A Storm of Swords (A Song of Fire and Ice #3)

#673
Title: A Storm of Swords (A Song of Fire and Ice #3)
Author: George R. R. Martin
Publisher: Bantam
Year: 2000
1179 pages

I have a hard time reviewing books in multi-volume series without giving too many spoilers. Therefore, I'll just say, in the technical argot of F&SF, that though it starts slow, in this one a bunch of people abruptly bite it, and some people who appear to bite it turn out not to have actually bitten it. This advances the plot while relieving the tedium of hundred-page stretches where people just wander around or worry in a way that makes the Camping Scene That Would Not Die in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows look like a haiku.

The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire

#672
Title: The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire
Author: Joe Jackson
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2008
420 pages


Absorbing and well-written, a better example of its genre (biography/history/natural history) than some, including Rose's For All the Tea in China: Espionage, Empire and the Secret Formula of the World's Favourite Drink, which treats a similar topic (biotheft on behalf of empire, destroying another power economically) but without the depth of Jackson's treatment. Here, the ethical issues are well-explored in both contemporaneous and contemporary contexts. This was a bit light on natural history, but adequate to the needs of the book's stronger elements. While Jackson occasionally strays into speculation about personalities and motives, much of the material is extensively and usefully end-noted.

The Lunatic Express: Discovering the World...Via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes

#671
Title: The Lunatic Express: Discovering the World...Via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes
Author: Carl Hoffman
Publisher: Broadway Books
Year: 2010
297 pages

A pleasant surprise--this was better than I expected, in that the author was respectful of people from other cultures and engaged in a certain amount of introspection about why he travels as much as, and in the ways that, he does. Where it disappointed was in the anti-American/America conclusion. Perhaps people everywhere are sometimes jerks, but it's easier to be aware of this in one's own language. As a reductive coda, it seemed too pat.

My friend and I used to play a game we called "Europe in America." It served me well and might be useful to Mr. Hoffman. An important aspect of the game was that if we encountered a problem in the U.S., whether while traveling or in the course of daily life, we'd turn to each other and say something like, "How exciting! The road is flooded! What does this tell us about infrastructure?" or "My! They say they have leash laws, but that was a lot of dogs just now!" or "How quaint--you have to tip even if the service was poor." This, I think, made us more mindful of our automatic negative responses and how we might put them aside by treating familiar situations as novel cultural puzzles.

Like many travel narratives, this also inspires me to ask, How is it different to travel as a woman than as a man? The dangers are different, and the possibilities more circumscribed by gender violence, and I haven't seen a male writer yet discuss this in any depth. 

The Jews of Kaifeng, China: History, Culture, and Religion

#670
Title: The Jews of Kaifeng, China: History, Culture, and Religion
Author: Xu Xin
Publisher: Ktav Publishing House
Year: 2003
209 pages

A good enough book, though the content is not as organized as it first seems and is often repetitive (sometimes concerningly so--what editor missed the repeated 12-line block quote on pages 41 and 87?). This is a history of the Jews in Kaifeng, primarily distilled from other sources. I'm not sure why people find it surprising that Jews, who were involved in merchant and lending trades, would be in Asia Major. I'm never sure if that's about oblique racism/antisemitism, Eurocentrism, US myopia about countries existing more than 300 years ago, or some other factor that stifles even logical speculation about the movement of people in the world. One needn't have been a lost tribe to be told to get out of country X and disperse. That Jews have been pretty good at this is demonstrated by the ongoing existence of Jewish communities.

The book could have earned another star by having a map showing Kaifeng in relation to the silk road, or a schematic of the synagogue, or photos of the stelae, but there are no illustrations. Here's a map, and here's a more linear and cricial account (with photos). 

I can't tell which part of the book is the author's original contribution to the literature. He usually reports rather than interprets. I found one interpretation on page 101 rather odd: "Even today, the Jewish descendants in Kaifeng still do not eat pork. It is interesting to compare the attitude toward dietary laws in Reform Judaism. The Kaifeng Jewish descendants seem more authentic than Reform Jews in this respect." Is the author suggesting that not eating pork is a more authentic expression of Judaism than is, say, adhering to a Jewish moral code? Or does "seem" suggest that he doesn't know whether Reform Jews eat pork? I'm not sure what "authentic" means, unless it is "historically similar." However, this is really the only jarring note in an otherwise interesting summary that can be read quickly because of its many redundancies.

Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006

#669
Title: Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006
Author: Roz Chast & David Remnick (Introduction)
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Year: 2008
400 pages

Roz Chast is consistently funny in an enjoyably bent way. Few other cartoonists make me laugh aloud, alone, in the middle of the night. This is a nice, big, chunky retrospective that will use up a certain amount of your otherwise productive time. Too big to read in the tub or to hide in a professional journal at work. 

Pump Six and Other Stories

#668
Title: Pump Six and Other Stories
Author: Paolo Bacigalupi
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Year: 2008
239 pages
Audiobook

Some of these stories are quite good; others are good enough but frustrate me because the worldbuilding underlying them is more interesting and the story isn't big enough for the background. Many of the stories seem to nod to plots or elements from great science fiction writers--for example, "The Fluted Girl" has more than a little of Farnham's Freehold about it, another story "The Tell Tale Heart," and another "A Boy and His Dog." Bacigalupi doesn't always choose the story that I'd pick as the best use of his variables. For example, in the first story,* why is there no discussion of wiping the boy's memory (which there is) and reprogramming him with the personality in the cube? Or why doesn't the boy, scrabbling for his handhold after an escape, accidentally plunge his hand that holds the cube into the organic building, thus joining the life that has no consciousness with the consciousness that has no life? Two stories take place in the world of Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl; one (about a man murdering his wife) is not science fiction, and is the least successful or interesting of the collection. Bacigalupi doesn't often end these stories positively. The few that hold a glimmer of hope are a relief but promise the characters, and their wasted worlds, long work for small gains.

*(Spoiler follows. Highlight to see text.)

Tales from Outer Suburbia

#667
Title: Tales from Outer Suburbia
Author/illustrator: Shaun Tan
Publisher: Arthur A. Levine
Year: 2009
96 pages

Beautiful, weird, lovely little stories of a somewhat off-kilter suburbia, with exquisit illustrations. Really, I can't get enough of Tan. Whether this is a children's book is debatable, but a certain kind of child, and adult, will like it very much. "Broken Toys" is my favorite, a tiny netsuke of a story that implies so much more. Really, you might want to just order all of Tan's books, since that's probably what you'll end up doing, anyway.

Culture Shock! China: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette (Culture Shock! China)

#666
Title: Culture Shock! China: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette (Culture Shock! China)
Authors: Angela Eagan & Rebecca Weiner
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish Corporation
Year: 2007
304 pages

I like this series, but found this volume light on customs and etiquette. The history was nicely presented, considering how vast and old China is, but there was too much emphasis on moving to China and not enough on how to behave. 

The Wild Girls

#665
Title: The Wild Girls
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Publisher: PM Press
Year: 2011
128 pages

A sort of Whitman's Sampler of UKL. The poems aren't her best, and the interview is more witty than informational. The story is the best of the bunch, though it's a nice taste of her genres. I'm not sure why they're "wild girls" in the title when they were "dirt" girls in the story; in any event, the story is a little drop-in-the-bucket narrative hinting at big culture- and world-building. 

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

#664
Title: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
Author: Donald Miller
Publisher: Thomas Nelson Publishers
Year: 2009
288 pages
Audiobook

Read by the author. I liked this less over time. It grew increasingly repetitive, the message increasingly religious, and the story seemed to discard its initial assertion that Miller was re-telling/re-making his life as he edited the movie of his previous autobiography. One of these problems wouldn't have bothered me, but 3 was too many. It may be that I'm trained as a narrative therapist, so I found Miller not only repetitive but reductive in his use of these techniques. Rather than opening up the story of his life, as seemed to be the premise and promise, he seems to substitute an authoritarian and limiting schema for previous aimlessness. Though taking on some of the responsibility for his experience, he moves quickly to attributions about an outside reality--god and evil forces--that wind up getting the glory (deity) or the blame (evil entity). This just seemed like externalizing, and externalizing to a well-worn, albeit heartfelt, cultural narrative. If this is what is meaningful for Miller, fine, but it's not what he said the book would be about.