THE GEOGRAPHY OF BLISS by Eric Weiner

All right, Goodreads. Maybe you've got a good statistician up your sleeve after all. First The Dart League King and now The Geography of Bliss. Maybe you do have a little sense in your recommendations.

Of the plethora of recommendations that Goodreads gives, I opted for this one because I thought it was great that it was chosen for me because I read Eat, Pray, Love and The Sex Lives of Cannibals. I wouldn't have normally made that connection and am surprised that others read that pair of books to come up with this recommendation.

I guess it's not entirely surprising. All three books are travelogues. And the subtitle of Geography of Bliss - one grump's search for the happiest places in the world - does have a bit of similarity to Elizabeth Gilbert's quest. She may not have been a grump but she was looking for happiness.

In Eric Weiner's book, he starts off by going to the Netherlands to meet with a happiness researcher. This fellow has been collecting data on the happiness of people around the world and Weiner decides to use the fellow's database to explore what common traits these countries might have. He visits some of the happiest countries in the world as well as some on the bottom of the list for contrast purposes.

In the end, he finds that there aren't a lot of similarities and that every country also has it's downsides. If anything, Weiner realizes that happiness is largely relative and that there are a few things that bring happiness regardless of where you are in the world such as a network of friends and family.

That being said, I'm still a believer that place can at least enhance, if not provide, happiness. That's why A Barn in New England and City of Your Final Destination are such favorites of mine. Of the countries that Weiner visits, Iceland, Bhutan and the Netherlands all sounded appealing to me and I have been to the Netherlands and it did feel very much like some place I could call home.

As far as Weiner goes, I thought he was a riot. I laughed out loud several times just in the opening few pages. He has great turns of phrases. He finds the right balance of being a journalist and reporting about the places he's visiting but bringing himself in, usually in a self-deprecating sort of way, to keep it entertaining and not turn it into a documentary.

I loved it, can see myself re-reading it, and it will likely find it's way into my top ten of the year. Better than Eat, Pray, Love? Hard to say. Very different perspectives. Very different styles. I think in a head-to-head matchup, I would give the nod to Gilbert, though.

--Jon

KAROO by Steve Tesich

For all of the dark subject material I've been reading about as of late - suicides, drug use, depression, soccer (a non-library book not reviewed here) - you probably wouldn't expect the most depressing book I've read in a while to be about a script rewriter. Especially given that the cover of the book contains a page from the script of one of my all time favorite movies, the uplifting Breaking Away. Nonetheless, this book was one big book of defeatism.

Karoo was another book from the small press collection at the library, this one published by Open City Books. The author, Steve Tesich, actually did write the screenplay to Breaking Away as well as The World According to Garp. Karoo is far closer to the latter than the former.

Saul Karoo is a guy Hollywood execs hire to fix scripts. Saul doesn't think much of his work and feels that he does more harm than good to the scripts on which he works. Even though the revised movies may be lacking artistically, once he fixes a script, the revisions tend to have box office success.

Saul is going through an incredibly amicable divorce with his wife, so much so that the proceedings have been going on for years, with occasional dinners out together to iron out details. Saul has a son in his twenties that he and his wife adopted as a newborn. Makes good coin, has a family, well-respected in his field...what does Saul have to be unhappy about?

Everything. He avoids his son like the plague. He's gained a ton of weight and can't quite land the caliber of girl that he feels he should, especially when trying to show off for Hollywood execs. The dude has no self-respect and doesn't care much for others either. He's middle aged and definitely feeling the crisis coming from his sense of meaninglessness.

He finds meaning when he's brought in to rework a movie done by a legendary movie writer. Saul watches it, realizes it is an artistic masterpiece, and proceeds to deconstruct it into a romantic comedy. During the process, a waitress with a bit part in the original movie laughs on film and Saul recognizes it from a phone call over two decades before. It is the laugh of his son's biological mother, a woman Saul got to talk with on the phone after she delivered her baby which Saul and his wife then adopted.

Saul tracks her down, uses the cut footage of the film to make her the star of the revised script, and creates a new family of himself, his son, and his son's biological mother. He doesn't tell either of the other two the truth about their relationship, hoping to spring the news on them at the premiere of the movie.

Even though Saul has created this movie script life for himself, he still isn't happy. When things turn sour, the book goes even further downhill.

The book seriously put me into a funk for days. Tesich writes well and the book is long because it's almost entirely in Karoo's head. Every single thought process, it seems, is covered. It's more coherent than a simple stream of consciousness but there's a lot of noise surrounding the story's signal. It's just sad. At least I think so.

Reflecting on the book, I was reminded of the movie Oscar and Lucinda, a movie that I first watched when I was going through a tough time in my life and that I thought was the saddest movie I had ever seen. Years later I re-watched it and couldn't believe I had thought it was so sad. The second time through the movie I thought Ralph Fiennes overacted so much as to make the movie right near unwatchable. So I might be unduly influenced by my own recent thought processes when it comes to Karoo.

For all the gloom, though, it's still a good, well-written book. Once again, it's not a book for everybody but I think it is one that has enough merits to make it worth reading.

--Jon

DARKNESS VISIBLE by William Styron

I was browsing the new book shelf one night at work and saw a large biography about William Styron's daughter. I've heard of Styron before but had never read him and I knew that he had written a book about his depression. This book is often cited as being a good one for people without depression to read so that they may understand the illness better. As someone who suffered from depression in the past, I was interested in seeing at how well Styron was able to put depression into words so I requested the book, Darkness Visible.

Coming in at only 84 pages, it didn't take long to read. Styron reiterates a good deal, too, which means the book is probably longer than it needs to be. I thought Styron did a pretty good job of explaining his own feelings and symptoms, at least as best as he could well after his suffering. Of course, doing so while coping from depression is well nigh impossible.

The big problem with depression (as well as other illnesses, both mental and otherwise (see lupus)) is that the illness manifests itself differently in different individuals. If you look at the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, you'll see that there are a checklist of possible symptoms. If so many are met, the patient probably suffers from depression. So one person might have 1,4,5 and 9. Someone else might have 2,3,4 and 5. Both are depressed. Totally different behaviors and symptoms.

It's because of this that treatment is still haphazard. Styron went through a number of pharmacological options, one which he believes made him more suicidal, until he found something that worked (good lord, I just read another book on drugs. I didn't even realize it). He talks about the importance of cognitive therapy, which is how I overcame my depression, and which surprised me as an option for him given the age of the book and when he dealt with depression.

Styron does a nice job. I did find it hard to believe at times that he had ever been depressed as he didn't seem to have a lot of self-esteem issues. The tone rubbed me the wrong way sometimes. It was a good read and one I definitely recommend for those who have a loved one suffering from depression and are having a hard time grasping the condition.

--Jon

THE GENTLEMEN'S HOUR by Don Winslow

 One of the best things about working at a library is when shipments of new books come in. It's like Christmas. We recently got a batch of books and it came as a surprise when Don Winslow's book The Gentlemen's Hour came in. The name Don Winslow might be familiar to you because it wasn't too long ago that I reviewed Savages. I was surprised he had a new book out already. Turns out he doesn't. This book was published in 2009 and then recently re-issued.

This was quite a bit different from Savages in tone and content. Yes, there were still drugs involved (I know, shocking, right?). Yes, it was still fast-paced with short chapters. Still jumped around from character to character although the focus was really on one. This time, though, very few profanities. I enjoyed it and while Winslow isn't a creator of great literature, he writes entertaining stories. I definitely recommend him for those looking for lighter "beach reads".

Beach read is appropriate for The Gentlemen's Hour in that the book takes place on the coast of sunny San Diego. The main character, Boone Daniels, is a noted surfer and somewhat lackadaisical private investigator in his forties. He and his buddies are always up bright and early to surf and their group is known as the Dawn Patrol. His buddies all have Guy Ritchieesque ironic nicknames. The gigantic Samoan is known as High Tide because the waters rise when he gets in. There's Hang Twelve who has six toes on each foot. Johnny Bonzai is an Asian cop. There used to be a waitress named Sunny who surfed with them but then she turned pro. The waitress who replaced her came to be known as Not Sunny. Sort of goofy and charming all in one.

Boone has been dating this hot lawyer with violet eyes (have you ever met anyone with violet eyes? I haven't. Maybe it's a California thing) but his buddies think it won't last because of the socio-economic differences. You have to have a love interest, though. It's in the PI novel handbook, I think.

The Gentlemen's Hour is when the group of surfers after the Dawn Patrol surf. That group is composed of older wealthy guys; guys with nowhere else to be because the golf course isn't really them. One of the members of The Gentlemen's Hour hires Boone to follow the guy's wife to see if she is being unfaithful.

Meanwhile, one of the most popular surfers around gets killed outside a bar by a bunch of punk kids. Boone's girlfriend is hired to represent the one kid being charged with the murder and she enlists Boone's help to gather information. Boone's friends turn on him for this breach in surfing brotherhood.

The cases get all twisty and involved. There's drugs, including a Mexican cartel. There's a Naziesque skinhead organization, there's insurance fraud. There's a fellow who Boone got arrested years ago who has his Mutt and Jeff henchmen alternately rough Boone up and take care of him. It really gets out of hand and nonsensical at times.

It's exciting, though. I blew through the book. Didn't want to put it down. Winslow is a former PI and you sort of get a sense he is a former/current surfer and has gone through/is going through a mid-life crisis. What I mean is, the story has the details right. Maybe Winslow just does good research but the surfer lingo and PI methodologies seem really smooth and natural.

A fun read, definitely more accessible than Savages, with characters you can actually root for. The cockamamie plot twists take a bit away from it but it's not nutty enough to make it completely unbelievable.

--Jon

BUYOLOGY by Martin Lindstrom

Over the course of this past year, I've grown enamored with the magician Derren Brown. Not so much his magic as his work with the subconscious and subliminal messages. Check out some of his stuff on Youtube and you'll see what I mean.

I came across an article that mentioned Brown's work and that of the author of this book, Martin Lindstrom. Brown's books are hard to find in the United States but the library system had Buyology. Thought I'd give it a shot.

If subliminal messages work, Lindstrom needs to put some in his book because I really didn't care for it. Much of the book is self-congratulatory nonsense about a study he did using brain scans and tying it into advertising. If a section of the brain lit up when a subject viewed an advertisement, Lindstrom made the leap that the ad must have some connection to what that part of the brain normally does. For instance, a certain part of the brain is supposed to be in charge of cravings. In some of the subjects, that part of the brain lit up on viewing ads with a Marlboro red color. Therefore, Lindstrom concludes, the red in and of itself is enough of a stimulant to trigger the craving. Never mind that that part of the brain might be involved with a dozen other activities. Never mind that Marlboro is hardly even recognizable anymore because of the shutdown of tobacco advertising. If A, then B.

Lindstrom spends part of every chapter talking about how exciting his research is and then the remarkable finds. He hardly provides any details whatsoever about the studies. Given that this is to be some remarkable research, you'd sort of expect there to be a decent amount of citations, letting the reader know what has been done before in this area. At the very least, providing some sense that the results are scientifically valid. No such luck. While the book is chock full of citations, they're all websites, most to newspaper links, and the few that have any sort of connection to the scientific community are mainstream sites like Scientific American.

While I have an interest in the topic matter, I really didn't get a lot out of this book and hated Lindstrom's tone. I'm sure there must be other books out there on this subject and hopefully I'll come across them. I don't think this one is worth reading.

--Jon

THE NIGHT CIRCUS by Erin Morgenstern

At first I was looking forward to reading The Night Circus. The author, Erin Morgenstern, first conceived of the idea for this book when taking part in Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) back in 2004. When she was done writing it, though, she had a hard time finding anyone interested in it. Thirty literary agents rejected it before someone finally took it on. In the end she received a six figure advance for the book and the number thirty is now the number of foreign publishers that have agreed to publish the book as well.

But then the hype started. "The next Harry Potter!". Ugh. Seriously? I hate the next anything. Why can't thinks be appreciated on their own merits? Why must there always be comparisons? Saw one review call it the next Harry Potter with a Twilightesque forbidden love. Double ugh.

Add in the fact that I am oversaturating myself with books and I really didn't need to be reading this. Then we got it into the library and there weren't any holds on it....well, what the heck.

I liked it. The author blurb on the dustjacket cites Morganstern's love of fairy tales and that's what this feels like. Two magicians place a wager with one another on who can teach a student to do magic best. The one magician uses his daughter as his student, the other grabs a young man from an orphanage. And we're talking "real" magic here, not pick-a-card-sleight-of-hand hijinks. The field of competition is the Le Cirque des Reves, a mystical circus that is only open at night.

The two students, Celia and Marco, don't know initially that they are in competition with each other yet they know that they are in competition. They fall in love with one another before they realize that they should be vying against one another.

The chapters are very short and very dreamlike. Morganstern does a wonderful job creating a fairy tale atmosphere and she makes the reader long for the reality of the circus. If there was really a Night Circus, I would definitely go and perhaps even try and run off with it. Or at least become it's archivist and librarian.

Where Morganstern is lacking, though, is in plot and character development. The chapters jump back and forth through time which, in some places, creates a nice sense of tension, but in most just makes things confusing. A more linear timeline I think would have improved the story.

Celia and Marco's "love" for one another seems very superficial. The whole reason behind the battle between magicians is unclear, especially since the two teachers have fought this duel before. There is a subplot of a young lad falling for another circus performer and running off with the circus which leads to what I felt was as unsatisfyingly tidy ending.

Really, the whole time I read this, I was thinking "Young Adult" book. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I just felt the book lacked depth (as opposed to one of all-time favorite books, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell). It never felt like there was any sort of tension or conflict that would be resolved. You just had the sense that things would work out. Maybe it was the fairy tale aspect.

Ultimately, it's the fairy tale aspect that made me like this book as a not young adult. The Night Circus was a wonderful literary escape that let me forget about bills and weeds and dirty floors and dream about a happily ever after.

--Jon

THE DART LEAGUE KING by Keith Lee Morris

I did it again! Another book involving drugs! At least this one was suicide-free. I'm making some progress.

Between JJ and the woman who runs The Next Best Book Blog, I became convinced I should sign up for Goodreads. I'm not entirely sure it's worthwhile but it doesn't take a whole lot of effort and it makes it easy to see all the books I've read over the years.

Goodreads also has a recommendation engine which looks to be as primitive and inaccurate as Amazon's. Before I became a librarian, I used to do statistical modeling for a living and it continues to baffle me how poorly some of these places do in predicting what their customers will like. But that's another story. Goodreads' recommendations at least have the benefit of not being confounded by miscellaneous items. Amazon, for example, takes into accounts purchases I might make as gifts for other people in terms of recommendations. This won't help me find something new to read.

Despite my complaints, Goodreads did have some recommendations that looked good. The Dart League King, published by Tin House Press, one of the small presses included in the new collection at the library (publishers of Fantastic Women, which I am definitely going to read), was one of them . An interesting looking book published by a small press? Sure, I'll check it out.

Good choice, Goodreads. The book has a nice ensemble cast of small-town misfits. It takes place in Garnet Lake, Idaho, where there is little to do. The "hero" of the story, Russell, is in his early twenties, works for a logging company where his lack of skills makes him a danger to others and a disappointment to himself. He lives for his dart league, which he started and has dominated until recently.

That's because Brice Halberstam has moved into town. Brice took over a local convenience store and was once a professional dart player. Brice has a couple of secrets, though. One, he's not really a convenience store owner. He's an undercover Drug Enforcement Agency officer. Two, he's married to a woman suffering from many maladies, most of which might be imagined, who has yet to make love to him even after decades of marriage.

Drugs? In Idaho? Well, yes. There's a good deal of marijuana coming in over the Canadian border (which I also read about in Border Songs. I AM beginning to think all novels involve drugs). Brice has discovered that main character number three, Vince Thompson, supplies drugs locally and is probably part of a larger cartel.

Vince is my favorite character. He deals drugs while at the same time is really concerned about the environment. The cartel would love for him to step up and increase his business but Vince is pretty happy right where he is, being a small-time guy and just making a living and saving up his money. Vince has a lot of anger issues, mostly due to his father, and he sets out to kill Russell who stopped buying drugs from Vince because he owes him too much money.

There has to be a love interest and that is Kelly. Kelly longs for something more than small-town Idaho. She has a child (Russell's) who everyone thinks belongs to another guy who long vanished from the area. She's interested in this intellectual guy, Tristan, who she went to high school with. She thinks Tristan might be her ticket out of Podunkville but Tristan has a dark secret of his own which he needs to share with someone and he has picked Kelly.

The entire book covers just one evening in town; the night of the biggest dart match of the year, where both the team and individual championships may be settled. But while the match is going on there are all these undercurrents going on - will Vince kill Russell? Will Brice arrest Vince? What's Kelly doing with that guy? Will she tell Russell the truth about her child? What's Tristan's secret? What's the deal with Brice's wife? For such a short period of time, there's a lot going on.

I enjoyed Morris's writing. It was fast-paced and he moves from character to character very nicely. Despite the flaws of everyone, my interest was kept in the characters. Russell is a bit of a doofus and my like of Vince is probably not universal. His paradoxical behavior is a bit unreal. As is Brice's marriage and Tristan's secret. Add that to an ending that can be viewed as filled with creepiness or redemption, and you get an entertaining yet flawed book.

For a Goodreads recommendation, though, I am quite happy.

--Jon

THE FINANCIAL AID HANDBOOK by Carol Stack and Ruth Vedvik

Hard to believe (at least it is to me) I have a son who is a senior in high school. Unlike his ol' pops who knew exactly what he wanted from a college (Had to be in Pittsburgh. That was my one criteria. Not surprisingly I transferred to a tiny school in North Carolina a year later.), he isn't sure where he wants to go or what he wants to study.

That's where The Financial Aid Handbook comes in. The authors, two former (current?) college admission counselors, think that with the cost of tuition nowadays and the fairly minimal differences in the quality of education once you get out of the top thirty schools or so (which are virtually all Ivy League and engineering schools), the college-bound student should be focused on getting their college education as cheaply as possible. Who wants to graduate college with six figures worth of debt?

The authors go into how to look at the differences between what schools say tuition is and what students tend to actually pay out of pocket. They liken it to when you buy a car. There's the manufacturer's recommended price versus what you actually pay once you get to the dealership.

So a situation like mine where your potential college attendee is unsure what he or she wants to be when they're all growns up can be a good thing. Find what schools might be willing to give financial assistance to your kid and select your colleges based on that criteria. Makes a lot of sense.

The book is supposed to be written for the student, primarily, with the parents as an after thought. The authors believe that they are "hip" in their writing style but I would be astounded if any kids actually enjoy reading this. My son thumbed through it. He's an avid reader, too, and was not captivated by the book in the least.

Given that the book has a very limited target audience, the authors don't hit their target audience well and that there is a lot of extraneous fluff to fill out what is really a small book, it's not exactly a book to sit down and read for fun. If you are a parent whose kid is uncertain about his or her college prospects, though, give it a look-see. It's worth it for you.

--Jon

GHOSTED by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall

This is the first book that I have read of our new small press collection at the library. Written by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall and published by Soft Skull Press, Ghosted is about the life of Mason Dubisee, a semi-aspiring writer and an addict of almost every shape and sort. Alcohol, drugs, gambling. Mason finds himself in Toronto where his long-time friend, Chaz, now resides. Chaz is a successful drug dealer who sets Mason up with an apartment and a job, an arrangement that works really well for Chaz given Mason's predilection for drugs and gambling (and his lack of skill at the latter).

The job Mason has is working as a hot dog vendor with the brand name Dogfather. Mason befriends one of his customers, a man named Warren who is afraid of just about everything. Warren discovers that Mason is a decent writer and asks Mason to write Warren a love letter for this girl he longs for at the video store. Mason, always interested in making a buck, does so. Warren is found dead and the love poem is deemed to be Warren's suicide letter.

This provides Mason with inspiration. He'll start a little side business writing suicide notes for people who are looking for an exit a little more literary. The problem with Mason (and he only has this one problem) is that he wants to help people. He finds he wants to save people instead of helping them towards their self-inflicted deaths (but he still doesn't mind taking the money for their notes).

The story is really entertaining. Chaz, at least at the start, has his own sort of lingo ("are you flapjacking me") going which unfortunately vanishes as the novel goes on. Mason, despite being a ne'er-do-well who can't seem to get his act together, is extremely likeable as a main character. So much so that he drives you nuts with his bad choices. You want to reach into the book and strangle him when he sits down yet again to play cards with Chaz after doing drugs he bought from Chaz.

Then you have the other characters. The potential suicides are all really quirky characters. There's the drug counselor with her own set of odd characteristics. You also have Mason's love interest, a heroin addict in a wheelchair who has feeling in one side of her body but is paralyzed on that same side. The side she can control has no feeling.

So two-thirds of the way through this book, I'm loving it. Debating whether it might be able to top Eleven for best fiction I've read this year. I'm liking it that much. Then it careens into one of the darkest, most depraved things I've ever read in my life. It came completely out of nowhere and was really disturbing. At that point I was left wondering how I felt about the book. Up until this point the book was a really entertaining and unusual story. Suddenly there's this psychopath involved and the entertainment factor is lost. Then it becomes a bit of an action story. Can Mason save the day?

All the loose ends are tied up, some in a manner a little too forced for my looking and some a little too out there for my liking, but the story returns to it's previous charm. Chaz even gets some of his lingo back.

That left me with my review. The writing was spectacular. I didn't ever want to put the book down. The characters are great. Unlike, say, Savages, where the characters are involved in activities generally frowned upon by society, I liked these characters and were rooting for them. I didn't view Mason as a bad guy. I saw him as someone with problems who wasn't happy with his lot in life.

Speaking of which, the title comes from the idea that we have these goals and achievements we want for ourselves in life. We picture ourselves as a writer or an astronaut or a professor at Minot State. But life takes its crazy turns and we don't always reach our objectives. Nonetheless, these pictures of ourselves stay with us and are "ghosted", haunting the recesses of our mind, making us think of what might have been.

There are a number of scenes where we learn about Mason's past and I think that helps make him more sympathetic to the reader. The oddball nature of all the other characters give them appeal as well (with the exception of one). And the story, while it goes every which way, is captivating. Without a doubt, I will remember this book for a long time.

But then there's that crazy dark section. It's part of the reason I'll remember this book. It's disturbing. I don't know that I've ever winced from a story I was reading before (bad writing, yes, but not the story).

I think, much like Lemon Cake, this isn't going to be a book for everybody. I can see some people putting the book down when the story turns. But it's still an awesome book and will be one of my favorites from this year.

--Jon

NO LEASE ON LIFE by Lynne Tillman

In case you haven't noticed, the library has started a small press collection. One of those presses, Red Lemonade, publishes the works of Lynne Tillman. Her newest release, Someday This Will Be Funny, sounded like it might be good but I thought I'd give some of her earlier works a try instead. This may seem stupid since part of the Red Lemonade publishing model is making the books available online to be read. Here's Someday This Will Be Funny. But I hate reading things online. So I went the old-fashioned route and got a couple of books; No Lease on Life and Bookstore.

I thought I would really like the latter. It is a non-fiction account of Jeanette Watson and her seminal New York City bookstore, Books & Co. Tillman didn't really write it, though, so much as she compiled it. The book is mostly an oral history of Watson but after every couple of paragraphs of Watson talking, Tillman inserts comments from others involved in the story that mostly pertain to what Watson just said. It made for a very disjointed reading. Between the style and not really being able to get excited about Watson's challenges (her father was head of IBM and when she started her bookstore she asked him for money. Sure, if you put up $150,000, I will too. Guess she had been saving her allowance for a while), I gave up on it. As I said, it was more compiled than written and wasn't really giving me a sense of how Tillman writes.

I got a much better sense from No Lease on Life. The novel is a day in the life of Elizabeth Hall, a low-paid proofreader living in rent-control squalor in New York City. It begins late at night with her being unable to sleep because of noise and hooliganism going on outside in the streets below. Her boyfriend has no problem ignoring the noise every night and seems to accept their living conditions much more readily than she does which only contributes to her rage and anxiety.

Ultimately, that is what this book is - 179 pages of rage and anxiety. There are no chapters, per se. Instead, blocks of thoughts are broken up with jokes. No mention is made of who is telling them or why but you get the sense it's a way for Elizabeth to cope with the stress.

Once the morning comes, you find out more about the other people in the neighborhood and the problems Hall has had trying to get anyone to do anything about the living conditions, the most prevalent difficulty being junkies shooting up in the entryway to the building.

The ending comes with some relief for Elizabeth but it is a small victory. While not a real happy or satisfying ending, it is a somewhat realistic ending. It's not Richard Gere climbing up the fire escape to whisk her away in a limo.

The stress made the story difficult to want to read but Tillman's writing is really good and made it palatable. I think the lack of chapters and the shortness of the book aid in making it readable. I think if there were chapter breaks, I might be tempted not to come back to it. Because the story never really pauses, I found it hard to want to stop reading. Some of the jokes are entertaining, too.

After both of these, I will read more Tillman and may put Tillman's newest on the "to acquire" list for the small press collection. I recommend checking her out.

--Jon

ZAZEN by Vanessa Veselka

The setting is southern California.  The time is now, but events are off.  There seems to be a violent discontent within the population.  Bomb threats cause panic and shut down streets, stores, and restaurants.   Some bomb threats are followed by actual bombings.  Riots and racial killings seem to happen for no specific reason.  War against some unspecified adversary is threatening.

Della is right in the thick of things.  She calls in bomb threats.  And then some other group carries out the bombings.  She attends the funeral for the slain black boys and ends up in the riot.  And then she plans the bombing of a local Walmart on a back-to-school sale day.  She buys a one-way plane ticket to Hondorus so that she can get away to a better place.  But, at the same time, she worries about the innocent children who might be killed.

Della is clearly unhappy.  But it is not clear what exactly she is unhappy about or what can make her happier.  Her involvement with the bombings seems to have no purpose.  She seems adrift.  Perhaps Veselka states it best in the Acknowledgements:  “Della was afraid that the world was full of sadness and that everything beautiful just got hurt.”  I should have understood this by the second chapter.

Veselka’s writing does appeal.  Picture this:  “Britta turned into a blowfish and floated towards Astrid spiny and offended.”  And then a few paragraphs later:  “The blowfish, Britta, floated away from the sink.”  Great images.  It’s worth reading Zazen for the metaphors.

--Sue

THE PIONEER WOMAN by Ree Drummond

Book reviewing has moved down on my priority list. Intimidation and fear are the main reasons – I feel it somewhat presumptuous and quite frightening to critique a person’s writing and creativity. I’ve also read some heady books lately that I’ve been too small to say anything about (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Love Wins, Middlesex, and A Field Guide to the North American Family).

But another librarian, who will remain nameless, has this nasty habit of writing a review of every book he reads. Sheesh. So, I have self-imposed pressure to keep up with the librarians, I guess.

My book of choice: The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels by Ree Drummond.

Ree Drummond began a blog in 2006, which has grown into the very-popular-amongst-almost-every-woman-I-know Website: www.ThePioneerWoman.com. The Website seems to have a category for almost everything a domestic woman could ever want or need – cooking, homeschooling, photography, home and garden, entertainment. Full Disclosure: I had never seen the site before I read this book.

Though I was not a fan, I wanted to read Drummond’s book because of the appeal she holds for my gender and because I love reading true stories.

The book chronicles a period of Ree’s life when she was transitioning from California to Chicago and breaking up with a long-term boyfriend. During this move, she temporarily moved back home to Oklahoma with her parents. While hanging out at a local bar, she met a mysterious cowboy.

Time goes on and the cowboy (whom she calls Marlboro Man) woos her and she falls in love. She ditches her move to Chicago and agrees to marry her man. Giving up city life and moving to a ranch deep in the country was a sacrifice that Ree worried about but came to cherish. She learned to eat meat (throwing out her vegetarian lifestyle), stick thermometers into cows’ rectums, and chase cows out of her front yard.

While her courtship with the Marlboro Man progressed, her mom and dad’s marriage crumbled after a lifetime of what Ree thought was happiness and stability. The demise of her parents’ marriage caused her to question the whole institution.

Not much really happens in the book that is all that different from many of our own lives. Families break up. People fall in love and get married. Pregnancy and parenthood often follow a marriage. Not a big deal. But yet it is.

What I appreciate about Ree’s book is that she took a story that wasn’t that unusual or earth-shattering and recorded it in such a way that I wanted to keep reading. A talented writer and storyteller she is. I can see why her blog earned her a huge following. She’s funny and entertaining and self-deprecating enough that I can see my own weaknesses in her and they don’t seem all that bad.

Ree and her husband now have four children, but the book ends when they have just one. It’s a very sweet story and a quick and easy read.

--JJ

LEGEND OF A SUICIDE by David Vann

I've been working on a little side project recently involving baseball suicides and when I came across an interview with the author of this book, David Vann, I figured I'd go ahead and read the book. Legend of a Suicide is five short stories which surround a novel Vann wrote, all about his father's suicide. His father shot himself when Vann was thirteen and Vann wrote these tales throughout his twenties as a means of coping and trying to understand his father's death.

While Vann's book is fiction, there are elements of truth throughout the stories. His father was a dentist with two failed marriages caused by his infidelity. He quit his dental practice to move to Alaska and live off the land and it is there that he shot himself. His father tried to get Vann to move to Alaska with him and spend his eighth grade school year with him but he said no. The novel, which is by far the most powerful and gripping story in the book, is Vann's take on what might have happened if he had gone.

The short stories weren't near as enjoyable but they were captivating. Despite the gloomy subject matter, Vann keeps the stories moving. I was trying to figure out what exactly made his writing so compelling. I think part comes from Vann writing simply but capturing the other senses to describe things. The sounds and smells and textures provide detail in a better way than if he just wrote what the characters saw or what was happening. I'm not entirely sure. Whatever it is, it grabbed me and kept me moving along.

There's a line in the fourth short story where Vann says his father "had inflicted avoidable pain on everyone around him but who must have suffered some himself". Suicide is horrible. For Vann to put together stories about suicide and make them good enough to want to read I think is an achievement. That being said, if I weren't already in a mindset about suicides, I don't know how willing I would be to read this. I mean, there's a reason why it took Vann another decade to get this published after he had finished it. Who wants to read about suicide?

It's a tough call. Vann's writing is good. It's not like I can recommend checking out one of his other books either (though I have not read any others) because their subject matters aren't all that chipper either. His book Caribou Island also deals with failed marriages and suicides. A Mile Down has some potential as it is about his failed attempts to restore a boat and start a chartered tour company in Turkey. He has a book coming out in the near future which is a creative non-fiction work (a genre of which I am not keen) about a school shooting. Not all sunshine and lollipops with Mr. Vann's writing.

I think ultimately I can't recommend this. While the writing is by far the redeeming quality, the subject matter (and the fact that there are many, many writers who write well about more enjoyable topic matters) make it that I can't recommend it on a general basis.

--Jon

YOU ARE NOT A GADGET by Jaron Lanier

I recently started a collection of books from small presses here at the library. I try to follow the independent, smaller publishing scene and the books that come out of it but am frustrated by public libraries not acquiring them. It makes sense. With budget cuts virtually every year, libraries have to be selective and it is much easier to purchase the big name authors that a gabajillion people will want to read than take a chance on some cutting edge literature about which few people have heard.

One of the books I wanted to acquire (and did) was Garth Risk Hallberg's book A Field Guide to the North American Family. Hallberg writes for The Millions, one of my favorite sites, and he linked to an interview he did with The Faster Times (another great website) and called himself "A poor man's Jaron Lanier" in doing so.

I wasn't familiar with Jaron Lanier. But I like Hallberg so I figured I'd have to like Lanier.

Lanier is the father of virtual reality so I don't see what the connection to Hallberg actually is to make Hallberg think he is the poor man's version of Lanier. Nonetheless, Lanier's book, You Are Not A Gadget is an interesting intellectual, philosophical look at technology. Reading it, you would probably be surprised that Lanier has such a strong technology background as he can seem at times to be very much against technological advancements. He is more against the usage of technology without clearly thinking out the ramifications of introducing it.

Lanier presents his thoughts very clearly and makes many valid points. He talks about how the open source community has helped reduce creativity and innovation. He bemoans how the "cloud keepers" are really the only ones who are making money in the internet world. He talks about how people reduce themselves to fit into categories online. Just a lot of stuff. And with his background, he is able to point out where wrong turns have been made and express how things might be able to get back on track.

I would not label myself an optimist, generally speaking, and reading this book didn't help matters. I agree with Lanier on a lot of things. As someone who regularly does research and who works as an information professional, helping others find things, one of my biggest frustrations is with the usage of Wikipedia. Never mind the accuracy of it. What is it? An online encyclopedia. All this technology available and what is done with it? The encyclopedia is reinvented. And an encyclopedia with more flaws than your typical one. Why? Because of who works on them and uses them. Want to know something about someone in pop culture? Wikipedia is a great source. Entries regarding science? Sure. Why those areas in particular? Because you have a collection of people who care about those subjects and are willing to make the information current. But what happens when you have masses of people working on the same thing? In the sciences, where there is a history of academic cooperation, conflicts are resolved in a congenial manner. But with other areas you get the equivalent of shouting matches.

There is also a lack of voice in Wikipedia. In the old-fashioned encyclopedia, the editing staff was entrusted with creating a uniform voice throughout the texts. Who does that for Wikipedia? It is the voice of the group and it is this group voice that concerns Lanier (and me).

Lanier believes there is hope, though. Myself, I think we're too far gone down some of these roads. I was working in the public sector years ago and read Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, about the disintegration of social structures, and I feel that technology has eroded those structures even further. I don't know. It frustrates me sometimes to look around and feel like I'm the only one who has these concerns.

Returning to Lanier and his book, I think it's an interesting read. It has a very strong philosophical bend to it. It's not a light read despite it not being a very large book and not very complex in terms of language. It's just a lot of food for thought and it took me a while to read because of it. I had to read, then stop, ponder a bit, get back to it, ponder some more, etc. If technology means more to you than a means to know what your 400 best friends are doing, I think it's worth reading this book.

--Jon

THE BEEKEEPER'S LAMENT by Hannah Nordhaus

The Beekeeper's Lament is a book primarily based on one specific beekeeper, John Miller. If you're as clueless as I was when I read this book, you might think of a beekeeper as someone who has a few hives in his backyard to make some honey that he can give to his friends and neighbors. Or maybe he has enough to run a small farmer's market type store, selling produce from his fields as well.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Like every other agricultural product in this country, the production of honey is big, big business, albeit in this case not very profitable. The trials and tribulations of a professional beekeeper and his bees made for a fascinating and sympathetic tale.

Miller's family has been involved in bees for generations. As such, Miller has the science of beekeeping down to a science. It's hard even to know where to start when talking about the beekeeping business as it is one big cycle. Miller is headquartered in North Dakota. Why there? Because people don't live in North Dakota and he (and other beekeepers) can keep their bees somewhere where there is lots of alfalfa and similar crops grown so that the bees can collect pollen and nectar for honey.

Seems simple enough. But it isn't. The lament of the beekeeper is actually many laments. First is the care of the bees. There are mites and fungi and the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder where the bees just up and abandon the hive. There are bee thieves. There are pesticides used on fields that affect the bees. Mostly, though, there is the lack of money.

When the weather gets cold in North Dakota, Miller and his brethren load the hives onto tractor trailers and move their bees to warmer climates. They could stay and just let the bees winter over, losing some of them to cold temperatures but there is money to be made pollinating crops - citrus trees and almonds.

Who knew almonds were such big business? It's so big that almond growers can't take chances in letting nature do the pollinating of their trees for them so they hire beekeepers like Miller to bring their masses of bees to pollinate their acres of almonds. The problem is that almond honey tastes horrible. The beekeepers only do this for the money from pollination fees and goodwill to the almond growers.

Speaking of money, there's also the problem of imports of foreign honey, particularly from China. The quality isn't as good, is often watered down or corn syruped down and then there's the shenanigans on top of that. For instance, when it was discovered that Chinese honey contained chemicals (I believe from pesticides), the U.S. banned honey imports from China. Suddenly countries such as Singapore and other Pacific Rim countries that had never exported honey before became enormous sources of honey. Hmmmmm....

Following up on foreign honey, there are also foreign bees and the diseases and mites that may or may not come from them. On the one hand, beekeepers try to use foreign bees to try and breed resistance to mites and fungi. On the other hand, bees, such as the more aggressive African types, can take over and wipe out existing bee colonies when accidentally introduced.

All in all, it's a royal pain in the butt to keep bees but those who love bees as Miller does do it well. The choice of Miller is inspired because he's an entertaining fellow and respected in the beekeeping community. His passion and quirkiness shine in the book and make for an entertaining read.

I didn't think it was a great book, though, because I felt at times Nordhaus dragged things on or reiterated points needlessly. It was minor - I never felt like the book bogged down - but it was frequent enough where it noticeably reduced my enjoyment. It's well worth the read to learn about a hidden side of agriculture and the challenges beekeepers face.

--Jon

THE READING PROMISE by Alice Ozma

One of our patrons had requested this from another library and seeing the subtitle "My Father and the Books We Shared", I had to take a look at it. It looked interesting and when the patron returned it, I proceeded to sign it out.

This is the story of the author, Alice Ozma, and her father, Jim. Jim, an elementary school librarian, always read to Alice as she was growing up. Around the age of nine the two of them decide that Jim will try to read to Alice for one hundred consecutive evenings. Upon successfully doing so, they decide that they will keep the streak alive and continue as long as they can. Jim reads to Alice every night of her life up until the day she leaves for college.

I enjoyed this story a lot because I could relate on many levels. First, I love to read to people. I read to my sons when they were younger (and my oldest son still reads to my youngest even though they are almost 17 and 12 years old, respectively. My youngest just likes his brother reading to him). I've read to girlfriends, my ex-wife. A friend of mine who lives in another state has gone through many illnesses and I have recorded myself, first on cassette and later digitally, so she can hear me read to her. I even looked into trying to get a gig reading for audiobooks once but found that the companies who produce them like people with vocal training and acting background and all that stuff. Oh well. So there was the whole reading aspect that I enjoyed.

I also could relate to Jim a lot. He raises Alice and her older sister on his own as a single parent. They struggle financially on his librarian salary. Jim doesn't like cats. He's friends with spiders. I liked Jim and I especially liked the foreword he wrote for this book, which should be required reading for all parents. They're also from the Philly area and visit places near where I grew up (Brandywine River Museum, Hank's Place (which I heard was submerged to the windows from Hurricane Irene)).

As for Alice, her writing is very simple and concise. The chapters are very short (about nine pages each) and talk about some aspect of her life with her father. Not all the chapters relate to reading and the streak. They all do have something to do with the father-daughter relationship.

The negative aspects of the book come from Alice just being a little too truthful. Reading to your child throughout their teenage years, almost into adulthood, isn't what most people would consider "normal". This isn't the only quirk the family shows. Some of the stories made me feel uncomfortable in a "too much information" kind of way. While I liked Jim and admired him, I also had to question some of the things he did.

All in all, though, this was a terribly sweet book and biases aside, I think it's one well worth reading.

--Jon

JOHANNES CABAL THE DETECTIVE by Jonathan Howard

My oldest son and I both were looking forward to this book with much anticipation. We both loved Howard's first effort, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer. My son is a fan of Lovecraftian horror tales and the character of Johannes Cabal was first developed by Howard for stories printed in a magazine devoted to H.P. Lovecraft so his enjoyment makes sense. For me, I thought it was a unique tale with a surprise ending, well-written and entertaining.

When I brought home JC the Detective from the library my son snagged it up and started reading it. He was not immediately impressed and he soon dropped it to return to readings in preparation for the school year. I grabbed it back and also was unimpressed early on.

Howard takes a long time to set up the premise of the story and he really tries hard to make Cabal out to be a bad guy (which, as I told my son when we were discussing the story, I don't think he is. I think he's a good guy who does bad things). In this case, Cabal has snuck into a foreign country to steal a rare book on necromancy. He gets caught but manages to escape, boarding an aerocraft of some sort (this has a steampunk feel to it) on its way to another country by pretending to be an agricultural official.

A murder occurs on the flight and Cabal's curiosity gets the better of him. In his efforts to learn more about what happened, an attempt is made on his life. The aerocraft lands and Cabal tries to make his way back home when another murder takes place. Cabal finally figures things out and pieces the puzzle together.

Through most of the story a character from Howard's first book, Leonie Barrow, accompanies Cabal. There's not a lot of background given about the relations between the twain which, coupled with Howard's desire to paint Cabal a certain (incomplete) way, really made me feel like reading JC the Necromancer was a prerequisite for this book.

As a continuation of JC the Necromancer, this is really good. The writing style is the same. Entertaining, albeit with a lot of forced attempts at humor and redundant wisecracks. Once the story gets underway after the slow, murky beginning, it is hard to put down. But then it has a bizarre ending. The story ends in fine fashion. Cabal finds his way home safely. But then Howard says that, oh, by the way, Cabal did have another adventure on his way home and if you want you can read it. He then proceeds to give this short story, told from the standpoint of a fellow at a social club who ran into Cabal during this adventure and is relating the story to his compatriots at the club. Odd. But still good.

I'd recommend you read both Johannes Cabal books together. The second isn't quite as good as the first (which I also rated one star when I read it a couple of years ago) but if you're like my son and I, after you read the first, you'll want to read more about Cabal.

--Jon

THE PRONE GUNMAN by Jean-Patrick Manchette

Audrey Niffenegger had to be looking over her shoulder with this book. About a third of the way through I really thought about putting it down. Picture some hack writing a bad screenplay for a Jason Statham flick (we're talking a typical non-Guy Ritchie Jason Statham movie where Statham is a driver/killer/disc jockey for hire). And I'm talking a hack, maybe some college kid who is a big Jason Statham fan and who really has no idea what makes a good story, good dialogue, good characters, because it doesn't matter since Jason Statham is in it and he's the bomb. Perhaps the founder of a Jason Statham fan fiction blog. Now picture Jason Statham being a Frenchman in this movie and the inherent drop off in coolness that this suggests. That's the starting point for The Prone Gunman.

I really should have stopped when I thought of stopping because somehow, this book got worse. I honestly laughed out loud in some sections it got so bad. Like this sentence:

"His haggard face at first registered great perplexity; then it registered worry, thoughtfulness, or whatever other movements of consciousness that might cause his face to look as it did."

The problem is that this is a French novel and at times, like with the above sentence, I thought that maybe the translator was being a practical joker. For instance, there tends to be a pattern in paragraphs talking about a character (which are frequent). A paragraph will begin with the character being named (usually the main character Martin Terrier). Then the second time the character is referenced, he will be referred to as "The man". Lower case "m", not upper case cool slang "The Man". Third mention will get the pronoun "he". Jon should have put the book down. The man knew it sucked. He couldn't resist.

So that gnawed at me a bit. Maybe it's not the author but the translator's fault. But the story is just awful so no, I'm blaming Manchette.

Martin Terrier as a youth is a kid from the wrong side of the tracks. His mother left him and his dad for a truck driver soon after Martin was born. Martin, as an eighteen year old, falls in love with a hot chick two years younger who comes from a well-to-do family. Martin vows to win the All-Valley Karate Tournament....wait a minute, that was Ralph Macchio. My bad. Martin vows to make his fortune and return for her. Will she wait for him ten years while he goes and earns his bundle? Why sure, says the smitten sixteen year old. Not a problem.

You're not going to believe this....she doesn't wait for him! If you can't trust the word of a sixteen year old girl on matters of love, who can you trust? She married some snooty rich French guy (being French and all herself). You did what?!?!?! says the dejected Martin. But I've been saving up my money from doing contract killing for the last decade! And now that ten years have passed I'm ready for you. I quit my job! And even though I was banging this other chick who liked my cat more than me, I was really thinking about you. I did all this for you!

And it's not like Martin can go back to the other chick and his cat because the family of a guy he killed is after Martin and they killed the woman and her feline friend to send a message. I think. It wasn't really clear. The cat was gutted, placed in an aquarium filled with water, sealed, and shipped to Martin's hotel (where he was traveling incognito). I think it was a message.

Lo and behold, this same family shows up at the house of Martin's love and (good fortune!) kills her husband. Martin manages to kill the family and he and his babe go on the lam.

But, oh noes, that darn family killed Martin's financial adviser and took all the benjamins he had saved. Good fortune strikes again! His former employer will gladly pay him a bundle if he does this one last hit. Sigh. I'll do it. For love. I have my babe, now I just need the money.

Only Martin can't get it up for his babe. He blames the immense concentration required in preparing for this kill. This even though the kill is two weeks away and his employer has put him and his woman up in a nice place out in the woods. With three days until the scheduled kill, the caretaker of the place/Martin's driver on the kill/representative from the employer finally sits down with him to go over choice of weapons. No, we can't get the gun you want in just three days. You'll have to use this crummy gun. What?!?! If I can't have the gun I want, I'm going to go tell on you. Martin goes and calls his employer who says, sure, we can get you whatever gun you need. Whew. Thank goodness. Martin heads back to the place in the woods. He goes up to the bedroom and there's his woman banging the caretaker/driver. Does Martin the trained assassin shoot them both? Torture them? No. The trauma of seeing his woman going at with another guy causes Martin to go mute. No joke.

First she can't wait for him ten years, then she can't wait for him ten days. But Martin still loves her. Martin heads for the kill, realizes he is being setup, escapes, then kidnaps a guy working for those setting him up. He's still mute. When he kidnaps the guy, he grabs him by the ear and rips the guy (Sammy Chen)'s ear off.
Two of Sammy's associates come along and subdue Martin. The one sees Sammy's ear on the floor of the car and picks it up:

"I must be dreaming!" he exclaimed as he examined the red auricle. "Shit!" he added respectfully.

"This guy is really violent," said Sammy Chen with conviction.

Those last two lines are straight from the book. I'm really glad Sammy said that with conviction. I know I tend not to believe people whose ears have been ripped off when they say the person that did it to them is really violent.

There's a standoff. The whole reason why Martin is set up is really vague and goofy. The man gets shot in the head. He can talk again. He gets his babe but suffers from more performance issues. We get this stunning bit of text a couple pages from the end:

"But she soon tired of an existence entirely lacking in adventure-not to mention money, for Martin Terrier, under his new identity and with his current abilities, could find work only in the restaurant business: he was now a waiter in a brasserie. She also grew tired of three-minute coitus, or so we may surmise. In any case, she left suddenly and without explanation. And she has not reappeared in Nauzac, although she owns property there. May we surmise that she is running around the world and leading a passionate and adventurous life? We may; it's no skin off our nose."

Words fail me. And apparently the author, too. Well, I could write about what happened, or I could just say that we may surmise something. And even though until this point I have refrained from acknowledging that there are readers and I am the narrator, I think I'll make mention of it with two pages to go. No skin off my nose.

What else? A lack of detail except for brand names. Every make of vehicle and weapon is identified. Defining characteristics of people, not so much. Except for the black man. We know he's black. We're told that a lot about him. Citroen's are the vehicle of choice although other makes make appearances.

This was just awful. It is really short (thankfully!) and is so bad it does become entertaining. Because of that, Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife still maintains its hold as worst book I've ever read. I think Stephen Carter's New England White also falls below this just because of the length of his book and the blatant racism by the author, a Yale professor. But this passes The Museum Guard for putridity. I think I have to say this is the third worst book I have ever read. And to think that this guy is considered one of the best noir writers in France. Yikes.

--Jon

THE FINAL SOLUTION by Michael Chabon

I had just about caught up with my reviews but then held up because I wanted to research this one a little more. It is a review of a book written by one of my favorite authors, Michael Chabon.

Chabon's place in my stable of fantastic authors has been knocked down a few notches over the years with some books I just didn't enjoy very much. I'm reminded of a TED talk with Elizabeth Gilbert where she expresses that she has come to grips with the fact that she will likely never match the success she has had with Eat, Pray, Love and that her writing career is all downhill from here.

I had been feeling that Chabon was in the same boat. What do you do after you win a Pulizter Prize (for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay)? Chabon has branched out into other genres writing movie screenplays, comics, a children's book (Summerland, which I enjoyed), and now has a picture book coming out next month. And it's not like his writing has become bad. He is still as marvelous with words as ever. I just haven't liked his stories much.

The Final Solution came out seven years ago, a year after it first appeared in The Paris Review. I avoided reading it for a number of reasons, the biggest one being I hate people who write Sherlock Holmes stories who aren't named Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It bothers me to no end. You have a brain, come up with your own character and don't leech off a legend. Sheesh. And for one of my favorite authors to do so? The mind boggles at my moral dilemma.

The thing is, for all the talk about this novella being about Sherlock Holmes, I cannot find any suggestion that it actually is. The sleuthing hero in the story, an old man who was once a respected, legendary crime investigator in England is only referred to as "The old man". Heck, Chabon might have been ripping off Hemingway. The old man has excellent powers of observation and deduction. The story takes place in the early 1940's which makes the age right but I found no reference that said "Hey, the old man is Sherlock Holmes". I have read every Sherlock Holmes story that Doyle wrote. And while I don't have a photographic memory, I would think something would register in my brain as being from some Holmes tale. Even more so, I would think if you're going to make it a Sherlock Holmes story, you make the obvious reference. You reference the stories everyone knows; A Study in Scarlet, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Valley of Fear...something. Nothing.

So I applaud Chabon for the incredible act of writing a story that most people think is a Sherlock Holmes story but isn't. That's talent. I think.

What is this story then? Well, there's a young mute lad with a parrot that speaks German and rattles off sequences of numbers from time to time. The boy lives in a boarding house with some motley characters. One night the parrot vanishes and one of the household members is found murdered. The inspector on the scene is baffled and enlists the old man's assistance. The old man realizes that the parrot is the key to the mystery and so they search for the bird instead of the killer. Both are found but the importance of the parrot (if there is any importance to be attached to the parrot) is left as a mystery.

All in all I liked it. It was a nice breezy book which is hard to say about a Chabon work given his predilection for gargantuan words. It also has a handful of nice illustrations. I initially wanted to give it two stars (my top rating) but the more I thought about it, the more I felt I was doing so because it was written by Chabon. Anyone else and it's a nice story. So I'll be honest with myself and give it one-star (still a fine book and recommended).

--Jon

EVERYTHING HERE IS THE BEST THING EVER by Justin Taylor

There was nothing about this book that was even really good, let alone the best ever. It's a collection of short stories that I found completely unmoving and forgettable. The characters, like the stories, are sort of aimless.

I like to think I don't require a connection to the characters in order for me to like them or the book. Maybe if I were a twenty-something hipster, I would have been able to relate more to the drug use and the pansexual experiences. I couldn't, though, and couldn't care less about the characters or what happened to them. There's no doubt Justin Taylor has some writing talent, and being short stories, it was a quick read and not a waste of my life. Not an awful book but not one I would recommend.

One last caveat concerning my lack of recommendation. I struggle with short stories. I think they're a difficult format to do right and when they are done right, I usually want more than what the author gave me. So, if you do like short stories, this might be worth your while just because Taylor can write. Or, if you're not an old man like myself, you might find something worthwhile.

--Jon

ELEVEN by Mark Watson

JJ wondered in her review of this book what it was that I liked about it. Well, I'm catching up on my book reviews and have finally reached Eleven so here are my thoughts.

Eleven has become my most favorite fictional book I have read this year. What a terrific book. I finished it and really wanted to just go right back to the beginning and start again. I have recommended it to several people, a couple whom have read it and enjoyed it as well (the others haven't read it yet to my knowledge).

Eleven is about the unusually named Xavier Ireland, nee Chris Cotswold, a native Australian living in London where he works as a late night radio talk show host with his co-host, the stammering Murray. Xavier lives a quiet, lonely life outside of work, indulging in a traditional weekend Scrabble tournament, and tries to steer clear of deep involvement with people's personal lives, even as he dispenses advice on his talk show.

The title Eleven comes from the eleven lives that are influenced by a non-decision Xavier makes early in the book. A young child is being bullied by a bunch of schoolmates. Xavier makes a half-hearted attempt to break it up but ultimately leaves the kid to his own fate. This starts a chain of events that concludes with a very unexpected yet appropriate and moving ending.

This concept could easily be done in a very ham-handed way with "fate" being forced down the reader's throats and coincidences that are just too far-fetched to swallow. Mark Watson, though, does it with a tremendous elegance, creating a literary "butterfly effect". If you're not familiar with the theory, it is the idea that the breeze that a butterfly stirs with its wings in one part of the world, has an influence on the air currents and weather patterns in other parts of the world in ways we cannot fathom. So it is with this novel.

The story can really be summed up by one line in it, a line that seems like a throwaway line about two-thirds of the way through the book:

Everything has a chance of mattering.

Action or an absence of action has impacts in ways we cannot possibly fathom as Watson shows how the smallest things can escalate then ebb. A minor irritation makes us grumpy and our snappish comment to a stranger may in turn set off other events.

Beyond the study of fate and the influence of one person on another, this book is great because of Watson's characters. They are charmingly flawed starting with Xavier Ireland. We eventually find why Ireland has left Australia and changed his name and why he seems so set on being uninvolved. There's Murray (whoever heard of a stammering radio DJ?). The love interest, Pippa, who Xavier meets at a speed dating event and initially hires to clean his apartment. She is a former Olympic caliber athlete who now struggles to care for her recently impregnated sister. There's the neighbors; an upstairs couple who endlessly quarrel and seem abusive, and the downstairs single mother with the ultra-hyperactive toddler. The folks from Ireland's past. The depressed regular caller to Ireland's show. The restaurant reviewer who is the mother of the aforementioned bullied child. The realtor with bad breath.

The book is primarily about Ireland but these other characters flit in and out of the story, each with their own lives that don't seem to have anything to do with Xavier's but each doing or not doing something that impacts someone else.

I loved this book. I found it inspirational in an odd way. I think it is exquisitely crafted and well thought out. Even the ending, which is shocking and emotional, is perfect. The characters are human and modern. I honestly cannot think of a single negative thing to say about this book. Please read it.

--Jon

SAVAGES by Don Winslow

Even working at a library, you can't always get the books you want when you want them. Take our library system. There are seventeen libraries in the system, ranging from some really large ones to some really small ones. But seventeen....you would think that most books that get reviewed places would end up being purchased by one or more of them.

I had read a review of Savages and it sounded like it was a fast-paced, oddly written book, much like the much-loved-by-me Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow. I wanted to read it. Only one library in the system had it. Libraries in the system won't ship new books to the patrons of other libraries. You can either drive to the owning library, hope the book is on the shelf, and sign it out, or you can wait for the six month restricted period for new books to end and then request it be shipped.

I opted for the wait. And on the exact day it came off, I requested it.

Worth the wait. I knew the book was going to be different when I started the book. You know how you always hear the advice to writers that your first line should be powerful, drawing the reader into the book? Well, the first line of Savages is the first chapter of Savages. It reads, in it's entirety, "F%*#! you" (cleaned up due to the potential for a younger audience reading this).

So, yeah, that grabbed me. Especially since that was the whole chapter.

The book is about two young guys who are marijuana dealers in sunny California. Chon is a former Navy SEAL who brought back some high quality marijuana seeds when he was fighting overseas. His buddy Ben is a botanist who figures out how to create some nice blends with these seeds to create highly desired designer marijuana. The two share a girlfriend named Ophelia.

A Mexican drug cartel decides that they want to expand their operations into So-Cal and they go tell Ben and Chon that they are taking over their business. Naturally, the two are opposed to the idea. The cartel kidnaps Ophelia. A drug war begins.

This is another book with some really nicely developed characters with multiple points of views. Chapters (which are mostly really short and brisk) move from perspective to perspective.

But profanity, drug wars, seedy folks, violence. Not a big chance for a happy ending and no one really to root for (gee, I hope that Chon and Ben get Ophelia back so they can have another threesome and then sell some more weed! By the way, f%*#! you!). That keeps this from being a two star book for me. It's well-written, powerful, with a driving style that I liked. I'd put it more James Ellroy than Toby Barlow in terms of style, which isn't bad. Well worth it if you don't mind amoral characters in your novels

--Jon