Heat (2006)

I read Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford (2006), thanks to the lovely Choo who has an unlimited number of books that she is always graciously willing to loan.

Buford is a journalist (including 16 years as an editor for Granta, and a stint as the fiction editor for The New Yorker). After inviting Mario Batali to a dinner party, he decides to write a profile on Batali and his restaurant, Babbo, and embarks on a lengthy research-based journey as a slave in the Babbo kitchen -- chopping, carrying, picking, grating, braising, and boiling his way up to a spot in the kitchen during dinner service. Then after a brief period back at his desk job, Buford quits everything and goes back to Babbo.

This section of the book is an equal mix of profiles of the eccentric members of the kitchen staff, revelations of "shocking" kitchen secrets (Mario thinks the pasta dough is kneaded for 45 minutes, but they really only knead it for 10 minutes if he isn't around!), a history of Batali's education as a chef, and detailed descriptions of the work of a professional kitchen. It's this last part that was most interesting to me, and Buford's status as an outsider on the inside makes him a perfect guide. Since I don't have cable and have never seen "Molto Mario" or any of Batali's other shows, the biographical profile of him as a chef and the "behind the scenes" look at his personality was a little less interesting to me (although he is a pretty engaging character, so I got on board with him pretty quickly).

In the second half of the book, Buford follows the steps of the pre-Babbo Batali and goes to Italy to learn how to make pasta and later, to apprentice himself to a volatile and impulsive Tuscan butcher. Oddly enough, the fictional biography of Michelangelo that I read a few weeks ago takes place primarily in this same region of Italy, and I found a lot of overlap between Buford's historical profiling of the region and Irving Stone's meticulous recreation of the 15th century Tuscan countryside.

Luckily for me, Dr. M cooked exclusively pasta dishes this week, so I got a taste of the Italian food that I was reading about every day. This book made me very hungry.

If you have an interest in Italian cooking, the New York restaurant scene, or the life of a professional chef, then you won't go wrong reading this book. At the end Buford hints at a future book exploring French cooking in the same way, and I would love to read it.

Though I Know She Lies (1965)

Though I Know She Lies (1965) is a solid mystery novel by Sara Woods, and is one of the nearly 50 "Antony Maitland" mysteries that she wrote in her 25 year career.

Antony Maitland is an English barrister who often works alongside his Uncle, Sir Nicholas -- who is also a barrister, although a much more orthodox one than his creative and hunch-filled nephew. Antony is called in by his uncle to do a little investigating on his case defending a beautiful woman who has been accused of murdering her sister. The case has just gone to trial, so there isn't much time, and Antony soon finds himself tied in knots around a series of witnesses who are all obviously lying, but about different things and for different reasons. And although Antony and the rest of the defense want to believe that their captivating client is innocent, they all suspect that they may just be duped by her beauty into wanting her to go free.

This is an engaging mystery with fun twists, turns, and red herrings, and a satisfying ending. If you like mystery novels, then I don't see how you could go wrong with Antony Maitland and his crotchety uncle.

The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961)

I've read one other Irving Stone book (The President's Lady -- a goofy historical romance based on Andrew Jackson and his wife), and while I am a total sucker for historical fiction, I didn't get into Stone's writing style at all. Why then did I just read the extremely long The Agony and the Ecstasy: the biographical novel of Michelangelo, and why do I also own (and plan to read) his Lust for Life, a fictional novel of the life of Van Gogh? The answer might be that I am a fast reader who will read anything. I'm also pretty patient and forgiving if I'm interested in the subject. However, even with all these qualifications, The Agony and the Ecstasy was a bit of a chore to get through.

Stone spent several years researching this epic novelization of the 90 year life of Michelangelo. He lived in Florence and Rome, had all of Michelangelo's letters and papers translated into English, worked in archives and libraries, and spent time with stonecutters, sculptors, painters and architects. While this probably gave his book more historical accuracy than a less intensively researched effort, he seemed to be compelled to fit every tidbit of his acquired knowledge into this book. This results in long lists of the architectural wonders of Florence, who sculpted them, when they were built, and what they are north, south, east or west of. We also get long lists of names of artists, politicians and other movers and shakers in 15th century Italy, along with who their fathers were and a list of their greatest accomplishments. As you might imagine, this distracts a bit from the main plot of the novel.

The plot itself eventually slides into a pattern of hills and valleys where Michelangelo is either excitedly working on a giant art project (David! The Sistine Chapel!) or unable to work because he has made a nobleman mad with his brusque nature or the pope who was sponsoring him just died. The descriptions of his artistic intentions and the process of creating his master works were worth reading, and generally well-written (although there were several rather forced metaphors comparing sculpting to sex, and one very very limpid sex scene that compared sex to sculpting). Michelangelo, like almost all the characters in this novel, is somewhat of a one trick pony. Once his personality is established at the beginning of the book, it stays unchanged until the very end. Each character that Michelangelo comes into contact with can immediately be labeled as a bad guy or a good guy, and with the amount of heavy-handed foreshadowing in the book there are few surprises as things move forward. By far the most interesting characters in the book are the Medici family -- a dynasty whose fortunes are closely intertwined with the history of Italy and Michelangelo's career, and a historical subject I'd really like to read more about.

So, not a glowing recommendation, but certainly worthwhile if you are a fast reader with an interest in art history or Italian politics. You can't borrow my copy, though, because I'm selling this big boy to Half Price Books to make room for less of a guilty (not so pleasurable) pleasure on my shelves.

War of the Worlds (1898)

I just finished my journey through The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (1898) courtesy of the daily bite-sized emails of DailyLit (which I love -- next up: Anne of Green Gables!). It is no secret that I love H. G. Wells, and The War of the Worlds continued his streak of exceeding my high expectations.

The War of the Worlds is such a popular novel that I felt like I already knew the whole story, even though I'd never read it, heard the radio version, or seen any of the movies. And yet, the original text contains plenty of surprises, enough science to keep it interesting, and a truly engaging story of human behavior. It's a fast read, and should be required reading for anyone interested in science fiction, war, outer space, or life as we know it.

And even if you don't want to read it, take some time to browse through this amazing collection of The War of the Worlds book covers and interior illustrations (like the one above by Edward Gorey) from the past 110 years.

[Oh, come on -- go read it right here! Or on Daily Lit! Or, you know, in book form.]

The House with a Clock in its Walls (1973)

A billion thanks to Choo who loaned me her copy of John Bellair's The House with a Clock in its Walls (1973). I hadn't read it since I was a kid and didn't even know I wanted to re-read it until I got another look at the wonderful Edward Gorey illustrations and stepped back into the town of New Zebedee, Michigan.

The book begins with ten-year-old Lewis Barnavelt riding a bus to meet his uncle and new guardian, Jonathan Barnavelt, after both of his parents were killed in a car crash. Lewis is an overweight kid who likes to read a lot and cries easily. He fits right in with his eccentric uncle and his neighbor and best friend, the elderly Florence Zimmermann. They play a lot of poker, stay up late, drink hot cocoa, and explore the large and mysterious house that Jonathan bought after the death of its previous owner, the creepy and evil wizard Isaac Izard and his wife Selenna. Everything is generally happy and fine for Lewis, but every night the house is plagued with worry over the mysterious and ominous ticking of a Doomsday clock in the walls.

Lewis soon notices enough magical occurrences around the house to learn that his uncle is a warlock, and friendly Florence is a good witch. After his unlikely friendship with local popular kid Tarby starts to sour, Lewis tries to win him back through a series of magical demonstrations that eventually lead them two of them into the local graveyard at midnight on Halloween with some scribbled notes on Necromancy. Eventually Lewis's actions bring a confrontation with the not-quite-dead-yet Izard's and their deadly clock.

This book is a fun and dark fantasy, and Lewis is the ultimate underdog. Anyone who liked Harry Potter or enjoys the work of Edward Gorey (whose illustrations are perfectly matched to Bellair's story), should check this one out.

[Also, I know I read Bellair's other two Lewis Barnavelt books (The Figure in the Shadows and The Letter, The Witch, and The Ring) when I was a kid but I had no idea that someone else continued the series in the 1990s by completing some of Bellair's unfinished manuscripts and then writing his own original books based on Bellair's characters). Has anyone read any of these?]

The Spirit of the Place (2008)

I received a copy of The Spirit of the Place by Samuel Shem (2008) through the truly great and wonderful LibraryThing Early Reviewers program (although the publisher was supposed to send it in March and only just sent it a week or so ago, so the book has actually been released already and this early review is not quite so early).

The Spirit of the Place is a solid novel about Orville Rose, a divorced doctor who has spent the last several years living as an expatriate in Europe and alternately working as a doctor for charity organizations and doctoring the wealthy at a series of spas. While on a vacation with his Italian girlfriend, Orvy receives a telegram that his mother has died, so he quickly returns to his hometown of Columbia, New York. Once there he learns about his mother's unusual will which leaves him half the estate, the family home and the car, but only if he lives in Columbia for one year and thirteen days -- otherwise everything goes to his sister. After a little indecision, he decides to stay, moves into his childhood home, and begins helping out the town doctor -- who also happens to be his good friend and the childhood mentor that got him interested in medicine.

All seems relatively normal until Orville begins getting letters from his deceased mother, starts seeing her ghost flying around town and talking to him, the horrible bully from his childhood is running for Congress and wants to make friends, and he gets involved with an intriguing young widow who also happens to be the town historian and the mother of a young son.

Shem's characters are deeply drawn and although Orville's story of forgiveness, self-reflection, and growing understanding of his home and family pretty much go where you think they will, the steps along the way and the people in the town are unique, interesting, and well-written. The best bits are the doctoring parts, and since Shem is a doctor himself they have an appealing realism to them. Definitely worth picking up...

Beast in View (1955)

I picked up this copy of Beast in View by Margaret Millar (1955) at a garage sale across the street from my apartment for a quarter -- mostly because it was a book for a quarter and it had a woman with a house-head on the cover. After reading it I'm extra glad that I also grabbed another Margaret Millar book from the box because this psychological thriller was an excellent read.

In Beast in View, the wealthy and reclusive Helen Clarvoe begins to receive threatening phone calls from a woman named Evelyn Merrick. Unable to turn to her estranged family, Helen calls Paul Blackshear, the attorney of her recently-deceased father who is now handling her investments, to investigate. Out of boredom Blackshear takes the job and slowly begins unraveling the story of a fractured family, past regrets, and personal demons. And then people start dying...

Millar draws complicated and interesting characters and makes this novel more than just your usual mystery/suspense fare. The final twist is satisfyingly hidden but once it's revealed the reader can see the trail of hints leading to the inevitable end.

The Annotated Wizard of Oz (2000)

The Centennial Edition of The Annotated Wizard of Oz story by L. Frank Baum, edited and with an introduction and notes by Michael Patrick Hearn (2000) is one of the best presents I've gotten recently. As you may remember, I spent much of last year reading a compilation of all 15 of Baum's Oz books, which I really enjoyed. The only sad part was that the single-volume edition of the books that I read didn't have any illustrations. The illustrations are particularly important for the first Oz book, The Wonderful World of Oz (1900) where the drawings by W. W. Denslow had a huge impact on the reception of the book and its success with children.

This centennial edition of the book reproduces the original text and illustrations of The Wonderful World of Oz with the original colors -- including a large section of full-color plates in the center of the book and dual-color drawings throughout that change colors as Dorothy and her friends travel through the land of Oz. In addition, there is a lengthy, nicely written, and thoroughly illustrated introduction that gives biographical information on Baum and Denslow, the history of their creative partnership, the popular reception of the first Oz book, and Baum's continued work with the Oz series.

The book itself is annotated by Hearn through a series of footnotes. These often interesting (although occasionally a little out in left field) notes include biographical information; connections between the original books and various movies, plays, and other artwork inspired by the Oz characters; critical receptions of the books; and the occasional nerdy highlighting of inconsistencies within or between different Oz stories. I found the majority of the annotations to be worthwhile and fun to read, although if you hadn't read the book before I would definitely give the original text a read-through before working through Hearn's digressions...

I love really nice books, and this book is physically just awesome -- it is big and heavy with thick paper, just like a children's fairy tale storybook. The illustrations and photographs are wonderful to look at, and make the book a joy to read.

Camilla (1951)

I just finished reading Camilla by Madeleine L'Engle (originally published in 1951 as Camilla Dickinson), because how on earth could I resist it after Choo's description. I'm sad to say I wasn't re-reading it because for some reason the only L'Engle I read as a kid was the Wrinkle in Time series. The whole time I was reading this book it was like there were two me's in me -- the junior high me who would have lovedlovedloved this book and its complicated and endearing characters and dramas, and the grown up me who loved the characters, but sometimes found the dialogue a little goofy and the philosophies a little heavy handed.

Camilla is the story of Camilla Dickinson, a 15 year old from a wealthy New York City family. She is an only child and has lived a relatively sheltered life until one day she comes home to find her beautiful and fragile mother kissing a man who isn't her strong and silent father. Camilla is great because she keeps almost everything inside (I can relate) and doesn't talk about how all this makes her feel, even to her best friend Luisa whose parents often have screaming matches that wake up the neighbors, drink too much, and break things. Instead Camilla finds herself falling into a first romance with Luisa's older brother, Frank, and that little bit of distance is enough to pull her away from her parents and make her see herself as an individual, her parents as human, and her friends as fallible.

There are the kinds of young-romance / coming-of-age plot points that you might expect in this kind of novel, but L'Engle handles them all in such a unique, real, and dark way that this book is miles away from the usual young adult fare. It treats the reader like they are smart and grown up enough to read about war, death, drinking problems, suicide, amputation, depression, unhappy endings, and failed love. There are light and happy points too, and L'Engle's description of New York City is truly wonderful.

If you read this as a kid and loved it, go read it again right now. And if you know a kid who is an adventurous reader, put this book in their hands. For me, it transported me back to the intensely dramatic and weird world of growing up -- I'm usually not too sad that I'm past that point in my life, but sometimes something like this book makes me miss all the newness and craziness of fifteen.

The Art of the Infinite : The Pleasures of Mathematics (2003)

I worked for over four years as the archivist for a mathematics collection, even though the last math class I took was pre-calculus as a junior in high school and I did not consider myself mathy in the least. But something strange happened as I got further enmeshed in my work. As I browsed through higher-level mathematical journals and attended annual mathematics conferences and wrote articles for mathematics newsletters and helped mathematical historians do their research I began to relax into the idea of mathematics. Not the actual math itself, but the ideas behind the math. Why it was interesting and creative. What it was good for. All that stuff.

And I began to really like it -- although every time I told someone where I worked I still felt like I had to defend it. "It's not that bad!" "It's not as boring as it sounds!" (I actually still have to do that with my current job archiving a religious collection...) Still, very few people really seemed to understand that these mathematicians and the work that they do were different than the drudgery of high-school algebra. If I could make all those mathematics-doubters read The Art of the Infinite : The Pleasures of Mathematics by Robert Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan (2003), I think they could start to see my point.

Of course, I could also get you doubters to start with Robert Kaplan's actually pretty popular (for math writing) book, The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero (1999), which I have also read and which is really excellent. It is much shorter than The Art of the Infinite and involves less equations, so it might be a little more approachable as a first dip into popular mathematics reading.

Yes, The Art of the Infinite has a lot of equations, schematics, graphs, and geometric projections (although the really intricate ones are kindly set aside in the Appendix). But don't let that scare you. Remember, we are relaxing into the idea of really understanding how cool upper-level mathematics is -- don't tense up at all those Greek symbols and acute angles, just let them wash over you and the Kaplan's will lead you through some pretty amazing mathematical concepts one step at a time. Along the way, you will get a taste of the major mathematical figures: from Pythagoras to Cantor -- all nicely illustrated by Ellen Kaplan, who also hand-draws all the mathematical figures in the book.

I wouldn't claim to have understood (or really thought out) every proof in this book, but I feel like I got enough of a taste to understand what was going on every step of the way and why it was interesting. I feel like I really understand the definitions and distinctions between Real, Natural, Rational and Imaginary numbers. I have a huge appreciation for the imagination and creativity of mathematicians who attack the mind-blowing complications of infinite numbers and come up with something that can be wrangled into an equation and applied to any number at all. This isn't the kind of thing I usually read about, especially since I left the math archives behind nearly two years ago, and it got me a little pumped up to dip back into that world again.

Okay, here is just one of the mind-blowing things the book got me thinking of: think about all the counting numbers. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.... They are infinite, right? Just pick the highest one you can think of, and you can always add one more. But then think about the rationals (which are basically fractions). Between 1 and 2 on the number line, there are an infinite number of rational numbers. You can always divide the piece of pie one more time, add another number to a decimal, etc. But if there are an infinite number of rationals between each pair of natural numbers (which are also infinite), the infinity of the rationals is more infinite than the infinity of the naturals.

Just think on the awesomeness of that for awhile. No wonder some mathematicians go crazy and try to prove the existence of God. This is some heady and cool stuff...

The Trembling Earth Contract (1969)

I bought this copy of The Trembling Earth Contract by Philip Atlee (1969) mainly for the cover, but also because I was curious to see just how far the author would go while putting his (white) secret agent character, Joe Gall, undercover as a member of a black militia group. Well, folks, he goes pretty far.

Our rich, tough, smart, heroic, and ultra-manly hero is a secret agent under contract to "The Agency." After a really weird and long interlude where Gall goes hunting with a friend who makes a fake lake to attract geese, Gall is attacked on his way back to his hidden palatial home. He naturally outsmarts the attackers, who turn out to be two black guys, one the son of a sheriff and the other recently discharged from active duty in Vietnam. When he finally makes it to his door he is surprised by a shadowy figure which he attacks first and realizes is a sexy lady later. Sexy lady is a lawyer that is trying to sign him to a contract working for her corporation. Gall invites her in, shows her around the ritzy pad (including the sauna hidden behind the waterfall), cooks her a giant dinner, and then shows off the pair of white tigers he has roaming the property (?). After all of that he says yes she says no, then later she says yes. The sex scene is very oddly written, and Atlee has a tendency to throw in technical terms for body parts at very awkward moments (gonads? pudendum? Not sexy words.).

After all of that, we finally get to the story: the two guys who tried to kill Gall were after him because he was the agent most likely to be sent to overthrow their group: a highly organized militia of black veterans (The Republic of New Africa) who are planning to take over the South by force and eject all the whites. Naturally Gall must infiltrate them from the inside so he takes pills to make his skin dark and glues an Afro wig to his head. Then he gets himself thrown in jail, where he is recruited into the organization.

Gall is a pretty right-wing dude and really shows very little interest, sympathy, or understanding for the black group and there is a lot of casual racism in the book that should make any modern and/or normal reader a little uncomfortable. Of course, there isn't always that much time for careful consideration of political positions and racial attitudes between the explosions, assassinations, secret meetings, more weird sex scenes, and half-developed characters and plot-lines.

This is actually the tenth book in the Joe Gall series of spy novels, written by former CIA agent David Atlee Phillips under the pseudonym of Philip Atlee. It was a fast read, and occasionally entertaining, but mostly inconsistent and not a great representative of the genre.

[Back cover is right here, dear.]

Lonesome Dove (1985)

I first read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1985) when I was in junior high, shortly after the mini-series came out. The mini-series was a huge deal -- my family watched it, all my friends watched it, the teachers at school watched it, and everyone was talking about it. Maybe it just seemed more pervasive since I was 13, but I can't think of a recent television "event" that was really talked about the way Lonesome Dove was back in 1989.

And after everyone I knew watched the mini-series, it seemed like everyone I knew went out and read the book. Have you read it? It seriously seems like it must be one of the most-read books of all time, at least among people who were of reading-age in 1989. I loved it then because it was really long, there was some sex in it, and part of it took place in Nebraska. I love it now because it is really long, they say "dern" so much that I started inserting it in all my thoughts, and it takes place in Texas and Nebraska, the two states that I've called home.

In case you don't know, Lonesome Dove is the story of Captain Augustus McCrae and Captain Woodrow F. Call, two former Texas Rangers who run the Hat Creek Cattle Company in South Texas. When their former partner Jake Spoon comes through town on the run from the law, he gives Call the idea of rustling up a bunch of cattle from Mexico and driving them up to Montana -- a practically unsettled frontier compared to the Texas they helped tame as Rangers. The bulk of the book follows the cattle drive from Texas to Montana, and McMurtry is at his best when describing the day-to-day life of the drive. He gives us details of the food, the weather, and the hard and monotonous work broken up by lots of card playing and the occasional unexpected death. Tons of people, both large and small characters, die in this book. Come to think of it, that's another reason I loved it in junior high. I like some tragedy mixed in with my adventure...

Mixed in with the cattle drive are stories of unrequited love in Ogallala, a whore with a heart of gold, a runaway wife, a bumbling deputy, a sheriff unprepared for his duty, and a young man growing up on the cattle drive. McMurtry weaves the stories in and out of each other nicely, changing perspectives and letting the reader into every character's head without losing the central thread of the story or the movement of the drive.

The last 150 pages or so drag a bit at times, particularly after the most entertaining and likable of all the characters meets his end, but overall this book is a really fun read that is worth revisiting.

[And for an archival connection, check out the on-line Lonesome Dove exhibit from the Southwestern Writer's Collection at Texas State University (they also have an in-person exhibit that is pretty cool), as well as their finding aid for the Lonesome Dove Television Mini-series Archive].

Men, Martians and Machines (1955)

I picked up Men, Martians and Machines by Eric Frank Russell (1955) at Half Price Books a few months ago because I liked the crazy space knight on the cover, it was only a dollar, and it looked like it needed rescuing. What a pleasant surprise to find out that it is also a pretty great book.

Men, Martians and Machines is a collection of four inter-connected stories of the adventures of the crew of the Marathon, a new-fangled super-spaceship that thanks to some hastily explained science is able to explore further out than ever before. Our unnamed narrator is the Sergeant at Arms for the ship, and the crew is made up of a fun mix of Earthlings and a handful of Martians (very large octopus-like beings who are obsessed with space chess, like low gravity, and need very little air -- making them perfect for external ship repairs. They also love making jokes about how bad humans smell.)

Our narrator guides us through the ship's near collision with the sun, a trip to a planet of killer machines (well they mostly just want to dissect you to figure out what makes your individualistic mind run, but that tends to involve killing), a world filled with surprisingly defensive plants, and a planet of hypnotic beings that can make you see whatever they want, but when threatened actually look like a bundle of writhing snakes.

These stories are light on science and heavy on adventure, with a playful almost pulpy-detective-story edge to the narrator's voice. Here's a couple awesome sample sentences for your reading pleasure:

On the left a tall, idiotic gadget faintly resembling a drunken surrealist's notion of a sober giraffe was running away with McNulty.

The Martians frequently tried to imitate the Terrestrial habit of significantly closing one eye; they kept on trying despite the dismal fact that it can't be done without eyelids.

There are some fun anachronisms (like a set of on-going gags between our narrator and the ship photographer who is constantly worried about his boxes of heavy and fragile photographic plates breaking -- although, [nerd alert!] to be fair, photographic plates were used in astronomical photography until fairly recently, which I know since I had to rehouse and describe a bunch of them in my last archives job. They are very heavy.) And some unsurprising but cringe-worthy anachronisms like the fact that the alien life forms are almost always compared to Asians (it seriously seems like half of all old sci-fi books do this), a lot of talk about how black the black doctor is, and no women are mentioned at all.

Still, anachronisms aside, this really is a fun book. The aliens are interesting and surprising and and the other planets are creative and nicely described. Add to that some very good action sequences and the occasional bit of snappy dialogue and you have a nice little read on your hands.

[Back cover is here, fools. Check it out to see the cutest little spaceship of all time!]

Movie Wars (2000)

I recently plucked Jonathan Rosenbaum's Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See (2000) off of the Dr. M shelf for a random non-fiction read. Rosenbaum was reportedly not happy with the subtitle, which the publishers added, and while it does reduce his argument a bit, I don't think it misrepresents the ultimate thrust of the book.

In this book, Rosenbaum examines the often-heard explanation that the reason Hollywood movies are so dumb is because that is what the people want to see. Through a series of previously published essays (with new content in the introduction and conclusion), he suggests that the real reason Hollywood movies are so dumb is because it is easier for the film industry to make and sell them and easier for reviewers to write about them. Plus it makes them feel better for not seeking out foreign, arty, or difficult films themselves -- if we all know that the mass audience will never watch this movie, then why should we write about it?

Occasionally Rosenbaum gets a little repetitive (particularly in his dislike of certain film critics and Harvey Weinstein), his constant pointing to France is a little tiring, and I don't always agree with his views on certain films or directors. Still, this book is fun in its polemicism, and worth reading just to be able to shake your fist along with Rosenbaum at those creepy advertising dudes and dumb film writers who don't even like films.

[And if you are interested in more discussion of this book, check out this lengthy and interesting review of the book that was published in Senses of Cinema.]

America America by Ethan Canin (2008)

Thanks once again to LibraryThing's Early Reviewer's program, I received an advance reader's copy of America America, the upcoming novel by Ethan Canin (June 2008).

America America is the story of Corey Sifter, a middle-aged newspaper publisher in a New England town who is reflecting on his youth and his ties to the powerful Metarey family in his hometown of Saline. Saline is a mining and logging town that was built by Liam Metarey's robber-baron father and now run under the son's more liberal but still powerful gaze. Corey is 16 and begins working as a handy-man at the Metarey estate -- when the family (including the daughters) take a liking to him, Liam Metarey becomes his benefactor and sends him first to a private boarding school and later to a good college. While away at boarding school, Corey comes back to the estate every weekend in order to help with the increasingly optimistic campaign of Senator Henry Bonwiller -- Liam Metarey's candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 1972 Presidential Election. Bonwiller is a strong liberal candidate, "the best friend the working man ever had," but also an old-school politician who is familiar with the game of public handshaking and back room deal-making.

The reader is led back and forth through time around hints of a Chappaquiddick-type incident involving the Senator and his mistress, and the part in the cover up played by Liam Metarey and Corey himself. Careful not to reveal too much too soon, Canin carefully balances the naivety of the young Corey with the journalistic integrity of the grown-up Corey.

The novel explores the pre-Watergate era of American politics with a nostalgic eye. Intertwined with the political machinations of the Senator and his supporters is the story of Corey's relationship with his own family and the tension inherent in his alliance with the Metarey family and his move into academia and the upper-middle class.

As the book draws to a close it gets a little ponderous and draws some of its themes a little too broadly, but overall this is really an enjoyable read. The structure of the book is nicely done with moves back and forth in time increasing as the key to the story comes into focus. I'm not a huge fan of nostalgia as a primary viewpoint, but Canin mixes his narrator's nostalgia and guilelessness with a healthy dose of realism and sensitivity that makes it more interesting and less predictable. Definitely worth a read.

[And if you are interested, go over here and read an excerpt of the novel.]

The Wizard of Venus (1941) and Pirate Blood (1932)

This 1970 volume posthumously publishes two of Edgar Rice Burroughs's novellas that were found after his death, The Wizard of Venus and Pirate Blood. It is obvious that neither one was ever shined up for publication -- although the Wizard of Venus, as a continuing volume in the Carson Napier novels, is more of a done deal than the rather bare bones pirate story.

The Wizard of Venus was written in 1941, fell prey to the changing nature of the pulp fiction market after the war, and was never published. It is a rather slight, but fun, story of Carson Napier, an American who has been conquering and living on Venus through a series of four books. He and his friend (a Venusian, I think, although I've never read any of the other Venus books, so I'm not totally sure), test out an airplane-type-contraption that Napier has invented. Sadly they get thrown off course and caught up in those crazy Venusian clouds. When they finally land, they find themselves in the middle of a war between several neighboring nobles, one of whom has convinced everyone that he is a wizard with the power to turn people into zaldars (which are kind of like pigs). [This is, by the way, apparently what he is trying to do to Napier on the cover of the book.] Because of this power, no one will eat a zaldar any more (because it might be family), and the wizard and his followers get all the good food.

One noble family has held out against the evil wizard, although their beautiful daughter has been captured and zaldarized. They confiscate Napier's ship and weapons and won't give them back unless he gets the wizard to turn their daughter back into a person. It isn't hard to figure out where this "Emperor's New Clothes" kind of story will go, but it is fun and the descriptions of the zaldar's are neat (even though the people seem to just be from the Middle Ages and not really from Venus).

Pirate Blood was written in 1932 and is an adventure story that loosely explores the nature vs. nurture question through the person of Johnny LaFitte, an ancestor of the famous pirate Jean LaFitte, who tries to ignore his bloodline and be a cop instead. It doesn't really work out for him. After a rather cool section where a bad guy takes off for the Philippines in a homemade dirigible with LaFitte on board, our hero finds himself second-in-command of a group of roughneck pirates and strangely attracted to the captive woman of his boss. There is a lot of excellent action and adventure in this one, although the second half is very choppy and Burroughs obviously meant to fill it out more before publication.

These are both very fun reads if you are into Burroughs, although if you are just checking him out for the first time I would delve into the Tarzan or John Carter of Mars series first.

[Yay to Choo for lending this to me!]

Everything is Miscellaneous (2007)

Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger (2007) was on my Christmas list last year, perhaps because I am a giant library science nerd. It set the library-blogosphere on fire when it was first released, and responses seemed to be either vehemently supportive or completely dismissive. When it also came highly recommended by both the Boing Boing and LibraryThing folks, I knew I had to give it a shot. And although it occasionally riled up my librarian sensibilities (only in the most nitpicky of ways), I ultimately really enjoyed this book.

Weinberger proposes that the possibilities for ordering information in the digital and networked world can completely change the way we approach knowledge and learning. To make his point, he nicely summarizes organizational schemes of the past including the alphabet, good old Mevil Dewey, Linnaeus, Ranganathan (woo!), the card catalog, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and many more. His overviews are fun to read, well-researched, and deep enough to make his point without getting sidetracked. He then contrasts these traditional methods of organization with the Web 2.0 variety, leaning heavily on Flickr and Wikipedia as examples of tagging and social creation of content. In the end, he points us in the direction of a world filled with user-generated content and context where the interconnections are as important as the information itself, and where creativity and knowledge are found in the spaces between my ideas and your ideas.

This is all pretty heady stuff, but Weinberger is a very readable philosopher who gives his readers plenty of concrete examples to latch onto. Occasionally I found myself getting a little huffy (why, oh why, does he constantly use the card catalog as his illustration of how libraries organize things and never mention the OPAC? Why no mention of brick and mortor libraries that are incorporating Web 2.0 into their cataloging and public access? Why are libraries implicitly lumped in with "the man" who is keeping information out of the hands of the masses? How would he handle providing access to collections that are both physical and digital?). But once I calmed down a little, most of my qualms ended up being addressed elsewhere in the book, or could easily be dismissed by the fact that Weinberger isn't writing a book about libraries or archives, there is just a lot of overlap in what we are trying to accomplish.

This is a great book to read if you are a librarian, a library-wanna-be, an archivist, a techie, a scholar, a Flickr user, a philosopher, or just some jerk who likes to find things on the Internet.

[As you might expect, Weinberger has an accompanying blog to the book here, which also includes a couple of sample chapters in case you'd like to take it for a test drive.]

Dracula (1897)

For the past 187 days (actually longer than that, as I suspended delivery for a bit over Christmas when I wasn't checking my email as much) a short section of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) has appeared in my inbox, courtesy of DailyLit. This is the third or fourth book I've read this way, and I am surprised with how much I like it. Since I'm a pretty fast reader, this forces me to slow down and spend more time with a book than I usually do. And since I love vampires, I had no problem at all spending 187 days with Dracula.

Dracula is so entrenched in our culture that I couldn't believe I'd never read the Bram Stoker novel. Hadn't I seen the story about a million times? Stoker's novel gives you everything you would expect the seminal vampire story to provide -- creepy castle, beautiful and pure ladies, valiant men, the smart vampire hunter, the cunning Count, plus lots of coffins, earth, wolves, and blood. The story is told primarily through the diaries of a group of people brought together by friendship, circumstance, and the vampire's curse. The archivist in me loved the emphasis on documenting conversations and thoughts in order to review them as a group and solve the mystery of the vampire. Documents!

Even though I was familiar with the story, it still took some twists I hadn't encountered in other interpretations. And speaking of other interpretations, when I was about halfway through this book we rented Guy Maddin's film, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary -- which is sort of a ballet, sort of a silent movie, and all kinds of awesomely Guy Maddin. You should watch it. [And the picture above is a still from that movie.]

My next DailyLit adventure: War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. I shall report back in approximately 73 days.

Dewey Death (1958)

I ordered myself a copy of Dewey Death by Charity Blackstock (1958) after I saw it advertised in the back of Death at the Medical Board (sadly, I couldn't find the 1958 or 1963 edition, so I settled for this 1985 printing instead). Much like Death at the Medical Board, this mystery is terribly British and terribly post-war, but that doesn't distract at all from the fun.

Our story takes place at the Inter-Libraries Despatch Association (ILDA), a centralized interlibrary loan service that takes requests from students and professors at regional universities and procures the articles and books they need from an international list of libraries. The reader is usually with Miss Barbara Smith, a young University graduate who is working in the Location department, typing up requests and compiling responses. One of her co-locators, Mrs. Warren, is everything you would hope your colleagues not to be: gossipy, loud, both offensive and easily offended, and possessing of a grating laugh that she spurts out at all times, whether it is appropriate or not. In fact, no one in the library seems to care much for Mrs. Warren. She snoops about when Mark Allan (the microfilm and photostat man) and Mrs. Bridgewater (who does the accounts) have a workplace romance. She butts in when Barbara tries to get some work on her romance novel done during work hours. She insults people in the cafeteria and teases the young typists until they cry. No one would be sad at all were she to leave the library all together, but everyone is rather surprised when she shows up dead, stuffed into a bag of books scheduled for deposit in the basement stacks.

In classic mystery style, everyone has a motive and no one really has an alibi -- one of the library workers has to have been the killer, but as the detectives unravel a complicated tangle of insults, slights, drug smuggling, eccentric personalities, suspicious conversations and worthy war records the trail to the real killer becomes more and more murky.

And then another librarian is murdered.

The real mystery in this mystery is not that hard to figure out, and it quickly becomes more of a psychological study of the characters -- particularly Barabara Smith, the naive romance writer, and Mark Allan, the dashing ex-soldier who handles microfilm on the 4th floor. That isn't a bad thing, though -- for a book I bought based on its title, it really is a well-written and complex mystery novel. Plus the chapter headings all come from Dewey's original classification system ("Chapter one: Male and Female Employees, 647.22 & 647.23," "Chapter two: Influence of Sex, 615.55."). What librarian could resist that?

And now for some library-appropriate quotes:

Do you catalogue your kisses, Mr. Allan? Or do you perhaps just make photostats of them for future reference?

"Surely," said Mark gravely, coming into the room, "the work of the department must go on. Death may come and death may go, but libraries, one presumes, go on for ever."

"Did I never tell you I was a schoolmaster? Quite a good one, too, though I am not a very patient man... I taught physics. I didn't mind the boys, but I didn't like my colleagues, so I became a librarian instead, and don't care much for my colleagues either. Still, one has more privacy."

Unread tag tag-down

I know this is long and possibly boring, but I had fun with it -- someone compiled a list of the top 106 books tagged "unread" on Librarything, and started a nifty little meme. I can't promise I caught everything I read, or everything I own, but I did my best. Interestingly, I almost always finish a book so the italics don't really apply, although I really never did finish Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Of course I was in junior high when I tried reading it, so maybe I should someday give it another shot...

Here is the plan:
Bold = I've read it for fun
Underline = I read it for school
Italics = I started it but didn't finish
Asterisk = I own it, but haven't read it

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov*
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace*
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula [actually reading right now]
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion*
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences*
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

***

Now you do it!