Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being. I am a sucker for an epistolary novel (even a not-quite epistolary novel like this one). A transoceanic correspondence between a lonely 16 year old young woman and an isolated middle-aged writer who can't write. Mystical/mythical/metaphysical and disjointed in time without stupidity or bullshittery. Comic and touching, without irritating or soggy sentiment.

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote. When I read this as a kid, I read it as a straightforward comedic adventure story - I was alternately frustrated with/ amused by/ sorry for the poor knight and horrified/ amused /sympathetic toward Sancho. That's all still there, but after 20 more years loving novels, wow, everything else is there. The line from Quixote to Tristram Shandy continues straight through to every self-aware, playful book I've ever loved.

Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart. Another lovely, surreal, lonely book. Sumire and "K" are more sympathetic and human than most Murakami protagonists and narrator. And I just love, really I do, I love the title.

Alice Munro, Dear Life

Alice Munro, Dear Life. Lean stories. Felt odd to have read some and not others in periodicals.

Jane Smiley, Private Life

Jane Smiley, Private Life. Solid story - interesting: early 20th century - marriage - constrainment of a single woman's role - passivity in private life -  WWI & WWII - Japanese culture in Pacific Northest - paranoia & internment camps - astronomy.

Alice McDermott, Someone

Alice McDermott, Someone. It took me about eight chapters to confirm that, no I had not actually read this particular book before, because I kept thinking 'Oh god, not this book again'.

Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Gave this book to my mother based entirely on the title. Not what I expected, but funny. And timely, as my youngest has a non-human primate obsession at the moment.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot. Thin. Stupid.

Robin Sloane, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Robin Sloane, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. This is a cute little silly story. At first you think is is going to descend into a lugubrious "one big misunderstanding" sort of book, but it stays light and funny. And for what it's worth, it is infinitely better that The Circle (which tried to be a funny satire of current technological and social trends and failed dreadfully - Mr. Penumbra has some of the same topical Google-ly stuff, also a little ridiculous, but without the strident whining and bitterness).

More scifi and fantasy

Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth, The Long War, and The Long Mars. These are good, although there are some problematic aspects that would take me a long and careful post to explain. But the Long Earth idea is compelling and fruitful.

George R.R. Martin (and others), Dangerous Women (anthology): some good, some great, and some terrible stories.

Lev Grossman, The Magician's land. OK, this is actually really fun.

Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes

Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes. I love these lonely and strange short stories.

Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure

Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure. I love, love, Gary Shteyngart. I would forgive him anything, even Super Sad True Love Story, after Absurdistan, but no forgiveness is needed. This memoir is wonderful, funny, bitter, angry, and kind. I shrieked and snorted on the bus while reading, apologies to fellow commuters, and aren't you glad I usually bike. I have a dear friend who emigrated from the USSR in the late 80s as well, and so many of her reminisces, particularly food related ones, make so much more sense to me now. Beet everything, dill and salt sandwiches? Of course.

Martha Grimes, some older Jury/Plant mysteries

Martha Grimes, The Man with a Load of Mischief, Jerusalem Inn, I am the Only Running Footman. Grimes back when her RJ series was good. Man with a Load more so, Footman less so. Love Melrose, love Wiggins, love her comic relief - so much better than forced sadness. Although to be fair, when she tries, Grimes hits the melancholic notes with the best (The End of the Pier, Hotel Paradise).

Matthew Quick, The Good Luck of Right Now

Matthew Quick, The Good Luck of Right Now. This story of a non-neurotypical adult dealing with the loss of his mother and only friend started with both comedy and a potential for uniqueness, but devolved into sugary predictability.

Lev Grossman, The Magicians and The Magician King

Lev Grossman, The Magicians and The Magician King. Harry Potter and his friends go to Narnia in college. Better than you'd expect, and fun to read. The rare sequel that is better than the first, partly because there is an actual female character rather than stage prop, if she is a bit flat - so are the rest of them.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

George Eliot, Middlemarch. I enjoyed this so much more than the first time. I have more sympathy for the constrained choices and maddening behaviors of the young women, probably because I no longer identify with them. I think that it tied up too neatly with happy endings for all honesty, but it does make for a satisfied glow at the finish.

Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman

Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman. The story of the OED. I've always been fascinated and puzzled by the creation of dictionaries - how would you write the first one? Apparently, by reading every book and writing down every word and quotes of it used in every context. The story of the people who created the dictionary (an army of volunteers including one notable murderer and lunatic) was interesting, but I enjoyed the dictionary parts more. I think I read the wrong book, as the author has written another book about the venerable dictionary focusing on the work itself.

G. B. Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page

G. B. Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page. An obstinate, garrulous, and witty old man recounts his life spanning two world wars on the island of Guernsey. He tells the story of his friends, family, and neighbors and of the way of life and language that have disappeared. And best, it is a funny book, full of zeal and enjoyment rather than exclusively nostalgia.

Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding

Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding. This was lovely. I actually enjoy books about self-centered brattish women that are developed as characters, in part because they are quite rare.

John Fowles, The Magus

John Fowles, The Magus. Just horrible. Another self-centered, privileged asshole is not narcissistic enough, so he goes to a Greek island where a sociopathic millionaire makes the entire world actually revolve around him. Really well written, but so full of nasty people I felt bile rising at the finish.

More light reading

Been reading some fun stuff between the cracks lately. E.L Konigsburg, The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place. A cute story about a girl's relationship with her elderly uncles and the giant scrap metal towers they built in their back yard. George R.R. Martin, Tuf Voyaging. A portly cat loving intergalactic trader acquires god-like powers. Daniel Pinkwater, The Afterlife Diet. Heaven for chubby people and diet book scams.

Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

Jennifer Egan, Look at Me. I don't have much patience for meditations on the meaning of self in the digital age, and the central conceit of the faceless model didn't convince me. But the language is lovely, and the whole book is rich enough to hold even with a weak thread or two.  I loved some of the themes, particularly the vanished industrial America still  present at the liminal intersections.  Much of the story was set in Rockford, IL, a town I know well, and where this past country still lurches on, decaying and undead, looming over the present.

John Scalzi, Redshirts

John Scalzi, Redshirts. Wouldn't those poor crew members on the Enterprise figure out something was up?

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. A most elaborate autobiography as a set for a series of dick jokes: the jokes are related with such delight and propriety, however, that it would be inhuman not to enjoy them.

Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City. I thought it was a novel about the world's fair in Chicago, judging by the cover, but instead it was a novelized non-fiction account of a disgusting and ingenious serial murderer operating in Chicago during the world's fair. Maybe it was good, and it was certainly fascinating, but I wanted to bathe in sand and bleach and remove my mind after reading.

Saladin Ahmed, Throne of the Crescent Moon

Saladin Ahmed, Throne of the Crescent Moon. A truly enjoyable swords & sorcery story - the best kind of genre - smart, funny, with a set of evil-fighting wise-cracking mismatched heroes that are fun to walk around a city with. (Chapter one as well as a short story are on the author's site.)

Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke. Why do I keep reading books about the Vietnam war? They all make me want to gouge out my eyes. This one though, is good. In a  (lazy & unable to encapsulate the plot meaningfully) list of adjectives: senseless, horrible, bleak, funny. Like Catch-22 but even more depressing.

James Joyce, Ulysses

James Joyce, Ulysses. A really great reading by John Lee with an accent you can chew on - I found I missed some aspects of the text by listening, but also gained some hilarity by listening to a speaker read the lines. Did I mention that it's funny? Don't let Joyce's reputation scare you -  slide along with with the words and be entertained.

Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire

Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire. Michael Pollan is always enjoyable, even though sometimes  a little hyperbolic in his arguments. At least he lists his sources. Anyway, a history of agriculture or plant and human co-evolution using the apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato as examples. Fascinating, particularly the history of the domestication of the apple. At lunch with a couple of Braeburns between us, a Kazakh friend told me that the city of Almaty is named for apples and wild apples of all strange sorts grow around it. I also like to think of the reproductive strategy of the plants in domestication - reminds me of successful pathogen evolution, but more beneficial.

Jennifer Egan, A Visit From The Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan, A Visit From The Goon Squad. Rock and roll doesn't age gracefully.

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way. Do a few moment of poignant and transcendent beauty make unending pages of boredom worthwhile? Probably, but there it is.

Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child

Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child. A beautiful fairy-tale about a mysterious girl appearing to a lonely  pioneer couple - they love her as their longed-for child - and she brings them a love of the wildlife and wild country of Alaska. The story is a rare snapshot of frontier life that illustrates the deep pleasures that the environment provides as well as the hardships.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield. One of the few books I ever refused to finish as a child - I was deeply disgusted by Uriah Heep and irritated with Little Eml'y. I still have complicated feelings about Dickens - love, frustration, exasperation, anger - but I do enjoy revisiting him on occasion. D.C. was much much funnier than I remembered and Betsy Trotwood nearly made up for the horrible Eml'y and Dora. And as the ridiculous coincidences pile up the slapped-on sentimentality acquires its own hilarity.  But really, nothing like Dickens to make one glad one is not living in Victorian England without a penis.

Nicola Griffith, Hild

Nicola Griffith, Hild. Wonderful. Immersive and beautifully crafted historical fiction on par with Wolf Hall.

Sci-fi and children's books and odds and ends

So, a super fast run down of some of the fun things I've been reading for respite while writing a science review paper:
Super creepy, liked that the protagonist was terribly bossy and a perfectionist and that these qualities were both positive and were abused by the horrible insect-y villains: Claire Legrand, The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls.
Reading Ryan North's choose your own path Hamlet To Be or Not To Be with the kids, too much fun - you can choose to be the ghost, Ophelia, Polonius, or Hamlet (Jr).  And, I got the Humble eBook Bundle 3 (which To Be or Not to Be was part of) and enjoyed most of the books, especially the silly and fun Arcanum 101 by Rosemary Edghill and Mercedes Lackey and Mogworld by Yahtzee Croshaw and the extremely silly Zombies Vs. Unicorns anthology.
Oh, and Chris Jones and Zach Weinersmith's Twins in Time, a picture book about the relativistic traveling twins of many physics textbooks, is adorable.
William Gibson & Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine, which I could have sworn I read already but had not, is a little disappointing but has fascinating aspects.
David Rakoff's essays, Half Empty, are neither children's nor science fiction but are completely delightful.
And I am discovering Christina Rossetti, whose work I unaccountably missed growing up except for a few anthologized poems, and she is absolutely worth the read. Fantasy fans in particular should reread The Goblin Market and then read anything by Neil Gaiman.
Terry Pratchett's The Carpet People was very cute and we also just listened to The Wee Free Men for the five millionth time and can't recommend it enough.
Reread The Once and Future King, still love it. Listened to the audiobook of the the first book, The Sword in the Stone with the family and it is wonderful and was much faster than when I read it out loud and Neville Jason's voices were much better.

Hilary Mantel, Vacant Possession

Hilary Mantel, Vacant Possession. A social thriller in contemporary Britain. Not a gigantic feast like the Cromwell books, but Mantel can really write. A little too creepy for me, but I am terrible with anything scary.

Annie Dillard, The Living

Annie Dillard, The Living. An interesting, rambling novel about several families of settlers and Native Americans  in the Pacific Northwest. Not as precious as some Dillard, but not as lovely as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. 

Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party

Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party. A thin book like a play: a dying man lies motionless as all the people in his life enter and exit around him. The loss and confusion and remembered joys  overlap with the disintegration of the structure of the country they left behind. They loved it, they hated it, they fled it. They longed for it, they lived their lives in opposition to it, and they thought it would last forever.

Padraic Colum, The Golden Fleece

Padraic Colum, The Golden Fleece. Really nice retelling of Jason and the Argonauts and other stories from Greek mythology. Recommended to read out loud if you have a fan of the Percy Jackson books.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit

Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit. Loved it. Such a blast. TR is an honorary member of the family. Learned a ton about the progressive movement and the history of the american political system that I didn't know. So many fascinating people, lovingly rendered. Many imaginary coffee dates and dinner parties with the journalists, activists, politicians, and their families.

Charles Portis, True Grit.

Charles Portis, True Grit. The audiobook (from the humble audiobook bundle) read by Donna Tartt. Great adventure story, loving narration.

Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind

Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: occasional essays. Smith's essays are always perfect. I will buy or borrow any magazine to read one, so a collection is a great pleasure.

Dave Eggers, The Circle

Dave Eggers, The Circle.  Eggers is entertaining, but this makes Swift seem the subtlest satirist. At least eight eyerolls per chapter. And the wise hirsute visionary Thoreau ex-boyfriend? Sheesh. Or I should say: Downvote. Unfriend. ☹ Frown.

Paul Harding, Enon

Paul Harding, Enon. Not the intricate elaboration of melancholy in Tinkers, but the excruciating corrosion of grief.

Daniel Pinkwater, Uncle Boris in the Yukon

Daniel Pinkwater, Uncle Boris in the Yukon. Shaggy dog stories. I laughed so hard. And read bits out loud to my long suffering family. "If one is going to grow up in a certain kind of family - I like to think of it as precivilized - it's a good thing to have some basis for understanding it early."

Juan Gabriel Vasquez, The Sound of Things Falling

Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling. Translated by Anne McLean. A story about about fear, the aftershock of random violence, and  the detachment of a young law professor in Bogotá.

Ian Pears, Stone's Fall

Ian Pears, Stone's Fall. Great fun. I actually listened to this one rather than read it and the cast of readers (many who read the Game of Thrones books) made the structure of different narrators of different facets more interesting. Not as fabulous as The Evidence of the Fingerpost, (or at least the setting wasn't as enthralling to me - I prefer natural philosophy to the origins of modern financial markets), but another intricately detailed period mystery that I was reluctant to leave.

Start this up again, beginning to forget both authors and titles and am useless in conversation.

Well, some things I have read and enjoyed (or not) over the last few months:
Jonathan Dee, A Thousand Pardons; Jami Attenburg, The Middlesteins; Emma Donogue, Astray; George Saunders, Tenth of December; Julia Stuart, The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise [yuck, sentimental and awkward, although occasionally funny]; Terry Pratchett, Unseen Acedemicals, Going Postal, and Making Money [these last two very good]; Macbeth; Michael Crumney, Galore; Twelfth Night; Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories [read these ONE at a time if you don't want to drown yourself in your morning coffee]; Charlotte Bronte, Wuthering Heights [I liked this more than I did when I was twelve, although I still think every character should have been drowned at birth]; All of the Adventure Time comics;  David Rakoff, Love,Dishonour, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish; Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half; China Meiville, Railsea [not my favorite Meiville]; All of Dorothy Sayers Lord Peter books [necessary therapy]; DFW, Oblivion; Robert Charles Wilson, Spin; Haruki Murakami, After Dark and IQ84; Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo [more hilarious than I remembered]; Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch; Nick Harkaway, The Gone Away World [enjoyed very much, no one agrees with me, dammit].

Rilla Askew, The Mercy Seat

Rilla Askew, The Mercy Seat. Two related families migrate to the Oklahoma frontier in grinding poverty amidst the family drama and tragedy that they had been fleeing. The environment is so alive that you can taste the dust and smell the mules, but the whole spirit and story didn't grab me.

Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island

Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island. Bryson can be engaging and chatty but this book was like being trapped on a greyhound bus with a dull and cantankerous old codger who will not shut up about how the world was so much more interesting and difficult in his youth and how people are so boring to talk to on buses nowadays.

Neal Stephenson, Reamde

Neal Stephenson, Reamde. Just too much fun. And made me want to play Skyrim or something. It reminded me of Cryptonomicon in its pace and plot and I enjoyed it so much I just re-read Snow Crash.

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Certainly precious, and not as hilarious as Everthing is Illuminated. But you know, sentimental is ok if it's convincing and I did love Oskar. I am a sucker for precocious children. I loved his grandmother. I loved the friends he made. I like the letters and the narration - I wish his mother had had a voice. Somehow though, I felt emotionally manipulated and I don't think Foer lives up to his promise.

E. B. White, One Man's Meat

E. B. White, One Man's Meat. I really love E. B. White and he is always a pleasure to read. However, this collection of essays written for serial publication in Harper's from his refuge on a saltwater farm was mildly self-indulgent. That said, I am the child of parents who removed themselves to a hobby farm and raised chickens (while continuing to support the family with a white collar job), and this might be why I kept rolling my eyes.

T.C. Boyle, World's End

T.C. Boyle, World's End. One of those multi-generational stories with recurring characters and layered events. Set in New York state and stretching from Dutch colonialists and their vassals to their descendants in the 1960s. Many funny moments and bits of fabulous description but disappointing. At times the twisting of the plot interfered with the parts of the story that could have been more satisfying. I love Boyle's wordplay but not his people.

Aimee Bender, An Invisible Sign of My Own

Aimee Bender, An Invisible Sign of My Own. A fun, whimsical story of young Mona Gray, lover of numbers and of knocking on wood.

John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed

John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed. An hilarious story of an eccentric vicar and his family in the postwar years.

Jonathan Dee, The Privileges

Jonathan Dee, The Privileges. Ew. What crap people. I though at first it was going to be a witty social comedy and then I thought it would be a financial thriller, but it fell flat on all fronts.

Patti Smith, Just Kids

Patti Smith, Just Kids. I found the writing style exasperatingly earnest, but I felt affection for Patti and enjoyed her story of friendship and adventure with Robert Mappelthorpe. The photographs were lovely.

Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge

Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge. A pretty story of Vietnamese-American immigrants and the aftermath of the Vietnam war in their lives here. It's a traditional format: a daughter recounts her experience in America as an immigrant and her complex relationship with her mother and her gradual understanding of her own history through that of her mother unfolds.

Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands

Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will. Since being cabin-boy on an Antarctic expedition is not in my future, this book was a good substitute for exploring barren, desolate, and weird landmasses without the risk of scurvy or mutiny. In short, a perfect atlas for those of us afflicted with severe motion sickness who also possess an unrequited love for seagoing exploration.

Tim Dorsey, Nuclear Jellyfish

Tim Dorsey, Nuclear Jellyfish. The adventures of the insane and hyperkinetic travel writer/hotel vigilante/florida arcana enthusiast Serge A. Storms are wild, crass, and funny. However they're also formulaic and a little stale - unforgivable for gonzo slapstick.

Augusten Burroughs, Magical Thinking

Augusten Burroughs, Magical Thinking. Well, he seems to have become a bit happy and metaphorically plump, but he's still delightfully narcissistic.

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge. Once again, a book about parents and children, but this one hangs together in a way that Amy and Isabelle didn't. Perhaps because Olive carries and fills the book by force of character alone. A story of love and kindness and anger; the edge between despair and managing to muddle along each day.

Abraham Verghese, My Own Country

Abraham Verghese, My Own Country. Verghese tells his own story of being an infectious disease doctor in the 1980's in rural Tennessee. A moving personal history of the AIDs epidemic in America: sometimes a little clunky and in need of editing, other times dated in language and perspective, still a riveting story and one we need to remember.

Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses

Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses. I expected a bit more from this primer on viruses.

Geraldine Brooks, March

Geraldine Brooks, March. So, this book is about Mr. March (you remember his four daughters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy?) while he was with the union army. It ends with the reunion with his wife and daughters after his grave illness. It was fine, I suppose. It must be hard to superimpose a story onto one that is so indelible. Made me want to read a book about the actual Alcotts. Are there any good books about Fruitlands? Perhaps Transcendental Wild Oats? I will see if I can find it.

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The story of Henrietta Lacks, her family, and her cells. A riveting glimpse of history.

Theodore Gray, The Elements

Theodore Gray, The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe. Unexpectedly delightful. I bought the book for the pictures and ended up reading it cover to cover. A hilarious, opinionated, and above all fascinating window into the world of the elements. Who knew Boron could be so interesting?

Teresa Marrone, Abundantly Wild

Teresa Marrone, Abundantly Wild: Collecting and Cooking Wild Edibles in the Upper Midwest. This book had me eating all the weeds in my garden immediately. I was excited to find out that violet leaves as well as the flowers are delicious in salads, since this year violets are half of my lawn (not to mention my lettuce patch). I also tried burdock root, which tasted like a watery Jerusalem artichoke - definitely not worth the effort of digging two feet deep in clay. Pig's ear and plantain (the low broad-leaf weed, not the banana relative) are two more weeds I won't bother to pick out of the spinach patch. I also recognized quite a few wild berries or fruits that I will try later this season. (Don't fear for the health of my family, they won't even try wild raspberries, so all risk of accidental ingestion and poison ivy contact is mine alone). Recipes are included, but I generally just ate my experiments raw. As a guide this could be very useful, with pictures of leaves, fruits and flowers, detailed descriptions of dangerous lookalikes, and information about season and habitat. I wouldn't be comfortable eating a plant I wasn't already able to identify, though, so the information on which plants are edible is more useful than the identification guide. More than for its utility, I enjoyed this guide for the chatty tone and the author's infatuation with all things growing. She often exhorts to take just one leaf(!) from a plant, or describes the odd places that she has found specimens. This book perfectly fulfills the function of a wildlife guide in that it opens your eyes to the world around you and leaves you itching to get outside.

David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper

David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper. A fun thriller set in the exciting world of stock-jobbery, corporate intrigue, organized crime, and thief-taking in eighteenth century London.

Orson Scott Card, Seventh Son

Orson Scott Card, Seventh Son. In a north American frontier where superstition and magic work and persist, an unimaginably powerful young boy only survives because more powerful forces are protecting him than trying to kill him. Eh. The first of Card's I've read and probably the last. It was fine, but not great in any way.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead. So lovely that I read it with my heart in my mouth, afraid to breathe. Exactly how I feel about the beauty of this world.

Paul Harding, Tinkers

Paul Harding, Tinkers. A intricate and beautiful book, nearly a poem written to the richness of the world and the wonder of stopping in it. How much of self is memory and how much we live in a remembered world of our senses - all our loves and the beauty we encounter in some phantom connection of our neurons, ready to replay at the encounter of a lost trigger or to escape into entropy.

Nick Hornby, How to Be Good

Nick Hornby, How to Be Good. Funny. And surprisingly it actually was about how to be good. Or at least how a middle class middle-aged middling unhappy family attempts to be good. But I hated it at the end and I thought they were all horrible people.

Machine of Death

Machine of Death: a collection of stories about how people who know they will die. The friend who recommended this told me that the stories vary widely in quality, but some of them are delightful. She was right. And it's fun to see an idea stretched and pulled into every imaginable configuration.

A. S. Byatt, The Children's Book

A. S. Byatt, The Children's Book. My favorite Byatt so far, with an intricate and engrossing setting, and characters to really care for. Olive and Humphrey Wellwood, their many children, and those in the orbit of their complicated family live in a world of fairy tales (not the Disney kind), radical politics, arts and crafts, and family secrets. The story is set in England during the years 1895-1917. It's a time and place that I sometimes think I own, or that a large chunk of my mind inhabits. Those of us who grew up reading AA Milne, E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame, and all the stories that grew from those roots probably feel the same. Despite this, I only lately began to learn about the history and politics of the time itself from a vantage outside of mystery novels and children's books (admittedly, mostly by reading Wikipedia articles about various Fabians and other contemporaneous celebrities after rediscovering E. Nesbit), so this story was a perfect pick for me by my mom (thanks!).

Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Changez, a young man, tells a stranger his journey from Lahore to New York and back again. A beautiful little narrative, composed so that it seemed a lost story by Camus. But despite its precise beauty, I never quite felt the emotion.

Jingo and Sourcery, Terry Pratchett

Jingo and Sourcery, Terry Pratchett. Commander Vimes and the Ankh-Morpork Watch dabble in international diplomacy, submarine-ing, and, er, military tactics in Jingo. Rincewind and the Luggage save the world again in Sourcery. I've been saving these since Christmas (thank you Maddo) for stressful situations. Combined with a half-dozen Dorothy Sayers mysteries they contained enough fun to get me through a small patch of anxiety and grinding drudgery.

David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System

David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System. I loved the silliness and the muchness of words. Oh- and the Great Ohio Desert.

Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road

Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road. A swashbuckling little adventure.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook. A "free woman", erstwhile communist, and novelist who has lost faith in writing keeps four notebooks separating the strands of her life. Quite beautifully written. It was strange however, that a book with such radical topics had such stereotypical and rigid sexual relationships- the recurring theme was that all "real women" are looking for a "real man" to dominate them physically and emotionally- very strange, especially because there was no sense of awareness of the incongruity.

Jane Austen, Emma

Jane Austen, Emma. Thought I'd give it another try, although I took such an intense dislike to Elizabeth Bennet when I was young that it leaked over to the rest of Austen. It's too bad, because she does write lovely novels. But Emma makes Elizabeth look like Marie Curie or Joan of Arc. And it's very hard to be interested in any of the lazy, stuck-up, country gentlefolk in this book. What a lot of totally useless people convinced of their own innate superiority and good breeding who do nothing but visit each other and eat food that other people make for them.

Agatha Christie, Postern of Fate

Agatha Christie, Postern of Fate. A Tommy and Tuppence mystery that I had never read, though I had looked for it - I thought it was called "The Laurels". Not the best mystery, but Tuppence attempting to sort old children's books and continually getting lost in them was adorable.

Lucia Nevai, Salvation

Lucia Nevai, Salvation. Crane and her siblings were born in a squatter's shack to the alcoholic trio of a hooker, a lunatic, and a pool-hustler/failed revival evangelist and were starved and left to fend for themselves for a decade or so. Crane was eventually adopted by a sweet childless couple and renamed Princess (she learned to read and became a talented young scientist). I was never quite able to suspend my disbelief and really enter into the story, fun as it was. Perhaps if it had been set anywhere other than Iowa - who could believe the neighbors minded their own business for eleven years?

Arthur Phillips, The Egyptologist

Arthur Phillips, The Egyptologist. A clever, tangled, and darkly humorous book about a man obsessed with immortality and a certain nebulously extant pharaoh famous for off-color hieroglyphs. I should have enjoyed it, but it made me feel a little sick; I couldn't stomach the grotesque unwinding of the plot.

Jonathan Stroud, The Ring of Solomon

Jonathan Stroud, The Ring of Solomon. Another sneak peek at a Christmas book, this is a prequel to the Bartimaeus trilogy. Bartimaues, the djinni-hero-narrator is just as hilarious, vain, garrulous, and generally entertaining as in the first three books.

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom. Fantastic; every bit as good as The Corrections. Exactly what a novel should be.

John le Carre, Our Kind of Traitor

John le Carré, Our Kind of Traitor. A young English couple on an island holiday get entangled with an international criminal and his children. You know what to expect: wistful characters, (either idealistic and naive or idealistic and exhausted by a lifetime of compromise and operational gray areas) in situations fraught with moral ambiguity, political urgency, and human feeling. Not as amazing as A Most Wanted Man, but another solid, well-crafted novel.

John Updike, Toward the End of Time

John Updike, Toward the End of Time. All right, John, here's the deal. I love you, but I can't keep doing this anymore. I don't know why I keep reading your often mediocre and sometimes horrible novels. This book was generally muddled and and sort of limping along, but it was the combination of lazy interpretations of cosmology and particle physics and the absolutely florid and often astoundingly gross descriptions (you deserved this award, and let's leave it at that) that forced me to this. Your lovely language and gift for recognizable and heartbreaking description (and let's face it, when you're good, you're really really good) just aren't worth it right now. I'm not reading anything of yours for a year. Not even that nice volume of short stories I found. A year from now, I'll pretend like this never happened and start over again with your Rabbit books.

Suzanne Collins, Gregor the Overlander and The Hunger Games

Suzanne Collins, Gregor the Overlander and The Hunger Games. We have a bad habit in my family of sampling the books we buy for each other before giving them. Anyway, these were fine and pretty well written. Gregor was a story about a young boy going on a mission in a mysterious land to save his father and the kingdom, with the adorable twist that he has to carry his two year-old sister on his back the entire time. The Hunger Games was fun, fast-paced and thrilling (like watching the novel's horrible gladiatorial television show of the same name, no doubt) but I found it a little hollow.

Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere. Better than American Gods. More than a little reminiscent of the Sandman series. Richard Mayhew (a forgettable Neo-ish regular guy) accidentally falls through the cracks into the goth-ish world of London Underground and ends up a hero. Reads like a screenplay and you can just see the costumes (ah, wikipedia just told me that Gaiman wrote it as a television series first, which explains that, although in my mind the marquis de Carabas must be played by Johnny Depp).

Sholom Aleichem, Selected Stories.

Sholom Aleichem, Selected Stories. Found a lovely copy of these at a used book store; they were not what I expected. Let's just say that you will already know some of these short, hilarious stories about life in the fictional Eastern European town of Kasrilevka.

Jacqueline Winspear, Birds of a Feather

Jacqueline Winspear, Birds of a Feather. An ok detective story, I suppose, with Maisie Dobbs as a doubly unconventional private investigator in 1930 London. But intuition, psychology, and mind-body awareness are not the most interesting of investigation methods or conversation topics; and while the background was great, the plot was only unoffensive. I didn't really fall for Maisie, either (internal dialogue can be too explicitly voiced and make a hero boring).The blurb on the back said "If you like classic mysteries you'll love... " - that may be true, but then again, if you like classic mysteries you might like classic mysteries better.

Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Rock-and-roll, gods and superstars, myth, earthquakes, colliding worlds. Big and florid.

Technology

So I've been reading on my smartphone, substituting reading free ebooks for my old favorite vices of sudoku and crossword puzzles. I really enjoyed Secret Adversary (by Agatha Christie - a Tommy and Tuppence!) and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which I hadn't read in ages and had totally forgotten. But one of my favorite books, Notes from the Underground, was a little frustrating to read on a three-inch screen so I gave up and dug it off my bookshelf to finish. I think that phone reading is better suited for less complex reading or at least shorter sentences, as it's tough to focus when flipping the pages so frequently, something a bigger screen would help. I can't imagine how horrible it would be to read Henry James on a phone - it would take three screens per phrase.

If I could read in the bathtub with one, I might buy an eReader device of some sort (especially for magazines and journal articles - I print out way too many pdfs). But I think I am too attached to paper books to ever really change over. I like to lend books, to give them away, to browse through piles of them, to acquire them on curbs from dejected little heaps. I still remember plunking down my Christmas money to buy my first book on my own. It was a paperback copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and I read it 28 times in a row, memorized it, and eventually made a replacement cover for it out of gold foil and candy-wrappers.

Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks

Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks. Four children on summer vacation at a country estate with a dead mother, affectionate yet preoccupied father, and rambunctious family dog. They have adventures, get into scrapes, stick up for each other and make new friends while facing all sorts of obstacles. Sounds familiar, right? The story is explicitly reminiscent of E Nesbit and Edward Eager and CS Lewis - and mentions by the children of really good books are themselves a tradition in these sorts of stories.

Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down

Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down. Good. Emotionally convoluted, dramatic, and far-fetched but also emotionally convincing. Beautiful language goes a long way.

Julian Barnes, The Porcupine

Julian Barnes, The Porcupine. The narration of the trial of a deposed party leader after the fall of the USSR. The slyly understated dialogue of the prosecutor and the accused reminded me of Camus.

Jon Fasman, The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman, The Geographer's Library. Eh. Pretty lame despite some fun details and a decent plot. The journalist/investigator protagonist was a brat. And I'm tired of alchemy, anyway. Not like this, not the historical proto-chemistry (however mystical), but like philosopher's stone, immortality, secret societies, blah blah blah. I can just watch Indiana Jones or something.

Virginia Rounding, Catherine The Great.

Virginia Rounding, Catherine The Great: Love, Sex, and Power. This was recommended by the ladies at Stuff You Missed in History Class. Don't be fooled by the titillating subtitle - this book is perhaps less shocking then any old Russian novel. Catherine did have a series of young favorites, but she and those around her were unfailingly discreet. Catherine is a fascinating figure and the biography itself was decent, and seem to get better and less awkward as it went along. Early in the book it felt as though someone comfortable with more academic prose was trying a bit too hard to be relaxed and conversational. Catherine's letters and those of her friends and visitors to her court were wonderful and the author did a great job of framing people's words; for example pointing out that certain correspondence was often intended to be intercepted and read by people other than the adressee - a sort of free advertising or propaganda. Catherine's letters to Voltaire, for example, were intended for a wider audience. Some letters were just fun to read - the long and frank correspondence between Catherine and her dear friend and art dealer Friedrich Melchior Grimm, full of details about her grandchildren, dogs, and daily life - made her absolutely come to life. Catherine lived in such a fascinating time, right at the beginning of our modern age, and how she managed to efficiently adopt an new country and religion, take it over in a neat coup, efficiently rule and expand a vast empire (based on serfdom) with the longest reign of any Tsar, while simultaneously maintaining within herself at least the ideal of an enlightened ruler modernizing and improving Russia, is incredible.