Book reviews, 2010

The Holly-Tree Inn -- Charles Dickens et al.

The Christmas number for 1855.  The parts written by Dickens are a lot better than the parts written by his friends.  Particularly the dreadful poem.


Iorich -- Steven Brust

This was all right, but I thought it was weakened by the introduction of a major character who turned out to have no plot function.  Also, as Brust gets older his anti-hero, Vlad, becomes more and more anti and less and less hero, so I find myself caring less about what happens to him.


What the Dog Saw -- Malcolm Gladwell

Excellent collection of essays from the New Yorker.  I particularly liked the one about the dog whisperer guy, and the one about Nicholas Taleb, which explained Taleb's business model much better than Taleb's own crappy book did.


The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek -- Barry Cunliffe

Interesting account of Pytheas' journey from Greece up to the British Isles and Iceland, which was pretty amazing for 300 BC.  I found out from this book where the Arctic Circle gets its name: arktos is Greek for "bear", and the Arctic Circle is the line north of which the Big Dipper (which the Greeks called the Great Bear) is always visible.


Why Buildings Fall Down -- Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori

Very good book on the history and math of engineering failure analysis.  Bizarrely, the used copy I bought had a letter in it addressed to someone who had been given the book as a present; apparently the recipient was an engineer, because the letter (dated 1994) referred to the 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in New York, and concluded cheerily, "Sorry you didn't get in on the rebuilding contract, but don't worry, someone will probably try again."


The Illustrious Dead -- Stephan Talty

Excellent book on Napoleon's march to and retreat from Moscow, making the argument that the real killer was not the cold (the snow didn't even start until a week after  the retreat had already begun) but typhus, which is carried by lice.  Full of detail and very well-written.


The Hamlet -- William Faulkner

This had some beautiful writing in it, but structurally it was weak -- it's clearly a bunch of short stories that have been rewritten into a novel.  It's pretty pessimistic; the thrust of the book is to show how the Snopes family -- Faulkner's incarnation of white trash -- has taken over the South from the decayed but essentially decent fallen aristocrats, the McCaslins and Sutpens of his earlier stories.  The ending is terrible, as it was obviously written at a different time than the rest of the book and the characters are inconsistent.


Eiffel's Tower -- Jill Jonnes

Very interesting book on the 1889 World's Fair and the building of the Eiffel Tower.  The stuff about the mechanics of its construction is the best part, but there's also a lot of asides on the criticism -- a lot of people hated the Tower and tried to stop it from being finished, and there were attempts to have it torn down as soon as it was finished.  Reportedly Guy de Maupassant ate dinner at the Tower's restaurant every day because it was the one place in Paris where he didn't have to look at the Tower.


Hackers -- Steven Levy

This was a fairly interesting history of the MIT model train club and its evolution into the core of what became the early population of computer enthusiasts.  I thought Levy bought a little too much into the arrogant hacker idea that "If I'm smart enough to break a lock I have a moral right to do what I want with whatever the lock was guarding."


Meditations on Violence -- Rory Miller

Pretty good book on conflict avoidance and de-escalation by a former prison guard/SWAT team guy.


Once Upon a Number -- John Allen Paulos

Very good book on the application of formal mathematics to the stories we tell ourselves about our lives.  For instance, pointing out how "I would have gotten that job if I were a member of minority group X" is not logically equivalent to "I didn't get that job because I'm not a member of minority group X".  I liked it a lot.


The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Scott Bruccoli (ed.)

Fitzgerald often wrote down fragments or just sentences that occurred to him and later incorporated them into stories.  This is a collection of stuff he never got around to using.  Great reading.


The Book of Basketball -- Bill Simmons

This has the advantage of having been written by someone who really, really loves his subject, and it's also pretty funny.  I'm not entirely in sympathy with the basic thrust of the book, though, since I'm not interested in any argument that involves the thesis "You just had to see it."  Of course Simmons is a comedian so I'm never quite sure how seriously he means something, but I have no use for such statements as "<Unfounded assertion>.  You will never convince me otherwise."  Still, it was worth reading.  Also, I was carrying it around San Francisco with me and it sparked several conversations with strangers, every one of whom (though some more discreetly than others) argued that the NBA isn't as good as it once was because white people are better than black people.  That was creepy.


Sudden Sea -- R.A. Scotti

Good book on the great hurricane of '38.  Dad remembers being out for weeks the spring after that helping Uncle George get rid of the fallen trees with the old two-man tree saw.


Not a Star -- Nick Hornby

Short novella about a woman whose nasty neighbor gleefully gives her a videotape, which she finds is a porn movie starring her son.  Not bad.


Cyclops -- Euripides

Greek drama festivals in Euripides' day generally included a cycle of three tragedies on some serious subject, followed by a farcical play lampooning the same subject, almost always involving a chorus of satyrs with gigantic phallic costumes.  These were called "satyr-plays", which is the origin of the word "satire".  This is the only complete surviving satyr-play from that era.  It lampoons the episode in the Odyssey where Odysseus and his men are trapped by the Cyclops Polyphemos.  The play adds a chorus of satyrs and the wine-god Silenos, and revolves around broad sexual innuendo and drunkenness jokes.  I also learned from the introduction something I hadn't known: in the cave of Polyphemos, Odysseus says his name is Metis ("No-man") so that later, after he and his men have burned out Polyphemos' eye, Polyphemos calls to the other Cyclopes that "No man has blinded me."  It turns out there's another pun there, since metis sounds very like another word that means "cleverness".


Switch Bitch -- Roald Dahl

I've liked other collections of Dahl's stories, but none of these were very good.


The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay -- Michael Chabon

I liked this a lot.  It's a story about a couple writer/artists from the very early days of comic books, who make their start developing a knockoff of Superman.  There's a good episode on the origins of the Comics Code, and its application (this really happened) to persecute homosexuals.  Chabon makes what I thought was a very good argument that the Batman-Robin relationship is not at all a secret man-boy love thing, because we the readers don't identify with Batman -- we identify with Robin and his orphan's longing for a powerful protecting father.  There's also a good sub-plot involving the Golem of Prague.  Good reading.


Sway -- Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman

Pretty good book about decision-making and how it's influenced.  The authors did an experiment that showed interesting results.  If they took a subject and showed him a test that had an obvious answer, he would give the correct answer.  But if they showed him the same test in the company of several other subjects (all of them actually paid actors) who all gave the wrong answer, the subject almost always gave the wrong answer too, probably out of a reluctance to oppose the consensus.  However, if they added one more actor who gave the right answer, then the subject almost always gave the right answer, apparently because the presence of another dissenter made him feel confident enough to dissent as well.  This was a really good illustration of the danger of surrounding yourself with yes-men, and of the value of dissent in public debate.


Martial Arts in America -- Bob Orlando

Overall I didn't think this was that good, but it did include a very interesting theory on the cyclical nature of martial-art training, progressing from a martial art (being good at fighting in order to survive) to a martial way (using a martial art as part of a spiritual effort) to a martial sport (being good at fighting for its own sake) and back again.


An Emperor for the Legion -- Harry Turtledove
The Legion of Videssos -- Harry Turtledove
Swords of the Legion -- Harry Turtledove

These are the last three books in Turtledove's alternate-world history of the Byzantines.  They deal with the civil war that engulfs Videssos (Constantinople) after the alternate-world version of the Battle of Manzikert, and the war against the villain Ashvar.  Ashvar seems to be an analogue of the real-world Turk Arp Arslan, who in real history was a pretty decent guy as medieval warlords went, but of course to the Byzantines he probably looked like a baby-murdering sorcerer.  The series ends with Ashvar defeated and Videssos apparently on the way to recovering its power, though that's the opposite of what happened to the Byzantines.


Once On A Time -- A.A. Milne

A charming and funny fairy-tale that Milne wrote in the teens, revolving around a silly war between two kingdoms and the court intrigue that develops while the kings are in the field.  It's got a good heroine, too.  I liked it a lot.


What I Talk About When I Talk About Running -- Haruki Murakami

Excellent book abut long-distance running.  Murakami used to be a jazz-club manager, until one day -- more or less out of the blue -- he wrote a novel.  He worried about being too sedentary as a full-time writer, so he took up running.  There's a lot of really interesting stuff on the process of running, plus some sobering reflections on how, as he gets older, the benchmarks he used to hit are no longer possible, no matter how much effort he puts in. 


A Child's History of England -- Charles Dickens

This was used as a standard text in English schools until World War Two.  It's a dates-and-battles history of England from Caesar's invasion in 50 BC up to the Glorious Revolution in 1688.  I'd expected the endless put-downs of the poor old Pope, but I hadn't expected the monarchs to get such a hammering.  Dickens had about as low an opinion as possible of most of the British kings and queens, and shared his opinions gleefully.  Which probably explains why he stopped where he did, since if he went on longer he would have had to start in on the Hanover family, which of course was still the ruling family when he was writing.


Relativity -- Albert Einstein

This was a popular-science book Einstein wrote in 1916 to explain the overarching ideas of relativity to laymen.  This book does not contain the mathematics of relativity (just as well -- even Max Planck had to keep writing to Einstein for help in making it through the original papers) but it's still not what you'd call light reading.  It is, however, exceptionally lucid and clear, if you have enough patience.


The Beautiful and Damned -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Very well-written. Some friend of his said, correctly I think, that Fitzgerald's writing had a great quality that can't be taught: charm. The problem for me is that it's an autobiographical story, a lightly fictionalized version of the early days of his marriage. And if you had deliberately gone out and searched for two people designed by Nature to make each other miserable, you couldn't have found a better pair than Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The novel is a dissection of a terribly unhappy marriage, and it's very painful to read.  The really strange thing is that Fitzgerald wrote it when he was 26, and he had only been married for about a year. Yet the book is a perfect picture of how his marriage actually went -- which suggests he could foresee all the problems they were going to have, but went ahead anyway.


Seizing the Enigma -- David Kahn

This was a very well-researched book detailing the huge and complicated effort to break the Nazis' code.  Just possessing actual working Enigma machines wasn't enough: a group of Polish mathematicians had to pioneer whole new approaches to group theory to make the initial breakthrough, and then when Poland fell they fled to England, where Alan Turing designed some of the earliest computers to apply their techniques in the British code-breaking lair at Bletchley Park.  And then the Nazis kept upgrading the Enigma, so the Allies had to keep working out ways to capture newer machines without the Nazis realizing they'd done so.  Good reading.


The Little Black Book of Violence -- Lawrence Kane and Kris Wilder

This wasn't bad, though I'm not really the target audience.  It's basically aimed at adolescents, and the message is "You need to grow out of believing in the movie in your head where you're Superman, because the real-world consequences of acting as though that were true are really, really bad."  One really interesting thing they mention is that the majority of gang kids who go to the hospitals for gunshot wounds are astonished that the gunshots hurt so much -- on TV people who get shot never seem to be in pain, plus they routinely run around doing awesome action-star things after getting shot.


Master Humphrey's Clock -- Charles Dickens

Master Humphrey's Clock was the name of a magazine Dickens published for a few years in the 1840s, in which he serialized both The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge.  This book is a collection of the "framing matter" in the magazine -- scenes where Master Humphrey gathers his friends at his house and prepares to read aloud to them the manuscripts he eccentrically keeps in the case of his grandfather clock (this was the lead-in to the stories or the novel segments.)  It's notable because one of the friends he reads to is none other than Mr. Pickwick.  This is the only example in all of Dickens where he brings back a character from a previous work (Sam Weller comes back too, holding his own imitation society of servants in the kitchen, calling it "Sam Weller's Watch".)  It was also the device he used, rather lamely, to explain away the holes in the plot of The Old Curiosity Shop, by having Master Humphrey invent excuses and relate them to his friends after he finished reading the novel aloud.


Oranges -- John McPhee

One of McPhee's early books, on the history and development of the Florida orange industry.  Excellent reading.


The Crack-Up -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

A posthumous collection of some of Fitzgerald's letters and notebook entries, plus a group of essays (making up about half the book) that Fitzgerald wrote in the aftermath of his nervous breakdown.  It's gripping stuff.  I was most struck by his remark about the common phrase, "dark night of the soul" -- he said, "In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day after day."  Troubling, but good reading.


1968 -- Mark Kurlansky

A retrospective of all the world-changing events of that year -- the assassinations of MLK and RFK, the Prague Spring, the disaster at the Chicago convention.  It was good but it took me a long time to wade through it all.


Plan B -- Anne Lamott

Religious memoir.  There was some good stuff about her sincerely trying to see what's good and lovable in political figures she really despises.  She also mentions a good parable, which I had the impression she invented: A traveller going from one city to another meets a wise man on the road.  He asks, "What are the people like in that city, for I mean to go there?"  The wise man asks, "What were the people like in the city you come from?"  The traveller says, "They were mean, small-minded, and unfriendly."  The wise man says, "You will find that the people in this city are the same."  The funny thing was that only a few days after I read his book I heard a priest use that same parable in his sermon.  (Lucy tells me that a lot of ministers read Lamott, so that may be where he heard it.)


Tokyo Vice -- Jake Adelstein

A well-written memoir of a guy who was a police beat reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun (largest-circulating daily newspaper in the world) for about fifteen years.  It's a great picture of the incestuous relationship between the media and the Japanese power structure, explaining why
criticism of the police almost never appears in any Japanese paper.  It's also full of interesting Japanese crimes.  A fairly common one is "ram-raiding", where crooks map out ATMs near construction sites; after dark they break into the site, hijack an earth mover, rip the ATM out of the ground, and take off with it; around the corner they lever the safe out of the ATM, load it into a car, and split.  (This wouldn't work in the US because US ATMs are both bolted down with heavy steel rods and loaded with impact-sensitive dye packs.)  Many housebreakers are actually Chinese nationals who make day trips to Tokyo and buy tools at a store, then dump them before going home.  One essential item: packs of "Hello Kitty" stickers, which they put over drill holes in doors so nothing will look suspicious.  (Those stickers are all over everything in Tokyo, so seeing them on somebody's front door does not call for comment.)


Very Far Away From Anywhere Else -- Ursula K. LeGuin

Pretty good coming-of-age story about a high school student struggling to assert his own plans for his life against the desires of his parents.  I liked it.


A Bridge Too Far -- Cornelius Ryan

Very, very good book on Operation Market Garden, a huge post-D-Day Allied airborne assault on the Netherlands, which depended on seizing a series of bridges across the Maas and Rhine rivers.  It ended in failure, due mostly to over-extended supply lines, when the Allied force couldn't quite make it to the last bridge before the Nazis blew it up, but it came incredibly close to success; the enormous competence and bravery of the Allied troops couldn't quite overcome the enormous overconfidence of Field Marshal Montgomery.  It's a fantastic story, well-told.  Also Monty's amazing agility at blame-shifting was really impressive.


Flappers and Philosophers -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

This was Fitzgerald's second book, released after the success of his first novel.  Fitzgerald actually disliked most of his short stories -- not that he thought they were technically bad, it's just that the sort of stories he knew would be popular weren't really the sort of stories he wanted to write.  In his usual grandiose way, he condemned himself as a failure and a prostitute for writing stories he didn't like in order to finance his marriage and his booze bill.  (I suppose his later emigration to Hollywood was only a natural continuation.)  I guess I'm part of the Philistinical audience he was aiming at, because I think many of the stories are excellent.


Fibonacci Numbers -- N. N. Vorob'ev

A pretty dry monograph by a Soviet mathematician on the properties of the Fibonacci sequence.  Includes a lucid explanation of how another Russian used them to solve Hilbert's Tenth Problem.


Dr. Johnson's Printer -- J. A. Cochrane

Biography of William Strahan, a London bookseller and printer who was a good friend of Ben Franklin, but who is best remembered for being Samuel Johnson's printer.  (In fact when I saw this book in the Strand, and read the title, I thought at once, "Oh, William Strahan.")  It's a
good picture of the book trade in the 18th century.  Not bad reading.


The Groucho Letters -- Fred Allen (ed.)

Collection of Groucho's correspondence, which is pretty good reading.  It's interesting to see the tone he takes depending on the recipient -- to most people he writes in the "Groucho" persona, while to his friends he's more genuinely personal, and his letters to his family are touching.  His very sad letters written after Harpo died are heartbreaking.


I, Claudius -- Robert Graves
Claudius the God -- Robert Graves

This was a two-part novel written largely to showcase Graves's idiosyncratic theory that the Roman Emperor Claudius -- who is generally regarded as having been mentally deficient -- was actually a clever and accomplished man.  It's cast as Claudius' secret diary; the first part deals with his life up to the moment of his ascension to the throne, the second deals with his reign.  In it Claudius claims that he only pretended to be stupid so that Nero and Caligula would leave him alive.  (According to Suetonius, the real-life Claudius made this claim once he was Emperor, "but nobody believed him.")  I didn't care for it very much, largely because I didn't find Claudius very sympathetic.  Also Graves's central thesis is contradictory: he presents Claudius as capable and competent, yet shows him as totally dominated by the women in his life.  In fact Graves' picture of the whole Julio-Claudian dynasty shows all the men as living in terror of their wives and mothers, all of whom are vicious harpies.  He argues that Augustus was a weakling who did nothing without the approval of his wife Livia -- yet Livia seems to spend all her time murdering people and oppressing Claudius, so who was appointing the tribunes and reviewing the law cases and setting the tax rates?  Graves also spends time arguing in favor of monarchy, as Claudius starts out as a republican (there's no evidence for this in real life) but eventually concludes that people aren't capable of governing themselves.  I'm not sure Graves was aware of the towering hypocrisy of the emperor's attitude -- "we must maintain the power of the aristocracy, because if the people governed themselves there would be civil war and chaos!" -- in the face of the fact that just during Claudius' lifetime there were four civil wars and chaos was almost constant.  Overall I didn't like it very much.


The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Part One -- Edward Gibbon

This is the first half of Gibbon's masterpiece, starting with the fall of the Republic and continuing on until the great sack of Rome in AD 476.  It's amazingly well-written; even in an age of great prose stylists, Gibbon stands out.  He also "drank from the source", as he put it, meaning he ignored secondary sources in favor of primary ones, making him the first really modern historian.  He also caused a great deal of controversy by considering the rise of Christianity as a historical phenomenon, with worldly causes, rather than as a divinely appointed event that had no worldly antecedents.  Gibbon traces the seed of the decline of the empire to the creation of the Praetorian Guard, an armed body that the Caesars maintained perpetually in the capital to protect them from the populace, and which eventually came to be the main threat to stability -- the leaders of revolts were almost always commanders of the Praetorian.  This pattern repeated itself in macro: to guard against popular uprisings, the emperors disarmed the people and discouraged them from entering the legions -- which meant they had to employ mercenaries who had no vested interest in the stability of the empire.  Gibbon argues that the separation of the people from the costs and duties of military service led to a weakening of civic virtue.  This weakening, he thought, was helped along by the rise of the Christian religion, which was not compatible with the Roman spirit.  Gibbon requires a heavy investment of time, but it's well worth it.


The Physiology of Taste -- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (translated by M. F. K. Fisher)

A really good book, written in 1825, on the pleasures of eating.  Interesting to note that he strongly disapproves of overeating, both because it's piggish and rude and because it leads to indigestion, which takes away the pleasure of the meal and thus loses the table's main attraction.  It's an eccentric book, full of aphorisms and pronouncements on the proper ways of behaving.  I got the feeling I would have liked Brillat-Savarin a lot.


The Hardest Game -- Hugh McIlvanney

A collection of boxing essays, some of them pretty good.  I liked a story he told about Muhammad Ali: some time in the early seventies, an airline stewardess asked Ali to fasten his seat belt.  Ali: "Superman don't need no seat belt."  Stewardess: "Superman doesn't need an airplane."


The Mysteries of Pittsburgh -- Michael Chabon

This was Chabon's first book, a sort of coming-of-age story about a twentysomething guy who's torn three ways between his unconventional girlfriend, his unconventional boyfriend, and his wild-rebel motorcycle-riding platonic friend.  It's got a lot of good scenes in it, but I thought it was a little unfocused.


Richistan -- Robert Frank

I liked this book a lot.  You know how we often say that rich people don't live in the same world as the rest of us?  Frank decided to try and describe the world they do live in, an imaginary country he called Richistan.  There was a lot of stuff I hadn't known about in it; all about bodyguard training, butler schools, estate-management schools, classes on how to bring up the subject of pre-nuptial agreements with a potential spouse, classes on being kidnapped.  And there was some comedy listening to the older-money people whining about the uppity behavior of the new-money people.


The First Salute -- Barbara W. Tuchman

A very good book on the American Revolution, concentrating mainly on how it looked from Europe.  Points out that the American Revolution helped enable the French Revolution in more than one way: not only did it provide an example and an inspiration, but one of the main causes of the weakness of the French monarchy in the 1780s was that it had spent so much money supporting the Americans against the British.  The book draws an interesting portrait of Washington, showing two essential qualities he had, which seem almost contradictory.  On the one hand he was absolutely committed to the war and had the mental fortitude to continue in the face of any obstacle; maybe nothing else could have gotten the army through the winter at Valley Forge and the even worse winter the next year.  But on the other hand he had the good sense and flexibility to listen to his advisors and change his plans if necessary.  Washington's original plan had been to retake New York, and he was strongly emotionally committed to it.  But when Rochambeau and Lafayette argued that the southern theater would be a better place to make the most efficient use of their combined resources, Washington considered their arguments, acknowledged they were right, and changed his plans, which ultimately led to the victory at Yorktown.


Introduction to Mathematics -- Alfred North Whitehead

Very readable explanation of the foundations of math, beginning with arithmetic and number theory and going on in clear progression all the way to analysis.  It's one of those very lucid explanations where he makes every step clearly show how it was made necessary by the previous one, and makes the next one necessary in turn. 


The Year of Confusion -- John Maddox Roberts

A mystery story set during Caesar's dictatorship, when he used his authority as pontifex maximus to reform the screwed-up old lunar calendar and establish the Julian calendar, which caused enormous confusion.  It wasn't bad, but it wasn't that great.


Mr. Langshaw's Square Piano -- Madeline Goold

A pretty good book on the development of the pianoforte in the nineteenth century.  The author found an old square wooden-frame piano and tracked it back to its origin in London in the mid-1800s.  (Modern pianos use a steel frame, which means that the tension of the strings won't make the frame warp over time, but also changes the tone of the music.) 


Rainbows End -- Vernor Vinge

Science-fiction novel about a near-future English professor who is slowly recovering from Alzheimer's disease after a cure has been discovered.  The professor has to re-acclimate to the rapidly-changing world, which isn't made any easier by the fact that he almost immediately stumbles onto a vast conspiracy involving the world's intelligence agencies.  Naturally, the guy he goes to for help turns out to be the bad guy.  This book won awards, but I actually thought the plot was too complicated for its own good, and the characters were neither believable nor interesting.  I didn't like it.


Moby-Dick -- Herman Melville

I was supposed to read this in high school but didn't.  It's just as well, I wouldn't have appreciated it then.  It's really a vast allegory about good and evil, and about the difference between courage and fearlessness.  The complex relationship between Ahab and Starbuck is the heart of the story: the Quaker Starbuck serves as Ahab's conscience, and Ahab drifts further and further away from him, finally breaking for good when he refuses to delay the Pequod to help another ship look for its lost crew.  It was a fantastic book, with an extraordinarily good prose style.


El Borak -- Robert E. Howard

Good pulp-fiction stories from the thirties about a Texas gunfighter who becomes a Lawrence-of-Arabia type adventurer in Afghanistan.  He's nicknamed el Borak ("the swift one") for his lightning reflexes.  There's a lot of great action scenes.


Selected Letters of James Thurber -- Helen Thurber & Edward Weeks (eds.)

These were pretty interesting.  Of course many of them deal with the New Yorker. I notice that after Harold Ross died, Thurber was no longer willing to work for what he regarded as a discount and there are several arguments about money.  There are also hints of the jealousies I've heard existed at the magazine ("Not even Andy White has done as much for the New Yorker as I have.") 


Irons in the Fire -- John McPhee

Excellent collection of essays.  The title piece is the best, a long account of time McPhee spent accompanying the government officials who keep track of cattle brands and fighting the never-ending battle against cattle rustlers.  Terrific reading.


The Great Divorce -- C.S. Lewis

Only C.S. Lewis could make Heaven sound unappealing.


Naked Came the Manatee -- Carl Hiaasen et al.

This was a "write a chapter and pass it on" collaboration among a bunch of Florida writers, organized by Hiaasen.  It was more whimsical than really funny, revolving around a silly plot involving the severed heads of Fidel Castro impersonators.  Really the best parts were the catty passages where the writer of one chapter would complain about how stupid and poorly thought out the previous chapters were.


The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel -- Baroness Orczy

A collection of short stories centering around the sidekicks who helped the Scarlet Pimpernel in his madcap missions to rescue condemned aristocrats from the guillotine.  I'm not really in sympathy with the stories, since Orczy was of course an aristocrat herself, and the stories shudder at any sight of the brutal, vicious working classes, while my own feeling is that the guillotine was exactly what the aristos deserved, and the Scarlet Pimpernel and his League should have minded their own damn business.  Also, the stories can sometimes be forced and dull, though the majority of them are witty and entertaining.


Around the World in Eighty Days -- Jules Verne

I read this as an abridged "Little Big Book" when I was seven or eight.  The real book is much better.  I loved the story, the resourcefulness of Fogg and Passepartout, the elephant ride, the fight with the Thugs, the ice-sled race -- it was all exciting and fun.  I did have two problems, one technical and one philosophical.  The technical one is a big plot hole, committed because the author was French and had never been to England: there is no possible way that a traveller could have arrived in London on a Saturday and thought it was a Sunday, because in the Victoran era the Sunday observance was so extreme that the city was essentially silent and the streets empty -- the biggest possible contrast to the tremendous noise and bustle of Saturdays.  The other flaw, to me, was much more annoying: when the travellers see the girl Aouda unwillingly conducted to the suttee ceremony (where she was to be burned alive along with the body of her deceased fiancée) Passepartout, at tremendous risk, hides himself in the Brahmin camp, sneaks past the guards, and switches places with the dead body on the pyre so he can leap up when the fire is set, grab Aouda, and carry her away past the terrified Brahmins.  His plan works perfectly, and thanks to his ingenuity and courage Aouda is saved from a horrible death...whereupon Aouda immediately falls in love with Fogg, who sat on his ass the whole night and did nothing whatever to help with the rescue.  That struck me as pretty snobby and ungrateful.


Paycheck -- Philip K. Dick

A very good collection of science-fiction stories.  The title piece is the best: an engineer comes out of a two-year contract with his memory of the time he spent on the job erased, for security reasons; and he finds that, before having his memory wiped, he had requested that instead of his two years' pay he should be given an assortment of useless odds and ends -- a ribbon, a paper clip, a used theater ticket, like that.  The story revolves around him figuring out why his memory-wiped self wanted to have those particular things.  Good reading.


Sappho: A New Translation -- Mary Barnard

All of Sappho's poetry only exists in fragments.  She was so highly thought of in Attic Greece that they called her "the tenth Muse".  Even the fragments show a great depth of sensitivity and command of imagery.  The moon has set, and the Pleiades; midnight has gone; the hours wear by; and here I lie alone: alone.


Shopgirl -- Steve Martin

A novella about isolation and attempts to escape it.  It gives a very good description of a depressive episode. 


Newton and the Counterfeiter -- Thomas Levenson

A pretty good look at Isaac Newton's tenure as Master of the Mint, during which he aggressively prosecuted counterfeiters, often disguising himself and hanging around low-life taverns and criminal haunts to gather evidence.  His most difficult case was against the counterfeiter William Chaloner, who -- with great chutzpah -- carried on a public campaign against counterfeiting while he was busily striking false coins himself.  Chaloner's charge was that the Mint was selling tools and dies to counterfeiters (this was probably true) and that Newton was personally involved (not very likely.)  Newton arrested him, but he was acquitted at an obviously rigged trial, so Newton dedicated most of a year to gathering evidence for a second trial, where Chaloner was sentenced to be drawn and quartered.


Drag King Dreams -- Leslie Feinberg

Depressing novel about several trans people living in New York in early 2003, and the changes that follow when the drag bar they all work at closes and one of them gets beaten to death in the subway.  There was a strong sense of the tremendous herd pressure that fills their lives: they have to look out for each other and help each other, because no one else will -- they get themselves hired as a crew at another bar, for example -- but that also means they're stuck with each other.  For example, the group pressures one of them to come out with the rest to march against the war in Iraq -- with the clear subtext that the one can't afford to disagree with the others on anything really important, because the others might punish the one by excluding that one from the group, which could easily mean death. 


The Pencil -- Henry Petroski

Good book on the history and design of pencils, with a lot of interesting digressions.  You don't often think of Thoreau as a successful businessman, do you?  But he was; he worked for a while in the family pencil business (he could pick up twelve pencils every time without counting) and after he moved on to become a surveyor he helped his father transform the business from a pencil-manufacturer to a supplier of graphite to other businesses, which was more profitable.  Also, apparently, Thoreau invented raisin bread.


La Place de la Concord Suisse -- John McPhee

A very good book describing a few weeks McPhee spent with a unit of the Swiss military during its periodic mandatory call-up.  His assigned liaison is a wine-maker in his ordinary life, and due to his general lack of interest in the army is assigned to a scout unit, kind of the catchall reservoir for square pegs in the round-hole army.  He brings a good deal of his own wine along and shares it generously as McPhee gets a good look at the surprisingly all-encompassing defense measures of the country -- there's no bridge in Switzerland that doesn't have concealed explosives waiting to destroy it, no mountain pass that doesn't have concealed machine guns covering it, no picturesque forest or hill that doesn't hide a rocket launcher somewhere.  There are even secret jet fighter hangars hidden in cliffs, though McPhee didn't actually get to see those.  The attitude towards military service varies among the Swiss -- almost all high-ranking executives in Swiss companies are also high-ranking officers in the army, who spend several months a year on army business, while working stiffs like those in the scout unit do as little as they can get away with, even while on duty.  There's a great scene where the unit, as part of a war game, is supposed to be scouting a location in the hills, but in fact they all go to a hillside cafe and sit around drinking, occasionally calling in false reports on the radio.  The locals at the cafe -- who do exactly the same thing during their own call-up duty -- help out by making loud Mooooo! noises in the background when the radio is on.


Insanely Great -- Steven Levy

Pretty good history of the back-room effort to design the original Mac, which happened when Steve Jobs was pushed out of the Apple "Lisa" project and had to run his competing Mac team almost in secret.  There's a good analysis of the strangely fanatical devotion Mac users developed for the Mac -- the only analogy I can think of was that of early automobile users for the car.  The funny thing is that Levy wrote the book in 1996, when Apple was in the toilet, and the whole tone of the book is elegiac, and how the Mac "might have..."  Of course, right after the book came out, the Apple board went crawling to Steve Jobs to come back and save the company, which he did.  Levy had to tack on an afterword where Jobs showed him the new iMac.  The afterword was especially interesting because Levy goes into the question of "Why would Steve Jobs go back to Apple?"  (Remember, Jobs had founded both Pixar and NeXt in his ten years away, and had become the largest single shareholder in Disney, and was worth something like eight billion dollars.)  People who worked with Jobs said, essentially, that Jobs is inextricably associated with Apple, not only in the public's mind, but in his own -- so if Apple fails, Jobs fails. 


Girl Sleuth -- Melanie Rehak

This was a pretty good book about the various people behind the creation of the Nancy Drew mysteries.  Both "Nancy Drew" and the pen name "Carolyn Keene" were the property of a syndicate created by a guy named Stratemeyer, who also created all kinds of other characters -- the Bobbsey Twins, for example, and Tom Swift.  Stratemeyer created the characters and wrote eight- or ten-page outlines, and then hired a woman named Mildred Wirt to write the books, at $125 a shot, which wasn't bad in 1930.  After Stratemeyer died, Wirt continued to work for his children up through the fifties, writing almost all the Nancy Drew books (there were three or four that were written by Leslie McFarlane,  who wrote most of the early Hardy Boys books, also created by the syndicate.)  In the late fifties Stratemeyer's daughter, Harriet Adams, ended the relationship with Wirt and took over writing the books herself, at the same time issuing new editions of the earlier books, re-written to make the plot simpler, remove racist and classist elements, and make Nancy more domestic and less cocksure and independent.  In later years Adams claimed to have written all the books herself and tried to erase Wirt from the corporate history, but the whole story came out in a big lawsuit between the syndicate and Grosset & Dunlap in the 80s.


Split Image -- Robert B. Parker

Big old pile of crap.  I read it in the book store and even that was more effort than it was worth.


Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis -- Dan Rockmore

Interesting book on the history of attempts to prove a hypothesis stated by Bernhard Riemann in 1859: that all non-trivial zeroes produced by the Riemann zeta function should have the real part 1/2 (meaning that they lie on a certain critical line, defined by a complex number, which has a real part and an imaginary part, and the real part is always 1/2.)  For such an esoteric pure-number-theory problem, it draws a great deal of attention (probably just the fact that it's been unsolved for so long makes it stand out.)  It seems to attract more than its fair share of crackpots claiming to have solved it, although their convoluted explanations of why peer-reviewed journals reject their articles are often entertaining.


The Ronin -- William Dale Jennings

Novelized adaptation of a Buddhist story about an aimless unemployed samurai of poor character in feudal Japan who decides to reform himself and do something useful with his life by digging a tunnel through a mountain.  After twenty years of work he breaks through on the far side and finds he miscalculated and the tunnel comes out in the wrong place, whereupon he decides he's been wasting his time and leaves.  I didn't really understand it.


Road Dogs -- Elmore Leonard

I've liked almost everything by Leonard, but this did nothing for me.  Several characters from previous books come together in a slow plot that's neither likely nor interesting.


Eifelheim -- Michael Flynn

Decent science fiction story about aliens who crash in rustic Germany in the fourteenth century.  I liked the way the humans and aliens each tried to get across concepts for which the other had no referent.  The humans understand that the aliens come from "far away", but cannot grasp that the aliens mean "not on this planet" or how the distance was crossed.  In turn the aliens cannot really understand human society, and when a monk explains to them about Jesus, they can only grasp that the humans revere a Lord who came from the sky and will someday return -- which they assume means a previous alien visit.  It was pretty good, but would have been better without the framing device, where two annoying people in the 21st century discover the story of the 14th-century aliens in old historical records.


Mandragola -- Niccolo Machiavelli

A satirical play Machiavelli wrote while in exile, revolving around a rogue who dupes an elderly fool into arranging for the rogue to sleep with the fool's wife.  I'd be inclined to think it's mainly the author's name that's kept the play alive, but maybe it's better in Italian.


Trout Fishing in America -- Richard Brautigan

A very strange non-linear collection of surreal scenes.  I liked the section where a guy tries to buy sections of a river from a wholesale store.  Oddly, the edition I have doesn't use the original cover even though the text of the book refers to the cover illustration constantly, thus making this edition even more disconnected.  (I remember a guy pointing out once that fishing is so popular in the US that this book became a best-seller on the title alone.)


WLT -- Garrison Keillor

The chronicle of an imaginary Minnesota radio station, originally begun to promote the owners' deli ("WLT" stands for "With Lettuce and Tomato") from the early days of broadcast radio through to the beginning of television.  It was pretty good but I think it would have been better if I'd heard Keillor read it aloud.


The Common Law -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

This was a series of lectures given by Holmes before he became a Supreme Court Justice.  His intent is to explore the origins of the common law and the right way to apply old laws to new situations.  Near the beginning he recalls Edward Coke's saying that "Reason is the life of the law", and disagrees, saying that "The life of the law is not reason but experience," meaning that the law was not designed from rational first principles but is instead an artifact of history and precedent.  He points out that many of the principles of the common law, before they were codified as law, could be deduced from oral history -- he refers to the Saga of Burnt Njal no fewer than three times.  It was very interesting reading.


The Survival of the Bark Canoe -- John McPhee

A very good profile of a New Hampshire craftsman, the only boat-builder in America who still makes canoes the way the Algonquins did, out of sheets of tree bark.  The book has a nicely layered structure, combining the profile of the boat-builder with a description of a long canoe trip in New Hampshire and Maine and a history of the development of the canoe.  Really good.


The Adventures of John Wetherell -- C.S. Forester (ed.)

This was the diary of a British sailor who was captured in the Napoleonic Wars and marched to and fro across France as a prisoner.  Some of it probably isn't reliable; Wetherell obviously hated his ship's captain, and may have had legitimate grudges against him, but the multitude of crimes Wetherell charges seem unlikely -- never mind that it's completely unbelievable that a captain would entrust an ordinary seaman who hated him with dishonest missions.  However, Wetherell had no reason to lie or exaggerate concerning his imprisonment in France, and that part of the story is the most interesting.  Captured British sailors had to walk to their places of imprisonment, walks that often took months.  Generally the French authorities would give the prisoners directions to the next town and a letter requiring the mayor to feed them, and send them on their way, escorted by one or two pensioned soldiers.  According to Wetherell, the French townsmen, and even most of the soldiers, were quite hospitable to the British, and there seemed to be very little hostility, with a few exceptions -- mostly drunken soldiers.


Three Soldiers -- John Dos Passos

A World War One novel, following the careers of three different soldiers from different backgrounds, and how they're all ground into the same shape by the inexorable machinery of the Army.  I was interested to note that none of the soldiers knew or cared anything about the war, but was only concerned with his own circumstances.  I think the main fact of army life -- the inescapable fact that you're always being ordered around, often by people you can't stand, which Dos Passos found unbearable -- would weigh more heavily on someone like Dos Passos, who had a high opinion of himself, than on other people.


The Battery -- Henry Schlesinger

A well-written history of the development of the battery.  Apparently it got its name because the early ones consisted of a series of large electrochemical cells arranged in a row, like a battery of artillery.  The name stuck.  There's an excellent explanation of the ingenious way the electronic components of early missiles were powered: the payload included a voltaic pile with a glass tube in the middle filled with a conductive fluid; when the missile was launched, the acceleration shattered the tube, and since the missile was spinning on its own axis, the centripetal force spread the fluid through the voltaic pile, thus charging it. 


The Ransom of Russian Art -- John McPhee

McPhee was on a train ride and happened to fall into conversation with an expert on underground Russian art produced outside the official Soviet approved academies.  He wound up writing a whole book about the art and about Norton Dodge, the expert and collector he met.  Dodge owns almost ten thousand Soviet-era underground paintings, which he acquired on trips to Russia as a professor of economics. There are a lot of examples of the artwork in the book, and it's all subversive modern stuff, which I find interesting more for its political import than for its artistic quality, but I'm not a big modern art lover.  There's also a good look at the art underground under the Soviets.  There was some stuff about Dodge himself, too, but not a lot because he was pretty evasive.  He would never say exactly why he was making trips to obscure Soviet outposts, or explain where he got the money to buy all the paintings he bought and ship them out of the USSR, which must have cost a lot in bribe money.  Maybe he was a spy, maybe he was involved in drug smuggling, maybe he was involved in crooked business deals?  McPhee probed him about that but eventually let it drop.  If he was a spy or a crook, obviously he's not going to talk about it.  It was a good book.


The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed -- John McPhee

Kind of a sad look at people who wouldn't let go of the past.  It's the story of a company founded by former Navy pilots who flew the last airships -- blimps, really -- for the Navy in the fifties, and its attempt to design and launch a hybrid airship/airplane (which looks sort of like a gigantic pumpkin seed.)  The designers -- who fund the company with their own money and what they can borrow -- tout the advantages of airships: the big one is that they can go for weeks without refueling.  Though the book was written in 1973, you could see even then that the driving force of commercial transport was, and was going to continue to be, speed -- the one area where the airship finishes last.  The company's prototypes tended to crash, but even if they'd worked no one would have bought them.


The Curve of Binding Energy -- John McPhee

This is a book McPhee wrote in the early seventies, all about nuclear power, concentrating on a profile of Theodore Taylor, who worked at Los Alamos during the war and later spent many years on the Orion project, which planned to build a nuclear-powered spacecraft -- basically it would be a giant steel hemisphere, really thick, and you'd set off nuclear bombs inside the concavity, which would propel the hemisphere the other way.  (You could build up some serious speed doing that.  It would probably be our only realistic way of reaching the outer planets.)  After Orion was cancelled, Taylor spent most of is time trying to get the AEC to increase the security of its nuclear-materials transport, which was pretty shoddy back then and probably hasn't improved much since.  Good book.


A Journey in Ladakh -- Andrew Harvey

Ladakh is a region in the far north of India, although what country it actually belongs to has been in dispute for a while.  The local religion is mainly Tibetan Buddhism, and the writer went there to study it and to meet a locally famous lama.  As travel writing the book is very good; as an attempt to convey the nuances of Buddhism to a non-Buddhist audience, it's not quite as successful.  Whatever made the lama so impressive in person doesn't really come across in the book.


Supernatural Horror in Literature -- H.P. Lovecraft

A really good overview of the history of horror stories.  Lovecraft had a keen critical sense and a great feel for what elements of a story make it interesting and/or scary.  Well worth reading.


The French Lieutenant's Woman -- John Fowles

A novel showing a very strong Thomas Hardy influence.  It's set in Dorset in the 1860s, in the town of Lyme Regis (the same town where Jane Austen set her novel Persuasion) and involves a young fossil-enthusiast who becomes involved with the local woman of mystery, Sarah, who has supposedly been abandoned by a French lieutenant.  As the story goes on we find that the woman's story is made of several layers of lies.  I strongly disliked Sarah, but I think the author's point was that given her desire to live outside the conventions of Victorian society, there was really no way she could interact with a conventional person without being dishonest.  It was pretty good.  (Mom and Dad have been to Lyme Regis, and have gone out on the sea-wall where the characters spend so much time dramatically not looking at each other, and Dad says that considering the sea-wall has no guard rail and is both windy and wet, it's surprising that Sarah's mysterious dark cloak didn't get her blown out to sea.)


Milk -- Anne Mendelson

This was a cultural history of milk, which wasn't really that interesting.  The writing was dull and I didn't think half the book needed to be filled with recipes.


Private Yankee Doodle -- Joseph Plumb Martin

The diary of a private soldier from Connecticut who fought through all seven years of the American Revolution.  It's really interesting, and shows just how much of the time the Colonial army spent unpaid, without shoes or blankets, and without enough food.  Martin wasn't the world's best prose stylist but he did have an excellent sense of humor.


Uncommon Carriers -- John McPhee

A really, really good book about freight transportation.  McPhee rode on coal trains, river barges, and ocean tankers.  He took a cross-country trip with the only guy in America who owns his own one-truck hazmat fleet, hauling hazardous liquids from one place to another.  He mentions that liquid-tank trucks have problems solid-cargo trucks don't.  The weight limit on US highways is 80,000 pounds, and if, say, a tanker is hauling WD-40 to some industrial plant, stopping at the weight limit means the tank isn't full, so the WD-40 will slosh around, which is very dangerous for the truck's motion, especially in a high wind.  So what they do is fill the truck all the way and then drain their fuel tanks until they're at the weight limit.  That's why tanker trucks have to stop to refuel so often.  There's also a good story about McPhee and his brother taking a canoe trip trying to follow the path Thoreau and his brother took on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which turned out not to be that easy because all the canal locks the Thoreaus used have long since vanished and the rivers are much rougher now.  Also more polluted.


Jacques the Fatalist -- Denis Diderot

A very funny novel about the servant Jacques and his never-named master travelling across France in the late eighteenth century.  We never learn exactly where they are or where they're going, which is intentional, since the whole book is meant to feel unreal.  Jacques is constantly trying to tell his master a story about his love life, but is always interrupted, and the interruptions are themselves interrupted, and so on, so no story is ever completed and there's never any closure.  There's even a meta-character, an imaginary reader who keeps interrupting the narrator and telling him to go back to some abandoned story.  I liked it a lot.


Table of Contents -- John McPhee

A terrific collection of New Yorker essays.  About half of it is taken up with a very long essay on the renaissance of the general practitioner and the new (in the 80s) field of "family medicine".  There are also good essays on bears and about a guy who started the first phone service on the Arctic Circle. 


Medium Raw -- Anthony Bourdain

A collection of magazine articles, generally slamming people Bourdain doesn't like, such as Alice Waters (who honestly is kind of a clueless buffoon -- I remember when some TV interviewer remarked to her that "natural food" is actually pretty expensive, and low-income people can't really afford organic food, she gave this prissy smile and condescendingly said that maybe they should spend less on sneakers.  I wanted to slap her) and a restaurant critic who got mad at Bourdain and panned a restaurant where Bourdain hadn't worked in ten years, just out of spite.  I also liked his essay about accepting you're getting older, and realizing that "when your first kid is born it's probably time to hang up the Ramones T-shirt."


The Quark and the Jaguar -- Murray Gell-Mann

A not-exactly-autobiography in which Gell-Mann talks about things in his early life that sparked his interest in theoretical physics.  It wasn't very well-written, and in fact wasn't all that interesting.


Tess of the d'Urbervilles -- Thomas Hardy

A great novel from the 1890s about a farm-girl named Tess and two rotten men who ruin her life.  She meets Angel Clare, and there is a mutual attraction, but then her father learns that he is distantly related to the aristocratic d'Urberville family, and sends her to visit her cousin Alec, who rapes her.  After her illegitimate child dies, she re-encounters Angel, and they fall in love and are married -- until Angel finds out she was raped and angrily repudiates her.  Abandoned, she is persecuted by Alec, who believes that because he raped her she is now his property.  It's an infuriating story.  The story was well-received when it was published serially in a magazine, but when it was published in a book there was a big controversy because Hardy added the subtitle "A Pure Woman".


Werewolves In Their Youth -- Michael Chabon

A collection of short stories, some of them pretty good.  "The Harris Fetko Story" was the best, a kind of bizarre real-estate/failed marriage/kleptomania story.


Warriors of Blood and Dream -- Roger Zelazny (ed.)

An anthology of short stories about fighting and the martial arts generally.  Some of them were pretty silly, but there were also some good ones.  Actually the parody ones were my favorites, especially the one about the impressionable acolytes who gather at the feet of the unemployed drunk Bubba and ponder the possible deep Zen meaning of his drunken ramblings, while hoping to learn his method of fighting with a tire iron.


Mathematical Circus -- Martin Gardner

A collection of Gardner's excellent "Mathematical Games" columns from Scientific American.  Includes some really interesting articles on cryptography.


The Control of Nature -- John McPhee

Three really excellent long essays on human efforts to enforce stability on unstable systems: the flooding of the Mississippi (made much worse by the fact that most of its tributaries -- more than a thousand -- have been closed off for development reasons, leaving the water many fewer places to go) and the fact that left to itself, the river would change course and drop into the bed of the Atchafalaya, leaving New Orleans without a river; an attempt in Iceland to stop a lava flow from destroying a town and filling its harbor; and the constant work it takes to keep the detritus from the San Gabriel Mountains from destroying Los Angeles.  Terrific book.  My favorite bit: during the great Mississippi flood of 1927, an attempt was made to preserve a railway bridge by parking a fully loaded coal train on it -- the idea being that the tremendous weight of the train would stabilize the bridge against the pounding of the river.  However, what actually happened was that the river pounding caused so much shaking that the friction set the coal in the train on fire! 


Your Mythic Journey -- Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox

A book about story-telling and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives.  A little hippy-dippy, but not bad.


The Man Who Loved Only Numbers -- Paul Hoffman

Good biography of the extremely eccentric mathematician Paul Erdos, who did a great deal of work in graph theory and set theory.  He wrote his own epitaph: "At last, I have stopped getting stupider."  


Summerland -- Michael Chabon

A pretty good long fairy tale about giants and baseball.  Our hero has to go on a barnstorming tour across the realms of Faerie with a motley team, playing baseball against every local nine they can find, ultimately as part of a plan to stop the spirit Coyote from cutting down the World Tree and destroying everything.  I liked it.


Born to Run -- Christopher McDougall

A good book about ultramarathons and the odd characters who run them, and about the Tarahumara Indians from central Mexico, whose tribal sport is long-distance running.  (Did you know there's a hundred-fifty-mile long foot race along a highway in Death Valley?  The runners have to stay on the yellow traffic lines because the pavement would melt their shoes.)  Makes a good case for the argument that humans evolved for long-distance running when our ancestors literally ran down their prey on the savannah.  He points out that sweating is much better for heat-shedding when you're moving than when you're still; that standing upright presents a smaller heat profile to the sun, while retaining hair on our heads helps protect the brain from the sun's direct heat;  that we have tendons that other primates don't, which is why we can run and they can't; that humans can breathe through their mouths when they run (which favors endurance running) while animals that can put on huge bursts of speed, like cheetahs, can't; and that humans who spend too much time sedentary get sick.  Also, interestingly, the difference in performance between men and women decreases as the distance increases.  No woman has ever been among the top fifty one-mile runners, but when you get up to marathon distance there are women in the top twenty, and when you get to hundred-mile and more distances, there is no significant difference between men and women.


Running With Scissors -- Augusten Burroughs

A memoir of the time Burroughs' mentally ill mother left him, at age 12, to be raised by her therapist, who was also mentally ill.  The period Burroughs describes is unbelievably bizarre and disturbing, as his mother's psychotic episodes increase and the therapist's behavior gets stranger and stranger.  I really didn't like the book at all, and the fact that it all happened in Northampton, and that I know people who know the people involved, doesn't make it any easier.


Paperboy -- Henry Petroski

Petroski's autobiography, in which he describes the circumstances in his life that led to his interest in engineering.  Most of it centers around the paper route he had as a boy in the forties and fifties, and in which he had most of the same problems I had in the seventies and eighties -- how to get around on a bike when you have a big bag of newspapers weighing down one side; how to fold the papers so they won't come apart; the annoyance of rainy days, when you have to walk up and put the paper inside the screen door out of the rain, rather than just toss it on the steps; the problem of collecting, especially when it means dealing face to face with mean or crazy customers and asking them for money.  If you never had a paper route you might not like this as much as I did.


The Sweet Life in Paris -- David Lebowitz

Memoir of an American pastry chef who relocated to Paris.  Not bad.  There's some good culture-shock observations, like reminiscing about how he had to learn to shove and cut in line.  He tries to pinpoint the moment when he had gotten used to Paris, and settles on the day he went to the bank with 135 euros to pay a bill for 134 euros, and wasn't surprised when the clerk told him the bank didn't have change that day.  (What the clerk meant was, "I'm not going to give you your change because I'm keeping it myself, and if you feel like arguing about it you can wait in line all day.")


The Wealth of Nations -- Adam Smith

Excellent and beautifully written book about capital and the origin of value.  I believe Smith was the first person to articulate the idea that an object has two values: its use-value and its exchange value.  The use-value is what the object can be used for -- an ax, for example, has a certain use-value because you can use it to chop firewood and keep yourself alive; a potato has use-value because you can eat it.  These objects also have exchange value, which is the amount of money people are willing to exchange for them.  One thing that complicates economies is that an object's use-value and its exchange value are not necessarily related.  He also clearly articulated the fact that human societies are composed of different classes, and that these classes have conflicting interests, which is why there can't be an economic policy that's fair and agreeable to all classes.  (This is why Marx said the only way to have a just economy was to have a society that had no classes.)  Smith said that the basic problem was designing an economy that had the maximum degree of fairness, pointing out that you can't call any society fair or prosperous where the workers (who are the majority) are poor and miserable.  This was a radical notion for its time and is always ignored by the free-market guys who seem to think Smith was an "Every man for himself, as the elephant said when he stepped on the chickens" sort of thinker.


The Lost City of Z -- David Grann

A book about an eccentric explorer from a hundred years ago who disappeared looking for a lost city in the jungles of South America.  Funny how everybody seems obsessed with finding out what happened to this guy but nobody seems to give a crap about what happened to all the other guys who disappeared looking for him.  The book takes up the question of whether a high civilization could exist in the Amazon basin; the common thinking until recently was that it wouldn't be possible because there wasn't enough food there.  The question certainly deserves to be re-examined, especially since some modern archaeologists have found sites that may well have been cities once, but the author seems too eager to declare the debate over.  (I have no opinion either way, but I wouldn't be convinced until the archaeologists can give plausible answers to the staple problem: no large civilization can exist without a staple crop to live on, and a means to store it.  If there were cities in the Amazon, what crop did they live on, and where and how did they store it?)


What We Have to Live With -- Marilyn Krysl

A collection of long poems, largely about Mao.  I picked this up because the author was giving away copies at an Erika Krouse reading I attended.  They're technically sound but I'm not a big fan of free verse.


Basin and Range -- John McPhee

The Basin and Range is an area between Utah and eastern California, a regular sequence of mountain ranges with wide basins between.  McPhee drove across the area with a geologist, pulling over to look at rock outcroppings, gathering oolitic conglomerate from the bed of the Salt Lake, and generally drawing a picture of what the area has looked like over the last two hundred million years.  Good reading.


Hardcore Zen -- Brad Warner

A book about Zen by a guy with a kind of self-conscious "Look how hardcore I am, I used to be in a punk rock band" attitude.  I didn't like it very much, largely because the guy kept explaining how there is no truth, but Zen is truer than your stupid religions.  I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like the author if I met him.


Clublife -- Robert Fitzgerald

Engaging memoir of a bouncer at a series of clubs in New York City.  The club scenes are a lot more interesting than the look-what-a-self-sabotaging-underachiever-I-am parts.


In Suspect Terrain -- John McPhee

McPhee's second book on the geology of the United states, this one mainly dealing with plate tectonics and the personalities surrounding it.  I thought he had to stretch a little bit in order to find a geologist who argued against the plate-tectonics theory -- the woman he found wasn't very impressive.  In her arguments she constantly refers dismissively to "the plate-tectonics boys", a sure warning sign -- anyone who groups all the proponents of a theory into a homogeneous group with the same motivations is generally a crank.


Rising From the Plains -- John McPhee

His third book on the cross-section of the US at the fortieth parallel.  This one concentrates on the geology of Wyoming, and on a geologist who grew up on an isolated ranch there and eventually joined the US Geological Survey.  I was surprised to find that that's actually a pretty dangerous job; surveyors have to go all over the state, which means going into remote areas of Colorado and Wyoming where nobody ever goes.  Since nobody ever goes there, that's where drug dealers usually grow their crops and surveyors have a good chance of getting shot.


My Life With Charlie Brown -- Charles M. Schulz

Schulz never wrote an autobiography, but this is a posthumous collection of autobiographical essays, interviews, and forewords he wrote.  There's a lot of great stuff in it.


Extra Credits -- Mike Lupica

A mystery story set in lower New York.  The writing was entertaining, but I was disappointed when the street-wise hero went back to his alma mater to reconnect with his beloved older mentor, because of course that meant the mentor would turn out to be the bad guy.  Leaving aside the predictable plot turns, it wasn't that bad.


The Crow Road -- Iain Banks

A not-very-engaging novel about a whiny Scottish slacker who uses clues from a dead uncle's unpublished manuscript to solve a decades-old double murder.  All right but not great.


Assembling California -- John McPhee

The fourth of McPhee's books on the geography of North America, this one concentrating on the strange assemblage of varying terrains in California.  Current thinking is that most of California formed when a landmass about the size of Madagascar hit the western end of the North American plate, and the rest of it was added on later, in a long series of microcollisions.  This does seem to be the best explanation for the very complex folding and striation in the California landscape, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered -- or answered only with the geologist's favorite explanation: "That's not well understood."


Stylized -- Mark Garvey

A history of how Strunk and White collaborated, forty years apart, to write "The Elements of Style", and a look at how the book has been revised since the fifties.  There's a lot of love and hate for the book -- many people swear by it, many other people swear at it.  Someone said that it's a guide to writing the kind of writing the New Yorker likes, which is probably fair.  I still think it's better than Fowler's Standard English Usage.


In This Corner...! -- Peter Heller

A collection of newspaper reports of boxing matches, mostly uninspired, but interesting because they cover a wide range of boxers of whom I'd never heard.  Most boxing reporting only covers the ten or twelve most famous boxers.


Hooked -- Bruce Knecht

A story about Australian naval authorities and their fight against fish pirates -- mainly Spanish boats falsely registered in Uruguay who illegally fish in restricted waters.  Mostly they're fishing for the "Chilean sea bass", which isn't a bass at all -- the name was invented by marketers on the theory that no one wanted to buy a "Patagonian toothfish".  The thing is, the toothfish was so overfished off Patagonia that it's all but extinct there now, and despite all the efforts of the Australian coast guard it's become overfished in the south Pacific as well.  The astonishing part was when the author interviewed the pirate (while he was awaiting trial in Melbourne) and the pirate told him, totally sincerely, that he didn't believe it was possible to overfish a species -- that the toothfish would never become extinct no matter what fishermen did. 


Reservation Blues -- Sherman Alexie

Good but depressing novel about the bluesman Robert Johnson (presumed dead since the thirties) wandering onto a Spokane Indian reservation and giving a young Spokane his magical guitar, for which he had traded his soul to the Devil.  The Spokane and his friends start an Indian rock band, which initially does pretty well, but ultimately collapses into alcoholism and/or death. 


Levels of the Game -- John McPhee

Pretty engaging description of a tennis match between Arthur Ashe (before he turned pro) and his rival Clark Graebner at the 1968 US Open.  Ashe ultimately won the match and the championship.  McPhee was interested in the contrast between the players, who were nothing at all alike and came from widely different backgrounds, but who had known each other since the age of twelve and had played against each other literally thousands of times.  This was written at a time when it was popular to see sports as a political metaphor -- somebody called Joe Frasier "Nixon's hatchetman" because he was fighting the vocally radical Muhammad Ali -- and McPhee decides that the middle-class, white Graebner plays a stiff, conservative Republican game while the slum-born, black Ashe plays a loose, liberal Democratic game.  The metaphor is a little stretched.  I thought it was interesting that Graebner said he found playing against Ashe frustrating, because Graebner's solid, disciplined game usually couldn't stand up to Ashe's sloppy play and his penchant for taking crazy chances.  What it came down to, really, was that Ashe was a genius while Graebner was only an excellent player.


The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte -- Karl Marx

This was originally meant to be a series of letters for a German-language newspaper in the USA describing the political situation in France following the coup d'etat that put Napoleon the Third on the throne, but the paper folded and Marx collected the letters and published them as a pamphlet instead.  The 18th Brumaire was the date, under the old Revolutionary calendar, when the original Napoleon overthrew the state and made himself dictator.  When his nephew Louis Bonaparte did the same thing, Marx made his famous remark that history tends to repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.  Most of the book is taken up with describing the state of France leading up to the coup, to explain how the country came to a point where such a person as Napoleon III (who was mostly a nonentity) could become the head of state.  He sums up the role of the individual in history by saying that "men make their own history, but they cannot make it just as they please" -- meaning that they are constrained by the pre-existing conditions of the society wherein they were born.  It's good reading -- Marx was a keen observer, and he had a deep and thorough understanding of French politics -- and it's interesting to see (though Marx didn't foresee it) how the rise of Napoleon III was mirrored by the rise of the fascist dictators of the 20th century.


The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner -- Alan Sillitoe

Good book of short stories.  The title piece is the most memorable, being the nihilistic story of a young petty thief doing time in a Borstal (a British juvenile prison.)  Since he happens to be a good runner he gets to get out in the mornings to practice for a long-distance race to be held against a public school; most of the story is him reflecting as he runs, recalling the crime that got him put away and nursing his contempt for everyone who plays by society's rules, whether by working for a living or by trying to get approval from a superior.  On the race day he builds a big lead and then deliberately stops right before the finish line, losing the race on purpose as an act of defiance -- as a sign that he is unreformable and will never become a part of society.


The Neutrino -- Isaac Asimov

A good popular-science book explaining the beginnings of particle physics, and explaining how the structure of particle-physics theory made the neutrino necessary, which is why the neutrino's existence was postulated before it was actually observed.  Very well put together.  It so happened that I was standing in line at a lunch counter while I was reading this book, and the waitress gave me a slip of paper with my order number on it, and I stuck it in the book, whereupon a receipt fell out.  I looked at it and remarked, "Huh, I bought this book in 1989 and I'm just getting around to reading it now."  The waitress: "That was the year before I was born."


The Mapmakers -- John Noble Wilford

This was all right but not very memorable.  The main thing that sticks with me is that European maps used to be drawn with the East at the top, because the East was supposed to be the location of the Garden of Eden.  This is why the East is still called "the Orient" -- because it's the direction maps used to be oriented.


Pieces of the Frame -- John McPhee

A collection of excellent essays from the New Yorker.  My favorite was one where he decided to go to Atlantic City and try to find all the locations from the board game Monopoly.  Really well-written.


The Return of the Prodigal Son -- Henri J.M. Nouwen

Really, really good book on the nature of forgiveness and repentance, and the three figures of the story -- the sinning younger son, the jealous older son, and the loving father. 


Pirates of the Levant -- Arturo Perez-Reverte

Good naval adventure story, where our old friend el Capitan Alatriste and his now-grown ward Inigo find it prudent to leave Madrid for a while.  They spend their time away from Spain fighting Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean.  Inigo is about nineteen by this time and the book features his first rebellion against Alatriste's authority.  There's a chilling scene when it comes home to Inigo (and to the reader) that rebelling against a father figure is not the same thing as rebelling against an actual father -- that Alatriste could and would kill Inigo if he pushed him too far.


Gate of Ivrel -- C.J. Cherryh
Well of Shiuan -- C.J. Cherryh
Fires of Azeroth -- C.J. Cherryh

A science-fiction series about a future society that was once held together by a series of extradimensional gates, except the gates wound up causing some gigantic problems with the fabric of the universe or something (the details are left vague), so a team set out to travel through all the gates, destroying them behind them as they went.  As the series opens, only one member of the team is left alive, and she enlists our hero to help her.  Of course, our hero is from a pre-technological society and doesn't understand anything about what's really happening, so what we see is him trying to make sense of what's going on without the tools to do so.  They weren't bad, but the first one was a good deal better than the other two.


Eight Little Piggies -- Stephen Jay Gould

A collection of essays on natural history.  Some of them were good, but some were kind of dull.  The best one was an essay about a species of hermit crab that lives only in the abandoned shells of a different species of shellfish -- except the second species has been extinct for a hundred years, and as its abandoned shells become scarcer the hermits will inevitably die out.


Wonder Boys -- Michael Chabon

If this had been the first Chabon book I read, I would never have read any of the others.  I thought it was terrible.  For one thing, it's the story of a middle-aged academic with substance-abuse issues and his problems with his wife and mistress.  Which has only been done like seventy million times already.  Also, the whole scene at the party at the department head's house is lifted right out of Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, who was there first and did it better.


The Headmaster -- John McPhee

Excellent book about Frank Boyden, who was the headmaster at Deerfield Academy for 66 years.  It's well-written and full of great detail.  Boyden was essentially the king of Deerfield for a half-century, reigning from his golf cart (he never learned to drive.)  When he rebuilt the school in the twenties he didn't assign himself an office; instead he set up a table in the main hallway, where everyone in the school passed through every day, to keep on top of things.  He was also instrumental in changing Mass Agricultural College into the University of Massachusetts.  He was a big believer in phys ed; every Deerfield student was required to be on at least two sports teams (since there were 500 students, they would just keep adding teams until there were spots for everyone.)  He also masterminded the construction of Boyden Gym at UMass, which was of course named for him, and was at the time the largest gymnasium in America.


The Billionaire's Vinegar -- Benjamin Wallace

Very interesting book.  A kind of shady guy claimed to have found a wine vault underneath a house in Paris; the vault had been bricked up during the French Revolution and it still contained some wine.  The finder claimed the bottles had belonged to Thomas Jefferson when he was ambassador to France.  (Most Jefferson scholars discount this possibility.)  Anyway, whether it was Jefferson's or not, the bottle was full of 200-year-old wine, and the publisher Malcolm Forbes bought it at auction for an absurd price -- something like a quarter million dollars.  Then he put it in a public display with his other Jefferson stuff -- and he shone a hot spotlight on it!  (This meant that even if the wine had been drinkable before, it would be ruined now.)  In fact the cork shriveled up in the heat and fell into the bottle.  Most of the book is taken up with analyzing the old-wine trade, noting that after the idea of having big tastings of all kinds of vintages became a fad among the rich, an improbable number of batches of old wine kept turning up -- most of them coming from the same shady guy, who would never say exactly where he got them, and dismissed the vintners' doubts by saying he knew more about old wine than they did.  Looking at it all in a mass, it's obvious the guy was a fraud and nearly all his old wine was fake.  (I also enjoyed learning that the vintners themselves don't approve of all these big gatherings where people drink thirty or forty vintages and spit them out.  They say wine is meant to be drunk, not spat, and on top of that they say wine is intended to accompany food, and if you drink wine with nothing but more wine you're not really appreciating it.)


Flawless -- Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell

Terrific book about a gigantic jewel theft from a diamond exchange in Antwerp.  It was really detailed and interesting.  What really struck me was the bizarre ending.  After more than two years of planning, inside infiltration, designing a device to hack into the vault magnet, designing another device to break the deposit box doors, setting up a fake diamond business, and rigging up a way in and out -- all of this at huge expense -- and pulling the whole thing off without a hitch, they were caught because they carelessly dumped all the leftover evidence in garbage bags by the side of the highway, where it was all picked up the same day.


Giving Good Weight -- John McPhee

Five long essays, all of them terrific.  There's a great piece on a duel between two pinball wizards (J. Anthony Lukas was one of them), and another on an eccentric travelling chef.  My favorite was the title piece, about working for farmers in upstate New York and selling the produce at street markets in Harlem and Brooklyn.


I Shall Wear Midnight -- Terry Pratchett

The fourth and probably last of the novels about no-longer-apprentice witch Tiffany Aching.  I liked the prose but I found the plot kind of unmemorable -- it actually seemed like a bit of a do-over of his earlier novel A Hat Full of Sky. 


The Crofter and the Laird -- John McPhee

A brilliant book about the tiny island of Colonsay, and the troublesome relations between the Scottish inhabitants and the English landlord, the laird, who owns the whole island.  The old laird had maintained things in more or less the old feudal style, paying for the roads and the school and not racking the rent out of the tenants in bad years, but since the old laird died the new laird has decided not to spend any money on the island, and to get rid of as many inhabitants as he can.  He can't go as far as he'd like, because after the terrible brutality of the Highland Clearances in the nineteenth century, Parliament belatedly passed a law forbidding the eviction of any farmer who maintained a croft of a certain acreage.  So the laird and his crofters are stuck with each other, and there's no love lost on either side.  The hardest part to take was the scene where the new laird -- apparently seeing nothing wrong with his policies -- goes on about how much he loves the island (where he keeps a vacation home for the summers) and how the tenants (who live there year-round) don't appreciate it, and how they're all lazy and need to be brought into the modern world.  (By which he means they can't be allowed to work morn till night on their own farms where they've lived their whole lives to maintain their independence, but must be kicked out to go hat in hand to the officer for the poor relief, for the convenience of their absentee landlord.)


Operation Mincemeat -- Ben Macintyre

Excellent book on the counter-intelligence operation (originally dreamed up by Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, when he worked for the British secret services during the war) whose intent was to fool the Nazis into believing that the objective of the Allied invasion of Europe was not Sicily, but rather Greece and the eastern Mediterranean.  The plan involved finding a corpse in London, dressing it in a naval uniform, handcuffing a briefcase full of fake documents to it, and letting it wash ashore in neutral Spain, knowing that the Spanish authorities favored the Nazis and would pass along anything they found.  There operation was brought off, but with a lot of drawbacks -- the corpse had obviously been dead longer than he was supposed to have been in the water, and he had died from taking rat poison, which meant that his corpse did not look like a drowned corpse.  But the letters it carried were accepted anyway.  Macintyre argues that the body was so obviously a plant that it's probable that the Abwehr intelligence officer who oversaw the case realized it was false -- but that he reported it as true anyway, because that officer is known to have been an ardent anti-Fascist who hated Hitler and poisoned Nazi intelligence whenever possible.


The Wounded Healer -- Henri J.M. Nouwen

A book from the sixties on the problems of providing spiritual counsel in the face of the possibility of a nuclear holocaust.  It's not bad but not as good as his later books.


The House That Beebo Built -- Janine Ast and Alain Gree

Excellent children's book from the sixties, about a pleasant and handy inventor named Beebo who gets fired from his job for being too nice, and then builds a wonderful house with his friend Mop.  The author was German, and there's a socialist message, as Beebo and Mop have no sooner finished the wonderful house than heartless greedy people come to tear it down to build a block of flats.  Beebo invents scary machines to frighten the developers away, but they come back, and rather than hurt anyone Beebo and Mop escape into the sky on a self-propelling staircase.  (Reading it as an adult I get the feeling that the author meant that they killed themselves but wasn't explicitly saying it because he was writing for an audience of children.)


The Earth Moves -- Dan Hofstadter

A short book concentrating on Galileo's trial for heresy.  The trial was actually fairly complicated, but two things stand out: first, Galileo was in fact guilty of the charges against him (he advocated a heliocentric theory, which was not only generally banned but had specifically been forbidden to him personally, a ban that he had accepted and then broken; and he also interpreted Scripture on his own, which the Church forbade to non-clergy); and second, the trial was conducted illegally, since Galileo was threatened with the Inquisition even though he was legally immune to torture, both because he was over sixty-five and because he had been formally approved by the Holy See as an upright
person.  


The Man Who Loved Books Too Much -- Allison Hoover Bartlett

A pretty interesting account of a book thief who had a fairly long career; apparently it was difficult to get the police to take much interest in his thefts because the police generally refused to believe that a book could be worth as much money as the victims claimed.  He was caught eventually, largely as the result of a determined private investigation by a group of booksellers, and in a series of interviews with the author revealed himself to be a pretty unattractive person, a compulsive liar with a strong belief that he deserved to have the things he wanted and everything else must follow from that.  It didn't really surprise me that the thief wasn't much of a reader; he wanted the books because they were valuable, and owning a lot of valuable books gave him a feeling of satisfaction, allowing him to think of himself as a classy, cultivated person, the sort of person who would have a good book collection.  He was pretty creepy, actually.


A Roomful of Hovings -- John McPhee

An excellent collection of profiles, including the curator of the Met and the guy who keeps the lawn at Wimbledon.  The two best pieces were an account of a canoe trip he took with an expert on living off the land (they ate nothing on the trip but what they found along the way) and a really good long study of the MIT Fellows, recent college graduates in the sixties who took government positions in developing nations for terms of three or four years.  One was a guy who spent years travelling around the Sudan gathering local law cases to compile a record of decision and precedent for the nation.  Another was the comptroller for Nigeria for several years, establishing a procedure for governmental tax collection and expenditure.  All of them had limited terms and were succeeded by locals when they left office.  It was a tremendous challenge for the Fellows -- they were doing work at age 25 or 26 that in the US wouldn't be given to anyone with less than thirty years of experience.


An Edge in My Voice -- Harlan Ellison

A collection of Ellison's columns from various fly-by-night LA papers and magazines.  Some of them are pretty good, once you get past the bombast of Ellison praising himself for his awesome courage, but I think the fact that Ellison is constantly (and I mean constantly, in almost every column) blasting his critics for not understanding him, shows his essential insecurity and weakness as a writer. 


Just Enough Liebling -- A. J. Liebling (David Remnick, ed.)

An anthology of writing samples from Liebling's various books.  I would have liked it more if there had been more whole essays, and fewer selections from essays.  I think an essay is meant to be read as a complete whole, and a chunk taken out of an essay isn't really worth reading without the rest of it.  You're better off getting the original books and reading the essays in their entirety.


Encounters With the Archdruid -- John McPhee

Three long essays describing canoe trips McPhee took in the company of David Brower, the head of the Sierra Club and a militant conservationist, and his opponents.  I thought it was kind of surprising that a mining engineer, a resort developer, and a dam builder -- all of whom regarded Brower as a mortal enemy -- were willing to take river trips with him and debate their life philosophies in front of McPhee, but they did, and the results were really interesting.  I was also surprised that Brower, while firm in his positions, was not at all confrontational, and all the anti-conservation guys remarked on how much more reasonable he was than they'd expected.  I suppose he could afford to be polite, seeing as how he'd beaten them at every turn.  The disconnect in worldview was sometimes pretty startling -- like the time when, looking over a mountain vista, the mining engineer insisted, with total sincerity, that a 2500-foot-wide hole plus a big pile of rock waste (the necessary by-products of mining out the copper under the mountain) would not detract from the view in any way.


Painted Ladies -- Robert B. Parker

Lousy.


The Toughest Indian in the World -- Sherman Alexie

A collection of short stories dealing with life on the Spokane reservation in Washington state -- the stagnation and alcoholism when living on the reservation, and the isolation and sense of not belonging when living off it.  I thought they were pretty good.


Newspaper Days -- H.L. Mencken

The second volume of Mencken's autobiography.  Very well-written, and it gives a really interesting picture of what the newspaper business was like a hundred years ago.


Cryoburn -- Lois McMaster Bujold

Mildly interesting SF novel.  Gave me the impression that it was written while the author was thinking about something else.


The Telephone Booth Indian -- A.J. Liebling

Really excellent book about a vanished culture, the nickel-and-dime hustlers of the teens and twenties who made their living running small-time mail frauds and phone frauds.  The slightly more successful ones rented fly-by-night offices in an office building in the low-rent district; the others hung around the lobby of the building all day because they had given, as their business number, the number of one of the lobby pay phones.  Liebling loved to quote the peculiar English of the New York low-lifes, and drew a terrific picture of their daily routine.


Special Topics in Calamity Physics -- Marisha Pessl

Basically there are two kinds of first novels.  A man's first novel is generally the story of a middle-aged academic and his troubles with his wife and mistress.  A woman's first novel is generally the story of "how mean everyone was to me in high school."  This is the second kind.  Our heroine, Blue Van Meer, is the only girl in history who has ever been spitefully teased by her classmates, apparently, plus she has a creepily manipulative dad.  A lot of people liked this book, but I found it over-written, and the prose was kind of forced. 


Beebo and the Fizzimen -- Janine Ast and Alain Gree

A Beebo sequel, involving Beebo using his ingenuity to stop a fizzy-lemonade company from using his likeness to promote their drink.  It was okay but not nearly as good as the original.


Coming Into the Country -- John McPhee

A long book about Alaska written in the mid-seventies, when there was a big kerfuffle about moving the capital (it never came to anything.)  It was kind of funny that the power structures of Juneau and Anchorage hated each other so much that the only thing they could agree on was that the new capital shouldn't be within thirty miles of either city.  McPhee went way up into the Yukon and visited a lot of Alaskans who lived way out on their own -- people for whom the town of Eagle (pop. 120) was too big.  The town itself was an interesting contrast, about half fundamentalists and half anti-religion libertarians, but the people living in the woods were pretty striking.  None of them were native Alaskans; all had come there looking for independence.  The thing about them was that these were people who really came there because they couldn't get along anywhere else.  They had a certain uniformity to them: all of them were resentful of authority, couldn't hold a regular job because they couldn't stand being told what to do, and had wives and children they hadn't seen in
decades.  I noticed that the ones who had women living with them treated the women like slaves -- even getting angry if the women answered a question from McPhee without looking at the men first.  It was not an attractive picture of frontier life.


The Commitments -- Roddy Doyle

A really good short novel about a bunch of unemployed twentysomethings starting a soul band in the ratty part of Dublin in the eighties.  When one of the band members points out that no one in the soul band is black, the manager, Jimmy Rabbitte, replies, "The Irish are the blacks of Europe."  I loved it.


The Snapper -- Roddy Doyle

Not exactly a sequel to The Commitments; it's about Jimmy Rabbitte's family, mainly his father (Jimmy Senior) and his older sister, who gets raped by her boss in the parking lot outside a pub.  She gets pregnant ("snapper" is Irish slang for a baby) and most of the book is about her family and friends finding out and dealing with it.  The writing is good -- Doyle has a good ear for the way people talk -- but it's a bit depressing.


The Founding Fish -- John McPhee

A long book about the shad, a commercially important American fish.  McPhee has been a keen fisherman his whole life, and some of the book is given over to first-person accounts of fishing for shad -- which only McPhee could make interesting -- and the rest is a natural history of the shad, its importance in American trade, notable shad fishermen (like Washington and Thoreau) and visits to ichthyology labs for fish dissections.  The book explains why fish eyes are spherical (instead of the flattened-concave shape of the human eye lens): the light hitting our eyes is travelling through air before it hits the water in our eyeballs, and air and water have different indices of refraction, so the human eye has to have a lens that is shaped in such a way as to interpret the change.  But a fish eye is immersed in water, which means there's no refraction boundary when light hits the fish eyeball, so a fish doesn't need a convex lens in its eye.  I thought that was interesting.


Spaceling -- Doris Piserchia

A psychedelic SF novel set in a near future where people have become aware of interdimensional faults that drift through the Earth's atmosphere; certain people can pass through them into other worlds, where they assume different physical forms.  It was pretty interesting.


The Van -- Roddy Doyle

The third of his novels about the Rabbitte family and their lives in the poorest part of Dublin.  In this one the laid-off Jimmy Senior goes in with a laid-off friend to start a chip van, a sort of cafeteria truck selling fish and chips and assorted snacks.  I liked the story structure: it's a good contrast between on the one hand the uncomplicated fun of running the van, ignoring the health and safety laws, and flirting and cracking with the customers, and on the other hand the friction and jealousy between the two men running the van, old friends who have never had reason to come into conflict before.  Good book.  I would have liked to have a little more of Jimmy Junior in the story, though.


The Crystal Cave -- Mary Stewart

Well-written retelling of part of the Arthur legend, dealing with Merlin's youth and early manhood and his relationship with Uther Pendragon (Arthur's father.)  The story ends right after Arthur's conception, probably because Merlin isn't the central character any more once Arthur is on the scene.  It's a very good story.


The Chunnel -- Drew Fetherston

Pretty good book on the construction of the tunnel under the English Channel.  I hadn't realized how much opposition there was to it in England, where "being an island" was very psychologically important to some people.  Britons also have an exaggerated fear of hoof and mouth disease, which is why the tunnel had to have wire mesh at either end, just in case an infected fox walked all the way under the Channel from France to England.  Naturally the project took years longer than it was supposed to, and ran hugely over budget, and was almost paralyzed by bitter political infighting -- par for the course, really -- but as a piece of engineering it was pretty amazing.  They dug the first tunnel starting from either side and they had to come together with a tolerance of only a little more than a square foot.  There are actually three tunnels -- an east-bound one and a west-bound one (so there can't be any collisions) and a smaller central tunnel for maintenance and to give passengers a place to go if they had to evacuate a stopped train.  There are also arched passages connecting the two train tunnels, because a train in the tunnel pushes an envelope of air ahead of it, and the mass of the air would slow the train down; the passageways give the air a place to bleed off so the train can maintain its pace.


The Maine Woods -- Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau made three lengthy canoe trips through the forests of Maine, including a long trip to Mount Ktaadn (now officially spelled "Kahtahdin".)  He wrote accounts of all these trips for magazines and later collected them into a manuscript, which was published after he died.  He had great powers of description and his remarks on the woods are good reading, but I was most struck by his observations of the Indians he met and sometimes travelled with.  Thoreau could speak a little of the Algonquin language, not really that well, but enough to note things about the way the Indians thought -- for example, that if you asked any Algonquin speaker "How far is it to such a place?" the Indian would never answer with a distance in miles but would always say "It's two and a half days from here" or "The other side of the lake is four hours from here" or the equivalent -- that is, they did not reckon in distance but in time.  It's kind of sad that Thoreau found it necessary to provide reasons why the Indians were not a degenerate form of white men (this was a popular theory in the 19th century.)  In fact he spent some time contrasting the grammar of the Algonquin language with English grammar, to demonstrate that the Indians spoke their own independent language and not, as the preachers liked to say, a debased form of some European language.


Swallows and Amazons -- Arthur Ransome

Excellent children's book about four brothers and sisters, aged seven to twelve, on vacation in the Lake District in the 1930s, and their adventures sailing a small sailboat called the Swallow.  They meet some kindred spirits, a pair of sisters who have their own sailboat, called the Amazon, and they engage in a friendly war.  I was struck by the fact that the children's mother let them sail out to an island in the lake and camp there alone, something that probably wouldn't be allowed these days.  For one thing the island would probably have a Starbucks on it.


Armor -- John Steakley

A pretty good SF-military novel about an armored soldier who, thanks to a records glitch, keeps getting sent back to the front over and over. 


Silk Parachute -- John McPhee

An excellent collection of essays, especially the title piece, a short memoir of his mother.  There was also an interesting essay on the amazing lengths gone to by the fact-checker at the New Yorker, and a terrific essay on lacrosse.  Did you know that before he played football in college, Jim Brown was nationally famous as a high-school lacrosse player?  I didn't.


The Invention of Air -- Steven Johnson

Good biography of Joseph Priestley, the English chemist who isolated and named oxygen.  He was also a religious dissenter -- he helped to found the Unitarian Church -- and this, plus his support for the French Revolution, made him the principal target of the Birmingham Riots, staged by the Church-and-King party of wealthy Anglicans to crush their political opponents.  Priestley's house and the church he preached in were burned down, and he had to flee to the United States.  (King George the Third, who was naturally in favor of the Church-and-King party, and who moreover detested religious toleration, egalitarianism, and dissent of any kind, issued a statement in which he gloated over 
Priestley being attacked and his house burned.  God, what an asshole.)


Kai Lung Raises His Voice -- Ernest Bramah

A collection of unpublished stories gathered from the personal papers of Ernest Bramah.  They weren't as good as the published stuff, but they were still worth reading.


Back Where I Came From -- A.J. Liebling

An extended love letter to New York City, Liebling's home town.  Full of excellent writing and good observations of NYC, if a little too much given to pitying other cities for not being New York.  Occupational disease of big-city dwellers, I suppose.


Predictably Irrational -- Dan Ariely

A book about decision-making.  Makes the point that people often use irrational processes to make decisions, but usually they use the same irrational processes.  I liked the research and the presentation, but I didn't care for the wow-aren't-people-dumb approach.  Who says every decision has to be approved by Mr. Spock?  If there's someone out there with a clipboard giving me points based on how perfectly rational my life is, he's wasting his time.


How we Lived Then -- Norman Longmate

A very good social history of World War Two, describing life on the home front in Britain.  Turns out the most successful war department was the Ministry of Food.  That had long-term effects as well: apparently, before the war, there probably weren't a dozen people in England who had even heard the words "calorie" or "protein".  Also the general level of public health improved thanks to the Ministry of Public Health.  There was a lot of stuff about the arrival of the American troops, who most of the interviewees remembered fondly.  The cultural differences caused some comedy -- like payday for the armed services, when the British sent one clerk on foot with a briefcase to the bank, while the Americans sent a convoy of Jeeps guarded by a squad of soldiers with Tommy guns.