Author: Justin Torres

2011, Houghton Mifflin

Filed under: Literary

An avalanche of hype covered this book when it was published last summer. Its flap copy claims it is “an exquisite, blistering debut” full of “magical language” and “unforgettable images.”

That’s not exactly accurate, but it’s on the right track. Torres is not an especially gifted prose stylist; he falls into a fairly standard contemporary “young fiction” voice. Clipped sentences, long lists, lightly abraded grammar—all the hallmarks are here. It’s not bad, just not very unique. Like this:

These days, I sleep with peacocks, lions, on a bed of leaves. I’ve lost my pack. I dream of standing upright, of uncurled knuckles, of a simpler life—no hot muzzles, no fangs, no claws, no obscene plumage—strolling gaily, with an upright air.

You could’ve plucked that paragraph from a dozen debut novels this year. Luckily, Torres has a much more unique skill. He’s not a wordsmith, and not really a constructor of sentences, but there is poetry in his characters.

We the Animals should be rightly called a novella, both because it barely breaks a hundred pages, and because the story it tells features no real arc. Instead, Torres sets out to portray the emotional life of a young, poor family (evidently based on his own experiences growing up), and the nuanced web of relationships stretched among each of its members.

Three boys live with a listless, spineless mother, and a sometimes abusive, sometimes magnetically charismatic, sometimes absent father. The boys, their father is quick to tell them, do not belong much of anywhere.

We the Animals is about not fitting in and about loving your parents, and hating them, loving your family and hating them. It’s about being the smart one in the family, and also the weak one.  It’s about the whorl of emotions that come up when there’s not enough for everybody. It’s about trauma. The traumas from outside are tough but predicatable. Those traumas that come from within the family are devastating.

It’s a simple tale about three brothers trying to find their way in the world, and it’s simultaneously an infinitely detailed catalog of familial strife. And it’s one of the few books in the world still available as a library ebook. So there’s no excuse not to read it.

Similar books: Love and Shame and Love, by Peter Orner; The Believers, by Zoe Heller

Author: John Connolly

2006, Atria Books

Filed Under: Short Stories, Horror

I’ve still never read any of the crime fiction Connolly made his name with, but this is the third supernatural book of his I’ve tackled and loved: it’s just as good as the others. Perhaps as a result of his experience writing thrillers, Connolly has a real knack for building tension. The stories in this collection range from a few pages to over a hundred, but each is expertly paced and crafted. He manages to write stories that are taut and spooky without dipping into cliche or camp. His The Book of Lost Things reminds me of Stephen King at his best, and the mood and creativity of The Gates readily compares to Neil Gaiman’s work. This collection of scary tales marries those styles almost perfectly.

While there are vampires and the like in here, most of the supernatural subjects are pretty original. My favorite were those that told of hauntings by evil spirits, such as the old pagan gods of “The Shifting of the Sands” apparitioning from swirls of dirt to consume men’s souls. The child-nappping beast “The Erkling” and the possessing spirit of “The New Daughter,” who lures a child from her home to an ancient burial mound nearby while her father tries in vain to save her, are similarly great. These particular stories do great things with atmosphere–I found myself transported back to my childhood, reading Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books by flashlight.

Stories like “The Inkpot Monkey” and “Nocturnes” are very Stephen King-y with their cursed or haunted objects and susceptible subjects. And more than one story (“The Ritual of Bones,” “Mr. Pettinger’s Daemon,”"The Shifting of the Sands”) places demons amidst old institutions such as the clergy or a boarding school. There are submerged houses of the dead, passages to Hell, giant spiders in ancient caves, witches, vampires, slime ghosts, you name it.

The long-form stories that dot the book do a fine job of shifting gears. “The Cancer Cowboy Rides Again,” which opens the collection, is actually a departure from the rest of the stories, so much so that placing it first was a pretty bold move. It’s about a wanderer who is a sort of walking carcinoma. In order to ease his own pain, he must infect others with his curse, giving them rapid, incurable forms of cancer. It’s a cop-versus-bad-guy horror story, and a good one. Similarly blending horror and crime writing, “The Reflecting Lens: A Charlie Parker Novella” features a private eye on a case that turns up some other-worldy stuff and includes perhaps the most creepy character in the whole collection.

All told, there’s a lot of great horror stories in here. There’s not a single one I didn’t like, and since the subjects and styles vary so much from story to story, I suspect there are a lot of people that will find something to really enjoy here. Connolly is a great entertainer and storyteller, I can’t recommend his books enough.

Similar Reads: The Book of Lost Things (Connolly), Night Shift (King), Coraline (Gaiman).

Subtitle: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself

Author: David McRaney

2011, Gotham

Filed under: Nonfiction

Freelance journalist David McRaney’s first book is part psychology survey, part self-help guide, and part humor column. McRaney contends that we are all driven by a need to feel awesome and perfect. That’s an evolutionary advantage, because it means that those of us who aren’t very awesome (almost all of us) won’t commit suicide, and the human race can continue. But it also means that we civilians know next to nothing about the real reasons we like and do the things we like and do. Instead, we make up rationales and convince ourselves that our fables are truth.

Each of McRaney’s 48 chapters deals with a different way in which we deceive ourselves—”Self-Fulfilling Prophecies,” “The Bystander Effect,” “Confimartion Bias.” McRaney collects and synthesizes the results from a myriad of psychology studies, and interprets the ramifications with a healthy dose of sarcasm and humor. Here’s the one-paragraph summary:

You are a story you tell yourself. You engage in introspection, and with great confidence you see the history of your life with all the characters and settings—and you at the center as protagonist in the tale of who you are. This is all a great, beautiful confabulation without which you could not function.

The ways this confabulation plays out are often strikingly dramatic.

In one chapter, McRaney digs into the world of wine. As you might expect, “priming” plays a big role in wine connoisseurship—i.e., you taste what you’re expecting to taste. If you pay $100, you’re primed to think it tastes better than an $8 bottle, even if there’s objectively little difference. That makes sense.

But the extent to which that priming determines the experience of drinking wine is shocking. McRaney details a study in which 54 undergraduate wine students (“wine” is evidently a real major) were completely fooled by false priming. The experimenter “had them taste one glass of red wine and one glass of white wine. He had them describe each wine in as much detail as their expertise would allow. What he didn’t tell them was both were the same wine. He just dyed the white one red.” The result? Not a single wine student could tell that the red wine was actually white.

When a different experimenter scanned experts’ brains as they drank, a wine that they were told was expensive lit up entirely different parts of the brain from a wine they were told was cheap, when in fact both were equally cheap. Priming has such a big effect on us that it can actually alter our brain activity. (You can read that entire chapter here.)

As surprising as that is, my favorite parts of Smart involved those biases and effects that I could recognize in the real world. Remember when Michele Bachmann torpedoed her presidential campaign when she claimed that she’d met a woman whose daughter “suffered from mental retardation” after taking the HPV vaccine? That was an attempt to exploit the availability heuristic. In McRaney’s words, “You are far more likely to believe something is commonplace if you can find just one example of it, and you are far less likely to believe in something you’ve never seen or heard of before.”

Or perhaps you read the story about the Lululemon murder, in which two Apple Store employees listened to a woman at the store next door being stabbed to death for twenty minutes as she screamed and called for help. They did nothing. That’s the bystander effect: “The more people who witness a person in distress, the less likely it is that any one person will help.” In that gruesome case, they only needed two people to form a feedback loop: each looked to the other to see if they should be worried, each saw the other wasn’t worried, and each projected calmness to the other.

On a more personal level, I recognized my own behavior in at least half of these self-deceptions. For example, the illusion of transparency, in which you feel like people can read your thoughts. When speaking in front of a crowd, McRaney writes, you allow your nervousness to compound itself because you think you appear just as anxious as you feel. I’ve been there, many times.

In that chapter and many others, McRaney offers tidbits of advice on how to combat, or even exploit your fallacious instincts. For this one, he says:

When you stand in front of an audience or get interviewed on camera, there might be a thunderstorm of anxiety in your brain, but it can’t get out; you look far more composed than you believe. Smile. When your mother-in-law cooks a meal better fit for a dog bowl, she cant hear your brain stem begging you to spit it out.

In sum, Smart is a winning combination of fascinating surveys, humor, advice, and sharp writing. It might not be heady enough for a PhD, but if you’re a psychology novice, it’s a great read.

Similar books: Liespotting, by Pamela Meyer; The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell; How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer

Author: Peter Orner

2011, Little, Brown

Filed under: Literary

Love and Shame and Love centers around a Jewish male named Alexander Popper, simply “Popper” as he’s known to almost everyone—I hesitate to describe him more thoroughly, because the book covers nearly his entire life (as well as several other lives). Is it fair to call him a “writer,” or a “Democrat,” or even a “man,” when each of those descriptors will, at some point or other, fail to apply to him?

The first time we see Popper, he’s almost 13, nervously waiting to talk to a local judge in what we’re told is a kind of Bar Mitzvah. Five pages later, Popper’s at college, getting a degree in creative writing and falling in love with Kat, whom he’ll eventually marry. Soon the novel backs up a generation and follows Popper’s parents, Philip and Miriam, detailing how they fell in love and had kids and then, as the title implies, how their love fell apart.

Then it’s back another generation, to detail Popper’s grandparents, Seymour and Bernice, and how their marriage fared before and after WWII.

It takes nearly three hundred pages to get back to Popper and Kat’s life after college, and those pages are a jumble of time periods, perspectives, characters, and relationships, intercut with letters and drawings and epigraphs. Even though Orner’s an excellent writer, this technique has a tendency to underwhelm and confuse, at least for the first half of the novel. The characters are too briefly described, too obliquely set in the chronology of the Popper clan (and more often set along a timeline of Democratic politics, which doesn’t much help). It takes close reading or half the book’s length to sort out exactly who’s who, and whom each section focuses on, because those clues too are well-guarded.

Eventually, though, a rich picture of the Popper clan emerges, and by the end, each tiny moment reveals an intimate, and often heartbreaking glimpse into the core of a life.

Still, my favorite parts of this novel are sets of such moments, series of them that build entire scenes. A few brief chapters in the middle of the novel show how Popper’s parents grew distant, and then divorced. Then we see the aftermath, when Popper’s mother has to take a job to support her sons. We see her start dating again, and then marry another man. We see Popper’s father desperately trying to connect to his sons, and failing.

This is one of the clearest times we see characters reckon with the repercussions of their actions, and it’s the novel’s most powerful section. The narrative, though never as masterful as that one simple arc, continually captivates with great writing and great characters.

Peppered throughout the saga of the Poppers are mini-stories starring walk-on characters who steal their scenes. Like the neighbor, Mr. McLendon, who goes out to the street in the middle of the night, nude, to throw rocks at the streetlamp until he breaks its bulb.

Such detail and precision helps justify the fragmented structure of the book. When each small scene has so much attention paid to it, it’s easy to give each scene weight in reading it, too.

Orner also has a vivid, lighthearted prose style. Like this gruesomely beautiful scene, in which Philip has taken his sons pheasant hunting, along with Sir Edmund, their dog:

Pheasants aren’t very hard to shoot. First, there’s that hysterical nuthouse cackling. And the the running start, followed by a slow rise, like a fat, wide-bodied plane taking off. Occasionally, with their volley of shots, somebody would hit a bird. Sir Edmund would retrieve the body. It was Popper’s job to ferry the deceased, and he liked that part. He was a backward kangaroo, the pheasant against his back, warm, bleeding, heavy with the puttylike inertness of the newly murdered. Every third field or so there was a rack and a row of nails. Birds would be hanging there like spent rags, their eyes as if pried open.

All in all, this means Love is less like a mosaic and more like a handful of vivid puzzle pieces. Some of them complement each other to form minor stretches of the completed image, but more often, you get scattered bits of that much larger picture and it’s up to you to imagine or deduce the interstices between the clues.

If you enjoy that kind of reading, definitely don’t miss this book. If you’re more of a casual reader, give it a try anyway. You might well find that Orner’s prose and his people are enough to keep you invested. For the record, I fall into the latter group, and I loved this book.

Similar books: The Believers, by Zoe Heller; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, by Michael Chabon; Liars and Saints, by Maile Meloy

Author: Tom Frick

2011, Burning Books

Filed Under: Literary, Historical.

Set in the early 1800’s in Robin Hood’s territory, Thomas Frick’s The Iron Boys is a real tour de force that takes the mayhem of the Luddites who resisted the Industrial Revolution as its subject.  The term “Luddite” has long been used to describe a person who resists technological change, but it’s a sure bet that not many are really aware of its historical roots as an unorganized, almost spontaneous insurrection against the dehumanizing tendencies of the emerging capitalist economy.

The  Luddites flourished in the second decade of the nineteenth century in the Northern English counties of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire and  Nottinghamshire.  Ned Ludd, the mythical figure after whom the movement was named, was reputed to live in Sherwood Forest.  The Luddites were crafts workers who largely had control over their lives and livelihoods until the advent of the textile factories, which dehumanized workers in the name of profits.  Indeed, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was written to an extent as a reaction to Luddism, an eloquent treatise against the machine.  Byron championed the movement in the House of Lords, a lone voice against the machine.  The Luddites attacked the mills and smashed the machines that were ruining their autonomous way of life.

The Iron Boys in Frick’s novel are Luddites by another name.  Related in the semi-literate first-person voice of Corbel Penner, a paraplegic middle-aged loner, the narrative meanders according to Corbel’s whimsical thinking but ultimately culminates in the Iron Boys’ futile attack on the textile factory owned by George Cogent Meadows Richard Pilfer Withy, a pontificating, greedy capitalist, a comical if slightly sinister character who was made to be played by W.C. Fields.

Corbel is a likeable character.  When we first meet him he is conversing with the birds.  Ricky did it.  Ricky did it, they say, and Corbel responds, Whos Ricky. Whadideedo.  Whos Ricky. Whadideedo. It’s clever the way Frick mimics birdcalls here and puts a human voice to the sounds, onomatopoeically, but it also suggests to us that Corbel is one with the natural world, which in the context of the story is crucial: nature versus machinery.  By the end of the novel Corbel is no longer conversing with the birds, though he has not been conquered by the machines; he has achieved a new maturity, a level of equanimity.

Corbel tells us of his life, his love, his legs–we know that he has lost them but only find out how during the climactic scene, a plot development Frick handles skillfully, just as the turn of Corbel’s love life/family life by novel’s end is also handled with skillful storytelling.

In his meandering, Tristam Shandy-like narrative, Corbel introduces us to the principal characters in the story, including the machine=loving (anti-life) Withy, and the other Iron Boys who will challenge him.  These include the inscrutable Pank, leader of the Iron Boys if there is one, William Dogg, Rose Stonewarden, Maggie Moats and New Billy, a sort of village idiot who may or may not be the pattern of Ned Ludd himself.

Many of the little stories that Corbel tells us along the way, which feel like pure digression, have the force of parables:  the story of Black Whopper, William Dogg’s Lustrabustions, the construction of Withy’s factory compared with “the Babble Tower.”  Corbel frequently mentions “the Black Book,” whose obscure prophecies make one wonder if this is some sort of magical Book of Runes, until it becomes clear he is talking about the Bible.  Indeed, numerology has an importance for Corbel, the magic of numbers.  Numbers also represent the mechanical, as embodied in Withy’s factory’s clock.

Frequently Corbel breaks into song, little bits of doggerel verse – some from the Black Book indeed–that have a sort of psalm-like folk wisdom.  At times they echo with the simple emotion of folk tales.

Will Flowers “63”

Plays the Heavenly Lyre

Born bred & hanged

All in the same shire

The hanging of Will Flowers for killing a factory guard during an attack on a mill is an event that galvanizes the Iron Biys.  Flowers’ father had been forced out of his household shop and so had a justifiable grudge, but it’s also likely he was framed by the authorities, made an example of.  Withy, meanwhile, has delivered his own lecture about how “machines improve men.”

The Iron Boys carry little pouches of iron filings that they superstitiously believe have magical, transformative powers – alchemy – and it is from these that they derive their name.  The Iron Boys take the iron oath:

With this sacred oath

I weave my word and will

With those of every Iron Boy

Our mission to fulfill

Their very words are one

An oath to set us free

And never shall it be undone

Unto eternity

The salient part of  Corbel’s “speech”–of the novel itself–a decision Frick has made, is the lack of punctuation–no apostrophes, no quotation marks, no question marks, no punctuation of any kind except periods at the end of sentences.  The narrative is presented in paragraph-like chunks that are not really “paragraphs” but blocks of thought, or speech.  Words are frequently spelled as they sound.  The intention here is to sink the reader into the stream of Corbel’s thought, as if the entire book were being spoken, an oral presentation rather than a written one.  Indeed, this idea reflects the basic tension between “nature” and “machine”: written language is artificial; grammar is a mechanical device imposed on organic speech; writing is a lifeless (mis)representation of speech.

The hillbilly-like voice is not meant as dialect, therefore, but the reader is still left wondering about it.  Is this the way a person of a certain class in early nineteenth century England talked?  Thought is the shadow of speech, after all.  Even though Frick does not mean to represent “dialect,” the paradox is that this is a written narrative, a “book,” and not really a story being told aloud a la Homer.

At times you can even hear Huck Finn in Corbel’s narrative, as when he satirizes Withy.  Withy the blowhard, the pontificator, makes pompous speeches that borrow Biblical language; he uses phrases like, “Verily I say unto you,” straight from the Sermon on the Mount.   “Not that we eat more but there be ever more that eat he says.” Here Withy seems to be justifying the need for mass production, and Corbel comments with sly innocence, “Although you ask me I think Withy do eat more to judge from what his tailor let out.”

The Iron Boys is definitely a book that makes a reader think. It’s one of those books whose difficulty of style could easily result in a reader simply hurling it across the room in frustration and giving up on it, but it’s satisfying to those who pursue it to its end.  Moreover, in its conflict between man and “progress” the plot has a contemporary relevance.

Similar Reads: Henry James’s The Ambassadors, L.D. Brodsky’s This Here’s a Merica, and Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opionions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Author: Neal Stephenson

2011, William Morrow

Filed under: Literary, Thriller

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A few weeks after Reamde came out, there was a bit of a kerfuffle about the ebook edition being full of typos. This is not surprising. The paper version has more than its share of typos, too. Not an overwhelming amount, perhaps two dozen mistakes over a thousand pages. But more than you see in most professionally published books.

I can entirely understand these errors. Reamde runs a thousand pages, roughly 400,000 words, and it was published just three years after Stephenson’s last novel. In addition, it’s a globe-trotting thriller, steeped in real-world facts and places, technology and tactics. And it has its own built-from-the-ground-up online virtual world.

It took me three weeks just to read this thing, let alone proofread it. I can’t even imagine editing or writing it. So a few mistakes are certainly forgivable. But they tell of Stephenson’s attitude toward writing, which has emphasized, in the past decade, length above all, moreso than ensuring the highest sentence-to-sentence quality possible.

This is not to say that Reamde feels rushed or shoddily produced. On the contrary, it’s very very good—entertaining, immersive, thrilling, fun, educational and full of great characters. But it’s not Stephenson’s best work. His best, in my mind, is still Snow Crash, the revolutionary information-disease cyberpunk epic that made his name. Snow Crash is also a hefty read at well over 100,000 words—I’d guess 150K—but it’s less than half the size of Reamde, and it shows a different Stephenson than the one from 2011.

When Stephenson labors over a passage, his prose is his best talent. Snow Crash teems with that kind of writing. But, since its publication (in 1992), Stephenson’s writing has expanded and sprawled. As Tom Bissell pointed out, he’s published six 1000-page novels in a dozen years. That’s an absurd pace, and it lends itself more toward new-Stephenson’s penchant for extensive logistical layout and much less toward old-Stephenson’s penchant for phrase-turning and bombastic character details.

For example, in Snow Crash, the main character is a samurai-sword-wielding pizza delivery driver, named Hiro Protagonist, who drives a very fancy car. This is how it’s described:

The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big, sticky contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

In Reamde, the two main characters are a middle-aged game developer and his favorite niece, who was born in Eritrea and raised in Iowa. Here’s how the coolest car in that novel is described, from the perspective of the niece:

From the axles up, it was simply a pickup truck, albeit of the biggest and heaviest class: the kind that, on her visits back home, she saw driving around in farm country, carrying bags of cement and towing fifth wheel trailers. From the axles down, though, it looked like nothing she’d ever seen. The wheels had been removed and replaced with contraptions that looked like miniature tank treads. At each corner of the vehicle, where her eye expected to see a round wheel, it was instead baffled by the impossible-looking spectacle of a large triangular object, consisting of a system of bright yellow levers and wheels circumscribed by a caterpillar tread made up of black rubber plates linked together into an endless conveyor belt about a foot and a half wide. This ran along the ground for several feet beneath each axle and then looped up and around the yellow framework that held it all together, which, she perceived, was bolted onto the truck’s axle using the same lug nut pattern as would be used to mount a conventional wheel. So it seemed that these things were a direct bolt-on replacement for conventional tires, made to spread the vehicle’s weight out over a much larger contact area. Just the thing for an environment that was covered with snow for six months out of each year, and mud for another two. And indeed as the day grew brighter, she saw that the truck’s rearview mirrors and upper body were spattered with dried mud. Conditions might be snowy up in this valley, but this truck had been stolen from some place where spring was well advanced.

A lot of this comes down to taste. If you prefer a risky style, and shorter, more deliberate, and frankly more entertaining prose, you’d like Snow Crash more. If you prefer a very good but slightly long-winded and not quite as polished style, then you might well prefer Reamde.

Whatever your preference, it seems that Stephenson, as the last decade has proven, is the latter kind of writer, and Snow Crash was the exception to the rule.

That’s not to say Reamde doesn’t have its gems. In fact, it has a lot of them, but the sheer length of this book, the exhaustive setup and tangents Stephenson indulges, means that those real beauties are usually dozens of pages apart.

In this kind of format, Stephenson’s best talent is his world-building, a descriptor that usually attends science fiction or fantasy writing. In this case, the world Stephenson builds is an intensively realistic setting full of brilliantly realized characters. Each of his dozens of heroes and villains has a history and a unique worldview, habits, thoughts, good sides and weaknesses.

So, finally, the very worst you can say of Reamde is that it’s an outstanding thriller, one of the best ever and unique in its complexity and humanity. For the sake of thoroughness, and because it seems appropriate to have a review of Reamde run 1500 words, the rest of this review is a summary of the premise.

Richard Forthrast spent a good deal of his 20s ferrying pot across the US/Canada border. He made a whole lot of dirty cash, and so he spent a lot of time wondering and worrying about money laundering. Later on, after losing an entire decade to an addiction to World of Warcraft, he developed an idea for a similar medieval combat online role-playing game, one that wound up being called T’Rain, short for TERRAIN, the landform-generating program at the heart of the world.

T’Rain has a number of features that distinguish it from WoW, like its hyper-realistic land formations, and its ability to map real-life situations and actual jobs like airport security or business meetings into the game. Most of all, T’Rain’s distinguishing feature is that Forthrast built significant substructures into the game to cater to, of all groups, the masses of teenage Chinese “gold farmers” who slog through the game earning gold, weapons, and other things of value, and then selling them to rich Western players who have more money than time.

So, T’Rain features self-sustaining accounts, which don’t require credit cards, since Chinese teenagers don’t have credit cards. And it easily allows for transferring money back and forth from China, and so on and so forth. As Richard notices, gold farming is a multi-billion dollar per year industry, so catering to that market is not exactly insane.

But it also makes T’Rain ideal for money laundering, and for a particular kind of virus called ransomware, which worms into an infected computer, locks up all the documents it can find into one big encrypted zip file, and then charges the infectee for the key. The biggest new ransomware virus in T’Rain is called REAMDE, and it tells its victims to report with their ransom payment (a bargain-basement $73) to a certain location inside the game. That makes it difficult to actually pay, since hordes of predatory third-party gamers descend on the location in question and kill anyone who approaches.

Life’s tough in the real world, too. When a young hacker steals a bunch of credit card numbers and sells them to the Russian mafia, the file gets corrupted by REAMDE, and the Russian mafioso press-gangs the hacker’s girlfriend (who happens to be Richard Forthrast’s favorite niece) into service to track down the person responsible for the virus, so that he, the mafioso, can kill him.

All of that is just the beginning of the plot, the barest outlines of the premise. We’re still not even 100 pages into the novel’s massive girth. If you’re already bored, this probably isn’t the book for you. Things get more interesting, certainly, and there’s plenty of action, but Stephenson is never afraid to explain, in minute detail, the inner workings of a relatively minor detail, like how Richard stumbled across Pluto, his genius geologic-model maker, and why detailed geographic formations are important.

Stephenson’s writing is never quite dry, but it can be exhaustive, and hence exhausting. Still, a great novel, especially if you’re already a Stephenson fan.

Similar books: The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway; Zero History, by William Gibson; Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

Author: Max Barry

2011, Vintage

Filed under: Literary, Sci-fi

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Machine Man began its existence as a kind of blog through which Max Barry sent readers one page a day of the novel in progress. Those readers, who had to pay after the first 43 pages, gave Barry feedback that he sometimes incorporated into the plot of the novel. He even let the cover be decided by popular vote.

This sounds crazy. I mean, crowd-sourcing a novel? That’s a train wreck waiting to happen. That backstory made me skeptical of the book, to the point that I almost didn’t read it. Luckily I eventually did, and the novel itself overcame my skepticism and won me over in a big big way, because the end result, Machine Man the finished product, is delightful.

For the record, I have previously used the word “delightful” zero times to describe a book, but it’s been a long time since I’ve read one that comes together this well. Machine Man has a fascinating plot, outstanding (and hilarious) writing, and one of the all-time best sci-fi protagonists ever. It’s easily one of the two best books I’ve read this year. Let me tell you why.

Charlie Neumann works for Better Future, a shiny, evil corporation of the type that seems to be Barry’s hobbyhorse (his last novel, Jennifer Government, took place in a world where each citizen takes the name of the company he or she works for as their own surname).

Charlie’s very smart and entirely socially stunted. That sounds perhaps like an overused character model, but the way Barry writes him—Charlie narrates as well as playing the hero—makes him unique and engaging and a blast to follow.

Here’s how Charlie describes himself:

I am a smart guy. I recycle. Once I found a lost cat and took it to a shelter. Sometime I make jokes. … I have a job. I own my apartment. I rarely lie. These are qualities I keep hearing people are looking for. I can only think there must be something else, something no one mentions, because I have no friends, am estranged from my family and haven’t dated in this decade. There is a guy in Lab Control who killed a woman with his car, and he gets invited to parties. I don’t understand.

Charlie’s a bit like an alien species or a shoddy human clone: he sees and understands emotions and social signals, but he can’t quite do the subcutaneous algebra required to fit in. Nor he does particularly care to.

All this makes him perfectly suited to the story in store for him. One day, at the corporate lab where Charlie works, he gets his leg crushed in a clamp and they have to amputate it. He gets the best prosthetic money can buy, and finds it woefully inadequate. (Meanwhile, he falls in love with the prostheticist.)

He decides that he can build a much better prosthetic himself, and he does, but then his biological leg is holding him back, because it can’t keep up with the robo-leg.

So Charlie crushes his other leg.

Better Future hears about his project and decides there’s a lot of money to be made. Things get weird and hairy quickly, and the relatively short course of the novel holds an impressive number of twists, surprises, and treats.

In the midst of gleefully over-the-top complications, Barry manages to explore the philosophy and ethics of technology use (along with the philosophy and ethics of being human) without ceding a moment of entertainment. Largely because Charlie tackles ethical and philosophical questions like a socially stunted engineer, which is pretty funny.

Here’s another snippet, in which Charlie is discussing with an assistant what would happen if he used a drug to anesthetize his ventromedial prefrontal cortex (or VMPFC), the part of the brain responsible for manufacturing feelings of guilt. Charlie speaks first:

“So if my VMPFC were suppressed, I’d feel less guilt, but otherwise be the same.”

“A lot less guilt.”

“Right. A lot less guilt.”

“And/or regret. They both lit up the VMPFC.”

I pondered this. “Is there a difference between guilt and regret?”

Jason stared blankly. “I don’t … think … so.”

“I guess one is …” I shook my head. “Lost it.”

“Emotions aren’t really my … area of expertise.”

“Let’s assume they’re the same.”

This kind of thing makes Machine Man a pleasure to read, not only because it’s both funny and thought-provoking, but because it’s driven by characters, mostly the character of Charlie. Like The Sisters Brothers, this is a thoughtful, witty, insightful, and entirely overblown adventure story that takes a little bit of work on the part of the reader, but offers great rewards.

Don’t miss it.

Similar reads: The Dream of Perpetual Motion, by Dexter Palmer; The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick deWitt (the other best book I’ve read this year); Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline (I’ll be reviewing Ready Player One soon—it’s not nearly as good as Machine Man, but they are very similar)

Author: Carol Birch

2011, Doubleday

Filed Under: Literary, Historical.

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I read a review of this last Wednesday and, thanks to the magic and compulsive buying ease that comes with owning a nookColor, had finished by Sunday night. I’m ready to jump on the top of the pig-pile of glowing reviews. This book was a blast. How can you not like a novel that begins like this:

I was born twice. First in a wooden room that jutted out over the black water of the Thames, and then again eight years later in the Highway, when the tiger took me in his mouth and everything truly began.

As far as plot goes, this book is almost a mash-up. It has three distinct parts, each of which reminded me of an old favorite. The first section is solid Dickens: it follows Jaffy Brown, a London street urchin in the true Dickensian sense. (The son of a young “fallen” mother, we meet him happily walking the sewers, searching for coins in the muck with his bare feet.) A chance encounter with an escaped tiger leads Jaff to the title character, the eccentric Charles Jamrach, an overblown menagerie owner and importer of exotic animals who quickly takes the youth under his wing, where the innate animal magnetism that led Jaff into a tiger’s mouth quickly leads him to success.

With bustling London, a young street urchin, and a benevolent benefactor this includes nearly all of Dickens’ favorite tropes except for mistaken identity, and this is a near-miss: although Jaff’s new friends Tim and Ishbel Linver, are twins, they are brother and sister.

Once established, the story quickly changes gears. A rich collector tells Jamrach of a dragon sighted near in the Philipeans (Komodo Dragons were not yet discovered), and Jamrach charges Jaff and Tim with collecting this animal that may or may not exist. The pair serve on a whaling boat along the way. An animal lover, Jaff muses “I wanted to look a whale in the eye,” as if he would be on a sight-seeing trip. Once aboard, the narrative shifts. Someone once wrote of Melville’s Moby Dick that after reading the novel one could go to sea and expect success as a whaler. An exaggeration, sure, but a compliment to Melville’s exhaustive detail.

Birch’s novel is not as concerned with the minutia of whaling, which makes for a quicker and less tedious read, but she still manages to capture the essence of the experience Melville described: the cycle of long periods of tranquility upon the seas, shocking violence initiating whales upon seeing a whale’s death, and bone-wearying days of work following a kill. Waiting for the first whale to die, watching as ten, fifteen, twenty minutes pass while the animal struggles in its own gore, Jaff is horrified, commenting, “It was then I truly realized the whale is no more a fish than I am.”

Following a disaster at sea while returning, the novel takes its final, dark turn, from what feels like a YA adventure to a gritty survivor’s tale. I was reminded most of The Life of Pi, and anyone even vaguely acquainted with the plot will be able to guess why. Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that the wide-eyed musing and adolescent whimsy that made Jaff such a likeable character in the first sections of the book will be long, long gone by this part’s end.

The three distinct sections could seem shoe-horned together, but Birch avoids this. She convinces us with telling but not distracting details, and under the wide-eyed voice of Jaff, there are no seams showing.

“I got to know the stars well at sea,” Jaff says of his journey.

You can’t rely on the sun and moon–they do funny things sometimes–but you can rely on the stars. When you look at them through a telescope, they start to flutter like little white wings burning in a silver fire. Then, if you focus you lens her below on a bird’s eye, you can see the shine in it, the life. And sometimes a thing comes so close it makes you jump.

It’s the same when you look at the past. Far away the white wings twinkle, nothing can be known. Further in, details: the riggings of great ships that web the darkening sky; rooftops, clear on the inner eye, magnified; and sometimes a pang, up close.

It is here the frame of the story is revealed for the first time, and we learn this story is being told as a reflection as an older Jaff is muses about the loss of a valuable gift, a telescope. This is fine, and allows for some clever foreshadowing (although this might not be necessary considering the very compelling plot). However, this is the one area I find fault with.

The voice of teen Jaff is so strong that, for me, the adult voice did not ring entirely true, and was still under the influence of the wide-eyed narrator. This doesn’t seem to be an adult reflecting on his curious, and ultimately tragic, misadventures as a youth, but more what a child might assume an adult would be like. The lessons learned between adolescence and the ripe old age we leave him at are never revealed. What this amounts to is a loss-of-innocence through adventure, and a great one, but without a realistic adult reflecting on that loss, a piece may be missing.

But that’s a minor criticism, the kind a person rereading his book review throws in to counter-balance what he wrote earlier out of a kind of embarrassment for gushing so much (did I really just compare the book to Dickens, Moby Dick, and The Life of Pi?). But I am not ashamed at all to endorse this book wholeheartedly to anyone, especially those interested in fleet-footed, wide-eyed novels of youth, inevitable loss, and rolicking adventure.

Similar Reads: The Life of Pi (Martel), Moby Dick (Melville), Great Expectations (Dickens)

Author: Félix. J. Palma

2011, Atria Books

Filed Under: Literary, Historical, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Romance.

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There’s very little I can say about this book without spoiling something. So I’m going to try something a little different to start. Let’s do word association. Take a look at this list and see how many things you think could help make for a good story:

Victorian romance. Parasols. Hoodwinks. Murder. Historical figures in fictional situations. Meticulous plotting. Vengeance. Paradoxes. Bawdiness. Secret societies. Blackmail. The Terminator. Drunk British whores. Jack the Ripper slaughtering drunk British whores. Minority Report. Tribal magic. The time machine in H.G. Wells’s attic. Street brawls. Apocalyptic robot battles. Dimensional rifts. Time travel. Henry James and Bram Stoker having a sleepover. Time Cop. Lava guns. Immortal dogs. Naive girls easily coerced into sex. Parallel universes.  Steam powered automatons. Fourth dimensional dragon-like beasts. Sword fights.

Pretty good odds for an entertaining book right? Right. In any case, if that piqued your interest sufficiently, go ahead and skip the rest of the review, pick up this book, and enjoy.  Read on and I’ll try and explain a little more substantively, but be aware that while I’ll try to limit them, there will be spoilers after the break. If you already think you want to read the book, do so, then return to my review in the future (oooooh).

Last chance to avoid SPOILERS. Okay, you’ve been warned.

It’s not perfectly clear that time travel actually exists in this novel. There’s evidence for it, but also evidence against. The reader, much like the 19th century London depicted in Palma’s excellent novel, gets taken in by an elaborate scam. How deep the scam goes remains debatable–perhaps it’s only superficial and H.G. Wells (the primary protagonist) is nothing more than a character embroiled in a twisting murder mystery spanning a multiverse, or perhaps it goes far deeper.

Whatever the truth is, The Map of Time is full of hoaxsters. You will find youself tricked more than once. Yet each time the wool is pulled, you’ll rush to replace it, or begin looking elsewhere for the otherworldy. The twists are never cheap. I continually found myself feeling self-satisfied as I figured out what was going on, just to be wrong again (in fact, I had to rewrite this whole review, because I unwisely began it before finishing the book). Palma sets a meticulous stage, and the readers will see what we want to see, despite any indication to the contrary–I understand how vague that is, but it’s difficult to be spoiler-wary.

The basic plot follows a few main storylines, each twisting from a center plot featuring Wells himself. First there’s Andrew Harrington. He’s a meloncholy rich kid who falls deeply in love with an alcoholic prostitute. On the very night he renounces his family fortune for his love, he finds her skinned and filleted in a Whitechapel boarding room. After despairing for 8 years, Andrew decides to kill himself, but his cousin intervenes with a plan. All of London is talking about Gilliam Murray, who has been leading London’s wealthy elite on expeditions to the year 2000. They turn to him to send Andrew into the past, where he will kill his love’s killer (none other than Jack the Ripper) before her murder can occur.

For complicated reasons, Murray cannot help. But he directs the cousins to the science fiction writer H.G. Wells, who, he surmises, probably has a time machine upon which he based his novel, The Time Machine.

The second storyline features young Claire Haggarty, who falls in love with the savior of the future on one of Murray’s expeditions. After witnessing him destroy the leader of the robot army amongst the ruins of London in an epic sword duel, she swoons. Tom Blunt, a seemingly goodhearted simpleton in Murray’s employ, manages to convince Claire that he’s the savior of the human race, traveled through time to bed her. When this coercion effects life-threatening consequences for the girl, he turns to Wells for help.

Then there’s Inspector Garret of Scotland Yard, who gets a warrant to travel to Murray’s future in order to arrest a suspect for a murder in order to prevent it from occurring in the first place. There are time guardians and pan-dimensional thieves, glimpses into the future and libraries hidden in prehistory. Some of it is real, and perhaps all of it isn’t. Through Wells, everything intertwines brilliantly. And, I should note, the stentorian and somewhat playful narrator–an omnipotent showman of sorts–adds a whole lot of charm to the story.

Palma is not a perfect writer, there are a few smudges on the polish. Occasional bits of dialogue feel stodgy, and the mostly airtight plot has the occasional minor leak in plausibility–namely, characters too often jump to conclusions with too much conviction, a technique that services the plot but hurts the tension and characterization. But as a whole, The Map of Time is an example of a wonderfully planned and crafted novel. Palma keeps a lot of balls in the air, continually adding more; it really is a spectacle.

I was very much looking forward to this book. A steampunk vengeance story about a Victorian time traveler sounds ridiculously awesome to me. Even when I first suspected a hoax, I wasn’t disappointed, not for a moment. I was a sucker spectator eager for what I believed I was being offered. I kept thinking that maybe, just maybe, the illusion was real.

Offering such immersion and such satisfaction is the sign of a top-notch novel. Even when you know its secrets, The Map of Time is very much a Great Read and well worth your time.

Similar Reads: The Time Machine (Wells), The Chess Machine (Löhr), The Resurrectionist (Bradley), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Wilder)

Author: Grant Morrison

2011, Spiegel & Grau

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction, Graphic Novel

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In Supergods, a nonfiction exploration of superheroes as a fictive phenomenon, comic book writer and artist Grant Morrison argues that Superman is humanity’s greatest accomplishment. From anyone else that might be considered a cynical statement; of all the scientific and artistic achievements, across centuries, nothing scores higher than a gaudily costumed, flying strongman born in a medium that’s not even 100 years old?

But Morrison is absolutely sincere—he contends that superhero comics are not just entertainment for children and fodder for blockbuster movie adaptations, but windows into a separate reality populated by gods that fight intensely pitched battles for good, of which Superman is the best and brightest.

Morrison’s is a delightfully optimistic premise, doubly refreshing when considered next to the daily articles and blog posts about the imminent death of the comic book industry. Those writers worry (rightfully so) about relevance, demographics, and market share, while Morrison knows that the stakes are actually much higher. How appropriate that a book about the history and potential of superheroes aims to save the world.

Writing about Alain Resnais’s notorious experimental film Muriel, critic Gary Giddins states that “a reputation for difficulty is almost impossible to undo.” That’s true of individual texts, like Muriel or Finnegans Wake or Metal Machine Music, but also of entire careers. And perhaps no other comic creator’s career is as obscured by received wisdom about difficulty or inscrutability as Grant Morrison’s.

Part of the “British invasion” of writers in the early 80s that also included Garth Ennis, Neil Gaiman, and Alan Moore, Morrison’s interest in surrealism, cut-up narrative techniques, fringe science, and the occult marked him early as a creator whose comics couldn’t necessarily be digested in a single reading. As a result, Morrison is labeled a “challenging” writer, and his work often gets dismissed as “weird for weirdness’s sake,” or deliberate provocations meant to confuse and irritate readers.

What his critics so often overlook is Morrison’s solid storytelling instincts—his characters are never ambiguous, and his plots follow an internal logic that rarely wavers (even if they don’t resemble conventional plots). Supergods is just as readable, perhaps more so considering Morrison has nothing to gain thematically or dramatically by employing unusual structures or oblique dialogue. He keeps his prose light and often quite funny, reflecting the boyish enthusiasm that informs his thesis. Even when discussing difficult concepts like fifth-dimensional beings (more on that later), the text stays lucid and expansive, as Morrison clearly wants readers to follow along.

The structure of Supergods also contributes to that readability. It’s part history book, part treatise, and part memoir, with all three modes braided into a single coherent narrative. For instance, Morrison folds his recollections of childhood and his writing career into the history of superheroes, discussing the cultural impact of the Silver Age Kennedy-era superheroes along with his own first experiences with comic books as a boy growing up in Govan, Scotland.

Later, he breaks down the first page of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s classic series Watchmen, while expanding on how the deconstructed, realistic approach runs contrary to the very nature of superhero comics and their paper-god status. This structure is also key to the book’s appeal; there’s no shortage of superhero histories, but precious few with such a strongly defined point of view and direct access to a celebrated creator’s life story.

In fact, many of the most interesting passages in Supergods concern Morrison’s take on his own career, particularly his self-willed transformation from wallflower to bon vivant. Directly inspired by superhero comics, Morrison turned himself into the kind of person he often wrote about—confident, curious, open to every possible experience. Of those experiences, the most likely to get attention in reviews of the book is Morrison’s encounter with fifth dimensional beings in Kathmandu. I won’t even try to describe what happened—any attempt to summarize or condense the story inevitably leads to distortion and incoherence—suffice to say that it’s a surreal and highly entertaining tale that requires a bit of lateral thinking to comprehend.

It’s also the story detractors most often point to as evidence that Morrision is crazy, or a binge pscyhedelic drug user, or a fabulist who embellishes his biography to accumulate counter-culture cred. Morrison himself acknowledges that there are a number of ways to interpret what happened in Kathmandu, and doesn’t quibble with those who maintain it’s nothing more than a particularly memorable acid trip—what’s important, he argues, is how the experience changed his worldview and led to a fervid creative period he’s maintained for almost twenty years.

There’s an almost spiritual quality to the Kathmandu story, and to much of Supergods, but it’s a spirituality rooted in creativity. Morrison is aware that superheroes aren’t real people, that they only exist on paper (in fact, that’s a key point in his criticism of Alan Moore’s take on superheroes, specifically Watchmen—sure to be another flashpoint for controversy), but he maintains that those same characters can have a real, substantial impact on our reality, just as we can have an impact on theirs.

You can’t pray to Superman and expect him to save you from a burning building, but perhaps through fiction and storytelling you can interact with him, and draw hope from his example. For Morrison, superheroes don’t just represent warmth and bravery and loyalty and love; they’re a way to directly access to those very same qualities in ourselves, which too often go undiscovered and unexpressed.

Recommended reading: All-Star Superman, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely; The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison and various artists; Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, by Gerard Jones

[A review copy of this book was provided by the publisher.]