July Book Log
I visited a lot of places in my reading this month, from Botswana to Brazil to Mars. But for some reason, I kept coming back to New York City. I'm not sure what that means, other than that there sure are a lot of books set in New York.
72. Bag of Bones by Stephen King
After bestselling author Mike Noonan's wife dies, he suffers the world's worst case of writer's block, learns that there are some things that his wife never told him about, discovers that his summer house is haunted, and gets drawn into a custody battle between a nice young woman and her nasty old father-in-law.
It's a decent read, although far from perfect. The narrative cheats a little here and there (although maybe mostly in excusable ways), and it ends with an unfortunately clunky, exposition-laden epilog. There's a small child who's only occasionally believable as being the age she's supposed to be, and a bad guy so cartoonishly evil that during the (mercifully short) time that he's actually, so to speak, on-screen, my suspension of disbelief snapped like a twig. And there's a plot point near the end that's such an unpleasant cliche that even the main character explicitly acknowledges how bad it is. (I can't quite make up my mind whether that makes it more palatable or not.) I suppose I should also add that this definitely isn't a book for those who aren't okay with reading about a lot of ugly topics, as it features everything from small-town racism to sexual violence to murdered children. Although maybe that kind of warning goes without saying when you're talking about a horror novel.
Anyway. Definitely a flawed book, but the story itself is good enough. The main character is well-drawn -- perhaps unsurprisingly, since if there's one thing King knows, it's what the inside of a writer's mind is like. The ghost story elements aren't quite as creepy as King can be at his best -- possibly deliberately, as if they were too hair-raising, it would be impossible to believe the guy would ever stay in that house, no matter what excuses the author comes up with to keep him there -- but they're interesting nonetheless. As are the bits of history that King slowly reveals.
Like many later Stephen King novels, though, it does suffer from being way, way longer than it really ought to be. It's not that it's tediously slow; the individual pages turn fast enough, for the most part. It's just that it's so easy to see that it'd be immensely to the book's benefit if it were trimmed down and tightened up by at least a couple hundred pages. As it was, by the time I was two-thirds of the way through, the main question in my mind wasn't, "Gosh, I wonder what's going to happen next?", but "How is it that I haven't finished this thing yet?" King did manage to recapture my flagging interest well enough before the end, but, of course, he'd have done better not to lose it in the first place.
Rating: Let's call it 3.5/5.
73. Don't Sleep: There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel L. Everett
American Daniel Everett spent many years, off and on, living among the Pirahã people of the Amazon jungle. Initially he came as a missionary, with the goal of learning their language and culture in order to translate the Bible for them, but became deeply interested in that language and culture for their own sake, and eventually came to regard much about their attitude towards life and belief as superior to his own, ultimately de-converting himself rather than converting the Pirahã.
In this book, he describes his own experiences living with and learning about the Pirahã and adjusting to life on the Amazon. He also describes, in depth and with considerable analysis, some of the unique and interesting features of Pirahã society and language. The language, in particular, potentially challenges a lot of conventional wisdom about how human languages work, and, Everett believes, suggests a much more complex interplay between language and culture than linguists usually allow for.
The linguistic discussion sometimes gets very technical, and I am in no way expert enough to evaluate whether Everett's take on things is completely right or not, but it is thought-provoking, and there's no question that the language itself is fascinating. As are Everett's observations of the Pirahã culture, although it seemed pretty clear to me that he must be overgeneralizing a bit in places. For instance, he states quite emphatically that the Pirahã are extremely peaceful and non-aggressive among themselves (if not necessarily always with foreigners), but then mentions in passing a couple of details that perhaps call that into question. Although that's probably understandable, really; I don't think there's a society on Earth that's entirely consistent and free of contradiction.
In any case, if you can handle the sometimes hard-to-follow linguistic discussions, it's well worth reading, if only for the example it provides of just how diverse human languages and societies can be, and for its look at thought and speech patterns that can be very different from the ones most of us take for granted.
Rating: 4/5
74. Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh
Spademan (not his real name) used to be a garbage man. That was back before New York City was devastated by a dirty bomb and abandoned by half its population, while most of the other half retreated from reality into VR dreams. These days, he's a hit man. Usually he doesn't ask questions and doesn't hesitate, but when he's hired to kill a young woman, he finds a reason not to follow through and instead ends up taking her side against her father, who turns out to be up to some ugly, ugly stuff.
I could quibble with a few aspects of the plot, and I suspect it may be entirely too dark for a lot of people, but overall, I really liked it. Spademan's a very well-drawn character, dangerous and damaged, whose personality comes through strongly and immediately. The writing style consists of lots of terse little sentences, often no more than one to a paragraph, almost like a parody of a hardboiled noir story. This looks like it should be annoying, or at least get annoying very quickly, but instead it works surprisingly smoothly and effectively. The setting and the premise reminded me a lot of The Dewey Decimal System by Nathan Larson, but I enjoyed this one much better. I'll definitely be checking out the next book in the series.
As a bonus, the volume I have also includes a short essay about anti-heroes by Sternbergh, and a thought-provoking, delightfully nerdy conversation about genre and the blending of genre boundaries between Sternbergh and Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians and sequels, which was well worth reading all by itself.
Rating: 4/5
75. The Muppets Character Encyclopedia by Craig Shermin
An A-Z guide to characters from The Muppet Show and related shows, movies, and specials. Potentially useful if you have a burning need to figure out what the name of that Muppet monster you just saw is, but mostly it's just fun, and full of goofy, bad-pun-laden, classically Muppety humor. I started it thinking that, while amusing, an entire book's worth of this might quickly become tiresome. But, nope. Like the Muppets themselves, it somehow just never gets old.
Rating: 4/5
76. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
I may be the last person on Earth to start reading this series, but in case I'm not: It's about a woman in Botswana who sets up shop as a private detective, despite the fact that nobody in Botswana expects a woman to be a private detective. Or expects a private detective at all, really.
I went into this assuming it was going to be a straightforward whodunnit kind of detective story, albeit one with an unusual setting. It's not. It's more about the main character, Precious Ramotswe, her life, and the various minor, quirky little cases she investigates. (There's also one slightly more serious case, but that doesn't dominate the novel.) I think every time I've seen this book mentioned, I've heard it described as "charming," and, much as I hate to be unoriginal, I have to echo that. It is charming. And Precious Ramotswe is a marvelous character, one who immediately feels like an old friend. I'll definitely be continuing on with this series.
Rating: 4/5
77. Precursor by C. J. Cherryh
This is book four in Cherryh's Foreigner series, set three years after the conclusion of the original trilogy. Humans and the alien atevi -- or, more accurately, atevi and the alien humans -- have been coexisting on the atevi's homeworld for a couple of centuries, but now the balance has been disturbed by a new arrival. Bren Cameron, our protagonist from the first thee books, is sent to do some negotiating, and things seem to be going very well... until, of course, they're suddenly not. And, meanwhile, his family just keeps having personal crises he can't help with.
Like most of Cherryh's stuff, this is dense with lots of analyses of the political and security situations, and it's very slow-moving. (Although, in this case, I think it also wraps things up a little too suddenly at the end.) But, as often manages to be the case with Cherryh, while this seemed like it should be just plain tedious, it nevertheless held my attention and my interest. In fact, I think I found it the fastest-reading of the series so far.
There are a lot more books in this series, and I find I'm looking forward to seeing how this world of hers develops. But not just yet; even when I'm enjoying her writing, there's a limit to how much of it my brain can handle all at once.
Rating: 4/5
78. Godless Grace: How Non-Believers are Making the World Safer, Richer and Kinder by David Orenstein and Linda Ford Blaikie
Religious folks tend to like to think that morality comes directly (and only) from God, and many of them take that belief to its extreme conclusion, assuming that those who don't believe in God must necessarily be immoral, caring for nothing but their own selfish, or even destructive pleasures. It ain't so, of course, and non-believers who work to improve the lives of their fellow humans and for the betterment of human society in general are the main subject of this book.
The centerpiece here is a collection of stories about the lives and work of atheists from all over the world who are involved in charity work and/or political activism. This is a diverse group of interesting people doing laudable work, many of them with truly extraordinary personal stories. But I found the telling of the stories themselves disappointing. From the way the authors were talking in their introduction, and the fact that each person was interviewed individually, I expected something substantial and meaty, with each person given the chance to talk at some length about their own perspectives on non-belief and activism. Instead, each gets only a bite-sized profile, usually less than two pages, with just enough quotes from their interview to make me really wish we could hear more about them in their own words.
There is another chapter, a little later on, though, about students and ex-clergy members who are active in humanist charities or causes, that features much more of the kind of thing I was hoping for, as we get to see individual responses to various interview questions. I found that chapter by far the most interesting and readable in the book, and only wish the rest had been more like it.
Various other topics are also covered, including two pretty dry chapters about the demographics of non-believers, and some brief discussion of the history, present, and possible future of atheism and atheist/humanist activism. (It is very brief, though, and the history, in particular, is compressed and cursory enough that I think it's close to pointless. For those wanting a truly in-depth history of atheism and religious doubt, I strongly recommend Jennifer Michael Hecht's Doubt: A History.) There's also an appendix with a potentially very useful list of atheist organizations and atheist or secular charities.
I have to say, this is the first time I've ever felt conflicted about writing a completely honest review of an Early Reviewers book. Because I strongly agree with what the writers are trying to do here. The world needs more understanding of the fact that the non-religious can in fact be deeply moral, and more acknowledgment of the atheists who are out there doing good work. I'm completely behind them in that, and I would be happy to see them sell lots of copies of this book. But the truth is, I think the book itself is only just OK. It may be of more interest to people who are less familiar with the topic already, and if you're an atheist looking for some bite-sized inspirational stories, maybe it's got what you want. I wouldn't want to discourage anybody from reading it, especially if it's the only book on the subject you're considering. But if what you want is a thoughtful look at who non-believers are, what their morals are, and how they can and do accomplish good in the world, I think Greg M. Epstein's Good Without God is a much better place to start.
Rating: 3/5
(Note: As mentioned above, this was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)
79. The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
Prickly bookseller A. J. Fikry is slipping slowly into self-destructive despair after the death of his wife, but when someone abandons a small child in his bookstore, he finds a new lease on life and new people to love. Now, this sounds like the makings of a sappy Hallmark Channel movie, and it very easily could have felt like one, or like a corny romcom, complete with Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Or both. I can imagine there might be some readers who don't agree that it completely avoided that fate, but I personally am impressed and delighted by how well it managed the difficult feat of being sentimental without being schmaltzy, and I found it thoroughly, incredibly charming. I liked the characters immensely, even if I did often want to get into loud, impassioned arguments with A. J. about his bookish opinions. I unreservedly loved the way that this is very much a book about book people for book people, by an author who is very clearly one herself. And I enjoyed the playful, slightly meta feel to it; this is a novel that understands and loves the narrative conventions of novels, just as much as its characters do. I will say that there's a development at the end that threw me for a loop at first, as, for some reason, it was really not how I was expecting things to go. But the more I kept reading, the more it worked for me, and the more I think about it, looking back, the more I feel that way. And I think it ends on exactly the right emotional note.
Rating: 4.5/5. Objectively, I'm not entirely sure it deserves the extra half-star. But this is my rating, and I loved it, so I don't care.
80. Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson
There are lots of doom'n'gloom laments out there about how technology -- specifically, computers, smartphones, and the internet -- are dumbing us down, distracting us to the point where we can never concentrate on one thing for more than five minutes, alienating us from face-to-face contact, destroying our privacy, and inundating us all with relentless waves of the obnoxious and banal.
Clive Thompson, while he readily admits that these technologies have downsides that should not be ignored, also thinks it's important to consider the other side of things: the way the internet can connect us to each other and improve our lives and our societies. To this end, he considers a wide variety of topics, from the way team-ups between computer and human chess players can be better at the game than either is individually, to how recording technology can help us augment our fallible memories, to the remarkable results math tutoring programs can achieve in schools, to the use of Facebook to organize protest movements. Not to mention a thoughtful consideration of why all those tweets about what your friends had for breakfast might not actually be as useless as they look. He doesn't go to Polyanna-ish extremes on any of this, however; he is as skeptical of claims that Twitter will bring about world peace as he is about claims that Google is completely destroying our memories and leaving us with blank, empty brains.
Most of the general topics and many of the specific examples he talks about here were already familiar to me, but some were fascinatingly new, and even when he's going over ground I found highly familiar, he does so in a marvelously lucid and compulsively readable way. And I do mean the "compulsively" quite literally. I kept reaching the end of a chapter, thinking I should get up and do something else, and then turning the page and reading on, anyway.
Definitely recommended to anyone who wants a little more insight into this crazy, digital modern world of ours, or a different perspective on all that grumbling commentary about kids today ruining their minds, and possibly the future of the world, with all that semi-literate texting.
Rating: 4.5/5. (I had to give it that extra half-star, just for being so surprisingly unputdownable.)
81. Half-Resurrection Blues by Daniel José Older
There are a lot of ghosts in New York City. Fortunately, there's the Council of the Dead to keep them all in line, including ending what's left of their existence if they bother the living too much. Or maybe that's not so fortunate, as the Council are a bunch of annoying paper pushers. At least, that's the opinion of their operative Carlos, who's very useful as an enforcer because he's only half-dead and can interact equally well with the ghostly and the living. Which he does a lot in this adventure involving an ancient sorcerer, a beautiful woman, a horde of creepy imps, and a plan to erase the boundaries between the living and the dead.
This is billed as the first book in a new series. That's not entirely true, as there was actually a previous small press book of linked short stories set in the same universe, mostly featuring the same main character: Salsa Nocturna. I read that one a couple of months ago, and my main thought about it was that it was really rough around the edges and in great need of a professional editing job, but that this Older guy definitely had a lot of promise. So I'm pleased to report that this one is a lot more polished. It's not perfect; a lot of things at the beginning feel very underdeveloped, for instance, and the key scene that launches off everything else in the novel feels weirdly skimmed-over. But the premise is great, the plot is decent, the main character is interesting, and it's littered with some good, sharp sentences. Overall, it's an imaginative and entertaining piece of urban fantasy, and I am fully intending to stay on board for the rest of the series.
Rating: 4/5
82. The Martian by Andy Weir
When what was originally meant to be a month-long Mars mission is aborted on day six due to a nasty dust storm, astronaut Mark Watney is injured, and his shipmates, believing him to be dead, reluctantly leave him behind and get out while they can. Turns out he's still very much alive, but staying that way is going to be a heck of a challenge, especially considering that he now has no way to contact Earth.
25 pages in, as Watney was telling us all the details of his plan to make water from hydrazine fuel and doing endless calculations about how much of everything he'd need and how long it would last him, I started feeling confused. "Wait, how is this book so popular?," I thought. "Why do even people who don't generally read SF seem to be into this? I'm a giant science nerd, and even I'm only mildly interested in all of this!" But then, as the novel went on, a funny thing happened. Even though it continued being more of the same -- lots of Martian MacGyvering, lots of arithmetic -- the story got really gripping.
It seems like it shouldn't have been, really. It should have felt like yet another so-so, tediously technical Tale of Hard SF Space Competence. Seriously, the writing's nothing special, the dialog (in the sections that have dialog, anyway) is stilted, and there's very little human drama at all, no powerful emotional sense of what it would be like to be stranded alone on an alien world. Watney's not a guy we learn much of anything about, beyond the fact that he's a) amazingly resourceful, and b) a total smartass, and his troubles are all physical, not psychological. He ought to seem like an impossible-to-care-about cardboard cutout of a space hero, like a million hard SF characters before him. (And I use the word the word "characters" loosely.) And yet... I wasn't just interested in the science-y problem-solving here, although that was pretty cool if you're into science-y problem solving. I actually cared about this guy, and I felt genuine suspense every time he faced an even-more-dangerous-than-usual situation.
I'm not entirely sure how Weir pulls that off, but it involves a good sense of humor and a surprising ability to summarize a lot of technical details in an accessible way. I'm still a little surprised that this has become something of a genre-transcending hit but, hey, maybe I shouldn't be. After all, Apollo 13 was a highly successful movie, and I think this novel is all about capturing that exact "failure is not an option"/"figuring out how to put the square peg in the round hole" spirit.
Rating: 4/5
83. Half Empty by David Rakoff
A collection of articles and essays by David Rakoff on subjects including a visit to a porn expo, the complicated relationship between Jews and pork, and the way people seem to regard him as a safe receptacle for their secrets and confessions.
I have such mixed feelings about Rakoff's writing. My first impression was that it was intelligent and fairly clever, but also annoyingly pretentious. As I read on, though, my feelings softened a bit, and I began to appreciate the glimpses of human vulnerability visible underneath all that determinedly witty cynicism and gosh-aren't-I-so-neurotic self-deprecation. The final essay, about his diagnosis with a rare form of cancer, had an especially moving and honest feel about it, made all the more painful by the fact that I went into it knowing that the cancer had eventually taken his life. That piece was, for me, by far the best in the collection, in its own sad way. But as for the rest of it... I don't know. Rakoff, despite the fact that he's originally from Toronto, writes with this sort of uber-Manhattanite sensibility that I have trouble connecting to. He's sort of like a gay Woody Allen. (Y'know, minus the skeevy aspects.) And, just like Woody Allen, I can sort of see how many people might think he's hilarious and brilliant, but for me personally, his stuff is probably best encountered in small doses.
Rating: an extremely subjective and slightly apologetic 3.5/5
84. Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson
Christine does not remember most of her life. Every morning she wakes up next to a stranger who tells her he is her husband, Ben. Every day he explains to he that she has amnesia. And every night, when she sleeps, she forgets everything that happened that day, too. But then, at the urging of a doctor, she begins to keep a secret journal that provides her with an artificial memory of recent days. And sometime during those days, she's scrawled "Don't trust Ben" in the front of the journal.
It's a fantastic setup for novel, the kind that promises creepy, slowly revealed secrets and deep emotional tension. Plus, the cover is plastered with blurbs praising how heart-stopping and nerve-jangling and page-turning it is. So I went into it looking to have my heart stopped and my nerves jangled, and such, and... it kind of didn't happen.
The writing isn't great, but that wasn't really the problem. None of the big, surprising twists felt all that surprising, but I don't think that's the problem, either. The problem is that none of it felt real to me. And I don't mean the fact that amnesia just doesn't work that way. I was actually OK with that, after a line from a doctor about Christine's condition not fitting our current understanding of memory convinced me that the author wasn't proceeding from ignorance, but instead knowingly fudging the medical facts for the sake of the story. I was willing to go with that. It was everything else that bugged me. Stuff like the fact that Christine's doctor seems to have no patients but her to worry about and is free to spend big chunks of his work day dropping by her house and taking her on memory-jogging field trips.
But the biggest problem was Christine herself. She just never felt emotionally believable to me as someone going through the things she's going through. She talks a lot about her thoughts and feelings, but it all feels sort of... hollow. I'm not sure I ever really believed there was a person in there. And without any deep sense of empathy for her, I was more irritated by her than concerned about her. Which made it kind of hard for my nerves to get tingly for her.
Rating: 2.5/5
85. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
I have kind of mixed feelings about this book. It talks about a lot of things that are, in themselves, pretty interesting, from how marketers convinced people to use toothpaste and Fabreze, to how a lack of inter-departmental communication was responsible for a deadly fire in a London Underground station, to why Rosa Parks' unwillingness to give up her seat proved so pivotal to the civil rights movement when others before her had done the same thing with no results.
But I'm not sure all of these anecdotes really add up to anything coherent. Duhigg's concept of what constitutes a "habit" -- basically, a prompt leading to an action leading to some expected reward or benefit -- is so broad as to encompass practically all of human behavior, and, rather than a close examination of the concept of habits, the book feels more like a loose collection of stories drawn semi-randomly from the fields of psychology, business and sociology. Which is interesting enough, but not really very satisfying.
Rating: 3.5/5
72. Bag of Bones by Stephen King
After bestselling author Mike Noonan's wife dies, he suffers the world's worst case of writer's block, learns that there are some things that his wife never told him about, discovers that his summer house is haunted, and gets drawn into a custody battle between a nice young woman and her nasty old father-in-law.
It's a decent read, although far from perfect. The narrative cheats a little here and there (although maybe mostly in excusable ways), and it ends with an unfortunately clunky, exposition-laden epilog. There's a small child who's only occasionally believable as being the age she's supposed to be, and a bad guy so cartoonishly evil that during the (mercifully short) time that he's actually, so to speak, on-screen, my suspension of disbelief snapped like a twig. And there's a plot point near the end that's such an unpleasant cliche that even the main character explicitly acknowledges how bad it is. (I can't quite make up my mind whether that makes it more palatable or not.) I suppose I should also add that this definitely isn't a book for those who aren't okay with reading about a lot of ugly topics, as it features everything from small-town racism to sexual violence to murdered children. Although maybe that kind of warning goes without saying when you're talking about a horror novel.
Anyway. Definitely a flawed book, but the story itself is good enough. The main character is well-drawn -- perhaps unsurprisingly, since if there's one thing King knows, it's what the inside of a writer's mind is like. The ghost story elements aren't quite as creepy as King can be at his best -- possibly deliberately, as if they were too hair-raising, it would be impossible to believe the guy would ever stay in that house, no matter what excuses the author comes up with to keep him there -- but they're interesting nonetheless. As are the bits of history that King slowly reveals.
Like many later Stephen King novels, though, it does suffer from being way, way longer than it really ought to be. It's not that it's tediously slow; the individual pages turn fast enough, for the most part. It's just that it's so easy to see that it'd be immensely to the book's benefit if it were trimmed down and tightened up by at least a couple hundred pages. As it was, by the time I was two-thirds of the way through, the main question in my mind wasn't, "Gosh, I wonder what's going to happen next?", but "How is it that I haven't finished this thing yet?" King did manage to recapture my flagging interest well enough before the end, but, of course, he'd have done better not to lose it in the first place.
Rating: Let's call it 3.5/5.
73. Don't Sleep: There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel L. Everett
American Daniel Everett spent many years, off and on, living among the Pirahã people of the Amazon jungle. Initially he came as a missionary, with the goal of learning their language and culture in order to translate the Bible for them, but became deeply interested in that language and culture for their own sake, and eventually came to regard much about their attitude towards life and belief as superior to his own, ultimately de-converting himself rather than converting the Pirahã.
In this book, he describes his own experiences living with and learning about the Pirahã and adjusting to life on the Amazon. He also describes, in depth and with considerable analysis, some of the unique and interesting features of Pirahã society and language. The language, in particular, potentially challenges a lot of conventional wisdom about how human languages work, and, Everett believes, suggests a much more complex interplay between language and culture than linguists usually allow for.
The linguistic discussion sometimes gets very technical, and I am in no way expert enough to evaluate whether Everett's take on things is completely right or not, but it is thought-provoking, and there's no question that the language itself is fascinating. As are Everett's observations of the Pirahã culture, although it seemed pretty clear to me that he must be overgeneralizing a bit in places. For instance, he states quite emphatically that the Pirahã are extremely peaceful and non-aggressive among themselves (if not necessarily always with foreigners), but then mentions in passing a couple of details that perhaps call that into question. Although that's probably understandable, really; I don't think there's a society on Earth that's entirely consistent and free of contradiction.
In any case, if you can handle the sometimes hard-to-follow linguistic discussions, it's well worth reading, if only for the example it provides of just how diverse human languages and societies can be, and for its look at thought and speech patterns that can be very different from the ones most of us take for granted.
Rating: 4/5
74. Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh
Spademan (not his real name) used to be a garbage man. That was back before New York City was devastated by a dirty bomb and abandoned by half its population, while most of the other half retreated from reality into VR dreams. These days, he's a hit man. Usually he doesn't ask questions and doesn't hesitate, but when he's hired to kill a young woman, he finds a reason not to follow through and instead ends up taking her side against her father, who turns out to be up to some ugly, ugly stuff.
I could quibble with a few aspects of the plot, and I suspect it may be entirely too dark for a lot of people, but overall, I really liked it. Spademan's a very well-drawn character, dangerous and damaged, whose personality comes through strongly and immediately. The writing style consists of lots of terse little sentences, often no more than one to a paragraph, almost like a parody of a hardboiled noir story. This looks like it should be annoying, or at least get annoying very quickly, but instead it works surprisingly smoothly and effectively. The setting and the premise reminded me a lot of The Dewey Decimal System by Nathan Larson, but I enjoyed this one much better. I'll definitely be checking out the next book in the series.
As a bonus, the volume I have also includes a short essay about anti-heroes by Sternbergh, and a thought-provoking, delightfully nerdy conversation about genre and the blending of genre boundaries between Sternbergh and Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians and sequels, which was well worth reading all by itself.
Rating: 4/5
75. The Muppets Character Encyclopedia by Craig Shermin
An A-Z guide to characters from The Muppet Show and related shows, movies, and specials. Potentially useful if you have a burning need to figure out what the name of that Muppet monster you just saw is, but mostly it's just fun, and full of goofy, bad-pun-laden, classically Muppety humor. I started it thinking that, while amusing, an entire book's worth of this might quickly become tiresome. But, nope. Like the Muppets themselves, it somehow just never gets old.
Rating: 4/5
76. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
I may be the last person on Earth to start reading this series, but in case I'm not: It's about a woman in Botswana who sets up shop as a private detective, despite the fact that nobody in Botswana expects a woman to be a private detective. Or expects a private detective at all, really.
I went into this assuming it was going to be a straightforward whodunnit kind of detective story, albeit one with an unusual setting. It's not. It's more about the main character, Precious Ramotswe, her life, and the various minor, quirky little cases she investigates. (There's also one slightly more serious case, but that doesn't dominate the novel.) I think every time I've seen this book mentioned, I've heard it described as "charming," and, much as I hate to be unoriginal, I have to echo that. It is charming. And Precious Ramotswe is a marvelous character, one who immediately feels like an old friend. I'll definitely be continuing on with this series.
Rating: 4/5
77. Precursor by C. J. Cherryh
This is book four in Cherryh's Foreigner series, set three years after the conclusion of the original trilogy. Humans and the alien atevi -- or, more accurately, atevi and the alien humans -- have been coexisting on the atevi's homeworld for a couple of centuries, but now the balance has been disturbed by a new arrival. Bren Cameron, our protagonist from the first thee books, is sent to do some negotiating, and things seem to be going very well... until, of course, they're suddenly not. And, meanwhile, his family just keeps having personal crises he can't help with.
Like most of Cherryh's stuff, this is dense with lots of analyses of the political and security situations, and it's very slow-moving. (Although, in this case, I think it also wraps things up a little too suddenly at the end.) But, as often manages to be the case with Cherryh, while this seemed like it should be just plain tedious, it nevertheless held my attention and my interest. In fact, I think I found it the fastest-reading of the series so far.
There are a lot more books in this series, and I find I'm looking forward to seeing how this world of hers develops. But not just yet; even when I'm enjoying her writing, there's a limit to how much of it my brain can handle all at once.
Rating: 4/5
78. Godless Grace: How Non-Believers are Making the World Safer, Richer and Kinder by David Orenstein and Linda Ford Blaikie
Religious folks tend to like to think that morality comes directly (and only) from God, and many of them take that belief to its extreme conclusion, assuming that those who don't believe in God must necessarily be immoral, caring for nothing but their own selfish, or even destructive pleasures. It ain't so, of course, and non-believers who work to improve the lives of their fellow humans and for the betterment of human society in general are the main subject of this book.
The centerpiece here is a collection of stories about the lives and work of atheists from all over the world who are involved in charity work and/or political activism. This is a diverse group of interesting people doing laudable work, many of them with truly extraordinary personal stories. But I found the telling of the stories themselves disappointing. From the way the authors were talking in their introduction, and the fact that each person was interviewed individually, I expected something substantial and meaty, with each person given the chance to talk at some length about their own perspectives on non-belief and activism. Instead, each gets only a bite-sized profile, usually less than two pages, with just enough quotes from their interview to make me really wish we could hear more about them in their own words.
There is another chapter, a little later on, though, about students and ex-clergy members who are active in humanist charities or causes, that features much more of the kind of thing I was hoping for, as we get to see individual responses to various interview questions. I found that chapter by far the most interesting and readable in the book, and only wish the rest had been more like it.
Various other topics are also covered, including two pretty dry chapters about the demographics of non-believers, and some brief discussion of the history, present, and possible future of atheism and atheist/humanist activism. (It is very brief, though, and the history, in particular, is compressed and cursory enough that I think it's close to pointless. For those wanting a truly in-depth history of atheism and religious doubt, I strongly recommend Jennifer Michael Hecht's Doubt: A History.) There's also an appendix with a potentially very useful list of atheist organizations and atheist or secular charities.
I have to say, this is the first time I've ever felt conflicted about writing a completely honest review of an Early Reviewers book. Because I strongly agree with what the writers are trying to do here. The world needs more understanding of the fact that the non-religious can in fact be deeply moral, and more acknowledgment of the atheists who are out there doing good work. I'm completely behind them in that, and I would be happy to see them sell lots of copies of this book. But the truth is, I think the book itself is only just OK. It may be of more interest to people who are less familiar with the topic already, and if you're an atheist looking for some bite-sized inspirational stories, maybe it's got what you want. I wouldn't want to discourage anybody from reading it, especially if it's the only book on the subject you're considering. But if what you want is a thoughtful look at who non-believers are, what their morals are, and how they can and do accomplish good in the world, I think Greg M. Epstein's Good Without God is a much better place to start.
Rating: 3/5
(Note: As mentioned above, this was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)
79. The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
Prickly bookseller A. J. Fikry is slipping slowly into self-destructive despair after the death of his wife, but when someone abandons a small child in his bookstore, he finds a new lease on life and new people to love. Now, this sounds like the makings of a sappy Hallmark Channel movie, and it very easily could have felt like one, or like a corny romcom, complete with Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Or both. I can imagine there might be some readers who don't agree that it completely avoided that fate, but I personally am impressed and delighted by how well it managed the difficult feat of being sentimental without being schmaltzy, and I found it thoroughly, incredibly charming. I liked the characters immensely, even if I did often want to get into loud, impassioned arguments with A. J. about his bookish opinions. I unreservedly loved the way that this is very much a book about book people for book people, by an author who is very clearly one herself. And I enjoyed the playful, slightly meta feel to it; this is a novel that understands and loves the narrative conventions of novels, just as much as its characters do. I will say that there's a development at the end that threw me for a loop at first, as, for some reason, it was really not how I was expecting things to go. But the more I kept reading, the more it worked for me, and the more I think about it, looking back, the more I feel that way. And I think it ends on exactly the right emotional note.
Rating: 4.5/5. Objectively, I'm not entirely sure it deserves the extra half-star. But this is my rating, and I loved it, so I don't care.
80. Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson
There are lots of doom'n'gloom laments out there about how technology -- specifically, computers, smartphones, and the internet -- are dumbing us down, distracting us to the point where we can never concentrate on one thing for more than five minutes, alienating us from face-to-face contact, destroying our privacy, and inundating us all with relentless waves of the obnoxious and banal.
Clive Thompson, while he readily admits that these technologies have downsides that should not be ignored, also thinks it's important to consider the other side of things: the way the internet can connect us to each other and improve our lives and our societies. To this end, he considers a wide variety of topics, from the way team-ups between computer and human chess players can be better at the game than either is individually, to how recording technology can help us augment our fallible memories, to the remarkable results math tutoring programs can achieve in schools, to the use of Facebook to organize protest movements. Not to mention a thoughtful consideration of why all those tweets about what your friends had for breakfast might not actually be as useless as they look. He doesn't go to Polyanna-ish extremes on any of this, however; he is as skeptical of claims that Twitter will bring about world peace as he is about claims that Google is completely destroying our memories and leaving us with blank, empty brains.
Most of the general topics and many of the specific examples he talks about here were already familiar to me, but some were fascinatingly new, and even when he's going over ground I found highly familiar, he does so in a marvelously lucid and compulsively readable way. And I do mean the "compulsively" quite literally. I kept reaching the end of a chapter, thinking I should get up and do something else, and then turning the page and reading on, anyway.
Definitely recommended to anyone who wants a little more insight into this crazy, digital modern world of ours, or a different perspective on all that grumbling commentary about kids today ruining their minds, and possibly the future of the world, with all that semi-literate texting.
Rating: 4.5/5. (I had to give it that extra half-star, just for being so surprisingly unputdownable.)
81. Half-Resurrection Blues by Daniel José Older
There are a lot of ghosts in New York City. Fortunately, there's the Council of the Dead to keep them all in line, including ending what's left of their existence if they bother the living too much. Or maybe that's not so fortunate, as the Council are a bunch of annoying paper pushers. At least, that's the opinion of their operative Carlos, who's very useful as an enforcer because he's only half-dead and can interact equally well with the ghostly and the living. Which he does a lot in this adventure involving an ancient sorcerer, a beautiful woman, a horde of creepy imps, and a plan to erase the boundaries between the living and the dead.
This is billed as the first book in a new series. That's not entirely true, as there was actually a previous small press book of linked short stories set in the same universe, mostly featuring the same main character: Salsa Nocturna. I read that one a couple of months ago, and my main thought about it was that it was really rough around the edges and in great need of a professional editing job, but that this Older guy definitely had a lot of promise. So I'm pleased to report that this one is a lot more polished. It's not perfect; a lot of things at the beginning feel very underdeveloped, for instance, and the key scene that launches off everything else in the novel feels weirdly skimmed-over. But the premise is great, the plot is decent, the main character is interesting, and it's littered with some good, sharp sentences. Overall, it's an imaginative and entertaining piece of urban fantasy, and I am fully intending to stay on board for the rest of the series.
Rating: 4/5
82. The Martian by Andy Weir
When what was originally meant to be a month-long Mars mission is aborted on day six due to a nasty dust storm, astronaut Mark Watney is injured, and his shipmates, believing him to be dead, reluctantly leave him behind and get out while they can. Turns out he's still very much alive, but staying that way is going to be a heck of a challenge, especially considering that he now has no way to contact Earth.
25 pages in, as Watney was telling us all the details of his plan to make water from hydrazine fuel and doing endless calculations about how much of everything he'd need and how long it would last him, I started feeling confused. "Wait, how is this book so popular?," I thought. "Why do even people who don't generally read SF seem to be into this? I'm a giant science nerd, and even I'm only mildly interested in all of this!" But then, as the novel went on, a funny thing happened. Even though it continued being more of the same -- lots of Martian MacGyvering, lots of arithmetic -- the story got really gripping.
It seems like it shouldn't have been, really. It should have felt like yet another so-so, tediously technical Tale of Hard SF Space Competence. Seriously, the writing's nothing special, the dialog (in the sections that have dialog, anyway) is stilted, and there's very little human drama at all, no powerful emotional sense of what it would be like to be stranded alone on an alien world. Watney's not a guy we learn much of anything about, beyond the fact that he's a) amazingly resourceful, and b) a total smartass, and his troubles are all physical, not psychological. He ought to seem like an impossible-to-care-about cardboard cutout of a space hero, like a million hard SF characters before him. (And I use the word the word "characters" loosely.) And yet... I wasn't just interested in the science-y problem-solving here, although that was pretty cool if you're into science-y problem solving. I actually cared about this guy, and I felt genuine suspense every time he faced an even-more-dangerous-than-usual situation.
I'm not entirely sure how Weir pulls that off, but it involves a good sense of humor and a surprising ability to summarize a lot of technical details in an accessible way. I'm still a little surprised that this has become something of a genre-transcending hit but, hey, maybe I shouldn't be. After all, Apollo 13 was a highly successful movie, and I think this novel is all about capturing that exact "failure is not an option"/"figuring out how to put the square peg in the round hole" spirit.
Rating: 4/5
83. Half Empty by David Rakoff
A collection of articles and essays by David Rakoff on subjects including a visit to a porn expo, the complicated relationship between Jews and pork, and the way people seem to regard him as a safe receptacle for their secrets and confessions.
I have such mixed feelings about Rakoff's writing. My first impression was that it was intelligent and fairly clever, but also annoyingly pretentious. As I read on, though, my feelings softened a bit, and I began to appreciate the glimpses of human vulnerability visible underneath all that determinedly witty cynicism and gosh-aren't-I-so-neurotic self-deprecation. The final essay, about his diagnosis with a rare form of cancer, had an especially moving and honest feel about it, made all the more painful by the fact that I went into it knowing that the cancer had eventually taken his life. That piece was, for me, by far the best in the collection, in its own sad way. But as for the rest of it... I don't know. Rakoff, despite the fact that he's originally from Toronto, writes with this sort of uber-Manhattanite sensibility that I have trouble connecting to. He's sort of like a gay Woody Allen. (Y'know, minus the skeevy aspects.) And, just like Woody Allen, I can sort of see how many people might think he's hilarious and brilliant, but for me personally, his stuff is probably best encountered in small doses.
Rating: an extremely subjective and slightly apologetic 3.5/5
84. Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson
Christine does not remember most of her life. Every morning she wakes up next to a stranger who tells her he is her husband, Ben. Every day he explains to he that she has amnesia. And every night, when she sleeps, she forgets everything that happened that day, too. But then, at the urging of a doctor, she begins to keep a secret journal that provides her with an artificial memory of recent days. And sometime during those days, she's scrawled "Don't trust Ben" in the front of the journal.
It's a fantastic setup for novel, the kind that promises creepy, slowly revealed secrets and deep emotional tension. Plus, the cover is plastered with blurbs praising how heart-stopping and nerve-jangling and page-turning it is. So I went into it looking to have my heart stopped and my nerves jangled, and such, and... it kind of didn't happen.
The writing isn't great, but that wasn't really the problem. None of the big, surprising twists felt all that surprising, but I don't think that's the problem, either. The problem is that none of it felt real to me. And I don't mean the fact that amnesia just doesn't work that way. I was actually OK with that, after a line from a doctor about Christine's condition not fitting our current understanding of memory convinced me that the author wasn't proceeding from ignorance, but instead knowingly fudging the medical facts for the sake of the story. I was willing to go with that. It was everything else that bugged me. Stuff like the fact that Christine's doctor seems to have no patients but her to worry about and is free to spend big chunks of his work day dropping by her house and taking her on memory-jogging field trips.
But the biggest problem was Christine herself. She just never felt emotionally believable to me as someone going through the things she's going through. She talks a lot about her thoughts and feelings, but it all feels sort of... hollow. I'm not sure I ever really believed there was a person in there. And without any deep sense of empathy for her, I was more irritated by her than concerned about her. Which made it kind of hard for my nerves to get tingly for her.
Rating: 2.5/5
85. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
I have kind of mixed feelings about this book. It talks about a lot of things that are, in themselves, pretty interesting, from how marketers convinced people to use toothpaste and Fabreze, to how a lack of inter-departmental communication was responsible for a deadly fire in a London Underground station, to why Rosa Parks' unwillingness to give up her seat proved so pivotal to the civil rights movement when others before her had done the same thing with no results.
But I'm not sure all of these anecdotes really add up to anything coherent. Duhigg's concept of what constitutes a "habit" -- basically, a prompt leading to an action leading to some expected reward or benefit -- is so broad as to encompass practically all of human behavior, and, rather than a close examination of the concept of habits, the book feels more like a loose collection of stories drawn semi-randomly from the fields of psychology, business and sociology. Which is interesting enough, but not really very satisfying.
Rating: 3.5/5