so, about those books.

So, as promised, what I thought about some of the books on the big 2007 list.  I want to start with a little disclaimer, though--these aren't really book reviews proper.  I think a good book review should probably have some critical infrastructure, and should certainly have more thought put into it.  This book list was the leisure-reading list.  I didn't include the books I read for course prep, or for academic use.  When I read something for academic purposes, I think about it differently, with a whole critical infrastructure; I don't generally bring all that mental machinery to bear on books that I'm reading just for pleasure.  So I'm thinking of this more as my reader reactions to the books, not as actual reviews.  (If that distinction even makes sense outside of my head.)

• David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas.  I loved everything about this book, and it's one of the rare books in my life that I wish I could read again for the first time.  It was beautiful, and weird, and surprising, and I didn't want it to ever end.
• Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai.  I also loved everything about this one--it's one of the best books I've ever read, although I felt constantly off-balance while I was reading it.  It only took me a page or two to figure out that it has nothing at all to do with that Tom Cruise movie of the same name, thankfully.  It took me much longer to figure out what it -was- about, but that was okay. 
• David Mitchell, Black Swan Green.  So, Jenn said in the comments on the earlier post that she has trouble sorting out her reaction to The Last Samurai from her reaction to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, because she read them at around the same time.  I read The Curious Incident a couple of years ago, right after I read The Speed of Dark; it was an unplanned sequence, and an unfortunate one, because both books feature autistic narrators, and The Speed of Dark was so goddamned brilliant that The Curious Incident couldn't help but look sad and gimmicky in comparison.  And then when Black Swan Green came out, I saw people comparing it to The Curious Incident, and as a result I had no interest at all in reading it.  But everyone kept saying how good it was, and I had loved Cloud Atlas so much, so I finally gave it a try, and I liked it quite a bit.  It didn't have that light shimmery kind of brilliance that Cloud Atlas had, but it was really good, entertaining and weird and smart.
  
• Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild.  I confess, I only read this because I saw the movie.  I like Jon Krakauer quite a bit--Under the Banner of Heaven is a fabulous book, and one that I couldn't stop talking about for weeks after I read it--but the book just didn't sound that interesting.  I only saw the movie because I was in the mood for a movie and it was playing at a convenient time, and I liked the movie, I think.  I think.  I feel a little bit like the movie I saw was not the same one Sean Penn thought he was making, like I was seeing something in it that wasn't quite there, or wasn't intended to be there.  Mostly, though, I came out of the movie desperately curious to know how Jon Krakauer had put the story together, and I was hoping that the book would give me that story.  It didn't, but it was a good read anyway. 
• Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels and What's Bred in the Bone.  These were fabulous.  I have no idea how to talk about them--they're so different from most of the things I read.  For that matter, they're so different from each other!  But such good books.  (I'm not thrilled with the change in Maria from the first to the second book, but I'm hoping that when I finally get a copy of the third in the trilogy, she'll make more sense.  She's only a cameo in the second book, after all.)  But so strange.  Davies has this talent for weaving together a string of weird coincidences that, when they finally come together, look less like gimmicky coincidence and more like the pieces of some larger puzzle falling naturally into place.
• Allegra Goodman, Intuition.  This was completely a comedy of manners in the academic world--no, wait, when I write that sentence it sounds like Jane Smiley's Moo or something, and this book is nothing like that one.  And I actually had a little trouble while reading it, because my brain kept trying to map it more directly onto the David Baltimore / Thereza Imanishi-Kari incident.  (It maps pretty directly on its own, there's no need to force an even closer correspondence.  But somehow I kept trying.)  But the characters all made sense, and all seemed like people I know--not that anyone in the book reminded me of anyone particular, just that each one of them felt a little familiar.  Slightly melodramatic, but in an entertaining and fairly realistic way.
• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.  True story: when I graduated from college, I had two weeks before I had to start at my new job, and I told myself that I would use part of that time to read some huge epic classic that I'd previously neglected.  I settled on Anna Karenina, checked it out of the library, and over a period of a few days I read nearly a third of the book and just adored it. But then I put it down for a few days, and when I went back, I couldn't remember who anyone was or how they were related to each other, and I was too demoralized to start over.  I finally got around to trying again, and I still adored it.  The big secret about this book is that it's a soap opera dressed up as high art.
• James Halperin, The First Immortal.  This book was absolutely horrible--it's practically a caricature of itself, and just kept getting stupider and more awful.  I don't think I finished it, actually--I gave up somewhere around the time when Our Hero, having attained immortality, adopts the eight-year-old clone of his dead wife, who he raises expecting that she'll be his new wife once she's, y'know, past puberty.  One hopes. 

More later, but that's a start.

Comments

[Liz]

Good to see yet another person liking Intuition, as I just ordered it from amazon. I wasn't aware of the Baltimore incident, but it sounds interesting - Wikipedia gave me the basics but there seem to be a number of books about it, so I was wondering if you've read any of them and know which ones are good?

[Hannah]

>I gave up somewhere around the time when Our Hero, having attained immortality, adopts the eight-year-old clone of his dead wife, who he raises expecting that she'll be his new wife once she's, y'know, past puberty. One hopes.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!

[Susan Marie Groppi]

Liz-- Dan Kevles's _The Baltimore Case_ is the book that I read about the Imanishi-Kari thing, and it's a good thorough coverage of the incident. There was some drama at some point as to whether Kevles was sufficiently impartial--the book was published not long after David Baltimore became president of Cal Tech, where Kevles was teaching at the time, and the book does lean very heavily towards the conclusion that Baltimore was completely innocent of wrongdoing. But I have an extraordinary amount of respect for Kevles as a historian, and I thought the book was great.

(And Hannah-- Seriously, right? And that wasn't the only "you have -got- to be kidding me" moment in the book, it was just the one that finally made me give up.)

[Jed]

You wrote:

I read The Curious Incident a couple of years ago, right after I read The Speed of Dark; it was an unplanned sequence, and an unfortunate one, because both books feature autistic narrators, and The Speed of Dark was so goddamned brilliant that The Curious Incident couldn't help but look sad and gimmicky in comparison.

Wow -- I would have started that sentence the same way, except changing "right after" to "right before", but I would've ended the sentence by saying exactly the opposite. My version of it would've read: "...because both books feature autistic narrators, and The Curious Incident was so good and so well-done that The Speed of Dark couldn't help but look kind of weak and slow in comparison."

I didn't dislike Speed of Dark, but it really didn't do much for me, and part of the reason for that was that I had found Curious Incident so thoroughly compelling.

Interesting that we both strongly preferred the one we read first. I'm pretty sure I would've liked Speed of Dark more than I did if it hadn't been for the juxtaposition; but I also suspect that I wouldn't have liked it more than Curious Incident even if I'd read them in the opposite order. But hard to know for sure.

[Ted]

Another data point: I read Curious Incident a couple of years after reading Speed of Dark, and found the latter much better written and more believable.

[Dan]

Ted: latter in sentence order or reading order? (I'm guessing sentence order, but I'm sleepy and confused today.)

[Ted]

Oops, very careless of me. I meant that I found Curious Incident better written and more believable than Speed of Dark, even though I read Curious Incident second.

[Dan]

Ah, got it. Thanks.