Proust Was a Neuroscientist

by Jonah Lehrer

I actually took notes while reading this book, about all the things that were annoying me in it. I think, in retrospect, that I was cranky for unrelated reasons, and I've since decided not to waste so much effort on what will essentially be a negative review, so I'm ditching my notes.

Anyway, in the introduction the author mentions Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist who wrote the absolutely brilliant book Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Lehrer then basically takes Damsio's idea (of drawing parallels between current discoveries in neurophysiology/neuropsychology and the work of a 17th century philosopher), steals it and waters it down, and tries to apply it to an array of other non-scientists, such as Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Walt Whitman.

I really wanted to like this book, but I think the author's stretching a bit. He also has this annoying habit (and I realize I'm picking nits) of saying that s0-and-so "discovered" such-and-such neurological fact, rather than saying the writer or artist intuited or intimated or expressed something about the brain that we now know to be true. No matter how well an artist's work synchs up with what we know about how the brain works, it really comes down to us and our hindsight; even a writer as scientifically inclined as George Eliot wasn't consciously contemplating neuroscience in the way we understand it today. (A philosopher, such as Spinoza, is another matter entirely; philosophers, in pondering the phenomenology of human mental and emotional states, really are studying neuroscience in a non-biological fashion.)

It's not a terrible book. I might even have liked it if I hadn't already read so much about neuroscience and philosophy.

American Virgin 2, Going Down

by Steven T. Seagle

I checked this out on advice of a co-worker who said, hey, this looks interesting. It's a comic book, which I like, and it appeared to be about an attractive young guy exploring the steamy/seamy (under)world of gay sex, also good. But I should have paid more attention to the title. Turns out the guy's a christian virgin who reluctantly pretends to be gay in order to get information about the person who murdered his fiancée. I'm not really sure who would like this. The plot's well-constructed enough, but there's a lesbian sister and ex-pornstar stepdad, sexual situations and a pretty much evil mother, so I don't really see it appealing to actual christian virgin types, while the protagonist is too smugly and/or earnestly christian to be appealing to anyone else.

The Wordy Shipmates

by Sarah Vowell

A more serious turn for the usually hilarious This American Life contributor, but apparently she's more than just a joker. In addition to hearing Vowell on the radio, I'd previously read her book Assassination Vacation, a Sedaris-like collection of humorous personal essays with a travelogue theme and a streak of seriousness. (Even after a hundred and seventy years, you can't really joke about the Trail of Tears.) Like that one, this book is shelved in the American history section, and it has a photo of a less-than-museum-quality Pilgrim diorama on the cover, so I figured it'd be about the same: funny stuff with a historical theme.

Although she hasn't completely muzzled her wit, this is a much more serious book dealing with primary sources (the written words of the titular wordy shipmates, early colonists in New England) and examining the disconnect between real, historically accurate Puritan ideals and current notions of the origins and meaning of American freedom and power, destiny and morality (including the post-9/11 beribboned-pickup-truck-and-lawn-sign creed of American exceptionalism that asserts our right and obligation to rule the world through economic and military warfare). Sounds like it could be pretty boring, right? But the author's obvious passion for and command of the material, as well as her engaging writing, make this a compelling and informative yet easy to read book.

This is the book I'd been expecting when, several years ago, I read The Puritan Ordeal.

Emotional Design: why we love (or hate) everyday things

by Donald A. Norman

As a self-professed design geek, I had high hopes for this book. Sadly, I was disappointed. The writing isn't great, the ideas seem over-simplified, and the many generalizations aren't given enough supporting evidence or details. The basic concept behind the book is pretty well summed up in the title, and in some ways it's similar to The Architecture of Happiness — an unfortunate comparison, since the latter is so much more lyrical and moving, making this book seem even more bland. At times it reads like a textbook, but at the same time it comes across as really unscientific in the way it drops all these unsupported assumptions on the reader. (Even when something seems obvious, academic standards require some minimal justification, or at the very least stating that something is to be taken for granted.) I started skimming toward the end of the first chapter, and after picking through the second chapter I didn't even finish and just gave up.

Poison: a history and family memoir

by Gail Bell

This was on my "want to read" list for years, and then one day I passed by it on the shelf and decided to check it out; then it sat on my shelf at home for quite a while, until one day it didn't renew because someone else had a hold on it. I probably could have renewed it in a few days, after that person's hold was satisfied with a different copy of the book, but I decided it was time at last to shit or get off the pot, as they say.

So, after all that waiting, the book is very good, but just a hair shy of excellent — not for any particular reason, just overall it's a B+ and not an A. (It occurs to me now, having just typed that, that the grade analogy is apt: though the book doesn't fail in a specific way, I've read a number of other conceptually similar books that are better, so this book is marked down relative to those that truly excel, as if graded on a curve.) It serves up a nice mix of facts and narrative, in the vein of well-known literary nonfiction books such as Salt; Cod; The Botany of Desire; The Big Oyster; Rats (the one by Robert Sullivan); etc. It even has a theoretical edge over other books of its ilk, in that it incorporates the family history angle, detailing the author's investigation of allegations that her grandfather poisoned two of his children.

Trained as a pharmacist, the author really knows her stuff when it comes to the chemical properties and biological effects of various poisonous substances. The historical information about famous poisoning cases, and also the less-scientific explorations of the literary, cultural, symbolic nature of poison and poisoning — the areas one might have expected her to falter or seem out of her element — are well-researched and well-written. I'm still giving it a hearty recommendation: ain't nothin' wrong with a B+.

Charmed Thirds

by Megan Mccafferty

At the end of my post about the first two books in this series (here), I expressed reservations about the direction in which to story seemed headed. Unfortunately, I was right. Even worse, it's not necessarily the plot per se that's disgusted me, it's the fact that the main character is so narcissistic and needy and pathetic. I think she has borderline personality disorder. I seriously doubt I will read the fourth book or, heaven forfend, the fifth. (BTW, did you ever hear of Fifth disease? It's parvovirus — which I always thought was a dog thing — for people. Gross.)

The Hunger Games

by Suzanne Collins

I read a review of this somewhere online, and it made me think of a few friends who I know are into young adult fantasy-type stuff. Coincidentally, the people I was thinking of all happen to be women, with whom I've discussed the particular appeal of YA fantasy with just the right amount of romantic tension — approaching, one could even say flirting with, but not quite entering the romance genre.

I'd also heard rumblings that this would be a "big" book, and sure enough I had to wait my turn to get it from the library. (Sadly, I must admit that when I first got it I was having some trouble managing my library materials and wound up returning it late, without even having read it, and putting it on hold again.) When at last I read this book, I found it to be a gripping, rip-roaring read completely deserving of the praise and good reviews. I also discovered a romantic edge to it that I hadn't expected but totally appreciated.

It's not overly girly. In fact, the protagonist is rather tomboy-ish, and the story involves hunting and wilderness skills, hand-to-hand combat and outright killing (people, no less). But I still would hesitate to recommend it to a teenage boy, unless he's a total fantasy nut, unostentatiously secure in his masculinity, and/or a little bit (or a lotta bit) gay. At the same time, I wouldn't recommend it to any ol' girl either, for sure not those with overly delicate sensibilities.

SPOILER ALERT!
I should know enough to expect this by now, but I must unhappily report what I found at the conclusion: End Book One. When's the next book out? Who knows... nothing obvious on the author's official site or the publisher's site. Being a crafty liberrian, however, I found out from Books in Print that it's scheduled for publication in September 2009. The only consolation for having to wait that long is that the romance element is poised to ratchet up a bit in the next book.

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.

Zine Round-up à trois

This is totally out of control, because all the while I've been trying to finish this post, I've been reading more zines on my lunch breaks. Won't somebody think of the children?!

Dealing with Difficult People, by S.K.L.(?)
Mostly funny stories — some from e-mails, Craigslist, and such — about interactions with the annoying people in our lives: cheap landlords, annoying and/or mentally ill co-workers, frenemies... the list goes on. I had a laugh-out-loud moment in a quiet restaurant while reading a story from a young woman who had tried to confront the neighbor she thought tattled on her for slamming doors: when she says "We're considerate of other people," he replies, "Then why do you wear your hair like that?"

Secret Mystery Love Shoes #5 and #6, by Maria Goodman and Androo Robinson
Very cute size-wise, and the humor is pretty cute and sassy too. If you opened a drawer labeled "odds and ends" and found an envelope labeled "miscellany," these zines might be inside. They exemplify the way details add up to a whole life, and they are a laugh riot to boot. Reading them will really make you want to invite Androo and Maria over for a game of Boggle.

Zuzu and the Baby Catcher, by Rhonda Baker
If you know me, you know I'm not a big fan of babies (except for eating babies, and making funny faces at babies, and mock-crying back at them when they cry). But I read this whole mommy-zine anyway, and it's pretty interesting. I imagine mommies would really like it. The author is also a doula or midwife (don't recall), and she chose to end this issue (no. 8 or 9, don't remember) with a reference that has seared an image into my brain forevermore. I don't want to do the same to you, so I'll just say, "Taint what it used to be".

Flytrap: Episode 1, Juggling Act, by Sara Ryan and Steve Lieber
Don't let the "Episode 1" fool you — you're getting dropped right into the middle of a story-in-progress. Kinda cryptic at first, and then it kills you by being so darn short. Clever, they are, because you will read more episodes; yes, you will.

Estrus Comics, Issue 5, Kiss & Tell, by Mari N. Schaal
As a boy, as a gay boy, I have to admit a slight aversion to the word "estrus" and things related. Luckily, these sex-related comics are friendly, funny, and approachable for the whole gender spectrum. I can't speak to other issues of Estrus Comics, but this one at least doesn't have a major feminist agenda.

Shorts, by Emily Block
Cute and doodle-y mini-comics featuring a bit of parkour (if you don't know what it is, look it up on the YouTubes, it's ridonkulous), and a Kill Bill-style murderous daydream.

Subgroup Cursive: the older sibling of Dusty Wing, Spring 2006, edited by Tod
Sweet little anthology of art, activities, and stories by, for, and about younger teens. Also for cool parents who want their kids to be cool too. Zine for this age group are pretty rare, in my experience.

The Heart Star, by Christoph Meyer
Precious, tiny, sentimental story of love, death, ghosts, and the cosmos. From the creator of 28 Pages Lovingly Bound with Twine.

How to Survive Heartbreak, by Michael Lee Cook
Breaking up is hard to do, laughter is the best medicine, the personal is political: this zine could be a mess of clichés, but the superb writing and illustrations lift it above all that. It begins with the dumpee's self-deprecating humor and sly innuendos about the dumper's character flaws, but then it does attempt to offer some earnest advice, before hitting you with the heavy existential crisis — an emotional roller-coaster in just a few thousand words. The illustrations, which I think were done by the author's brother, are of people with blank faces, only eyebrows to convey the range of emotions; it'll give you a new respect for your own eyebrows.

BFX, by Nate Beaty
It took me a while to figure out that the title is short for Brainfag 10; then it took another while for me to realize its relation to BFF, which is Brainfag Forever, and which my library has catalogued as a graphic novel rather than a zine (which happens sometimes to compilations of zines into a single volume); then I had to realize it's "fag" as in "fatigue" and not a gay thing. Anyway, brain fatigue is just what it sounds like, and I totally have it today, which is the excuse I'm going to use for not remembering much about this auto-bio mini-comic, which I'm sure is quite good. ... Actually, I just peeped the review from Booklist, and it jogged my memory! It really is good, and to the (debatable) extent that any zine can be considered a classic, this is for sure.

Some/Body, by Amaris Summer Jule Hayden
A zine in two parts: Chapter 1, Diagnosis; and Chapter 2, Denial. Also goes by the name Patient Files Confidential, and their covers are little file folders just like at the doctor's office. Pretty heavy stuff in here, about a woman's serious and potentially (probably, eventually) life-ending medical condition, her efforts to deal with it, and her worries about her kid's future without her.

The La-la Theory! Or a zine about language #2, by Katie Haegele
Man, what's with the zines with the super-long names? This one's title continues "February 2005, Fancy word for widow". (To some extent, lengthy titles result from a culture clash between library cataloguing practices and the free-form creative zine ethos.) In any case, linguistics is one of the things I kind of nerd-out about, so I really dug this one's multidisciplinary approach to it's subject. I even read it twice, because it had information I wanted to commit to memory: I learned about suttee, a dreadful fate that awaits some widows in India; and I learned that veuve, as in Veuve Clicquot champagne, is the French word for widow.

DAR: a super girly top secret comic diary, #1
Girlfuck: an introduction to girl-on-girl lovin'
I Like Girls, by Erika Moen
If that lovable Belgian reporter Tin-Tin were a lesbian... wait, he kind of is, isn't he? Anyway, it's just the shampoo-horn hairdo and being comics that they have in common. Girlfuck is quite informative and not nearly as icky (for gay boys) as it could be; the other two are more story-oriented. The best thing about all of them is their absolute candor and naughtiness and humor. Oh, and butt-sex jokes — what's funnier than butt sex?

Ivy, chapters 1 and 2, by Sarah Oleksyk
No idea if these mini-comics are autobiographical, or even semi-, but they're darn good. Really nice illustration style, bold and clear but also dynamic and nicely detailed; and a true-to-life storyline about a young woman on the verge of post-high school life. The author/artist also makes really awesome prints that she sells on her website. I'm totally in love with the "Otter Erotic" print, but it's kinda expensive; it would make a very nice present to give to a certain blogger whose birthday is August 1st.

There's No Such Thing as a Free Couch, by Katie C. and Nickey Robo
Put an ad on Craigslist offering a free couch, and you'll get a lot of responses. Now make it a couch with an unpleasant history, and let the jokes write themselves! Well, actually, weirdos willing to live with a haunted and/or soiled and/or louse-y couch will write e-mails that read like jokes. Next, post a personal ad from a woman who's openly bitchy and looking for a man she can emasculate and dominate: hilarity ensues. Nickey Robo also wrote a cute little thang called My Heart Beats Only for You and a Few Dozen Other People: A Zine About Crushes.

Listy and Listy 2, by Maria Goodman
Speaking of crushes, if I weren't a homo, I'd have a crush on Maria. As it is, I have a crush on her sense of humor. A variety of lists and list-related commentary is to be found in these zines, along with reviews of found lists. There's a book called Milk, Eggs, Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found that sort of stole the idea — at least, I'm choosing to give Maria credit for inventing the concept because she does it better. The book is big and splashy, but it mostly just mocks the lists and list-makers; Listy is more analytical, almost scholarly at times, without sacrificing the funniness.

Deep Cuts: Comix About Jamz
Noise Art?!
True Tales of Actual Birds, Issue #1
by Actual Birds
I'm not sure how much of it is just the weird appeal of the name "Actual Birds," but I really enjoyed these wee comics. Two of them are seriously wee, bordering on ephemera (another magnetic word), and at least one doesn't even really have pages per se. I also don't know if there's a bird equivalent of a furry (feathery?), but I also have a strange attraction to the drawings of the guy with a human body and a bird's head.

Former Fetus, by Emily
A nakedly honest account of getting pregnant and getting an abortion, this would be a good recommendation for female teens, but anyone who reads it will feel its impact. I could see it being used in educational or counseling settings, but casual readers will probably find fuel for their own inner discussions.

Adventures in Service!, by Matt Fagan
"Featuring Hobbeson and Chives — crimefighting butlers in love and battle!" The author of this mini-comic explains that these are two orphan characters that he's played with for years, drawing single panels and short story fragments, but never turned into a bigger project. It's a shame, because I for one would like to read a longer story about these charming manservants of justice. (I'd also appreciate more opportunities to use the word "manservant.")

Wendy magazine #12, by Wendy and Wendy
This is a zine made by two Wendy's. (My friend from Ohio, who went to the same high school as the girl after whom the fast food chain is named, says that in those parts they say it more like "windy".) I've never seen any other issues, but this one's pretty good. They collected people's answers to the question "What haven't you told your mother?" and then provided complementary illustrations, collages, etc. Gives you the same voyeuristic thrill you get from Post Secret (website and book), along with the satisfaction of handicraft that comes with reading a zine.

What did you buy today? : Daily Drawings of Purchases, volume 3, April 2006, by Kate Bingaman-Burt
There's something really Buddhist and anti-consumerist about this, even though it's all about buying stuff — well, stuff that's already been boughten. The author makes nicely detailed drawings of something she buys each day. It's a glimpse into the everyday life of another person, and also prompts a pause for the viewer to think about all the things s/he buys (and maybe doesn't need, so the subtext seems to be.) She's also, according to the colophon, drawing copies of her credit card statements until they're paid off, which sounds like a punishment; if nothing else, it'll reduce the amount of time she has to spend more money.

Where are you from?, by A.M. O'Malley
While chronicling a childhood in many places and remembering a mother with a wandering heart, the author explores what "home" means. Well-written and very interesting, especially for someone like myself, who's only made one major change of address in 35 years.

Imaginary Life #4, Current Resident, by Krissy Durden
A great concept, and well-executed. (Don't you hate those amazing ideas that don't pan out?) It's like that game of making up stories about strangers, except using houses for the starting point and imaging stuff about the people who might live there. In a way, it's connected to the thesis of The Architecture of Happiness, which I wrote about here.

Urban Adventure League Zine Pack: Collecting the previous issues: bicycle rides and walks in Portland, by Shawn Granton
When the weather's nice, I always think about going for a walk or a bike ride, but if I don't have any errands to run it can be hard to figure out where to go. This awesome little thing saves the day! It's pocket-size, it has fold-out maps! Places to go, things to see along the way, and illustrations!

Papercutter: issue 7
Every Papercutter I've seen has been top-notch, inside and out, story and art. This one has work by Andy Hartzell and Aron Nels Steinke, and an M.K. Reed/Jonathan Hill collabo. "Americus" by Reed and Hill is a poignant middle school story of fading friendships and shifting loyalties; it also has an amazing line (spoken by a bully) that I think would make a great T-shirt: Ha! Books are totally queer!

All the Ancient Kings, by Julia Gfrörer
Imagined interactions among musicians and artists famous for their substance abuse as much as for their art, including Leonard Cohen, Warren Zevon, Hunter S. Thompson, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young. Great little comics, painstakingly (I'm guessing) and tinily (tiny-ly?) drawn.

Action Bookbinding!, by Skylaar Amann
A little bit hip hop, a little bit book nerd: this celebration of the craft won't exactly teach you to bind your own books, but it has illustrations and a dorky bespectacled white guy rapping. It's a real hoot. Wheat paste, yo!

Sidewalk Bump #2
Just like the first Sidewalk Bump, this one has a be-yoo-tee-full colored cover. Inside, there's a bunch of cool comics and art, by various artists, about skateboarding and the skater life.

Tales from the Bus: from the pages of Manuscripts Don't Burn, by Dr. Daniel Q. Swank
When she came to visit me a couple years ago, I had to work one day so I put my sister — all 5 feet and 100 pounds of her — on her very first public bus ride. She missed the stop and, not really understanding how buses work, tried to stay on the bus until it "looped around" so she could get off next time around. The bus she was on is not that kind of bus; it took her very far away, where she was made to get off and board another bus going back the opposite direction. Somewhere along the way, a gigantic fat person sat on her and didn't even hear her meekly saying "excuse me"; someone else on the bus had to intervene and tell the fatty "I think you're sitting on someone." That story pales in comparison to some of the most hilarious tales in this collection of crazy-but-true shit that went down on the bus during the author's workaday commute. Seriously. Funny. Shit.

Crazy with Good Intentions: too much & never enough; a personal zine, by Wyatt Riot
Reading a perzine can be rather dicey. When it's good, it's really good, like talking to an old friend; when it's bad, it's like the worst of the worst "reality" TV. Even though it's a hodgepodge of think-out-loud, this one works. The author (points for the name, BTW) is clearly intelligent and thoughtful, and has some interesting ideas that are made even more interesting by unpretentious postmodern punctuation and formatting.

The Penny Dreadful #. 19: The Last Days, by Mark Russell
Not as funny as the other issue of The Penny Dreadful that I read, and nowhere near as funny as The Superman Stories, but I definitely got a few chuckles from this vaudevillian zine. (That's "vaudeville" as in "variety," not as in "old-fashioned," although the title is a nod to the olden days.)

Nosedive, Lucky #13, by Erik R.
I have to admit that I only skimmed this one. At the risk of undermining my zine cred, I was kind of turned off by the angsty-punk, self-righteous, anti-gentrification thing. I mean, yeah, gentrification sucks (basically; the devil's in the details), but a certain amount of it is inevitable, and now that I'm over 30 I've given up trying to fix the world. Anyway, just not my cup of tea, so my thumbs down should be taken with a grain of salt.

Fuzzy Lunchbox, #11 and #12, by Laura and Deborah Nadel
Reading these zines is like telling stories with friends over drinks, especially since a lot of the stories are drinking stories. In addition to some laugh-out-loud moments, you'll also enjoy the clashing and meshing of the different voices and styles of the two authors, who are twins. Bad grammar and misspellings usually irritate me, but in this case the lack of spell-checking by one of the authors only adds to the funniness; it probably helps that the other doesn't seem to need spell check.

Water Column, by Josh Frankel
Gorgeous wordless (except few paragraphs at the very end) comic about the oceanic food chain, from plankton through copepods all the way to giant basking sharks. I'd love to know about the artist's technique, they almost look like wood- or linocuts. He also did a very sad, and also wordless, comic called Twilight of the Sea Cow, about the hunting to extinction of a giant sea mammal. On a barely-related note, I'd also like to plug the locally produced and utterly fascinating documentary film Crustaceans Alive Through a Microscope, filmed, edited and narrated by Warren A. Hatch.

I Was a Teenage Comic Nerd, by Liz Prince
I recognize the name, like she's, like, famous or something. I don't think I've read any of her stuff before, but I like her style. This collection is odds and ends from her younger years, short little auto-bio or semi-auto-bio vignettes. Her drawing style is cute, it reminds me of Powerpuff Girls but with long, stretchy limbs and normal-size heads.

Manhole #3, by Mardou
If this were any longer it would have to be called a Graphic Novel rather than a comic. Well-drawn and well-paced, it's a melancholy tale of young womens' friendship and how, when life changes, friendships fade.

What Are Crass?, by Sean Christensen et al.
Truly bizarre, and I'm certain the author would take that as a compliment without having to be told it's a compliment. Short comics about weird creatures in a weird world doing weird stuff. No other way to describe it.

I Cut My Hair #1, by Lisa Rosalie Eisenberg
Every time I try to think of or type this person's name, it comes out Lisa Marie, as in Presley — and for that I apologize, to no one in particular. Pleasingly drawn journal comics about working in the education system and about the creative process, and by a local author to boot. Shout out to Open Meadow!

As Eavesdropped #2, by Suzanne Baumann
Very short, very random, chuckle-inducing comics. My only complaint is, I want more! Sometimes I love the shortness of mini-comics and other zines, sometimes it's frustrating as heck. Whatcha gonna do?

White Male Neurosis, by James Williams
This guy has a unique-ish drawing style... I haven't seen many zines with a similar look, but it does kind of remind me of Lynda Barry in some ways. (I'd say there's R. Crumb influence, but how could there not be? It's like saying a band is influenced by the Beatles — duh!) But anyway, what I really like about this zine is the subject: it's about the author as a kid and how he built a wall of cereal boxes around himself because he couldn't stand the sight or sound of his family chewing. I myself have a powerful, rage-inspiring aversion to chewing sounds; if I ever go postal, it'll probably be the result of someone eating noisily. I know, it's a "First World crisis," not important in the larger scheme of things, compared to people who don't even have any thing to chew, noisily or quietly, but we all have our little issues. What's yours?

Squirrelly #1, by Sue Cargill
A really fantastic and inspiring collection of painfully detailed drawings and short, surreal stories on a variety of topics, but still thematically tight. All the stories deal with something or someone squirrelly (in the figurative sense), even the one that's about lobsters. Truly one of the best zines I've ever read, it made me wheeze with laughter.

Girl in Landscape

by Jonathan Lethem

I guess this is speculative fiction, since it isn't cataloged as science fiction. Future, space travel, extrasolar colonization, aliens... but somehow not sci-fi. The story doesn't have to be set on another planet, it could easily be re-worked as a western or in any kind of frontier/colonization situation. Except for that one thing, which I can't really tell you about.

In my experience, a lot of sci-fi and fantasy books are coming-of-age stories, whether it's a character growing up or a civilization maturing (or declining). There's a convergence in the liminal aspects of both the transformation narrative and the imaginative effort of writing or reading without reference to conventional reality. Girl in Landscape inhabits the same territory.

It's a fairly breezy read that I think would appeal to teens (the protagonist is a psychologically mature 13-year-old girl), but there's a barely contained complexity that keeps a multitude of themes and potential conclusions afloat. (I'm trying to think of an expressive image, but all I can come up with is a pillowcase full of kittens.) The ending is kind of abrupt, but I suppose it has to be, since it's also the collapse of all those possibilities into a single eventuality.

I don't want to get into the plot too much, but here's the set up: abandoned by both parents (one dead, one abdicated), Pella Marsh moves with her father and younger brothers to a very small human settlement on a planet whose inhabitants are strange remnants of a once-great culture that left their home and took to the stars; transplanted into this environment, she faces the tyranny and the disappointment of adults, while becoming one herself.

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.

Jesus Freaks: a true story of murder and madness on the evangelical edge

by Don Lattin

After I read this book, which I think was back in fall of 2007, I made a blog entry with just the title and author, thinking I'd get around to finishing it in a few days. Yeah, right. So here I am a year and a half later finally getting around to it. Knowing there's some kind of subtitle, I just did a quick keyword search, only to find that there are not one, not two, but three other books called Jesus Freaks. Subtitle indeed.

In this case, the word "freaks" refers not only to the fact that these people are really into Jesus, but also to the fact that the organization (sometimes known as Children of God, or Family of God) grew out of the hippies for Jesus movement dating back to the free-love, anti-war '60s counter culture — in other words, they're freaks because they're hippies, as in "freaking out the straights, man." (And that's "straights" as in straitlaced non-hippies, probably but not necessarily heterosexuals.)

So, the Family of God is basically a cult, complete with tyrannical leader, shady finances, questionable "religious" practices, brainwashing, the whole nine. Some female followers reportedly engaged in "fishing for Jesus," which was having sex for money or to convert, and there was something sort of like polygamy going on, for the leader at least. There also have been allegations of child molestation and/or incest. (The family of River and Joaquin Phoenix was apparently involved in the cult at one point; a friend told me she read in an interview that River Phoenix said he'd lost his virginity at age 4 with an adult woman.)

What about the murder, then? A boy who was born into the cult and raised as if he were going to inherit leadership of the cult (and at times treated like or portrayed as the new messiah) becomes disillusioned as a teenager and leaves the cult, but can't escape it's influence and winds up murdering the leader's second (third?) "wife" and then kills himself not long after. He may have been hoping to kill more people, but it's hard to tell for sure. Either way, it's a rather anti-climactic ending, for him at least.

Ultimately, it was an OK book, a little bit of a guilty, voyeuristic pleasure. Not quite tabloid levels of sensationalism, but definitely meant to be shocking. It seems well-researched enough, and there isn't any apparent reason to question the author's motivation, but it somehow falls just shy of proper journalism. I had a couple of friends at the time who were reading a lot of I-escaped-a-Mormon-cult books, and I recommended this to them. I've never read an Ann Rule book (she's the queen of true crime, if you didn't know), but I imagine they're a lot like this.

Close Range: Wyoming Stories

by Annie Proulx

When the movie Brokeback Mountain came out back in 2005, I remember hearing from somewhere that the original short story is quite different from the movie. Ever since, I'd been curious about it.

(For the record, I didn't like the movie that much the first time I saw it. I was just kinda "meh." I watched it again on DVD, cuz I have several friends who really-really-really liked it. After watching it a second time, I realize that part of the reason I didn't like it is that it's hard to understand what the characters are saying. Ennis especially is a mumbler, but Jack too. And I think the sound quality in general is just kinda poor. I did, however, like the movie more upon second watching — at home with the sound turned way up — and in fact it made me cry.)

So, fast-forward to late last week. I finally got around to reading the book. "Brokeback Mountain" happens to be the last story in the collection, and I wanted to read some of the others for the sake of context too. I didn't really like the first one... second one was better. Not bad, necessarily, but not my cup of tea. I got through most of the book, and warmed up a little to the western milieu, but finally decided to skip the last two before "Brokeback Mountain."

Turns out it's exactly like the movie — or vice versa, I suppose. There are several lines of dialogue in the movie exactly as they are in the book. And again it made me cry.

I wish I could remember how/where I got the impression that the story was supposed to be different from the movie. Makes me wonder if there wasn't some of kind of conservative smear campaign to convince people the movie was pro-gay Hollywood propaganda because stuff like that wouldn't/doesn't happen in the "real" wild west.

A Countess Below Stairs

by Eva Ibbotson

I don't know if I've made any snide remarks about romance novels here in this blog, but I'm pretty sure I haven't fully and openly mocked them — at least, I hope I haven't, because I have a confession to make...

When I was in middle school, I used to sneak into my sister's room so I could borrow her Sweet Valley High books. I've read almost all of the Princess Diaries books (and there's a lot of them). I've read (and enjoyed) Angus, Thongs and Full-frontal Snogging (and two of its sequels); Meagan Meade's Guide to the McGowan Boys (and wished it had a sequel); I Capture the Castle (even though, or perhaps because I'd already seen the movie); and I especially loved Victoria and the Rogue, from the Avon True Teen Romance series. Romantic comedies are well-represented in my Netflix queue. (I've also read quite a few Victorian novels — Austen, various Brontes, Hardy, Eliot — many of which involve romance, but they have history on their side and aren't as embarrassing.)

So imagine my (sort of secret, barely concealed) joy when I came upon this book, in which a young Russian countess flees the revolution and, having been forced to abandon all her wealth and possessions, finds work as a lowly chambermaid on an English estate... I shouldn't have to add that, of course, the estate's dashing young master returns from abroad and discovers a stunningly beautiful and shockingly well-educated young woman has joined his staff.... (Now that I've written staff I really must let you finish the thought yourself.)

Actually, everyone is quite chaste, moonlit skinny-dipping (and accidental skinny-watching) notwithstanding. All in all I really liked this book, for what it is. It isn't spectacular in any way, but it's a very good example of the genre, and, to it's credit, the plot owes more to the likes of Austen than to the more modern Harlequin formula.

Burndive
    and
Cagebird

by Karin Lowachee

The first book in this sort-of-series is Warchild, which I wrote about here. It's not exactly a series, because the stories aren't sequential; instead they're the same basic story told from the points of view of three different characters (another echo of Orson Scott Card's "Enderverse"). I don't know why I didn't just check the publication dates, but I somehow managed to read them out of order. It didn't really matter for these two, but reading either of these before Warchild would have ruined that book's ending, so I'm glad I at least got that part right.

These books are definitely of the military sci-fi subgenre, but there's also the heavy focus on character and emotion typical of the soft/social sci-fi subgenre. Each of the main characters experiences physical and psychological trauma, and ultimately finds the inner strength to endure, first, and then to free themselves from their pasts. The way the protagonists evolve sort of reminded me of some of Octavia Butler's heroines, too.

All three characters are young men, ranging in age from 14 to 20 during the main action of the books, with some flashbacks or introductory parts about their earlier childhoods. (At my library, they're classified as young adult books, but I've seen them catalogued as regular SF on other libraries' websites.) Partly as a function of their ages, and also because of a major plot element — war, piracy, kidnapping, forced prostitution — sexual themes arise. It's mostly innuendo of the gay-vague and gay-chicken* variety; only Cagebird has actual gay characters and actual sex happening, which is slightly more explicit than a romance novel but far from the language of erotica.

*Not to be confused with the older gay slang "chicken," referring to a very young gay boy/man usually in the context of a relationship with an older gay man, "gay chicken" is when (supposedly) straight guys say and/or do "gay" things to each other, turning up the intensity and pushing boundaries until one of them "chickens" out. It's related to frat-boy/athlete/military sexual bravado and gay-baiting, and it depends on the paradox that the more secure you are in your masculinity, the farther you can push the gay boundary. In these books, there's also an implied feeling that there's much less social stigma attached to being gay and that gender and sexuality categories are... not exactly fluid, but maybe more mix-and-match.

Final analysis: the action and intrigue of Ender's Game or a Heinliein book, with the added attraction of teen angst and sexiness. I loved this series, and I'd recommend it to teens and adults alike. I'm very sad that my library no longer has Warchild and is down to one copy each of Burndive and Cagebird. I'm even considering putting them in my Top 10.

The Altruism Equation: seven scientists search for the origins of goodness

by Lee Alan Dugatkin

I enjoy science books, and one of my particular science interests is evolution; I'm also a cynic, and I don't really believe in (philosophical or pure) altruism. Evolutionary biology has catalogued plenty of examples of behavior that appears altruistic, at least when one considers animals as individuals, but the altruism often vanishes when the behavior is framed in social or genetic terms. I pretty much take it for granted, but not everyone — scientists included — agrees with the major tenets of Richard Dawkins' argument in his book The Selfish Gene.

All that is just a long way of saying I was very interested to read this book, which explores the historical and contemporary scientific discourse on altruistic, or apparently altruistic behavior. The approach taken is to examine the lives and studies of seven researchers, with the intention, I presume, to make the scientific story more compelling by adding more of a plot (so-called literary nonfiction being all the rage the last couple of years). Unfortunately, it doesn't quite make the grade. It's quite dry and, well, science-y. OK for the academically inclined, or those actually doing school work, but not so great for the dabbler.

And since we're on the subject, I did once upon a time read some of The Selfish Gene. I was supposed to read it over the summer between high school and college, because my college had stuck me in its honors program, and they were making all the honors students read the book and attend a lecture/Q&A with Dawkins himself. Looking back, I squandered the opportunity, but back then my scientific interests hadn't matured — plus, what kind of hopeless nerd wants to read a science book the summer after graduating high school?! I remembering feeling as if I mostly understood most of what I read in the book, but I didn't really have the context to understand why the ideas were controversial or paradigm-changing. (Shortest possible version: genes want to reproduce themselves, and every other biological apparatus — from viral coats to eukaryotic cells, to simple multicellular organisms, all the way to complex organisms such as humans and bees and sequoias — has evolved in order to further that goal of reproducing genes, rather than reproducing the organism itself; in other words, people don't really have babies to make more people, they have babies because the genes inside people make more genes by making people want to have babies.) Also, as I said in my review of another Dawkins book (here), he's not the greatest writer.

Blue Pills: a positive love story

by Frederick Peeters

As much as this book is deserving of a dignified review, I won't be able to go on until I say this: "Peter" and "Peters" are funny enough, but the extra E in this author's name is just icing on the cake!

Now. Ahem. This is another straggler, one I read a long time ago and I'm just now catching up. It's probably one of, if not the first proper Graphic Novels — emphasis on the "novel" — I ever read. It's a comics memoir about the author's relationship with an HIV-positive partner. The description I initially read did not specify genders, so I suppose I must have been thinking or hoping it was about gay guys. Turns out he dated an HIV-positive woman, who had a son who also is poz.

It's a good book, but I don't remember being amazed by it or anything. It's certainly interesting — especially if you've ever been in, or have the potential to be in a sero-discordant couple — and it's not a huge time commitment either. Would definitely add something to a sex-ed lesson about HIV/AIDS, and I don't recall anything that would make it inappropriate for teens.

On Truth
     and
On Bullshit

by Harry G. Frankfurt

These two tiny books are precious gems of practical philosophy. They're basically extended ruminations on the natures of their subjects — truth and bullshit, respectively — with an eye to how an understanding of either can be useful in navigating our lives, making judgments and decisions, negotiating relationships, analyzing and evaluating knowledge about how things are in the world*.

What good is truth? Why care about it? How do useful instances of truth (known facts) differ from the abstract idea of truth? How does bullshit (obfuscation and/or meaningless jibber-jabber) differ from an outright lie? What do they have in common? How does all this affect our quest for the reliable information we need to get through day-to-day life?

The author is a professor emeritus at Princeton University. I kind of want to buy these books, partly because they're so tiny and cute, but also because they're the kind of books you can re-read at different points in life and learn new things every time.

*I say "how things are in the world" instead of lower-case "reality" to avoid confusion with Reality, which can be made subject to hair-splitting, ennervating, and/or fatuous metaphysical speculations. I'm just talking about the reliable, easily agreed upon physical world.

The Graveyard Book

by Neil Gaiman

Meh.



I'd really like to just leave it at that, but duty (hee-hee) compels me to let you know that this book just won the Newberry, pretty much the ultimate award for children's literature. Personally, I think it should be a young adult book, first of all; second, if not for Gaiman's already creepy oeuvre, I'd accuse the author of trying to cash in on the trendiness of all things occult by cramming as many stock spectres as possible into one book. It's not that it's bad, it's just... maybe the problem is that I went to see the movie Coraline in the middle of reading this book, and I was reminded how much more original Coraline is. Also, it should be noted that recent Newberry winners have been books that adults think have literary merit but that aren't necessarily popular with kids, and this, apparently, is what they've come up with in reaction to that criticism.

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!

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

by Margaret Atwood

This is a brilliant book, one that could be read multiple times and still thrill the mind, one that I'm actually considering purchasing for my home library. (Which would be a pretty big deal: I've only bought two or three books since I started working at a library; although I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 of the library's books at my home, my personal library of owned books is down to about 30 from a high of several hundred a decade ago.)

Margaret Atwood is a genius, and she's Canadian. Does it get any better? I've only read two other of her books — The Handmaid's Tale and The Edible Woman — but I'm quite confident in calling her a genius after reading this book-length essay considering debt and credit as concepts in the spiritual, psychic, historical, symbolic, literary, fiscal, cosmological, and biological realms. You can tell she's crazy well-read, and it's astonishing how much territory she covers and how many threads she weaves in an actually rather short book. I was a tad worried, however, when I reached the last chapter, in which she conducts a thought experiment that transports Ebenezer Scrooge into modern times; I thought it would be strained and dorky, but it turned out OK.

Debt is on the minds of many in the spring of 2009, but Atwood is here to remind us it isn't just dollars and cents, however captivating and/or tragic and/or sustaining those digits are. Even in a time of financial crisis — or perhaps even more so — it's well worth taking the time to consider the deeper meaning of debt-as-archetype and how deeply embedded it is in the way we live now.

Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea

by Chelsea Handler

Ooh, I love me some Chelsea! Girlfriend cracks my shit up. And, she's the reason I haven't told the cable company that I'm not getting some channels I'm supposed to get — because if I tell them that, they might realize I'm getting some channels I'm not supposed to get, namely E!, which is how I get to watch Chelsea's show, Chelsea Lately. She has a sharp sense of humor, and her show is a great source for celebrity-type gossip, which she mocks mercilessly. She and I also share an affection for "nuggets," aka midgets.

I first came across this book, and fell in love with the title, before I'd ever seen the show. There was a long waiting list for the book, and in the meantime I discovered my illicit cable channels and discovered the comic brilliance that is Chelsea Lately. When the book finally turned up on hold for me, I was so excited that I jumped it to the top of my to-read list, even though I should have been finishing a different book that was already overdue. I figured I could read it pretty quickly, and boy did I ever; I basically read the entire thing in one afternoon.

Definitely some laugh-out-loud moments, but all in all I was actually kinda disappointed. I think a huge part of Chelsea's charm is in her delivery, so now I'm wishing I'd gotten the audio book instead. It's like that with a lot of authors in the "humorous personal essay" genre, people such as David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell: no matter how funny they are on paper, it'll always be funnier to hear them reading aloud.

Manga, Yaoi, and Sequels — oh my!

Here's one of the things I love about manga: last night I read three books! (Even a really, really good nonfiction book takes a couple of days at least.) Since all three are parts of series-es, two of which I've already written up, I'm going to combine them into one post.

Il Gatto Sul G., vol. 2
by Tooko Miyagi
I wrote about the first volume (here) just a few months ago, even though I'd read it quite some time before. I didn't remember it that well, although I had a vague sense of not liking it too much. But O!M!G! am I glad I decided to read the second one. The story's getting more interesting, a new character has entered the picture, the romantic-erotic tension has been taken up a notch, and the overall tone is a little more serious. Only problem is, now I want to read the third installment, but my library doesn't have it yet, and there's only one library in the UK that has it in the interlibrary loan database. Grrrr.

Boys Be, second season, vol. 14
by Masahiro Itabashi
I've already read several in this series (very short post here) and even watched a couple of DVDs. I enjoyed them, because they're cute and funny, but I wasn't invested in trying to read the whole series. After having volume 14 checked out for a long time, I finally got around to reading it — and what a nice surprise! These mini-stories of teen boy lust and longing are still funny, charming, and mostly innocent, but it may be that the series has gotten more risque as the volume numbers have climbed. Still PG-13, but closer to NC-17 than any of the others I've read.

Hero-Heel, vol. 2
by Makoto Tateno
I haven't actually written up the first one yet — it's among the 50-plus titles on which I'm behind (tee-hee! I typed "behind") — so consider this my review for both. The protagonist is a talented but inexperienced actor on a TV action show sort of in the vein of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. Tormented by an unrequited lust for his co-star, he manipulates and blackmails his way into the older man's bed, only to suffer an even more crushing rejection. Thus ends act one. Still obsessed in the next installment, our "hero" begins a tortured, torrid affair with a different actor on the show; meanwhile, his on- and off-screen nemesis seems to be reuniting with an old flame. Just when it looks as if everyone is going to be mature and considerate for once, a sucker-punch ending sets the reader to wondering once again: "who is the hero and who is the heel?"

The author of this series is a manga super-star whose other series include Yellow (which I'm about to start), Ka Shin Fu, and Steal Moon. And, BTW, the Hero-Heel series is not quite pornographic, but it is as explicit as it gets without actually showing genitalia.

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.

Falling Boy

by Alison McGhee

I don't know why this isn't a young adult novel. It's the right length, and it's the right kind of story. The protagonist is a teen who uses a wheelchair ever since the accident — you know, the accident he refuses to talk about. He's somewhat estranged from his father and weirdly obsessed with his absent mother, he has a wise-cracking slightly older buddy, and there's even a preternaturally wise and observant little girl who thinks he's a superhero using the wheelchair as a disguise.

Overall rating: meh.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human nature

by Steven Pinker

Ahhhh, I finally found the psycholinguistics book I've been looking for! I've read a few other books on language (How Language Works, by David Crystal; and I think the other one was Empires of the Word, by Nicholas Ostler) that were interesting in their own ways, but this was the jackpot.

You might be aware of the idea that language can limit or determine the way we think, that if a language lacks certain concepts or grammatical structures (or has ones another language does not have), the speakers of that language don't or can't have those mental concepts because they don't just speak that language, they actually think in that language too. Classic examples are Amazonian tribes that don't have words for numbers higher than two; North American Indian tribes that lack future tense; and the habitual case in Black American English, sometimes called Ebonics (i.e., He be in the kitchen, meaning he is habitually or often in the kitchen, vs. He [is] in the kitchen, meaning he happens to be in the kitchen at the moment).

At first glance, it's stunningly obvious — just try thinking something that isn't words or at least accompanied by words in your mind — and also staggeringly consequential — no wonder it's so difficult to communicate across cultural barriers! But it's also pretty pointless, in a way. Knowing it doesn't serve any purpose, doesn't free your mind from the prison of language, doesn't help the peoples of the world finally to get along and live in peace. Also, it turns out to be not really true, or at least not true in the way most people understand it.

Pinker turns the idea on its head and shows how analyzing language can reveal things about the way we think. That's where the psycholinguistics and conceptual semantics come in. There's a ton of fascinating information in this book, so I'm not going to try to summarize it. I will say, however, that I found the first two-thirds of the book more interesting; I especially liked the sections discussing grammar vis-à-vis our mental concepts of space and time, as well as the chapter on metaphor. The last two chapters deal with broader issues of pragmatics, taboo words, conversation strategies, etc.

Microcosm: E. coli and the new science of life

by Carl Zimmer

This is the greatest kind of science writing: science-y enough to satisfy the nerd in you, easy enough to be understood by the dunce in you. It will give you an appreciation of the amazing complexity of single-cell organisms, and particularly the fascinating history of E. coli, which has been front and center for most of the advances in biology over the last 50-plus years.

Did you know there are more microbes living in your gut — allowing you to digest and absorb things you couldn't otherwise — than there are cells in the rest of your body? So who's really in charge, where do you end and the bugs begin; talk about being one with the universe!

Another thing that really struck me was the complexity of the E. coli metabolism, a wicked network of alternatives and redundancies that allow thte organism to adapt and survive in harsh and constantly changing conditions. On the face of things, it seems obvious that humans and other "higher order" animals are more complex: we have more parts; we can do more (visible) things; we appear to shape and control our environment; we plan, think, and solve. But looking at a (very simplified) diagram of the E. coli metabolism, it occurred to me that a metabolism is a network, and just as the neural network of the human brain gives us intelligence, the complexity of the E. coli metabolism represents a certain kind of unconscious, cumulative intelligence at the cellular level.

Then again, some strains of E. coli can kill you, or at least put you under house arrest, in a manner of speaking.

Spud, the Madness Continues...

by John van de Ruit

(See my post about the previous book in the series here.)

Man, I freakin' loved the first book in this series. The second one is also quite good, but with some fairly major drawbacks.

I still really love the protagonist, young John "Spud" Milton, but I also found myself getting annoyed with him for not realizing that one of his friends is actually a complete tool whom I, as of the middle of this second book, cannot stand. I don't want to dwell on the why's and what-for's, but I really hope Spud will eventually recognize that this guy is a spoiled-rich-kid narcissistic bully and heroically stand up to him, in the manner of Tom Brown's Schooldays (for the record, I've only seen the movie and haven't read the book).

There are some hopeful signs that Spud himself is maturing, and I'm optimistic that the slight increase in homophobic behavior and post-apartheid racist backlash in the book is more reflective of Spud's growing sensitivity to such things, and of the time period in which the book is set, than it is indicative of what's to come.

On a related note, a friend of mine, who doesn't normally read anything like this at all, stumbled across the first book and really enjoyed it. The third one isn't published yet, and I'll probably have to interlibrary loan it, but I certainly will.

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.

Action Philosophers: the lives and thoughts of history's A-list brain trust told in a hip and humorous fashion, vol. 1

by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey

Graphic novels and comics (and manga too) are sometimes praised as the wedge that can get teens and other reluctant readers reading — content be damned, as long as they're reading something! And then of course you might be able to trick them into learning something by reading a graphic version of Shakespeare or Moby-Dick or whatever. I've even seen graphic presentations of chemistry and other science subjects, for all those "visual learners" out there. (I sort of agree, but I also sort of think it's baloney. I mean, the mental effort and discipline, and the imagination involved in reading a novel as a novel — and lots of other kinds of words-only reading — has educational and intellectual value beyond just knowing the story.)

Action Philosophers is a fun way for anyone to learn the bullet points of major figures in philosophy. If you like to think of yourself as well-rounded, widely-read, culture, erudite, etc., this series would be a great way to get exposure to philosophers and their ideas without having to read an introduction to philosophy book; the graphic format might even help lodge some of the info in your cranium. Serious students of philosophy need not apply, but I'd say there's enough info even for a very short report or essay.

This volume 1 collects numbers 1-3 of the original comic book series. Included are Plato, Bodhidharma, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Jefferson, St. Augustine, Ayn Rand, Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung, and Joseph Campbell.

Working Stiff: the misadventures of an accidental sexpert

by Grant Stoddard

This book is one of those pulp-y sort of memoirs, often humorous, written by people far to young to be writing memoirs. There's probably a word for it in the publishing industry, those books by young-ish people about interesting episodes in their lives — strange and/or terrible job and/or boss; a year of doing or not doing something most people take for granted; something extreme or weird has made me wise beyond my years; etc. etc. etc. It's also an example of another odd species of the publishing world: the magazine/newspaper/online column or blog re-packaged as a book with little or no new material. Light, amusing reading, nothing wrong with that.

All that sounds pretty negative, doesn't it? The book is quite funny and engagingly written, in fact, despite being what it is. I never read this guy's Nerve.com column, so I can't actually say how much new material is in the book, but it seems to talk a lot about his research and writing process in a way that seemed as if it wouldn't have been part of his articles as originally published. The stuff about his immigration issues and other background is also fresh material, I'd imagine. I also instantly liked him because he's British, and kinda short for a guy.

After following a girlfriend to the U.S., the author falls into a job as a sort of sexual guinea pig for an erotic website. (Actually erotic, with literary pretensions and all, rather than pornographic, but also intentionally edgy and risque.) He gets sent to fetish balls and group sex parties, missions to test pick-up lines, nudist camp, asked to try sex toys and female condoms with his girlfriend — that kind of stuff — culminating in his final assignment: to mold a dildo from his own penis (there's a kit for that) and have a lady friend strap it on and screw him with it.

The Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

If you want the excitement and suspense of a "thriller" without the spies, terrorists, viruses, or serial killers, this might be the book for you. It's a gothic Victorian-ish story with ghosts, twins, probably incest, bastards, foundlings, cats, skeletons, a governess, scars, a fire, a blizzard on the moors. It's very gripping and exciting, and I got really into it and had a hard time putting it down. (Unfortunately, I got interrupted really close to the end and couldn't get back to it for several days, which deflated the ending a bit for me — so make sure you plan enough time to read through to the end once it gets going.)

It feels as if a certain kind of teenage girl would really like this book. What comes to mind as a comparison, aside from Jane Eyre, is Gentlemen and Players, which caused me to get sunburned because I was so engrossed I forgot to turn over.

Addendum: I just realized it could also be compared to Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which I've previously compared to The Secret History.

The Cult of the Amateur: how today's Internet is killing our culture

by Andrew Keen

I'm kind of glad I didn't write up this one immediately after I read it. Nonfiction books are difficult to review to begin with, and with a book like this one there's also the danger of getting bogged down in a point-by-point argument for or against whatever the book is for or against.

Anyway, this guy made a bunch of money in the original, Clinton-era interwebs bubble, spent some time trumpeting the salvational virtues of the web, managed to get out without losing his shirt, and has now written a book warning of the perils of Web 2.0 technology. Pretty much the usual arguments (Google is making us stupid; YouTube is sometimes amusing and almost always useless; Wikipedia isn't reliable enough; the "wisdom of the crowd" isn't actually all that wise; if no one pays for music and anyone can put their crappy songs on Myspace, there's no way for the good stuff to rise above the crap; etc.), all of which have some validity, up to a point. As in all polemics, some of his points are overstated, in order to draw attention and... to make a point. It's a pretty short book, so worth a gander if these issues are of interest to you; in any case, it won't be a huge waste of time.

I agree that Google is making us stupid, but I also know that, most of the time, Google does the trick. I also think cell phones weaken the memory — how many phone numbers do you have memorized now that you have a cell? I hate it that so many things on the web are video, because I like to read and because it isn't always convenient to watch/listen. (Not to mention that it's kind of lazy for "citizen journalists" and bloggers to just post the clip instead of making the effort to describe something in words.)

Ultimately, however, I believe that both the boosters/futurists and the negative nellies are right, and wrong. I just hope I die before everything goes video.

Tell Me Everything: a novel

by Sarah Salway

The protagonist of this book is a pathological liar — unless she's so delusional that she doesn't realize she's lying — or may she's just lying to herself too. In theory, I guess, it's an interesting exploration of truth and truth-telling, growing up and learning the rules of shared reality, make-believe as essential to the construction of a self... but ultimately I just found the character annoying, willful, stupid, mean, self-destructive: in a word, a teenager, but with all that stuff magnified and laid bare. Looking back I'm kind of surprised that I didn't quit reading it. I think maybe I was waiting for the big "reveal" at the end, but I didn't really feel the impact, maybe because I wasn't invested in (or impressed by) the character's ambition to create a new life for herself, because I didn't feel her pain.

The character's quasi-fugue escapism reminds me a bit of The Dive from Clausen's Pier, in which a young woman runs away from dealing with her fiance's paralyzing injury — a real trauma, even if the physical trauma is not her own. In this book, however, it's never entirely clear if any real trauma serves as motivation, or if attention-seeking behavior manufactures a a justification for itself.

What-the-Dickens: the story of a rogue tooth fairy

by Gregory Maguire

This guy has made quite the career out of re-telling traditional fairy tales and such from new perspectives:

• Wicked is The Wizard of Oz told from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West (it has a sequel, Son of a Witch — arguably better than its parent book — and it has been made into a critically-acclaimed musical, currently touring the nation, which itself spawned a reality TV spin-off);


• Mirror Mirror is an Italian Renaissance-and-incest version of the story of Snow White;


• Lost, which I never got around to reading, takes a new look at Ebenezer Scrooge;


• just out in 2008, A Lion Among Men revisits Dorothy's cowardly pal from Oz;


• and my favorite, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (you should be catching on by now; need I explain?), was made into a Lifetime television movie starring Stockard Channing. (Yes, I worship her; no, she is not the reason this book is my favorite of Maguire's.)

He's also written many books for younger readers, and What-the-Dickens is one of the longer ones. It's the story of a tooth fairy (more of a pixie or sprite, actually, with more of an animal nature than your typical Disney-style flowery fairy) struggling to grow up and discover himself outside the society of other tooth fairies — sort of a fish-out-of-water or raised-by-wolves kinda thing — and eventually challenging the traditions and strictures of what turns out to be a rather oppressive tooth fairy community.

The story of this rogue tooth fairy is told within another story: the tale is being told by a young man to his younger neice and nephew, whom he's left with during an unspecified and possibly apocalyptic storm or catastrophe while the children's parents have gone in search of food and help. This wrap-around story was kind of unnecessary, but not really bothersome. I think the author explained the reason for it in an interview on Fresh Air, but I don't recall what he said. If i were going to read this book aloud to kids, I'd probably just leave it out.
Good ratings overall, not awesome but very enjoyable. Should be appealing to fans of Artemis Fowl and the like.

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.

Same-cell Organism

by Sumomo Yumeka

Argh! I can't believe I'm still so far behind. This is another one that I read long enough ago to have forgotten. It's from the same publisher as some other high-quality yaoi I've read, but I recall this one being a bit dull, even though the artwork is beautiful. I read a review just now that jogged my memory a bit, reminding me that the "main" story about two young men in love is interrupted by chapters that seemed totally disconnected to me (other than being about boys love) but, according to the reviewer, are sort of allegorical representations of different aspects of the main characters' relationship. Ultimately, there's better out there, so I wouldn't recommend this unless you've already read all the really good ones.

On Subbing: the first four years

by Dave Roche

One of the longest zines I've ever read, and among the first. All about the author's experiences a substitute teacher's aide in a large metropolitan school district on the West coast somewhere between Seattle and San Francisco. (I no longer recall if he actually specifies, but it's Portland for sure.) As a teacher's aide, he works with a lot of troubled and disabled students, probably because most classrooms don't have TAs. It's an interesting, well-written account of type of work and workplace not many of us will ever see firsthand. I also learned about the life skills program for developmentally delayed students, some of whom stay in the program until age 21, that was of use to me at my work, where some of these young adults hang out and/or visit as a group. As far as I'm concerned, this zine is a classic.

From Eroica with Love

by Yasuko Aoike

I've read the first four books in this series so far, here and there over the last two years, but recent clean-up efforts led me to re-read parts of 2 and 3, and all of book 4 in the last two days. Now I'm really into it, and I've made hold requests to get the remaining books, 5 through 14, that my library owns.

It's classic Cold War-era manga originally published in the late '70s. Eroica (aka Earl Dorian Red Gloria) is a flamboyant, hedonistic, homosexual, aristocratic art thief. His nemesis is NATO officer Major Klaus von dem Eberbach (aka Iron Klaus), whose rigid Teutonic nature is at odds with his shoulder-length hair and bangs. (Of course, fashions that seem feminine or androgynous to a modern reader weren't necessarily considered un-masculine in the '60s and '70s — think long hair, bell-bottoms, velour, V-necks, and angel sleeves.)

Iron Klaus, of course, despises Eroica and his louche ways, while the Earl, of course, lusts after the Major. To the officer's chagrin, and to the thief's pleasure, their paths are constantly crossed. Or are they in fact star-crossed lovers? Klaus's hatred of Dorian (and queers in general) definitely carries a whiff of "me thinks the lady doth protest too much."

Me, I have a crush on Agent Z.

World War Z: an oral history of the zombie war

by Max Brooks

Wow, I'd heard about this book so long ago, and over the years I've suggested it to a few friends but only recently got around to reading it myself. Probably, we're in the decline of the coolness of zombies, but they'll never drop out of the zeitgeist entirely.

The cool thing about this book is sort of captured in the subtitle: it's a collection of interviews of people who lived through and witnessed the zombie-pocalypse. Partly because of that, and also because it's a book instead of a big-budget-special-effects movie, the book offers a more detailed look at aspects of humans vs. zombies that often are left out. It really gets into the practical, military, political, psychological, and moral issues related to battling a worldwide zombie infestation instead of just relying on the inherent scariness of zombies for focus.

I read it pretty quickly, and ravenously. Hard to put down and fun to read, without the careless, uninspired writing that sucks the enjoyment out of a lot of thrillers.

Z for Zachariah

by Robert C. O'Brien

A couple years ago, the library got a paperback copy of this book with a cover that made me think it might have zombies in it. The title, of course, hints at that a little too. The back-cover description doesn't use the Z-word, but it tells of a young woman all alone in a post-apocalyptic world and the arrival of a stranger. So I'm still thinking maybe he's a zombie!

If I'm recalling correctly, it says in the foreword or afterword, or one those kind of things, that the book was actually finished by the author's family for posthumous publication. The story is pretty bleak compared to the author's better-known Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh (itself better-known, perhaps, as The Secret of NIMH, the title of the 1982 animated film). I'd argue that the stories have a lot in common, but this young adult book is definitely less fuzzy and more mature than the cartoon-friendly younger kids' book.

Z for Zachariah doesn't have much explicit violence, but there are references to "off-screen" violence and a pervasive sense of barely-restrained potential violence. Creepy, but no zombies, and with an ending that's either sad, disappointing, or both — which I mean in a positive way, in the sense that it's not a tidy ending or the one you'll find yourself wishing for, even if you think happy endings are lame.

Like zombie or vampire movies, or pretty much anything apocalyptic, it could be considered an allegory and therefore potential book report fodder. It could be read fairly quickly and, I think, would hold the attention of most teens.

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.