Busted

Busted is a book about a person — a NYTimes finance reporter — who bought a house he shouldn’t have in 2006. It was too expensive, he was recently divorced (and freshly remarried to a woman who had just declared her second bankruptcy), and he thought he could beat the market. He uses his story as a springboard to talk about the current economic debacle and he wants to use it to put a personal face on the stress that foreclosure can put on families.*

It doesn’t really work.

Busted is mostly about the generalities. His personal story is shoehorned in, supposedly enriching the whole. The two stories never mesh and as a result, neither is done well. Anyone who regularly listens to Marketplace already knows the broad strokes of what happened to the economy (though I had to keep checking dates – were mortgage brokerages really failing by August 2007? why did it take until September 2008 for the bottom to fall out?), and he never really gets into the interesting questions about the personal one. Why didn’t he and his wife talk more about their financial differences before they got married?  Why didn’t they sell the house when they could? Why didn’t they sell everything they had? Why did they take a don’t-talk-about-it attitude for so long? Why did they still have cable when they couldn’t pay their bills? He never  answers any of those questions. He keeps saying how much he loves her, but also saying how unfathomable she is to him (but that’s why her loves her! it’s the challenge!). It smacks of someone who’s gone through couples counseling who’s just realized that what he says matters.

I don’t feel like Busted made anything clearer to me, and I’m a little bit frustrated that it could have been a great cautionary tale about what financial pressures can do to a marriage. That was its hook — books about What Happened To The Economy are going to be a dime a dozen soon. Too bad it didn’t deliver.

Busted: Not Recommended

* It’s the book this article from May 2009 was exerpted from. I think the article was better pulled together than the book was.

More Information Than You Require

John Hodgman is best in small doses. A book is not a small dose.

More Information Than You Require: Not Recommended (But it does hurt to type that. I wanted to like it.)

The Ladies of Grace Adieu

Susanna Clarke is a good writer; I enjoyed Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. But her stories take a good 25-30 pages to get into. Ergo, this book of short stories doesn’t work all that well. By the time you figure out who everyone is and what’s going on, the story is finished. Not a good thing.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu: Not Recommended

The Emperor’s Children

You know what? I’m just going to face the fact now: I am never going to read The Emperor’s Children. I’m twenty pages in, and I just got to the which-character-from-War-and-Peace-are-you discussion that a couple of the characters are having and no. Who the hell has read enough War and Peace to actually have that discussion? Pretentious, over-educated people with nothing better to talk about. And I don’t want to read a book about them, particularly one that doesn’t seem to hold any promise of smacking these people upside the head and telling them to get out of their insulated little world.

I mean, given that the title is The Emperor’s Children, who else is going to be in this book?

Whatever. I picked it up because I remember reading a decent review, but clearly that reviewer and I have a difference of opinion.

The Emperor’s Children: Not recommended

The Millionaire Next Door

The big secret in The Millionaire Next Door? That people who have money save more than they earn, which means that they have small houses and don’t spend very much on cars. They save 15% of each paycheck. They invest in the market, and they don’t do a lot of buying and selling. This is nothing you can’t figure out if you read any of the major money management sites. There’s nothing new here, but it did help reassure me that not buying a house in the Bay Area is the Right Thing To Do.

It would be a good summary of the main attitudes to have if you want to accumulate wealth, but its big downfall is that it’s amazingly sexist. The authors talk mainly about the big earner in the couple, usually the husband. This is a by-product of the fact that, in order to be worth $1 million, you need to work for a long time, and fewer women have been in the workforce that long. Fine. That means that the data will show that more men are millionaires. That’s acceptable, and I expect it to change as more women earn more money. And they do talk about the women millionaires as well. But the book’s big point is that you have to save: in the second chapter of the book, they acknowledge that the other spouse is Very Important and tacitly admit that the person who’s not earning all the money is largely in charge of spending. But the earner ends up getting all the credit, and the only one worthy of being called a millionaire.

Not to mention the chapter about stay-at-home wives who are apparently either super-human in subsuming their own desires to take care of their husbands, kids, and parents or they’re completely selfish, spending all their husband’s and parent’s money in order to boost their own self-esteem. There’s no in-between.

In short, you can get the same info elsewhere, without having to put up with all the crap.

The Millionaire Next Door: Not Recommended

The United States of Europe

I wish I’d liked The United States of Europe more than I did. Hell, I wish I’d been able to get through it. I wanted to like it because I agree with its basic premise: that a unified Europe would make a good counterweight to a dominate US. But its tone and its assumption that Europe can throw more weight around in the world without increasing its military spending were irritating. Not to mention that it was written before the Dutch and French vetoed the European Constitution, and before the riots in the French suburbs, which dates the book and diminishes its relevancy.

Which is not to say that a European counterweight to the US won’t or shouldn’t happen (although God knows I get too much of my European news from The Economist and not enough from anywhere else, so my limited view on the issue should be taken with a grain of salt). But The United States of Europe (or at least the part I read) seemed like boosterism for the cause instead of analysis of it.

The United States of Europe: Not Recommended

A Gentle Madness

A Gentle Madness is essentially a chronicle of book collectors. It takes pains to point out that people who like to have books around them don’t necessarily like to read them, just to have them. Not only does it treat book collectors as good people, it elevates them to a higher class of collectors, somehow better than people who gather other things. It even treats book thieves as scamps, with a boys-will-be-boys attitude about the stealing, rather than as the crime that it is.

In addition to sparking every get-rid-of-your-stuff instinct in me, it also made me think that this kind of information-gathering just to have it made a lot more sense before we lived in a world where information was as ridiculously plentiful as it is today. Before, a good library might have been essential to having certain information at your fingertips, and, even more in some cases, a sign of social status. Now, practically everyone has the internet*, with more information than you’ll ever need. Having the information at your fingertips is no longer a social-status signifier. Now, you need to be able to make sense of the information and put it to good use. Collecting makes less sense now.

Do I need 500 pages about collectors to think about that? Nope. I ended up putting A Gentle Madness down after about 60 (I did glance through the table of contents to see if anything else was going to be covered), and I’m ok with that.

A Gentle Madness: Not Recommended

* I’m clearly ignoring any digital divide-type issues; but the fact remains that even people without internet connections at home, in the developed world (which A Gentle Madness concentrates on) anyway, can always go to the library to use the internet.

Paris Babylon

Paris Babylon is a history of Paris through the 1870s. I bought it *many* years ago because it was about Paris, and have tried to read it a number of times, never getting very far. Here’s why: it’s written by someone who’s a regular Vanity Fair contributer. It shows. The whole thing’s written in that style; I’m not sure I can describe it exactly, but it seems to be both backstabbing and obsequious, and it’s definitely factual, but it kind of creeps me out. I used to be able to stomach it for a whole magazine,* but extending that to book length is deadly. The history might be interesting (and indeed many reviewers on Amazon seem to think so), but I couldn’t take it.

Paris Babylon: Not Recommended

* It suddenly occurs to me that it’s been years since I bought one.

Misreadings

I wanted Misreadings to be better. I remember it being better. What happened? I was going through an Umberto Eco phase when I originally bought it in the summer of 1997, and I remember enjoying it then.

Now, it’s just… boring. It’s a bunch of essays that he wrote for an Italian magazine in the 50s and 60s, and I ended up skipping about half of them because they were too Euro-centric or too literary or both. A couple of them were funny, but that’s like buying a CD because you like one of the songs.

Misreadings: Sadly, not recommended.

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

I was reading this book, enjoying myself, having the occasional insight but mostly not thinking too hard until I got to the essay on Billy Joel. And again, mostly it’s pretty good, entertaining and the bit about how rock music is mostly just a way to make money from being cool is both flip and knd of right. Then we get to the third footnote:

Actually, as it turns out I was completely wrong about this….Obviously, I can’t argue about the meaning of a song with the person who wrote it. But I still think my interpretation is more interesting than his truth.

At which point, my eyes bugged out of my head. He goes on with the essay as though he’s not COMPLETELY WRONG. By his own admission! He discusses his theory in detail and expects us to be fine with the fact that he’s basically wasting our time. This discounts every other insight he has in the book – how do you know he’s not doing the same thing with everything else?

And that was more thought than I wanted to put into Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. Particularly while I was on vacation. I haven’t thought a lot about why kids like Luke Skywalker and not Han Solo and what that means about Generation X. I don’t actually care that much.* He didn’t make me want to, either.

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: Meh.

* Which begs the question, so why’d you pick it up in the first place? Because I’d heard he was a smart, good writer, and thought it might be fun.

Wicked

I may be the last person in the world to read Wicked. I’ve been putting it off for awhile, and it turns out to be for good reason: I didn’t like it very much. It’s *much* too detailed about Oz politics and religion; the book was set up that way to explain why the Wicked Witch of the West (aka Elphelba) was so misunderstood. He did have to write it like that because he did have to conform his story to The Wizard of Oz. But man, were those parts boring.

Obviously, the hook is that this is a different perspective on a classically Evil character, and I suspect that he wrote it for two reasons: one, he wanted to show explore what evil really is, and two, he wanted to show how people become evil. I’m not sure he did a very good job with the first point and Elphelba is far too sympathetic to have accomplished the second (if you want a good discussion about evil and how to get there, read Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century*).

The book holds together fairly well until he has to deal with Dorothy and the part where it has to directly conform to what L. Frank Baum wrote. That bit? It feels forced. He ends up having to sleep deprive Elphelba (which didn’t make sense in the context of the story) and have her go a little irrationally nuts over the ruby slippers – which doesn’t fit with the rest of her actions.

Wicked ends up being bad because it tied itself to a well-known story. On the other hand, a book about the same ideas that didn’t use that trick probably wouldn’t have sold as many copies.

Wicked: Not Recommended

* I’ve never written it up, but it’s one of the best things I’ve ever read.

The Constant Gardener

Here’s the thing: I’m not a Le Carre fan. It’s not that he’s bad, it’s just that his books (ok, the two I’ve read) have such an overt agenda. The more I read, the more that bothers me. Or maybe it’s just because I’m so sick of the business-politician-lobbyist-media quadrangle that I don’t want to read about it anymore. And maybe that’s the problem. There are so many of those kinds of movies and books that I feel like “we get it already, can we talk about something else?”

So while the book isn’t bad and I sympathized with almost everyone, I couldn’t get into it, and ultimately can’t recommend it.

The Constant Gardener: Not Recommended

Case Histories

The fact that I don’t like this book enough to post about it after only reading twenty-two pages of it says more about me than it does about the book. Kate Atkinson is a fine writer, and her characters are all pretty good in those twenty-two pages. The reason I’m putting it down and not picking it back up is this: I don’t read books that are about children getting kidnapped.

At least, not anymore. There was a time when I would, but since I’ve had a kid? Not so much. Yes some of it is because I just don’t want to think about that happening to my family, but it’s also because the chances of it happening are so freaking small that I don’t want to spend time thinking about it. Far too many of our news cycles are spent on this-kid-disappeared stories (Fox News and Natalee Holloway, I’m looking right at you). Less attention needs to be spent on this. That includes fiction books.

My to-read pile is far too big to spend time on this.

Case Histories: Not Recommended

The Science of Harry Potter: How Magic Really Works

I’m having problems getting this review written. Why? Because this book was just sort of – meh. It wasn’t exciting or terribly interesting or terribly blasphemous. It just was.

I had high hopes. I like it when science can explain things that had only been describable (is that a word?) by myths and stories. Alas, this book had another agenda. The first half was about emerging technologies that could make some of the odder or more amazing things in the Harry Potter books actually happen. My favorite is the superconducting magnets that could make things – such as brooms – fly. Doesn’t Japan already have some trains that operate with that technology? Maybe. The book didn’t talk about those, though. Instead, when talking about people (instead of objects) flying, he launched into a chapter about psychotropic drugs. Huh? That’s not actual flying, just a way to fool the brain. Not the science I was looking for.

The second half was better. It talked more about possible origins of J.K. Rowling’s inventions in history, nature and myth. Like Dumbledore might have been based on Queen Elizabeth I’s astrologer. And, of course, dragons are dinosaurs. He also presents evidence of prehistoric peoples belief in magic.

I also have two non-subject issues with this book. The first is that the pages were flimsy enough that it was difficult to turn just one at a time. The second is a terribly disconcerting habit of treating the magic world as though it actually exists in tandem with our own. If this had been done well, I wouldn’t complain. But it wasn’t. It felt like something that is separate from the rest of the book, like it was tacked on afterwards at the suggestion of a reader. It disrupts the flow of the book.

I’d have to suggest skipping this one.

The Science of Harry Potter: Not Recommended

Originally published on degelau.com.

Quicksilver

Memo to: Neal Stephenson’s editor
From: kated
Re: the new book

You must be feeling under the weather because your latest work is, shall we say, not up to your usual standards. I’d like to assume this is due to inattention rather than incompetence. I certainly rule out malice; surely you cannot have wanted to inflict this version of this book on Mr. Stephenson’s fan base.

While Mr. Stephenson’s writing is, as usual, more than competent and his characters are (mostly) actual people rather than cardboard cut-outs, those frequent philosophical and mathematical speeches are diverting and cover up the plot. To the point where, if you aren’t looking carefully, you might miss it. I think we can assume most of Mr. Stephenson’s readership is familiar with calculus and Newtonian physics. Surely they will – as I did – treat these as something to be skipped. Just like everyone does with the poetry in The Lord of the Rings (notice how the poetry didn’t make it into the movies?).

Oh, the plot has something to do with court intrigues and who’s king where in the late 1600s. And it draws a cute little parallel to the “Did Newton or Leibniz invent calculus?” question. Did I get it right?

Also Mr. Editor (and I assume you must be male in order to allow the following), you have allowed Mr. Stephenson to alienate a good portion of his female readers – and he does have them – with the female lead. She’s the ONLY female character of any note. But that’s not the only thing. Oh no, you had to go and make her a beautiful sex slave – a virginal one at that. Yet she’s still strong, competent and, shockingly enough, interested in people who by today’s standards would be complete geeks. Oh yeah, and she doesn’t mind being raped. WHATEVER. That first scene with her and William of Orange was, how shall I put this? Ew. And EW! What the fuck were you thinking? You, editor, are the person who is there to make sure that doesn’t make it through! In the end, all it does is turn her from a character back into a cardboard cut-out.

I’d like to take a step back here and say that I don’t think Mr Stephenson has issues in general with women. The Diamond Age was a very good book full of strong female characters that I really enjoyed. I think it’s better than Snow Crash. What the hell happened?

In short, this book has much in common with last summer’s movie, The Hulk. That had a good art house movie (hell, maybe even two) struggling to get out of a summer blockbuster behemoth. Quicksilver has a good, perhaps even excellent, 300 page novel struggling to get out of a 900 page book. Mr Editor, I think you could have helped Mr Stephenson find it.

Quicksilver: Not Recommended

Originally published on degelau.com.

Child of My Heart

This book made me think about summers spent at the beach. It was supposed to make me think about growing up, and the realizations you start to have about the world as you start to become aware of things around you. When you’re a kid, everything is very me-centric and that changes as you get older. At least for some people. Ms. McDermott illustrates the main character’s growing knowledge of the families that she works for very nicely.

And yet… When the Economist reviewed this book, they said that they wished the main character had taken a slug of the drinks she prepared for one of the fathers. I’m not sure drinking is the answer, but I understand their sentiment. The book is very dreamy, like it’s being remembered, not lived. Which I guess it is. She does allude to that fact on the first page or two, but never again through the book. I suspect her editor made her add that bit to make the story more robust.

All in all, this book reminds me of cotton candy: well spun, yummy when you devour it, but ultimately not very filling.

Child of My Heart: Not Recommended

Mission to America

I don’t have much coherent to say about Mission to America, so I’m going with the bulleted list. Maybe a theme will emerge. Maybe not. Here goes:

• My lack of Bible-knowledge hurts me with this book, since it *is* fundamentally about how religion and spirituality can both help and really screw us up.
• There’s a little Siddhartha here, maybe, since one of the religious characters totally goes hedonistic. But I also haven’t read Siddhartha since high school, so I might be wrong about that.
• Mission to America also has a lot to say about how modern American society can really screw people up, too, with all its competitive consumerism.
• The AFAs are probably the longest-lasting utopia to come out of late-1800s America. And it sort of reminds me of Northern Exposure and how Cicily and Rosalyn founded Cicily, AK.
• Why are relationships so screwed up in modern literature?

There is a theme in there, somewhere, about utopias and how they go wrong. But I can’t quite grasp it. That’s a problem with the book too. The author is so fond of talking around the point that he doesn’t ever seem to get to it. And so you miss things. Like a crucial bit of history about Betsy, the love interest? The only reason I knew it was because I read the summary on the dust jacket. I may be dense, but I don’t think I’d've gotten it from just reading the book. And that seems like a fundamental flaw. What else did I miss because the author wanted to be clever like that?

Mission to America: Interesting, but ultimately, not recommended.

The Far Side of Eden

Bleh. Bad book. While the actual sentences are pretty well constructed, The Far Side of Eden’s premise — that the old rich Napa Valley wine makers are being pushed out by the new rich-from-other-businesses, dilletante wine makers who are destroying all the beautiful land — just doesn’t work. You end up not having a whole lot of sympathy for anyone, and not in that good I-like-to-hate you way. Really, the only thing the book makes you want to do is not buy any wine from any Napa Valley vinter.

It might get better, but I’m not sticking around to find out.

The Far Side of Eden: Not Recommended