Castle by J. Robert Lennon

This book was mentioned in The Millions' post on books to keep an eye out for in 2009. They quote from Lennon's website: "A man buys a large plot of wooded land in upstate New York, only to find that someone has built a castle in the middle of it--and the castle is inhabited." Always looking for books that get me out of Oprah's trade fiction, I decided to try it.

What a weird and frustrating read. Lennon is a great writer - his ability to describe a situation or location or create a character's persona was excellent. However, his writing style did not carry the book past its challenges with plot and theme. Eric Loesch, the main character, returns to the town he grew up in after some set of not-known-to-the-reader circumstances, and immediately purchases a large plot of land. The first half of the book, in which Loesch is fixing up the house he bought and exploring the area, reminded me of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go - detached, deliberate, and frustratingly hinting at dark secrets to be revealed later in the book. While Ishiguro delivers on the buildup, Lennon's payoff is just plain weird and unmotivated.

In the second half of the book, Loesch reveals a huge chunk of history about his past that explains much of his distant and anti-social behaviour. The mystery of the castle is resolved, then more recent events in Loesch's life are revealed as well. While there are some themes common to all these points in his life - compliance with authority for one - the second half of the book was pretty disconnected and choppy for me.

Obviously Lennon had some ideas he wanted to convey and a thematic way he wanted to tie them together but it did not work for me. I guess part of it is that Loesch is not very likable and delving into his past to find out why isn't something I cared about. I'd suggest that Hannibal Lechter is the only character I've ever disliked but become invested in finding out his personal history.

I would probably try something else by Lennon because he is well-regarded but this was not the book for me.

The Addict by Michael Stein

I first heard about this book in my June issue of Brown Alumni Monthly. Dr. Michael Stein is a professor at Brown and this book chronicles the relationship he has with a patient who is trying to correct her all-consuming addiction to painkillers.

Stein runs a program that provides buprenorphine as an alternative to Vicodin; while there are differences between this type of program and one that replaces heroin with methadone, the parallel is valid for the purposes of understanding the story. He seems to be compassionate but not soft, and was definitely likable as a narrator. Lucy, the title character, is likable too, despite her low self-image and erratically sad behavior relating to drug abuse.

The cover of the book include the subtitle "One Patient One Doctor One Year" but this is an oversimplification. Stein's book covers several patients' stories, which not only provides some context for Lucy's story but also for Stein's. A leading expert on addiction, Stein easily covers research on drug abuse, clinical trials he has run, as well as several intimate portraits of patients in a very readable format.

What most held my attention about this book is that it was the first one I had read from the doctor's point of view. I have read several books on mental health and addiction, including Appetites, My Name is Bill, Parched, Drinking: A Love Story, Prozac Nation, Holy Hunger, and More Now Again, but they are all from the point of view of the patient. There are glimpses of the doctor's point of view in many of these books, but always through the patient - in fact one of the most memorable parts of Prozac Nation occurred when Wurtzel had just attempted suicide and she hears her (excellent) Dr. Sterling on the phone commenting to another doctor, "Well, you know how it is, me and all my suicidal patients." Wurtzel grants her some "gallows humor" and the book quickly moves on...but I always wondered about the doctor's side.

And Stein provides a great view into that - his most striking characteristic is his measured competence, appropriately interspersed with concern and worry. We see Lucy as he does - weekly or monthly, with no additional information as to what the time is like in between other than her depictions of it. She is a sympathetic character, and clearly a favorite patient of Stein's (if they have favorites), but she is imperfect and he is appropriately distanced and clinical in his description of their interactions.

Lucy seems to be really invested in changing her life. My view into addiction, heavily influenced by the books listed above, is obviously slanted towards high-functioning addicts who can write and publish a book (or collaborate with an author). It was interesting in contrast to read about a recovery journey that was 'in-progress' with a patient who was motivated but not so much so that she was writing a book.

While I liked Stein as a (true-life) character and came to trust him as a doctor, I did wonder if Lucy would have benefited from seeing a psychiatrist too - Stein is an internist who provides talk therapy along with the buprenorphine. I didn't notice anything about their interactions that made me think he was not providing great health care but I also don't know how a psychiatrist would have changed her chances of recovery.

I appreciated reading this book and look forward to picking up Stein's other memoir, The Lonely Patient, sometime in the future.

Rising from the Rails by Larry Tye

I heard Larry Tye interviewed on NPR and was strangely interested in reading his book about the impact the Pullman Porters had on the making of the Black middle class. This isn't the type of book I usually choose but something about it struck me. I have shamefully decided not to read Infinite Jest this summer after trying for 34 pages, so this book became a kind of penance.

The book reminded me of the serious nonfiction I used to have to read for classes in college. Tye had obviously researched the book impeccably, interviewing porters and family members to gather a complete collection of anecdotes which he used generously throughout the book.

I had known very little about the Pullman Porters - but Tye gave some good background to get even the casual reader up to speed. After emancipation, ex-slaves had very few choices for careers. George Pullman had started a sleeping car business and needed attendants who wanted job opportunities so badly that they would accept sub-par conditions and expectations. He also wanted attendants for his cars that would blend into the background as "invisible" and ex-slaves fit both of those bills - thus an industry and labor force was born.

Pullman porters were treated horribly, scarcely sleeping, ridiculed by some passengers and co-workers, and underpaid with no chance of promotion. But they were also given an opportunity to travel and get exposure to the country that was not afforded to most ex-slaves or to their offspring. This job, Tye argues, enabled Blacks in America to create a middle class that previously had not existed for them.

Tye does a wonderful job covering the breadth of the story, including topics such as the porters' depiction in media, their training program, their family life, and a large section on their creation of a workers' union, which was one of the lengthiest processes in history for this type of union. He provides significant background on George Pullman, whose company employed the porters, and A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the union. Tye even takes a slightly long detour into Martin Luther King's draft into the civil rights movement.

This book opened my eyes to an era and a particular set of lives that I hadn't considered before.

Larry's Kidney by Daniel Asa Rose

I was really excited about reading this book that I heard about on a blog a few months ago. It is subtitled "Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant--and Save His Life" which basically summarizes the book for you.

Given the flippant charm of the subtitle, I expected the book to be funny, but it wasn't. I thought that Daniel's cousin Larry was a pathetic character - socially awkward in a way that presented like Asperger's. This book seemed to exploit his story rather than chronicle it. Rose also began the book with some notes on his decision to write the Chinese character's speech in the pidgin English he perceived they spoke in. While his intention may have been authenticity, the execution was tasteless.

Rose has another book about his visit to Eastern Europe with his children to trace the route his relatives took in an effort to escape the Nazis. While that subject seems interesting, I'm not likely to try it any time soon given the tone of this book.

The Other by David Guterson

I tried to read Snow Falling on Cedars (also by Guterson) when it was popular, but I had a hard time getting into it and gave up. When the description of this one caught my attention I decided to give it a try.

The story is about two friends who meet in high school. One (Neil) is from a working class family, the other (John Williams) from a rich family. After a formative trip where they get lost in the mountains for several days, Neil goes on to lead a traditional life and John William decides to live in the woods alone. The book is told from Neil's point of view, looking back on their relationship over thirty years later.

The majority of the book held my attention. The writing was superb - very dense and descriptive but I did very little skimming because I was interested in what I was reading. Neil was the narrator, and his style of telling the story was reasonably detached - looking back and describing the feelings he had at different times, but with a slightly clinical voice. This was when he was talking about both his own history (e.g. how he met his wife), and John Williams'. I kept changing my opinion on whether the book was about Neil or John Williams, but that was a satisfying challenge to grapple with while I was reading.

My only disappointment was with the last 10% of the book. After a tightly written narrative about the relationship between the two men and their choices, Guterson reveals some of John Williams' background through a long rambling monologue delivered by his father and a misplaced set of anecdotes revolving around his mother. The information revealed did not tie the entire book together well enough to justify the mediocre writing. That aside, I enjoyed the book overall, but I don't appreciate the book now that I am done with it as much as I did while I was reading it.

Middlesex being made into a series

Nice - Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, is being made into a TV series on HBO. Wow! I loved that book and the Pulitzers aggreed. I am dying to know how HBO is going to cast it and how they plan to tell the story.

Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog by Kitty Burns Florey

I think I first noticed this book, subtitled, "The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences" on my favorite book blog: The Millions. The book is delightful - it's 8x6, thin, and cleanly formatted and illustrated. I don't usually notice the design of the books I read but this was hard to miss. It's worth a trip over to Google Books to see a sample page.

Florey's book reads like a long essay - I could imagine this being in the New Yorker in a few segments. It was a mix of literary history, her personal story, details about diagramming sentences, and a little social commentary thrown in. I had always enjoyed diagramming sentences in school (it was like math during English) and it was interesting to read the history of how and why it was invented.

I encountered a few laugh-out-loud moments (which reminded me to put Bill Bryson's books on my reading list - I was once on a flight with someone reading Bryson's A Walk in the Woods and she laughed uproariously for the entire flight) but mostly just enjoyed the writing. She spent a long chapter discussing what famous writers may have covered in school vis a vis diagramming and how it may have impacted their style - James, Stein, Twain, Cooper, Proust, and Oates to name a few. I was surprised how shockingly out-of-date her irreverent references to George W. Bush seemed.

The penultimate chapter was the only one that seemed out of place to me. As a copy editor, Florey encounters many grammatical errors. In this chapter, she enumerates her least favorite ("ain't", double negatives, and "youse"), weakly connecting this to the rest of the book by considering whether diagramming these errors would make it obvious they were wrong. While I appreciate a discussion of grammatical errors as much as the next logophile, I didn't think it fit with the rest of the book.

That criticism aside, this was a quick, likable, and memorable read.

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Gregg mentioned this book on his blog and it was a great break from the serious reading I'd been doing. Since reading Cuckoo's Egg as a teenager, I have enjoyed technology-based thrillers, and this was a great one. I had some trouble finding it at first since it was initially pulished under the psudo-psuedonym 'Leinad Suarez'.

This book is about a world-famous techie who dies and appears to be controlling events from the grave. The characters quickly find out that it is a set of computer programs (known as daemons) that he's written that begin a set of events upon his death. A World of Warcraft-type online game plays a central role in the execution of his plan.

I read this book quickly, and enjoyed the combination of action, technology, and philosophy. Unlike the drivel about technology we often see on television (what's that Lassie? someone's hacked the blowfish algorithm and the router is launching an attack on the firewall?), this was well-researched and imaginable. While some reviewers see it as a cautionary tale about the dangerous future of a world run by machines, I just found it to be a fun read. Hopefully I won't regret that sentiment in 2060!