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.