The Lacuna

#539
Title:  The Lacuna
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher: Harper
Year: 2009
508 pages

Read as an audiobook narrated by the author. The story revolves around a number of empty centers, much like illumination around a manuscript page. Many events and elements recur usefully and enjoyably. The tone shifts at about Book 4 in a set of writings, mostly news articles, that struck a sour note and seemed hollow in a bad way. A tone of false jocularity jarringly appeared at times. The tightening scrutiny of HUAC was realistically unpleasant and difficult for me to listen to in the lead-up to this election season. The conclusion was satisfying. I'd enjoy reading it again now to appreciate how the pieces fit together.

Leaves of Grass

#538
Title: Leaves of Grass
Author: Walt Whitman
Publisher: ?
Year: 1854
333 pages

I read a public domain edition and calculated the page count. Whitman kept revising until his death, so it's a little hard to say which revision I read. I know it wasn't the first edition.

This was the fourth of the "encyclopedic" books I read simultaneously from DailyLit. Whitman is sometimes more a thesaurus than a poet, pouring forth endless lists of synonyms, related ideas, associate professions, and the like. This may help account for the varying quality of the poems, some of which are indeed exultant, joyous, transcendent, all-encompassing; others, however, are quite dull, mundane, and seem to lack a raison d'etre.

When I Was Puerto Rican

#537
Title: When I Was Puerto Rican
Author: Esmeralda Santiago
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Year: 1993
Country: Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (an unincorporated territory of the United States)
286 pages

This is primarily a memoir of a Puerto Rican childhood. Santiago gives a satisfying account of daily life with its occasional dramatic, punctuating events. She uses description well to imbue the landscape with emotional resonance. The New York section was thinner and seemed rushed. It would have benefited from an additional 20% of the page count added to allow more showing and less telling.

Selections from James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

#536
Title: Selections from James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson
Author: James Boswell
Editor: Robert William Chapman
Publisher: Oxford
Year: 1821
220 pages

I understand and appreciate this biography's historical import in terms of the way biographies are constructed, just as I appreciate the ways in which Proust, Joyce, Stein, and Woolf altered the shape and focus of the novel. However, I find that I love neither Boswell, who seems to be a sycophantic toady, nor Johnson, so many of whose bon mots are merely forms of insult and aspersion. This quickly wore on me and soon became unbearably tedious. I'd have preferred to read much more about Johnson's construction of the dictionary, a still-topical subject that has a great advantage over obscure, class-riddled jibes at the expense of many, many other people. Let us not refer to male privilege, pray let us not.

Tree of Smoke

#535
Title: Tree of Smoke
Author: Denis Johnson
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Year: 2007
620 pages

I agree with reviewers who call this sprawling or confusing, but I thought both of these aspects contributed to a useful chaos and uncertainty that paralleled the war in Vietnam, the landscape traversed, and the clash of world views. The audiobook was infinitely easier than the novel since the speakers were more clearly differentiated. Who's on the level? Are there conspiracies? Did the colonel know what he was doing? Thought these questions are raIsed but not answered, this was nonetheless a satisfying novel.

Just Dirt: Memoirs

#534
Title: Just Dirt: Memoirs
Author: Wilson Smith
Publisher: Wilson Smith (Lulu)
Year: 2007
131 pages

A slim yet emotionally substantial collection of memoirs comprising a portrait of the author's life. Though most are straightforward, they are evocative and sometimes lyrical. It is not so much that the events unfold dramatically as that the demonstrate a growing maturity through the accretion of experiences.

The Stone Gods

#533
Title: The Stone Gods
Author: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: Harcourt
Year:
212 pages

Any Winterson is a treat, though not necessarily fully intelligible. A lot about this sort-of-science-fiction novel made me laugh, not least of which was the core story in which all of the intrepid explorers, who the reader might expect will be the new hope of humanity, die. The core narrative, though, is about the continuity (or even more extreme, the inevitability) of human, robot, parrot, and universal experience. A fun novel about archetypes, plus space pirates, bisexual robots, and of course, stone gods.

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

#531
Title: Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Year: 2010
336 pages

Sex, scatology, other stuff, and space travel. Roach is funny as hell, with long, delightful tangents that wheel away from the narrative (not unlike Frank Poole after HAL finishes him off). Readers of Roach's other books will recognize the points of intersection (corpses, e.g., or sex in space). I'd have liked more on the temperament needed for long space voyages, but that's about my interests, and perhaps not Roach's.

Just like Someone Without Mental Illness Only Moreso

#532
Title: Just like Someone Without Mental Illness Only Moreso
Author: Mark Vonnegut
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Year: 2010
224 pages

In the interval between The Eden Express and the present memoir, Vonnegut's diagnosis has shifted from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder. This isn't surprising for two reasons: 1) He responded well to lithium, which today we generally understand as tipping the scales toward a bipolar diagnosis; and 2) schizophrenia is a garbage category for a lot of disorders that include psychosis (and in my opinion, may not be etiologically related). These days, there's a lot less hebephrenic schizophrenia and a lot more bipolar II.

The Eden Express makes more sense as a narrative of manic and depressive episodes (leavened with a plethora of recreational substances). It's wild, fast, roller coaster-like. The author is not in consensual reality for much of the story. By contrast, Just like Someone Without Mental Illness Only Moreso is a normalized book, slower and perhaps less interesting, although the contrast over time is fascinating. Read the two together as a really good look at how disruptive unchecked bipolar disorder can be.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

#530
Title: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Author: Jack Weatherford
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Year: 2005
352 pages

An interesting and entertaining history of the Mongol empire. The tone is sympathetic and the author asserts that the Mongol invasions of European towns and cities were not as horrific as European history books assert. This has caused angry and vituperative responses from some reviewers. I'm not in a position to compare conflicting accounts, but mildly note that generally speaking, whoever tells the story spins it in their favor. Also, I'm awfully sorry that some Christian communities were attacked. I agree that that might well have been horrible. Perhaps, in the spirit of reciprocity, those reviewers might consider how those gentile communities treated the Jews who lived there. Lots of horror there as well.

Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath

#529
Title: Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath
Author: Michael Paul Masdon
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Year: 2009
314 pages

Light on science, long on condemnation of almost every medical professional and system except his own hospital. Rife with grammatical problems and incorrect usage. Head trauma is a serious and underserved phenomenon, but I've seen heroic and sustained efforts on behalf of people with TBIs, so has Mason. Instead, read Where is the Mango Princess?, which also indicts TBI health care, but with more specificity and better balance.

The Colors of Space

#527
Title: The Colors of Space
Author: Marion Zimmer Bradley
Publisher: Walsworth Publishing
Year: 1988/1963
141 pages

As opposed to Proust, this reminds me of early adolescence in a positive way. I received a few bucks a week for allowance and I'd rush to the bookstore, then stand in delicious agony before the fantasy and science fiction racks, endlessly considering which 1 or 2 paperbacks to get. I'd usually get 2 at $1.50 or $1.75 apiece, go home, read them, and the next day face 6 more days without books. The Colors of Space recalled this experience: I started it on DailyLit, sent for the next installment, sent for the next installment, and before you know it, I was done and started on the second Marion Zimmer Bradley. As to plot and writing, these were also familiar--straightforward space cowboy story, simple plot, no real subplot, resolution, space cowboy becomes a space cowman. Mind you, I'm not complaining. It's like eating a little bag of lemon drops--sweet, familiar, pleasant, and not of great consequence.

#526
Title: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Publisher: Eigal Meirovich
Year: 2009/1921
48 pages

Cute and a little stupid, though, I imagine, less so in its era. Man grows backward; is castigated; dies/is born.

Swann's Way (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu #1)

#525
Title: Swann's Way (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu #1)
Author: Marcel Proust
Translator: C. K. Scott Moncrieff
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1970/1913
474 pages

At this time I would like to quote from that finest flower of the cinematic arts, Barbarella: "It amuses the Great Tyrant to resent the expense of feeding orchids to slaves." This, then, was my experience of the first volume of Proust's massive yet strangely static A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. It amused me to resent the effort of reading Proust, finally finishing a mere 28 years after I began. That's a lot of orchids.

As a story, I found it too interior and agonizingly self-scrutinizing for my taste, though I applaud Proust's thoroughness. Swann's Way was one of four books I began simultaneously on DailyLit, reading 1 to 3 segments a day for the last ever so many months. Although it wasn't my intention, all are encyclopedic, each in their own specially hellish and complete manner. I will characterize them as I complete them. Swann's Way, which I finished first, is a compendium of internal states and perceptions, exquisitely masticated until the fibrous pulp disintegrates in an undifferentiated mass that is not as sweet as one might have anticipated or hoped. It reminded me of a person I once dated when I was young. This person would say things like "When I get up in the morning to go to work, I think, 'What's the point? Why don't I just kill myself right now?'" And when this person would say these things, I would think, "Okay,  go ahead. It would be more interesting than this endless rumination on what tiny slivers of experience mean." You must remember that I was 13 or 14 at the time, and wouldn't have enjoyed an actual suicide. Still, Proust puts me in mind of being 13, not only due to the minute dissection of every nanosecond and potential action, but because of the excruciatingly preadolescent social behavior of almost every character, petite bourgeoisie or no. I've seen Proust hailed for his skewering of the rising middle class, but I must report in all honesty that it reads like a middle school lunchroom, replete with titters, frosty and unexplained snubs, crises of meaning and interpretation, and once in a great while a moment of relief that merely presages the return of unendurable social strictures. Imagine Swann as the band teacher, 35 perhaps but still at the mercy of those pimply smirks. Today's cold entree is orchids.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2nd reading)

#524
Title: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2nd reading)
Author: J. K. Rowling
Publisher: Scholastic
Year: 2007
 759 pages (17 disks)

Second time, this one on CD. The pacing is much better when I'm listening rather than racing through it in the hours after its release.

Fire (The Seven Kingdoms #2)

#523
Title: Fire (The Seven Kingdoms #2)
Author: Kristin Cashore
Publisher: Dial
Year: 2009
466 pages

I enjoyed this in its own right, and I enjoyed it as a prequel to Graceling. Fire is another strong female protagonist whose relationships with men are more mutual than is sometimes the case in fantasy/swords and sorcery novels. Intertwined with Fire's story is that of Leck, who appeared in an important role in Graceling. While that book focused on the lands where gracelings arise, here the story concerns beautiful monsters, of whom Fire is one.

Quite aside from the story and the writing, both of which held my interest, I want to appreciate several aspects of the story. First, the non-marital sexual and romantic relationships were nicely described without gratuitous sex scenes. Second, the existence of same-sex relationships was acknowledged neutrally and without much emphasis by the narration and characters. Third, you've got to love a young adult novel where the protagonist's travels are thwarted by her monster-attracting menstrual blood. Now that's an interesting twist.

City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments #1

#522
Title: City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments #1)
Author: Cassandra Clare
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Year: 2007
 493 pages

Many of the reviews of this book, and many of the emotions in those reviews, focus more on the reviewers' relationships with Cassandra Clare and her writings in the world of online Harry Potter fandom. I see that I read one of her novellas or novel sections several years ago, but didn't associate it with her authorship of The Mortal Instruments. I leave the articulation of those disputes to other reviewers. To the charge that City of Bones or her other writings plagiarize the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I couldn't say. To the critique that they are derivative, I note that when I read the very first Star Wars novel, purchased from Science Fiction Book Club before there was a movie, I thought, What a piece of thieving crap. I still think this. I am much less troubled by Clare's book because it makes much better, creative, and expansive use of its fantasy/urban fantasy/science fiction/mythoreligious roots and sources. It's fresh and, to me, unangering compared to the wholesale larceny committed by the first Star Wars,* or Eragon, or The Sword of Shannara (or even many parts of the story of a certain boy wizard). If anything, I am much more tired of the Betty Sue cute teen girl who suffers the ambivalence of being the apex (or possibly nadir) of a love triangle. Often, the action stalls here for tremulous or truculent conversations between adolescents whose time might be better spent slaughtering the demon who is attacking them.

While the writing wasn't sterling, I wasn't pulled out of the narrative by it too often, and Clare's worldbuilding, while sometimes holding the possibility of inconsistencies, was ambitious. As a first novel it kept my attention and showed promise.

*(Star Wars From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, 1976)

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

#521
Title: Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town
Author: Nick Reding
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Year: 2009
269 pages

Read as an audiobook. An absorbing, educational, and grim history of methamphetamine production and distribution in the Midwest, punctuated by the stories of meth makers, users, and the people trying to shut it down. The criticism that Reding got some geography wrong is picayune and of little consequence, though I agree that it is a problem that should be corrected. More concerning is Reding's reductive concept of how meth is a drug that uniquely fits the American work ethic, and that meth use and addiction pretty much comes down to bad eco0nomic times. For one thing, I'm sure people in Southeast Asia, where it's manufactured in Burma/Myanmar and is a long-time favorite of long-haul truck drivers, could tell an equally compelling story about the meaning of meth and how it fits their culture. For another thing, sociology aside, meth is inexpensive, a compelling high, and quite addictive.

The Dead and the Gone

#520
Title: The Dead and the Gone
Author: Susan Beth Pfeffer
Publisher: Graphia
Year: 2009
321 pages

A companion to the post-apocalyptic Life As We Knew It, this young adult novel tells the story of the same events from the experience of a teenage boy in New York City. Though he is male, I found this version more frightening, perhaps because there were more people but fewer trustworthy adults around.

I do have one nagging criticism, which is that trying to break in through the doors of apartments in NYC is impossible. Go to the basement and get a fire axe, then chop through an interior wall, or rappel from a higher floor and kick in a window.

Brain Death

#519 
Title: Brain DeathAuthor: Sandra Wilkinson
Publisher: Pinnacle
Year: 1988
396 pages

It's hard even to tag this as "disappointing" when I knew what it was going into it--the kind of fiction that a hospital worker brings to the nursing station in a grocery bag full of similar books that are functionally disposable. In this regard, Brain Death did not fail to deliver what it promised. It did serve  the function of causing me to re-evaluate my book for Bahrain, QuixotiQ, in a kinder light. I read it because it was there. My sister-in-law, mother-in-law, and I all read it while agreeing it was dreadful, not unlike kvetching about how nasty those stale chips are while eating the whole bag.

You know this book's ilk--its characters and scenes are those of pornography--ill-defined suites that are sparsely detailed except for some emblem or notation that is intended to signify "hospital" or "brokerage after hours" or "millionaire's yacht." The worn carpets and nondescript nightstands, though, say that the action has nothing to do with the setting that has been asserted.  Peopling this world are "administrators" or "doctors" or "young men from the countryside who are confused and alone in the big city." The "nurses" or "teachers" wear "diamond" tiaras; the "doctors" or "electricians" or "police officers" are saviors or menaces. Any resemblance of set to purported story is incidental.

You don't need a spoiler tag on this, right? I can't even find a cover photo on the web. The action here takes place in a Boston hospital. Since I worked in a Boston hospital at the time this book was published, I have a good basis for comparison. For better or worse, we had no sentient computer, evil medical research cabal, or vituperative board members. Anyone psychotic (whether patient or staff) was easy to identify and generally not destructive. To my knowledge, our hospital had far fewer homicides than plague the protagonist's institution, and had we had multiple homicides, severed legs left in closets, etc., I feel certain that our administrator and her cop boyfriend wouldn't have been the ones to try to figure it out, heroically rising from their hospital beds again and again to right wrongs and rout the bad guys. Also, if a large number of our nurses were raped in an only nebulously related way, I imagine we'd have put a guard in the parking lot.

About this sentient computer--I have nothing against artificial intelligence stories, but I loathe bad science fiction by writers of other genres who seem to believe that the reader is entirely credulous and that logic has no place in the reader's participation in solving the mystery/thriller. I'll promise you one thing--if I ever managed the use of a sentient computer, I would damn well make sure there was a "threat to the safety of self or others" alert mechanism for patient or staff confidences to said sentient computer. Even in 1988, before HIPAA, we would have prioritized that, evil medical research cabal or no evil medical research cabal.

QuixotiQ

#518
Title: QuixotiQ
Author: Ali Al Saeed
Publisher: iUniverse
Year: 2004
Country: Bahrain
192 pages

Why is the last Q capitalized? We don't learn the answer to this rather obvious question in this first Bahraini novel published in English. That it has won awards speaks to the importance of this publication, but not its quality. There may be something of Bahrain in the themes or tone of the story, but I don't have a way to evaluate it. It seems to take place in the U.S., England, or somewhere similar. The events and plot seem to intend to convey that we cannot escape our (frightening, horrific, intertwined) destinies, but that why things should happen to us, in particular, is random or chaotic. This is the best sense I can make of the novel, which reads like a good second draft in a college fiction writing class. There is something there, but the powerful and genuine aspect of the novel has not yet emerged. The English itself is intermediate EFL level with sudden changes of tense within sentences, misused words, infelicities of grammar, and technically correct but awkward constructions.

I applaud the effort. I may read the only other book I could find by a Bahraini, though I thought when I bought it that he was Qatari: A Line in the Sea: The Qatar v. Bahrain Border Dispute in the World Court--Oh yes, be still, my heart.

Woman at Point Zero

#517
Title: Woman at Point ZeroAuthor: Nawal el Saadawi
Publisher: Zed Books
Year: 1983
 112 pages

A tightly constructed fictional study of PTSD, deceptively simply told within a clinical frame narrative given more credibility by the author's professional work. The protagonist committed a murder after betrayal after betrayal and a reductive cultural version of male-female relations. In this cultural regard, it is not very different from many stories, both actual and fictional, of the oppression many women experience in other African countries, regardless of religion or economics. A fine example of Nawal el Saadawi's themes and writing skill.

Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle

#516
Title: Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle
Author: Slavoj Žižek
Publisher: Verso
Year: 2004
Country: Slovenia
188 pages

Slovenia may be a more hopping joint than I realized. Imagine Žižek as your college philosophy instructor. Mine (in the days when instructors smoked in the classroom) would pace back and forth on a slightly raised stage flanked by two columns (Ionic, if memory serves). As he intoned about Aristotle or Hobbes, he would light a cigarette, then deposit it on the edge of an ashtray on the end of the plinth to which he had walked. He often wound up with a burning cigarette on either side, and occasionally would lift one to to his mouth, seeming bemused when he discovered that he was already smoking another cigarette. I picture Žižek as that professor, but perhaps more ironic and, as befits a man who cites Lacan so frequently, with a fistful of burning stogies. This has little to do with Žižek, but is evoked because sometimes Žižek's essays seem to have little to do with the topic at hand, and sometimes the sense of them is obscured as if by clouds of smoke.

This rather dense yet sometimes loosely constructed volume collects three related essays that take as their starting point, and sometimes their end point, the war in Iraq. More specifically, the war in Iraq as its unconscious/subtextual metaphors and logic are unpacked, sometimes crisply and sometimes murkily. How many analyses of U.S. military decisions have you read that are based on Freudian dream interpretation? So it's intellectually fun, if sometimes obscure. The first and third cohere reasonably even if one (let me be frank: this one) cannot always follow or does not always agree with his associations or conclusions. The second lost me, though I even took notes in an attempt to wrest its meaning (phallus) from it to appropriate as my own. No dice. What's a girl who's only taken a few graduate semiotics classes to do?

As when I read many works of philosophy, religion, or conspiracy, I was frustrated at times by how self-referential a passage would become. Admittedly, Žižek does less of this than some maddening philosophers whom I shall not mention. I enjoy the aesthetic and balance of ideas that are internally harmonious, but also want to see sufficient outside referents and (and this is the feminist deconstructionist in me) acknowledgment that the idea or phenomenon under discussion could be understood differently without having to argue that one perception is always more accurate than others. This seems like an enactment of capitalist ideals or a pissing contest, probably not what Žižek had in mind.

Stories of Women

#515
Title: Stories of WomenPhotographer: Shanta Rao
Text: Charles-Henri Favrod and Sèlim Nassib
Publisher: Dewi Lewis Publishing
Year: 1995
136 pages

Not actually stories of women, but black and white art photos of women and settings from East Africa. There is a great deal of portraiture, not always sharply focused, in dark interiors that seem more claustrophobic than cozy.

Title: Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's

#514
Title: Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's
Author: John Elder Robison 
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Year: 2007
317 pages

It's fascinating to read this memoir by Augusten Burroughs's older brother. Both this book and Burroughs's A Wolf at the Table have an emotional focus on their father, and it's fascinating to compare their perspectives by reading these synchronic narratives. Robison's father is sometimes frightening but also pathetic, whereas Burroughs, the younger, experienced him more consistently as terrifying.

Robison's writing is generally clear and coherent. Though there are occasional Aspy forays into a welter of technical details, the tone and content are often interpersonally sophisticated and sweet, as when he takes on a doggy persona to express affection and vulnerability to his wife.

The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

#513
Title: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life
Author: Tom Reiss
Publisher: Random House
Year: 2005
476 pages

Rather than thinking of this as a biography, it may be more accurate to consider it a story of a man and his life in their historical context. I know that may not be a salient distinction for some, but I've read a good number of reviews that complain about the story being overly inclusive, padded, or wordy. It may be better to treat it as a text in which Lev Nussimbaum is an interesting and emblematic exemplar of the tensions and identity strains of the region in this era. Taking Nussimbaum's story as the point of depature and return, Reiss interweaves the story of a man--both Jewish and Muslim, Asian and European, Nussimbaum and Kurban Said and Essad Bey--with the events that shaped modern Euro-Asian history and the Jewish experience in the Old World. Reiss does this with only occasional repetitions and digressions that are too lengthy. I was least held by the end of the book, where Nussimbaum's story seemed to be wrapped up with an excess of brevity and alacrity. A good reflective and summative end note would have managed this problem.

Nightlight: A Parody

#512
Title: Nightlight: A Parody
Author: Harvard Lampoon
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 2009
154 pages

Bored of the Rings was funny. Nightlight is closer to Doon: Not really funny enough. Twilight cries out for parody, but like Bella in the first few books, the reader's desire will not be gratified. There are some funny ideas, key among which is that Edwart is about as far from a cool vampire as you can get, but it's not enough to sustain the book in its own right.

Mockingjay (The Hunger Games #3)

#511
Title: Mockingjay (The Hunger Games #3)
Author: Suzanne Collins
Publisher: Scholastic
Year: 2010
400 pages

Another action-packed account of Katniss as she becomes a larger than life symbol of the revolution, still can't really manage her own image, and is ultimately utilized by more players and for more ends than she can imagine. This is a novel about spinning out of control, and Collins adroitly renders the vertiginous plunge (sometimes with literal plunges into monster-filled sewers).

I have no objection to the deaths and destruction of the ongoing and climactic fights. This is a dystopian novel, and it's time those teenagers got off my lawn and thought about how you can suffer losses, bleakness, and even love triangles that don't include any vampires. However, I didn't initially find the conclusion satisfying. It's a little like Rowling's deflating retreat-to-the suburbs epilogue, plus a heaping cup full of post-traumatic stress. As I've sat with it, though, I find it becoming if not more appealing, more palatable. It's not even the action of the ending that concerns me, but the timing and sagginess of it. I may have to read it again to be more specific than that.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

#510
Title: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Author: David Mitchell
Publisher: Random House
Year: 2010
491 pages

Outstanding!  After two chapters, I picked up a copy of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and if I'd had more money I'd have picked up all of his books.

I hardly know what to write about this meticulous, compelling novel. I loved the setup of the young Dutchman seeking his fortune in the mostly-closed Japanese trade, his generally less-than-savory companions, the peculiar doctor, and the Japanese midwife with an imperfect face. I loved watching the relationships develop, or fail to develop, including some seriously funny humiliations at the hands of the doctor and others. I loved how it slid into subtle then overt weirdness. I loved  the language, descriptions, and emotional tones. I haven't read as pleasurable a novel in quite a while.

In the Shadow of Papillon: Seven Years of Hell in Venezuela's Prison System

#509
Title: In the Shadow of Papillon: Seven Years of Hell in Venezuela's Prison System
Authors: Frank Kane and John Tilsley
Publisher: Mainstream Publishing Company
Year: 2008
Country: Venezuela
287 pages

Kane, who seems to think Papillon was a real memoir, was imprisoned in Venezuela after getting caught trafficking drugs. While the treatment her received appears to have been brutal, he is also an aggressive, racist, sexist narrator who doesn't seem to have learned much from the experience. The flavor was very much that of A Million Little Pieces in that it seemed inflated and not genuine. I have no idea what Venezuelan prisons are like, but my point is about emotional veracity. Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons and The Damage Done: Twelve Years of Hell in a Bangkok Prison tell a similar story while also answering the question, And why are you telling me this?

Life As We Knew It

#508
Title: Life As We Knew It
Author: Susan Beth Pfeffer
Publisher: Harcourt
Year: 2006
345 pages

A climate-change dystopia, more or less. An asteroid hits and moves the moon, a great starting point, though the science is sketchy. The moon is 238,000 miles away and it would take a while to be able to see that it had been pushed closer to the earth. This may be a nitpick, but an author who's proposed a scientific explanation for the action loses credibility when her science is bad. Those of us who learned about logarithms or the difference between weight and mass from reading Heinlein as children know this to be true, and if I could figure out how to use a slide rule from Heinlein at this book's target audience age, I would have noticed this problem with the moon and put this book down. Now as an adult who's forgotten how to use a slide rule, I read on, though with greater skepticism than I would have otherwise.

Beyond this initial flaw, the novel is engaging and absorbing. I appreciated that Pfeffer didn't wrap up all the stories happily. The characters' difficulties make sense and may resonate with readers' uncertainties about how you know there's a problem, and how big that problem is. If you enjoy thinking about how you'd survive without much infrastructure, you'll enjoy strategizing about how the characters can save themselves when they are essentially off the grid.

Papillon

#507
Title: Papillon
Author: Henri Charrière
Translators: June P. Wilson & Walter B. Michaels
Publisher: Perennial
Year: 1970
Country: French Guiana (overseas region of France)
 560 pages

Eh. As long as you understand it's fiction (in the style made famous by A Million Little Pieces) it's interesting enough, though it's picaresque and there's really no developmental self-reflection. There is more insertion into and extraction of objects from the anus than in much pornography. Really, it's enough to make you rethink shaking hands with the guy.

Poor Papillon, who protests his innocence while evincing a startling degree of criminal knowledge and underworld relationships, periodically becomes enraged and spews angry fantasies. Yeah, I'd let him into my house. If you want to see the basis for the movie, read this. If you want to read a prison narrative, there are better, and more true to life.

Global Faces: 500 Photographs from 7 Continents

#506
Title: Global Faces: 500 Photographs from 7 Continents
Photographer: Michael Clinton
Publisher: Glitterati, Inc.
Year: 2007
352 pages

A strangely disappointing collection. Though roughly organized into regions, there's little in the way of guidance or orientation, and there is a section of people the photographer knows, posing, which is antithetical to the stated intention of the book. Many of the photos are blurry, not artistically so but as if they are blown up details from larger photos that had something else as their focus. The overall effect is frustrating and claustrophobic. I should be thinking about the human family or some such. Instead, I kept wondering if I had the right pair of reading glasses. Instead, read the excellent Traditional Peoples Today or Material World, or the classic Steichen The Family of Man.

Of Spirits and Madness: An American Psychiatrist in Africa

#505
Title: Of Spirits and Madness: An American Psychiatrist in AfricaAuthor: Paul R. Linde
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Year: 2002
240 pages

This medical memoir describes Linde's experiences as a visiting psychiatrist in Zimbabwe. In general it's affectionate, culturally sensitive, and informative. Linde describes the setting and the people well, and while I sometimes wonder about his ways of investigating and managing psychiatric presentations (as a psychologist, I get to play "spot the differential diagnosis" as I read), but then, I'm sure he'd say the same if I wrote a memoir about my own work.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: A True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession

#504
Title: The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: A True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary ObsessionAuthor: Allison Hoover Bartlett
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Year: 2009
282 pages

I liked reading this, though it's not really about a man who loves books too much, but rather is about The Man Who Couldn't or Wouldn't Stop Stealing Something. If that "something" weren't books, but, say, pipe cleaners or cashews, it wouldn't be much of a story. Instead, it would be an episode of Hoarders, where much is made of motivations and the psychodynamic meaning of the object. Since the meaning may well be an explanatory narrative developed post hoc, one might ask, both for the television show and for this book, might a little bupropion take care of that?

Since the thief's object is  books, however, the author has license to explore and describe the world rare book collecting. This is interesting, but not sufficient to integrate the two elements of the story. In addition, while Bartlett has some negative feelings about her protagonist, it's also clear that she enjoys him, fining him attractive or compelling in certain ways. This reminds me of a similar dynamic in Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, though there, at least, the thief's motives were a better match with the comparably detailed and obsessive world of orchid breeders and collectors.

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

#503
Title: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
Author: Robert Charles Wilson
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Year: 2009
413 pages

This is the funniest of Robert Charles Wilson's novels to date, but no less engaging. Imagine Samwise Gamgee as Watson. The tale's narrator, Adam Hazzard, is that man. He reports what he observes, and speculates about Julian, politics, and the world on this basis, but he doesn't understand everything he sees. In some ways, the best part of this novel is seeing precisely how the historian's perspective shapes his narrative, and what we as readers can discern (for example, Julian's romantic proclivities) that is opaque to Adam.

The narrative is post-apocalyptic/post-deluge, and strongly evokes Heinlein's "If This Goes On--" in the intertwining of religious, military, and political forces. I am sad to say that in many ways its difference from contemporary America is only a matter of degree. Some reviewers see Gore Vidal's Julian here; I haven't read it yet,  but picked up a copy in order to evaluate the comparison.

Julian's rise to power is well-described. I believed less in his behavior afterward, since it seemed less savvy and the shift was too abrupt. Still, it's a terrific novel and I enjoyed it very much.

The Namesake

#502
Title: The Namesake
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Publisher: Mariner Books
Year: 2002/2004
291 pages

Read as an audiobook.

It pains me to say it because I thought Interpreter of Maladies was just lovely, but I found the latter 2/3 of this tedious. The protagonist, Gogol, seems to learn little from his experience and is passive or obstinate by turn. He is a paralyzed man, I get it. Unfortunately, he is not a very interesting paralyzed man, and his biggest accomplishment seems to be dragging down those around him with his inertia, narcissism, and entitlement. I don't need him to be a sympathetic character, but I do need something beyond 10 hours of torpor. Perhaps Lahiri is just better suited to the short story than to the novel. The movie was showing on the television of a bus I took on my most recent trip in Mexico. Though I tried not to watch or listen (it was dubbed in  Spanish) because I get severe motion sickness, I still threw up. Sadly, this was a more interesting experience than listening to the  novel.

The Secret Sharer

#501
Title: The Secret Sharer
Author: Joseph Conrad
Publisher: FQ Publishing
Year: 1910/2007
64 pages

Much of Conrad's oeuvre is concerned with haemartia--the hero's tragic flaw. Typically, Conrad's protagonists (or the subjects of a framing narrative) appear to be decent, more-or-less upright men who are tempted and slide down the slippery slope because of their anxiety about their image management. They feel weak or vulnerable or potentially subject to ridicule, so they commit the first act that then usually leads to their downfall. The Secret Sharer is a novella so this conceit is not fully developed. here, a young, untried ship's captain allows an escaped prisoner from another ship to board his own and smuggles him to safety because he sees in this fugitive a mirror of himself. Because this novella is relatively uncluttered, and generally free of the pages and pages of misogyny and racist colonial spew that mar so many of his works, I would, were I still an English teacher, have students read this and identify themes and symbolism, then read one of Conrad's novels to see how these play out and are elaborated in a longer work.

Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds

#500
Title: Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds
Author: Olivia Gentile
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Year: 2009
345 pages

This biography of Phoebe Snetsinger, the woman who held (and appears still to hold) the world record for most bird species seen, answers many of the questions implicit, but not answered, in her autobiography, Birding on Borrowed Time. These include such nagging concerns as how she paid for her frequent birding expeditions and what her family thought of this pursuit over time. (Answers: Inheritance, more explicitly documented here, and With increasing annoyance.) Gentile is reasonably evenhanded and fills in Snetsinger's own account nicely. For example, to the best of my recollection, Snetsinger does not mention having a daughter who is lesbian and who officially changed her name to Marmot in adulthood.

My one complaint is that Gentile seems unable to grasp as a possibility that Snetsinger's rape, while clearly upsetting to her, may not have been as significant for Snetsinger as Gentile wants it to be. I use this language deliberately because much of Gentile's narrative is focused on the rape as an emotional impetus for Snetsinger's subsequent accelerated birding. This could be true, but as a psychologist, I think Gentile's horror may drive her interpretation as much as the rape (or, for that matter, recurrent malignant melanomas) may have motivated Snetsinger. This ultimqately doesn't detract a great deal, but it is intrusive.

Imaginary Poets: 22 Master Poets Create 22 Master Poets

#499
Title: Imaginary Poets: 22 Master Poets Create 22 Master Poets
Editor: Alan Michael Parker
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Year: 2005
160 pages

While "master poets" is a stretch for some in this collection, the idea here is a fun one. Have established poet invent a poet, "translate" a poem, give a brief biographical sketch, and provide a critical analysis in relation to that poet's oeuvre. Having at one time handwritten, transcribed, and commented on a lost Shakespearean sonnet, the last phrase of which was, if I remember correctly, "'neath cerise-spingled* skies" (*spangled"), I thought this was a wonderful idea for an anthology. Some of the entries are better than others--more dryly humorous, more earnest, more engaged with questions of translation and language. Some were so dry as to be simply unfunny. Generally, though, if you like the idea, you'll probably like the book.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

#498
Title: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Author: Thomas de Quincey
Publisher: Halcyon House
Year: n.d. (orig. 1821)
228 pages (in edition read)

Read this not for its literary merits, but as an attempt at an empirical approach to the use of opium, even though de Quincey does not admit the legitimacy of experiences other than his own. From a contemporary psychopharmacological perspective, I note that de Quincey took opium (laudanum) for pain, which may account for his assertion that opium is not intoxicating--opiates don't tend to cause euphoria when they are actually relieving pain. The narration is so discreet at times as to be tediously impenetrable.

Escaping the Tiger

#497
Title: Escaping the Tiger
Author: Laura Manivong
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2010
222 pages

It's odd to call this a "sweet" book since it's a young adult novel about life as a Laotian refugee in a Thai camp, but nevertheless, it is a sweet book. Part of this is the presumed target audience, which appears to be middle readers, but a great part is due to the engaging characters and their development.

Manivong is married to a man whose story inspired this one, so I expect that her depiction of protagonist Vonlai's thoughts and psychology is accurate, though it seemed closer to Western psychology than Southeast Asian to me.

Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener's Bones

#496
Title: Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener's Bones
Author: Brandon Sanderson
Publisher: Scholastic
Year: 2009
336 pages

The joke in this series is that Alcatraz's talent is to break things; the meta-joke is that Alcatraz breaks the story by lying, lying about lying, intruding on the story to explain its structure, and generally gumming up the narrative works. This second volume is less self-conscious and more relaxed than the first, without sacrificing its cleverness. This adventure advances the plot and provides more of the unfolding story of the Smedry family, their talents, and the technology and history of the world beyond the Hushlands. I don't usually laugh aloud when I read, but encountering a Smedry named Australia made me snort. If you recall the Smedry naming tradition and its corruption by the Librarians, you'll know why it's funny.

Season of Migration to the North

#495
Title: Season of Migration to the North
Author: Tayeb Salih
Translator:
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1966/2003
159 pages

A little gem of a novel, perhaps overladen with symbolism and parallelism, but not significantly worse for that. This lovely story stands the typical post-colonial narrative on its head and is biting and disturbing while also deeply engaging, complex while still a fast and enjoyable read.

Is it Still Cheating if I Don't Get Caught?

#493
Title: Is it Still Cheating if I Don't Get Caught?
Author: Bruce Weinstein
Publisher: Flash Point
Year: 2009
160 pages

This is a life ethics book for teens. The principles are those articulated in his Life Principles: Feeling Good by Doing Good, with some simplified language and examples more relevant to young readers. This book could serve as the basis for a psychoeducational group or be incorporated into lesson planning for youth who have had poor adult role models or been in disciplinary or legal trouble. This would require more discussion about why a person would choose to act morally rather than amorally or immorally, which would be an interesting extension of the text and ensure that it was not used in a "Just Say No" parroting sort of way.

The Prisoner of Zenda

#492
Title: The Prisoner of Zenda
Author: Anthony Hope
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 1894/1994
208 pages

Via Daily Lit.

It is resolved that a certain proportion of the books I've read ultimately derive their plots from The Prisoner of Zenda, and from there obliquely from Shakespeare and other comedies of mistaken identity. Hope's writing is clear, the story moves quickly, and it was refreshing to read a classic with a contemporary feel.

Extras

#491
Title: Extras
Author: Scott Westerfeld
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Year: 2009
417 pages

Other than its reliance on the reader's knowledge of who Tally Youngblood is, plus a few incidentals of culture and action, this 4th volume in the Uglies series would stand alone pretty well. Though many of the themes are similar to those of the previous books, Extras is the best of them--best plotted, best written, best resolved. Unfortunately, as the last in the series, it is repetitive and many elements are stale. It might be best to read it as a more-or-less comprehensible stand-alone if you want to read only one.

The Last Jews of Kerala: The 2,000 Year History of India's Forgotten Jewish Community

#490
Title: The Last Jews of Kerala: The 2,000 Year History of India's Forgotten Jewish Community
Author: Edna Fernandes

Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing

Year: 2008
248 pages

Unfortunately, Fernandes takes an interesting topic, the long-term Jews of India, and muddies it considerably with factual errors and a thesis that her book does not support. I leave aside the complaint that she discomfited members of the community by publishing her book, which is between her and the people she interviewed. I also leave aside the book's repetitiveness and meandering, which are annoying but not critical. The factual errors include some about Judaism, which decreases her credibility as a reporter-historian. The thesis problem, however, is more serious because it is the rationale for writing her book rather sticking with previous books on the Jewish communities of Kerala. Fernandes's contention is that racism on the part of the "white" Jews, and their failure to intermarry with the "black" Jews, has caused the death of the community. However, by both the communities' and Fernandes's report, it was the establishment of the state of Israel that caused a return from diaspora. Given these concerns, I recommend the interested reader to the books Fernandes cites rather than to hers.

The Land without Shadows

#489
Title: The Land without Shadows
Author: Abdourahman A. Waberi
Translator: Jeanne Garane
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Year: 2005
Country: Djibouti
118 pages

Waberi's short story collection is less episodic and more descriptive--that is, the focus often is not on events or action but on creating a portrait of Djibouti. The effect is of a poetic mosaic and creates an emotional impression rather than a plot or story arc. The tone seemed to be affectionate or indulgent, even when Waberi was sarcastically describing horrible circumstances and acts.

The Suburb Beyond the Stars

#488
Title: The Suburb Beyond the Stars
Author: M. T. Anderson
Publisher: Scholastic
Year: 2010
227 pages

Received as an ARC via Goodreads.

I think it's reasonable to give the spoiler that while this second volume in the series that began with The Game of Sunken Places stands alone in terms of resolving the immediate plot points that it introduces, it ends on a cliffhanger betokening a third novel. Brian and Gregory, having won the game of sunken places, are now in charge of designing the next game--that is, Brian won, and Gregory is somewhat testy about this. However, it seems that someone isn't playing fair, and the boys find themselves in a Vermont suburb, built with surprising rapidity on the ground where the previous game was played. While this volume has some of the horror elements present in the first book, it is better read as a parody of the genre, with many of Anderson's typically clever comments and asides leavening the mood. While Gregory's surliness is somewhat inexplicable, it does not detract from the action, which is, though somewhat more superficial than the first book, far more hilarious.

Observations of an Orderly: Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital

#487
Title: Observations of an Orderly: Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital
Author: Ward Muir
Publisher: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, & Co.
Year: 1917
249 pages

It was very interesting to compare this look at the typical experiences of a British ward orderly in World War I to more recent war and medical narratives by U.S. soldiers, some of whom are in psychological and medical services. In some ways, despite his greater formality, I have a better sense of Muir's daily life and concerns than I do of some more contemporary authors. Muir's tone is conversational but precise, and very engaging. Had he written anything else, I would seek it out.

AIDS in South Asia: Understanding and Responding to a Heterogeneous Epidemic

#486
Title: AIDS in South Asia: Understanding and Responding to a Heterogeneous Epidemic
Authors: Stephen Moses, James F. Blanchard, Han Kang, Faran Emmanuel, Sushena Reza Paul, Marissa L. Becker, David Wilson, and Mariam Claeson
Publisher: The World Bank
Year: 2006
136 pages

An orienting document describing HIV transmission routes, patterns of spread, and suggested general points for effective and economic intervention programs. I found it fascinating, but that may be my inner epidemiologist talking. The comparison sections underscore the specific factors that differentiate between AIDS epidemics in different countries. This has to do with social/sexual behaviors, drug distribution and use patterns, and, of course, policies, among other factors.

I recognize that organizations such as The World Bank must be neutral and politic in their comments, but I found it strange that, though human trafficking was explicitly mentioned several times, the risk factors identified didn't seem to distinguish between free and coerced sex workers (e.g., trafficked people potentially have less say about condom use). Similarly, there was some elision of agency about the purchase of sex that was subtle but troubling.

An Outcast of the Islands

#485
Title: An Outcast of the Islands
Author: Joseph Conrad
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 1896/2008
312 pages

Conrad writ small. Think of this as a sketch for Heart of Darkness to think the best of it. As is often the case in Conrad, men are flawed and the protagonist tumbles down a slippery slope, women are monstrous or associated with man's internal monster/savages (i.e., non-white people), savages abound and are sly and disgusting in their primativeness, and the not-very-heroic hero is subsumed by the darkness. Only here, there's more racism and less narration that stays close to the narrator. The segments where the non-white natives talk among themselves serve as not-very-convincing exposition. Ah, well. Conrad got better with practice.