Rigged by Ben Mezrich

I think I have officially fallen out of love with Ben Mezrich. I was a huge fan of Bringing Down the House, his book about students at MIT who figure out a scheme to win millions in Vegas. (It's being made into a movie now.) However, I was disappointed with both Ugly Americans and Busting Vegas, the two books that followed. I had no particular criticism of either one, other than that neither was the fun ride that Bringing Down the House was.

When I heard Mezrich interviewed on NPR recently, I thought his new book, Rigged, sounded interesting. It was about David Russo, a recent Harvard MBA graduate who goes to work at the New York Mercentile Exchange. The "Merc" is an exchange that is otherwise filled with Brooklyn-born Jews and Italians who were traders because their fathers had been traders. Originally for potatoes, then butter and eggs, today the Merc is where oil futures are traded. Russo quickly becomes central to the management of the Merc, then attempts the impossible - to bring a sister trading floor to Dubai.

I expected this book to explain the technical details of how an exchange works, how oil prices are negotiated, and what it means to have two exchanges for the same commodity on opposite sides of the world. Instead, Mezrich spends the pages detailing Russo's encounters with alcohol, women, and ego-driven traders. Some of the book's most dramatic moments are when Russo cheats on his girlfriend and when he is forced to jump out a hotel window. While some of this detail is necessary to describe both the traders in New York and the different but equally-raucous environment in Dubai, Mezrich robs us of the actual financial details of the story. He trivializes some of the most interesting issues in favor of the glamorous, glitzy details that sell books. Ugh.

Now I have to go find another book on the New York Mercantile Exchange just to understand what the heck David Russo did, how, and why. And I'm annoyed with Mezrich because he obviously knows all these things and just left it out of the final published product.

More on Brockmeier

I Googled Brockmeier since I liked his book so much. He says the coolest thing in an interview on his Random House website:

"I'm a list-maker---I always have been---and over the past few years I've been keeping and regularly reconsidering a list of my fifty favorite books."

I am so incredibly jealous! I should do one of those each year - maybe on my birthday - and see how my tastes change over time.

From the top of his list:

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
All the Days and Nights by William Maxwell
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Death in the Family by James Agee
Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars by Daniel Pinkwater
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton
The His DarkMaterials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
The Complete Short Stories by J.G. Ballard

A Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

This was a very unusual book.

Half of the story takes place in "The City," a limbo-esque location where people go when they die. In the book, they live there until there is nobody left alive who remembers them, at which point they actually go to a more final resting place. The author based this concept on a belief in certain African societies that such a place exists. The other half of the story is about a woman trapped in a research post in Antarctica who trying to figure out how to communicate with the outside world since her satellites are damaged and power sources are quickly draining. Brockmeier skillfully weaves these two stories together in an incredible way.

This was not one of those books with two stories where one of them was more interesting to the other and I thus spent half the book trying to get to the good parts. Both stories were compelling and I wanted to know what would happen.

One thing I loved about Brockmeier's writing was his use of small anecdotes throughout the book to quickly get the reader more background on a particular character or environment. I have not seen this technique used as successfully as this in anything I can remember.

I ought to put his first novel on my reading list.

Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

Unlike much of what I've been reading lately, this book was one I plucked off the new fiction shelf in the library with no review. I liked it a lot.

The story is about a woman who hosts a radio show in an unnamed Latin American country. The country has been ravaged by war and her radio show is a chance for people who have lost friends and relatives to say their names and hopefully find each other. In parallel, the woman has lost her husband to the war and she meets someone in the book who may be able to help her find him.

One reviewer compared the world Alarcon creates to that of Orwell or Huxley. I did not find it to be nearly as dystopic as that. Surely it was not a country I'd want to visit, but it was far more realistic and 'possible' than those other portrayals of the future. I found it to be more similar to Didion's Book of Common Prayer or Saramago's All the Names. Like those books, its being in a created country forced Alarcon to provide the historical backdrop, not just the plot. While I didn't think the history he created was entirely original (he seemed to rely on a composite of Latin American histories), it was well-developed and complete.

Considering this was a first novel, I thought it was excellent.

National Book Critic Award Finalists Announced

Joyce Carol Oates is having a VH1-style 'Best Week Ever.'

http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/01/2007-national-book-critics-circle-award.html

Run by Ann Patchett

I love love loved this book. Ann Patchett is one of my favorite authors, so when it came up on the library's hold queue, I was very excited - "like your birthday or something," said Jo. I didn't even realize until I brought it home that it was set in Boston, a block from my house.

The story is about an affluent white family who adopts two black boys. The main story takes place within two or three days surrounding a car accident, but Patchett spans several decades of the story by taking us back into the history of the adoptive family and of the boys' mother. She experiments with ideas around family, success, and identity, all with a cast of characters that I couldn't help but root for. The writing, too, was superb.

I tried to explain the entire plot to Webster on a walk to brunch the other day. In doing so, I realized how complex the story was, and how much I liked that about the book, although I didn't notice that while I was reading it. I did get a kick out of reading a well-researched story set in my own neighborhood.

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.