Book reviews, 2012

Boston -- Upton Sinclair

A fictionalized account of the Sacco-Vanzetti case.  It had a lot of good writing in it, but it suffered from the flaw of all advocacy novels and let its special pleading override the story.  It’s a two-volume novel, which is necessary because it’s more than half pamphlet.  I think his attack on private property would have stood up better with Sacco and Vanzetti in the background where they wouldn’t overwhelm the fictional part of the story.  Sinclair presents Vanzetti as a kind of living saint who nevertheless has fits of temper, and Sacco as more enigmatic.  I actually do think the trial was unfair, but Sinclair hurts his case by overstatement, though unintentionally.  I’m sure Sinclair genuinely believed, as fanatics do, that every single person who wasn’t actively working for the pair’s acquittal was stupid, inbred, criminal, insane, or prompted by fear or greed.  It’s obvious he thinks Sacco and Vanzetti were framed, but he spends less time showing the poor quality of the prosecution’s evidence than he does speculating about the motives of the prosecution.  (By the way, I agree with Francis Russell’s later account that Sacco was guilty, and Vanzetti wasn’t involved but probably knew Sacco had done it.  But Sinclair published in 1927, the year of the execution, and never saw Russell’s research.)  

Tapped Out -- Matthew Polly

A pretty good piece of participatory journalism. A middle-aged former Chinese boxer decides to spend a couple years training to fight in the MMA.  Turns out most fighters use a combination of wrestling, Thai boxing, and grappling, usually along with boxing or karate or whatever they started with.  I was astonished to find out how many vitamins and dietary supplements they take – seventy or eighty pills a day!  Honestly, that can’t be good for you.  

The Amateur Gentleman -- Jeffery Farnol

A Regency novel, telling the story of a young man raised in rural 18-teens England to be a prize-fighter by his father and godfather, both former champions.  But he unexpectedly inherits seven hundred fifty thousand pounds (I can’t even guess what that would be in 2012 dollars – hundreds of millions, at least) and decides to go to London and make a new start as a wealthy gentleman.  It’s funny, if a little silly.  The best scene was when the mean-spirited rival discovers the hero’s antecedents and arranges for the rustic father and godfather to arrive at the hero’s house in the middle of a grand society affair, and instead of being embarrassed the hero proudly announces them to the Prince Regent and the other guests.  Of course this means the end of his career in Society, and just as well.  Naturally the hero gets the chance to use his boxing skills to settle the rival’s hash.

Essayes, Second Booke -- Michel de Montaigne

The thing that struck me most about these essentially humanitarian essays is how snobbish and authoritarian they are.  Probably his most repeated observation is that education is only good for certain special people, and everyone else should just believe what they’re told and not try to learn anything.

The Turn of the Screw -- Henry James

A very chilling ghost story that succeeds by hinting at evil rather than showing it.  (Edmund Wilson’s half-hearted argument that it’s really a psycho-thriller that takes place in the mind of the governess isn’t really supportable.  Wilson just didn’t want to admit he liked a ghost story.)   It seems to me that what happens is that the ghost of Quint is haunting the children, having molested them while he was alive, and the governess kills the boy to save him from being turned to evil by Quint’s ghost.  But it’s all presented in a very vague, nightmarish way that makes it a lot more frightening.

The Hunger Games -- Suzanne Collins

An enjoyable YA book about a hellishly bleak future post-war America, a collection of districts kept in crushing poverty by a brutal dictatorship based in Denver.  Basically to rub everyone’s faces in their total powerlessness, every year the government rounds up a couple dozen children between the ages of about ten and eighteen, and puts them in a sadistic torture chamber where they have to survive terrible traps and genetically engineered monsters, while also fighting each other to the death.  Naturally it’s very popular television.  Our heroine is a sixteen-year-old who, while fighting for her life, also desperately wants to make some gesture to show to the cameras how much she hates the country for putting her in the position she’s in.  She comes up with a pretty good one.

The House of Godwine -- Emma Mason

Well-written history of Godwine, Earl of Wessex, and his son Harold, who became the last Saxon king before getting overthrown by William the Conqueror.  It’s a good study of power politics, and an illustrative picture of how there can be individuals within a state who are more powerful than the actual head of state.

World's Greatest Sleuth! -- Steve Hockensmith

Boring.

Crime and Punishment -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I tried to read this about twenty-five years ago but got bogged down.  I liked it a lot better this time – Raskolnikov was more comprehensible, though no more admirable. I also liked the detective, who figures out that Raskolnikov is the killer immediately, but doesn’t arrest him right away; the story is a psychological thriller, with the detective manipulating Raskolnikov’s guilt to make him turn himself in.  Interestingly, he also wants Raskolnikov to confess on his own because he really believes that confessing will be good for Raskolnikov’s soul.  There’s an excellent scene where the detective tells Raskolnikov that even if life consisted of nothing but standing in a few square feet of open space, eternally surrounded by impenetrable gray fog, even then life would still be worth living.  Perhaps strangely for a book about a senseless murder, it really gave me a sense of Dostoevsky’s belief that everything that happened to him was endurable because he really believed that God loved him.

The Wonder Clock -- Howard Pyle

Pretty good collection of re-told fairy tales.

Things Fall Apart -- Chinua Achebe

The story of Okonkwo, an Ibo man who lives in inner Nigeria, and his life before and after the arrival of the British missionaries and colonialists.  It does a really good job of describing the bewildered anger of the Ibo – as if some aliens just dropped out of the sky and told us that we belonged to them now, and would follow their laws or else.  There’s a really painful subplot with the conversion of Okonkwo’s son to Christianity, and Okonkwo’s inability to understand that it was really prompted by his son’s desire to escape his father’s authority, the son never having recovered from finding out that Okonkwo took part in the ritual killing of his foster-son (the novel doesn’t paint pre-British Nigeria as some sort of Eden.) A good book.

The Big Bam -- Leigh Montville

I like this author, but I didn’t think this book was that good.  It’s a biography of Babe Ruth, but dwelling mostly on the parts of his life nobody knows much about – his childhood before he was sent to the reform school, the non-baseball parts of the reform school period, what he was doing in his spare time his first few years with the Red Sox.  But Montville really has nothing to say about those times, because nobody knows anything much about them.  Ruth, who was always a live-for-today sort of guy anyway, clearly preferred not to talk about his younger days, and nobody involved in them kept a diary or anything, so all you can really say about his youth is “We don’t know and we’ll never know”.  So Montville is reduced to saying “Maybe this happened, maybe Ruth felt this way, maybe, maybe, maybe.”  The whole book seemed kind of pointless, really.

Moll Flanders -- Daniel Defoe

A picaresque novel, very racy for its time, purporting to be the memoirs of a (now wealthy, retired, and respectable) Englishwoman who, born to a convict in Newgate prison in the mid-1600s, lived a long life as a thief, prostitute, and con artist.  Actually what struck me most about her was that, by my count, she had thirteen children by seven different fathers and never mentions one of them by name – every time she has to change names and residences due to her criminal career, she gives up her current children to in-laws and then apparently never thinks about them again.  The book was heavily panned by the eighteenth-century critics due to its content of murder, thievery, fornication, and incest, and its popularity among the working classes was widely regarded as proof of their low moral character.  (I think myself that the servant classes loved the book because it shows the upper classes acting like pigs and getting their just desserts for it.  Also, of course, it’s a very well-told story, so it doesn’t really need any other excuse.)

Catching Fire -- Suzanne Collins

The sequel to The Hunger Games, which comes up with a fairly contrived reason for sending our heroes back to repeat the first book over again. The outcome is different, though; the tournament fighters, rather improbably, have to survive the deadly traps while also fighting to the death and simultaneously plotting a breakout.  It ends on a cliffhanger that’s also a major downer.

The Road -- Jack London

A very good memoir of London’s days as a hobo, with a lot of interesting stuff about hitching rides on trains.  Back then there was a sort of wooden framework between a train car’s wheels, and you could crawl on top of the slats and ride there – it was called “riding the rods”, and it was just as dangerous as it sounds.  You had to keep informed about all the rail lines; usually the railroad guards wouldn’t do anything too severe to hoboes, beyond dousing them with buckets of water or putting the boot in when kicking them off the train, but on lines where there had recently been violence – especially if a guard had been hurt – things were different.  Once a hobo was on the rods, there was no way off them until the train stopped.  So the guards might tie a railroad spike to a cord and let it out slowly so the spike would bang around under the carriage and knock the hobo off the rods, which meant certain death.  

Eminent Victorians -- Lytton Strachey

It was kind of surprising to realize, reading this, that Strachey hated the Victorians, and the four long biographies that make up the book are meant to illustrate the worst qualities of the era. The four are General Gordon, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, and Cardinal Manning.  I already knew that Gordon was pretty close to being functionally insane, and that Dr. Arnold was the worst schoolmaster I could ever have hoped for, and their entries reconfirmed that in a big way.  His take on Nightingale was that, while personally unpleasant, she was an extremely able administrator who changed the whole focus of nursing into, essentially, keeping an eye on the doctors and fixing their mistakes. The really interesting one was the longest: it’s purportedly a disapproving biography of Cardinal Manning, but really it’s an admiring biography of Cardinal Newman.  Both of these men were Protestant clergymen who converted to Catholicism in mid-life, but Manning rose high in the Church while Newman did not, which Strachey credits to Manning’s scheming thirst for power (he calls him a “born autocrat”.)  I was interested to see that Gladstone called Manning’s conversion the most painful incident of his life, worse than the death of his mother.

Tom Sawyer Abroad -- Mark Twain

I got the idea this was supposed to take place after Huck comes back from the raft trip but before he lights out for the territories.  It’s a funny farcical story about Huck, Tom, and Jim being kidnapped by a crazy scientist to ride around the world in a balloon.  After the scientist falls to his death while trying to murder our heroes, they have to figure out how to pilot the balloon; in the process they end up being chased across the Sahara by lions and landing on top of the Great Pyramid.  It was fun.

The Good Earth -- Pearl S. Buck

A fairly good story about a Chinese peasant farmer and his long, long journey towards prosperity.  The author was born and raised in China, which in my view kind of invalidates the criticism from American-born Chinese writers from San Francisco who don’t speak Chinese. The moral is a little simplistic – as the hero moves further and further away from actually working on his land with his own hands, he becomes a less and less admirable person.  He treats his wife like crap, too. There’s also a good description of what a shame it is that once we free ourselves from constant manual labor we often can’t think of anything better to fill the time than opium, or the equivalent.

Mercenaries, Missionaries, and Misfits -- Tarquin Hall

A very good memoir of a Londoner who decided that the best way to become a journalist was to finish school and then wander around the world looking for odd jobs, writing in the meantime.  This led to a lot of stories that made great telling – page and dogsbody at a high-class hotel in New York, hired cowboy at a dude ranch in Texas, stringer on an alternate rag in San Francisco, reporter in Peshawar, illegal photographer in Afghanistan, freelancer in Nairobi, war correspondent in the Sudan.  I really liked it, when I wasn’t consumed with envy.

The Shadow of the Wind -- Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A terrific sort of neo-Gothic novel.  Our hero, Daniel, is the son of a bookseller in Barcelona.  When he’s a teenager – just after World War II -- his father lets him into the secret of booksellers, and takes him to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a hidden labyrinth in an obscure part of the city, where a copy of every book ever printed is preserved.  It’s every bookseller’s duty to choose a book and become responsible for it.  Daniel wanders the labyrinth and eventually happens across a book called The Shadow of the Wind and takes it with him.  He’s enthralled by the book and looks for others by the same author, only to find that the author – a man named Carax – has long since vanished without a trace and there are no copies of any of his books to be found; many of them have been destroyed in inexplicable fires.  After Daniel goes around asking at every bookseller he can think of, he’s approached in the street by a mysterious trench-coated man with his face hidden in the shadow of his hat, who smells vaguely like burnt paper, and who clearly knows that Daniel has a Carax book and wants to buy it from him, with an implied “or else”.  (Isn’t that a great setup?)  The book covers about ten or fifteen years of Daniel’s life, mixing his growing up in Fascist Spain with the mystery of Carax and being haunted by the trench-coated man.  I loved it.

Mockingjay -- Suzanne Collins

The depressing conclusion of the Hunger Games story.  The lesson: you can get what you want and still not be very happy.  She resolved the love triangle, too, in a very depressing way.

No Longer at Ease -- Chinua Achebe

A story of modern Nigeria, featuring Obi, the grandson of Okonkwo from Things Fall Apart.  Obi is a public servant, an official in the British civil service that runs the country.  Obi doesn’t fit in anywhere, really: he grew up in a small village, then went to school in England, and now lives and works in Lagos.  He works for repulsive bloated English expatriates, who are both corrupt and incompetent, and who look down on and despise Nigerians.  Obi resists them by being an honest worker and a patriot, but he loses spiritual support from his family and neighbors when he takes up with a woman who does not come from his home village. This sends him into a depressive, nihilistic funk in which he stops caring about doing good work, which only confirms the bigotry of his bosses. It wasn’t an uplifting story.

The Kite Runner -- Khaled Hosseini

A novel about self-hatred. Its message, essentially, is that people can’t change and that sins can never really be atoned for.  I hated it.

Titanic Thompson -- Kevin Cook

A biography of “the man who bet on everything”, who was the model for Sky Masterson in the short stories of Damon Runyan (which were later turned into the musical Guys and Dolls.)  Thompson was a hustler, a guy who hung around rich marks playing golf or pool just badly enough to make them bet against him, whereupon he would start playing just well enough to win.  He was apparently good enough at golf to have been a pro, and supposedly when Runyan asked him why he didn’t go pro he said there was much more money in hustling (certainly true in the twenties) and going pro would just make him more recognizable to potential marks.  He would come up with ridiculous bets that people would take just to see how they came out – for instance, he’d bet a guy “you can’t hit me in the nose while we’re standing on the same newspaper” and then he’d set them up in a doorway, both standing on the same sheet of newspaper – but with the door closed between them.  Hustling isn’t a good long-term investment, though, and he died broke.

Essayes, Third Booke -- Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne seems to have run out of things to say by this point – the majority of the third book is a hundreds-of-pages-long criticism of an obscure work of medieval philosophy that I’ve never even heard of.  It was pretty dull.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects -- Ted Chiang

A pretty good novella about a woman who adopts two newly-“born” artificial intelligences and brings them up.

In England Now That Murder's There -- Helen Heineman

A self-published mystery by an otherwise distinguished academic writer.  It was very, very bad.

Iron and Silk -- Mark Salzman

A good book about an American’s experiences as an English teacher and martial-arts student in China in the eighties.  He spent his time when he wasn’t working travelling, studying wushu, and obtaining censored foreign literature for his friends.  (I liked the scene where a staid older Communist tells him that The World According to Garp was the most unsuitable book he had ever imagined, and then asked if he could keep it.)  I was really struck by a scene where the author asks a martial-artist friend to show him a certain subject, and the teacher is reluctant because his goal is to pass his knowledge on to students who will preserve it and teach it again – like planting a seed in fertile soil – and he doesn’t want to toss seeds onto barren ground; meaning, that if the author doesn’t plan on perfecting himself in the subject with long, hard work, and then teaching it to students of his own, then showing it to him is a waste of time.

Normandy Revisited -- A.J. Liebling

Liebling’s return to France after the war and his nostalgic visits to places he remembered.  It’s got a lot of good-old-days complaining in it, but the prose is very good.

The Bat-Poet -- Randall Jarrell

A short novella, a beast-fable about a bat who composes poetry and his attempts to find an audience.  His fellow bats have no ear for poetry, and the academic bluejay he recites for only wants to discuss technical matters of prosody; he finally finds his ideal listener, a chipmunk who appreciates the emotional impact of bat-verse.  I liked it.  It had good illustrations by Maurice Sendak, too.

Time and the Gods
The Sword of Welleran
A Dreamer's Tales
The Book of Wonder
The Last Book of Wonder
The Gods of Pegana      -- Lord Dunsany

Several excellent books of weird-tales fiction from the teens and twenties. Many are set “at the edge of the world”, a great backdrop for strange stories of the gods’ ways with men.

Notes of a Native Son -- James Baldwin

A collection of essays, mixing autobiography with literary and social criticism.  He had a lot of interesting things to say, although I think he had a tendency toward sweeping over-generalizations – declaring that no American can ever really feel comfortable in Europe, for example.  Interesting that he didn’t like Richard Wright’s Native Son because he thought it perpetuated an “angry Negro” stereotype.

Made Possible By... -- James Ledbetter

A sharp criticism of how the need for money has defanged public broadcasting.  Ledbetter makes it clear that “made possible by” is just a polite synonym for “cravenly indebted to”. Once Mobil Corporation started footing part of the bill for PBS, that reduced the likelihood that PBS would run an expose on Mobil to essentially zero.  It’s why the hard-hitting PBS documentaries of the seventies stopped getting made. (There was also a great section on how Mr. Rogers’ testimony before a hostile Congress totally bowled them over and made them reverse their positions on public broadcasting funding. Rogers! Thou shouldst be living at this hour, America has need of thee.)

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil -- George Saunders

I picked this up for the title.  It’s not bad; it’s a morality tale about the dangers of demagoguery and being ruled by passion. It’s pretty short, which is good because a longer story would collapse under the weight of the message.

The Road -- Cormac McCarthy

Outstanding, haunting book. It’s a post-apocalyptic story, about a man and his young son (whose names we never learn) following what is apparently the remnant of I-95, heading south looking for warm weather.  Some undescribed catastrophe that happened a few years in the past (I liked that it was never explained – why would survivors sit around saying, “Well, as you know, Johnny, our society was wiped out by…”?  Actually, why would survivors even know what had happened?) has left the world totally dead – all animal life, all insect life, all plant life wiped out, except a few surviving humans living off canned food and each other.   It’s a terrible story, the tired, cold, hungry pair walking down the road in an endless rain of gray ash, surrounded by silence and dead trees and in constant dread of being attacked by robbers and cannibals.  The father carries a gun with two bullets in it (it’s implied that his wife used their third bullet to kill herself.) He keeps it handy in case he has to use it to shoot his son, to save him from being eaten alive by a cannibal gang. I also liked that the big philosophic question of the book is never actually stated, but impressed on the reader by circumstance: why are the man and his son travelling at all?  What reason do they have to keep moving?  The world has been totally wiped out, everything is dead, and it can only be a matter of a few years before all the last surviving humans starve to death.  There is no future, nor any hope for one. I think this was the best book of the year.

Water for Elephants -- Sarah Gruen

A really good running-away-to-join-the-circus story.  It’s told as a looking-back story by the narrator, a former circus vet and animal trainer, now long retired, remembering how he bluffed his way into a circus job back in the Depression. It’s got a great villain, an interesting supporting cast, and a really surprising murder.  There’s also a lot of good stuff about elephants, and how intelligent they are – he recalls an elephant who would casually pull its stake out of the ground, walk over and drink the roustabouts’ entire barrel of lemonade, then walk back and shove the stake back in the ground again.  I liked it a lot.

No Country For Old Men -- Cormac McCarthy

An interesting novel.  It’s a story involving a random guy who stumbles across the aftermath of a major drug deal gone bad (the pile of bodies was the big clue) and takes the money and runs, foolishly letting himself be identified and subsequently hunted by various ruthless killers. But what the book’s really about is the late-middle-aged sheriff and the incapability and ineffectiveness that results from his failure to adapt to changing times.  He’s so caught up in his maundering about the good old days that he can’t take any effective action to find either the thief or the guys hunting him, and in the end he decides not to pursue the book’s villain, an emotionless killing machine, because he finds the concept of him too frightening.

Passages From the English Note-Books -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

Selections from the diary Hawthorne kept while he was an American Consul in Britain.  It’s surprising how little work he actually did – he would go off and do tourist stuff for a month or six weeks while his clerks manned the office.  The big takeaway: Hawthorne didn’t like England.  Everything he writes about – the architecture, the food, the people, even the plants and animals – he only mentions so he can complain about how inferior it is to the American version.  Also he seemed like a crabby sort of person.

Our Old Home -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

These were the articles and memoirs he wrote for publication about his time in England: travel writing, touristy descriptions of landmarks, and some interesting and funny reminiscences of being a Consul (when he was actually in the office, that is.)

Sons and Lovers -- D.H. Lawrence

A coal-mining story about the Morel family: a middle-class woman who marries a working man, and their two sons.  The marriage gradually weakens as the father is worn down by his very heavy work, and the mother comes to regret giving up the more refined life she might have led.  The main story involves first the older son and then the younger son trying to make attachments to women in the face of their mother’s powerful jealousy. The younger son, the novel’s main protagonist, spends some time torn between a genuine emotional and physical feeling for a local farm woman and a more intellectual connection with a higher-class woman; but he has to give them both up to please his mother, and when she dies he’s left with nothing and apparently on the road to suicide. It’s one of those books where I appreciate that it’s brilliant but I didn’t particularly enjoy reading it.

Lost Face -- Jack London

A good collection of Yukon-adventure stories.  The title piece was the best, a story about a captured sea-trader who, to avoid being tortured, has to trick his Indian captors into killing him. Good reading.

Odd and the Frost Giants -- Neil Gaiman

A short fairy tale about an ordinary boy named Odd who meets some talking animals, who turn out to be the gods Odin and Thor in reduced circumstances. To help them out Odd has to outwit their enemies, the Frost Giants (which honestly isn’t that hard, according to the Eddas.) It was fun.

The Book of Sand -- Jorge Luis Borges

A collection of short stories and poems.  They were all pretty good; unusually for me, I liked the poems better, especially a really, really good one called “Hengist Needs Men”, a great Anglo-Saxon-inspired poem about Hengest the Jute’s expedition to conquer Kent in the fifth century.  I was grateful for the facing-page translation, too.

Blood Meridian -- Cormac McCarthy

A very well-written book; it’s a Western story, somewhat off-putting because it’s extremely violent.  McCarthy has never agreed to discuss the book, so there are a lot of interpretations.  I myself see it as a story about the problems of agnosticism: both the villain (the Judge) and the hero are people who feel a powerful longing to identify with the Divine, but who cannot bring themselves to believe in God.  For the Judge this leads him to turn his immense intelligence and force of character towards, essentially, turning himself into the Devil. For the hero it turns him into a sort of moral blank, an eternal follower; for example, he wouldn’t have gone scalp-hunting on his own, but having fallen in with a band of scalp-hunters he joins in without objecting. He’s so far without moral identity that we never even learn his name.

Middlemarch -- George Eliot

A very good novel set in the English midlands in the 1830s, against the background of the Great Reform Bill.  It’s largely a story about conservatism, as the various characters with a bent towards modernity – the young doctor trying to reform his profession, the young land manager trying to reform the tenants’ living standards, the young writer trying to reform political thought – are opposed at every turn by the rock-like resistance of the older entrenched authorities.  There’s a great illustration of the hard consequences of living unreflectingly, when the bombastic zealotry of the town banker -- a hypocritical cover for his dishonest past -- is threatened by the arrival of a blackmailer.  When that blackmailer falls ill in the banker’s house, the doctor tells the banker that any alcohol will kill him; that night, when the housekeeper (not knowing of the prohibition) asks for the key to the liquor cabinet to relieve the man’s pain, the banker silently hands her the key – the natural outcome of his always having taken the easy route his whole life.  Good book.

The House of Tomorrow -- Peter Bognanni

An excellent bildungsroman about over-controlling parents and punk rock.  Our hero, who’s been home-schooled by his obsessive, authoritarian grandmother in their geodesic dome, is left not knowing what to do when she has a stroke when he’s fifteen or so.  He tries to get along with regular people for the first time, and he makes friends with the local weird kid and the two of them start a punk rock band with instruments illicitly borrowed from the church youth group.  Our hero thus experiences his first teenage rebellion just as his grandmother is made even more eccentric and controlling in the wake of her stroke. I really liked it.

The Revolt of the Masses -- Jose Ortega y Gasset (J.R. Carey, trans.)

I kind of expected this to be liberation-theology literature, but it was really the opposite: a long sermon on why the mass of men are inferior, and even lacking individual worth, lumping together in a generic “mass-man”, a huge uneducated troglodyte who envies and harasses his superiors.  He doesn’t really consider classes in the Marxist sense, simply measuring mass-men by their inherent barbarity.  I am not, as you may imagine, very much in sympathy with the book, but I thought he had a fair point in his attack on the typical middle- or upper-middle-class arriviste, whom he calls Senorito Satisfecho or Little Mister Satisfied, a person who believes that his talent in his own industry extends to a general mastery of human affairs.

Jude the Obscure -- Thomas Hardy

This was Hardy’s last novel; the reviews it got were so negative that he never wrote prose again.  I have to say I think the reviewers were right -- I hated it.  I was initially in sympathy with Jude and his self-taught eagerness to become educated, and I was indignant at the way he was treated by the university dons who told him that he was better off continuing in the station to which he had been born; but my sympathy couldn’t hold up under his annoying wallow in self-pity and self-indulgence.  He spends years alternating between rededicating himself to hard study and periods of dissolution with women he despises, and something probably happened after that but I couldn’t keep reading.  I abandoned the book about half-way through, though I did skip ahead to see that Jude dies miserably, as I might have expected.

The Faith of Men -- Jack London

Good collection of action-adventure stories.

Crimes Against Logic -- Jamie Whyte

Not-bad overview of common errors of reasoning.  Kind of marred by the fact that the author obviously thinks most people are stupid.

Forever Blue -- Michael D'Antonio

An apologia for Walter O’Malley, who moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn to LA.  The author is concerned to defend O’Malley from the usual charges of greed and indifference; he doesn’t do a very good job.  He unconvincingly paints O’Malley as a hapless victim of the urban planner Robert Moses, who, according to this theory, forced O’Malley out of Brooklyn kicking and screaming, because Moses didn’t like baseball. It’s a pretty silly theory, especially since it takes O’Malley’s public PR statements at face value. At most crucial points he just says  “O’Malley felt this way” or “O’Malley felt that way”, readings that require a creative interpretation of his quoted sources.  He even just says “it is not true that O’Malley wanted such and such” without any source at all – he’s really just asserting his own unfounded belief.  Not a very good book.

The Guide For the Perplexed -- Moses Maimonides

Most of Maimonides’ work was technical commentaries on Hebrew writings that are really only of interest to scholars, but he also wrote this book, which was intended for the general reader.  In it he talks about essential religious issues – what does it mean to keep faith, to what extent can a human understand the will of God.  I thought it was interesting that he apparently felt it was necessary to spend a lot of time explaining that God doesn’t literally have a human body with hands and feet and so on.  More important were the points he made later in the book, such as that God does not require beliefs but actions, and his contention that the reason God gave the teachings to Israel in the desert, instead of when they reached the Promised Land, was that the desert was open territory that didn’t belong to anyone – signifying that the teachings of the Hebrews were intended for all mankind.  He emphasizes that one shouldn’t try to declare the meanings of Scripture without long study; I was impressed that he frankly admitted that there were several passages of Scripture that he simply didn’t understand, so he didn’t try to elucidate them.  It took a long time to read, but it was worth it.

Pere Goriot -- Honore de Balzac

A sad story about a young man named Rastignac who comes to Paris to study law, but ends up entering Society and inevitably bankrupting himself.  The parasitic nature of high-society Paris is shown by his fellow boarder at the cheap house he rooms in, an old man named Goriot, once a prosperous man enjoying a comfortable retirement.  Goriot has two daughters, both married to aristocratic husbands who despise their middle-class father-in-law and won’t allow him in their houses; both daughters spend money like water, and are constantly coming to their doting father to get money to pay the gambling debts of their lovers.  Rastignac is revolted by the daughters and the whole way of life they represent; when Goriot lays dying, having no money left for doctors or food, Rastignac goes to find the daughters to come see their father before he dies, in accordance with his last wish, and both refuse because they have social engagements.  Rastignac tends to Goriot himself, and after the old man’s death he leaves the city in disgust.

The Johnstown Flood -- David McCullough

An excellent book about the failure of the dam above Johnstown, PA, in 1889.  Thousands died, and smaller towns between the dam and Johnstown were literally scoured off the map – nothing whatever remained of them. The dam’s failure was the result of poor maintenance and general indifference by the sporting club of rich people who owned it; for example, they lowered the top of the dam several feet so they could put a carriage-road on top of it, and ignored the warnings of several engineers that the dam wasn’t suitable.  After the disaster the survivors stormed the club to lynch the sporting-men, and I can’t blame them, but they’d made their escape and spent the next weeks simultaneously denying that the dam failure was their fault and insisting they’d never belonged to the club in the first place.  No one was ever held responsible or punished, of course.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich -- Leo Tolstoy

A novella about a stoical man who finds his philosophy doesn’t help him when he becomes terminally ill.  It’s a good picture of a frightened man clinging to life.

Victory -- Joseph Conrad

A siege story. A typical Conrad character – an aimless, enigmatic European named Heyst, of no certain background – drifts from one business venture to another in the South China Sea. As often happens in Conrad stories, Heyst meets a man who hates him on sight for no real reason, an innkeeper named Schomberg.  Heyst rescues a young woman from being raped by one of Schomberg’s customers, and takes her away with him to the island where he lives in near-isolation. Soon after, the arrival of a crew of three obvious pirates at his inn prompts Schomberg to get rid of them and attack Heyst at the same time: he tells them that Heyst has treasure hidden on his island, and the three go and lay siege to Heyst’s house.  After a tense standoff, Heyst manages to kill all three, but the woman is killed as well, and Heyst commits suicide, for what seemed to me insufficient reason, except that most Conrad characters seem to long for death and will take any excuse to seize it.  It was not an uplifting read.

Walk On, Bright Boy -- Charles Davis

A short novel, purportedly the memoirs of a once-eminent Spanish churchman now held by the Inquisition and awaiting torment.  He tells the story of his younger days, his friendship with a Moorish storyteller, the horror of finding that a local man was a serial murderer, the calm, intelligent priest who determines the truth and clears the Moor, and his own decision to follow in the priest’s footsteps and join the Church.  I liked it.

Fail-Safe -- Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler

This is a thriller written in the sixties, and I think the book that inspired Dr. Strangelove; it’s about a squadron of American nuclear bombers on high alert near the borders of the USSR, who due to mechanical failure receive mistaken orders to destroy Moscow.  The book is one long high-tension effort to turn them back, or failing that shoot them down – there are good scenes when fighting erupts at NORAD because some officers don’t want to help the Soviets shoot down American planes.  There are pretty convincing phone conversations between Khrushchev and the US President (who is obviously meant to be Kennedy, but isn’t named for some reason) leading appallingly to the President’s decision to nuke New York without warning as a demonstration to the USSR that the destruction of Moscow was an accident, thus preventing worldwide holocaust.  Very suspenseful.

Sailing Alone Around the World -- Joshua Slocum

This was a very enjoyable book.  (Arthur Ransome said that anyone who didn’t like it deserved to be drowned.)  It’s the memoir of Slocum’s journey around the world in the late 1890s, in a sailboat called the Spray that he built himself.  As far as anyone knows he was the first person to make the circumnavigation alone.  It’s well-written, exciting, and funny.

Literary Essays -- Mark Twain

A collection of his essays on writing and related subjects, including things like “How to tell a funny story” (the key difference between a funny story and a joke is that a joke is just a leadup to a punchline, whereas a funny story is funny from start to finish.) It also of course includes his classic slapping-around of James Fenimore Cooper, which is worth the price of admission by itself.

Hide Me Among the Graves -- Tim Powers

A vampire story. Funny thing about Powers: some of his books are brilliant, some I can’t even finish.  This turned out to be a sequel to his earlier book, The Stress of Her Regard (which I didn’t like at all), though I didn’t realize that until I was a quarter of the way through the book. I stuck with it because I liked the protagonist, but in all I didn’t care for it.

The Angel's Game -- Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I liked the prose, but I thought the story was kind of strained.  It’s set in Barcelona in the 20s and 30s, following the career of David, a young man who is approached by a mysterious wealthy man who wants him to write a book.  David isn’t sure about it, and the man says take your time, I have all the time in the world.  So David goes on with his life and becomes an incredibly prolific author, writing a long adventure serial of the type popular ninety years ago, as well as standalone novels.  There’s a wrenching scene where David, having located but not approached his mother, who abandoned him and his now-dead father when he was a small child, mails her a copy of his first novel; he lurks in the shadows across the street to watch her pick up her mail, and he sees her open the package, look at the book, and then throw it in the trash.  The book isn’t explicit about it, but I suspect this is the point where David begins to lose his reason, since the rest of the story becomes more and more surreal and grotesque, as if David’s life were turning into one of his own Gothic novels, with a big mystery full of terrible murders, hidden rooms, and the return of the mysterious wealthy man, who seems to be a powerful magician, or the Devil, I’m not sure. The story got kind of over-tangled, I thought, although that may be inevitable when your protagonist is slowly going insane, but it was still a pretty good read.

The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi -- Junichiro Tanizaki

A creepy psychosexual story about a medieval Japanese warlord who becomes fascinated with corpses after seeing severed heads being given cosmetics and having their hair done before burial.  I didn’t like it much.

Orlando Furioso -- Ludovico Ariosto

A vast sixteenth-century Italian verse epic about the knights of Charlemagne and their war against Islam (which Ariosto pictures as Christian Europe with the names changed, so it’s actually hard to remember which knights are supposed to be on which side.)  Though there’s a cast of dozens, the main figure is the French knight Orlando, who has been laid under a magic spell that drove him mad. Both he and another knight are in constant pursuit of a woman constantly fleeing them, since both knights are driven by a love potion and the woman is driven by an anti-love potion.  It’s a little silly, since what are they going to do if they catch her?  They’re chivalrous knights.  Ariosto gets around that by having them have to turn aside to rescue an innocent or fight a duel whenever they get too close.  There’s also, kind of surprisingly, more than one powerful female knight; in fact Ariosto spends a good deal of time arguing against the oppression of women.  I read it both in verse and prose; I liked the prose better, and it was probably also more faithful to the original.

Chomp -- Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiassen’s books have a great format.  Most of them can be summed up as “Awful douche bag gets what’s coming to him.”  This is the story of a teenage kid who helps his dad with the family business of renting out “wild animals” for movies and TV.  In need of cash, they reluctantly agree to work with a second-rate nature-television show, a “Man versus Wild” kind of thing, where the photogenic host poses with wild scenery and narrates his dangerous adventures in a fake Aussie accent, then goes off to the trailer while the crew splices in the wild-animal shots.  But the host wants a new contract and decides to be more involved this time, insisting on being in the animal shots in person, and since he hates animals this leads to a lot of poetic justice.  I liked it a lot.

Arrowroot -- Junichiro Tanizaki

A short novella about a man who was orphaned at a young age, and is now searching for his family history.  He learns that his family used to make a living making fine paper from the fiber of the arrowroot plant, which he finds appropriate since he is a reading man who can only put human relationships in perspective by framing them in terms of the traditional kabuki drama.  It was all right but it didn’t really stick with me – I had to think for a while before I remembered what it was about.

Jurgen -- James Branch Cabell

A parody of Dante, where the hero searches for "courtly love" instead of Heaven. After entering a mysterious cave, Jurgen wanders through ever more fantastical realms, becoming a magistrate, then a duke, then a King, and ultimately the Pope, before realizing it was all a vision.  It's pretty funny, although the part I liked best was the foreword the author added later, after he spent years in court fighting the book's banning for obscenity; the foreword is a very funny sham trial, where Jurgen is tried by a jury of Philistines, with a dung beetle as the prosecuting attorney.

A Fable -- William Faulkner

A retelling of the Christ story set during World War One, where the Christ-figure is an ordinary soldier who gets arrested and executed for getting the troops on both sides to just stop fighting.  It’s very well done – there’s an extremely bitter scene where the English and German generals meet to confer on how to get everyone to start fighting again.  It’s depressing but still worth reading.

A Handful of Dust -- Evelyn Waugh

A badly-organized novel.  It’s a meandering story about a poisonous marriage and divorce.  Apparently Waugh couldn’t think of an ending, so for some reason he took his earlier (terrific) horror story, “The Man Who Loved Dickens”, changed the names and some details, and tacked it on to the novel as an utterly out-of-place and senseless ending. Not worth reading.

Political Writings -- Samuel Johnson

Some of these were good and some weren’t.  You could see the difference between the articles he wrote on his own and the ones he wrote because his friends in the ministry asked him to.  I actually think some parts must have been inserted by the ministry; it’s true Johnson wasn’t in favor of American independence, and he did think some of the founding fathers’ complaints were without merit, but it would take a very heartless and brutally indifferent man – which Johnson was emphatically not – to reply, to the very serious complaint of the colonies that in order to be tried by a jury they had to sail to England (a very difficult and dangerous thing to do at any time, never mind if you were shipped as a prisoner), that if they found that a hardship they just shouldn’t commit crimes.  

The Pursued -- C.S. Forester

A minor suspense novel, left unpublished until very recently.  It’s the story of a woman’s conspiracy to murder her brutal, abusive husband with the help of her mother; the botched murder itself; and their flight and life on the lam afterwards.  It was all right, but it doesn’t live up to the rest of his novels.

The Windup Girl -- Paolo Bacigalupi

This was well-written but I didn’t enjoy it, mostly because I found all the characters so repellent.  I think that may actually have been deliberate; it’s a near-future story set about fifty or sixty years after the exhaustion of fossil fuels and the consequent shrinking of global spheres of influence (due to the lack of cheap travel.)  It’s set in Bangkok, where the main protagonist is ostensibly running a research program on manufacturing super-high-tension springs, but really looking for ways to get access to the Thai collection of stable food genomes – the powers in this age fight by releasing vat-grown microbes to attack edible plants, thus forcing reliance on their own microbe-resistant crops.  One of the points the author seems to be making is that in an era like this, there is simply no one whom we would recognize as a civilized person.  Also there was an awful rape scene.  I don’t recommend it.

The Scarlet Plague -- Jack London

A minor science-fiction novella, set in a post-apocalyptic future where most of the human race has been wiped out by a terrible disease, leaving only a remnant reduced to a stone-age subsistence.  It’s cast as a bunch of punk kids harassing an old man as he tries to tell them the story he learned from his grandfather, about the fall of civilization.  It wasn’t very good.

The Sunset Limited -- Cormac McCarthy

A novel in play format.  We open in medias res in a tenement with a well-off white academic talking to an obviously uneducated black laborer.  It’s apparent that the two men – who are never named, and only called “Black” and “White” in the stage directions – have only just met.  As they talk we slowly piece together what’s happened: Black was on his way to work, saw White about to jump in front of a train, stopped him, and brought him back to his apartment to talk him out of it.  White is trying to end the conversation so he can leave; they both know that if he leaves he’ll just try again, so Black is keeping him talking.  What follows is a sort of oddly reversed Dialogue of Saint and Sinner, and really good reading.  Excellent book.

The Cloister and the Hearth -- Charles Reade

A historical novel that’s also sort of a bleak farce.  Our hero, trained in a monastery in the Netherlands, is an outstandingly good penman (though to earn a living at it he has to keep travelling to stay ahead of the spread of the printing press.)  He and his sweetheart agree to marry after he’s been to Rome and made his fortune, but during his travels a series of crossed messages, plus the malice of a petty town-burgher, convinces each that the other is dead (more than once, as they both learn of their mistake and then get fooled again.)  Eventually our hero, in despair, takes holy orders, and then promptly finds out (again) that his sweetheart is alive, and so he goes and lives as a hermit in a cave.  I liked the book a lot until halfway through, and then I kept waiting to enjoy it again but never did.  I actually get the feeling that something bad happened in the author’s life when the book was half-written, so the second half was poisoned.  It was disappointing.

The Stranger -- Albert Camus

An excellently written novel, telling the story of Mersault, a French Algerian, who is emotionally disconnected from his life and the people in it.  After attending his mother’s funeral, to which he has no real reaction, Mersault inexplicably shoots and kills a stranger.  The incident forces him into introspection and he comes to believe in responsibility, just as he goes through the rather silly and arbitrary experience of the justice system.  I think the fact that Camus had Mersault’s moral awakening occur in prison is meant to serve as a microcosm: Mersault realizes that his own responsibilities are not affected by the absurd inefficiency of the justice system – just as our moral responsibilities are no less real because we live in a world that is often absurd.  The book was written in 1942, so I think Camus was also making the case that the individual’s moral responsibility doesn’t disappear just because he’s placed under the rule of a mad and arbitrary regime.

The Last Tycoon -- F.Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald’s last novel.  It’s not actually “incomplete” – he did finish it, he just didn’t live to revise it (he normally went through many, many drafts before publishing.)  It’s actually a fairly pleasant story about a middle-aged movie-studio bigwig who sees a starlet-in-training who reminds him of his late wife.  He falls in love, from a distance, and feels reinvigorated enough to fight back against an in-house rival trying to seize his position.

Set This House In Order -- Matt Ruff

A very well-constructed story, told from the point of view of an entity who is the “public face” of a person who has dozens of personalities, a result of childhood trauma.  The personalities have cooperated to build an imaginary “house” inside their mind where they all live, run by the most forceful of them, who has appointed our hero (Andy) to be the one who runs the body and talks to other people.  The story has a nice dual structure, where on the outside Andy meets another multiple-person who isn’t coping the way he is, and tries to help her (this has some funny moments when some of her personalities make friends with some of Andy’s personalities, and then everyone argues about whose turn it is to run the body and hang out with their friends) while on the inside Andy finds that the “house” may not have been as solidly built as he’d thought – for one thing, he discovers it has a basement no one knew about. I liked it a lot.

Mornings On Horseback -- David McCullough

A family-biography of the Roosevelt clan, mostly focusing on Teddy Roosevelt, of course, but also drawing excellent portraits of his parents and siblings.  TR worshipped his father but could never get over the shame of knowing his father paid a substitute to fight for him in the Civil War.  Interesting that TR was willing to toe the Republican party line when they were obviously in the wrong (he wouldn’t join the reformers of the 1890s, though I think his father would have) but later, in 1912, actually founded a third party to oppose them when they were actually a good deal less corrupt than they had been twenty years earlier.

All The Pretty Horses -- Cormac McCarthy

A good novel, written in a very spare and bleak style, I think in an attempt to capture the empty feel of the wide open spaces on the border of Texas and Mexico. The hero, John, is a teenager who grew up on a cattle ranch; however, in 1949, the ranch is being sold, and rather than go live in a city, John and a friend ride south through the hills of Mexico looking for work as vaqueros.  Although things go well initially, they come to grief through a combination of bad luck and bad judgement (the Mexican police arrest them, mistakenly thinking they’re involved with a third Yankee rider who’s been causing trouble, and the ranchero turns them in because John has been sleeping with his daughter.)  The prison scenes are vivid and extraordinarily well written, including the best knife-fight scene I’ve ever read.  They get out eventually, but learn the essential lesson of the book, that there’s no going back, and the only thing to do is keep moving.

Almayer's Folly -- Joseph Conrad

Conrad’s first novel, the story of an unsuccessful European adventurer named Almayer who, failing to find the gold mine he expected in the South China Sea, hears a rumor that the British will soon conquer a certain island nation.  He foolishly builds a grand house in expectation of a flood of European visitors, who never arrive.  Crushed, he takes to spending all his time sitting on the veranda of his empty, rotting house and drinking.  His islander wife and half-caste daughter both despise him, and so does everyone else.  It’s not a cheerful book.

Where Good Ideas Come From -- Steven Johnson

A pretty good discussion of lateral thinking.  I particularly liked the incubator story: I hadn’t known this, but apparently the natal incubator – the doohickey they put newborns in to keep them warm – is the single biggest preventer of infant mortality.  Humanitarian organizations have donated them to places that can’t afford them, but they have a basic problem: they break down easily and they’re both difficult and expensive to repair.  After a tsunami, some NGOs donated eight incubators to hospitals in the Philippines; a year later none of them were working.  No one knew how to repair them, and even if they had they couldn’t have afforded the parts. So someone at MIT came up with an inspired solution by turning the problem around.  Instead of asking, “How can we teach enough people to repair incubators?” he asked, “What do a lot of people there already know how to do?” Turns out that because of the condition of the roads, cars need constant repair, so there are large numbers of skilled auto mechanics in the Philippines.  So MIT designed an incubator that’s built out of automobile parts. Bang! There’ll always be someone who knows how to repair it, and there’ll always be parts available cheap.  I thought that was really smart.

Punching Out -- Paul Clemens

A book about the closing of American factories.  It isn’t just horribly depressing statistics about how many factories close in America every month, although there is plenty of that.  The book describes the actual process of dismantling a closed factory, the selling off of the equipment to manufacturers in Brazil and Mexico, the huge logistical problems of moving machines weighing hundreds of tons that were not built to be moved, the crummy job of keeping night-watch and making sure you make a lot of noise during your rounds so the host of scavengers don’t shoot you, the booby prize of being one of the workers temporarily kept on to help dismantle the machines only to find the company has turned off the heat to save money. I was in Detroit last April and it was thoroughly awful.  The city’s shrunk from 3.8 million to about 1.2 million in the last twenty years.  Interesting book though.

Wild Bill Donovan -- Douglas C. Waller

A biography of the founder of the OSS, a WWI war hero who created America’s first real wartime covert intelligence organization.  It was well-written and full of interesting detail, but I thought the author was a little too much on Donovan’s side.  Donovan was furious when Truman disbanded the OSS after the war and reconstituted it as the CIA, without Donovan in charge.  But Truman’s decision made perfect sense – Donovan was a dangerously reckless authoritarian who thought he knew better than the President.  Truman already had to deal with one J. Edgar Hoover; the last thing he needed was another one.  I also thought the author was being foolishly partisan when he asserted things he couldn’t possibly know – like when he refuted the rumor that Donovan had an affair with his widowed daughter-in-law by simply saying “That never happened.”  Aside from the errors of partisanship it was pretty good.

The Outlaw Sea -- William Langewiesche

An interesting book about the lack of jurisdiction and even bigger lack of law enforcement on the oceans, and their natural results: crime, pollution, and shipwreck.  Well-written.

The Shipping News -- E. Annie Proulx

I loved this book.  I think it won the Pulitzer; if it didn’t it should have.  It’s the story of a life-long loser named Quoyle who, by emigrating to his ancestral home in Newfoundland, where he’d never been, finally finds the right environment to thrive in.  It’s a terrific picture of small-town life, with very well-drawn characters.  Great read.

Moonwalking With Einstein -- Joshua Foer

A book about memorization techniques and the Theater of Memory. It wasn’t bad, although it was clear the author was bending over backwards to avoid admitting a very obvious fact: all the people whose story he’s telling, all the amazing memory-champions who compete in feats of recall, are pretty useless people.  They’re like any other niche-hobbyists: people who devote their whole lives to their only talent.  Most are either independently wealthy (from inherited money) or live on the unimpressive prizes of the memory competitions, which is why they all stay on each other’s couches.  None of them have actually used their memory tricks to do anything except win memory tournaments, no more useful to society than people who are really good at crosswords or Scrabble.  I have to admit they got on my nerves.

The Scar -- China Miéville

A sea-story, one where the setting, atmosphere, and ancillary details are much more interesting than the main character, about whom I didn’t care very much. On a voyage from one port to another, her ship is captured by the pirate nation/fleet called Armada, which is a mobile sea-city made up of vast numbers of ships lashed together to make a huge floating platform.  There’s a lot of great scenes involving exploring Armada and the very strange people who live there.  The city has existed for generations and is much older than anyone now living on it.  Apparently the city-dwellers have always been content to remain fairly small-time – their city can only move very slowly, and it’s best for them not to draw the attention of the coastal cities’ navies.  But recently some newcomers with greater ambitions have risen to power in the strongest of the several sub-cities that make up Armada, and they have convinced the other rulers to go along with them, although in some cases reluctantly.  Their plan is to build a colossal harness underneath Armada and capture a titanic deep-sea creature, like a miles-long whale, to tow the city, allowing it to move at great speed.  But their further, secret plan is to then use that speed to voyage toward a legendary distant oceanic discontinuity known as The Scar, apparently a place the fabric of reality has torn open.  Most of the story involves the power struggle among different factions on Armada, and the widely different opinions on the wisdom of the plan – especially after the harness-building crew gets started and finds, underneath the city, a remnant of a harness already there, clearly used and broken generations before.  The main character is a boring, whiny nonentity, really only there to give the background something to be the background to.  It was an engrossing story.

The Golden Notebook -- Doris Lessing

I didn’t get very far in this.  It’s one of those novels where everyone sits around being poisonous to one another.  It’s also a bad sign that the author felt the need to add a long preface lashing out at the ulterior motives of people who didn’t think her book was a work of genius.  (Actually, I only picked this up in the first place because I’d confused the title with The Golden Bough, a work Eliot mentions in the notes to The Waste Land.)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks -- Rebecca Skloot

The engrossing story of the HeLa cells, the human-cancer-cell culture that has been the basis of pretty much all cancer research for the last sixty years or so.  The cells were originally taken from a tumor biopsy removed from a cervical-cancer patient named Henrietta Lacks, who died soon afterwards.  Human cells grown in culture usually die after relatively few cell divisions, but Lacks’s cells had a rare mutation that allows them to redivide almost indefinitely.  This naturally makes them ideal for research.  Patients’ names are not printed in research papers, so Lacks’s children didn’t find out about their mother’s cells until a newspaper printed her name twenty years after her death.  Since they were a very poor family with almost no schooling, they were naturally shocked and freaked out to learn that part of their mother was still “alive”.  Even in the last dozen years, when the author did her research, no one in the family actually understood what a cell is, or in what sense the cultures in research labs came from their mother.  I’m afraid their reactions broke down rather stereotypically: the men were angry that labs had made money selling the culture and hadn’t given the family a share, while the women were concerned about whether the existence of the cultures affected their mother’s soul.  It was a good book.

The Big Necessity -- Rose George

I’ve often heard that statistic that something like two billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water. But I’d never heard the main reason for it: most of those people can’t get clean water because all the water near them is contaminated with human shit. This is a well-written book on the enormous engineering and logistical problems of cleaning up after ourselves.  Another thing I hadn’t known: how dangerous it is to work in the sewers.  When Prince Charles spent some days examining the London sewers (and good for him!) he was surprised to find that the sewer workers had to operate on an unofficial schedule – for example, they had to knock off for a while around one in the morning, because that’s when half the restaurants in London illegally dump their boiling-hot kitchen grease into the sewer.

Buddha Da -- Anne Donovan

A very funny Irish novel about a house-painter with a history of picking up enthusiasms and then getting bored with them.  He meets some impressive Buddhist teachers and becomes interested in meditation.  This enthusiasm looks like it will stick, and his wife and daughter aren’t sure what to make of it.  I liked it a lot.

The Art of Fielding -- Chad Harbach

A well-written book about a high-achieving college athlete who discovers a high-school baseball phenomenon, a year younger than he is, and through sheer force of personality gets the kid’s parents to send him to the same small college he attends.  It’s a great story about working really hard to get what you want, which is fulfilling but demands a high price.  It gets more complicated when, in his junior year, already being scouted by major-league teams, the phenom makes an errant throw from shortstop that hits a teammate in the dugout, and then begins to suffer from Steve Blass Disease, the psychosomatic inability to throw on target (named for a pitcher in the seventies whose career it ended.)  I liked it, although I wasn’t in sympathy with the B-plot, or at least I didn’t feel about it the way the author seemed to think I should.  It seems to me that it’s fundamentally wrong and immoral for a college president to have a sexual affair with a student at his own college, especially an underage student, and it being a homosexual relationship doesn’t make it any different.  The president deserved to be fired – especially given that the parents had found out -- and I thought the board was being generous in letting him retire quietly.  His indignant complaining that everyone would just have winked if it had been a female student sounds to me like nothing but a self-serving rationalization.

The Widow Clicquot -- Tilar J. Mazzeo

A very interesting biography of la Veuve Cliquot, the widow who took over her late husband’s small vineyard and founded a huge champagne business.  Her early success was due to her inventing a new method of racking bottles that allowed removal of sediment in days instead of weeks.  It was a well-told story.  I’d had no idea that champagne used to be a dessert wine – in the Widow’s time each bottle might have 250 grams of sugar!  Mostly that was because the main market was Russia and Russians liked sweet wine.  But then Napoleon III became emperor, and he didn’t have a sweet tooth and so didn’t drink their wine, so they had to change.

An Education -- Nick Hornby

A screenplay for a short film about some abominably stupid and graceless people.  I liked reading the screenplay but I’m not sure I’d want to watch the film.

The Buried Book -- David Damrosch

A book about the composition of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and how it was lost for thousands of years and then rediscovered.  It was very good.

A.D. 381 -- Charles Freeman

A good discussion of the Council of Nicea and the conversion of Constantine.  The author makes the point that although he did “convert”, Constantine apparently never stopped worshipping the pagan deities, and he may not even have understood that as a Christian he was supposed to deny other gods; after all, adding new gods to the pantheon was hardly unknown in Rome, and he probably just thought he was adding one more.

Little Women -- Louisa May Alcott

I liked this, although I was put off by Alcott’s awful Puritanical guilt-mongering – the smallest break from perfect virtue always results in immediate, terrible punishment.  Jo gets mad at Amy for burning Jo’s journal and won’t make peace right away; instantly Amy falls through the ice and almost drowns.  (Their mother even says, sternly, “You have had a warning, Jo,” explicitly stating that God almost killed Amy in order to teach Jo a lesson!)  Jo, Meg, and Amy, exhausted from running the house and doing good works while their mother is away, decide to rest for a half-hour before going out to visit the poor; Beth immediately goes in their stead, visits an infected house, gets scarlet fever, and dies.  (“Take that!” says God, apparently, in Alcott’s mind.)  Also, Jo should have married Laurie.

Tales of the Fish Patrol -- Jack London

A very entertaining book, a memoir of London’s teenage years on San Francisco Bay, first as an oyster pirate (they raided privately-owned oyster beds by night and sold the oysters on the far side of the bay) and later as a member of the Fish Patrol, a sort of subdivision of the SF police, who roamed the Bay trying to catch people who were using illegal nets, or fishing in protected areas.  Good reading.

The Devil and Sherlock Holmes -- David Grann

A very good collection of essays about obsessed people.  There’s a great one about a guy who’s spent his life trying to capture a live giant squid (hard to do because they live at incredible depths); another about Rickey Henderson and why he wouldn’t retire from baseball, still playing in independent leagues at the age of fifty; one about the rise of the Aryan Brotherhood, and the paradox of how a gang of lifers in widely separated maximum-security prisons managed to wield power across the country; and a dozen others.  The title piece is all about the strange story of the Conan Doyle archive, which I remember being a big stink in the papers at the time, and how it drove a Holmes-obsessed researcher to suicide.  Excellent reading.

A City in Terror -- Francis Russell

A good book about the Boston police strike of 1919.  I still think the cops were in the right – they were treated like crap, and were paid peanuts for demanding and dangerous work, many of them having to work almost a hundred hours a week for about thirty cents an hour.  The extent of the rioting was exaggerated for political purposes by anti-union publishers, but it was still a scary week.  None of the strikers ever got their jobs back, but most of the abuses were addressed over the next few years, so I guess you could call it an institutional victory.

This Alien Shore -- C.S. Friedman

A science fiction mystery/thriller about a future society where everyone has cortical implants to interface with the future-Internet.  Some bad guys have developed a computer virus that can bypass the implant/brain barrier and physically kill the victim.  The book is the story of tracking down the origin of the virus and finding out why it was made.  Pretty good.

Seabiscuit -- Laura Hillenbrand

Well-written book about the famed racehorse Seabiscuit.  I hadn’t known that race-horses are literally handicapped: fast horses are made to carry lead weights to slow them down.  Seabiscuit always had the highest handicap even though he was usually the smallest horse on the track – sometimes as much as thirty pounds!  Apparently he wasn’t much to look at – race fans coming to the stable for a look at the famous horse would walk right past him.  It’s exciting and full of drama, and also a good illustration of the crappy lives of jockeys.  

The Flanders Panel -- Arturo Perez-Reverte

An interesting mystery where our heroes solve a centuries-old crime by studying clues left in a contemporary painting of a chess game.  I liked it, though the big reveal of the bad guy fell flat since it was really predictable.

The Letters of Machiavelli -- Allan Gilbert, trans.

Sabatini called Machiavelli “the most penetrating mind of his time”, and the letters do nothing to contradict him.  Most of them are his answers to letters from Italian political figures asking his opinion on the state of Europe, which he was happy to provide at length.  Of course a lot of it was detail that was specific to a  short time, but it’s still a great study of power politics.

1776 -- David McCullough

An overview of the first full year of the war. It includes a lot of interesting stuff from the British point of view that I hadn’t seen before – I hadn’t known, for example, that the British habitually referred to the Americans contemptuously as “hymn-singers”, and looked down on their religious zeal.  I had read about the British generals’ putting comic relief in their letters home by laughing about how the American women complained about rape (the idea, ha-ha!) but I hadn’t realized that several of the generals made it a standard practice to send out rape gangs.  (To be fair, that was local, not high-command policy, and Cornwallis gave orders against it.)

When Germs Travel -- Howard Markel

Pretty well-written book about disease vectors, with case studies of a half-dozen different epidemics.  Honestly, I’m amazed we’re all still alive.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities -- Jane Jacobs

The opening salvo in Jacobs’ long war against the urban planner Robert Moses.  She argues that most of Moses’ main points were designed to benefit cars at the expense of pedestrians.  For example, Moses was big on having long blocks with as few cross-streets as possible, to increase traffic flow (fewer people blocking traffic while waiting to make a turn) and to reduce accidents (more than half of which occur at intersections.)  But eliminating cross streets makes it much harder for pedestrians to get where they’re going, and also hurts neighborhood businesses by reducing foot traffic.  Her central position is that Moses’ plans all assume that everyone hates cities and wants to live in a pastoral idyll, while she argues that the whole reason people congregate in cities is that they like them.  The essential difference: Moses thought that, given that cities have to exist, the thing to do is make it as easy as possible for cars to get in and out of them so no one has to stay there longer than they have to; while Jacobs thought that, given that cities have to exist, the thing to do is make the cities pleasant places to live in.  (I’m with Jacobs, myself.)

The Emperor of All Maladies -- Siddhartha Mukherjee

Very well-written history of cancer.  You couldn’t expect it to be an uplifting book with a topic like that, but it was still interesting.  I hadn’t known that it was Hippocrates who gave cancer its name – apparently he thought the surface of a tumor felt like a crab shell, so he called it a karkinos, Greek for "crab".  I was really struck by the damage well-funded publicity can do to the scientific method.  It’s a pattern that’s been repeated many times: some research lab comes up with treatment X and puts it into human trials.  People hear about the trials and insist on being given treatment X, and when the research lab refuses they raise a stink in the papers (there’s no good reply to “I can’t wait, I’m dying”) and eventually get court-ordered access to the treatment.  But once that happens, everyone insists on getting treatment X and no one will agree to be in a clinical trial where they might or might not get treatment X.  So there’s no way for the researchers ever to determine if treatment X actually works!

The Deeds of Louis the Fat -- Suger of St. Denis (Translated by Richard C. Cusimano and John Moorhead)

Suger was the Abbot of St. Denis in the twelfth century, and owed a lot to King Louis, so when he wrote this admiring biography he had to do a lot of twisting around – relating, for instance, how the King bravely overcame his enemies by wisely retreating, that sort of thing.  The thing that struck me most was just how little power the King really had in the 1100s – he really only controlled the area around Paris, and it wasn’t safe for him to leave it.

The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken -- Tarquin Hall

A mystery set in Delhi.  I liked it for the characters and dialogue, though the author is getting to that stage in a series where he starts to invent mysterious pasts for the supporting characters to generate plot ideas.  This one revolves around fallout from the Division of 1948, when England more or less arbitrarily divided India and Pakistan and many families were separated forever.

Child of God -- Cormac McCarthy

A creepy story about a serial murderer.  I didn’t like it that much.

Raging Bull -- Jake La Motta

La Motta’s autobiography, describing how his years as a teenage delinquent and his time in prison led him to his boxing career.  He’s adamant that it was his refusal to cooperate with the Mafia fight-riggers that kept him from getting a shot at the championship for so long; he admits that he eventually gave in and went along with the mob because being the champion was that important to him.  The book is surprisingly honest about his alcoholism and the awful way he treated his wife.

In a Sunburned Country -- Bill Bryson

A collection of travel writing about Bryson’s various trips to Australia. It was very funny.  He notes that the favorite occupation in every part of Australia is talking about how weird the people from other parts of Australia are.

Grey Eminence -- Aldous Huxley

A spiritual biography of the terrifying Pere Joseph, Cardinal Richelieu’s right-hand man and interrogator, whose nickname was “Chief Hangman”.  Huxley ignores his political career almost entirely, focusing instead on his inner life; the whole book is really an examination of mysticism within the Catholic religion, and whether a personal mystical experience endows a person with spiritual authority, and if so in what degree.  It was dry, but interesting.

The People of the Abyss -- Jack London

An account of the crummy lives of the denizens of the East End of London in at the turn of the last century.  I didn’t like it at all, and it took me a while to articulate why: unlike his other pieces of social journalism – which he told from personal experience of being an actual hobo, or an actual Yukon miner, or petty criminal – this is really poverty tourism.  London took a room near the East End and bought fake cheap clothes so he could wander around the East End and look at how miserable everyone was.  (He went home at night to take a bath and change his clothes.)  It gives the whole thing a strong feeling of condescension, especially since he obviously thought the people there were pretty worthless.  All the words he uses to describe them are animalistic – they live in dens, they crawl about, they nest in holes.  I had to laugh when he said a woman he saw was an example of a wretched sub-human creature who couldn’t possibly fall any lower – because she was breast-feeding in public.

Pierre -- Herman Melville

This was the novel that pretty much ended Melville’s career.  He did keep writing afterwards, producing some great things, but it was all at long intervals and superseded by his day job.  The prose is excellent, but it’s an odd, disturbing book – the story of a young man, nineteen or twenty, who, with all the world at his feet, suddenly finds out that his father had an illegitimate daughter.  In a stupid teenage way, he makes a grand romantic gesture and throws his life away – fiancée, career, inheritance, everything – to assume a role as his half-sister Isabel’s protector, and then is both astonished and angry to find that the world doesn’t reward his romanticism with success.  He settles miserably in a garret in New York, and, while supporting both Isabel and his ex-fiancée, who has abandoned everything to join them in a Platonic ménage, he dedicates himself to writing a bitter and angry work of philosophy that argues that humanity is worthless and deserves to be destroyed.  Then they all die.  It’s not what you’d call an uplifting story.  The press received it badly, more than one critic openly wondering if Melville had gone insane.  I suppose what really set them off was the question of just how Platonic the half-incestuous ménage really was – Pierre is haunted by doubt of whether Isabel really is his father’s daughter or just an adventuress, and his powerful sexual attraction to her is obvious from the first.

The Crossing -- Cormac McCarthy

A melancholy novel, written in a spare style, about a Texas teenager in the fifties and three long, difficult journeys he makes across the border into Mexico: once to release a pregnant she-wolf he’s captured, once to recover some horses stolen from his family, and once to find and bring back his younger brother’s body.  It was well told, though I found the hero something of an enigma – I didn’t understand at all why he felt the need to spend months dragging a captive wolf to another country, for example, and I’m not sure he did either.

Diaries, Prayers, and Annals -- Samuel Johnson

A collection of journal entries and daily prayers that Johnson wrote from time to time.  I felt conflicted about reading it, since Johnson obviously did not intend for any of the pieces to be published – in fact what there is, is just what he overlooked when he was burning his papers in his last days.  Still, I couldn’t help but be impressed at the power and care he put into his prose when he was writing only for himself and God.

The Napoleon of Crime -- Ben Macintyre

A reasonably good story about a master thief of the nineteenth century and a famous painting he stole and kept for thirty years.  I liked the writing but he didn’t succeed in making me feel really interested in the subject.

Missee Lee -- Arthur Ransome

An “imaginary story” – a sea-story that the Walker and Blackett children are taking turns making up and telling to each other.  In their story they sail to the Far East and are captured by Chinese pirates, then escape.  It’s very obvious it was written by an Englishman – not only do the Chinese speak in a silly broken “Engrish” (even the one who went to university in England!) but they’re shown as childish and stupid in essentially every way.

Dark Tide -- Stephen Puleo

A well-researched book about the disastrous failure of the Boston molasses storage tank in January of 1919, which flooded the North End with millions of gallons of molasses, killing dozens and causing enormous property damage.  The molasses was used as a cheap source of industrial alcohol, needed for manufacturing ammunition for World War I. The book argues that the disaster was a big part of forcing the Italian community in Boston to get organized; the tank was located in the Italian part of Boston in the first place because most Italians didn’t vote, and weren’t organized enough to stop it. One very unusual thing about the aftermath: the people responsible were actually arrested and punished, which is almost unheard-of in industrial accidents.  This incident also directly caused the passage of the US law that states that every construction project must be approved by a professional engineer, who by law is personally responsible for the project’s outcome.  I’ve heard that throughout the 1920s you could still smell the molasses on hot summer days.

Ike's Spies -- Stephen Ambrose

A decent overview of Eisenhower’s use of covert intelligence, both as Supreme Commander in Europe and later as President. It wasn’t bad.

Brief Lives -- John Aubrey

This was pretty interesting.  A friend of Aubrey’s who was working on writing a history of England (this was in the mid-seventeenth century) asked Aubrey to help him out by doing biographical research.  Apparently he picked Aubrey because Aubrey was an exceptionally cheerful and friendly person, which meant he had a very large circle of friends, so he had plenty of leads.  (Remember that in those days, pretty much the only way to do biographical research was to go find someone who knew your subject, or knew someone who did, and ask them about it.)  Aubrey obliged, putting together a couple hundred gossipy, entertaining biographies of English people of interest, full of interesting details (Aubrey always made sure to record any odd or unusual thing anyone did or said.)  His friend was so delighted with Aubrey’s work that he had it published just as it was, for which I am grateful.

Specimen Days -- Michael Cunningham

A novel in three parts, telling the story of three characters – a man, a woman, and a boy – in three different settings (the nineteenth century, the present, the hundred-years-from-now future) and from three different viewpoints (once from the man’s, once from the woman’s, once from the boy’s.) In each story the characters cross paths with artifacts or incidents left by or caused by the versions of themselves from the earlier stories (although only the audience is aware of this.)  It’s an ambitious and well-executed story structure, but I would have liked it better had there been a stronger thematic connection between the three iterations.

The Next 100 Years -- George Friedman

What really impressed me about this was that after three hundred pages of extensive discussion of geopolitics, I still didn’t know what the author’s own beliefs were.  It’s a big-picture look at what might happen to the international power structure over the next century.  Among many other things, he predicts the emergence of Turkey as a world power; since the American wars have destabilized Afghanistan and Iraq, thus preventing an effective Islamic alliance led by conservative states (which the author thinks was a deliberate part of the thinking behind the invasion), there’s room for Turkey to step up, which the US would probably encourage because Turkey has a secular government.  He also predicts a labor shortage as the percentage of the population older than working age increases.  I got the same feeling reading it that I get reading unclassified DoD papers: the essential thing about geopolitical strategy is that human cost means absolutely nothing – it isn’t even considered.

Cities of the Plain -- Cormac McCarthy

The last of McCarthy’s novels set on the Texas-Mexico border.  This one finds the protagonists of the previous two novels working on a cattle ranch on the US side of the border in the fifties; but the business is dying, and the land may be lost to eminent domain anyway, and no one is sure what they’ll wind up doing since it seems as though their whole profession is fading away.  This may be why the younger one, John, seems willing to die; he attempts to help a prostitute out of a whorehouse in Mexico, which leads him to a deadly showdown – I was so caught up in it I didn’t even realize until later that it was a classic Western “two men facing each other down an empty street” scene, the second-best knife fight scene I’ve read.  The novel ends with an epilogue that shows the later life of the older cowboy, who drifts from one failing ranch to the next and eventually winds up living homeless under an overpass.  It was pretty bleak.

The Better Angels of Our Nature -- Stephen Pinker

A heavily-researched book on the general decline of violence over the last hundred years.  I thought his most persuasive argument was his documenting of the way our attitudes toward violence have changed: in the nineteenth century, people thought war was just awesome.  Serious thinkers argued that an end to war would be disastrous, as we would no longer have any occasion for the gallantry and stirring patriotism of a good war.  Even William James, amazingly, wrote an essay called “The Moral Equivalent of War”, which is not at all what you’d think – he’s talking about finding a societal challenge that would be as good as war, that would have all of war’s excellent effects on society and the individual!  World War One had a lot to do with changing that attitude.  (I have always been struck by how ludicrous the mural on the main stairway in Harvard’s Widener Library is: it’s a battlefield scene, showing an angel lifting up a fallen soldier, with the caption Most Happy He Who In One Embrace Clasps Death And Victory.  If I were to say to that 19th-century artist that I thought it would be a much happier thing never to have to go to war at all, he’d just think I was insane.)  However, the book is clearly agenda-driven; there are many places where you can feel the rotten boards of the author’s argument creaking under your feet, as it were.  There are too many occurrences of phrases like, “There’s no evidence linking X and Y, but surely…”

The Outer Dark -- Cormac McCarthy

A horrible story about incest, murder, obsession, and poverty.  The writing was very skillful but I didn’t like it at all.

Some Remarks -- Neal Stephenson

A collection of various essays he’s written over the last twenty years.  The one about the laying of data cables in the Far East was really interesting, though his constant complimenting himself on being geeky enough to go look at people laying cable got kind of old.  I also don’t agree with his assessment that we’ve “lost the ability to innovate in science”, but he’s a big-time pessimist so I don’t usually agree with his predictions anyway.  Also, I thought he was way off on his reaction to the reaction to the movie “300”.  At least in my case, I didn’t dislike the movie because it unironically celebrated old-fashioned virtues like courage and patriotism.  I disliked it because it falsely celebrated the brutal military despotism of the Spartans, the opposite of the American ideal of the soldier-citizen.

Ready Player One -- Ernest Cline

I liked this a lot, even though it’s mostly about video games and I’m not interested in those.  It’s a near-future science fiction story, set about fifty years from now.  The conceit is, a computer nerd and pop-culture junkie (who grew up in the eighties) built a very good game-rendering engine, which people use by wearing special goggles and gloves that let them interact with an imaginary computer world.  The design was so good that people took to using the huge collaborative game world for all kinds of things, from games to real businesses to virtual universities.  This was all possible because the designer let everyone use the rendering software and only charged a small user fee, enough to pay the bandwidth bills.  But the designer has died, and now some gaming companies are trying to get control of the rendering software and lock everyone else out, so they can charge huge fees and generally ruin everybody’s good time.  The only hope is the designer’s very strange will: he didn’t leave his intellectual property to anyone; instead he set up a hugely complicated series of puzzles inside the game world, and the first person to solve them all gets the key to the kingdom.  The catch is that in order to solve them you need to be a near-savant level expert in 1980s pop culture.  It was a good story, well-told; although I think people much older or younger than I am would have trouble getting a lot of it.

More Baths Less Talking -- Nick Hornby

A collection of Hornby’s book reviews for Believer magazine.  As usual, I’d heard of very few of the authors he mentions.  His reviews of Sarah Vowell got me to buy a couple collections of her essays.

Redshirts -- John Scalzi

A comic science-fiction novel that started extremely well but didn’t hold up. The first hundred pages are excellent: imagine an actual starship where things work the way they work on Star Trek.  Then imagine being a new crew member assigned to that ship and trying to work out what the hell’s going on.  Why does the ship’s navigator get sent out to obtain ore samples?  Why do the doctor and the chief engineer hang around on the bridge all the time? Why does the super-genius scientist, when presented with a scientific problem, spout nonsensical gobbledygook – and why does it work?  Above all, why does someone die every single time the senior officers leave the ship?  I loved all that part, but unfortunately that’s not enough to carry a whole book, and the author had to come up with a reason explaining everything, and I thought his solution was kind of dumb.

Looking For Jake -- China Miéville

A collection of grotesque fantasy stories.  Most of them were very good; I really liked the “Jack” story.  The title story wasn’t one of the stronger ones.

The Legend of Pradeep Mathew -- Shehan Karunatilaka

I was hooked by the opening paragraph, where the narrator says that after carefully studying global issues – war, hunger, disease – he concluded that what the world really needed was a half-decent documentary about Sri Lankan cricket.  It turned out to be a good book about the value of sports in general, the problem of nationalism in a country divided by a decades-long ethnic civil war, and the collision of the two that results in corruption and favoritism on the government-sponsored national teams that play in international competitions.  There’s a fun scene near the beginning, where, at a wedding dinner, the narrator and several of his sports-writer cronies have a long drunken argument trying to assemble an imaginary roster for the greatest cricket eleven of all time.  They manage to agree, eventually, on ten positions, but they break into fighting over who should be the bowler.  The narrator, idiosyncratically, insists on one Pradeep Mathew, a sort of Sidd Finch character, one of those sports legends who’s supposed to have done all kinds of amazing things that for one reason or another were never recorded on film.  The narrator believes that Mathew was unfairly left off teams because he was part of the Tamil ethnic minority, and decides to write a book about him, which turns out to take years and be un-finishable because Mathew disappeared years ago, and no one is willing to talk about what matches may or may not have been influenced by political concerns.  It took me a long time to realize that what the author isn’t saying, and what the narrator probably realizes but won’t put in his book, is that Mathew was probably a Tamil Tiger – a terrorist, part of the death squads that assassinated Indians during the secessionist movement.  That was probably the real reason no one will talk about him, and the reason he disappeared.  It was a pretty good read.

Confessions -- Saint Augustine

This is Augustine’s spiritual autobiography.  It was mostly pretty accessible, though I wasn’t keen on his habit of calling non-sectarian preachers “voices of Satan”.  I’m sure I wouldn’t have liked Augustine had I known him.

The Corpse-Rat King -- Lee Battersby

A mildly good novel about a battlefield corpse-robber who steals the crown of a fallen king, and then, because he has the crown, mistakenly gets dragged to the underworld in the king’s place.  Upon realizing their mistake, the dead send him back into the world to bring them back a real king, or else – and they send an animated corpse along with him to be sure he doesn’t forget.  I thought it could have been better executed.

The Idiot -- Fyodor Dostoevsky

The story of Prince Myshkin, an epileptic who has lived half of his young life at an asylum in Switzerland.  In the 1870s, now in his early twenties, he leaves the asylum with the doctor’s approval and returns to Russia.  He is due to receive a large inheritance, but not knowing how to go about hiring a lawyer he visits his only relative, a distant aunt married to an important government official.  Naturally the official thinks Myshkin is there to sponge, but after realizing his mistake he invites Myshkin to meet the rest of the family.  All of them are astonished at Myshkin’s simple naiveté, the product of living so much out of the world, but also at his capacity for profound thought – he tells them a story (drawn from Dostoevsky’s real-life experience) about being condemned to death for political dissent and standing facing the firing squad, actually standing on the lip of his own grave, before being told he would not be killed after all.  His relatives take him under their wing and try to introduce him to Society, where he’s rather a fish out of water.  There’s a tremendously wrenching scene where, at a dinner party his relatives give for the purpose of introducing him to several important people, Myshkin has an epileptic fit, described with great feeling by Dostoevsky, who was himself epileptic.  Myshkin is swamped by the awful knowledge that a fit is coming, and begins to rant inanely – he’s aware he’s making no sense but can’t do anything about it – and then actually has the seizure, smashing a large and valuable vase before falling right in the center of the guests.  It was really horrible, but it was redeemed the next day when (entirely unexpectedly) Myshkin’s stuffy, society-conscious aunt assembles her children and sternly tells them that Myshkin is their family and their friend, and a better man than any of the guests, and that none of them are to do or say anything that might make him feel any less welcome.  I really liked that scene, and not even Myshkin deciding not to marry the woman he loves and instead marry an unworthy woman he doesn’t even like, because he thinks the second woman’s need is greater, could ruin it.  In the end Myshkin has to return to the asylum, since his “idiocy” – his epilepsy and his general simplicity -- make him unsuited to live independently.  It was a very good book.

The Distracted Preacher -- Thomas Hardy

A short novella about a young Anglican clergyman who arrives at a coastal village to fill in for its vacationing minister, and, after falling in love with his landlady’s daughter, gets ludicrously involved in her illegal business smuggling kegs of brandy from France.  It’s very funny, which for a Hardy novel is frankly astonishing.

Born Standing Up -- Steve Martin

A very good memoir about stand-up comedy.  I was really struck by his belief that his success was what ended his comic career.  He found that once he was headlining major venues, selling out shows of forty or fifty thousand or more, he had no more room to experiment; he couldn’t just pull out new stuff to try on a live audience, because the audience was paying top dollar.  So that meant he wasn’t coming up with new material.  Also the size of the venue meant he couldn’t use any of his older stunts – taking the whole audience out to the street to improvise bits with hot-dog vendors and the like.  So he had to give it up.  Really interesting book.

The Long Earth -- Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

A science fiction adventure involving the discovery of a means of travelling between an arbitrarily large number of uninhabited parallel Earths. I liked the hero, and his weird journey of exploration in a self-aware robotic blimp which claims to be a reincarnation of a Tibetan farmer, but I thought the story was loosely organized – too many characters who appear and then get forgotten about – and I’m not really a fan of lady-or-the-tiger plot twists.  Also I thought it stopped too abruptly.

Picts and Martyrs -- Arthur Ransome

Another Lake District story, featuring the return of the dreadful Great-Aunt, who appears, uninvited, at the Blacketts’ house to make everyone’s lives difficult just as the Callum children have arrived for a visit, and their adult allies are all away. So the poor Blackett girls have to dress properly and please the Great-Aunt by reciting their lessons and playing the piano under her critical eye, while the Callum twins have to hide out in a cabin in the woods so the Great-Aunt won’t find out that Mrs. Blackett allowed her daughters to have guests while she was away.  It’s well-told.

The Shadow-Line -- Joseph Conrad

One of Conrad’s later novels, the story of an old sea-captain recalling his first voyage as chief mate and how it taught him to command, with a really good picture of that voyage’s captain, a conscientious but driven man haunted by sea-ghosts only he can see.  I liked it.

The Deerslayer -- James Fenimore Cooper

It’s impossible for me to read this without constantly being reminded of Twain’s hilarious criticism of it (which is spot-on, by the way) but it’s still entertaining.  Although Hawkeye himself is just about the most humorless, least entertaining protagonist ever – I really got sick of his constant pontificating about how proper it is for him to employ a “white man’s gifts”, which was his way of saying how superior he was to Indians and their customs.  Why the hell would Chingachgook ever have hung out with him?

The Power of Habit -- Charles Duhigg

Not bad.  It’s heavily weakened by the fact that about half of it is taken up with fawning portraits of business leaders, as seems to be required by editors these days.  (Of course these portraits always focus on the business leaders' one success as proof of genius, ignoring how every other venture they ever undertook failed.)  But there’s some interesting research on the behavior-reward cycle.

The Night Circus -- Erin Morgenstern

A really, really good novel about the best travelling circus you could ever imagine, and the very strange decades-long duel that brought the circus about.  I loved it.

Destiny of the Republic -- Candice Millard

A really, really good book about the assassination of President Garfield, and the wacky-crack moron who shot him.  (When he bought the gun, he spent a few dollars more to get one with an ivory handle, because he thought it would look better in the museum exhibit extolling him as a hero.)  The really horrible thing is that the wound wasn’t fatal; Garfield was killed by his doctors, who constantly poked unsterilized instruments (and their bare fingers!) inside the wound, looking for the bullet.  This introduced massive infection (the bullet was lodged in fatty tissue behind the President’s kidney, where it could have stayed harmlessly.)  As a result Garfield died in slow agony over several months.  What makes it even worse is that Garfield’s regular doctor was one of the only doctors in Washington who practiced sterilization – but he was black, and when he arrived the emergency doctors wouldn’t let him in, and Garfield was unconscious so he couldn’t do anything about it.  The Secret Service existed then, but guarding the President wasn’t part of their job; Garfield was shot while he was standing on the platform by himself, waiting for a train.  I knew almost nothing about Garfield before I read this – he seems to have been a thoroughly admirable person, a good family man, a soldier and a scholar (the college he went to hired him as a professor while he was still an undergraduate there!)  Interestingly, he never actually ran for any office – he was elected to the Senate while he was fighting in the Civil War, and didn’t find out about it for months.  He wasn’t even asked to run for President; he was nominated at the convention because no one could agree on anyone else.

Common Sense -- Thomas Paine

I read extracts from this in high school, but I’d never actually read the whole thing.  It’s really well-written, and makes an eloquent and forceful case.  I felt like going out and punching British people after reading it.

Tales of Hearsay -- Joseph Conrad

Four longish short stories.  Three are war stories set in Russia, dealing with the Napoleonic invasion and with the failure of the Holy Alliance, which led to the Polish uprising.  They all deal with the angry resentment of Russian Poles (Poland was a subject state  for all of Conrad’s lifetime, only regaining independence after WWI.)  The third is a sea-story.  They were all good.

The Baron in the Trees -- Italo Calvino

A bizarre story about a young nobleman who, in a fit of rebellion against his authoritarian father, climbs a tree and stubbornly stays there – and then never comes down again.  Since they live in a heavily wooded area of Italy, the young man can roam far and wide without ever touching the ground, and he decides to live that way, staying in the trees the rest of his life, even after his father dies and he becomes Baron.  I liked it.

The Cruise of the Dazzler -- Jack London

A sailing-story, about a pair of joyriders (joy-sailors?) who accidentally get mixed up in a payroll robbery and end up managing to recover the stolen money and save the day.  It was pretty good.

The Dark Tower -- C.S. Lewis

A collection of poorly-written and uninteresting short stories.

The Big Roads -- Earl Swift

A book about the building of the Interstate system.  It was kind of dry, but there was some interesting detail in it – for example, the concrete Jersey barrier is shaped the way it is so that a car running into it, assuming it’s not going way too fast, will hit it tire first, and the driver should be able to ride the tire up the side of the barrier and back down without the car body actually making contact.  I suppose that worked better back when the speed limit was 35.

The Brothers Karamazov -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A brilliant novel built out of many different tropes: it’s a philosophical novel, a psychodrama, a spiritual biography, a love story, a criticism of shallow ethical systems, a grotesque family story, a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and a satire of courtroom dramas, all at the same time; you’d think no author could pull that off, but Dostoevsky does it splendidly.  The hero is the youngest Karamazov, Alexei, nicknamed Alyosha: he’s named after Dostoevsky’s son, who died of an epileptic fit at the age of three just as Dostoevsky began the novel; his grief pervades the book, and Alyosha is drawn as what I imagine to be the man Dostoevsky would have liked his son to grow into.  He’s contrasted with his oldest brother, a drinker and spendthrift who is wrongly convicted for their father’s murder, and his middle brother, an irritable man with nihilist tendencies who has written a long poem in which Jesus returns and is condemned by the Inquisition.  The middle brother realizes that their illegitimate half-brother murdered their father and framed the oldest brother, but is overwhelmed by feelings of guilt because he hated his father and wanted him to die; he worries himself almost to insanity over this and becomes convinced that he is guilty of the murder, and tries to confess.  It’s a huge, sweeping novel, but nearly all of it leads thematically to the ending; the only part I wasn’t sure belonged was the place where Dostoevsky spends over a hundred pages describing the life and works of a recently-deceased monk, a minor character who had very little influence on the Karamazov family; I still can’t figure out why Dostoevsky thought it was important to go into so much detail about that.

Making All Things New -- Henri J.M. Nouwen

Nouwen’s answer to the question: “What do you mean by the spiritual life?”  He gently makes the point that the general busy-ness of life distracts us from listening to the voice of God.  He says that the stress of busy-ness makes worry and fear seem like an ordinary part of life, but reminds us that Jesus told us not to be afraid.  He says that spirituality requires a little distancing of ourselves from work and worry.  This will cause us to have less worldly success, but he considers that a necessary sacrifice.

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance -- Lois McMaster Bujold

I liked this.  It’s an ancillary story to a series of SF novels by the same author; this one is told from the point of view of the character who’s used as comic relief in the main series.  I have always wondered how things look from that guy’s POV, so I was glad to read this.  The hero, whose name is Ivan, is a fairly mellow, relaxed person, all of whose relatives are hyper-competitive Type-A overachievers, which doesn’t make for family harmony.  The novel makes explicit something I had always suspected: since Ivan is the fourth in line to inherit the throne, his higher-precedence relatives have made it a deliberate policy his whole life to marginalize him and make him feel stupid (it’s a long-established fact in the series that his relatives never speak to him without starting every sentence with “You idiot.”) If something had ever happened to the Emperor, I believe Ivan’s uncle and cousin would have maneuvered to place Ivan on the throne as their puppet, and he would have had to go along with it because the alternative would be civil war.  I bet he had a plan for getting rid of the uncle and cousin, though; he’s actually quite intelligent.

Poor People -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A depressing story.  It’s an epistolary novella, a series of letters between a very poor man and his very poor cousin in nineteenth-century Moscow.  The man is obviously in love with his cousin, who’s twenty years younger than he is, but creepily keeps up a pretense of only being concerned for her out of family interest.  He’s constantly sending her useless trifles – boxes of bonbons and the like – when he’s in the middle of being evicted for not paying his rent and being reprimanded at work for his ragged clothes.  The cousin eventually gets married and moves away from Moscow, and stops answering the man’s letters; the story ends with several unanswered letters from the man, alternating between rage and pleading.  I suspect if the story went on it would end in suicide or murder.  I didn’t like it.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid -- Bill Bryson

A memoir of growing up in Iowa in the fifties.  It wasn’t bad.

Iron Council -- China Miéville

I found this tedious – it never really engaged my attention.  Also I’m not sure I understood the message – I know the author is an ardent socialist, and I can see that the collective government that evolves on the train of runaway slaves and workers is meant to contrast with the brutal, arbitrary oligarchy that runs the city-state they escaped from; but when he brings them into conflict the collective is ruthlessly beaten. The lesson I take away (reinforced by other books he’s written) is that moral individuals or groups will always be destroyed when opposing immoral powerful state governments.  Can that really be what he was trying to say?  I could even read the book as an indictment of the great failure of collectivism, its vulnerability to cults of personality. We’re told that the collective is run by the Iron Council, but in fact all important decisions are made by one fanatical demagogue, who doesn’t always even pretend to consult the council.

The Histories – Herodotus

A history of the Hellenic world, mostly concerned with the great conflict between Athens and Persia.  It’s really good reading, exciting suspenseful, and full of great anecdotes.  After the battle of Plataea, when the Greeks finally beat the last of Xerxes’ army, the Spartan commander called the other officers to look at the luxurious gold-laden tent of the Persian commander, and said, You see what fools these were, who live like this, yet come to rob us of our poverty!  After the victory at Salamis, the Athenians went around shaking down the neighboring cities who hadn’t helped them fight, demanding they pony up their fair share.  At one island city, Themistokles shouted over the wall, We Athenians have two powerful gods on our side – Persuasion and Compulsion!  The city spokesman shouted back, We Plotinians have two useless gods who refuse to leave us alone – Poverty and Inability!

Astray -- Emma Donoghue

A thematic collection of short stories, all about people who have gone astray in one way or another.  They’re fiction, but they’re all inspired by real-life people mentioned in old newspaper articles, letters, and diaries.  Most of them were pretty good.

Dracula -- Bram Stoker

Interesting how even though this story has been imitated to the point of nausea, the original is still powerful and effective.  The scene where Dracula gives Harker an evil look and says Enter freely, and of your own will, is genuinely frightening.  The scenes in England, where Harker and van Helsing and their friends turn from hunted to hunters and run Dracula to his grave are exciting and full of suspense.  I liked it a lot.

The Way of All Flesh -- Samuel Butler

A savage and hilarious attack on the hypocrisy and self-serving false public virtue of the Victorians.  It was so vitriolic, in fact, that Butler didn’t dare print it, and he sat on the manuscript for twenty years, only publishing after the Queen died.  It’s the story of three generations of the Pontifex family, and how each one starts out well as a boy but gradually becomes ruined by being forced into the iron-bound path of a respectable career, eventually becoming self-satisfied, self-worshipping, and awful.  The last of them, Ernest, is rescued from awfulness by his godfather (the narrator) and his independent-minded aunt.  I think Butler was probably right – a book that argued that the path to becoming a decent person was to avoid becoming a clergyman would very likely have been banned in the 1880s.  I liked it.

From Square One -- Dean Olsher

Mildly good book about crossword puzzles.  More valuable for the funny anecdotes than for the meandering attempts at philosophy.

Both Flesh and Not -- David Foster Wallace

This started out well, with an excellent long essay about Roger Federer (it’s a rare writer who can interest me in tennis) but the rest of it didn’t live up – it looks to me as though, after Wallace died, some publisher just put his last good essay with a bunch of not-so-great essays that Wallace hadn’t republished, probably because he didn’t think they were worth it.  The Federer essay was really good, though.

Titus Groan -- Mervyn Peake

A surreal-Gothic novel, set in the imaginary Castle Gormenghast, the colossal and grotesque home of the Earls of Groan. The story follows a year in the life of the castle, starting with the birth of an heir to the Earl and ending with the boy being installed as Earl after his father’s funeral.  The main action involves the bizarre feuds and cross-loyalties of the castle’s inhabitants, such as the murderous hatred between the valet and the cook, and the unscrupulous teenage servant who, after running away from his job in the kitchens, begins to gather power in the castle by manipulating the Earl’s sisters into setting fire to his library, thus driving him insane, and then blackmailing them afterwards.  It wasn’t really engrossing, though the prose is interesting.

Dodger -- Terry Pratchett

A good adventure novel set in London in the middle of Victoria’s reign, telling the story of Dodger, a teenage tosher (someone who makes a living by scavenging in the sewers) who comes up out of a manhole one night and interrupts an abduction, thus accidentally becoming tangentially involved in an international intrigue.  The story is well-told and funny, involving Charles Dickens, Sweeney Todd, and other leading lights of Victorian London.  I liked it.