazine on the general subject of booze.  They're funny and well-written, and have the advantage of being written by someone who loves his subject and knows a great deal about it.


The Yiddish Policeman's Union -- Michael Chabon

This was good but depressing.  It's an alternate-history story where instead of creating Israel, the US donated a big chunk of Alaska as a Jewish homeland.  (This was actually proposed in Congress at one time.)  It's a "divorced detective with a drinking problem stumbles into a murder case with far-reaching implications involving powerful people" story, which has been done a million times but is still good if done well.  I figured the mystery out pretty much right away -- I mean, when you're dealing with a story about the Jewish identity and the Jewish homeland, and it turns out the murder victim's name was Emmanuel, well, it's not hard to see where that's going.  I didn't really like the ending, either.


On the Pleasure of Hating -- William Hazlitt

Some excellent essays, particularly his 1817 article on the death of John Cavanagh, a champion at Fives (a form of handball).  It's a deep examination of competitive sports and more generally on the value of great physical skill.  Really interesting.


The Chess Player -- Edgar Allan Poe

A collection of Poe's non-fiction essays, mostly journalism pieces, particularly the article in which he exposed the fraud of the chess-playing automaton.  That was all the more impressive because Poe had no special access, and only saw the automaton from the audience the same as everyone else, but nonetheless he deduced how the trick must work and published a lucid explanation, with drawings.  Poe at his sharpest and least crazy.


The Closing of the American Mind -- Allan Bloom

There was a lot of things-were-better-in-the-good-old-days to this book.  It did have some interesting things to say, but in the end I think that an elderly academic is probably not the best person to explain young people's attitudes toward sex, music, and family.


Ackroyd -- Jules Feiffer

Self-indulgent and immensely dull.  I quit halfway through.


Excursions in Number Theory -- C. Stanley Ogilvy & John T. Anderson

Very well-written and lucid.  It actually made me feel like I understood congruence arithmetic.


Quartered Safe Out Here  -- George Macdonald Fraser

Fraser's memoir of his World War Two service as an enlisted soldier in a Cumberland regiment in Burma, which involved hard and desperate fighting.  It's full of detail and excellently written, one of the best things he ever did.  Like most war memoirists, Fraser believes that his experience of war was universal, and angrily condemns people who saw the war differently.  He spends some time in the preface contemptuously dismissing the works of Paul Fussell, though he admits he has not read them.  (Just as well.  Fraser and Fussell would have hated each other.)


My Name Is Asher Lev -- Chaim Potok

This is a novel I've had since Mom read it in about 1978, thus establishing a new record for "book I've owned the longest without reading it".  It's a pretty good psycho-drama about a New York boy growing up in a very strict Hasidic family, who has a gift for painting, and who has to overcome tremendous pressure from his family and his community in order to follow a career in art.  I liked it.


Zero -- Charles Seife

Pretty good book on the concept of zero and the development of calculus.  I felt like the author bent over backwards a little too far to make it non-technical.


In Cold Blood -- Truman Capote

Really disturbing true-crime book about a quadruple murder from 1959, where two career lowlifes set out to burglarize a house and wound up taking the members of the family into separate rooms and killing them all with knives and shotguns, for no apparent reason.  


Inside the Machine -- Jon Stokes

Fascinating book on the evolution of the microprocessor.  Gets right down to the machine-language level and gives clear explanations of things like register renaming and instruction pipelining.  Outstanding book.


Saturnalia -- Lindsey Davis

A mystery set in the early Roman Empire, kind of plodding and dull.  


Cuckoo's Egg -- C.J. Cherryh

Science fiction novel about a human baby being raised by an alien in an extreme "Spartan samurai warrior" sort of way.  The suspense comes from finding out how the baby came to this alien dojo in the first place.  It was all right, but nothing to write home about.


The History Boys -- Alan Bennett

Like all British stories involving public schools, it's about homosexuality.  More than that, though, it's about how the form-over-substance crowd has taught a generation of schoolchildren that it's fine for ideas to be shallow and cynical as long as they sound good; that impressing admission officials with the appearance of open-mindedness and intelligence is more important than actually possessing open-mindedness and intelligence and using them to understand things.  Depressing play.


Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions -- Charles Dickens et al.

The Christmas number for 1865, and reportedly Dickens' favorite.  Doctor Marigold ("Doctor" is his first name) is a travelling peddler, and the conceit is that he is saving up stories to tell to his daughter when she returns from school.  As usual, the Dickens parts are much better than the rest.


The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Boring.


Of Mice and Men -- John Steinbeck

This seemed very familiar while I was reading it; I may have read it long ago and forgotten, or maybe the story is just so well-known it seemed like I'd already read it.  Knowing what was going to happen at the end didn't weaken the story.  A really good book.


In The Wake of the Plague -- Norman Cantor

Not a bad summary of the Black Death and its aftereffects.  The author seemed kind of over-invested in a recent theory that the Black Death was a dual attack of both bubonic plague and anthrax.


Flatland -- Edwin A. Abbott

A lively and charming Victorian science-fiction fable, told by "A Square", a respectable citizen of a two-dimensional world, Flatland, who encounters a Sphere from Spaceland.  At first he cannot grasp what the Sphere is, or why he cannot see the Sphere when it rises above the plane he lives on, but after an expedition to the one-dimensional Lineland, where he sees the Line's analogous confusion, he eventually comes to perceive, intellectually, that there are more then two dimensions; naturally he is confined in the Flatland insane asylum for trying to explain the concept to others.


Barnaby Rudge -- Charles Dickens

One of Dickens' two historical novels; this one is an attack on religious bigotry.  It's set in 1775-80, and concerns the Gordon Riots, a massive week-long campaign of anti-Catholic violence organized and led by Lord George Gordon that burned down wide areas of London, including the Fleet Prison and the Clink, as well as the houses of many prominent Catholics.  The city authorities did nothing at first, probably both because they hoped it would run its course and because they were reluctant to take action against Protestants to defend Catholics.  I thought it had some weaknesses: it has no real hero (Barnaby Rudge is retarded, and manipulated by the other characters); too many villains (I count nine separate bad guys who all need to get their comeuppance); and some unlikely character changes (why would the idiot Barnaby, at age 27, suddenly stop obeying his mother and become a fanatical follower of a man he has never met?)  There's also the problem that the main villain, Lord George Gordon, was a real person and so can't receive poetic justice (Gordon was arrested for high treason but acquitted thanks to the old-boy network.)  Since Dickens can't give Gordon a sufficient punishment he draws a scathing portrait of him instead, showing him as a thoroughly weak and foolish man whose fanaticism is easily manipulated by more intelligent cynics.  The hollow vessel rings the loudest, as Dickens says.


Winesburg, Ohio -- Sherwood Anderson

A sort of novel built out of a couple dozen short stories, all of them revolving around small-town newspaperman George Willard and the people he interacts with, and their shared frustration with the narrow confines of their lives.  It's a powerful book, well-written, though I did wonder, if everyone in this town is overwhelmed with thoughts of escape, why does anyone live there at all?


Nation -- Terry Pratchett

Excellent comic novel set in a world very slightly different from ours, where an attack of the flu wiped out the entire British royal family in the 1880s and the crown descended to the 150th or so guy in line, a minor bureaucrat quietly leading his bookish life in the south Pacific, just at the same time his only daughter is shipwrecked in a storm and cast ashore on a Polynesian island, which has been mostly depopulated by the same storm and is now in the process of being rebuilt by the novel's hero.  I loved it.


ENIAC -- Scott McCartney

Good book on the design and construction of the world's first general-purpose electronic computer.  The designers actually intended to use it to predict the weather, though the funding came from the War Department to calculate artillery firing tables.  ENIAC weighed thirty tons and took up a whole floor of a big building.  It had something like eighteen thousand vacuum tubes.  The tubes burned out so often that the eventual solution was to leave the machine running 24 hours a day, because tubes blew most frequently during warm-up and cool-down.  It ran so hot they had to remove all the windows from the building it was in and even break holes in the walls to let in more air.  Really interesting story.


An Essay on Typography -- Eric Gill

A lengthy essay on the moral value of art and its decreasing weight in society, with some digressions on typography as art (Gill was a typeface designer who's best-known for creating the Gill Sans font.)


The Bookseller of Kabul -- Asne Seierstad

A book by a Norwegian journalist who lived with an Afghan family for some months in early 2002.  Her host was a bookseller, and the book divides its time more or less between the problems of running a book store under a harsh regime and the stresses of her host's wives, sons, and daughters living in their very strict patriarchal family.  In the bookseller's expert opinion, the Taliban had a slight advantage over the Soviets in that the Soviet soldiers could read, while the Taliban soldiers were all illiterate.  So when the Soviets raided his shop, they knew which books were which and burned anything that wasn't state-approved; but when the Taliban raided, they couldn't tell one book from another, and were afraid to burn indiscriminately in case they accidentally burned a holy book, so they only burned books that had pictures in them (making images of living things is ritually forbidden.)  So the bookseller could protect books from the Taliban by pasting index cards over the pictures; that didn't work against the Soviets.  It was a pretty good book, although I was puzzled by a chapter near the end that seemed to have no connection to the rest of the book; I actually wondered if it was there by mistake.  


A Reverence for Wood -- Eric Sloane

Short book on the form and function of wooden tools in America.  Pretty good.


Connie Mack -- Norman L. Macht

Immense biography of Connie Mack, who owned and managed the old Philadelphia A's for fifty years.  It's massively researched and has great detail on the baseball seasons of the early part of the century, but I think it goes somewhat overboard.  I mean, the book is seven hundred fifty pages long and it only gets up to 1914, meaning there's going to have to be a volume two to cover the last forty years of Mack's life.  Okay, he lived to be ninety, but honestly, fifteen hundred pages?  That's just self-indulgent.  You don't need that much space even to write about Abraham Lincoln, for God's sake, never mind a mild-mannered guy who ran a baseball team.    


Nickel and Dimed -- Barbara Ehrenreich

I didn't really like this book.  The idea was that Ehrenreich would take a series of unskilled jobs (housecleaner, hotel maid, Wal-Mart drone) and see if she could pay her expenses on nothing but her paycheck.  Obviously the answer is "No", as anyone could have told her before she started.  I didn't care for Ehrenreich herself, who seemed condescending to and disdainful of her co-workers.  You know, generally people aren't going to like you if you call them stupid to their faces.  Also, just so you know, when you started talking about unionizing and people avoided you, that wasn't because they feared your awesome courage in speaking up, it was because they figured that a new worker who starts talking loudly about unions on her second day on the job is probably a management spy.  I was also annoyed at the way she did careless, lazy work at her various jobs (all the while pitying herself loudly) and summed up at the end by saying she did a decent job and could be proud of herself.  (No you didn't, and no you can't.)


Familiar Studies of Men and Books -- Robert Louis Stevenson

Essays on various literary figures.  Stevenson seemed kind of up on his high horse with these, as he spread the moral disapproval around with a big shovel, particularly on Burns.  He really went around the bend on the essay on Villon, where he positively gloats over the miserable ends of Villon and his lowlife companions, gleefully congratulating himself on the hangings of men dead for four hundred years.  If I didn't know Villon lived centuries before Stevenson I would swear Stevenson had been harmed by him personally.  Still, there's some useful insight, and the essay on Pepys is very good.  He didn't seem to know what to make of Thoreau, at once admiring and condemning Thoreau's ascetic life.  (He also seemed to judge Thoreau by his own standards -- for example, he says "His palate was so undeveloped that, like a child, he did not like the taste of wine.")


Don Quixote de la Mancha -- Miguel de Cervantes (translated by Tobias Smollett)

This wasn't bad.  I agree with Dad that you have to think of Don Quixote as a cartoon character -- like Wile E. Coyote -- so it's still funny when he gets terribly beaten up on every page.  I wanted to read the Smollett translation because it was done in the 1750s, much closer to Cervantes' lifetime, and particularly because it was done before Lord Byron's romantic idea of Quixote as a tragic figure became popular.  I'm sure Cervantes would be astonished to hear critics say there was nobility in Don Quixote; Cervantes clearly meant him to be laughed at, not to be admired.  Just as one example, there's a scene where, after Don Quixote has been beaten up several times in one day, including having his face kicked in and then several teeth knocked out with rocks, Sancho sighs that he should be called "The Knight with the Messed-Up Face"; modern translations usually render this "The Knight of the Woeful Countenance", a misleading Byronism.  The first part of the book is better than the second.


The Black Dove -- Steve Hockensmith

The third book about the Holmes-inspired Amlingmeyer brothers.  This one finds them out of the railroad-detective business and trying to sign on with the Pinkerton Agency in San Francisco.  They become involved in solving a crime in Chinatown and the plot moves on from there.  Interestingly, the book manages to be very different from both the first and second books, while still being funny and exciting and also a good mystery.


Three Bags Full -- Leonie Swann

Very funny mystery story, where a flock of sheep decides to investigate the murder of their shepherd.  


The Planets -- Dava Sobel

The success of Sobel's earlier book Longitude more or less created a new genre, what Simon Garfield calls "books about little things that meant a lot."  Even though I thought Longitude was poorly written, I am extremely grateful to Sobel, since so many excellent books have come of it.  That's why I read this one, which gives short histories of the discoveries of the various planets and their properties.  I don't have a high opinion of her prose style, but it wasn't bad.


Straight Man -- Richard Russo

I got ten pages into this and quit.  I don't need to read another "timid academic who hates his job and his life and spends all his time getting pushed around by awful people" rewrite of Lucky Jim.  Kingsley Amis was there first, okay?  And that's not a story you need to tell twice.


The Doctors' Plague -- Sherwin B. Nuland

The sad story of Ignacz Semmelweis, the nineteenth-century doctor who proved that puerpurea (childbed fever) was not only an infectious disease but that it was spread by doctors who didn't clean their hands between patients (or even between conducting autopsies and examining patients) and by nurses who didn't clean the wards or even change the bedsheets between one patient and the next.  Doctors generally angrily denounced Semmelweis, and he was eventually driven out of the profession and finally had a mental breakdown.  He was committed to an asylum in Vienna, where on his first day he was savagely beaten by the guards and died a few days later.  (I wonder if someone paid the guards to do that.)


Rough Weather -- Robert B. Parker

Piece-of-crap Spenser story that I read in the bookstore.  I actually can't remember the last Spenser book where the client didn't turn out to be the bad guy.


Augustus -- Anthony Everitt

Good biography of the Emperor Augustus.  Had a lot of detail, some of it pretty funny -- for instance, the author notes that archaeologists have recovered sling bullets from around a town where he was once besieged by Lucius Antonius (Mark Antony's brother.)  Sling bullets were chunks of lead about the size of a golf ball, and most of them had messages scratched on them; things like "Hi, Octavian!  You suck!"  and "On my way to Lucius' ass!"  The book also reminds me that Roman politics were intensely vicious, their speeches routinely involving personal attacks that make our own political campaigns look like models of decorum and civility.  Everitt draws a picture of Augustus as highly intelligent, immensely capable, immensely ambitious, totally ruthless, and devoted from a young age with entire single-mindedness to his own vision of Rome.  Good read.


Copies in Seconds -- David Owen

Very well-written and interesting book about the invention of the Xerox machine.  The photocopier is unusual in two ways: it was essentially the unaided invention of one man (almost unheard-of in a 20th-century technology), and its technology is stable -- the newest photocopier built today works almost exactly the same way the original one did in the 1950s.  It's also a good example of what happens when a big project is overseen and run entirely by engineers instead of accountants.  It's hard to remember now how revolutionary the photocopier was -- IBM wouldn't invest in it because they thought there would be no market for it.  (And Xerox was actually investigated for fraud because government officials wouldn't believe the machine could do what the ads said it did -- even though Xerox had actually understated the capabilities of their machine in the ads, because no one would believe the copier could actually do what it did.)


A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire -- Charles Dickens et al.

The Christmas number for 1852.  In this one a group of relatives sit around the fire at Christmas telling stories.  Some are good, others less so.


The Secret Agent -- Joseph Conrad

A novel about an absurd terrorist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory.  (The plot really happened, in the 1890s sometime, and the bomb-thrower was some sort of half-wit who, presumably by accident, blew himself up with his own homemade bomb in Greenwich Park; nobody ever really knew what he was doing or what his target was.)  In Conrad's story the bomber is the idiot brother-in-law of a professional spy and agent provocateur who works for an unnamed foreign power (obviously the Russians) and is also part of a ring of anarchists, drawn by Conrad as repellent and pathetic, disappointed men who have turned against society out of a belief that they are unappreciated.  The spy, Verloc, has in fact not been doing any provoking and has been coasting along on his stipend from the foreign power for ten or twelve years, running a pornographic book store as a front.  A new bureaucrat at the embassy orders him to actually do something or lose his stipend, so he gets a bomb from a member of his anarchist ring and, too cowardly to use it himself, gives it to his wife's half-wit brother to deliver instead.  The brother trips on a tree root and blows himself up, and things end badly for everyone.  It was pretty good.  Interestingly, I've read that this was the Unabomber's favorite book and that he identified strongly with the bomb-making anarchist called "The Professor" -- I wonder about that, because the Professor is loathsome, an obvious loser who can't hold a job because he thinks his employers don't treat him with sufficient reverence.  Not someone I can really imagine anyone taking as a role model.


A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper -- John Allen Paulos

Well-written essays on the use and misuse of statistics and mathematical information in the news.  I liked it.


The Visual Display of Quantitative Information -- Edward R. Tufte

Tufte is a statistician at Yale, and this was his first book, which has had a huge influence on information design since it was published in 1975.  I picked it up at a seminar he gave in Southie.  Very interesting.


The Coldest Winter -- David Halberstam

Outstanding book on the Korean War and the conflict between Truman and MacArthur, which Halberstam argues was the only time in the twentieth century when the American government was really in danger.  By the fifties MacArthur's enormous ego had grown so huge he really seemed to consider himself the uncrowned king of the world.  When he met Truman at Wake Island he didn't even salute.  He sent cables directly to foreign powers without going through the State Department.  He openly opposed the President in domestic politics and ran his own foreign policy directly counter to the government's instructions.  He wanted, more than anything, to start a full-scale war with China.  And at the same time he seems to have grown senile; he often lost his concentration, or needed things repeated, or forgot orders he had given.  He ignored all intelligence and insisted that the Chinese would not intervene in Korea; when they did, he insisted they had very few troops; when it turned out they had thirty divisions, he simply insisted it wasn't happening.  When he was finally relieved the first thing his successor had to do was put a telephone in his office, because MacArthur hadn't seen a need for one.  With all that, it took immense courage for Truman to stand up to MacArthur and there was a real danger that the government might fall and MacArthur might try to install himself as king for real.  If he hadn't also insulted and angered the Joint Chiefs of Staff over the years, so Truman had the support of the rest of the military leaders, it might have been impossible to remove MacArthur from command.  If Truman had done nothing else while President, this one thing -- the renewed lesson that the military is always and everywhere subordinate to the civil power -- would still make his place in history.  Great book.


North Dallas Forty -- Peter Gent

I thought I'd like this more than I did.  It's a roman a clef about a guy, obviously the author, who plays football for an unnamed team, obviously the Dallas Cowboys.  I was on his side for a while -- through the scenes where he has to sit through a report from a private eye on his off-field behavior, accompanied by a self-righteous lecture from the team president and another from the coach, because they're not honest enough to just say "We needed an excuse to cut you because we think your knee will give out soon", and also when he showed in realistic detail how much pain football players are in every day -- how he had to spend several minutes every morning clearing blood out of his sinuses so he could breathe, how he hid injuries from the trainers so he wouldn't get downgraded.  I was less sympathetic when he breaks into the trainer's cabinet to steal painkillers and blames it on the star quarterback, knowing the star was above being punished; and when he spends essentially every single minute when he's not playing either drunk, or stoned, or on pills, or all three.  I suppose I also dislike him because he thinks his asinine behavior is actually an expression of his freedom of spirit, and that it makes him superior to all the dull squares, who just, you know, work for a living and stuff.


From Hardtack to Home Fries -- Barbara Haber

Pretty good collection of essays on American history, centered around food.  Some are more interesting than others, but overall I enjoyed it.


Deciding the Next Decider -- Calvin Trillin

Short collection of bad political doggerel.  I bought it out of loyalty, because I love Calvin Trillin's writing, but honestly his poetry is terrible even for comic doggerel.


iWoz -- Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith

As-told-to autobiography of the guy who designed the original Apple and Apple II.  I'm pretty sure I would not get along with Steve Wozniak if I knew him.  For one thing, I don't think practical jokes are funny and I generally don't like the sort of people who play them.  For another, I am wary of people who loudly proclaim how honest they are and boast that they never tell a lie.  


Martin Chuzzlewit -- Charles Dickens

Really the only Dickens novel that was a commercial failure; he actually had to leave his publisher because sales were so low.  He changed the plot half-way through to send the hero to America, so he could get some mileage and hopefully some sales out of extended America-bashing, which was very popular in England right then.  I think the book suffers because it's all about selfishness, which is probably the nastiest of the domestic vices, and all but one of the main characters suffers from it to one degree or another, while Tom Pinch, the only one who doesn't, is less attractive because he's so entirely blind to the disgusting character of his employer Mr. Pecksniff, whom he worships.  This was a book that, as they say, failed to find an audience.  My copy has no fewer than three prefaces, each more strident than the last, in which Dickens insists ever more petulantly that it is too a good book; in the third one he finally concludes that his readers are just too dumb to appreciate it.  The later parts of the book are better than the earlier parts, but I was really annoyed by one thing: after young Martin parts ways with his selfish and domineering grandfather, and goes to America to make his fortune, where he fails and nearly dies of malaria, he finally comes back to London, destitute.  Does he try to get a job, or think of some way he can restore his own fortunes?  No, instead he simply goes back to his grandfather and asks him for money.  And Dickens clearly thinks this is right and even admirable.  I can't really swallow that.  This was my least favorite of all the Dickens I've read.


Oracle of the Dead -- John Maddox Roberts

Murder mystery set in the late days of the Roman Republic, just before Pompey and Caesar went to war.  well-told, but kind of a weak mystery.

Locked in the Cabinet -- Robert Reich

Reich's journal of his time as Secretary of Labor in the first Clinton administration.  Gives a good picture of how awful the political culture in DC is, and how the importance of any Cabinet position depends mainly on the Secretary's personal relationship with the President.  Bill Clinton does not come off well in it; Reich portrays him as indecisive, too eager to please, and overly willing to compromise.


Shakespeare Wrote for Money -- Nick Hornby

A collection of Hornby's book reviews for Believer magazine.  I'm a little peeved that Hornby recommended a book, which I bought because he said it was written in blank verse, and I was curious to see how someone would write a modern novel in blank verse, but it turned out to be in free verse instead.  I really think a professional writer and book reviewer is obligated to know the difference between blank verse and free verse!


It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over -- ed. Steve Goldman

A series of essays by the Baseball Prospectus people on the tightest pennant races in baseball history.  Obviously I bought it because of the long article on the 1967 pennant race (titled "The Summer of Loving Carl Yastrzemski") but the others were good too.


M is for Magic -- Neil Gaiman

Collection of fantasy-horror short stories.  All but one of them have been printed in other collections of his, which I've already read, so the only new thing here was the longish short story "The Witch's Headstone", which was very good.


Traffic -- Tom Vanderbilt

Good book on traffic engineering.  Lots of great detail here; traffic accidents were the leading cause of death in London in 1720 (ahead of "immoderate quaffing");  pedestrian walk/don't walk lights are run by pushbuttons in New York, except on Fridays and Saturdays, when they operate automatically (because there are so many Orthodox Jews in New York); Los Angeles dedicates a large chunk of its logistical and police resources to make sure all the limos arrive at the Oscars on time.  He also makes the point that cities are designed to maximize traffic flow at the expense of pedestrian travel, even though there are hundreds of times more pedestrians than vehicles, so logically a city should be designed for the benefit of pedestrians at the expense of vehicles.  Also, apparently cars in cities spend approximately thirteen per cent of their total driving time looking for a parking space.  I liked it a lot.


The Fellow-Townsmen -- Thomas Hardy

Very good novella about two friends of the same age, of whom one marries for love and the other for social position, and how their lives turn out.  This being Hardy it isn't allowed to be a happy story, but it's really well-written.