White Man’s Grave Richard Dool­ing
Pic­a­dor USA 1995World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Boone West­fall has been sucked into the fam­ily insur­ance busi­ness after earn­ing what his father con­sid­ers to be a worth­less degree in fine arts. He hates the job and yearns to escape and see the world. He’s given just such a chance when Michael Kil­li­gan — his best friend from high school — sug­gests that they meet in Paris and back­pack around Europe. Boone arrives in Paris on the appointed date and waits for his friend; he eschews paid accom­mo­da­tions in favor of sleep­ing on the grave of Hec­tor Berlioz. Michael, who is work­ing as a Peace Corps vol­un­teer in Sierra Leone, never shows up.

Boone learns that Michael has gone miss­ing in the bush, and sets of for Africa to find him. Mean­while, Michael’s father Ran­dall, a hypochon­driac mega­lo­ma­niac bank­ruptcy lawyer, starts search­ing for Michael in his own way — by brib­ing Sierra Leonean offi­cials. As Boone delves deeper into the cul­tures of the Peace Corps and the tra­di­tional Mende peo­ple, Ran­dall becomes more and more involved with the volatile pol­i­tics of Sierra Leone.

In this book, Richard Dool­ing has cre­ated a hilar­i­ous and bit­ing piece of satire. Its con­stant cul­tural and ide­o­log­i­cal clashes and jux­ta­po­si­tions — Amer­ica vs. west­ern Africa, bureau­crats vs. tra­di­tional peo­ples, neu­ro­sur­geons vs. witch doc­tors, lawyers vs. witches, etc. — bring sur­pris­ing and uncom­fort­able sim­i­lar­i­ties to the fore. Dooling’s humor is quirky and dry, just the way I like it. His large cast of char­ac­ters is var­ied, inter­est­ing, and mem­o­rable. All in all, this is a fun read with some real substance.

The Mer­cury Visions of Louis Daguerre A NovelDominic Smith
Atria 2006World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Louis Daguerre was an early inno­va­tor in pho­tog­ra­phy. His Daguerreo­type process, which was the first pop­u­lar and wide­spread pho­to­graphic method, used a coated cop­per plate which was devel­oped by expo­sure to mer­cury vapor.

This novel joins Mon­sieur Daguerre late in life. His many years of exper­i­men­ta­tion with toxic gaseous mer­cury have taken their toll, and he is becom­ing mad as a hat­ter. He has visions which con­vince him that the end of the world is nigh. He makes a list of ten objects and peo­ple he wants to pho­to­graph before Armaged­don. As he works through his list, he becomes increas­ingly obsessed with the last entry — Iso­bel Le Fournier, a woman he loved in his youth. He has not seen Le Fournier in decades, and doesn’t know her where­abouts. He enlists the poet Charles Baude­laire and a pros­ti­tute named Pigeon to help him find Le Fournier before what he is con­vinced will be Judg­ment Day.
This, Dominic Smith’s first novel, is very well writ­ten. He includes plenty of his­toric detail and his­toric fig­ures with­out try­ing to cram in too many famous names. His prose is ele­gant and com­pletely read­able — never dense or awk­ward. I eagerly await Smith’s next book.

The Book of the Dead Lin­coln Child
Grand Cen­tral Pub­lish­ing 2006World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Like the last cou­ple of books by Pre­ston and Child, this novel cen­ters around the enig­matic Spe­cial Agent Pen­der­gast of the FBI. He how faces his tough­est adver­sary: his estranged and dia­bol­i­cally bril­liant brother. Many of the char­ac­ters from Pre­ston and Child’s pre­vi­ous books, who have now become reg­u­lars, appear once again. The Book of the Dead is a fun quick read, but I’m glad that the so-called “Pen­der­gast Tril­ogy” has now come to a close. I hope that the authors can now once again move away from their stock char­ac­ters and New York City crime plots.

The His­to­rian Eliz­a­beth Kos­tova, Eliz­a­beth Kos­tova
Lit­tle, Brown and Com­pany 2005World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

In this well-researched first novel, Kos­tova tells the sto­ries of a suc­ces­sion of schol­ars who have all pur­sued the same topic: Vlad Ţepe&#351. Vlad, more com­monly known as “The Impaler,” was a real fifteenth-century Tran­syl­van­ian ruler, and the inspi­ra­tion for Bram Stoker’s Drac­ula. Kos­tova uses a multi-layered nar­ra­tive to reveal what each researcher has uncov­ered — the most recent learns of her predecessor’s work, and through his let­ters and notes learns about his pre­de­ces­sor, etc. We soon learn that each scholar is drawn into this line of enquiry by the mys­te­ri­ous appear­ance of a strange ancient book — blank except for a sin­gle wood­cut of a dragon with the word “Drakulya.” The recip­i­ents of these books tend not to live hap­pily ever after. The harder they search for infor­ma­tion about Vlad, the more the leg­ends sur­round­ing him appear to be true, and the more they feel as if they are being hunted.

The His­to­rian is far bet­ter researched and writ­ten than any other historical/legendary mys­tery (i.e.: The Da Vinci Code) that I’ve read. She cre­ates very inter­est­ing char­ac­ters and takes them to fas­ci­nat­ing, detailed places. She man­ages to meld his­tory and leg­end with­out ever being over-the-top or cheesy. Sup­pos­edly, ten years of research went into this book. While I eagerly await Kostova’s next novel, I hope that the pres­sure of suc­cess will not force her to rush infe­rior work to press.

Chil­dren of the Mind (Ender, Book 4) Orson Scott Card
Tor Sci­ence Fic­tion 1997World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

This, the fourth and final install­ment of the Ender series, was orig­i­nally envi­sioned as part of the pre­vi­ous book, Xeno­cide. Card was wise to split the story into two books (the two together are almost 900 pages), but nei­ther one can really stand on its own. As such, the cri­sis at hand in Chil­dren of the Mind is a holdover from Xeno­cide (and actu­ally started in Speaker for the Dead): a fleet from Star­ways Con­gress is en route to Lusi­ta­nia, and is charged with oblit­er­at­ing the planet.

By the begin­ning of this book, a num­ber of Lusitania’s inhab­i­tants have been secretly moved to new colony worlds. Thus, there is no longer dan­ger of any species being wiped out of exis­tence, but many inno­cent humans, pequeni­nos, and bug­gers remain on the planet. Also in peril is Jane, a one-of-a-kind entity of some­what mys­te­ri­ous nature who inhab­its the faster-than-light, galaxy-wide com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work. Her exis­tence has been dis­cov­ered by the Con­gress, and mea­sures have been put in place to destroy her. As her pow­ers are key to sav­ing Lusi­ta­nia, Ender and his fam­ily and friends are des­per­ate to save her. Due to a very bizarre occur­rence at the end of the pre­vi­ous book, the aging Ender is now in sub­con­scious con­trol of two new beings mod­eled after his child­hood mem­o­ries of his brother and sis­ter. These two take cen­ter stage as they, with the help of oth­ers, try to stop the fleet and save Jane.

As with the pre­vi­ous book, I’m not so fond of all the meta­physics in the story. It’s all very com­plex, odd, and at times a lit­tle creepy. I did, how­ever, like the way in which Card wraps up the entire series. One of the char­ac­ters makes some very shrewd obser­va­tions about the natures of and rela­tion­ships between the var­i­ous known sen­tient species. This human char­ac­ter has things to say about his own species that are harsh, yet opti­mistic — and entirely deserved. The first two books in the series are still my favorites, but I (for the most part) like how the tetral­ogy ends.

Death in Venice and Seven Other Sto­riesThomas Mann
Vin­tage Books 1989World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

This col­lec­tion of sto­ries is my first expo­sure to the work of Thomas Mann. I picked it up on a whim while brows­ing in a thrift store. For the most part, I enjoy Mann’s writ­ing. It’s a bit clunky at times, but some or all of the blame for that may very well lie with the trans­la­tor of this par­tic­u­lar edition.

Mann is won­der­fully descrip­tive in all the sto­ries, but espe­cially so in “A Man and His Dog.” This story, which con­tains almost no dia­log, con­sists of the nar­ra­tor describ­ing his faith­ful canine com­pan­ion, the nature of their rela­tion­ship, and the places where they spend time together. This is prob­a­bly the light­est story in the col­lec­tion, both in terms of tone and content.

While these two qual­i­ties (along with style) vary greatly from story to story, there are a num­ber of recur­ring themes. Tragic death appears a num­ber of times. Chil­dren or young adults play promi­nent roles in most of the sto­ries, either as pro­tag­o­nists or as impor­tant sec­ondary char­ac­ters. Love (or some­times infat­u­a­tion mis­taken for love) appears in nearly every story as well.

Mann explores many dif­fer­ent kinds of love in a vari­ety of rela­tion­ships: man and dog, par­ent and child, brother and sis­ter, etc. He also exam­ines unre­quited love: that of a man for his child­hood crush, that of another for a mar­ried woman who is dying, and that of an author for a teenage boy who he has only observed from a distance.

I enjoyed some sto­ries more than oth­ers, but I liked the col­lec­tion over­all. While Mann occa­sion­ally ram­bles, he more than makes up for it with lush descrip­tions and inter­est­ing characters.

A Dirty Job A NovelMoore, Christo­pher
William Mor­row 2006World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

This, Christo­pher Moore’s lat­est novel, cen­ters on Char­lie Asher, the owner of a sec­ond­hand store in San Fran­cisco. Fol­low­ing the birth of his daugh­ter and the sub­se­quent death of his wife, Char­lie starts to see strange things and finds him­self sur­rounded by death. He soon dis­cov­ers that he has been thrust into the mid­dle of an epic bat­tle between the forces of light and dark.

This is one of Moore’s best — and fun­ni­est — books. It is chock-full of inter­est­ing and bizarre char­ac­ters — from a seven-foot-tall, lime-green-clad record store owner/Death Mer­chant to ancient Celtic demons to an army of small crea­tures made out of seem­ingly ran­dom dead ani­mal parts. I also love Moore’s absurd yet utterly lucid fig­u­ra­tive lan­guage. This book is laugh-aloud funny, and I thor­oughly enjoyed it.

Bal­lad Of The Sad Cafe Car­son McCullers
Ban­tam 1983World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

I’ve not read much short fic­tion, so I don’t con­sider myself a knowl­edge­able critic of the genre. How­ever, I thor­oughly enjoyed these sto­ries. McCullers is good at con­vey­ing a great deal of infor­ma­tion about her char­ac­ters quickly, through their own — as well as other char­ac­ters’ — thoughts and actions. In these short vignettes — some fewer than 10 pages in length — McCullers often achieves more char­ac­ter devel­op­ment than some authors achieve in whole books. I sup­pose that’s one of the hall­marks of good short fic­tion, though. I liked all the sto­ries in this col­lec­tion, but I espe­cially enjoyed the pieces involv­ing music and musi­cians — “Wun­derkind,” “Madame Zilen­sky and the King of Fin­land,” and “The Sojurner.”

Xeno­cide (Ender, Book 3) Orson Scott Card
Tor Books 1992World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

This is the third and longest book in Orson Scott Card’s Ender saga. It picks up where Speaker for the Dead leaves off. With Ender’s help, the humans and pig­gies of the planet Lusi­ta­nia are work­ing to live together as equals. Now, how­ever, they are shar­ing the planet with a third sen­tient species — the buggers.

Lusi­ta­nia is under threat of attack by the fleet of the Star­ways Con­gress, and the three species are scram­bling for ways to either stop the fleet or escape the planet. Each of these sur­vival strate­gies is fraught with dif­fi­culty. Escape from the planet is par­tic­u­larly trou­ble­some, as every organ­ism on Lusi­ta­nia har­bors a virus that is 100% lethal to unvac­ci­nated humans.

The events on Lusi­ta­nia are linked to those on Path, a world con­trolled by priests. These priests are highly intel­li­gent, but suf­fer from a bizarre form of obsessive-compulsive dis­or­der that they (and the rest of the planet’s pop­u­la­tion) regard as direct com­mu­ni­ca­tion from the gods. Also involved in the plot are two other life­forms whose sta­tus as sen­tient is inves­ti­gated and debated.

It is the inter­ac­tions between these var­i­ous peo­ples and life­forms that makes up the core of this book. Their var­i­ous fates are inter­twined, and issues of the var­i­ous species’ rights and respon­si­bil­i­ties are dis­cussed. This I found to be very inter­est­ing. Less engag­ing, at least for me, was the time Card devoted to his own brand of meta­physics. He has cre­ated things called philotes, which seem to be a com­bi­na­tion of souls, Pla­tonic ideals, and The Force. My inter­est began to wane near the end of the book, when Card uses these philotes to effect some bizarre and all-too-convenient plot twists.

This is my least favorite of the Ender books so far, although I still enjoyed it. I hope that the last install­ment will be on par with the first two.

P.S. — The last line of this book, “For the God of Path is Glo­ri­ously Bright,” makes the entire Path sub­plot seem like a shaggy dog story to me. I can’t find a Bib­li­cal ref­er­ence, but it may be a Mor­mon thing, as Card is a mem­ber of the LDS church. Can any­body ver­ify this?

High­way 61 resur­faced by Bill Fitzhugh.
Mor­row 2005World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

This is the sequel to Fitzhugh’s last book, Radio Activ­ity. The story cen­ters around a group of old blues musi­cians and a myth­i­cal record­ing ses­sion in which they were sup­pos­edly involved. Radio DJ turned pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor Rick Shan­non is drawn into a search for the blues­men, their leg­endary tapes, and the mys­te­ri­ous cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the sup­posed time of the record­ing session.

This book is often laugh-aloud funny — typ­i­cal Fitzhugh. He has a knack for cre­at­ing hilar­i­ously absurd char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions. He names his three blues­men Blind Buddy Cot­ton, Crip­pled Willie Jef­fer­son, and Crazy Earl Tate. Thus, the myth of the Blind, Crip­pled, and Crazy record­ing ses­sions. Fitzhugh is also very good at cre­at­ing fig­u­ra­tive lan­guage that seem­ingly comes out of left field, but that absolutely works. For exam­ple:

He passed the faded green-and-white sign for the South­ern Pride Apart­ments. The build­ing itself was gone but its foun­da­tion still sat proudly on the lot, as if wait­ing for that part of the south to rise again.”

This book, like Radio Activ­ity, also dis­plays Fitzhugh’s great love for — and knowl­edge of — music. His char­ac­ters are made-up, but all the musi­cal back­ground infor­ma­tion is real. I can highly rec­om­mend this book, along with the rest of Bill Fitzhugh’s output.

Speaker for the Dead (Ender, Book 2) Orson Scott Card
Tor Books 1994World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

In this, the sec­ond book in Orson Scott Card’s Ender saga, we join the main char­ac­ter three thou­sand years after the end of the pre­vi­ous book (a prod­uct of fre­quent near-light-speed travel, not a tri­umph of sci­ence over aging or death). Hav­ing left the mil­i­tary far behind, Ender now trav­els the stars, giv­ing truth­ful human­is­tic eulo­gies as a Speaker for the Dead.

A com­plex sequence of events draws him to Lusi­ta­nia, the home of the pig­gies, the third sen­tient species known to humans (after them­selves and the bug­gers from the pre­vi­ous book). A small human colony exists on Lusi­ta­nia, partly for the pur­pose of learn­ing about the appar­ently prim­i­tive pig­gies. Ender’s explicit rea­son for trav­el­ling to Lusi­ta­nia is to speak the deaths of two sci­en­tists who were inex­plic­a­bly mur­dered by the pig­gies they were study­ing. Dis­pute of the actions, natures, and rights of the pig­gies leads to con­flict within the colony as well as between the colony and the Star­ways Congress.

This book opened up to me a genre that I never knew existed: anthro­po­log­i­cal sci­ence fic­tion. Much of the book hinges on the study and under­stand­ing of the pig­gies. Card cre­ates two new types of sci­en­tists to accom­plish this: xenologers to study piggy cul­ture and xeno­bi­ol­o­gists to study piggy biol­ogy. These two fields are inex­tri­ca­bly inter­twined. In study­ing human cul­tures, there are numer­ous givens: the need for cer­tain nutri­ents in food, the method of repro­duc­tion, the meth­ods avail­able for com­mu­ni­ca­tion, the life cycle, etc. In study­ing an alien cul­ture, these things must be stud­ied as well; biol­ogy helps explain cul­ture and vice versa.

Card also some­what explores inter­ac­tion with the pig­gies from philo­soph­i­cal and Chris­t­ian the­o­log­i­cal per­spec­tives. De we treat them as equals, as “human?” How do we view our own place in the uni­verse, with knowl­edge of another extant sen­tient species?

Like Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead is very well writ­ten. The char­ac­ters are very well devel­oped, and it is far deeper than your stan­dard sci­ence fic­tion novel. I eagerly look for­ward to read­ing the last two books in the saga.

The Eight Kather­ine Neville
Bal­lan­tine Books 1990World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

My friend Jeff gave me this book when I was in LA audi­tion­ing for USC. He told me that it has a com­pelling plot, but that it isn’t very well writ­ten. “Good plane read­ing,” he said. I agree com­pletely: The Eight is a real page-turner that had me rolling my eyes at reg­u­lar intervals.

Kather­ine Neville’s 598-page behe­moth has two related plots. The chap­ters alter­nate between rev­o­lu­tion­ary France (and other parts of the world at the same his­tor­i­cal period) and the present day. The plot revolves around the Mont­glane Ser­vice, a fic­tional chess set given to Charle­magne by a Moor­ish lord. Nat­u­rally, the Ser­vice is imbued with unspeak­able ancient power and must be kept out of the wrong hands. The pow­ers of good have pro­tected the Ser­vice for hun­dreds of years, finally split­ting it up and hid­ing it around the globe. This dras­tic mea­sure hap­pens at the begin­ning of the 18^th cen­tury plot. The remain­der of that plot and the 20^th cen­tury plot con­cern keep­ing the Ser­vice out of the hands of power-hungry baddies.

As if this isn’t ridicu­lous enough already, Ms. Neville feels the need to include as many his­tor­i­cal fig­ures as pos­si­ble in her nar­ra­tive. These fig­ures are not merely men­tioned; nearly all of them play an active role in the plot. I’ve already men­tioned Charle­magne, and here’s a par­tial list of the oth­ers: Jacques-Louis David, Charles Mau­rice de Tal­leyrand, Ger­maine de Staël, Car­di­nal Riche­lieu, Voltaire, Cather­ine the Great, Leon­hard Euler, Max­im­i­lien Robe­spierre, André Phili­dor, Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach, Napoleon Bona­parte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, William Blake, Jean Paul Marat, Char­lotte Cor­day, Bene­dict Arnold, James Boswell, Sir Isaac New­ton, Alexan­der Hamil­ton, and Ben­jamin Franklin.

In addi­tion to all these his­tor­i­cal fig­ures, Neville throws in the Freema­sons, the Hashishin, the Baby­lo­ni­ans, the Phoeni­cians, the Egyp­tians, and a num­ber of other ancient cul­tures. She even makes the claim that the secret hid­den within the Mont­glane Ser­vice is what allowed ancient cul­tures to build things like the pyra­mids of Egypt. Because, as we all know, ancient peo­ples were com­pletely igno­rant of things like math­e­mat­ics, archi­tec­ture, engi­neer­ing, and basic physics, and must have had spe­cial help to build their tem­ples and mon­u­ments. At least she doesn’t sug­gest that aliens built the pyramids.

Mov­ing beyond prob­lems of con­tent, I have one huge com­plaint about Neville’s writ­ing style: her use of slap-you-in-the-face fore­shad­ow­ing. She never hints at future plot devel­op­ments; she pep­pers her first-person nar­ra­tive with state­ments like, “Lit­tle did I know that [upcom­ing event] would change my life for­ever!” It’s as though she wants to be damn sure that she never sur­prises the reader with any of her ridicu­lous — yet often pre­dictable — plot developments.

In sum­mary, The Eight is even more ridicu­lous than The Loch in terms of his­tor­i­cal tie-ins. It’s more ridicu­lous than The Da Vinci Code in terms of ancient secrets and inter­na­tional, multi-generational secret soci­eties and con­spir­a­cies. At 598 pages, it’s a lit­tle long for plane read­ing, unless one is stuck with mul­ti­ple flights and long lay­overs. The plot does dis­suade one from putting the book down, but one must take reg­u­lar breaks for eye-rolling and excla­ma­tions of “Oh, come on!”

Ender’s Game (Ender, Book 1) Orson Scott Card
Tor Sci­ence Fic­tion 1994World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

I read this book once before, about 7 years ago. I liked it then, and I enjoyed re-reading it. I revis­ited Ender’s Game because my friend Mike rec­om­mended the whole series (8 books) to me, and loaned me the Ender quartet.

Ender’s Game is set at some unspec­i­fied point in the future. The var­i­ous nations of Earth have joined together in alliances of vary­ing degrees of sta­bil­ity in order to fight an alien men­ace, referred to as “the bug­gers.” Earth’s space-based mil­i­tary iden­ti­fies at a very young age chil­dren who have the poten­tial to become offi­cers. Those selected begin inten­sive train­ing at the age of six. In addi­tion to reg­u­lar stud­ies, they learn mil­i­tary strat­egy, zero-gravity fight­ing, and var­i­ous other skills nec­es­sary for enter­ing bat­tle. Ender in an excep­tion­ally tal­ented child who is spe­cially groomed by those in command.

This is much deeper than your stan­dard sci­ence fic­tion novel. As Orson Scott Card says in his intro­duc­tion to the sec­ond edi­tion, it can be read as sim­ple sci-fi if one desires, but the reader can also choose a far more lit­er­ary approach. The char­ac­ter of Ender is very well devel­oped. More than any­thing, this is the story of a child who is forced to act like an adult at a very early age. Ender is excep­tion­ally gifted, but he still strug­gles with the emo­tional, social, and moral demands of pre­ma­ture adulthood.

On top of being a great book, this is a quick read — I highly rec­om­mend it.

The music of the spheres Eliz­a­beth Red­fern
G.P. Putnam’s Sons 2001World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

This his­tor­i­cal thriller gets off to a promis­ing start. Jonathan Absey, a clerk in Britain’s Home Office, diverts time from his job ana­lyz­ing sus­pi­cious let­ters to search for his daughter’s killer. His dis­cov­ery of a num­ber of sim­i­lar mur­ders leads to an inves­ti­ga­tion of a group of French refugees liv­ing in Eng­land. He sus­pects that not only is there a mur­derer among them, but that at least one of them is a spy for the French Repub­li­cans (the British backed the Roy­al­ist cause). This leads him back to the Home Office, where he finds more sus­pi­cious evi­dence. Absey gets his brother involved, hav­ing him spy on the refugees to uncover both the mur­derer and the spy. Absey chooses his brother because of his accom­plish­ments as an ama­teur astronomer. The French­men in ques­tion are sup­pos­edly astron­omy buffs, and Absey sus­pects that they are send­ing secret mes­sages encoded in what appear to be astro­nom­i­cal observations.

This astro­nom­i­cal ele­ment, which ties into the mur­der inves­ti­ga­tion as well, is quite inter­est­ing. Red­fern obvi­ously did a good deal of research on late 18^th-century astron­omy. She also put alot of effort into recre­at­ing Britain in that era. How­ever, the qual­ity of the work decreases as the plot thick­ens. Jonathan Absey is never exactly like­able. The reader is drawn to him only out of pity as his sit­u­a­tion becomes more and more des­per­ate. None of the other char­ac­ters — of which there are many — are espe­cially like­able, either.

From its promis­ing start, the book devolves into a cum­ber­some mass of sub­plots, some of which could have been trimmed or even removed. Con­fu­sion over lies, espi­onage, and dou­ble agents at times leaves the reader unsure of whom Red­fern intends for us to root. A bizarre and poorly explained twist near the end sealed my low opin­ion of this book. While it begins well, the unsat­is­fy­ing end­ing leaves me unable to rec­om­mend this book, even as a bit of escapist fiction.

Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land & Through the Looking-Glass Lewis Car­roll
Ran­dom House Pub­lish­ing Group 2006World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

In Won­der­land, Lewis Car­roll (real name: Charles Lutwidge Dodg­son) has cre­ated a world that never fails to be sub­limely ridicu­lous. It is pop­u­lated by talk­ing ani­mals, anthro­po­mor­phic objects, and neu­rotic char­ac­ters from nurs­ery rhymes. Car­roll makes lib­eral use of word­play and math­e­mat­i­cal puz­zles or jokes. He also par­o­dies poems and lessons that I assume were well-known at the time he was writing.

I did not read these books as a child — my knowl­edge of Alice came solely from the Dis­ney­ized ver­sion. While the books are cer­tainly won­der­ful for chil­dren, much of the word­play and math play demands a more advanced reader.
Try very hard, when read­ing these books, to find copies which include the orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions by John Ten­niel. His draw­ings cap­ture the sur­real nature of Won­der­land much bet­ter than more recent Dis­neyesque attempts.

The Loch Steve Alten
Tsunami Books 2005World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Let me start by say­ing that this is a very enter­tain­ing book. It’s a real page turner, and I read it over the space of about 36 hours. There, now I’ve got most of the good stuff out of the way.

How can you make a book about the Loch Ness Mon­ster even more ridicu­lous? Why, you get the Knights Tem­plar involved, that’s how. Not only that, but you cre­ate a super-secret Scot­tish sub­set of the sect, and make them Nessie’s keep­ers. Tie all of this in with a mix­ture of real and made-up Scot­tish his­tory (with appear­ances by William Wal­lace and Robert the Bruce), and you have one far-fetched piece of fiction.

There are a cou­ple of recur­rent annoy­ances in this book. One is that every chap­ter is fronted by one or a few (mostly real, I sup­pose) quotes from peo­ple who claim to have seen Nessie. There are only so many ways that one can describe a fleet­ing sight of some­thing that appears to be a large aquatic ser­pent, and they’re all cov­ered in the first few chap­ters. The sec­ond annoy­ance comes in the form of recur­ring entries from the diary of an early Tem­plar. The diary has been “trans­lated” in a pseudo-modern-Scottish dialect, and is printed in a hard-to-read Old Eng­lish font.

If you skim the quotes and the diary entries, then this can be an enjoy­able — albeit ridicu­lous and his­tor­i­cally inac­cu­rate — read.

An atomic romance a novelBob­bie Ann Mason
Ran­dom House 2005World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Mason has cre­ated some very quirk­ily inter­est­ing char­ac­ters in this novel. There’s Reed, a motorcycle-riding astron­omy buff who is a third-generation employee of a ura­nium enrich­ment plant. His on-again, off-again love inter­est, Julia, is a mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gist who stud­ies quan­tum mechan­ics for fun and is staunchly anti-nuke. Reed’s friend Burl is an alco­holic who dab­bles in a num­ber of reli­gions, some­times call­ing him­self Prayer War­rior. The other sup­port­ing char­ac­ters are no less odd. The novel doesn’t have alot of action; most of the inter­est­ing things come out of char­ac­ter inter­ac­tion or intro­spec­tion. It’s a quick read, and pretty enter­tain­ing, but no mas­ter work of literature.

Mid­dle­sex A NovelJef­frey Eugenides
Pic­a­dor 2003World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Mid­dle­sex is pre­sented as the story of a sin­gle gene — the gene that makes Cal, the nar­ra­tor, a her­maph­ro­dite. This gene at times takes acts like a Greek god — it pops into the story to alter the course of human actions, then it dis­ap­pears for awhile. The story of the gene is really the saga of three gen­er­a­tions of a Greek (and later Greek-American) family.

Cal tells the sto­ries of his par­ents and grand­par­ents, draw­ing on a knowl­edge of events prior to his exis­tence that is far more detailed than should be pos­si­ble. He relates not only the actions, but the thoughts and moti­va­tions of a num­ber of peo­ple. This extends into Cal’s own life­time, as well. This appar­ent omni­science, although unlikely, never seems unbe­liev­able within the con­text of the story.

Part fam­ily epic and part com­ing of age story, Cal’s nar­ra­tive is at turns hilar­i­ous, heart-wrenching, insight­ful, poignant, and infor­ma­tive. Eugenides has done a won­der­ful job of bal­anc­ing the inner strug­gles of Cal and other mem­bers of the Stephanides fam­ily with fam­ily issues, and with big-picture issues like war, reli­gion, and race rela­tions. He has beau­ti­fully crafted this tale, mak­ing it a sheer plea­sure to read. The char­ac­ters are quite com­pelling — I want to know more about what hap­pens to Cal later in life. This is the best piece of lit­er­a­ture I have read recently. I will have to add The Vir­gin Sui­cides to my read­ing list.

Flat­land A Romance of Many Dimen­sions (Dover Thrift Edi­tions)Edwin Abbott Abbott
Dover Pub­li­ca­tions 2007World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

This short book com­bines satire of Vic­to­rian Eng­land with the unlikely genre of math­e­mat­i­cal fic­tion. The nar­ra­tor, a quadri­lat­eral lawyer named A. Square, describes his two-dimensional world, called Flat­land. He describes the world’s physics, geog­ra­phy, biol­ogy, and social struc­ture. In a dream, he vis­its Lineland, which only has one dimen­sion. Later, he meets a sphere who pulls him out of Flat­land to visit three-dimensional Space. In each case, the higher-dimensional beings have great dif­fi­culty describ­ing their worlds to their lower-dimensional brethren. By exten­sion, this explains the dif­fi­cul­ties we three-dimensional beings encounter when con­tem­plat­ing higher-dimensional space.

When Flat­land was writ­ten (1884), higher-dimensional space was a purely math­e­mat­i­cal con­cept. In the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, how­ever, it shifted from the realm of hypo­thet­i­cal math to that of the­o­ret­i­cal physics. The rel­e­vance of this book has, as a result, grown since it was first pub­lished. Now, string the­o­rists and M the­o­rists talk about 10-, 26-, and other multi-dimensional spaces. Flat­land pro­vides some per­spec­tive on why we assume the uni­verse to be three-dimensional, and why we find it hard to visu­al­ize space in any other way.

The satir­i­cal aspects of Flat­land are quite good as well. Abbott skew­ers clas­sism, sex­ism, and racism as they were man­i­fested in Vic­to­rian Eng­land. Dif­fer­ent shapes appear as dif­fer­ent classes, with isosce­les tri­an­gles at the bot­tom and poly­gons with so many sides that they are prac­ti­cally indis­tin­guish­able from cir­cles form­ing the top, priestly class. Women, regard­less of the classes of their male rel­a­tives, are always mere straight lines — lower even than the triangles.

Flat­land is quite an inter­est­ing book, and a rel­a­tively quick read (it’s under 100 pages). The writ­ing bogs down a lit­tle at times, though. I found myself reread­ing pas­sages more often than normal.

The Dar­win con­spir­acy John Darn­ton
Alfred A. Knopf 2005World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Darn­ton uses three con­cur­rent plot lines to reveal a fic­tional con­spir­acy that is 150 years old. This takes a lit­tle get­ting used to; he rotates them by chap­ter. Once you’ve got­ten into the story, how­ever, this tech­nique works quite well. In one plot line, two mod­ern day researchers study Dar­win, hop­ing to uncover some­thing new about which to write. The sec­ond story tells of Dar­win on the Bea­gle. The third con­sists entirely of entries in a diary located by the researchers. This diary, which was writ­ten by Lizzie, the Dar­win child about whom the least is known, hints at trans­gres­sions com­mit­ted by Dar­win that made pos­si­ble his rise to fame.

Darn­ton does a very good job with giv­ing the reader all the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion. The best-written mys­ter­ies allow the reader to assem­ble the clues along with or ahead of the protagonist(s). Sto­ries in which a crit­i­cal fact or clue is only revealed in the denoue­ment are much less sat­is­fy­ing. Darn­ton is par­tially guilty of this, how­ever he only with­holds details; the rel­e­vant facts are there. All in all, this book is a good read. At times, the char­ac­ters in the his­tor­i­cal story lines express opin­ions or beliefs that make today’s reader cringe. They are not, how­ever, out of char­ac­ter for upper-class, impe­ri­al­ist, nineteenth-century Britons.