Book reviews, 2013

The Mirage -- Matt Ruff

I liked this a lot.  It’s a mirror-image of contemporary geopolitics; the Middle East is an advanced, secular federation of republics, while North America is a backward collection of fanatical theocracies.  The book is set in 2011, ten years after a group of Christian extremists crashed planes into the skyscrapers of Baghdad.  The book does a really good job of setting up the alternate history, and just at the right point, the hero starts to discover strange artifacts – copies of the New York Times that describe events that never happened, an Xbox, videotapes of news broadcasts that show a strange alternate world where America is an advanced technical power.  The rest of the book is both an action thriller and a puzzle, as the hero (a Baghdad cop) tries both to solve his case and figure out what the artifacts mean.  I really like it that the essential question – what happened to turn the history we remember into the history of this book? – isn’t explicitly answered; the book gives you everything you need to figure it out, but doesn’t come right out and tell you.

Hedy's Folly -- Richard Rhodes

A study of Hedy Lamarr’s contribution to the war effort: she designed a method of spread-spectrum frequency-hopping that would prevent jamming of radio-controlled torpedoes.  As it happened, the Navy never adopted her design, and it would be less remembered today except that other uses were found – the same technology is used in wireless Internet and Bluetooth.  The book is pretty well-written; naturally a lot of it focuses more on the movie-star aspects of her life than her technical interest.  A lot of it is also taken up with her co-inventor, an avant-garde composer, and his bizarre mechanical symphonies that featured sets of up to 20 player pianos.  He was a bit of an egotist and blamed his poor reviews on jealousy, but I don’t think I would have felt like sitting through one of his pieces.

Parnassus on Wheels -- Christopher Morley

A nice story about a woman who runs away from home to work at a travelling library.

Surprised By Joy -- C.S. Lewis

A spiritual autobiography about Lewis’s conversion to Christianity.  He rather talks down to his audience; and as I think I’ve remarked before, only Lewis could make Paradise sound unpleasant.

War and Peace -- Leo Tolstoy

This is really more of a tract than a novel.  It has some memorable characters, but Tolstoy spends too much time (way, way, way too much time) inserting his essays on history and philosophy.  He’s hampered by some of the prevailing Russian ideas of the time – it was conventional in Russia then (understandably) to portray Napoleon as an incompetent dunce, a thorough fool whose only notable attribute was his colossal vanity.  If you take that idea as an axiom then it’s essentially impossible to make any sense of 19th-century European history.  This suited Tolstoy, though; apparently he thought his 900-page novel didn’t go deep enough into the question, so he added a 200-page afterword in which he takes a great deal of trouble to show that the only possible answer to the question “What are the root causes of historical events?” is “No one knows, and knowing is impossible, and all historians know this and are conscious liars.”  I liked the scenes with Pyotr more than any other parts of the book.  Interesting that he was generally known as Pierre, since French was the language of the educated classes then.

Ether Day -- Julie M. Fenster

A pretty good book on the development of general anaesthesia, focusing largely on the cultural gap between European and American science in the 1840s – some Europeans rejected ether out of hand because it came from America; others were infuriated that the American inventors patented the process, concentrating on profit more than on advancing knowledge in the abstract.  The process was dangerous at first – the guy who popularized the notion was actually a con artist who’d stolen the idea from someone else, and he didn’t really understand what he was doing.

Telegraph Avenue -- Michael Chabon

A sad novel about a failing vinyl-record store in Oakland.  The writing was very good.  The story centers around the two partners who run the store, who are both hampered by the past.  The one clings to the past, because wants his store to go on the way it always has, and won’t admit that changing times make business changes necessary.  The other has the opposite problem: the past won’t let him go, as his no-good absentee father (who clings to the past himself, always hoping to resurrect his Blaxploitation movie career) keeps coming around to complicate his life.  I liked it.

Star Island -- Carl Hiaasen

Kind of a silly novel about an impossibly stupid and self-centered pop star, her fed-up body double, and the loser paparazzo who follows them around.  Populated by Hiaasen’s usual cast of bizarre South Florida weirdos.  It was fun.

The Death of Vishnu -- Manil Suri

This had a good prose style but I didn’t really care for it.  It’s a story revolving around a low-caste beggar named Vishnu, who lives on a stairway landing in a cheap apartment building in a slum in Mumbai.  He’s allowed to sleep there in exchange for doing menial work for the apartment-dwellers, but he’s become very ill and can’t get up.  The neighbors, small-minded people who all hate each other, leave tea and biscuits near him (they can’t actually touch him because he belongs to the “untouchable” caste, which is meant literally.)  They argue about calling in a doctor, which they don’t want to do because they would have to pay for it, as Vishnu has no money.  The neighbors are poor and also miserly, and also they hate cooperating with each other, plus Vishnu is obviously dying and a doctor would therefore just be an unnecessary expense; but on the other hand the Hindu religion requires them to take care of the beggar at their doorstep and not just step over him, plus they do have human feeling for Vishnu, although this only appears individually, not when they’re in a group.  It was well-told, but I found the neighbors pretty unpleasant and I didn’t really enjoy reading it.

Ten Weeks With Chinese Bandits -- Harvey J. Howard

Howard was an American doctor working on containing the widespread epidemic of the eye disease trachoma in northern China in the teens and twenties.  In 1925 he was visiting a European farmer friend in Manchuria when a gang of bandits attacked the farm, intending to carry off the wealthy farmer and hold him for ransom.  However, by mistake they got hold of Howard instead, and they probably would have just killed him when they figured it out, except that as it happened nearly all the bandits were suffering badly from trachoma, and Howard agreed to treat them in return for not being killed.  The bandits carted Howard around with them for almost three months, in the hope of getting some ransom, before finally letting him go in exchange for his promise to treat them and their families in Beijing.  He draws a very interesting picture of bandit life.  Howard was surprised at the very high standard of education and culture among the bandits, and equally surprised at the seemingly incongruous fact that nearly all of them were heavily addicted to opium.  He also noted that nomadic bandit life was both very dirty and very boring.

The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture -- Yoram Hazony

This was fascinating.  The author mainly addresses the question of why the Hebrew scriptures are organized as they are (the books are presented in a different order in the Hebrew than they are in the Christian Old Testament.)  Broadly, Hazony argues that the scriptures were arranged into something like their current form at the time of the Babylonian conquest, by the prophet Jeremiah and his disciples.  He pictures Jeremiah’s state of mind in this way: “Our nation has been conquered, Jerusalem is destroyed, the Temple is destroyed, our people have been made captive.  The Jews are in shock and disarrayed.  They may decide to give up being Jewish altogether and blend in with the conquerors – this has happened before, when the northern kingdom of Israel was conquered by Assyria.  Some Jews have already said to me that the fact that Israel has fallen means that the gods of Babylon are more powerful than the God of Israel.  I need to show them that it is necessary that they remain Jewish.”  Hazony argues that the structure of the scriptures is meant to tell the long story of the Hebrews from the Creation right up to now (“now” being the Babylonian conquest) and emphasize that the story is not finished; and also to answer the question “Why should we remain Jews?” with the reminder: “Because to stop being Jews would be to break the Covenant.  We have made an agreement with God and we must keep it.”  An excellent book.

The Hunter, The Man With the Getaway Face,  The Outfit, The Mourner, The Score,  The Jugger, The Seventh, The Handle, The Rare Coin Score, The Green Eagle Score, The Black Ice Score, The Sour Lemon Score, Deadly Edge, Slayground, Plunder Squad, Butcher’s Moon -- Richard Stark

This is a series of noir crime novels written in the sixties.  They all revolve around an anti-hero, a professional thief who calls himself Parker, and the various crews he assembles to do various robberies.  They’re really well-written and exciting.  I also find Parker very interesting; almost invariably, any writer who tells a story about an anti-hero throws in a soft spot, or something – a wink to show that the guy isn’t really that bad.  Stark never does that.  Parker really is that bad.  He’s completely amoral; he’s never cruel or sadistic, but that’s only because he doesn’t care enough about people to be, plus it would interfere with the job.  Parker is really odd; he seems to have no interest in life apart from taking a workman’s pride in doing a good job.  He doesn’t seem to spend his loot on anything.  He has no hobbies, no friends, no anything.  When we see him while he’s not actually working, he just sits in the dark and stares at nothing.  It’s also a good picture of how much easier crime was fifty years ago; Parker and his crews never have to worry about video cameras, or forensic evidence, plus targets are plentiful because everybody’s payrolls were in cash back then.  How things have changed: at one point, when Parker needs to track down a rich, important guy, he naturally goes to Buffalo, that wealthy and successful city of millionaires.

The Disappearing Spoon -- Sam Kean

A collection of pretty good essays on chemistry.  Worth reading.

Basilica -- R.A. Scotti

A good book about the building of St. Peter’s in Rome.  I hadn’t known there were conservationists even in the fifteenth century – the current St. Peter’s was built on the site of the original St. Peter’s, which was erected by Constantine and had stood for more than a thousand years.  A lot of people were mad about that at the time, but the Pope (Julius II) was a bit of an egomaniac and disregarded them.  One engineering problem: obstructing the larger new building was an Egyptian obelisk that had been set up there by Pompey.  It needed to be moved, but the Italians of the 1400s didn’t have the engineering knowledge of the ancient Romans, so no one knew how to move it.  Eventually Michelangelo designed a system whereby the obelisk would be sheathed in plywood and slowly laid over on its side, and then moved on rollers.  On the day, all the crowds assembled to watch were warned that anyone who made any noise would be executed on the spot – and there was a gallows erected in the plaza that day just to show the threat was serious.  However, at a certain point when all the obelisk’s weight was on the pulleys, the ropes started to stretch and were close to snapping.  In the dead silence a sailor in the crowd shouted “WATER THE ROPES!”  Which they did, and the day was saved.  To reward the sailor, the Pope ordered that the Vatican would buy all its palm leaves for Palm Sunday and Easter from the sailor’s hometown, a rule that continues to this day.

The Murder of the Century -- Paul Collins

A history of tabloid journalism.  The author uses a grisly murder (a dismembered body turning up in the rivers of New York in 1897) as an illustration of how Hearst and Pulitzer shaped their sensationalist coverage to suit the public and to attack each other.  Good reading.

Notes From the Gallows -- Julius Fuchik

This is the prison diary of a Czech Communist who was held awaiting execution  by the Nazis.  Fuchik wrote it on cigarette papers that were smuggled out by sympathetic guards.  It’s pretty self-conscious Communist propaganda, and I suppose he can be forgiven for representing himself as fearless in the face of death, but by the same token I think I can be forgiven for doubting that he was quite so fearless as all that.  My edition is a post-Soviet printing, which restores the descriptions of squalor and torture in the prison that the Soviet censors removed to paint Fuchik as a stainless hero of the proletariat.

My Antonia -- Willa Cather

A novel, probably pretty autobiographical, about a young woman growing up on the Nebraska prairie, as seen at various periods of her life by the narrator, her close childhood friend.  I liked it but it didn’t really move me.

The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep And Never Had To -- DC Pierson

A good book about being the odd kid out in high school, and what a relief it can be to run across another odd kid, because the difference between having one friend and having no friends can be the difference between life and death, spiritually if not physically.  Things get more complicated when it turns out the second odd kid has some kind of genetic mutation that means he doesn’t sleep, ever.  I liked it a lot.

The Most Human Human -- Brian Christian

A book about the Turing contest, wherein a number of people interact with other people over remote screens, and the object is to decide whether you’re talking to a person or a computer.  I think this is regarded as more of a big deal than it actually is, since the conditions of the test are pretty artificial – there’s a very short time limit, and there’s only certain questions you can ask.  Plus there’s a big difference between, on the one hand, telling the difference between a computer and a human, and on the other hand, telling the difference between a computer and a human trying to trick you into thinking he’s a computer.  Like, in ordinary circumstances, if I asked “How about those aliens that turned Congress into zebras last night?” and didn’t get an answer along the lines of “What are you talking about?” then I’d know I wasn’t talking to a person.  But in these tests the person might answer “What do you think about it?” just because that’s what a computer program would answer and they’re trying to fool you.  The prose was a little flat.

Two Pints -- Roddy Doyle

A very good short novella, all in dialog, transcribing occasional conversations between two Irishmen when they meet for a beer.  Excellently written and very funny.

Hidden Harmonies -- Michael and Ellen Kaplan

A history and explanation of the Pythagorean theorem.  I thought there was a little too much attempted debunking – we don’t really know whether the Babylonians understood the theorem, or whether Pythagoras had read their writings.  Asking “Did Pythagoras really invent his theorem?” is being rather like the guy who tried to prove that the Iliad wasn’t written by Homer but by another Greek of the same name.  Still, the book gives clear explanations of the relationships of the theorem to the rest of mathematics and its practical applications.  It was pretty good.

The River of Doubt -- Candice Millard

A gripping account of Teddy Roosevelt’s trip of exploration down uncharted rivers in Brazil after his Presidency.   We know little enough about the Amazon jungles even now – a hundred years ago they might as well have been on the Moon.  It was really a feat of the most amazing enterprise and daring, especially since Roosevelt was in his mid-fifties and not in the best of health (the expedition was so trying he almost died, and in fact the strain was so great it probably shortened his life.)  The expedition – about fifteen men, including TR, his son Kermit, and several prominent Brazilian and American naturalists – spent months charting a long unknown tributary of the Amazon, fighting heat, disease, weather, and hunger.  Three of the men died, and several others – including TR and Kermit – were badly injured.  Three of their canoes were smashed in a heavy rapid, where one of them drowned; they lost a lot of food that way, too.  One of the men went mad and murdered another, then ran off into the jungle and never came back.  A really, really good book – it was hard to put down.

Why Me -- Donald Westlake

A comic mystery about a born-loser burglar who unexpectedly finds a colossally valuable gemstone in a jewelry store safe and then can’t get rid of it.  Mildly funny.

Yokohama Burning -- Joshua Hammer

A good book about the terrible earthquake and fire of 1923 that destroyed a huge stretch of coastal Japan.  Sobering, but good reading.

The Book of Snobs -- William Makepeace Thackeray

A collection of social-satire pieces from Punch magazine in the 1840s.  It appears that Thackeray coined the term “snob” to describe people who look down on other people as social inferiors.  They were biting and funny.

A Splintered History of Wood -- Spike Carlsen

A hodgepodge of natural-history factoids about various kinds of wood.  I liked the section on the surprisingly prosperous industry of recovering millennia-old fallen trees from the bottom of bogs and selling the wood.  One of those guys has a board that’s twelve feet high by thirty-five feet long by six inches thick, all one piece!  Somebody’s going to do something pretty cool with that someday.

An Object of Beauty -- Steve Martin

A good novel about art and art collecting, and the disconnect between appreciating a painting for its aesthetic qualities, which is a very personal thing, and evaluating it on its market value, which is wholly impersonal.  The heroine is an auction house employee who gets fired after the house suspects (correctly) that she invented an imaginary phone bidder in order to drive up the price of a painting; she goes into business for herself and follows the ups and downs of the art market over the eighties and nineties.  Steve Martin knows a great deal about art and writes about it very well.  I liked it.

The Partly Cloudy Patriot -- Sarah Vowell

A collection of essays on topics such as patriotism, foul shots, and why Tom Cruise is creepy.  My favorite was the one that wonders why so many staggeringly inappropriate people love to compare themselves to Rosa Parks.

Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy

To tell the truth, I liked Nabokov’s critical essay on this book more than I liked the book itself.  I found Anna to be an unsympathetic person, whose motives I didn’t really understand.  Why is she so eager to divorce Karenin, whose behavior seems unexceptional?  What draws her to Vronsky, a man she doesn’t even like and who does not make her happy?  Also, a lot of the novel (which is about a thousand pages long) focuses on Tolstoy’s ideas about social and religious reforms in Russia, ideas that had no real usefulness at the time and which are totally irrelevant now.  There’s a secondary character, Levin, who is obviously meant to represent Tolstoy himself, and serves as a mouthpiece for his ideas.  Levin is troubled by his own lack of certainty in anything until he meets an elderly peasant whose simple faith reawakens his own, and he decides that the proper life is to live on a farm and aspire to nothing.  Anna herself I didn’t find interesting, since she’s obviously mentally ill, and the whole book is really just marking time until she inevitably kills herself.  I was unmoved.

The Wordy Shipmates -- Sarah Vowell

A good book on the Puritans and their intense concern with morality and civic life, which they wrote about at great length and with surprising eloquence and power.  I liked it.

The Last Girlfriend on Earth -- Simon Rich

A collection of comic short stories, mostly dealing with failed romance.  They were pretty funny, and some of them were nicely off-beat.  I liked the one where we saw the list of Jeopardy! categories that Alex Trebek supposedly arranged on the day his ex-wife came on the show.

The Poincaré Conjecture -- Donal O'Shea

A good book, that did a good job of making a pretty abstruse mathematical concept clear and understandable.  In fact, to make sure I understand it, I’m going to explain it now.  Feel free to skip this part.  The Poincaré conjecture (finally proved six or seven years ago, after a hundred years of trying) states that every closed, simply-connected 3-manifold is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere.  In topology, a manifold is a defined space. A 1-manifold would be the surface of a geometric shape; a 2-manifold would be the shape itself; a 3-manifold is the shape extended into an extra dimension, which is hard to visualize but which can be represented mathematically.  The Universe is generally considered to be a 3-manifold, specifically a 3-sphere.  An object is simply-connected if any two points on its surface can be connected by a path in such a way that the path can be infinitely transformed (like the surface of a sphere, where a line connecting any two points can be shrunk to a point without catching on anything.)  A doughnut, for example, is not simply-connected, because you could run a string through the hole and tie it to itself, and then there’d be no way to remove the string without either cutting the string or cutting the doughnut.  An object is closed if it has a boundary, that is, if it does not stretch infinitely in any direction.  Two objects are homeomorphic to each other if you can transform one into the other without cutting or piercing it; for example, a blob of silly putty is homeomorphic to a sphere, because you can squeeze and stretch it until it becomes a sphere, without having to tear it apart or put a hole in it.  Essentially the conjecture (which is a theorem now, I guess, since it’s been proved) shows that for a certain defined set of conditions, there is no three-dimensional shape that can’t be transformed into a sphere without cutting or piercing it.

Class Matters -- Correspondents of the New York Times

A collection of newspaper features that the Times commissioned a few years ago studying the decline of the middle class in America.  The loss of manufacturing jobs and other labor industries – sawmill work, for example – means, for many families, the loss of their only chance at a middle-class income.  It was very depressing.

What in God's Name -- Simon Rich

A comedy about two case-workers in Heaven, whose job it is to try to bring about happy marriages on Earth.  The book presents God as a kind of inattentive doofus, who has decided to end the world simply out of boredom, but has agreed to let things go on if our heroes can get the two awkwardest people in the whole world to date each other.  It was silly, but there was some good dialogue.

Life on Mars -- Tracy K. Smith

A book of modern poetry.  (Not much of it was actually about Mars.)  It didn’t really speak to me.

Kraken -- China Miéville

A very good action-adventure story with fantastic elements.  The hero (Billy) is a curator at the British Museum, who runs across a secret cult worshipping giant squid, who are convinced that Billy is a prophet of their squid-god.  It’s well-written and exciting, and it has a terrifically weird and horrifying villain, a living tattoo running a criminal empire from the back of a poor schmuck who has no say in the deal.  Miéville said in an interview I read that the key to a good dark story is to take a colossally ridiculous idea and treat it with deadly seriousness, and he does a good job of that here.  Billy ends up on the run from thugs, cultists, good cops, bad cops, different cultists, psychopathic strike-breakers, and a crowd of wackos, all working to prevent (or bring about) the end of the world.  I loved it.

The Good Son -- Mark Kriegel

A biography of the lightweight champion Ray (Boom Boom) Mancini.  I watched Mancini kill Duk-Keo Kim on live TV when I was a teenager.  The book draws an affecting picture of the eight-year-old Ray going from bar to bar in Youngstown looking for his father, a punch-drunk (and booze-drunk) former boxer, and making him come back home.  Naturally the Kim fight takes up a large part of the book; it’s well-described, and in fact I watched the fight again on YouTube after reading it and felt like I understood it better.  Although it didn’t change my mind about Kim’s trainer being the one responsible.  Mancini, at the end of the fourteenth round, hit Kim with two colossal lefts; the first staggered him, the second killed him.  Kim’s people had time to throw in the towel and they didn’t.  I hadn’t known that Kim’s mother flew all the way to America to meet Mancini and tell him she didn’t blame him.

This Is a Book -- Demitri Martin

A collection of short humor sketches.  I remember thinking it was funny but I don’t really remember any of the jokes, so it probably wasn’t that deep.

Rilla of Ingleside -- L.M. Montgomery

The last of the Green Gables books, dealing with Anne’s children.  It covers World War One and the death of Anne’s son (which was foreshadowed long before) and Rilla’s sweetheart going to war.  Rilla is named after Marilla, the woman who took Anne in when she was a child, which I thought was nice.

Da Vinci's Ghost -- Toby Lester

A book about one of Da Vinci’s most famous drawings, Vitruvian Man, which is an illustration of the principles laid out in a book by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius.  Vitruvius declared that all architectural ratios must follow the proportions of an adult male human body, and found mystical significance in the fact that the body could be arranged symmetrically within a circle and a square.  Leonardo probably cared less about the magical properties Vitruvius attributed to these proportions and more about their aesthetic appeal; he did believe that architecture was only beautiful as it applies to human proportions.  It was pretty good.

Leonardo and the Last Supper -- Ross King

This was a really good book, a history of how Leonardo came to paint The Last Supper, from where he drew his inspiration, and what happened to it afterwards.  Unfortunately, thanks to Dan Brown, he can’t really ignore the conspiracy drivel about the painting that’s become popular these days, but he demolishes it all pretty quickly and moves on to important things.  Apparently Leonardo was the worst procrastinator ever – he’d promise you something in six months and deliver it twenty-five years later.

Adam Bede -- George Eliot

Kind of a dull novel about a little agricultural town in England at the turn of the nineteenth century, centering on the Bede brothers, a pair of carpenters in their twenties.  Adam Bede, the elder brother, is courting the town beauty even though it’s obvious he’s fallen in love with a woman from a neighboring town who preaches with the Methodists.  Eliot tries to be fair but it’s impossible to make a Methodist preacher sound like anything but a tedious prig, so I can’t say I cared much whether the shallow Hetty or the tiresome Dinah would win Adam in the end.  (Of course it was Dinah.)  This was Eliot’s first novel; luckily she got much better later.

The Celts -- T.G.E. Powell

This was poorly written and dull.  Some great pictures of Celtic knotwork, and interesting old inscriptions, but that’s about it.

The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla -- David Hatcher Childress

More of a gosh-wow book than an actual story.  I got the feeling the author didn’t want to do a lot of research so he concentrated on “Oooh, look at this idea Tesla had! (Which may or may not be something he actually did!)”  There’s no real biography – nothing much about Tesla the man at all, actually.  Not very good.

A Brief History of Stonehenge -- Aubrey Burl

This had some very good photographs of Stonehenge, but the text was plodding and not that well presented.

The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades -- Jonathan Riley-Smith

Not well written.  It didn’t hold my interest.

Free-Range Chickens -- Simon Rich

A collection of short-short pieces of absurdist humor.  I really liked the “conversation among the monsters who lived in my closet when I was seven.”

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun -- J.R.R. Tolkien

A retelling in alliterative verse of some parts of the Volsunga Saga.  Tolkien seems to have done this as an exercise to amuse himself some time in the twenties; there’s no reason to think he ever expected it to be published.  If you’re interested in old Norse poetry (as I am) it’s excellent; if you’re not, there’s no reason to read it.

Ant Farm -- Simon Rich

Another collection of short-short oddball humor, such as the imagined conversation between Abraham and Isaac on the way back from the sacrifice.  I particularly liked the conversation at the Thanksgiving grown-ups’ table as imagined by the kids at the kids’ table.

That Old Ace in the Hole -- Annie Proulx

A good novel about a guy named Bob, who’s a good guy but kind of aimless, and who gets a job as a location scout for an agribusiness concern.  He gets sent out to the Texas-Oklahoma border to scout for locations for industrial hog farms, and to get the local farmers to sell out to make way for them.  The very first red flag is that Bob finds out he has to lie to everyone he meets about why he’s there (his boss tells him to make something up.)  The second red flag is when he sees why he needs to lie – he gets his first look at a hog farm, and it’s pretty appalling.  The hogs are treated terribly, of course, but far worse from the locals’ point of view is the waste problem.  Hog farms pour all their waste into what’s called a “manure lagoon” – which is just as awful as it sounds – and though there are federal regulations about how they should be maintained, no one enforces them (that’s one reason the hog farms are always located in some remote area that’s hard to get to) and the stink is just unbelievable.  Bob sets up camp in a farmer’s unlit outbuilding and starts looking around, only to find that the locals are on the lookout for hog scouts.  He gets a job at a local restaurant and half-heartedly interviews a few older farmers who might be willing to sell (he tells them he works for a resort company.)  He’s a lousy liar, though, and pretty soon he gives up altogether and sends fake progress reports to his boss while really just hanging around hearing the life stories of the locals.  Of course this gets him fired eventually, but he doesn’t care.   I liked it, though I thought the plot device that allows the locals to avoid having to sell out to agribusiness was kind of a fantasy.

We Meant Well -- Peter Van Buren

This was both extraordinarily funny and extraordinarily depressing.  It’s a memoir by a State Department employee covering his years stationed in Iraq, and our inept attempts at nation-building.  The basic problem: what Iraq needs is long-term sustained infrastructure growth; but no colonel is going to make general by going home and saying “During my time in command I nurtured slow and steady power-grid improvements and water-cleaning programs.”  (The same applies to State officials, though their promotions are to better posts, not to higher rank.)  So people in charge need something impressive-sounding to fill out their resumes.  For PR reasons, helping widows looks best, so that’s how you wind up with US aid programs teaching widowed Iraqis how to support themselves as bakers and pastry cooks, in a city where there’s no power or running water and most of the buildings have no roofs.  The same blindness appears everywhere.  The US government spent a fortune teaching Iraqi farmers how to make their cows give more milk; but the farmers have no refrigeration to store extra milk, and no trucks to transport it with, and if they had trucks they couldn’t afford fuel, and if they had fuel they couldn’t drive because the roads have all been destroyed, and if they could travel on the roads they’d only get killed by bandits anyway.  So the extra milk just goes to waste.  Waste is the major factor in everything, actually: the author says the Iraq section got so much US money they were literally kicking bundles of cash out of their way in their offices, but it was spent so stupidly.  The most representative example: some State official decided that what Iraqis really needed was to have a couple hundred American and European classic novels translated into Arabic – this would surely make them appreciate the cultural value of the occupation.  So it got done; hundreds of thousands of dollars to translate, print, and ship books to Iraq, only to find, to their surprise, that no one was interested in Arabic translations of Moby Dick.  The local State employees eventually had to pay a local school to take the books, on the condition that State would do all the heavy lifting, so one of the first things the author did in Iraq was to unload heavy cartons of books off a truck in the burning sun, while pretending he didn’t know the books would all be used for fuel and toilet paper.

King Rat -- China Miéville

A good urban fantasy with horror-story elements about a Londoner named Saul who’s always had a troubled relationship with his father, and who wakes up one morning to find the police shouting at him that his father has been murdered and he’s the only suspect.  After long interrogation he’s put in a cell, where a mysterious figure steps from the shadows and offers to get him out.  He goes along; it turns out his rescuer is the King of the Rats, who tells Saul he’s his uncle, and who has come to recruit Saul for his battle against the Piper, who cost King Rat his position centuries before in the disaster (for the rats) at Hamelin.  Saul, being half-rat, half-human, should be able to resist the Piper’s control.  It’s a dark story, well-told, with a great ending.

Fireworks -- George Plimpton

An illustrated appreciation of fireworks, not very interesting, although there were some funny asides about Plimpton’s semi-official position as Fireworks Overseer of New York City.

Comeback, Backflash, Flashfire, Firebreak, Breakout, Nobody Runs Forever , Ask the Parrot, Dirty Money -- Richard Stark

Stark stopped writing about the professional thief Parker in 1973, but then in the late nineties he started writing about him again, and pulled off the very rare achievement of going back to a character after decades away and still writing good books.  These books are a little longer and more complicated than the originals; for one thing, the jobs need to be more complicated, since employers don’t pay workers in cash any more, and hitting any high-traffic venue – a casino or a sports event – will mostly yield useless credit card slips.  So Parker (who, admittedly, is strangely ageless) has to turn to art, jewelry, and other non-cash targets, which have to be more high-profile (because he has to fence the goods afterwards, which means getting twenty cents on the dollar or so, so the goods have to be more valuable to make up the difference.)  Good reading.

Doctor Zhivago -- Boris Pasternak

A complicated love story following the ill-starred couple of Yuri Zhivago (a physician who would rather be a poet) and Larissa Guichard, an occasional nurse, over the years from the Russo-Japanese War through the October Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and all the way on to World War II.  Most of the interplay of the lovers, and of all the other characters, consists of their desperate attempts to alleviate their awful loneliness.  It’s really a pessimistic story: Yuri and Lara both marry other people (naturally—this is a Russian story) but reconnect several times over the years.  Eventually they have an illegitimate daughter, but all three are separated by the turbulent times; Yuri dies while looking for the others, Lara dies in a gulag, and their daughter grows up to be an illiterate laundress.  I didn’t like it much.

The Lock Artist -- Steve Hamilton

A crime novel about a teenager (Michael) who can’t talk due to a childhood trauma.  He’s a skilled artist, but he also works at his uncle’s junk store, where he teaches himself to pick locks.  In his last year of high school, when he gets dragooned into a school prank that causes some unintended property damage and gets left holding the bag when everyone else runs, he’s sentenced to do community service.  Unfortunately the guy in charge of his service time is heavily in debt, and ends up selling Michael’s time to a brutal gangster, who sends Michael to apprentice with a retired safecracker.  Michael, not having much of a choice, becomes a professional safecracker, controlled by the gangster, and works on jobs for him until one of the crew screws things up and everything goes to hell.  It was entertaining.

The Signal and the Noise -- Nate Silver

A very good book about data analysis.  Goes over the sub-prime lending fiasco in some detail.  He dwells on the bizarre lack of accountability both inside and outside the financial firms; when the rating experts testified before Congress they all called the collapse an unpredictable event that no one could have seen coming, even though a text search reveals that the phrase “housing bubble” appeared in American news media thousands of times in the months leading up to the collapse.

The Prague Cemetery -- Umberto Eco

An incredibly unpleasant novel, ostensibly the memoirs of the person who forged the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  He’s unbelievably disgusting, and I suppose the author achieved his aim of making the most awful narrator ever, but I don’t see why he wanted to.  I wouldn’t recommend it.

A Good Story -- Donald E. Westlake

A collection of mystery and suspense stories.  The title story was the best, about a low-level criminal who works for a smuggling ring, whose trick for moving drugs across the border is just so clever that he can’t resist telling someone about it.  Which is about as good an idea as you’d expect.

Sideways Stories from Wayside School -- Louis Sachar

I read this because I liked his young-adult book Holes, but this was aimed at a younger audience.  I can’t say this definitively, but I think I wouldn’t have liked this when I was in its target age range.

The Mark Inside -- Amy Reading

An interesting book about the successful con men of the nineteenth-century West, with some very detailed explanations of how the cons worked.  One of the most amazing common elements was that many people refused to believe they’d been taken, even if the police and the Pinkertons and a delegation of prior victims laid it all out for them with diagrams and mug shots.  Many of them went back and gave the con men more money!  The main narrative follows a Texas rancher who got heavily rooked, losing a great deal of money, and then gave up his ranch business and spent the next several years tracking down the con men, posing as a wealthy mark to entrap them.  He did actually get several of them arrested, though as the author points out, his account of how he did it is obviously tailored to make him look daring and clever.

Fathers and Sons -- Ivan Turgenev

A story about a student who returns from the university to his home, the Kirsanov farmstead.  His father and uncle, both liberals, are upset at the son’s fascination with the new idea of nihilism, which was just becoming prominent in Russia at that time (the 1860s.)  The son’s nihilism is less a product of his time in the city and more a product of his intellectual domination by his friend Bazarov, a doctor and the novel’s anti-hero.  The story is meant to show the empty worthlessness of Bazarov’s ideals while also showing that Bazarov is not worthless as a person.  He has a philosophical crisis when he falls in love with one of the Kirsanovs’ neighbors, since love is contrary to nihilistic principles, but he isn’t able simply to ignore it.  Thanks to his confused state of mind, he accidentally cuts and infects himself while operating on a patient, gets typhus, and dies.  Very Russian.

The Yard -- Alex Grecian

A good detective novel about the early days of the Murder Squad at Scotland Yard, and its attempts to rehabilitate its reputation after its very public failure to catch Jack the Ripper.  It’s well put together, with a crowd of recognizable figures – the earnest young constable-turned-inspector, the brilliant but eccentric doctor (and his precocious, still-waters-run-deep teenage daughter), the weary, cynical older cop, the wise and idealistic chief inspector – who are well-drawn enough that they rise above a mere sketch of a type.  I was impressed by the hero’s concern with not allowing justice to become an impersonal machine, and trying to fit his actions to the particular circumstances of each case, even though that’s often difficult.  I liked it.

The Dialogue of the Dogs -- Miguel de Cervantes

A satirical story, in the form of a classical Greek dialogue, except that the interlocutors are two dogs.  A man lies in a fever at a hospital and hears the two guard dogs telling each other their life stories, which naturally represent virtuous dogs as the victims of deceitful humanity.  Cervantes really rubs it in – he could have just said the narrator had a fever and left it at that, but he takes care to specify that the fever is caused by syphilis, which the man caught from his wife.

The City and the City -- China Miéville

An excellent urban mystery.  It took me some time to work out what was going on; the story takes place in a pair of sister cities in an unnamed Eastern European country.  I thought at first it was a fantasy or ghost story, because the city is full of people who can’t interact with each other; but eventually it becomes clear that the two cities are actually the same city, but there are two separate cultures, two languages, and two separate (and hostile) governments, and it’s a matter of law and custom that the citizens of one city are not allowed to interact with the citizens of the other.  So people just have to pretend that the citizens of the “other” city just aren’t there – walk past each other with their eyes averted, pretend they don’t hear each other speaking, all under terrible penalties.  The only way to “travel” from one city to the other is to walk through a guarded gate, which arbitrarily puts you in the “other” city even though you haven’t gone anywhere.  Imagine the problems if you’re a cop investigating a murder, and you think the killer came from the other city!  I liked it a lot.

Notes From Underground -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The unorganized diary of a retired Russian civil servant, nasty in a small-minded way, and his gripes against life.  He’s mean-tempered and paranoid; he complains about his chronic liver and tooth problems, but at the same time insists that the only reason anyone complains about aches and pains is to make everyone else miserable.  He’s not stupid, though, and recognizes his own spitefulness, despising himself for it.  It’s possible the narrator (who never tells us his name) has been reading Tolstoy, because he argues that war is the ultimate example of the fact that people often do things for no reason at all – in fact, often do things just because they are pointless, as an angry, though useless, act of rebellion against society and God.

Israel Potter -- Herman Melville

A novelization of the real-life memoirs of Israel Potter, a Revolutionary soldier who was captured by the British and taken prisoner to England, where he escaped and lived as a fugitive for many years.  It was well written but I didn’t really see what the point was.  What made Melville feel like writing it?

The Black Country -- Alex Grecian

This was a sequel to The Yard, and not nearly as good.  This time our hero the young inspector, and (for various contrived reasons) his cast of acquaintances, leave London to investigate disappearances in the countryside.  The story isn’t well-handled; the cops are dealing with various locals (and a mysterious stranger) who all obviously know things they’re not telling, and to prevent the whole mystery from being solved in five minutes the author has to resort to a series of unlikely interruptions (honestly, the scene where the hero is distracted from someone making it plain they have a vital piece of information by someone else making a dramatic entrance, only to turn back and find the first person is gone, is so tired I’d groan on seeing it once – and in this book it happens about forty times).  The conclusion was kind of dumb, too.  I didn’t like it.

The Stockholm Octavo -- Karen Engelmann

A story about cartomancy (fortune-telling with cards) and court intrigue in eighteenth-century Sweden.  The hero is self-consciously spineless and weak; I didn’t like him that much.  The story wasn’t bad but I didn’t really like it, since the bad guys win (that’s the problem with historical novels, you have to live with what really happened.)

Great Northern? -- Arthur Ransome

This was the last of Ransome’s books about the Walker and Blackett children.  It was apparently written long after the others, and it shows.  The dialogue is pretty flat, and the plot seemed thin – I’m not a nature hater or anything, but I can’t see that the difference between a Great Northern diver and a Great Black-Throated diver is worth two hundred pages of arguing over.  It didn’t really interest me.

Fallen Dragon -- Peter Hamilton

An SF novel about a future Earth that has become all one corporate state, run by a large group of clones of the same person.  Earth has settled a number of colony planets, but it has turned out that interstellar trade isn’t really profitable, so corporate Earth uses the colony planets as fodder – every so often they send out military ships on missions of “asset realization”,  which means to land, take anything worth having, and deal out some damage, enough to cripple each colony and make sure it can’t grow to rival Earth’s power.  The monkey wrench in the works happens when one of the colonies recovers a damaged alien spacecraft and starts progressing faster than Earth wants.  That starts a race for the technology between our hero and a renegade corporate clone (though if the clone had succeeded I’m sure he wouldn’t have been considered a renegade any more.)  It wasn’t bad.

The Gun Seller -- Hugh Laurie

This had some funny scenes but I didn’t care for it.  It’s an action thriller, and falls victim to its own clichés.  Our hero, an ambiguously ethical former spy, is forced into a scheme involving a faked terrorist incident whose purpose is to increase the defense budget for a certain kind of attack helicopter.  Leaving aside the fact that someone with the resources to pull off a big coordinated fake terrorist attack could easily just bribe people to make sure the helicopter gets bought, which would be much simpler, the resolution is stupid: the hero goes along with the plan in order to sabotage it and expose the bad guy.  But before that we get a scene where the Big Bad Guy confronts the hero, and in the course of the conversation he casually shoots and kills a CIA agent, right in front of a high CIA official, just to show our hero how powerful and untouchable he is.  That breaks the story – the fact is, anyone who can get away with that could get away with anything at all, so nothing the hero does to expose him can possibly matter.  It wasn’t well told.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane -- Neil Gaiman

A British countryside-fantasy about a boy whose neighbors are a family of witches, and how they help each other against an evil witch that threatens both their families.  I didn’t like it at all, but I can’t really say why.  Probably it was just because I was in a bad mood right then.

The Pleasure of My Company -- Steve Martin

A novella about a shut-in with severe OCD and other emotional issues.  It was interesting how he could sort of manage his behavior by seeing himself from the outside as a kind of eccentric wind-up toy that he could put through its paces.  

The Great Pearl Heist -- Molly Caldwell Crosby

A true-crime story of what appears to have been the first theft from the international mails.  Pearls were very much more valuable a hundred years ago than they are now (that was before cultured pearls became common) and this pearl necklace was fantastically valuable – worth about two million pounds in 1913 money.  The thief – who was wealthy already, by the way, and seems to have set up this theft for the fun of it – devised a very complicated scheme that involved high-speed travel back and forth from London to Paris and coordinated efforts from several accomplices.  The only flaw was that at one point they had to bribe a mailman, who drew attention to himself when it was obvious he had more money than he should, and then talked immediately when he was pressured.  The writing was good and the story moved pretty fast.

Pictures From Italy -- Charles Dickens

Dickens’ travelogue of his journey to Italy in the mid-1840s, which was quite a caravan – he brought his wife, all his children, and three nannies.  Disappointingly, a lot of his commentary is indistinguishable from that of any other English traveler on the Continent: poverty, filth, ignorance, superstition, a litany as predictable as an English lady complaining about the servants, and as tiresome.  He’s completely out of sympathy with the culture of the country and has no interest in appreciating it – when he watches the village women, despite the demands of their work and families, taking the time to venerate the saints at the church, he doesn’t see the deep piety and the comfort they get from it, he only sees slaves to the Pope.  I was surprised to see how totally I disagree with Dickens on the matter of art criticism; he disliked the paintings of Leonardo and Michelangelo because their saints and Apostles looked too earthy, too human – he thought they should be shown as entirely ethereal and unworldly, which is so wrong I don’t know where to start.

The Monsters of Templeton -- Lauren Groff

A contemporary novel set in a fictional version of Cooperstown, New York, about a doctoral student who has abandoned her graduate program after an affair with her professor and come home pregnant.  I have to say I took against the heroine’s mother right from the start, when she greeted her daughter by saying, essentially, “Well, here you are, having wrecked your life and disappointed me, just like I always knew you would.”  The heroine keeps herself busy by researching her family tree and (not incidentally) trying to figure out who her father is, something her mother has always refused to tell her.  I was never wholly in sympathy with the story, but it wasn’t bad.

The Ramen King and I -- Andy Raskin

Kind of an oddball spiritual autobiography wrapped up in food.  Right off the bat I have to give Raskin credit for being willing to show himself at his worst.  He had emotional issues that led him to sabotage every relationship he was in, usually with infidelity.  He went to a counselor who advised him to pick a spiritual guide, a real person, not necessarily someone he knew, and write letters to that person (not actually send them, just write them.)  This is a practice some therapists use to take the place of prayer for people who don’t believe in prayer.  Raskin chose the first person who came into his head – Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen noodles.  Most of the book is taken up with Raskin’s letters to Momofuku, alternating with an account of Momofuku’s life and inventions, Raskin’s unsuccessful attempts to get a real-life interview, and his attendance at Momofuku’s funeral.  I liked it more than I thought I would.

Ice -- Ice-T and Douglas Century

An as-told-to autobiography of the rapper Ice-T, about his quiet suburban life growing up in New Jersey and the massive cultural shock of moving to East LA as a child after his parents died.  One example: where he was born it was common for blacks to call each other “blood”, but he soon found that he was now living in Crip territory and he wasn’t allowed to say that (because of the rival Bloods gang) and in Crip neighborhoods blacks called each other “cuz”.  He grew up a Crip – it really doesn’t seem like he had much choice – and eventually became a petty criminal.  He strongly implies he later got into some really heavy-duty crime, but the only ones he actually describes in the book, naturally, are lesser offenses for which the statute of limitations has expired.  He’s always said he would have wound up in prison or dead like most of his friends if he hadn’t found he had a talent for rapping.  It was pretty interesting.

The Ice Opinion -- Ice-T and Heidi Seigmund

A collection of essays on various topics, such as crime, crime prevention, the music business, and gangs.  They were interesting, although he’s clearly thought more deeply about some subjects than others.  (His thoughts about other people’s chronic depression, for example, are pretty superficial.)

Rock Paper Tiger -- Lisa Brackmann

A good story about a US veteran of the Iraq war, who was medically discharged with a permanently damaged leg and undiagnosed PTSD, and who now lives in Beijing, where she settled when her husband took a job there; however, her husband has recently abandoned her for a younger Chinese woman, and since she has no job and no money she needs to scramble to find some means of staying in China, since she has learned the language and feels at home, and doesn’t want to return to the USA (we gradually learn this is related to her PTSD, which was largely caused by finding out about the means her husband used to interrogate POWs in Iraq.)  Things get more complicated when Chinese State Security decides that the work of her best local friend, an avant-garde artist, is not in the best interest of the state, and start questioning her about him.  Interestingly, she manages to turn her problems to her advantage: apparently a lot of white men in Beijing attract Chinese women (what with having money to spare and offering the possibility of leaving China) and apparently a lot of Chinese men are really pissed about it, so hearing her story gets the men from State more on her side.  I liked it.

Hour of the Rat -- Lisa Brackmann

This is the sequel, a story more about underground art and dissidence in modern China.  There was a lot of weird detail about China: apparently most Chinese genuinely are not aware that smoking cigarettes is bad for you; of course this is because the government owns the tobacco companies.  Not that it makes much difference -- the pollution in Beijing is so bad the government doesn’t even issue air-quality information.  The American embassy puts its own information on its web site for the benefit of American locals; but they’ve run out of standard air-quality categories and have had to make up new ones.  Most days in Beijing, apparently, the air quality is officially “crazy bad”.  It’s also eye-opening that you can go to some place called something like “Lower Treasure Chicken Village”, which is so out of the way it isn’t even on the map, and when you get there you find out it’s a metropolis of three million people.  A city the size of Houston isn’t even worth keeping track of in China!

The Perils of Certain English Prisoners -- Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins

One of the double-size “extra numbers” of his magazine that he put out at Christmas.  This one is a jingoistic story of a group of English soldiers and civilians, inhabitants of an imaginary British mining colony in Central America, who are taken captive by the ungrateful and brutal natives.  The tone is very strongly imperialistic: no reason is given for the natives’ behavior – it’s just assumed that they are naturally treacherous and untrustworthy.  Also the military commander of the mining town is shown to be obviously, pig-headedly in the wrong for not assuming a policy of regularly killing and terrifying the natives, to prevent just this sort of uprising (because that always works.)  The Colonel Blimp tone is rather out of character for Dickens, and probably caused by the great uprising of the Indians against the British which was going on at that time; and Dickens’ anxiety for his son, a soldier who had just been posted to India, makes his attitude more understandable, if not more excusable.

The Golem -- Isaac Bashevis Singer

A short novella retelling the legend of  the Golem of Prague.  I liked it.

A Daughter of the Snows -- Jack London

One of London’s earliest novels, about a young woman raised in the Yukon, who has been away at finishing school for some years and is now returning to the North.  It’s mainly a character study, attempting to describe what sort of person does and does not belong on the frontier.  There’s a pretty clumsy love story, wherein the heroine falls for an obviously callow city boy, for no very apparent reason other than to highlight the worthiness of the city boy’s Yukon rival, who of course gets the girl after the city boy is shown to be a coward.  Not very good.

The Shadow Scholar -- Dave Tomar

A memoir by a guy who spent several years making a living by writing other people’s school papers for them.  I knew that sort of thing went on – I admit my editing of my sophomore roommate’s papers often went beyond “proofreading” to “rewriting” (to be fair, English wasn’t his first language) – but I hadn’t realized just how prevalent it is.  It seems rather a poisonous business; the author despises the people whose work he ghosts (how could he not, after all?) and seems to use his contempt for them as a stimulant to keep him going, like mainlining caffeine.  Speaking of contempt, he spends a lot of time slamming his alma mater, Rutgers; although since he admits he spent his whole college career alternately binge-drinking and getting high, I think it’s fair to ask who failed whom.

From Absinthe to Zest -- Alexandre Dumas pére

Dumas once wrote a massive food dictionary and cookbook that’s never been translated into English.  This is a short collection of excerpts, which show that Dumas certainly enjoyed eating and thinking about food.  It made me want to read the whole thing, although I’ll probably never work up the motivation to go through it all in French.

Credos and Curios -- James Thurber

A book of uncollected pieces put together by Thurber’s widow after he died.  Even though several of them must have been written when he was in severe pain and knew he was dying, there’s no hint of morbidity – the stories and cartoons are light-hearted and funny.  I’m sure I would have liked Thurber a lot, had I known him.

Argo -- Antonio Mendez and Scott Baglio

A very good book on a crazy plan concocted by the Canadian government to rescue a handful of fugitives who fled the American embassy in Tehran when it was overrun by the Irani nationalists in 1979.  The fugitives hid in the basement of one friendly embassy after another; in fact Canada left its embassy open for the sole purpose of having a place to hide them.  Their plan to get them out was to invent a fake movie company that wanted to film a movie on location in Iran.  They really went all out to sell the idea -- they took out ads, rented studio space, hired stenographers and producers and ad men, and even produced a script (based on the 1960s science fiction novel Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, a really excellent book, although the script they came up with was essentially a low-budget Barbarella knockoff.)  They went to the CIA for help making fake passports and other documents, and then they sent an “advance team” to Tehran, ostensibly to scout movie locations.  They rounded up the fugitives and mixed them in with their movie crew and flew home; Canada closed its embassy immediately afterwards and the movie was never heard of again.  Just a really, really impressive piece of chutzpah.  I loved it.

Liar's Poker -- Michael Lewis

A funny and very well-written memoir of working as a bond trader at Solomon Brothers in the late eighties.  What struck me was that everyone seemed to be aware at the time that the firm was hugely overstaffing itself with largely unqualified recent graduates, and they all just sort of agreed to pretend it wasn’t a problem.  There seemed to be a lot of self-deception going on, too – the big movers in the financial world prided themselves on being coldly rational, but from an outside view it’s obvious many of their decisions were driven by egomania and competitiveness.  It’s also kind of funny that Lewis, at the time of writing, clearly believed the culture couldn’t last and would have to reform itself almost any minute; he never imagined it feeding on itself and becoming ever more insane, year by year.

Subliminal -- Leonard Mlodinow

A book on how we’re influenced by the unconscious mind.  I thought he leaned a little too much on trendy neuroscience.  There was too much basing his theories on evidence like “the such-and-such region of the brain lights up under this stimulus!”, which treats the process of MRI brain mapping with rather more respect than it really deserves.  His writing implies that areas of the brain light up clearly and distinctly and within definite boundaries, which isn’t true.  It’s more like “This part over here might be glowing a little brighter than it was before, what do you think?” and is heavily vulnerable to observer confirmation bias.  Also I thought the writing wasn’t as good as in his other books.

The Far-Distant Oxus -- Katherine Hull and Pamela Whitlock

A very good children’s book set in Exmoor, about a young group of friends who go on a grand “expedition” down the river to the beach, where they race their horses.  Nothing much actually happens, but the interest of the book is the children’s pleasure in making a plan and executing it, and the fun they have with their horses and each other.  I liked it a lot.

A Walk in the Woods -- Bill Bryson

Bryson’s account of how he and an old friend attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail.  They eventually realize that the trail is too difficult and they’re too middle-aged, so they only walk sections of it, going home in between.  It’s funny and well-written, and the friction between Bryson and his friend (over the friend’s shiftlessness and alcoholism) is actually kind of unsettling – at first I thought he was playing it for laughs, but I soon realized that part was serious.  Maybe the only way it could really be addressed was as a sub-theme of an overarching funny story.

Zealot -- Reza Aslan

A very interesting speculative picture of Jesus’ early life.  One thing the author pointed out was that Nazareth was a fairly small town, only a hundred families or so, and would not have had enough work for a family of carpenters (Joseph, Jesus, and Jesus’s four brothers.)  So probably they would have had to walk to a nearby city where a building boom was going on at that time (Herod was rebuilding the city after it was destroyed during the revolt of the year AD 4.)  That means Jesus would have spent a lot of his growing years in a busy city, exposed to all sorts of people and ideas; that was probably where he heard about John the Baptist and decided to make the trek to see him (a very long journey in those days.)  I was less impressed by the author’s somewhat silly efforts at Gospel-debunking – pointing out, for example, that Pontius Pilate is known to have been a bad-tempered, intolerant man who disliked the Jews, and asking how likely it is that a man like that would have been impressed by a back-country preacher.  Because apparently no one in history has ever done anything that was out of character.  (It’s my own impression that Pilate was rather a small-minded man who was somewhat lifted out of himself when he encountered Jesus, who from all accounts had a tremendous force of personality.) 

Outposts -- Simon Winchester

Winchester came up with the odd idea of mapping out the remnants of the far-flung British Empire and visiting all of them.  There’s a surprising number of tiny bits of Britain here and there – Pitcairn Island in the Pacific, with a population of fifty or so; Tristan da Cunha in the eastern Atlantic, where it’s almost impossible to land most of the year; and, of course, the Falkland Islands, where Winchester was arrested and interned by the Argentines during the war in 1982.  It was well-written and interesting.

The Jungle -- Upton Sinclair

A Socialist novel about the hard times of the working poor in Chicago at the turn of the last century, centering on a family of Polish immigrants.  The hero gets a job working in the meat-packing plants, which is a lot like working in Hell.  Sinclair was actually disappointed with the novel’s reception, because he’d meant to complain about the plight of the working class but all his readers came away with was a vivid picture of the horrible conditions of the meat industry.  In fact this was probably because those are by far the best-written scenes in the book.  The story of the Polish laborer Jurgis is really not very well-drawn; it’s more of a tract than a novel, and the events of his life are arranged to display Socialist talking points – rather like a Chick tract, only without the rock and roll.  This made me regard Jurgis as less of a character to empathize with and more of a cartoon.  It didn’t help that Sinclair was a teetotaler and firmly believed that drinking one beer would instantly turn anyone into a hopeless alcoholic.  Naturally the story ends with Jurgis discovering his class-consciousness and becoming a Socialist agitator.  It took  me some effort to keep reading after the meat-packing parts, which are well-drawn and horrifying (and pretty accurate, too, according to research I’ve seen, as opposed to the private lives of Polish immigrants, which Sinclair just made up, unconvincingly.)

A Man of the People -- Chinua Achebe

A depressing novel about 1960s politics in Nigeria, and the doomed attempts of younger reformers to oust the corrupt incumbents, whose control of patronage makes them secure.

Spiced -- Dalia Jurgensen

A good memoir of apprenticing and then working as a pastry chef.  Since these days only high-end restaurants have a full-time pastry chef, jobs are a little harder to come by; she was a cook originally but moved to pastry because it’s less physically demanding than working on the line.  There’s a bit of a disconnect when designing a dessert menu.  On the one hand, you have to have some sort of super-rich chocolate thing, or the customers will complain; but on the other hand, you have to have some sort of one-off signature dessert, which will be more trouble than it’s worth because you have to have it on hand even though very few people will order it, because if you don’t the food critics will say your restaurant lacks inventiveness and imagination.  (And of course every time you change jobs you have to invent a new signature dessert.)  I liked it.

First Snow on Fuji -- Yasunari Kawabata

A collection of short stories and one play, largely concerned with repression and the desire to keep up outward appearances.  In one of them a woman who fantasizes about having an affair with a neighbor never actually speaks to him, and at home she throws out newspapers that have articles about adultery, as though having them in the house would reveal her secret desire.  I particularly liked the story “Silence”, about a man who pays visits to an old friend now paralyzed by a stroke and has one-sided conversations, although he’s less interested in the conversation than in the story that a female ghost has been appearing in the local taxicabs.

The Crocodile -- Fyodor Dostoevsky

A satirical novella about a man who goes to the zoo and gets swallowed whole by a crocodile, and the tremendous problems he causes everyone by not dying, because there’s no entry on anyone’s official forms for “alive but inside a crocodile”.  It was pretty funny.

The Man who Changed Everything -- Basil Mahon

A biography of James Clerk Maxwell, whose work on understanding electricity really paved the way for twentieth-century physics.  The Maxwell Equations are a set of eight fiendishly complicated partial-differential equations, which are really over my head, and the book doesn’t try to go into them in depth.  I’ve heard it said that there are two types of people: those who say “I never understood electricity until I saw Maxwell’s Equations”, and those who say “I thought I understood electricity until I saw Maxwell’s Equations.” 

If on a winter's night a traveller -- Italo Calvino

An experimental novel that’s still good even after you get used to the gag, which is rare.  Calvino begins by remarking that the opening of the novel is the best part because of its endless possibilities, and then has the narrator – for various contrived reasons – read only the first part of a dozen or so novels.  So really the whole novel is just a series of beginnings.  I didn’t notice for quite a while that the titles of all the started-and-abandoned novels, when strung together, form yet another story.  I liked it.

Master Mind -- Daniel Charles

A biography of Fritz Haber, an ambiguous figure in the history of chemistry.  He invented a method of synthesizing ammonia, which is what allows large-scale chemical fertilization – approximately half the world’s population could not be alive now if not for his work.  On the other hand, he also invented chlorine gas and was a strong proponent of chemical warfare, enthusiastically helping the German forces develop ever more lethal gases.  He never apologized for it, either, maintaining all his life that fighting with poison gas was no different to fighting with bullets – even after his wife killed herself, being unable to live with the guilt of her husband’s actions.  He seems to have been rather a distant and unempathetic person; he was cold to both his wives and not very attached to his children.  Since he was Jewish he had to flee Germany in 1933, but he was not welcome in England – the famously affable Ernest Rutherford wouldn’t shake his hand – and he moved to Palestine, where he died alone. 

Put Out More Flags -- Evelyn Waugh

A World War II novel, rather nasty, showing how people who succeed and thrive are often those willing to do rotten things – the book’s anti-hero secures a safe administrative job for himself during the war by falsely accusing an old friend of Fascist leanings.  It was an unpleasant read.

Agent Garbo -- Stephan Talty

I liked this a lot.  It’s the story of a guy in Madrid who, at the outbreak of World War II, essentially said to himself, “How can I, a middle-aged, unemployed chicken farmer, help to bring down the Third Reich?”  He decided to enroll as a Nazi spy, and then went to Lisbon, from where he sent fake reports on England back to the Abwehr – even though he could not read or speak English and had never been to England.  The Germans really had no intelligence presence in England, because Hitler had always believed the English would go along with the Nazis, so when he finally had to admit they weren’t on his side, the Nazis had to scramble to get a spy network in place.  They had no success.  “Garbo” eventually crossed to England and worked full-time with the British services, maintaining an entirely imaginary spy network throughout Britain and sending intelligence reports that had actually been written by British counter-intelligence.  The Germans never caught on.  One of the British boffins later suggested that German nature worked against them: people with a sense of humor didn’t get promoted under the Nazis, so the Abwehr just couldn’t have imagined the colossal ridiculousness of the Garbo scheme, or believed it could work if they had.  Garbo’s most important job was contributing to the effort to convince the Germans that the D-Day invasion was actually further north; even while the invasion was going on, Garbo’s fake network of fake spies was constantly reporting that it was a feint, and the real invasion was still coming.  The Germans fell for it, and Hitler held fifteen panzer divisions out of the battle for weeks because he thought he’d need them against the “real” threat.

Death in Midsummer -- Yukio Mishima

A short story collection.  The most memorable was the one where an Army lieutenant comes home one afternoon and tells his wife that colleagues of his have been involved in an attempted coup; he’s sure to be arrested and executed, so the two of them commit lovingly-described ritual suicide.  It’s pretty disturbing how sexualized the deaths are.  Mishima clearly thought this was the best possible way to go out; some years later he staged a silly attempted coup himself, whose only real purpose, most people think, was to have news cameras rolling while he committed ritual suicide.  He was a disturbed person.

The Liar's Tale -- Jeremy Campbell

More a work of philosophy than history, examining the benefits of falsehood and arguing that lying is a natural part of human existence.  I wasn’t that impressed with it, and most of the book has escaped my memory.

The Plague -- Albert Camus

A very good existential novel about an outbreak of bubonic plague, and the resulting strict quarantine, in the city of Oran (in Algiers, where Camus was born.)  The narrator is a local doctor (although he tells the story in the third person, near the end he reveals his identity) who reports the progress of the disease and the behavior of the citizens with clinical detachment.  Partly the novel is an allegory – the city represents France, the plague is the German occupation – but it has a wider application in the study of human behavior under pressure.  The narrator ultimately concludes that “the great thing is to do your job as it should be done”; that  is, plague or no plague, Nazis or no Nazis, he’s still a doctor and has a clear duty, and all moral questions must begin from that idea. 

Within the Tides -- Joseph Conrad

A short story collection, with stories told by a narrator telling the story of how he met a man who told him a story.  So the actual events are at (at least) three removes from the narration.  In fact large chunks of the each story are concerned with the sub-narrators and their various reasons for telling the narrator the stories they’d heard.  They’re generally concerned with loyalty and betrayal; my favorite was “The Partner”, a story of a hushed-up robbery and murder in the Channel.

Operation Sea Lion -- Peter Fleming

A thoroughly-researched book on the Nazi plan to invade Britain and why it never came off.  The writing is a little academic, but it was well told nevertheless.

Getaway -- Lisa Brackmann

A crime thriller about a recent divorcee on a Caribbean vacation, who inadvertently gets involved in a drug-smuggling scheme when a burglar hits the wrong hotel room by mistake.  You have to gloss over the usual thriller questions – why doesn’t she go to the police, or the consulate, or just go home? – but apart from that it was pretty good.

The Rathbones -- Janice Clark

A maritime novel about several generations of an eccentric and prolific New England whaling family.  The story describes how the Rathbones gradually lose their mystical connection to the sea and the whales as they become richer and turn more attention to wealth and social position, an appropriately Puritanical message.  It was pretty good.

The Prisoner of Heaven -- Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A novel about bookselling in Barcelona in the fifties.  It deals with life under the Fascists and old scores from the civil war being settled.  I liked it.

Bullfighting -- Roddy Doyle

A collection of short stories, all about Dublin men in their forties facing up to the changes of middle age.  Well written.

The Gambler -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A well-written but not very enjoyable book.  Dostoevsky was a gambling addict himself, and this is a portrait of an addict in action, very uncomfortable to read.  The protagonist, Alexei, is a sort of secretary or charge d’affaires of a Russian general, who is staying with his family in a Crimean resort town, putting up a appearance of wealth while he waits impatiently for a rich relative to die.  Alexei is in love with the general’s daughter, who secretly loves him in return but puts on a show of despising him, for no real reason I could see except “they’re Russians”.  Most of the novel is taken up with Alexei’s desperate hours at the roulette table, where he wins and loses (mostly loses) entirely at random, while thoroughly believing in his “system”.  Dostoyevsky does a good job of describing the irrational fever that comes over a gambler, the mad, mystical conviction that he must win, which actually carries some of the physical symptoms of a real fever – the hot skin, the sunken eyes, the sense of detachment from the real world.  There’s a good scene when Alexei, in the depths of his nihilistic anger after losing at roulette, draws a vivid word-picture of the sort of man he affects to despise: a plodding, respectable man who merely works all his life, slowly amassing capital to pass on to his children.  He calls this sort of man “utterly German” (a great insult among the Russian Bohemians of that time.)  Naturally he ignores the fact that his own spiritually higher life has brought him nothing but ruin, and he is in fact waiting along with the general for a relative to die and leave them money.  One of the things that makes the book so effective, I think, is knowing that Dostoevsky was bankrupt at the time and was actually writing the novel in order to get money to pay off his gambling debts.

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish -- David Rakoff

An ambitious short novel in rhymed couplets following a string of related characters across America throughout the 20th century. It wasn’t bad.

Heads in Beds -- Jacob Tomsky

A very funny and well-written memoir of working in hotels.  Tomsky started as a valet parker in a high-end New Orleans hotel, and eventually worked his way up to management before getting burned out and leaving.  He later worked the front desk at a New York hotel, also high-end, but where the owners were an absentee corporation that didn’t care much about good service.  Luckily for him he joined the union, because a year or two after he started there the owners fired everyone (except the union guys, who had a contract) and replaced them with low-wage college students (because that’s how you ensure good customer service, of course.)  New York seems to be the only place where there are still bellmen; their least favorite invention is the roller suitcase, because that inclines customers to do without their help.  Tomsky was friendly with the bellmen so he made a practice of always yelling “Front!” and giving the room key to the bellman instead of the guest.  He also notes that there’s one silver lining when you get a bad-tempered, abusive guy in line: after he’s done yelling at you and stormed off to his room, the next guy in line, who had to watch the whole thing, is always super nice to try to make up for it.  Tomsky says that after someone has watched some middle-aged businessman throwing a tantrum like a two-year-old, he could tell them “Our only available room is in the basement, and it has rats, and it’s $1500 a night” and they’d be all “No problem.”  It was a great book.

Mere Anarchy -- Woody Allen

A collection of short comic pieces.  They were all right, but I didn’t find them as funny as I found his other books thirty years ago; whether that’s more a change in me or in his writing, I don’t know.

The Big Short -- Michael Lewis

A good overview of the financial meltdown of the late aughts, written by someone who’s not exactly an insider but who does have an insider’s knowledge of the business.  There was a good illustration of the sort of willful blindness that contributed so heavily to everything when he described a Bear, Stearns executive giving a speech on how safe an investment his company was, totally unaware that Bear, Stearns was in the process of going out of business.  When someone pointed out that Bear, Stearns stock had fallen something like sixty percent just since the start of his speech, he just stood there with no idea what to do or say.  Lewis says that one of the key problems is that the people who work in the rating agencies are the ones who weren’t smart enough to make it on Wall Street.  So you have a system that makes sure that the people who are supposed to be keeping rein on Wall Street are people whom Wall Street can always outsmart.  He also says that the big backlash against hedge funds in 2008 and 2009 was basically their punishment for being right when everyone else was wrong.  Good reading.

Slumdog Millionaire -- Vikas Swarup

An excellent novel about a young waiter from the slums of Mumbai who goes on a television quiz show and wins the grand prize, the equivalent of about sixteen million dollars.  The show has him arrested and falsely accuses him of cheating, in order to get out of paying him the money.  Ordinarily he would have no hope at all, but (for reasons made clear later in the novel) a lawyer comes to represent him (not something that would usually happen for a broke teenager from the slums) and he explains to her how he happened to know the answers to the questions on the show, telling her his life story (out of order) in the process.  I loved it.

Laughing Anne -- Joseph Conrad

A short play based on his story “Because of the Dollars”.  Conrad liked to tell stories through an observer unconnected to the main action.  This one is told by a sea captain who meets a woman named Anne several times over the course of his career; he sees her progress as the kept woman of a series of sailors, gradually losing her looks but keeping the good temper that gave her her nickname.  He eventually encounters her in her decline, kept by a man who treats her badly,  but having nowhere to go.  The captain realizes the only thing he can do for her is to take her child away to be raised somewhere decent.  It was a sad story.

One Day More -- Joseph Conrad

A one-act play, a sad story about a retired seaman whose son has gone to sea and never returned; the man has become obsessive and somewhat senile, and believes every day that his son is returning tomorrow.  The only person who treats him kindly is his old-maid neighbor, who longs to run away herself.  I didn’t like it much.

Invisible Cities -- Italo Calvino

An interesting, experimental book.  It’s the story of Marco Polo travelling the cities of China and coming back to report on them to Kublai Khan, even though neither of them speaks the other’s language.  It’s told alternately from both of their viewpoints.  It was pretty good.

The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov -- Peter Pringle

Vavilov was a plant geneticist, an extraordinarily tireless man who travelled the whole world in the twenties and thirties collecting plants and seeds for what is still the world’s largest plant gene bank.  Based on his observations and collections he formed theories about the origins and history of various staple crops, and also bred strains of wheat and rye that could thrive in farming areas in Russia and the Ukraine.  Unfortunately his real success in improving crop yield was a threat to Lysenko, who was building his reputation on his own faked claims of improving crop yield.  Their clash was sadly typical: Lysenko rose in power because he was willing to tell Stalin anything he wanted to hear, while Vavilov, whose results were accurate and verifiable, was pushed to the margin.  Eventually Lysenko grew powerful enough that Vavilov was arrested and sentenced to death.  The intervention of his brother, a famous physicist, got his sentence commuted to a term of twenty years, but he starved to death in prison anyway so it hardly mattered.  He did leave a legacy: the staff he had appointed at his institute rescued his seed bank, hiding it in the basement during the siege of Leningrad, and none of them touched it even though they were literally starving.

The Vicar of Wakefield -- Oliver Goldsmith

An eighteenth-century sentimental novel that also contains some satire on sentimental novels.  It tells the story of an honest, good-hearted vicar who, through being overly trusting, gets into all sorts of trouble – his dishonest banker absconds with all his money, his daughter runs off with a rake who tricks her with a false marriage, his heartless landlord demands his rent even after his house burns down and he loses everything.  The day is rather ludicrously saved when their eccentric vagabond friend sheds his disguise to reveal himself as a wealthy nobleman who uses his money and social position to solve all their problems.  Still, the writing is clever and funny, and it’s an enjoyable book.

Pan -- Knut Hamsun

An unpleasant novel about a youngish lieutenant on long leave, who is taking a hunting vacation and staying in a small hut in the woods above a fishing town.  He becomes romantically (and, it’s implied, sexually) involved with two local women; his internal state is kind of mysterious, but I got the distinct impression that he was angry at himself for being attracted to them, and angrier for acting on the attraction.  I didn’t really like it.

Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte

I didn’t like this much.  I can’t see why Heathcliff is considered a hero of any kind, Byronic or otherwise; he’s a brutal, sadistic swine, with no redeeming qualities at all.  I did appreciate the way Bronte showed that young Cathy’s imprisonment is as much a product of Victorian culture as it is of Heathcliff’s will – once he has kidnapped her, what are her options?  There are no police and very few neighbors, and what neighbors there are wouldn’t be willing to interfere.  Even the novel’s narrator (the servant Nelly, a woman I rather despised for her passiveness) works against her own charge’s interest: when Cathy realizes that Heathcliff has locked the doors and imprisoned her, she decides to take a log from the hearth and set the house on fire (the only rational decision anyone makes in the whole book) but Nelly stops her, simply from the fear of defying convention.  Honestly I couldn’t wait for Heathcliff to die.

The House of the Sleeping Beauties -- Yasunari Kawabata

A creepy psychosexual novel about prurient abstinence.  The narrator, an old man, hears about a not-quite-brothel that provides women as sleeping partners (not sex partners) for old men – like Abishag warming the bed of the dying King David.  The catch: all the women are drugged into unconsciousness, so they won’t show signs of repulsion at their elderly clients. The narrator sometimes has difficulty sleeping there, troubled by thoughts of how easy the women would be to abuse.  The book is deliberately written to be disturbing, and it succeeds; but I admired the craftsmanship more than I enjoyed reading it.

David and Goliath -- Malcolm Gladwell

A collection of essays generally concentrating on situations where underdogs have to contend against superior opponents, and what strategies they employ.  I thought he was rather dominated by his agenda.  For example, he tells the story of a small college basketball team that had success against stronger opponents by employing the full-court press, a tactic that limits the stronger team’s advantages in talent and athletic ability by minimizing their chances with the ball and increasing the area of the court they have to defend.  It’s a workable strategy in some situations, but Gladwell argues that the failure of more teams to employ the full-court press means they’re unimaginative and dominated by conventional thinking.  But there are good reasons why the full-court press isn’t generally used at higher levels: when people try, it always fails.  (Gladwell doesn’t mention that.)  The press depends on the other team only having a few good ball-handlers, and on your team having significantly more endurance than the other team; but at higher levels of basketball everyone can handle the ball and everyone is in top shape.  In fact, the team Gladwell is describing only succeeded until they started playing genuinely good teams, who easily countered the press and demolished them.  I think this is a problem of falling in love with your own cleverness: the real value of any strategy does not lie in how original or unoriginal it is, but in how well it succeeds.

Cosmicomics -- Italo Calvino

This was an odd collection of short stories about cosmic entities reminiscing about the early days of the Universe.  I didn’t like it much.  I got the feeling a lot was lost in the translation from the Italian.

The Idea of a Christian Society -- T.S. Eliot

This was an essay written in 1939, after Chamberlain’s peace agreement with the Nazis.  Eliot argued that the only possible resistance to the rise of fascism – which he saw as a purely pagan phenomenon – was a strong established Christianity: specifically a state-run church on the model of England.  Eliot was opposed to individualism and his proposed society sounds revolting to me; he himself admits that the church would “appear” repressive to anyone who did not “fully apprehend” the truth of Christianity.  What he proposes is essentially an intellectual aristocracy: the ideals of the church-state would be debated and upheld by a “Community of Christians”.  A capital-C Christian, in Eliot’s idea, was a respectable educated gentleman who thought seriously about the religious life.  Eliot expected that such a community, which of course would include him and his friends, would carry moral weight because of the natural respect people feel for their superiors.  Eliot was himself a tolerant person, but his proposed church-state was not; he openly says there would have to be “unity of religious background”, and there would be no room for freethinkers or Jews (he doesn’t mention Hindus, Buddhists, or Moslems, but no doubt they’re included.)  He doesn’t actually say what solution would be found for religious non-unity, probably because the only possible avenues are forced conversion, expulsion, or extermination, all of which he would have been opposed to.  So he rather stumbled on his own foundation there.

Tris Speaker -- Timothy Gay

Pretty good biography of Speaker, who was the best player on the Red Sox in their great days in the aughts and teens.  He won three World Series with the Sox before getting traded to Cleveland. Mostly what I’d known about Speaker before this was that he was an intense racist and anti-Catholic who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan; I’d wondered if this book would gloss over that, but the author faced up to it, not offering any apology but noting that Speaker seemed to relax his prejudices as he got older.  Speaker was a teammate of Ray Chapman, who was killed by a pitch in 1920; the papers at the time said he didn’t appear at the service because he was overcome by grief, but in fact it was because he’d gotten in a fistfight trying to prevent Chapman from being given a Catholic funeral. Even leaving that aside, I don’t think I would have liked Speaker anyway; the book draws a picture of a hard, driven, perpetually angry man.

Notes Toward a Definition of Culture -- T.S. Eliot

An opinion essay on what exactly “culture” means and what its importance is.  I was disappointed that even so brilliant and insightful a thinker as Eliot uses cheap hand-waving tricks such as saying “of course everyone agrees that…” when he’s introducing an unfounded assumption.  Of course for a twenty-first-century reader, Eliot’s idealization of prewar English institutions falls a little flat; and I can’t be expected to go along with his idea that all culture was dying if not dead already thirty years before I was born.  Of course cultural institutions are in a constant state of change, and Eliot was a reactionary and genuinely believed that all change was change for the worse, so his position made sense to him.  The problem is that when you choose to define your own prejudices as “common sense”, there’s no possibility of reasonable disagreement.  When Eliot says (with an air of someone imparting a piece of very obvious wisdom) “May we not agree that no normal woman would want to have a job outside the home?” it’s clear that the answer “No” would only elicit the response “Well, there is nothing to be said then.”

Ready For a Brand New Beat -- Mark Kurlansky

An entertaining book about Motown and Detroit in the sixties and the recording of “Dancin’ in the Street” by Martha and the Vandellas.  It draws a great picture of the early days of Motown, with recording sessions going on on several floors of an old house in Detroit (they knocked out one wall of a bathroom to get a reverb effect) twenty-four hours a day, and Martha Reeves playing with the child Stevie Wonder on the kitchen floor to keep him happy.  The released single was the second take – the sound guy told her the microphone wasn’t working the first time, and it wasn’t until this book was being researched that the sound guy admitted there was nothing wrong with the first take, he just wanted the record to sound edgier so he told Martha they had to do it again, so she’d be irritated.  Apparently it was Marvin Gaye who decided to assign the song to Martha.  There was a lot about Marvin’s complicated relationship with Barry Gordy, the owner of Motown, who was also Marvin’s brother-in-law.  Gordy didn’t want Marvin to record “What’s Going On”, because he wanted Motown to stay apolitical, but Marvin argued that if they stayed on that path Motown would become irrelevant, like Elvis did, and he had his way.  The book interviewed a famous music historian, I’ve forgotten his name, who said that “Dancin’ in the Street” was one of a very few songs (“Like a Rollin’ Stone” being another he mentioned) where even after hearing it hundreds of times he couldn’t think of a single thing that could be changed to improve it.

The Painter of Battles -- Arturo Perez-Reverte

A dark novel about a photojournalist who has retired from taking pictures in war zones and is now painting a large war mural on the inside of an old watchtower on the coast of Spain.  The tower isn’t well-maintained, and the mural will decay and fall apart in a decade or so, but that’s part of the point of his project.  When he’s getting toward being finished, a stranger arrives to confront him: it’s a former Serb soldier who was the subject of a prize-winning photograph by the painter, years before.  The soldier is taken aback to find that the painter does not recognize him.  He explains that he has come to kill the painter, but wants to talk to him first (he’s not entirely sane.)  The rest of the novel is taken up by their conversations, interspersed with flashbacks and the painter’s attempt to finish his mural before he dies.  Well written.

Chance -- Joseph Conrad

A sea-novel with aspects of feminism.  Unusually for Conrad, the hero of the story is a woman, named Flora, but the story is actually narrated by a man and everything we know about Flora’s internal state is what is reported to us by men who are inferring it.  Flora was raised by a father whom she worshipped, although he was distant, and when he is convicted of a great financial swindle, her life is complicated by her refusal to believe in his guilt, even though she secretly knows he is guilty.  With her father in prison she is put in a position where, for most of the rest of her life, other people make decisions for her.  Without actually preaching, Conrad is pointing out how helpless a woman with no money was in England in the nineteenth century.  Finally, after being prevented from suicide, she escapes by marrying a sea-captain, who not only takes her to sea but takes in her father when he is released from prison, and takes him to sea as well, where he won’t be hounded by his past.  But the father has become mentally infirm and irrationally blames all his troubles on the captain.  It’s also a good picture of the choices of a decent man, who marries a woman whom he knows does not love him, and their careful life together.  I liked it.

Agent Zigzag -- Ben Macintyre

The strange story of Eddie Chapman, an English con man and thief who was in prison on the Isle of Jersey (for burglary) when the Nazis occupied it.  He was transferred to a Paris prison and joined the Abwehr, the Nazi spy bureau, and was trained as a saboteur and spy.  In late 1942 he was parachuted into England on a mission to destroy the De Havilland aircraft factory.  His actual motives are unknown.  As a native Englishman, he must have known that the German planning was terrible – for one thing, they gave him the wrong kind of money, all of it in high denominations that couldn’t help but draw attention.  In any case he made no attempt to carry it out, but walked into the first police station he found and surrendered immediately.  As it happened, the British knew all about him already (thanks to the code-breakers at Bletchley Park) and were right on hand to pick him up.  Chapman became a double agent, which he always maintained had been his plan all along, though several of the people who worked with him doubted it and considered him more of an opportunist.  In his case the British were clearly the side to be on – Germany had no intelligence apparat in Britain at all before the war (thanks to Hitler’s conviction that the British were really on his side) and their last-second mad dash to set one up failed totally.  The British hired stage magicians to create a convincing appearance (from the air) of total destruction at the De Havilland plant, so Chapman could claim to have achieved his mission.  He was later sent back to Europe, where he became an instructor at an Abwehr school for spies.  He got pretty chummy with several of the Germans he worked with, many of whom were cynical opportunists themselves – a classic case where operatives in the field have more in common with their opponents than either of them does with their own organization.  A general feeling that Chapman was best not left to his own devices led the British to bring him back to England, where he spent the rest of the war sending false spotting reports on rockets that fell near London.  The sense I got was that what he really liked in life was tricking people, being smarter than other people, and a triple-cross situation – where he could feel superior to everyone on both sides – must have suited him enormously.  It was a good read.

The Other One – Colette

A short novel about a small family living in France: a successful writer, his wife, their young teenage son, and the son’s governess. The story takes place over the course of an afternoon and evening, as the wife realizes that the son is in love with the governess; that her husband and the governess are lovers; and that she’s content to leave their ménage as it is.  Not bad.

Neither Here Nor There -- Bill Bryson

A travel book about Bryson’s two journeys around Eastern Europe, first in the early seventies and then in the early nineties.  It was good reading, but a little overshadowed by my knowing that only a year or two after his second trip, all the places he writes about were levelled in civil war and ethnic cleansing.  It’s kind of hard to remember that there was ever a time when Belgrade wasn’t a chaotic nightmarish hellhole, never mind that that was only twenty years ago.

Memoirs of Egotism -- Stendhal

A memoir of Stendhal’s early life in Italy and France in the first decades of the nineteenth century.  It really isn’t all that egotistical – the title is Stendhal making fun of himself for presuming that readers would care about his youthful follies.  It’s all about the social side of his life – he doesn’t discuss his writing process.  He describes a French society phenomenon I have always thought very strange, that being what I might call the “public love affair” – an arrangement where a man has a publically proclaimed adulterous affair with some society woman that is largely for show, designed to increase the social consequence of both.  Real attachment does not enter into it – he describes men and women sitting with their friends having complex discussions about who should be seen to have an affair with whom.  No one seems to think this at all out of the ordinary; in fact, what I would think of as a romantic attachment had a different name in French, and was considered far less important and of no general interest.  I thought it was interesting that Stendhal said that Italy was more civilized and urbane than France, but he may just have written that to annoy people he knew; it’s the sort of thing he did.  It’s pretty short, but still interesting.

A Time of Gifts -- Patrick Leigh Fermor

A well-written travel book, being the memoir of a young Irish-Englishman who in 1933, at the age of nineteen, decided to walk from Rotterdam to Istanbul (which he insists on calling Constantinople).  He subsisted on monthly remittances of four pounds; I don’t have a good idea of how much buying power that had in Europe in the thirties, but it wasn’t a huge amount, at any rate.  The book turned out to be unintentionally tragic – not only were most of the beautiful buildings he saw on his trip destroyed a few years later, but on his trek through Germany and Austria he met and stayed with many people who were friendly to English strangers, and in retrospect it’s obvious that most of these friends he met – open-minded, cosmopolitan, decent people who were opposed to Fascism – wouldn’t have survived the rise of the Nazis.  At this time Fermor, like most of the British, still regarded Hitler as rather a silly clown who would vanish soon.  The book only gets him as far as the border between Czechoslovakia and Hungary; he covers the rest of the way in a second book, which I haven’t read yet.

The Swerve -- Stephen Greenblatt

A book about the survival of ancient books into the Middle Ages, particularly focusing on Lucretius’s long, weird, atheistical poem On the Nature of Things.  I think the author gives the poem more credit for changing the mindset of educated people from medieval to modern than it really deserves – as if it were the only surviving ancient text – and, being an atheist himself, thinks Lucretius’s atheism is more important than it really is.  It was pretty interesting, though.

Then We Came to the End -- Joshua Ferris

A very enjoyable novel written in the first person plural, which is peculiarly appropriate for a story about office culture.  It was done so well that I was halfway through the book before it came home to me that there really is no one lead character – there’s no nameless narrator saying “we” on behalf of everyone else; the narrator is the entire office population, speaking in one huge collective “we”.  I liked it a lot.  It really captures the conflicted feelings of people who simultaneously dislike their jobs and fear losing them.

The Yugo -- Jason Vuic

A book about the Yugoslavian export hatchback of the 1980s that is often voted the worst car of all time.  The car actually sold strongly in the Balkans, where automobile standards are much lower.  One thing I learned from the book: America has the highest automobile standards in the world, and California’s standards are higher than that.  Almost no industrial nation has the capability to make engines that will meet American standards; Japan and Germany are basically it.  That’s why so many imported cars have Japanese engines.

Set of Six -- Joseph Conrad

A collection of short stories, generally “true” – that is, the essential facts were told to Conrad by some third person, and he embellished them into good stories, though (he says) after a while even he can’t really remember where the real story ends and the fiction begins.  The longest is a Napoleonic story about two French officers who get into an argument over some foolish trivia and end up fighting a series of duels across twenty years, for no very good reason.  Well written.

Just My Type -- Simon Garfield

A very good book on the history of typography.  Has a good defense of the unfairly-maligned Comic Sans font, which was designed to be easier for dyslexics to read and serves its intended purpose very well.  There’s also a good bit about the Guardian newspaper’s hoax on the newly-independent island nation of Sans Serif, with its Bodano Airport and the great beach of Gill Sands.