Magic or Madness

#142
Title: Magic or Madness
Author: Justine Larbalestier
Publisher: Razorbill
Year: 2005
Genre: children's/young adult, fantasy & science fiction
277 pages 

Part 1 of the Magic or Madness trilogy. The protagonist, Reason, is an Australian teen who has grown up on the run with her mother. She has always been warned that her grandmother believes in magic and is evil. When Reason's mother goes insane, Reason is sent to live with this grandmother. A good start to a trilogy. The writing and plotting were both fine and not intrusive. The book stands alone all right in that it resolves the plot points it raises overtly, while still leaving questions to be answered in a broader story arc. Plus, any female protagonist who thinks about Fibonacci numbers all the time is okay by me.

When a Gene Makes You Smell Like a Fish...and Other Tales about the Genes in Your Body

#141
Title: When a Gene Makes You Smell Like a Fish...and Other Tales about the Genes in Your Body
Author: Lisa Seachrist Chiu
Publisher: Oxford
Year: 2006
Genre: science
225 pages 

An interesting enough look at human genetic problems, marred by unclear writing and poor editing. This is problematic in a technical discussion. Errors range from a sometimes-random distribution of commas to actually switching elements in a protein's name (fore example, writing "MeC2P" when "MeCP2" is correct) to leaving out words. In addition to these technical flaws, the author does a poor job of transitions between paragraphs and of associating each new section of content to a chapter theme. Her apparent lack of understanding of how to organize a paragraph further complicates matters. The effect is of discontinuous segments strung together. I'm sure I could make a chromosome joke about this if I were willing to work harder. The author slides into jargon in the later chapters, where these errors are also more frequent. Thus, I recommend the earlier chapters but not the latter. This is disappointing because topics she addresses are interesting. Ultimately, however, other authors express themselves better.

My Year of Meats

#140
Title: My Year of Meats
Author: Ruth L. Ozeki
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1998
Genre: fiction
 384 pages 

It's a little hard to know whether this is an excellent novel with horrific content, or an excellent novel that becomes somewhat disappointing over the course of the story. I tend toward the former interpretation, but some reviewers seem to agree with the latter. Specifically, the novel veers toward pedantic nonfiction documentary toward the end; since the protagonist is making a documentary, this does not trouble me. I'm a little more concerned by the sometimes heavy-handed parallelism between documentarian Jane and important secondary character Akiko. They begin more as foils, but end in some ways as reflections. I'd have liked to see more divergence between them by the end. It's stated, but not adequately conveyed.

Both the novel and negative reviews of the novel evoke comparisons to Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer and Smiley's Moo (indeed, the included reader's guide quotes Smiley's comments about the book). The novel itself involves women finding their place and power, and learning to articulate their beliefs and values, and act on them, with reasonable confidence. Like Moo, the story begins innocently and somewhat farcically, then moves gradually toward more serious revelations with bigger consequences and higher stakes. As in Prodigal Summer, the characters must wrestle with their growing awareness that, hopeless as it may seem, they must act in accord with the dictates of conscience in order not to stand by passively when damage is being done.

All three novels have a reasonably strong anti-chemical agricultural message. All have evoked angry reviews that state that the author (and protagonist) is some sort of unreasonable smug feminist who thinks women (and in this case, also lesbians) and nature are great and that men and American culture are bad--the twist in reviews of My Year of Meats is the charge that Ozeki valorizes white Americans and denigrates Japan. Sorry, I don't see it the way these readers see it. Positive depictions of lesbians and negative depictions of American agricultural practices do not trouble me overmuch. In fact, I see positive and negative depictions of both males and females in all of these novels, and I'm not sure what has some reviewers so up in arms. If I were to count up all the books I've read in which women are shrill and useless and American men save the day, I'd have to say they far outnumber the novels that depict the opposite. Each of these stories doesn't quite trust that the reader will put the pieces together, and so is unnecessarily emphatic and unsubtle. I can live with that.

Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet

#139
Title: Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet
Author: Xinran
Publisher: Vintage (different cover from above)
Year: 2005
Genre: Asia, memoir (perhaps)
172 pages

Billed as nonfiction, but I can't quite shake a feeling of artifice. The frame is a classic fictional device: I met a mysterious stranger who had obviously been through some great sorrow. She told me her story. I recount it here for you. It is unlikely and involves high romance and high tragedy. Then the mysterious stranger disappeared, and I am left with my many questions.
This might be a true story of a Chinese woman searching for her husband in the vastness of China and Tibet after his military unit reports him dead. However, I don't believe it. I've never read an account of the Chinese invasion of Tibet that felt like fluffy beach reading. Both professional reviewers and readers seem to share my sense that if this story is true, it has been liberally fictionalized. The publisher refers to it as "based on a true story," which sounds like fiction to me. In fact, many reviewers slip and refer to it as a "novel." As a work of nonfiction, it is not credible. As a novel, it over-relies on coincidence and is rather soppy and sentimental.
There are two other books with "Sky Burial" in the title. Caveat emptor.

Stealing Buddha's Dinner: A Memoir

#138
Title: Stealing Buddha's Dinner: A Memoir
Author: Bich Minh Nguyen
Publisher: Viking
Year: 2007
Genre: Asia, memoir
257 pages  

Nguyen's memoir of growing up Vietnamese in Michigan after fleeing Saigon in 1975 is somewhat different from similar memoirs, and perhaps shouldn't be understood as an example of the same genre. Many accounts that begin with a similar premise are about not fitting in, about traumatization, about striving for the immigrant's version of the American Dream. While Nguyen certainly enacts and recounts all of these themes, the story in the forefront of this memoir is the allure of a particular form of consumption. Literally, this is a paean to the junk foods of Nguyen's Michigan childhood. Symbolically, it is a tale of incorporation, of gobbling up, of becoming American by ingesting American products. Yes, there are some Amy Tan-like moments of admiring the previous generation's culture, but most of the time Nguyen reminds me of the Vietnamese baby Kim from Trudeau's Doonesbury strips of the 1970's. Old people like me remember that long before she married Mike Doonesbury, Kim learned to speak English from television commercials, and her first words were "Big Mac."

Nguyen's America - through - oral - incorporation rings true, and is merely a different spin on the narrative of acculturation. At the same time, it has trouble finding its emotional center, and feels like a small book in some ways. Nguyen's relentless comparisons of herself to others wore me down. I can only assume that she found it exhausting as well. It's a story that's about as far from a Buddhist sensibility as you can get, and might have been more complex had this cultural tension been better articulated and woven into the story over time.

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

#137
Title: Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
Author: Atul Gawande
Publisher: Picador
Year: 2007
Genre: medical, history
288 pages 

In his second collection, Gawande ranges further afield than he did in Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science. There, many of the essays dealt with surgical training and socialization. Here, while still grounded in hospital practices (such as handwashing, or the lack of it), Gawande recounts the history of Ignac Semmelweis, whose handwashing crusade against puerperal fever was thwarted by his lack of both empirical studies and interpersonal skills. Other chapters of note include on on polio vaccination in India and the restructuring of battlefield triage. Throughout, Gawande promotes the concept of "positive deviance" as a way to break out of presuppositions and mindless practices.

I enjoyed Better at least as much as Complications. Gawande manages to speak conversationally but not callously about some pretty horrific stuff. However, at times the material seemed either oversimplified or not updated. For example, contemporary concerns about handwashing gel, polio outbreaks in Europe, and the shocking conditions at Walter Reed are simply missing. While some of these essays appeared first in The New Yorker and The New England Journal of Medicine, the publication date for the book is 2007, and Gawande should have updated some of these pieces, or appended an epilogue.

The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces

 #136
Title: The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces
Author: Ray Vukcevich
Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur
Year: 2000
Genre: mystery/suspense, fantasy & science fiction
245 pages 

This is a mystery that can't quite pull all of its components together. However, Vukcevich is often funny and sometimes outrageously so. As does Lethem in Gun, with Occasional Music, Vukcevich spoofs many of the conventions of the noir detective novel. Like the protagonists of Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn and Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Skylight Howells has characteristics that let (or make) him view the world from an unusual perspective. In Skylight's case, it's multiple perspectives--either he has a partially integrated form of dissociative (multiple) identity disorder, or he's really good at shifting his ego state. Either way, some parts of him are better than others at the various tasks associated with detective work. Vukcevich creates a character who is both competent and somewhat pathetic. Encounters along the way with the Russian mafia, secret kitchen rites, cybersex, computer documention, and the heartbreak of tap-dancing addiction almost work, but not quite. Like Skylight himself, the parts just miss coming together. I can enjoy that as a textual parallel to the protagonist's condition; if you can, too, or would enjoy the setup at least as much as you'd enjoy a more satisfactory conclusion to the mystery, read it.

The Spiderwick Chronicles, Book 1: The Field Guide

#135
Title: The Spiderwick Chronicles, Book 1: The Field Guide
Authors: Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Year: 2003
Genre: children's, fantasy & science fiction
128 pages 

An auspicious beginning to the series, this very sweet little book has terrific illustrations and conveys a surprising amount of information about characters' behaviors, skills, hopes and fears, and relationships with few words and little fanfare. Although it is intended for younger children, it will hold older readers' attention as well. While children may move on to the Harry Potter books, adults may want to pair it with The Stolen Child for their own reading pleasure as they contemplate the  the potential effects of domestic supernatural creatures on their own families.

Black Water (Pendragon Book 5)

#134
Title: Black Water (Pendragon Book 5)
Author: D. J. MacHale
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Year: 2004
Genre: young adult, fantasy & science fiction
429 pages 

I continue to be heartened by the overall improvements in this series over time. The plotting and characterization, while still not terrifically complex, have increasing internal consistency. In the present volume, Saint Dane's cleverness is more evident; the characters face wheels-within-wheels situations in which it is very difficult to know how to act with certainty and rectitude. Mark and Courtney play a much larger role, with larger consequences. Finishing this fifth book was the first time I was enthusiastic about picking up the next one. I hope that MacHale sustains this jump start and continues to improve through the remaining five books.