BOOKS: Two Boys Kissing, David Levithan (2013)

Over the course of a single weekend, we follow the lives of several high school boys who make up a cross-section of what it is to be a young gay guy today. A pair of exes engaged in a political demonstration; a couple in the comfort of mid-relationship; a couple who've just met; some singles who are coping (or not) with the stresses of being gay and alone.

The narrative voice is in the first person plural, made up of the ghosts of the generation of young men lost to AIDS. For me, one of the surviving members of that generation, that occasionally brought up tears, as I was reminded yet again of just how damned awful those years were, or as random words or turns of phrase would remind me of particular friends.

Levithan's characters capture what it feels like to be young; his narrators capture what it feels like to look back on youth. It's a powerful combination. And that narrative voice is a glorious thing to read, wise and insightful, sad without being bitter, missing their lives in all their joy and pain and confusion. There are thoughts, sentences, paragraphs, that I wish I could have heard at 15 or 16 (even if I suspect wouldn't have understood or believed them at the time). I loved this paragraph, for instance:

The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest. Each of us had a first sentence, and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it. What we hoped, and what we found, was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first, and the third sentence is even easier than that. Suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs, in pages. The fear, the nervousness, is still there, but it is joined by a new confidence. All along, you've used the first sentence as a lock. But now you find that it's the key.

I'm curious to know what the YA audience for whom the book is written will make of that voice and that perspective. Do they know the history of that era well enough to understand it who these narrators are, and will it just come across as old guys preaching at them?

By the end of the book, the narrators are shouting out (to borrow Whitman's words) a "barbaric yawp" in celebration of life, demanding that it be lived and loved and fought for with every ounce of strength.

Stunning book, recommended with the highest possible enthusiasm.

BOOKS: Talking Hands, Margalit Fox (2007)

Imagine a group of children raised in isolation, whose caretakers do not speak to them, and who have no access to any spoken language. What sort of language would they develop among themselves, and what would it tell us about the way languages are created, or about the innate human instinct for language?

Obviously, this is not an experiment one could ever actually do, which is why linguists jokingly refer to it as "the forbidden experiment." But occasionally, circumstances arise that provide conditions as close to the forbidden experiment as one is ever likely to see, and Margalit Fox's Talking Hands follows a group of linguists as they explore one such rarity.

Al-Sayyid is an isolated village in Israel with a population of about 3,500 and an unusually high rate of genetically inherited deafness; one in 25 residents are deaf (1 in 1,000 is the typical rate). Because of their isolation, the villagers have developed their own sign language, and nearly everyone speaks it, whether they're deaf or not.

It's a new language -- the current generation of children is only the third generation to use it -- which makes it an ideal topic for study into how languages are created and developed. But the team is pressed for time, because the village becomes less isolated with every generation, and bits of Israeli and Arabic Sign Languages are already creeping into the language of those children; it's a bit of a challenge to find kids whose local language is still pure.

It wasn't that long ago, Fox tells us, that studying the sign language of Al-Sayyid would have been considered a waste of time, because sign languages weren't thought to be real languages at all. They were considered merely glorified pantomime, with none of the linguistic subtlety or complexity of spoken language. It wasn't until the mid-20th century that linguists began to realize that sign languages had their own syntax, grammar, and complex rules; and that they were every bit as thoroughly developed as spoken languages were.

Fox alternates between chapters showing the team of linguists at work, collecting data from the people of Al-Sayyid; and chapters on the history of sign language in general, with a focus on how our understanding of such languages has changed and deepend in the last fifty years.

I was particularly fascinated by a chapter on how strokes impact sign language. To oversimplify a bit, we know that language ability is controlled by the left side of the brain, and that dealing with spatial relationships is mostly controlled by the right side of the brain. Given that sign languages are almost always highly organized in space -- a sign made in front of the body might not mean the same thing as the same sign made to one side, for instance -- what happens to the ability to use sign language when a stroke injures one side or the other of the brain?

Fox has degrees in linguistics herself, and does a very good job of discussing the subject in layman's terms. I was fascinated by the history and the details about how sign languages work, and I enjoyed the book very much.

BOOKS: Three Graves Full, Jamie Mason (2013)

Jason Getty is not a man who grabs life by the horns and lives with gusto; he is a man who watches as life happens to him. He has had precisely one moment of assertiveness in his life, a confrontation with a con man that wound up with Jason burying a body in the backyard. A year later, he's just beginning to get over his paranoia about being discovered when landscapers turn up not one, but two bodies on his property. And neither of them is the body that Jason put there.

Mason eventually fills us in on how all three of the bodies got there, and tells her story through multiple points of view -- Jason, the people left behind by the assorted corpses, the cops investigating the whole mess. They're all distinct, vivid characters with lots of personality. Mason even gets away with making "volunteer police dog" Tessa a point-of-view character, with logic and motivations that feel perfectly dog-like.

Almost half of the book takes place on a single night, a long, bleakly hilarious series of disastrous meetings that bring together all of the book's characters in a frantic chase through the countryside. It's a magnificently planned sequence, reminiscent of Hitchcock in the way that complications pile upon complications. Everyone is struggling desperately to escape their situation, and every tiny decision only pushes them deeper into it.

This is dark comedy at its best; none of the characters are wholly sympathetic or wholly evil, and there are a lot of delightful moments where you realize that you're queasily cheering for someone to get away with doing something horrible. Mason's prose is smart and witty, filled with unexpected turns of phrase and sharp observations.

Highly recommended, and all the more impressive for being a first novel.

BOOKS: Openly Straight, Bill Konigsberg (2013)

Rafe has been openly gay since he was in the eighth grade. And in Boulder, Colorado, it really hasn't been a big deal. His parents are almost ridiculously supportive, to the point of throwing him a surprise coming out party at Hamburger Mary's, and his classmates haven't hassled him about it.

But even so, Rafe can't help but feel boxed in by the idea that everyone sees him as The Gay Kid; he fears that his social circles and range of potential friends are being limited by that perception. So when he transfers to an all-male boarding school in Boston for his junior year, he decides not to mention being gay to anyone. He won't go so far as to lie if someone asks a direct question, he tells himself, but he'd like to see what life might be like if he gets the chance to be just Rafe without being The Gay Kid.

The plan seems to be a success at first; Rafe quickly falls in with a group of the school's jocks, not at all the sort of artsy/nerdy types he'd hung with in Boulder. But inevitably, Rafe falls for one of his new friends, and wonders if there's a way to turn this friendship into something more.

Konigsberg does a fine job of lightening his serious issues with a lively sense of humor; the conversations between Rafe and his new pal Ben capture perfectly the way that smart kids meander between goofiness and profundity. He lets the consequences of Rafe's decision play out in an honest manner, without imposing an artificially happy outcome, but still finds a way to end things on a realistically hopeful note.  

BOOKS: California Rush, Sherwood Kiraly (1990)

For the most part, baseball's a simple game. Hit the ball, throw the ball, catch the ball, run the bases. But some strange things can happen, and there are a lot of obscure rules that pop up when they do. And so every now and then, someone writes a story about that mythical game in which all of those things happen, the most bizarre game of baseball every played. Sherwood Kiraly's California Rush is such a story, and it's an entertaining take on the theme.

The first two-thirds of the book meanders a bit, as we stroll casually through the careers of the men who will be the opposing managers in the key game. Davy Tremayne is a golden boy -- attractive, talented, popular with the fans. Jay Bates, on the other hand, is a short-tempered fellow who will bend the rules as far as they'll go to get an edge.

But the meandering pays off, because by the time we get to the final game, in which Davy is managing (and playing for) St. Louis, and Jay is managing the California Rush expansion team, we know them well enough to understand their behavior and their reactions to the bizarre events that unfold. And a wild game it is, unfolding in so unlikely a fashion that one player refuses to continue, believing that this game can only be the work of the devil, and it would be sacrilegious to keep playing.

California Rush is by no stretch great literature, and if you're not interested in baseball, you'll be bored to death by it. But for baseball fans, it's a moderately amusing story, and Kiraly manages to keep finding new bizarre plays and rule interpretations to throw into the final 50 pages.

BOOKS: More Than This, Patrick Ness (2013)

In a brief prologue, we are with a 16-year-old boy who has swum too far out into the ocean. It's cold, he's losing strength, and he's terrified. He knows he's about to die, and it comes almost as mercy when instead of the long, slow agony of drowning, he is dashed against the rocks and killed instantly.

And then, at the beginning of Chapter 1, he wakes up.

Seth finds himself in the English village of his childhood, but it's deserted, with overgrown weeds everywhere and a thick layer of dust covering everything. The local supermarket has plenty of canned food that hasn't gone bad, so he's in no danger of starvation. But how can he possibly be here at all, apparently still alive? Where is everyone? And why is there a shiny black coffin in the middle of his bedroom?

The terror and mystery of this complete isolation may not be the worst thing in store for Seth, though, because when he falls asleep, he dreams. His dreams are intensely realistic, and in all of them, he's forced to relive the most painful moments in his life.

Ness tells a terrifically twisty story about reality and fantasy, the importance of friendship, the pain of loneliness (and of life in general), and the desperate measures we will take to escape that pain, or to at least make it more bearable. The characters (no, Seth doesn't remain alone for the entire book) are lively and memorable; I particularly liked Tomasz, an 11-year-old Polish boy who grumbles in grandly comic style about how unappreciated his acts of bravery are.

More Than This is a marvelous book. It's creative, thought-provoking, and very hard to put down.

BOOKS: The 5th Wave, Rick Yancey (2013)

More than just another in the current flood of dystopian YA novels with tough teenage heroines.This one's got a smart story, interesting characters, strong moral dilemmas, and exciting action that should appeal to adult readers as well as teens.

The alien invasion began with an electromagnetic pulse that wiped out all of our machines. A series of increasingly severe attacks have left only about three percent of humanity alive, and they tend to be isolated, since any one of them could be an alien in disguise.

One of those survivors is Cassie. She's 16, and her goal is to re-unite with her little brother, Sammy, who has been taken (along with the other small children) to a government camp for protection. When she's injured, she's nursed back to health by a stranger, a young man named Evan. She can't be entirely sure that Evan is trustworthy, but she's left with no choice but to team up with him to find her brother.

Most of the book is told from Cassie's point of view, but we get the occasional chapter from someone else -- Sammy; Cassie's old high-school crush, who's being trained as a soldier to fight the invaders; one of those alien invaders in human form -- and each of those characters is crisply and distinctly defined.

As the book's mysteries are slowly resolved -- What do the aliens want? What's really happening to Sammy? What's Evan hiding? -- each answer ratchets the tension up another notch, until the final action sequence brings the book to a rousing climax.

There's certainly room for sequels in Yancey's universe, but The 5th Wave is entirely satisfying on its own, and it's a fine SF thriller.

BOOKS: But He Doesn't Know the Territory, Meredith Willson (1959)

Willson's memoir of creating The Music Man, from first inspiration to Broadway opening night. By the standards of today's tell-alls, this is tepid stuff; there are no scandalous revelations and no villains to be found. But Willson's writing is filled with the same gentle charm and humor that he brought to The Music Man itself, and it's a sweet little book.

BOOKS: The Human Division, John Scalzi (2013)

First, congratulations to Scalzi for winning this year's Hugo Award for his novel Redshirts, which I thought was absolutely terrific.

The Human Division returns Scalzi to the universe of his Old Men's War and its sequels, and it's an interesting experiment in story structure. The residents of Earth and of its many colony planets make up the Colonial Union, a political and military organization which protects humanity from the universe's many hostile alien races. But Earth is beginning to realize that the vast majority of the Union's resources, money, and soldiers are coming from Earth, and Earth's politicans have begun to resent that they are being asked to defend everyone else. So when Earth is invited to join The Conclave, a powerful alliance of alien cultures and planets, the diplomats and soldiers of the Colonial Union find themselves struggling to keep Earth in the fold, because without Earth, the Union will collapse.

Against that background, Scalzi tells his story in thirteen "episodes," which were originally released as separate e-publications, and each of which is designed to stand on its own as a short story while coming together to tell a complete story. So rather than a strong plot or narrative throughline, the book plays out as a series of vignettes set against the backdrop of the Union's fight to hang onto Earth. There are recurring characters, a second-tier diplomatic crew whose missions always seem to play into the larger story in unexpected ways, but about half of the episodes feature their own characters who don't reappear elsewhere.

Styles and tones vary widely, from "The B Team," a classic bit of space opera in which our diplomatic crew has a dangerous alien contact problem to resolve; to "A Voice in the Wilderness," a look at a Limbaugh-style rabble-rouser for whom ratings are the most important goal, which reminded me somehow of Shirley Jackson.

For those readers who've already purchased the individual stories in e-format, Scalzi includes a pair of bonus stories set in roughly the same period of his future history. "Hafte Sorvalh Eats a Churro and Speaks to the Youth of Today" is a sweet little charmer of a story that brings the book to a delightful end.

I'm not convinced that the stories work together to tell a single novel-length story. The reader is left to assemble that larger story for himself by putting together the background details of each individual piece, and by filling in the gaps between stories. And even after doing that assembling, the story never quite reaches resolution; there's at least one more novel's worth of story waiting to unfold. But I appreciate Scalzi's continuing willingness to experiment with how stories can be told (Redshirts ended with three short-story "codas"), and the individual stories are all delightfully entertaining. Even if The Human Division is less a novel than a story collection, I'm certainly happy to have read it.

BOOKS: Red Planet Blues, Robert J. Sawyer (2013)

Robert J. Sawyer is one of our best science fiction writers, and here he tackles one of the genre's bigger challenges -- the SF/mystery hybrid.

The challenge with mixing the two, I think, has to do with reader expectations. SF readers, enjoy -- and yes, this is a rather broad generalization -- the surprise of new gadgets, gizmos, concepts, technology. They'll let an author get away with introducing something entirely new six pages from the end of the book if it makes for an exciting finish. Mystery writers, to make an equally broad generalization, want to feel that they have a fair chance to solve the puzzle, which means that they're going to be annoyed if the solution depends on some unknown bit of technobabble that show up at the very end of the book.

Sawyer's solution to this dilemma is to introduce only one major big new idea for his mystery readers to deal with (and by SF standards, it's neither a very big nor a very new idea). That idea is "transfers," artificial bodies into which human minds can be transferred for enhanced beauty, strength, vision -- whatever they think might be helpful; the original human body is destroyed immediately after transfer so that there's only one copy of any given person at any given time.

And throughout the early chapters of the novel, Sawyers explores the possible complications and ramifications of transfers in a crime-solving context, so that by the time we reach the climax, the reader has been given all the necessary information to stay one step ahead of the detective.

He is Alex Lomax, the only private eye in the Martian city of New Klondike, who Sawyer completists will recognize from the novella "Identity Theft." An altered version of that story makes up roughly the first quarter of Red Planet Blues; it's been fleshed out with additional characters and details to set up the plot for the rest of the novel.

That plot centers on the search for the great mother lode of Martian fossils, the location of which was kept a secret by its discoverers. All of the things you love about private eye novels are here -- cops, both honest and corrupt; beautiful dames, naive and worldly; the local powerbroker who knows where the bodies are buried (often literally). They're set against an appealing Martian backdrop; New Klondike sits under a large dome, and spacesuits are required to venture outside (unless you're a transfer, and don't actually need oxygen).

Sawyer's prose, as ever, is crisp and clean; his ideas are interesting; and his characters are a bit more fully developed than is the norm for either SF or private eye fiction. Red Planet Blues is a breezy entertainment that should please fans of both genres.

BOOKS: The Bughouse Affair, Marcia Muller & Bill Pronzini (2012)

Muller and Pronzini are surely the most successful husband-and-wife team working in the mystery genre. Each has a long-running series character -- Muller's Sharon McCone, Pronzini's Nameless Detective -- and each has received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. This collaboration is the first volume in a projected new series.

Our heroes are former Secret Service agent John Quincannon and former Pinkerton employee Sabina Carpenter, who work together as private investigators in 1980s San Francisco. As the novel begins, they're working on separate cases. Sabina is trying to identify and locate a female pickpocket who's been striking local amusement parks; John is trying to solve a string of home burglaries. It will, I suspect, surprise no one that the two cases are more closely connected than they originally seem.

The novel's most interesting supporting character is an eccentric Englishman who claims to be Sherlock Holmes, and who involves himself as an unwanted assistant in the firm's investigation. He's an amusing accent for one story; I don't think it would work, though, to make him a regular character, as seems to be threatened at the end of the story.

The historical setting is less interesting than I'd hoped, and it's notable mostly for making me feel that Muller and Pronzini had spent a lot of time researching criminal terminology of the era (or maybe they just went to a Ricky Jay show), and were determined to show off every last bit of it. The endless references to dips and cutpurses and yeggs and scruffs grow tiring after a while.

I was also distracted by the disparity in how the characters are identified. Chapters are titled according to the point-of-view character, either "Sabina" or "Quincannon," and it's not clear why it's first name for her and the more formal, respectful last name for him.

The story itself is moderately entertaining, but not up to the level I've come to expect from Muller (I'm less familiar with Pronzini's work). Pleasant enough book, but not so strong that I'm likely to seek out further installments in the series.

BOOKS: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Benjamin Alire Sáenz (2012)

Each year, the American Library Association awards several awards for excellence in literature for children and young adults; the Newbery and Caldecott Medals are the oldest, and thus the best known, of the group, but the newer awards are beginning to gain their own prestige. And one of the big winners this year was this novel by Sáenz -- one of several runners-up for the Printz Award for excellence in YA literature, winner of the Pura Belpre Award for literature celebrating the Latino cultural experience, and winner of the Stonewall Award for literature relating to the LGBT experience. The book more than lives up to that level of honor and praise.

The setting is El Paso in the late 1980s, and Ari and Dante are 15 when they meet at the local public swimming pool. There's not a huge amount of plot; the novel is simply the story of their developing relationship. It's very nicely written, and Sáenz has an interesting way of developing characters and relationships through absence or separation -- Dante's family moves out of town for several months; Ari's father is an emotionally withdrawn Vietnam veteran; Ari's older brother is in prison, and though he's never actually present in the book, his absence is an enormous factor in the family dynamic.

There's a growing body of coming-of-age literature for and about gay kids; most of it is still about white kids, which makes this book a much-needed addition. The boys' ethnic and cultural identity as Mexican-American isn't the primary thrust of the story, or of who they are as people, but it's more than insignificant background, and it helps make the characters feel like more specific individuals than we often get in this sort of book.

If anything felt off, it was that Ari seems to be a very late sexual bloomer. I can understand being repressed enough for various reasons that you don't recognize or identify yourself as gay, but this kid barely seems aware of himself as having any sexual feelings at all.

That's a small quibble, though, and more than outweighed by the strengths of the book, which is fine stuff indeed.

BOOKS: Let Me Clear My Throat, Elena Passarello (2012)

The subject of Passarello's delightful collection of essays is the human voice, the sounds it makes, and what they tell us about ourselves.

The book is divided into three sections -- scream, song, and speech. Topics are wide-ranging; the scream section alone gives us essays on Brando's "Stella" (and on Passarello's, as she was the first woman to win New Orleans' annual Stella Shouting Contest), the movie sound effect known as the Wilhelm scream, and the yelp that contributed to the demise of Howard Dean's presidential campaign.

Even when she's tackling familiar topics, Passarello's approach is often unexpected. Her chapter on the voice of Frank Sinatra, for instance, is built around a "Tips for Popular Singing" pamphlet that Sinatra published in the early 1940s; a meditation on birdsong turns into a hymn of praise to the "crows" of the human world, men like Tom Waits and Sid Vicious, and the music that can be found in their not-terribly-musical voices.

Passarello's writing is filled with colorful details. In a discussion of the castrato voice, she notes that unnecessary castration was a sin, punishable by excommunication, and that choirboys all arrived with plausible sounding excuses; "in the 1750s," she reports, "every last one of the soprani in the Sistine Chapel was an alleged victim of a wild pig attack."

And her descriptions of the voice, a notoriously hard thing to describe in words, are both technically precise and filled with vivid imagery. Here's how she describes Howard Dean's scream:

It is a one-second glissando from an impossibly high note down two full octaves to a flat, guttural trough, as long as a slide down sixteen keys of a baby grand. It is the sound of a Muppet, or a baby in tantrum, or a bike horn half-squeezed. Or, rather, it is all three sounds at different milliseconds, smooshed. It meets his unbuttoned collar and the sloshing bottles and the fibers in that long mic cord and the tone of the HVAC to make a unique recorded moment -- an electric, fantastic, obscene, unspellable thing.

Delightful, thought provoking reading all the way through.

BOOKS: novels by Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey was a British novelist of the late 1940s and early 1950s, best remembered for her mystery novels, several of which frequently appear on "best novels ever" lists. I'd never read any of her work, so I grabbed a three-novel omnibus volume from the library to get an introduction.

Miss Pym Disposes (1948) is an oddly structured novel, with virtually no plot to speak of until about 80% of the way through. Miss Pym is a middle-aged writer of best-selling pop psychology novels; an old friend is an administrator at a womens' college, and has invited her to speak to the students. Miss Pym enjoys the change in atmosphere from London, and the company of the young students, and decides to extend her visit for a few days.

There is, eventually, a crime, which Miss Pym solves; that solution is not entirely satisfactory, as it requires us to believe that one of the novel's characters would be self-sacrificing to a degree that I don't think we've been prepared to accept. And the general aimlessness of the novel is occasionally frustrating. But the students are an entertaining bunch of characters, and Miss Pym is a charming protagonist.

The Franchise Affair (1949) is the most conventional mystery novel of these three. A middle-aged woman and her elderly mother are accused of kidnapping a young girl and forcing her to serve as their servant. They claim to be innocent, but the girl's story holds up and all of the evidence seems to support her. The resolution, when it comes, it something of a deus ex machina, but the story is an entertaining one, and Tey's explanation of what's actually happened is clever.

Brat Farrar (1950) was my favorite of the three. In it, Tey pulls off the stunt (which must surely have been even more audacious at the time) of making the criminal her protagonist and gaining our sympathy for him. The family on a British estate is about to celebrate the coming of age (and coming into his inheritance of the estate) of Simon, the eldest son, when a young man arrives claiming to be Patrick, Simon's slightly older twin, who disappeared and was believed to have committed suicide at 13. If Brat, the new arrival, really is Patrick, then he will take over the estate and Simon will inherit nothing. Tey presents the story as a tightrope exercise -- can Brat pull off his deception? -- and we can't help rooting for him to succeed, even as we come to like and admire the family he's attempting to deceive.

Tey's greatest strength is her vivid characters, who are well-rounded and vividly written; they were enough to hold my attention even through the book's occasional bits of mechanical plot-churning (or, in Miss Pym, full-on plotlessness). Her novels are certainly of their time, but there are moments that feel surprisingly modern; the relative honesty, bluntness, and lack of disapproval with which she treats homosexuality in Brat Farrar is quite unexpected.

There are five other mystery novels written by Tey, of which the most important appears to be The Daughter of Time, in which an injured policeman researches the history of Richard II and exonerates him of the accusations that he had his young nephews murdered. These three novels were good enough that I will have to put at least that one, and perhaps more of Tey's writing, on my "to be read" list.

BOOKS: Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter (2012)

Maybe it's just my imagination, but I feel like I'm seeing a lot more novels lately structured the way this one is. There are a lot of characters, scattered in time and place, each with his or her own story to be told, and they're tied together just tightly enough that the whole thing can be called a novel instead of a bunch of short stories. In general, I don't find it a terribly satisfying way to structure a book; I want to get lost in a story. That's A story. As in single. If I wanted to bounce from story to story, I'd be reading a collection of short stories.

With a book like this, every time I'm finally settling in and getting involved with one character, suddenly I'm whisked away to another that doesn't really have much in common beyond the moment of "oh, he's her daughter" that links the two.

And in Beautiful Ruins in particular, I had the added misfortune that my interest in each character was inversely proportional to Walter's. I'd have really enjoyed a novel about Claire, the put-upon assistant to an asshole Hollywood producer; or one about Pat, an aging pop has-been struggling with the realization that he probably never is going to be a star after all. But every time I'd just settled into either of their stories, Beautiful Ruins whisked me back to 1962 Italy and Pasquale, a sad sack innkeeper whose perpetual moping left me bored.

(And another thing that almost never works, and serves here to drag the Italy sections down: The addition of a real person as a character in a story otherwise made up of fictional ones. Richard Burton pops up here, and it's enormously distracting, not least because of Walter's authorial tic to always always always refer to him as "Richard Burton." Never "Richard" or "Burton" or "Dick," it's "Richard Burton this" and "Richard Burton" that. Lord, does that get old fast.)

If you like this style of storytelling, you may well enjoy the book. There was, after all, just enough of the interesting stories in it that I did finish, despite my lack of enthusiasm for the structure.

BOOKS: An Age of Madness, David Maine (2012)

Freud would say I'm a lousy mother. But then Freud would say lots of things. He'd declare me a textbook case, overbearing but emotionally distant, doomed to produce maladapted children. There's even a name for women like me: schizophrogenic mothers. Of course, Freud invented names for all sorts of things whether they existed or not, and then happily accused anyone nearby of doing, or being, or having, most of them.

 

That's our introduction to Regina, the central character of David Maine's An Age of Madness, and it's instantly clear that while she may not be the most likable person, she's got a lot to say and she's by god going to say it.

Regina's a psychologist, and her bitter, sardonic view of life isn't without justification; her husband died when she was only 34, leaving her to raise their daughter, Anna, on her own. Anna's now 17, struggling to adjust to college life, and doesn't seem much interested in talking to Regina during their rare phone calls.

Regina's finding it harder to have patience with, or show much compassion for, the clients she sees in her private practice and at the state hospital where she works. And she can't figure out why she's finding herself drawn to a new orderly who's fifteen years younger than she is.

The death of Regina's husband is the central mystery of the novel, and it doesn't take long to figure out that we're not being told everything. The structure of that story is a bit formulaic, with a new bombshell detail being revealed at predictably regular intervals. But even when I could see that a new surprise was on the way, the precise nature and details of the revelation still managed to catch me off guard.

Maine's characters are the novel's strong suit. Regina has a sharp and distinctive voice, and Maine's not afraid to let her be unlikable. The principal supporting characters, Anna and Russell (Regina's orderly beau), are equally well drawn, and Maine is very good at letting us see them through Regina's eyes in ways that let us understand how that view might be distorting things.

I'm a big fan of Maine, and while his Biblical novels are still my favorites, An Age of Madness is a marvelous book, and Regina is a crisply defined character who grabbed my attention and would not let go.

BOOKS: The Fault in Our Stars, John Green (2012)

The Fault in Our Stars is one of the hot YA novels of the moment. It's a teen rom-com that attempts to merge the manic energy of screwball comedy with a tragic story (both principals have cancer).

The first problem with doing that hyperactive banter in print, as opposed to in film or TV, is that most of can hear a lot faster than we can read, so when reading, the words don't crackle with the speed and energy they need. Hearing instead of reading also doesn't allow us any time to stop and think about how wildly unrealistic this manner of speech is.

The second problem is that it's simply not easy. I would argue that Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of Gilmore Girls, writes that type of dialogue as well as anyone, and even when Gilmore was at its best, there were moments when I wanted to tie Lorelei to a chair and tell her to just. stop. talking. And Green is not in Sherman-Palladino's class as a writer of bouncy and madcap, so there were lots of similar moments in this book.

Our protagonist is 16-year-old Hazel, whose cancer is being held at bay for the moment, but which is incurable; she knows that it will kill her, and that she doesn't have many years left. She meets Augustus at Support Group one evening, and they fall madly in love.

And how could they not? Augustus has been written to be Hazel's perfect guy -- handsome, irreverent, just as quick with a zippy one-liner as she is. He's so obviously The Guy For Hazel that even the book's jacket copy describes him as "a gorgeous plot twist."

Hazel and Augustus spend a few happy weeks together before tragedy strikes, as we knew it would, but at least they have time to toss off a few more bon mots, make amusing philosophical comments about the nature of oblivion, quote poetry back and forth, and just charm the hell out of each other. Constantly. Every single minute of every single day.

(Oh, and they find time to pop off to Amsterdam to visit the reclusive author of Hazel's favorite novel. Y'know, as one does when one is slowly dying of cancer and must lug an oxygen tank everywhere one goes.)

And there's the biggest peril of writing this type of character: They don't exist in real life. No one is this charming and witty and personable and quirky and chipper all the time; even when they get sick, Hazel and Augustus are adorably sick.

(A digression: Hazel and Augustus? Seriously? Have any Indianapolis parents in the last 80 years or so actually named their children Hazel and Augustus? As if the personalities weren't big enough quirk-fests, they have to be named Hazel and Augustus. Oy.)

Some of the jokes and epic monologues are amusing enough that they kept me going to the end of the book, but oh my god, how I hated both of these characters before it was over. You know the author's doing something wrong when you find yourself rooting for the cancer.

BOOKS: The DVD Novel, Greg Metcalf (2012)

Metcalf argues that the increasingly popularity of watching television by the season, rather than by the episode, is changing the very nature of what we want from television. (And it's a circular process in which the changing nature of television encourages and rewards such binge viewing.)

Once upon a time, TV was an episodic medium, in which characters and their circumstances were not allowed to change; now, a season of a series (or a series as a whole) is viewed as a complete work which is primarily devoted not to telling a separate story each week, but a single overarching story that may last for several years. There may be contained stories in each episode to keep the casual viewer involved, but the show is meant to absorbed as a whole; it is a "DVD novel," as opposed to a series of short stories.

There are obvious elements to that change -- series that have ending dates planned in advance, and stories that come to a firm ending -- but Metcalf also sees this change in some less obvious ways -- the rise of the unsympathetic lead, the increased blending of genres, the shorter seasons that dominate cable, a visual style and vocabulary borrowed from comics and graphic literature.

These aren't all new changes, or at least not as new as we might think. Metcalf goes as far back as The Fugitive for the roots of the series-long arc in American television (will Richard Kimble ever find that one-armed man?). And he traces much of the change to the influence of British television, in which seasons have usually been shorter -- as few as 6 or 7 episodes -- and self-contained programs of only a few hours have always been part of the TV landscape. (We went through a brief craze for those in the US; we called them "miniseries.")

And at the root of all of this, Metcalf places Dennis Potter's 7-hour series The Singing Detective, which featured a distinctively unpleasant protagonist, and which mixed forms like mad -- reality with hallucination, noir with musical numbers, realism with fantasy; it was a formative influence on Steven Bochco, whose Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law began the slow serialization of American television.

Metcalf's writing isn't overly scholarly, and for the most part, his arguments are clear and easy to follow. The biggest exception, for me, is in his chapters on comedy, where he argues that we've shifted away from situation comedy to "attitudinal comedy;" it was never quite clear to me what distinction he was trying to draw.

And there are a handful of annoying factual errors that any good fact checker should have caught. The L.A. Law character is named Michael Kuzak, not Kusack; All in the Family began in 1971, not 1968. Such mistakes always make a bit nervous about how many other errors are lurking that I'm not informed enough to catch.

Still, those details aren't at the heart of Metcalf's premise, which is fascinating, and which he presents in convincing fashion.

BOOKS: The Sound and the Noise, Nate Silver (2012)

Nate Silver's The Sound and the Noise is an overview of the art and science of making predictions -- why we're so often bad at it, how we're learning to get better, and why it's such a hard thing to do in the first place.

There is less here than you might expect about politics and polling, the fields in which Silver has become famous. Instead, Silver looks at what we know and have learned about predictions in areas like climate change, baseball, earthquakes, poker, the stock market, and weather forecasts.

In some areas, our ability to make good predictions has gotten much better in recent decades; we are able to predict the weather (for the next week or so, anyway) far more accurately. In other areas -- earthquake prediction, for instance -- we are least learning to acknowledge that we are very far away from being able to make accurate predictions, and accepting that fact is a sort of progress in its own right. And in some areas -- the stock market, or political punditry -- even if some experts continue to claim that they can predict the future, the evidence suggests that they'd be just as well off flipping a coin.

Silver's style is smart but accessible, and when he does dive deeper into statistics than readers might be comfortable with, he's very good at explaining the concepts and tests he's using. This is an entertaining and useful book on a fascinating topic.

BOOKS: The Blank Wall, Elisabeth Sanxzy Holding (1947)

This one has a story strong enough that it's been adapted for the movies twice -- in 1949 as The Reckless Moment, with Joan Bennett and James Mason; and in 2001 as The Deep End, with Tilda Swinton and Goran Visnjic. (The latter was a somewhat looser adaptation.)

It's set late in World War II, when Lucia Holley is on the verge of collapse from trying to manage the household on her own (her husband is in Europe). The news that her teenage daughter has begun dating an older man doesn't help her mental state, and she starts trying to figure out a way to get him out of Bea's life. Things go wrong (as they so inevitably do in suspense novels), and suddenly Lucia's got a corpse on her hands and a death to be covered up.

Holding doesn't waste time on extraneous detail, but everything she does tell you is useful; her characters are crisply and quickly drawn, and her story moves briskly and logically from point A to point B.

Social attitudes of the day are, of course, present, but the casual sexism and racism of the late 40s are not so offensive here as to be distracting, as they can be in some novels of the era. In fact, the only real eyebrow-raising moment for me was in a moment that was surely intended to show that Lucia was, for her era, fairly enlightened -- a scene in which Lucia is surprised to realize that her housekeeper Sibyl is an actual person! With dreams and a life of her own that go beyond doing Lucia's grocery shopping! (We still occasionally get that type of scene these days, though it's more likely to be about the Hispanic nanny or gardener than the African-American housekeeper, and it always strikes me as terribly condescending.)

Can't say that I'll be rushing out to read more Holding (though there's plenty out there; her books seem to be reprinted every 15 or 20 years), but The Blank Wall is a taut and effective thriller that holds up surprisingly well after more than sixty years.