Another Best-of Booklist from the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/books/28intro.html?ex=1199682000&en=c9db30b0e281808e&ei=5070&emc=eta1

I'm going to try the Laura Lippman book first.

The Last Life by Claire Messud

I didn't like the Emperor's Children, but everyone else did so I decided to try this book by the same author about a young girl growing up in France. I bought this for our trip to France but just got around to it now.

I liked it. It was a coming-of-age novel about a girl whose father is French and mother is American, who grows up in the hotel her family owns in the south of France. The writing was good albeit a bit pretentious, like Emperor's Children - she uses the word "simulacrum" within the first paragraph when "approximation" would have done just fine. The writing may have been a bit uneven, as I page through the book now, the style seems to change through the book although the narrator doesn't, and I don't think it's an (effective) effort to have the narrator mature. I also missed some references to Augustine and Camus that she returned to a few times.

All of that said, the writing style did not dampen my experience. The characters were compelling, the plot was interesting, and a few scenes were memorable enough to contribute to a good movie script. I'd consider this book 'recommended'.

Hominids by Robert Sawyer

I really liked Rollback by Sawyer earlier this year, so I decided to try the "Neanderthal Parallax" series by him. Hominids is the first book in the series.

The premise is that while doing quantum experiments, a man from a parallel universe ends up in our universe unexpectedly. He is a Neanderthal, and comes from a world where they survived evolution and we (homo sapiens) didn't. He is also a scientist, and he is befriended by a small group of scientists in our universe who get to know him.

The book read quickly, and the characters were well-developed and likable. I am always pleasantly surprised at how good science-fiction character development can be. As the book goes on, we learn more about his world, and are brought into a classical science-fiction universe where things have their own language and concepts are taught to the reader through observation. I was a little disappointed that the world he came from was different from ours in a classical science-fiction/social commentary way, but not in a way directly related to their being Neanderthals. However, other than that I really enjoyed the story.

I look forward to the two other books in the series, Humans and Hybrids. Perhaps some of his decisions about the Neanderthal universe will become clearer.

Best Books of 2007 Lists

Slate.com
Salon.com

NYTimes Top 10
NYTimes Top 100

Boston Globe Fiction
Boston Globe Non-fiction

Washington Post

Amazon

Barnes and Noble Fiction
Barnes and Noble Nonfiction

Christian Science Monitor Fiction
Christian Science Monitor Non-fiction
Christian Science Monitor Memoir

Newsweek

Booksense

Under the Tree

Today I got several books from my inlaws-to-be. Two on wedding planning (yeah!), one by Richard Russo (whom I did not know had a new book out), and one called And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. I am very excited about the Richard Russo one, since Empire Falls is such a great book.

I should put myself on the library wait list for the new Ann Patchett book and for the Junot Diaz book everyone's talking about.

Last Minute Barnes and Noble Run

Tonight we went to Barnes and Noble for a last minute gift run, and ended up with several treats for ourselves. Webster couldn't find two books he wanted, so he went over to the self-serve kiosk and ordered them. (He even had them gift-wrapped for himself!) The kiosk was easy to use and he double-checked that his credit card number was not accessible to the next user. It's nice to see B&N having some self-service. I remember reading an article once about Borders having self-service and B&N not, purposely, but I'll take a couple minutes with a computer rather than a sales associate any day.

I picked up another sci-fi book by Robert Sawyer, Nigella Lawson's new cookbook, and a book by Doris Lessing.

I forgot my B&N gift certificates, so Webster paid for my books and I paid him back in gift certificates when we got home.

Body and Blood by Michael Scheiefelbein

This book was ok. It was about two Catholic priests who were reunited after growing up together. They were in love as young men and find love again as adults. The story wasn't incredibly well-written, but the plot was interesting.

What I enjoyed most about reading it was that it was gay literature. It gave me a window into what it is like for gay people to read heterosexual literature. I thought a lot about
how I felt like I was reading something foreign, which made me sad to feel like gay people always feel like outsiders reading the literature I usually read.

I thought it was weird that the other books by this author were about gay vampires.

Top Books of 2007

This was a great year for me for books! Writing full-length reviews of each book I read (with a few Robert Ludlum exceptions) made me like many books more than I would have otherwise. It was a great way to really "engage with text" and think more about each book. You can click on "Recommended" on the right to see a list of the ones that at the time I thought were notable. Below is a list (in no particular order) of the creme de la creme. Sci-fi played a prominent role in what I read. I am clearly obsessed with Michael Lewis.

I've begun to experiment with the blog this month, posting more general thoughts and ideas about books and booklists, not just book reviews. Let me know what you think. Never fear, there will always be a "Best Books" list independent of the format of the blog.

Fiction (in descending order):

Rollback by Robert Sawyer
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
What is the What by Dave Eggers
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion
Timeline Michael Crichton
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
When Madeline was Young by Jane Hamilton
Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb
The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean

Nonfiction (in no particular order):

Blind Side by Michael Lewis
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
Moneyball by Michael Lewis
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

Going back to the library

Several books are overdue at the library so they are going back Friday (or Saturday) even though I didn't read them and would like to at some point.

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
Out Stealing Horses
The Teahouse Fire
To Say Nothing of the Dog

Perhaps To Say Nothing is not the right Connie Willis book to read next, but Passages is still in my head from years ago, so something by her would be good.

Gifts

Webster bought me The Physics of Football this week.

At my birthday, Dave got me 1001Books, which I page through for inspiration guilt around classics I haven't read. I was happy to see that I've read many of the more recent picks towards the end of the book.

I gave Webster the New York Times 2007 Notable Book List to give to his parents for ideas for a gift for me. I'm excited to see what they pick.

We got Webster's mom a Dean Koontz book about a woman and her relationship with a Golden Retriever. I hope it's not too creepy, since he usually writes about killers and ghosts. Apparently, Dean Koontz had a dog for a long time, and now writes a beyond-the-grave blog from the dog's point of view. Weird.

To be read

Again, I have a backlog of books around the house. Towards the top of my list:

Rigged, by Ben Mezrich - heard about at NPR, bought in hardcover!

Next, by Michael Crichton - on sale at Costco

Wild Fire, by Nelson DeMille - on sale at Costco

Random Walk Down Wall Street, by Bernard Malkiel - I think I agree with his point of view, but I have to start this book over again. I gave up a few chapters in last time.

The Last Life, by Claire Messud - hated Emporer's Children but I'm willing to give her another try.

The Calculus Wars, by Jason Bardi - bought on impulse at Barnes and Noble

And many more...

Catching up on Reviews

Ugh. So I'm deathly behind on reviews of books. Here's what I've been reading:

Incompleteness by Rebecca Goldstein

I was supposed to learn what Godel proved with his Incompleteness Theorem during my senior year Logic class in college. No-go. I tried but that was the most difficult course I took and I definitely did not understand the grand finale. To be fair, I'm not sure anyone in class did. Then I tried to read Godel, Escher, Bach, but gave up a few times halfway through. The Theorem haunted me. I knew that it was the basis of how we understand not just numerical systems, but all systems of information based on axioms. I noticed this book at Barnes and Noble over the summer, and while I didn't want to take it to France with me, I went back for it a few months later.

Given all my background with math I was anxious to understand the Theorem. However, this book delved into a biography of Godel for the first two thirds. I learned about his loneliness, his background in Platonic philosophy, and his friendship with Einstein at Princeton (before it was Princeton). I understood for the first time why people study the history of science, as the author wove Godel's interest in different topics and the historical backdrop for his lifetime into his development of this theory. And, ultimately, I did understand the incompleteness theorem, at least for a few moments while it was all in my head at one time. I wouldn't have minded a slightly more mathematical book, but unless you are a mathematician, even this may be too technical or obscure.

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

I was hoping to love love love this book but I didn't. Sebold's previous books (Lucky and Lovely Bones) were both shockingly good so my expectations were high. The story followed the days after a middle-aged woman kills her invalid mother. While I thought the writing in this book was superb in certain places, the plot was reasonably predictable and the characters mostly archetypes. The book wasn't particularly memorable, although I enjoyed it while I read it.

Fair Game by Valerie Plame

I heard Valerie Plame interviewed on NPR and decided to reserve her book at the library. I knew embarrassingly little about her story (other than her name and some connection to Scooter Libby), so I figured it would be a good current events lesson. In case you are not familiar with the story: Members of the Bush administration leaked her name to the press as a spy in retaliation for an editorial her husband wrote that did not support Bush's entrance into the Iraq war. To complicate things, Plame worked in the part of the CIA who sent her husband on an expedition to investigate whether Iraq sourced uranium in Niger.

What I found was an incredibly political book in many ways. First and foremost, because Plame was a CIA agent, the book had to be vetted by the Agency, and a good quarter of the book was redacted (blacked out). Often sections were blacked out that did not seem to contain classified information. Sometimes, Plame seems to write sections she knows will be redacted. There is an afterword that explains a lot of the redacted sections with information that is in the public domain but that Plame could not write as a narrative based on CIA guidelines. It made for annoying reading and good commentary.

The story is mostly about Plame's background and training as a CIA covert operative, leading up to the events that outed her as a spy in mainstream media. She takes an inexplicable twenty page detour into her postpartum depression, but otherwise the story is interesting and well-formed, if not well-written. The anger and betrayal that she feels towards the government is clearly emotional, albeit justified, which in some cases is far too much telling and not enough showing. Someone who is not inclined to dislike the current administration would probably find her to be protesting too much. (Interestingly, though, Plame was on the CIA team seeking evidence of WMD's to justify invading Iraq in the early 2000's.)

Despite these criticisms, I did learn from the book, which is always a recommendation unto itself.

Beyond Fear by Bruce Schneier

I bought this book over the summer but left it half-read at the end of vacation. I've known Bruce Schneier's work since studying cryptography and math in college, and recently started reading his blog. This book takes his knowledge of security, as it has matured since his days of traditional crypto and addresses today's current events. Rather than take a purely political or economic view of topics such as airport security or online credit card usage, Schneier teaches and applies a five-step evaluation for any system to determine if it is a worthwhile security measure.

One of the things I liked about this book was that Schneier drew on examples from many sources. He references Sun-Tzu, Ancient Rome, home alarm systems, passwords, and many other varied systems. My only criticism of the book is that in an attempt to be accessible and "common sense" it seemed a bit simplistic at times. I wish it had been a bit more technical. That said, it appealed to my skeptical side and I appreciated an apolitical way to examine each of the current security issues and form an educated opinion of my own. I'd recommend this book to a wide audience.

First Love by Adrienne Sharp

This book looked like it could have been either a beach read or a serious love story. Initially I put it back on the shelf, but something drew me back and I took it home from the library. The book was about a love story about two young ballet dancers who had been childhood friends. When the book started, the two dancers were at different ballet companies, one traditional and the other flashier. The story was obviously researched impeccably, and I enjoyed getting inside the world of ballet. Thought it took place in New York, reading it felt like being transported to a different country.

The writing was very good, although a bit melodramatic at times. I also found some of the characterizations of the dancers to be unexpectedly sophisticated and complex for their age. That said, I'd like to see the next books from this first-time author. Recommended.

Indignity

I saw a book in Barnes and Noble called, How to Talk About Books you Haven't Read.

I am - uncharacteristically - speechless. I am also determined to comment on this book, even though I have not read it. Yes, that is ironic.

What the heck? There is no way that I would want to talk about a book I haven't read. I also have no interest in talking to someone about a book they haven't read. I can barely find anyone to talk to about books we both have read. Most people want to talk about the ending, or the main character. So few people want to talk about the the writing itself, or of (for example) the symbolism of minor characters. If I wanted to talk to people about books they haven't read, I'd just go back to one of the book clubs I've tried.

I have the same feeling about this book that I do about favorite books of mine showing up on the discount table. Yuck.

The Amazon Kindle

Amazon has released a handheld electronic book reader. It has free wireless access for downloading books and some limited ability to write and send email.

AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL

Now, I admit that I have not tried this or any electronic book reader. Perhaps my snap judgement is part of why I'm not a well-known book-industry pundit. BUT, I could NEVER give up reading real books. I love paging through a book, I love hating the books that have pages with slightly different-sized pages. I am a dog-earer. I also love the weight of a pile of books as I walk home from the library. In fact, one of the best moments of my week (or month) is getting into bed with five new books from the library and re-reading their jackets to decide which one to read first.

To add insult to injury, Amazon is now SOLD OUT of this product and Michael Lewis (whom I idolize) has endorsed it as a great product. Traitor!

My Aunt Ellen pointed out that I read the newspaper online, something she would never do. Good point. Now I know how she feels.

Follett's back

Jo called me to tell me that Ken Follett released a sequel to one of my all-time favorite books, Pillars of the Earth. The new book is called World Without End, and takes place 300 years after the original. (Pillars is about several generations of people in the 12th century building a massive cathedral in England. My high school guidance counselor suggested it to me when I was freaking out about whether to study English or Math.)

Now the only question is whether to reread Pillars first. It's a 1000 page commitment, but might enhance my experience of World. I guess the other question is who took my original copy, forcing me to buy a replacement with a different cover.

Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer

This is the first book in a long time that I stayed up late (too late!) to finish. This is hard-core science fiction, a la Asimov, but absolutely readable and totally delightful.

It is the story of a married couple in their eighties, and it begins in the year 2048. The wife, Sarah, is a famous scientist who decoded an alien communique thirty years earlier. When the aliens contact Earth again, Sarah is asked to work on the new message. Sarah is offered a "rollback", a chance to return to being in her twenties, physically, so she can work on the decryption. She accepts, with the caveat that her husband Don gets the rollback as well. It works for him, but not for her. And that's all in the first few pages.

The book alternates between the time period that begins in 2048 with the second message from the aliens, and the time period that began in 2009, when the first message was received. It's funny to be in the 2048 world with all its technology and see 2009 as the quaintly simple time. The story also shares third-person narration between Sarah's point of view and Don's. Sarah struggles with decoding and aging; Don struggles with not aging and conceiving of another sixty years of life he didn't expect.

I liked this book because I liked the plot and the characters. The story of Earth's communication with a distant galaxy, including the message with which the galaxy replies, is creative and unique. Sarah, her husband, and the other ancillary characters are likable with realistically familiar hopes and fears. That is what I love about good science-fiction writing: once you suspend your disbelief, there are complex characters in interesting circumstances with a good dose of social commentary thrown in.

The social critiques in this book were not severe. The rollback obviously critiqued our society's adoration for everything youthful, physically. There wasn't that much negative discussion of technology replacing humans or replacing interpersonal interactions. There was even a friendly heroic robot. This book did offer a theme of universal values across not just people, but galaxies. The aliens, who we never meet (well, not exactly), still develop strongly as characters with valid desires. In that way, it reminded me of how Star Trek can suddenly make you think about the universal nature of existence.

Perhaps my favorite line from the book, in all its campyness, is spoken by Sarah: "The Aliens from Sigma Draconis have responded to the radio message my team sent all those years ago." It was such a throwback to a 1950's sci-fi movie that I had to chuckle at how out of place it seemed in an otherwise well-written, serious book.

Broken Paradise by Cecelia Samartin

I was out of borrowed books and vacation books and I-need-a-treat books so I cruised the library's newest acquisitions. This is the first of five new books I took out. Given my affinity towards books set in foreign places, as well as my affinity towards Latin American topics, it was surprising to me that this is first book I can remember reading that is set in Cuba.

The book follows the lives of two best friend-cousins, Nora and Alicia. Growing up, Nora is quiet and compliant, while Alicia is beautiful and wild. During the Batista reign in Cuba, the girls live a charmed, upper-middle class life. However, when Castro comes to power, Alicia's father is accused of being anti-Communist, just one of the many things that convince Nora's parents to emigrate to the United States. Nora adjusts (with a few hiccups) into life as a Cuban-American. Through her correspondence with Alicia over the years, we can see how different her life would have been if she hadn't left.

I was really struck by how bad things got in Cuba and how quickly they got bad. I suppose I had always throught of Cuba as run by Castro, who we are not supposed to like, but otherwise sunny and full of good cigars. This book really taught me a lot more about the history and about how poor the living conditions became when he took power through current times. Some of the descriptions of people waiting it out and in denial when he first took over, as well as the seemingly random violence towards citizens reminded me of Hitler's rise to power. The book also opened my eyes to Cuban-American sentiment about returning to Cuba with Castro in power; many Cubans don't see it as their country as long as he is in power.

The writing in the book was not as good as the story or the descriptions of Cubans. It switched haphazardly between a poetic and a matter-of-fact style, sometimes within the same chapter. It also was structurally confusing in a few places when significant amounts of time had elapsed without the reader knowing.

Overall, I enjoyed the process of learning more about pre-Castro Cuba, Communist Cuba, and Cuban-American attitudes towards Cuba. The friendship between the girls was touching and I did want to know how the book would end (although I had a hunch that was right). However, I was not sold on the book as a whole because the writing just wasn't good enough to support the contents.

The Dissident by Nell Freudenberger

I found this book on an old booklist of mine, so I'm not sure who recommended it to me. The ending of this book came out of nowhere and I really disliked it, so overall I'd say that I didn't like the book. However, there were aspects of the experience of reading the book that I did enjoy. I just wouldn't recommend it.

The book is about a Chinese artist named Yuan Zhao who comes to the United States for a year-long experience. He is sponsored by a local university who expects him to exhibit his work in two shows during the year. Zhao lives in Los Angeles with an American family, the Travers, and teaches art at an all-girls high school.

Freudenberger could have written a book exclusively about the Travers and the high school, which the mother teaches in and the daughter attends. There were complicated relationships within the family, as well as between family members and other characters. The situations these characters faced, and their decisions, were compelling and well-crafted.

However, the book also covers Zhao and his life, both currently in Los Angeles and in a burgeoning artists' community in China in the early 1980's. Zhao's difficulty in adjusting to his role as a guest at the Travers' and a teacher is palpable. The descriptions of the artists' colony he becomes a part of in China are clear and evocative. It was a window into a time and place I had never seen or even thought about.

Where the author veers off course a little is in her insistence on having her characters grapple with existential questions like "what is art" along all the other things going on in the book. I think she is trying to make some statements about art but I don't know what they are. A struggle with identity is one thing to cover in a novel like this; comments around performance art are better suited for an editorial in a weird magazine that I don't read.

However, I would have forgiven her the detours into art critique because I liked the characters (or at least how well-developed they were) and enjoyed learning about art in Communist China. The ending of the book, though, superseded its appeal. Most of the characters' resolutions were satisfying but Zhao's was neither satisfying nor what it should have been: a confirmation of the themes throughout the book.

ps: I just learned that this blog has at least one loyal fan, and she shares a first name with the author of this book. Hello and thanks for reading!

Intuition by Allegra Goodman

Mer A. cornered me in a bookstore and told me I HAD to buy this book. Knowing that she and I don't always agree but feeling like treating myself to a book, I bought it. It was okay, not great, but held my interest well enough. I'd try something else by this author but I wouldn't necessarily recommend this particular book.

The story is interesting enough; a researcher at an institute in Cambridge makes a shockingly good discovery in a cancer-related rat experiment. The results become public, then publicly challenged. As the events unfold, there are life-changing consequences for him, his ex-girlfriend, and the two people who run the lab, one of whom is highly political the other of whom is a true scientist.

The best part of this book was not the story, although the plot was good. The best part of the book was undoubtedly the characters and character development. Close to ten characters were incredibly well-developed, their motives and fears believable and mistakes forgivable. It was almost the inevitability of the plot that made the characters shine. Since what was going to happen with the investigation was reasonably predictable, what became interesting about the book was how the characters reacted and more so what they were thinking and feeling.

The writing was not great. (In fact, I haven't read much lately that has had great writing although I've liked the plots of a lot of books lately.) There were, however, a few passages that were noteworthy. Goodman's ability to capture her characters' essence with small, efficient notes was the main reason I would try another book by her.

Of Cliff, the main researcher, she writes, "Gently he put the book down and threw away the cardboard wrapping. Wilde's tale of the beautiful young Dorian and his dissembling might have been the last stake through Cliff's heart, except that, fortunately, he was unfamiliar with the novel."

Of Robin, his ex-girlfriend, she writes, "Clutching her black pen tightly, she bent over her journal and wrote, He actually asked if I would stay and keep him company tonight to watch him work. Then when I said no, he was surprised. She might have written more. She could have ranted on, but for Robin that was a rant. She'd wrung those few sentences from her heart, and grieved every word."

I loved how you could learn so much about the characters from such short passages.

Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

This was a fun and easy book, set in France and thus perfect vacation reading this summer. The Kirkus Review said it was "of higher literary quality than the Da Vinci Code, to which it will inevitably be compared." I didn't find the writing much better than that of DVC, although I did think the story was incredibly well-researched and well-crafted. Web was surprised that I picked it up to begin with, claiming it seemed to be more his speed than mine, but I think my tastes are widening a bit.

The story follows Alice, who is on an archaeological expedition in France and finds something unusual there. For reasons she does not understand, she is drawn to ignore the protocol of working with a partner and alerting the people who are running the dig to her findings. This item ends up putting her in danger , and we follow her through France as she tries to solve the mystery associated with this item and subsequently regain her safety.

Several hundred years earlier, we meet Alais, also a strong woman who lives by her own rules in an otherwise male-dominated world. Alice's modern day discovery is a result of Alais' membership in a secretive society, the continuation of which is still being sought by other characters in the book, some good and some evil.

While I did not find the writing exceptional, I did enjoy both stories. That is unusual; usually there is one time that holds my attention more than the other. The scenes in the past were well-described and evoked a very clear picture of the times. There were some exceptionally sad scenes that have stayed with me that occurred when Alais' town was attacked during the Crusades. Both Alice and Alais were strong, well-developed characters. As the book unfolded, and the connections between the time periods became clearer, I was anxious to know what was the resolution would be.

The Invisible Circus by Jennifer Egan

I needed a few Europe-themed books for my vacation to France this year so when Mom suggested that I'd like this one I went to Barnes and Noble with it on the top of my list. Jennifer Egan's Look At Me was great, so I had high expectations for this. Unfortunately, B&N only had a paperback version of this that actors from the movie adaptation on the front, but I bought it anyway.

Phoebe, the protagonist, is the youngest of three children, the eldest of which was her now-deceased sister, Faith. Faith went to Europe as a hippie teenager, and died under mysterious circumstances there. We meet Phoebe as she is a frustrated high school student. "At her vast public high school Phoebe had felt reduced to a pidgin version of herself, as during "conversations" in French class--Where is the cat? Have you seen the cat? Look! Pierre gives the cat a bath--such was her level of fluency while discussing bongs or bands or how fucked up something was at a party." Her life stagnating (and her relationship with her mother strained), she takes off to Europe seeking more information about Faith's death.

As the book progresses, and Phoebe makes her way through Western Europe, we learn more about her family history. The relationship between Faith and her father emerges as incredibly unhealthy, her father relying on her sister for strength: "Maybe nothing of hers could compete with their father's need of her, her [sister's] unique and seemingly bottomless power to save him." Faith becomes less elegant and more flawed as Phoebe follows her sister's route through Europe.

This book is very well written, which makes up for the occasional inevitability of the plot. Egan's ability to capture certain moments between characters was shockingly good, particularly for a first novel. Had I not already read other books by her, I'd worry that she exhausted all her beautiful prose in one place. The following scene occurs between Faith's former boyfriend and his new girlfriend: "Carla exclaimed at something she'd found, set down her cigarette and circled the time with a stubby pencil, her other hand groping for Wolf as if for a pair of glasses or a cigarette pack finding his wrist without lifting her eyes from the paper. The gesture transfixed Phoebe--the inadvertence of it, the thoughtlessness."

What I also liked about the book was that it was both a coming of age story as well as a journey story. At the beginning of the book, Phoebe is young; in many ways, she is frozen in time from when her sister died. As she moves through her trip she grows up and is clearly a young woman by the time she returns home. She falls in love for the first time and expresses several universal feelings about it: "Seeing Wolf clothed, out in the world, Phoebe, often was shocked at how unmarked he was physically by all that had happened between them. Their flesh seemed ready at times to fall apart limb from lib, yet here they both were, intact. Somewhat creaky, lips faintly bruised, but unmarked in any permanent sense. If they went their separate way, there would be no proof. This troubled Phoebe."

This was a great work of female fiction. Thanks, Mom.

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

One of the reasons I went to Brown for college was so I didn't have to take a set of required courses. Like, say, um, Biology. But every year, I remember seeing legions of freshman dutifully taking introductory biology and the first course assignment was to read Vonnegut's Galapagos. And every year, I remember thinking, "well gosh, I like books, maybe I'd like Vonnegut, maybe I'd LIKE biology." But I never tried it. So this year, when August rolled around, I decided to symbolically start a school year by reading Galapagos.

Awesome. This book was absolutely awesome. It made me want to read more Vonnegut and go to the Galapagos. Maybe go to the Galapagos and read Vonnegut. Anyway, I'm clearly on a sci-fi kick and this fit right in. A great story, cleverly told, with plenty of commentary on evolution and ethics.

At its simplest, it's about the story of several people on a cruise through the Galapagos Islands (home to many interesting species - particularly evolutionarily). Of course, there is a world-wide armageddon that begins when the cruise begins, and it's narrated several millenia in the future, but hey, it's Vonnegut.

The book is equal parts science and poetry. The science deals a lot with genetics and evolution. Writing about dental care, the narrator (millenia in the future) remarks, "It would be nice to say that the Law of Natural Selection, which has done people so many favors in such a short time, had taken care of the tooth problem, too. In a way it has, but its solution has been draconian. It hasn't made teeth more durable. It has simply cut the average human life span down to about thirty years."

Vonnegut wrote the story using many techniques that ensured the reader could not focus on the plot. He often interrupts his own descriptions or stories to tell you ahead of time what the resolution of a particular situation will be. It puts the reader in a position of analysis, like the narrator who knows the ending, rather than one of following plot. For example, he writes, "He was unmarried and had never reproduced, and so was insignificant from an evolutionary point of view. He might also have been considered as a marriage possibility for Mary Hepburn. But he, too, was doomed. *Siegfriend von Kleist would survive the sunset, but three hours after that he would be drowned by a tidal wave."

As someone who doesn't read the New York Times Book Review because of how much plot they give away in their reviews, I was incredibly frustrated by this aspect of the book. But it also challenged me to understand what was going on through different eyes, which is not something just any author can accomplish. Another example: "It just might have been fatal that the colonists killed off all the land iguanas almost immediately--but it turned out not to have been a disaster. It could have mattered a lot. It just happened that it didn't matter much at all." The narrator says this, hundreds of thousands of years later, and the reader is forced to understand that the action in this story is reasonably insignificant and that plot is not the narrator's point.

Like all good science fiction, Vonnegut is ultimately making a socio-political point. This one, I believe not just about technology and environmental damage (although he is commenting on that, albeit deterministically), but about people's treatment of each other.

"It pains me now," his narrator writes, "even a million years later, to write about such human misbehavior. A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That's all I can say."

If you like Vonnegut, or science fiction, or evolution, or even a challenge, this is a great book. If you're more comfortable in the Oprah range (don't be ashamed), then skip this one.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

I was looking for something reliable at the library, and decided on an Atwood book. I think I was in the mood for a women's friendship book and instead I ended up with a dystopia sci-fi book, but it was a good one. I was definitely reminded of how good a sci-fi writer Atwood is, this book pushing her capabilities further than even Handmaid's Tale.

This book takes place in an alternative future, alternating between two times. The first is when the world as we know it reached its peak of scientific "progress". This time is best captured here, in a discussion of a major company's business model:

"There were pigoons at NooSkins, just as at OrganInc Farms, but these were smaller and were being used to develop skin-related biotechnologies. The main idea was the find a method of replacing the older epidermis with a fresh one, not a laser-thinned or dermabraded short-term resurfacing but a genuine start-over skin that would be wrinkle- and blemish-free."

The second time frame in the story takes place after this world has imploded due to too much technology being misused. The new world can only be described as post-apocolyptic, reminding me of a wasteland I don't remember since seventh grade's Canticle for Liebowitz.

"Along the road is a trail of objects people must have dropped in flight, like a treasure hunt in reverse. A suitcases, a knapsack spilling out clothes and trinkets; an overnight bag, broken open, beside it a forlorn pink toothbrush. A bracelet; a woman's hair ornament in the shape of a butterfly; a notebook, its pages soaked, the handwriting illegible. The fugitives must have had hope, to begin with. They must have thought th'd have a use for these things later. Then they'd changed their minds and let go."

The narrator is named Snowman (formerly known as Jimmy in the old world), and he was best friends with Crake and in love with Oryx, the title characters. Now Snowman seems to be the only human left on earth, kept alive by specially bred species who used to be science experiments. Growing up, he worshipped Crake as an older brother-style role model. His life starts to fall apart while Crake becomes the darling of a multinational conglomerate. As the story unfolds we learn more about Crake's motives and drive, and more about Jimmy's path to becoming Snowman.

I liked reading this book and thought it had a more satisfying ending than Atwood's books usually have. However, it's not for the weak of heart. It's hard-core sci-fi and takes some patience to learn all the language and ocnstructs relating to this new world.

Timeline by Ken Follett

I was unexpectedly home in New Jersey and ran out of books, so I ransacked Jo's bookshelf. She has always liked Michael Crichton so I was in luck. I ended up lugging it back to Boston, hardcover and all. Part science fiction, part historical fiction, 100% action.

This was a fun book. It's about a high-tech company in the near future who figures out a way to time travel. Their corporate goals intersect those of a group of academics who are excavating a 14th century village, the Dordogne in France. The academics end up getting sent back to 14th century France, and that's where things get interesting.

I had forgotten how good Michael Crichton is! There were no particular passages in the book that I thought were exceptionally well-written, but I could not put the book down. Reminiscent of Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, this book demonstrated an author's comprehensive and extensive understanding of a reasonably obscure topic (in this case both particle physics and French history) brought into a great story.

The preface, written with the book in 1999, made me chuckle. Crichton writes of the futuristic setting for the book: "It is a world of exploding advances on the frontiers of technology. Information moves instantly between two points, without wires or networks. Computers are built from single molecules. " Check, check.

Definitely a good read, specifically for you science types out there.

Jesusland by Julia Scheeres

This is yet another one from Mer A's pile. This is a very sad book. Scheeres' memoir depicts a childhood both unusual and terrible.

Scheeres grows up in rural Indiana in a strictly Calvinist home. Her parents adopt two black children because circumstances make it seem that it is the "Christian" thing to do. However, their town is completely white and the boys' seemingly lucky addition into Scheeres' family ends up being nightmarish for them. The first half of the book focuses on this early childhood, from elementary school through early adolescence. Her upbringing is shameful and strange: her (doctor) father drives a Porsche, but the family eats table scraps for dinner; her mother pipes Christian pop music into the entire house through the intercom system; her black adopted brothers are beaten and live in the basement but she is not and does not.

Her writing ranges from good to superb. She is wonderfully self-aware and extremely descriptive. One of her best qualities as a writer is the ability to connect her individual experiences with familiar archtypes, as well as with each other. In talking about her brothers, she says, "As we've gotten older, and Father's beatings have become more frequent, their [her brothers] blackness has finally united them. They are the outsiders, the basement-dwellers, Mother's failed mission to Afrrica. The black boys who get whipped by the white master."

Later in the book, I caught her describing her life at church with a similar theme: "When I was in grade school, I wanted to be an usher like my brothers but was sent downstairs to the nursery instead. That's where the women work, in the basement--changing diapers, organizing potlucks and teaching sunday school. In the basement, out of sight."

The second half of the book is where her story really gets strange. Scheeres' brother David is sent to a Christian reform school/boot camp in the Dominican Republic called Escuela Caribe and she soon follows. What she finds there (understandably missing from David's censored letters) is a nightmarish caste system coupled with ridicule, manual labor and physical abuse. She is able to outsmart the system over time, but her time spent there (over a year) is fascinatingly horrible. I had no idea that environments like this even existed today.

As she says upon arriving, "I want to focus on my misery. I want to roll around in it like a dog in a pile of shit. I want to claim it as my own. Right now, it's all I have. I still can't believe that a place like Escuela Caribe exists, and that I find myself enrolled in it."

Despite the many hardships she faced growing up, her tone is never one of martyrdom or self-pity. The story is more of a confession or a therapeutic exercise than it is a purposeful indictment of Midwest Christianity. Scheeres says she wrote the book to honor her relationship with her brother. However, it is nearly impossible to read this book without forming a critical opinion of (at the very least) the fundamental Christianity that her parents followed and that spawned Escuela Caribe. I see this book both as a memoir as well as the work of an activist.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

This book, by the same author as The Kite Runner, caught my eye several months before it was published. Sara Coe gave it to me on my birthday; Web had bought me a copy that day too in case nobody else gave it to me. I really enjoyed the book, probably as much as Kite Runner, although the plot was more predictable.

The story follows an unusual friendship between Mariam and Laila, two women living in Afghanistan from before the Russian occupation through today. The narrative follows them through their early lives as brides through child-rearing and into middle age. It was interesting to read about women this time (in contrast to in Kite Runner) and compare it to other books I had read recently on women in Muslim countries. Life changed drastically for women during the 30 or so years during which this book is set, and I learned a lot about Afghan history. I also enjoyed the contrast between the two women: Mariam, raised poor, ending up obedient and bitter, and Laila, raised in a more reasonable household, always hopeful and deceptive.

In some places, the description of women and their struggles was striking, like in this scene from a hospital:

"They want us to operate in burqas." the doctor explained, motioning with her head to the nurse at the door. "She keeps watch. She sees them coming; I cover."

She said this in a pragmatic, almost indifferent, tone, and Mariam understood that this was a women far past outrage. Here was a woman, she thought , who had understood that she was lucky to even be working, that there was always something, something else, that they could take away.

However, in other parts of the book, the voice that Hosseini gives Mariam sounded a little preachy to me. "And the burqa, she leaned to her surprise, was also comforting. It was like a one-way window. Inside it, she was an observer, buffered from the scrutinizing eyes of strangers. She no longer worried that people knew, with a single glance, all the shameful secrets of her past." I couldn't tell if it was his being a man writing a woman's character, his desire to defend some parts of Islam, or just bad writing.

Plenty of the book, however, was good writing. Mariam grows up as the illegitimate child of a local aristocrat, and she is abruptly married off when her mother dies. Hossieni's descriptions of her confusion in growing up were brilliant. He writes in her voice: "Husbands who doted on their mothers and wouldn't spend a rupiah on them, the wives. Husbands who gambled. Mariam wondered how so many women could suffer the same miserable luck, to have married, all of them, such dreadful men. Or was this a wifely game that she did not know about, a daily ritual, like soaking rice or making dough? Would the expect her soon to join in?"

Overall, I'd recommend this book. It had some great descriptions and unusual scenes which I'm sure I'll confuse with movie scenes over time. I also enjoyed learning more about Afghanistan given how much attention it has received in the media since 9/11.

Eventide by Ken Haruf

I had been saving this sequel to Plainsong for as long as I could, but in need of a pick-me-up book this weekend I finally succumbed. Eventide was good not only of its own accord but also because it reminded me how much I liked Plainsong.

This book is a continuation of the story begun in Plainsong. The book also uses many of the same literary affectations as its predecessor: conversations without quotation marks and local grammar in non-conversation descriptions. "First they set to cleaning it, as people do when they move into a new house." This made the book immediately familiar to me, despite having read probably 40+ books since Plainsong.

One of the best things about Plainsong was the surprising connections between seemingly disparate characters within the story. Prepared for this, I kept trying to figure out who would end up living with or helping out whom in Eventide, but to no avail. Thankfully, Haruf made similarly clever connections between the characters that surprised me at every turn of the page. The characters were interesting to follow, well-developed, and appropriately likable or hate-able. Their tragedies and mistakes felt like my own.

Towards the end of this book, I noticed that I was reconsidering my superiority as a capuccino-drinking therapy-going, Tivo-using blue-stater. The characters in this book (no doubt based on people Haruf has come across in his native Colorad0) are at least as good as my contemporaries are in solving problems and comforting each other. I yearned, briefly, for a simpler life in a small town.

Perhaps my only disappointment with this book was that it was exactly as good as Plainsong, for all the same reasons.

Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb

I had a hard time putting this book down. On Saturday, I was trying not to read it too fast, so I would read a chapter, then look something historical up in Wikipedia and force myself to spend 10 minutes learning before going to the next chapter. It is the first book taking place in a foreign country that I've read in a while, and I loved that feeling of being transported.

This book is about a woman who (as a small child) is left by her British-born bohemian parents at a Sufi shrine in Morocco for a long weekend. They die that weekend, and she ends up converting to Islam and making a pilgrimage to Ethiopia as a young woman. The political unrest in Ethiopia sends her to London, and the bulk of the book alternates between these two locations and times in her life.

The book's main theme was identity. As a British-born woman in an Islamic society, Lilly did not fit in; nor did she fit in returning to London after that experience. She is a strong, independent woman, but as the book continues and the places where she finds comfort are threatened, she hardens on the outside. Lilly is a very likable character, but one who seems distant; I believe that distance is purposeful, not an indication of bad writing.

I learned a lot about Ethiopian history and culture, as well as Islam, neither of which I was expecting. For me, Ethiopia was always a country that (a) also used to comprise Eritrea, (b) spawned some good restaurants in the States where you ate without your hands, and (c) had a famine that prompted the original We Are the World or something. I am much better educated now, although I didn't find any of those things to be untrue.

If I have any criticism of this book, it's that in what I perceive to be an effort to describe Islam as having incarnations that are kind and joyful (not terrorist fodder), Gibb gets a little preachy and long-winded through Lilly. I think it's great that the literary community is trying to support a wider worldview of, among other things, Islam, and that's one of the reasons I love reading so much. But, a few of Lilly's comments about Islam were less about telling a story or developing a character and more about defending it to its critics.

That aside, there was some excellent writing in the book. At a social gathering, Lilly notices she is being spoken to in English, not the native language: "It's okay, I wanted to tell them, I even dream in Harari now. And Harari dreams are not like Arabic or English dreams: there are always a great many more people involved."

And Gibb makes some larger points through Lilly as well: "Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops, a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made."

Definitely recommended, this book will open your mind.

When Madeline was Young by Jane Hamilton

This book had a particularly unusual premise, and Hamilton did a superb job writing a complete story around it. The story is about a family comprising a man, his mentally challenged first wife, his second wife, and the two children from his second marriage. It is told from the point of view of the man's son, and spans about forty years of the family's saga.

Madeline, the title character and first wife, was involved in an accident during their first year of marriage, and subsequently lives as a perpetual eight-year-old. When her ex-husband remarries, she remains in their life, and becomes like a third child in their family. His second wife is unusually accepting of Madeline, calling her "lamb", rarely scolding her, and even allowing her to join them -- chastely -- in the marital bed, as one would a young child.

The book addresses some of the ethical and logistical issues around the care of the mentally ill. There is discussion on long-term care for Madeline, the decision to provide her with an eight-year-old's fantasy bedroom and toys, concern around her relationship with men, and other similar difficulties. However, more central than any of that was about placing the situations and concerns faced by this family into familiar territory. It's a story about a family, not about a family with a mentally ill child.

More specifically, it might be a story about the son, the narrator, more than about anyone else. Several portions of the book focus on the son's life growing into an adult, and how his childhood circumstances informed his own marriage. He makes many remarks about his own life and his impressions of the world, and it is clear to the reader how certain individual incidents as a young adult shaped his worldview. Significant portions of the book discuss his history with his wife, his daughters, and growing into being a man. Some of his most memorable comments relate to how women always reach out to other women, and how his daughters (predictably) despised his wife during their adolescence.

The one weakness in the book was the narrator's daughter Tessa. Tessa was bright, tough, and clearly his favorite daughter. Of her, he writes, "When she looks at you, it is best to clear your mind of insincerity...Tessa is a predator when she listens, the girl taking your full measure." Unfortunately, neither his favoritism of her over his other daughters nor her virtuous irreverence seemed realistic. More likely, Tessa is Hamilton's ideal self or child incarnate and poorly hidden.

That aside, I remain a huge fan of Jane Hamilton's. She has a way of making the mundane stand out as unique and the weird seem reasonably normal, which served her well in this book. At the end of the book, she describes a scene between the husband and Madeline, after his second wife has died, "He gave her a quick pat before he helped himself to an indeterminate kind of sandwich, turkey or ham or egg salad, whatever was most oozing mayonnaise."

I looked forward to picking up this book each night, and I think you will too.

The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi Julavits

This book was unusual, and I'm not sure if I liked it or not. It is about a woman named Mary who returns to her hometown when her mother dies and grapples with some difficult decisions she made while in high school. The book alternated between the present and Mary's high school years. There are also some excerpts from a fictional book written about her interwoven with these sections.

There was a strong backdrop of Freudian psychotherapy throughout the book. Mary sees a therapist (actually two) while in high school, and much of her present-day life is about closure on her relationships with them. Mary also has a questionable encounter with an older man that is "unpacked" throughout the book.

One thing the author was very good at was providing concise but complete descriptions of Mary's relationships with her family members.

She writes of Mary, "She and Gaby, she'd believed, had a sibling closeness based on the unspoken agreement that they would never be close; this shared understanding of the limits of their relationship made it the easiest relationship Mary shared with anyone in her family."

And in describing her difficulties with her mother, Mary says in therapy, "I sprinkled red food coloring on my underwear and left it in the hamper where my mother would find it. That afternoon I found a box of pads on my bed and a pair of cameo earrings. This is how we communicate, my mother and I."

I'd say that anyone with a strong interest in psychotherapy or analysis should definitely read this, otherwise it's a coin toss on whether you'll like it.

Still Life with Husband by Lauren Fox

The cover art and title of this book made it seem like it would be chick-lit, but I thought it was better than that. This story follows a woman named Emily in her early thirties who is doubting her relationship with her husband and contemplating an affair with a man she meets.

Emily was immediately likable and familiar. As I read, I thought of Emily as, if not myself in a different situation, at least as someone I would be friends with. For example, she writes, "I have always fallen for guys the way smart girls do, the way not-beautiful girls do, with my brain." Even her relationship with her mother was familiar: " 'Erica Marchese had twins,' she says by way of greeting, giving first me, then Kevin a perfumey kiss on the cheek...I went to grade school with Erica Marchese, although I haven't seen her in about twenty years. But my mother keeps her finger on the pulse of her thriving, procreating suburban community."

The majority of the book describes Emily's descent into a relationship with a man who isn't her husband and the ensuing exhilaration, guilt, and confusion surrounding this decision. The reason I didn't consider this book pure chick-lit is the intelligence with which Emily (actually, Lauren Fox) comments on the situations she's in. "Later, in bed, it occurs to me that maybe a lie is composed not of the substance of what you tell someone, and not even of its intention, but of the amount of stress is causes you to tell it." These comments are included in the book not as Carrie-Bradshaw-esque interludes, but as continual reflection.

The book was a bit scary, too, in its possibility. Here was a story about a young well-educated woman who married a nice, steady guy, and suddenly felt trapped at a young ago. A little too close to home for me? Probably not. But it was the first book about adultery that I have read in which the main perpetrator was of my demographic. Her description of her husband was sweetly familiar, which was scary: "Poking out of a pocket of Kevin's suitcase, I notice, is the book he brought to read during his free time: Sound Investments for the Careful Planner. I feel a familiar pang of love for my steady, staid husband."

A pretty good book.

Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress by Sarah Jane Gilman

Mer A strikes again. Woe is me when I've gone through the pile she gave me. This was a memoir about a girl who grows up in a mixed-race neighborhood in New York City during the 1970s with hippie parents. It follows her from some of her earliest memories until her marriage in her early thirties. Disclosure: she went to Brown, like me, so I'm predisposed to like her. See also Caroline Knapp.

As she says in the preface, "I've written this book...because so many of the stories women are currently telling are all about getting a man...while a few stories do involve a boy, a bra, and a booty call, mostly their focus is elsewhere--on other passions and delusions that we all experience in one form or another."

And she succeeds at this. Her stories about growing up are about her interactions with her surroundings, and about the often-hilarious mishaps and misunderstandings that pepper everyone's childhood. About two-thirds of the way through the book, the tone changes from quaint growing-up stories to more of an adult style, which tells the reader about her progression into adulthood. I was never too impressed with her writing style, but I was interested to find out what was going to happen to her; it was more like reading a friend's email than a proper book, but with good grammar and punctuation.

I probably related the most to her description of her expectations around a high school dance. She writes about the iconic story of an unpopular girl with a chance to become well-liked:

"But then, we see montage shots of the dork in training--jogging, sweating, getting a makeover, holding up outfits in front of a department store mirrors while a bevy of salesclerks frown and shake their heads, then nod approvingly--until the Big Night. Inevitably, some school bully or bitch tries to sabotage her plans. And inevitably, last-minute obstacles pop up, theatening to jettison the whole evening. Maybe her limo breaks down. Maybe her father has a pulmonary embolism...[once she succeeds] her nemesis, meanwhile, ends up tearing her hair out in jealousy in the parking lot while a car veers past and platters mud all over her taffeta bubble dress.

The moral of these stories was never lost on me: namely that, with the right makeover, it was possible to reverse years of social ostracism in a single evening."

As an adult, her honesty and commentary on herself is no less present. She says of moving to Europe with her husband, "No doubt, plenty of Swiss citizens would be happy to engage me in lengthy discussions about "Totour and Tristan, the two wooden soldiers" who I'd studied ad nauseum in grade school, then listen raptly as I informed them that "whenever Pierra and Simone go to the market, they purchase a pair of shoes, a cauliflower and a small brown monkey, ... For all my schooling, I hadn't the foggiest idea how to say such basic things as "lightbulb," "extension cord," and "Can you please help me? My husband is stuck in the bathroom."

All told I enjoyed reading this book. The writing is nothing spectacular (although it is funny), but Gilman's honesty and ability to look critically at herself generally make up for that.

Saturday by Ian McEwan

I am still working my way through Mer A's pile of books, and I really liked this one. I thought Atonement by McEwan was pretty good, and I'd rate this one similarly. Like Atonement, it was a little slow in some places but not so slow that I lost interest. Unlike Atonement, it took place in the course of one day, a Saturday.

The main character is a neurosurgeon who is planning to cook dinner for his family that evening and thinks the day will be just another Saturday. Instead, he witnesses something early in the morning that changes his mood, then is involved in an altercation later in the day that has an unusual outcome. My father-in-law-to-be's being a neurosurgeon made it immediately intriguing.

My favorite thing about this book is that it taught me that other people's thoughts are as dense as mine; that I'm not the only person who lives a seemingly successful life but has a crowded narrative running in my head all the time. For example, this paragraph describes his making dinner:

"Into the biggest colander he pours the rest of the mussles and scrubs them with a vegetable brush at the sink under running water. The pale greenish clams on the other hand look dainty and pure, and he merely rinses them. One of the skates has arched its spine, as if to escape the boiling. As he pushes it back down with a wooden spatula, the vertebral column breaks, right below T3. Last summer he operated on a teenage girl who broker her back at C5 and T2 falling out of a tree at a pop festival, trying to get a better view of Radiohead. She'd just finished school and wanted to study Russian at Leeds. Now, after eight months' rehab she's doing fine. But he dismisses the memory. He isn't thinking about work; he wants to cook. From the fridge he takes a quarter-full bottle of white wine, a sancere red, and tips it over the tomato mix."

The relationships that he has with his family are also a highlight of the book. His poet daughter and grunge rock son are both well-developed characters, and his love for his wife is clearly described throughout the book, "This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer--a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight."

And finally, I thought the plot and composition of the book were great. All too often I find myself complaining about the ending of a book; in reality, that is probably a complaint about the composition of the book entirely. In this case, no complaints here.

The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

I was supposed to really like this book but I didn't. Arguably I hated it although I read the entire thing. I should have liked it because it was about a young woman who graduated from Brown and her relationships with her friends, family, and fiance. Additionally, she was struggling with her career in her late twenties. She was living in New York City. All that, coupled with its being on several booklists, and I was excited to read it.

What I found was a book that was hard to read about an unlikeable group of characters. The prose was complex with an insane number of words I did not recognize. The characters were whiny and unrealistic. And the storyline, including the climax and ending, were disappointingly predictable. The characters existed in what was supposed to be an erudite, cultured, shallow-but-complex world, but I wasn't buying it. The main character didn't seem to have conflicts any more complicated than Marjorie Morningstar's, and I expect more than that from fiction in 2006, supposedly about my generation.

As usual, I noted down a few passages that I enjoyed, and interestingly I noticed that they were all about one particular character, the only character I liked. Below, she is describing the changes she made in her apartment after starting an affair with an older man. (Incidentally, the fact that the only character I liked is one who has an affair says a lot about the low quality of the other characters.)

"She now kept a bottle of Lagavulin in the cupboard over the fridge and behind it, hidden, a symbolic, as yet unopened, carton of Marlboros. She kept on hand packets of heavily salted pretzels, which she was beginning herself to appreciate, and Altoids, for which he had a weakness. She felt simultaneously proud and ashamed of these accommodations."

I suppose the other bright part of the book was the omniscient third person narration. I did enjoy seeing the story unfold from polarly different points of view. In most cases, unfortunately, the writing style overshadowed this.

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

This was a great book, and my reading it solidified my identity as a HUGE Michael Lewis fan. When I was in high school and freaking out about what to pursue in college, my guidance counselor pointed me to Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth as an example of an author marrying his love of writing with his lifelong interest in the Middle Ages. Michael Lewis, similarly, matches his love of sports with an acute acumen for economics.

Unlike just about any review I've written before, this one won't have any quotations in it. In the spirit of other other books I've loved, it has just about every page dog-earred with a comment or passage to share in the blog. Overwhelmed with this volume of comments coupled with my handwritten notes, I'll stick to a description of the book and let you trust that it is well-written.

This book is about sabremetrics, baseball statistics. It tells the story of Billy Beane, a mediocre baseball player who takes over the Oakland A's as GM, and turns the team around in a few short seasons with an incredibly low payroll. Beane does this (with the help of several statistically-minded folks, most notably Paul DePodesto) by examining what contributes to a baseball team's record and figuring out how to get those talents at below-market prices.

The book traces a history of certain players as well as of the scouting methodologies used by most teams. It also contains a large discussion of baseball economics and salaries. I most enjoyed reading about some of the unlikely heroes Beane created who were too fat, old, or unskilled in the field to play for other teams. The most hilarious scenes in the book were about Beane's tactics during the draft and trading season to get what he wanted.

His strategy, wildly successful, is based on several decades of statistical work (starting with Bill James) that has gone on quietly beside the old-school conventional wisdom of generations of sportswriters, scouts, and managers. Throughout the book these groups of people turned their noses up to Beane's approach, and many still dispute his strategy despite both his success. In 2002, for example, the A's were at the top of their division and had won more games than any other MLB team other than the Yankees, despite the A's having the lowest payroll in baseball.

Those naysayers are also up against several teams who have since begun to follow the methodology, including Toronto and Boston. The afterward of the book has some great anecdotes about people's misconceptions of the strategies employed by Beane, along with Michael Lewis' commentary on this lack of acceptance by baseball's old guard.

Some of the strategies employed by Beane are quite clever, ranging to downright amusing. For one, he would trade for a sub-par pitcher on the cheap, turn him into a closer, let him accumulate some saves to pump up his statistics, then trade him for a higher-value player. He also took advantage of the low salaries paid to newer players who contractually did not have salaries on the open market until the sixth year of their employment. Once they reached their sixth year, he would trade them for first-round draft picks which were of more value to him.

As a reasonably new baseball fan --and as a mathematician-- I was able to embrace Beane's beliefs and enjoy the David and Goliath story. The most interesting assertions on the book, some of which am still fighting with my fellow sports fans about:

-On Base Percentage (OBP) and slugging are better indicators of a player or team's ability to score runs than averages are.

-It is not worth trading outs for anything.

-Slugging and ability to draw walks stay with aging players, which ability to hit home runs does not.

-To make a difference in a team's record, base-stealers must steal bases with 70% accuracy.

-The connection between the count a batter faces and their ability to get on base is not statistically significant until the second pitch.

-Fielding is just 5% of the team's success.

To sum it up, this book was great fun. I suggest you read it during baseball season so you can "play along" with the hypotheses.

The Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

Mer A. recommended this book to me, after I mentioned Didion as an author on my reading list. Wow. Fabulous. Mer's recommendation mentioned some oddities with Didion's style, which I'll address below.

The book takes place in a fictional Latin American country, and is narrated by the matriarch of a family who controls much of the business and politics in the country. The narrator was born in the United States, but moves to this country as a young adult. She claims early on in the book that the story is not about her, it's about a woman named Charlotte who flees to this country as an adult when her life in the U.S. starts to fall apart. However, it is clear to the reader (well, at least to this reader) that her telling of the story is as much about her as about Charlotte.

Early in the book she characterizes Charlotte as a norteamericano, a classification in her world that determines how Charlotte is treated and how she integrates with the local community. The following passage well illustrates the mirror the narrator looks into in her telling of the story:

"As the child of comfortable family in the temperate zone she had been as a matter of course provided with clean sheets, orthodontia, lamb chops, living grandparents, attentive godparents, one brother named Dickie, ballet lessons, and casual timely information about menstruation and the care of flat silver, as well as with a small wooden angel, carved in Austria, to sit on her bed table and listen to her prayers. In these prayers, the child Charlotte routinely asked that "it" turn out all right, "it" being unspecified and all-inclusive, that she had been an adult for some years before the possibility occurred to her that "it" might not. She had put this doubt from her mind. As a child of the western United States, she had been provided as well with faith in the value of certain frontiers on which her family had lived, in the virtues of cleared and irrigated land, of high-yield crops, of thrift, industry and the judicial system, of progress and education, and the general upward spiral of history. She was a norteamericano."

Didion has a very rhythmic writing style, which I enjoyed. That passage above is of a style common in this book: sentences that would be considered "run-on" anywhere else, coupled with a strong ability to capture a particular theme quickly. In some cases, Didion was more likely to break her rhythm onto separate lines, connecting them by using the same words in a different way. This style definitely brought me into the book and into the narrator's head:

"Anyway." Charlotte folded the pages of her unfinished Letter with a neat vertical crease as children fold their weekly themes. "It's not just a new sentence. It's a new paragraph."

It occurred to me that I had never before had so graphic an illustration of how the consciousness of the human organism is carried in its grammar.

Or the unconsciousness of the human organism.

If the organism under scrutiny is Charlotte.

Thematically, the book was largely about Charlotte's relationship with her daughter, who disappeared as part of a radical political organization. I think there were ways in which I would have connected with the book even more if I had children. That said, I may have appreciated themes in the book I would have otherwise missed had I been more focused on the mother-daughter narrative.

For example, avoidance. Charlotte's move to Latin America is the most extreme example of her propensity to avoid the things in her life she doesn't like. She refuses to acknowledge her daughter's defection initially:

"Marin...was at that moment, even as the two FBI men occupied Leonard's Barcelona chairs, even as te fat FBI man toyed with one of Leonard's porcelain roses and even as the thin FBI man gazed over Charlotte's head at the 10' by 16' silk screen of Mao Tse-tung given to Leonard by one of the Alameda Three, skiing at Squaw Valley. Or so Charlotte tried to tell the FBI man."

Finally, ideas around separation were common in this book. Charlotte is norteamericano, thus treated differently. She also expects to live by different rules as her counterparts. The dialectic of how she acts and how she is treated through her life reinforces this. The narrator's comment on this is extreme:

"Charlotte had no idea that anyone else had ever been afflicted by what she called the "separateness."

And because she did not she fought it, she denied it, she tried to forget it, and, during those first several weeks after Marin disappeared and obliterated all the numbers, spent many days without getting out of bed. I think I have never known anyone who led quite so unexamined a life."

This book takes more patience than most books. It nudged me through the story rather than ushering me. I enjoyed that about it, but not everyone will.