February Book Log
My internet at home is completely hosed, so I had to steal some time at work to post this, which is normally no problem, but has not been easy today, because work has been insane. Sigh. But, anyway, here we go! The February books! I'm sure there are lots and lots of interesting themes and motifs this month, but the biggest one seems to be me going, "Man, this was such a great idea! If only the author had done this with it instead of that! How dare they not write the thing I wanted to read!" Ah, well. Fortunately, it's not all like that...
So, the books:
12. Under the Dome by Stephen King
A small town in (where else?) Maine is suddenly and shockingly cut off from the rest of the world by a mysterious and impenetrable force field dome. Unfortunately, some of the most powerful people in town are really not the sort of folks you want to be trapped in a bottle with, and things start to go very bad long before the food or the generator fuel run out...
My thoughts on this book are pretty much all, "On one hand... on the other hand...":
On one hand, it's definitely not the best-written of King's novels, and, like far too many of them, it's way too long, taking nearly 1,100 pages to tell a story that could have been done more effectively in half that.
On the other hand, it's certainly readable enough, and it doesn't drag too badly, considering its length. And the last two hundred pages or so are really quite gripping, which is particularly nice, since King often has problems with endings.
On one hand, King has clearly put a fair bit of thought into some of the details. I was particularly impressed with the way he has the dome affecting weather patterns and trapping in pollution. It adds a nice note of realism, as well as factoring into the plot in important ways, and also makes for a very appropriate atmosphere, as the town begins to get hotter and dirtier both literally and metaphorically.
On the other hand, there's one detail where he really falls down on the job, and that's in understanding the impact that 21st century communications technology ought to have in a situation like this. Very early in the book -- early enough that I don't think it qualifies as any kind of spoiler -- the military insists on cutting off cell phone communications from inside the dome, citing a vague and never fully explained concern about what kind of information might come out of there. They deliberately decide not to cut off the internet, though, with some offhand comment about it being easier to monitor e-mail than phone calls. Well, they might just as well have cut it off, because, even though a lot of people in the dome still have power, nobody ever uses the internet to communicate with the world outside in any fashion, and the world outside almost never uses it to reach in to them. For that matter, for a good chunk of the book, the main characters are sort of fighting an information/propaganda war, and they never take advantage of the internet for that, either. Now, this book was published in 2009, and I don't blame Stephen King for not anticipating the massive role that social media like Twitter would play in global politics in the years between then and now. But he at least should have realized that after something this disastrous and weird, the very first thing that would happen is someone blogging about it. I hate to say it, but I think Mr. King is showing his age here. He gives the impression that he has to remind himself that the internet can be used for more than e-mail, and at one point he has his characters exclaiming over a streaming webcam like it's the most brilliant and unexpected invention they've ever seen. And it's all too bad, because not only does this cause a big suspension-of-disbelief problem for me, but it also robs the story of an interesting dimension that it might otherwise have had.
And, finally, on one hand, it's a really terrific premise, and one which could be used in any number of interesting ways. King opts to use it to explore such topics as small-town corruption, bullying, and the politics of fear-mongering. Which is great, and he does some things with those themes that work really well.
On the other hand, I think the book suffers from clinging a little too closely to the Stephen King formula that says every story needs monsters -- in this case, human monsters. The bad guys in this story are a corrupt official who (with the help of spineless and dim-witted minions) effectively becomes the boss of the town, his thuggish son, and the thuggish son's thuggish friends. The problem is that these characters aren't just corrupt, self-serving, power-abusing, and petty. They are also, in various combinations, murders, rapists, drug dealers on a staggeringly massive scale, religious hypocrites of a particularly exaggerated kind, and, in one case, full-out tumor-in-the-brain crazy. Oh, and the boss man is literally a used car salesman. He's more of a caricature than a person, and it's unfortunate, because I think that having more nuanced and human antagonists might well have led to a more powerful, more believable, and possibly even ultimately more horrifying story.
I did mostly enjoy it -- if "enjoy" is quite the right word for a book this full of awful events -- but I can't help thinking that I would have enjoyed the leaner, subtler, more New Media-savvy book it could have been much more.
Rating: 3.5/5
13. Playboy's Silverstein Around the World by Shel Silverstein
A collection of cartoons first published in Playboy in the 50s and 60s, drawn by Shel Silverstein on his travels to various countries and sojourns among various subcultures. A fair number of these gave me a little chuckle, but I don't think they have nearly the sharp, clever, zany bite that his later kids' stuff does. (Which is maybe a little bit ironic.) Not all of them have aged terribly well, either, and this being Playboy, way too many of them are about hitting on chicks around the world, often in ways that may have been amusing to a male in the 1960s, but aren't nearly as funny to a 21st century female. There's also a weird cruelty-to-animals motif, as Silverstein fights a bull in Spain, attends a cockfight in Mexico, and shoots a water buffalo in Africa.
Overall, I really would not call this essential Silverstein.
Rating: 3/5
14. To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer
In a strange landscape of plains and hills, along the banks of a seemingly endless river, every person who has ever lived on Earth has been mysteriously resurrected in a new, young, and healthy body. It's an afterlife of some kind, but not one that any religion ever anticipated.
Out of all the human beings who have ever lived, the novel chooses to focus on Richard Burton, a nineteenth century Englishman known, among other things, for his extensive travels and his language skills. And Burton is determined to find out what the secrets behind this place are if he has to sail all the way to the end of the river to do it.
It's a fantastic, mind-blowing, absolutely compelling premise. So I can sort of understand why this is so highly regarded. But I find what Farmer does with it incredibly frustrating. There's just really not much development of anything. I want a really close-up look at how people react to and adapt to this weird new reality, how their societies and their philosophies and their ways of relating to each other slowly evolve, but that's all dealt with very shallowly, if at all. Mostly we're told things rather than being shown them, and that's true on every scale, from human relationships to the rise and fall of mini-civilizations. We're shown a very little bit of the first few days after the resurrection, then there's a month-long time jump while Burton and his new friends build a boat, then there's a jump of well over a year while they explore the river, an expedition we get to see almost none of. Farmer seems way, way more interested in the details of Burton's life than in this amazing new setting he's created, and, while I'm sure Burton is a very interesting guy, given the choice between debates over whether he was or wasn't an anti-Semite vs. a travelog featuring a trip down a million-mile river with all of human history colliding and mutating along its banks, I know which one I'd rather hear about.
In the end, there aren't any definite answers to the question of what the heck is going on here, just partial explanations and hints, which I'm sure are more fully explored in later volumes. But, while this one certainly piqued my interest, I doubt I'm going to continue on with the series unless someone can convince me that it changes its focus enough to be less frustrating for me.
Rating: 3.5/5 (and, honestly, some significant percentage of those stars are for the premise, rather than the execution)
15. The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree
This companion to the classic TV series starts out with a couple of introductory chapters. The first one seems to be about Rod Serling's pre-Twilight Zone career, but unfortunately the falling-apart library-sale copy I have is missing most of those pages, so all I can say about it is that at the point where I was able to come in, it was in the middle of a really fascinating discussion of the amount of influence sponsors were able to wield over TV content at the time. (And I thought today's product placement was bad!) The second chapter is about the origins of the show, and then the bulk of the book consists of an episode guide, with occasional short features on various aspects of the production or profiles of people who wrote or directed for the show. For each episode, there's a still photo, a list of credits, a short summary, transcripts of Serling's open and closing narration, a few comments from the book's author on the quality and most interesting points of the story, and usually some quotes from the scriptwriter or other people involved in the production. It's well put together, informative and interesting, making it a fun read for anyone who's a fan of the show. (And, really, who isn't? It's The Twilight Zone!)
The only bad thing about this is that it's instilled in me a burning desire to go back and (re)watch all of it, even the not-very-good episodes. I keep clicking over to Amazon and ogling the "complete definitive collection" boxed set and just barely managing to talk myself out of spending the money for it. But I don't think my willpower is going to hold out very long... [ETA: Yeah, it didn't. The DVDs are awesome!]
Rating: 4/5
16. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich
This book collects the words of people whose lives were affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster: People who were evacuated. People who weren't evacuated. People who, seeking refuge from war and having nowhere else to go, moved into contaminated areas abandoned by everyone else. Soldiers who were sent in, inadequately protected, to clean up afterward. Family members of people afflicted by radiation poisoning, or birth defects, or cancer. Scientists who tried to warn people, and one who lives with the shame of having trusted the authorities and looked the other way. There are long, rambling stories and short, bitter outbursts. Some are sophisticated and philosophical, others inarticulately emotional. Many of the most personal narratives are heartbreaking and horrifying, but, taken all together, they also paint an enlightening portrait of what it was like to be a citizen of the Soviet Union in 1986, and of the all too fallible ways in which human beings and human institutions can react to disasters that they don't fully understand. It's a painful book to read, but a very worthwhile one, and the way that Alexievich presents these transcripts, without context or comment, somehow just makes them all the more powerful.
Rating: 4.5/5
17. Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
A YA steampunk novel centering on a fugitive prince and a girl who disguises herself as a boy in order to join an airship crew, set in the first days of WWI. Or, rather, in what would be WWI in our world. This is a significantly different universe, however, in which the global powers are divided into the "Clankers," who use armored, steam-powered walking vehicles, and the "Darwinists," whose technology is largely based on genetic engineering.
It's an attractive book, with an eye-catching cover and lots of very nice illustrations. And the fantastic biotechnology of the Darwinists is clever, intriguing, and interestingly described. But while the story is perfectly okay, I just never found it particularly engaging, except perhaps at the very end. And I found the invented (or at least highly idiosyncratic) slang and swearing to be extremely distracting. Sometimes that sort of thing can work well, but here it varies from the mildly silly to the highly unfortunate. (Sorry, Mr. Westerfeld, but the word "squick" does not mean what you think it means.)
I'm not entirely sure whether I feel like this series is worth continuing on with, but there are just enough promising loose ends that I suppose I'll want to check out the next volume eventually.
Rating: 3.5/5
18. My Ántonia by Willa Cather
A 1918 novel in which a man -- now a successful New York lawyer -- looks back at his rural Nebraska childhood, and particularly at his childhood friend Ántonia, an immigrant from Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic). There's a touching sense of nostalgia to the narrative, and Ántonia, while we only ever see her from the outside, comes across as a very sympathetic character, an interesting mixture of frontier toughness and unpretentious emotion. But the setting is the real star of this story. Willa Cather's deceptively simple prose brings the Nebraska prairie vividly to life from the very first page, and it made me feel as if I were part of that landscape, sharing in a life very different from my own late-20th-century suburban upbringing and yet somehow instantly familiar. I can't imagine ever wanting to live the way these people did, with their constant struggle to earn a living from the land, and yet I also can't quite escape the feeling that maybe they had something important that most of us these days are missing.
Rating: 4.5/5
19. The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet
Jeff Sharlet investigates a religious organization called the Family, a fundamentalist Christian group which puts much of its emphasis on "leadership" (or, to use a less charitable word, "power"), and which possesses a surprising amount of clout in American politics. He opens by talking a little about the organization, its people, and its principles, including recounting his own experiences with the group, then spends the bulk of the book exploring the history of the Family and its precursors, highlighting the often rather startling influence that this very narrow breed of evangelical Christianity has had on politics both foreign and domestic. He then devotes a couple of chapters to the social attitudes of its adherents and their place in the so-called "culture wars."
It's an interesting and important subject, one that (distressingly, for those of us who believe strongly in the separation of Church and State) is extremely relevant to the current political landscape in America. Unfortunately, I don't feel like I got quite as much out of this book as I wanted to. It's a complicated topic that requires clear and careful journalism, and while Sharlet has obviously done vast amounts of research, he comes across as less "clear and careful journalist" and more "frustrated literary novelist," writing in a style that includes lush and often slightly fanciful descriptions of people's physical appearances and personalities and interactions, lots of rhetorical rambling, and turns of phrase or even whole paragraphs that leave me imagining the author sitting back and smiling in satisfaction at his own linguistic cleverness. None of which is necessarily a bad thing, and it works pretty well in the chapters where he's giving us glimpses of ordinary individuals and using that to convey some of the flavor of this particular theology and culture. But when it comes to his presentation of the historical facts, I think it muddles things a bit and dilutes some of the rather important points he's trying to make.
Which isn't to say that the book didn't have any impact. Mostly, it's left me feeling depressed. I like to believe that compromise and mutual understanding are always possible, but occasionally I have to acknowledge the fact that some worldviews are just intrinsically irreconcilable, and it's hard to escape the conclusion that we have some of those battling it out in America today.
Rating: 3.5/5
20. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Here I am, still slowly re-reading my way through this series...
I remember finding this one pretty suspenseful on first reading, what with Harry catching glimpses of a beast that may or may not be an omen of his death, learning that he may be the target of a maniacal killer, and slowly collecting tidbits of information about his parents and hints about the circumstances behind their deaths. All of that is rather less exciting when you already know how it plays out, though, and I did find myself a bit impatient with much of the story this time through. But as it builds up to the climax, with all its confrontations and reveals, I found myself getting quite caught up in it again. I think in the later chapters a re-reader's perspective is actually helpful rather than hurtful, as certain things gain a little additional depth when you know stuff that's revealed in later books. I'm sure it also helps that, at this point, I'm really much more interested in the adults at Hogwarts and the history of things that happened before Harry was born than I am about his and his friends' antics, and the ending of this one plays heavily on that history.
The book does have some flaws. Rowling's writing style isn't terribly impressive, something that maybe seems a little more in evidence in this volume, which perhaps wants to be taken just a little more seriously than the previous rather fluffy outings. There are a few too many clunkily expository conversations, a little too much of people shouting in ALL CAPS, that sort of thing. I also continue to have a few issues with various aspects of the world-building, my main question here being, "Why the hell is the wizarding world's criminal justice system so psychotic, and why does nobody have a problem with it?!" Still, for all that, I think this is about the point where I start to understand why this series is popular, if not why it's quite so ludicrously popular.
Rating: I'm still finding these hard to rate in retrospect, but I guess I'll call this one 4/5. Despite its flaws, it ultimately did get me where it wanted me to be.
21. Planetary: The Fourth Man by Warren Ellis
The second collection of comics featuring Planetary, a team of "mystery archeologists" on a mission to investigate "the secret history of the world." My opinion on the first volume was that I liked the concept, loved the artwork, found the characters potentially interesting, and enjoyed the way it played around with pop culture tropes, but thought the stories were far too slight, making the whole thing a little disappointing. Well, I do not have that problem with this volume. The first two chapters here do have much the same kind of structure as the stories in the first collection, but they seemed more satisfying to me, as they managed to successfully give the impression of offering windows into a much wider world. A weird, wonderful, horrible, and fascinating world. And then things suddenly get very, very dense, to the extent that I don't think I understood half of what was going on. But that's OK; I don't think I'm entirely supposed to yet, and if I'm confused, I'm also intrigued. And if I liked the way the first installment played around with the pop culture tropes... Well, this one delights in taking comics and B-movies and pulp fiction and all kinds of other familiar stories and not just playing around with them but warping and distorting them like taffy into freakish and often darkly humorous shapes.
At this point, I have absolutely no idea what to make of it all, or whether any of it will make sense in the end. But I do know I want to see more of it.
Rating: 4/5
22. No-Man's Lands: One Man's Odyssey Through the Odyssey by Scott Huler
Scott Huler recounts the story of his trip around the Mediterranean, following the route of Odysseus. Well, more or less the route of Odysseus, anyway, since nobody can agree on exactly where to locate most of his adventures on a map, or even to what extent it's reasonable to try. But that's all right; geographical accuracy isn't really the point, anyway.
It's a very low-key sort of book. Huler's wanderings are much less full of shipwrecks and man-eating giants than Odysseus', and he doesn't try to exaggerate his experiences to make for a more lively story, but instead realistically portrays the mundanities of 21st century travel, with all its annoyances and disappointments and unexpected little moments of complete happiness. Through it all he is quietly, unpretentiously thoughtful as he contemplates travel, life experiences, and the lessons and insights of the Odyssey. I started off hoping, perhaps, for a somewhat more exciting travel memoir, but in the end was quite satisfied by the journey I was taken on instead.
Rating: 4/5
23. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
A 1995 novel about a guy who owns a record shop in London and who, when we first meet him, has just been through a rather painful breakup. Throughout most of the novel, he divides his time between wallowing in self-pity, talking pretentiously but with genuine enthusiasm about music, making pop cultural top five lists, and wallowing in more self-pity.
I find it difficult to decide exactly what I think about this book. To begin with, I really disliked the main character. In addition to the whiny self-pity, he's also capable of being a grade-A dick, and every time I started developing some real sympathy for him, he'd turn around and do something unbelievably dickish again. His approach to women and relationships is incredibly self-absorbed and adolescent (although to his credit, he at least kind of realizes this), and while he's showing glimmers of approaching maturity by the very end, I can't quite manage to feel terribly optimistic about his chances for improvement. I also occasionally found myself wondering why he seemed to expect me, or anybody, to actually care about his crappy love life. And yet, there's something about Hornby's writing -- I'm not quite sure what -- that just pulled me along effortlessly and kept me interested, sometimes almost despite myself. There are also, perhaps, some decent insights here about relationships, and there's an impressive feeling of realism to the whole thing. Painful realism, even, especially for a woman who'd like to think that sex and relationships don't ever really look like this from a male POV, but knows in her heart that, at lest to some extent, they can and do.
So, while I was reading this, I'd say half of me felt entertained and thoughtful, while the other half was just going "Grrrr" and wanting to smack people. (Not the author, it should be said. He gives the strong impression of having a sense of perspective that his main character lacks. But the protagonist himself, definitely. And very possibly a couple of men I have known personally, as well.) Did I like it? I honestly don't know. But I do know that somehow I feel glad for having read it.
Rating: This one's extremely hard to rate, but let's call it 3.5/5
So, the books:
12. Under the Dome by Stephen King
A small town in (where else?) Maine is suddenly and shockingly cut off from the rest of the world by a mysterious and impenetrable force field dome. Unfortunately, some of the most powerful people in town are really not the sort of folks you want to be trapped in a bottle with, and things start to go very bad long before the food or the generator fuel run out...
My thoughts on this book are pretty much all, "On one hand... on the other hand...":
On one hand, it's definitely not the best-written of King's novels, and, like far too many of them, it's way too long, taking nearly 1,100 pages to tell a story that could have been done more effectively in half that.
On the other hand, it's certainly readable enough, and it doesn't drag too badly, considering its length. And the last two hundred pages or so are really quite gripping, which is particularly nice, since King often has problems with endings.
On one hand, King has clearly put a fair bit of thought into some of the details. I was particularly impressed with the way he has the dome affecting weather patterns and trapping in pollution. It adds a nice note of realism, as well as factoring into the plot in important ways, and also makes for a very appropriate atmosphere, as the town begins to get hotter and dirtier both literally and metaphorically.
On the other hand, there's one detail where he really falls down on the job, and that's in understanding the impact that 21st century communications technology ought to have in a situation like this. Very early in the book -- early enough that I don't think it qualifies as any kind of spoiler -- the military insists on cutting off cell phone communications from inside the dome, citing a vague and never fully explained concern about what kind of information might come out of there. They deliberately decide not to cut off the internet, though, with some offhand comment about it being easier to monitor e-mail than phone calls. Well, they might just as well have cut it off, because, even though a lot of people in the dome still have power, nobody ever uses the internet to communicate with the world outside in any fashion, and the world outside almost never uses it to reach in to them. For that matter, for a good chunk of the book, the main characters are sort of fighting an information/propaganda war, and they never take advantage of the internet for that, either. Now, this book was published in 2009, and I don't blame Stephen King for not anticipating the massive role that social media like Twitter would play in global politics in the years between then and now. But he at least should have realized that after something this disastrous and weird, the very first thing that would happen is someone blogging about it. I hate to say it, but I think Mr. King is showing his age here. He gives the impression that he has to remind himself that the internet can be used for more than e-mail, and at one point he has his characters exclaiming over a streaming webcam like it's the most brilliant and unexpected invention they've ever seen. And it's all too bad, because not only does this cause a big suspension-of-disbelief problem for me, but it also robs the story of an interesting dimension that it might otherwise have had.
And, finally, on one hand, it's a really terrific premise, and one which could be used in any number of interesting ways. King opts to use it to explore such topics as small-town corruption, bullying, and the politics of fear-mongering. Which is great, and he does some things with those themes that work really well.
On the other hand, I think the book suffers from clinging a little too closely to the Stephen King formula that says every story needs monsters -- in this case, human monsters. The bad guys in this story are a corrupt official who (with the help of spineless and dim-witted minions) effectively becomes the boss of the town, his thuggish son, and the thuggish son's thuggish friends. The problem is that these characters aren't just corrupt, self-serving, power-abusing, and petty. They are also, in various combinations, murders, rapists, drug dealers on a staggeringly massive scale, religious hypocrites of a particularly exaggerated kind, and, in one case, full-out tumor-in-the-brain crazy. Oh, and the boss man is literally a used car salesman. He's more of a caricature than a person, and it's unfortunate, because I think that having more nuanced and human antagonists might well have led to a more powerful, more believable, and possibly even ultimately more horrifying story.
I did mostly enjoy it -- if "enjoy" is quite the right word for a book this full of awful events -- but I can't help thinking that I would have enjoyed the leaner, subtler, more New Media-savvy book it could have been much more.
Rating: 3.5/5
13. Playboy's Silverstein Around the World by Shel Silverstein
A collection of cartoons first published in Playboy in the 50s and 60s, drawn by Shel Silverstein on his travels to various countries and sojourns among various subcultures. A fair number of these gave me a little chuckle, but I don't think they have nearly the sharp, clever, zany bite that his later kids' stuff does. (Which is maybe a little bit ironic.) Not all of them have aged terribly well, either, and this being Playboy, way too many of them are about hitting on chicks around the world, often in ways that may have been amusing to a male in the 1960s, but aren't nearly as funny to a 21st century female. There's also a weird cruelty-to-animals motif, as Silverstein fights a bull in Spain, attends a cockfight in Mexico, and shoots a water buffalo in Africa.
Overall, I really would not call this essential Silverstein.
Rating: 3/5
14. To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer
In a strange landscape of plains and hills, along the banks of a seemingly endless river, every person who has ever lived on Earth has been mysteriously resurrected in a new, young, and healthy body. It's an afterlife of some kind, but not one that any religion ever anticipated.
Out of all the human beings who have ever lived, the novel chooses to focus on Richard Burton, a nineteenth century Englishman known, among other things, for his extensive travels and his language skills. And Burton is determined to find out what the secrets behind this place are if he has to sail all the way to the end of the river to do it.
It's a fantastic, mind-blowing, absolutely compelling premise. So I can sort of understand why this is so highly regarded. But I find what Farmer does with it incredibly frustrating. There's just really not much development of anything. I want a really close-up look at how people react to and adapt to this weird new reality, how their societies and their philosophies and their ways of relating to each other slowly evolve, but that's all dealt with very shallowly, if at all. Mostly we're told things rather than being shown them, and that's true on every scale, from human relationships to the rise and fall of mini-civilizations. We're shown a very little bit of the first few days after the resurrection, then there's a month-long time jump while Burton and his new friends build a boat, then there's a jump of well over a year while they explore the river, an expedition we get to see almost none of. Farmer seems way, way more interested in the details of Burton's life than in this amazing new setting he's created, and, while I'm sure Burton is a very interesting guy, given the choice between debates over whether he was or wasn't an anti-Semite vs. a travelog featuring a trip down a million-mile river with all of human history colliding and mutating along its banks, I know which one I'd rather hear about.
In the end, there aren't any definite answers to the question of what the heck is going on here, just partial explanations and hints, which I'm sure are more fully explored in later volumes. But, while this one certainly piqued my interest, I doubt I'm going to continue on with the series unless someone can convince me that it changes its focus enough to be less frustrating for me.
Rating: 3.5/5 (and, honestly, some significant percentage of those stars are for the premise, rather than the execution)
15. The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree
This companion to the classic TV series starts out with a couple of introductory chapters. The first one seems to be about Rod Serling's pre-Twilight Zone career, but unfortunately the falling-apart library-sale copy I have is missing most of those pages, so all I can say about it is that at the point where I was able to come in, it was in the middle of a really fascinating discussion of the amount of influence sponsors were able to wield over TV content at the time. (And I thought today's product placement was bad!) The second chapter is about the origins of the show, and then the bulk of the book consists of an episode guide, with occasional short features on various aspects of the production or profiles of people who wrote or directed for the show. For each episode, there's a still photo, a list of credits, a short summary, transcripts of Serling's open and closing narration, a few comments from the book's author on the quality and most interesting points of the story, and usually some quotes from the scriptwriter or other people involved in the production. It's well put together, informative and interesting, making it a fun read for anyone who's a fan of the show. (And, really, who isn't? It's The Twilight Zone!)
The only bad thing about this is that it's instilled in me a burning desire to go back and (re)watch all of it, even the not-very-good episodes. I keep clicking over to Amazon and ogling the "complete definitive collection" boxed set and just barely managing to talk myself out of spending the money for it. But I don't think my willpower is going to hold out very long... [ETA: Yeah, it didn't. The DVDs are awesome!]
Rating: 4/5
16. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich
This book collects the words of people whose lives were affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster: People who were evacuated. People who weren't evacuated. People who, seeking refuge from war and having nowhere else to go, moved into contaminated areas abandoned by everyone else. Soldiers who were sent in, inadequately protected, to clean up afterward. Family members of people afflicted by radiation poisoning, or birth defects, or cancer. Scientists who tried to warn people, and one who lives with the shame of having trusted the authorities and looked the other way. There are long, rambling stories and short, bitter outbursts. Some are sophisticated and philosophical, others inarticulately emotional. Many of the most personal narratives are heartbreaking and horrifying, but, taken all together, they also paint an enlightening portrait of what it was like to be a citizen of the Soviet Union in 1986, and of the all too fallible ways in which human beings and human institutions can react to disasters that they don't fully understand. It's a painful book to read, but a very worthwhile one, and the way that Alexievich presents these transcripts, without context or comment, somehow just makes them all the more powerful.
Rating: 4.5/5
17. Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
A YA steampunk novel centering on a fugitive prince and a girl who disguises herself as a boy in order to join an airship crew, set in the first days of WWI. Or, rather, in what would be WWI in our world. This is a significantly different universe, however, in which the global powers are divided into the "Clankers," who use armored, steam-powered walking vehicles, and the "Darwinists," whose technology is largely based on genetic engineering.
It's an attractive book, with an eye-catching cover and lots of very nice illustrations. And the fantastic biotechnology of the Darwinists is clever, intriguing, and interestingly described. But while the story is perfectly okay, I just never found it particularly engaging, except perhaps at the very end. And I found the invented (or at least highly idiosyncratic) slang and swearing to be extremely distracting. Sometimes that sort of thing can work well, but here it varies from the mildly silly to the highly unfortunate. (Sorry, Mr. Westerfeld, but the word "squick" does not mean what you think it means.)
I'm not entirely sure whether I feel like this series is worth continuing on with, but there are just enough promising loose ends that I suppose I'll want to check out the next volume eventually.
Rating: 3.5/5
18. My Ántonia by Willa Cather
A 1918 novel in which a man -- now a successful New York lawyer -- looks back at his rural Nebraska childhood, and particularly at his childhood friend Ántonia, an immigrant from Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic). There's a touching sense of nostalgia to the narrative, and Ántonia, while we only ever see her from the outside, comes across as a very sympathetic character, an interesting mixture of frontier toughness and unpretentious emotion. But the setting is the real star of this story. Willa Cather's deceptively simple prose brings the Nebraska prairie vividly to life from the very first page, and it made me feel as if I were part of that landscape, sharing in a life very different from my own late-20th-century suburban upbringing and yet somehow instantly familiar. I can't imagine ever wanting to live the way these people did, with their constant struggle to earn a living from the land, and yet I also can't quite escape the feeling that maybe they had something important that most of us these days are missing.
Rating: 4.5/5
19. The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet
Jeff Sharlet investigates a religious organization called the Family, a fundamentalist Christian group which puts much of its emphasis on "leadership" (or, to use a less charitable word, "power"), and which possesses a surprising amount of clout in American politics. He opens by talking a little about the organization, its people, and its principles, including recounting his own experiences with the group, then spends the bulk of the book exploring the history of the Family and its precursors, highlighting the often rather startling influence that this very narrow breed of evangelical Christianity has had on politics both foreign and domestic. He then devotes a couple of chapters to the social attitudes of its adherents and their place in the so-called "culture wars."
It's an interesting and important subject, one that (distressingly, for those of us who believe strongly in the separation of Church and State) is extremely relevant to the current political landscape in America. Unfortunately, I don't feel like I got quite as much out of this book as I wanted to. It's a complicated topic that requires clear and careful journalism, and while Sharlet has obviously done vast amounts of research, he comes across as less "clear and careful journalist" and more "frustrated literary novelist," writing in a style that includes lush and often slightly fanciful descriptions of people's physical appearances and personalities and interactions, lots of rhetorical rambling, and turns of phrase or even whole paragraphs that leave me imagining the author sitting back and smiling in satisfaction at his own linguistic cleverness. None of which is necessarily a bad thing, and it works pretty well in the chapters where he's giving us glimpses of ordinary individuals and using that to convey some of the flavor of this particular theology and culture. But when it comes to his presentation of the historical facts, I think it muddles things a bit and dilutes some of the rather important points he's trying to make.
Which isn't to say that the book didn't have any impact. Mostly, it's left me feeling depressed. I like to believe that compromise and mutual understanding are always possible, but occasionally I have to acknowledge the fact that some worldviews are just intrinsically irreconcilable, and it's hard to escape the conclusion that we have some of those battling it out in America today.
Rating: 3.5/5
20. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Here I am, still slowly re-reading my way through this series...
I remember finding this one pretty suspenseful on first reading, what with Harry catching glimpses of a beast that may or may not be an omen of his death, learning that he may be the target of a maniacal killer, and slowly collecting tidbits of information about his parents and hints about the circumstances behind their deaths. All of that is rather less exciting when you already know how it plays out, though, and I did find myself a bit impatient with much of the story this time through. But as it builds up to the climax, with all its confrontations and reveals, I found myself getting quite caught up in it again. I think in the later chapters a re-reader's perspective is actually helpful rather than hurtful, as certain things gain a little additional depth when you know stuff that's revealed in later books. I'm sure it also helps that, at this point, I'm really much more interested in the adults at Hogwarts and the history of things that happened before Harry was born than I am about his and his friends' antics, and the ending of this one plays heavily on that history.
The book does have some flaws. Rowling's writing style isn't terribly impressive, something that maybe seems a little more in evidence in this volume, which perhaps wants to be taken just a little more seriously than the previous rather fluffy outings. There are a few too many clunkily expository conversations, a little too much of people shouting in ALL CAPS, that sort of thing. I also continue to have a few issues with various aspects of the world-building, my main question here being, "Why the hell is the wizarding world's criminal justice system so psychotic, and why does nobody have a problem with it?!" Still, for all that, I think this is about the point where I start to understand why this series is popular, if not why it's quite so ludicrously popular.
Rating: I'm still finding these hard to rate in retrospect, but I guess I'll call this one 4/5. Despite its flaws, it ultimately did get me where it wanted me to be.
21. Planetary: The Fourth Man by Warren Ellis
The second collection of comics featuring Planetary, a team of "mystery archeologists" on a mission to investigate "the secret history of the world." My opinion on the first volume was that I liked the concept, loved the artwork, found the characters potentially interesting, and enjoyed the way it played around with pop culture tropes, but thought the stories were far too slight, making the whole thing a little disappointing. Well, I do not have that problem with this volume. The first two chapters here do have much the same kind of structure as the stories in the first collection, but they seemed more satisfying to me, as they managed to successfully give the impression of offering windows into a much wider world. A weird, wonderful, horrible, and fascinating world. And then things suddenly get very, very dense, to the extent that I don't think I understood half of what was going on. But that's OK; I don't think I'm entirely supposed to yet, and if I'm confused, I'm also intrigued. And if I liked the way the first installment played around with the pop culture tropes... Well, this one delights in taking comics and B-movies and pulp fiction and all kinds of other familiar stories and not just playing around with them but warping and distorting them like taffy into freakish and often darkly humorous shapes.
At this point, I have absolutely no idea what to make of it all, or whether any of it will make sense in the end. But I do know I want to see more of it.
Rating: 4/5
22. No-Man's Lands: One Man's Odyssey Through the Odyssey by Scott Huler
Scott Huler recounts the story of his trip around the Mediterranean, following the route of Odysseus. Well, more or less the route of Odysseus, anyway, since nobody can agree on exactly where to locate most of his adventures on a map, or even to what extent it's reasonable to try. But that's all right; geographical accuracy isn't really the point, anyway.
It's a very low-key sort of book. Huler's wanderings are much less full of shipwrecks and man-eating giants than Odysseus', and he doesn't try to exaggerate his experiences to make for a more lively story, but instead realistically portrays the mundanities of 21st century travel, with all its annoyances and disappointments and unexpected little moments of complete happiness. Through it all he is quietly, unpretentiously thoughtful as he contemplates travel, life experiences, and the lessons and insights of the Odyssey. I started off hoping, perhaps, for a somewhat more exciting travel memoir, but in the end was quite satisfied by the journey I was taken on instead.
Rating: 4/5
23. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
A 1995 novel about a guy who owns a record shop in London and who, when we first meet him, has just been through a rather painful breakup. Throughout most of the novel, he divides his time between wallowing in self-pity, talking pretentiously but with genuine enthusiasm about music, making pop cultural top five lists, and wallowing in more self-pity.
I find it difficult to decide exactly what I think about this book. To begin with, I really disliked the main character. In addition to the whiny self-pity, he's also capable of being a grade-A dick, and every time I started developing some real sympathy for him, he'd turn around and do something unbelievably dickish again. His approach to women and relationships is incredibly self-absorbed and adolescent (although to his credit, he at least kind of realizes this), and while he's showing glimmers of approaching maturity by the very end, I can't quite manage to feel terribly optimistic about his chances for improvement. I also occasionally found myself wondering why he seemed to expect me, or anybody, to actually care about his crappy love life. And yet, there's something about Hornby's writing -- I'm not quite sure what -- that just pulled me along effortlessly and kept me interested, sometimes almost despite myself. There are also, perhaps, some decent insights here about relationships, and there's an impressive feeling of realism to the whole thing. Painful realism, even, especially for a woman who'd like to think that sex and relationships don't ever really look like this from a male POV, but knows in her heart that, at lest to some extent, they can and do.
So, while I was reading this, I'd say half of me felt entertained and thoughtful, while the other half was just going "Grrrr" and wanting to smack people. (Not the author, it should be said. He gives the strong impression of having a sense of perspective that his main character lacks. But the protagonist himself, definitely. And very possibly a couple of men I have known personally, as well.) Did I like it? I honestly don't know. But I do know that somehow I feel glad for having read it.
Rating: This one's extremely hard to rate, but let's call it 3.5/5