Books, etc. May 2009

Ok, lots of books, proly not a complete list of what I've consumed in the last few months but close... So speed reviews so I can catch up...

Fiction...
"Domino Men" by Jonathan Barnes was a fun Queen Victoria era meets present day alternate reality house of Winsor maybe sold out the populace of London to some sort of evil entity and now a hapless civil servant has to fix it all kinda book. By the guy who did Somnambulist.

"The Dark Volume" by Gordon Dahlquist was a little more convoluted sequel to a kinda victorian alternate reality dark version of something that reminds me of the Golden Compass with a tear in reality where all the good/bad things bleed through sorta book. Not bad if you need a diversion but proly worth reading the Glass Eaters first.

"Drood" by Dan Simmons was an exploration into a possible Dicken's era explanation for Dicken's last book based on history and a bit of playfulness. Kinda long (like he's just filling pages sometimes) but overall enjoyable read with a dark twist.

"The Last Dickens" by Matthew Pearl was oddly also about Dicken's last unfinished novel but this time not so much fantasy as unexplored mystery by the writer who brought us The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow. Both of these books together give you a pretty good sense of Charles Dickens and his spellbinding ability to perform in public as well as captivate his readers. Also a nice exploration of piracy and copyright (America was like Napster or China back then).

"People of the Book" by Geraldine Brooks follows an ancient illustrated holy jewish book from lebanon backwards in time across continents. Not bad, sorta soft.

"A Fraction of a Whole" by Steve Toltz kinda reminds me of something written by Chuck P if he were less of a minimalist. The story of a very disfunctional Australian father and son and the destruction of many things and the living of life inside and outside the lines. I liked it.

"Pygmy" by Chuck Palahniuk was a short little riff on super smart chinese children agents that are bred to be adopted by hapless American christians to deploy a plot to destroy the US, love ensues. Fun, fast.

"My French Whore" by Gene Wilder is a short little book (really more like a novella) that finds Gene's protagonist in World War One France, behind enemy lines and ultimately fooling the Germans and finding love. Nicely done.

"The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet" by Reif Larsen really kills me. The story of a 12 year old Montana boy who draws and maps everything (from real world places to ways things work) in the margins of his travelogue as he runs away from home to find his fame as the invited guest of the Smithsonian. Buy it.

Non-Fiction...
"A Walk in the Woods" by Bill Bryson is a sometimes funny walking trip along the Appalachian Trails. Bears seem to predominate Bill's thoughts. Great history of the trail and the times that made it and the kinds of people who walk it.

"A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson isn't always completely factually accurate (at least not based on current theories) but is a pretty nicely pulled together history of the universe all the way up to people. Mostly a rumination on scientists who are thought crazy, dismissed, discovered to be correct (or more correct), probably after their death, and who end up having someone else take the credit for their discovery. And lots of scary bad ways of imagining the scale of things (like the energy under Yellowstone is akin to taking the state of Rhode Island and piling it six miles high with TNT). If you like the history of science it's worth a read.

"1434" by Gavin Menzies is one of those books that you hope is like "The Man Who Loved China" but instead is painful after the first few chapters (mostly because he can't stop trying to prove he's right and that he and his wife had a delightful vacation finding out all they did). Ok, I get it. China's emperor back in the 1400's wants the world to know that China rules and invented everything, sends out an armada to bring the good news (and get tributes) to the uncivilized (like those people in the dark ages of Europe), they leave maps and slave girls along the way, in places like Venice and the Vatican... maps of the entire world including details of North and South America, Australia, etc. hundreds of years before they were all discovered. Leave drawings of all the things Leonardo later "invented" but maybe just did a better job illustrating, and then they all returned to China and were maybe mostly destroyed by a huge comet that left actual evidence of Chinese junkets in Oregon, California, South America, and New Zealand.

"How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer is the second book in his exploration of how we think (the last one was about how artists probably discovered much of what we now are starting to understand about our brains decades or centuries ago). It reads a bit more like a Gladwell book than I'd like but it is full of fun examples and experiments. Worth reading.

Music...
Passion Pit, Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear... all good...