Read any good books lately?
Spook Country by William Gibson, 2007 A '90s indie-music star enters the 21st century as a freelance journalist working on a piece about locative art, interviewing a Los Angeles artist who uses augmented reality to restage famous deaths. No one has heard of the magazine she's working for, a Belgian start-up headquartered in London knocking off Wired magazine. Meanwhile, a family of Chinese-Cuban…
China After Mao by Frank Dikötter, 2022 Chinese Primer Zhou Enlai died in January 1976, and the Great Helmsman followed eight months later. After a brief tussle between factions, the Gang of Four was disbanded, and the era of China after Mao began. Putting it in extremely rough terms, the two principle actors after Mao were Deng Xiaoping, who was responsible new directions in economic development,…
The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk, 1990 An Italian traveling to Naples has his ship commandeered by an Ottoman fleet and is taken as a slave. Incidental medical knowledge and some simply treated injuries lets him pass as a doctor, and he works his way into becoming a pasha’s favorite. His pleas for freedom are ignored, but he does get handed off as the personal slave of a man with whom he will work…
Remainder by Tom McCarthy, 2005 A never-named man receives grace from the sky. Well, actually, he receives severe head trauma from the sky; grace comes later in the form of £8.5 million from the guilty party. Between those two events he relearns many of the things knocked out of his head, such as how to walk and eat. Remainder shows how and what happens when he tries to recover the things physical…
The Track of Sand by Andrea Camilleri, 2010 Montalbano walks out of the house one morning and finds a corpse, this time of a horse. He calls in his colleagues to collect evidence and the municipality to collect the horse, but the horse has disappeared by the time the municipal workers arrive. The horse’s owner seems disproportionally calm over having her horse killed, and doesn’t want to file a…
The Idiot by Elif Batuman, 2018 When nerds collide. Salin Karadağ, a first-generation Turkish-American nineteen year old from New Jersey, starts her first year at Harvard in 1995. She wants to be a writer, and takes courses in linguistics, philosophy of language and Russian, apparently using the same logic that suggests becoming a heart surgeon to learn about love. And Salin wants to learn about…
Hoover vs. Roosevelt by Hal Elliott Wert, 2022 The way Herbert Hoover handled World War I relief efforts won him the White House in 1928. The way he handled the Great Depression lost him the White House in 1932. Hoover's enmity toward his successful Democratic opponent, Franklin Roosevelt, festered until the war after the war to end all wars, when it blossomed into opportunity. Wert covers the…
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, 2006 Blue van Meer, a smart 16-year-old, spends her senior year at a private school. She attracts the attention of Hannah Schneider, the film studies teacher, who invites her into the Bluebloods, a clique of five snobbish seniors. They strip van Meer out of her intellectual and social cocoon (they give van Meer her first cocktails, and after she…
The Sicilian Method by Andrea Camilleri, 2020 In The Voice of the Violin Montalbano becomes interested in a seemingly abandoned car. Frustrated in his attempts to learn more, he pulls a black-bag job, finds a corpse, and the story’s off and running. In The Sicilian Method it’s Auguello’s try at this bit, but, keeping in character, he’s fleeing a cuckold, out the window and down into the apartment…
Witches Be Crazy by Logan Hunder, 2015 A dying king seeks to marry off his daughter, establishing the quest. A stranger shows up telling of a neighboring kingdom destroyed by an evil queen that looks like the princess. Now the quest is either to marry the princess, or kill her. A irascible hero acquires an irritating side-kick and a wizardly antagonist. Diversions occur on the way to the palace,…
The Bad Lands by Oakley Hall, 1978 Andrew Livingston — Harvard man, banker, political operative — comes to grief in New York City. He settles the rest of his family with his sister and heads west to the Bad Lands in the Dakota territories. As he scouts for land and crew for a cattle ranch, Livingston meets Lord Machray, a newly established large-scale cattle rancher who has big plans backed by…
Why I am a Catholic by Garry Wills, 2002 You know that guy? Carl Sagan? That guy who said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”? Garry Wills knows that guy, or at least that quote, because before he can tell you why he’s a Catholic, he has to invent the Church, starting from the debate over which of Peter or Paul should be the foundational rock. In…
The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux, 2022 Cho Jun-su is an eleven-year-old school boy in North Korea when he finds a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook. Written in English, the book remains an excessively wordy, not too interesting comic book until he gives it to a teacher. The teacher translates enough of the book to let them play a version they call the House of Possibility. This sets the…
The Potter’s Field by Andrea Camilleri, 2011 This time the corpse is disfigured beyond recognition; nothing much happens until a distraught wife files a missing-persons report for her sea-faring husband. Montalbano spends the idle time channeling his inner Umberto Eco to appreciate the murder’s semiotics, although, given the story’s biblical theme, maybe it’s more like the murder’s hermeneutics.…
Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope, 1865 Women in Can Your Forgive Her? have trouble with marriage. Alice Vavasor, the her of the title, loved her paternal cousin, but sensed life with him would not be smooth, and broke the engagement. She recovered with a wealthy squire, but her senses now point in the opposite direction, and she breaks with him because she feared her life would be too…
A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty, 2022 Piketty has three objectives in presenting a brief history of equality. The first is to define equality, and describe its behavior over the past couple of centuries. The second is to determine the motivations and mechanisms supporting and opposing equality. And the third objective is to extrapolate supportive motivations and mechanisms into the…
The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick, 1997 Following the paper theme, The Puttermesser Papers are linked stories of erasure. Ruth Puttermesser is a woman, a Jew, and a lawyer living in New York City during the late 20th century. The first two stories track her professional life’s dissolution. The third story dismantles her personal relations, the forth story her ideals, and the final story her…
Radio’s America by Bruce Lenthall, 2007 As radio developed and spread in Depression-era America, various groups began to notice and adjust. Public intellectuals and academics fretted over mass communication and mass culture. Demagogues (Charles Coughlin) and mountebanks (John Brinkley) moved in and prospered, as did politicians (Franklin Roosevelt). With network growth, mass culture became…
Chains of the Heretic by Jeff Salyards, 2016 Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The emperor of a confederation seizes the means of control — mind witches! — and declares himself absolute ruler. A dissident confederate sends out a squad to meet with the disposed emperor to plot a restoration. The squad is run down by the emperor’s troops and escapes through the looking glass, where they find…
The Vital Center by Arthur Schlesinger, 1949 “If both the left and the right are mad at me, then I must be doing well” is one of the more tiresome political analyses. The variant used by this book is “If I’m not doing what the left or the right are doing, I must be in the center.” The problem tackled is the post-war anomie blanketing democratic countries, although the ending chapters sharpen focus…
Uselessness by Eduardo Lalo, 2017 A man moves from bohemian youth to bourgeois middle-age. In Paris he loses his first love, desultorily picks up another before temporarily reconnecting with his first, develops interests at school, makes a stab at a career, then pitches everything and goes back home. In Puerto Rico he fumbles around, then fades from the story as he becomes a university professor,…
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920 Amory Blaine learns unhelpful and unsustainable social skills from his mother, then goes into the world: to the east coast for prep school, Princeton, and adulthood. Not much happens in prep school until he, as a senior, has a turn at that most useless of social heroes, the star quarterback. Early on he makes an adult friend who could be a guide,…
The Safety Net by Andrea Camilleri, 2020 One of Montalbano’s acquaintances draws his attention to a set of home movies, each showing the same view of a wall. Notes on each box indicate they were shot at the same time on the same day from 1958 to 1963. This piques Montalbano’s interest, and he promises to look into it. While that’s going on, a more serious situation develops at a local middle…
Self-Reference Engine by Toh EnJoe, 2013 Short stories, some of which are meditations on love and time-shifted assassinations, others of which are about warfare among sentient piles of information, and the remaining ones off by themselves (maybe, some could be about language). The table of contents is cryptically remapped as a directed graph, so it may be that some of the stories are linked,…
Sophomores by Sean Desmond, 2021 The Malones — dad, mom, son — are very Irish and very Catholic. Dad works for American Airlines, which transferred the family to Dallas in response to airline deregulation (the story takes place from late 1987 to mid 1988). Dad also has multiple sclerosis and is on his way to becoming an alcoholic. Then he gets laid off. As a young woman mom answered the call, but…