Bragan reads still more books in 2014

Happy 2014! And welcome to another year of reading! Somehow, I did not manage to reach my "goal" of "reading ALL THE BOOKS" in 2013. Indeed, my TBR Pile is now bigger than ever. But that just means I have lots and lots of options for this year, right? Right! So, stay tuned for the same kind of completely unthemed reading from me as in previous years, including lots of speculative fiction, lots of non-fiction on various subjects, some literary fiction, some YA and kids' books, and whatever other random stuff manages to attract my easily captured attention.

I may also try to do a better job of keeping up with, and occasionally responding on, other people's threads this year. I think I got a little overwhelmed last year and, after a while, tended to mostly stay in my own little corner of Club Read. And, needless to say, all comments and discussions here are very much welcome! I'll be looking forward to seeing where the reading life takes us all in the next twelve months.

Whee! First book of the year!

1. Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters by Bill Tancer



Bill Tancer's job involves analyzing patterns of internet use, including website traffic and anonymized search engine requests. Presumably this involves things like helping online businesses better target their advertising, but that's not the really the sort of thing he's focused on here. Mainly, he seems interested in digging into all this data, pointing out trends, trying to figure out why they happen, seeing if he can draw predictions or conclusions from them, and speculating on what it all might mean in psychological or sociological terms.

All of which sounds really fascinating, and Tancer seems to know a lot about this stuff and to be extremely enthused about it. (Indeed, he often seems entirely too enthused about some of it.) I didn't find this book nearly as engaging as I'd hoped, though. Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that it's kind of dated. I didn't realize, when I purchased it in 2012, that it was actually published in 2008. On the internet, that's a pretty long time. And although the more general topics he discusses are still relevant enough, the last couple of chapters, about new online trends and the prediction thereof, feel downright creaky, as do the frequent references to MySpace. Also, Tancer isn't exactly the world's liveliest or most polished writer. Mostly his prose is adequate enough, but he doesn't trasfer his excitement over into my excitement very well, and there are one or two places where some of the specifics of what he's talking about are frustratingly unclear.

In terms of the big picture of "why it matters," I don't think there's a lot here that seems terribly profound, although that may be partly because a lot of other people have said a lot of similar things in the years since this book was written. One thing that I did find insightful is the idea that people will ask Google about subjects they won't even talk about with their close friends and family, making a search engine into an odd sort of personal confidante. Which seems fairly obvious once you stop to consider it, but which is nevertheless worth thinking about. Tancer doesn't really explore that notion too much, though, beyond a brief, facile speculation that this intimacy with our computers may be isolating us from other people.

In general, I found the odd little bits of trivia that Tancer has dredged up from his vast seas of data much more interesting than any of this analysis. I may have absolutely no use for the knowledge that Americans are less likely to watch online porn videos on Thanksgiving than on any other day of the year, but I can't help being tickled to know this fact.

(By the way, one thing this book did do is to prompt me to go and look at my own search history over the last couple of months, wondering what it might say about me. Depressingly, it turned out to mostly be a tedious parade of my real and imagined medical issues. I suspect all that says is that I'm getting old and boring.)

Rating: 3/5

Great review of Click: What millions of people are doing online and why it matters and a laeeson to us all to erase our search history so that we are not tempted to review it and become depressed.

Bill Trancer seems to be the wrong person to write this book, especially after it's title which does grab the interest. You need to be the sort of writer that can make this subject really come alive; that may be the reason it has not been updated.

Seems like an appropriate first book of the year to post online, too bad it wasn't as interesting as expected.

Tempted to risk it and review my search history anyway...

>3 baswood:: He apparently writes -- or wrote -- a column for Time on this stuff, and in the book he talks about being approached to do that with the comment that he was nervous about it because "I was at best an amateur writer." He may have gone from amateur to professional, what with getting paid to do it, and he's not actively bad, but you can tell writing's not exactly his main talent.

>4 dchaikin:: In honesty, I already half-expected it to be less interesting than I might hope, but mainly because I was worried it would be too business-focused. Which it wasn't, at least.

I hope if you do review it, your search history turns out to be less depressing than mine!

Click: What millions of people are doing online and why it matters sounds like it had the potential to be interesting. That's an interesting point about the outdatedness of it. Anyone who writes a book about the internet or technology runs the risk of their book being outdated very fast. Perhaps the best place to publish this type of information is online rather than in book form so that you can update frequently.

What?! I'm shocked that you didn't read ALL THE BOOKS last year. :)

It's too bad Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters was poorly written as well as being dated. It sounds like a fascinating subject.

>6 fuzzy_patters:: It really is amazing just how fast anything having to do with the internet can date. I hadn't realized how much things had changed just in the last five years, but reading stuff like this can really bring it home. I think keeping a book like this up-to-date would be kind of a daunting task, really.

>7 arubabookwoman:: I know! That was an entirely realistic goal! :)

(Alas, I am pretty sure I will never even manage to read all the books I already have. And more just keep arriving all the time, far beyond my ability to control it! I woke up this morning -- well, except it was 3 PM, because I'm on night shifts -- opened the door to get the mail, and was greeted by a bag of books a friend who was passing through town had left on my doorstep while I was asleep, because he thought I might want them. I should really just give up and bow helplessly before the power of the immortal TBR Pile.)

And I'm not sure I would go so far as to call Click poorly written, but I would definitely go so far as to say that it wasn't well written. I'm not at all sorry I'd read it, but I'd love to see a more polished and more recent book on the subject.

2. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell



I often get very, very annoyed at the stereotyped ways that books and TV shows and other media portray people who are fans of science fiction and fantasy, Trekkies and Harry Potter fanatics and Dungeons & Dragons players and other geeky types. Almost inevitably, even in these days when nerds are supposedly cool, what you see are immature, obsessed, socially clueless loners who cling to fantasy because they can't handle the real world, and who desperately need "normal" people to teach them how to be less weird so they can lose their virginity sometime before they die. I hate that kind of thing. I find it personally insulting. So, you'd think maybe I ought to hate this book, since, in broad outline, it kinda-sorta seems to follow that same pattern. The main character is college freshman Cath Avery, who is a huge fan of a Potter-esque fantasy series about a character named Simon Snow. She writes massively popular Simon Snow fanfiction, but in real life she's socially awkward and spends most of her time in her dorm room, completely fails to recognize when a guy is flirting with her, and relies entirely on her roommate as a conduit to any kind of social life.

Well, surprise! I didn't hate it. In fact, I loved it to pieces. And I think there are a lot of reasons why it works, why this portrayal feels right where so many of them feel very, very wrong. To begin with, Cath is such a believable, engaging character that it's impossible to think of her as any kind of generic stereotype. She's far too much herself. And she, along with everything else in this story, is written with real charm and with gentle, witty humor. Better still, the author never treats her with condescension. Her interests are not mocked or derided, and although she may learn that there is a bit more to life than Simon Snow, she is never required to give up what she loves or who she is in order to participate fully in that life, and there's no implication that she should be. I cannot tell you how refreshing that is. Indeed, Rainbow Rowell seems to have a genuine affection for and a personal familiarity with the fan subculture her character belongs to. She gets right all the things that most people fail to understand, and, boy, does that make a difference.

More than that, this book gently reminds me that, cartoonish and insulting as they so often are, those stereotypes exist because there is a grain of truth in them, and that I once was -- and in many ways no doubt still am -- walking proof of that. My family situation was very different, but in other ways Cath's college experience is so much like my own was that it's giving me sweetly painful feelings of nostalgia. Except that I had the good fortune to go to a tech school, where people actually thought my encyclopedic knowledge of Star Trek made me cool. That, and the fact that it was twenty-five years ago, and we didn't have the internet to go posting fanfiction epics on. Kids today don't know how lucky they are!

Anyway, this book made me happy. It's warm and funny and likable and the exact opposite of insulting. And, damn it, now I really want to read these Simon Snow novels. And then read fanfiction for them. I'm actually feeling genuinely miffed that they don't really exist.

Rating: 4/5

Your review made me smile. A toast to our inner nerd!

My inner nerd is really more of an outer nerd. But I shall toast to her, anyway! :)

I read Fangirl last month, and really enjoyed it too. Like you said, Cath is a very believable character - I often find that university freshmen characters are written several years older, and more worldly, than they actually are (the same is true for high schoolers, too), but Cath reminded me of how I felt at this time, and she went through a lot of the same social stuff that I remember, stuff that I see my students struggling with when they come back to visit from university. It was nice to see an author portray the awkwardness of living with a stranger, not knowing when/how to eat, etc.

Rowell's earlier novel, Eleanor and Park is fabulous as well, if you want to read more of her.

Was it a good bag of books??

Great review. I've been wondering about whether this book would be sincere or a hipster take on fandom (i.e., ironic and snide). Glad to hear it was the former.

>12 Cait86:: Now that I think about it, I'm not sure I've ever read a book that reflected my own state of mind and lack of worldliness when I started college nearly as well as this one. And I don't think I've ever seen that giant shock to the system that comes from starting college portrayed from a real introvert's point of view like this before. There a bit in there where she's basically thinking, "How can I just sit here and write when I'm constantly aware that there's a stranger in the room with me?" And, wow, the jolt of recognition I got from that!

And Eleanor & Park went onto my wishlist before I'd even finished Fangirl. I definitely want more of this author.

>13 wandering_star:: Well, I'm now much closer to owning the complete works of Charles Dickens, which is a good thing.

>14 fannyprice:: Oh, yes, most definitely sincere and not at all ironic or snide. And entirely authentic, to the point where I find myself thinking, "OK, where can I find Rainbow Rowell's fic, because she definitely comes across as someone who's written some."

Great review of fangirl

I think I have got more nerdish as I have got older.

>16 baswood:: I consider that improving with age. :)

Congratulations on the Hot Review for Fangirl. I just recently had a go at reading Attachments but found it a bit annoying, so gave up. I think the problem was that I didn't find the style of the chat messages between the two friends very convincing/realistic. I might try it again when I am in the right sort of mood.

>18 wandering_star:: I hadn't even realized that was on the hot reviews. Gosh. :)

Attachments I hadn't even heard of. Well, if you do give it a try again, I'll be interested to know if you decide it's worthwhile.

Loved your review of Fangirl. I know somebody (a self-proclaimed "fangirl") who would probably love that book!

>20 avidmom:: Yay for the self-proclaimed fangirls! She might indeed enjoy it.

3. The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival by Stanley N. Alpert



Stanley Alpert, an Assistant US Attorney in New York City, was grabbed on the street on the night before his thirty-eighth birthday by three guys who shoved him into a car at gunpoint and demanded his ATM card and his PIN. Frustrated by the daily withdrawal limits on the card, they kept Stanley captive for more than twenty-four hours while they worked on plans to get more cash out of his accounts. Then, somewhat surprisingly, they let him go.

In this book, Alpert describes his ordeal, with a particular focus on his attempts to remain calm and rational and make the best choices for getting out of the situation alive. To that end, he made an effort to be polite and accommodating towards his captors -- at one point, he had them asking him for legal advice! -- and to gather as many clues as possible to the criminals' identities and the location of the house they were holding him in. There turned out to be quite a lot of those; these were not exactly the most skilled and savvy kidnappers in the history of crime. He also talks about the police investigation afterward and how the experience affected him, and intersperses the story of the kidnapping with various digressions about his experiences growing up in Brooklyn, the details of his career in environmental law, and his opinions on crime and race relations in New York.

Alpert sometimes comes across as a bit of a lech when he's talking about women, which is a bit annoying, but I do have to admire his ability to properly handle a situation that would have undoubtedly turned me into a gibbering wreck. His writing sometimes feels like he's trying a little too hard to mimic the style of a thriller or gangster novel, but it's still an interesting read about an interesting experience, with a few moments that are unexpectedly, darkly funny.

Rating: 3.5/5

" but I do have to admire his ability to properly handle a situation that would have undoubtedly turned me into a gibbering wreck."

That would be an understatement for me.

You convinced me to give it a try. It's now on my never ending TBR. :)

At first I thought that was a fun title - didn't know I was supposed to take it so literally. Enjoyed (and disturbed by) your review.

>23 NanaCC:: I think that's true for most of us! Apparently "be cooperative and pleasant and make them relate to you as a human being" is truly excellent advice for kidnapping victims, though, if you can maintain the presence of mind for it. Alpert mentions one of the people involved later reporting to the police a conversation out of Alpert's earshot that basically went: "Why don't we just kill him?"/"Nah, he's a nice guy." I will try very, very hard to keep that in mind if I'm ever nabbed off the street.

>24 lesmel:: Ah, the never-ending TBR! I know it well. Hopefully you'll find it interesting!

>25 dchaikin:: Yes, I think many of us have trouble surviving our birthdays metaphorically, few of us quite so literally! Thank goodness.

Wow! What a story. And here I thought it was going to be something funny.

Bad luck on the kidnappers for nabbing Alpert. Just what you don't want an intelligent victim who knows the law.

>27 avidmom:: Oddly enough, bits of it really were funny, in a somewhat dark, "Oh, my god, I can't believe this!" kind of way. Given that the guy survived unharmed to tell his story, it is possible to laugh.

>28 baswood:: Yeah. At one point, they asked him what he did for a living, and knowing that he had business cards and stuff in his wallet, he didn't think it would be good idea to lie. So he told them, and very apologetically added, "I'm afraid you kind of picked the wrong guy." Only one of the kidnappers was smart enough to realize how much of a problem this could potentially be, though, in that the fact that the guy was a Federal prosecutor meant the FBI might get involved. Which they did.

To that end, he made an effort to be polite and accommodating towards his captors -

There's a fantastic 1960s TV series, The Fugitive, about a man on the run from the law, therefore always in a precarious, vulnerable situation vis-à-vis other people, even women and children. In every episode he is placed in some life-threatening danger from which he typically extricates himself using wits and just being nice. A remarkable series with a hero unlike any other in Hollywood.

>30 LolaWalser:: Oh, yes, I remember watching and very much enjoying that show in my teens. (They used to show reruns of it on the A&E network, back before A&E became... whatever the heck it is now.)

I read that several years ago, but before I reviewed books on LT. I thought it was mostly fascinating, although I recall being irritated by him too.

>32 rebeccanyc:: I figure I ought to maybe cut the guy a little slack for being irritating, especially as he was only very slightly so. But, well, if he were a slightly more polished writer and slightly less interested in making sure I knew how attractive every woman he encounters is, I would have easily given his book four stars instead of three and a half. Not that that makes his story less fascinating.

Great review of The Birthday Party: A Memoir, Betty!

4. H.M.S. Surprise by Patrick O'Brian



Book number three in O'Brian's Napoleonic-era series featuring ship's captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and shipmate Dr. Stephen Maturin. Reading these books is always a bit of an odd experience for me, because, I have to admit, there are inevitably large-ish stretches where I have almost no idea what is going on, as I have no fluency whatsoever in Old Timey Nautical Speak. Which you'd think would be a big barrier to enjoyment, and yet I found this book, like Post Captain before it, strangely delightful. Much of that is because, whatever I may or may not understand, the characters always shine through, and I feel tremendous affection for them. Especially for Maturin, whose eccentricities and enthusiasms are utterly adorable, even if he can be a stubborn idiot about some things. And the relationship between the two is just heart-warming. It's difficult to imagine two more utterly different people, but despite all obstacles, their attachment to each other is steadfast and endearing.

There's also a wonderfully vivid sense of place here, especially when that place is aboard ship. Sometimes, I swear, I could almost taste the salt water. And then there's the sly, dry sense of humor, which probably makes the whole thing worth reading all by itself. You wouldn't expect this sort of book to be laugh-out-loud funny, but it often is.

Among other events, this particular installment features a trip to India, some continuing complications in affairs of the heart, and, of course, the inevitable skirmish with the French. Although as far as I'm concerned, they could pretty much sail around aimlessly, and I'd probably still be interested.

(I am kind of hoping poor Stephen gets to catch a break in the next installment, though, after the multiple kinds of abuse he suffers in this one. Or is that too much to ask?)

Rating: 4/5

After I read Master and Commander last year, you made a comment about the sea jargon. My daughter posted this, and I am not sure if you saw it -

"Regarding the Aubrey and Maturin series, there is a lexicon available for those swimming in sea jargon: A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion to the Complete Seafaring Tales of Patrick O'Brian."

I have it on Kindle.

I don't in fact recall seeing that before. Thanks! It sounds like it might be worth a look, although I can't help but wonder if it would actually help me, or if all the terminology would just continue to leak right out of my brain as soon as I read it.

5. Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer



An experiment at CERN designed to detect the Higgs Boson instead has the unanticipated effect of causing everyone on Earth to black out and experience one minute and forty-three seconds' worth of their lives twenty-one years in the future.

If this premise sounds almost familiar, you may be remembering the short-lived TV series of the same name, which was based on this novel. I did watch that when it was on, but eventually found myself growing frustrated with it. It felt to me like it was trying way too hard to be the new Lost and not doing a terribly good job of it. So I finally gave up on it, a couple of episodes before the network did. But I still thought the concept was intriguing, so I figured I'd pick up the book and see if what the original did with it was any better.

As it happens, the novel bears very little resemblance to the TV show, except for the basic idea of the blackout and future vision, and some cases of what people see in that future being broadly similar. (E.g. one man discovering that he's been murdered in the future, and another learning that he's no longer with the woman he thought he'd love forever.)

But the premise is still fascinating, even on encountering it for the second time, and it opens up a lot of interesting discussion about the physics and philosophy of time. Is the future fixed, something that already exists out there somewhere, or is it malleable? Is there such a thing as free will? And if you could see the future, what would that do to your present? There's some nifty, thought-provoking stuff here. Unfortunately, I think it goes off the rails a bit by the end, getting into some rather nutty, or at the very least scientifically and philosophically dubious territory. Which maybe shouldn't be too surprising; this is the kind of story where it seems hard to imagine an ending that would be entirely satisfying.

That's not the only thing that I found not quite satisfying, though. Sawyer does a really good job of setting up personal situations that make this time-jump idea and its human consequences feel very grounded and relatable, and that's good. But his characters are a little too flat to make it all quite as effective as it might have been. Most of the time, it feels more like we're being told how the characters feel, rather than shown their emotions and made to feel along with them. Also, this was written in 1999 and set (mostly) in 2009, and the fact that Sawyer inevitably failed to correctly predict the world ten years in his future means it takes a little too much effort to suspend my disbelief in the world he predicts twenty years beyond that.

Still, it's a quick, interesting read, and may well be worth a look if you find time travel stories appealing and would like to see a somewhat different-than-usual take on the idea.

Rating: 3.5/5

Hmmmm I saw the TV series and like you I thought it was a great idea, but the Show started off well but just sort of fizzled out. Interesting that the book dates from 1999. I don't think I will go out of my way to read it, thanks for an excellent review.

I usually like Sawyer a lot - but mainly for his ideas and not for his execution or style (which can be pretty wooden in places - with characters staying flat even in great situations and during some of the best passages of a "story" I had read for a while). Sounds like this one is having the same downfalls but your review also tells me that I really need to read it :)

>39 baswood:: Yeah, I don't know that I recommend going out of one's way to read it. But it was a better experience than watching the TV series turned out to be, at least.

>40 AnnieMod:: It had been a while since I read anything of Sawyer's. I remember finding Illegal Alien to be quite a page-turner, but being unsatisfied with it in the end, for plot reasons I do not now recall. Otherwise, my impression of his stuff is that it's OK: very readable, but not terribly memorable in terms of characters and plot. A mystery-loving friend of mine did just give me a copy of Red Planet Blues with a strong recommendation, so I'll probably be giving that one a try in the not-too-distant future and see if I like it better.

>41 bragan: I haven't read the novel yet but I liked the novella he expanded to make the novel... Need to pick up the novel...

6. At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson



Bill Bryson lives in a house that was once a rectory, the home of the resident clergyman of a small English village. The central conceit of this book involves Bryson taking readers on a stroll through this house and using each room along the way as a jumping-off point to talk about all the history that went into making that room what it is. Although said history, it should probably be noted, is almost entirely that of the British Isles and America. Bryson also claims at the outset that he intends to focus mainly on the time since the rectory was first built, in 1851, but in practice, he rambles far and wide across across the past, touching on matters from the world-changing (e.g. the invention of the cotton gin and its impact on the American south) to the trivial (like the history of wigs as a men's fashion accessory).

Just as an example of how wonderfully wide-ranging and random this amble through history is, consider the chapter spent in the dining room, which features such topics as salt, scurvy, the spice trade, the many mistakes of Christopher Columbus, crops and diseases imported from the New World, Samuel Pepys' diary, the introduction of coffee and tea to Britain, the Boston Tea Party, the evolution of the fork, overcomplicated 19th century table settings, and why we no longer eat the heaviest meal of the day at lunch. And somehow, it all flows together in what seems like a perfectly natural progression.

It's all genuinely fascinating stuff, too, full of odd, quirky little details of the kind I never knew I wanted to know, related in an engaging style by a man who is clearly enjoying it all as much as I did.

Also, I have come away from this book with four main points in my mind, all of which are things I already knew, but which are certainly deserving of further consideration:

1. Everything really is connected to everything else, in all kinds of weird and wonderful ways.

2. I am deeply, incredibly, unbelievably grateful to live in the 21th century.

3. Very rich people have always done insanely, unconscionably wasteful things.

And 4. The Victorians were just plan weird.

Anyway. I definitely recommend this for even the most casual of armchair history buffs. Especially the ones who'd like to know something about the history of their armchairs.

Rating: 4.5/5

That is a great review of At Home! I'm so glad you enjoyed it. And I love this comment "full of odd, quirky little details of the kind I never knew I wanted to know..." Exactly!

I definitely recommend this for even the most casual of armchair history buffs. Especially the ones who'd like to know something about the history of their armchairs.
Haha!
That sounds like fun.

Thanks, guys! It really was a wonderfully fun and fascinating book. (Even if some of the history it describes was anything but fun!)

>38 bragan: I very much enjoyed Flashforward back when it first came out, and for the reasons you and Annie state -- the premise, the ideas, though I suppose not being in science I might entertain those ideas differently. It made for some great book club discussions (as did the science vs religion one, and the neanderthals vs humans trilogy—titles escape me at the moment). I stopped reading him during that trilogy, though.

Sometime we ought to open a thread for personal lists of favorite SF authors/books. I'd be interested in such lists from those in Club Read who read SF.

>47 avaland:: They're fascinating ideas, but they do get pretty out there, scientifically. I should probably note that Sawyer didn't make even the wildest of them up, though. He did base it all on ideas that actual scientists have had. In what are, I think, some of science's more interestingly nutty let's-get-philosophical moments. :)

That, by the way, sounds like a really great book club!

And such a thread could be a good idea! I'd certainly be interested in seeing others' picks. Although I myself am terrible at naming lists of favorite anything, though.

Once again, you've hit on the perfect oddball book with this Bill Bryson. I was getting somewhat bored with his jaunting around, but love reading books like this. Thanks!

I definitely recommend this for even the most casual of armchair history buffs. Especially the ones who'd like to know something about the history of their armchairs. Great line.

Bryson also wrote a similar book about science and the history of science, A Short History of Nearly Everything. But I liked this one better, mostly because it was telling me things I didn't already know more about than him.

Loved your review of At Home! It was already on my wish list, but you've bumped it up the queue.

>51 cabegley:: If and when you get to it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

2 - Maybe old Bragan, I don't know, but never boring!

Wonderful review of Fangirl!

and WOW! What a birthday!

Am I the only person who walked out of the movie Master and Commander? Boring!!! Maybe I just didn't get it. And I was a little cranky with Russell Crowe at the time.

Love your four points from Bryson LOL.

Thanks!

I enjoyed Master and Commander the movie reasonably well, from what I recall, but I remember almost nothing of the plot. Which is probably just as well, since then I won't remember it when I get around to reading whichever book in the series it was actually based on. (It wasn't Master and Commander at all, confusingly.) I don't know if it's generally highly regarded among fans of the books or not, though.

7. The New Dead edited by Christopher Golden



I really liked John Joseph Adams' Living Dead anthologies, which I would describe, by and large, as being on the classier end of the zombie fiction spectrum. I was a little trepidatious about starting this one, though; somehow, I was expecting it to be rather more on the cheesy side. But I was very pleasantly surprised. This anthology is at least as good as either of Adams', and I'm giving it an extra point (or an extra half-star) for being more consistently good. I liked some of these stories better than others, of course, but there's not a real dud in the bunch. Even the ones that weren't quite to my taste, or that had an identifiable flaw or two were really interesting, and left me feeling genuine appreciation for what the author was doing.

I suppose there's arguably one exception to that: Joe R. Lansdale's "Shooting Pool." Which was actually a perfectly decent story, but which contained, as far as I can tell, no zombie-related content whatsoever, as if it had accidentally wandered in from an entirely different anthology. I suspect the author's intent on that one was to write a sort of anti-zombie story, as it features someone who dies and stays very dead. But if that's the idea, well, it's trying to be entirely too clever for its own good.

The standout stories, though, are really good. Joe Hill's "Twittering from the Circus of the Dead" may be the best fictional use of Twitter as a storytelling medium the world will ever see, and David Liss' "What Maisie Knew" is probably the most unrelentingly, memorably horrific thing I've read in ages.

On thing I find interesting about this anthology is that it simultaneously takes a very narrow and a very broad view of the zombie concept. On the narrow side -- that one bafflingly out-of-place entry aside -- these are all very much stories about animate corpses. No 28 Days Later-style rage zombies. Nothing that kinda-sorta metaphorically resembles a zombie if you squint. It's all walking corpses, all the time. (Well, Aimee Bender's bizarre little piece "Among Us" may be a partial exception, as its whole point seems to be that practically everything metaphorically resembles a zombie if you squint. But even that does have a walking corpse in it.)

The scope is also broad, though, in the sense that it includes a lot of different ideas about zombies and does a lot of very different things with them. We've got everything here from mindless monsters to dead bodies with perfectly functional human minds still inside them, including a whole lot of disturbing gray areas in between. We've got plague zombies, science zombies, voodoo zombies, and zombies whose origins nobody knows. There are lots of different settings, lots of surprisingly original details, and lots of different tones and themes. Although there are a couple of themes that do keep cropping up again and again. One is the venerable notion that living humans have the potential to be far worse than any flesh-eating monsters. Another is the seldom-addressed question of how we can feel so keen about the idea of killing zombies when we are so disgusted by the idea of desecrating a corpse.

And, you know, it's interesting. A common (and entirely understandable) opinion about zombies in pop culture right now is that it's just time for them to be over. They're overused to the point of cliche, to the point of meaninglessness. They're not scary anymore, and there's nothing much left to say with them. So why do stories like the ones here not seem at all tired or meaningless or unoriginal to me? It occurs to me that maybe it's only once a subgenre reaches this point of pop cultural oversaturation that writers become completely free to play around with its tropes, to subvert and re-examine them secure in the knowledge that the audience will be able to follow wherever they may go. (Stories that use fairy tale elements are, I think, another good example of this.) And maybe it's not surprising that once you reach that point, the zombie subgenre in particular lends itself well to that kind of attention, if you stop for a moment to think about exactly what a zombie is. Because we're talking about a dead human being, brought back to life with some fundamental component of life or humanity missing. And that, surely, is an idea that has the potential to tap into all kinds of questions that are both philosophically deep and viscerally affecting, questions about life and death, about the human mind and (if it exists) the soul.

Or maybe I'm overthinking things. Maybe, y'know, I just like zombies. And, hey, if you like zombies, too, this may be a book for you. If you're looking for B-movie gore-fests or lots of survival horror, you'll probably be disappointed, but if you want some well-written, thoughtful, thought-provoking stories that continue to do interesting things with an idea that still won't die, no matter how many people say it should, you may find it's exactly what you're looking for.

Rating: a possibly slightly over-enthusiastic 4.5/5

Love the sound of the Bryson. I used to really enjoy his writing but like Sassy had got a bit bored of his trips; this sounds great, though. Thanks for making me aware of it!

The New Dead sounds good.

I actually love the Master and Commander movie. The first time I saw it I thought it was OK but forgettable, but for one reason and another I ended up watching it several times (eg, staying in a friend's holiday cottage and it was the only English-language DVD). Gradually I realised there was a lot more to it than just the swashbuckling - and perhaps that's the mark of a good film that each time you watch it you spot something else. Now it's become one of my staple films to put on when I just want something I know I'll enjoy.

>56 rachbxl:: I'm really looking forward to reading Bryson's One Summer: American, 1927 sometime, too, as it seems to promise more of the same.

>57 wandering_star:: That's good to hear about the Master and Commander movie. Maybe I'll watch it again sometime after I've finished the books. I do agree that being able to watch over and over and keep seeing new things is the mark of a good movie (or one of them, anyway). Not that there's anything wrong with just doing some good old swashbuckling, if you do it well.

You make a good case for zombies

>59 baswood:: I try. I figure someone ought to!

(The sad thing is, I could probably go on for much, much longer on that subject, if I wanted to.)

I read your review of At Home: A short history of private life with pleasure, as I recently acquired the book. Your review perfectly mirrors my impression of the book.

I'm glad to know you enjoyed it as much as I did!

8. The Wet Nurse's Tale by Erica Eisdorfer



Susan Rose is a servant in a grand 19th-century household, but after becoming pregnant, she has no choice but to leave that career and begin a new one as a wet nurse, tending to rich ladies' children at the expense of her own.

While Susan's life certainly has a lot of sadness and injustice in it, this story never becomes bleak, and even while it's describing some rather tragic things, the novel remains engaging and enjoyable. Mostly that's due to the fact that Susan is such a wonderfully clever and lively character; although she does a few things I can't bring myself to approve of, it's simply impossible not to like her.

I think the story does get a teeny bit far-fetched by the end, talking on a few aspects of Victorian melodrama that I wasn't really expecting, but despite that, I still turned the last page feeling satisfied.

Basically, a good, quick, entertaining read.

Rating: 4/5

Followed your lead and here I am! Starred you.

Hello, Connie! Welcome to my other thread!

I really enjoyed your reviews of At Home and The New Dead. Both are going on my ever-expanding TBR list :)

Ah, the ever-expanding TBR list! I know it well. Glad you enjoyed the reviews!

Good to know about Bryson's at home. Your review has me much more interested in reading it.

I'll be interested to hear what you think if you do.

9. Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin



Privacy, needless to say, is a very big issue these days, and in this book Julia Angwin attempts to navigate both herself and the reader through it all, investigating just how vulnerable our personal data is not just to government surveillance, but also to private companies looking to harvest information for marketing purposes. The answer to that, unsurprisingly, is very. Although maybe "unsurprisingly" isn't quite the right word there, because I thought I was fully braced to hear just how bad the situation was, but some of the things Angwin found still surprised me. Most particularly, she is concerned with the proliferation of the "dragnet" form of information-gathering, in which data is collected indiscriminately on large numbers of people, whether it's the NSA keeping records of everybody's phone calls or tracking cookies monitoring the behavior of everyone who visits a website.

Angwin starts the book off with a chapter about ways in which information about us can be collected and how that can be harmful, which is reasonably informative, but rather dry. Then she tells a couple of individual stories. One is about a couple of people who discovered that the internet forum they thought was a safe space in which to talk about their mental health issues was actually selling information about them to pharmaceutical companies. The other is about a young man who was placed under surveillance by the FBI for the offense of Participating in a Disparaging Internet Conversation About Airport Security While Muslim. Or, more accurately, for having a buddy guilty of said offense. These stories are anecdotal, of course, but they do illustrate some of the personal cost of violated privacy.

At this point, the book suddenly shifts into first person, which is a bit odd after two chapters narrated in a style of journalistic distance, but it's also the point where it becomes more engaging and more personally relevent, as Angwin takes us through her own investigations into where her (and, presumably, our) data ends up and tries out various ways to take control of what others can learn about her. These efforts range from very simple things, such as installing an ad-blocker in her browser, to complicated and rather paranoid-sounding efforts, including obtaining credit cards under a false name. Which I didn't even realize was legal, but apparently it is.

Angwin clearly believes that privacy issues in the modern world are a problem, one that invites us to carefully consider what kind of society we want to live in. She raises good, thoughtful points on the subject, without ever getting politically ranty or trying to convince us to take up any extreme positions. No "The gummint/evil corporations are spying on you so they can take over your life, and the only thing for a decent American to do is to go off the grid and live in a shack full of guns/hippie commune!" rhetoric here, thank goodness.

But, short of the commune/shack option, what can we do to protect our privacy in today's wired-in wold? Depressingly, the answer seems to be "not very much." The various strategies Angwin uses seem, at least for those of us who aren't journalists with sources to protect, to involve a hell of a lot of difficulty and inconvenience for very little practical effect. Even Angwin, who is clearly trying to keep an optimistic attitude, sees things like using e-mail encryption to be useful more as a form of political protest than anything. She believes it's important to send the message that privacy is important to us, that a lack of control over who has what information about us isn't something we'll simply yawn and accept. In principle, I think she's probably right. In practice... God, even taking small steps in that direction sounds exhausting. So mostly I think she's just succeeded in making me feel even worse about my own passivity than I did before. Still, at least now I am better informed, and that's something. Right?

Rating: 4/5

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)

I'm not actually sure. I've just about given up on the privacy thing.

Angwin says lots of friends she talked to said exactly the same thing. And I know it's not the message she wanted me to take away from the book, but the more I read of it, the more I could see why.

It would seem to me that lack of privacy is a price worth paying to use the internet.

>73 baswood:: In a way, I agree with you. Not having the internet is such an awful thought that there's a hell of a lot I'd be willing to put up with rather than lose it. But, you know, it sucks that I have to make that trade. And some of the results of that trade are disturbing and kind of worrying.

And, of course, there always comes a point past which it's actually not worth it. If somebody gets hold of your bank account information and cleans you out so badly you can't pay your internet bill, or if a homicidal stalker locates you, that's obviously too high a price. That stuff may be highly unlikely to happen to most of us, but the fact that there are potential bad consequences to an inability to protect our privacy isn't something we should shrug off, I think, even if we have decided to accept the risk.

Or so I tell myself, and continue to not change my behavior much.

Interesting about Dragnet Nation. Has it inspired you to do anything differently to protect your own privacy?

>75 dchaikin:: I... changed one password. That's a start, right?

10. Conquerors' Pride by Timothy Zahn



Deep in outer space, humans come across some ships belonging to never-before-encountered aliens. They attempt to open friendly communications, but the aliens respond by attacking, and quickly prove themselves frighteningly superior in battle. There is only one survivor: Pheylan Cavanagh, who is taken prisoner by the aliens. When the military realizes his body is still unaccounted for, they refuse to go and look for him (for what, I must say, seem to me like pretty good reasons). His family won't take no for an answer, though and set out to stage their own rescue operation. Meanwhile, the humans and other species of the galaxy prepare themselves for war.

I think this kind of SF story -- I suppose I'd call it a sort of lightweight space opera -- is much less to my taste these days than it was in my youth. Or, perhaps more accurately, I have higher standards for it now. So at first, I was pleasantly surprised by this. The premise, while not the most original in the history of SF, was interesting enough, and I was genuinely curious about the aliens and their motivations. I approved of the world-building, too. The technology feels believable without being over-explained, and there's a sense that this universe is big and complicated and has a lot of history. And while the prose is very, very far from being great literature, it lacks the extreme clunkiness you sometimes get in this sort of story. So I was finding it a pleasantly quick and fairly entertaining read.

And then, maybe halfway through, I found myself losing interest rapidly. What Pheylan's family was up to got more attention by far than him or the aliens, and to me that was a far less interesting story, especially as it became increasingly rambly and full of implausibilities. The most irritating of which is that nobody in this universe -- and I mean nobody -- seems to have any concept of security, and our heroes have no trouble whatsoever randomly stumbling onto any piece of information that the author wants them (or us) to have. By the time we got to the people who blithely showed everybody around their secret spaceport and then left their battle plans sitting out on a table, my suspension of disbelief was whimpering loudly under the strain.

And then the thing just kind of ends, with most of the major plot threads dangling and all the mysteries unsolved, presumably to be addressed in the next two books in the series. In fact, on reflection, this volume feels like its main purpose is to act as setup for whatever comes next. But, while I am curious and, whatever its faults, this one was readable enough, I still don't think I'm going to bother with the rest of the series.

Rating: 3/5

Jeff Jarvis Public Parts has a very interesting take on internet privacy. E.g. once we all find out we all do stupid and embarrassing stuff we'll accept ourselves more and stop shooting for perfection. Great book. Course your bank acct theft is a different story.

>78 mkboylan:: I've heard similar arguments, and there is probably something to them, although I'm not sure it's within human nature to be entirely comfortable with no privacy at all. And I know I really don't want every single word, action, and personal foible of mine visible to the scrutiny of the entire world. (But then, I grew up in a pre-internet society. And even if I can barely remember what such a world was like, there's no question that it shaped me very strongly. F'rinstance, nerdy, socially awkward little kid that I was, I got a lot of signals as a kid, that basically said "your interests and personality traits are weird and unacceptable, and you should keep them to yourself if you don't want abuse." So I learned to do that, and have only partially unlearned it since. I think that experience has got to be somewhat different for kids today, who have the ability to easily find like-minded people on the internet and online spaces where they might be better accepted. Not to mention the fact that all my nerdy interests have become way more socially acceptable in the last 25 years!)

There is also the argument -- a valid one, I think -- that a lack of privacy works both ways, that even as the authorities are watching us, we're watching them, too, which makes it harder to get away with abuses of power. (E.g. acts of police brutality getting captured by cell phone cameras.) So, yeah, it's all definitely not as simple as "lack of privacy, bad!" But the fact that we seem to be walking almost blindly into this privacy-deficient future -- and in that "we" I definitely include myself -- is a little concerning.

I use my library card number for some passwords. It's long, random and memorized. Better than the cat's name, at least.

>80 RidgewayGirl:: Hey, that's not bad!

Of course, possibly you shouldn't have admitted to this in a public place, but I imagine the odds of someone getting hold of your library card number and using it against you are low. :)

The world is full of unscrupulous librarians.

Lol

82. Lol

>77 bragan:

Nice review. This was designed as a series though so it was kinda expected that the 3 books won't stand on their own...

>85 AnnieMod:: I have to say, it really, really would have been nice to have some indication of that on the book anywhere! Of course, even when they do, it can be hard to know whether each book in the series is one more-or-less self-contained story, or whether it really is all one long novel split up into multiple parts until you're thirty pages from the end and suddenly realize, with that sinking feeling, that there's not enough time left to come to anything like a satisfying conclusion. (This one, really, was somewhere between self-contained and to-be-continued. The main "rescue the prisoner" storyline was wrapped up, but ultimately that whole plot really just felt like a delivery system for all the information readers will presumably need for Book 2.) When I rule the world, I think publishers will be required to put information labels on books. Like the nutrition labels on food. ("Story content: 33% of recommended allowance"?)

Anyway, I didn't penalize the book for being just the first part of a trilogy, or I would have rated it lower. Although it didn't interest me enough to make me want to run out and read the rest of the story, so, come to think of it, maybe I should have rated it lower. All the setup in the world isn't useful if it's not interesting enough to actually get you to the story it's setting up.

11. The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature by Daniel J. Levitin



Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist who is also a musician and former record producer, so he would seem to be uniquely qualified to write a book like this, about how music has shaped the human mind and how the human mind has shaped music.

The "six songs" of the title are actually six categories of song, which Levitin believes can be used to describe the various functions of music in human society: songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love. He regards this as an exhaustive list. I am unconvinced by that, personally, although I will say that it's at least closer to exhaustive then you might think, as he defines these categories very broadly. "Friendship" songs, for example, are defined as any (non-religious) songs that function to bind people together, including national anthems, work songs designed to establish the rhythm of a task, and songs associated with a particular movement or group.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, I think it contains a lot of interesting and often insightful commentary on music, the role it plays in human society and the effect it can have on us as individuals. I found the chapter on "knowledge songs" particularly interesting. Here, Levitin discusses the fact that we remember things much better if we learn them in the form of a song, which, when you stop to think about it, is both obvious and kind of strange. He also talks about techniques that make songs easier to memorize, which is extremely important in cultures without writing, where all knowledge and all stories must be passed on orally. And he considers the idea that many songs are written to remind the writer of their own experiences and the life lessons they have learned, and to share those experiences and lessons with others. There's some thought-provoking stuff here.

As a popular science book, though, I think it's less successful. A lot of his discussions about music and the brain seem rather simplistic to me, and to imply a lot more scientific certainty and scientific understanding than we really have yet about how anything this complex works in the brain. (Although Levitin has apparently written a previous book specifically about music and the brain, so it's possible he deals with the subject in a more nuanced way there and has deliberately simplified things a bit here to avoid going over too much of the same ground.) Also, while his more general explanations about evolution are fine, the specific ideas he presents about how music might have influenced human evolution and vice versa are really speculative. Evolutionary psychology is often criticized for making up "Just So Stories." I think that's often kind of an unfair characterization, but there are places here where it most definitely applies.

Levitin can also get a bit rambly and is sometimes prone to repeating himself. And while his tendency to include his own experiences with music provides a nice personal touch, I think there are parts of the book where he lets it all become a little bit too much about him for just a little too long.

Bottom line: It's worth reading and sometimes fascinating, but flawed, and some of it is probably best taken with a grain of salt.

Rating: 3.5/5

>10 NanaCC: Sounds like a fascinating book - even if it is, like you say "flawed."

hmm I have Levitin on my shelf. Not sure after your review. It'll have to be the right time. Excellent review.

I do think it's worth a read, even if it's far from perfect. It occurs to me that it might make an interesting pairing with Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia, which is a very different sort of book about music and the human mind. (I will say, one thing I did appreciate: Sacks' examples all come from classical music, a subject on which I am profoundly ignorant. But Levitin speaks much more of my rock'n'roll language.)

Levitan it is :)

12. Insane City by Dave Barry



Seth has just arrived in Miami, a couple of days before his wedding. The bride -- a rich, beautiful, and extremely strong-willed woman -- is bound and determined that everything is going to be perfect on her perfect day. But almost immediately, Seth begins to have an, uh, interesting time, starting with arriving at the wrong hotel, getting drunk and misplacing his luggage, and moving on through a cascading series of increasingly wacky hijinks involving, among other things, some Haitian refugees, an orangutan, a pirate ship, and rather large quantities of pot.

It's very funny stuff, which is unsurprising, as I don't think Dave Barry is capable of not being at least moderately hilarious. I gotta say, though, I kept finding myself cringing a bit for the poor main character, even as I was laughing.

As with many of Dave Barry's works, fictional or non-fictional, I think the moral here is: Stay the heck out of Miami. That place is nuts.

Rating: 4/5

Re The World in Six Songs: All songs are of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and/or love? Hmm. What about anger, fear, hatred, general badness? Or are anti-comfort songs also in the comfort theme and etc? Great review that is critical but leaves the book still sounding very interesting.

Barry's moral has some validity.

>93 dchaikin:: He puts angry songs and the blues and such in the "comfort" category, on the principle that the appeal of such things is that it makes us feel less alone in our own anger, sadness, etc. Which I do think has validity, even if I'm not entirely sure about his categorization scheme in general.

What I think he fails to really account for are songs that are meant to be funny, or songs whose function is to tell a story. Maybe the former fall in the "joy" category, but he doesn't really address them at all. He's vague on the latter, too, but seems to want to put them in the "knowledge" category, which I think is a bit of a stretch.

As for Barry's moral... Amusingly enough, I'm now watching some Burn Notice on DVD, so my current impression of Miami is that it is both nuts and multiple kinds of dangerous.

13. The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality by Richard Panek



One of the strangest and most fascinating developments in modern science is the realization that the stuff you and I and the stars and planets are made out of constitutes less than five percent of the universe. What's the rest of it made of? Well, we don't know, exactly, but at least we can put labels on it. There's dark matter, the invisible stuff whose existence we are aware of only because of its gravitational influences. And dark energy, which apparently has been causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate all the time we were blithely assuming it must be slowing down.

It's a terrific subject -- one that will literally determine the fate of the universe -- but Panek's treatment of it, while well-written enough, just wasn't quite what I was hoping for. There's a phrase I've often heard applied to works of non-fiction, frequently on the back cover blurbs: "It reads like a novel!" That's pretty much always intended to be a compliment, but it seems to me that, honestly, it's not always a good thing. Some topics lend themselves well to the "reads like a novel!" treatment, and some just... don't. And I'm not at all sure this is one that does.

Don't get me wrong. I think it's great to have some human interest in books on scientific subjects and to portray scientists as the human beings they are. And I think it's very important to accurately depict science as a process of figuring things out, rather than treating it as a series of facts handed down from some authority on high. And Panek definitely does both of these things. But... Well, it seems to me as if he's doing his darndest to make this a story full of DRAMA! and CONFLICT! and CHARACTERS! There are times over the course of this book when I think that works, when the science itself makes for an exciting story. But there are other times when it just feels forced and distracting.

Mind you, this may be just a case of me going into the book with the wrong set of expectations. What I was really hoping for was a nice succinct overview of how scientific thinking on this topic has progressed since I studied it in college, twenty years ago. What I got was a bit less of that and a bit more "Ooh, let me tell you the juicy story of the rivalry between these two groups of researchers studying supernovae!" Yes, the science was still there, but not quite in the form I wanted it. Other people, particularly those who may be interested in this kind of topic but find complicated scientific stuff easier to process if it's a bit less concentrated, may find it more up their alley.

Rating: 3.5/5

VERY nice review!

Thank you! It can be kind of difficult to review these sorts of books, where you have mixed feelings about them and half of them is probably more you than the book. :)

Enjoyed reading your excellent review of The 4% Universe.... Betty, did it tell you much that didn't already know, as I was thinking that someone who was not a scientist might find it much more revealing.

It did tell me a few interesting things that were new to me. But (at least as far as the science is concerned, as opposed to the lives and rivalries of the scientists), there was actually not a whole lot that I didn't already know, either from my twenty-year-old astrophysics degree or from having read other books on related subjects more recently. It is certainly possible that someone coming into it with less prior knowledge might find it all much more compelling.

Great review of The 4% Universe. I still have it on my TBR list, but it's good to know what I'm getting into.

>100 fannyprice:: I'll be interested to see what you think when you get to it. Again, you may very well be happier with it than I was; judging by the reviews here on LT, a lot of people were.

14. The Dinner by Herman Koch



I don't want to say too much about the story here, as a big part of the experience of this novel is the way we learn very gradually who these characters are and what's been going on with them. I will say that it takes place over the course of one dinner in a fancy restaurant, that there are four people at said dinner, and that the novel is narrated by one of them, a man who -- it is clear from the outset -- doesn't particularly want to be there, and is currently feeling troubled about an issue involving his teenage son.

I will also say this... I've seen a lot of discussion, especially recently, about the question of whether it's necessary for a story's protagonist to be "likeable." I am, in general, on the "heck, no!" side of that debate. Likeable characters can be wonderful, and some kinds of stories really do need them. A novel in which the author wants to make his characters likeable and fails, for instance, can be painful in the extreme. But unpleasant and unsympathetic people can still be interesting, often deeply so, and can take us places, psychologically, where the nice guys can't necessarily go. So, yeah, my general attitude is, "Jerkwad characters? As long as they're interesting, bring 'em on!"

Well, I feel as if this book looked into my brain, saw that statement there, and took it as a challenge. As if it's trying very, very hard to push the limits of what I'm willing to accept on that score. As if it's daring me to feel so disgusted by these people it's sat me down to dinner with that I simply put the book down and don't pick it up again. Much to my surprise, there were moments when I actually wanted to do that. But I never did. In fact, it's more accurate to say that I kept tearing through the pages with a sort of compulsive trainwreck fascination. And in the end, in its own awful way, it really worked for me.

Rating: 4/5

How on earth did you manage to sum up my feelings about The Dinner so accurately?

Heh. I guess it may have had that same effect on a lot of people.

> 103: And mine!

Of course, I imagine you read it in Dutch, Connie! Which I am a little envious of. Not that the translation was bad, but there were definitely moments where I suspected it just hadn't been possible to capture the language precisely.

"Compulsive trainwreck fascination" - I totally get it!

Well, 'we' get the same feeling reading translations of books in the English language!

>107 avidmom:: It really is the best description I can come up with!

>108 connie53:: I think it's probably true for anything in translation, really.

Great reviews! I especially like the one of The 4% Universe. Interesting thoughts there.

Thanks!

Great review of The Dinner. I won't say that I loved it, but it struck me and it stuck with me. Also, re likeable characters, I totally agree with you. I'm not reading a book to find a date or a new best friend; I am reading to be entertained or edified.

>112 fannyprice:: I think that really captures my feeling for it, too. I can't say I loved it, either, but it really is striking, and I think it is going to stick with me. Which is good enough for me!

And I figure, I read for all kinds of reasons. One of them might be to spend some time with fun, pleasant fictional people. But that's only one tiny little thing that reading can sometimes do for me, not the one big, important thing it needs to do.

I thought the story started really normal, but the strangness came slowly creeping in until it was a really terrifying story.

>114 connie53:: Yeah, if it had been told in a different, more straightforward way, it probably would not have been nearly as effective, I think.

Yes, that was what I thought too!

15. Lexicon by Max Barry



This novel opens with two distinct story strands. The first involves a guy being kidnapped in an airport. The second features a sixteen-year-old girl who is recruited to attend a special school where students learn to control people with words. Not just in the usual way -- although they're good at that, too -- but by somehow using language to hack into the basic programming of the brain. Eventually, of course, it becomes clear that these two narratives are very intimately connected.

It's a really fun story, pretty much right from the very first page. The premise is imaginative and cool. There's a little action, a little horror, a little humor, a little bit of a love story, some interesting characters and a wonderfully twisty plot. There is maybe one plot hole that's kind of bugging me, but that doesn't remotely stop it from being an entertaining read.

Rating: 4/5

16. Outlaw Tales of New Mexico by Barbara Marriott



Fourteen brief accounts of people who committed various acts of murder and mayhem in New Mexico, back when the west was still very, very wild.

These are, for the most part colorful and violent stories about colorful and violent people. They're not necessarily as engagingly written as they might be, though. Marriott's prose is not especially polished, and there were times when I found it surprisingly difficult to keep track of names and events as they were presented to me. And this is definitely more about offering up some entertaining Wild West stories, rather than serious historical scholarship or anything, although there is at least some attempt at separating what probably actually happened from rumor and tall tales.

But it's a short, quick read, and I found it worth a look, if only for the local interest factor: I live in Socorro, NM, and there's no denying that there's a macabre fascination in reading about a mob of vigilantes stringing someone up in your own town.

Rating: 3/5

17. Locke & Key Volume 6: Alpha & Omega by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez



The final volume of the Locke & Key graphic novel series. And a sufficiently climactic conclusion it is, too, full of suspense and horror and violence and nobility and warmth. I enjoyed it a lot, and I'm sorry it's all over.

I wholeheartedly recommend this series as a whole, if you have any interest at all in a beautifully drawn fantasy/horror comic that tells a great story with great characters and makes excellent use of the graphic novel format. I'd strongly suggest picking up all six volumes and reading them at once, though, because the only thing I disliked about these books was the way that the loss of momentum in the long wait between installments did such a disservice to the story.

Rating: 4.5/5, although the whole thing, put all together, might well deserve a 5/5.

Ooh, Volume 6 is out? I'm up to V4 but was saving 5 & 6 to read together.

It is! Which I hadn't realized myself until a few days ago, but once I did, Amazon Prime got it into my hot little hands right away.

Not on amazon UK quite yet :-(

Aww. Hopefully soon?

I like your review of Outlaw Tales of New Mexico. I'm thinking about reading it now. Might as well put it on my wishlist.

Lexicon sounds intriguing.

>117 bragan: Lexicon does sound good.

I don't know that I recommend rushing out and buying Outlaw Tales of New Mexico or anything, as there are probably better books about this sort of thing. But it has the advantage of being something you can sit down and read in a couple of hours, and a lot of the subjects are interesting.

I do recommend Lexicon, for those to whom it sounds interesting.

>117 bragan: Oooooh, Lexicon sounds right up my alley. I really enjoyed both Jennifer Government and Company, so onto the wishlist it goes.

Jennifer Government has been on my wishlist for a while. I think, after reading Lexicon, my interest in it has moved up another notch.

18. The Secret Country by Pamela C. Dean



This is the first book in a fantasy series from the 1980s, which features a group of children who have invented an elaborate game of magic and intrigue set in a realm called The Secret Country. Although they're quite certain they made the whole thing up, one day they find themselves transported to that world, which sure looks surprisingly real.

I have such mixed feelings about this book. For much of it, I honestly couldn't decide whether I liked it or disliked it. It does have a good premise, and Dean does some interesting things with the idea, including a lot of really thoughtful and clever touches. And there is the core of a decent plot, although it takes about half the book to get going, and doesn't really get very far before this volume is over. (It should, by the way, be noted that this is definitely not a self-contained story. Which is OK; I had a strong suspicion that it wouldn't be. Still, when I am in charge of the world, there is going to be an unbreakable rule stating that any novel that effectively ends in a "to be continued" must say so in clearly visible letters on the front cover.) Also, I don't know whether this was originally marketed for kids or adults, but it does read very much like a book for adults, with none of the clunky, simplistic writing you sometimes get in kids' stories.

But, while it does get better as it goes along, I had a lot of trouble getting into it. The biggest problem, I think, is that it jumps into the fantasy realm entirely too soon. We don't get to really know these characters or get a good sense of what their game or their invented world is like before we're abruptly plunged into it. And, while the characters themselves are a little off-balance at all the things they find surprising and unexpected, at least they knew and understood (and cared about!) things a lot more than I did going in. It honestly felt like the book was missing some important introductory chapters. On top of which, Dean often seems to avoid describing things too closely, or to write in a somewhat subtle and oblique kind of way. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but put these two things together and for far too much of the book, I felt very much like an estranged outsider, looking in at the story through a slightly smudgy glass.

Also, for reasons I can't really put my finger on, I found the Shakespeare-style dialog the fantasy characters use strangely irritating. Also strange and irritating is the fact that, while the kids occasionally complain that those characters are hard to understand, when they're doing their playacting for their game, they somehow manage to declaim the same kind of dialog flawlessly. It's possible, I suppose, that there will turn out to be a plot reason for that, although I kind of doubt it. The fact that these children all seem to be intimately and inexplicably familiar with Shakespeare -- they even quote him a lot -- makes me think that this is a case of the author projecting her own interests a little too enthusiastically onto her characters.

Still. For all my complaints, I am just interested enough in this that I'm planning to continue with the series at some point. (If for no other reason than that I already have a copy of the fourth book. Although I think that's actually a separate, but related story.) I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to get to it, though.

Rating: This is a difficult one to rate. I'm going to call it 3.5/5.

How difficult it is to resist a series once you start, you always hope it will be worthwhile in the end.

>131 baswood:: It really is! I at least find it easier to abandon a series in the middle than I do to give up on a single book (which, for me, is practically impossible). But unless it's completely awful, there is always the optimistic hope it will get better.

I think there are reasons to think I might like this particular series better as it goes along, though. Here's hoping I'm right.

Maybe it has something to do with the book being written in the '80?

>133 connie53:: I don't think that's actually it, really. It doesn't feel dated at all. It feels a bit weird, in some ways, but not particularly dated.

Okay, I thought it might be the dated thing. Weird is something else.

Datedness can definitely cause issues sometimes, it's very true.

19. The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: A Psychiatrist's Stories of His Most Bizarre Cases by Gary Small, M.D. & Gigi Vorgan



Psychiatrist Gary Small shares stories of some of the oddest and most memorable cases he has encountered in his career, including people suffering from such problems as false pregnancy, weird nightmares, complicated addictions, and mass hysteria.

It's interesting to get a look into the practice of psychiatry that goes beyond the cliches of "Tell me about your mother" or "Here, have some antidepressants" (although there are certainly enough examples of both of those things). And many of these cases are indeed interesting. As a human, myself, I'm always interested in what goes on in -- and what can go wrong with -- the human mind.

But, I don't know. There's just something about Small, or about his writing (or about the writing of his wife/co-author, perhaps) that rubs me the wrong way. I think it's partly that he can't seem to quite decide whether this is a collection of interesting cases or a personal memoir, and keeps including extraneous, uninteresting information about his personal life. Partly it's the way he includes lots of dialog that cannot possibly be verbatim, which often feels really stilted and simplified. (Admittedly, in a book like this, that sort of thing is probably inevitable, but it can certainly be done more smoothly. And the fact that he never explicitly discusses the fact that that's what he's doing doesn't thrill me, either.) He includes lots of conversations with his co-workers, too, which often have a hearty "ha-ha, look at us guys all having a laugh together!" tone, where the people and the jokes in question tend to come across as more obnoxious than anything. Also, while he's often self-deprecating and is willing to discuss his own uncertainties and false assumptions as he attempts to figure out his patients' problems, I can't help noticing the fact that all these cases ultimately make him look good, sometimes by showing up other doctors whom he portrays as hidebound idiots. Now, maybe it's a false impression, but all of this together combines to make the whole thing feel a little off to me. A little self-absorbed, maybe. A little artificial.

But that's not even what really bugs me the most. Because, all right, it comes as absolutely no surprise that therapists sometimes find their patients boring, or annoying, or unpleasant. And, in general, I am all for honesty and openness in this kind of account. But I cannot help feeling that it's deeply unprofessional for a therapist to talk publicly about finding his patients boring or annoying or unpleasant, no matter how many personal details he's changed. And Small does this kind of a lot. I think I reached the height of my discomfort with him when he quotes a patient as saying, "This is completely confidential, right?" and his reply of "Of course" left me exclaiming, "Except it's clearly not, because you put it in your book!" In other contexts, maybe that would have bothered me less, but with this book, I just can't quite get past it.

Rating: A possibly unkind 2.5/5

As a human, myself,
LOl! Me too .... (well, at least on a good day.)

It does sound a bit unethical ... and annoying.
Maybe he needs therapy on how not to be a schmuck!

The thing is, he doesn't exactly come across as a bad guy, overall . But... But that doesn't mean I don't look askance at him. Frequently. :)

Excellent review of Small.

Thanks!

>87 bragan: Interesting review, thanks!

Great review of The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head, Betty. Although the topic is interesting to me, I won't read it, based on your comments about the book.

I definitely recommend reading Oliver Sacks instead. :)

I read the first two books in The Secret Country series back when I was a teenager. I remember liking them, but I now only remember something about the towels being different, so it really didn't stick.

Wow, it's amazing the weird, random details we remember!

>137 bragan:, Betty, thanks for warning against The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: A Psychiatrist's Stories of His Most Bizarre Cases. Based on the title, this reminded me of Oliver Sacks' books and seemed intriguing. But it seems kind of annoying.

I suspect I may have been more bugged by it than a lot of people might be, quite possibly even more than it really deserved. But I can confidently say: Oliver Sacks he ain't.

20. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson



Ursula is born in a snowstorm in 1910... and promptly dies. Then she is born in a snowstorm in 1910, lives a short while, and dies. And is born in a snowstorm in 1910... Round and round the cycle goes, with Ursula living her life over and over again, the same but different, as she avoids one disaster only to be found by new ones, making choices that send her down new paths, or down old ones in new ways, and remembering her past lifetimes mainly only in brief, odd moments of déjà vu.

I feel reasonably comfortable saying that this is a good novel. It's nicely written, with a creative premise. It does some really interesting things with structure, and its central conceit allows it to show us the period of history from one world war to the next from several different angles, which it does quite vividly. I have to say, though, that I think it suffered a bit from being over-hyped, for me. I'd seen so many great reviews and so much high praise for it that I ended up spending a lot of the novel thinking to myself, "I like this well enough, but I was expecting something a little more gripping, more affecting, more insightful. Just... something more." I think part of the problem is that it's slow; given the nature of the story, there's not a great deal of what I suppose you might call forward narrative thrust. And Ursula, no doubt because of the malleable nature of her life, never really felt very well-defined to me, and was thus less easy to empathize with than she probably should have been.

But, somewhere towards the end, I somehow forgot to keep thinking about how I was hoping for something a bit different and just became entirely engrossed, to the point where, 30 or so pages from the end, I found myself feeling deeply resentful of having to put it down so I could go and feed the cats. Then, when I did finish it, I wasn't at all sure what I thought, or exactly what I was meant to take away from it all. But I very glad I read it, and, in the end, I think it's thought-provoking in a lot of interesting and subtle ways that I may still be mulling over for a while yet.

Rating: 4/5

Enjoyed reading your thoughts of what reading Life After Life was like for you.

But I very glad I read it, and, in the end, I think it's thought-provoking in a lot of interesting and subtle ways that I may still be mulling over for a while yet.
IMO, that's the real mark of excellence for a book - something that stays with you.

Mind you, part of what it left me mulling over was to what extent things, in the end, actually made any sense. But even that can be interesting.

I loved Life After Life. I remember feeling that it had so many layers. I don't re-read many books, but that is one I will eventually read again, just to see what I may have missed the first time.

Your review of Life after Life is very interesting. I'm trying to decide if I want to read Life or white is Witching hey both look like they are meant to confuse and leave you uncertain. Both to my mind sound excellent.

>152 NanaCC:: It does seem like something that's likely to reward re-reading. I'm quite sure there are some connections and echoes between lifetimes that I missed. I think once is probably enough for me, though.

>153 stretch:: I don't know if I would say it "confused," although the ending did a bit. But it's definitely complicated and non-linear. White Is for Witching looks interesting.

21. Because I Said So!: The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids by Ken Jennings



Ken Jennings of Jeopardy! fame takes a look at the various dire warnings and bits of received wisdom parents pass down to their kids -- Don't cross your eyes, or your face will freeze like that! Most of the heat leaves your body through your head, so you need to wear a hat! -- and examines just how true they really are.

I thought this might be mildly interesting and perhaps amusing, but I was surprised by just how much I enjoyed it. Jennings does a good job of addressing each topic in a clear, thorough way in just a page or two. He cites real science and employs some admirable critical thinking skills. I like the fact that he doesn't oversimplify things in order to declare them true or false, but instead places them on a spectrum of validity: this one is "mostly true," that one is "false, but..." He also puts a lot of the risks of childhood into perspective, pointing out that the things parents make a big deal out of warning their kids about -- running with scissors! tainted Halloween candy! -- are actually not the things kids are most likely to be hurt by. He doesn't shy away from talking about topics that are provocative or just plain gross, either. (I expect a lot of parents will look askance at his conclusion that it's not that great to teach kids not to talk to strangers. And I'm still wincing over the section on whether your eyeballs will pop out if you sneeze with your eyes open.) And he does it all in a lively, humor-filled way. It was a lot of fun to read, and I actually did learn quite a lot. Mostly about how much my mother lied to me.

While this seems like a book that just about anybody is likely to enjoy, I think it might be especially interesting for parents who want to know just how right or wrong all the stuff they've been telling their kids is, and for smart-ass kids who want ammunition for arguments with their parents.

Rating: 4/5

155 > OOOOooooo! On my TBR it goes. :)

>156 lesmel:: Yay! I definitely recommend it.

That sounds like fun! Good that it relies on science and critical thinking skills.

>158 rebeccanyc:: I was actually pretty impressed, especially with the way he talks a lot about risk assessment (although he doesn't use the term).

It will be interesting to read the part about kids and strangers. There's a smaller trend that I've seen/heard/read about that parents are teaching their children not to fear and/or ignore strangers; but to evaluate them for potential threats. Though I don't have children, "Stranger Danger" always struck me as too simplistic a method of "protecting" children. All that strategy seems to do is hamper children socially and emotionally.

>160 lesmel:: That seems to be pretty much exactly his position on the subject, that it's better to take the approach of teaching kids to evaluate adults' dangerousness based on their actions, to be wary of people who try to hurt them or touch them or make them break safety rules or want them to get into a car. Jennings makes the point, which I've seen many times before, that the vast majority of child abduction and child abuse comes from people the kids actually know, so instilling a simple fear of strangers isn't actually a very good way of protecting them. He also points out that it can actually endanger kids, who won't go to an adult for help when they really need it. (He mention a couple of examples, including one kid who was lost in the woods for four days and nearly died. Except that he was actually on the trail the entire time. He should have been easy to find, but every time the search parties came down the trail looking for him, he'd hide in the bushes from the dangerous strangers.) He also does question the possible social and emotional costs of being overprotective towards children, in this and a couple of other contexts.

All of which seems eminently sensible to me. But, not having kids, I'm not sure if I'm fully entitled to have an opinion. :)

22. The Afterlife Diet by Daniel Pinkwater



Fifth-rate book editor Milton Cramer dies and discovers that heaven is basically a very uninspiring resort camp. Also, everybody he meets there is fat, because the thin people don't want to have to look at fat people in their heaven. And from there, things just get... strange.

I loved Daniel Pinkwater's kids' books when I was young, and the ones I've read or reread as an adult, I've mostly also loved. They're just so wonderfully offbeat and nutty and inventive. Well, this one is also offbeat and nutty and inventive, but it does leave me thinking that maybe his particular kind of nuttiness works a little better in kids' books that it does in an adult one. (And this one is definitely written for adults.)

Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of cleverness here. There's some stuff that's very funny, in its own ridiculous way. And there's some impressively vicious satire aimed at the way that fat people are treated with contempt in our society and at the exploitative nature of the diet industry. But while some of the satiric stuff is scathingly effective, I think it's undermined somewhat by being a bit overdone, as well as by the way Pinkwater himself perpetuates the stereotype of fat people as gluttonously obsessed with food. And the story itself has all the coherent structure of a plate of spaghetti. (Note: one of the side effects of reading this apparently involves an irresistible urge to describe things using food metaphors.)

Admittedly, this is perhaps not something I should have picked up while suffering a head cold and the resultant thick, sluggish thought processes. I kept encountering characters, thinking their name looked familiar, and having to flip back through the book to figure out that, oh, yes, they'd popped up briefly thirty pages earlier in a completely different context for no obvious reason. Because it's just that kind of a book.

Rating: It's kind of hard to come up with a fair rating for this one. Let's call it 3.5/5

I'm probably one of those guilty of inflating expectations for Life After Life. At the risk of doing it again, White is For Witching is excellent. Creepy, weird family dynamics, narrative unreliability. My favorite things!

>163 fannyprice:: I think it was a collective effort, for which no one person is to blame. :)

And I have to say, that does all sound pretty great...

23. First Men to the Moon by Wernher von Braun



Von Braun wrote this book in 1958, more than a decade before the first Apollo moon landing, as a sort of speculation (or perhaps proposal) as to what such a mission might be like. He offers a detailed fictionalized account of the trip from liftoff to landing, including a few things that could go wrong along the way. In the margins of this story, he provides lots of explanations of the science and technology involved, including much discussion of orbital mechanics.

As a big space history buff, I found this fascinating, especially the way in which von Braun's imaginary journey differs from the real one made such a relatively short time later. For example, he posits a winged reentry vehicle, and has his astronauts land on the moon with it attached, rather than using a separate lander. He also depicts considerably less communication and coordination with ground control back on Earth than was actually the case, and fails to anticipate the extent to which the eyes of the world would be watching the entire thing. And, rather heart-breakingly, he has the main focus of the expedition being an evaluation of the moon with an eye towards future human habitation, which he seems to assume as the obvious and inevitable next step after the initial exploration.

Von Braun also includes a section at the front answering the questions he most frequently got from the public. I think nothing in here illustrates the difference between this early period of space exploration and now better than the fact that the very first question there is, "Man's abode is the earth. Are we not invading God's kingdom as we prepare for human travel through the universe?" Wow.

This isn't a particularly remarkable book in terms of the writing or anything; it really is interesting mainly just as a historical curiosity. But for me, that was more than enough.

Rating: How to even rate something like this? Well, splitting the difference between the book's inherent qualities and its interest value to me as an odd little piece of space history, I guess I'll call it 3.5/5.

When I think of Werner von Braun, I think of Tom Lehrer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5JmDNpjKYc

"Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down?"

>166 rebeccanyc:: Ha! Funnily enough I was just mentioning the same thing to the person who gave me First Men to the Moon. I was actually planning to read it after I finished Life After Life, but that featured a lot of scenes set during the Blitz, and after that every time I looked at the von Braun book I kept hearing that song in my head. I figured that was probably not the best mindset to approach it with, so I read a couple of other things first, instead. :)

(And Tom Lehrer is great, isn't he?)

If it wasn't for "October Sky", I probably would never have known who Wernher von Braun was. What a neat book to have read & simply just to have!

It is a neat little book! I just e-mailed the person who gave it to me to let him know how delighted I was to have it. I'm not entirely sure where he got it, but it appears to have originally belonged to a school library. Where, if the card that's still there in its pocket in the back is to be believed, one person checked it out, in 1964.

October Sky, the movie, is well worth watching. I have the book still on my TBR Pile, but I'm willing to bet it'll prove to be just as good.

#167 I love Tom Lehrer. I think I have all his CDs (dating myself).

>170 rebeccanyc:: You're dating yourself? I'm pretty sure I've still got some of his stuff on tape somewhere. Although whether I'd have anything to play it on now is another question.

I had it on tape (if not records). I had to convert.

So, basically, we're all old. But have good taste in music/humor. :)

Very entertained by your Wernher von Braun review. I agree with with Susie, a neat book to have read.

I'm catching up from a ways back. I'm little sad that dark matter book did not work for you, but noting that it still actually might work for me. And, really, I'm so curious now, how much of your body heat does leave your body through your head?

If it wasn't for "October Sky", I probably would never have known who Wernher von Braun was.

If it wasn't for October Sky I would never have known who Homer Hickam was! What an amazing story. Werner von Braun I knew about.

>174 dchaikin:: Yes, the dark matter book wasn't really what I wanted, but I do think somebody going into it with the right expectations and a slightly different background might like it more.

Apparently there are no actual good figures for how much heat leaves your body through your head. The only study done, and the one where the 80% figure comes from, involved soldiers who were bundled up in cold-weather gear. And, well, of course 80% of the heat they lost came from their heads. It was the only part exposed! One suspects if they'd worn hats but left their hands uncovered our mothers would be citing some similar figure to make us put on gloves.

>175 SassyLassy:: I had heard of Homer Hickam before watching October Sky, but only from all the people telling me to watch/read October Sky!

24. Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse



This is a Jeeves & Wooster novel. It's got all the things you usually find in a Jeeves & Wooster novel: ridiculous situations, complicated romantic entanglements, a hilariously hapless Bertie finding himself in various troublesome situations and an unflappable Jeeves sweeping in repeatedly to save the day. Really, all of these are similar enough that after you've read a few of them, they start to take on a slight feeling of déjà vu.

But absolutely none of that matters. What matters is that when I picked this book up, I was feeling grumpy and unwell, and by the time I'd finished reading the first sentence, I was grinning from ear to ear. Such is the marvelous magic of Wodehouse.

Rating: 4.5/5

I'm about to start a stretch of Wodehouse therapy too! Have you seen the TV adaptation with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie?

>177 bragan: I love the Jeeves and Wooster stories. Happy making for sure.

>178 LolaWalser:: I have not. But thank you for reminding me that I was intending to go and put it on my Netflix queue!

>179 NanaCC:: It's just impossible not to smile while you're reading those, isn't it? Sometimes you need that.

Oh I have to check out Because I said so.

Wodehouse has never appealed to me but I'm starting to think it's time.

It's hard to describe the appeal of Wodehouse. It's almost entirely in the way he writes, rather than what he writes.

I have thumbed your reviews of The Afterlife Diet and First Men To The Moon (my first thought also was 'Gather round while I sing you...') - both excellently written, although I won't be reading them myself.

(Note: one of the side effects of reading this apparently involves an irresistible urge to describe things using food metaphors.) - I quite often feel that I am writing a review in the style of the book, if it has a distinctive one!

>183 wandering_star: Thank you!

I have very occasionally, after reading a particularly immersive book with a particularly distinctive style, found myself even thinking in that style for a while. It can be a little disconcerting.

25. Walking the Amazon: 860 Days. One Step at a Time by Ed Stafford



Ed Stafford spent well over two full years traversing the entire length of the Amazon on foot. Why? As far as I can tell, the answer to that seems to be "Well, nobody'd ever done it before, and, hey, why not?"

This book wasn't quite what I was expecting. Stafford doesn't describe the jungle in vivid, you-are-there terms for the armchair traveler, and there isn't too much in the way of long, thoughtful musings about the ecological significance of the rainforest. Instead, he recounts the details of his journey step by step in a linear fashion, including where they slept, the people they encountered, what kind of time they made, what they did for food, and how much trouble they had financing it all. He also focuses a lot on the psychological aspects of spending that long traipsing through the wilderness, freely admitting that it was a struggle -- and often a losing one -- for him not to get depressed and short-tempered and behave like a jerk to his traveling companions. (Having experienced more than enough of this phenomenon myself just on a three-day hiking trip, I find myself sympathizing with everybody involved, there.)

Even excusing his self-confessed periods of jerkiness, it's a little hard for me to know quite what to make of Stafford. He struck me as entirely too over-confident and cavalier about the whole thing at the beginning, but you do have to admire his fortitude, if nothing else. And there is a certain kind of honesty about this narrative that I came to appreciate. He's not trying to turn this journey into something it's not; he's just telling us what it was like for him, day to day. Although no matter how much of a look he tries to give us into his head, I must confess that I never will understand the mindset of someone who would just randomly decide to spend years of his life doing something as miserably uncomfortable and essentially pointless as this.

Also alien to me is the Amazon itself, and I don't think I'd realized before just how vague and stereotyped my ideas about the place were. For some reason, I was profoundly surprised by the fact that, for a good portion of the trip, they were able to find small settlements to stay at most nights, and sometimes even large towns with hotels. In retrospect, it's silly that that should surprise me. It's a huge, navigable river. Of course people live along it. It's just that apparently the entry labelled "Amazon" in my mental encyclopedia contained little more than an image of trackless jungle populated by the thinly scattered remnants of hunter-gatherer tribes. So it was interesting to get some better perspective on that. And it was also interesting to get a sense of what this kind of expedition is like in the 21st century. There's something utterly bizarre to me, somehow, about the idea of someone hacking his way through the jungle with a machete all day, making camp in some isolated spot, and pulling out his laptop to check his e-mail and update his blog. It really brought home to me just how very, very connected the modern world is.

Anyway. I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about this book at first, but I found myself getting more and more into it by the end. I think it was the descriptions of moving with immense difficulty through a landscape of chest-high water and tangled thorns during the river's flood season that probably did it. There's just something weirdly compelling about experiencing that kind of awfulness vicariously. Although I am, of course, quite happy to leave experiencing it first-hand to the Ed Staffords of the world.

Rating: A somewhat generous 4/5

Did he encounter a lot of bugs and reptiles?

>186 RidgewayGirl: More bugs than reptiles, although he does have a story about how he had some fishing nets seriously damaged by caimans.

The bugs apparently were awful, but he claims to have gotten acclimated to them and to really not even feel the mosquito bites anymore after a while. And he seemed remarkably unfazed by having a botfly lay eggs in his head. I would have been running screaming for the hills; he just describes it as a mildly annoying inconvenience.

The bugs - that would be enough to kill any romantic notions I might have had of wanting to camp in the amazon.

Years ago, as a college freshman, I got lost in a book that got into the natural aspects of the rain forests...I need to look up the title...In the Rainforest by Catherine Caufield. It was assigned for an economics class.

There's something utterly bizarre to me, somehow, about the idea of someone hacking his way through the jungle with a machete all day, making camp in some isolated spot, and pulling out his laptop to check his e-mail and update his blog.

Yes, that seems totally bizarre to me too.

I guess I have the romantic, undeveloped vision of the Amazon too, based largely on fictional accounts, especially The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa, but others as well. That may not have literally been the Amazon, but it involved a South American rainforest/jungle and a river.

>186 RidgewayGirl: >187 bragan: Oh dang forgot I was in public and that made me cringe and people are looking at me. Whoops. So gross!

My favorite jungle books:

Stranger in the Forest on Foot Across Borneo by Eric Hansen

The Forest People by Colin Turnbull

>188 dchaikin: If you come up with that title I'd like to know about that book. In the Rainforest pops up as a fourth grade book

Uh oh - Just found the right link for that Dan and your review and I'm busted once again as ignorant for using the term jungle. Think I'll check out the book tho:

In the Rainforest: Report from a Strange, Beautiful, Imperiled World.

>185 bragan: Thanks for the great review!

>190 mkboylan: - I didn't even know I had a review posted. Comes across a bit snotty on the word jungle, apologies for that. I fixed the touchstone in my earlier post.

>191 dchaikin: Didn't sound snotty to me. I thought it was funny. Maybe because I know you somewhat from your thread. Also, I am now smarter!

Whee, more books to look at and ponder adding to my wishlist! Thank you guys.

Also, I wish to point out that I was just following Stafford's lead in using the word "jungle." :)

>190 mkboylan: Sorry for making you cringe!

26. Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie



A group of Spokane Indians form a rock and blues band with the help -- if "help" is quite the right word -- of Robert Johnson's supernaturally gifted guitar. Although that description doesn't give any true sense of what this novel is about. What it's really about is the blues, both the musical and the existential kinds, about what it means be an American Indian in the modern world, and what life on a reservation can do to people. I suppose you'd call it magic realism, although what it emphatically isn't is the kind of romanticized New Age-y mysticism that white people like to associate with Native Americans. (Alexie has some rather uncomplimentary things to say about that stuff.)

The story is a little unfocused, and I don't think this is nearly as sharp and powerful as his The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. But I was deeply impressed by that book, so don't take that statement as any kind of insult. Alexie's just a damned good writer, and, fantasy elements or not, there's always a strong feeling of truth to his work.

Rating: 4/5

27. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken



When her parents leave for a long sea voyage, little Bonnie and her cousin are left in the care of an evil woman who just wants to take over Bonnie's father's estate, and they find themselves facing various kind of hardship before they can find a way to expose her for the fraud she is.

This is a decent enough kids' book, and I give it some points for being written in a way that doesn't talk down to its audience, but I don't quite see why it's considered something of a minor children's classic. And I think it's the sort of thing I would have done better to read when I was still a kid, as my adult brain kept getting hung up on how artificial the faux-Victorian dialog sounded and asking all kinds of over-analytical questions. (Like, why is England suddenly full of ravenous wolves?)

Rating: 3.5/5

I liked your review of Reservation Blues. I need to read Sherman Alexie again soon. He really doesn't think well of non-Native Americans appropriating bits of Indian culture or religion, does he?

>196 RidgewayGirl: He really doesn't, and it's hard to blame him.

Imagine the outcry if companies held team building exercises for mid-level management incorporating communion and baptism by a "real" Christian preacher.

28. The Nerdist Way: How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life) by Chris Hardwick



Comedian Chris Hardwick, host of The Nerdist podcast and various TV shows, offers his advice on mental health and motivation, physical fitness, organization, and fulfilling your ambitions.

Generally speaking, I have a very low opinion of self-help books. But I do enjoy things that speak to my nerdy side. (Which, honestly, is far and away the biggest side I have.) So when I found this book in one of those discount book catalogs I love so much, I figured I'd give it a look.

Well, it's certainly nerdy enough. I mean, Hardwick actually suggests drawing up a Dungeons & Dragons-style character sheet for yourself. It is still very much a self-help book, though, with all the rah-rah cheesiness I tend to associate with the self-help industry. Not that his advice is bad, really. Some of it, like the D&D character sheet, seems kind of dumb and gimmicky. But much of it is reasonable enough, if not exactly bursting with insight. Hardwick claims this stuff helped him get his life together, and I suppose I can see where some might find it useful. But there's not a whole lot here that really does very much for me. Maybe because my problems aren't that big, maybe because I don't have the kind of creative ambition he seems to be speaking to, maybe because I'm just not the kind of person who finds motivation in the pages of a self-help book, no matter how nerd-oriented it might be.

Also, while Hardwick's hyper-manic, goofy-twist-on-every-sentence style is entertaining in smallish doses, I find that after a chapter or so it starts rapidly crossing the line back and forth between amusing and annoying.

Rating: 2.5/5

>199 bragan: Generally speaking, I have a very low opinion of self-help books.
Me too.
This was pointed out to me by my son. I had spent the day organizing our messy bookshelves in the living room and when he came home from school I explained my new "system."

"The classics are here; the history stuff is here, and here's all this self-help crap."

He said, "Self-help crap! Guess we know how you feel about those books!"

At least Hardwick's book sounds like it tries to be funny and entertaining.

>200 avidmom: I believe I own a grand total of two self-help books now: this one and Richard Wiseman's 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot, which I kind of think of as "the self-help book for people who think self-help books are full of it."

The Nerdist Way is definitely trying to be funny and entertaining, even though he's clearly very serious about the subject matter. I was kind of hoping that it would be funny and entertaining (and nerdy) enough to overcome my antipathy for self-help stuff and be worth reading, but... meh.

The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase sequence was something I loved when I was a kid - I keep thinking it would be good to re-read and see how it holds up. I think I remember liking the character of Dido Twite (was she in this one, or Black Hearts In Battersea?), but not too much else about the books.

>202 wandering_star: Dido Twite was not in this one, although someone already told me elsewhere that she was the best thing about the series and I should at least read Black Hearts in Battersea so I could make her acquaintance. I am vaguely considering it.

29. The Spellmans Strike Again by Lisa Lutz



This is book number four in the Spellman Files series, featuring Izzy Spellman and her family of private detectives, all of whom seem to spend as much time practicing their skills on each other as they do on behalf of their clients. This time, Izzy is investigating a corrupt fellow PI, getting caught up in her sister's crusade to free the wrongfully imprisoned, setting up a friend as a combination butler and spy, and pondering the question of why all the doorknobs in her parents' home keep disappearing. But the plot, such as it is, almost doesn't matter. The fun in all of these books is in Izzy's interactions with her quirky friends and family, and in watching her character development as she slowly evolves into something vaguely resembling a mature adult.

Like the rest of the series, it's a breezy, entertaining read that's just about perfect for when you're in the mood for something light, but not too relentlessly fluffy or over-the-top silly.

This feels a bit as if it were intended as a wrap-up to the series, but I know there's at least one book after this, so apparently it didn't take. Which is fine by me. I'm not tired of it yet.

Rating: 4/5

30. Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!: A World Without World War I by Richard Ned Lebow



Richard Ned Lebow firmly believes that World War I was not inevitable. In fact, he contends that if Archduke Ferdinand had not been assassinated -- an easy enough possibility to imagine -- the war would not only not have happened in the same way or at the same time, nothing like it would have happened at all. And if it hadn't... what then? He considers a couple of the myriad possibilities: a "best plausible world" and a "worst plausible world." The former involves a world that is much more peaceful and stable, although this benefit comes at the cost of slower social and technological progress. The latter features oppressive regimes and high international tensions in Europe, culminating in a limited but destructive nuclear exchange between Great Britain and Germany.

First off, I have to say that I'm probably not the ideal audience for this book. Despite the (honestly rather half-hearted) attempts of my high school history teacher, I've never felt like I had any real understanding of the complicated political landscape that made WWI possible. I was rather hoping the what-if scenarios of this book might provide an engaging way to learn more about how things went in the real world, and why, and in what ways they might have gone differently. But I was mostly disappointed on that front, as Lebow's discussions of the subject tend to be dense and dry, to the point where I sometimes found it difficult to keep my eyes from glazing over.

But as far as I can tell, at least, his ideas about where things might have gone in the immediate aftermath of Ferdinand's non-assassination do seem pretty well-grounded and thoughtful. From there, however, things get more and more speculative. Which is pretty much inevitable, but at some point he seems to become way more interested in playing around with these fictional universes he's invented than in anything else, going on and on and on about things like what various famous people might be doing in his alternate worlds. This is more readable than the dense historical political commentary, but after a while it starts to feel kind of self-indulgent, and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of point to most of it. Also, it's often not immediately clear when he starts talking about some historical development or other whether it's something that happened in the real world or something he made up for his alternate history scenario, and that kind of drove me crazy.

All that having been said, these alternate universes he's imagined are interesting, and the question of what WWI actually meant to the world and how things might have gone differently without it is well worth exploring. And Lebow's clearly put an impressive amount of thought into it all. It's just that the execution is lacking. Ultimately, this book felt like it was trying to pretend to be a serious work about the contingencies of history and the significance of the war, when the author really just wanted to invent nifty alternate history scenarios, delve into all their little nooks and crannies, and narrate their most important events. Both of those things are perfectly fine, I think, but trying to do both at once seems to have led to not doing either one particularly well.

Rating: 2.5/5

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)

>205 bragan:, Enjoyed your thoughts on Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives. I've still got to read it for ER, but I keep hearing poor things. :(

>206 fannyprice: Well, I can at least say that I didn't think it was unmitigatedly awful, just disappointing. So maybe you'll get something worthwhile out of it? Even if you don't, at least it's not very long.

31. Red Planet Blues by Robert J. Sawyer



Alex Lomax, the only private detective on Mars, finds himself caught up first in a bizarre case of identity theft, and then in complicated attempts by various people to either find or protect a site full of incredibly valuable ancient Martian fossils.

Like other novels of Sawyer's that I've read, this one features a bit too much in the way of unbelievable exposition-laden dialog, and, except for the protagonist, the characters are mostly pretty flat. I also could really have done without the seemingly endless parade of gorgeous and often scantily-clad women for our hero to shamelessly ogle. (Seriously, do men ever realize how off-putting that sort of thing can get for the female portions of their audience? Do they even care? No, wait, don't answer that.)

Fortunately, however, none of those flaws prevents this from being a really enjoyable story. The plot is engaging and full of a lot of twists and turns. (Maybe almost too many twists and turns, but what the heck, it's fun.) The Martian setting, with its frontier Gold Rush-style sensibility, is nicely realized. And the narrative voice is entertaining; Lomax clearly enjoys giving off that smart-alecky gumshoe vibe, and he's equally as amusing when he does it well and when he does it badly.

Great literature it ain't, but it's a quick, pleasant read that should appeal to both SF and detective fans.

Rating: 4/5

>208 bragan: Sounds like fun. Love the title!

>209 avidmom: Yes, isn't that a great title? Apparently Sawyer asked for suggestions from his fans when his publisher didn't like the title he initially proposed, and four different people came up with it independently.

>194 bragan:, a bit late, but I liked your review. Would you recommend The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven be read first, or is Reservation Blues a good way to start with Sherman Alexie?

>211 stretch: I think you can read either one first, really. Reservation Blues has some of the same characters from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, but it stands on its own perfectly well. I might recommend Lone Ranger first, just because I do think it's somewhat better, but the linked short story format might not appeal to everybody as well as a novel does.

If you like YA, you could also start with The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is what I did.

Hi Bragan, just popping in to keep up with your reading.

Hello! Here I am, still reading along. :)

32. Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park by Lee H. Whittlesey.



Author Lee Whittlesey lays out an account of all the known fatalities that have occurred in (or, sometimes, just outside of) Yellowstone National Park, from the mid-1800s up to the present. Included are deaths caused by wildlife, falls, boiling hot springs, drowning, falling rocks, lightning, murder, suicide, and a variety of other causes. (The only thing he leaves out are car and snowmobile accidents, which are numerous and about which there usually isn't very much to say.)

By the time I got to the end, the relentless list of deaths was beginning to be a little bit much, an odd and slightly disturbing combination of the tedious and the morbid. But overall, I found the book bizarrely compelling. Some of the events chronicled here are little more than brief listings of what happened when to whom, but many of them are stories that are strange, gruesome, heartbreaking, or all three at once. And they're conveyed with a real sense of humanity; no matter what may have caused their deaths, Whittlesey never loses sight of the fact that these were all real people with real loved ones.

And the point of it all isn't simply to appeal to readers' morbid curiosity. Whittlesey believes these are important pieces of Park history, and they are certainly interesting from that perspective. But, more than that, in the course of relating these events he touches on a lot of important issues involving the extent to which national parks have legal responsibilities to keep visitors safe, what park visitors need to do to protect themselves, the sometimes confused and naive ways in which people relate to the wilderness and its dangers, and the indisputable fact that no wild place can ever be completely safe and no safe place can ever be truly wild.

Having read through this whole thing, I now have a heartfelt plea to make to anyone visiting Yellowstone, or any other national park or wilderness area: for the love of sanity, pay attention to the rules and recommendations. They honestly do exist for good reasons, and they do apply to you. Yes, you. Yes, even the one about keeping your dog on a leash. Especially the one about keeping your dog on a leash. (There is one awful, awful story in here that starts with a loose dog, which I will never be able to get out of my head.) And if you don't care enough about your own safety, at least spare a thought for the poor park rangers, because having to retrieve some poor idiot's mangled, gory corpse from a grizzly bear can surely ruin their entire day.

Rating: 4/5

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)

33. Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley



Helen McGill's brother has become a celebrated author, while she has been relegated to cooking all his meals and doing most of the work around their farmhouse as he spends more and more time away. Then, one day, a traveling bookseller arrives, hoping to sell his entire operation to her brother. On a whim, Helen buys it herself, and sets off on her own literary adventure.

It's a charming, good-hearted little story, one that's calculated to appeal to book-lovers, and, at novella-length, is exactly as long as it needs to be. It's also left me rather wistfully longing for a life spent wandering the countryside in a horse-drawn bookmobile.

Rating: 4/5

>216 bragan:

It's also left me rather wistfully longing for a life spent wandering the countryside in a horse-drawn bookmobile.

That sounds delightful, Bragan.

>216 bragan: Betty, Charming is good. The simpler life might be tempting. :)

I suspect downsides to that life might become apparent eventually, but right now, it sounds pretty darned good!

Death in Yellowstonesounds the sort of book that will leave you exclaiming "how could they be so foolish", but people are. It makes me wonder whether we are living in a society that is over protected and so if you don't see a notice warning you of all the dangers then it must be alright.

Over here in France when you go up into the high mountains (the Pyrenees) near where I live there is just one sign that says "You are entering high mountain country which is dangerous."

>220 baswood: The author sort of tries not to come out and call people who got themselves killed stupid in so many words, but he spends a fair amount of time making pretty much exactly that point. In particular, he seems to have trouble wrapping his head around the ideas that people who simply were not raised around nature sometimes have about animals, citing a surprising number of people who've said things like, "Don't be silly, if the animals weren't tame, why would they let them run around loose?"

And he mentions one court case where the judge gave the impression he pretty much thought there should be "danger" signs every ten feet, anywhere in the park that people might go, and couldn't understand why there wasn't some kind of high-tech system keeping constant track of the movements of every bear. You can practically hear the guy headdesking through the pages.

I have Reservation Blues on my shelf - maybe soon.
>198 RidgewayGirl: roflmao but since this is LT I'll settle for LOL.

I love what the Dalai Lama said, "...the violence of self-help books....."

>211 stretch: I started with Alexies indian killer and loved it - just a mystery kind of novel -

Excellent review of Death in yellowstone. I read the death in the grand canyon one and have still not recovered from the fact that the most common cause of death there is men urinating too close to the edge and falling off. and on that note...........

>222 mkboylan: The Yellowstone book mentions Death in the Grand Canyon. It also sounds interesting; I gather they're very similar sorts of books.

And, you know, if someone's reaction upon seeing the majesty of the Grand Canyon is, "Oooh, I want to pee in that!", I can't help thinking they probably deserve... Well, OK, maybe not a fall to their death, but at least a smack upside the head. :)

I have started a new thread for a new quarter. Come and join me there for more eclectic reading!