April Book Log
Kind of an interesting assortment this time out, I think.
40. Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison by Piper Kerman
In 1993, Piper Kerman was 24 years old, well-educated, privileged, rebellious, and bored. Also very, very stupid. She got involved with someone glamorous and exciting, and when it turned out that the glamor and excitement were fueled by a job smuggling drugs, she didn't particularly care. Eventually she was asked to help out by escorting a suitcase full of drug money on an international flight and, like an idiot, she agreed. Five years later, when she'd long since turned her back on that life, she was finally arrested for the crime. Due to some weird circumstances involving extradition issues with the drug kingpin she was indirectly working for, she didn't serve her prison time for it until eleven years after the fact, when she did thirteen months in a minimum-security women's prison in Connecticut. This memoir is about her experiences on the inside.
Kerman offers us a very different perspective on prison life than the depictions you usually see on the news, or in television and movies. It's not a violent story, or a sensational one. She's not trying to impress us with how tough she is or make us feel sorry for her. Mostly, it's about the ordinary experiences of life in prison, about staying sane as you do your time, and, most especially, about the surprisingly close and supportive relationships that develop between prisoners. It's also a quiet condemnation of aspects of the US criminal justice system. Kerman never gets up on a soapbox and rants, but she does make it clear how ill-served many of these women are by the system, which does little except teach people how to live as prisoners. Overall, it's an interesting and rather eye-opening read.
Rating: 4/5
41. On the Surface of Things by Felice Frankel & George M. Whitesides
This book features lots of very close-up photographs of scientifically interesting things such as ice crystals, opals, drops of water, yeast cells, and various bits of micro-technology. Each photo is accompanied by a few paragraphs of text. The writing is rather poetic, and features some fairly good metaphors for various scientific concepts, but I have to say, I found it rather frustrating, as I would much rather have had a much more plain and clear explanation of exactly what I was looking at. It's definitely a "science for artistic types" kind of book, whereas I'm the kind of person who's more likely to need art books written for scientific types.
Rating: 3.5/5
42. The Grievers by Marc Schuster
Charley Schwartz is theoretically supposed to be a mature adult, but the best approximation he can manage is a job standing outside a bank wearing a giant dollar sign costume, a doctoral dissertation he never actually works on, and some dysfunctional friendships with people he met in prep school. When he learns that one of those fellow alumni has committed suicide, he takes it rather badly despite, or perhaps because of the fact that he never really knew the guy very well. Determined to do at least one decent thing with his life, he decides to set up a memorial fund to donate to the school in the dead man's name, but the whole thing ends up getting away from him and turning into something of a circus.
Despite the subject matter, this is actually humorous as much as it is anything else, and I was a bit impressed by its ability to combine some mildly goofy elements -- the dollar sign costume, the fact that Charley's alma mater's mascot is the Raging Donkeys, the ridiculous eccentricities of some of his friends -- with some very real-feeling characterization and emotional responses. True, the "no-longer-quite-young man has trouble learning to deal with adulthood" theme is almost a little over-familiar, plus some of the main character's emotional revelations aren't terribly subtle, and, at 175 pages, it's all maybe a bit slight. But on the whole, it worked for me. I laughed in most of the right places, I felt sympathy and understanding for the protagonist, and I felt at the end like it had said a few things worth saying.
Rating: 4/5
(Note: This was an ER book from the March batch.)
43. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Unlike large numbers of schoolchildren, I was never forced to read this book for class. But it's impossible not to know the story anyway, as it shows up in zillions of pop culture references, zillions of homages and parodies and works-inspired-by. Whether you've read it or not, you know what it's about, right? British schoolboys, stranded on a deserted island with no adults, slowly turn into murderous little barbarians, more or less. I always like to go back and visit the source material for these stories everybody knows, though. Often I get some interesting surprises.
So, I did finally get around to reading this, and I'm honestly not sure what to make of it. I have to say, I didn't always get along with the writing style, for reasons I can't entirely put my finger on. The fact that I often had trouble telling which character was speaking is probably part of it, but I don't think it's just that. I don't know... Sometimes it was oddly compelling, and sometimes it was mildly annoying, and I have no explanation for either response.
It is a powerfully symbolic book. The author has something very definite to say about human nature and the fragile veneer that is civilization. Just about everything plays into that, directly or metaphorically, and there's some pretty effective imagery behind it. On the other hand, I can't help but think that it's all a bit too symbolic. I mean, there are places where it's practically jumping up and down shouting, "Look at my symbolism! Look at it! Do you get the idea yet?" And while everything the kids do in the story is plausible enough, if you're in a cynical mood, they seldom felt to me quite like real, living, breathing kids. I always felt a certain emotional distance from them, which is too bad. I can't help but think that the more real and visceral the events in this book might have felt, the more effectively disturbing they would have been.
I also don't fully agree with the novel's view of human nature. Yes, there's a lot of ugliness in human beings, and yes, I can imagine something like this happening, but thematically, it just all seems a little too simplistic. It's also pretty clearly informed by certain colonialist ideas about the nature of "civilization" and "savagery" that are problematic. "Savage" here means both "violent, selfish, irrational and amoral" and "one of those people who paint their faces, go half-naked, do tribal dances and chants, and have beliefs that look to us like superstition." The truth is, of course, that people in tribal societies are as capable of being as prosocial as anybody, and this particular notion of savagery, which William Golding's own culture liked to congratulate itself on having long since overcome, is largely a myth, anyway. And the more I think about that, the less the whole thing works for me, however eloquently it might strive to make its point.
So. Whatever I was hoping for from this book, I don't think I quite got it. But I am glad to have finally read it, and it certainly did get me thinking a bit.
Rating: 3.5/5
44. Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Neil Gaiman
An account of Douglas Adams' professional life, with an emphasis (of course) on the Hitchhiker's Guide series in its many and varied iterations. I wouldn't call this absolutely essential reading for the Douglas Adams fan; it's not exactly chock full of juicy details and surprising anecdotes. But it is a decent overview of Adams' career, with lots of quotes from the man himself, as well as from various other relevant folks. And it's a pleasant read, breezily and amusingly written, often with a deliberately Adams-esque sense of humor. It's also got some interesting odds and ends, including snippets of deleted scenes from the radio plays and TV show (although it's often rather obvious why they were cut) and several appendices, featuring such things as a plot-point-by-plot-point summary of the different versions of the story and some commentary by Adams on each of the characters.
Rating: a very slightly generous 4/5
45. The Lateral Logician by Paul Sloane & Des MacHale
A collection of puzzles that are meant to be solved by "lateral thinking" -- that is, by questioning your natural assumptions and coming at things from a different angle.
There are really three different kinds of puzzle here. First, there are straightforward riddles or logical puzzles, where you can figure out the answer just from the information given in the question and the common knowledge in your own head, either by careful reasoning or by chewing it over until insight suddenly dawns. For me, these were far and away the most fun. While a few were familiar, there were plenty I hadn't seen before, and some of them were quite clever and entertaining and made for great exercise for the brain. (Here's one for you: "The day before yesterday Freda was 17. Next year she will be 20. How can this be so?")
A few were really more trivia questions than anything, with answers that probably you either know or you don't, and which I imagine most of us would be unlikely to be able to guess. (Example: What was the first man-made object to exceed the speed of sound?)
The majority, though, describe some odd, unlikely, or even seemingly impossible scenario and require you to figure out the explanation or the backstory. (E.g.: A man is lying dead in a field, with an unopened package next to him. What happened?) The authors recommend approaching these as a group activity, where one person knows the answer and the others get to ask yes or no questions until they figure it out. Not having a willing group of people around, I didn't get the full effect of these, I'm afraid, and the clues provided for those of us playing on our own were often either useless or too much of a giveaway, and were seldom the questions I wanted answered, anyway. I'm sure it is more entertaining to do it properly, but, well, I do actually remember doing a couple of them that way in college, thanks to a housemate who must have either had a copy of this book or one much like it. And my recollection is that it was fun for a little while, then quickly got frustrating, and that the answers, when revealed, provoked less of an "Aha!" reaction and something more along the lines of, "How the hell were we ever supposed to get that?" A lot of the answers in this collection -- not all of them, by any means, but a lot -- elicited a similar reaction from me. And several, frankly, seemed like cheats even when you're expecting a sneaky answer. Still, some of them were moderately nifty and reasonably guessable.
This volume, by the way, is actually a compilation of three books: Lateral Thinking Puzzlers, Challenging Lateral Thinking Puzzles and Great Lateral Thinking Puzzles. I'd say the first one was the best. By the time they got to the third volume, the authors seemed to be running out of creative ideas; half the puzzles in it are little more than re-purposed urban legends.
Rating: 3.5/5
46. Matched by Ally Condie
A YA novel set in a future in which every aspect of people's lives -- including who they marry, where they work, and even when they die -- is carefully and scientifically controlled. But when young Cassia is Matched with her carefully calculated ideal marriage partner, something apparently goes wrong. She's shown images of not one boy, but two, both of whom she knows. She's quickly assured that the extra Match is a mistake, but after that, she can't help seeing the boy in question differently. And, slowly, she begins to perceive her own supposedly perfect society differently, as well.
I'm really surprised by just how much I liked this book. My only complaint, initially, was that the writing style was overly simplistic, as if written for readers much younger than its apparent target audience. But it quickly won me over, because there's something about the sparseness of the prose that's actually quite appropriate for such an inexperienced character living in such a pared-down and tightly constrained society. And the story is definitely not simplistic. I very much appreciate the fact that the culture it describes doesn't, on the surface, look all that bad. You can absolutely understand why people believe in it, which just makes its subtle evils all the more effectively disturbing. The world-building in general is good, too. There are a few small details that I have a little trouble believing in as directions any society could actually go in, but there are surprisingly few of them, and even those make sense in emotional terms, if not necessarily logical ones.
I don't think Condie is going to win any awards for originality. Arguably, she's jumping on the Hunger Games bandwagon here, but mostly this reminded me very, very strongly of Lois Lowry's The Giver. This one works for me, though, in all kinds of ways that The Giver didn't.
I absolutely must get my hands on a copy of the second book in this series soon.
Rating: 4.5/5
47. 100 Fiendish Little Frightmares edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg & Martin H. Greenberg
This is an anthology of very short horror stories. Most are about five or six pages, with a few even shorter than that. They span several decades, from the 1920s to the late 1990s, when the collection was published, so there's a fair variety of styles. Despite the title, most of these are really not particularly frightening. A surprising number seem to just describe some random, not necessarily horrific, encounter with the supernatural -- often involving ghosts -- and are, at most, vaguely creepy in their intimation that the world is full of strange and unexplained things. Many of the best of them are interesting mainly because they feature some clever Twilight Zone-style twist that, despite the dark subject matter, I often found myself thinking of as "cute."
They're decent stories, generally speaking. Out of all one hundred of them, there were probably only a handful that I really disliked, which isn't bad, especially since horror tends to be something of a hit-and-miss genre for me. On the other hand, there weren't many more than a handful that I thought were especially memorable and effective, either. Which unfortunately means that it adds up to a mildly unsatisfying whole. It's all perfectly readable, but it lacks, well, punch. And if there's one thing very short horror stories should have, it's punch.
I will admit, though, that the fact that I tended to read these in large gulps probably didn't help much. I'd recommend spreading them out, otherwise you run the risk of becoming jaded, and at some point you'll likely find yourself going, "Yeah, yeah, something horrific is going to happen now. I bet I can guess what it is. Yup, I was right. Well... on to the next one." And that doesn't do anybody any favors.
Rating: 3.5/5
48. Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos by William Poundstone
This is Carl Sagan: astronomer, planetary scientist, writer, political activist, popularizer of science for the public, and the driving force that led lots of 80s kids, including me, to decide that astronomy looked so awesome they wanted to do it, too. (Me, I never got beyond a bachelor's degree and a job as scientific support staff, but I'm not blaming Sagan for that. Well, OK, maybe I am, but I forgive him.)
This biography covers both Sagan's personal and professional life, but the emphasis is definitely on the latter, making it a pretty good read for those who are interested in the idea of searching for life in the solar system and beyond. Among other things, it features a very detailed description of the 1970s Viking mission to Mars and the complicated tests it used to attempt to detect life in the soil. (Although it wasn't until 2008, well after the book's publication, that the strange and inconsistent results from those tests were finally properly explained.)
Sagan was something of a controversial figure, and Poundstone does a very good job of dealing with that in an even-handed way. He certainly makes no attempt to whitewash the man. The character flaws that people who knew him agreed on are presented pretty frankly, but his positive qualities are also very much acknowledged and respected. And where there was disagreement -- and there was a lot of disagreement -- both his critics and his admirers are allowed to offer their own perspectives. The result is a portrait of a very human guy.
My one complaint is that the book is a little choppy, being divided up into short -- usually 1-3 page -- segments that sometimes follow on naturally from one to another and sometimes don't. I sort of get the impression that the author couldn't be bothered coming up with any decent segues. Definitely worth reading, though, for those of us on whom Sagan had an impact. You know who you are.
Rating: 4/5
49. I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech by Ralph Keyes
A surprising number of the words and phrases that we use every day are actually allusions to once-current events, people, pop culture, or technology, and many more of them originated as sports references, military terms, movie-making lingo, or other kinds of specialized language. Some of them have been used so often and for so long that they're now just part of the way we talk, long after we've forgotten what they originally referred to.
I Love It When You Talk Retro explores these expressions, with examples from various categories (names-turned-words, literary references, allusions to politics, etc., etc.) and short explanations of where they came from and how they entered our speech. Some seem very obvious, others interestingly obscure, but, as the author points out, which ones you think are common knowledge and which are new to you will vary from person to person, and depends a lot on exactly when you were born.
I've read a few other books lately that have dealt with similar topics, but I think this is far and away the best of them, or at least the most entertaining. That's largely because Keyes doesn't take a condescending "Here's some allusions you should be aware of if you want to be culturally literate" tone. He also doesn't organize things in a dictionary or encyclopedia format. Instead, he just takes a pleasant ramble through the history of American speech, and invites the reader along for the ride. And it's kind of fascinating, not least because it highlights the fact that so much of what we say can't be understood just by knowing what all the individual words mean, but is steeped thoroughly in our culture and history in ways that we don't necessarily even realize. It's also fun to speculate on what references or catchphrases that are current today will still be in use ten or twenty or fifty years from now, something Keyes indulges in a little bit in the final chapter.
It's hardly a comprehensive collection of "retroterms," but for language lovers, it's a pleasant and often informative read.
Rating: 4/5
50. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
This is the story of two closet intellectuals: a fifty-four-year old concierge at some sort of luxury apartment complex in Paris, and the 12-year-old daughter of one of the wealthy tenants. Both are intelligent and given to philosophical musings; much of the book consists of their somewhat rambling thoughts about such topics as art, the class system, and the meaning of life (or the lack thereof), as well as their decidedly cynical observations of the people around them. Both, however, attempt to hide their inner lives from others as much as possible, until a new tenant moves in, brings them together, and begins to help bring them out of themselves.
This seems to be kind of a love-it-or-hate it book, and I was very curious to see which side I would end up on, but I think the answer is neither. Or maybe both. I don't know. It's hard to know what I think about this book. I started out feeling that the philosophical stuff was mildly interesting, even (or perhaps especially) when I wanted to argue with it, and that the writing had a certain odd charm, but absolutely hating the characters. They struck me as cowardly, wallowing in their own intellectual superiority while lacking the courage to do anything but rigidly conform to what they believe others expect of them. Worse, they both have that particular kind of arrogant intellectual attitude that assumes that everyone but them is a blind, shallow sheep of a human being walking uselessly through life with closed eyes and a brain full of nothing but meaningless banalities. Which, I am ashamed to admit, reminds me a bit of myself when I was, oh, about the age of the kid in this story. Eventually, though, I came to understand how ugly that attitude was, how lacking in any kind of perspective or empathy.... And, of course, the character flaws we've overcome in ourselves are often the ones we find least tolerable in other people. So, yeah, I hated these characters. At first. Near the end, though, I found myself warming to them quite a bit, as they began to change slowly under the influence of the new tenant, Monsieur Ozu, a man quite capable of being intelligent without being arrogant and sophisticated without being pretentious, a man who genuinely does not care what French society might think of him or his choice of friends. And I started to feel reassured by the idea that the author didn't exactly disagree with me about the two main characters and their flaws, that she was doing something much more interesting than using them as mouthpieces for her own ideas, and I began to think, you know, maybe this is a pretty good book after all. Maybe I'm starting to really feel something for these people. Maybe I like where this is going.... And then the incredibly cheap-feeling ending came along and annoyed the crap out of me.
So, yeah. I can say that I found this an interesting enough reading experience that I don't regret spending the time on it, but as to whether I liked it or not... Meh.
Rating: 3/5
51. Planetary Vol. 3: Leaving the 20th Century by Warren Ellis & John Cassaday
Volume three of the collected Planetary comic series, set in a world whose secret history is shaped by vast conspiracies, bizarre events, and weird technologies. Plot-wise, this one feels like a bit of connective tissue between the revelations of the previous volume and what will no doubt be an interesting finale in the next one, with bits of backstory being filled in and our heroes working against nemeses who are, for the moment, largely unseen. But even so, it's still a wild ride. I'm still not sure exactly what the hell is going on, but, what the heck, it's fun just holding on and enjoying the view. Hey, there's monsters, famous literary characters, superpowers, creation myths, weird science, alternate dimensions, kung fu, lost jungle cities and Victorian spaceships. Stir all that stuff together and how can the result not be fun?
Rating: 4/5
52. Planetary Vol. 4: Spacetime Archaeology by Warren Ellis & John Cassaday
The fourth and final collection of Planetary comics. I was really astonished by what a satisfying wrap-up this is. Everything finally comes together and... Well, to say that it makes sense is to completely misunderstand the nature of the exercise, but it does all hang together surprisingly well. One major point does get resolved so suddenly that I couldn't avoid a bit of a "Wait, that was it?" reaction, but even that kind of works in context, and everything around it made me happy enough that I wouldn't be particularly inclined to complain, anyway. Also, there's beautiful artwork, nifty plot twists, inventive science fictional environments, freaky drug trips, weird (but based-on-real-science!) physics, fun flashes of humor, still more bizarre twists on familiar stories, and, through it all, the exhilarating sense that there is a profound and wonderful strangeness lying just below the surface of the world, ready to break through at every opportunity. I'm so glad I stuck with this series, after a slightly uncertain start.
Rating: 4.5/5
40. Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison by Piper Kerman
In 1993, Piper Kerman was 24 years old, well-educated, privileged, rebellious, and bored. Also very, very stupid. She got involved with someone glamorous and exciting, and when it turned out that the glamor and excitement were fueled by a job smuggling drugs, she didn't particularly care. Eventually she was asked to help out by escorting a suitcase full of drug money on an international flight and, like an idiot, she agreed. Five years later, when she'd long since turned her back on that life, she was finally arrested for the crime. Due to some weird circumstances involving extradition issues with the drug kingpin she was indirectly working for, she didn't serve her prison time for it until eleven years after the fact, when she did thirteen months in a minimum-security women's prison in Connecticut. This memoir is about her experiences on the inside.
Kerman offers us a very different perspective on prison life than the depictions you usually see on the news, or in television and movies. It's not a violent story, or a sensational one. She's not trying to impress us with how tough she is or make us feel sorry for her. Mostly, it's about the ordinary experiences of life in prison, about staying sane as you do your time, and, most especially, about the surprisingly close and supportive relationships that develop between prisoners. It's also a quiet condemnation of aspects of the US criminal justice system. Kerman never gets up on a soapbox and rants, but she does make it clear how ill-served many of these women are by the system, which does little except teach people how to live as prisoners. Overall, it's an interesting and rather eye-opening read.
Rating: 4/5
41. On the Surface of Things by Felice Frankel & George M. Whitesides
This book features lots of very close-up photographs of scientifically interesting things such as ice crystals, opals, drops of water, yeast cells, and various bits of micro-technology. Each photo is accompanied by a few paragraphs of text. The writing is rather poetic, and features some fairly good metaphors for various scientific concepts, but I have to say, I found it rather frustrating, as I would much rather have had a much more plain and clear explanation of exactly what I was looking at. It's definitely a "science for artistic types" kind of book, whereas I'm the kind of person who's more likely to need art books written for scientific types.
Rating: 3.5/5
42. The Grievers by Marc Schuster
Charley Schwartz is theoretically supposed to be a mature adult, but the best approximation he can manage is a job standing outside a bank wearing a giant dollar sign costume, a doctoral dissertation he never actually works on, and some dysfunctional friendships with people he met in prep school. When he learns that one of those fellow alumni has committed suicide, he takes it rather badly despite, or perhaps because of the fact that he never really knew the guy very well. Determined to do at least one decent thing with his life, he decides to set up a memorial fund to donate to the school in the dead man's name, but the whole thing ends up getting away from him and turning into something of a circus.
Despite the subject matter, this is actually humorous as much as it is anything else, and I was a bit impressed by its ability to combine some mildly goofy elements -- the dollar sign costume, the fact that Charley's alma mater's mascot is the Raging Donkeys, the ridiculous eccentricities of some of his friends -- with some very real-feeling characterization and emotional responses. True, the "no-longer-quite-young man has trouble learning to deal with adulthood" theme is almost a little over-familiar, plus some of the main character's emotional revelations aren't terribly subtle, and, at 175 pages, it's all maybe a bit slight. But on the whole, it worked for me. I laughed in most of the right places, I felt sympathy and understanding for the protagonist, and I felt at the end like it had said a few things worth saying.
Rating: 4/5
(Note: This was an ER book from the March batch.)
43. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Unlike large numbers of schoolchildren, I was never forced to read this book for class. But it's impossible not to know the story anyway, as it shows up in zillions of pop culture references, zillions of homages and parodies and works-inspired-by. Whether you've read it or not, you know what it's about, right? British schoolboys, stranded on a deserted island with no adults, slowly turn into murderous little barbarians, more or less. I always like to go back and visit the source material for these stories everybody knows, though. Often I get some interesting surprises.
So, I did finally get around to reading this, and I'm honestly not sure what to make of it. I have to say, I didn't always get along with the writing style, for reasons I can't entirely put my finger on. The fact that I often had trouble telling which character was speaking is probably part of it, but I don't think it's just that. I don't know... Sometimes it was oddly compelling, and sometimes it was mildly annoying, and I have no explanation for either response.
It is a powerfully symbolic book. The author has something very definite to say about human nature and the fragile veneer that is civilization. Just about everything plays into that, directly or metaphorically, and there's some pretty effective imagery behind it. On the other hand, I can't help but think that it's all a bit too symbolic. I mean, there are places where it's practically jumping up and down shouting, "Look at my symbolism! Look at it! Do you get the idea yet?" And while everything the kids do in the story is plausible enough, if you're in a cynical mood, they seldom felt to me quite like real, living, breathing kids. I always felt a certain emotional distance from them, which is too bad. I can't help but think that the more real and visceral the events in this book might have felt, the more effectively disturbing they would have been.
I also don't fully agree with the novel's view of human nature. Yes, there's a lot of ugliness in human beings, and yes, I can imagine something like this happening, but thematically, it just all seems a little too simplistic. It's also pretty clearly informed by certain colonialist ideas about the nature of "civilization" and "savagery" that are problematic. "Savage" here means both "violent, selfish, irrational and amoral" and "one of those people who paint their faces, go half-naked, do tribal dances and chants, and have beliefs that look to us like superstition." The truth is, of course, that people in tribal societies are as capable of being as prosocial as anybody, and this particular notion of savagery, which William Golding's own culture liked to congratulate itself on having long since overcome, is largely a myth, anyway. And the more I think about that, the less the whole thing works for me, however eloquently it might strive to make its point.
So. Whatever I was hoping for from this book, I don't think I quite got it. But I am glad to have finally read it, and it certainly did get me thinking a bit.
Rating: 3.5/5
44. Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Neil Gaiman
An account of Douglas Adams' professional life, with an emphasis (of course) on the Hitchhiker's Guide series in its many and varied iterations. I wouldn't call this absolutely essential reading for the Douglas Adams fan; it's not exactly chock full of juicy details and surprising anecdotes. But it is a decent overview of Adams' career, with lots of quotes from the man himself, as well as from various other relevant folks. And it's a pleasant read, breezily and amusingly written, often with a deliberately Adams-esque sense of humor. It's also got some interesting odds and ends, including snippets of deleted scenes from the radio plays and TV show (although it's often rather obvious why they were cut) and several appendices, featuring such things as a plot-point-by-plot-point summary of the different versions of the story and some commentary by Adams on each of the characters.
Rating: a very slightly generous 4/5
45. The Lateral Logician by Paul Sloane & Des MacHale
A collection of puzzles that are meant to be solved by "lateral thinking" -- that is, by questioning your natural assumptions and coming at things from a different angle.
There are really three different kinds of puzzle here. First, there are straightforward riddles or logical puzzles, where you can figure out the answer just from the information given in the question and the common knowledge in your own head, either by careful reasoning or by chewing it over until insight suddenly dawns. For me, these were far and away the most fun. While a few were familiar, there were plenty I hadn't seen before, and some of them were quite clever and entertaining and made for great exercise for the brain. (Here's one for you: "The day before yesterday Freda was 17. Next year she will be 20. How can this be so?")
A few were really more trivia questions than anything, with answers that probably you either know or you don't, and which I imagine most of us would be unlikely to be able to guess. (Example: What was the first man-made object to exceed the speed of sound?)
The majority, though, describe some odd, unlikely, or even seemingly impossible scenario and require you to figure out the explanation or the backstory. (E.g.: A man is lying dead in a field, with an unopened package next to him. What happened?) The authors recommend approaching these as a group activity, where one person knows the answer and the others get to ask yes or no questions until they figure it out. Not having a willing group of people around, I didn't get the full effect of these, I'm afraid, and the clues provided for those of us playing on our own were often either useless or too much of a giveaway, and were seldom the questions I wanted answered, anyway. I'm sure it is more entertaining to do it properly, but, well, I do actually remember doing a couple of them that way in college, thanks to a housemate who must have either had a copy of this book or one much like it. And my recollection is that it was fun for a little while, then quickly got frustrating, and that the answers, when revealed, provoked less of an "Aha!" reaction and something more along the lines of, "How the hell were we ever supposed to get that?" A lot of the answers in this collection -- not all of them, by any means, but a lot -- elicited a similar reaction from me. And several, frankly, seemed like cheats even when you're expecting a sneaky answer. Still, some of them were moderately nifty and reasonably guessable.
This volume, by the way, is actually a compilation of three books: Lateral Thinking Puzzlers, Challenging Lateral Thinking Puzzles and Great Lateral Thinking Puzzles. I'd say the first one was the best. By the time they got to the third volume, the authors seemed to be running out of creative ideas; half the puzzles in it are little more than re-purposed urban legends.
Rating: 3.5/5
46. Matched by Ally Condie
A YA novel set in a future in which every aspect of people's lives -- including who they marry, where they work, and even when they die -- is carefully and scientifically controlled. But when young Cassia is Matched with her carefully calculated ideal marriage partner, something apparently goes wrong. She's shown images of not one boy, but two, both of whom she knows. She's quickly assured that the extra Match is a mistake, but after that, she can't help seeing the boy in question differently. And, slowly, she begins to perceive her own supposedly perfect society differently, as well.
I'm really surprised by just how much I liked this book. My only complaint, initially, was that the writing style was overly simplistic, as if written for readers much younger than its apparent target audience. But it quickly won me over, because there's something about the sparseness of the prose that's actually quite appropriate for such an inexperienced character living in such a pared-down and tightly constrained society. And the story is definitely not simplistic. I very much appreciate the fact that the culture it describes doesn't, on the surface, look all that bad. You can absolutely understand why people believe in it, which just makes its subtle evils all the more effectively disturbing. The world-building in general is good, too. There are a few small details that I have a little trouble believing in as directions any society could actually go in, but there are surprisingly few of them, and even those make sense in emotional terms, if not necessarily logical ones.
I don't think Condie is going to win any awards for originality. Arguably, she's jumping on the Hunger Games bandwagon here, but mostly this reminded me very, very strongly of Lois Lowry's The Giver. This one works for me, though, in all kinds of ways that The Giver didn't.
I absolutely must get my hands on a copy of the second book in this series soon.
Rating: 4.5/5
47. 100 Fiendish Little Frightmares edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg & Martin H. Greenberg
This is an anthology of very short horror stories. Most are about five or six pages, with a few even shorter than that. They span several decades, from the 1920s to the late 1990s, when the collection was published, so there's a fair variety of styles. Despite the title, most of these are really not particularly frightening. A surprising number seem to just describe some random, not necessarily horrific, encounter with the supernatural -- often involving ghosts -- and are, at most, vaguely creepy in their intimation that the world is full of strange and unexplained things. Many of the best of them are interesting mainly because they feature some clever Twilight Zone-style twist that, despite the dark subject matter, I often found myself thinking of as "cute."
They're decent stories, generally speaking. Out of all one hundred of them, there were probably only a handful that I really disliked, which isn't bad, especially since horror tends to be something of a hit-and-miss genre for me. On the other hand, there weren't many more than a handful that I thought were especially memorable and effective, either. Which unfortunately means that it adds up to a mildly unsatisfying whole. It's all perfectly readable, but it lacks, well, punch. And if there's one thing very short horror stories should have, it's punch.
I will admit, though, that the fact that I tended to read these in large gulps probably didn't help much. I'd recommend spreading them out, otherwise you run the risk of becoming jaded, and at some point you'll likely find yourself going, "Yeah, yeah, something horrific is going to happen now. I bet I can guess what it is. Yup, I was right. Well... on to the next one." And that doesn't do anybody any favors.
Rating: 3.5/5
48. Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos by William Poundstone
This is Carl Sagan: astronomer, planetary scientist, writer, political activist, popularizer of science for the public, and the driving force that led lots of 80s kids, including me, to decide that astronomy looked so awesome they wanted to do it, too. (Me, I never got beyond a bachelor's degree and a job as scientific support staff, but I'm not blaming Sagan for that. Well, OK, maybe I am, but I forgive him.)
This biography covers both Sagan's personal and professional life, but the emphasis is definitely on the latter, making it a pretty good read for those who are interested in the idea of searching for life in the solar system and beyond. Among other things, it features a very detailed description of the 1970s Viking mission to Mars and the complicated tests it used to attempt to detect life in the soil. (Although it wasn't until 2008, well after the book's publication, that the strange and inconsistent results from those tests were finally properly explained.)
Sagan was something of a controversial figure, and Poundstone does a very good job of dealing with that in an even-handed way. He certainly makes no attempt to whitewash the man. The character flaws that people who knew him agreed on are presented pretty frankly, but his positive qualities are also very much acknowledged and respected. And where there was disagreement -- and there was a lot of disagreement -- both his critics and his admirers are allowed to offer their own perspectives. The result is a portrait of a very human guy.
My one complaint is that the book is a little choppy, being divided up into short -- usually 1-3 page -- segments that sometimes follow on naturally from one to another and sometimes don't. I sort of get the impression that the author couldn't be bothered coming up with any decent segues. Definitely worth reading, though, for those of us on whom Sagan had an impact. You know who you are.
Rating: 4/5
49. I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech by Ralph Keyes
A surprising number of the words and phrases that we use every day are actually allusions to once-current events, people, pop culture, or technology, and many more of them originated as sports references, military terms, movie-making lingo, or other kinds of specialized language. Some of them have been used so often and for so long that they're now just part of the way we talk, long after we've forgotten what they originally referred to.
I Love It When You Talk Retro explores these expressions, with examples from various categories (names-turned-words, literary references, allusions to politics, etc., etc.) and short explanations of where they came from and how they entered our speech. Some seem very obvious, others interestingly obscure, but, as the author points out, which ones you think are common knowledge and which are new to you will vary from person to person, and depends a lot on exactly when you were born.
I've read a few other books lately that have dealt with similar topics, but I think this is far and away the best of them, or at least the most entertaining. That's largely because Keyes doesn't take a condescending "Here's some allusions you should be aware of if you want to be culturally literate" tone. He also doesn't organize things in a dictionary or encyclopedia format. Instead, he just takes a pleasant ramble through the history of American speech, and invites the reader along for the ride. And it's kind of fascinating, not least because it highlights the fact that so much of what we say can't be understood just by knowing what all the individual words mean, but is steeped thoroughly in our culture and history in ways that we don't necessarily even realize. It's also fun to speculate on what references or catchphrases that are current today will still be in use ten or twenty or fifty years from now, something Keyes indulges in a little bit in the final chapter.
It's hardly a comprehensive collection of "retroterms," but for language lovers, it's a pleasant and often informative read.
Rating: 4/5
50. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
This is the story of two closet intellectuals: a fifty-four-year old concierge at some sort of luxury apartment complex in Paris, and the 12-year-old daughter of one of the wealthy tenants. Both are intelligent and given to philosophical musings; much of the book consists of their somewhat rambling thoughts about such topics as art, the class system, and the meaning of life (or the lack thereof), as well as their decidedly cynical observations of the people around them. Both, however, attempt to hide their inner lives from others as much as possible, until a new tenant moves in, brings them together, and begins to help bring them out of themselves.
This seems to be kind of a love-it-or-hate it book, and I was very curious to see which side I would end up on, but I think the answer is neither. Or maybe both. I don't know. It's hard to know what I think about this book. I started out feeling that the philosophical stuff was mildly interesting, even (or perhaps especially) when I wanted to argue with it, and that the writing had a certain odd charm, but absolutely hating the characters. They struck me as cowardly, wallowing in their own intellectual superiority while lacking the courage to do anything but rigidly conform to what they believe others expect of them. Worse, they both have that particular kind of arrogant intellectual attitude that assumes that everyone but them is a blind, shallow sheep of a human being walking uselessly through life with closed eyes and a brain full of nothing but meaningless banalities. Which, I am ashamed to admit, reminds me a bit of myself when I was, oh, about the age of the kid in this story. Eventually, though, I came to understand how ugly that attitude was, how lacking in any kind of perspective or empathy.... And, of course, the character flaws we've overcome in ourselves are often the ones we find least tolerable in other people. So, yeah, I hated these characters. At first. Near the end, though, I found myself warming to them quite a bit, as they began to change slowly under the influence of the new tenant, Monsieur Ozu, a man quite capable of being intelligent without being arrogant and sophisticated without being pretentious, a man who genuinely does not care what French society might think of him or his choice of friends. And I started to feel reassured by the idea that the author didn't exactly disagree with me about the two main characters and their flaws, that she was doing something much more interesting than using them as mouthpieces for her own ideas, and I began to think, you know, maybe this is a pretty good book after all. Maybe I'm starting to really feel something for these people. Maybe I like where this is going.... And then the incredibly cheap-feeling ending came along and annoyed the crap out of me.
So, yeah. I can say that I found this an interesting enough reading experience that I don't regret spending the time on it, but as to whether I liked it or not... Meh.
Rating: 3/5
51. Planetary Vol. 3: Leaving the 20th Century by Warren Ellis & John Cassaday
Volume three of the collected Planetary comic series, set in a world whose secret history is shaped by vast conspiracies, bizarre events, and weird technologies. Plot-wise, this one feels like a bit of connective tissue between the revelations of the previous volume and what will no doubt be an interesting finale in the next one, with bits of backstory being filled in and our heroes working against nemeses who are, for the moment, largely unseen. But even so, it's still a wild ride. I'm still not sure exactly what the hell is going on, but, what the heck, it's fun just holding on and enjoying the view. Hey, there's monsters, famous literary characters, superpowers, creation myths, weird science, alternate dimensions, kung fu, lost jungle cities and Victorian spaceships. Stir all that stuff together and how can the result not be fun?
Rating: 4/5
52. Planetary Vol. 4: Spacetime Archaeology by Warren Ellis & John Cassaday
The fourth and final collection of Planetary comics. I was really astonished by what a satisfying wrap-up this is. Everything finally comes together and... Well, to say that it makes sense is to completely misunderstand the nature of the exercise, but it does all hang together surprisingly well. One major point does get resolved so suddenly that I couldn't avoid a bit of a "Wait, that was it?" reaction, but even that kind of works in context, and everything around it made me happy enough that I wouldn't be particularly inclined to complain, anyway. Also, there's beautiful artwork, nifty plot twists, inventive science fictional environments, freaky drug trips, weird (but based-on-real-science!) physics, fun flashes of humor, still more bizarre twists on familiar stories, and, through it all, the exhilarating sense that there is a profound and wonderful strangeness lying just below the surface of the world, ready to break through at every opportunity. I'm so glad I stuck with this series, after a slightly uncertain start.
Rating: 4.5/5