Category: Book Reviews

Wow, it’s been 7 years since I posted a revue. I started this post in 2019 and then didn’t finish it, let’s see if I can finish it now.

I made a note that I had started a lot of library books that then expired before I finished them. That still happens. I won’t review those.

Chris Smith – The Daily Show (the Book): An Oral History (2016)
I think I remember this one. If I recall it was a series of statements or recollections by different people who worked on the Daily Show from its very start, into Jon Stewart’s tenure and through to when he left. In particular I recall it captures how the show changed after 9/11 and became a cultural force. I liked it, it makes you think about what it would be like to write for a comedy show.

Arthur C. Clarke – Rendezvous With Rama (1973)
Classic sci-fi novella about an encounter with an alien spacecraft drifting through the solar system. Earthlings are sent to explore it and strange things happen.

I heard of this story when Oumuamua shot around the sun a couple years ago and folks were comparing it to Rama. I liked it.

N. K. Jemisin – The Fifth Season (2015), The Obelisk Gate (2016), The Stone Sky (2017) (aka the Broken Earth Trilogy)
This was just so weird, I still think about it sometimes, the bits I remember: a world with enormous stone formations floating in the sky; people who are born with the ability to move the earth with their minds, and are either persecuted or enslaved for it, or both (I don’t quite recall); how nothing is made of metal because it’s unreliable and inconstant. It was so creative, and yeah weird. I should read it again.

Jeff VanderMeer – Annihilation (2014), Authority (2014), Acceptance (2014) (aka the Southern Reach Trilogy)
Reading the first book of this series was such an odd feeling, it was just so weird. The story is weird and the way it’s told is weird, it gives you little glimpses at a time of what’s going on and it takes a while to put a picture together that never quite coalesces while still drawing you in. In short: some mysterious event decades ago on some small coastal area of the U.S. created a world-within-the-world that changes anyone who enters in unknowable ways. I thought it was great, though the second and third books lose some of that mystery.

Volker Ullrich – Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (2013)
I picked this up shortly after the 2016 election, put it down for a year or so, then finished it. I remember now reading it on a rocking chair while while my infant son napped on my lap. Fascinating history of Hitler’s rise to power and the historical conditions that enabled it. It’s odd at times as the author clearly admires his subject and has to interject every now and again to remind himself and us that Hitler was bad. I look forward to reading the next volume. I wonder what happens?

Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw – Why Does e=mc²? (2009)
File this under books that help you feel smarter. I loved this one, because it very clearly explained special relativity; building each concept logically onto the next, starting from one observation: that, once scientists were able to measure the speed of light, they kept getting the same number despite differences in velocity between sources and sensors. Pursuing the implication that light actually has the same speed for all observers, given other physical laws, led Einstein to discovering a relationship between mass and energy.

I recall some concepts toward the end of the book that were harder to grasp, I should read this one again too.

Michelle McNamara – I’ll Be Gone in the Dark:
One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer (2018)
I came upon this one back when I read Twitter and followed Patton Oswalt. The author had been his wife, and had died before finishing the book. There’s a documentary series about it. As I recall she gathers much of the available evidence and finds that it points to one suspect, who was charged shortly after the book was published and later found guilty. I recall the book was super creepy. The 70s were nuts.

George Orwell – Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
Orwell wrote this memoir about his young adulthood slumming it in Paris. At least that’s how I remember it. Two images in particular remain with me: dirty, sooty kitchens in the basement of fancy hotels, and the author and some friend of his having to share the same suit in order to keep a job in those kitchens. I think. There was a lot of talk about a suit.

Scott Pape – The Barefoot Investor: the Only Money Guide You’ll Ever Need (2016)
I don’t remember anything about this.

Ben Macintyre – A Spy Among Friends (2014)
An English spy turns and starts spying for Russia during or shortly after WWII, and another English spy has to catch him. It was good.

Vanessa McGrady – Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption (2019)
If I’m remembering the right book, the author came off as pretty unlikeable.

Ling Ma – Severance (2018)
A post apocalyptic novel following an American woman of Chinese descent who works at a company importing things from China when a pandemic starts that turns people into zombies. I recall the banality of the woman’s life as the disease spreads but she keeps going to the office, as coworkers and her foreign contacts start dropping out of the picture. They’re not like “braiinns” zombies, more like a person catches the disease and stops being sentient. The story follows her as she leaves the city and finds other people who have been resistant to the disease, and then the story becomes about authoritarianism. I think.

Rebecca Solnit – Men Explain Things to Me (2014)
A famous book that’s both funny and eye-opening. Sobering? Naw, I’m not one of those men. Well, actually…

Manuel Gonzales – The Regional Office Is Under Attack! (2016)
I don’t remember this at all, even after reading a synopsis on wikipedia. Maybe I didn’t read it.

James S. A. Corey – Leviathan Wakes (2011)
I had to read a synopsis to remember this. Like a lot of sci fi I remember bits and pieces of it, particularly the scenes on Ceres ring a bell. I don’t think I read any of the others in the series.

Annie Proulx – The Shipping News (1993)
I remember reading this and thinking it was great, and that I knew more about Newfoundland than I did before. Or thought I did. It’s an enjoyable novel. I think I read Barkskins afterward because I liked it so much. Or it was the other way around? Who knows.

Tom Hansen – American Junkie (2017)
This one stayed with me. Partly because it paints a bleak picture of deep heroin addiction. Partly because it involved the similarly deep heroin addiction of some rock stars I like. And partly because the protagonist describes staying at the Bailey-Boushay House, in front of which I used to catch the bus. Also it’s pretty well-written.

Tom Hansen somehow survived extreme addiction and lived to tell about it, though he died in 2023. Mark Lanegan, who also survived extreme addiction and died somewhat recently, mentions Tom in his memoir. They mention each other in their memoirs, that’s nice.

George Saunders – Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)
Another weird but amazing book and the first I’ve read by George Saunders, so now I get why he’s a genius. That said, years later now mostly I just remember it was about ghosts and it was written in a weird way that was very affecting and that I liked it.

Katherine Dunn – Geek Love (1989)
Another one where even after reading a synopsis I don’t recall a single bit of it. Either I didn’t read it or I need to write these posts faster or I need a physician.

Jenna Fischer – the Actor’s Life: A Survival Guide (2017)
Part memoir, part career advice to actors. She almost quit but stuck it out. I liked it.

Alright I did it! Caught up to 2019.

Looking back though my saved library notice emails, which yes I save, I’m noticing some titles I missed last time. Did you notice as well, gentle reader? In addition to helping me remember books to get as gifts, these blurbs might serve to mark points of time over these years which appear to be accelerating.

Shannon Curtis – No Booker, No Bouncer, No Bartender, No Problem (2014)
A how-to on how to book dinner party-with-wine-type house shows. Very informative, I never tried putting the ideas into practice because there’s just no time. If you’re looking to take your solo music career from a hobby to something more than that by way of house shows, this is useful reading.

Philip K. Dick – The Man in the High Castle (1962)
I know this was an alternate history re: if the Axis had won WWII but really don’t remember much of it other than that it’s Phildickian in the sense of telling a story about big world-spanning things through several individuals’ story arcs. I watched the first episode of the TV show and thought “this is different from the book” because at the time I still remembered the book. I should have written this then.

Jon Fine – Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution (but Can No Longer Hear) (2015)
I gave this to my brother telling him that if he was curious what it was like being in an indie band on tour, this tells that story pretty well. I imagine, since my touring was both over 10 years ago and largely unsuccessful, but still those feelings were evoked. The writing is really good.

After playing in bands and being poor for years the author married an internet rich lady and now lives in a nice house and writes for a living. He comes off as a bit of a dick, but a likable one.
(checked out 5/2015)

Ryan Gattis – All Involved: A Novel (2015)
During the 1992 LA riots the rule of law was briefly suspended. All Involved follows various characters through a gangland free-for-all. It was really good but really dark.
(checked out 10/2015)

Warren Zanes – Petty: The Biography (2015)
It’s easy to forget just how prolifically great Tom Petty was. The Biography follows his life from growing up in an abusive household through early bands, fame, working with Stevie Nicks, regret over passing up “The Boys of Summer” after his guitarist wrote it and later offered it to Don Henley, solo albums, Wallflowers, then taking up heroin after that. I read it before he died. Sadly no mention of the character Lucky from King of the Hill.
(checked out 1/16)

Bob Dylan – Chronicles: Volume One (2004)
I already forget what I learned from this, other than it was fun to read.
(checked out 2/16)

Ginger Strand – The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic (2015)
While Kurt Vonnegut was getting started in fiction, he wrote marketing material for GE where his brother was already a successful and important scientist.
(checked out 2/16)

Philip Pullman – The Golden Compass (1995); The Subtle Knife (1997); The Amber Spyglass (2000); Lyra’s Oxford (2003)
AKA, the His Dark Materials trilogy plus a novella. Kind of on the young adult end of things, with enough violence and suspense to keep it interesting… I liked these quite a lot. There’s a new, related trilogy started in 2017, I haven’t seen it yet.
(checked out 5/16, 6/16)

Tony Tulathimutte – Private Citizens (2016)
A bildungsroman of sorts about 20-something millennials making their way in the world after college, plus some kind of weird stuff happens, maybe sort of oedipal, what with the blinding? I don’t know. There was an overeducated denseness to the writing here that was at once really extremely impressive and also kind of insecure, a bit too much. Which is to say I didn’t get half the references, but I was still entertained.
(checked out 6/16)

Carrie Brownstein – Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir (2015)
I saw Sleater-Kinney at the Showbox in, I want to say 2003? I couldn’t stop watching Carrie Brownstein because she put so much energy into her performance — total rock star — which was weird for the indie scene which prided itself at the time for being completely limp. It was awesome. In 2006 they were at KEXP and I worked up to talking to her in the hallway. I said “any chance the Spells will get back together?” She kind of laughed and said she didn’t think so. But then she and Mary Timony started Wild Flag. So yeah that was me.

The main subject of her memoir is Sleater-Kinney. No mention of the Spells or Wild Flag, only passing mention of Portlandia. It’s an engaging read and a fascinating account of what it’s like to be a musician at that level, revealing a different kind of behind-the-scenes drama than you might expect from a rock bio. Brownstein’s writing borders on the academic but it’s still a page-turner. It was fun going back and listening to some SK — Dig Me Out and the Hot Rock were my favorites of their albums.

Dan Savage – The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant (1999)
All about how Dan Savage and his then-boyfriend-now-husband adopted a kid through open adoption. It was helpful reading before my wife and I did the same thing through coincidentally the same agency. Though our experiences ended up being pretty different it made me a lot more comfortable going into it with another perspective.
(checked out 1/17)

Peter Watts – Blindsight (2006); Echopraxia (2014)
I was jonesing for some scifi to get a break from the newspaper and my friend Ben suggested Blindsight. I loved it! Crazy creative imaginings of how evolution in interstellar timeframes might produce advanced alien beings that are not strictly sentient or conscious but that are oh so deadly. Also, vampires? What? Yeah, it’s great.

Echopraxia was also good fun but it was harder to follow for some reason.
(checked out 3/17, 4/17)

Johnny Marr – Set the Boy Free (2016)
Johnny Marr is pretty awesome and the story of the Smiths is great fun to read about. This just in: sounds like they’re not going to get back together. Of interest though are all the projects Marr has worked on since, including many I hadn’t known about, like Kristy MacColl who used to be his landlady. The song “Walking Down Madison” that they cowrote sounds kind of familiar. And it’s crazy what happened to her, right? But I digress.

The book drags a bit toward the end as Marr stacks success upon success onto his resume. Now he’s in Modest Mouse making a hit album, now he’s in the Cribs for a bit of fun and more hit albums, now he’s running marathons. I’m very glad for him and I hope those marathons keep him strong and looking half his age for decades to come, but without any kind of conflict the story gets old. You know? But it goes on.
(checked out 3/17)

John Scalzi – Old Man’s War (2005)
Keeping the scifi thing going after Blindsight, also on Ben’s recommendation. If humans become a spacefaring race they may discover that they exist in a hierarchy of alien beings at different levels of technological advancement, and they may need a space army to carry out resource wars against said aliens, and they may want to recruit old people who are done with their lives on earth to be in that space army, and then perhaps they’d give those old people new genetically engineered superbodies to fight in. MAKES SENSE TO ME.
(checked out 4/17)

Janna Levin – Black Hole Blues (2016)
In 2006 I took an intro physics class at the UW to take advantage of the free-ish tuition I got for working there and with a goal to eventually formally learn some electronics. I was actually repeating the same class I’d taken 10 years earlier when I was a freshman, which felt a bit weird. Now it’s over ten years later again, which feels weirder. Is it time to take physics 121 again?

Anyway, the professor in 2006 worked on the LIGO project and offered a field trip to anyone interested in going to see it, which I was, so I went to Hanford for a tour. This book is about the history of the LIGO project from the 70s up til it finally detected gravitational waves in late 2015. They’ve now detected 3 separate astronomical events of such insane magnitude but so far away and long ago that the waves in question by the time they get here vibrate spacetime in distances smaller than the nucleus of an atom. How the hell they can separate that out from the noise of even someone walking past is not something they were really able to cover in one field trip.

Importantly, the story of LIGO is largely one of political and bureaucratic success in maintaining and funding a somewhat abstract but incredibly amazing science experiment over 40 years and a billion dollars. It’s impossible to imagine such a thing getting off the ground let alone succeeding in our increasingly confused and superstitious USA.
(checked out 4/17)

M. R. Carey – The Girl with All the Gifts (2014)
A twist on the whole zombie thing where certain children exposed to the contagion turn out to be not so bad. It makes for pretty fun reading, something to take your mind off real monsters for a while at least.
(checked out 5/17)

Emily St. John Mandel – Station Eleven (2014)
Like the Girl with All the Gifts, Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic thriller but somewhat more depressing because the premise is more realistic: a pandemic swine flu kills everyone directly, as opposed to a mutated fungus turning folks into zombies. The author’s focus on individual perspectives to tell the story of something so large is pretty great and well executed, and makes it feel all the more real. Some more light reading for the modern era.
(checked out 5/17)

Douglas Coupland – Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
Another post-apocalyptic-by-way-of-disease-or-something-novel but also the action follows an emotionally-messed-up group of gen-X friends and there’s a supernatural component to it. I liked it but now I’m writing about it way way later and don’t remember so much. The title is from a Smith’s song.

Julie Lawson Timmer – Mrs. Saint and the Defectives (2017)
Amazon made this available as a $2 kindle download, so I gave it a shot. The story follows a single mother (newly divorced, if I recall) and her son as they try to make a go of it on their own. They rent a house next door to a neighbor (Mrs. Saint) who injects herself into their lives, uninvited, intending to be helpful, and conflict ensues. But is there more to Mrs. Saint than meets the eye?

At first I couldn’t tell if the author was moralizing on single mothers or kids these days or something, which would have been tiresome, but the story was convoluted enough that I think ultimately my takeaway is that it’s good to meet your neighbors.

 

This catches me up to about 2 years ago.

I won’t apologize (again) for once again not publishing one of these blurb collections in over a year and a half because, one, who cares? and two, who cares? I read these to think of birthday and Christmas presents during the year.

Iain Banks – The Wasp Factory (1984)
I picked this up to see how Banks’s “straight” fiction compared to his sci-fi. I didn’t like it much, it’s ultra-dark and sick and I wasn’t in the mood for it. I guess I could have stopped reading it.

Ernest Cline – Ready Player One (2011)
A dystopian vision of a not-to-distant future of hellish wealth disparity where people escape their crappy lives by plugging into a massive virtual community that’s somewhere in between World of Warcraft and Facebook. The plot is the Bourne Identity meets Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It was very entertaining.

Barbara Tuchman – The Guns of August (1962)
I know this book is a famous and popular history of the beginnings of World War I through its first month. Therefore I’m not likely to say much about it that you don’t already know. I overheard a coworker talking about it so gave it a shot, and liked it quite a lot. Depressing though.

Eric Schlosser – Command and Control (2013)
Speaking of depressing, Command and Control is good if you don’t want to feel secure about how the world’s nuclear arsenals are designed, stored, and handled. The book is written around a central narrative regarding the accidental explosion of a Titan II missile in Arkansas in the 80s, with the history of atomic weapons, their safety mechanisms, deployment around the world, strategies of use, and the stories of various other “near miss” incidents weaved in. You get the impression that the odds of a “full yield” accident taking place, possibly triggering a war, are very high, and that it’s strange that one or the other hasn’t happened yet.

Nicholson Baker – House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)
If you’re sexually repressed or overly religious you might not like this. Or maybe you would? House of Holes is a series of bizarre wet dream vignettes that ultimately sort of tie together but really showcase Baker’s amazing facility with language and his weirdo imagination. Very fun and also uncomfortable to read in public.

Hector Tobar – Deep Down Dark (2014)
Remember the Chilean miners who were trapped in that mine for a while? This publicist-approved retelling of that event fills in all the details of the human drama you forgot you cared about. It’s well-written and engaging, but ultimately feels like a last attempt to cash in on what’s kind of a boring story (no pun intended!).

Peter Mehlman – It Won’t Always Be This Great (2014)
Peter Mehlman used to write for Seinfeld and this is his first novel. It was alright.

Jonathan Waldman – Rust: The Longest War (2015)
For a history of human attempts to prevent rust (and other forms of corrosion) that reads a bit like someone’s master’s thesis, look no further. It’s pretty interesting and for a bit of controversy, touches on why companies that use BPA in their products (like can manufacturers) think it’s just great and you should stop worrying about it.

Dale Carnegie – How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
As the title implies, this famous book gives you advice on how to not come across as a jerk so that you can be more successful. It sounds exhausting.

James Bowen – A Street Cat Named Bob (2012)
James Bowen was a recovering drug addict and street musician/newspaper salesman when he found a cat that helped him stay straight and sell more papers. Kind of a sweet story, nothing wrong with it.

I went pretty heavy on fiction this time, with a lot of sci-fi. Nerds! Speaking of, I’ve yammered on a lot about e-reader apps in this space, so to add to that I’ll say now that Apple fixed whatever weird bug it was I mentioned last time where hitting the right side of the screen would take you backwards in iBooks. That was bad. It’s no longer so. Good job Jobs’ ghost! I read most of these in OverDrive though which is also great.

Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City (1984)
An essay I saw on Salon.com prompted me to look for this one. If it’s the earliest example of this particular form then I can see that it was influential, though the only other book like it that I could think of was the Mysteries of Pittsburg my Michael Chabon. That’s (part of) why I don’t do this for money.

Erik Larson, Isaac’s Storm (2000)
I think this is the last of them, of the Erik Larson books I can track down. Big historical event, check. Relatively overlooked persons (historically speaking) with compelling storylines that interweave in unexpected ways with aforementioned historical event, check. Conflict, drama, etc. OK we got a bestseller.

Daniel Suarez, Daemon (2006); Freedom (2010)
It’s like the Internet but better. A combination techno-thriller, mystery, and Bildungsroman, if you will. Imagine Google Glass going horribly wrong. Or horribly right, it’s not clear. Very fun reading.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices (2008); Powers (2009)
The sequels to Gifts, which I talked about last time. Each story focuses on a child/adolescent character dealing with some personal crisis (town occupied by barbarians, being a runaway slave, that sort of thing) who happens also to be coming to terms with a particular supernatural (or at least extraordinary) ability. Eventually each story ties in with characters we met in Gifts. It’s all fine and very Le Guin-y, good times.

Various authors, Lightspeed: Year One (2011)
I picked this up (or downloaded, rather) as I was on an Ursula K. Le Guin streak and she has a story in here. Other people do too, and holy crap there are some great stories. And lots of them, this thing took forever to finish. Naturally I didn’t take notes on which stories I liked the best, so I’ll have to go back and pick those authors out. Steven King had a good one. Ursula’s was good too but not the best in here.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974)
A classic, apparently, I didn’t know. Interesting to see how Ms. Le Guin’s writing has changed since this early novel. In it she has ideas about authoritarianism versus socialism and plants them on a fictional alien planet and its moon (respectively), imagining that the closest thing you could have to a utopia would necessarily be compromised and not exactly Club Med. Or maybe it is like Club Med? I don’t really know what that is. Anyway, good stuff.

Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives (2004); The Jennifer Morgue (2006); The Fuller Memorandum (2010)
These are fun, and part of what’s fun about them is that you can observe Mr. Stross improve as a writer across this series. Subject-wise they’re kind of like Maisie Dobbs for geeks. They’re mysteries, of sorts, but of the deus-ex-machina James Bond variety where the reader’s not in a position to Hercule-Poireu anything. You’re pretty much just along for the (sometimes unintelligible) ride.

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006)
Dawkins has been painted as the Pope of atheism, as a sort of irreligious fundamentalist, but after finally reading one of his books I don’t think that’s fair. I do think I see where it comes from. First, he is very smart and extremely well-read, knowledgeable through his own decades of research in biology, and kind of a stickler for logic. Those qualities are usually annoying. Second, he seems to take a lot of joy in showing off how smart he is and pointing out exactly where others are misguided. Finally, he has the impetuousness to assert his conclusions against a majority that doesn’t want to hear them. To some this might appear fanatical, but it might just be extremely brave.

As I progressed though this book my initial impression of Dawkins as a sort of precocious know-it-all was replaced with an image of someone so awed by the workings of the world, particularly the biological world, as revealed by scientific understanding that he is frustrated and saddened by those who refuse to see it for themselves — or worse, those who would deny it for everyone.

As an aside, it was interesting to note that the world’s most famous atheist claims not to be atheist, insisting rather that he’s technically agnostic. He goes on to point out, however, that agnostically treating religious claims in terms of probabilities makes the distinction more or less irrelevant.

Charles Stross, Glasshouse (2006)
This one was just plain badass, with Stross hitting his stride as a writer right about here. I don’t know how many of the ideas in here are original to him. I’m guessing a lot of it is taken from Kurzweil and others’ ideas about the Singularity and post-human futures where technology has caught up with consciousness. Either way it’s fun stuff. Not unlike the Daniel Suarez books reviewed previously, or a lot of Cory Doctorow stories, or William Gibson, or OK so this is fairly well-worn territory. Still, not bad.

Charles Stross, ???
At this point I was on a roll with this author, but I read a couple of other things by him that were so hit and miss that they lost me. I don’t remember now what they were, which means it’s time to move on.

Dan Simmons, Ilium (2003), Olympos (2005)
Ilium is so bizarrely, wildly weird and creative I was dazzled for a while there. Just describing the premise: a classics professor from Indiana circa 1996 is resurrected hundreds of years in the future by certain Greek gods in order to monitor and record the Trojan war, which seems to be happening on Mars. In the meantime, humans are living on Earth, but not many of them, and they’re kept in a state of idiocy by robots, while not aging (the humans, not the robots — though I guess they don’t age either). Also in the meantime, another bunch of robots are hanging around Jupiter, reading Proust and Shakespeare, and planning a mission to go see what all is happening on on Mars and Earth.

And it all works, for the most part. As the story goes along (which it does for thousands of pages and on into Olympos) these ideas are spun into some kind of sense. As is the case in a lot of stories that start out showing great promise, however (I’m thinking the TV show Lost, or Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves), explaining all that great stuff necessarily kills the intrigue and/or becomes tedious and silly. Still, it was overall pretty awesome, and Simmons keeps it interesting in part by showing off a crazy amount of scholarly knowledge of Proust, Homer, and Shakespeare.

Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (2011)
My brother gave this to me for my birthday, thanks John!

So, Steve Jobs… this book makes the young Jobs appear much less impressive than his later self. The impression I got of early Jobs is one of a magalomaniacal bully who lucked out big time, meeting the right people with the right talents at the right time and knowing how to exploit them for gain, while also being something of a crybaby.

Then later, a transformation: into competence. And a remarkable competence at that, along with amazing drive and energy. But still basically a jerk, which, what can you say. Jerks move the world.

I’m going to stop here because I’ve been taking too long to write these, and I’m way behind.