The Professor and the Madman: a tale of murder, insanity and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary

by Simon Winchester

Sounds like a really nerdy book, and I have admitted to being somewhat nerdy, but this book is surprisingly exciting. I really tore through it and had trouble putting it down when I needed to. Seriously, not dry or boring at all. The subtitle hints at the sort of intrigue that gives the book a bit of thriller-iness, but it's also quite interesting to read about the who's and how's and the sheer humungousness of the creation of the OED. And I really swear it's not boring! It's like a really good episode of Nova or History Detectives, with a dash of Poirot. Probably among the Top 10 literary nonfiction books I've ever read, I recommend it highly.

Tales from Outer Suburbia

by Shaun Tan

I've been trying to think of a word to describe this amazing graphic novel-y book; it's unusual in both form and content. It's a collection of short stories (some very short) accompanied by illustrations. The stories are surreal without being spooky, while the illustrations are beautiful and detailed but also sort of soft-focus. I guess the best word is "dreamy," although I'm tempted to use "plush" (rich and smooth, as in "lush," but — despite the weirdness and unreality — gentle and comforting, like a stuffed animal), but that sounds weak and/or twee and doesn't really work without explanation.

What else? It's effing fantastic! Top 10 even! I would recommend this to anyone: adult, teen, tween; you could totally read it to little kids like a picture book. Anyone who likes GNs/comics or short stories and people who make/appreciate art will be especially pleased.

And it's totally cute that his name is spelled like Shaun Cassidy.

The Architecture of Happiness

by Alain de Botton

This is, without a doubt, a Top 10 book. It's one of those books that make me want to be the author, or at least be smart enough and creative enough to write this book. It helps that I'm a total geek for architecture, but this book is very accessible for non-geeks too.

Architecture has elements of art and science, the proportion varying over time and place (and space), and that's kind of what this book is about: the many different ways, successfully and not so successfully, that architecture combines aesthetics and practicality, philosophy and physics, engineering and emotion — and, ultimately, the many different ways architecture reflects and shapes ourselves and our world, and our perceptions of ourselves and our world.

But that makes it sound terribly academic, or like a pompous art gallery artist's statement, or some dilettante spazzing about jazz, or some hideous combination of all three. And I swear it's not like that! It's so much more beautiful and subtle and grounded in everyday experience. Reading it is like meditating (but way less boring).

Last thing I want to say is, don't expect to read the whole thing through in large chunks. Each chapter is further broken down into a series of vignettes (for lack of a better word), which adds to the meditative quality and makes it an ideal bedtime or toilet book. I'm not necessarily recommending you read just one wee section at a time, but giving yourself some time to absorb and marinate smaller amounts will definitely enhance the experience of reading this book.

The Book of Dave

by Will Self

I only just noticed the subtitle: "a revelation of the recent past and the distant future" — which pretty well sums up the whole idea of the book, although it doesn't even begin to hint at the complexity of its execution. This book's layers have layers, and those layers have layers too; hierarchy and archaeology are definite themes.

The recent past is the story of Dave, a cab driver in London who's been through a rough divorce. He's got a number of "issues," as pop psychologists like to say, most importantly his estrangement from his son, and he goes pretty crazy for a while, actually spending a short time institutionalized. To explain too much about his episode would possibly give away too much about the plot, but, yes, he does make a book of sorts, as the title indicates.

The distant future is a post-apocalyptic, post-global-warming world in which rising sea levels have made the UK into an archipelago of smaller islands populated by a feudal society of religious oligarchs, land owners, and uneducated villagers. At least, that's what you'll surmise after reading a bit, since the details are left intentionally vague. The religion of these future people has echoes of Christianity (particularly the medieval, Inquisition-y brand) but is based primarily on the worship of Dave, who gave them a book that is more or less their bible.

The restriction of access to knowledge in general, and control of Dave's book in particular, is the linchpin of the social and religious hierarchy, and the Davist belief system is particularly at odds with the pastoral lifestyle and Natural (capital on purpose) intelligence of the residents of a certain very remote island — which also happens to have exclusive access to a highly prized natural resource and is therefore subject to very rigid control by the authorities. Unbeknownst to the islanders (although the reader begins to suspect it very early on), the island is also the cradle of Davism, where the book was found. Being quite remote and having some other local cultural quirks as well, the island is a thorn in the side of the religious power- and knowledge-brokers, a persistent and recalcitrant source of heretical anti-Davist ideas. It might even be the source of a new revelation: further messages from Dave himself might lie hidden in the forbidden, unexplored areas of the island.

The book could be read as a fairly obvious lampooning of organized religions based on alleged divine revelations and holy scriptures, but to the author's credit the book really is more than that. It also grapples with the notions of historicity and personhood, knowledge, experience, faith and reason, love and anger and forgiveness, and the meaning of humanness itself.

A friend of mine who's a major history buff and nonfiction reader once mentioned that he was in the mood to read a bit of fiction, and I instantly recommended The Book of Dave without even doing a full reference interview. It's a challenging book that I'd recommend to anyone intelligent, analytical, and curious. The book is on par with one of my other all-time favorites, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, and I am hereby officially putting it in my Top 10!

Descartes' Bones: a skeletal history of the conflict between faith and reason

by Russell Shorto

Wow! Beautiful literary nonfiction about one of my favorite subjects. (See also my posts about The End of Faith and The Closing of the Western Mind; in addition, I haven't written about it, but not too long ago I really enjoyed a DVD lecture series called Tools of Thinking: Understanding the World through Experience and Reason.)

This book is more entertaining than academic, but it's absolutely chock full of facts — no small number of which I've made an effort to commit to memory for trivia-game purposes. It's also remarkably nonjudgmental about the "conflict" to which the title refers. The author takes an objective, journalistic approach, remembering to anticipate and present the counter-arguments, and saves his speculation for a Sherlockian flourish near the end. (And the speculation has to do with the actual fate of the actual bones, not with any grand metaphor or metaphysical conclusion.)

Ultimately, though, the book isn't about faith versus reason, or radical versus moderate Enlightenment philosophy, it's about the way the conflict itself, which results from and at the same time is the very essence of Cartesian dualism — the often misstated and misunderstood "mind-body problem" — how that duality is at the heart of both theological and secular ideas about the world since Descartes, and how the modern world — everything from scientific advances to the globalization of culture, and much more — grew from the philosopher's great quest for a solid foundation on which to build the edifices of knowledge.

Final analysis: highly readable, surprisingly smooth and quick given some of the weighty ideas it explores; short-listed for my nonfiction Top 10, if I ever get around to making such a list.

Confessions of a Mask

by Yukio Mishima

I'm not sure how to begin to tell you how gee-dee amazing this book is...but it's going in my Top 10. It's got that literary feeling. You can tell it's capital-letter Great and Classic even as you read it, but it doesn't seem old-fashioned or stuffy, and it isn't boring. It's very emotional, in fact, and it made me cry. It's also quite different from the Western canon of important novels.

Mishima was a renaissance man: poet, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, actor. In post-WWII Japan he was a well-known celebrity and cultural hero. He embraced some aspects of modernity and Western culture, but he also called for a return to traditional samurai-esque values of courage, honor, and independence — the latter being particularly important in the years after Japan's humbling defeat and disarmament. He committed ritual suicide in 1970 during a failed attempt to take over a Japanese military base, an act he had hoped would inspire a coup d'etat and return power to the imperial throne.

Mishima's second novel, published in 1948 when he was 24, Confessions of a Mask is a semi-autobiographical account of a young latent homosexual who conceals his true nature from society. The author's own sexual orientation remains subject to debate, although in some ways it was also an "open secret", as if he were the Jodi Foster of 1940s Japan. Reading the parts of the novel in which the protagonist wrestles with his desires, tries to intellectualize them away, ignores and denies them, gives in to them, it's difficult to imagine all that was written by someone who hadn't felt those feelings himself. (Then again, a lot of people were fooled by J.T. Leroy and other fakesters.) If he were a gay man determined to stay closeted, that could also explain at least part of his attraction to the rigid discipline of military life and bushido.

I also highly recommend the amazing film called Mishima: a life in four chapters.

Don't Say Any More, Darling

by Fumi Yoshinaga

Fumi Yoshinaga might be the greatest yaoi manga author/illustrator ever! The art is exquisite, the stories compelling, the whole package simply amazing. I'm in the middle of the Antique Bakery series, and I'm loving it. Don't Say Any More, Darling is a collection of short pieces — gay (with some R-rated scenes), sorta gay, not even gay — and I really enjoyed them all. They're realistic, poignant, artfully composed. I've read short stories by renowned authors, "masters of the craft," that aren't as good stories as these; the beautiful illustration only adds to their greatness.

If you like yaoi, if you like romantic, emotional manga, you simply must read this. I'll give a Top 10 Manga rating.

Mother's Milk: a novel
     and
Some Hope: a trilogy

by Edward St. Aubyn

I just finished the absolutely stunning Mother's Milk, which features among its protagonists the main character of the trilogy Some Hope, which I read a few years ago. The author has truly mastered the craft of stream-of-consciousness, exposing the mental and emotional lives of his characters in exquisite — sometimes agonizing — detail, but in a way that's perfectly coherent and sympathetic. We're talking Virginia Woolf-style stream of consciousness, not the staccato jibber-jabber or random ramblings that some writers have produced. It's meant to be a stream, after all, flowing and connected.

As you might guess from the author's name, St. Aubyn, he has some other things in common with Woolf: his characters are upper- or upper-middle-class, and they're unfulfilled. They have the sort of first-world crises that it's become fashionable to mock. Now, I suppose it's rather first-world of me, but I don't think one needs a genocidal war or Oprah's-Book-Club-style tragedy to write an interesting book. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that it's a bit cheap and easy to write about a catastrophe of some sort, and more challenging to root out the tiny personal catastrophes and make the reader care about them.

Unlike the novels by Woolf, there's a dark humor and hedonistic ennui woven through the existential angst. In some ways, it reminds me of Douglas Coupland or even Chuck Palahniuk; in particular it brough to mind A Spot of Bother, which I reviewed here.

A strong recommendation for Anglophiles, fans of dysfunctional families, and those looking for something more literary, but still contemporary, than much of today's popular fiction. Some Hope is very good, but Mother's Milk even better — enough to gain a provisional spot in my Top 10.

The Book of Lost Things

by John Connolly

From an author who's previously written mysteries and thrillers, we now have this abso-freaking-lutely awesome fairy tale for adults. I loved this book, tore through it in less than three days, and have already verbally recommended it to at least five people.

It's a coming-of-age story with a young boy/man whose mother has died after a long illness and whose father rather swiftly remarried and produced a baby brother. (Step-mom was a nurse at the institution where the dead mum was receiving hospice care, which gives you an idea of the timeline.) The story begins in the suburbs of London during WWII. Boy has conflicts with step-monster, but she's not evil; everyone's having tough times, and once we cross Narnia-style into the alternate reality we'll see that all the characters are imbued with complexity and ambiguity.

The coolest thing about this book is the way it retells the fairy tales you thought you knew. For example, Little Red Riding Hood wasn't a girl who was nearly eaten by a wolf, she was woman who fell in love with and seduced a wolf, giving birth to a race of half-wolf, half-human creatures that embody the struggle between instinct and intellect.

This book also gets bonus points for having a gay knight (disowned prince, in fact) searching for his lost lover, and for managing to encourage acceptance and diversity while acknowledging that those ideals don't mean that people won't sometimes have negative reactions and that those reactions don't necessarily indicate their deeper feelings.

I'm putting this book in my Top 10. (There are actually only two other books that are definitely in my Top 10: The End of Faith, which I've already blogged, and Cloud Atlas, which I haven't yet, although I have written up another of the author's books, Black Swan Green. Building my Top 10 is one of the things I hope to accomplish through writing this blog.)

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

by Sam Harris

This is the most important book I have ever read. This is a book I am actually going to buy. (I've bought only two or three books since I started working at the library six years ago.) I cannot say enough good things about this book — although reading it was a bit unsettling, and despite the fact that some people will be upset or offended by the book and what I have to say about it.

In a nutshell: religious faith, in addition to being entirely irrational and obviously unjustified, has been and is the source of many bad and scary things in the world (the Inquisition, suicide bombing, &c.); given the technology available today and the current strife among the world's major faiths, religious belief has the potential to destroy the world as we know it and perhaps put an end to mankind altogether. We need to stop constructing our lives around 2,000-year-old fairy tales and stop teaching our children to mimic the same absurdity. We need to agree on a reasoned basis for ethical and harmonious living with one another that does not resort to a fictitious supreme being.

And on and on — much more eloquently, of course. This is all mostly stuff I know already, but it can be an eye-opener when it's laid out in front of you all at once. The biggest lesson I took from The End of Faith is that I am not obliged to "respect" or "tolerate" anyone's ridiculous religious beliefs. (We don't "accept" alternative beliefs about algebra or traffic laws, do we?) In fact, if I have any obligation it is that of a rational person to point out the error of religious belief. (No can do at work, of course, though I wonder if I could get away with saying, "Sure, I can show you where the mythology books are.")

On a completely different topic, the author, Sam Harris, is hot. (And, no, I'm not mixing him up with the eponymous Broadway actor. Check out this photo of the author.)