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.

Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society

Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society. An extremely gifted team of orphan children must save the world on their own while deep undercover at a shadowy and Brave-new-world-ish sinister academy. Cute, funny, vaguely unoriginal. I am passing it on to my little brother Ben, who I think will enjoy it more than I did.

Daniel Pinkwater, The Education of Robert Nifkin

Daniel Pinkwater, The Education of Robert Nifkin. Started reading it out loud in the car to the boys (we recently enjoyed listening to The Neddiad on tape), realized it was a little out of their age bracket and finished it up to myself. Hilarious. Home room, commie infiltration of ROTC, his parents' furnishing misadventures; Robert Nifkin relates his high school (and delinquency) experience in the best Pinkwater deadpan.

Jonathan Stroud, The Bartimaeus Trilogy

Jonathan Stroud, The Bartimaeus Trilogy. The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem's Eye, and Ptolemy's Gate. I loved these. A really fun and funny well-written trilogy. Bartimaus (the sometimes snarky, extremely famous, quite accomplished, infinitely clever, fabulously powerful, and ever modest djinni-narrator) is priceless.

Philip Roth, Exit Ghost

Philip Roth, Exit Ghost. I was going to complain that this book was exactly the same as the last Roth book I read, but to be fair, it was a little better put together than Indignation. But nothing about Zuckerman's (it's another Zuckerman book) terminal obsession with decay and impotence was interesting or even novel - and even in his impotence and senility he can't narrate one damn female character that is anything more than the object of sexual fetish - no life of their own beyond a mirror for their men to gaze into. But really - the only reason I can't forgive this book is that there was not one damn beautiful or funny or amazing moment in it - it was stale and tired, a meandering waste of time.