Book reviews, 2018

An asterisk (*) means that the book was one of my dad’s.

Truffle Boy -- Ian Purkayastha with Kevin West

The first chapter or two made me think about giving up on this, but I decided to stick it out a little longer and it did get better. It's an as-told-to story about a guy who got into international food supply at a remarkably young age -- at fifteen years old, he was apparently the youngest person ever to apply to incorporate a business in Arkansas. It is interesting, but the problem is that the whole book is essentially a commercial for his luxury food-imports company, and I kind of don't believe a lot of it. I mean, I'm sure it's true overall, it's just that the book is clearly structured to show Purkayastha as a foodie saint, scouring the globe for pure ingredients out of a sense of mission, while all his competitors are careless or greedy or both. According to him, everyone he's ever tried to partner with was a crook who stiffed him; coincidentally, all those people he's painting as conniving cheats just happen to be the same people who run businesses that compete with his. The book also builds Purkayastha up as a huge expert -- we get scenes where he amazes older men with his deep understanding of olive oil, rather like the young Jesus astonishing the elders at the Temple. The best part of the book is his picture of the rampant culture of deceit and mislabeling that plagues the food trade -- white truffles sold as coming from the famous soil of Alba in Italy are often in fact grown in Serbia and illegally bought at night-time black markets, while Spanish black truffles are often labeled as French and sold at a markup; many companies deceitfully put the common name of one species of truffle on the label, while the list of ingredients shows the Latin name of an entirely different species of truffle, but most people won't realize that and technically that's not false advertising -- all of which is quite true, but it's obviously spun to give the reader the idea that Purkayastha is the only honest dealer in a dirty industry. In a way I don't care, since white truffles cost between three and five thousand dollars a pound and I will certainly never eat any regardless of who's selling them.

The Secret Life of Clams -- Anthony D. Fredericks

I bought this for the title, but the book doesn't live up to it. It's written in annoying pseudo-folksy prose, strewn with little text boxes advertising "Fast Facts!", the sort of thing you'd find on a cheap restaurant place mat, which honestly is about the book's level. Not only the prose but the content is quite bad -- the author spends a couple pages early on giving an account of the formation of the Earth so idiotically wrong I would flunk a sixth-grader for turning it in (he actually says that "a cosmic force" made stellar debris bang together and the resulting explosion formed the Earth, "which is why it's called the Big Bang Theory.") The about-the-author blurb says he's a science teacher; if that's true I would encourage all his former students to sue him for neglect.

The Wuggly Ump -- Edward Gorey

A happily upbeat illustrated story about three innocent children who get devoured by a horrible monster. Don't open the door to strangers, kids!

The Egg and I -- Betty MacDonald

A memoir of running a chicken farm in Washington State in the twenties. It was a huge best seller in the forties, and a pair of comic characters -- her neighbors Ma and Pa Kettle -- took on an independent life of their own in a dozen or so colossally successful movies. The author got married at age eighteen to the first man who ever paid any attention to her because she was worried about being an old maid. I got the feeling this was more of an "inspired by real events!" story than a straight autobiography. To hear the author tell it, halfway through the honeymoon her husband suddenly announced, out of the blue,  that he was going to quit his job at the insurance company and buy a chicken farm in the remotest part of Washington. The rest of the book is the story of a teenage city girl trying to manage as a farm wife, played for laughs. I would have thought it was funnier if it weren't for the nasty sections where she plays up her awful racist attitudes as comedy, and the even worse sections where she segues into straight-up hate pamphlets about the Indians of the Pacific Northwest. That really poisoned the book for me.

I Contain Multitudes -- Ed Yong

A really, really good book, exceptionally readable and interesting, about the microbiome, which is a fairly recent word coined to emphasize that the microorganisms that live in, on, and around your body aren't just random passers-by, but rather collective elements of a whole ecology, which evolved in tandem with us and is wholly inseparable from our life and health. (Yong makes the point that another reason Jurassic Park wouldn't work is that even if we could bring back the dinosaurs, we couldn't bring back the microorganisms they carried, without which they would get sick and die very quickly.)
Yong spends some time on a fascinating hypothesis I hadn't heard before. There are two types of single-celled organisms: bacteria, which have a nucleus, and archaea, which don't. It's not known how or why single-celled organisms made the jump to multicellular organisms, but lately some evidence has been advanced that multicellular life began when a bacterium merged with an archaeon, an event so unlikely that it's apparently only happened once. Our cellular mitochondria, which act as power plants for the cell and allow it much greater energy expenditure than a bacterium can muster, may be the remnants of our archaeal ancestor. Yong doesn't go this far, but it occurred to me that an event so unlikely it's only happened once in four billion years may well be so unlikely it's only happened once in the lifetime of the Universe, which may mean that there is no multicellular life anywhere but here.
A really interesting theme of the book is that bacteria are capable of horizontal gene transfer -- that is, unlike us, individual bacteria can swap out their genes for other, more useful genes they find in their environment, while remaining alive -- which is a big part of why they're so adaptable and why drug resistance is such a nightmare. Luckily we can also turn it to our advantage; there's a program in Australia that's working to eliminate dengue (breakbone fever) by infecting the species of mosquito that carries the dengue virus with a bacterium called Wolbachia, whose presence stops the mosquitoes from acting as carriers. Basically the Wolbachia, which is harmless to both mosquitoes and humans, uses up the resources in the mosquito that the dengue virus lives on, so dengue can't live in a Wolbachia-infected mosquito. Amazingly, the research team just went house to house and asked people "Hey is it okay if we leave this box of infected mosquitoes in your yard, so they'll breed with the local mosquitoes and then no one will get breakbone fever, we hope?" and pretty much everyone was happy to cooperate. Australians are way better at appreciating science than we are.
There's a whole lot more, some of it on popular misconceptions -- apparently "probiotic" supplements don't actually do anything, because none of the cultures they contain can survive our stomach acids, so none of them make it to the intestine. Also research seems to show that your microbiome is more diverse (which means better able to adapt to changes) if you share your living area with a dog. Just a really great book. I couldn't put it down.

A Burglar's Guide to the City -- Geoff Manaugh

There wasn't a lot of substance to this. I liked the idea -- what does a building look like to someone planning to rob it? Architects design their buildings with the people who are going to use it in mind, so they often don't plan on people going outside the prescribed uses of the space; for example, an architect might put a door with a strong lock right next to a stretch of drywall that anyone could kick through in two minutes, because it doesn't occur to the architect that the wall's function -- permanently separating two open spaces -- is only an agreed-upon convention, not a physical fact, and there's nothing stopping someone willing to ignore convention from breaking through it. I also liked the section on how getaway drivers are the only people who really take full advantage of the potential of the highway system. Outside of that, though, the book was thin. There's a long section on lock-picking, even though the author admits that no burglar actually picks locks (nearly all burglaries are smash-and-grab) and lock-picking is just a niche hobby, so the whole chapter felt like filler. There's also the source problem. Most of his content comes either from police, who obviously have a vested interest in overstating how good they are at catching burglars, or from retired burglars -- or, more accurately, anonymous people who claimed to be retired burglars. He had no way of checking up on anything either group told him, so most of the book is the author just uncritically repeating what he heard from sources who both had good reason to exaggerate or lie. I didn't think much of it.

Spring Fever -- P.G. Wodehouse

A funny farce about a young American named Stanwood, engaged to an actress named Eileen; Stanwood's rich father sends him to England to try to break up the engagement and also to try to ingratiate himself with the Earl of Shortlands, to whom they are distantly related. Stanwood sensibly stays in London instead, and sends his friend Mike to Shortlands in his place, because Mike is in love with Stanwood's pal Terry, who coincidentally is the Earl's daughter, having run away to escape the tyranny of her awful older sister. The Earl is a friendly cheerful widower, devoted to Terry, but dead broke and thus under his older daughter's thumb. He has his own plan of escape, which is to marry his cook and start a pub in London; to do this he needs to get his hands on two hundred pounds, and also needs to overcome the rivalry of his own butler, who also wants to marry the cook. It was really good.

*The Guermantes Way -- Marcel Proust

The third book of Remembrance of Things Past. Proust wrote it during World War One, but a general shortage of paper prevented it from being published until after the war, so he had a lot of time to revise it and to expand the story. I appreciate the writing more than I enjoy it, since as the narrator gets older I like him less and less. In this book his family has moved to Paris, living in apartments in a building owned by the Duchesse de Guermantes, with whom the narrator becomes infatuated; most of the book seems to be a criticism of Paris society. The narrator is obviously based on Proust, so I don't know how many levels the criticism is supposed to operate on. We see foolish characters imagining themselves to be great wits, who are looked down upon by other characters who consider themselves superior, who themselves are looked down upon by the leading lady of the salons, who is in turn looked down upon by the narrator. That's where I'm uncertain -- is Proust inviting us, the readers, to look down on the narrator in our turn? And is Proust then looking down on us? Or is Proust identifying with the narrator and that's where the looking-down ends? The narrator has a lot of lousy attitudes; for one thing he thinks "friendship" is a false romantic idea, and he chooses his associates only for the intellectual amusement they provide him. This is partly a class attribute; the narrator isn't noble (we know because he can't sit in the sections of fine hotels reserved for people with titles) but he's still, in a sense, an aristocrat -- he doesn't work for a living, and neither does anyone he knows. Two huge sections of the book are taken up with dinner-parties hosted by the women of the Guermantes family, with whom the narrator has been fascinated since he was a small child -- they owned an estate near his home in the country, and for him the name of Guermantes is infused with the essence of aristocracy, which he seems to consider an unquestioned good. The dinner parties seem unbearable to me, the sort of affair where everyone sits around saying poisonous things about everyone else, each one imagining himself the life of the party and secretly despising the dull wits of all the others.
I do like the structure of the book and its overall echoes of memory, and the way the narrator is constantly forced to reappraise the past. In the first book, the narrator, as a child, visited his uncle's apartments and innocently met loose women there, among them a "lady in pink" whose vulgarity and over-friendliness repelled even his childish sensibilities; in the second book, his first conscious encounter with the smell of sex brought the apartments back to his mind and revealed to him what the women were doing there; in this third book, a former servant of his uncle's shows him pictures of the apartments from the old days, and he realizes that the "lady in pink" was his neighbor Madame Swann, who was already married even then.
There's an odd aside where the narrator remarks that just before the second dinner party he saw something "by chance" (once again he just accidentally happened to be concealed in a place where he could see but not be seen -- does he believe that excuse himself, I wonder, or is it just a polite formula, not meant to be taken seriously?) Whatever it was he saw, he is so affected by it that he says he will have to describe it in detail later on (by which he must mean in one of the later books, because it's not mentioned again in this one.) Not exactly a cliffhanger, I guess, but it did leave me wondering.

The New Tenant -- Eugène Ionesco

An absurdist play about a man who arrives to take up residence in a new apartment. As his furniture is delivered he is pestered by the building's charwoman, who is by turns ingratiating and abusive, as she alternates between buttering him up in an attempt to get hired to care for his apartment and denouncing him as a selfish miser. As this is going on the furniture keeps coming, and as the movers run out of room they have to start piling one piece on top of another, on and on until everyone disappears behind the towering pile of furniture. The play ends with the new tenant buried under all his furniture and the movers turning out the lights as they leave. I think Ionesco is trying to show his characters overwhelmed by a physical representation of their existential problems. If I saw it performed I bet the audience would laugh, but pretty uncomfortably.

*Three Plots for Asey Mayo -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

Three wartime novellas, none of them very good. Dad's notes comment that the title is apt -- all three stories are plot-driven, and Taylor wasn't good at plotting so they kind of fall to the ground. One of them is the only Asey Mayo story not set on the Cape, as Asey goes to Boston and stumbles across an early-morning murder in the Public Garden, a ridiculous scheme where the killer rigs a pistol up in the branches of a tree so that pulling a string fires the pistol, thus making the bullet come from an unexpected direction, and simultaneously drops the pistol out of the tree and onto a swan boat, where only Asey notices it. I would have thought that using that plot at all was the high-water mark of the author just not caring, but Taylor tops it when she has Asey announce that he knew what had happened as soon as he saw that one guy had a length of string in his pocket. The only interesting part was the scene where an officious cop is browbeating several bystanders until one of them says something and the cop backs down. What daunted the cop wasn't what the man said, but how he said it: he had a Harvard accent. Dad notes that even in the forties the Boston police would automatically defer to someone who spoke like a Brahmin.

Gone Fishin' -- Walter Mosley

The sixth Easy Rawlins book. This one breaks the continuity, going back in time to 1939 when the teenaged Easy is still living in Houston. We've heard before that Easy's father disappeared when he was young; here we get the whole story -- the father got in a fight with a white man and had to flee the town. He never got in touch again so Easy doesn't know if he escaped or was lynched. Easy's friend Mouse has family troubles of his own: he wants to get married, but having no money he's decided to go back to the tiny hamlet he came from and confront his abusive stepfather to get the money he should have gotten when his mother died. Easy goes along because Mouse doesn't know how to drive a car, and -- though it's mostly unspoken -- because Mouse is afraid of his stepfather and needs moral support. There's a lot of violence and voodoo and race resentment, but the real heart of the story is Easy having to decide what kind of man he's going to be. It was well told.

Churchill and Orwell -- Thomas E. Ricks

Churchill and Orwell never met, as far as we know, and they were worlds apart politically, but the thesis of this book is that they had a powerful common interest: a firm belief in democracy as both the most morally justifiable form of government and the best defense of individual human dignity, which they both considered the bedrock of civilization. (Although only for white Europeans, which Ricks doesn't choose to bring up; Churchill was an open racist and Orwell often seemed unaware that non-white people existed.) Many people disagreed with them on both counts, openly arguing that democracy was unworkable, and that social equality was neither achievable nor desirable. It sounds like parody to say that the pro-aristocrats believed the masses were both happier and better off without rights, but that's literally what a lot of people claimed -- not only the Fascists in Europe but a great many influential people in both England and the USA, among them Joe Kennedy and Douglas MacArthur. I don't agree with several of Ricks's positions; he's overly dismissive of Orwell's early work, for one thing -- I think Down and Out in Paris and London is actually Orwell's best book, and it seemed to me Ricks didn't really understand Orwell's arguments in The Road to Wigan Pier. He's also back and forth on Churchill; on the one hand he blithely hand-waves away Churchill's war crimes in South Africa, and on the other hand he comes down too hard on him for Gallipoli, where the British defeat was really due more to the stupid incompetence of the generals on the ground than to any failure of planning. However, Ricks does show proper appreciation for A Homage to Catalonia, a truly brilliant book, and gives a good account of Orwell's time in the Spanish Civil War, which Orwell survived because of getting wounded -- he was in the hospital when the Stalinists rounded up his battalion and killed them. There's a good vignette where Orwell shows a tiny example of humane resistance to brutality: the secret police, looking for Orwell, raided the hotel room where Orwell's wife Eileen was staying. He wasn't there, but Eileen had hidden his papers and passport in the bed and lain down on them; Orwell later said of the raiders that although they were Fascists and secret police, they were still Spaniards, and still civilized enough to be unwilling to turn a woman out of her bed, so the Orwells were able to keep their passports and so return to England. Ricks also draws a convincing picture of Churchill's frustration at having to move from being the central figure of the war to a partner, and an increasingly junior partner at that, since after 1943 the war became dominated by America and fought for American ends, as Marshall and Eisenhower ignored Churchill's demands to preserve British colonial power. Ricks points out that Churchill's massive (and self-serving) history of the war is intensely absorbed and fascinating for the first few volumes, but volumes five and six, dealing with the part of the war where Churchill was no longer a prime mover, are sketchy and superficial, and in fact the parts that weren't plagiarized from Samuel Eliot Morison were probably written almost entirely by Churchill's assistants. There's also a good picture of the relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt, which appears to have been genuinely friendly, although each of them believed he was cleverly manipulating the other. (They also both thought they were "handling" Stalin, who was actually smarter than either of them.) It was a good read.

Victims of Duty -- Eugène Ionesco

A theater-of-the-absurd play from the fifties, kind of Cold-War-ish. We find a man named Choubert and his wife living in an apartment, remarking that nothing ever really happens there; Choubert sees in the newspaper that the government is recommending that everyone adopt a philosophy of detachment, so the terrible state of the world won't affect anyone's productivity. A detective arrives looking for the apartment's previous tenant, whom Choubert vaguely remembers; when Choubert cannot recall if the man's name ended in a D or a T, the detective flies into a rage and starts force-feeding him stale bread. Choubert, chewing until his mouth is bloody, starts walking in circles and apparently regressing mentally, egged on by the detective. During this scene a woman arrives in the apartment and takes a seat, to oversee things regally; she says nothing and takes no part in the action. Choubert returns to the present, still unable to remember whether it's D or T, and the detective furiously shoves more stale bread down his throat; another man named Nicolas arrives and tries to debate the detective on philosophical matters before drawing a knife and stabbing him to death. The detective dies observing that he is a victim of duty. Choubert cries that they are all victims of duty and continues eating the bread as the curtain falls. I took the play as a statement that the modern world is so crazy that art cannot portray it in any way that makes sense. I think it would be more powerful on stage than on the page.

The Nakano Thrift Shop -- Hiromi Kawakami

This was sort of a collection of short stories and sort of an episodic novel. It covers a couple years in the life of a woman in her early twenties named Hitomi, who works at a not particularly thriving secondhand store in Tokyo, run by a mercurial and often unfriendly man named Nakano. Over the course of the book Hitomi develops a crush on her uncommunicative and possibly autistic fellow clerk, gets sent as an unofficial emissary to check on the suitability of the man dating Nakano's sister, and dithers about returning to college. Eventually Nakano lays everyone off and closes the store, and they all go their separate ways. I felt like there were things going on that the translation didn't communicate.

Blind Man With a Pistol -- Chester Himes

His last completed novel, a deliberately disjointed, nonlinear book in which the Harlem detectives Grave Digger and Coffin Ed work two unrelated murder cases, one involving a religious fraud and the other arising out of brutal large-scale battles between blacks and whites in the New York summer. Reading it was kind of confusing; the fraud murder case alternates with the race riot case and the two threads never even refer to each other -- they might as well be two different books whose chapters have been interleaved at random. Neither case gets solved, and the book ends with a scene unrelated to either case, an incident apparently drawn from real life where a blind man on a subway imagines that a conversation he overhears is about him, and he draws a gun and fires at random. I guess it's supposed to be a chaotic picture of a chaotic time, but I didn't really enjoy it.

The House is Full of Yogis -- Will Hodgkinson

A memoir of an English kid who had a fairly normal life until age eleven, in the early eighties, when his father took up mysticism and joined a group of religious loonies (which the author avoids calling a cult, but it obviously is) and became detached from his family. Around the same time his mother, a well-known tabloid writer, made a national splash when she started arguing in favor of sexless marriage and proclaiming that she found being a mother a burden instead of a blessing, which I'm sure made her kids feel just great. There are some pretty funny scenes as Will's father starts solemnly insisting that his teenage boys live a life of vegetarianism, celibacy, and meditation, while also arguing that doctors are unnecessary, and providing free crash space in their house for dozens of cult members at a time. On the other hand it's obviously a picture of Will's highly-colored memories, and his parents and brother appear rather like caricatures drawn by a tween, so I wouldn't put a whole lot of reliance on things really having happened as the author relates them. Also Will seems to have picked up a bit of his father's indoctrination, since he goes into a speech familiar from every crackpot complaining that no one has the brains to appreciate his car that gets infinite mileage out of fuel made from marshmallow fluff: "Oooh, everyone acts like they value independent thought, but as soon as a genuinely independent thinker (like me!) challenges their preconceptions (with my nutter ideas about how evolution is fake and history is a repeating cycle that I can predict) their tiny little minds just overload!" It was reasonably well-written, but I got to the end and thought "Okay, but so what?"

A Song for Arbonne -- Guy Gavriel Kay

An action-adventure-intrigue story set in an imaginary version of thirteenth-century Provence. The hero is Blaise, a German aristocrat who left home to become a mercenary and to escape his hated father. After war and adultery in Italy, Blaise comes to Provence, where he gets involved in a blood-feud among stubborn nobles, just in time to have to gear up for an invasion from Germany, where Blaise's father has arranged a dishonorable peace with the Swedes in order to be able to bring a murderous crusade into France, which he hates for its religious unorthodoxy and the way it allows rights to women. There's an interesting cast of supporting characters, including minstrels, Venetian banker-soldiers, assassins, and mysterious priestesses. The writing was very good; it really kept me turning the pages. An excellent read.

50 Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy -- Tim Harford

A book less about inventions than about the economic effects they had. A good example: in 1800 the highest-paid entertainer in the world was an English singer, Mrs. Billington, who made the equivalent of about $850,000 in today's money. The highest-paid individual entertainer in 2016 was Elton John, who made over $200,000,000. How does it happen that Elton John makes over 200 times what Mrs. Billington did? The answer is recording technology. Mrs. Billington's audience was necessarily limited to people who could get physically close enough to her to hear her sing. Elton John's audience includes anyone who can pay $1.25 for a song on iTunes. That increased income didn't appear from nowhere, though --in Mrs. Billington's time, people who couldn't reach or afford her concerts would spend their entertainment budget to go hear other singers, the middle class of the music world. When recording technology came along, everyone started spending their entertainment budget on the same few singers at the top, and the musical middle class vanished. The same thing happened to local baseball teams when baseball on TV came along, and to boxers when boxing made its deal with pay TV. That's repeated over and over through the book: pretty much every invention, whatever its effects on the population as a whole -- barbed wire, shipping containers, double-entry bookkeeping -- made a small number of individuals rich while driving many more out of business. It was pretty entertaining, though it's more a collection of short articles than a book, really.

The Arrow of Gold -- Joseph Conrad

A companion-piece to his earlier non-fiction book The Mirror of the Sea. As a young man Conrad was part-owner of a ship whose French and American majority owners were supporters of the Carlist plotters in Spain, and in The Mirror of the Sea Conrad tells the story of that ship, prudently not explaining exactly what his involvement was (the ship was probably running guns) and the disaster that eventually overtook him. I say non-fiction, but Conrad was a born story-teller and he probably improved the real events; plus of course he made no pretense that he wasn't inventing the dialogue. The Arrow of Gold is a novel, a sort of negative image of The Mirror of the Sea; the unnamed narrator -- obviously a fictionalized version of Conrad -- tells the story of what he was up to on shore in Marseille in between the voyages to Spain described in the earlier book. It's an unrequited-love story; I got the feeling a lot of its details were drawn from life, but rearranged and embellished to make a better novel. It's a very Conrad-ish picture of a young man joining a life-and-death enterprise that he actually cares nothing about, just because it lets him spend time in the company of a woman who is aware of his love but doesn't return it. There are some very good character sketches. I liked it.

Paul's First Letter to Corinth -- John Ruef

The New Testament contains thirteen letters from Paul, fourteen if you count the unsigned letter to the Hebrews sometimes ascribed to him but probably really written later by someone influenced by his style. Not all of them are given the same weight by Biblical scholars; Titus and Timothy are generally considered inauthentic, while there's disagreement about Colossians and some others. The Corinthian letters are the ones generally thought to be the most certainly written by Paul himself, apparently dictated to his secretary Sosthenes. This letter is basically one side of a conversation: some of it is clearly meant to answer a series of questions put to Paul in a letter from the Corinthians, which hasn't survived. Some of the rest of it is Paul expressing concerns about reports he's heard about some unorthodox practices among the Corinthians, with varying degrees of severity. He deals casually with things like what kind of head coverings people are supposed to wear at the altar, but gets much more serious when rebuking the congregation for keeping separate areas at the communal table -- where some have so much they overeat and get drunk, while others go away hungry, which Paul calls absolutely un-Christian behavior that cannot continue. There's a sudden digression in chapter 14 that states that women do not have the right to speak in church and moreover must always be submissive; modern scholars agree this is a later interpolation, since it has no connection to the text around it, and it appeals to the Mosaic law, which Paul doesn't do elsewhere; moreover, it contradicts the eleventh chapter of the same letter, where Paul speaks approvingly of women prophesying at Mass. Also, in the other letters generally agreed to be authentic (Romans, Galatians, Philippians, Thessalonians, Philemon) Paul praises women preachers by name, such as Chloe and Prisca, as well as Phoebe, whom he specifically calls a deacon (diakonos, the same word he uses for Timothy) and Junia, whom he calls an apostle (the same word he uses for himself.) The epistles appear to have been edited sometime in the third century, as part of a campaign to exclude women from the Church.

An Era of Darkness -- Shashi Tharoor

A terrifically written and incredibly infuriating book about the British occupation of India, a two-century-long blood-soaked money grab that the English still pat themselves on the back for. The Raj always gave the English a chance to show off at their self-worshipping worst, from Macaulay sneering that one shelf of books in English was worth more than the entirety of all Asian literature (although he couldn't read any Asian language), to Winston Churchill coldly continuing to ship food out of Bengal during the famine of the 1940s, justifying it by saying that Indians were beastly people who bred like rabbits (four million Bengalis died in that famine), to Cyril Radcliffe blithely drawing a border line pretty much at random between India and Pakistan to determine the future of both nations when he'd never even been to India (thousands died when the border was immediately militarized and it's been a hot spot ever since.) The English turned up in India around 1600 and basically hung around the western coast waiting for a period of civil instability; they seized their chance a hundred fifty years later when the Mughal Empire declined, beginning an enormous looting of India's resources and money that swelled England, like a huge tick, to the wealthiest nation on Earth. When the English came India produced twenty-seven percent of the world's GNP; when they left it was less than three percent. The English East India Company never made any apology about grinding money out of the sweat and blood of India -- half of Parliament was made up of Company directors, so they didn't have to -- but after the great uprising of 1857 the Crown finally took India away from the Company and after that they dressed up their looting and rapine with hypocrisy. (I say "took" it away, but in fact the Crown paid the Company an enormous indemnity to repay them for losing India; guess where that indemnity came from? Taxes on India!) There were over a dozen major famines during the Raj, in which millions died; independent India hasn't had even one. English apologists insist the Empire had a ton of good effects; Tharoor goes over these one by one and very convincingly shows them up as self-serving rationalizations. He says there were only three good things that came from the Empire -- tea, cricket, and the English language -- and all three of those were brought for the convenience of the English, with no thought at all for the Indians, and if the Indians managed to turn them to their own advantage that's more to the credit of India than England. What it all puts me in mind of is a conversation I had my first year in college, when I made friends with a guy from Ireland, and there was something in the news about England, and he said, as deeply and feelingly as anything I've ever heard, "The English. Those fucking bastards."

Something Missing -- Matthew Dicks

I liked this a lot. It's a novel about a guy named Martin who thinks he has OCD but whose real problem is severe social anxiety. He has only one friend, but since he doesn't trust anyone, he tells the friend a set of complex and surprisingly consistent lies about the life he supposedly leads as a  translator and technical writer. In fact he's a burglar, skillful enough that he's robbed houses for over a decade without ever getting caught; the hook is that he robs the same houses over and over, mainly stealing things no one would miss -- one stick of butter from the fridge, a couple cans of tomato sauce from the pantry, half the contents of the laundry detergent bottle -- and lives on that while he builds up an exhaustive inventory of the house, eventually identifying valuable things that the homeowners seem to have forgotten, like expensive handbags or scarves or jewelry that's been in the bottom of the same drawer for a year; he figures that if they do eventually miss something they won't remember when they saw it last and will just assume they lost it. The book spends just the right amount of time showing us how Martin works -- his methods for picking victims (no children, no dogs, near several routes of escape, no one living alone who'd notice when the dishwashing liquid runs out sooner than it should), how he sells the goods, how he avoids suspicion (he works half-time at a Starbucks, for the health insurance, and otherwise lives as a shut-in) -- before sending his life off the rails. It starts when one of his regular victims gets a parrot and Martin starts hanging around the house longer than he should just because he wants someone to talk to. Then he gets caught in a house when the owners come home, and in a really nerve-wracking scene he has to maneuver around the house while they're in it to stay out of their sight. Eventually his presence in a house inadvertently causes a problem for the homeowner, and to both fix the problem and avoid being found out he has to become involved in the homeowner's life, which leads to a shattering of his routines, a reunion with his estranged father, and a climactic scene where he has to tell someone the whole truth for the first time in his life. I thought it was great.

The Big Knockover -- Dashiell Hammett

An excellent collection of crime stories from the old Black Mask magazine, put together after Hammett's death in the sixties by Lillian Hellman, who lived with him on and off for thirty years or so. She wrote a long foreword about Hammett and how his health, already bad, was permanently ruined by his stretch in prison for refusing to testify before Nixon and HUAC. She also says she was the model for Nora Charles, which I hadn't known. The stories feature Hammett's most prominent character, the nameless Continental Op, an agent of the "Continental Detective Agency", Hammett's stand-in for the Pinkertons, for whom he himself worked before and after WWI. In the foreword Hellman postures a bit about how at one time she thought all these stories were good, blah blah, critical senses have sharpened, whatever. I think the stories remained just as good as they ever were and Hellman just lost the capacity to appreciate them as she got older. The stories are a portrait in action of the Op, an intelligent, determined man who likes his work. There's a good scene when a cornered criminal offers the Op a big bribe to let her escape, and the Op quite reasonably explains that there's no future he could buy with her money that he would like as much as the life he has already. I liked them all, but probably the best was "Blood Money", a tense drama where the Op is stuck with two hard decisions -- on the one hand he's found out that another Continental employee is crooked, and he doesn't want to either hurt the Continental's reputation by exposing him or let him get away with it; on the other hand he knows but can't prove that an informant, who is helping the Continental find a most-wanted crime lord in return for a huge reward, is himself a brutal murderer. He orchestrates a  powerful confrontation scene to solve both problems at the same time. For some reason Hellman also included a chunk of a novel Hammett started after WWII but never finished, a clearly autobiographical story about the Army and tuberculosis and prison, very unlike anything else he wrote and jarringly out of place.

*Amerika -- Franz Kafka

An early novel, never finished. It's the story of a young German immigrant named Karl who arrives as a steerage passenger and immediately meets an uncle he's never heard of who's a US Senator; the uncle rejecting him, he becomes a tramp, then a hotel worker, and then a domestic servant, before running away to join the circus. Kafka was interested in America but never went there, so his version of it is somewhat unreal; some of this is unintentional -- such as the bridge connecting New York and Boston, which was probably just Kafka misreading a map -- but some of it is certainly intentional, such as the Statue of Liberty holding an upraised sword instead of a torch. At every turn Karl faces unreasonably hostile bureaucrats who harangue him with nonsensical disputes; this is made worse by Karl's German attitude of unquestioning deference to authority and inability to stand up for himself. He usually gets sympathy, if not help, from his fellows among the down-trodden. The travelling road show Karl joins in the last chapter is extraordinarily strange and over the top; according to Max Brod, Kafka was delighted with this chapter, and even intended the book to end optimistically, which seems out of character. I liked the beginning and the end (as far as the end went) but not the middle, where Karl is pointlessly bullied by people he could easily just walk away from.

Portuguese Irregular Verbs -- Alexander McCall Smith

I thought I'd like this more than I did. It's an academic comedy, about an unworldly German professor of philology and his equally unworldly professor friends, pottering around in their out-of-touch way while people snicker behind their backs. It seemed kind of mean-spirited, and I thought the professors were unnecessarily touchy and puffed-up. I won't be reading the sequels.

Grant -- Ron Chernow

A terrific book, really absorbing. I've read Grant's memoirs, which are extraordinarily well-written and fascinating, but they pretty much ignore all his life outside the Civil War. This is a true biography, drawing an engaging picture of an admirable and complex man. The main thing I take away, I guess, is that Grant had a particular set of qualities that made him ideally suited to supreme command of an army at war, but that hampered him in every other theater of life. I was well-disposed toward Grant already, and the book made me more so, but I thought Chernow was a little too much on his side; he goes to a lot of trouble to put Grant's failures in the best light. He uses the word "childlike" when talking about how Grant was so often betrayed by his associates, explaining it as an issue of excessive trust, when I think a more objective view is that Grant was a bad judge of character but wouldn't admit it, and having once placed a man in a category as "trustworthy" or "not trustworthy" -- generally without any good reason -- he would never reconsider, out of sheer stubbornness. He made his own problems a lot worse by continuing to rely on people even after being confronted with ironclad proof of their malfeasance, which honestly is less "naiveté" (Chernow's word) than an outright refusal to face the truth, which is inexcusable behavior in a chief executive. Chernow also shies away from blaming Grant for his bad attitude during succeeding administrations -- Grant clearly expected later Presidents to defer to him, in fact seemed to think he was still President, and he was furious at Hayes and Garfield for not following his instructions. I actually sympathized with Sherman, who objected to Congress returning Grant to the rank of General of the Army in order to restore his pension after his business partner bankrupted him (typically, people had warned Grant about his partner but he wouldn't listen); if Grant hadn't been sick with cancer, I think he would certainly have started trying to run the Army from the retired list, and expected Sherman and Sheridan to follow his orders. If I'm harping on Grant's faults it's because I thought Chernow was too forgiving of them. To be fair, Chernow also makes the point that Grant is never given enough credit for shepherding the country through the post-war period, for adamantly championing the rights of the freed slaves (Grant founded the Justice Department specifically as a tool to crush the Ku Klux Klan, and returned thousands of indictments against them), for his uncompromising support for the separation of church and state, and for his very public support of American Jews -- this last as part of a campaign of atonement for an unconscionable order he gave, while besieging Vicksburg, for all Jews to be forcibly removed from the area (the order was never enforced and quickly rescinded.) Grant very publically admitted to being wrong and spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it, which I admired. Chernow also persuasively argues that Grant deserves great credit for overcoming his alcoholism, which hampered him as a young man and flared up occasionally during the war (he had an aide whose main job was keeping booze away from him), but which he apparently entirely conquered during and after his Presidency. The book is over nine hundred pages but it doesn't feel too long. I really liked it.

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents -- Julia Alvarez

A novel about the problems of assimilation, concerning a Dominican family that flees to the US in the fifties when the father is targeted by the Trujillo regime. The story is told backwards, starting with the youngest daughter (Yolanda) deciding to return to the Dominican as an adult in the eighties, and moving episodically back in time, each chapter told from the point of view of one of the four daughters, ending with their childhood on the island and their escape. It seemed to me that the family never accepted the idea that they could be both Dominican and American, but tried alternately to go all-in on one or the other, with the result that they never felt at home in either place. There's a good scene when Yolanda, as an adult in the Dominican, asserts her independence (like an American) and goes off by herself to pick guavas in the woods, but then when her car breaks down she's frightened at the approach of two campesinos who stop to help her, which she wouldn't be if she had grown up there. It also gave me a good feeling for immigrant anxiety: suppose I had a small son and had to move to the Dominican, and my son, growing up there, started acting the way Dominican teenage boys do -- macho, belligerent, pushing women around? I'd go ballistic, but my son wouldn't see what the problem was. A good book.

Do Butlers Burgle Banks? -- P.G. Wodehouse

An excellent farce revolving around a private country bank in England. Our hero, Mike, inherited the bank from his uncle, and it's busted; the uncle splurged on all kinds of local improvements, out of a love of being popular, and he drained the depositors' money to pay for it, with the unwitting help of the bank's trustees, a pair of stuffed-shirt pea-brains who signed everything they were given without reading any of it. Mike has managed, through gambling on horses, to replace about half the shortfall, but a bank inspector is due soon and the game will be up, with everyone sent to prison -- unless the bank should be fortuitously robbed before the inspector arrives. As it happens Mike's butler is actually an American gangster on the lam, and he takes on the job, only to run into a London gang who came to rob the bank on their own, and who are pursued by an ex-member they kicked out for being too violent, who turns out to have a grudge against the butler. Things get more complex when Mike's fiancee wanders into the robbery, and the gang's muscle man is waylaid by a street preacher and suddenly gets religion, and the head of the gang falls in love with a local cook and resolves to go straight. As is the way of things in Wodehouse, all these complications neatly resolve each other and everything ends happily. I loved it.

Bad Boy Brawly Brown -- Walter Mosley

The seventh Easy Rawlins book. It's now 1964 and he's still trying to go straight, working as a head custodian in the LA school system, but his old friend John asks him to look for his missing stepson Brawly. Easy goes to a meeting of a black power group Brawly belongs to; the meeting is raided by the LAPD and Easy escapes out the back, but he finds he has drawn the attention of federal agents (they're obviously part of COINTELPRO, though the name isn't used because Easy wouldn't have known it then.) While this is going on Easy is adjusting to having his girlfriend Bonnie move in with him and his children, and trying to find out what happened to Mouse, whose wife took him out of the hospital after he was shot two books ago. Eventually Easy finds out that a group of militants, including Brawly, are planning a payroll robbery, egged on by an agent provocateur who's actually preparing to lead them into an ambush. With admirable lateral thinking he shoots Brawly in the leg to keep him out of the robbery, which goes on without him and runs right into the federal trap, getting everyone killed. I liked it.

The Kata and Bunkai of Goju-Ryu Karate -- Giles Hopkins

A book by my karate teacher about the kind of karate we do. I've trained with him for thirty years and I was around while he was developing these ideas, so I know the material already, and of course training with him all that time is what formed my own ideas about karate in the first place. So on the one hand my review is "yeah this is all true" and on the other it's all so internalized for me that it's hard to look at it with enough distance to explain it to someone else. The basic idea he lays out in this book is that the Goju-ryu kata are not merely collections of techniques, but are set up to illustrate certain principles -- whether they were always that way, or whether Higashionna or Miyagi redesigned them for that  purpose in the early 20th century, who knows, but Giles's position is that the kata shows you how the technique is done; if you say, for example, "this is the application for such a technique", but what you're doing doesn't follow the way the kata moves, then it's not the application intended by the kata. And if your technique doesn't follow the kata, then why do you do the kata at all? That seems common-sensical to me but a lot of people are surprisingly resistant to it. I remember at least one well-known martial arts theorist who called Giles an "iconoclast". That is true in one sense, I guess, since Giles's opinion is that the Old Words of Wisdom (TM) people quote from the old masters may well just have been off-hand remarks, which we tend to assign much more importance than they deserve. One example he gives is that in the eighties, Giles trained in Okinawa with the famous master Matayoshi Shinpo, who was an expert not only in Goju-Ryu and kobudo but in several other styles as well, including his own semi-secret family style, and also had trained with the white crane master Go Ken Ki. Giles once asked him what style he thought was the best and he said "I like Goju-ryu." But, Giles now says, what does that mean, really? Maybe Matayoshi was just saying what Giles wanted to hear, or maybe he would have given a different answer on a different day, or maybe he didn't really understand the question -- he didn't speak much English. In any case masters can't magically transmit their knowledge from one generation to the next and every generation just has to develop its own understanding. Even the Buddha said that his students should regard his words as a raft -- once the raft has carried you across the river, you don't weigh yourself down by carrying the raft on your back forever, you leave the raft behind and set out on your own.

*Punch With Care -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

An Asey Mayo mystery, this one dealing with a guy who's such a train buff that he keeps an actual working train on a small track on his property, going so far as to dress up like a conductor and issue tickets to his guests. Where he got the money to operate a God-damned steam locomotive in his back yard on the Cape in 1946 is not gone into. Asey finds a dead body in the train car, of course, which then vanishes as soon as he looks around -- a Taylor device she really loved to use in the later part of her career -- but he still has the punched ticket to prove the body was there. The title comes from the silly rhyme made famous by Mark Twain as an early example of an ear-worm: "Punch, conductor, punch with care, punch in the presence of the passen-jaire!" Doc Cummings gets the rhyme stuck in his head, which becomes a running gag and the funniest part of the book. I've actually forgotten who did it, not that it matters because there's never any good reason for anyone in particular to be the killer in a Taylor mystery, so it might as well have been anybody.

Six Easy Pieces -- Walter Mosley

The eighth Easy Rawlins book, a short story collection. There are actually seven stories in the book so I don't know what the deal is with the title. Mosley has apparently decided that Easy's custodian job is making plotting too difficult, so in this book Easy is growing dissatisfied with the workaday routine of his job (although we've previously been told he took the job in the first place so he'd have a less dangerous life, for the sake of his children.) Over the course of the book he looks into cases of arson, missing persons, and murder, and finally finds out that Mouse is alive, his wife having taken him to their friend Mama Jo the witch -- who lives in a patch of swampy woods in the middle of Compton, which seems strange -- and then tried to keep Easy from finding out so he wouldn't put Mouse in danger again, an odd attitude for a woman married to a conscienceless assassin. Each individual story was good, but I thought the connecting threads were a little clunky.

Soonish -- Kelly and Zach Wienersmith

A very good book, exceptionally interesting and funny. It's all about technologies that may change everything about how we live -- how they might work and what their effects might be. The title comes from the habit popular-science writers have of always saying that such-and such is "ten years away" (practical nuclear fusion was "ten years away" when I was in middle school.) So the authors say the technologies they discuss are probably coming "soon...ish", by which they mean "maybe between thirty and a hundred years from now." Topics covered include cheap access to space, nuclear fusion (of course), programmable matter, and enhanced biology (the authors think we'll eventually be able to 3-D print new livers, for example.) The writing is funny and complemented with funny cartoons, but it's also clear that the authors are deeply engaged and fascinated with science. I really enjoyed it.

Dear Ijeawele -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A short book, basically a letter Adichie wrote in response to a friend who had written to ask for advice on raising her infant daughter to be an independent woman. It's a brief manifesto of feminism, mainly arguing that a woman shouldn't sacrifice her personal identity for anyone, and also that women should demand that the men in their lives treat them as real people, and not just accept men's bad behavior as a natural law that women must adapt to. I thought it was great.

Little Scarlet -- Walter Mosley

The ninth Easy Rawlins book, and the one where you can start to see that the author isn't as engaged as he once was. There's some changes that seem to have been made with an eye towards sales figures; for example, there are more sex scenes, and there's some gratuituous graphic descriptions of naked female bodies, which is new. There's also a couple new characters, behind whom I seem to hear an editor's voice saying "Can't you include some sympathetic white people?" The story involves the Watts Riots of August 1965, that being the inciting incident that gets Easy to quit his custodian job and return to detective work full-time. The LAPD, in the person of an unrealistically unprejudiced white detective, asks Easy to look into a murder case: a black woman has been killed, and the police suspect a white man, and they want the suspect found without setting off any more violence. Easy finds out that the suspect was the murdered woman's boyfriend and realizes she was killed by a deranged street person Easy has been hunting for over a year, a homeless man who kills black women that date white men. It takes some doing to convince the police, but the killer gets caught and the suspect exonerated. It wasn't bad.

The New Jim Crow -- Michelle Alexander

A heavily-researched and thoroughly convincing (and infuriating) book on the American prison system. The author argues that once slavery became politically untenable, the white power structure just created an alternative, the Jim Crow laws, that served essentially the same purpose. When Jim Crow became politically untenable in its turn, once again the white power structure needed a replacement, and what came out of that was our current prison system. Black people are treated worse than whites at every stage of the process, from arrest to trial to post-release. White and black Americans commit crimes, particularly drug-related crimes, at nearly identical rates, but blacks are overwhelmingly overrepresented among arrestees. Police officers have training handbooks with instructions on who they should consider suspicious, but these handbooks are written so loosely they can apply to anyone at all -- "suspicious" is defined in the same manuals as being too calm or too uneasy, too polite or too confrontational, too unconventional or too normal -- yet police overwhelmingly stop black people for being "suspicious" instead of white people. Once arrested, the public prosecutors -- nearly all white -- have unlimited discretion as to whether to press charges; overwhelmingly they decide to press charges against blacks and not against whites. Blacks are far more often subject to "overcharging" (a fully-legal procedure where the DA piles on dozens of charges carrying a cumulative sentence of hundreds of years) in order to pressure the arrestee into a guilty plea. The courts have other powers too: the Miranda rule requires the court to provide an attorney if you can't afford one, but the court gets to determine whether you can afford one. In Wisconsin, for example, if you make more than three thousand dollars a year you are considered able to afford an attorney, so you won't be given a public defender. Even if you do rate a public defender, you have to apply to the court for one -- which means paying an application fee. The huge majority of criminal cases never go to trial because the arrestees are threatened with huge fees and enormous prison sentences and also not informed of the consequences of a felony conviction. Felons automatically lose the right to vote, and in most states they can't get it back, and even where they can they have to pay huge fees. They also lose their driver's licenses, and have to pay even more fees to get them back, which heavily limits the jobs they can get; plus they're ineligible for public assistance or public housing, they can't serve on juries, and in most states they can't hold public office. A felony conviction is essentially a mechanism for making a person permanently powerless, moneyless, homeless, and helpless; and felons are overwhelmingly black -- even though, again, blacks and whites commit crimes at the same rates. On top of that there's the prison system itself. On the one hand, more and more prisons are privately operated, with a vested interest in increasing the number of prisoners, so the rich people who own them (including the US Attorney General) push get-tough-on-crime advertising and support judge and DA candidates who convict as many people as possible. On the other hand, the US Census uses a "usual place of residence" principle, which means that prisoners are counted as residents of the place they're in prison, not the place they came from; because most prisoners are black, and most prisons are in rural conservative counties that are nearly all white, and because Census data is used to allot political representation, that creates an artificial transfer of political power from heavily populated black urban areas to less-populated white rural areas. The black prisoners artificially inflate the voting power of the white people who hold them prisoner, in exactly the same way the slaves were counted for population purposes but not allowed to vote. This process started exactly when Jim Crow was outlawed, which isn't a coincidence. The prison population has grown from about 300,000 in 1970 to about 2.7 million today, even though crime as a whole and particularly violent crime has declined steadily over the same period. The only conclusion possible is that the prison system in America is a program deliberately designed to strip black people, as a group, of their rights and their political power, reducing them to a permanent underclass.

The Cleft and Other Odd Tales -- Gahan Wilson

A weird-tales collection featuring Wilson's marvelous, somehow threatening blobby illustrations. All of them are horror stories except the title piece, which was my favorite, about a mountain temple that could only be reached through a narrow cleft, and how the reasonable precautions travellers took to navigate the cleft became ossified in tradition over the centuries and gradually became a massive, sacrosanct ritual that turned a half-mile climb into an elaborate production that took months. The kicker comes when a monk, having achieved enlightenment, leaves the temple by simply climbing down a rope and walking away; the other monks, stunned by the valuable lesson the first monk has taught them, immediately decide to commemorate it by establishing a new rope-climbing ritual. I liked it a lot.

The Homeric Hymns -- trans. Thelma Sargent

A collection of a few dozen ancient Greek hymns, which actually predate Homer -- they're called "Homeric" because they're in dactylic hexameter, which is the meter Homer used, and they use many of the same formulae, which is hardly surprising since they must have been among his sources. The translation is really excellent, vivid and full of arresting imagery. Most of them are pretty short, but there are four long hymns -- to Demeter, Delian Apollo, Pythian Apollo, and Hermes -- that together make up about half the total.

Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension -- Matt Parker

A recreational-math book, sort of like Martin Gardner without the DIY sections. It's a fun smorgasbord of geometry, topology, and higher dimensions. The section on knot theory helped me finally understand the xkcd comic about "hyperbondage": knots only work in three dimensions, because in one or two dimensions you can't pass anything over or under anything else (so the knot can't be made in the first place) while in more than three dimensions the strands of the knot could just (from the point of view of a three-dimensional observer) pass through each other. I also liked the section that explained the Rouleaux triangle. You construct one using the same method Euclid used to construct an equilateral triangle, except that you consider the three vertices as connected by the arc-segments of the defining circles instead of by straight lines. Now imagine a Rouleaux triangle and spin it on its vertical axis, so fast that it appears to be a three-dimensional solid. That three-dimensional solid is isometric along every diameter, making it the equivalent of a sphere, meaning you could use a group of such solids to replace ball bearings and there would be no noticeable difference. Also, for the first time, I feel like I really, intuitively understand why Euclid's fifth postulate is necessary. There's a lot more. I really enjoyed it.

Add a Dash of Pity -- Peter Ustinov

A very good collection of short stories from the sixties. The title piece is about a man who comes to see the difference between good writing and great writing in the course of interviewing retired generals for a publication about a battle they were both involved in. The commanding general loudly blames the disastrous loss on a subordinate general; the subordinate won't be interviewed, but the writer, doing his own investigation, finds that the subordinate had in fact behaved heroically and the defeat was due entirely to the commander's stupidity and loss of nerve. Confronted with the writer's findings, the subordinate explains that the commander is a bitter failure and a drunk, whose son died in the same battle, and insisting it wasn't his fault is all he has to cling to; the subordinate, on the other hand, leads a reasonably good life, and he's content to bear the blame rather than take away the only thing the commander has left. It was a powerful story. There was another good one about a Soviet writer at a literary conference watching a younger writer try to establish his own orthodoxy by over-loudly denouncing Boris Pasternak; the first writer, who is almost too old to care, uses a much more effective strategy of pretending to nod off whenever political expediency demands a reaction from the audience. I really liked it.

We Should All Be Feminists -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Title says it all, really. This is a short book, adapted from a TED talk, arguing that "feminism" isn't so much a fight for a bigger share of the existing society as a struggle to reshape society itself, creating an opportunity for women to live without having to measure everything in their lives by how it relates to men.

Cinnamon Kiss -- Walter Mosley

The tenth Easy Rawlins book. Mosley has started to consult the Out Of Ideas Playbook: in this one Easy's ten-year-old daughter is sick with an unspecified life-threatening illness that can be cured only with very expensive treatment from a specialist. Mouse invites Easy to join him in an armored-car robbery, and he seriously considers it, but just in time another friend hooks him up with a high-paying job working for a weirdo recluse in San Francisco, looking for a black legal secretary who's gone missing from the public-aid place where she worked. It turns out the white lawyer she worked with, who was also her boyfriend, has also gone missing, after discovering evidence that his very wealthy family and its associated law firm had illegal dealings with the Nazis during the war. He's been murdered, of course, and Easy has to find the missing evidence as well as the missing secretary. There are some pretty funny scenes when Easy drives through San Francisco and sees his first hippies.

Blonde Faith -- Walter Mosley

The eleventh Easy Rawlins book. It's now 1967, and Mosley has clearly grown tired of the character; Easy pokes his way through an uninspired plot dealing with drug smuggling among soldiers returning from Vietnam, having graphically-described sex with an unrealistic number of women, and following a trail of dead bodies that are somehow never discovered or investigated. His daughter has miraculously recovered from her Mystery Illness, which is never mentioned again, and Easy has had a blow-up with his girlfriend, which Mosley uses to have Easy get drunk and drive his car off a cliff, ending the series dramatically if depressingly. It wasn't that great.

Little Green -- Walter Mosley

But wait! Six years later, Mosley must have had bills to pay, because here comes Easy Rawlins back from the dead. It's two months after the car crash; Easy wakes up from a coma and goes right back to work the same day, relying on magic potions from his friend Mama Jo the witch to keep him on his feet. Mouse asks him to find a young man named Evander, who it turns out is the son of Frank Green, whom Mouse killed back in the first book in 1948. Evander was given LSD unawares and wandered off on a bad trip, coming down to find himself covered with someone else's blood and holding several big bags of money. While he's sorting that out Easy also has to rescue his friend Jackson from extortion and try to reunite with the girlfriend he attempted suicide over, which isn't unhealthy or anything. This was the first Mosley I read, a few years ago, and it turns out I didn't really need to know the back story to enjoy it. It was a good deal better than the previous book.

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore -- Matthew Sullivan

This is a novel set at a book store called Bright Ideas, apparently a disguised version of the Tattered Cover in Denver. I picked it up because I generally like books set in book stores, and I was looking for something cheerful to read. A few pages in, though, a lonely guy hangs himself in the upstairs stacks, and it's not long before we get a flashback to a ten-year-old girl getting killed with a hammer. So it wasn't what I was looking for, but even at that I didn't care for it. It was super obvious who the killer was, for one thing. For another, I found the heroine's domestic decisions baffling. I mean, I totally get why she breaks up with her boyfriend after she finds out he's been talking about her with her estranged father behind her back, especially since it's clear she has no strong attachment to the guy and only lives with him because she doesn't want to be lonely. But then she reconnects with a guy who had an unrequited crush on her when they were in fifth grade, whom she hasn't seen in over twenty years, and who is basically stalking her after seeing her picture in the paper, and she ends up moving in with him. This is a trope I have often seen in fiction that I can't even imagine happening in real life. I can't even remember the faces of anyone I went to elementary school with. And there's something awful and child-molestery about an adult mooning over a girl he liked when she was ten. I didn't think anyone in the story acted very believably, and I just found the whole book unsatisfying.

Pattern Recognition -- William Gibson

This is the first Gibson I've read since Neuromancer came out thirty years ago. All I really remember about Neuromancer, aside from not liking it, is that it was a kind of nihilistic SF story set in a dystopian near future. This is more of a contemporary corporate thriller, sort of, though it was written in 2001 and now feels dated -- the characters are all high-tech and everything, with their cutting-edge Hotmail accounts and Mac G4 Cubes. The "corporate" part has a movie-set feel to it; Gibson is a hippie turned academic, and the Big Company in the book works the way a hippie who's never worked at a corporation and only knows them from movies thinks it would work. The company is run by one guy who has total authority and no one to answer to, and who also has unlimited free time, is personally involved in every company project, and hires and fires people at whim without negotiations or contracts. The protagonist, a woman named Cayce (pronounced "Case", which incidentally was the name of the protagonist in Neuromancer) has a similarly unrealistic job where clients fly her around the world in order to consult on proposed corporate logos; even less believably, all these clients agree to her condition that she will only look at a logo and say "Yes" or "No" and provide no feedback. Cayce has a strange back story where she's allergic to advertising -- literally allergic, she has an actual histamine reaction. She showed symptoms of it before she was six years old; as far as I can tell it's not supposed to be a psychosomatic thing resulting from trauma, the book just expects us to accept that this is a thing that can happen. The plot involves her tracking down a mystery film-maker who's anonymously posting short segments of an art film; I can easily believe there'd be an Internet forum filled with obsessive people who argue over what the film means and what order the segments should be in, but I didn't believe that the film project could really have the importance it takes on in the book. Even within the book's fictional universe, I couldn't see what was so important about the film-maker's innovative methods of getting her work seen (posting anonymously through Tor, basically) that it was worth kidnapping and killing over. (I was impressed that the Internet forum has a belligerent troll who's eventually revealed to be a Russian agent fomenting discord and trying to shape public opinion. That was prophetic.) I found Cayce enigmatic -- I never had any sense of what she wanted, or what her life was like before the story took place, or what she might do afterwards. I never really got into it.

Adam -- Henri J.M. Nouwen

A lovely, painful book about Nouwen's coming to live at the Daybreak home for mentally disabled people in Toronto. At Daybreak the patients and the workers live together in homes of eight or ten people; the most disabled patients have a worker assigned to them full time. Nouwen's responsibility was Adam, a profoundly disabled man in his thirties who couldn't speak or look after himself. Nouwen feelingly describes his state of mind while taking care of Adam, sometimes helplessly overwhelmed, sometimes frightened, inevitably sometimes tired and resentful. The book is essentially Nouwen's description of how he eventually came to see Adam as a beloved child of God, in every way as important and deserving as any of God's children. Adam died before he was forty and the book includes a moving picture of his last days and funeral.

Kitchen Con -- Trevor White

From the title and the back cover I expected this to be an exposé of restaurant critics and the shady things they get up to, like leaning on chefs to buy kitchen equipment from companies that pay the critic a kickback in return for not writing a scathing review. That will have to wait for a better author, though, as this book wasn't about anything much. After being bored with it for a while I made a game of working out just how much of the book is made up of long quotations from other books, and my final estimate was about forty percent. It was a waste of time.

The Botanist and the Vintner -- Christy Campbell

An interesting book about the phylloxera outbreak of the 19th century, when a species of aphid carelessly brought from America destroyed every grapevine in France in less than twenty-five years. The aphid's greatest ally was simple parochial stubbornness: every single vigneron believed that he and only he knew the best possible method of viticulture, so absolutely no one listened to the entomologists' warnings, and when the government tried to initiate emergency procedures the growers rioted against them. As the devastation moved north year after year, every vineyard owner insisted that the vine failures to the south were due to the vignerons' incompetence, and it won't happen to my vines. And when it did, his neighbor to the north said exactly the same thing. It took years and years of work for French scientists to understand the aphid's extremely eccentric reproduction cycle, and no counteragent was ever found, so in the end the French had to import aphid-resistant vines from America, cut the roots loose and plant them, and then graft French leaves onto the American root stock, creating not a new hybrid but the same plant with a prosthetic limb, as it were. Naturally there were people who insisted the wine was never as good afterwards, out of French nationalism or just wine hipsterism ("I drank Chateau Lafitte before they grafted their roots!")

Rose Gold -- Walter Mosley

The thirteenth Easy Rawlins book. Although we get such symptoms of The-Author's-Stopped-Caring Syndrome as getting details from earlier books wrong and telling us character back stories that don't fit with back stories we've previously been told, it's still a pretty good story. The LAPD, the FBI, and the State Department all separately come to Easy to enlist him in a kidnapping case: a college student has gone missing from her dorm and a man has called her rich father demanding ransom. The father, suspecting his leftist daughter is faking the kidnapping so she can take the money he makes from manufacturing napalm and give it to revolutionary causes, refuses to pay; the cops and feds and everyone else want Easy to find the man they've picked as a suspect, a retired black boxer named Mantle. They clearly want to pin a lot of crimes on Mantle, including the death of several police in a recent shootout, and Easy realizes that they all plan to kill Mantle on sight and let him take the fall for all sorts of things. Easy finds Mantle and realizes he's just a stumblebum who hasn't done anything; the cops want to blame him for the dead officers so it won't come out that they were actually dirty cops killed in a drug deal. Easy has to hide Mantle, find the real kidnappers, get the girl back, and steal part of the ransom for good measure, all of which he pulls off entertainingly with the help of several friends. The feds and State guys and drug-dealing bosses and rich father all join the long, long list of powerful people Easy has pissed off who never do anything to get back at him and never get mentioned again.

The School For Scandal -- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

A tremendously funny play, both a hidden-identity farce and a comedy of manners. Johnson called it the best comedy in English. It involves two brothers: Joseph, a hypocrite of plaster virtues, and his younger brother Charles, a loose-living spendthrift with a good heart. Both of them want to marry the lovely Maria (Charles for love, Joseph for money.) Since the vicious gossip Lady Sneerwell wants to marry Charles, Joseph allies with her to break the pair up by spreading rumors that Charles is having an affair with his uncle Peter's new wife, Lady Teazle. (Joseph is in fact trying to pursue an affair with Lady Teazle himself.) Everything is shaken up by the return to England of the brothers' other uncle, the wealthy Oliver. Arriving early and unannounced, Oliver asks Peter how things stand; Peter, wholly taken in by Joseph, praises Joseph's stern morality and condemns Charles for his libertine behavior. Oliver, wanting to see for himself, decides to visit both brothers in disguise. He finds Charles, despite his partying life, to be generous and mindful of family obligations, while Joseph is greedy and dishonest. Everything builds up to a terrific scene where all the principals, for various reasons, are concealed in the same room, and everyone hears everyone else speak frankly about them, which goes over as well as that ever does. I thought it was great.

Their Eyes Were Watching God -- Zora Neale Hurston

A powerful novel from the thirties, about riding out the storm of life and taking what you can when you can. There's a great scene near the beginning where the heroine, a teenager named Janie, watches the bees dart in the sunlight among the tree blossoms and gets an idea of the sort of life she'd like -- one with some romance in it. That same day she gets essentially sold to an old man by her grandmother, who wants her married before she (the grandmother) dies; a few months later she escapes the harsh marriage by running off with a passer-by. The two of them move to an all-black town in northern Florida, where he becomes the chief citizen, installing Janie in the lousy position of being both his trophy wife and unpaid drudge, so she has to do all his menial work but can't have any social life. As he gets older he treats her worse, beating her and scorning her in front of his friends; he finally dies, leaving Janie a widow in her thirties. She's still beautiful and also inherited a good deal of money from her husband, so the men buzz around her, but she's had enough of being told what to do and she starts an affair with a young gambler called Tea Cake. Janie and Tea Cake move south to the Everglades, where they work for a few years in the bean fields, until a hurricane destroys the area; there's another great scene where they take shelter and watch the storm, terrified, and Janie decides it's like looking into the face of God: all-powerful, destructive, indifferent. Rescuing Janie from drowning, Tea Cake is bitten by a mad dog and gets rabies; he suffers terribly and finally goes mad. He becomes violent and Janie has to shoot him in self-defense; she's arrested, but the judge rules it a mercy killing, and Janie returns to town, where she ignores the scorn of her former neighbors and tells her best friend that though it didn't last long, she finally got what she'd always wanted, a happy life with a partner who loved her. In the nature of things, I think she's saying, happy times are rare and fragile, so you have to grab one when you see the chance and enjoy it as much as you can while it lasts.

Draft #4 -- John McPhee

A collection of essays on his writing process. I was interested to see the original diagrams and outlines for several of his books. What struck me most is that he's written about thirty books, all of which are still in print -- some of them have been in print continuously for over fifty years -- and he's never made enough money from writing to live on. The New Yorker sometimes paid his expenses on spec while he was doing research, but he never had an actual job there; he's always supported himself by teaching. I liked the chapters on interviewing best; there's a good one about a long piece he did on Jackie Gleason for Time magazine way back when, made much more difficult because Gleason was constantly getting harangues from his drinking buddies about how everyone from the press was a hack out to make him look stupid.

Open Secrets -- Alice Munro

I was in the City Lights book store looking for something to read when I saw a whole shelf of Alice Munro and it struck me that I'd never read anything of hers, although she won the Nobel Prize a few years ago. I picked this one because it's a short story collection, which suited my mood, though I found out later that nearly all of Munro's work is short stories. These were very well written, mostly set in and around a factory town in Ontario at various times across the twentieth century. The factory, which makes pianos, is the center of the town, affecting even people who don't work there: I imagined the factory as a very heavy weight, changing the shape of the town so that everything nearby tilted towards it. There's a story about a love affair conducted wholly by letter, one about a woman who makes herself feel more satisfied with her life by pushing her reclusive neighbor to get married and leave town, and a really good one about an English woman travelling in the Balkans in the teens whose guide is killed and who has to live through the winter with a tribe of Ghegs (Albanian Catholics), with no one to talk to but a Xaverian monk, with whom she can sort of converse in pidgin Italian. There's another really good one about a woman who pretends to be insane in order to escape a murderer back in frontier times. Characters from one story sometimes appear peripherally in others, which sometimes makes you reevaluate what happened in their own stories. I thought they were great.

The Assassination of Federico García Lorca -- Ian Gibson

Although Gibson is Irish, all of his books were initially written in Spanish. In the sixties he spent some time living in Granada and got interested in the morass of obviously false stories surrounding the death of the great poet Federico García y Lorca (he's usually referred to as Lorca, his mother's family name, because García is such a common name in Granada.) Lorca's death was obviously an embarrassment to the fascist regime because they constantly changed their story about it: Lorca was murdered by Marxists; no, he was killed by Republican air raids; no, he was killed by "uncontrollable elements"; no, he was killed by overzealous underlings; no, he was executed by the CEDA faction while the Falangist leader was out of town; no, he was shot to death fleeing the Garda Civil; no, he was murdered by a jealous lover. The only parts of the official story that stayed consistent were 1) that Lorca's killing was totally unofficial and 2) that Lorca was pro-Franco, practically a Falangist himself, and in his last days he was writing an ode to the Falangist dead. Both of these were lies. Gibson did a whole lot of legwork, interviewing all kinds of people, including the goon who actually arrested Lorca and the conscript who buried him; Gibson secretly tape-recorded several of these interviews, which was extremely dangerous. It's clear that Lorca was arrested by a CEDA deputy with the cooperation of the Accion Popular, and brought to the headquarters of the Falangist provisional government in Granada, where he was a prisoner for two days before being taken out and shot. (The fascists held kangaroo trials for a few days after the coup in mid-July 1936, but after the first week they'd arrested so many people that they just started executing them without bothering with trials. Lorca was killed on August 19.) Lorca was a socialist, a member of the Society for Aid to Russia, a vocal supporter of the Popular Front, the brother-in-law of the Republican Mayor of Granada, largely irreligious, and homosexual; anyone who fit that description couldn't possibly survive a fascist coup. As background to the murder, the book gives a very good capsule history of Granada during the fascist rebellion; the book was banned in Spain, and only allowed into print after the reforms of Juan Carlos. The Catholic Church was wholly and enthusiastically on the side of the fascists, all the more so because the Falange was anti-Semitic. The Vatican officially called the rebellion a "crusade" and never made any attempt to get the Falangists to stop assassinating people. Even today the Church proclaims the pro-fascist priests killed by the Republicans were "martyrs who died forgiving", but it makes no such proclamation about the priests who were executed by the fascists for trying to prevent the murder of local Jews and leftists. It was a good book.

*Diplomatic Corpse -- Phoebe Atwood Taylor

The last Asey Mayo book, published in 1951 after a five-year hiatus (the earlier books came out one or two a year for sixteen years.) It's printed by a different publisher, too. Were the sales declining? Maybe she just got tired of it? Dad was never able to find out. She lived until 1976 and never wrote another. This one is pretty funny, getting a lot of mileage out of the excesses of local boosterism, to the point that one character goes for a hike in a swamp just to get away from his innkeeper's constant proud lectures on the town's history. The first chapter introduces a character clearly meant to be the protagonist, giving him a back story and an obvious love interest, but after forty or so pages he literally runs out of the scene and vanishes from the book, only getting a mention on the last page that felt like it was added by an editor. The killer is revealed a couple pages from the end. I got the feeling Taylor just got that far and then made a list of characters and threw a dart at it to pick the killer; that's her usual method, of course, but it seemed more bald-faced this time. The usual supporting cast is offstage most of the book so we get a lot of Asey talking to locals about genealogy and gravestones. I may have been more absorbed by it than I would have been had I not known it was the last one.

The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an IKEA Wardrobe -- Romain Puertolas

This had an interesting structure -- it's a farcical tall tale, very funny, but with occasional moments of deadly seriousness scattered through it. It was like eating a doughnut that has hard bits hidden inside, that give you a shock when you bite down on them. It's the story of a fakir from Rajasthan, a charlatan, who flies from India to Paris in order to visit an IKEA and buy a bed of nails with nothing but a counterfeit hundred-euro bill and chutzpah. Complications ensue, naturally, and he ends up staying in the IKEA after it closes; avoiding some after-hours staff he hides in a wardrobe, which is bundled up and shipped to England. Getting out of the wardrobe in the back of a shipping truck he meets a half-dozen Sudanese refugees trying to get to England; their story is the first of the serious moments (which are all part of a thread involving displaced people and the constant danger and despair they face.) The English round up the lot of them and dump them in Barcelona, where the fakir is chased around the airport by a Gypsy with a grudge; he escapes by hiding in the clothes trunk of a famous French actress and getting shipped to Rome. Shaken by the refugees' story, and having a lot of time to think, the fakir comes to regret his life of deceit and resolves to become a better person. In Italy he gets chased by a different Gypsy with the same grudge and has to flee Rome in a hot-air balloon, carrying a suitcase full of cash; he's picked up by an unregistered tramp vessel and put on shore in Libya, where he has to go to ground to escape the shooting in the streets, eventually escaping to France. There's one last jarring moment in the traditional windup section, where we find out how everyone got a happy ending -- the Gypsies mollified, the actress repaid, the reformed fakir now a successful novelist, all of them married and happy, and one refugee drowning in the Mediterranean while fleeing from a civil war in Africa. It was really memorable.

Electric October -- Kevin Cook

A good book about the 1947 World Series, very readable. That Series was memorable for showcasing the first of many Series appearances by Jackie Robinson and Yogi Berra, among others, but Cook chooses to concentrate on the players who had the most memorable game-to-game impact. There's a little bit of inside-baseball hipsterism where Cook congratulates himself on being a Real Fan, since who else would know about Al Gionfriddo or Bucky Harris? I knew who all the characters were because I've read a lot of baseball history, but I think even casual fans have at least heard of Cookie Lavagetto. Gionfriddo -- in the game as a substitute --made one of the most dramatic catches ever: Joe DiMaggio hit a long ball almost to dead center, which was a tremendous distance in the original Yankee Stadium -- they called it Death Valley. Gionfriddo caught the ball right at the 420-foot sign, robbing DiMaggio of a home run. DiMaggio couldn't believe it -- he was almost to second base already by the time Gionfriddo made the catch -- and Dad, who listened to the game on the radio, remembered the announcer saying it was the only time DiMaggio ever lost his cool. Even the next inning he was walking in circles in the outfield muttering to himself. Gionfriddo never played again after that game, either. The book goes into enjoyable background details on his life and career, as well as that of Lavagetto, Harris, Snuffy Stirnweiss, Burt Shotton, and Hugh Casey, all memorable baseball characters. An excellent read.

The Story of a Soul -- Saint Thérèse of Lisieux

This is an autobiography Thérèse wrote at the prompting of her older sister, who was a fellow nun at the same Carmelite convent. Thérèse was dying of tuberculosis at age 24, and her sister thought she should leave a record of her extraordinary piety. She had determined to lead a religious life at a very early age, hardly surprising considering all four of her older sisters were nuns and both her parents were later canonized. Let me acknowledge right up front that Thérèse was a saint and an ordinary person like me isn't likely to be able to understand her thinking. Unlike her, for example, I am not passionately eager to experience pain and suffering for my soul's sake. My reaction to the book was somewhat mixed. I respected her obviously genuine love of God and her spiritual serenity, and the way she regarded God as a trusted and benevolent parent ("When I pray I say very simply to God what I want to say, and I trust that He will understand me.") I was also struck by her battle with irrational anxiety, what they used to call "scruples" -- when you feel overwhelmingly guilty for things you haven't actually done. She describes very feelingly how that anxiety feeds on itself -- "I cried from feeling guilty, and then I cried because I had cried.") On the other hand I thought the book was occasionally a little petty, as when she passive-aggressively thanks the mother superior for being such a bitch to her (I'm paraphrasing) because it provided her with such welcome suffering. I also didn't care for her position that learning is unnecessary and the best state of mind is total ignorance. My edition included some of her poetry, but either the translation from the French is poor or -- what I think is more likely -- the poetry just isn't that good, and her contemporaries overrated it because they were influenced by knowing her personally. It was interesting.

Charcoal Joe -- Walter Mosley

The fourteenth Easy Rawlins book. Mosley is really digging deep for story devices in the "this series has been going on too long" barrel, including having Easy break up with his girlfriend yet again, bringing in characters from a different series (a sure sign of desperation) and, in a classic well-we've-done-everything-else move, introducing the Super Powerful Character We've Never Heard Of Before. Mouse comes to Easy asking him to take a job on behalf of the criminal Charcoal Joe. Although Easy's whole shtick is that he knows absolutely everyone in LA -- in this book we're shown that he's so dialed-in he can recognize one particular prostitute just from hearing her initials -- he's somehow never heard of this incredibly powerful and influential crime boss. Making it even more ludicrous, every single person he talks to in the book knows everything there is to know about Charcoal Joe, right down to which musical instruments he plays best. It's as though Charcoal Joe's life were a popular TV series and everyone in LA is an obsessive fan except Easy, who's never seen the show or heard of TV. The job ostensibly involves clearing a young black physicist of false murder charges, but evolves into a deadly search for stolen diamonds and missing Mob money. I didn't think much of it, and I think I'm done now. So long, Easy Rawlins, you gave me some good times.

Lays of Ancient Rome -- Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay

A collection of poems, written the way a nineteenth-century Englishman thought Romans from various periods would have written them. I'm probably prejudiced against them, since Macaulay was a pompous, self-important white supremacist whose attitudes towards India were despicable, but even leaving that aside, if possible, I didn't really like them. Macaulay was an enthusiastic supporter of a colonial power, and naturally the things he celebrated were all examples of conquest and domination -- heroic Romans standing alone against huge armies, the gods themselves descending to Earth to fight in the Roman army. Macaulay nods approvingly as a father stabs his own daughter to death rather than let her be seized for immoral purposes by a powerful official; though no one asks the daughter what she thinks about the whole thing, since she's not really a person and her only function is to be a vehicle for her father's family honor. There's also a long prophecy about how in later days a new Rome will arise and spread the power of Europe to the savages, etc. I don't think a genuine Roman would have found that appealing. "Oh look, Decimus, in the far future a bunch of descendants of those barbarians in Germany will find a small remnant of our writings and use it to create a sort of pseudo-neo-Roman ideal that's more than half made up out of their imagination, and then use that to say they're honoring us by slaughtering and looting half the world in the name of some priests who say our whole religion is false."

Lovecraft Country -- Matt Ruff

This was a really good book. As Suzanne pointed out, considering that it's a novel by a white guy about black people dealing with Jim Crow, there were a whole lot of land mines the author could have stepped on but didn't. The hero is a veteran named Atticus returning from the Korean War to his home in Chicago, where he and his family and friends all work with his uncle to publish a guide for black people who have to travel in the United States (a real thing, telling black travellers which towns are safe to stop in and which gas stations will serve them.) Atticus is descended from an escaped slave who ran away from her strange and frightening white owners in the eighteenth century; as the novel begins, Atticus's father is kidnapped by the descendants of the same family in order to lure Atticus to their backwoods town in rural north-central Massachusetts -- what Atticus calls "Lovecraft country", because that's where Lovecraft set most of his horror stories. It turns out the name is appropriate in another way: the family is still very strange and frightening, and they want to sacrifice Atticus in a ritual to raise the Great Old Ones. He gets out of that, but for the rest of the book he and his friends and family are persecuted by various factions of sorcerers. I got the feeling that Ruff originally meant this for a TV series, since the book is episodic, with each main character getting their own weird-tales adventure (all of which are individually exciting and also give each character an emotional arc and further the overall plot, which impressed me.) It's also a good picture of Jim Crow times and a good look at racism from both sides: the main villain is a thoroughly evil man who genuinely doesn't believe himself to be evil, a true monster. There's a great Jeykyll-and-Hyde scene where a sorcerer gives one of Atticus's friends a magic potion to disguise herself -- and it turns out the disguise is temporarily changing into a white woman, which naturally freaks her out. It's worth noticing that the very first thing she does as a white woman is to use her privilege to get someone else in trouble. I also liked that the ingenuity and emotional resilience that the heroes have had to develop in order to combat racism is also what helps them defeat the villain. That's good plotting. I really enjoyed it.

Casey Stengel -- Marty Appel

Robert Creamer wrote a terrific biography of Stengel forty years ago, but Appel had access to materials Creamer didn't -- mainly the voluminous unpublished memoir of Casey's wife Edna -- which led him to write a new one. Unfortunately Appel used to be the chief of publicity for the Yankees, and he hasn't left old habits behind; the book is written like a press release, slanted to put Stengel (and the Yankees) in the best possible light, dwelling on Stengel's endearing eccentricities and his intelligence and innovation in running a team, while downplaying the fact that Stengel was short-tempered, played favorites, and was often nasty to people. Plus he was a mean racist. Appel tries to defend Stengel by arguing that it was totally normal to yell racial slurs at opposing players in those days, which is true, but Appel is clearly trying to equate "he wasn't more racist than most people of his time" with "he wasn't a racist", which is dishonest and Appel should know better. (And, you know, Connie Mack never yelled racial slurs at people and he was much older than Stengel.) It's worth reading for the very good picture of Stengel's married life, which Creamer didn't really cover, but if you're going to read just one, Creamer's is the book to pick.

The Rivals -- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Sheridan's first play, a farcical comedy set in Bath. Jack, wanting to marry the romantic-minded Lydia, pretends to be the poor-but-honest "Ensign Beverly" in order to indulge her dreams of forsaking money for love. Jack's wealthy father arrives in Bath announcing that he has arranged a marriage for Jack; Jack refuses, causing a violent quarrel, until he finds out that the proposed wife is Lydia, whereupon he makes a show of submitting to his father's authority. In the mean time, the wealthy Sir Lucius is also courting Lydia, or so he thinks: his love letters are actually being intercepted and answered by Mrs. Malaprop, the play's best character, a woman fond of long words but always using the wrong one. A third suitor, Acres, decides to get rid of his two rivals by provoking a duel between them; but Sir Lucius maneuvers things so Acres has to duel "Beverly" himself. Jack, in a foul mood because Lydia has discovered his ruse and dumped him, accepts the challenge without even knowing what it's about; on the duelling ground, Acres, finding out "Beverly" is actually his friend Jack, gratefully calls things off, while Lydia, hearing about the duel, rushes to save Jack, and the two get back together again. Sir Lucius, already angry that the duel scheme failed, is mortified to find out that he has been exchanging love letters with Mrs. Malaprop and he leaves in a huff, and everything ends happily. The play was a flop originally; it was booed off the stage on opening night, the audience pelting the actors with vegetables as they fled. Sheridan put it on again a couple weeks later, re-written and with a new cast. My edition has both texts; they aren't all that different, leading me to think it was mostly the acting that annoyed the audience.

*Mon -- Natsume Soseki

A family-life novel from the turn of the last century. The main characters are Sosuke and his wife Okone, a youngish married couple who live in poverty. It's slowly revealed over the course of the novel that the couple has to live without family support because their families didn't approve of their marriage, and we eventually find out that this is because Okone divorced her former husband to marry Sosuke, which was considered so disgraceful that Sosuke lost his job and the couple had to move to another part of Japan. Their on-the-edge life is made even harder by the arrival of Sosuke's younger brother, who can't afford to continue with his schooling because their aunt and uncle have cheated him out of his share of the sale of the family house. The brother wants Sosuke, as the oldest son, to settle the family dispute (this is Sosuke's responsibility and he shouldn't have to be prompted to do it.) But Sosuke, who always seems tired, can't work up the energy to deal with the problem and just lets things ride, putting off his brother from month to month; Okone gently tries to get Sosuke to at least visit the aunt and uncle, but she doesn't feel able to push him too hard because she blames herself for Sosuke's poverty. She also thinks their childlessness is a punishment from the gods for abandoning her former husband. There's a good section of the book where Sosuke, making an effort to rouse himself spiritually, takes a long leave from work and spends some time living in a Buddhist monastery; he's uncomfortable and finds it hard to concentrate, and when he meets with the abbot to discuss his ideas about the koan he was given to meditate on, the abbot coldly tells him that his ideas are worthless and that if that's the level of his spiritual insight he would have been better off not coming. (I found that scene very affecting and I bet it's drawn from life.)

Performing Flea -- P.G. Wodehouse

A collection of Wodehouse's letters to his schoolmate Willam Townend, with whom he remained friends all his life. Townend started out as an artist -- he illustrated some of Wodehouse's early stories -- but, he says, finally realized that the problem with his art was that he wasn't any good at it, and he turned to writing. He went in for heavy drama, real-life-on-the-high-seas sort of thing; he was moderately successful in his day, though forgotten now. The letters are mostly discussions of the craft of writing, one writer to another, and they're really interesting. Wodehouse goes on in fascinating detail on what makes a good villain, the difference between a supporting character and a minor character, and elements of episodic plotting. He said he still thought of his novels in terms of writing for the theater -- for example, he would think to himself, "All right, if John Barrymore were playing this character, would he complain that he's not getting enough stage time?" If the answer was yes, then he would edit a scene to bring the character back earlier. Townend adds long commentary after nearly every letter, explaining the circumstances of the time and letting us know what happened after Townend acted on some advice Wodehouse had given. I was interested already, but what really caught me was a long, long journal extract Wodehouse sent to Townend, describing Wodehouse's two years of imprisonment by the Nazis, which I had no idea existed. Really good book.

*The Awdrey-Gore Legacy -- Edward Gorey

An odd book, as all his books are. I once heard someone call it "an illusion of a mystery", and I think that nails it. It tells the story of Miss D. Awdrey-Gore, an Agatha Christie-like figure: a well-known mystery writer who went missing for years and then turned up dead, "obviously murdered". The "legacy" is the contents of a packet found on her estate, that might be the outline of a novel she was writing, or might be a series of clues to her own murder. The clues don't lead anywhere and nothing is solvable; the point is to enjoy the exquisitely-drawn oddball characters (who all have names that are anagrams of "Edward Gorey") and weird plot fragments just for their own sake. I thought it was great.

Nightmare Town -- Dashiell Hammett

A posthumous short-story collection, including, among others, a half-dozen Continental Op stories and all the Sam Spade stories -- there were only a few, all written after The Maltese Falcon. Hammett drew a distinction between these in that the Op is a fairly accurate picture of a real detective, whereas Spade is more what a detective wishes he could be, an unstoppable nemesis who's always the canniest and the toughest and who always gets the best of everyone he runs into. I liked the Op stories better, partly because I got the feeling Hammett's heart wasn't really in the Spade stories -- Spade emerged out of nowhere in his head to be the star of one story, and didn't really belong anywhere else.

*Faust -- Ivan Turgenev

An epistolary novella about a man who accidentally ruins a woman's life with great literature. The story is told through letters to a friend from a man visiting a town in the country; the narrator had been there before, in his early twenties, and had known a girl in her teens named Vera, whose mother, a dogmatic, domineering woman, never allowed her to read any fiction on the ground that it was all lies. Back then the narrator had asked the mother for permission to marry her daughter, but the mother had refused and the narrator had gone away, never seeing any of them again until now, when he's in his thirties (he's vague and contradictory about exactly how old he is, which Dad thought was deliberate.) Vera, now in her twenties, has married; her mother is dead but Vera has still never read any fiction, out of filial obedience. The narrator decides to read her a novel, and he chooses Goethe's Faust, which he (like Turgenev) considers the best novel of the century. Vera, overwhelmed by the beauty and power of the story, decides to run away with the narrator, but she stops before she gets off her own land, confronted by the stern ghost of her mother; whether the ghost is real or in her mind is not addressed, but whichever it is, Vera is struck down by fear and guilt and soon dies. I'm not an expert on the nineteenth-century kulturkampf between the Slavophiles (like Dostoyevsky) and the Westernizers (like Turgenev); but it seemed to me that the story could be read as a criticism of the general aesthetic weakness of Russian culture, with its picture of a woman who has never read a novel (representing the malaise of Russian creativity) and is unprepared for exposure to a European book, whose genius is so powerful that it upends her whole life.

Convictions -- Marcus J. Borg

A spiritual autobiography, written near the end of his life. Borg was raised by North Dakota Lutherans, but he had a crisis of faith when he studied math and physics in college and realized he couldn't accept fundamentalism. He went to a non-denominational seminary after college and gradually became a liberal theologian, which essentially means Enlightenment Christianity. The book mainly describes how his elders' commands to believe lost their hold on him when he grew up enough to realize that they rested on nothing but authoritarianism, and how he came to replace them with a different set of beliefs that he arrived at through his own spiritual exploration; he considers these genuine convictions, as opposed to imposed convictions. He devotes sections of the book to each one. They're fairly simply stated -- God is real; a lot of things about God can't be understood; your behavior in this life is a much more important concern to you right now than the existence of an afterlife; the value of Scripture doesn't rest on its being literally true, which a lot of it isn't; true followers of Christ must be passionate about justice and helping the poor -- but he goes into a lot of depth on each one, and how American evangelicalism has become so enamored with political power that it's smothered the cause it nominally espouses. A very good book, I thought.

Shadow Box -- Michael Cristofer

A play, from the seventies I think; the stage shows us the interior of three small cottages, and as the action proceeds we realize this is a hospice. The lights go up and down from one cottage to another as we watch the families of the residents try to cope with impending death, in three unconnected stories: a gay man whose poisonous, alcoholic former wife arrives to try to get his current lover drunk; a middle-aged man whose son doesn't know, and whose wife won't accept, that he's dying; and an elderly woman with dementia whose ill-treated daughter invents letters from her sister, their mother's favorite, all promising to visit soon, although the sister has been dead for years. Very well-written -- I think it won the Pulitzer -- but depressing.

The House With Sixteen Handmade Doors -- Henry Petroski

A decent book about the Petroskis' summer home, a coastal Maine cottage built in the fifties by a skilled carpenter. Petroski got interested in the woodwork and decided to examine the whole house minutely, without taking anything apart, and deduce what he could about what was behind the carpenter's design decisions. It has some interesting discussions of craftsmanship, and to what extent it makes sense to do technically unnecessary work for pure pride. Petroski was impressed with the level of skill the carpenter showed, with the house's doors still swinging smoothly without scraping or banging after sixty years; but I thought it was a little silly that he tsk-tsked in a disappointed way about how the interior of the garage wasn't finished to the same standard as the house (it's not like I'm carefully champfering the end of every shelf in my tool shed. It's not living space.) Even with Petroski going to a tremendous (and frankly somewhat self-indulgent) level of detail, there's still some extraneous stuff about the local ship-building plant that's interesting but out of place; it felt like that chapter was included in order to hit a page count. If you're super interested in finish carpentry (as I am) this is worth reading; otherwise you can skip it.

Nobody Knows My Name -- James Baldwin

A collection of essays written in the late fifties and early sixties, when Baldwin returned to the US after ten years of living in Paris. He compared Harlem in 1960 to the Harlem he grew up in, and -- though he admitted later he was scared to do it -- toured through the South, meeting Martin Luther King and the SNCC activists. He thought that the white people of the late fifties were angrier and more hostile than before, probably because the idea of black civil rights had become more of a present threat to them. The line that sticks with me is "The emptier our hearts become, the greater our crimes will be." He was invited to meet Elijah Muhammad, but he thought they disappointed each other -- Baldwin was disappointed that Muhammad's movement was too confident and also too unconcerned with the high human cost of the race war they believed was inevitable; while Muhammad was disappointed that Baldwin was overly individualistic and insufficiently militant. A big chunk of the book is taken up with several long essays about Baldwin's artistic, political, and personal differences with Richard Wright, but I didn't give too much weight to those -- I'm never impressed by anyone who sadly pities someone else for being too blind to see what's really happening between them, you know? That aside, it was a good book. Baldwin's theory about the terrible violence of lynching was that at the root of it was sexual repression among the whites, who projected their own desires for sexual freedom onto the blacks -- this, he thinks, is the origin of the stereotypes of oversexed black women and sexually threatening black men -- and the lynching was sexual violence, ultimately born of sexual frustration and envy. The majority of victims he saw were castrated.

Author! Author! -- P.G. Wodehouse

This is the American edition of Performing Flea. I generally don't bother reading both the English and American editions, since in most cases they're essentially identical, but I guess Wodehouse wasn't happy with the original, because for this edition he threw out all of Townend's commentary and replaced it with his own, which is both funny and interesting. I had to read pretty closely, since I noticed the contents of the letters weren't quite the same -- Townend and Wodehouse both abridged, but differently, and each included paragraphs that the other left out. In this edition, too, Wodehouse not only left out the prison camp diary, he left out all mention of the ill-advised broadcasts he made from Germany in 1941, which were never the treasonous speeches that English hysteria made them out to be, but he was probably still embarrassed by them and certainly sick of hearing about them. That's probably also why he changed the title, since the original title was a slap at Sean O'Casey, who called Wodehouse "English literature's performing flea."

Runaway -- Alice Munro

A good short story collection, mostly set in mid-century rural Ontario. Several of the stories cover different periods in the lives of a woman named Juliet and her illegitimate daughter Penelope; an early story shows Juliet having a brief affair on a train ride across Canada, which we later learn results in Penelope's birth, and later on we see Penelope's childhood and adolesence and the pair's rocky relationship with Juliet's parents. In the final story we see the now-retired Juliet living alone, Penelope having left without explanation decades before and never contacted her again, for no reason Juliet can think of. The writing is excellent but the stories are heartbreaking. The non-Juliet ones are just as bad -- a woman leaves her unhappy marriage on a sudden impulse and goes off with a man she just met, probably to a future that isn't any more fulfilling; a twelve-year-old girl is stalked by a lonely woman who's wrongly convinced that the girl is the daughter she gave up for adoption. I liked them but I needed a break after reading them, if you know what I mean.

Silver Screen Fiend -- Patton Oswalt

A sort of retrospective on a period in Oswalt's life where he spent way too much time watching movies. It's spattered all over with the self-hatred mantra so many comedians seem to share -- I'm a loser, I drive people away with my general awfulness, here's a list of jobs and relationships I've ruined, and so on. I discount that, generally, since it's irrational inner experience and not visible to anyone else -- Max Brod said that Franz Kafka was a cheerful, sociable person and you would never imagine, from talking to him, what his writing was like. What I get from this book is that Oswalt really, really likes movies just as movies -- good, bad, indifferent, doesn't matter. He would consider two hours of watching an awful movie well spent just if there was one beat in the movie where some character actor had one line or one bit of business and nailed it. He'd remember and appreciate the good moment and let the rest of it go. This isn't something I share -- I have trouble sitting through movies I like, even -- but I think I get it. There are books I've read where I remember the one good scene or the one good dialog exchange and rest of the book was meh so I've forgotten it. There were some good parts about learning to be a better at doing standup, which I liked.

Pamela -- Samuel Richardson

A boring and woodenly-written story with a disgusting moral, what could be better? It took me months to finish it. I only started it because I wanted to read Fielding's Joseph Andrews, which it turns out is a sequel to Fielding's earlier novel Shamela, which is a parody of this book. Few things are less funny than reading a parody of something you're not familiar with, so I sighed resignedly and picked this up. It's an epistolary novel, in the form of letters from an angelic house maid named Pamela to her parents, chronicling her resistance to the improper advances, and eventually the repeated attempts at rape, of her employer, a rich asshole. After she fights him off for the third or fourth time he's all, fine, you ungrateful bitch, if you're so far above your station that you have impertinent ideas about not deserving to be raped, I'll send you back to your poor family -- but the cart he sends her in actually takes her to a country house where she's held prisoner for some months, piteously resigning herself to Providence since none of the neighbors think it worth their time to help a peasant girl escape a rape dungeon. Eventually the asshole turns up at the house and he's like, well, have you changed your mind, and after she fights him off a few more times, he insults her for a while and then sends her back to her family, for real this time, except that when she's halfway there he sends a messenger to tell her he's decided to marry her, and she joyfully turns around and runs to him, and then spends the rest of the book nauseatingly thankful for his treatment of her. It's thoroughly revolting watching her happily praising God for the way this kidnapper and rapist condescends to give her a long lecture on how to be an obedient wife. I was relieved to get to the end, then appalled to find out there's a longer sequel called Pamela In Her Exalted Condition, then relieved again to realize I don't need to read it in order to understand Fielding's parody.

*Yakov Pasynkov -- Ivan Turgenev

A very good short novella wherein the narrator describes the character of his friend Yakov Pasynkov, a thoroughly good and decent man who is drawn with such convincing affection that I'm sure he must be based on some friend of Turgenev. It's an unrequited-love story on several levels: in his student days the narrator and Pasynkov were friends with an intellectual family; the narrator loved one of the daughters, Sofia, but was rejected. He credits his growth as a person to Pasynkov and tells how he felt unable to lie or speak meanly in Pasynkov's presence. Years later, having taken a job that carried him far away from romantic disappointments, he's in Siberia when he meets Pasynkov again; Pasynkov, now a regional official, is dying, having been mortally wounded when an escaped convict he was arresting shot him with a bow and arrow, of all things, the sort of thing that could only happen in the far back country. The narrator sits with him while he dies, and Pasynkov tells him that he had loved Sofia himself, and like the narrator had found a job that would take him far away. Later the narrator sees Sofia again, and tells her about Pasynkov; she tells him that her older sister had pined away for love of Pasynkov. A very Russian love story, where no one ends up happy, and the best person in it literally dies from an arrow wound. I liked it.

Take the Cannoli -- Sarah Vowell

A collection of essays. As befits the title, there's a long chapter on The Godfather, but I don't really remember any of it even though that's probably my favorite movie. There's also a long appreciation of Frank Sinatra, but that's lost on me because I detest everything about Sinatra, both as a performer and as a human being. The only thing that stayed with me from the book is a sort of travelogue about following the Trail of Tears from Georgia, where her Cherokee ancestors were forced out, to Oklahoma, where they ended up. That part made the book worth while.

Sister Outsider -- Audre Lorde

A powerful collection of essays on feminism from the seventies. It's mostly about overlapping spheres of oppression, although I don't think she actually uses the word "intersectional" since it wasn't in common use then. In any case, Lorde was personally in a perfect position to see all kinds of exclusion first-hand. Mainstream feminism has long been criticized for excluding black women -- it's a commonplace that white feminists want to free themselves from gender oppression but keep their color and class privileges. On top of that, Lorde says that black women fight for inclusion in the feminist movement but themselves exclude gay people like her, and even other black gay women distanced themselves from Lorde because her partner was white. Add to that that she was a poet who grew up poor, and wound up working in a publishing environment largely full of well-off academics, and you can see she must have felt like an outsider pretty much all the time. A lot of the essays deal with voices, and who society allows to speak on what subject; one of her central themes is that what unjust societies demand of their victims is silent acquiescence, so the priority of the victim should be to "transform silence into language and action". A lot of her perspectives were different enough to mine that I had to reread the essays two or three times before I felt like I understood where she was coming from. For example, in one essay she coined a phrase, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," which was clearly very important to her since she repeated it in many of her speeches. I admit that my first reaction was pretty narrow-minded: hang on, I thought, you absolutely can take apart a house with the same tools you used to build it -- I've built houses, and you give me a hammer and saw and I can certainly take those houses apart again. But on second thought I got that she wasn't saying that the tools can't dismantle the house, but that they won't. If a house is built with injustice, inequality, and oppression, you can take up those same tools against it, but using those tools will corrupt you to the point where you won't want to tear down the house any more -- or if you do, all that will happen is that you'll end up building the same house over again. If what you want is a different house, you'll have to use different tools. Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and stablisheth a city by iniquity! Probably Lorde would think me puerile for having to go through that process at all; her intended audience would have understood what she meant immediately, but I don't share the background that would provide that insight. 

The Girl in Blue -- P.G. Wodehouse

A comedy of errors set in a country house, wherein the hero, Jerry, is blackmailed by several people (all acting independently) to help recover a miniature painting by Gainsborough (the "Girl in Blue") which everyone believes to have been stolen by an American woman whose family packed her off to stay at the house because her habit of shoplifting from London stores might prove embarrassing should it come to light during a pressing business deal. Jerry has the congenial help of the butler, who is in fact a debt-collector's agent keeping an eye on the house's owner and posing as a butler for appearances' sake. All this while Jerry is trying to find out the name of a woman he fell in love with at first sight while they were serving on the same jury and simultaneously trying to figure out how to escape gracefully from his engagement to a harridan. Luckily the harridan is a gold-digger and dumps Jerry when she can't pry his inheritance out of the hands of his trustees, and the miniature isn't stolen at all but only absent-mindedly put in the wrong place. It was pretty good. The only thing that bugged me was that early on Wodehouse makes a point of mentioning that the Gainsborough miniature is one of a pair, and would presumably be worth much more if the other were found, but then that never comes up again, which left me with rather a missing-the-top-step feeling.

Cattle Kingdom -- Christopher Knowlton

A really absorbing book. I lost my copy somewhere in the San Diego airport and when my flight landed I went to the book store instead of going home. It's all about the growth of the cattle business in the American West in the mid-to-late nineteenth century -- which I'd had no idea was largely financed by Scottish and English investors, who turned the cattle boom into a bubble and mostly lost their shirts, and serve them right. The book does a great job of showing you the myriad faces of the cattle boom, from the everyday life of the ordinary cowboy to the infighting of the financiers in Europe to the advertising campaign persuading Americans to abandon their favored pork for unfamiliar beef. There's also a long account of the Johnson County War, an appalling episode where an association of large ranchers in Wyoming tried to clear out all the smaller ranchers (whose 100-acre spreads, bought cheap from the government, got in the way of the larger ranchers' water access) by falsely accusing them of cattle-rustling and lynching them; when the sheriff arrested the lynchers, the association hired a mob of mostly Confederate veterans from Texas and set out to kill the sheriff and all his deputies, along with the leaders of the small ranches and all the local mayors for good measure. The shooting lasted for months, with dozens dead, and only ended when President Harrison sent in the Army. The gunmen from Texas were rounded up but never prosecuted, because the ranchers' association that hired them included the Governor of Wyoming as well as both Senators. (Teddy Roosevelt whole-heartedly supported the association, by the way, and was only prevented from going out to join the war on the association's side by troubles at home.) It was a really good book.

A Field Guide to Awkward Silences -- Alexandra Petri

This annoyed me, honestly. It reeked of fake self-deprecation -- "LOL I'm so AWKWARD, I mean sure my dad's a Congressman and I was Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard and I'm a successful comedian and playwright as well as the youngest person ever to have a column in the Washington Post, but once I wore ugly sandals to a party!!" "OMG I'm so WEIRD, I like to whistle and I entered a national pun contest so I could write a column about it, isn't that CRAZY??" Reading it was like listening to someone fake-complaining about how unattractive they are in order to get you to compliment them. The only part of the pun-contest story I liked was her awareness that puns are almost never funny, not because they're inherently bad but because punsters rarely consider that a good pun, like any good joke, should enhance and adorn a conversation, not stop it dead. She calls punsters sharks in the water of conversation, not really listening, just marking time until they hear a word that gives them a chance to make a pun, whereupon they immediately interrupt to shout it, which is really just them saying "LOOK AT ME!" Think of Dr. Cottard, the idiot dinner guest at the Verdurins' in Proust, who barges into conversations with irrelevant nonsense; as when someone mentions a book by Rabelais and Cottard bellows "Le quatre-heure du Rabelais!", a punchline from a 16th-century story that has no connection to the topic at all -- he just heard the word Rabelais and shouted the only phrase he knew that contained it, imagining he's made a joke when what he's actually contributed is the conversational equivalent of a record-scratch.

The Accidental Tourist -- Anne Tyler

I didn't like this at all. I picked it up because I read an essay where John McPhee praised her writing, but I found it hard to appreciate the prose style when I hated all the characters so much. If I met the hero in real life I'd escape his company as soon as I could, and I'd cross the street to avoid talking to the love interest -- that's not even taking into account the scene where the love interest rapes the hero, which the book treats with a sort of "that's a thing that happened, we're moving on now" attitude. By halfway through the book I was daydreaming about all the characters dying in a fire. I wouldn't recommend it.

Going To Meet the Man -- James Baldwin

A short story collection. The first two are childhood and teenage-rebellion stories, probably autobiographical, about the main characters from Go Tell It On the Mountain, set earlier than the novel. The others are sometimes cerebral, sometimes terrifying: a failed farmer, living off a neighbor's charity, is jealous that his neighbor can pass success down through his family, so he strangles the neighbor's only child. A white sheriff lies in bed thinking about the black civil-rights protesters he beat into unconsciousness earlier in the day, mixed with memories of a lynching his father took him to as a child, where the victim was castrated; the violent memories arouse him, but he can't manage to have sex with his wife unless he role-plays, imagining himself as a black man. The best story was "Sonny's Blues", about a middle-class black school teacher who is ashamed of his brother's heroin addiction, feeling his brother is "letting down the race"; he helps his brother on his release from prison, though, and after they attend a revival meeting Sonny explains that for him heroin serves the purpose that religion must serve for the preacher, in that it lets him keep his head above water in the sea of misery and despair that is black life in America. The narrator asks if it's worth killing yourself to escape from suffering, and as an answer Sonny takes him to a jazz club where the narrator sits and listens to Sonny play beautiful music, and decides he understands him as well as he ever will. I liked it.

Money in the Bank -- P.G. Wodehouse

An excellent farce, the best of the books featuring the semi-competent crooks "Chimp" Twist and the Molloys. We find the hero, Jerry, a cheerful, friendly sort with a take-life-as-it-comes attitude, engaged to an uptight, humorless social climber who chose to take his idle compliment as a proposal; now working for his lawyer father-in-law-to-be, Jerry is assigned to discredit a witness named Green. In court he recognizes Green from school and uses his cross-examination to bring up Green's bullying history and ask things like "Is it not the case that you were a stinker whose word no one would ever believe?" This makes excellent newspaper filler but loses the case and gets Jerry both fired and dumped. Overjoyed at escaping his engagement, he celebrates by throwing his landlady's inedible cakes out the window; they fall through a next-door window that happens to be where Chimp Twist poses as the private detective Adair, bonking him on the head. Seeing the massive Jerry hurrying over to apologize, Chimp naturally thinks Jerry is on his way to beat him up, so he quickly hides in a closet. As Jerry stands puzzled in the empty office, a new client enters, a young woman named Jane; Jerry immediately falls in love at first sight, and so he can spend time with her he pretends to be the detective Adair. Jane is accompanied by her eccentric uncle, a viscount who converted all the family money into diamonds as an investment, and then hid the diamonds on the family estate and forgot where he put them. To make ends meet he rented the estate to a social reformer who's using it as an institute to promote her ideas about vegetarianism and healthy excercise, while Jane stays on as the reformer's secretary and the viscount poses as the butler, in order to search for the diamonds. The "butler"'s behavior has attracted suspicion, and the reformer has sent Jane to hire a detective to keep an eye on him; Jerry (still pretending to be Adair) agrees to come to the estate and pretend to spy on the "butler" while actually keeping the reformer off their necks, and also so he can pursue Jane, which will be the more complicated since she happens to be engaged to the witness Green. Chimp, hiding in the closet, has heard the whole thing, and since his sometime allies, the Molloys, happen to be staying at the same estate (pretending to be interested in vegetarianism so they can sell the reformer some worthless oil stock) he hurries off to enlist them to find the diamonds before anyone else can. And that's just the first three chapters! Wodehouse was really on top of his game with this one. I loved it.

The Dain Curse -- Dashiell Hammett

A suspense novel, wherein the Continental Op investigates a diamond theft on behalf of an insurance company, only to have the case expand into religious fraud, kidnapping, drug addiction, and murder. I liked the way the case is seemingly resolved several times but always opens up again because the Op is never satisfied with accepting a pat and easy answer and double- and triple-checks his own conclusions, even in the face of opposition from other parties who want everything to be all over. When we meet an old buddy of the Op's we've never heard of before, it was inevitable that the buddy would turn out to be rotten, but at least it was managed well. I liked it.

This Old Man -- Roger Angell

A collection of New Yorker pieces from Angell's long tenure, including baseball essays, recollections of writers and artists, the peculiarities of various editors of the magazine (a perennial favorite topic among New Yorker memoirists), some backbiting (ditto), and autobiographical sketches. I've always found it a little odd the way Angell writes about E.B. White as though he were a stranger, without ever mentioning that White was his stepfather. It's a good read, full of affection for the magazine and the work -- I liked the piece where he described how everyone at the New Yorker jumped up and down with delight when Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize. (Angell was over ninety even then, so that must have taken some doing.)

Tell Me a Riddle -- Tillie Olsen

Four excellent short stories, comprising almost the whole of Olsen's output. The first is an inner monologue: a San Francisco woman, while doing her ironing, thinks about the lives of her five children and about how she might have raised them differently, particularly the oldest, if she'd known more about life. The second is the story of a married couple with a close family friend, a merchant marine who usually stays with them between voyages; their marriage is strained by the friend's increasing alcoholism. The third tells how the friendship between two young girls -- one black, one white -- is broken by pressure from society that neither of them can resist. The last is a long story about an elderly couple, Jewish revolutionaries who fled Europe and raised children in poverty in the US; the husband is told his wife has terminal cancer, but the doctors order him not to tell her about it, so he takes her on a trip to visit their children, who it turns out are the main characters from the other stories. They were beautifully written and moving.

Almost Perfect -- Joe Cox

A book about games that were almost perfect -- where the pitcher retired 26 straight batters but couldn't get the last one out. It's happened about a dozen times. I was at one of them -- Mike Mussina retired the first 26 Red Sox in a game in 2001, and Carl Everett (who I never liked otherwise) got a base hit to break it up, and Fenway went bananas. Rich and I were high-fiving people for like an hour afterwards. The book gives one chapter to each game, starting back in 1908 when Hooks Wiltse got 26 guys out and then hit the 27th batter, and covering a bunch of games I'd heard of -- the time Babe Ruth walked the leadoff man and was ejected for arguing, and Ernie Shore came on in relief, picked the runner off first, and then got the next 26 out; the time poor Harvey Haddix threw twelve (twelve!) perfect innings, before losing the game 1-0 in the thirteenth on an error, a sacrifice, and a double; the time Armando Galarraga lost a perfect game because the umpire called the last runner safe at first when he was out by several feet -- and a bunch I hadn't, by pitchers I don't remember like Ron Robinson and Brian Holman. The writing was pretty good, though a little canted towards the player -- the author repeats about five times that the umpire in Wiltse's game later admitted to Wiltse that he should have called strike three on the pitch before, but really there's no evidence for that other than Wiltse's say-so, and Wiltse may just have made it up because it made a better dinner-table story.

*Cities of the Plain -- Marcel Proust

The fourth volume of Remembrance of Things Past. This one is all about homosexuality, hence the title (the cities of the plain were Sodom and Gomorrah, and in fact the title in French is Sodom et Gomorrhe, but that was unprintable in England in 1920.) We begin with the narrator reminding us that in the previous volume he told us that he saw something happen that he would describe later, and now he tells us what it was: while hiding in the shadows at the top of an outdoor stairway (he pretends he just happened to be there, but he was obviously eavesdropping) he saw the arrogant aristocrat Charlus and the working-class Jupien talk in the courtyard for a moment and then go inside an outbuilding, and the narrator secretly followed them inside and spied on them having sex. The narrator doesn't seem to feel that his behavior requires any explanation, and just treats it as perfectly normal that he would hurry into a building through another entrance, sneak through a basement, and then climb a ladder and look through a ventilator in order to spy on the two men. This leads him into a long discussion of what he calls "inversion", and the character of men who practice it. I think the story makes more sense if we assume that the narrator is himself an unadmitted homosexual, otherwise he wouldn't be so creepily fascinated by it. It might be worth noting that the women in his life -- I can't say the women he loves, since it doesn't appear that he's capable of love, only a sort of violent possessiveness and jealousy -- all have male-derived names, such as Gilberte and Albertine. Speaking of Albertine, a lot of this book deals with her -- the narrator, now (I think) in his late twenties, revisits the fictional coastal resort of Balbec, where he stays the summer and spends most of his time with her. They have nothing in common -- when they're together she bores him and he wishes her gone, but when they're apart he can think of nothing else and obsessively imagines that she is carrying on lesbian affairs behind his back. He makes no bones about showing himself at his worst -- while waiting at a train station he refuses to walk a hundred yards to say hello to a friend's elderly father, because he won't let Albertine out of his sight even for a moment, for fear of what she might get up to; and rather than let her go around without him he accompanies her to the torturously dull dinner-parties of Madame Verdurin, who has grown even stupider and more vapid, if that's possible, since the long-ago days described in the first volume when Swann (now dead) pursued Odette at the Verdurins' table. As an illustrative counterpoint we see that Charlus -- who, however unpleasant, is a highly intelligent and accomplished man, and a member of the high-society Guermantes family -- also comes to the Verdurins' parties, where he is ludicrously out of place, because he has fallen in love with a pianist friend of theirs named Morel. The narrator relates how all the other regulars at the Verdurins' cruelly mock Charlus behind his back for his pathetic pursuit of Morel, who treats him heartlessly; though it doesn't seem to occur to the narrator to wonder what the regulars say about him and Albertine when he's not there. Albertine is rather silly and empty-headed, and I can't see anything attractive about her -- although even if she were Marie Curie and Brigitte Bardot rolled into one she wouldn't be worth having to listen to the Verdurins' friends talk for a whole evening -- and the narrator himself finally decides he's bored enough with her that he can cut her loose, until he finds out that she is acquainted with Mademoiselle Vanteuil, a woman he knows is a lesbian (because he once spied on her and her girlfriend from behind some bushes.) He's now utterly convinced that every second she's out of his sight Albertine is engaged in Sapphic orgies, and -- in a strange leap of logic -- this makes him resolve to marry her. He seems to have the idea that keeping Albertine from exercising her lesbianism -- which as far as I can see exists only in his mind -- is an absolute necessity, even at the cost of an unhappy marriage, of making himself miserable for life, of condemning Albertine to be confined in the company of only the narrator's family and friends, all of whom dislike her. It makes no sense at all, and the only thing I can think of to explain it is that the narrator is jealous that Albertine can fully experience her sexuality while he must remain closeted, though he can't admit that to himself. I suppose I should pity him for that, but honestly as the book goes on I have gone from disliking the narrator to starting to despise him.

The View From Castle Rock -- Alice Munro

A collection of short stories, fictional but based on the real experiences of Munro's ancestors, following the emigration of the Laidlaw family from Scotland to Canada, starting in the eighteenth century with the writer James Hogg (who if I've done the math right was Munro's great-great-great-great-great-grandfather) and continuing on to Munro's life in the late twentieth century. I recognize a lot of the details, from them having been scavenged for plot elements in other stories she's written. I was most moved by the story of Andrew Laidlaw, who left Ontario for Illinois in the mid-19th century, looking for a life that wouldn't be circumscribed by pitiless farm work and harsh Presbyterian family life; he died of cholera and the story tells how his older brother comes to Illinois to take the widow and children to a life of poor-relation drudgery on the farm, a prospect they dread so much that one of the children pretends that the baby has been stolen, in the hopes that their uncle will leave without them. I was also struck by the later story about Alice's wedding, where the night before, one of Alice's aunts quietly gives her a big envelope of money in case she needs it to run away. It was a good book.

The Lost Lions -- Edward Gorey

A brief book where Gorey gives us a series of intricate still images and all the story happens in between them. A young man named Hamish, who accidentally becomes a movie star after opening the wrong envelope, uses his unexpected fortune to start raising lions. He gets burned out by stress and goes to Africa, where he writes a journal while living in a jungle, and returns home to find his lions have been sent to Ohio for the winter. I especially liked the last page, as Hamish looks out over the winter landscape, seemingly uncertain what to do. A picture of human life, really.

The Swoop! -- P.G. Wodehouse

A pretty good farce from 1909, a parody of the England-gets-invaded story genre popular at the time, the most famous of which was The Swoop of the Vulture, which gave this book its title. In this one a German army makes an unopposed landing while everyone is busy watching cricket, and news about the invasion is only printed in small type underneath the much more important sports scores. By coincidence eight other invading armies all land at the same time, and all the invaders have to argue about who gets to take London first; the English phlegmatically soak the invaders with overpriced raffle tickets and life insurance, and give the enemy artillery a vote of thanks when they blow up ugly civic buildings. ("Luckily it was August, so no one was in the city.") The only patriotic resistance is put up by the Boy Scouts, who cleverly turn the armies against each other by spreading rumors about which commanding officers get paid more, and finally chase the thoroughly demoralized enemy out of England with slingshots. My edition also contains a much shorter version of the same story set in America, which follows the same skeleton plot but leaves out all the supporting details that made it funny.

Our Sister Killjoy -- Ama Ata Aidoo

A novel from the seventies. Aidoo is Ghanian, but she writes in English rather than in any of Ghana's over a dozen official languages, possibly because she looks to Nigeria as the leader of African art, and most Nigerian novelists write in English. Or maybe she just wanted a broader audience than she could have if she wrote in Ashanti or Hausa, I don't know. The book, which interestingly alternates between prose and verse, tells the story of a Ghanian radical called Sissie who is unexpectedly given a literary fellowship to attend a writers' conference in Europe. She spends a lot of the book attacking the African middle class, whose conscious and unconscious imitation of European manners infuriates her; she regards them as complicit after the fact in colonialism. She considers African writers who live in Europe without ever intending to return to Africa to be mediocrities who value material comfort over helping their countrymen -- and imitation mediocrities at that, since she thinks Africans chase after European things indiscriminately, never asking if things are good in themselves but simply considering them good just because they're European, an expression of a cultural inferiority complex deliberately implanted by white colonialists. Sissie argues that Africans need to invigorate their art by cultivating their own heritage and healthily grafting on some good parts of other cultures, rather than trying to create a wholesale second-hand copy of European culture as seen by the underclass. It's a good story, though I thought it was weakened a bit by Sissie's irrational hatred of European food. Sissie doesn't like sandwiches, for example, since she thinks all food should be served hot; and she spends a chunk of the book pointlessly psychoanalyzing European taste -- like, what deep-seated thing is wrong with white people that they eat cold food? -- never realizing that she's just homesick. I liked the book though.

River of Stars -- Guy Gavriel Kay

A novel set in an imaginary version of China, taking place during the long fall of the Song dynasty in the twelfth century, and following the real events fairly closely, but with all the names changed so the author can arrange things more dramatically. It's a somewhat divided story -- the character with the most claim to be the protagonist, a soldier named Ren, is briefly introduced at the beginning and doesn't appear again for over a hundred pages, and then returns only at intervals. Much of the story when Ren is off stage involves a poet and singer named Lin, who lives as a favored artist in the Emperor's palace and uses her position to protect the lives and fortunes of her scholarly family. These two main threads are supported by a large number of vignette-like scenes, involving characters who only appear once but whose small stories make up a mosaic that brilliantly illustrates the themes of the larger story. It takes a lot of skill to do that and it was rewarding to watch each smaller scene reflect a facet of the story as a whole. The prose is excellent and I enjoyed reading it, but great skill carries the burden of increased expectations: it's Ren who makes the decision that causes events to go one way and not the other, and I thought a character who had so important a role in the story should have appeared in the novel a good deal more than he did. I still liked the book a lot, though.

The First Three Minutes -- Steven Weinberg

A book from the seventies describing the Big Bang theory and the incredibly fast expansion (and consequent cooling) of the early universe. In the first second, the temperature was so high that even subatomic particles couldn't have existed, and the laws of physics would have been nothing like they are now. If some random fluctuation had gone another way the universe could be unrecognizably different. Well written.

The Last Revolution -- Lord Dunsany

A badly written and uninteresting science fiction story from the early fifties. A well-meaning scientist creates intelligent robots that turn against humanity, and, well, that's all there is to it, really. The writing is repetitious and dull, which is surprising for Dunsany, and full of the same tiresome homily against machinery, repeated almost without variation in every chapter. On nearly every other page the scientist yells at someone that "I keep telling you they're smarter than we are!" It's a good thing he reminds us, since we never actually see the robots do anything smart. Once the suspense of "will the robots turn against us?" is finally over (took long enough, since it's clear on the first page that that's what will happen) the humans barricade themselves in an English country cottage, and the robots outside just mill around stupidly, unable to get in even though they each have a hundred super-strong tentacled arms ending in powerful gripping claws. Good thing the robots are superintelligent, otherwise they might be completely stymied by a half-dozen people hiding in a small wooden cottage and armed with nothing but pails of water! Oh wait, that's exactly what happens. There's a lot of stupid hand-waving, too -- somehow the robots manage to take mental control of other machines, like trains and cars and wristwatches, and when the plucky sidekicks ask the scientist how they do it he's all "We don't know how the queen bee controls all the other bees, and yet it happens (I keep telling you, they're smarter, etc.)" Which is lazy writing and also not true, since the queen bee does nothing but reproduce and the other bees manage their affairs on their own. Also there's an infuriating scene when the scientist's friend is giving that chapter's variation on the machines-are-bad speech and he waves his arm at the pretty trees and flowers around him and says "Is it worth giving all this up for a more convenient life?" ...totally ignoring the fact that he's standing inside a walled garden that's accessible only to rich people. In the end the robots all run out of lubricating oil and rust solid (yes, really.) It was lousy.

The Jesus I Never Knew -- Philip Yancey

A book about meeting the Gospels as an adult, without preconceptions. Yancey was raised in a fundamentalist church, which left him with a predisposition to atheism. He tells the story of how, when he was a child, his father was sick in the hospital and on life-support, and the church he belonged to convinced the family to turn the life-support off, since God would heal him. When he died the church blamed Yancey's family for not believing hard enough. Understandably, Yancey turned away from religion, and when he read the Gospels later in life he was surprised at all the ways the Jesus he saw there was unlike the Jesus he'd been taught about in his childhood. People tend to conflate one religious figure with another, and think of Jesus as rather gaunt and ascetic because that's what John the Baptist was like. But Jesus didn't teach asceticism, and in fact his contemporaries criticized him as a glutton and a "wine-bibber". More importantly, Jesus lived and taught a radical message of compassion that has generally been ignored or rejected. It's amazing how people so often see messages in the Gospels that aren't there. An example Yancey gives is the Canaanite woman, mentioned in Matthew and Mark, who asks Jesus to heal her sick daughter; Jesus refuses, on the grounds that he was sent for the Israelites and no one else. He even, in an unexpected moment of heartlessness, tells her that it's not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs. The woman replies that even the dogs can get the crumbs from the table, and Jesus, impressed by her faith (and, I hope, realizing that he's been acting like an asshole) heals her daughter. American evangelicals say that this story supports their position that women should be obedient and unquestioning, even though the story clearly shows the woman talking back to Jesus and making him change his mind. I was also interested in Yancey's observation that Jesus never made any attempt to influence the temporal powers of his time -- he didn't go to Rome and he never tried to see Pilate or Herod on his own account. He seems to have been only concerned with individuals. It reminds me that Jesus wasn't the Messiah I would have expected. I remember thinking in high school that I sympathized with Judas, because if I were an apostle I would be upset that Jesus didn't establish social justice and end poverty. But really that's the same as saying, why is there injustice and poverty in the first place? If God the Father allows the world to be the way it is, you can't expect God the Son to go changing it. Given that it apparently wasn't part of his assigned mission to overhaul and reform human nature, the only approach Jesus could take was person by person. (Which Jesus seems to have thought was a raw deal, by the way. He got tired and pissy sometimes and he didn't want to die, either. That's another reason I hate gospel-of-prosperity people. Jesus didn't tell us we should be grateful for getting such a crappy deal. He thought it was crappy too, and had no problem saying so.)

Always Hungry? -- David Ludwig

I think Ludwig couldn't decide whether he wanted to write a serious study of nutrition or a diet book, so he tried to do both. The hard-science part argues that the country has generally gone overboard with no-carbohydrate diets, and most people would be better served with a diet that contains rationally-thought-out amounts of carbohydrates, fat, and sugar rather than simply eliminating all of them. (The exception is sweetened soft drinks, for which all research shows that the best approach is to avoid them completely.) The other part is a description of a generally healthy diet, which is pretty sound actually but isn't as well-written as the science sections, because it's splattered with advertising gimmickry -- testimonials from people who lost weight following the diet, silly marketing-speak to make the diet seem desirable (heavy overuse of the words "delicious" and "luscious", for example.)

The Last Policeman -- Ben Winters

An end-of-the-world story, very well done, I thought. It's set in an imaginary 2012 where it was determined in January that the world will be destroyed by an asteroid in October. The story is set in April, and the hero, Hank, a cop in Concord, NH, is called to an abandoned McDonald's where a man has apparently hanged himself. The suicide rate has gone way up, so there's nothing surprising about it, but Hank wonders about some odd loose ends -- plus he's only in his early twenties, and only a detective because so many people are abandoning their jobs that they had to promote him, and since he might never get another chance, he decides to investigate it as a murder. It's not bad as a mystery, including a couple of good red herrings, but the real story is watching the characters try to navigate a collapsing society. Of course there are religious loonies who think they can pray the asteroid away, and conspiracy nutjobs who think the government has built an escape hotel for rich people on the Moon, and survivalists who act like this is what they've always wanted; I liked the bit where Hank reflects that people's reaction to the asteroid is more depressing than the asteroid itself. I also liked that Hank is deliberately not an action hero; he's inexperienced, underprepared, and easily led, and does a number of foolish things. (I did think the author went a little overboard with that, as Hank is constantly caught off guard -- there seems to be no one who can't get the drop on him, from a prisoner with three cops holding him to a nine-year-old boy.) Hank gets in debates with interviewees and fellow cops about the value of what he's doing -- why bother, after all, when the world will end in six months? Hank's answer (unconsciously echoing Saint Benedict, who said "Whether we live forever or die tomorrow does not affect righteousness") is that when we stop maintaining the rule of law, society is over -- giving up would, in effect, end the world ahead of time. I liked it.

The Nobel Prize Lecture -- Bob Dylan

The only requirement of winning a Nobel prize is that you have to make a speech. Honestly most laureates treat it like unwanted homework: show up, prattle out something that sounds like it was written over the weekend because it was, take the prize, and go home. Some take it more seriously: Faulkner's speech was essentially his thoughts on the meaning of life and the value and responsibility of the artist. Dylan clearly took it very seriously. He delivered it eight months after the award was announced, and he seems to have spent all of those eight months thinking deeply about the connection of songs to literature. He begins with a story about seeing Buddy Holly right before he died, and how he felt a sort of mystic transference between them; he explains how Holly wove three strands of music (country ballads, rock and roll, and rhythm and blues) into one tapestry of his own. He goes on to explain that when he was first exposed to great music he already had a foundation, a way of looking at the world, that he derived from reading, and he goes into depth on three books in particular (Moby-Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and the Odyssey) and how the themes of those three books wove themselves into his music. He closes by retelling the story of how Odysseus visited the underworld and met Achilles, who said that his choice of a short but glorious life instead of a long and contented one was wrong, and given the choice over again he'd choose to be alive. I think he's saying that the books he read are alive in him and in his music, and that's the connection he's been thinking about. Like a lot of Dylan's work it's not really abridgeable and I'd encourage you to read the whole thing. After I read it I found out that Dylan had made a recording of it, reading the speech aloud over quiet jazz piano, and I've listened to it a half dozen times, and really, go find it online and listen. It's beautiful.

Shoplifting From American Apparel -- Tao Lin

More of a mood piece than a novel. The Guardian review -- quoted in a blurb -- says it's "stripped of novelistic bullshit" until "nothing remains but attitude". I'd call that pretty accurate; that could make for an enjoyable read, except that the attitude seems to be just "Fuck everything." I didn't really like it.

*Dr. Bowdler's Legacy -- Noel Perrin

A book about the fad for "cleaning up" parts of books some people found unsuitable, which was not a concern anyone at all seemed to have before the 19th century. It all kicked off with Bowdler's publication of a "Family Shakespeare", with every reference to sex taken out. (It actually appears to have been mainly the work of his sister.) It got stricter and stricter as new editions came out, gradually dropping all references to pregnancy or childbirth, then all mention of any body parts whatever. (Perrin notes a good number of dirty jokes that survived in every edition, apparently because none of the Bowdlers understood them.) Other publishers picked up the idea and started putting out their own "cleaned-up" editions; these were originally known, appropriately, as "castrated" editions, but eventually that got changed to "expurgated" or some other euphemism -- so even bowdlerization was bowdlerized! Perrin points out that none of these publishers stopped printing the uncut originals, they just came out with an alternate version some people found more acceptable -- they were mainly used in schools, which have always been pretty vulnerable to the sort of stay-at-home parent who has nothing better to do than worry that the kids at school will be turned into perverts because they read the word "belly" in Balzac. The fad peaked around World War II, with severely cut editions that even left out any scene where children talked back to their parents, before everyone seemed to get sick of it and it sort of died out. The last edition of Bowdler's Shakespeare came out in the 1950s and it didn't sell. It's easy to feel superior to the sort of people who wanted these castrated editions, but I find myself doing essentially the same thing, though for different "unsuitable" subjects. I skip over some passages when I'm reading aloud to my godchildren, and sometimes I even change the text -- like when I'm reading them a book where there are Chinese characters that speak in ridiculous "bloken Engrish", I don't do the dialect and just rephrase what they say. Although P.G. Wodehouse is one of my favorite authors, I wouldn't read a lot of his earlier stuff to children because of the books' casual racism and the heroes' constant use of racial slurs. A couple years ago I needed to paint one wall of my house, and I decided to put on some stand-up comedy that I could listen to through the window while I worked. I was stuck about what to listen to, though, because my neighbors on that side are an interracial gay couple, and it occurred to me that I could hardly think of any stand-up routine where the comic doesn't say "faggot" or "nigger". So I don't suppose I have any room to criticize the Bowdlers. Not that that's going to stop me.

The Great Train Robbery -- Michael Crichton

I read this about ten years ago, and then saw the movie, which I liked. I ran across it at the Boulder Library book sale and decided to read it again. It's a heist story, lively and exciting, based on the real-life robbery of gold bullion from a moving train in England in 1855. It's really an "inspired-by-true-events" story, as most of it is made up to add drama; in real life, for example, the thieves got hold of the keys to the safes by waiting for the station clerks to go to lunch and then just walking in to the empty office in broad daylight and copying them; in the book Crichton gingers things up by turning it into a daring nighttime raid with armed guards and split-second timing. All the rest of the story is similarly embroidered, so that what was actually accomplished quietly through bribery and taking advantage of institutional carelessness is turned into a thrilling nail-biter involving fake corpses, caged leopards, prison breaks, and a daring run across the top of a moving train. In what must be deliberate irony, Crichton -- who presents the whole story as if it were fact -- spends quite a lot of time talking about the social implications of the crime and the Victorian fascination with the "master criminal", although the actual theft was pedestrian, if bold, and the Napoleon-of-crime stuff only happened in Crichton's imagination. He even puts in a few paragraphs at the beginning about how the idea that "crime doesn't pay" is wishful thinking, and then presents the story as a wild ride where the criminal genius escapes with the loot, although in fact everyone was caught and they all went to prison. It was fun.

The Poems of Saint John of the Cross -- James Frederick Nims, translator

John of the Cross was a leader of the Counter-Reformation and a close associate of Saint Teresa of Avila, and because of this he was imprisoned in Toledo by the anti-reform Carmelites and kept on bread and water in a cell too small to lie down in. To keep himself occupied he composed spiritual poetry in his head, and he wrote it down later after his escape. He wrote in Spanish; he came from a family of poor weavers and didn't have the education to be able to compose in Latin, and in any case the formal intricacy of Latin verse wasn't well suited to memorization. He modeled his verses on peasant folk songs, which retained a strong Moorish influence, with a repetitive structure and reinforcing middle-rhymes that let him retain dozens of stanzas in his memory. The most prominent is the Spiritual Canticle, a long poem that could be looked at as a very loose adaptation of the Song of Songs (at that time translating Scripture into the vernacular was forbidden.) The Song of Songs is a celebration of sexual love, but John retold it as a dialogue between a bride and groom, representing the Church and Christ, all about the ineffable union of humanity with God. The others are generally shorter pieces of mystical poetry, on such subjects as the unknowability of God and the "dark night of the soul", by which he meant the journey the soul takes toward God, likening it to a traveller walking through unfathomable darkness on the way to an unknown destination, whose only guide is faith. My copy is a dual-language edition, with the original and the translation on facing pages, which was nice. I read the original aloud (when I was by myself!) and I found it very affecting.

Too Much Happiness -- Alice Munro

A collection of dark stories. I'm not sure if they're technically noir, but certainly you always feel right from the start that the worst is sure to happen. Most of them deal with adults living with the consequences of something bad that happened in their past, with Munro gradually revealing key elements so that we have to reassess what happened several times (just as the characters must have had to reassess their pasts as they grew older.) Like, the story of the girl whose brother drowned as a child is made much worse when we find that her stepfather didn't go and try to save him -- and even worse when, much later, the stepfather explains matter-of-factly that it was snowing and he didn't have shoes on, and he clearly thinks she's unjustly critical. Another story slowly fills in the detail of a grown woman's terrible secret: that once at summer camp another camper drowned -- and she and another girl saw him go under and didn't tell the camp staff, who might have saved him -- and he was a slow kid, one of a group who came to the camp from a halfway house, and the two girls were sure he was always staring at them -- and in fact the girls had thrown him into the deeper water to get him away from them. I can't exactly call it a horror story, but it was horrifying. A good book.

The King of Vodka -- Linda Himelstein

A book about the founding of the Smirnoff vodka company. I wasn't really into it. There was nothing very interesting about the Smirnov family, and I wondered if the book was commissioned by the Smirnoff company, since otherwise I don't know why the author would want to write it. Nearly nothing is known about the life of Pyotr Smirnov, so most of the first half of the book is the author constructing what might have happened -- for example, she gives a description of the young Pyotr's journey from his little back-country village to Moscow, adding in a quick aside that there are no records of this journey and the whole thing is imagined based on records of journeys other people took around that time. The whole book is like that. The second half is largely given to long descriptions of the pointless infighting among Smirnov's children and last wife after he died. There's some dispute even now about who should really own the brand name and logo, so I suppose the book might be intended to reinforce the legitimacy of the status quo. It can't have been a passion project.

Beyond the Fringe -- Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore

A transcript of the London version of the stage show. My copy is an anniversary edition, including interviews with the cast; I was surprised to see that Alan Bennett doesn't think the material has aged well, and the only part he still likes is the vicar's sermon. The show changed over time, but it still got repetitious, and to keep each other on their toes the cast would do ridiculous things during the show; for example, Dudley Moore once pretended to drop dead during a sketch and Peter Cook just picked him up and then walked on and off the rest of the show with Moore slung over his shoulder. Another time Peter Cook's wife had a baby and Jonathan Miller, without telling Cook beforehand, carried the baby on stage without making any reference to it. Dad loved this show and even Mom thought it was funny.

Frozen Assets -- P.G. Wodehouse

One of his most involved farces, really funny and satisfying. Our hero is Jerry, who works for Wodehouse's perennial angry tycoon, Lord Tilbury. On vacation in Paris, Jerry meets Kay, who needs help finding her missing brother, Biff. It turns out that Biff is an old pal of Jerry's, and Jerry correctly predicts he's off boozing. Having fallen in love with Kay at first sight, Jerry goes back to  London, where he finds Biff, who's just found out he's inherited a huge fortune from his godfather, on the condition that he stay out of legal trouble until he's thirty. Biff's all in favor of Jerry pursuing Kay, and he himself, buoyed by his good fortune, sets out to win back his former fiancee, who happens to be Lord Tilbury's niece. It so happens that Lord Tilbury was the brother of Biff's godfather and expected to inherit himself; he hardly needs the money but he's super greedy. Luckily for him, when Biff got the telegram announcing his inheritance, he exuberantly shared the news with the waiter who brought it; coincidentally the waiter is the uncle of Tilbury's secretary, so Tilbury, learning about the will's condition, hires a private eye to get Biff drunk and encourage him to get in a fight with a cop. Jerry, knowing Biff won't be able to stay out of trouble even for the two weeks until his thirtieth birthday, puts Biff up at his own apartment and then steals his pants so he can't go anywhere. This leads to a terrific running gag where one visitor after another comes to the apartment, gets his pants stolen, and has to lie in wait for the next visitor and steal his pants in turn, and so on. Naturally it all ends with Tilbury thwarted, Jerry engaged to Kay, and Biff reunited with his fiancee and safely out of trouble. I loved it.

Nevada -- Imogene Binnie

A bleak story about a transgender woman named Maria who, overwhelmed by the end of her relationship with a woman she didn't really love anyway, steals her ex-girlfirend's car and sets out from Brooklyn for Nevada, for no reason other than that she's never been there. On the way she meets a teenage store clerk named James and immediately realizes -- though I wasn't clear how -- that he's someone who wants to transition to female, and (possibly to give herself something to feel good about) she appoints herself his transition mentor, practically kidnapping him to go along with her to Reno. Maria's really kind of unlikeable, and I was starting to dislike the book because of it until we got a couple asides that let me know the author had a clear-eyed view of Maria: Maria's ex sitting in a bar and coldly dissecting Maria's exasperating character flaws for one, and for another a great scene when Maria, after splitting with her girlfriend, wants to crash at a friend's place, and the friend just unloads on her about dropping out of her life for two years and then suddenly wanting to be buddies again when she needs somewhere to stay. James isn't really any better; he's a small-town loser who does nothing but smoke unbelievable amounts of weed, but at least he belatedly realizes that Maria isn't going to do him any good, so he leaves her behind to work out his own problems. It was kind of a squalid book, actually.

The Baseball Codes -- Jason Turbow

This starts out as an investigation into the origin of the "unwritten rules" of baseball and why they seem so much more persistent than equivalents from other sports; it opens with an anecdote about the famous fight between Nolan Ryan and Robin Ventura, in which Ventura explains that he didn't even want to charge the mound but he was afraid of what the older players on his own team might do to him later if he didn't. That could have been interesting, but the book soon degenerates into fawning portrait-of-a-tough-guy prose, standard glorification of stupidity and stubbornness right out of the 1970s sports-writing playbook. "Joe Schmo knew his straight-ahead, hard-nosed approach wasn't fashionable any more, but he didn't know any other way to be," that sort of thing. I gagged on it for a while and then gave up and threw the book away.

The Call of Cthulhu -- H.P. Lovecraft

A collection of Lovercraft's weird-tales stories about the terrifying Old Ones, incomprehensible god-like beings that lived on Earth unimaginably long ago and whose remaining traces are lodestones for madness and evil. Lovecraft generally got himself out of having to describe them by saying that any contact with them drove human minds insane; though he does describe cultist statues of the loathesome Cthulhu, who lies sleeping under the ocean until the stars align, as a sort of combination of an octopus, a dragon, and a misshapen human. (Lovecraft, a solid 19th-century racist, inevitably describes the human cultists as "lower types" or "mixed-blooded".) Lovecraft's writing is often somewhat clumsy and wooden, but the stories still communicate nameless dread pretty effectively: "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Colour Out of Space", and "The Dunwich Horror" are all very good. One that really illustrates the problems with Lovecraft is "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". Looked at one way, it's a horror story about a New England port town that's secretly home to a mad cult that makes human sacrifices to the terrible sea-dwelling Deep Ones; the cult has murdered those who opposed it and is slowly filling the town with human-Deep One hybrids in preparation for an assault on the land. Looked at another way, it's an awful racist parable about the dangers of white-black intermarriage. You can't appreciate the one without facing the other.

Black Feminist Thought -- Patricia Hill Collins

A dense book about the position of black women in the United States, and how there has to be a unique black feminism because black women are generally excluded from mainstream feminism, which is white-centered. One of her theses is that black women can only look for support from each other, because no one else is willing to put their interests at the center: black men, particularly, have demanded that black women subordinate their own interests to supporting black men in the struggle against white domination. Collins talks about how Anita Hill faced powerful resistance from the black community when she spoke out against Clarence Thomas, because she was expected to support a powerful black man regardless of what he'd done to her. One important thing I got out of it: there's a long examination of the question of ontology -- how do we know what we know, and more importantly what tools do we use to establish certainty? It had never even occurred to me that anyone might not agree that the scientific method is always the proper way to determine the truth. But Collins argues against positivism itself as devaluing the lived experience of people who actually suffer under oppression. She makes a good argument. I was always taught in school that the rule of the sciences is nihil humanum -- "no humanity". (You know they mean it seriously because they say it in Latin.) The process of collecting data and deliberately stripping it of all human context in order to obtain objective results is undeniably the proper approach for deciding which vaccines work against which diseases, but now that I think of it, maybe it's not that great for deciding what public policies we should enact to alleviate injustice. You know how a black person has to work twice as hard and live twice as uprightly as a white person at the same job? Collins is an academic, and in order to be taken seriously by other academics she has to write twice as academically. The content is interesting but the writing is so incredibly clinical and involved that reading it was a real chore.

Meddling Kids -- Edgar Cantero

I liked this. It's a takeoff on the four-kids-and-their-dog-investigate-mysteries type of story, more Famous Five than Scooby-Doo because the kids are pre-teens. (Although the terrain they investigate does include the River Zoinx.) We meet the kids as disaffected, directionless adults: a dropout, an escaped con, and a mental patient (the fourth, the oldest and leader, committed suicide and is haunting the mental patient.) We gradually learn that this is all fallout from their last case, ten or twelve years before, where they investigated a mysterious abandoned mansion on a creepy island. None of them really remember what happened, or agree about the sequence of what they do remember, but it ended their detective careers. They finally agree that none of them will be able to move on with their lives unless they return to the Oregon town where it all happened. It turns out that what they thought was a big con to scare people away in order to grab mining rights was in fact a cover for a wizard who's trying to raise the Great Old Ones and destroy the world, and the kids were so overwhelmed by the nameless horrors they saw that their minds broke. So where the four plucky kids failed, the three traumatized adults (and one ghost) have to succeed. It was both funny and genuinely exciting, which is pretty impressive for a parody.

Scurvy -- Jonathan Lamb

I liked about half of this. On the one hand it gave a good explanation of what's actually happening in a case of scurvy; ascorbic acid is involved in an amazing number of bodily processes! It's a co-factor in the production of enzymes that make collagen, for example, so without it the body can't build connective tissue, meaning old scars reopen and teeth fall out, and blood vessels become fragile, leading to internal bleeding and an appearance of heavy bruising. The body also needs ascorbic acid to make dopamine and serotonin, so without it you eventually sink into lethargy and indifference. I was also interested to learn that the fact that the juice of citrus fruits is effective against scurvy was discovered and then forgotten over and over again. Things were confused because until the twentieth century no one really had a clear idea of the distinction between a treatment and a preventive; it wasn't generally understood that scurvy is not a disease -- the presence of what should be absent -- but a deficiency -- the absence of what should be present. When theories about deficiency were proposed, many physicians angrily pronounced them impossible. On the other hand, the author also wanted to produce a work of literary criticism, and spent quite a long time on things like trying to show that all the characters in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" had scurvy, and that the image of Death as a blackened skeleton is actually a picture of the internal bleeding of scurvy. That might have been more interesting had it been better written, but we'll never know.

Lost in Yonkers -- Neil Simon

A play from the nineties, brilliant but depressing, about a German family living just outside the Bronx during World War II. The main characters are two teenage boys, whose mother has just died; their father, a salesman, has to take a higher-paying traveling job to pay off the high medical bills -- also to get out of town, since he borrowed a lot of the money from a gangster. He leaves the boys with their stone-faced, bitter grandmother, who at first refuses to take them in, until her slow-witted daughter threatens to move out and leave her alone. The play follows the boys trying to adjust to their new home, dealing with their tyrannical grandmother, their slow aunt and her romantic tangles, their worries that their father is working himself into a heart attack, and the arrival of their uncle Louie, a minor crook on the lam, and the fights he gets into with all the others. It was well-told. I wouldn't read it again but I might see it on stage if I got the chance.

Sourdough -- Robin Sloan

I had high hopes for this because I liked her previous book a good deal, but this one never engaged me. It's sort of a parody of the Bay Area foodie culture and the work-yourself-to-death atmosphere of tech startups, but neither really hit home for me. The hero is an engineer named Lois, who works at a San Francisco company that builds robot arms; she finds her work unfulfilling and gets solace from a small food delivery place, run by two brothers of a made-up ethnicity, who make extraordinarily good spicy soup and sourdough bread. When the brothers return to Europe they leave her their supernatural singing sourdough starter and she starts baking bread as a hobby, making unusual bread that has smiling faces in the crust. She starts selling it at a market in Alameda, getting caught up in a rivalry between new foodie entrepeneurs and an old-guard curmudgeon who's obviously meant to be Alice Waters. Lois quits her job to bake bread and out of the blue realizes she's in love with one of the brothers, with whom she's been exchanging emails. (I can't stress enough how nothing in the story led up to that.) An unscrupulous foodie/techie steals the magic sourdough starter for nefarious reasons that don't hold up to scrutiny, but I didn't really care because I never cared about the rivalry, or Lois, or anything in the book, really. I did appreciate the realism when Lois single-handedly solves her tech company's most important problem and gets no recognition whatsoever.

The Fire Next Time -- James Baldwin

The definitive race-relations book of the sixties. I read it in college but I think I appreciated it more this time. Baldwin emphasizes that racism is not a localized, easily isolated problem, but is systemic throughout America, part of the fabric of American life itself, and that's why no one can ever stop and be satisfied with civil-rights legislation; the only way forward is for all Americans to reform their own lives and attitudes, which will require unflinching introspection. This leads him into religion in America; he was an evangelical minister as a teenager, and only later became disillusioned with his church and with organized Christianity itself, which he viewed as corrupted, serving mainly to advance the selfish goals of its leaders under a hypocritical cloak of righteousness. He was disappointed, too, by the members of the Nation of Islam he met; he thought they aimed at unnecessarily narrow ends, and he also thought that many American blacks were drawn to the Nation of Islam as an outlet for the rage their lives filled them with. Baldwin thought that, hard as it is, white and black Americans have no choice but to transcend their own anger, because the alternative is mass violence, which Baldwin thought was inherently bad no matter who was doing the dying. A great book.

The Mahabharata -- Carole Satyamurti, translator

This is one of the two national epics of India (the other is the Ramayana.) It goes back to somewhere around 800 or 900 BC, probably, and it's incredibly long -- like, ten times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. As far as I know there's no English translation of the entire thing, which isn't surprising considering how many variant readings there are; I've seen a picture of a complete Sanskrit edition and it takes up two entire bookshelves. This edition probably includes about a fifth of the full text and it's still a thousand pages long. The story is actually pretty simple: The five Pandava brothers get cheated out of their inheritance in a rigged dice game by their cousins, the Kauravas; the Pandavas go into exile, and at the end of the agreed term the Kauravas break their promise to let them return, so they go to war, culminating in the titanic battle of Kurukshetra, in which nearly everyone on both sides is killed; the survivors eventually die and everyone's reunited in the afterlife. What makes it all so convoluted is the huge number of characters, all of whose life stories are told in detail going back several generations, and the many digressions on philosophy, religion, and the right way to live your life. Parts of it are treated by Hindus as genuine religious scripture; the most famous section is found at the beginning of Book Six, when the hero Arjuna, facing the battlefield of Kurukshetra, is appalled at the idea of causing the deaths of so many people, many of whom are related to him. His charioteer, the god Krishna, preaches him a sermon now known as the Bhagavad-Gita ("Song of God") in which he instructs Arjuna that "Right action is that which is done without selfish attachment to the outcome." The story is full of action and exciting fight scenes, especially the great battle itself, which has both vivid one-on-one duels and tremendous clashes of armies, and also several characters that have the use of "celestial weapons", basically magic spells that they've acquired through asceticism; these wreak cataclysmic destruction through the hosts, leaving millions dead. There's also fascinatingly weird characters, like the sage Vyasa, who is composing the story aloud while simultaneously being a character in it, and the regent Bhishma, who is hit by so many arrows that when he finally falls the arrow shafts suspend his body off the ground; he lies there for months, giving his grandchildren lectures on good government, before dying. It was a lot of fun to read.

*The Voice of the Dolphins -- Leo Szilard

A collection of short stories about cold war problems. They're fairly dogmatic and wooden, more interesting as a picture of what Szilard thought about than as fiction. The title story is a long fable about scientists using pretended discoveries about dolphin intelligence to manipulate world leaders into letting the scientists shape their policies. The most interesting is the story where Szilard imagines a US defeat in a third world war and describes his own arrest and trial by the Soviets on charges of war crimes. 

Dear Life -- Alice Munro

Her most recent collection, I think. It had a lot of powerful stories. There was a great story about a woman who meets a man on a train and has a two-hour-stand while her daughter is asleep, only to return to her cabin and find her daughter missing; the panic attack she goes through before realizing her daughter is only in the bathroom was wrenching. I also liked "Corrie", a betrayal story, about a woman who has a long affair with a married man named Howard; early on they're seen by a housemaid named Lillian, and for decades the independently-wealthy Corrie pays blackmail twice a year. When Lillian eventually dies, Corrie realizes there never was any blackmail and Howard has been keeping the money himself all along. The emotional climax is Corrie's long night of deciding whether to tell Howard she knows. There was a heartbreaking story about a woman driving around trying to find a retirement home, just to look at it; she gets lost and is afraid to ask anyone for help for fear that they'll think she's losing her marbles. At the end we find the whole story is just a confused memory of the days before she had Alzheimer's and came to the home. That one hit hard.

Dilvish, the Damned -- Roger Zelazny

I last read this in high school, and I remembered the overall shape of it, but rereading it I was surprised to find that a lot of it is terrible. It's a collection of fantasy short stories about a soldier named Dilvish who was turned to a statue by an evil wizard, and after spending two hundred years in Hell he's returned to life to get revenge. (Hilarity ensues!) (No, not really.) The first few stories must have been written when Zelazny was just starting out, because they're just awful -- the prose is tone-deaf and all over the place, with ridiculous overuse of the past emphatic tense ("He did draw his sword") right next to someone using the phrase "dietary requirements". The later stories aren't as crummy, but I still wouldn't recommend the book.

The Changing Land -- Roger Zelazny

A novel about Dilvish finally getting his revenge, written later than the stories, when Zelazny was in his highly experimental period. The main scenes are set outside the castle of the bad guy; there's a strange otherdimensional being inside the castle, and it's having a fit of madness, and reality around the castle keeps changing in reflection of it, so Dilvish and some other characters (who are heading to the castle for reasons of their own) have to negotiate a landscape where not only the terrain but the laws of nature change kaleidoscopically from minute to minute. Clearly those scenes were the whole reason Zelazny wrote the book, since all the rest of the novel is flat and kind of pointless. I didn't enjoy it much.

Barmy in Wonderland -- P.G. Wodehouse

A theater farce, pretty funny but not really one of my favorites, I'm not sure why, unless it was that the hero is Wodehouse's only character named Phipps, and his nickname is Barmy, British slang for "dimwit". Barmy is a hotel clerk who makes friends with a hotel guest named Potter, a famous actor; when Potter gets drunk and burns part of the hotel down, the owner, unable to get back at the famous Potter, vents his spleen by firing Barmy. Barmy goes to New York and falls in love at first sight with a woman he meets by chance in the street; when he goes to Potter's theatrical agency for a visit he finds that the same woman is coincidentally the secretary there. He foolishly invests his inheritance in Potter's show, and the rest of the story is the agony of following a bad show around the boonies, frantically rewriting every night in the hopes of not bombing when they open in New York. Wodehouse knew everything there was to know about that, so the story's pretty engaging. Naturally Barmy makes the show a success by accident and makes enough money to marry the secretary and buy his own hotel.  

The Tsar of Love and Techno -- Anthony Marra

I picked this up for the title and wound up liking it a lot. It's a collection of stories that, in aggregate, form a novel covering several generations of a Russian family from Stalinist times to the present, though the characters are generally unaware of their family connections because of various purges and arrests. A lot of the action is set in a mining town north of the Arctic Circle, a town so polluted you can mine the snowdrifts for nickel (I looked it up and this is actually true.) Several of the stories deal with the ripples of one event -- a Russian soldier killed by a land mine in Chechnya -- reaching out to shake the lives of family, lover, neighbors, and strangers. There's a thematic arc that stretches through the book about art, censorship, and betrayal. I thought it was really good.

Hiero the Tyrant -- Xenophon

An imaginary dialogue between Hiero of Syracuse and the great poet Simonides, who lived in the fifth century BC, five or six generations before Xenophon. It's a debate on whether a tyrant is happier and better off than a common man, although it's not really a "debate" because Hiero gets the last word on everything. The structure basically goes:
SIMONIDES: Well, Hiero, certainly you must be better off than an ordinary man in such and such a respect.
HIERO: How can you say that, Simonides? Consider this list of reasons why I'm actually much worse off than any commoner in that respect.
SIMONIDES: Well, you know best. What about this other respect?
...And so on. I wasn't impressed with it. Of course I'm biased because Xenophon was an anti-democrat and I oppose all his political principles.

Sula -- Toni Morrison

A novel set in a black community in Ohio, concerning three generations of the Peace family: Eva, her daughter Hannah, and Hannah's daughter Sula. (The men in their lives are unreliable and rarely present.)  Sula, growing up in the early 20th century, has a close friend, Nel; but their lives are broken up by a childhood accident: while playing with a smaller boy, swinging him around in circles, Sula loses her grip and the boy falls and rolls into a river and drowns. The girls keep it secret but after that their lives go in different directions. Hannah worries about her relationship with Sula, contrasting it with her own relationship with Eva, who brought her up in iron-hard poverty even worse than the hardscrabble lives they lead now, and who in consequence appears incapable of any kind of affection. However, when Hannah's clothes catch fire while she's burning trash outdoors, Eva leaps from a second-story window to try to save her while Sula just watches from the porch. We never get Sula's viewpoint so we're left to wonder if Sula just froze, or if Eva's belief that Sula just watched because she thought it was interesting is correct. I don't know how far we should agree with Eva, though; she's clearly brutalized by her upbringing and we also see her rise from her sickbed to smother her worthless son to death with a pillow as he lies drunk. Sula leaves town and is absent from the book for a long stretch, returning ten years later and establishing herself as the local "bad woman", having affairs recklessly with men and women, including Nel's husband. When Sula dies the town will have nothing to do with her, leaving the white people to take care of her body, but strangely the community slowly falls apart afterwards, perhaps missing their united front in dislike of Sula. Only Nel is left to take care of Eva, who dies long afterwards, telling Nel on her deathbed that she knew about the boy who fell in the river; after Eva's funeral Nel goes to visit Sula's grave and cries for the loss of her childhood friendship. It was a pretty harrowing read, but it's a good book.

No-No Boy -- John Okada

A novel set in Seattle just after WWII. The hero is Ichiro, a second-generation Japanese-American, who has just been released from prison. In the internment camps, all the men had to answer a long questionnaire; the last two questions asked if you would renounce allegiance to the Emperor of Japan, and if you would be willing to fight in the US Army against any opponent. Many of them feared (with good reason) that the questionnaire was a trick, and if they answered yes to the first they'd be accused of hiding a secret allegiance to Japan, while if they answered yes to the second they'd be drafted on the spot. Men who answered no to both questions (like Ichiro) were known as "no-no boys" and sent to prison. The war over, Ichiro has been released and returned home, where he is shunned by whites for being Japanese and spat on by Japanese for refusing to serve, thus (they argue) bringing the loyalty of all Japanese into question. Ichiro's own brother lures him out of a bar to get beaten up by a crowd of Japanese veterans. It's all the worse because Ichiro's mother is unshakably convinced that the Japanese won the war, and that all the news is just American propaganda; she expects victorious Japanese warships to appear in the harbor any minute, and she throws letters from her relatives in Japan asking for money and food into the trash, insisting they must be forgeries. Ichiro has opportunities to leave Seattle and start his life over, but he's paralyzed with self-doubt about not having served, unsure if he refused the draft out of conviction or because he didn't dare oppose his domineering mother.  It's a depressing book, but well-written.

The Power -- Naomi Alderman

An SF novel, set in the present day, whose conceit is that a human mutation results in women, and only women, becoming able to generate electric charges out of their bodies, like electric eels. The story works better in macro than in micro: that is, I absolutely accepted the book's premise that the contemporary power structure couldn't change peacefully -- that men just wouldn't compromise their economic and political power to share it with newly physically powerful women, so there would ultimately have to be a war. The actual details of the process I found unconvincing -- several of the characters do things that would require immensely more energy than one human body could possibly generate, for example; and I don't believe any human society could ever be rebuilt after the kind of world-wide catastrophic war that we're capable of, five thousand years later or not -- but the book is a socio-political allegory, it's not trying to be hard SF, so that doesn't matter so much. I feel like the whole book was written for the sake of the scene where a woman of the matriarchal society of the post-war far future gives a condescending speech about evolutionary biology to a man, explaining why a female-dominated society is the inevitable result of historical and biological necessity. That was a good scene. I didn't like the story's view of human nature, though; without exception, all the women, after realizing their new power, immediately become abusers. Suburban girls immediately form rape gangs. The politician character immediately admits that her goal in pursuing office is not to promote the public good but to savor the joy of defeating her enemies. And so on. These aren't consequences of societal pressures -- all these women grew up in the society we have now, which explicitly encourages them to be passive and peaceful. So if their behavior changes literally overnight, their violent aggression can only be an inherent part of their character, which they've always wanted to exercise and were only prevented from doing so by lack of power. The men, too, find themselves enthusiastically drawn to the service of powerful women. The book doesn't just imply, but explicitly argues, that the real essence of human nature is for those without power to worship those who have it, and for those who have power to wield it unrestrainedly for their own gratification. All I can say is, if that's a true picture of humanity, then humanity doesn't deserve to exist.

Countdown City -- Ben H. Winters

The Last Policeman didn't need a sequel, but I suppose the idea was pitched to the publisher as a three-book deal, so here we are. It's now midsummer (the world will be destroyed by an asteroid in October, remember) and the sequel problem arises immediately: we already had the why-keep-working-in-the-face-of-apocalypse debate in the first book, and it can't really be rehashed now because Hank doesn't have a job any more, having been pensioned off when the police department stopped operating. He's filling in time doing a favor for a woman named Martha, who baby-sat him as a child. Martha's husband Brett has left without telling her, and though it's obviously not foul play-- Brett packed before he went and arranged with some local scavengers to keep Martha supplied with food and water until the world ends -- Martha refuses to believe she's been abandoned and guilt-trips Hank into looking for Brett. At the same time Hank is trying to find out what happened to his younger sister, who's gone off following her conspiracy-theory dream of a secret plot to avoid the asteroid strike. There's no good reason for Hank to do either of these things, and the author knows it, so he has Hank turn directly to the audience and say "This is what I do because this is who I am," which is just the author admitting "I'm contractually obligated to write this book so I need Hank to do something, and since I wound up the story at the end of the first book there's nothing he can do that makes sense, so just roll with it." Hank rides his bike around New Hampshire looking for clues, and spends some time at UNH, which has become a kind of hippie anarchist commune, and where he finds Brett's trail (he stole a rifle there) and also people who knew his sister (they have a connection to the ramshackle collection of nodes that's what's left of the World Wide Web.) Continuing a theme from the first book, Hank has no survival instinct at all -- at least a dozen people jump him, including the same guy three different times, and he's taken completely off guard every single time. I don't believe Hank could really have graduated from the police academy. Hank does track down Brett, and then we get some explanations that I'll skip because they're stupid, and then Hank gets shot and is suddenly rescued by his sister in a helicopter, which I thought at first was a hallucination but wasn't. He gets back to Concord to find that the water mains have stopped working and order has broken down for good, and some former cop friends take him out of the burning city to await the end on a farm in western Massachusetts. It was forgettable.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold -- John le Carré

The book that made Le Carré's career: a Cold War drama, well-written and suspenseful. It's the story of Alec Leamas, a British spy in early-60s Berlin whose network of agents is wiped out by a Soviet spymaster named Mundt. Recalled to England, Leamas meets with "Control", the head of MI6, who asks him to volunteer for a poison-pill operation to destroy Mundt. Leamas is officially disgraced and relegated to make-work duty in the budget office, where failed agents are put on the shelf. He starts drinking and gets in fights, eventually losing his place; he gets a job in a library, where he meets a Socialist organizer named Liz who takes him to Party meetings, which he openly scorns. He gets in a drunken fight at a grocery and is sent to prison, and upon release he gets recruited by a Soviet spy. He's taken to East Germany, where he gives a long description of his work in Berlin and at the budget office that's tailored to make it appear that Mundt is a double agent in the pay of the British. The interrogator, a man named Fiedler, takes the bait and brings Mundt to trial; but at the trial, Liz unexpectedly appears, and from her naive and well-meaning testimony the court concludes that Leamas is a plant, and Mundt is exonerated while Fiedler is arrested. When guards connive at their escape later that night, Leamas realizes what's happened and explains it to Liz: Mundt really is a double agent, and the intelligent Fiedler was too close to figuring it out, so Control sent Leamas, unknowingly, to save Mundt and destroy Fiedler. The idealistic Liz, appalled, protests that Fiedler is a good man while Mundt is a brutal ex-Nazi; Leamas harshly tells her that "Yesterday Mundt was my enemy; today he's my friend," and coldly reminds her that the plan was wholly in accordance with her own espoused Communist ideology of the unimportance of the individual. The guards look the other way while the two of them scale the Berlin Wall, but just as they reach the top Liz is shot and falls to her death, a last-minute piece of insurance by the careful Mundt. Leamas hesitates on the Wall and then climbs back down to stand by Liz's body, where he's shot and killed. I think Le Carré's point is that a basically decent man like Leamas can only accept the pragmatic amorality of the espionage service for just so long.

*The Captive -- Marcel Proust

The fifth volume of Remembrance of Things Past, and a really nasty turn to the story. I had to keep taking breaks from it. I don't know what Proust intended to do, but what he actually did was to write the story of an abusive relationship as told by the abuser. Albertine is now living with the narrator, who grows ever more obsessive, effectively keeping her prisoner in the house and only letting her out accompanied by servants in his pay and followed by hired spies. The drawn-out psychological torture he subjects Albertine to is appalling -- endlessly interrogating her on every detail of where she's been and who she's seen and what someone said to her at a hotel fifteen years ago, constructing complicated falsehoods complete with invented reports from imaginary witnesses as he desperately tries to get her to trip on her words, all the while marvelling indignantly at what an incredibly accomplished liar she is. He's convinced that she cleverly suborns every servant and spy and that every second she's out of his sight she's carrying on lesbian affairs with a staggering number of women, all of them laughing at how easily fooled the narrator is. Like all abusers the narrator considers himself the injured party, and excuses his disgusting behavior by imagining that all the torment he deals out to Albertine is only his just punishment for her crimes. There are long scenes where we return to the dinner-parties of the spiteful Madame Verdurin; the narrator observes her cruel manipulation of the musician Morel, feeding him lies in order to get him to publicly rebuke and humiliate his lover Charlus, and although he admires Charlus the narrator does nothing to help, although I can think of a dozen things he could have done to interrupt what he clearly saw unfolding. The narrator's a real piece of shit, honestly. The only good part was the ending, where Albertine decides she's finally had enough and leaves, driving the narrator into a helpless frenzy. I was kind of hoping he'd have an apoplectic fit and drop dead, but no such luck.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy -- John le Carré

A very good book. I saw the BBC version of it on "Mystery!" when I was a kid, and though I remembered nothing of it, I still have a strong mental image of Alec Guinness as George Smiley. It's set in 1973, with Smiley -- a wartime spy -- retired after the disastrous failure of a covert operation called TESTIFY threw the British intelligence apparat, nicknamed "the Circus", into disarray. Smiley is secretly approached by the government Minister who oversees the intelligence services: a Circus agent who vanished a year ago has unexpectedly gotten in contact with his former handler, also shelved after TESTIFY, and thus with the Minister. For the first time, Smiley learns TESTIFY's real purpose: "Control", the head of the Circus (now dead) was convinced that someone high-ranking at the Circus was a Soviet agent. (Le Carré coined the word "mole" to describe such a secret traitor, and it immediately became part of the real intelligence lexicon.) Control narrowed it down to five suspects (of whom Smiley was one) and created TESTIFY to find out which it was: an agent was sent to meet a Czech defector who knew the mole's identity, but it was a trap set up by the Soviet spymaster, Karla, a man of ice and Smiley's nemesis (Smiley interrogated the captured Karla soon after the war, trying to get him to defect, but Karla manipulated the exhausted Smiley into revealing more than he meant to, while giving away nothing himself, and eventually stole Smiley's cigarette lighter -- a present from his wife -- on his way to being repatriated.) Smiley, forced out of MI6 after TESTIFY, is obviously not the mole, so the Minister turns to him for help. The rest of the book is an exciting cat-and-mouse game, as Smiley gathers a small number of outsiders to lay a trap for the mole without anyone at the Circus realizing what they're doing. A terrific story.

Friend Of My Youth -- Alice Munro

One of her earlier collections; mostly stories about women with ambitions for education and their frustrations with their anti-intellectual families and communities. They all have ill-considered affairs with unsuitable men that end unhappily. I liked them but no one story really stands out for me.

The Prince and Betty -- P.G. Wodehouse

An early novel, about a rich Englishman named Scobell who decides to overthrow the democratic government of the tiny Mediterranean country of Mervo so he can build a gambling mecca there. He finds out that Mervo's former ruling family has a living descendant, a young Englishman named John Maude who has no knowledge of his ancestry. Scobell hires Maude to return and be invested as the Prince of Mervo; John, having nothing better to do, accepts. His reign involves roaming around the casinos and welcoming tourists, while Scobell's stooges run the country. He isn't troubled by this until the arrival of his old flame Betty, who coincidentally turns out to be Scobell's daughter. Having her eyes on him makes John ashamed of himself for living as a wealthy layabout and he encourages the local radicals to overthrow him and reestablish democracy, which they do. It was all right but not as funny as his later books.

Artemis -- Andy Weir

An action/suspense thriller set in a near-future base on the moon. I loved Weir's previous book so I anticipated liking this one, but I didn't, really. For the first seventy-five pages all we get is the characters explaining to each other how living in a moon colony works. No one ever seems to get irritated at having to deliver an illustrative, articulate lecture on their own society to someone who must already know about it, so maybe there's some chemical in the moonbase atmosphere that makes people enjoy unnecessary explanations? ("Expositol"?) The silliest bit was when the hero, a malcontent called Jazz -- a non-practicing Muslim who's a skilled welder but prefers to make money smuggling -- sits down and gives a capsule history of the colonization of the moon, including a lucid breakdown of the financial considerations that make everything work, to a businessman from Earth who's already spent a huge amount of his own money to come to the moon in order to pursue a specific business strategy -- a strategy that depends on the conditions found on the moon in order to be profitable -- but who somehow doesn't know what any of the regulations on the moonbase are like or even what they use for currency. It was bad writing. The action gets going when Jazz is enlisted to sabotage the colony's aluminum-manufacturing operation, in order to take control of it away from Earth-based gangsters and instead give it to a local gangster. Jazz annoyed me. I did sympathize with her life-long "potential" problem, where everyone she knows hammers on how she's not doing enough with her skill and intelligence -- they all see only what she could accomplish, so nothing she actually does accomplish will ever measure up. On the other hand I don't think that deciding "I'll turn to crime and get rich and then do nothing ever again, that'll show them" is an admirable reaction. The big caper did set up some interesting engineering problems and then provide interesting solutions for them, so that was good, but overall I thought the book was clunky; Weir spent too much effort thinking out the logistics of the moon colony and not enough thinking about the plot and dialogue.

The Honourable Schoolboy -- John le Carré

A spy story, set in 1974. George Smiley, now in charge of the Circus, has to rebuild the agency practically from scratch after it was almost destroyed by a mole during the events of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He's convinced (correctly) that the near-downfall of the Circus was choreographed by his old enemy Karla, who is now the head of the KGB's dreaded "Directorate Thirteen" and Smiley's opposite number. Smiley assembles an inner circle of the loyalists who helped him uncover the mole and sets to work reestablishing the Circus's credibility and effectiveness. He assigns his top researchers to comb through reports from the last few years, looking for anything that shows signs of having been buried or ignored -- any sign that the mole was preventing the Circus from looking into something. They dig up evidence of the Soviets moving unusual amounts of money through a complicated laundering scheme without any sign of what the money was for. Smiley reactivates our anti-hero, Jerry, a wastrel aristocrat, newspaper reporter, and off-and-on Circus agent, and sends him to follow the money trail in Hong Kong, where Smiley has noisily cleaned out and closed down the compromised Circus operation, while very quietly setting up a smaller and more secure replacement. Jerry uses coercion and blackmail to get access to confidential bank records and determines that the Soviet money is going to a powerful businessman named Ko, who is the key figure in delivering a flow of stolen British and Chinese intelligence to the KGB. With the help of the CIA, Smiley sets up a trap for Ko, goading him into breaking cover so the Circus can kidnap him and take him away for interrogation. Jerry almost sabotages the operation, having turned against the scheme out of a combination of burnout, disgust with the methods of counterintelligence, and an infatuation with Ko's girlfriend; but he fails and Ko gets grabbed. Ko winds up being taken to the US and interrogated by the CIA instead of the Circus, an apparent piece of mismanagement, but Smiley's right-hand man suspects Smiley arranged it on purpose in order to get himself out of being in charge of the Circus after having reenergized it. A good book.

You Can't Keep A Good Woman Down -- Alice Walker

A collection of short stories from before Walker went insane and started ranting about Jews and lizard people. A couple of them are probably-autobiographical stories about having affairs with fellow academics. The one I liked the best was the story of a black woman whose R&B hit is re-recorded as a rock song and made famous by a white man -- it's Elvis, obviously, but the story doesn't use his name. The original singer doesn't get any royalties, but Elvis -- shown here as a sincere but not that bright artist who doesn't understand anything about the music business, or about race privilege either, which is pretty accurate actually -- constantly buys her cars and houses and tries to promote her music. There's a great scene when the older Elvis, decades later, gets the singer on TV to sing her original version, and he just can't understand why no one appreciates her singing the way he does (it's because by "no one" he means "no white people", though he never sees that.) The singer ultimately feels sorry for Elvis, though from her point of view her music has always lived though her and the use the white music business made of it never really affected her.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage -- Alice Munro

A collection of excellent but often painful stories. The hardest was one about a retiree named Grant who, after long resistance, finally has to move his wife Fiona into assisted living because her Alzheimer's disease has made it impossible for her to continue living at home. Fiona soon forgets who Grant is and believes he's a stranger trying to interfere with her relationship with another resident, whom she imagines is a former boyfriend. When the other resident's wife removes him from the home because of money troubles, Fiona goes into a decline and Grant meets the wife to try to get her to let her husband visit Fiona. It hurt to read. There was another story about a terminally ill man who commits suicide rather than put himself and his wife through the strain of long, painful, expensive treatment, but who asks his wife to keep the fact that it was suicide a secret, because he had been fired from the high school for refusing to teach creationism in his science class, and he didn't want the school board to think they'd driven him to it. The title story was pathetic but funny, about a pair of school girls who play a spiteful prank on a lonely townswoman named Johanna, tricking her into a fake romantic correspondence with a relative of theirs named Ken on the other end of Canada (the girls write all Ken's letters themselves and steal Johanna's replies before they're sent.) Johanna quits her job and takes the train to the backwater where Ken lives, which made me think the story was going to turn really tragic, but she arrives to find Ken laid up with the flu and settles in to nurse him; by the time he recovers he's realized he's onto a good thing and they get married. I liked that one.

World of Trouble -- Ben H. Winters

This series needed a third book even less than it needed a second. This one opens only a couple weeks before the asteroid hits, and finds Hank deciding to leave the Massachusetts farm house where he and his ex-cop friends are wating for the end and set out on foot for Ohio to find out what happened to his kid sister after she flew off in a helicopter at the end of the last book. There's no good reason for him to do this, and the author just gives up and has Hank admit "I don't know why I have to do this," which is actually only the book's second-most egregious auctorial failure: Hank again gets jumped by several people, including an Amish pacifist, and he reflects on how dumb he must be to get caught flat-footed every single time. Winters apparently decided that pointing out a flaw in your own storytelling is less work than fixing it. Nothing in the story was very likely or interesting, but at least it ends with the sky lighting up as the planet-killer enters the atmosphere, so there won't be a fourth book.

*Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors -- Franz Kafka

A collection of Kafka's letters, leaving out the ones he wrote to his lovers, which have their own separate volumes. These mostly deal with his everyday life, the problems of finding enough time to write, his ever-increasing illness, and his extraordinary sensitivity to noise -- at the sanatarium, even the sound of two people having a quiet conversation two rooms away was enough to keep him awake. It was sobering to see how matter-of-factly he had to arrange things for his approaching death from tuberculosis, which dragged out over several years, and his never-failing energy in honing his work and appreciating the work of contemporaries he admired, even when he was exhausted and sick. His manager at the insurance company where he worked, who liked Kafka as a person and also appreciated him as an intelligent and valuable employee, was constantly arranging things so Kafka could take six months off work to go to a sanatarium in the mountains, which I'm glad to know.

Smiley's People -- John le Carré

The end of the Smiley-Karla duel, and a reversal of roles: Smiley attacks Karla through a human weakness, while himself abandoning his own sentimental vulnerability of attachment to his faithless wife. In 1978, a retired Russian double agent resurfaces, secretly contacting British intelligence and demanding to talk to his handler, Smiley, not knowing that Smiley is no longer with the Circus. The current staff respond slowly and the agent is murdered by the KGB. Smiley gets called in to cover things up, but he finds information the KGB assassins missed, and he patiently follows the trail to Paris, Hamburg, and Lübeck, skillfully evading both MI6 and KGB, finding sources and getting what they know out of them, and preventing another assassination, ultimately reconstructing what the agent had discovered: the Soviets had used a Russian emigré to create a false identity and background for a teenager in Switzerland, coupled with hidden funds. From the ineptness of the Soviet agents, Smiley deduces that Karla is working outside of his usual Moscow resources, suggesting that he has something to hide. Smiley eventually finds the teenager, who is Karla's illegitimate daughter, being treated at a mental institution in Bern, paid for by diverted KGB money. Smiley uses all this to get the British government to approve an off-the-books, deniable attempt to blackmail Karla. Smiley assembles a cadre of his closest former associates and uses Karla's daughter to force him to defect. There's a great scene where the defeated Karla, in disguise, crosses the bridge into West Berlin, to be rounded up by Smiley's people. He walks past the watching Smiley and, without looking at him, drops at his feet the gold lighter he stole from Smiley decades before, with Smiley's wife's name engraved on it; Smiley looks at the lighter and leaves it lying in the street. I thought it was an excellent illustration of the toll that the nastiness of counter-intelligence has taken on Smiley over the years. It was a good story.

This Alien Shore -- C.S. Friedman

I read this six or seven years ago, but as I read it this time I only had a vague sense of familiarity; I thought I was confusing it with a different, similar novel, but I wasn't. I'm getting older, or it didn't make a strong enough impression on me the first time, or both. It's an SF story, set in a far future where a wave of widespread human colonization of space led to the discovery that interstellar travel causes mutations; this led to Earth abandoning all her colonies, leaving them to adapt or die, until much later a different form of interstellar travel was found, one that involves using extradimensional space that can only be navigated by pilots with schizophrenia. Naturally all of Earth's former colonies are pretty pissed about being abandoned so there's a lot of hostility. Our hero is a teenager named Jamida, raised in an orbital station around Earth, who has to flee when her station is invaded and her tutor killed during a violent corporate takeover. Jamida, we gradually learn, is an experiment, part of an Earth corporation's attempt at artificially creating people with the right mental disorders to be able to pilot interstellar ships, thus breaking the monopoly held by a powerful colony. Jamida has artificially-induced separate personalities, one of whom is the schizophrenic one who has the ability to pilot. Word about the experiment has leaked, and Jamida gets chased across various space stations by various interested parties. The B-plot involves a fiendishly complicated computer virus that's designed to penetrate the implants everyone has in their brains, and the attempts of various people to track the virus to its source; naturally they cross paths with the people searching for Jamida. I liked it but I had two big problems with it: first, the person the good guys go to for help turns out to be the bad guy, which is a trope I'd be happy never to see used again. Second, we get a lot of exposition about how computer code is like handwriting and it can tell you a lot about the person who wrote it, yet the main character pursuing the virus -- who's established as the single most knowledgeable programming expert alive -- somehow doesn't realize that the virus was written by a famous acquaintance of his whose coding style he should recognize at once, while a hacker who gets a brief glimpse of the code identifies the writer immediately. That aside, it wasn't bad. I met an editor from DAW books this summer who told me that Friedman is writing another book in the same setting; I'll read that when it comes out.

The Pigeon Tunnel -- John le Carré

A collection of autobiographical essays, mostly concerning his life after he left the secret services and published his first few novels. A common theme is that most people he meets have the idea that he was much higher up in the intelligence world, for much longer, than he actually was, and any denials only make people believe it more. By his own account he was only in the services for a few years after the war, and never did anything particularly important oher than escort a few foreign agents around. In fact the secret services were so workaday that when he wrote his novels he had to invent a whole bunch of slang terms to pep things up -- many of which were taken up and used in the real secret services afterwards! He tells a funny story about his only brush with actual counterintelligence, when -- as an embassy attaché with no clear duties, who wasn't married and had not been to diplomatic school, which he says was like wearing a sign that read "SPY" -- he was approached by a Russian diplomat who talked about wanting to defect, but he eventually concluded that the Russian just wanted to be taken to expensive dinners and concerts at British expense for a little while, and probably repeated the process every so often when new attachés showed up. It was pretty good.

Kindred -- Octavia E. Butler

A very good novel about a black woman named Dana, living in LA in 1976. Dana is married to a white man named Kevin, which has caused estrangement from both their families. On her 26th birthday, she suddenly vanishes from her home and finds herself in a wood near a river, where she saves a small boy from drowning before just as suddenly returning home. She's hardly back for a few minutes before vanishing again, finding herself in a strange house where she saves a boy from dying in a fire; she realizes it's the same boy, but a few years older, and that this is a plantation just outside Maryland in the 1810s. Dana finds herself pulled back and forth several times, gradually realizing that she goes to the past whenever the boy -- whose name is Rufus -- is in mortal danger, and comes back to 1976 when she herself is in mortal danger. She eventually works out that Rufus must be the father of one of her slave ancestors, but she never figures out why this is happening to her. I liked that part; of course an African stolen in a raid and brought to an alien land wouldn't have any real idea why it was all happening, and the story is meant to reflect that. Dana goes back and forth several times, sometimes having to remain on the plantation as a field slave for years, once accidentally bringing Kevin to the past and losing him there when she returns to 1976, leaving him to live as an abolitionist agitator for over five years until she finds him again. It's both sad and enraging to watch Rufus grow up from a friendly, grateful little boy into a brutal white supremacist adult. I liked the ending, the more so because it wasn't what I was expecting.

The Luck Stone -- P.G. Wodehouse

A boys’-adventure story, which Wodehouse co-wrote with someone else and published under a pen name. It's quite unlike anything else he wrote, and not very good, which is probably why he never wrote another. Through unlikely circumstances a plucky English schoolboy winds up carrying around a valuable jewel, trying to keep it out of the wrong hands until his father returns from abroad and can get it to the right people in Government. (The stone was stolen from India in the first place, of course, but that never concerns anyone.) Various bad guys chase after the stone and they're ruthless enough to shoot people over it but not ruthless enough to punch a teenager in the head and take it away from him, which they could easily have done at any time. I didn't think much of it.

A Legacy of Spies -- John le Carré

This is Le Carré's attempt at putting a capstone on the Smiley stories, not very successful, I thought. It's set somewhere near the present day; Peter Guilliam, Jim Prideaux, and George Smiley are implausibly all still alive (ignoring that Smiley would be over 110 years old by now) and the plot involves Alec Leamas's illegitimate son suing the UK to find out what really happened in the operation described in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, which has of course never been made public. In fact it was kept so secret that the only remaining person who knows the truth is Peter, now retired and living in France. (Smiley knows too, but he's off the grid, and also Peter suspects -- rightly as it turns out -- that MI6 doesn't want to talk to Smiley because they figure they'll need a scapegoat and Smiley was too high-ranking to be used that way.) I didn't like it for two reasons: first, there doesn't seem any good reason Peter should cooperate with the new blood at MI6. He and Smiley did such a good job of covering their tracks that no one would ever find the truth without their help, and Peter can always just skive off back to France. Sure they'll stop his pension, but so what? Don't tell me a guy who was a spy for forty years doesn't have some resources cached somewhere. Second, and more importantly, the plot contradicts the earlier books. According to this book, Control set up a secret cabal within MI6, led by Smiley and including Prideaux, that knew there was a mole all the way back in 1960; whereas in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which is set in 1973, Smiley is astonished when he learns about the mole, and Prideaux is so disbelieving he thinks Control has gone insane. I felt like the whole book was written just for the sake of the scene where Peter and Smiley look back on their works and reflect that nothing was worth it, which was a good scene that deserved to be surrounded by a better story. I was disappointed.

The Color Purple -- Alice Walker

An amazing book. It's an epistolary novel; most of the letters are from Celie, a young black woman living in the South a hundred years ago. The letters are addressed to God, the only person Celie can imagine listening to her sympathetically, until she has a crisis of faith and starts addressing them to her absent sister Nettie instead. Celie grew up being raped by her father Alphonso (though she doesn't learn until much later that Alphonso isn't her real father.) By the time she's fourteen she's had two children, both of whom Alphonso took away and sold to adoption brokers. When a man comes around wanting to marry Celie's younger sister Nettie, Alphonso (who wants to keep Nettie for himself) gives him Celie instead. Celie is so unconnected to her husband that she never calls him anything but Mister, even in writing. Mister is a brutal man, beating Celie and making her do all the farm work while he drinks, but Celie, having nowhere to go, makes the best of it. Nettie eventually runs away from Alphonso and Celie takes her in; she marries and goes off to be a missionary in Africa, and Celie, never hearing from her, assumes she has died. The heart of the story is Celie's relationship with Shug Avery, a beautiful jazz singer and Mister's long-time girlfriend. Shug and Celie become close friends; later they become lovers and Celie has her first positive sexual experience. Shug broadens Celie's outlook on human behavior and indirectly leads her to a religious epiphany, where she comes to see God and Nature as the same thing. Shug also saves Celie from herself: when Celie finds out that Mister has been intercepting Nettie's letters and keeping the sisters apart for decades, she goes into a murderous rage; she actually has Mister's razor in her hand and is reaching out for his neck when Shug stops her. Celie eventually leaves Mister and starts an independent life of her own with Shug. She reads through the letters from Nettie, who's been disappointed to find that the Africans she lives with are just as oppressive of women as Americans, and are cold to her not just because she's a missionary but because she has white ancestry. Far from finding a welcome in Mother Africa, as she'd dreamt of, she finds that Africans are just as eager to forget their willing participation in the slave trade, and to deny any share of responsibility, as Europeans are. So the descendants of slaves are left with no haven -- they have only rage at the white world for buying them, and at Africa for selling them. Nettie is eventually reunited with Celie, who defiantly builds a life for herself in the face of everyone who tried to step on her. I was surprised to see in the preface that Walker thinks that everyone missed the point of the story. In Walker's view, Celie's revelations about God and Nature are what the book's about, and everything else is just supporting material. I myself -- like most readers, I think -- see Celie's religious ideas as only informing the real story, which is Celie's human relations with Shug, Nettie, and Mister, and I just let the pantheism go, in the same way that I read Tolstoy for the sake of Pierre or Anna and ignore Tolstoy's discursions into his oddball religious theories.

The Theory of the Leisure Class -- Thorstein Veblen

A classic book of economics and social criticism from the turn of the last century. It's the book that introduced the phrase "conspicuous consumption". Modern economists tend to dismiss it for the same reason I admire it: Veblen argued that people are not "rational actors" motivated to pursue maximum utility at the cost of all other considerations, as economists generally regard them, and that explanations of human behavior have to take into account the social and cultural mores that surround them, which may cause them to pursue goals for reasons other than utility. "In utilitarian logic a man does not sell all his goods to go on crusade; still less does he write poetry." Veblen thought that one of the leading motivators of human behavior is the desire for social status, importance relative to one's neighbors, which he explained in Darwinian fashion as arising ab initio from a desire for safety. This was what he thought led to the emergence of a "leisure class", a social group whose philosophy is "I'm so inherently important that I don't need to do or make anything useful." He also argued that the existence of a leisure class had a ripple effect, since people who don't actually belong to such a class would try to imitate their outward show, for the sake of improving their own status, while doing everything they can to disguise the fact that they have to do useful work in order to support themselves. The writing is sui generis, and unexpectedly entertaining; I thought it was great, although Veblen was full of nineteenth-century eugenics nonsense -- he believed in phrenology, for one thing, and he often digresses on inherited behavioral characteristics of "dolicho-cephalic" (long-headed) people. There's a good larding of racism, too, since he associates dolicho-cephalic-ness with blond Northern Europeans, and all the supposed characteristics he imputes to them are (from his point of view) positive and objectively superior to other "types".

Hobo -- Eddy Joe Cotton

A memoir of a guy who left Denver at age nineteen after a fight with his dad, who was also his boss (they were a family bricklaying operation.) With no money and no particular goal, he decided to hitch rides on trains to get to Mexico, just because he'd never been there. It's not bad, though it has something of a self-conscious poetry-of-the-road tone to it. Also the timeline seems confused -- he refers to things that happened "on that train weeks ago" when according to the calendar he only left home nine days before. There's some obligatory self-congratulation about how much better it is to be sleeping cold and unwashed in the woods than trapped in an office job, but not so much that it's unreadable. He never does get to Mexico; his trip is derailed (ha ha) by hooking up with a woman on her way to Las Vegas, where they hang out for a couple weeks before splitting up, leaving Cotton contemplating his future, and the book ends. It was mildly interesting.

Food: a Love Story -- Jim Gaffigan

I must have picked this up in a fit of absence of mind, because I know perfectly well that books by standup comedians are usually just their stage acts written down. This one is a perfect example. About seventy per cent of it is just a verbatim transcript of bits from his recorded routines, complete with explanatory asides like (DUMB GUY VOICE) and (MAKES PURRING NOISE). The rest of it feels like stuff that was cut out while he was sharpening the stage act.

Beowulf and the Appositive Style -- Fred C. Robinson

A book on Anglo-Saxon prosody, by one of the foremost Beowulf scholars of the twentieth century. It's a shortish essay on poetic constructions in Beowulf that use apposition, which is the practice of connecting two phrases or images solely by placing them next to one another, and leaving out logical parataxis in order to make the connection ambiguous. One of my favorite examples is where Beowulf talks about Breca going back to his homeland, "where he had his people, stronghold and treasure." In this case folc, beorh ond beagas is an appositive pair; there's no explanatory connection, so it could be taken to mean "where he had his people AND his stronghold and treasure" or "where he had his people, WHO ARE his stronghold and treasure." Leaving it unspecified makes the listener hold both alternative meanings in mind at the same time. Of course the book is pretty academic, but I'm really interested in the subject so I didn't mind.

Black Klansman -- Ron Stallworth

A pretty funny book, a true story about a black cop in Colorado Springs in 1973 (the only black cop in Colorado Springs in 1973) who got so pissed off about seeing the local Ku Klux Klan advertise openly in the newspaper that he called the number and strung them along about wanting to join the Klan. They were glad to hear it and sent him all their membership material, and he wound up joining the Klan for real and spying on them. Of course he had to send a white cop to go to the actual meetings, and the two of them coordinated what he would say there, like a surrealist retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac. I wasn't a hundred percent on Stallworth's side, since he makes it clear that his true loyalty is to the police -- he was also spying undercover on the Black Panthers. But he really gives a good picture of the total pathetic uselessness of the self-aggrandizing idiots who make up the Klan. He talked on the phone with David Duke several times, and he notes that it was easy to get Duke talking about anything at all as long as you kept stroking his ego and telling him how amazing he was. There was more to it than just amusing himself, though: he got his hands on the local membership lists and shared them around with the state police and the Army, with the result (he was told) that a couple guys got reassigned out of NORAD in a big hurry, which was all to the good. I liked it.

Poems -- Samuel Johnson

A collection of all of Johnson's verse, which covers a whole lot of ground -- from uninteresting Latin poems he wrote in school, to occasional pieces he composed extempore to amuse guests at dinner (some of which are mildly good) to more serious work such as epitaphs for his friends' gravestones (which he insisted had to be in Latin) and the poignant On The Death of Doctor Robert Levet (a tribute to a physician who spent his career treating the poor of London, few of whom could pay him anything at all -- Johnson supported him for decades out of charity), to the magnificent satires London and The Vanity of Human Wishes. The book also includes Johnson's only play, Irene, which I'd never read before -- it's so little regarded that as far as I know it's never been performed professionally even once since the original run closed in 1749. It's a melodrama, terribly chauvinist, about a woman named Irene (I kept forgetting Johnson meant it to be pronounced with three syllables in the Latin way) who's captured at the fall of Constantinople by the Sultan Mehmed (whom Johnson calls Mahomet.) The Sultan becomes obsessed with the white, Christian Irene -- which Johnson would have considered only natural -- and decides to make her his queen, on the condition that she convert to Islam, which Johnson makes the heart of the drama: the Devil tempts Irene with the thought of all the conquered Byzantines she could save from death or slavery, if only she abandons the True Religion (TM). It all ends with Irene dying for her religion (because who cares if thousands of her countrymen get tortured, killed, or sold?) According to the editor, the general opinion is that Johnson was so concerned with the meter at the expense of all other concerns that the verse is unnatural and dead; sign me up to the consensus. I wouldn't read it again.

The Fun Stuff -- James Wood

A collection of literary criticism, about half of it concerning authors I've read, kind of dry. Honestly the most interesting part of it was an entertaining appreciation of Keith Moon, whom the author thinks was the best rock drummer ever because he was the only one who never accepted that the primary function of the drum is to keep the rest of the band in time. A lot of the lit-crit part was pretty insightful, although I thought he was a little over-ready to find Author A's influence in Author B's prose. For example, when talking about the powerful scene in "A Hanging" where Orwell sees a man being led to the gallows sidestep a puddle to avoid getting his feet wet, it makes sense to compare it thematically to the scene in War and Peace where a man facing the firing squad shifts his collar to be less uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean Orwell was "obviously influenced" by Tolstoy, especially considering Orwell was describing something he actually saw happen.

How To Fight -- Thích Nhat Hanh

A short pamphlet by a Buddhist monk, more properly about not fighting. Because humans aren't perfect we will always find ourselves coming into conflict; the book is about practicing enough mindfulness to be aware of what we're doing as it happens. Hanh recommends not letting things fester; he also says the ability to make a genuine and sincere apology is among the most important skills we can possess, and everyone should work on that. "Once we realize that we may have said or done something to make another suffer, we can find a way to apologize as soon as possible. If we can, we should apologize right away and not wait."

Dreams of Terror and Death -- H.P. Lovecraft

A weird-tales collection, mostly about people who wander off in dreams and can't return to the waking world for one reason or another. Sometimes a dreamer from one story comes across a dreamer from another story. Many involve the dream-explorer Randolph Carter, who first walks out of his adult life into his childhood through dreams, and then gets trapped in the mind of an alien on an unimaginably distant planet. I wasn't all that impressed by any of them.

The Love of a Good Woman -- Alice Munro

A short story collection, very well written, mostly dealing with domestic betrayals. The title story is about a young woman named Enid, nursing a mean-tempered older woman named Quinn on her deathbed, and beginning an affair with Mr. Quinn. Mrs Quinn, a restless talker, tells Enid about the affairs of her younger life and also tells her that Mr. Quinn once murdered a neighbor. Enid finds the story plausible but also wonders if Mrs. Quinn made it up, either because she's realized Enid is sleeping with her husband or just out of spite; she thinks about mentioning the story to Mr. Quinn, to test him, but decides to let it lie. A similar story, "Cortes Island", is about a young newlywed who lives in the lower half of a duplex owned by her nosy, judgy landlady Mrs. Gorrie. Mrs Gorrie hires her to spend afternoons taking care of the Alzheimer's-afflicted Mr. Gorrie. Over months of Mr. Gorrie's rambling conversations, supplemented by newpaper clippings he saved, the heroine puts together their life story: Mrs Gorrie murdered her first husband, and Mr. Gorrie realized it but was afraid ever to confront her with it. Another memorable one was "Rich as Stink", about a young girl named Karin whose mother, Rosemary, moved to rural Ontario to devote herself to Karin's father Derek's writing career. Derek is unapologetically self-centered, using Rosemary for her work while openly having an affair with their neighbor Ann. Karin, now old enough to grasp for the first time what's happening, suddenly starts to doubt the sincerity of the welcome Ann has always shown her. In an attempt at a silly prank to get everyone to laugh and break the tension, Karin accidentally gets badly burned; she wakes up in the hospital with Rosemary, who tells her that Derek, having finished his book, has indifferently gone off with Ann, not even waiting to see how Karin was. That one hurt a lot. The most harrowing, though, was "My Mother's Dream", narrated by a baby; her mother Jill married a man she barely knew, who soon left to fight in World War II, getting killed almost immediately and leaving her pregnant; Jill gets taken in by her husband's weird aunts, one a humorless disciplinarian and the other a vague airhead. The heart of the story is a terrible summer day when the baby, racked with heat and colic, screams inconsolably for twenty hours straight, while Jill is driven nearly mad with sleeplessness and shame -- what kind of mother can't comfort her own child? Eventually Jill takes sleeping medicine, and in her worn-out desperation also gives a tiny dose to the baby. The weird aunts come home and shake her out of sleep, accusing her of infanticide, though it turns out that the vague aunt has just hidden the sleeping baby under a sofa, apparently in the hopes of keeping it herself. The story does a really good job of making you feel Jill being driven to helpless near-insanity by the pitiless screaming. It was brilliant but I don't think I'd read it again.

The Fishermen -- Chigozie Obioma

A novel about four brothers (the oldest, Ikenna, is in his mid-teens) who live in southwestern Nigeria. They’re doing well in school and the family has ambitions for all their futures. The boys look out for each other, and they're basically well-behaved, but they look for ways to rebel that aren't too serious. They take to fishing in the local river with some other boys, although all the children are forbidden to go too near the river because it's so polluted. One day, on their way home from fishing, they meet a local madman. The other boys run away, but Ikenna stays to show off his daring, and his brothers stay rather than leave him. The madman curses the boys, invoking Ikenna by name, and prophesies terrible calamities and death; the brothers flee, but from then on Ikenna's behavior gradually changes. He becomes hostile to his younger brothers and disobedient to his mother, and stops going to school; in effect he has let the madman rewrite the narrative of his life. He gets more and more paranoid, believing that one of his brothers is plotting against him, and he starts smashing and destroying all the brothers' most valued possessions. The other brothers are angry at him but also desperate to stop their family from falling apart; this leads the third brother to enlist the youngest brother (who is also the narrator) in a plot to murder the madman and remove the curse. Unsurprisingly that doesn't make things better, and what results is an outright war among the brothers, a sort of Cain-and-Abel story with more participants. It was a downer of a story but well-told.

Vacationland -- John Hodgman

A funny book about owning vacation homes, first in western Massachusetts and later in coastal Maine. That's home territory for me, of course, and I ate it up, though I would have been happier if Hodgman had shown more affection for either place rather than making both of them out to be a burden.

Women and the Making of the Mongol Empire -- Anne Broadbridge

Just what it says on the tin. It's a study of the administration of the Mongol Empire under Genghis and the successor khans, and the way the Golden House cemented its supremacy by marrying its most capable daughters to less competent allies, thus ensuring their allied chiefs would be under the thumb of their wives, who controlled independent wealth and commanded their own troops, and whose primary loyalty would remain to their own family. Refusing a bride from the royal family was in effect suicide, so everyone had to fall in line. Nothing's perfect, of course, and this system did sometimes lead to one branch of the family trying to stage an internal family coup, which always led to the winning branch exterminating the losing branch. It's from a university press and the writing is pretty academic, but it held my interest.

A Good Walkthrough Spoiled -- Mike Tanier

Tanier used to write an excellent column called "The Walkthrough" for the Football Outsiders web site. I loved the column; it was well-written, funny, and insightful, and it discussed football in a sensible and analytic way, quite unlike the macho bloviation of most football writing. I was sorry when he stopped writing for that site, and I was glad to find this, which is a collection of his columns; but unfortunately Tanier is overly critical of his early writing and he decided most of the columns weren't good enough to be collected, so only about half the book consists of the columns. The rest of it is two long sections on "who were the best five quarterbacks and running backs for each team?" which didn't interest me much and I only skimmed it; though I was interested to see that the list isn't very deep for most teams, and some have headliners that go back before the war, although not for the same reasons. For example, the Bears' best QB ever is still Sid Luckman, basically because the Bears have never really had a genuinely great QB; while Washington's best QB is still Sammy Baugh, because Baugh was just that good. Tanier winds up the book with a detailed recap of the 1987 strike, which was a total defeat for the players and a permanent blow to the union, so, you know, that's just what I feel like reading about. I wish Tanier had been a little less full of himself and just put more of his columns in the book, though I'm grateful that he included his Watchmen parody, "Who Watches the Walkthrough?"

Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning -- Alice Walker

A poetry collection from the seventies, dating from before Walker went mad and started believing that the Earth is secretly ruled by Jewish lizard people. (Nope, not kidding.) The title is apparently what Walker's mother said to Walker's father's coffin at his funeral. I liked it when I read it but my recollection of it right now is colored by my more recent discovery of her hateful anti-Semitic poetry from the last couple years. As I recall, several of the poems appear to be about love affairs she had with a couple academic friends while married to a Jewish civil-rights lawyer (they divorced a couple years before the book came out), which makes the book feel strange in retrospect.

Mother Courage -- Bertolt Brecht

A powerful anti-war play from the thirties. Brecht wrote it in response to the Nazi invasion of Poland, but it's set during the Thirty Years' War. Mother Courage is a character from a seventeenth-century novel, repurposed by Brecht into an itinerant pedlar whose desire to protect her children is swallowed up by her lust to profit from the war. Her youngest son dies because she spends too long haggling with the executioner about the size of the bribe to let her son off. Over the course of the war all her children are killed and she's reduced to total poverty, hauling her own wagon behind her because soldiers killed and ate her donkey. I've never seen it staged, but Brecht gives pretty explicit stage directions -- he wanted the set to be as bare as possible, to create what he called Verfremdungseffekt, an effect of estrangement, leaving nothing to anchor the characters in a sense of place, as a way of suggesting that a world at war is inherently unlivable, and that war makes domestic virtue impossible. I'd like to see it some day.

Something Fishy -- P.G. Wodehouse

A terrific farce, and (alas) I think the last of Wodehouse's mature novels I hadn't read. The book opens with a prologue, set just before the stock market crash in 1929, wherein a dozen wealthy financiers, for reasons that seemed good at the time, each put a big chunk of money into a pool, the pool to be inherited in toto by whichever among their sons is the last to get married -- a marriage tontine. The action of the book takes place thirty years later, when the only remaining witnesses to the tontine are an elderly bachelor (who didn't throw in) and the  butler, Keggs, who had a bug planted in the room so he could listen in for investment advice. Keggs is spending his retirement supporting a former employer, the kind but vague Lord Uffenham (now broke) and Uffenham's daughter Jane. Keggs has kept track of all the sons, none of whom know about the tontine, and seeing in the paper that the second-to-last one (whose name is Bill, which is Wodehouse-ese for "this is the hero") has become engaged, Keggs decides to visit the last unmarried son (Roscoe) and tip him off to prolong his own engagement until Bill is married, and thus inherit the tontine, which by now is worth about a million dollars. Roscoe is a cheap bastard, though, and when he rudely offers Keggs a tiny reward for information about his rival, Keggs smoothly invents a pack of lies and then goes off to find Bill, who coincidentally has just been dumped and then fallen in love at first sight with Jane. The rest of the story is a backwards race between Bill and Roscoe to be the last one married; Bill acts like a stand-up guy and Roscoe acts like a creep, which in Wodehouse ensures that Bill will have a happy ending while Roscoe winds up with nothing. I loved it.

A Fish Caught in Time -- Samantha Weinberg

A good book about the coelacanth, a fish long thought to be extinct but rediscovered ninety years ago off South Africa. It's a deep-water fish, generally staying at about 200 meters, which is one reason it's so rarely seen. We still don't know a whole lot about them -- they spend a lot of their time in deep-sea caves. When out of the caves they tend to drift along vertically, nose toward the ocean floor and tail toward the surface, no one knows why. They tend to die when they come to the surface, probably for pressure-related reasons, so some icthyologists have invented a sort of reverse fishing line, which involves sinking a pulley and pulling the fish down with a barbless hook that they can shake loose when the fish gets to the right depth. I gather they're still working on figuring out how fast they should lower the fish in order to maximize its chances of survival. I liked it.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet -- Jamie Ford

A star-crossed-lovers story set in Seattle, alternating between the forties and the eighties. In the forties, a young American-born Chinese boy named Henry befriends a Japanese girl named Keiko; they bond over the bullying they experience at school and their shared love of jazz. Henry's tyrannical father is an adamant Chinese nationalist and Henry's involvement with Keiko is a flashpoint for his rebellion. In the eighties, the adult Henry has recently lost his wife and worries that his relationship with his own son isn't as open and friendly as he could wish. When he hears that a long-derelict hotel in the once-Japanese part of town, now being renovated, has turned up a large cache of personal possessions left there during the war by Japanese families who were being sent to the internment camps, he gets permission from the hotel's owner to look through the cache, bringing his son and the son's fiancee along. As he searches we get the rest of the story in flashback: Keiko gave Henry her family's photographs and papers to keep, and Henry's father found them and threw them out the apartment window; Henry never spoke to his father again, and for a long time managed to keep in touch with Keiko at her camp in Idaho. They lost contact, though, and after years of not hearing from her, Henry assumed she had outgrown him and moved on, only finding out much later that Keiko had written to him all through the war, but his father had intercepted the letters and burned them. One thing Henry's hoping to find in the hotel is a prewar vinyl recording of a local jazz band, featuring a friend of Henry and Keiko on saxophone. He does find it, but it's broken, and I thought the book was going to have a melancholy ending, but the son's fiancee locates Keiko, now a widow, and she and Henry meet again, finally. The book leaves it unclear whether the two of them will start a new romance, which I liked, but they do take Keiko's copy of the record and play it for their friend in his nursing home, which I also liked. Good book.

Blood Maidens -- Barbara Hambly

So, back in the eighties I read a Hambly novel called Those Who Hunt the Night, which I liked a lot and have reread once or twice, about an Oxford professor of philology and semi-retired British secret agent who in 1907 meets a vampire who coerces him to investigate the destruction of several London vampires. Ten years later there was a sequel; its mere existence cheapened the end of the first one, but I liked it enough that I could forgive that. This year I found out that Hambly has suddenly written five more sequels in the last five years; since I see that in the same period she's also suddenly written eight or nine sequels to a detective series she used to write, and all of these are from the same mass-market publisher, I presume she suddenly needed money. I hope she doesn't have cancer or something. Anyway this is a repetition of the earlier sequel: our hero, James Asher, gets recruited by the same vampire (a 16th-century Spaniard named Simon) to travel to Eastern Europe to investigate a case where the German Empire may be trying to create vampire soldiers, which neither James nor Simon wants to happen. I enjoyed the prose but I wasn't impressed with the story; also I was really annoyed with the publishers, who gave the book a pandering title unrelated to the content and put a sexy vampire chick on the cover. That actually strikes me as self-defeating: based on the title and cover, I wouldn't have bought the book if I hadn't already known the author -- and anyone who did buy it based on the title and cover wouldn't like it.

Hits and Misses -- Simon Rich

A collection of absurdist short pieces, most of them pretty funny. My favorite was the one about the long-suffering, ill-treated personal assistant and factotum for a loud rich asshole, who -- when both he and his boss are killed in a plane crash -- has to try to talk St. Peter into letting his asshole boss into Heaven. I liked the ending.

The Perfectionists -- Simon Winchester

Eighty percent of this is a terrific book, insightful, interesting, and entertaining. There's also a couple stupid chapters that are none of those things, but you can skip those. The theme of the book is precision: how advances in precision allowed us to make previously impossible things, and to take best advantage of them we needed more precision, which let us do even more things, and so on, until we've gotten to the point today where we're capable of unthinkable levels of precision that run to scores of decimal places; without that capability no part of our civilization would work. (In the context of this book, it's more important than usual to remember that precision and accuracy aren't the same thing. Precision is a measure of how close together two measurements can be, while accuracy is a measure of how close a measurement comes to a known standard. If I describe an event with as much detail as possible, I'm being precise; if my description is as close to what really happened as possible, I'm being accurate.) It's a great illustration of cooperation in science. James Watt's piston engine originally didn't work, because he wasn't capable of making a piston housing that fit the piston closely enough that steam wouldn't escape. It was only when he met another engineer who'd developed a new method of making metal cylinders by boring them out instead of hollow-casting them -- which he'd done in the pursuit of making better cannon -- that he could adapt the same process to making piston housings, and the steam age started. The book is full of stories like that, new advances and the colorful personalities that took advantage of them. I hadn't known, for instance, that shoes weren't sold by size until someone invented a lathe precise enough that you could make shoe molds of reliably graded sizes -- before that, cobblers just made shoes to fit whatever random molds they had, and customers just rooted through barrels of shoes until they found two that fit. I also hadn't known that the initial failure of the Hubble telescope was due to an error of two microns on the bezel of the main mirror -- and that NASA was able to correct for the error because the company that made the mirror deliberately left the room where it was made untouched for over ten years, just in case NASA needed to examine it! Or that engineers at Rolls-Royce always gave their models names like the "Royce 10" because it was Royce who designed the first car, and Rolls was only a salesman. (The Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost came out at the same time as the Model T, and nearly every one is still operable -- but they only made a few thousand Silver Ghosts, as opposed to twenty million Model Ts.) For some reason Winchester decided to include a chapter where he rambles pointlessly about how Japanese culture makes them good at manufacturing, and another where he makes a big deal out of visiting a company that makes wrist watches, praising their dedication to detail work at length, with no apparent awareness that the work is nothing but conspicuous waste -- the company charges tens of thousands of dollars for watches that don't keep time as accurately as any supermarket flip phone. Luckily those two chapters could be excised like tumors without affecting the rest of the book.

The Magistrates of Hell -- Barbara Hambly

Fine, let's head to China and check out the Chinese vampires. This one had some setup problems: we find Asher and his wife, along with Asher's nonagenarian Czech mentor, in Beijing in 1912, having seen a newspaper report that indicates that whatever it is that makes Prague vampires less intelligent and more numerous (this was a plot seed dropped in the last book) may have somehow spread to Asia. First of all, we get several scenes with the Ashers and the mentor arguing and expositing, having conversations that -- considering they spent weeks traveling to get to Beijing -- they should have gotten through long before this. Second, and inevitably I suppose, it turns out that the vampire Simon is also in Beijing, having seen the same news report; it's left unexplained how he got there, which rather invalidates the trouble the author went to in the earlier books to show how logistically difficult it is for a vampire to travel and how Simon couldn't go to Europe in the last book without bringing Asher along to guard his body and effects during the daylight. Hambly is a good writer and I felt sort of like she was using her talent to flesh out a series of plot points someone else gave her. There's a drunken no-good younger son falsely accused of murder, a respectable authority figure who's secretly a pedophile, a student-who-was-like-a-son-but-rebelled-and-came-to-grief, even an honorable Japanese enemy. There are some big clunkers, scenes where a secondary character basically says "Look, I can tell you know something, you're clearly not surprised to find this body that burst into flames, what the hell is going on?" and then we cut to later on where the secondary character has supplied Asher with all the material and information he needs even though Asher never answered the question or explained anything. (Apparently what happened during the cutaway was that the secondary character looked at the script and it said "YOU HELP THE HERO HERE FOR NO REASON.") I did enjoy reading it because the prose was good, but the plot was really weak.

Homegoing -- Yaa Gyasi

An extraordinary novel about the slave trade. It's a parallel saga, following two branches of the same family: the seminal character is an eighteenth-century Ashanti woman named Maame, who is stolen from her home by Fante raiders. She lives with her captors for a couple years until the night of a terrible fire, which we eventually learn she set herself; she uses the distraction to escape, leaving her baby daughter Effia behind. She returns to her home village and has another daughter, Esi. The daughters' lives diverge sharply: Effia's father sends her as a concubine to the British officer commanding the slave depot on the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and she lives a reasonably secure life; Esi is taken in an Ashanti raid and sold to the British, kept temporarily in a subterranean cell while her half-sister walks unknowingly overhead, and eventually shipped to the New World, though not before being raped to increase her sale value by getting her pregnant. The rest of the book follows Effia and Esi's descendants, in alternating chapters, one branch living in slavery in America and the other branch trying to survive in colonized Africa. All the descendants are pursued by nightmares about fire, apparently an ancestral memory of Maame's act of defiance. The modern-day scions of each branch meet, eventually, though neither of them knows they're related. I was really impressed with it.

The Gatekeepers -- Chris Whipple

A terrific book about the White House Chiefs of Staff, a position that before WWII was informally held by the President's friends and attorneys. After seeing how Roosevelt relied on his inner circle to great effect, Truman created the official position of "Assistant to the President", and Eisenhower, with his military background, changed it to "Chief of Staff", which it has remained ever since. The first person to have the title was Eisenhower's campaign manager, Sherman Adams. I remember Dad saying that it was a common joke in the fifties that Adams was the real President and Eisenhower was just his front man. (Reagan's second Chief of Staff, Donald Regan, got fired because he apparently thought this was really true of himself.)  Whipple interviewed every living Chief of Staff for this book, and he got them all to talk on the record, which is amazing. The job varies widely depending on the character of the President; H.R Haldeman famously said his job was to be "the President's son-of-a-bitch", which tells you a lot about both him and Nixon. Carter tried to do without one altogether, which just led to a chaotic muddle, with rivals competing for Carter's ear and contradictory policies coming out from one day to the next. One thing all the Chiefs agreed on was that the most valuable resource in DC is the President's time, and it has to be allotted carefully. I was interested to see that everyone Whipple interviewed about Dick Cheney (who was Ford's Chief of Staff, and who participated in the famous backroom round table where the GOP suggested Ford make Reagan his VP and share power in a "co-Presidency", which was rejected at the time but implemented later when Cheney became Bush's unofficial co-President) agreed that Cheney in the seventies was unrecognizably different to the Cheney of the 21st century -- calmer, more ready to work with others, and generally saner; most thought his personality changed radically after his several heart operations. (Cheney angrily denies this and claims that he's been consistent all along, which is obviously not true.) It was a fascinating book, well-written and absorbing.

Convenience Store Woman -- Sayaka Murata

I thought I would like this but I didn't. It's a story of a woman somewhere on the autism spectrum who uses her devotion to her job as a convenience store clerk to keep herself in a predictable routine, thus letting her cope with life and withstand the endless tearful rebukes from her parents and sister, who clearly have never understood anything about her condition, and who constantly wail about how she's hurting them by not being like everyone else. I was inclined to have a lot of sympathy for her, but the author pushed it too far when the woman, watching her sister try to comfort her crying baby, reasons that if the goal is to get the baby to stop crying then the obvious thing to do would be to kill it, and she's actually looking around for a knife when her sister takes the baby into another room. That really undid all the sympathy I had; if the heroine is so far on the spectrum that she doesn't grasp that killing people is wrong, then it's only dumb luck that she hasn't hurt or killed someone before now, and everyone would be better off if she were institutionalized. The convenience store isn't going to cut it.

Squirm -- Carl Hiaasen

One of his YA eco-novels, all of which feature early-teen kids who don't fit in and turn their energies to exploring nature, generally getting involved with what a less sympathetic writer might call eco-terrorists. This one's about a Florida kid who's really into snakes, whose mom is unhealthily obsessed with bald eagles, and whose absent father left them years ago to live with a nature guide in Montana and harass hunters with drones. It was a minor book but pretty funny. I liked that the trophy-hunting poacher got eaten by a grizzly.

The Beekeeper's Lament -- Hannah Nordhaus

A book about bees that I mostly liked. Nordhaus uses an eccentric beekeeper as the focus of the book, and she liked him rather more than I did; plus I didn't need the elegiac laments for vanished North Dakota small-town life, which were out of place and dull. The actual parts about bees, though, were good. I hadn't known that feral bees in the US were almost entirely wiped out even before colony collapse began, by a kind of parasitic mite that was probably introduced to North America along with illegally imported Asian bees.The entire beekeeping industry depends on the almond business: pollinating the California almond trees keeps them in the black for the rest of the year. The problem is that almond pollen makes bad-tasting honey, so the beekeepers have to relocate later to someplace that grows a lot of alfalfa and wildflowers, like the Dakotas. They used to be able to stay in California for orange season, to make orange honey, but the growers produce seedless oranges now and their orchards banned bees (because pollinated orange trees will produce oranges with seeds.) No one yet knows what causes colony collapse, but probably one of the factors that make bees vulnerable is that they're overworked, unnaturally trucked all over the country and kept barely alive on sugar water through the winter. I learned a lot about bees, too. Bees don't have blood, or a heart; their bodies are perfused with a hemic fluid that serves the same purpose. Also bees have no healing mechanism; an injured bee just dies. And when they sting they find their targets by heat, so a bee will aim for the hottest part of the body, the top of your head, which is super painful because the skin is so taut there that the swelling has nowhere to expand. The whole book was worth it just for learning about the Schmidt Pain Index. Schmidt is an entomologist who's spent his life getting bitten and stung by every insect there is, and he created a scale to measure just how painful their bites are. The index is surprisingly poetic, with each bite carefully described, like a wine list. The scale goes from 1 (the red fire ant, barely noticeable) to 4 (the bullet ant, whose bite leaves you unable to do anything but lie on the ground and scream for hours.) The honey bee is 2.3.

Aias -- Sophokles

In general, I like to transliterate Greek names to look as Greek as possible without being confusingly pedantic; so I write "Sokrates" and "Hektor", but not "Platon" or "Aristoteles". I myself would write the more familiar "Ajax" rather than the more accurate "Aias", but the translator makes a good case in the introduction that Sophokles understood Aias's name as deriving from the Greek word for "agony", and when Aias screams in pain in the play he yells "Ai! Ai! Ai!" which the translator thinks is a deliberate reference to his name. The play is set on the morning after the conclave where the Greeks, unable to decide who should be awarded Achilles' god-forged armor after his funeral, sent a herald to ask the Trojans, who replied that it should go to Odysseus. Aias, furious with envy, decided to kill Odysseus and Agamemnon both, as well as all their men for good measure, but Athena clouded his mind so he confused his targets with a herd of cattle. As the action opens we hear about how Aias raged through the night, slaughtering the livestock while crying out in triumph; he awakes and realizes what happened, and unable to live with the double shame he falls on his sword and dies. The Greeks didn't admire suicide and I think the point is to show that Ajax preferred to escape his shame rather than atone for it. The translation was excellent, very powerful and poetic.

*And Then -- Natsume Soseki

A Japanese novel from about a hundred years ago. The title in Japanese is Sorekara, which means "what happened [in the past]", as opposed to arekara "what happens [now]" and korekara "what will happen [in the future]". It can be a statement or a question, depending on context. (My karate teacher once had a promotion celebration in Okinawa, and some other students gave him a kwa with korekara written on it, in context meaning "What next?" or "This is the beginning.") The book's title, in context, means "here's what happened after that", and a better translation might be And Then... It's a few months in the life of Daisuke, the disaffected son of a wealthy family. Daisuke is university-educated -- a rare thing in Japan at that time, when the university system was just beginning -- but he's unable to feel any attachment to either traditional Japan or modernized Japan (Soseki considered this the biggest metaphysical problem of his day) and it's left him detached from everything. His father and older brother want him to marry into an important family in order to benefit their business, but he can't bring himself to make the effort. He eventually falls in love with a former classmate's wife, and it's implied that they'll divorce so she can marry Daisuke; just on the rumor, Daisuke's brother visits to tell him he's been cut off and should not try to see his family again. The book ends with Daisuke lying in his house with a fever, wondering if he'll live or die and if it matters. The editor of my edition points out in the afterword that this sounds similar to the back story of Okone and Sosuke in Soseki's novel The Gate, and perhaps their story could be taken as a picture of the best possible outcome of Daisuke's story. It was a sad, alienated book, but I liked it.

Gnarr! -- Jon Gnarr

A tongue-in-cheek autobiography of an Icelandic comedian who formed the "Best Party", a satiric political party with the stated goal of making Iceland more fun. Probably due to the Icelandic financial collapse in 2009, the Best Party unexpectedly won a plurality in the 2010 Reykjavik election, beating out the center-right incumbents to install Gnarr as mayor. In order to govern, the Best Party had to form a coalition with the Socialist bloc, though Gnarr made a point of announcing that he wouldn't share power with anyone who hadn't watched The Wire. I didn't really warm up to Gnarr, who walked a line between governance and performance art, not always successfully. To his credit he did grant permission for building the first Icelandic mosque, and he did make speeches on human rights, which got more attention than speeches from the mayor of Reykjavik ordinarily would because of his novelty value. He probably understood that he couldn't keep the act going, because he didn't run again when his term expired in 2014. I don't know, I kind of expected more out of this book than I got.

The End of the World Running Club -- Adrian J. Walker

An apocalyptic novel, pretty well told, if you can get past the idea that no one noticed an oncoming meteor storm big enough to wipe out most of the world until the day it arrived. The pacing bothered me: the narrator (Edgar) wakes up one weekend morning with a hangover to find out that meteors are going to hit in about an hour, and he instantly runs out to fight over bottled water with his neighbors. When he and his family survive in their basement, and they hear an injured neighbor calling for help, they ignore it. People are creatures of habit, and I think the habits of civilized life wouldn't disappear in a few hours. I just didn't think the family could really go full-on Mad Max so suddenly and unrepentantly. The survivors congregate at an Army base; Edgar and his friend Bryce return from a scavenging patrol to find that evacuation helicopters have been and gone, taking Edgar's family with them, and they're leaving by sea from Cornwall soon after Christmas. Along with the only remaining soldier -- a corporal who reasons that the end of the world doesn't erase her duty, it increases it -- they set out in a Jeep for Cornwall, until they come to a point where the meteor strikes have made car travel impossible. They have over four hundred miles to travel in twenty days. Edgar -- who's been shown as something of a loser, a reluctant father who'd rather stay out drinking than help with his children -- stands and looks over the shattered landscape, and thinks about his family, and -- in a decision that seems both surprising and inevitable -- he starts running. I wouldn't have thought I could end up liking the Edgar we saw at the beginning of the book, but the author pulled it off.

Jazz -- Toni Morrison

An experimental novel, told in the manner of a jazz performance: the narrative is free-flowing, with digressions and improvisational solos, sudden changes in mood, and phrasal repetition -- we get the same events over again several times, seen from the viewpoints of different characters, not all of whom are trustworthy. The plot revolves around an incident where a man named Joe Trace murders his girlfriend in 1920s Harlem; all the "solos" ripple forward or back from that event, showing the paths that led up to it and the consequences that led away from it. The whole thing is managed by a never-identified narrator, who at times appears to be a person and at other times appears to be something else, like an incarnated Harlem, or the essence of jazz music. I liked it.

The Thing Around Your Neck -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A short story collection, really well-written. The main characters are all women; some stories are told in the first person, some in the third. The thing that jumped out at me was that in every story the main character doesn't feel fully free with her voice. Every story has language like, "She wanted to say XYZ, but instead she did this other thing", or "My supervisor said so-and-so; I didn't say such-and-such which would have challenged his assumptions", or "I thought about saying X but didn't." The best one, I thought, was a story about a woman named Chika, who is in northern Nigeria visiting relatives when a riot breaks out; she and another woman take refuge in a closed store front, where they stay hidden for most of a day and a night. The two women are separated by all kinds of cultural gaps: Chika is from the south, while the other is from the north; Chika is Igbo and Christian, while the other is Hausa and Muslim; and they speak each other's languages only haltingly. Most importantly, there's a huge class gulf: Chika is a medical student, while the other is a vegetable seller. Tellingly, we never learn the other woman's name; Chika never thinks to ask it. Coming back to voices, there's a good scene when the Hausa woman, having learned that Chika is training to be a doctor, opens her shirt to show where her nipple is cracked from breast feeding and asks her advice. Chika sees that it's probably caused by a bad latch (the baby not getting the entire areola in its mouth.) The woman objects that she's had five babies and this has never happened before. Rather than fall back on authority and tell the woman that babies' mouths aren't all the same, Chika says that this often happens after four or five babies and adds the magic words -- "The same thing happened to my mother." (Although this isn't true.) The woman asks what Chika's mother did and Chika tells her to rub her nipple with cocoa butter after feeding. Chika understood, as a male doctor might not, that the woman would take a story about Chika's mother seriously, while she might reject Chika's diagnosis if she just delivered it as a command. I liked it a lot.

Less -- Andrew Sean Greer

A meta-story, a novel about a writer who's having trouble with a novel. Ordinarily I'd stop right there and throw it away, but Greer has a saving sense of humor and he's aware that nobody gives a shit about a middle-aged upper-class white guy wandering around a city feeling sorry for himself. Greer sends his writer-hero, Less, abroad on a budget world tour with an itinerary of literary conferences, visiting seminars, and retrospectives on the works of Less's older, more talented mentor; Less pretends it's to work undistracted on his novel, but it's really because his ex-boyfriend is marrying someone else and he needs an excuse not to attend the wedding. As he careens comically around the world he realizes that the problem with his novel is that it should be a comedy, and he triumphantly rewrites it and learns not to take himself so damn seriously. I liked it.

The Kindred of Darkness -- Barbara Hambly

Another James Asher novel. This one made me wonder if someone else wrote a first draft and then Hambly went over it to punch it up, like Dumas père: the writing is spotty and has occasional usage mistakes that I wouldn't expect from Hambly, like mishandled reflexive verbs; also the plot is sort of Hambly-and-water, a repeat of the plot of the first book but less interesting. With Asher away in Europe on some MI6 mission against the Kaiser, the master vampire of London -- a sixteenth-century doctor named Grippen -- kidnaps Mrs. Asher's toddler daughter in order to force her to use her academic research skills to locate the funds and hiding place of yet another new rival, a Balkan vampire who's fled the turmoil following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and is trying to build up a power base in London. By doing this Grippen is breaking the agreement he made with Asher at the end of the first book, for what seemed to me insufficient reason beyond "we needed a plot". Mrs. Asher summons both Asher and their old acquaintance Simon, Grippen's frenemy and rival; Simon is apparently now able to crisscross Europe in no time, without any of the logistical worries that were such big plot points in earlier books, never mind that it must be immensely more difficult now that World War One is under way, but that doesn't get addressed. The Balkan vampire is defeated, of course, and his overly complicated plan broken up. The McGuffin of the story is an obscure work of demonology called The Book of the Kindred of Darkness (seriously?) which although dumb was the only part of the story Hambly really had fun with, having her heroes study medieval variants of the text and try to decide which parts are genuine based on how degenerate the Latin is. I liked those scenes, and also the discussion of how Grippen maintains a number of human allies around the city without them knowing who or what he is; there's a good bit where he tells Asher "Some men walk around with leashes already on their necks; I just get hold of the end."

Milk! -- Mark Kurlansky

A book about how humans got started drinking the milk of other mammals, which is pretty weird when you think about it, and about people's attitudes towards milk across recorded history. I suppose this is common knowledge among nutritionists, but I had never realized that human milk, which is full of lactose, tastes sweet, and that's probably how people acquire a taste for sweet things. Milk proteins and fat content differ widely among mammals, and even within species -- Jersey cows give much richer milk that Ayrshires, for instance. Apparently the milk most similar to human is donkey's milk, and the main reason we didn't all grow up with the dairy board urging us to drink donkey milk is that cow milk is cheaper to produce. It was well written, but it didn't hold my interest all the way through. I kept putting it down to read other things.

You're Stepping On My Cloak and Dagger -- Roger Hall

A very funny memoir of Hall's WWII career in the OSS, which he joined without really knowing what it was, just as a way of escaping the boredom of his stateside posting. He does a great job of puncturing the mystique of covert operations, explaining that half the time the agents just flailed around with no real idea of what they were doing, and even the better organized operations often veered well outside the original plan or just fell flat. He tells funny stories about his training -- he and his fellow trainees had to assume false identities and infiltrate various financial and military institutions in Chicago and New York, make copies of vital information, and say nothing if caught. Hall got into an important war-work factory by pretending to be a disabled veteran looking for work, and even made a speech in the cafeteria about buying war bonds -- though that backfired on him when a local paper ran a human-interest story about the speech, complete with his picture. The whole book was funny, but there was a really skillful sequence where Hall, in England, gets ready for his first covert penetration: he's to be parachuted behind Nazi lines in Europe and rendezvous with French guerrillas. As he makes his preparations, the gravity of what he's doing unnoticeably leaches away the comedy, until by the time he's issued a cyanide pill to tape to his arm it's become a serious suspense story. The night leading up to the jump is harrowing; he does a good job of describing his fear and his determination not to show it -- although everyone around him understands it perfectly -- and then the jump itself, the crazy rush of parachuting into unknown territory in the dark of night, the scramble to hide his parachute, the first contact -- are they the guerrillas, or are they Germans? -- all building up to the huge deflation when he finds that in the hours since his plane took off in England the Allies have advanced, and he's actually landed well inside Allied lines and the whole operation has been rendered pointless. That was really well told. A terrific book.

Bloodchild -- Octavia Butler

A collection of SF short stories, along with a couple essays about writing. I remember reading the title story in Asimov's when I was in high school; it's basically a "what if men got pregnant?" story. The hero is a boy named Gan, one of a group of humans who live in what is essentially a reservation on a planet inhabited by insectoid aliens; the price the humans pay for being allowed to live is that one member of every family has to serve as a host for an alien's eggs. Gan has known all his life that he'll have to have eggs laid inside him; but he expects that the alien parent will guide him through the process and protect him. When he sees another host, impregnated and then left to fend for himself, torn apart in agony, he resolves to kill himself, until he realizes that that will just mean that his sister will have to bear the eggs instead. My favorite story was "Speech Sounds", about a post-disaster future where a virus has left nearly everyone unable to speak or read, so they can only communicate with body language.

The Agony of the Ghost -- Hasan Azizul Huq

A collection of short stories translated from Bengali, vividly written but utterly despairing. They're all about people trapped in total, helpless, hopeless misery, and how every element of their lives conspires to keep them there. The most representative, I guess, is a story about a few villagers who carry an injured friend a great distance to a hospital, where he lies on the floor untreated until he dies in torment from gangrene; the hospital only has one doctor, who, crushed by futility, explains to one villager that his friend needs to be operated on now, this minute, to save his life, but the same is true of the other three hundred patients lying in the packed room, and since there's no equipment and no personnel they're all going to die, in a more painful and more drawn-out fashion than if they'd never come to the hospital in the first place. The other stories were similar in tone. They made me wonder if the author was suicidal, honestly.

The Beggar Maid -- Alice Munro

Short stories that collectively form a bildungsroman, about a girl named Rose growing up in poverty in rural Ontario, with a distant father and a mercurial stepmother named Flo. Rose and Flo seem allergic to each other, neither of them apparently able to avoid putting the other's back up. (The original title of the book was Who Do You Think You Are?, which I think is a much better title and I don't know why they changed it for the US edition.) The individual stories cover periods of their lives like snapshots -- the young Rose getting into catfights with Flo and the sudden terror they both feel as they realize they've made enough noise that Rose's father is coming in to beat Rose with his belt, while Rose screams and Flo pleads for him to stop; Rose at school, embarrassed by her family's poverty and mocked by Flo for her infatuations with older girls; Rose getting a university scholarship while Flo is torn between her contempt for education and a secret admiration; Rose getting molested by a clergyman on the train to Toronto and never telling anyone because she couldn't face Flo sniping "I told you so"; Rose's ill-advised marriage to a rich boy whose self-admiration at rescuing a damsel from poverty eventually turns to hatred; the older Rose visiting Flo at the nursing home and coping with her dementia. I thought it was a really well-told story.

Dodge City -- Tom Clavin

I didn't get very far in this. There's a foreword that explains how the life stories of Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson have been so heavily buried under myth that there's really no digging them out again, and you can browse among the self-serving autobiographies, contemporary sensational dime novels, and later accounts written to grind various axes to build any narrative you want. The author says right up front -- what is certainly true -- that no one wants to read a whole book of "then X happened, but some people say it was really Y, and there's a small but insistent group that says it was Z, and another that says nothing happened at all." So, he says, you're going to get my reconstruction of events, and if you want other versions go look them up. Fair enough. I was even okay with his further acknowledgement that he'd chosen a narrative that made the best story, which is fine as long as you're candid about what you're doing. However, if you're going to tell a story, make it a good story. This was basically a three-strikes-and-you're-out experience for me: I saw "walk the streets side by side as men determined to do what was right" on one page, followed by "Bat and his blazing six-shooters" on the next, and "pistols primed for sudden action" a little further on, and I thought, okay, I've seen everything I need to, and I quit. (It's bad enough that the prose is silly and cliche-ridden, but jeez, at least use the right cliches. I care nothing about guns and even I know that you don't prime a six-shooter, because six-shooters don't have priming-pans, they use cartridges that contain their own primer.)

How Hard Could It Be? -- Bryan W. Blair

A self-published memoir by a guy who retired from general contracting to become a house-flipper. He struck me as a bit of a know-all, constantly bemoaning the stupidity and incompetence of customers, homeowners, and other tradespeople. It was almost impressive the way he quelled his infinitesimal flash of conscience about how his business model preys on the disadvantaged by deciding that everything's okay because the neighbors prefer living near a remodeled house. So, you know, that makes it totally fine that he made his profit by underpaying a desperate family who lost their savings in the recession. He didn't spend any of the profit on an editor, though, so the book is full of typos and misspellings. I didn't like it.

Behind the Kitchen Door -- Saru Jayaraman

A good book about the drive to unionize restaurant workers in the US. The author is an attorney and labor organizer for ROC United, the restaurant union; she was in the news seven or eight years ago when she won a big court case forcing the New York Restaurant Association to pay millions of dollars in unfairly withheld wages (from restaurants forcing employees to work off the clock and regularly shortchanging the paycheck of people who couldn't afford to complain and lose their jobs.) Of the ten lowest-paid jobs in America, seven are in the restaurant industry; the pay disparity breaks down on race and class lines. Front-of-house jobs, which have better pay, go to white people; the further away from customers the employees are, the darker their skin gets. Go in to any restaurant in America and look at the hostesses, the wait staff, and the bartenders; then, if you can, look in the kitchen at the cooks and the dishwashers, and you'll see what she's talking about. ROC United has fought for twenty years to have the minimum-wage exemption for tipped workers removed, without success; Jayaraman also argues vehemently against food writers who don't grasp that "sustainable" culture has to include a living wage for the people who handle the food. Some foodie might sit at a restaurant table congratulating himself that the food on the plate was all grown locally in an ecologically sound way, without considering that the people who put it on the plate have to come to work even when they're sick. Good book.

Memoirs From the Women's Prison -- Nawal el Saadawi

Saadawi, a dissident Egyptian author, was arrested in 1981 for criticizing the Sadat regime and held without trial for several months, finally getting released in a general clearing-out of the prison after Sadat was assassinated. This is her memoir of her time in prison, mostly written on toilet paper and hidden in the cell with other prison contraband. Saadawi was kept in a cell with a dozen or so other women; this was the "political" cell, where, ostensibly, prisoners were held for crimes against the regime, while ordinary prisoners were kept in another wing; but it soon became clear that the real division was that Saadawi's cell held educated middle-class prisoners, while lower-class prisoners were jailed separately. The educated women's cell wasn't any better than the working-class cells, so probably the wardens just wanted to keep the educated women away from the rest, in case they became ringleaders of some prison revolt. I was interested to see that Saadawi found it easier to compose her mind in prison when her sentence was indefinite; after Sadat was killed and everyone realized they would eventually be released, the waiting became intolerable. She draws a fascinating picture of the solidarity of the prisoners, who supported each other wholeheartedly even though they had political and religious differences that would have made them opponents on the outside. The squalor of prison life -- the dirt floor, the crowding, the single clogged toilet for a dozen women, the cockroaches, the fact that they had no change of clothes and no way to wash, the brutal indifference of the jailkeepers -- was hard on them all, and especially on the pregnant woman who was left to have her baby without help, and on the teenager who was rounded up indiscriminately in a mass arrest and put in the cell only because no one knew what to do with her, and whose family must have thought she just vanished. It was a powerful book.

Darkness On His Bones -- Barbara Hambly

Another James Asher book. This one is told in a double-flashback structure: Asher awakens in Paris, badly hurt, and with no memory of the past several days; over the course of the story he gradually remembers what happened, in reverse order. The  vampire Simon is also in Paris and we get long scenes of his memories of the Paris of the early seventeenth century. The common theme between the two threads is the strange power structure of the vampires of Paris, and the connection between a rebellion against the master vampire of 1600 and another rebellion against the master of 1914. The Battle of the Marne is being fought while all this is going on, so everyone's expecting the city to be shelled at any minute: a problem for Asher because he's too badly hurt to leave the city, and a problem for the master vampire because, unlike other masters in other cities, her authority seems to be tied to a specific location. The plot isn't that great, but the prose is good enough that I didn't mind. As in any series that goes on too long, there are contradictions: in the first book (the good one) we find that draining a vampire of all its blood while it sleeps is sufficient to destroy it, while in this book we get a vampire whose entire body was burned away with acid until nothing remains but an empty skull, and yet the vampire's consciousness is still present and it can still exert psychic power. Hambly went to a good deal of trouble in the first book to present vampirism as a collection of blood-borne viruses, but she's just thrown that aside here and made the vampires magic.

The Color of Law -- Richard Rothstein

Probably the standout book of the year. It's an incredibly thoroughly researched book written in support of court challenges to Justice Roberts's opinion that, while racism is bad and has had bad consequences, the federal government can't be sued for redress of actions not mandated by government policy. This is wrong twice: first, the "redlining" of American cities wasn't just a product of local prejudice, it was forced even into communities that didn't want it by government policies, chief among them that the Federal Housing Administration would guarantee mortgages only in all-white neighborhoods. The official FHA guidelines explicitly ordered separation of black and white neighborhoods; naturally the black neighborhoods were all located in the less desirable areas, such as adjoining industrial zones, which means black children have higher incidence of asthma and other bronchial disorders, which affects their school performance. Naturally, also, not just the good schools but the grocery stores, pharmacies, and municipal offices were all put in white neighborhoods, so the blacks had to travel much farther to reach any of them, while their own neighborhoods were filled with whatever the whites didn't want in their backyards -- night clubs, predatory check-cashing places, liquor stores. In the second place, government entities have a responsibility -- not just a moral but a statutory responsibility -- to enforce their own laws. When police stand by and do nothing as scores of whites attack black people who buy houses in white neighborhoods, or when city departments sign contracts with unions that don't allow blacks (the AFL didn't allow blacks until it merged with the CIO, which did), then their failure to act constitutes grounds for claims of negligence and malice. Here's a vignette of white privilege: I grew up in a house in a white neighborhood, a house my parents owned, and I never had any anxiety about my family losing our shelter. We owned that house because my dad got a guaranteed mortgage through the VA, one that didn't need a down payment. But up through the sixties, the VA only made that deal for white veterans, so I benefited unfairly my whole life directly because of government policy. Two big rocks from the book: first, far and away the main method for families to accumulate wealth over generations is home ownership, and black people have been unfairly excluded from buying houses everywhere in America. Second, there were two big opportunities in the twentieth century for working-class people to improve their conditions significantly: the two building booms between 1943-1955 and 1960-1973. Black workers were unfairly excluded from both. (When the BART was constructed in the sixties, by AFL-affiliated unions, not one skilled worker who worked on it was black.) It's an extraordinarily well-argued and powerful book, and I can't see how anyone who reads it could fail to conclude that the federal government has both a moral and legal responsibility to pay reparations to American blacks.

Sixty Second Science -- The Lagoon Group

A pretty good pop-science book with brief explanations of common phenomena, many of which I hadn't known, such as what causes ice cream headaches (the cold makes the blood vessels in the roof of the mouth suddenly contract and dilate; those blood vessels happen to be right next to receptors for the trigeminal nerve, which among other things is responsible for carrying pain messages from the face to the brain; and the brain misreads the I'm-cold message coming from the mouth as a pain message from the forehead) or why scratching makes an itch go away (scratching essentially overrides the I'm-itchy signal with an I-feel-mild-pain signal, because the neurons responsible for monitoring skin sensations give pain signals priority over other kinds of signals.) I liked it.

Killing Commendatore -- Haruki Murakami

Something of a grab-bag of standard Murakami plot elements. There's a protagonist whose name we never learn; important plot-altering and life-altering moments happening over the phone; a conflict between art and the demands of daily life; a genuinely platonic friendship between a grown man and a teenage girl; a mystical experience that happens underground; a scene where the hero walks into another world; unexpected comparisons between events of the book and a work of classic literature. The unnamed hero is a painter in his late twenties, who kind of unintentionally moved away from the art he wants to create in order to become a portrait painter, which is a fairly well-paid but not particularly respected niche among artists. His life is shaken up when his wife divorces him and won't say why; he quits his job and goes on a rambling drive around northern Japan that lasts for months, until an old friend from art school offers to let him house-sit at the remote mountain house of the friend's father, a famous painter named Tomohiko who is now in a nursing home and senile. In the house's attic the painter discovers a painting of Tomohiko's, carefully wrapped in brown paper and apparently hidden on purpose. He takes it down and finds a masterful Japanese-style painting of a samurai-era scene, showing a young man killing an older man while a woman and a servant look on. After a while he realizes that it's a cross-cultural representation of the scene in Don Giovanni where Giovanni kills the Commendatore. Fascinated by the painting, he spends some weeks looking at it while listening to Tomohiko's large collection of operas. (In another Murakami trope, the painter is absorbed with Western things -- he listens to Beethoven and Mozart, drinks French wine, and paints in the Western style; even if he compares someone to an actor from a movie, it's always a Western actor and a Western movie.) During this time his old agent calls him on behalf of a client who wants to pay him a lot of money to paint his portrait; the client is a man named Wataru, who turns out to live nearby, and the whole thing turns out to be part of Wataru's odd scheme to meet another neighbor's teenage niece under respectable circumstances, since Wataru believes that the girl may be his own daughter. While painting first Wataru's portrait, and then the girl's, the painter reawakens his own talent and creates works of genuine art rather than the paint-by-numbers portraits he's been making his living with. A complicated web appears to connect the painter, Tomohiko's prewar life in Vienna, Wataru's house, the niece's home life, the painter's wife's pregnancy by her new boyfriend, a mysterious man driving a white Subaru in Hokkaido who may or may not have been following the painter, and an unexplained pit in the woods behind Tomohiko's house. I should have mentioned that the painter frequently has conversations with a supernatural being who's taken the form of the Commendatore from the painting, but really, how would you bring that up? I liked the story, and it kept me turning the pages, but I didn't like that in the end the painter tries to put everything back the way it was -- he hides Tomohiko's painting back in the attic, doesn't finish his own new paintings, goes back to his wife, and resumes the same career as a generic portraitist, all of which seemed to me to be turning back the clock on his personal growth, which made me wonder what the point of the story was. Also there were some unnecessarily explicit sex scenes that I skimmed over. I felt like it could have been better.

The Irregulars -- Jennet Conant

A bit of a directionless book. It's ostensibly about the ring of British secret agents active in the United States before and during the second world war, whose assignment was to smear and discredit anyone who opposed aid to Britain -- pro-fascists, isolationists, or just anti-English. The problem is that none of the work those agents did has ever been declassified, since it would be embarrassing to both countries, and all existing information about it comes from self-promoting after-the-fact memoirs that frankly are probably all lies. Conant unconvincingly uses Roald Dahl as the focus of the story, not a great choice since Dahl was only peripherally involved; he was a junior officer invalided out of the RAF and assigned to the US diplomatic office just to give him something to do. Dahl banged a lot of society wives and later claimed they were assignments he was given for the sake of pillow talk, though he may have just made that up. The book is filled with phrases like "it was rumored" and "according to report" and that sort of thing, and actually there's so little content that Conant might have been better off just writing a novel. Although that probably wouldn't have been a great novel, because Dahl was a thoroughly nasty and cruel person who wouldn't have made a sympathetic main character. Overall the book was really a wandering mess with no point.

Pure Drivel -- Steve Martin

A collection of short absurdist pieces from the New  Yorker. I remember liking them but I can't call any of the details to mind.

The Looking Glass War -- John le Carré

Apparently le Carré was irked that the British took The Spy Who Came In From the Cold as a tragic-hero story, when he'd meant it as an indictment of the secret services and intelligence work generally. This time he decided to make his point even clearer: this is the story of an unnamed British intelligence department in the 60s, now  heavily reduced in manpower and influence as MI6 has been assuming control of all spying business. They get a report of a possible new Soviet rocket base in eastern Germany; their own analysts immediately realize the report is false -- none of the supposed informant's story adds up, and it was passed on by a middleman nearing retirement who needs last-minute funds -- but the department's director, desperate to increase his budget and feel relevant again, insists on taking it seriously. He sends an unprepared staffer to Europe to fetch some film, and when the staffer gets drunk and walks on the wrong side of the road and gets run over, the director is sure it was an assassination and he goes into high gear. He sends our hero, John, a younger man who joined the department after his business failed, to bring back the body and also find the film; John's excited about doing real spy work for once, but the trip turns into a comedy of errors and he realizes that no one seems to know what they're doing. He gets back to find that the director has reactivated an old agent from the war; John is assigned to run the agent, feeding him the lie that the department is still as large and influential as it was twenty years before, and off they go to Germany. The whole thing is a disaster; the agent panics and kills a sentry during his crossing into East Germany, and then forgets to switch between frequencies while transmitting, and the department abandons him to get caught by the Germans. I thought le Carré chickened out a little bit by having George Smiley come in at the end and clean everything up, but it's still a story about incompetent bureaucrats, afraid of getting old, who launch an unnecessary operation for stupid reasons and cause a lot of damage while accomplishing nothing, which was pretty much le Carré's opinion of most things the secret services did. Unsurprisingly it wasn't well received in England, but it was a good book.

Respected Sir -- Naguib Mahfouz

An Egyptian novel set during the monarchic period of the mid-twentieth century. The protagonist is a civil servant, a man with no real life outside of his work. The novel begins as he enters the civil service, and we learn that he was a brilliant student who couldn't afford to continue with his education. He's awed by the presence and self-assurance of the Director-General, and he's determined to hold the post himself one day. The book follows his climb up the ladder of the bureaucracy, the drawbacks of his poverty and lack of influential relatives offset by his outstanding work -- several times he's promoted just so he can do a higher-up's work for him. Although the hero is devout and conscientiously follows his civil and religious duties, Mahfouz means us to see his life as barren because he doesn't fulfill his Muslim duty to marry and have children, which would distract him from his devotion to work. The story ends with the hero finally achieving his goal soon before he dies of old age; Mahfouz clearly considers his life wasted, though from my point of view there was nothing wrong with the way his life turned out. Mahfouz may also have been indirectly saying that the hero turned his energies into his job because the oppressive state he lived under gave him no freedom to engage in public matters. I didn't enjoy it much.

Binti -- Nnedi Okorafor

An SF novella that won the Hugo and Nebula awards a few years ago. The hero, Binti, is from Namibia, where her people (the Himba) have apparently decided to maintain their traditional way of life and not participate in the space-exploration culture of their northern neighbors, the Arab-descended Khoush people. Binti is a mathematical genius and has gone as far in her studies as she can on her own; she's been invited to attend the chief human university, but she would have to leave Earth to go there, which would be against Himba tradition. Saddened to oppose her family, but unwilling to abandon her dreams of learning, Binti leaves home without telling anyone and boards the spaceship; she's the only Himba there and the Khoush passengers and crew look down on her for her dark skin and rural origins. To alleviate homesickness, and to face down people who sneer at her, she covers her hair and skin with ojitze, a reddish-orange paste made from a mixture of ochre clay and aromatic resin traditionally used by the Himba people. She makes friends with other university-bound math students, but everything is shattered when the ship is boarded by aliens called Meduse, who are at war with the Koush for reasons that are never explained (Binti doesn't know, so it's not gone into, which I liked.) The Meduse kill everyone on board except Binti, who survives thanks to an artifact of unknown purpose she carries (she found it in the desert, and it appears to be a computer tablet of some kind, so old its origin is forgotten, possibly a sign that this story is set in the very far future.) She calls it an edan (a Yoruba word for a magical object.) The edan somehow keeps the Meduse from touching her (it's never explained why, which I also liked) and over the next few weeks she talks to the Meduse through her locked door and discovers that they've taken the ship in order to use it as a Trojan horse to mount a surprise attack on the university, in order to recover an important Meduse artifact that's being studied there after the Koush seized it in a battle. Binti talks the Meduse into letting her mediate with the university on their behalf for the return of the artifact, and everything is settled peacefully. I thought it was silly that Binti's ojitze should magically turn out to have curative powers when smeared on Meduse wounds, but apart from that I thought it was pretty good.

Feminists Theorize the Political -- Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds.

An anthology of essays on feminist theory. I'd read one of them before: Sharon Marcus's essay on how rapists have a script in their heads, an expectation of how things will go, and the first defensive tool is to disrupt the script, step outside expectations, which often confuses an attacker and may even make him lose his nerve -- many people who aren't actually conscienceless have to work themselves up to committing violence, and an unexpected detour in their plan can knock them out of what is effectively a self-administered trance. A college girlfriend of mine lent me that one when we were teaching women's self defense, and it's as good now as it was back then. Of the other essays, some were more accessible than others. I'm not really an expert in feminist theory and I'm not that familiar with Derrida and Lacasse, and abstruse academic essays about how feminism is a different way of perceiving reality, and also super concerned with France for some reason, are kind of lost on me. I got more out of the essays about feminist praxis in developing nations and poor areas of industrial nations, and how teachers and social workers have to reexamine their assumptions constantly because they run the risk of ignoring the empirical knowledge of the population they're trying to help in favor of their own lived experience, which may not apply everywhere.