Book reviews, 2011

Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov (Sidonie Lederer, trans.)

I lament the death of letter-writing.  These letters give the impression of a very pleasant person who is interested in everything.  They’re full of insight – his letters about the Dreyfus affair are fascinating.

My Abandonment -- Peter Rock

A very well-written and disturbing story, told in the first person by a young girl who has been kidnapped from her family by a deranged paranoiac who believes she’s actually his daughter.  By the time of the action of the novel, the two of them have been living in a cave in the woods in a large public park, hiding from black helicopters, for several years, and the narrator has herself become deranged – her “father” having forced her to live like an adult long before she was really capable of it.  It’s a sad story.

This Side of Paradise -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

His first novel.  Clearly autobiographical, which is interesting because the protagonist is rather a spoiled brat.  The hero goes through a string of failures, largely due to his unrealistically high opinion of himself.

Heathen Days -- H.L. Mencken

The third volume of his autobiography, although unlike the first two it was assembled mostly from shorter pieces written for other occasions and so doesn’t have an overall theme.  There’s some really funny stuff about newspaper work.

The Hard Way Around -- Geoffrey Wolff

A pretty good book about Joshua Slocum, who was the first person known to have sailed all the way around the world in a small open boat.  It took three years, from 1895 to 1898, and he sailed without a chronometer – he made the whole trip using dead reckoning.  It was an amazing feat – others have done the same thing since, but they had radios.  Slocum was entirely on his own.  He wrote a book about it, which was actually much better than this book, but this one has a lot of external stuff and also covers Slocum’s disappearance at sea in 1909.

Scriblerus -- Alexander Pope et al.

This had Pope’s name on it but it was actually a group project by his friends in the Scriblerus Club.  (According to the introduction it was primarily written by John Arbuthnot.)  It’s a pretty funny satire on a sort of person who doesn’t really exist any more: a wandering scholar, a learned man who travels around disputing at universities (this was in the days when universities would room and board anyone with a degree.)  He’s wonderfully full of himself.

A Model World -- Michael Chabon

Chabon’s second book, a collection of short stories.  They were decent enough but no one story stands out in my memory.

The Road Back to Paris -- A. J. Liebling

A collection of Liebling's correspondence in the first half of the war.  The title is optimism, since the book was published in 1943.  Paris meant a great deal to Liebling -- he'd lived there when he was young, and was living there again just before the war.  The book describes Paris in the days before it fell, and the government’s flight.  Liebling fled to England just ahead of the Nazis, returned to the US, and came back to North Africa as a war correspondent.  It’s good reading.

Swallowdale -- Arthur Ransome

The Walker children return to the Lake District the next summer.  Unfortunately they find that the Blackett children are temporarily under the thumb of an awful great-aunt who doesn’t approve of unladylike things such as messing around in boats.  So there’s some fun escapades as the children elude the great-aunt with the complicity of more understanding older relatives.  A good read.

One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A novel of “magic realism”, which I gather to be a genre where everything is presented realistically, but there are fantastic elements that are treated as if they were ordinary occurrences.  This is the story of seven generations of the Buendia family in a remote village in Colombia, founded by the first Buendia.  Since the story is told non-linearly, and Spanish families tend to re-use the same two or three names, it was very confusing trying to sort out the order of events, and is this guy the Jose Buendia who went to Rome, or is he the Jose Buendia who organized the banana-worker strike?  Or the Jose Buendia who ran off with the Gypsies but came back?  There are some powerfully-crafted ghost scenes, and the episode where the family patriarch becomes obsessed with ghosts and chains himself up under a tree in the front yard throughout his old age has a convincing aura of madness.  

The Inner Voice of Love -- Henri J.M. Nouwen

This was published posthumously – it’s an account of Nouwen’s severe chronic depression and how he kept himself functional through prayer and an awareness of God’s unconditional love.  Very touching.

The Notebooks of Anton Chekhov (S.S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, trans.)

A really interesting collection of fragments that Chekhov wrote down from time to time, eventually incorporating them into his stories and plays.  This is a collection of all the fragments he never got around to using for anything.

Miss Wyoming -- Douglas Coupland

This wasn’t bad.  It’s partly a black comedy about the beauty-pageant industry and the horrible, domineering parents who slave-drive their children into it.  I liked the scene where one teenage beauty queen went off-script in a pageant, ditched her assigned cloying hymn, and sang Devo’s “Whip It” instead, driving her mother into an apoplexy.  The larger story, though, is about people who try to run away from their lives and find they can’t.

The Case of the Missing Servant -- Tarquin Hall

An excellent mystery set in modern Delhi.  The hero is a Punjabi private detective who is hired to find a missing maid – but the family knows nothing whatever about the maid except her first name.  In a country of over a billion people that’s a pretty tall order, but our hero is amazingly full of himself and takes the job.  The mixture of Hindi, Punjabi, and Indian English the characters speak is a lot of fun to read.

The Last Boy -- Jane Leavy

Pretty good biography of Mickey Mantle. I'd had no idea he was sexually abused by his older sister when he was a boy.  Leavy thinks that had a lot to do with how, in some ways, he never grew up.

Tales of the Jazz Age -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

His second short story collection, written at the top of his game; they’re all good, and the collection includes two of his very best stories, “May Day” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”.  Great reading.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -- Jane Austen/Seth Grahame-Smith

Sort of an interesting mash-up idea – someone took the text of Pride and Prejudice and edited it to make it into a zombie story.  The opening line – “It is a truth universally recognized, that a zombie in possession of brains must be in need of more brains” – is a little strained, but it wasn’t bad overall, if only because in this version Mr. Wickham is savagely maimed and ends up incontinent in a wheelchair.

Unbearable Lightness -- Portia de Rossi

A really interesting memoir about anorexia.  Full of the horrible things anorexics do to themselves – for example, she was supposed to keep a journal of what she ate for her nutritionist, so she kept two sets of books: a fake one to show the nutritionist, and a real one to torture herself with (apparently the pages were covered with notes like you fat ugly dyke!)  I wasn’t impressed with the ending, which didn’t sound very real – she more or less claims to have magically cured herself of anorexia, and says that now she eats whatever she wants and it just so happens that what she wants is healthy salads.  I don’t know, I’ve seen her on TV in the last year or two and she still looks pretty skinny to me.

Hawk's Flight -- Carol Chase

Decent fantasy novel, of the disguised-heir-to-the-throne sort.  There’s some pretty good fight scenes.

The Logic of Steel -- James LaFond

A not-very-good book about knife fighting. The author, counting up, reckons that he has been in eight knife fights in his life, which I can tell you doesn’t happen to someone unless he’s going around looking for them.  He also makes fundamental errors of research – since he doesn’t like or get along with cops, he bases everything on interviews with fight participants; however, he only interviews one party of each fight, which leads to the astonishing coincidence that every person he talked to won the fight he was in.  He doesn’t interview witnesses, or look at the police reports, which would have given him a more accurate idea of what really happened.  On top of that, he compiles numbers and makes up charts in every chapter, but he clearly has no grasp of mathematics, so the charts and graphs mean nothing, and since he doesn’t use any context or controls, the “statistics” and “percentages” he reports also mean nothing.  The whole book is less useful than one sentence from a Green Beret friend of mine: “Don’t get into a knife fight, because you might lose – or tie.”

The Late Shift -- Bill Carter

A pretty good behind-the-scenes memoir about how Jay Leno stabbed David Letterman in the back and took The Tonight Show away from him.  The villain of the piece is Leno’s manager, who seems to have been a first-class creep – she hated Johnny Carson and tried to force him off the air years before he retired – but Leno, though the author clearly liked him, still doesn’t come off well.  Sure he was a nice guy, but he was willing to look the other way while his manager did the dirty work, and happy to let her take the blame and ditch her once he got the job.

Mark Twain's Letters (2 vols.) -- Albert Bigelow Paine, ed.

These were really interesting but also very depressing.  It actually doesn’t show in his books just how bitter and depressed he was in the second half of his life.  I’m pretty sure he became genuinely mentally ill by the end.  It’s not the sort of book you can read all at once – his favorite subject is humanity and why it’s awful, and that wears on you.  However, there was also a lot of stuff I hadn’t known.  Apparently Twain and William Dean Howells were each other’s biggest fans, maybe because their writing was so unlike.  Twain painted with a broad brush and Howells used a fine one; neither of them could possibly have written like the other.  It’s also apparent that Twain’s failing as a businessman was that he just didn’t know when to give up; he kept throwing good money after bad into hopeless projects year after year.

Howards End -- E.M. Forster

A novel about isolation, arguing that the root of most human problems is the failure of people to connect with each other spiritually and emotionally.  Very well-written.

The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing -- Tarquin Hall

Another oddball mystery set in Delhi, where Vish Puri investigates a mysterious apparition that apparently killed a skeptic.  He winds up having to infiltrate a cult that’s a front for taking gullible people’s money.  The plot wasn’t as strong as the first one, but the writing and dialogue are still very entertaining.

The Second Tree From the Corner -- E.B. White

A collection of essays.  None of them really stand out in my memory except the one where he predicted that television would turn everyone into mindless zombies.

Or All the Seas With Oysters -- Avram Davidson

Pretty good collection of weird-tales stories.  The title piece is the best, a story where a bicycle mechanic makes a really determined effort to find out where all the extra wire hangers, paper clips, and safety pins are really coming from.

The 42nd Parallel
Nineteen Nineteen
The Big Money -- John Dos Passos

An immensely ambitious experimental novel in three parts, covering the years before, during, and after World War One from a strongly Socialist viewpoint.  The story is assembled out of four alternating elements.  One, taking up the majority of the text, is a non-linear sequence of twelve storylines covering the lives of twelve American characters, all of which involve the conflict of labor and capital in one way or another.  The characters appear in each other’s storylines, sometimes in major roles, sometimes in the background.  The other elements are scattered between episodes of these storylines.  One element is a number of “Newsreel” chapters, consisting of snapshots of the era – newspaper headlines, movie titles, ad blurbs, fragments of popular songs, and the like; another is a number of short biographies of real-life figures such as Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Edison, and the Unknown Soldier.  The last is a recurring stream-of-consciousness segment called “The Camera Eye”, which I found very puzzling at first; it took me quite a while to realize that it was Dos Passos’ autobiography, concentrating on his growth as an artist and his commitment to socialism.  It requires a heavy investment of time, but it’s worth it.

Our Mutual Friend -- Charles Dickens

His last completed novel, and a really excellent one, with a complicated plot involving a man faking his own death and then being hunted for his own murder.  This goes on against a backdrop of various men and women who are all, in one way or another, obsessed with money.  There are secret wills, disinheritances, plots to ensnare unwary nouveaux-riches, absurd marriage-agreements, and a loathsome parasite who secretly buys up debts and forces a gentle, elderly Jew to serve as his front-man so no one will know who actually owns the debts.  There are also some of his very best little touches – the woman who proudly says of her son’s reading the newspaper, “He do the police in different voices!”, or the gloomy butler: “ ‘Dinner is served,’ he intoned, as who should say, ‘Come down and be poisoned, ye unhappy children of men!’ “  There were a few flaws – I’m certain Mr. Boffin’s gradual change into a heartless miser, his good nature ruined by his inherited fortune, was initially meant to be genuine, and Dickens only made it into a big put-on because he couldn’t think of where to go with it.  

The World of Carbon -- Isaac Asimov

Very clearly-written introduction to organic chemistry.  It’s really noticeable that it was written in the fifties; Asimov tries to connect his explanations with everyday experience, and most of his examples are things like, “When a housewife uses a cleaner, what’s happening is…”  Nothing about our understanding of the basics of organic chemistry has changed since then, though, so the book is still an excellent resource.

The Eye of the Sibyl -- Philip K. Dick

I’ve really liked other collections of his stuff, but these stories were uniformly terrible.  Maybe the editors wanted everything included for completeness and they put all his sucky stories into one volume.

The Wayward Pressman -- A.J. Liebling

A collection of press criticism from the New Yorker.  Liebling came down pretty hard on newspapers for letting their publishers dictate what could go on the news pages.  He also noted that though Westbrook Pegler declared American ideals hopelessly dead in the forties, America kept rolling along somehow.

Taps at Reveille -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

His last short-story collection.  Though all of them have his charm and technical brilliance, a lot of them are pretty shallow and seem as though he didn’t care much about them.  However, it does contain “Babylon Revisited”, which most critics think is his best story, an obviously autobiographical piece about returning to Paris after the crash of 1929 and looking back in near-incomprehension at the riotous life of the 20s.

Etiquette Guide to China -- Boye Lafayette de Mente

This is primarily meant for business travelers, but it was still fairly useful.

Atlantic -- Simon Winchester

I found this kind of tedious.  The Atlantic Ocean is just too vast in space and time to be the subject of a book.  Winchester seemed not to know where to start or where to continue, jumping back and forth through a hundred million years of oceanic history, presenting a lot of interesting facts but never really making the book into a cohesive whole.

The Old Capital -- Yasunari Kawabata

The story of Cheiko, a foundling raised by a Kyoto kimono-maker.  At the age of about twenty she goes to visit a temple in an outlying village and is astonished to meet a woman who looks exactly like her; it turns out that this is her identical twin sister, and that Cheiko was not a foundling at all, but was actually stolen from her real parents by the childless kimono-maker.  The novel is mainly about the powerful emotions this discovery brings about in her and in her male admirer, and the grief she feels that her twin can’t be really close to her because they’re of different social classes.  I liked it.  

To the Elephant Graveyard -- Tarquin Hall

Outstandingly good book about wild elephants in far northern India.  (There are a lot of wild elephants there because of the vast stretches of forest; a grown elephant eats hundreds of pounds of tree branches every day.)  Hall is in the company of a hunter who has been hired by the government to find and kill a “rogue” elephant, meaning one who has started killing people, a very unusual thing for elephants to do.  (It turns out that this elephant was once owned by a drunk who treated him very cruelly, and the elephant has been killing drunken people – they have a very powerful sense of smell, and people who stank of alcohol set him off.)  I learned a lot of great stuff about elephants.  They bury the dead, for example; an elephant coming across the dead body of another elephant -- or a dead human! -- will rip up the ground with its tusks and kick dirt over the body.  Also, in Assam, where they’ve cut down some of the forest, the elephants come and eat the town’s crops.  Since Hindus won’t kill elephants (many believe they are living avatars of the god Ganesh, the Remover of Obstacles) they tried to frighten them away with firecrackers and lit torches, but the elephants just ignored them.  Then they dug ditches, but the elephants knocked down trees and used them to fill the ditches.  Then they put up electric fences, but the elephants sprayed water on the fences to short them out.  I loved it.

Peter Duck -- Arthur Ransome

A story within a story – this is a novel presented as a fabulous sea-story, which apparently the Walker and Blackett children are taking turns making up and telling to each other.  Pretty good.

A Shabby Genteel Story -- William Makepeace Thackeray

A collection of short stories.  The title piece is an unfinished novel that he decided would be better as a novella.  Many of them were really excellent, especially “Boots”, a terrific story narrated by a thoroughly awful person.  The great thing about that one is that it’s a poetic-justice story, but the narrator thinks it’s a hard-luck story.

The Spice Route -- John Keay

A not-very-interesting book on the history of the trading routes of the middle and far east.  Pretty dry.

Winter Holiday -- Arthur Ransome

The Walker and Blackett children, on winter break in the Lake District (extended because of a mumps quarantine) are joined by another set of children, the Callums, and together they build an ice sled and go shooting about the frozen lake.  It was pretty good.  I liked the sled-racing scenes.

Strata -- Terry Pratchett

A science-fiction comedy where a professional planet-builder is recruited into a motley crew on an expedition to a bizarre artifact in a distant part of the galaxy: a world-sized, disc-shaped structure whose builders clearly had technology so advanced it’s almost magical.  The expedition, which started out as purely mercenary, ends up trying to find out who built such a strange thing, and why.  It was pretty funny, though you have to have read Larry Niven’s Ringworld to get most of it.

Mink and Red Herring -- A.J. Liebling

A second volume of press criticism from the New Yorker, pointing out instances where news coverage was obviously forced into certain channels by wealthy publishers, in order to serve the interests of their wealthy friends.  Liebling was amazing – he read every New York paper (there were like a dozen in those days) as well as a number of out-of-town papers from Washington, Chicago, Boston, and other cities, every day.  Where did he find the time to do anything else?

John Adams -- David McCullough

Excellent biography.  John Adams is one of those people who, the more you learn about him, the more you admire him.  I hadn’t known that Adams acted as the defending attorney for the British soldiers who were arrested for the Boston Massacre, because he thought everyone deserved a fair trial.  Also he wrote pretty much the entire Massachusetts Constitution (and apparently it was his idea to call Massachusetts a Commonwealth.)  The book was very thoroughly researched, too, with pointers to all the sources.

The Allegory of Love -- C.S. Lewis

An interesting piece of literary criticism, studying the development of literary treatment of the concept of romantic love throughout the middle ages, covering the French troubadors, the Roman de la Rose, Chaucer, and the Faerie Queene.  He livens up the criticism with moralistic asides; I particularly remember him interrupting a description of a medieval garden with the stern warning that “Those who begin by worshipping power, soon worship evil.”

Ten Little Indians -- Sherman Alexie

A book of short stories.  The best one was “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”, a wonderful story about a homeless drunk Indian living on the street in Seattle, who sees a ceremonial dancing outfit in the window of a pawn shop and realizes it belonged to his grandmother.  

The Power of Now -- Eckhart Tolle

A book about encouraging spiritual growth.  A lot of it was too new-agey for me, but I did think his idea about trying to live entirely in the present, freeing yourself of regrets from the past and worries for the future, which do no good and cause suffering, was a good one.

Requiem For a Nun -- William Faulkner

A novel in play format, with the “intermissions” taken up with a prose history of Yoknapatawpha County.  I was a bit at sea at first, because I didn’t realize until half-way through that the book is a sequel to his earlier novel Sanctuary, which I haven’t read.  I had to look up the plot of Sanctuary to clear up what was happening.

The Gardner Heist -- Ulrich Boser

A good retrospective of the still-unsolved break-in at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum.  The security was maddeningly skimpy and inefficient – for a long time the cops thought the guards must have been in on the heist, because they just let the thieves in when they rang the bell, but eventually they decided the guards (minimum-wage short-timers) really were that lazy and stupid.  I’ve been there since – the empty spaces where the paintings used to hang really strike you, as though the museum were wounded.  No trace of any of the paintings has ever been found.

Comfort to the Enemy -- Elmore Leonard

This was a collection of a few short pieces, mainly a long novella that was later expanded into the novel Up In Honey’s Room, which I didn’t like.

How To Use Integrated-Circuit Logic Elements -- Jack W. Streater

A good introduction to methods of constructing and using integrated circuits.  Has a very clear explanation of fanout, something I’d never really understood before.

Reminiscences -- Maxim Gorky

Gorky’s reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Aleksandr Blok, all of whom he knew personally.  I thought the big contrast between Tolstoy and Chekhov was interesting: Tolstoy was almost a religious figure, and apparently he expected to be treated with enormous reverence, which he usually was.  Gorky says “I do not believe in God, but he was Godlike.”  Chekhov, on the other hand, was approachable and friendly.  Gorky relates that people who were going to meet Chekhov for the first time were nervous and intimidated, but that since Chekhov pretty much knew everything about everything, he could always find an agreeable topic for any visitor, so he could have a pleasant conversation with anyone.  

The Alice Behind Wonderland -- Simon Winchester

A short biography of Alice Liddell, the girl for whom Lewis Carroll invented his stories.  The book goes to some lengths to point out that photographing small children in various states of undress was not at all unusual in the early days of Victorian photography; pretty much every single photographer did it, so Carroll wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary.  It still comes across as creepy, though.

Doctor Sax -- Jack Kerouac

A strange, surreal novel about a man who has a dream about his childhood in Lowell, which then starts him telling the story of his childhood there, except he doesn’t seem to remember which parts were his actual childhood and which parts were the dream, so his story is a strange mixture – he has kids playing stickball in the street, under the shadow of a gloomy, mysterious castle haunted by werewolves, and textile factories manned by zombies and vampires.  I liked the conceit more than the execution.

Hypothermia -- Arnaldur Indridason

A pretty decent murder mystery, where our divorced, depressed, and possibly suicidal hero distracts himself from his troubles by solving a puzzling crime (the killer used a hot tub to change the body’s temperature and confuse things.)

Salaam Brick Lane -- Tarquin Hall

An excellent book about living in the East End of London for a year or so, in a cramped apartment illegally built out from the second story of a sweat shop run by a genial Bangladeshi.  Hall was living with his then-fiancée, later his wife, who was from Delhi; though they had deliberately gone to some trouble to prevent any of her relatives from finding out her address, her mother enlisted a distant cousin (in Hindi, all older women are called “Auntie”) to track her down and offer unrefusable invitations to tea parties, where she would simply ignore Hall and lecture his fiancée on why she couldn’t marry a foreigner.  (During the whole year she was constantly trying to set the fiancée up on dates with Indian men!)  The East End, these days, is largely populated by immigrants, many of them illegal, who tend to form linguistic enclaves, and mingle only in the market.  Hall spoke Hindi, Punjabi, and Farsi, but could still only speak with a few of his neighbors.  It was a very good story.

Tiassa -- Steven Brust

One of his Vlad novels, where he makes the decision to bring in characters from some of his other novels, which is usually a mistake, in my opinion.  I liked the story structure, and the writing, but I thought the central mystery was really left unresolved.

A Clergyman's Daughter -- George Orwell

One of Orwell’s “middle” novels, written in the thirties.  It’s the sympathetic story of a woman in her late twenties who is essentially her father’s dogsbody and slave, compelled to do all the work of the house (there are no servants), attend every church service, type her father’s sermons, sew on his buttons, and do all the work of the minister’s wife – visiting the sick, paying calls on parishioners, making costumes for the children’s play – because her mother is dead.  Also her father has no sense of money and refuses even to talk to bill collectors, leaving everything on her shoulders.  All this adds up to about a nineteen-hour work day.  Orwell does a good job of showing how completely helpless she is: her father would never allow her to marry, and since she’s plain-looking and has no money, no one is ever going to run away with her.  It’s no wonder she has a nervous breakdown and wanders away in a blackout, coming back to herself eight days later with no idea where she is or how she got there.  Since her father refuses to believe her story and will not answer her letters, she is thrown upon the world entirely unprepared.  She can’t stay at any decent lodging, since she does not have a companion and is therefore by definition not respectable.  She goes through the very few options available to her – she gets work as a migrant laborer, but after harvest time ends up living homeless in Trafalgar Square.  The chapter she spends homeless is written in play form, clearly a Joycean experiment, and in fact it was the only part of the book Orwell liked.  A distant relative arranges for her to teach at a disreputable girls’ school, where the awful headmistress lectures her on how she is to take special care of the children whose parents pay the best rates and ignore the others.  She finally ends up with enough money to take her back home, where, having completely lost her religious faith, she returns to her life of pointless drudgery.  The ending’s a real downer, but I think the rest of the book is very good.

Electroboy -- Andy Behrman

Pretty good first-person memoir of a guy with bipolar disorder, including both manic and depressive episodes, as well as kind of creepy descriptions of his electroshock therapy.

Coot Club -- Arthur Ransome

The Callum children from the last book take a vacation in Norfolk, where they hope to learn to sail so they can play pirates with the Walker and Blackett children later in the summer.  They make friends with a group of local children who spend most of their time on the water bird-watching, and trying to protect a nesting coot from the careless anchoring of vulgar, mean-tempered tourists.  The Callums get good hands-on sailing experience as they have to avoid the vengeful tourists, who are of course helped out by the local mean kid.  Good chase scenes.

Captain Singleton -- Daniel Defoe

A novel about a young English boy who is stolen by Gypsies and eventually joins a pirate crew, rising to become captain of a band of pirates in Madagascar.  Defoe knew a number of pirates personally, so the account is pretty authentic, showing unexpectedly thorough attention to the economic problems of maintaining a ship and crew when you are not officially part of any nation and have no legal sanction.  I liked it.

Cold -- Bill Streever

A book about the Arctic and periods of tremendous cold at various times of the year.  I wasn’t that interested in it.

A Long Way Gone -- Ishmael Beah

An interesting memoir of a child soldier from Sierra Leone.  After his village was destroyed in their civil war, he lived as a refugee with some other children for some time until he was conscripted into the governmental forces at the age of thirteen.  He spent almost three years as a soldier, living a life of terrible violence (he says he has no clear idea of how many people he killed, but it was a lot.)  He and the other soldiers became heavily addicted to drugs; he says they would not have been able to function without them.  He was eventually removed from the Army by UN forces, and sent to a UNICEF refugee camp (where apparently a lot of former child soldiers in drug withdrawal spent all their time fighting each other.)  In the book – written about ten years after the fact – he says that coming out of the army was harder than going in, because it’s easier to be dehumanized than it is to become human again.

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu -- John Updike

This is a fifty-years-later annotated copy of the New Yorker article Updike wrote about Ted Williams (the one where he called Fenway a “lyric little bandbox”.)  It was a very good article, with a really excellent closing line, noting that Williams didn’t tip his cap even after his very last at-bat (which was a home run): “Gods do not answer letters.”  Updike mentions in the annotations that he got a lot of hate mail about the article over the years from people who really, really hated Ted Williams.

Crypto -- Steven Levy

A history of cryptography, concentrating on the period between about 1960-1990, and the war between the NSA and private supporters of strong cryptography.  The NSA was initially at a disadvantage because the US didn’t even admit it existed until the mid-70s, but their position has always been consistent: no US citizen should be allowed, for any reason, to make any communication to anyone that the NSA can’t read.  They’ve faced constant opposition from civil libertarians, however, and Levy is optimistic about the future of privately held strong crypto – rather overly optimistic, I thought, since civil libertarians get old and die but government agencies are immortal.  Also, the book was written before 2001, and the NSA has bigger weapons now.

Pigeon Post -- Arthur Ransome

The Callum and Walker children return to the Lake District, where they reunite with the Blackett children to go camping and gold-prospecting.  Also, they train homing pigeons to keep in touch with their parents (I can’t see Mom and Dad going along with that one.)  There’s some good hiking scenes, some funny mistaken-identity comedy, and a good bit of excitement where they help fight a grass fire.

Tender Is the Night -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

His last completed novel, and his favorite.  It’s the story of his own life: a talented man who marries a fascinating woman, unaware that her family has gone to great lengths to hide from him that his fiancée is mentally ill.  Over years of an unhappy marriage, her illness wears away at him and his talent dissipates, a process he accelerates by drinking heavily.  I think I’ve said this before, but it’s amazing how Fitzgerald could be so self-destructive and yet so self-aware at the same time.  Probably the strong personal emotion of the book kept him from appreciating it objectively: he thought it was his best book, but it’s actually his worst, wandering, often tedious, and full of totally unlikable characters.

Indian Killer -- Sherman Alexie

An angry novel set in contemporary Seattle, where two groups of three men go around killing people: three whites who kill Indians, and three Indians who kill whites.  There’s also a mentally ill construction worker who gets wrongly blamed for the killings, a bitter social worker who attends college classes just so she can argue with the professors, and a couple annoying hippy-dippy white men who claim to be part Indian.  The prose is good but I wasn’t really clear on just what the author was trying to say.  One thing I think he wanted the reader to take away: if your grandmother was part Cree, or something, that doesn’t make you an Indian.  I think he’s saying that people who look 100% white, who grew up in a white world, who live lives of white privilege, and claim, for whatever reason, to be “part Indian”, are people who want the metaphysical “identity” of Indian-ness without the price of poverty, mistreatment, prejudice, and endemic alcoholism that actual Indians have to pay for it.  

How the Irish Became White -- Noel Ignatiev

A book about how the 19th-century Irish, who in Ireland were universally staunch Abolitionists, became racially prejudiced against blacks after they moved to the United States.  One reason: in the 1800s there were no black people to speak of in Ireland, while in America the Irish had to compete directly against the black population for the lowest-paying jobs.  It’s clear the book was originally a Ph.D. thesis, but it rises above the turgid prose you usually find in such books.

Blackout -- Connie Willis

A time-travel story, involving several future researchers who all go back in time to the Blitz and then get trapped there.  I liked the WWII Britain scenes, and in fact I thought the author could just have left out the whole time-travel part.  There’s a sequel, which I suppose will deal with why they’re all trapped in the past, but I don’t care enough to read it.

The Path Between the Seas -- David McCullough

A really good book about the building of the Panama Canal.  Did you know the French spent twenty years and millions of dollars, with workers dying like flies, and they never even had a master drawing of what the finished canal should look like?  The first accomplishment of the American attempt was bringing in a chief surgeon, who spent two years killing all the mosquitoes in the area, thus bringing cases of malaria and yellow fever down to zero.  Turns out the greatest engineering challenge was finding the angle of repose, the angle at which the hills at the sides of the canal would not be subject to random landslides (this was much more complicated because the soil is full of clay and there’s a lot of rain there.)  

The Ninth -- Harvey Sachs

A pretty good book about the era and circumstances surrounding Beethoven’s composition of his Ninth Symphony.  It hadn’t occurred to me before that the performances Beethoven’s contemporaries heard were nothing like the ones we hear – there weren’t really any professional orchestras then, and even in Vienna a typical performance would have had a couple dozen musicians at best, with very little rehearsal time.  A performance in the acoustically-perfect Boston Symphony Hall, with over a hundred musicians, plus a chorus of fifty or sixty voices, would be something they could only dream about.

The Ecolitan Operation
The Ecologic Secession -- L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

A science fiction story about a kind of ecological-engineering think tank declaring its independence from the ruling authoritarian regime.  I liked it mainly for the compelling argument made by the ruthless ex-commando helping the think tank that first principles have to come first.  For example, if winning independence is your first priority, then it has to be the first priority – if you find yourself saying “Independence isn’t worth that price,” then independence isn’t your first priority, is it?

The Seven Poor Travellers -- Charles Dickens et al.

The double-size Christmas issue of Dickens’ magazine for 1854.  I believe Dickens heavily edited the contributors’ prose but not the poetry, which explains why the prose stories are all good but the poetry is dreadful.

A River Runs Through It -- Norman Maclean

A long novella about fly-fishing and the difficult relationship between two brothers.  I thought it was very good.  My edition also included a couple other autobiographical stories about working as a logger and a fire-service man in the Northwest in the teens and twenties, which were also good reading.

We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea -- Arthur Ransome

My favorite of the Ransome books.  The Walker children go sailing on the river Orwell with a grown-up friend in his cutter.  They anchor far down the river while the friend goes ashore into town.  But the friend doesn’t come back (it turns out later he was knocked down by a bus) and in the night the cutter drags its anchor and heads out to sea on the tide.  Because of the strong gales they have no choice but to run before the wind and come to port in the Netherlands.  The best part of it is seeing the effort the older children go to, to keep the younger children from realizing how much danger they’re in.  

Sixkill -- Robert B. Parker

This was Parker’s last novel, a Pygmalion story where Spenser meets a directionless Cherokee tough guy who imprints on him and sets out to become Spenser Junior.  It’s as carelessly written as everything else of Parker’s after about 1985, when he stopped giving a crap.

Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi -- Charles Dickens (ed.)

Joseph Grimaldi was a famous 19th-century clown; so famous, in fact, that circus clowns are still called “joeys”.  He wrote his memoirs in the 1830s, in collaboration with a Grub Street hack, but died before he found a publisher.  The hack offered it to Bentley’s Miscellany, and Bentley bought it, but hired the young Charles Dickens to edit and re-write it.  The result is pretty entertaining, although Grimaldi suffered the usual fate of artists and died broke.

The Western Canon -- Harold Bloom

As Dad says, I feel as though I should like Harold Bloom, because he likes most of the same authors I do, but somehow I don’t.  There’s too much of a weary sigh of exasperation in his tone when he mentions theories that disagree with his.  I get the feeling I wouldn’t like him if I knew him.  I do agree with his idea that the canon of great writers should be based on artistic greatness and not on social importance.

The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices -- Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins

A short novella about two Apprentices to Literature (Dickens and Collins, of course) bunking off from their responsibilities and taking a walking-tour as a vacation.  They take turns recounting the trip, and gradually turn the whole thing into a pretty good ghost story.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

An outstandingly good book, one of the best things I’ve ever read.  It’s a slice-of-life story, a chronicle of one ordinary day in the gulag in Siberia.  It’s extremely vivid, and also kind of a primer on making the best of things.

The Lives of the English Poets (3 vols.) -- Samuel Johnson

Incredibly, the Yale press took 55 years to edit these three volumes.  Luckily it didn’t take that long to read them.  They’re amazingly well written and fascinating.  Actually I’ve never heard of a good many of the poets he writes about – I think he included some people because he approved of their moral tone, rather than because of their artistic value.  His favorite praise for good writing was that it was “easy”, meaning that reading it was like riding a horse with an easy gait, never catching your feet on clumsy passages.  For some poets he spends more time on biography, for some on criticism.  For example, his Life of Savage, the best character study he ever did, is 99% biography; he tactfully doesn’t include much of Savage’s poetry because it wasn’t actually very good.

The Cocoanut Grove Fire -- Stephanie Schorow

A short book about the terrible fire at the Cocoanut Grove night club in Boston in the forties.  Hundreds of people died because all the doors opened inward, and most of them were locked from the outside anyway, and the revolving doors at the front jammed.  (For decades afterward Boston buildings weren’t allowed to have revolving doors.)  There was something strange about the fire that’s never been really explained: the fire engulfed the club in seconds, moving so fast that some people died in their seats without even having time to put their glasses down.  Also, all the survivors agreed that there was a strong, acrid smell, something you wouldn’t expect from an ordinary fire.  Were the walls coated in some kind of accelerant?  Nobody knows.  I talked to a guy once who was at the fire – he said he would have died except he happened to be near where the firemen broke through the wall, and he got out that way.

Babbitt -- Sinclair Lewis

I have a vague memory that I was supposed to read this in high school but didn’t.  It’s a satirical novel about boosterism and self-satisfaction, and about mid-life crisis.  I didn’t think much of George Babbitt, though I suppose you’re not supposed to.  He looks to me like a picture of a man who could have been a decent guy if he didn’t let everyone else do his thinking for him.  Dad points out that George Babbitt would be right at home in the market today, since “He made nothing, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses to people for more than they could afford to pay.”

South Sea Tales -- Jack London

A collection of short stories about sailing and trading in the South Seas.  Somehow London’s racism is more visible here than in his Yukon stories.  There’s a story about a worthless, mean-tempered drunk white man who lives alone on an island trading-post, and when a traveler asks if he isn’t nervous living by himself, he cackles gleefully and tells the story of how the last time the island natives killed a white man, the company sent an armed ship and killed ninety percent of them.  London clearly thinks this a sign of how awesome white people are.

Round Up -- Ring Lardner

A collection of most of his sort stories.  I liked them a lot.  Along with several good baseball stories, there are some very funny comedy-of-manners stories, like the house guest resolutely trying to be polite to his pushy, overbearing hosts, or the long-suffering man who gets fed up with his bridge partners telling him what he did wrong on every hand, and his revenge.  Good reading.

A Journey to the Center of the Earth -- Jules Verne

Surprisingly good, despite it all being impossible.  It’s a good device to have the expedition following the carved messages left behind by a previous explorer hundreds of years before.  The title is misleading, since they don’t get anywhere near the center of the Earth, only descending thirty or forty miles (though that’s far enough to find underground oceans, dinosaurs, and twelve-foot-tall ape-men.)  Though nobody seems to care that the previous explorer’s trail leads to a passageway that goes nowhere, suggesting that he died on his journey.  The ending is pretty silly, with the expedition getting caught in a heated water-jet that propels them all the way to the surface, where they are shot out of a volcano vent in the Mediterranean (impressive considering they started their descent in Iceland.)

Secret Water -- Arthur Ransome

The Walker and Blackett children are “marooned” on an island in Essex, on a mission to use their small boats to explore the surrounding waters and marshes and make a chart before their parents come back for them.  The charting mission is livened up by a friendly war with some local children.

Best Short Stories -- Jack London

A collection of stories from various points in his career.  The best is “To Build a Fire”, a story about an Arctic prospector who foolishly sets out on foot when it’s 75 degrees below zero, and his desperate attempt to start a fire when he’s lost feeling in his hands.

A River Sutra -- Gita Mehta

A sutra is a string of aphorisms – it literally means “thread”.  This is a collection of short stories set in India; the connecting thread is the narrator, a civil servant who has renounced his material goods and set out for the sacred river Ganges to meditate.  On his journey there he meets various people – Jains, yogis, gymnosophists, village runaways – who illustrate different faces of Indian spirituality.  Good book.

Mosses from an Old Manse -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

A collection of short pieces, some fiction, some lengthy descriptions of the Old Manse, where Hawthorne and his family lived for several years.  This being Hawthorne, the stories are all about how awful people can be.  It includes the famous “Young Goodman Brown”, but my favorite was “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, a Gothic sort of story about a student in Padua who falls in love with a beautiful neighbor, only to discover that her body is steeped in poison – her breath kills nearby birds, her tears corrode her window sill, her touch withers flowers.  All of this is a consequence of the evil of her father, the magician Rappacini.  It ends unhappily, of course.

What Of It? -- Ring Lardner

A collection of various short pieces, among them some reimagined fairy tales, which were pretty funny.

The Vegetable -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald's only play, a funny story about a nobody who has a dream that he's inexplicably become President and filled his Cabinet with his in-laws.  I'd like to see it on stage.

The Lake -- Yasunari Kawabata

A creepy story about a middle-aged man in central Japan in the fifties, who becomes interested in a young girl and starts following her around.  The story is filled with flashbacks to his days as a schoolteacher, a job he eventually lost because of the inappropriate amounts of attention he paid to a young girl in his class.  I didn’t care for it.

The Overcoat -- Nikolai Gogol

A collection of Gogol’s short stories.  Some were good, some so-so.  It’s worth it for the title piece, though, and for the excellent, haunting ghost story “The Portrait”.

The American Claimant -- Mark Twain

A funny novel about one of Twain’s imperviously self-confident adventurers – Mulberry Sellers, who after the death of a relative decides that he is the rightful heir to the Earldom of Rossmore, and begins sending serenely assured letters to the Earl, bidding him lay aside his borrowed glories.  The Earl’s son, who has radical ideas, decides to go to America and surrender his title to the Earldom to Sellers, but through an accidental case of switched identities, winds up meeting Sellers incognito and falling in love with his daughter.  Hilarity ensues.  It was pretty good.

The Honest Rainmaker -- A.J. Liebling

A character portrait of an old friend of Liebling’s, an eccentric gambler and con man whom Liebling always called “Colonel John R. Stingo”, that being the pen name under which his friend wrote a horse-picking column in the free race sheets.  The “Colonel” didn’t bet on horses himself (“Every horse player dies broke,” he said) and instead made a living conning people out of money, as with his rain-making scheme – he did long statistical studies of weather patterns, and then he would go to the owners of race courses and tout his rain expertise: for a fee he would guarantee no rain would spoil any of the horse races in a given period.  Naturally he only made this offer when he was reasonably sure there wouldn’t be any rain anyway.  However, he took the precaution of getting paid by the day, so if it did happen to rain one day he could take the money and run.  There was something charming about such an unrepentant sinner.

The Sea-Wolf -- Jack London

Probably his best novel, and clearly one that got away from him.  The hero is cast adrift after the ship he is on sinks, and he is rescued by a seal-hunting schooner, captained by Wolf Larsen, a man of extraordinary force of character, who conscripts the hero into his crew, will-he, nill-he.  Larsen is a true Nietszchean ubermensch, totally materialistic, recognizing survival and pleasure as the only good, and believing human life to be of no value.  He treats his crew brutally, and though he makes a sort of court jester of the hero, because he enjoys intellectual conversation, he does nothing to protect him from the crew, so the hero has to learn to fight for survival.  It’s obvious that London intended the book to be a battle of will between the captain and the hero, with the hero winning by demonstrating the value of life, but Larsen was too strong even for London, and in the end London had to make him die of a stroke, since he was otherwise unconquerable.  There’s a silly love story tacked on, too, but the book would have been better without it.

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men -- David Foster Wallace

I hated this, and didn’t finish it.

Jitterbug Perfume -- Tom Robbins

Sort of an oddball suspense story, with several professional perfumers (all very strange people) competing to recreate a certain perfume found in only one centuries-old bottle.  What they don’t know is that there’s someone alive who knows the formula, a minor medieval king who became immortal through following breathing exercises he learned in India, and who hangs around with the great god Pan, who these days is mostly reduced to a goatish stench.  It wasn’t bad.

Understanding Physics, Vol. 1: Motion, Sound, and Heat
Understanding Physics, Vol. 2: Light, Magnetism, and Electricity
Understanding Physics, Vol. 3: The Electron, Proton, and Neutron -- Isaac Asimov

A really thorough and well-written introduction to basic physics.  Asimov was big on starting at the very, very beginning, and showing how one discovery builds on the last and leads to the next.  I thought it was great.

I Am The Market -- Luca Rastello

A very interesting book on the logistics of cocaine smuggling, written by someone who claims to be a former smuggler.  One point he makes is that nobody smuggles anything in small lots – the mules who carry two or three or twenty-five kilos of coke through airports are just decoys who are supposed to be caught, to distract attention from the really large-scale efforts going on elsewhere, a lot of which involve uninspected shipping containers.  At one time, apparently, it was popular to make the cocaine into a paste and saturate shipments of clothes with it, then reclaim it from the clothes afterwards, but the DEA caught on and nobody does that any more.

The Haunted Hotel -- Wilkie Collins

A pretty good short novel, a combination murder mystery and ghost story.  I liked it.

The Draining Lake -- Arnaldur Indridason

Reasonably good cold-case murder mystery.  Makes Iceland sound kind of dreary, though.

East and West -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A collection of various speeches he made in the seventies.  His general thesis is that everything that’s wrong with the world can be traced to the fact that men have forgotten God.  (He doesn’t say exactly when men forgot God, but I suppose it must have been an awfully long time ago, because there’s never been a time when the world wasn’t in a mess.)  He’s torn about the future of Russia; he’s adamant that the Communist regime must go, but he’s also wary of American influence in the post-Communist era, since he says that the inherently rural Russians aren’t compatible with Western culture.  His suggestion for the future of the world is to ban automobiles, abolish cities, and have everyone live in villages where no building can be more than two stories.  (“Sounds great to me,” Dad said.)  So he was a bit of a nutter.

War Dances -- Sherman Alexie

A collection of poetry and short stories.  I liked the stories better.  There was a good identity-question story about a Spokane Indian who is surprised in his house by a black teenage burglar.  When the man kills the burglar in self-defense (he hits him too hard) the talk-radio programs label him a white racist.  It’s all very confusing, deliberately so, of course.

Vineland -- Thomas Pynchon

A novel about ex-hippies and ex-anti-hippies in California in the eighties.  Explores how even twenty years later many people are unable to outgrow their adolescent identities.  It’s hard to tell which is sadder – the woman on the run still maintaining her “militant film collective”, or the COINTELPRO operative still trying to take her down.  I didn’t think it was that interesting.

Complete Prose Tales -- Aleksandr Sergeyevitch Pushkin

A collection of short stories.  It’s largely padded out with fragments because Pushkin didn’t actually write that many short stories.  Over half the stories in the book end abruptly with the note “Pushkin never finished this story.”

American Notes -- Charles Dickens

Dickens’ journal of his visit to the United States in the 1840s.  From the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit, I had expected this to be pretty savage, but it wasn’t at all – the characters in the novel are intentionally grotesque, but this book is non-fiction and Dickens goes in for straight reporting.  Naturally New England would be to his liking; he writes about Boston and Lowell with great approval, particularly admiring the well-run public charities, the talented preachers, and the general air of civilization (which he attributes to the good influence of Harvard.)  He can’t get anyone to give him a clear explanation of Transcendentalism, but he finally records that the Transcendentalists are “followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or rather of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson.”  He read Emerson while in America and called him full of good sense.  Overall his remarks about America are positive and even flattering.  I imagine the book’s poor reception here was due to the later chapters, where he went west and south and consequently spent a lot of time condemning slavery.

A Wind in Cairo -- Judith Tarr

A fantasy story about a young good-for-nothing in the time of Saladin, who gets cursed by a magician and is turned into a horse, so he can be humiliated by being led on a bridle by a woman.  The writing was decent, but I really couldn’t get past the fact that the kid got on the wrong side of the magician in the first place because he raped the magician’s daughter.  It didn’t help that his defense was that he thought the woman was a servant, because that apparently makes rape okay?  I was hoping the horse-hero would get killed at the end, which would really be the only kind of atonement I’d feel fine with, but the ending we got wasn’t as satisfying.

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens -- Jack Weatherford

A very good book on Genghis Khan’s daughters and daughters-in-law, who were removed from the official history of the Golden Family after they died.  Genghis’ four sons weren’t worth much, and if his grandsons amounted to anything it was because of their mothers.  I hadn’t known that Genghis’ first act after becoming Great Khan was to outlaw the selling or trading of women.

The Belly of Paris -- Emile Zola
                                                                                                               
A very good 19th-century book about a deserter who, escaping from prison and assumed dead, returns to Paris, where he gets a job as a market inspector, which was a sort of combination of health official, safety official, and overseer of weights and measures, along with dozens of other responsibilities, at the vast food market of Les Halles.  Zola had tremendous powers of description, and six hundred pages is barely enough room for his really excellent picture of the market, the fish stalls, butchers’ stands, and fruit and vegetable peddlers, from huge businesses covering entire blocks to old women selling carrots on a blanket, all rolling into Paris on creaking wagon caravans before sunrise every morning.  The poor inspector has to get up before dawn and spend all day criss-crossing the market, making sure the fish is fresh, that the butchers aren’t using food dye to disguise bad meat, that the scales are honest, that sellers aren’t giving people bags of yesterday’s unsold produce when they think they’re getting what they saw on the stand, that the big vendors aren’t pushing the small vendors around, and a thousand other things, with about as much cooperation from the vendors as you’d expect.  I liked it a lot.

Little Tales of Misogyny -- Patricia Highsmith

A collection of very short stories, all of them about villainous women betraying, deceiving, or murdering men, sometimes doing themselves in in the process, but not always.

Lord Chesterfield's Letters -- David Roberts (ed.)

These were the letters that Johnson said “teach the manners of a dancing-master and the morals of a whore.”  They’re letters the Earl wrote to his illegitimate son, full of advice on the best way to live his life.  His principal dictum was that his son must always study to be graceful and polite, since the Earl thought that being exceptionally polished and having excellent manners was the most important qualification in life, far more important than actual knowledge or competence.  At one point he mentions Martial’s couplet Non amo te, Sabidi, and says that he is perfectly satisfied that the reason Martial could not love Sabidius, though he was master of a thousand virtues, was that Sabidius did not have pleasing manners and the grace of behavior that inspires love.  The Earl was filled with immense disdain for people who disagreed with him, and I get the feeling that, for all his sermonizing on the value of making yourself pleasant, I would not have liked him if I’d known him.  Funny how little things stick with you: he only mentioned it in one letter, but I remember the irritation I felt that he named his dog “Loyola”.

Mollie, and Other War Pieces -- A.J. Liebling

An excellent collection of long articles for the New Yorker that Liebling wrote during the war.  The title piece is all about his effort to find the real name of “Mollie”, the nickname of an American private (it was short for “Comrade Molotov”, because of his Socialist bent) who at one point captured 600 Italian soldiers by himself (that’s really true; apparently he just got bored with being under cover from the Italian fire, and without asking anyone he just walked right up to the Italian position and asked them, more or less, “Aren’t you guys sick of fighting?  Mussolini’s dead and you’re just helping the Germans.”  The Italians talked it over among themselves for a few minutes and then surrendered en masse.  Picture Mollie leading them all back to his own lines!)  Mollie was killed some time after that, so Liebling never met him and had to construct his story from people who had known him – none of whom could remember his real name.

The Game -- Jack London

A boxing novella, about a Mexican revolutionary who comes to the US to earn money for the cause in the ring.  He fights his way to a big-money match, which is rigged against him, and he has to change his style mid-fight – he can’t clinch, because the crooked ref would take any opportunity to call him for a phantom foul, and he has to win by knockout, because any decision would go to his white opponent, however ridiculous.  London was a boxer himself (he made money fighting in his twenties) and the fight scenes are well-done.

The Abysmal Brute -- Jack London

Another boxing novel, about a man raised in the country by a former champion, who comes to the city with an unstoppable right hook and a truckload of naiveté.  He becomes a champion, although, unknown to him, most of his opponents are taking dives at prearranged times for the sake of the betting.  When he finds out that his next fight is rigged, he makes a speech beforehand, announcing to the crowd that the fix is in, and his opponent has been paid to take a fall in the tenth round; but he further announces he will wreck everyone’s plans by knocking the man out in the first round.  Which he does.  He gets the girl, too, but romance was not one of London’s strengths and the fight scenes are much better.

The Old Beauty -- Willa Cather

Three novellas, of which the title piece was the best, about a man who hears that a woman who was the leading beauty of the fashionable world when he was young has just died of old age.  Very affecting.

The World of Nitrogen -- Isaac Asimov

Asimov realized he hadn’t said all he had to say about organic chemistry in The World of Carbon, so he decided to continue on into another book.  Very clear and lucid.

The Son of the Wolf -- Jack London

London’s first short-story collection, mainly man-against-nature stories from the Arctic.  They were pretty good.

A History of Pi -- Petr Beckmann

Pretty dry exploration of various advances in measuring pi.  Somewhat livened up by idiosyncratic asides on how the Romans were worthless idiots, particularly Caesar, and how religion is for morons.  I would actually respect that more if he hadn’t added a preface about how he expected no one would like the book because of his iconoclasm, thus giving him an easy out against reviewers – “Well, of COURSE they said my book was boring and poorly written – they hate me because of my AWESOME COURAGE in voicing my UNPOPULAR OPINIONS!”

Blind Waves -- Steven Gould

A decent near-future action-adventure story involving submarines.  The villains were a little cartoonish, but it wasn’t bad overall.

Work -- Louisa May Alcott

A 19th-century novel about a young woman who is thrown into the workforce and supports herself in careers available to women: governess, companion, seamstress, actress.  She comes close to starvation and considers suicide, but is rescued by a kind friend and sent to what is essentially an unofficial halfway house, a small farm where they grow flowers for commercial sale.  For its time it must have been pretty progressive, though it’s off-putting now to see the shock our heroine feels when a fellow-seamstress is accused of having been seen unchaperoned with a man, and the internal effort she has to go through before “forgiving” the woman.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume II -- Edward Gibbon

The first part ended with the final collapse of the Western Empire, and this second part deals with the Eastern Empire and its endless war against Persia.  Gibbon was clearly not as interested in the Byzantines as he was in the Romans; the two parts are about equally long, but the first part covers about 300 years while the second part covers over a thousand.  He doesn’t go much into personalities – I remember the Byzantine emperors as a long line of guys who had their eyes burnt out one after another.  He shows his upbringing, too – to Gibbon, any rebellion against constituted authority is always inherently wrong, totally regardless of circumstances.  For example, he relates, with great disapproval, the story of a German queen whose husband was killed by a conqueror.  She was taken as a concubine by the victor, and after biding her time for a few years and winning his confidence she stabbed and killed him.  This seems thoroughly admirable to me, but Gibbon considers it an immoral act of rebellion.

Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly On Prayer -- C.S. Lewis

A one-sided correspondence, being Lewis’ letters to an imaginary friend about the nature of individual prayer as opposed to liturgical prayer.  I wasn’t really sure why he went with the whole Malcolm thing – he went whole hog, too, inventing a wife and family for Malcolm and referring in the letters to fictional outings their families had together – unless it were just to set up the death of imaginary Malcolm’s imaginary son, so he could talk about the nature of the prayers a parent would make after the death of a child.  I liked it, if only because for once Lewis doesn’t act like he knows the answer to every God-damned thing.

A Cafecito Story -- Julia Alvarez (Daisy Cocco de Filippis, trans.)

A short novelette about an unhappy college teacher from Nebraska who takes a vacation in the Dominican Republic, where he falls in love with the local coffee and the people who grow it.  He ends up staying in the Dominican and devoting his life to coffee farming.  It’s clearly propaganda supporting small coffee growers against big companies, but it wasn’t bad.

The Secret of the League -- Ernest Bramah

A polemic novel written in 1911, wherein the industrial powers of England wage an economic war against the popularly-supported Socialists.  As with all polemic novels, it’s not so much a story as a sequence of events, with the author saying “Look how everything would proceed smoothly and according to plan if only everyone would listen to me!”  The story ends with the defeat of the Socialists and the undoing of the reforms of 1906 and then some – Bramah’s plan for saving England was to restrict the right to vote to people who had a certain amount of money, with more votes going to people who had more money.  Naturally, as soon as the League institutes its rollback of social progress, all England’s problems are instantly solved.  Bramah represents the populace of England happily giving up the right to vote with a sense of relief, since deep down they’d always known they didn’t deserve it.  Unsurprisingly, the book didn’t sell and quickly went out of print.  The scary thing is that the only reason I knew the book even existed is that my copy was a reprint from the 1990s, published by some right-wing group who thought the book’s proposals were just awesome.

Eleven -- Patricia Highsmith

A short story collection, featuring not one but two stories where the protagonist gets killed by evil snails.  I thought they were pretty bad, and in fact I returned the book to the store and got my money back without reading the last two or three stories.

The Call of the Wild -- Jack London

A great beast-fable about a young California dog who gets stolen and shipped to the Yukon to be sold as a sled-dog.  In the brutal sink-or-swim environment he quickly learns to fight and to endure the cold.  As time goes by, he adapts more and more to the far North, until, escaping a catastrophe that wrecks his sled and team, he leaves civilization altogether and joins the wolves in the tundra.

Burning Daylight -- Jack London

A rags-to-riches-to-rags story, about a gold miner who makes a big strike in the Yukon and returns rich to California.  He is badly burned and disillusioned when he finds that the great businessmen of civilization are petty and deceitful, unlike the straightforward men of the mining towns.  London develops that into a pretty well-argued indictment of the capitalist system.  His hero decides to return ill for ill and becomes the most ruthless businessman in America, amassing enormous wealth and power, eventually realizing that the strain of it all is killing him.  He decides to walk away, letting his whole empire go to smash, and settles down in a quiet farm in an obscure corner of California.  

The King of the Golden River -- John Ruskin

A pleasant fairy tale about the consequences of good and bad behavior.  It is of course a convention of fairy tales that any pair of awful selfish brothers must have a despised younger brother who (for some reason) is their moral opposite.

Conversations with Sherman Alexie -- Nancy J. Peterson (ed.)

Various magazine articles and transcripts of radio and TV interviews.  They were pretty interesting.  I thought it was interesting that even he couldn’t exactly say what Indian Killer was about.  Also, he was insistent in his condemnation of Tony Hillerman and W.P. Kinsella, because they’re white people who have made money writing about Indians but have not done anything for the benefit of Indians with that money.

Damon Runyan: A Life -- Jimmy Breslin

This was terrible.  I actually stopped reading halfway through – the book seemed to be about everything but Damon Runyan, and in any case Breslin apparently did no research, relying entirely on second-hand anecdotes.  For example, he repeats, with great authority, the old story about Wally Pipp taking himself out of the lineup and getting replaced by Lou Gehrig, even adding insider details about how the whole thing was a contract maneuver that backfired on Pipp.  Five minutes of actual research shows that whole story is bullshit (Pipp was benched because he wasn’t playing well, and that’s all there was to it) and Breslin just never bothered to look it up.  If you mess up on something that easy, I’m not going to trust you on important stuff.  The book kind of revealed more about Breslin than Runyan, really, and unfortunately what it revealed was that Breslin was kind of a jerk.

The Mysterious Montague -- Leigh Montville

Probably the only book about golf I have ever read.  I bought it because of the author, who used to write for the Globe when I was younger.  It’s all about a guy who made a living hustling rich golf players at clubs in California back before the war.  He was a man of mystery, who wouldn’t let himself be photographed, which it turned out was because he was wanted for armed robbery under another name back east.  The book is really more about the legend than the man, recounting all kinds of astonishing golf feats that he was supposed to have pulled off (never when there was a reporter present, of course) – making 500-yard drives, knocking birds off distant telephone wires, sinking putts with a baseball bat, recording unheard-of scores below par, that sort of thing.  When he finally did play in recorded matches with witnesses, he suddenly became just an ordinary golfer, maybe good enough to be a pro, maybe not.  Montville attributes this to his getting older, but I think it’s obvious the stories were all just bullshit.  I’m also surprised Montville seems so eager to excuse him for being involved in a robbery where a man was killed.

Smoke Bellew -- Jack London

A bildungsroman about a young California layabout who heads to the Yukon and grows into a hardy, dependable, steady man.  It’s good reading, although London’s racism shows in a particularly ludicrous light here: he represents the white hero – in his early twenties, and only having been in the Yukon a year or so – as performing amazing feats of endurance that leave Indians dropping of exhaustion in his wake (the opposite of what would have really happened), fueled by the sheer power of whiteness.  It was embarrassing.

The Earl of Louisiana -- A.J. Liebling

A really entertaining profile of Earl Long, governor of Louisiana in the forties, fifties, and sixties.  It was kind of amazing that the Long brothers were able to keep such a stranglehold on power even though they had no support whatever from the newspapers and the wealthy people hated them.  Shows the real extent of populist power when it’s handled right.  The Longs kept their power by controlling New Orleans and upstate; New Orleans because the poor and the blacks turned out in huge numbers for them, upstate because they built roads and provided jobs.  Earl Long ran the state by himself after his brother was assassinated, facing resistance from the wealthy hard-core racists (he called them “grass-eaters”) because he wouldn’t back down on civil rights.  In fact, to prevent him from passing some piece of civil-rights legislation, his enemies kidnapped him – actually, literally kidnapped a sitting governor, the only time I’ve ever heard of that happening – and had an out-of-state judge certify him insane.  He got out of that because his friends found out where he was and got in touch, and Long told them there was no rule that said being crazy disqualified you as governor (which was true!) so he fired the head of the state hospital and replaced him with a friend, who let him out.  Great read.

Flight -- Sherman Alexie

An interesting novel about a teenage orphan – half white, half Indian -- who runs away from his foster home and lives on the street for a while, finally camping in an abandoned building with a possibly imaginary friend named Justice.  At Justice’s prompting, he’s about to shoot up a bank lobby with a paint gun when he has a mystical experience, seeing things through the eyes of people he doesn’t know – 19th-century Indians and Indian hunters, contemporary white pilots training Arab students, and others – which changes his mind about his life.  It was a good story.

The Things They Carried -- Tim O'Brien

A Vietnam novel, consisting of several thematically-arranged short stories.  The title story was the best, an exhaustive listing of everything his squad carried in their packs, on their backs, and in their pockets, from mortar rounds to pictures of sweethearts, which sounds like it would be tedious but wasn’t.  It was very well-written.

The Dancing Girl of Izu -- Yasunari Kawabata

I think this was his first book, written in the twenties.  It’s a story of an old man recalling a girl he was in love with when he was young – a dancing girl in the town of Izu, whom he saw only a few times and to whom he never spoke.  I liked it.

The Beach of Falesa -- Robert Louis Stevenson

A South Sea novella about a copra-bark trader who is tricked by a rival trader into taking a taboo woman into his house, thus hurting his chances of trading with the islanders.  The trader turns the tables by getting a Christian missionary to marry him to the woman, and sets out to avenge the crimes of his brutal, drunken rival.  It was pretty good.

Clowning in Rome -- Henri J.M. Nouwen

A book about the period he spent living in the Vatican before  going back to his ministry.  It’s set up in four sections, on solitude, celibacy, prayer, and contemplation.  I liked the clown metaphor: he says that in a circus performance, the clowns provide the between-acts material, letting the big guns get ready off stage.  Also, the main acts are brilliant displays of incredible talent, while the clowns fall on their faces and fumble things, so Nouwen thought of them as more human and approachable.  He thought his ministry lay with the (metaphorical) clowns in the circus of the world: the ordinary people who keep things moving while the great and powerful are off doing whatever it is great and powerful people do.

Maimonides -- Abraham Joshua Heschel (Joachim Neugroschel, trans.)

A good biography of Moses Maimonides, the great rabbi of the twelfth century, who thought he would be remembered for his vast commentary on the Mishnah, but who is actually more remembered for his book The Guide for the Perplexed.  I was amused to find out that scholars usually refer to him as Rambam, an acronym for “Rabbi Moishe ben Maimon”.  He was Spanish, but he and his family had to flee Spain when the Almohades overthrew the Ummayad dynasty and established their rival Caliphate in Cordoba.  Rather than be forced to convert to Islam, they spent the family fortune to get themselves secretly shipped across the Mediterranean, and eventually settled in Cairo, where the more cosmopolitan eastern Caliphs maintained freedom of religion.  Maimonides was a physician, eminent for his time, and he must have had a lot of energy, because in addition to treating people in the community for free, he was also the official physician of the court at Cairo, and somehow he managed to get through all that work while still writing deep works of metaphysics at night.

The Jacket -- Jack London

A gripping prison story, about a man in a San Francisco prison who endures the terrible torture of “the jacket” by escaping into visions of previous lives in his mind.  The jacket – a real thing, by the way, still in use at the turn of the last century – was a horrible procedure where they laid you face down on a sheet of canvas and wrapped it around your arms, torso, and legs, cranking it so tight you couldn’t move, so even breathing was agony.  Then they left you there for days at a time.  London said he knew men who had been driven irretrievably insane by it.  The book’s hero, with help from a couple other prisoners (tapped out in code with their feet) learns to meditate and eventually frees his consciousness from his body and re-lives past lives, the stories of which make up a large part of the book.  I liked the prison scenes better, but the whole thing was good.

Carlisle vs. Army -- Lars Anderson

A pretty good book telling the parallel stories of Dwight Eisenhower’s football career at West Point and Jim Thorpe’s football career at the Carlisle Indian School, and the lead-up to the big game between their teams (Carlisle won.)  Apparently Ike hurt his leg so badly when trying to tackle Thorpe that he really should have been medically discharged, and avoided it only because the West Point surgeon liked him and looked the other way when Ike failed his senior-year physical.

Sketches New and Old -- Mark Twain

Twain’s first short-story collection, including the Jumping Frog story and others, as well as several dozen short essays.  He was fond of telling egg-on-my face stories; like the time some friends of his told him that a man in the audience (pointing him out) was going through terrible troubles and a good laugh might save his life, and Twain practically killed himself during his performance trying to raise a laugh, but while the rest of the house rolled in the aisles the man just sat there showing no reaction.  Twain shamefacedly confessed defeat to his friends – who told him that the man was actually a deaf-mute they had planted in the crowd.  The book is from the period before Twain sank into more or less permanent depression, so it’s mostly light-hearted and funny.

How to Talk so Kids Will Listen, and Listen so Kids Will Talk -- Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

This was pretty good.  I skipped the training exercises, but I liked the case studies.  I was particularly struck with the effect of letting kids explain themselves and acknowledging that they feel what they feel.  For example, if a kid says “I hate school,” a common reaction is for the parent to say “No you don’t,” which ends the dialogue right there.  It’s generally better, the authors say, to respond with something like “Why do you say that?” and let the kid explain himself.

Growth of the Soil -- Knut Hamsun (W.W. Worster, trans.)

Hamsun’s most famous novel, generally thought to be the one that won him the Nobel Prize.  It’s a story of slow, patient strength, as a young man goes out into the Norwegian forest to establish a steading that grows, like a carefully cultivated plant, into a large and prosperous farm over the course of fifty years or so.  It’s a very good book, though I can’t read it wholly at ease, since Hamsun was a pro-Fascist who had the dubious distinction, according to the Nazi press secretary, of being the only person who could get a word in edgewise when talking to Hitler.

I, James Blunt -- H.V. Morton

A pretty good piece of war propaganda written in 1942, picturing life in a conquered England.  A lot of it dwells on how close the British came to holding off the Nazis, if only they had tried just a little harder back in 1942 when they had the chance!   

Perdido Street Station -- China Miéville

A gripping horror novel set in the imaginary city of New Crobuzon, where a criminal gang, in a really impressive display of short-sightedness, has imported five specimens of a terrifying man-sized moth, which are not only super-strong, hypnotic, and able to fly, but also feed on dreams, leaving their victims as mindless husks.  The criminals were keeping them penned to make a kind of narcotic from their secretions.  The author does a really good job of making the imprisoned creatures extremely frightening, so when you get to the part where you hear a dying guard choke “The moths are out!” it’s a really cold-sweat moment.  Most of the plot involves our hero rounding up allies, both willing and unwilling, to destroy the moths before they wipe out the city, while at the same time keeping away from the secret police that the dictatorial government has sent after him for other reasons.  It’s all fascinating and weird (in the weird-tales sense), with great background elements like the Ambassador from Hell (the Mayor has to speak to him from within a protective circle, and when the Ambassador speaks his words are formed of tormented screams that sound like they’re coming from unimaginably far away) and the Weaver, a kind of giant extra-dimensional spider-thing that lives beneath the city, whose thought processes are totally alien, and who speaks in strange stream-of-consciousness poetry, and does totally unpredictable and incomprehensible things, like leaving a message composed of dozens of pairs of scissors spelling out words.  Some people told me beforehand that the book was terrible, but I thought it was very good.

The Press -- A.J. Liebling

His third and last book of newspaper criticism from the New Yorker.  He goes into the process of how newspapers can manufacture a crisis to serve the business interests of their wealthy publishers, but no one notices because newspapers make mountains out of molehills all the time anyway; it’s what sells papers.  He really hammers the Chicago and New York papers for not even pretending to get labor’s side of the story in articles about strikes.

The Boston Irish -- Thomas H. O'Connor

A good look at Boston politics over the last two hundred years, and the bitter fight of the old Yankees against the upstart Irish.  It looks to me as though the Yankees eventually lost their grip simply because they were too used to being top dogs and didn’t do enough to maintain their power.

Boulder Juice -- Marinela Christel

The writing had a certain vitality, but I really couldn’t follow it.  I’m still not sure if it was supposed to have a plot and failed, or if it was supposed to be a stream of consciousness, or what.

REAMDE -- Neal Stephenson

A really good action/suspense story, launched by a computer virus called REAMDE that gets everyone into a lot more trouble than its writer intended.  I liked the story a lot, but what really impressed me was the way the author was able to keep so many balls in the air at once – there are at least thirty major characters in about eight plot lines that cross all over America, Canada, Russia, China, and the Philippines – without ever getting lost or tangled.  Also, it’s nice to see a story centering on computers where the characters don’t do computer stuff that’s actually ridiculous or impossible.

White Fang -- Jack London

Sort of the reverse of The Call of the Wild – this one is the story of a sled-dog born in the Yukon and raised by brutal men with clubs, who is eventually driven mad by the abuse and becomes a champion dog-fighter, until a stranger wades into a dog-fight and lifts him out of it and takes him away to treat him better.  The man patiently nurses the dog and eventually wins its trust through good treatment, and takes him out of the Yukon to civilization.

Exiles -- James Joyce

Joyce's only play, a story of interlocking love triangles. It isn't very good; it wasn't put on the stage until 1970, and wasn't well received even then.

The Last Knight -- Norman F. Cantor

A fairly interesting biography of John of Gaunt.  More of a picture of his times, really.  The writing was a little dry but the book wasn’t bad.

In the Lake of the Woods -- Tim O'Brien

A sort of post-Vietnam story, about a Minnesota politician whose career is destroyed when it comes out that he was present at the My Lai massacre but later faked his records to hide it.  The book is an examination of stories: the false stories the protagonist built around his real life are echoed in the way the narrator tells the same story several different ways – maybe it happened this way, or maybe it happened this other way, or maybe it didn’t happen at all.  Did the protagonist murder his wife and then commit suicide?  Or did the wife get lost in the reaches of the lake and the husband got lost looking for her?  Or did the two of them continue across the lake to Canada to escape their lives?  It’s all left unclear.  Usually I don’t like that sort of “well, we can’t know” kind of story-telling, but this was done better than most.

The Big Six -- Arthur Ransome

The first of his books I haven’t liked.  The story centers around the local bad kid causing trouble by loosing off people’s river-boats after they’ve been tied up for the night, and framing our heroes for it.  The problem is I just can’t buy the premise – all of these kids, both the heroes and the bad kid, have lived in the same fairly small village their whole lives.  Everyone in the town can’t help but know them well.  Yet absolutely everyone immediately believes the bad kid, immediately shuns the heroes without listening to their side, and generally acts like extras in a monster movie – I kept expecting them to show up at the kids’ clubhouse with torches and a pitchfork.  The heroes eventually prove the bad kid is lying, of course, and the townsfolk abase themselves.  I thought the heroes went along with a “Oh, that’s all right, never mind it” kind of too easily.

Chicago: the Second City -- A.J. Liebling

A collection of three long New Yorker essays on the city of Chicago and why it sucks.  The book version was annotated with his replies to indignant letters from Chicagoans, at whom he laughed for being so sensitive, although I actually thought the letters had a point.  Essentially, Liebling lived in Chicago for a year or so and hated it, and he also hated the Chicago Tribune and its publisher, so he let the city have it with both barrels.

The God of His Fathers -- Jack London

One of his earlier short story collections, drawing on his experience in the Yukon.  They’re mainly rough-justice stories, how quarrels are settled beyond the bounds of civilization.  They’re pretty good.

Essayes, First Booke -- Michel de Montaigne

A lot of these are very good, some others are poorly thought out.  In many respects they probably don't give a true picture of how he thought.  For example, in the essay on the best form of government, he concludes that absolute monarchy is best, the more absolute the better; which, considering that he lived under an absolute monarch and would have been executed for offering any other opinion, doesn't really tell us anything.  Similarly, he concludes that total adherence to the Catholic Church is best for everybody, and it's better to just do what the priests say and not become educated; of course, since any other conclusion would have gotten him burned alive, it's not a reliable indicator of what he really thought.

Lords of the Sea -- John R. Hale

Excellent book on the history of the Athenian navy and its relationship to democracy. The author's argument is that serving in the navy promoted egalitarianism, since everyone shared the same quarters and the same food and rowed next to each other on the same benches; and further that the city's total dependence on the navy promoted democracy, because it was the working classes that worked the oars.  In fact, when Athens finally fell to Alexander, it was because the aristocrats betrayed the navy and sided with the invaders.  The book gives very clear descriptions of the great naval battles of the Athenian Empire.  It also explains that a quinquireme was not, as I had thought, a ship with five banks of oars, but a much larger trireme, with three banks of oars, but with two rowers on each of the upper two levels, so that it took five men to crew one set of three oars.

Quite Enough -- Calvin Trillin

A Trillin retrospective.  I would generally rather buy an author’s collected works than read a collection of excerpts, but there were some previously uncollected pieces in it, so that was okay.  I am aware Trillin really enjoys writing political doggerel, but I do not share his enjoyment in reading it.

Jernigan -- David Gates

This was well-written but I didn’t like it.  It’s the first-person story of an alcoholic nihilist whose only pleasure in life is feeling superior to people who aren’t alcoholic nihilists.  The novel ends on sort of a negative victory, as the hero decides to triumph over his many problems by not getting treatment for them.

Something For the Pain -- Paul Austin

A memoir of working in an emergency room as a med student and then a physician.  A lot of it was pretty interesting.  It does give me pause to think about just how short on sleep the doctors in a hospital usually are.  I suppose the tensions such a demanding job causes in your family are a legitimate part of the story, but I thought those parts were pretty boring.  Also, he made his wife sound like kind of an awful bitch; I wonder what her side of the story would sound like.

Before Adam -- Jack London

A novel of reincarnation, where the narrator relates the dreams he has of his former life as a proto-human tens of thousands of years ago, mainly dealing with the wars between his tribe and the more primitive apes (whom he fears for their greater strength), as well as the more advanced Cro-Magnons (whom he fears for their weapons and command of fire.) It's well-told.

The Amateur Emigrant -- Robert Louis Stevenson

This is the first third of Stevenson’s travel memoirs, covering a  journey by ship from England to New York (he was on his way to California to marry his fiancée Fanny.)  He gives a good picture of ship-board life, with many character sketches of the other steerage passengers, maybe a little condescending; the great majority of them are going to America to escape drunken parents, drunken spouses, or the consequences of their own drunkenness.  It was pretty good.

Boss -- Mike Royko

An unsympathetic portrait of Richard Daley, who was Mayor of Chicago for twenty years or so, and always the city's biggest booster.  Royko hammers Daley for being a machine politician, for taking a different line with voters upstate than with the ones in the city, and for fumbling the ball when he played kingmaker in 1968.  My copy has a blurb from Jimmy Breslin saying that the book "does more written damage to a man than any I have seen", which is silly hyperbole and also wishful thinking, since as far as I can see the book had no effect on Daley's career at all, considering he was re-elected several more times after it came out (and then his son was mayor for another twenty-plus years.)  In fact, Daley as Royko paints him doesn't seem like a bad person at all to me, a disinterested party 45 years later; the worst thing you can say about him is that he rang the law-and-order bell too loudly, which led to a lot of police brutality in '68, for which no one was ever punished.  But even Royko admits that Daley was only doing what the rest of the country wanted done.  We look back in sympathy now at the '68 protesters, but that was not at all the general opinion at the time.

Jack Ballister's Fortunes -- Howard Pyle

A minor 19th-century kids' book, a rags-to-riches story where our hero sets out to make something of himself and briefly becomes a pirate before rescuing a maiden from durance vile and settling into respectability.  I liked it.

Deeper Than Words -- David Steindl-Rast

I didn't care for this much. I'm generally in sympathy with liberal theologians, but I can't agree with the author that Christianity and Buddhism are fundamentally reconcilable, because Christians believe in a creator-God and Buddhists do not.  I also don't agree with his interpretation of Thomas Merton's saying that "God isn't someone else."  Stendl-Rast interprets that in a Buddhist sense, meaning that separateness is an illusion; whereas I strongly believe that separateness is not an illusion -- I am not God in any sense, and the Dalai Lama and I are not fundamentally the same entity.

Steam -- Andrea Sutcliffe

A pretty good history of the steam engine and particularly the development of the steamboat.  I note that Robert Fulton never claimed to have invented the steamboat.  He just came along after the several independent inventors wiped themselves out fighting each other, improved their designs, and built one that worked.

Snuff -- Terry Pratchett

One of his Discworld novels, featuring my favorite character, Sam Vimes.  This one deals mainly with classifying people as things so you don’t have to feel bad about what you do to them.  There’s some great comic and fight scenes, with rather a reversal of the city mouse and country mouse paradigm, as Vimes comes out to the country and shows the good old boys what’s what.  There’s also a great river chase scene.  I wasn’t entirely convinced by the ending, though – because all the highbrow society people heard one girl play beautiful music at a concert, that convinces them that all her people are okay after all and shouldn’t be sold into slavery.  So does that mean if they couldn’t play beautiful music, than treating them like dirt would be fine?

The Picture of Dorian Gray -- Oscar Wilde

I hadn’t read this before, but of course I knew the conceit – a young man acquires a magical portrait of himself, and the portrait ages while he stays young.  There are three main characters: Dorian himself, the painter of the picture, and a mutual friend.  Dorian is a wholly amoral sensualist; the painter is an artist strongly concerned with the morality of art; the third man is a depraved sensation-seeker, who sets out to ruin Dorian for fun.  Wilde said all three are meant to represent him: the painter as he thinks he really is, the third man as he thinks the world sees him, and Dorian as what he wants to be.  (Which is a little strange given that Dorian falls ever deeper into cynical debauchery and finally kills himself by stabbing the picture, after he has murdered the painter, but there you are.)

The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. -- Jack London (completed by Robert L. Fish)

London’s last novel, which I suspect he left unfinished because he wrote himself into a corner.  The hero becomes aware of a secret league of highly moral assassins, who take assignments to kill evil people.  He meets the chief of the League and hires him for an assassination – the target being the chief himself.  The chief refuses, on the grounds that the League only kills immoral people; but after long argument the hero convinces him that the League is itself immoral (it’s a big weakness that London doesn’t actually give the arguments the hero uses, but merely says the chief is convinced) and the chief announces that he accepts the contract, and he gets in touch with the members of the League to inform them that he is their target.  The League refuses to act until the chief tells them he will kill them unless they kill him.  Then he vanishes, and the rest of the story is the League and the chief hunting each other, with the reluctant participation of the hero, who acts as the League’s secretary and liaison with the chief, supplying both sides with money (they are all highly moral and intelligent men.)  London stopped half-way through the chase, probably because he realized there was no satisfying way the story could go.  After he died some hack I’ve never heard of tacked on a weak ending, but it would have been better off without it.

Djibouti -- Elmore Leonard

A novel about piracy in Africa.  I liked the writing but I wasn’t keen on the story structure, as the action skipped around kind of excessively.  If you’re going to jump around in time and also jump around between different groups of characters, you need to stage-manage the whole thing with extraordinary clarity, which actually is usually one of Leonard’s strengths, but I didn’t think he pulled it off this time.

The Iron Heel -- Jack London

Another polemic novel, this one supposedly written long after the peaceful establishment of the world socialist utopia, looking back centuries earlier to the class war of the twentieth century.  Writing in 1903, London predicted the fall of the American Republic in 1908 and the start of a World War in 1913 (he was pretty close on the second one.)  Like all political literature, it’s immensely dull, and after the fact it’s silly to watch London talk confidently about the historical inevitability of things that never wound up happening – the growth of a large Socialist party in the United States, for example; and, more ludicrously, the idea that the nation-states would start a World War but it would quickly fizzle into nothing because the workers of the world would stop it through labor solidarity.  God, and the socialists accused other people of believing in pie in the sky!

Shades of Grey -- Jasper Fforde

A very good piece of whimsy, set in a bizarre future Wales where people have lost the ability to dilate their pupils, so they have no night vision and have stratified their society based on which primary color they can see.  The society is, by design, completely stagnant, following a set of mad rules no one really understands (why is it against the law to make spoons?)  It’s a something-rotten-in-Denmark story, as our hero gets jolted out of his imposed complacency and starts to perceive the surprisingly dark truth behind the rules.

Embassytown -- China Miéville

A novel about a small embassy of humans on an alien planet.  Since the aliens speak with two mouths simultaneously, they can’t understand human speech unless two specially trained humans speak the same words in two different tones at the same time.  There was a lot to like about it – the weird alien society, their strange literal-mindedness: in order to use a metaphor they first have to make the metaphor literally happen.  So they’ll break a boulder and then rejoin it with metal bands, so later they can say of something that “it’s like the rock that was broken and fixed again.”  Which makes for a funny scene when they need the heroine to act out some weird ritual behavior so they can use her as a metaphor for some concept humans can’t grasp.  However, there was a nagging feeling of “So what?” hanging over the whole novel.  I didn’t particularly care about any of the characters, and I’m not even sure the author meant me to – there are several that are set up to be major characters but are then sent off stage, never to return, with no real explanation.  And there was a lot I didn’t get.  Why did human society break down so completely under the threat of the aliens’ changed behavior?  Why did the ambassadors disarm and arrest the civil governor, and why does the heroine think that’s a great idea?  I wasn’t satisfied with it.

A World Lit Only By Fire -- William Manchester

A history of Magellan and the middle ages generally, flawed by Manchester’s obvious agenda and poor research.  The book has no footnotes and no given sources.  He repeats the old story that people in the middle ages used lots of spices to cover up the taste of rotten meat, which is not true and appears in no legitimate history of the times (people back then used a lot of spices because they liked spicy food, plus eating rotten meat would kill you regardless of what was on it.  Spices can’t fix dysentery.)  If you can’t get something that easy right, why should I trust you on important stuff?  He makes a lot of other questionable assertions that I would have checked up on if he’d said where he found the information, which he didn’t.  I wouldn’t recommend it.

The Poisoner's Handbook -- Deborah Blum

Case histories of poisonings throughout history, and long studies of the chemicals that make the deadliest poisons.  Good reading.

A Rum Affair -- Karl Sabbagh

This is a pun: rum is a Britishism meaning “strange” or “dishonest”, and the book deals with a case of possible scientific fraud involving the Isle of Rum.  The author dug up a private report from the thirties, written by a junior botanist who was clandestinely investigating the findings of a famous senior botanist, concluding that the famous one had planted specimens and then “discovered” them.  It’s actually hard to judge what was really going on – on the one hand, the famous one made all his discoveries on a small island to which he more or less controlled access; but on the other hand, it’s clear that the junior guy was sent on a mission by yet a third botanist who was hoping to catch the famous one out.  I give credit to the author for acknowledging that it’s natural to want to accept the report, because the junior guy was a pleasant sort of fellow while the famous guy was an unlikable, abrasive asshole – but that doesn’t have anything to do with who’s correct.  It looks like the botanist community went with the junior guy, though, because the famous one’s findings have been quietly dropped from catalogs.  It was a minor story, but reasonably well told.

Children of the Frost -- Jack London

A good collection of Yukon-adventure short stories, largely dealing with battles between the whites and the Indians.  London’s eyes were pretty wide-open here, and the stories do a good job of showing how the Indians had justice on their side, but the whites had ruthlessness and superior numbers.  In the fashion of his day, London shrugged off the injustice of the whites’ behavior with a might-makes-right attitude.

The Loved One -- Evelyn Waugh

A very funny short novel about living as an Englishman in Hollywood before the war, and the tremendous pressure from the small British community to not let the side down.  A young British poet who isn’t making it as a screen writer ignores the pressure to pack it in and go home, and gets a job working at a funeral home for pets, a lavish affair copied in all details from a swank Hollywood funeral home where the dead are always referred to as “The Loved Ones”.  

Liebling At the New Yorker -- A.J. Liebling (James Barbour and Fred Warner, eds.)

A posthumous book of uncollected pieces, including the last thing he wrote for the New Yorker before he died.  I was struck by his writing about Harold Ross, to whom he was never close, and whose attitude (“Money is bad for writers,” Ross would say) he disliked.  He also showed some of the jealousy common at the New Yorker (at least, I’ve seen it in every other memoir of the magazine) and his resentment of the older writers whom he thought Ross treated better, like Thurber and E.B. White – he called them “the Companions of the Prophet”.

Euclid's Window -- Leonard Mlodinow

An explanatory history of geometry, which had a tendency to wander from the point, but generally in an entertaining way, so that was all right.

Look Homeward, Angel -- Thomas Wolfe

A bildungsroman, powerful but kind of excessively sprawling.  (I’ve read that the original manuscript was 60,000 words longer, to which I say, thank God for editors.)  It’s the story of the young Eugene Gant growing up with an alcoholic father, a controlling mother, and resentful, infighting older siblings.  It’s obviously autobiographical, and I have to say that if I had been one of Wolfe’s family I would never have spoken to him again after reading it.  The most disturbing part of it is the mother’s insistent campaign to keep Eugene dependent, materially and spiritually, to try to prevent him from leaving to start his own life.  That was creepy.

Brave Companions -- David McCullough

A collection of short biographical essays, including an interesting description of Humboldt’s trip through largely unexplored Central and South America, as well as an excellent study of Theodore Roosevelt’s time as a cattle-rancher in the Midwest (apparently the cow-punchers all liked and respected TR, even though he didn’t drink and wouldn’t let them swear.)  The psychological study of Harriet Beecher Stowe was, I thought, less successful.   

At Home -- Bill Bryson

A very good history of the design of private houses and how they’re arranged.  Every chapter is dedicated to a certain part of a house, and uses that as a leaping-off point to discuss wider areas of history – for example, the cellar fuse-box leads to such topics as whale oil, the World War II blackout, the logistical problems of lighting a house with candles, and how the Industrial Revolution affected people’s sleeping habits.  You can probably guess it’s a very long book, but well worth the pages it takes up.  I liked it a lot.

Bruce Lee's Fighting Method -- M. Uyehara

This was a book Bruce Lee worked on for a while but abandoned in 1966.  After he died his wife decided to publish everything he’d left, so she hired an acquaintance to finish the book.  It’s a long sequence of shot-by-shot photos of techniques with accompanying text.  I’m pretty sure the reason Lee stopped working on the book was that he realized that the problem with still photo sequences is that the actual technique happens between the photos.  So the book does not, in fact, tell you much about a fighting method, but it does have a cool collection of action photos of Bruce Lee.

Far From the Madding Crowd -- Thomas Hardy

A very well-written rural novel, one of Hardy's earlier and therefore less depressing ones.  I liked the setup, where the young hard-working farmer Gabriel becomes acquainted with the proud Miss Everdene.  I was a bit surprised by the early scene where Gabriel proposes and she turns him down, and Gabriel basically says, "Well, I'm disappointed but I respect your choice and I won't bother you again" ("Well, that was a short novel," I thought to myself.)  However, Gabriel loses everything in a disaster and sets out to find work as a laborer, winding up (coincidentally) at Miss Everdene's farm, where he quietly supports her through her troubles with her suitors and later her husband.  The scene where her husband's abandoned mistress drags herself to the workhouse to give birth to her illegitimate child is wrenching.