lyzadanger's reviews from LibraryThing

The Three Musketeers (Penguin Classics) by Alexandre Dumas

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:20:25 -0500

lyzadanger's review: "Here's a book that has infiltrated popular culture to a certain extent for over 150 years. I've seen derivative movies, ridden themed amusement rides, shouted 'All for one...!' during heated moments. But I'd never read the book itself. Sure, I can check it off of my 'well read' list now. But the experience, though entertaining for the most part, left me wondering exactly what the big deal is about this novel. I'm going to warrant a guess that it was genre-shaping, and its outright irreverence was probably a kick in the pants to its 19th century audience. Dumas' treatment of illicit affairs is not subtle, and there is raunchy humor sprinkled liberally throughout. This is a boy's novel, thoroughly. Though the main antagonist is a crafty female, the real depth of character is saved for the four heroes (d'Artagnan, Porthos, Athos, Aramis). And it would be an overstatement to call this swashbuckling adventure a character study, anyway. The action is pretty constant, although occasionally formulaic (and thus predictable). Dumas uses patterns that sound poetic or mythic sometimes: a certain adventure befalls each of the four protagonists in rhythmic succession, for example. Something I learned, as an aside: Dumas wrote in tandem with a history teacher, Auguste Maquet, who served as his researcher and did a good amount of the outlining and a bit of the writing."
Penguin Classics (2006), Edition: New Ed, Hardcover, 736 pages

Of Mice and Men (Penguin Classics) by John Steinbeck

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 21:01:28 -0500

lyzadanger's review: "This isn't the first time I've read this book, but it is the first time I've read it with an angle to capture Steinbeck's almost drama-like structure. Almost entirely dialogue and scene description (stage instruction, as it were), this novella is more of a play than might be initially obvious. It has been the source of several very successful dramatic interpretations--not that it requires much adaptation for such an undertaking. As such, being dialogue-driven and narrative-sparse, this is not my favorite Steinbeck by a long sight. My appreciation of Steinbeck's works seems to be directly proportional to their length (with the exception of Cannery Row, but even that gem isn't my natural pick; it's simply that it's obviously a great book). Add to this that the book's plot is almost a folk tale at this point--very well-known in our culture--and the reading I did felt less like a literary investigation, more like a rote repetition of something almost ritualistic, mythological. Like a bedtime story I've heard many times before. If not comforting, entirely, then familiar."
Penguin Classics (1994), Paperback, 144 pages

Learning from Las Vegas - Revised Edition: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 16:50:13 -0500

lyzadanger's review: "Drop everything you think you know about architecture and snootiness and re-evaluate. This brilliant-bonkers study mines the genius in the inanity that is Las Vegas. Pre-computer-aided-layout, the book makes gorgeous use of cramped Helvetica and information presentation (this is all way pre-Tufte, kids). Dated, sure, and sort of hard to map onto today's Las Vegas--the surreal landscape there changing so fast--but an academic gem cogent to architecture, art history, sociology and urban studies students. Such a strange city."
The MIT Press (1977), Edition: Revised, Paperback

Daughter of Fortune: A Novel (P.S.) by Isabel Allende

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:44:42 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "Absorbing and quietly magical, with scads of feminine energy and colonial oppression. An interesting work when paired against Allende's master work, 'The House of Spirits', which I read within a month of this novel. Allende chooses appealing patterns for her characters, giving us something that is both an easy pleasure and a satisfying literary read. 'Daughter of Fortune' is not as complex as The House of the Spirits; it can be viewed as the groundbreaking novel's cheerful sister. We have a rebellious, role-breaking heroine (House of Spirits: Ditto) in love with a hopeless, down-on-his-luck socialist/Marxist (House of Spirits: Ditto) while living in an imprisoning and unforgiving society (HOS: Ditto). Where this branches away from The House of the Spirits is in Allende's newer interest in writing about the northern parts of the American continent. We get to go to California and hang out with the go-getters and upstarts of the Gold Rush. This is great fun. There's not a lot of trailblazing artistry in Daughter of Fortune. It does tend to revisit Allende's plot devices a bit too much at times. But Allende's genre is a compelling one, a spiritually calming one. One I find myself wanting to return to, often."
Harper Perennial (2006), Paperback, 432 pages

The BFG by Roald Dahl

Sun, 10 May 2009 13:35:54 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "My husband and I listened to this as an audio book during a long driving trip to the American Southwest. I was skeptical, even though I love Roald Dahl, and at first I thought much might be lost in not being able to see the spelling of the BFG's adorable malapropisms. But the reader was talented and brought the voices of the giants to life. And this book is indeed adorable. Not sickly-treacly adorable, but just plain heartwarming. I think it was this exchange between Sophie (the protagonist, a young girl) and the BFG (giant) toward the beginning of the book that won me over. Sophie is concerned that she is about to be eaten: ‘Do you like vegetables?’ Sophie asked, hoping to steer the conversation towards a slightly less dangerous kind of food. ‘You is trying to change the subject,’ the Giant said sternly. ‘We is having an interesting babblement about the taste of the human bean. The human bean is not a vegetable.’ ‘Oh, but the bean is a vegetable,’ Sophie said. ‘Not the human bean,’ the Giant said. ‘The human bean has two legs and a vegetable has no legs at all.’ When I was child I adored Dahl, but now I realize that his writing is timeless in its endearing quality. Much recommended."
Puffin (2007), Paperback, 208 pages

Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West by Hampton Sides

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 21:02:04 -0500

lyzadanger's review: "A strong history, balancing critical and sympathetic viewpoints of Kit Carson and the American settlement of the southwest. Carson comes out a bit heroic, while Sides tends to cast aspersion on supporting characters more generously. In the end, an educating, entertaining back-story of the human history of the American southwest. Especially recommended for its good coverage of the Navajos' Long Walk in the 1860s, as well as Kearny and his Western Army's march to California."
Anchor (2007), Paperback, 624 pages

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:01:42 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "Thoughtful new (or at least little-known in non-academic circles) perspectives fill Mann's book, a nice synthesis of pre-Columbian hypotheses that isn't a bad read at all. Mann's efforts to avoid emotionally-charged terminology (he even devotes an appendix to explaining himself) sometimes backfire: in his efforts to present lesser-talked-about pre-Columbian cultures of the Americas as valuable and complex in an even-handed way, he often ends up flinging pejorative and subjective descriptions of arriving Europeans. The Spanish are "gawking yokels," the Puritans smelly and ignorant. Even as he denigrates the "noble savage" construct he is paradoxically buttressing its inverse. But it does have a gentler feel to it, and perhaps it's just a bit of harmless overemphasis. What's more concerning is the striking lack of evidence for the core hypothesis he is shilling here: that there were many, many (many many many) more native Americans, in much more complex societies than we had realized. Well, OK. He has some significant archaeological evidence for the latter. But he even admits that "no definitive data exist" regarding population, and recognizes that even slight margins in estimates could have massive impacts on the actual reality of the past. Mann is a comfortable, conversational writer, sharp at the everyday kind of expository that makes for good popular non-fiction. The book is narrative, enjoyable."
Vintage (2006), Paperback, 560 pages

The Tricking of Freya by Christina Sunley

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:32:34 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "Woven with the ageless mystique of Nordic myth and the wistful complexities of families, Sunley's debut novel aches with something that notches it into the truly compelling. Her prose is wiser than her rookie status would suggest, echoing with cadences and feminine woe reminiscent of Joyce Carol Oates. Her linking of ancient Icelandic sagas to modern (and timeless) human archetypes is thoughtful, if not ground-breaking. Her plotsmithing is decent if, if not masterful (the final denouement arrived with a serious, heavy "duh" for me). It's hard to pinpoint what it is here, but the sum of this novel's parts is captivating. One does not want to let go of the frozen breaths of Iceland, the difficult and wan (eponymous) protagonist. Sometimes Sunley is too expository: she tends to tell us what neuroses and metaphors her characters are suffering; she analyzes their dreams so we don't have to (sometimes I would have liked to figure out the puzzle myself). Similarly, she is predisposed to long passages prefacing the profundity of upcoming content. But it works here, the quasi-adolescent, stark emotional clarity. It feels moving, even if Freya is just telling us that it is so. Even if it feels like Sunley herself is cracking through her own protagonist and taking on the narrator's spotlight for a while. Maybe it is just my own fascination with Iceland cracking through my own thoughts like Sunley's voice through Freya's, but there was something stormy and mysterious, something odd in keeping with midnight suns and lava fields, that made "The Tricking of Freya" more than just a passing thought."
St. Martin's Press (2009), Edition: 1, Hardcover, 352 pages

The Women: A Novel by T.C. Boyle

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:55:23 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "I have a bit of a star-struck love for TC Boyle, but this novel made my head buzz with the pestering question: 'Why?' Frank Lloyd Wright is entirely hate-able and without merit. That doesn't by any means immediately discount the story, but there isn't anything to balance his objectionable personality. The women in his life--from whose perspective, via an interstitial Japanese apprentice intern narrator, this novel is built--are little better. Miriam, FLW's second wife, is repellent enough to be laughably unrealistic. The tale, told in reverse-chronological order, unwinds the dramatic coil of Wright's libido, which apparently ran rampant and unchecked through the first half of the 20th century. His ego borders on the ludicrous and incredible, making the motives of his fawning paramours hard to reconcile. There are pockets of sensitivity and good historical insight, but the majority of the book involves jilted lovers and wives stomping around and dropping ultimatums and hiring lawyers. Boyle does have a good ability to jibe smartly at the pseudo-ennobling movements of the early 20th century--those apotheosized under the banner of artistic license and the elevation of romantic love, but as shallow and baseless as the institutions they seek to shatter. Wright's use of free love tenets coming back to bite him are priceless. But mostly this novel creates a gnawing, loveless null."
Viking Adult (2009), Hardcover, 464 pages

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Oprah's Book Club) by Carson McCullers

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:24:21 -0500

lyzadanger's review: "Yearning, melancholy, loving and sad: the more McCullers I read, the more I realize her genius for her gentle understanding of the lonely, the freakish and the isolated. McCullers understands the panicky void that gapes around those who are alone, who cannot express the complications of their minds. Each character here, floating alone through life in a miserable southern mill town, each one shares two things in common. One: their inner life is impossible to express to those around them. Two: a messiah-like reverence for deaf-mute John Singer, who is for all of them an apotheosis, a summation of everything they need him to be. There is a lot of aching and yearning here. A profound understanding of humanity. A gripping story. Tragedies, a moment caught like a fragile insect of history. Beautiful."
Mariner (2004), Edition: 1, Paperback, 368 pages

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:08:02 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "A random pick from my shelf dropped me in the English West Midlands at the turn of the 19th century. A mystery based on real events set during the senescence of Victorian ideals, starring the real human Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "Arthur & George" combines literary suspense with the themes of slowly declining empire. It explores what it means to be English at a time when what it means to be English is changing faster than it has ever done so before; it glances at the accelerating evolution of change in the time of full-steam-ahead Edwardian idealism. No longer is it exactly all right for a gentleman to express bald racism, instead a more insidious cousin allows for unfounded parlor and cigar chats, couched in pseudo-science, about the biological reason for Parsi 'blood lust.' This is important, because George, our much-suffering protagonist, is the son of a Parsi vicar and his Scottish wife. Successful, but unremarkable and socially stunted Birmingham lawyer George Edalji is accused of bizarre and gruesome crimes against livestock in what seems, at best, a farcical miscarriage of police investigation. Outrage upon outrage ensues. Injustice reigns. The identity of the true perpetrator remains elusive and provides a mysterious background tension. Doyle steps in and intertwines his own slightly-fictionalized biography with Edalji's. The novel shifts gears from a frenetic charge of clues and evidence to one more introspective. We learn of Doyle's complexes and conflicts. It is here that Barnes loses a bit of steam. While the reader champs at the bit to learn more about George and what really happened to George, we are instead derailed (to use a pervasive railroad symbolism in the book) into a yearning, self-exploratory quietness. This, while arguably more literary, is a disappointment. Tensions are ultimately resolved and it feels like the question that was, overall, asked, is left as an exercise for the reader."
Knopf (2006), Hardcover, 400 pages

Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (New York Review Books Classics) by George R. Stewart

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:25:31 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "This is not the first time I have read Stewart's opus about place naming in North America. In college I took a course in historical geography. I remember two things about the course: that the classroom was near the seismograph in Cramer Hall (one of my favorite places to wander past), and this book. The way that people express their cultural shape through naming has always intrigued me. Much of Stewart's theory was foundational enough that it stuck with me during the decade between that class and my recent re-reading: the types of place naming (transplantation of old names, adopting forms of native names, names describing events or attributes, biographical naming); trends in naming (colonial towns almost universally named after British counterparts, then post-Revolution rejection of English terms, then embracing of down-home American naming and Romantic notions). He traces the linguistic roots of name pieces (town-name-emes?) that we take for granted: -hurst, -glen, -ville. A book that could easily have read like a laundry list of towns and rivers is instead an adventure. Stewart comes across as one of the last of a dying breed: born in the 19th century, he projects an aura of pith helmets and wooden drawers full of collected specimens. He recaps centuries of expanding frontiers from a vantage (the first edition came out between the wars) where those frontiers had finally bumped up against oceans. The age of heady exploration and gentlemanly academic pursuit was waning. Stewart's tone is both poetic and wistful. It imparts an engaging enthusiasm. Names on the Land, though a carefully-researched (and vast-flung) labor of love, does suffer from its age. I noted a few inaccuracies, including his claim for how Pompey's Pillar (Montana) got named. Modern accounts explain that Pompey was the nickname of Sacagawea's son. Stewart, however, posits that "The [then] current classical furor and the love of the republican heroes may account for Pompey's Pillar." Much discussion is had over the origin of the naming of Oregon, and Stewart leans toward a sloppy map engraver misspelling or transposing a version of "Wisconsin." This theory is still in the mix, but has fallen slightly out of favor. Stewart is masterful at weaving the stories of the cultures that influenced the names on our land. He traces the Spanish era of California and the Southwest. He gives a romp of an account of the French explorers Jolliet and Marquette, who, in the course of a summer's paddling trip, established some of the greatest names of the central continent: Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Omaha, Arkansas, others. He follows the ebbs and flows of popularity: pro-French naming after the Revolution, classical revival, mellifluous and "proper" names of the Victorian era. He shows a soft spot for the rustic and honest names of the mountains and the west. Take this sentence as an epitome of the book's character: "Deathball Creek in Oregon originated from the attempt of an amateur cook to make biscuits." You can sense Stewart's tongue-in-cheek affection for the rough-and-tumble pioneer naming style, yet once again a slight inaccuracy is unearthed: McArthur's Oregon Geographic Names (a source I'll call more reliable with respect to Oregon-specific names) cites the feature as Deathball Rock (not Creek). This book sticks with you if you are of the right inclination. It has a strong sui generis feel to it. It will always maintain a safe, revered position on my bookshelf."
NYRB Classics (2008), Paperback, 432 pages

Ballad of the Sad Cafe, the (Essential Penguin) by Carson McCullers

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:02:49 -0500

lyzadanger's review: "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is, in fact, sad. So sad it resonates with the sadness behind it: Carson McCullers must have been sad herself. It feels too personally acquainted with sad to have been fabricated; McCullers might have been a genius but I still think she didn’t entirely make this up. McCullers tells a story of a doomed and miserable southern town, its misfits, and unrequited love. She has a tenderness for freaks--our protagonist, Miss Amelia, is a six-foot-two giantess who becomes hopeless obsessed with a warped hunchback. Miss Amelia is flint-spined, a bootlegging businesswoman with a ferocious streak, but, like the other characters in the story struck by love, is hopeless and floppy in the face of her beloved. While the plot weaves its love triangle ways, the thrumming feeling of “there is no hope, there is no hope” runs beneath it. McCullers captures the stifling dullness of a southern small town but pins her characters to it like bugs under glass. Poor things. This collection included several other short stories, most of which were riffs on love. Some were sensitive and lyrical: one touches on a wife’s alcoholism in suburbia, another the end of prodigy for a young girl. Others: slightly more forgettable."
Penguin Books (1999), Paperback, 160 pages

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:45:12 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "What does Neal Stepenson write about? Anything he damn well wants, and Anathem is his latest long-winded, exploratory romp. I saw Mr. Stephenson recently, at a sold-out book signing. He clearly didn’t want to be there; I think he hated the audience. Any other author and I would have been permanently disaffected, but Stephenson can get away with it. Why do I cut him so much slack? Because I see him as a sort of literary performance artist. It doesn’t seem as much like he writes novels as that he is doing something perverse, wonderful and occasionally downright obnoxious. Not everything he does works, and it certainly is not for everyone. Anathem is at best a fascinating other-world based on the worship of knowledge and the complexities of clocks, at its worst self-indulgent interminable exchanges (re-hashings of classical Western philosophy for the most part). The New York Times criticized Anathem as not really being a novel, and they’re right. Stephenson has caused the format to burst. Anathem feels like it would be more comfortable in a non-linear layout, one in which the user could choose how immersed he or she wished to be in the narrative and the ideas. Expandable dialogues, links off to more details. But I am one of those hopeless Stephenson fans. He has his finger on a certain pulse of humor that feels personal, like he’s writing just for me. So Anathem felt like indulgence. What fun! What a world! A world within a world, really: he takes monastic life and turns it on its ear. Anathem’s world--Arbre--is one on which men and women work simply in walled cloisters, building and ruminating upon knowledge, isolated from the outside culture. Contact between the so-called Mathic avouts--those toiling simply behind the walls--and the regular hoi polloi occurs only during planned “aperts,” when the gates in the walls are opened as controlled by an elaborate (and, to me, fascinating) clock. These aperts happen every year, ten years, hundred years, thousand years; different portions of the cloistered society are allowed outside contact at different intervals. Stephenson spends the first three hundred or so pages weaving this world behind the walls. It’s interesting to read, if you like the ideas he’s exploring and can deal with the absence of anything that can be called a plot. The life of our protagonist, Erasmas, is part monk, part scholar, part scientist, part dullard. He is merely a narrator of a richly-conceived landscape. Don’t panic, though, it does all go pear-shaped and then we get science fiction, Stephenson-style, which is to say hilarious, rampaging, and peculiar of plot. And, in true Stephenson fashion, again, the book doesn’t know how to end right. The most intriguing new element in this book is Stephenson’s exploration of the notions of consciousness, quantum events, and multi-cosmic theory. He riffs on the beauty--and perhaps the universality--of mathematics and other “true” forms of expression. It’s worth a read, for those who find their curiosity piqued. If you hate Neal Stephenson, you will likely hate this book. If you are a fan, you will probably like it, especially if you are of the Cryptonomicon or Baroque Cycle persuasion."
William Morrow (2008), Hardcover, 960 pages

Peripheral Vision by Patricia Ferguson

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 01:16:18 -0500

lyzadanger's review: "As a memory this book exists in snatches: the protagonist's mother's bucolic dog kennels, cancer, explicit and unforgiving medical procedures, stiff wool post-war suits and the void where love should be. Brazenly British and medically intricate (one might say too intricate, especially if squeamish), Patricia Ferguson's first US-published novel tracks the subtly-intertwining lives of three 20th-century women across time. In doing so it breaks no real new ground, but it provides a comfortable and undemanding casual read. Ferguson shines most when she is writing about her mid-century characters. Her post-war British landscape feels surreal, harsh and at times fantastical. It is a time of dying aristocracy, snobbery and early household appliances. Stiff upper lip. Iris, the heavy-handedly named working-class nurse, is intriguing enough to keep one reading. Her modern characters--our protagonist, Sylvia, is a rigid and competent eye surgeon--feel flatter, going about their daily urban lives and having their Oprah moments. What makes them compelling? Aside from Sylvia's inability to love her infant daughter (well executed), it's hard to say. A couple of times in the book Ferguson seems close to capturing an emotion in essence, as when Rob (one of our post-war characters) muses about being in love: "A great many things had stopped worrying Rob. Sometimes, hurrying down a corridor or along a pavement, happiness required him to leap up, arm outstretched, to touch the light-fitting or branch high overhead. He was always hungry. When alone he slept deeply, dreamlessly. He grew an inch." Overall, though, the writing is efficient, not profound enough to flash your heart alight. There is the expected tragic love and redemption, but the true nature of the characters' entanglement is an odd reveal near the end of the book: a spray of confusing details that feels too specific to be interesting."
Other Press (2008), Hardcover, 376 pages

Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:31:51 -0500

lyzadanger's review: "Holding the book "Firmin" as it is now, with its novella-like thinness and its stylized bite out of the side (makes for uncomfortable reading, being right where your thumbs would normally go), it’s easy to confuse it for something it’s not. “Is this a children’s book?” was my first reflection. It has a crude drawing of a rat on the cover. It’s about a rat who lives in the basement of a Boston bookstore and reads and reads and reads and wants to be, Pinnochio-like, human. How charming. It’s a book whose actual SHAPE is a gimmick. Let’s class it as a stocking-stuffer, a modern fable perhaps to be wrapped up with Coehlo’s The Alchemist and foisted off on some relative looking for some comforting but tepid philosophy. Except, you’d be wrong. I was wrong. Within a few pages, Firmin is clawing out his story: a desperate and raw dirge. His metaphorical yarn bemoans the traditionally ominous inhuman machines of progress as they triumph over sloppy--but much more meaningful--things like literature and love. This is a fable, sure, but it is one of viscera and coitus, redemption and meaning. Born by chance in a bookstore, Firmin reacts to the innately marginal position of his species by (inexplicably) learning to read. His littermates follow in the primal footsteps of their alcoholic mother, all teeth and primitive drives, but Firmin finds the vaunted world of literature and is transformed by it. He reads everything, and loves it, except, if you don’t yet believe he isn’t cute: “The only literature I cannot abide is rat literature, including mouse literature. I despise good-natured Ratty in The Wind in the Willows. I piss down the throats of Mickey Mouse and Stuart Little. Affable, shuffling, CUTE, they stick in my craw like fish bones.” It’s not for kids. It’s not even for especially sensitive adults. Its tone sometimes reaches mildly hopeful only to be drop-kicked down into a very dirty alley full of specters and sadness. Firmin is a sociopath, or at least delusional. He sees meaning where there is none and experiences interactions that don’t actually occur. He is, fundamentally, alone. And that’s where the sadness really festers. Here is a rat who obsessively reads books on sign language, wretchedly trying to learn to gesture the phrase “What do you like to read?” Absent digits and opposable thumbs, the best thing he can learn to shudder out is “goodbye zipper,” which gets him about as far as it sounds like it would. Behind this, a story about the demise of Scollay Square in Boston (wherein is located Firmin’s bookstore), with the expected lamentation about the boarded-up storefronts and abandoned buildings. It’s not a poor choice of backgrounds, but against Firmin’s story it seems jarringly anthropomorphic, occasionally distracting. Firmin leaves a haunting miasma behind. It’s not an easy book, despite its length, and one has to take care to find the hope in the hopelessness. But it is a thought-provoking one, one for savoring and considering, perhaps remembering."
Coffee House Press (2006), Paperback, 162 pages

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon S. Wood

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 18:11:24 -0500

lyzadanger's review: "There's nothing wrong with Wood's style (except for perhaps a heavy reliance on quotations), nothing wrong with his thesis (Franklin wasn't as simple nor as American as we like to paint him), nothing wrong with the facts (as far as I know them). And yet reading this was no gift to myself. Perhaps it waxed too political-science for me (as one who prefers more personal history). Maybe it's my own fault for going into the book with a reasonable understanding of Franklin's biography. What I read here felt like a fleshed out version of what I already knew. And the more I learn about Franklin, the more ambivalent I feel about him. Which gave me an icky feeling. Which made the book less enjoyable yet again. But I still don't think that this is Mr. Wood's fault. So, I suppose a travesty all around."
Penguin (Non-Classics) (2005), Edition: Reprint, Paperback

A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 by Simon Winchester

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 01:18:10 -0500

lyzadanger's review: "Winchester takes an oftentimes intriguing macro-view of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fire, but the most interesting parts of this pop-nonfiction recount are not necessarily the seismic elements. Though Winchester is apt to rehash--watch out for pedantic repetition if you already have even a passing understanding of plate tectonics--there are great passages about the human and physical history of San Francisco. Factoids abound, and some of the anecdotes are worthy of repeating to one's friends. Pruned a bit and without the somewhat tenuous personal-geological-discovery road trip subplot (especially the epilogue trip to Alaska, which seems shoehorned in), I'd give it four stars."
HarperCollins Publishers (2005), Hardcover, 480 pages

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008 (The Best American Series) by Jerome Groopman

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 01:48:22 -0500

lyzadanger's review: " A collection of recent publications that vary widely in quality, from some thought-provoking stunners to run-of-the-mill articles about primates. "Science and Nature" should be interpreted loosely here: among the writings about cosmology and biology, you'll also find entries that more comfortably categorize into geography, linguistics, sociology. In fact, it is some of these border stories in the "softer" sciences that provide some of the stand-out material in this compendium. Two of the stronger pieces are about linguistics: The baffling language (and culture) of the Pirahã tribe in the Amazon, communication via knotted tassels among the Incas. In contrast, the writings on biotech and nanotechnology seem like they're there because they're hot topics, not as much because the quality warrants inclusion. Overall the collection leaves me somewhat lukewarm: Is this really the best we can do? "
Houghton Mifflin (2008), Edition: 1, Paperback, 352 pages

Out Stealing Horses: A Novel by Per Petterson

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 03:47:06 -0400

lyzadanger's review: "If Out Stealing Horses were to be unraveled and performed as music it would sound something like Phillip Glass: modern, haunting, impenetrable. The sentences demand to be considered one word at a time, with minimal internal pause. Like arpeggios. Yet minimalism is not a fair descriptor. The prose is not coy, but it is not basic, either. True to Nordic legacy, it is clean and reserved, but it becomes obvious that it's a frozen, formal layer of ice over an emotional fjord of imponderable depth. The very paragraphs are walls that the protagonist, Trond, erects between himself and the reader. His own self-imposed isolation--he would say solitude, definitely not loneliness--is built into the sounds and shapes of the story. In his sixties, three years a widower, Trond has packed up and left the city to live in a ramshackle cabin in the Norwegian countryside. Not quite a misanthrope, not exactly a curmudgeon, he insists that his need for human companionship is minimal. But his seclusion opens a link to memories: summer 1948, just after the war, a summer like a hinge in his life, a summer of death and complexity and love and abandonment. Out Stealing Horses is, among other thing, a collection of echoes, balances. We meet two sets of twins: one from each pair will be shot to death. Jon, Trond's young contemporary and partner in boyish summer hijinx, ripples with a submerged evil; yet the brutish, teenage German guards stationed in the village are likeable and naive. Trond's boyhood fear of trees falling finally comes to pass, requiring help from someone of great coincidence who has the power to answer the greatest question of Trond's life. Petterson's telling of the forests, rivers of Norway are wrenching in their clarity. The landscape doesn't feel charming or sentimentalized. It feels like nature: cold and wet and beautiful, but not picturesque. The weather is harsh much of the time, the sky gray and dim, the great northern forest endless. It snows, lakes crust over with autumn ice. The Nobel committee recently chastised American writers, insinuating that we won't be seeing any Nobel winners until we emerge from our literary isolation: only a paltry percentage of the books we read are translated, and the general mood in the American literary style is to look within for inspiration. When I first heard this, I was offended. I thought the Nobel committee was being petty, not realizing that much of the reason we read so many American novels in America is because so many novels--and by extrapolation, so many good novels--were being written right here near us. But reading this novel changed my viewpoint slightly. I was reminded that different language doesn't just mean replacing sounds with slightly different sounds, it means a whole different structure. A whole different way to patch together sentences and thoughts. Different patterns of expression, and even thinking. While I have been assiduous in reading the Greek and Roman classics, I have not taken the care to balance my modern reading to have an international, worldly scope. I am inspired to change."
Picador (2008), Edition: 1st, Paperback, 256 pages