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.