Books Read in 1997

I think I just don't get it. In part, the problem was that I read this in short chunks over three weeks rather than in 2-3 sittings as it probably should be read.

I have a feeling I'm starting in on a serious Vonnegut kick. It's ironic that his writing is philosophically so close to my worldview now, nearly ten years after I last read his work. His ideas about determinism (are people machines?) and humanity's place in the universe are very similar to my own. Timequake is a novel in the purest sense of the word — no fiction like it existed before it was written. It is mostly autobiographical, though the lines between Vonnegut and his protagonist, Kilgore Trout, grow dim. One thing I don't get is how Trout was resurrected — in Breakfast of Champions he was born in 1907 and died in 1981, but in Timequake he is alive in 2001. So it goes.

This is easily my favorite book of all time. I've read it at least six or seven times (the most recent before this one was in 1989), but every page still resonates with me. Cat's Cradle is the best novelization of my cosmology that I've come across to date; in many ways, I am a Bokononist. Cat's Cradle should be required reading for every adult. I have never read another book that had me simultaneously howling in laughter and thinking hard about the meaning of it all. Busy, busy, busy.

Ullman's book articulates a lot of the ideas I've been thinking about lately in regard to perception (in particular, classification and identification). From a Society of Mind perspective, there's some good stuff here on hierarchies and level-bands. I particularly like Ullman's view that classification and identification are points on a continuum rather than separate tasks. I don't think the sections on image warping will be at all useful to me in my research, but many of the philosophical ideas will be.

This book is an excellent collection of readings on the nature of mind. Very few of these ideas are new to me at this point, but for someone just beginning to think about the philosophy of mind, this book would be a good starting point. The most frustrating thing is that the pointers to further reading are all out of date; there is fifteen years worth of new material available now.

This book was recommended by Marvin Minsky and referred to in Pinker's How the Mind Works. Minsky cites it as one of the very few scientific analyses of humor, but Koestler's aim was much larger than explaining why jokes are funny. The Act of Creation is a long and dense — but fascinating! — analysis of many different kinds of creativity. Koestler's conjecture is that all creativity stems from what he calls "bisociation" — that is, the joining of two previously separate "matrices" of thought. There's more to it than making candy ("two great tastes that taste great together"), and Koestler's book has changed my view of scientific discovery somewhat. He drives the point home that scientific thought rarely, if ever, consists of gathering lots of evidence and then finding a theory that fits; rather, many of the greatest scientists in history had insights and then searched for evidence to fit their models. Much of scientific discovery is accidental, with advances made based on wholly incorrect understanding of phenomena. Indeed, the main point of the book may be that we are most creative "when rational thought is suspended".

I'm failing to do justice to this book in my description, but I'll add one more note. The section on perception and memory is excellent (and very forward-thinking for the time). Koestler recognized the importance of top-down constraints on perception. He gives a wonderful, extensive example of the auditory perception of a symphony that hit most of the marks in my viewpoint.

The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems was fantastic, so I was hoping that this, one of Gibson's later books, would be even better. Instead, I found that the more recent writing concentrated on the parts of the older work that I didn't like . Gibson seems to entirely disregard the importance of preconceptions on perception; in particular, he doesn't write at all about how our models of the world affect our exploration of it. Particularly when listening, and I think also when looking, familiarity with the events under consideration affects perception immensely. He doesn't write about context either, which is disappointing. Overall, this is still a good book — and worth reading — but not as good as I expected.

Snow Falling on Cedars is an excellent novel — one well worth reading. It's odd that two of the last three books I've read have dealt with the U.S. government concentration camps for Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II (see also, Prisoner's Dilemma). Snow Falling is well paced and carefully written, but the prose is not at all poetic (the main reason I haven't given the novel top marks). On the plus side, Guterson is not at all pretentious, and his novel is likely to be greatly enjoyable for most readers. It's a slightly dumbed-down Corelli's Mandolin in a number of ways — come to think of it, there are lots of parallels between the two books.

Possible spoiler: My biggest disappointment with Snow Falling on Cedars was that Guterson failed to follow through on a great metaphor. When Kabuo (the accused man) meets with his lawyer for the first time, they play chess, and Guterson takes pains to describe the lawyer's chess playing style (he sacrifices important pieces up front for good board position later on). It was obvious to me that this should be a metaphor for his performance in court, and it wasn't at all.

Steven Pinker is a very talented writer of popular science, and this book is in some sense the logical consequence of his outstanding book, The Language Instinct. My enthusiasm is somewhat damped because I fully expected to gain a lot of insight from this book, but having already read The Society of Mind, Godel, Escher, Bach, Consciousness Explained, The Selfish Gene, Vision, and The Language Instinct, there wasn't very much new here for me. If you haven't read those books, How the Mind Works is a good place to start (though you should definitely read at least The Selfish Gene as a companion text). Pinker does a credible job of framing many aspects of human life and society in evolutionary terms, and while some of the passages on the differences between men and women will make many liberal readers cringe, there is merit in Pinker's arguments. In my opinion, this book is "less-Chomsky, more-Pinker", relative to The Language Instinct, and that's a good thing. Perhaps my biggest criticism is that in a one hour talk Pinker gave on the day I bought this book, he gave away all of the good jokes contained in the book. I had previously thought that his bag of tricks was deeper.

Richard Powers is now firmly cemented as my favorite contemporary writer (at least this month!). Prisoner's Dilemma is brilliant — a heartbreaking semiautobiographical (aren't all his novels?!) family study.

Warning: spoilers follow! Prisoner's Dilemma tells the story of a family of six — headed by an ailing father. The story is interspersed with long "flashbacks", which we late in the novel learn are recorded transcripts of the father (Eddie Hobson) speaking (creating his idyllic "Hobstown"). Through these interludes, we are presented with a very dark vision of the United States during World War II, in particular the insidious imprisonment of Americans of Japanese ancestry. Powers repeatedly considers possible solutions to the Prisoner's Dilemma, and it becomes apparent that in a society like ours, there is no easy solution — one vote matters only when it is exercised by everyone. The novel spirals with increasing speed to Eddie's death, where Powers inserts a one page eulogy to his own father, treading a dangerous line between ripping out heartstrings and committing a literary faux pas. Prisoner's Dilemma is one of the most heartbreaking books I have ever read — and one of the best.

This book is a wonderful explanation of Gibson's ecological view of sensory perception. I hate his term "direct perception", but the meat of the theory is good. Looking at perception as the detection of invariants in the sensory signal is very useful; it provides some of the basis for my own research in auditory perception.

Bukowski is the "simplest" writer I've come across in a while, or at least it seems so based on a reading of this one novel. The text in Post Office is spare, to the point, and often vulgar, and I am uncertain whether this is a reflection of the protagonist or of the writer (or whether they are one and the same). The novel is a page-turner (I read its 200 pages in two sittings of roughly 90 minutes each), but there seems to be little depth to it. I must admit it was a refreshing break from the delicate prose I've been reading recently.

It is impossible to read Fiskadoro without comparing it to Riddley Walker (or choose your own favorite post-apocalyptic novel). Denis Johnson is an excellent writer, and this novel is easier to read than Hoban's, but not ultimately as satisfying. In Riddley Walker there was a wonderful sense of putting pieces of a puzzle together and gaining a growing understanding of the story [Note: this would be completely ruined by reading the glossary provided in recent American editions!] . Fiskadoro is more clear from the start, and while there are surreal sections, there is less of a sense of underlying logic.

BUGS in Writing is an outstanding guide to improved writing; the explanations of em-dash and semicolon use were particularly helpful to me. I disavowed Dupre's advice and read her book from cover-to-cover, mainly because I was reading a borrowed copy—I may eventually buy my own copy to put on the shelf with Strunk and White.

La Maison de Rendez-vous is perhaps the most surreal novel I have ever read. The narrative is fragmented, containing frequent, undocumented shifts of point-of-view as well as multiple retellings of several scenes. The basic structure gels after about two-thirds of the pages have been turned, but the details of the plot remain contradictory in places, even at the conclusion. This novel has a strong affinity with Erickson's Arc d'X for the reasons previously stated, through Erickson's world is more internally consistent. At only 150 pages, La Maison is certainly a book to be reread, but I'll wait until I have the energy to devote three or four solid hours to it.

This is DeLillo's take on Science Fiction, and it is brilliant in places. I particularly enjoyed his version of the MIT Language Riots, which predates David Foster Wallace's (in Infinite Jest) by over 20 years. Ratner's Star is surreal in a number of places, and the ending is likely to leave many readers frustrated. The passage where a writer introspects (about why she writes) is great. I'm a little bit tired of DeLillo's style (perhaps of the whole postmodern thing), but I'll probably read the rest of his novels over the next year or so, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the critics say about the novel he's about to publish ( Underworld, I think).

This book, written in the 1970s, is a must-read for researchers and musicians interested in musical timbre. Erickson's review is excellent, with a number of references that have been subsequently ignored, much to the detriment of the research community. The later chapters on examples of timbral manipulations in composed music weren't very interesting to me, given my lack of background in modern orchestral music, but would probably be valuable to someone interested in that kind of thing.

As with any collection of essays, some of these are much better than others. Nearly all of the essays in this collection are excellent (even "The History of Punctuation" manages to be not entirely boring). I burst out laughing several times while reading "Leading with the Grumper", which is something of a review of a slang dictionary. However, the two longer essays, "Discards" and "Lumber", are weaker than the rest, and "Lumber" is an excrutiatingly boring, pedantic mess (after 100 pages, I couldn't bear to read the remaining 40 or so). Of course, your mileage may vary.

I lost my notes on this book in a freak PalmPilot disaster, so my review will be ultra-brief. End Zone is, on the surface, a book about college football. It centers on Gary, a player fascinated by armageddon, and with something of a problem with authority. It was DeLillo's second novel, and it's more of a novella in style and length. I'm not a football fan in any sense, but I enjoyed End Zone quite a bit.

This was mostly an exercise in remedial reading for me. Handel's book is the best overview of non-clinical hearing (mostly psychophysics) research I've read. I very highly recommend it to anyone interested in hearing and acoustics.

Again, DeLillo's dialogue sparkles. The story here is surreal. It centers on a quest for a pornographic film featuring Hitler. I'm not entirely sure how to describe it any further, other than to say that I enjoyed it quite a lot, but that the conclusion was very unconventional. See also: Great Jones Street, White Noise, and Libra.

This is a very interesting book, bringing together a wonderful panel of scientists (most of whom write "Popular Science Books"). The first section highlights modern views of evolution and helped me to understand some of the differences between Dawkins (who I've read) and Gould (who I've not) and a number of other influential authors. The second section deals with the mind, brain, and consciousness, helping cement my mostly high opinions on the work of Minsky and Dennett, and firmly placing Roger Penrose in the "shut up or talk about something you actually know about" category. The sections on the origins of the universe and on complexity were quite interesting as well, introducing me to a number of authors and ideas that I was not familiar with. Don't expect to gain an in depth understanding from this book on any of the ideas discussed within it, but do use it as a launching point for further reading (the bibliography is fairly extensive).

I'm not quire sure why I've rated this a 4 instead of a 5, since it is an excellent novel. Perhaps I'm reminded too much of John Irving's writing and it's my distaste for emotional manipulation and contrived storylines that lowers my opinion ever so slightly. I do, however, highly recommend The Brothers K.

The Brothers K tells the story of a family torn between the religions of Baseball and Seventh-Day Adventism. We watch the Chance brothers grow and mature as they watch their father ride his rocky professional baseball career. The novel is by turns heart-warming and -breaking and occasionally simply unbelievable. The key moral lesson seems to be that it is dangerous to devote one's entire being to a single pursuit, no matter how worthy it may appear to be. Perspectives change, things are not always what they seem, and digging oneself too deeply into a hole makes it hard to see or climb out.

Not having read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, I am not clear on the ties between the two novels, other than that they are both about the relations within a family. The title of Duncan's novel is a clever pun for this reason as well as for the baseball connotation of "K".

In his lengthy introduction, Pynchon himself pans most of the stories in this collection. Of the five, only "Entropy" and "The Secret Integration" were truly enjoyable, and in my opinion, the latter is quite a gem and worth the book's price on its own. "The Secret Integration" is both heart-warming and -breaking, and it's place is near the top of the list of short stories I've read. Now that I have read all of Pynchon's easily attainable work prior to Mason and Dixon, I'm ready to dive into his latest.

I enjoyed DeLillo's biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, but not as much as his other novels. I'm too young to really care much about the circumstances surrounding John Kennedy's assassination, so as ahistory this did not interest me greatly. Conspiracy theories have never been my bag, so DeLillo's version is as good as any other in my opinion (and reading a well-written book is much more interesting than watching an Oliver Stone movie). Libra is definitely a novel: many of the important characters behind the assassination plot are invented, though it is hard to see where the historical record endsandDeLillo's imagination begins. As with DeLillo's other novels (so far I've read White Noise and Great Jones Street), the writing is uniformly strong and accessible and the dialogue sparkles.

Quoyle, the protagonist, is a schlemihl (he is redeemable, however, unlike Benny Profane in V.). He is tossed about on the sea of fortune, suffering unrequited love and bouncing from job to job pathetically until he moves to Newfoundland with his family. There he writes "The Shipping News", a column in a local paper serving a sparsely populated coastal area, and begins to piece his life together.

Proulx is best described as a prose stylist. Her language is clever but occasionally unorthodox. This particular novel won the Pulitzer Prize, a strong indication of quality. I found myself interested but not captivated, though the Newfoundland characters are very well drawn and of particular interest. Your mileage may vary.

While The Diamond Age is a better novel than Snow Crash, it's not as good as the novels I've been giving four stars in recent months. Two years ago, it probably would have merited a higher rating, but my taste has changed. I'm no longer satisfied with this kind of pseudoscience romp. While it is one of the better science fiction genre novels I've read, it doesn't have the language craft that has become my main reading focus. The subject matter (nanotechnology and inter-cultural relations) is interesting but not compelling, and the plot elements all come together, albeit in a contrived way (much like a John Irving novel, but not as well done). For these reasons, I'd recommend this book highly to genre fans only.

Frog Hospital is good novel by a great writer. I enjoyed Anagrams quite a lot more, but mainly because the voice of the protagonist was more mature and interesting to me. Frog Hospital tells the story of Berie Carr, who stands somewhat in the shadow of her best friend Sils both physically and psychologically. The plot here moves more quickly than the one in Anagrams, and we see more of Berie's life than we did of Benna's, at least chronologically. Moore maintains a high level of descriptive detail in her second novel, but the wordplay that sold Anagrams to me isn't present to the same degree.

Lorrie Moore is amazing. Anagrams, as you might expect from the title, is jam-packed with wordplay. It's also hilariously funny and ultimately heartbreaking. In each of the novel's sections, we see a different version of Benna, the protagonist. I'm terrified of ruining any of the surprises this novel holds, so I'll just say that Benna is a lovingly drawn character with very real problems. There's not a whole lot of action in terms of plot advancement, but Moore's descriptive care is extremely enjoyable. If you are looking for a great contemporary writer to enjoy, Lorrie Moore is a good one to try. I enjoyed Like Life somewhat less, but probably because of the short story thing. I'm diving right into her other novel, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? now.

I've said before that I'm not a good reader of short stories, but since this book is more of a novel told in sketches than a true short story collection, I didn't have my normal problems. Indeed, I greatly enjoyed Johnson's collection, though I found it to be much too short, particularly for the price.

In Jesus' Son, Johnson presents a collection of short sketches told by the same narrator, a drug addict in his early twenties who travels through the western part of the United States taking jobs at hospitals (where he can steal drugs). The writing is surreal and poetic, while at the same time pretty harsh. I look forward to reading more by this acclaimed author/poet.

I thought that I'd like this a lot more than I did. Unsworth writes historical fiction, and this is a 14th century tale told by a monk who has left his parish and joined a troupe of traveling players. The group arrives in a small village just after the death of a local boy, and they break from the tradition of presenting Biblical tales in order to present the "True Play of Thomas Wells". Their motive is financial, but they uncover something of a mystery surrounding the boy's death.

Unfortunately, while Unsworth's writing is decent (and the descriptions of the plays are great, particularly for the interactions between the players as they improvise on stage), the mystery is not very interesting, and the novel therefore falls somewhat flat. Morality Play isn't anywhere near the league of The Name of the Rose.

Alice is the most disturbing book I've ever read, at least in terms of the discomfort I felt reading the descriptions of the characters' actions (although Pynchon's description of rhinoplasty surgery in V. is the only thing I've ever read that made me physically ill). I'm not a prude, but I don't particularly enjoy graphic sexual writing, particularly descriptions of rape. Sometimes reading something disturbing is worthwhile in that it can expand your worldview. In this case, however, my worldview didn't change, so I was left feeling pretty cold.

Alice clearly owes a lot to Lolita (and not just for the surface similarities), but Nabokov was an immensely better writer than Homes (which practically goes without saying, given his stature). If you haven't read Lolita, don't bother with The End of Alice.

This was a serendipitous find at $2.98 (hardcover) in the remainder shelves at the Harvard Bookstore. Lightman's other novel ( Einstein's Dreams) had been highly recommended, so I've had an eye out for his work for a while.

Lightman is a good writer. While his work isn't likely to last for centuries, there are no obvious problems with this novel, the lyrical quality of the prose is enjoyable, and Lightman's insight into the scientific mind is striking. I particularly enjoyed Bennett's "apprentice" physics problem (two 'particles' interacting gravitationally) as a metaphor for the relationship between two lovers.

DeLillo just vaulted onto my favorite author list. Great Jones Street is more slapstick than White Noise. The protagonist, aptly named (in Pynchonian style) Bucky Wunderlick, is a burned-out rocker trying to reclaim his privacy in a New York apartment. He becomes embroiled in a complicated plot involving a powerful new drug and a powerful entertainment (foreshadowing Infinite Jest to a degree — indeed, DeLillo's influence on David Foster Wallace is clear).

Perhaps DeLillo is a poor man's Pynchon. The paranoia is there, as is the slapstick and to some degree the wordplay. DeLillo is much easier to read than Pynchon, mainly because his books actually have clear plot advancement, but also because they are simply more focused. Great Jones Street is one of the best books I've read in a long time. It's not as well-wrought as White Noise, but the subject matter is slightly more to my liking, and I heartily recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in rock 'n roll.

Erdrich has been on my to-read list for a while, and this reading of Love Medicine was precipitated somewhat by the suicide of Michael Dorris. Here, Erdrich brings to life a cast of characters living in a Chippewa reservation in the Dakotas. The point of view changes in each chapter, giving a kind of holographic view of the Kashpaw family and their relations. Lipsha Morrisey, one of the characters, is a metaphor for contemporary American Indians, searching for his roots (his parents) and trying to fit into a hostile society.

Love Medicine is a very serious first novel and I'll simply repeat Toni Morrison's sentiment: "The beauty of Love Medicine saves us from being completely devastated by its power."

I had wanted to finish reading Pynchon's previous novels before diving into Mason and Dixon, and this was the last one on the list. I'm finding it easier and easier to read Pynchon (it doesn't hurt that I started with Gravity's Rainbow). I love the way he invents a cast of hundreds of interesting characters whose only purpose is to illuminate tiny portions of the main characters. His clever turns of phrase are memorable as well, and he is rising on my list of favorite writers.

V. starts out wonderfully with inventive characters and bizarre situations — pure Pynchon. I was frustrated by a couple of middle sections and the end for seeming to drag on without introducing anything really new, but overall the effect was good. V., as with most of Pynchon's novels, is tied together by themes rather than plot: paranoia (surprise), automata, etc. Indeed the plot is recursive with a push-down stack often five layers deep, which makes things somewhat hard to follow until you pick up on this trick.

The most frustrating thing about reading Pynchon is that you have to read each novel twice to really "get" it (I'm speaking hypothetically here, having read them only once). Basically, at the end of the first read, you get the gist of what's going on (if you were paying attention), but it would take a re-read to really appreciate the multiple threads as they are woven.

I rather strongly recommend taking a look at Tim Ware's Pynchon concordances as an aid to understanding the complexity of Pynchon's novels.

The White Hotel is full of surprises. Each section of the novel stands (somewhat) on its own, but the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. Thomas travels from the borders of erotica to the depths of psychoanalysis to the horrors of the holocaust. I don't know if this novel has any lasting value, but it sure was interesting. It's funny that three of the last six books I've read have used the phrase "cross the Rubicon" (which refers to an irrevocable step and comes from Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon river into Gaul, thereby declaring war); I hadn't come across that reference previously, but it's one I'll use now.

I was immensely disappointed by this novel, which I found pretentious and barely comprehensible. The novel consists of three sections that seem to be unrelated — except for some rather tenuous thematic links — until the last forty pages, where the threads come together in a very loose weave. If there was a message to this novel, it went over my head. I much prefer Arc d'X. I'll give Erickson another try, but only one unless it blows me away.

It's rare that I read two truly excellent books in a row, but here we are. This was my first exposure to DeLillo, and I'm bordering on blown away. His talent for dialogue is amazing, and the sophistry his characters engage in is riotously funny and at the same time a condemnation of our sound-bite society. Make no mistake about it: this is a novel about death, and it's dark at the same time that it's funny. I wonder if DeLillo has a background in science because his knowledge of psychology and neurology is pretty sharp. I look forward to reading more of DeLillo's ouevre.

What a fantastic novel — not only has Louis de Bernieres created an unforgettable cast of characters and a symphonic plot, but also he has created a wonderful tragicomic mini-epic and the first literary love story to really push my buttons. The Los Angeles Times Book Review called it "An exuberant mixture of history and romance, written with a wit that is incandescent." My thoughts exactly.

On one surface, this is a history of a family on the Greek island of Cephallonia, during and after World War II. I don't want to give away any of the joys of this wonderful novel, but it's ten times better a love story than The English Patient movie (I haven't yet read the book).

I had been meaning to read this for a while. I received a beautiful Everyman hardcover edition for my birthday last year, and it's a pleasure to hold, but I was a bit intimidated by what I'd heard about reading 19th century Russian writers, particularly Dostoevsky. In retrospect, my fears were unfounded, as Crime and Punishment is not a particularly difficult read.

I do, however, have some advice for others who want to read Dostoevsky. First, make sure you get an edition with a one-page guide to the variants of the characters' names. Second, keep a pencil and notecard nearby and jot down short descriptions of each character (i.e., Raskolnikov (Rodya) = protagonist, Avdotya (Dunya) = his sister) as they appear and develop. There are only about a dozen important characters, but a couple of them pop up unexpectedly and it's easy to forget how they tie in.

The plot of Crime and Punishment is simple and fairly easy to follow: a murder is committed at the beginning, and the novel deals with the psychology of the murderer, his family and acquaintances, and the police detectives searching for the killer. There are a number of well-written dream sequences, and the most important thing to keep track of is Raskolnikov's state of mind. I highly recommend the Knopf Everyman's Library edition both for it's high quality and for the endnotes, which helped sort out some of the 19th century Russian cultural references (and French, German, and Polish quotations) for me.

I found the very end (last 10 pages) to be somewhat unsatisfying; I think Dostoevsky pulled his punch. Perhaps he was afraid that his audience wouldn't accept the book without a happy ending. Please contact me if you think I'm wrong about this.

Sacks is a member of the pantheon of great popular science writers. As in his other books ( Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat , etc.), he presents some of his case histories (he is a neurologist) in easy-to-digest form. His patients are marked by neurological deficiencies (often due to localized brain damage), but have skills or compensations that reveal the complexity and fragility of human consciousness. Sacks himself is constantly amazed at the brain's ability to adapt and compensate, and his enthusiasm is contagious. I find his approach and conclusions much more palatable than Damasio's (see Descartes' Error), and I highly recommend this collection.

This was recommended by Adam (and after the fact by Eric ). In The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood tells the dystopic story of a young woman in a near-future society (apparently centered in Cambridge, with Harvard Yard as the thinly-disguised centerpiece) where most women are valuable only for their wombs. As in Erickson's Arc d'X, the central themes are freedom and slavery, and Atwood similarly asks: "what do we mean by freedom and what are its forms?" The Handmaid's Tale is extremely approachable and would be readable by almost anyone, but Atwood reaches beyond the apparent 10th grade readability with a consistency of metaphor and an ability to show without telling that reveals her strong talents. While this novel did not drastically alter my worldview, it made me think, which is to be commended.

I read this mostly as a "warm-up" for my Area Exam, the last part of my Ph.D. quals. I've used it as a reference for four years but had never read it cover-to-cover. Doing so was somewhat rewarding, giving me some additional insight into a number of topics I thought I understood. In about two weeks I read all but the last chapter — the one on homomorphic signal processing (the cepstrum, etc.) — which I decided to put off until after my Area Exam since I want to look at it carefully. I give this textbook a mediocre rating because I think it is decent as a reference but not a great way to learn the material from scratch. I wish I knew of a better reference, but this is actually one of the better ones I've seen.

This is one of Eric's favorite books, so I knew it would be good. I was a little bit bored with the first 250 pages or so, when it wasn't clear that the elaborate setup was necessary, but I read the second half in one day, once I got caught up in the flow of things. Owen Meany is a strong statement about religious faith, American politics, and what it means to be a hero, disguised as a fast-moving, unbelievable tale of a pint-sized giant in the form of Owen Meany himself. I was amazed at how everything came together at the climax, and I agree that Irving is a master storyteller.

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?

I have a narrative. But you will be put to it to find it.

Or is he in some peculiar way thinking of an autobiography?

Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of the Tibetan Book of the Dead?

Or does the absence of narrative progression plus that cross-circuited schematism possibly render it even a poem of sorts?

Not to add avec exactly 333 interspersed unattributed quotations awaiting annotation?

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

Wastebasket.

Hoban is one of DAn's favorites, and I was interested in discovering why. Riddley Walker is a very difficult book to read; it is told in a pidgin bastardization of English that must be read phonetically and is therefore not friendly either to translation or to non-native English-speaking readers. The story is set in a post-nuclear-armageddon future, where traveling puppeteers tell the story of "Eusa". The novel is complex and difficult to follow, but rewarding, particularly as the pieces come together at the end. I'm interested in reading some of Hoban's work in conventional English. I haven't read Delany, but I suspect that Riddley Walker is something of a "poor man's" Dhalgren. [If you get the new American edition, do not consult the glossary. In my opinion, that would entirely ruin the book.]

I must admit that I only skimmed through the last third of this collection. I greatly enjoyed a small handful of these essays, including the title one, as well as "Lumbar Thought" (the jeans make the man), and the one about soccer (I tend to share Eco's sentiments about professional sports). Other than those, however, I found that I did not have the background to appreciate Eco's writing; without training in the classics and a knowledge of Italy's post WWII history, the essays are dull. I feel bad giving this collection a low rating, because Eco is clearly brilliant, but this collection did not "work" for me. I recommend How To Travel With a Salmon much more strongly.

Eco's essays are sometimes very funny. I loved the Lolita parody, as well as the collection of publisher rejection letters and the "newscast" of Columbus' landing, but most of these essays were written before I was conceived, and Eco is much more widely read than I, so I didn't always appreciate his wit. This collection falls flat for me in comparison with How To Travel With a Salmon.

I started reading this with hopes that it wouldn't grab my attention in quite the way it did (I'm trying to prepare for my Area Exam and reading for pleasure isn't helping!). Wallace is an outstanding writer, and this, his first novel, is great. His writing is like cross-country travel — the ultimate destination isn't the main focus, but rather the concentration is on enjoying the scenery and local color along the way.

I was a bit frustrated by the ending, but the other merits of the novel outweigh that minor "flaw".

In tone, this reminded me a little bit of Nabokov's Despair. In The Fall, Camus lays out a philosophy of judgment, both of self and others. He appears to champion pragmatism, while at the same time casting it in a bad light. Jean-Baptiste Clamence is indeed A Hero of Our Time, and Camus seems to condemn us through him by revealing the condescension in our acts of mercy. Camus is very quotable, and I was compelled to underline some passages extensively. I would recommend reading one chapter per day, rather than reading it all at once. It is short, but reading it in accordance with the passage of novel-time would give the reader more opportunity to digest the ideas.

I adore Dilbert, but Adams should have had a higher concentration of comic strips in this book. The prose is not nearly as witty as the cartoons, and thus this book falls flat. I recommend skipping the text between the cartoon panels.

This may have merit, but I didn't find much. Myra Breckinridge is the story of a transsexual, and while this aspect of the character is not explicitly stated until very close to the end, it is patently obvious, almost from page one. The rape scene is disturbing but ultimately uninteresting. I can see why it was controversial, but not why it was a bestseller (actually, I'm certain it was a bestseller precisely because it was controversial).

This was my first exposure to the Sandman comic book series. It is clear that Gaiman has fleshed out a very interesting universe, but these particular chapters are apparently not the best introduction. I'm interested in reading more, but I'm not going to rush out and buy another $20 collection.

Operation Wandering Soul is dark. Very dark. Dark yet beautiful. Littered with alliteration, assonance and any number of other poetic devices, Powers' prose is anything but prosaic. I found myself reading very slowly, savoring the beauty of the language, not only because the themes of the novel are so dark that I was afraid to reach the end (and I was a little bit worried that Powers will pull his punch at the finish), but also because I was afraid that the end was so near.

Operation Wandering Soul is about mortgaging the future to feed the excess of the present and the devastation that such deficit thinking saddles upon our children. One of the principal themes of the novel is children wandering too far from home. This theme is emphasized by the retelling of a number of "children's stories", including Peter Pan, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and the Children's Crusade. As a whole, the novel tells the story of a ne'er-grown-up man, serving in the trenches of a pediatric surgery rotation, and his struggle to come to grips with both his past and the bleak futurepresent he tries desparately but vainly to repair. This theme is embodied by the ruined children of his ward, in particular a young girl named Joy, who is being destroyed by some sort of body-wasting cancer that may or may not be operable (I won't give away one of the interesting "twists" at the end).

I'm disappointed that only Kraft (the surgeon) was fully developed as a character. There was a great deal of promise in the young girl Joy that was never realized, and Linda (Kraft's lover) never rose above a do-gooder caricature. Even with these flaws, Operation Wandering Soul is excellent, securing Richard Powers' position in my pantheon of contemporary writers.

Snow Crash has the best opening of any science fiction novel I've read since The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. After a few pages, it drops in quality (the prose becomes much less witty and original) but maintains a decent level. The novel keeps up a break-neck action-packed pace, with some rather interesting views of early (Sumerian, mucho B.C.) religion and neurolinguistics. Snow Crash is good, but it's not as amazing as it's cracked up to be.

I spotted this in Wordsworth's in Harvard Square and was intrigued by the Pynchon cover blurb: " Arc d'X is classic Erickson — as daring, crazy, and passionate as any American writing since the Declaration of Independence." I asked around a bit and came home with a hearty recommendation from Richard Seltzer , whose extensive reading list (and considerable overlap with my favorites) lended authority, at least for me.

I still don't have it all quite figured out, but it is a well-written examination of the relationship between love and freedom. Erickson starts in Paris, with the relationship between Thomas (Jefferson, though never explicity given a last name) and his young female slave, and then leaps back and forth between two other time-locales: turn-of-the-millenium Berlin and an unspecified dystopian city (perhaps near L.A.) at the foot of an active volcano. Erickson's prose is razor-sharp, and his fictional universe is both complex and internally consistent. I was amused by the author casting himself as a character (a washed-up writer named Erickson), much like Richard Powers did in Galatea 2.2, though with a less "happy" ending.

I highly recommend this book to brave readers.

I'd had a copy of this for a while and was prompted to read it by seeing a trailer for the soon-to-be-released film. I was shocked to discover that Julia Ormond plays Smilla — she was stunning but unrecognizable (to me) in the trailer. The novel is a fast-paced thriller, full of suspense, with much psychological insight into the very intriguing main character presented in its first half. The ending smells a bit of Michael Crichton ( Sphere, I think), but the book is good, particularly in the first half.

I have the definite feeling that I would have appreciated this more if I had a better grasp of English history. The prose is excellent, but the storyline is quite strange.

The Wanting Seed describes a dystopia in which the world is plagued by over-population. The writing style reminds me quite strongly of Philip K. Dick, sprinkled with Burgess's immense vocabulary, which sends me running to my desktop dictionary every few pages (I think Burgess overdoes it with obscure words, taking away from otherwise decent writing). I'd recommend this, but only to those who have already read and enjoyed 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and A Clockwork Orange.