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“Reading it is like being there.” That observation about Lord of the Rings, said by the protagonist of Jo Walton’s Among Others, struck me as being just right. It’s also an apt observation about Among Others itself. More to follow, but I just wanted to make that comment right away.
Over the years I’ve read many books (more than two dozen) by the great mystery writer, Marcia Muller, who actually has a website now. Why is that surprising? Well, here’s the explanation in her own words:
There are many reasons to recommend Muller’s novels, but the principal one becomes evident only if you read her Sharon McCone series in order. Sometimes a series doesn’t need to be read in any particular order, sometimes it needs to be read chronologically for plot reasons, and sometimes it needs to be read chronologically for character development reasons. The Sharon McCone series falls into the third category. Over the course of 29 novels and 33 years, we learn a great deal about McCone, and she learns just as much about herself. You certainly don’t have to read all 29 unless you’re a completist like me, but I do recommend picking a few over this long span of time and reading them sequentially. It’s not just that the later ones won’t make sense otherwise — though I fear that in fact they won’t make as much sense as they should. It’s more that you’ll be missing out from the rich experience that you would otherwise get. Muller’s last two in the series — Locked In and Coming Back — are especially interesting because of the step they take away from the detective genre. The titles signal their primary plot element: as a result of a gunshot wound, McCone suffers from locked-in syndrome, a little-known but horrifying disorder, and she gradually comes back from it. How do you run a detective agency if you can’t really communicate? How do you lead an investigation? How do you keep your staff from ignoring you? These ideas overshadow the plot of the mystery story in the case of the two novels — not that there’s anything wrong with the story itself, it’s just that it pales in comparison.
You’ll recall that a month ago I wrote a few words about Mitch Cullin’s novel, A Slight Trick of the Mind:
The context here was a piece about two other Sherlock Holmes pastiches, The Sherlockian, by Graham Moore, and The Final Solution, by Michael Chabon. Now I’ve finished A Slight Trick of the Mind and can actually review it. The first thing to say is that my preliminary comments quoted above still hold true. In fact the “literary style” is just one indication that this book isn’t a genre novel at all but definitely a mainstream novel. Cullin has intertwined three stories, one current (i.e. 1947), one very recent (a flashback to a trip to Japan), and one from the time right after the canon (in the form of a previously undiscovered manuscript). The result is a character study in which the protagonist didn’t really have to be Sherlock Holmes at all — except that our understanding of him is inevitably informed by our prior knowledge of Holmes in his prime. A Slight Trick of the Mind is sad and revealing. Read it, but read it when you want to experience a novel, not when you want a Sherlock Holmes story.
Everyone who has any connection with education — teacher, student, parent, administrator — needs to read Todd Farley’s Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry. Yes, the book is a bit repetitive, and of course it reflects only one person’s views, and it doesn’t match my colleagues’ experiences scoring AP exams…but you still should read it. Not a statistical study, it is an easy-to-read narrative of Todd Farley’s work with Pearson (“the world’s leading education company”) and ETS (which “conducts assessment and policy research and develops assessments and related services to advance quality and equity in learning worldwide”). Farley started out scoring open-response questions, progressed to being a table leader and a trainer, and eventually wrote rubrics and test questions, all over a period of 15 years. Note, please, that none of this has anything to do with multiple-choice tests, which may have their own issues but at least are scored objectively and consistently. Quoting from the book will be more effective than merely commenting on it. We’ll start with a portion of a rubric describing how to score an eighth-grade descriptive writing task on a statewide test (not MCAS, but similar), quoted verbatim including layout, punctuation, and capitalization:
The excellent (4), inconsistent (2), and poor (1) portions of the rubric are identical to this one, as long as you do a find-and-replace accordingly. Now you have to understand that the typical abysmally paid and undereducated scorer somehow has to decide whether an essay is “good” in all four categories, with no more guidance than “good” = “good.” Of course the scorers and table leaders have to be trained, which means they have to pass a qualifying test. Here’s how the trainer, Maria, ensured that all the table leaders (Caitlin, Ricky, Harlan, etc.) would pass the qualifying test, on which they had to score seven out of ten essays “correctly”:
And so forth. Other examples of cheating pervade the first half of the book. For example:
The horrifying thing about examples like this one is that statistics are determining data, not the other way around. These are real students’ lives that they’re playing with. Even if, say, 70% of the scores are in some sense “correct,” that is of no comfort to you if you are in the remaining 30%. Not that you would ever find out. With all the pressures from politicians and the public these days, so-called “standardized tests” are going to become more and more prevalent. But the scorers won’t become better educated or better paid. And the more pressure there is for favorable statistics, the more likely it is that adults will cheat, as we’ve seen recently in Washington, New York, and Springfield. Replacing open-response questions with multiple-choice questions will solve several of these problems (though it would introduce other problems, of course). We might get a rebuttal from one of my colleagues. But in the meantime…read this book!
I’m sure you’re familiar with all the controversy surrounding Amy Chua’s memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Some of the controversy is well-deserved, but much is not. This book came to the world’s attention through an excerpt published in the Wall Street Journal and splashed all over the Web. Chua seemed to be claiming that Americans raised their kids all wrong, that Chinese (and other Asian) parents knew how to do it right, that it’s OK (and even desirable) to emotionally abuse one’s children in public, and that the important thing was to emphasize doing huge amounts of homework and spending even more time on practicing piano and/or violin. No other instruments would do. Theater was certainly out of the question. Grades of A– were also out of the question; only straight A’s sufficed. Needless to say, this seemed exaggerated and full of stereotypes. But Chua is a successful law professor at Yale, the second-best law school in the country (well…some people do call it the best…), so she has to be taken seriously. I decided to get the whole story by reading the entire book, not just the brief excerpt that had caused such extreme reactions. The book is worth reading. It’s written in a breezy style that makes it quick to read, and no deep thinking is required. That’s a mixed blessing, of course. Clearly there were some logical inconsistencies, such as the claimed insistence of every Chinese family in a class that their child had to be #1. More interestingly, it became apparent that the Journal had unfairly selected the most sensationalistic portions of the book, no matter how unrepresentative they might be. The full realization doesn’t appear until close to the end of the book, where the reader discovers that Chua recants half of what she had said earlier. It turns out that her child-rearing methods worked for one daughter and not for the other. (It also turns out that this memoir is only partly about child-rearing; like any memoir it covers an entire range of events.) It also turns out that Chua admits to unfair generalizations by contrasting Chinese child-rearing with American, since she admits that it isn’t ethnically based after all. So don’t believe everything you read in the papers, even the Wall Street Journal. In closing, however, I need to point out that there are, of course, several grains of truth hidden in the excerpts and in the earlier parts of the book. It’s not coincidence that over half of the students at the state math meet are always Asian. We know that it’s not genetic; it’s because of parental expectations. That much is believable.
A terrific turnout last night at the Driscoll School in Brookline. More than half (!) of the fourth- and fifth-graders (and their parents) showed up for an evening event revolving around Penny Noyce’s Lost in Lexicon. My role was to be the Pi Man, representing the Village of Irrationality. Kids (and often their parents) would measure various circular bowls, dividing the circumference by the diameter in each case. This being Brookline, most of them already knew about pi and expected to get the “correct” value, so the activity tended to turn into the surprise they experienced when the average of their ratios for three different bowls turned out to be less precise than they had expected. One boy decided to measure the entire round table to get a better result. Everyone had a great time, being totally engaged in a variety of activities relating to math and language. What better combination could there be?
I’m currently reading my third Sherlock Holmes pastiche of the month, and I have one more in audiobook format that I still need to listen to. All four are set entirely or in part after the Conan Doyle canon. We’ll take them in order of reading:
I recently read OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, by Allan Metcalf. For some unaccountable reason this book has only two customer reviews on Amazon; there must be some good reason for that. Anyway, Metcalf tells you everything you ever wanted to know about “OK,” starting with the true story of its etymology. No, OK doesn’t come from “Old Kinderhook,” as most people believe. (Actually, most people have absolutely no opinion on the matter.) Nor does it come from Finnish, or an American Indian language, or any other fanciful source. But you’ll have to read the book to find out the truth. Unlike most other people, he cites sources rather than spouting unsupported assertions. On the plus side, Metcalf has written an informative, well-documented account that’s easy to read. On the minus side, it’s somewhat repetitive, despite coming in at only 224 pages. Oh, no! We missed OK Day, which was two days ago. But you can still “like” OK Day on Facebook. More than two hundred of us have done so, even if only two posted reviews on Amazon.
When I was talking with a Weston English teacher the other day, I realized that my own high-school experience with literature as assigned by English teachers was badly skewed. “This is an English department, not an American department” was one teacher’s lame explanation for why we read almost nothing written by Americans. One of the many reasons why it was unconvincing was that our readings were not actually limited to English authors, though admittedly they did form the bulk of the curriculum. It was true that Hardy, Dickens, Milton, Donne, Herrick, Herbert, Tennyson, Shaw, Yeats (OK, those two were Irish, not English), T.S. Eliot (technically American, but English in spirit), Orwell, Jonson, Marlowe, and of course Shakespeare tended to predominate, supporting the “English department” explanation. (Naturally there was nothing by Austen, the Brontés, or George Eliot, but I’m sure you can figure out why they didn’t count any more than the Americans did.) But the explanation collapses because we read plenty of authors who were neither English nor American, not just Joseph Conrad but also lots of Ibsen in translation and even more ancient Greek literature in translation, ranging from Homer to Sophocles to Aristophanes. All this amounted to a rather peculiar collection of authors, though I admit to enjoying most of it (all but Hardy, of whom we had read one novel a year). It’s odd that F. Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O’Neill were considered “foreign” when Ibsen and Sophocles were not, but that’s what happens when an American school considers itself to be English. This was Phillips Academy in the early ’60s; I’m sure it’s different today. In all fairness, I have to admit that my wonderful AP English class taught by Dudley Fitts included not only a huge amount of Greek literature, which I loved, but also an entire collection of poetry by a contemporary American author — a woman, no less. Unfortunately almost nobody has heard of her today. But do check out Jean Valentine’s website, from which I re-learned something that I had forgotten: her collection Dream Barker, which is what we read in 1965, was almost literally hot off the press, having been published mere weeks before we read it. That was truly an unusual opportunity in those pre-Internet days. Finally, as you probably know, National Poetry Month is coming up in April. We were each asked to select our favorite poem to put in the school library’s display case. I chose Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses, apparently for the second year in a row, though I didn’t remember that. “Well, it’s still my favorite poem,” I explained.
“We should all embark on something completely new every ten years,” said Roy Strong, as quoted by Susan Hill in Howard’s End is on the Landing. When I read this opinion, I paused, closed the book, and thought for a while. I realized that that has pretty much been my philosophy, as long as we can be elastic about the prescription for “ten” as the magic number. In my twelfth year at Lincoln-Sudbury I joined some friends and colleagues in founding a new school. Intertwined with that effort was my experience in various software startups. About ten years after the initial planning for The Phoenix School began, I took on several endeavors, including teaching on television and teaching at The Saturday Course. Soon thereafter — certainly not ten years this time! — I joined Boston University Academy (BUA) as their first math teacher to help create their Math Department. Ten years after that I accepted the invitation from Harvard University to create — and then teach— the Quantitative Reasoning course at the Crimson Summer Academy. Spoiling the rough decennial pattern was my decision to move from BUA to Weston High School a mere four years after I started my work at BUA. Nevertheless, I think Strong has a point, a very good point. Of course there’s nothing magic about ten years, but new beginnings are a good idea. Don’t be afraid of professional change! That‘s what keeps you alive and active.
What an unusual title for a book! What on earth can it mean? Well, part of the problem is an intentional ambiguity in how book titles are traditionally indicated. One rule states that a book title that is mentioned inline should be italicized. Another (unrelated) rule states that italics within italics are actually de-italicized. For instance, if a phrase or sentence that is italicized for emphasis happens to include a book title, then that title is not in italics. So far, so good. But what happens when the title of one book includes the title of another book within it. That’s what happens here: the title tells us that Howard’s End is on the landing. Now it finally makes sense. Susan Hill is a British author of both fiction and non-fiction books. This is a “book about books”: Hill decided to spend a full year checking no books out of the library and buying no new ones, just catching up on the many books she already owned and hadn’t read (or hadn’t re-read, if that was what was needed). A sub-goal of hers was one of those desert-island things: selecting the 40 books that she couldn’t do without if she had to keep only 40. Her selection is, to put it mildly, idiosyncratic — at least it seems so from my POV, perhaps because she’s very British or because she’s very Christian. The title refers to a fact that I can easily identify with: she has so many books that they’re scattered all over her house and she often can’t find what she’s looking for. She was trying to find Howard’s End, and it turned out to be on the landing. That, at least, is the literal meaning of the title. Anyway, despite Hill’s odd choices — odd to me, I mean — and despite the occasionally excessive name-dropping — I found this book well worth reading.
Last year I listened to the audiobook version of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and reviewed it in this blog, so I figured that I would follow it up with Franzen’s fourth and latest novel, Freedom. While Freedom held my interest all the way to the end, it was definitely not up to the quality of the previous book, IMHO. The best thing about this novel is its convincing portrayal of a dysfunctional midwestern family. The variety of characters can certainly hold the reader’s attention, as can a few of the characters on the periphery of the family. In particular, Franzen does such a convincing job of portraying New York Jews that it almost makes one think the author is one of them, instead of being the midwestern Protestant that he in fact is. He also has an interesting range of political views among his characters. But his dialog is unconvincing — do people really talk like that? — and I am disturbed by his obvious antipathy to cats. At first I thought it was just a character’s antipathy, but it became clear that it is the author’s voice speaking.
Last night I saw the Weston High School Theater Company’s excellent performance of The Lie That Binds. What? You’ve never heard of this play? That’s because it was written collaboratively by the cast and crew — namely, the students in the Theater Company. Click on the link for more information, including photos of the production. You will also see there that Weston was one of the winners of the preliminary round at the Mass Educational Theater Guild Drama Festival. Congratulations to all involved! I particularly like this paragraph:
And now a segue to something that sounds entirely unrelated: Laura Lippman’s novel, Life Sentences, which I just finished reading. Lippman is best known for her Tess Monaghan mysteries, which I have unaccountably failed to review, though I reviewed two of her other novels five years ago — on April 13 and April 24, 2006. Life Sentences is a hybrid, a cross between a mainstream novel and a genre novel, and I definitely recommend it. The connection here is that the crux of the stories is a set of lies that may (or may not) hold a family together, and what happens when the lies come out. The lie involves adultery and a dead child, partly involving the family of a prominent politician — close to the story of The Lie that Binds. Although it is possible that someone in the Theatre Company has read Life Sentences, I think it’s unlikely. It’s more probable that this is an old literary theme that awakens especially whenever real life gets close to it. Actually, when I watched The Lie that Binds, I wasn’t thinking of Life Sentences (since I hadn’t finished the Lippman book until today) but of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. We read this provocative play in the wonderful eleventh-grade English class in which I was a student many decades ago. We also read five or six other Ibsen plays, and The Wild Duck is one of three that have stayed with me ever since. Again I have no reason to believe that anyone in the Theatre Company has read or seen The Wild Duck, but some of the thematic similarities are striking. Like all of Ibsen, the play feels quite modern, even though it was written well over a hundred years ago. As in both of the newer works — the Lippman novel and the Weston play — an initial lie is based on adultery, and then more lies are piled on. Eventually the truth turns out to be worse than the lies. Of the three works, only Lippman’s manages to have a happy ending.
It turned out to be a pleasure to read Steve Barry’s Rail Power, a gift from my sister-in-law. At first glance this looks like nothing more than a downsized coffee-table book, filled with lots of pictures and very little text. What a surprise to find that it is well-written, well-organized, and truly informative! The premise is very simple: provide a history of American locomotives. Hundreds of exceptionally crisp photographs do just that and clearly form the backbone of the book, but the quality of the supporting text is equal to that of the photos. The writing is exceptionally concise, while maintaining a real personality and often a light touch despite such a geeky topic. The organization is primarily chronological, divided into three large sections, one each for steam, electric, and diesel. If you have any interest in railroads — whether real or model — this book is definitely worth reading and keeping.
On the whole it was refreshing to read Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions about How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom. Despite the misleading title and overly long subtitle, Daniel Willingham’s new book offers an interesting mixture of the obvious and the unconventional. First, let’s get that title out of the way. The publisher obviously pulled it out of a small portion of Chapter One, the only part of the book to which it actually applies. Presumably the reason they did this was that it would sell more copies than the subtitle alone would do. (Speaking of disservices committed by the publisher, Jossey-Bass, I also have to observe that the tiny font size is very difficult for readers over the age of 40.) Willingham limits himself to nine principles, chosen on the basis of three criteria (quoted verbatim here, except for punctuation):
These criteria lead to principles that Willingham casts in the form of questions, a form that I like in this context:
Some of these are yawn-inducing, but some are truly intriguing. Willingham certainly goes against the conventional wisdom in #5–7. He makes a compelling case for devoting more attention to practice (“drilling”) than is currently in vogue; he makes an even more compelling case for not “getting students to think like real scientists, mathematicians, and historians”; and he debunks the current orthodoxy that there are different types of learners, such as auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. In this last context he observes that Howard Gardner is usually credited with this distinction even though it comes much more from Gardner’s followers than from Gardner himself. I’ve never been convinced that there’s a good reason to refer to Gardner’s list as intelligences rather than talents, and Willingham also claims that “most psychologists think Gardner didn’t really get it right.” Most interestingly, he observes that not only Willingham but also Gardner himself disagrees with the following idea that is usually attributed to him:
Finally, it’s worth mentioning Willingham’s observation that much of psychology can be learned from your grandmother.
Diamonds for the Dead, by Alan Orloff, is a reasonably compelling mystery with an interesting cast of characters, many of whom are Russian immigrants in northern Virginia. The characters and the place make the book. It’s fun to read — nothing very deep but written well enough to keep the reader’s attention. I’ll happily read Orloff’s next novel, and then I can form a surer judgment about him as a writer. Read Diamonds for the Dead if you’re looking for an above-average but not-too-taxing mystery.
Although it was published over six years ago, I’ve just gotten around to reading Missing Justice, a worthy early contribution to Alafair Burke’s Samantha Kincaid series. Actually, I didn’t read it; I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Betty Bobbitt. For the most part she was a convincing narrator, effectively rendering a variety of voices. But I was irritated by her inability to laugh realistically, and although her characters spoke differently, they laughed identically. Other than that point, the narration was worth listening to. This mystery revolves around an assistant district attorney (actually called a deputy district attorney in Oregon) and has the ring of truth, even though I can’t say I know anything about prosecution in Oregon. There is a definite sense of place in the characterizations of the Portland area. Following the conventions of the genre, Burke portrays Kincaid as a strong lawyer who thinks outside the box and doesn’t like to follow rules. Unsurprisingly, the person who is accused of the murder (you have to have a murder) turns out not to be guilty, and Kincaid unmasks the true perpetrator. So, we have a standard mystery without true surprises. Alafair Burke is not yet as skilled a writer as her much more famous father, James Lee Burke, but she is clearly well on her way. Actually I should postpone judgment until I’ve read her more recent books, since Missing Justice reflects her writing from at least seven years ago. So stay tuned on that score.
I just finished listening to the audiobook version of Faye Kellerman’s latest novel, Hangman, beautifully narrated by Mitchell Greenberg. While I liked it a lot, I can understand why some people might not. In the first place, this book is the most recent entry in Kellerman’s long series of mysteries featuring Rina Lazarus and Peter Decker; if you haven’t read the preceding stories, you might be confused, even though the background is not absolutely essential in this case. Second, the pace is rather slow; although I personally like slow-paced books (as you can tell from my other books), you may not. As in the previous books in the series, the fact that Lazarus and Decker (and Kellerman) are Jewish makes a continuing contribution to the plot, even though the reader is rarely hit over the head with this fact. A new, intriguing character is introduced: the almost-15-year-old Gabe, who is a convincing teenager despite his unusual combination of being a piano prodigy and having a gangster as a father. If you’ve read the earlier books, you will be struck with how the characters have grown older in a realistic way, in contrast to many series where the characters seem ageless. On the whole, this is definitely worth reading if you’re a fan of any of the three Kellerman authors.
So what’s not to love about this book? Just don’t expect Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish, which is a much lighter and less consequential work. Michael Wex’s Born to Kvetch is a serious, in-depth, expert analysis of conversational Yiddish and the culture that surrounds it. Despite the title, it’s not all about kvetching, though kvetching does play a starring role. So of course I do have one kvetch about this otherwise excellent book: I listened to a quarter of the audiobook version before turning in desperation to the much more satisfactory print version, since Wex’s own narration is intolerable. He reads with a sing-song intonation in which every declarative sentence sounds like a question — or, I should say, it sounds like a question? Of course the one advantage of the audiobook is that you know that the pronunciations of Yiddish are accurate, but it’s not worth it: the English is un-listenable-to, however you would say that in Yiddish.
This Body of Death, the latest in Elizabeth George’s series of literary mysteries, is well worth reading if you’re familiar with some (or preferably all) of the earlier novels in the series. I’m not at all sure, however, that it’s a good idea to pick up this book if you’re unfamiliar with the back story. It’s not so much that it won’t make sense — more that you won’t enjoy it. For one thing, the novel is over 600 slow-paced pages long, and you need something of a prior commitment to remain interested. I didn’t mind the slow pace, but your mileage may vary. Unlike almost all of the earlier books in the series, “Tommy” Lynley is not the protagonist. I can’t remember which of the other novels feature Barbara Havers, but I know that this isn’t the first. Even Havers, however, isn’t consistently the lead here. For one thing, This Body of Death belongs to a certain sub-genre (I can’t remember what it’s called) in which two apparently unrelated stories swirl around the plot, and it isn’t until close to the end that the reader finds out how they’re related. George handles this revelation in a masterful way: I didn’t guess the connection until one page before it becomes explicit, but it’s immediately obvious after she reveals the truth. One of the plot-lines is apparently based on a real-life case. So…do I recommend This Body of Death? Yes if you’re an experienced Elizabeth George reader; no otherwise.
Because I have such a large backlog of reading material, I often put print books and audiobooks on a queue; I get to them whenever I get to them. It could easily be months later, so I no longer remember what prompted the original ordering. Usually it’s nothing more subtle than the accidental timing of when I happened to read a review (which could be months or even years after it was written). Sometimes it’s a matter of availability at the library; I put in a request for a book, and it can easily be months before it’s available, especially if it’s very popular. As a result of these factors, it catches me by surprise when I read two books in a row that have similar themes. Were they reviewed in the same piece for this very reason? Or is it just a coincidence? I suppose I could do some research and find out, but I’d prefer to leave it a mystery. Speaking of mysteries, I recently listened to two mysteries — well, thrillers actually — that share certain themes. One was Capitol Betrayal, by William Bernhardt; the other was Inside Out, by Barry Eisler. Anyone who’s familiar with these two authors will expect the latter to be better written than the former, and indeed it is. It’s also more violent, as is no surprise to those familiar with Eisler’s writing. Bernhardt’s book is a truly implausible tale of terrorism, treason, and misguided idealism. The author breaks the cardinal rule of plotting: if your story takes place in this world, the reader can suspend disbelief about at most one event or item. (This rule gets modified if the story is in another world. For example, the Harry Potter series and Lord of the Rings take place in fictional worlds, not our own, where the authors create entire systems of new “facts.” Even there it’s essential to stay true to the setup of the new world. If the author breaks that trust, suspension of disbelief is no longer possible.) Bernhardt piles implausibility upon implausibility, thoroughly spoiling the novel. I don’t think it could have been fixed, since the entire structure is flawed. Nevertheless it was entertaining enough for me to be willing to finish listening to it — barely. Eisler’s book manages not to suffer the same fate. The reader has to accept a single implausibility, and that’s easy to do. The characters are more interesting, more believable, and more detailed. The author keeps the reader engaged, not merely entertained. What do these books have in common? In both cases the authors have a mildly left-wing agenda that is reflected in their handling of internal plots against the United States, more usually the province of right-wing writers. In both cases the authors let the reader know that they’re opposed to torture. In both cases it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys, except for the protagonists on the other hand and cardboard villains on the other. In both cases the authors present unflattering views of the U.S. government. Lawyers are portrayed more favorably by Bernhardt, the army more favorably by Eisler. There are, of course, many other differences, but the similarities are striking. Each book, by the way, is part of a series, so you may want to read earlier works in each series first. If you skip to these latest books, read Eisler if you can stomach the violence, but don’t bother with Bernhardt.
Too often I expect to like a certain book and then I’m disappointed. Occasionally the opposite situation happens to me; such is the case with Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I tend to read so much genre fiction and non-fiction that I occasionally need to read a mainstream novel to remain balanced, so I picked up the audiobook version of The Corrections and was pleasantly surprised by what I heard. I found it compelling — much easier to listen to than I had expected. Of course I don’t know what it would be like if I had read it instead. Some books are much more effective in one medium rather than the other, and it could go either way. Ordinarily I’m not enthusiastic about quoting other reviewers, but from time to time I find a review that expresses my opinions better than I could do so myself. I was astonished to find that Donald Mitchell of all people had written such a review. Here is an excerpt:
Yesterday I wrote about Penny Noyce’s new book, Lost in Lexicon. What prompted that post was that I was on my way to the official launch party for the book. It was a great success, and I saw a couple of former students there, but I can’t claim to be able to describe it as well as the author can, so check out her own description and photos of the party in her blog.
If you regularly see my Facebook status in your News Feed, you may have noticed that it said “I’m lost in Lexicon right now…” on October 17. This status confused some of my students. One of them asked, “How did you get lost in Lexington?” (Apparently he isn’t a very careful reader.) Another student asked me what it meant:
I assured her that there are plenty of people in Weston who have written books. Anyway, Lost in Lexicon: An adventure in words and numbers is indeed the title of a new book by Penny Noyce. It’s a work of fiction, somewhat in the spirit of The Phantom Toolbooth, aimed at readers in middle school (in my judgment). Of course the real reason I had to get a copy was not that the author lives in Weston (and is the mother of three of my former students), but that the focus of the book is words and numbers, as the subtitle shows. What could be a better combination? If you know children of the appropriate age (or older, for that matter), suggest this book to them. It’s both fun and informative, and should enhance or kindle interest in both math and language.
Do read Betty Webb’s fascinating and informative “Desert” mysteries about the world of fundamental polygamists in the southwest. So far I’ve read Desert Wives, Desert Noir, and (most recently) Desert Lost, all of which I can recommend. Please note that the polygamists in question are not Mormons: they are members of various offshoots of the Mormon Church. Since everything in Webb’s novels has been carefully researched, the novels ring with authenticity — perhaps too much so, since sometimes the reader has the impression of being handed a treatise or a documentary rather than a work of fiction. But the lead characters are always sympathetic, and the plots hold together. You may learn more about the polygamist sects than you wanted to know, but you will be reading some engaging mysteries along the way. Give them a shot!
You’ve heard Martin Walker on NPR. His peaceful mystery — Bruno, Chief of Police — is well worth reading if you want to bathe in a mixture of French politics, small-town French life, and a host of interesting characters. Despite some seriously heavy events, mostly in the backstory (Vichy France, the Algeria conflict, etc.), this novel is basically a charming police procedural, but one where the life of a small town is more important than the interaction of its one-man police department with the national police. I’m looking forward to the next installment in this delightful series.
In my previous reviews of two of Lisa Scottoline’s legal thrillers (Daddy’s Girl and Lady Killer) I wrote about Scottoline’s treatment of the world of Italian Catholic working-class South Philadelphia, families, law, and justice. Dirty Blonde (notice a theme here connecting these book titles?) continues the same themes, though it’s not in the same series. For the first time we focus on a judge rather than a lawyer. (Yes, I know that the judge is also a lawyer, but you know what I mean.) Unfortunately the protagonist is not nearly as sympathetic as the ones in the earlier series, and her character flaw also detracts from the believability of the novel. It’s still worth reading as entertainment; the story kept me engaged and interested, but don’t expect literature here.
I suppose you would have to label it historical fiction, as the novel Alice I Have Been is actually a fictionalized autobiography or memoir. Like all historical fiction, it is faithful to the letter and the spirit of the known facts while weaving dialog and situations around them to imagine a complete story. In this book Melanie Benjamin has created a compelling account of the life of Alice Liddell, the “real” Alice in Wonderland, upon whom Lewis Carroll based his two famous books. I found this story irresistible, partly because Carroll was a math teacher in his day job and since his primary mathematical interests were logic and language. But those points are actually minor ones in Benjamin’s narrative, which primarily tells the reader a story about the Liddell family and its place in the Oxford community in particular and Victorian England in general. The reader also learns a great deal about early photography and the cumbersomeness of Victorian dress. (Incidentally, we learn that Alice wasn’t blonde, despite John Tenniel’s famous illustrations.) As a side note, it is actually the audiobook version that I am reviewing, not the print version. The reading by Samantha Eggar is convincing and compelling, with three-dimensional portrayals of all the major characters. I enjoyed listening to the audiobook, and it kept me occupied through many hours of commuting. After reading Alice I Have Been, I figured that I had to see the 1985 Dennis Potter movie Dreamchild, which covers pretty much the same material. The atmosphere of the writing is far darker than that of Alice I Have Been — not surprising for anything written by Potter. In particular, the Muppets that portray the gryphon, the Mad Hatter, the dormouse, etc., are all quite creepy. The journalists that surround Alice in her famous visit to New York when she was in her eighties are presented very negatively, in contrast to their light-handed treatment in the book. So it’s worth seeing the movie and reading the book, as you will get two quite different perspectives. I have only one problem with Dreamchild, and it was almost enough to spoil the entire movie for me: all the actors consistently mispronounce Charles Dodgson, the real name of Lewis Carroll, by sounding the silent “g” in his last name. I suppose this shouldn’t bother me so much, but it did. In particular, it damaged the verisimilitude that’s necessary for a thorough immersion into the 19th-century world of the narrative. Fussy, fussy, you’ll say. And perhaps you’re right, but when I’ve gone through fifty years correctly pronouncing his name Dodson, it becomes jarring to hear it said wrong every time. When I see a movie, I want to be immersed in that world, not continually knocked out of it.
“I make order out of chaos.” This is how an old friend whom I hadn’t seen in years explains her transition from linguistics to statistics, when people think it’s a complete change of field. It’s how she explains it to non-linguists, of course — as I already knew the connection. But the phrasing really resonates with me. I’ve described elsewhere how the search for patterns and abstract generalizations is what unites linguistics and math teaching in my mind, but I rather like the step up the ladder of abstraction implied by “I make order out of chaos.” It also got me thinking about why I like the mystery and science fiction genres in popular fiction. My liking for science fiction is no mystery, so to speak: anyone with a mathematical bent is likely to enjoy the conventions of that genre. But what about mysteries? I’d been thinking about that lately, and it occurred to me that mystery writers also make order out of chaos: the unsolved crime is cognitively chaotic, and the solution creates order out of it. Furthermore, the puzzle that’s often involved bears definite kinship to the kinds of puzzles we solve in both math and linguistics. Just a thought…
During the last few months I read two interesting novels by John Hart: The Last Child, which I believe is his newest, and The King of Lies, which is definitely his first. It’s not really clear why I read them in that order, but I guess it was because I read a review of the new book, which caused me to read the book itself, and only then did I think of going back to his first effort. Anyway, it won’t be a surprise that The Last Child is definitely the better of the two — but both are worth reading if you want a diversion. I’ve already reviewed The Last Child. The King of Lies is a legal thriller in the style of Scott Turow and John Grisham, but with a lot of North Carolina culture thrown in. The characters are mostly pretty annoying, so don’t read the book if that’s a complete turn-off for you. On the other hand, if you’re interested in some effective writing and development of character, do read it. Like many male writers, Hart portrays men more successfully than women. The plot, though implausible, is absorbing. All in all, a decent first effort. |
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