rivka

March
A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, by Andrew Chaikin.

Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott.

Doubting Darwin: Creationist Designs on Evolution, by Sahotra Sarkar.

Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume, edited by Jennifer O'Connell.

Here if You Need Me: A True Story, by Kate Braestrup.

February
Breathing Lessons, by Anne Tyler.

A Silent Sorrow: Pregnancy Loss - Guidance and Support for You and Your Family, by Ingid Kohn & Perry-Lynn Moffit.

It's All Too Much, by Peter Walsh.

Cherry Ames, Boarding School Nurse, by Helen Wells.

January
Cherry Ames, Cruise Nurse, by Helen Wells; Cherry Ames, Mountaineer Nurse, by Julie Tatham.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, by Anne Tyler.

Witch Week, by Diana Wynne Jones.

Possession: A Romance, by A.S. Byatt.

New books in September:

( Wells, L'Engle, Hensperger & Kaufman, Brooks Tomblin, Tatham, Rupp )

Total for September: 8
Total for the year: 64

Madeleine L'Engle reading project:
I decided that I would mark L'Engle's death by reading all of her prose works in order. She meant so much to me, as a geeky, out-of-place child and teenager. I'm going to make notes about the books here - I'll just put re-reads in a separate section. ( The Small Rain, And Both Were Young. )

Do I still have to give a spoiler warning for Deathly Hallows? There are spoilers below the cut. Also below the cut: an extensive discussion of the Our Whole Lives sex education curriculum, for those who are interested.

( Westlake, Wilson, Heyer, Faber & Mazlish, Walton, Rowling, Barnhouse )

Total for July: 9
Total for the year: 50

That works out neatly - without intending to, I reached the 50-book mark precisely at the end of a month. I do intend to keep posting about books which are new to me; perhaps I ought to change the tag to "the increasingly misnamed 50 book challenge."

I kept thinking that I must've forgotten some of my May books, but the truth is that I think I hardly read anything in May. A lot of magazines - I got caught up (sort of) on the New Yorker. May was pretty angsty, and I think I just wasn't up to doing much. I did read a few new-to-me books, though. ( Andrews, Ginott, Burau, White )
Total for May: 4.
Total for the year: 35.

Books I read in March: ( Taliaferro, Parker, Fine, Baker, Bear, Moore )

Total for March: 7
Total for the year: 26.

Last year I intended to do the 50-book challenge. (50 books that are new to me - re-reads don't count.) I posted about my books for January and February. Then in March I read a couple of Lauren Slater books that I couldn't bring myself to write up, and didn't post my March list. Or my April list, jotted down on scratch paper which I promptly lost. It all went to hell after that.

So I'm trying again this year, but from the outset I am giving myself permission to just note the title and author of a book, if I want, without any additional commentary.

( Stevens, Best, Johnson, Harris, Kagan, Menzel & D'Aluisio, Westerfeld. )

Total for January: 9
Total for the year: 9

June
Overclocked, by Cory Doctorow.
I hesitate to admit this, but: I am tired of reading posthuman I-uploaded-my-consciousness-and-made-a-jillion-copies stories. That being the case, I didn't get much out of most of the stories in this anthology. But I enjoyed two of them very much: "Anda's Game" (available on Salon here) and the moving - and disturbing - "After the Siege" (available online here).

Sea of Glory, by Nathaniel Philbrick.
I devoured this fascinating book in just a couple of days. It tells the story of the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838-1842), a Naval mission which accomplished dazzling scientific and navigational achievements: charting much of the South Seas, exploring and charting the mouth of the Columbia River (still one of the most dangerous river entrances in the world), confirming that Antarctica was a continent and mapping 1,500 miles of its coastline, proving Darwin's theory about the formation of coral atolls, conducting the first real linguistic study of Polynesian peoples, and collecting such a vast wealth of naturalistic and anthropological specimens that the U.S. had to found the Smithsonian Institution to house them.

What should've been one of the greatest scientific accomplishments of the age was very nearly destroyed by the man put in charge of the expedition, Charles Wilkes, who was - not to put too fine a point on it - completely crazy. Paranoid, arrogant, and unbelievably self-aggrandizing, he punished any officer whose competence or expertise threatened his own sense of self-worth; made his own laws (including awarding himself a spurious field promotion); and didn't know a damned thing about handling a ship. Instead of ending in triumph, the Exploring Expedition ended in disasters at sea and court-martials for everyone.

This was an exciting story and very well-written. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in naval or scientific history, and to all Patrick O'Brian fans.

Teach Your Own, by John Holt.
Long before homeschooling in the U.S. became the province of fundamentalist Christians retreating from the twin boogeymen of sex education and evolution, John Holt was encouraging liberals who were suspicious of the effects of institutional education to teach their kids at home. There have been several editions of this book; I read the original one, written at a time when homeschooling wasn't protected by U.S. state laws. Much of the book is given over to discussion of how to avoid prosecution for truancy - these sections are a fascinating historical curiosity, but obviously not relevant today, and I think they've been left out of later editions. The sections on homeschooling and educational philosophy are still very much to the point, though. I particularly appreciated Holt's willingness to engage seriously with questions about whether homeschooling is incompatible with liberal social and political values. In my experience, modern homeschooling books tend to libertarianishly roll their eyes at those concerns, rather than really addressing them.

What's So Funny? and Road to Ruin, by Donald Westlake.
Two Dortmunder novels. (For the uninitiated: a comic crime series about a career thief with brilliant planning skills and the world' worst luck.) What's So Funny? was on the new books display at the library, and when I read it I discovered that I'd missed a couple since the last one I read. Road to Ruin is one of the catch-up books I missed. That one was pretty good, although it felt awfully slight. I realized afterward that too much of the book is told from the vantage point of not-previously-seen-in-this-series characters interacting with other not-previously-seen-in-this-series characters, but it's not a bad book overall. What's So Funny was much less successful - a plot that never got exciting, and a structure and prose that left me suspecting that Westlake has grown too eminent to be edited.

The Black Moth, by Georgette Heyer.
I didn't believe a word of it.

May
Little Bitty Lies, by Mary Kay Andrews.
A few years ago, I read Andrews' debut novel, Savannah Blues and liked it - it was an interesting chick lit/mystery blend, with good charactization and a well-invoked setting. Little Bitty Lies looked much, much more chick-ish at the library, but I picked it up anyway because I'd liked the previous one. Alas, I should've judged it by its cover. Cardboard characters, unbelievable plot.

Between Parent and Child (Revised Edition), by Haim Ginott.
This is a wonderful book about living with children. I wish I had written down some of the quotes that really struck me while I still had the book. It's hard to sum up in a few words, but Ginott's essential position is that family life needs to honor the emotions of both parents and children. He has a lot of suggestions for how to manage conflicts without demeaning children or controlling them unnecessarily, but (unlike many of the more modern proponents of this kind of child-rearing), he also has no problem with parents saying things like, "I am furious right now!" or laying down the law with firm authority.

Four bits which have worked themselves into my parenting practice, and weren't there before:
(1) Substituting accurate observations for evaluative praise. For example, "You climbed all the way up that very tall ladder!" instead of "You're a great climber!"
(2) Granting a child's wishes in fantasy if they cannot be granted in reality. For example, when Alex was having a tantrum about wanting to go to the (closed) Science Center, I started telling her a story: "Once upon a time, Alex decided to go to the Science Center. The first thing she did was..."
(3) Supporting effort by remarking on the difficulty of the task. In a section which seems blindingly obvious - except that it never occured to me before - Ginott points out that when a child is attempting to do something, if you describe the task as "easy" or say "I know you can do it," you set up a fail-fail situation. If they succeed, you've robbed them of their pride by implying that the feat is no big deal. If they fail, they probably feel shame and frustration, knowing that they couldn't do something you think of as easy. Instead, he recommends showing respect for the task: "It's not so easy to zip a jacket. It can be tricky to get the bottom pieces together."
(4) Not using time-out. I always assumed I would, until I read Ginott and became much less comfortable with the idea of punishment. I like his strategy of focusing on prevention and problem-solving, instead.

Answering 911: Life in the Hot Seat, by Caroline Burau.
Michael brought this home from the library and I read it in a couple of hours. It's an autobiographical account of training to be a 911 dispatcher, complete with a fair number of grisly stories. The technical aspects of the job are apparently much more complicated than I would've imagined. This book was just okay. Nothing I would've gone out of my way to read, but all right while it was in front of me.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Chronic Medical Problems: A Guide to Assessment and Treatment in Practice, by Craig White.
I read bits of this for my grant, because I needed to be able to discuss the impact of irrational cognitions on medical treatment choices. Then I read the rest of it, because it was good. It's always entertaining to read British therapy manuals, because the snippets of sample dialogue are so different from what my clients and I would say. I didn't learn a lot about cognitive-behavioral therapy that I didn't already know, but it was really interesting to read about its different applications in therapy with people who have specific diseases. And he did have a few brilliant examples of how to explain cognitive theory to clients. I enjoyed this one.

April
You Suck: A Love Story, by Christopher Moore.
The sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends, and superior because the annoyingly self-admiring zaniness has been dialed down quite a bit. Still not that great, although it is partially redeemed by the addition of a teenage goth character who goes by the name of Abby Normal - and especially by extensive excerpts from her diary.

Every Mother is a Daughter: The Neverending Quest for Success, Inner Peace, and a Really Clean Kitchen, by Perri Klass and Sheila Solomon Klass.
I would never have picked this up if it hadn't been by Perri Klass, because from the title and cover alone I would have guessed it to be a long string of mawkish, sticky-sweet cliches and stereotypes. I decided to give it a chance anyway, and I'm glad I did. Sheila and Perri Klass are strong, intelligent, offbeat women, and they're both excellent writers. They write in alternating sections about their experiences of childhood and motherhood, their interactions as adults (including a trip to India they take together), their differing experiences as working mothers in different generations, their relationships with Perri's father, who died shortly before they began the book, and their opinions of each other. They nitpick, correct each other, and predict what the other is likely to say in response to their latest section. Each provides her own - very different - lists of "how we are alike" and "how we are different." A very enjoyable read; it made me want to seek out more books by both Klasses.

Gods and Pawns, by Kage Baker.
I loved this collection of short stories and novellas set in the world of The Company. I read it shortly after finishing The Machine's Child, the latest company novel, which frustrated me because it seemed as though Baker was trying to keep so many different plot threads going that I lost the sense of being involved in a story. So this was perfect: deep immersion into a series of specific missions, cultures, and eras, and the ability to really focus on a couple of Baker's ongoing characters at once instead of skipping from head to head to head. I was particularly haunted by "The Catch" and "The Land Beyond the Sunset." I think this book would work for people who haven't read the rest of the Company series, but I'm not entirely sure.

The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro.
The sticker on the back of this book informs me that I bought it at the Reed College bookstore - probably right after I'd read An Artist of the Floating World by the same author and then seen the movie of The Remains of the Day, both for my senior Humanities seminar. For one reason or another, I'd never actually read the book. I'm so glad that I finally did. It's the first-person account of an elderly butler who is slowly beginning to realize that his lifelong aspiration to be "a great butler" has cost him terribly. Throughout the book he struggles to dodge his growing awareness that the man he devoted most of his life to serving was not only unworthy, but deeply morally tainted. I was particularly impressed by the skill with which Ishiguro is able to depict the first-person narrator's utterly crippled emotional life, even though he himself is unaware of the extent to which he is damaged.

Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child, by Alissa Quart.
This is a deeply confused book. The author was a "child prodigy" with considerable early talent for writing, which brought her tons of praise, awards, opportunities, and attention throughout her teens. She wasn't able to adjust well to growing up to become just another highly-skilled adult, and provides quotes and interviews with a number of other former prodigies who feel the same way - for example, musical prodigies who had brilliant childhood concert careers and then quit playing entirely. She has some good points to make about the problems that arise from overprofessionalization of children's talents and overemphasis on the creation of products that document children's precocity. And she offers an interesting exploration of the fundamental American ambivalence about gifted education.

So, good as far as it goes. But she conflates parental efforts to induce genius ("teach your infant to read" programs and the like) with parental efforts to provide appropriate resources to gifted children. She writes a highly approving profile of a public-school gifted program, and then looks askance at parents who try to get their children in to things like that - or who try to provide similar resources at home. She acknowledges that research on prodigies typically finds that these kids have a tremendous inner drive, but then manages to imply that all the individual parents who say their kid is internally driven are lying, or perhaps self-deluded. She never offers any kind of coherent suggestion of what parents of gifted children should do - it's mainly just a catalogue of criticism, suspicion, and rejection.

In the end, although there are interesting aspects to the book, I have to agree with the Amazon reviewer who said they thought Quart would've written a much better book if she had been through therapy first.

March
In a Far Country: The True Story of a Mission, a Marriage, a Murder, and the Remarkable Reindeer Rescue of 1898, by John Taliaferro.
I checked this out of the library on the strength of the subtitle, and was fascinated and delighted. It's the story of a missionary couple, Tom and Ellen Lopp, who were among the first white people to live year-round in Alaska. The Lopp's story is used to illuminate conflicting approaches to mission work; political and social wrangling about how native people ought to be treated; and relations among missionaries, whalers, gold rush miners, agents of what would someday be the Coast Guard, and native Alaskans. Taliaferro describes early Alaskan policy as being based on vague feelings of guilt about the way that Native Americans were treated, and a desire to do better by the "Eskimos" - yet he also shows how paternalistic and exploitative the "Eskimo helpers" were, and how programs initially designed to benefit Native Alaskans were ultimately perverted to serve the economic interests of whites. Against this backdrop, the Lopps come off as remarkably liberal and modern-minded heroes.

Hmm. Everything in the above paragraph is true, but it completely neglects to convey the fact that this book is also a thrilling adventure story about death-defying feats of Arctic survival and travel, including a midwinter journey driving an enormous herd of reindeer across literally trackless portions of the Alaskan interior, to rescue stranded and starving whalers on the north coast. I'd say that the book is probably composed of equal parts of "Hmm, interesting" and "WHOA!!"

Hundred Dollar Baby by Robert B. Parker.
A Spenser novel like many other Spenser novels - it was mildly enjoyable to read, and then leaked out of my head pretty much instantly, afterward. It sort of feels as though Parker will keep putting the same elements together as long as they'll sell, and isn't invested in bringing anything new to the series. I suppose it's hard to blame him.

Strong, Smart, and Bold: Empowering Girls for Life, by Carla Fine.
This was just drivel. It read like a puff piece on self esteem in a women's magazine, blown up to book length without adding any depth or nuance. Yeesh.

The Machine's Child, by Kage Baker.
I wish there were some kind of mechanism by which people who are really writing a single book that is several thousand pages long could publish them that way, rather than splitting them into a long series of novel-length installments. Kage Baker's Company series is great, but at this point either she has too many balls in the air at once, or the wait between novels is too long for me to keep track of all the different threads. Like minnaleigh, I enjoyed the earliest books in the series, the ones that were limited to specific timepoints and cultures, the most. This one was pretty good, though.

The Chains That You Refuse, by Elizabeth Bear.
I'm not generally a short story reader, but I saw this in the new books rack at the library and thought, "If you're going to be reading matociquala's LJ, you ought to read something she's written." For the most part, I liked it very much. A few of the stories (and the poems, because I have such a poetry blocok) didn't work for me, but several - the title story, the postapocalyptic one about a deal with the devil, the eerily prescient one that takes place in a sunken New Orleans, the two about a much-diminished Norse (God? Hero? I don't know my Norse mythology very well) - were fantastic.

Blood and Iron, by Elizabeth Bear.
Oh my gosh, this was good. Gripping and creepy. Two nasty powers are counterposed: Faerie (weakened, but still very dangerous), and the Promethean Society, a group of human mages bent on destroying Faerie. The protagonist was stolen by fairies as a young woman and now steals other humans for them, bound in servitude to the Queen of Elfland and very uncertain about where her loyalties actually lie. A lot of the book is obscure; murkily portentious things happen, the characters react ambiguously, the reader (well, if the reader is me, anyway) is confused. But I still really liked it. There are some astonishingly vivid, haunting images and set pieces. The magic is interesting. The prose is very well-written. If you have a high tolerance for ambiguity and angst, and an even higher tolerance for mashed-together bits of Celtic myths and ballads, then this is definitely the book for you. There will be sequels, which may make things clearer eventually.

Bloodsucking Fiends: a Love Story, by Christopher Moore.
Girl becomes vampire, meets wholesome Midwestern boy, and falls in love. Wholesome Midwestern boy's stoner buddies become vampire slayers. The plot was okay, I guess, but the characters were pure cardboard and the book suffered from a overdose of self-admiring zaniness. Yes, Mr. Moore, I get how interestingly and amusingly offbeat you are. Now, could you please just tell a story?

February
Midnighters 3: Blue Noon, by Scott Westerfeld.
The conclusion of the Midnighters trilogy. I think I agree with jinian that the second book is the best (how rare is that, for a trilogy?!), but this one was also very good. I did keep having mental intrusions of, "I could totally see this as a movie," which is sort of a compliment to Westerfeld and sort of not. I mean, yes, the action scenes were awesome, and the visual description is compelling. On the other hand, "I could totally see this as a movie" = "I am not fully immersed in this as a book."

Rise and Shine, by Anna Quindlen.
This book was only okay. It's a novel about two sisters, one who is essentially Katie Couric (the extremely wealthy and famous host of a TV magazine program) and the other who is a social worker serving disadvantaged families. The Katie Couric character gets burned out and says something honest but profane on the air, and most of the novel shows the social worker character's viewpoint on her subsequent fall from grace. Quindlen is pretty heavy-handed in the way she uses the social worker's clients' lives to show up the petty triviality of the TV star's "scandal." Case in point: the social worker has to deal with a bunch of families who are suddenly homeless because the crappy slum building they lived in was so shoddily maintained that the building's facade crumbles and falls right off OKAY OKAY I GET IT ALREADY. Also, there is a character who is too good to live, and he serves exactly the narrative purpose that one might expect such a character to serve.

Digging to America, by Anne Tyler.
Tyler doing what Tyler does best: a minutely observed and relatively plotless character study and portrait of family life. This one is about two families who meet in an airport because both of them are adopting a baby girl from Korea. One is the quintessential liberal upper-middle-class white suburban American couple, and one is an Iranian-American couple and the husband's Iranian immigrant mother. The two families become entwined through their shared adoption experience; the book is an exploration of foreignness and belonging. I love Tyler, and I liked this book quite a bit, but if you require a plot to your fiction you will probably find this unsatisfying.

Material World, by Menzel, Mann, & Kennedy.
I thought I was going to be crazy about this one, but instead I paged through it unmoved. I think it was contaminated by my irritation with Menzel's other book, Hungry Planet. In Material world, a team of photographers visits 30 families in 30 countries across the world. They describe and take pictures of the family's daily life, and then take one "big picture" of the family surrounded by all of their possessions. Only a couple of the families really stuck with me - most notably, the Bosnians. This book was photographed at the height of the war. It was shocking to see the family describing what they had once had, and then to see what they had been reduced to. I might try to read this book again in a few months, when my reaction to Hungry Planet has worn off a little.

Primary Inversion, by Catherine Asaro.
Asaro's first novel, and apparently the first in a zillion-book series of series. Battling empires, a psychic Internet, pilot warriors in flashy black leather uniforms, biologically-driven sadism, and star-crossed lovers. I understand that Asaro's physics is impeccable; that part was lost on me, but I enjoyed the worldbuilding and the story very much. I'd be happy to read the next books in the series, but they seem to be kind of hard to find. (Incidentally: the Amazon reviewer who titled his review "WOW I didn't like this book" and started off with, "In reading the other reviews of this book, I discovered the writer is female physist. That makes a lot of sense, the main character is a middle-aged very powerful woman"? Is revealing a lot more about himself than he is about Asaro. Just saying.)

The Read-Aloud Handbook, by Jim Trelease.
Much of this book is devoted to boosterism about the importance of reading aloud to children, which I didn't need. I still found the book worthwhile for its general philosophy and for the advice about the nuts and bolts of reading aloud. I don't ever remember not being able to read, so I was interested in Trelease's argument that learning to read sucks because the level of what you're able to decode is so much lower than the level of what you are able to understand. (For me, it was actually the reverse: I have clear memories of reading books that I completely failed to understand because my technical skill outstripped my emotional sophistication.) He recommends reading books that are above children's reading level, but not above their emotional level, and he devotes half the book to annotated lists of recommended books. He also recommends reading aloud well into adolescence - there are interesting discussions, for example, about which books are good for inner-city high school teachers to read to their students.

On a philosophical level, The Read-Aloud Handbook was probably my first ever encounter with an account of the "whole language" method of teaching reading not written by someone who vociferously disapproved of whole-language methods. Trelease hates worksheets (yay!) and phonics drill, although he acknowledges that many kids need phonics instruction to learn to read. He thinks the single most important lesson that reading instruction needs to impart is that reading is pleasurable, and that once kids figure that out, they'll slog through the hard work of actually learning how to decode text. And he very much does not think that worksheets, basal readers, and prepackaged phonics curricula teach the lesson that reading is pleasurable. (Hard to argue.) He also stresses the importance of background knowledge in learning how to read fluently; the greater the vocabulary and fund of information about the world a child brings to reading lessons, the easier it will be for them to match up letters on a page to the real world. Reading aloud is a pleasurable way of filling in vast quantities of vocabulary and background knowledge.

An Assembly Such as This, by Pamela Aidan.
If you have always wished that Pride and Prejudice had been written by Georgette Heyer, then this is the book for you. If you have very much not ever wished that, but you do like Georgette Heyer, then you, like me, will desperately wish that Aidan had just changed all of the names around. There's nothing wrong with the dripping-in-stock-Regency-set-pieces story she wants to tell - it's just not a story about Mr. Darcy.

Lullabies for Little Criminals, by Heather O'Neill.
The last time a book made me this deeply sad, it was... hmm. Probably five years ago, when I read Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Lullabies for Little Criminals is a note-perfect, all too vivid and evocative description of what it's like to be a twelve-year-old girl trailing through the red-light district of Montreal after her junkie father. I've known enough foster kids and junkies and crazies and throwaways that this book was horribly, horribly real to me. It's very good - absolutely worth reading. But I kind of wish I hadn't.

Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel.
This is Bechdel's graphic-novel memoir about her relationship with her cold and distant father. As she's grappling with coming out, she also has to grapple with her mother's revelation that her father has had affairs with men and adolescent boys. The memoir circles around Bechdel's attempts to understand her parents' history and inner lives, and by extension, her own. Really good. For fans of Dykes to Watch Out For: this one is not a comedy.

I also read The Fourth Bear, by Jasper Fforde, and then, apparently, promptly forgot about it. This isn't a Thursday Next book - it's another series, about the "Nursery Crimes Division" of the Reading Police Department. It's vintage Fforde: puns, literary allusions, self-referentiality, and a mystery plot, sprinkled with lots of little clever bits. But it just didn't add up to very much, for me. It felt recycled.

January
Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement, by Mitchell Stevens.
Very interesting, even if it was written by a sociologist. (Sorry, that's just a little interdisciplinary snobbery.) Stevens followed a large number of American homeschoolers for ten years. This book is mostly about the two parallel and largely separate homeschooling movements that have developed in the U.S. - a fundamentalist Christian one, and a humanist one based on 1960s-style ideals of freedom in learning. He does a nice job of tracing how the two movements' fundamental differences in values create differences in everything from curricular philosophies to ways of organizing support groups, and explains how they have clashed at the level of state and national politics.

Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists, by Joel Best.
This was a slight book that probably would've been better suited as, say, a long-form essay in the New Yorker. Or maybe I just say that because I know statistics too well; none of Best's points were really new information for me. It was still an interesting read, though, because I was unfamiliar with several of his examples of "mutant statistics." I'd definitely recommend it if you're interested in social policy but not very comfortable with statistical reasoning.

Everything Bad is Good for You, by Steven Johnson.
Tremendously fun and interesting book. Johnson takes on the received wisdom that popular culture is dumb, getting dumber all the time, and carrying us all down with it in a race to the bottom. He argues that, instead, pop culture is getting smarter and more complex every day, requiring more intellectual activity and involvement from its consumers. For example: popular TV shows typically require viewers to be able to keep track of multiple layered plot threads (in an episode, and in season arcs) and complicated social networks. There are many fewer "flashing arrows" to point out what is important to the story than there were in shows popular 20 years ago. Similarly, Johnson analyzes the mental work required to play current popular video games - compared to the work required to play, say, Pacman. In the most provocative section of the book, he links the increased complexity of pop culture to the Flynn Effect - the massive and well-documented rise in IQ scores worldwide over the last couple of generations. I actually found that part of his argument more convincing than I expected to. Johnson has a long New York Times Magazine piece here that gives a good feeling for the core of his argument. I definitely recommend the article, but you should read the whole book too.

Grave Sight and Grave Surprise, by Charlaine Harris
The first two books of a new series by the author of the "Southern Vampire" books. The Southern Vampire books are sort of fun potato-chip-style reading, but the tone is uneven and it's hard for me to take them seriously. These books are better written and have a much clearer and more distinctive narrative voice. The premise is that the main character, Harper, was struck by lightning as a teenager and developed (along with a host of physical and psychological problems) the ability to find corpses and tell how they have died. She makes her living by renting out her talent, fascinating and repelling people by turns. The tone is darker and more melancholy - possibly because these books are less fantastical than the Southern Vampires. V. good if you like creepiness and alienation.

Hellspark, by Janet Kagan
Oooh, I loved this book. How could I have gone so long without reading it? Smart, believable science fiction with a ninja linguist heroine who has a self-aware computer as a sidekick. Some of the cross-cultural misunderstandings seemed kind of obvious to me (Why do you need an ultra-linguist to recognize what the problem is here?), but I suppose that they might not have twenty years ago, when Hellspark was written.

Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio
Simple, yet endlessly fascinating premise: the authors visited 30 families in 24 countries, stayed with each of them a week, talked with them about food, and photographed them cooking, shopping, and eating. Then they took one "Big Picture" of each family posing with an entire week's worth of food. The week's foods are listed completely (with prices given in local currency and U.S. dollars), and some nutritional, health, and economic statistics for each country are provided as well. I want to make a separate post about this book, because I couldn't stop thinking about it for more than a week. I have very strong positive and negative feelings about it, and I want to give them more space than this review post permits.

Midnighters #1: The Secret Hour and Midnighters #2: Touching Darkness, by Scott Westerfeld.
Sure, Scott hates Pluto. But he also writes good books. These are the first two books of a contemporary YA horror trilogy set in small-town Oklahoma. The premise is that there is a "secret hour" between midnight and 12:01:01, which only a few people experience. The good: they have special powers they can enjoy in the secret hour. The bad: they share the hour with ancient eldritch horrors. Westerfeld gets vast quantities of extra credit for writing a second book of a trilogy that doesn't feel like the second book of a trilogy: it has an intense climax and a satisfying resolution.

I decided to give the 50bookchallenge a try this year, which means that I'm committing to read 50 books that are new to me in 2006. I wound up on a bit of a mystery binge in January, which has conveniently elevated my total and made me feel like I'm off to a great start.

Total for January: 9
Total for 2006: 9

( titles and brief reviews )