Unwind (Unwind Trilogy #1)

#717
Title: Unwind (Unwind Trilogy #1)
Author: Neal Shusterman
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 
Year: 2007
335 pages
Audiobook.

A nicely tense dystopian YA novel, first in a series. The story is enjoyable enough to make up for the somewhat expository and clunky present-tense writing. The basic premise provides an interesting distorted reflection of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go: Abortion is illegal, but adolescents can be "unwound" for spare parts. Logan's Run comes to mind as well. The variety of uses and abuses to which this policy may be put are sometimes shown, sometimes told. The three main characters are engaging and differ sufficiently from each other, and some of the minor characters become more sympathetic over time. I found Lev the most interesting character, and the interpretation of tithing an engaging idea. I don't believe that there would be Jewish tithes, however--Jewish philosophy argues against it, as well as Jewish beliefs and practices around death. Whether it's more plausible for the other religions mentioned is a question I'll leave to others more cultually proficient in those traditions.

Update: I think it's only fair to add the questions that arose as I reflected on the book last night. I'll spoiler tag them by putting them in white lettering. Highlight to see:
1. Why would a rebellion humanize and personalize the unwinds' situation? It might bring it to the public's attention, but time and again, studies of group behavior show that appealing at the individual level ("Mom! Don't you love me?") personalizes, while groups are perceived as scary or deindividuated mobs.
2. Why would a rebellion in a holding facility lead to changes in the law that favor the rioters? Blowing stuff up is more likely to lead to more stringent arrangements.

3. Roland is unwound when he is because he has a rare blood type, AB-. I'm not sure how Rh factors into it, but AB is the universal recipient. Though it's a rare type, it's not necessary to have it on hand for AB recipients, at least AB+. Further, Connor receives Roland's transplanted arm. So Connor is also AB-? Since this is true of only 0.6% of the US population, that's too much of a coincidence.

4. I'm willing to live with the conceit that one's consciousness pervades one's organs, but what about blood? Plasma? Lymph? The ending, though poignant, ruptures my suspension of disbelief with a) its wish fulfillment, and b) the implication that indeed, the unwinds are still alive--and even conscious!--as transplanted organs, which kind of kills the idea that unwinding is murder and substantiates the rationale for it.

Still, a good book, but not a 5-star experience.

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

#716
Title: When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
Author: Peter Godwin
Publisher: Picador
Year: 2005/2007
416 pages
Audiobook.

Godwin's memoir of growing up in Zimbabwe is a good companion piece to Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood; like Fuller's autobiography, Godwin's works best in the childhood segments. Godwin captures changing attitudes and moods over time and shows the sociopolitical changes in his country across his lifetime. The writing is descriptive but not flowery, and the dialogue flows naturally. 

Darke (Septimus Heap #6)

#715
Title: Darke (Septimus Heap #6)
Author:  Angie Sage
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Year: 2011
641 pages

One of the better books in this series, with plenty of action, a good level of anxiety, and teen self-preocccupation and angst. Some leveling occurs--Silas does something well, Simon attempts to mend his ways, and Septimus makes some errors. Enough multi-book story arcs are resolved for a good sense of closure, while others remain tantalizingly open for the 7th book including, perhaps, Princess Jenna's relationship to the Port Witch Coven. 

Blue Nights

#714
Title: Blue Nights
Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Knopf
Year: 2011 
208 pages

While The Year of Magical Thinking was easy to become absorbed in, and was an excellent evocation of grief, Blue Nights is a better-structured book. In part, this is because Didion is always so meticulous about language and the sequencing of scenes. Here, that very carefulness is subject to scrutiny. If The Year of Magical Thinking is about grief, Blue Nights may be about the defenses against grief, about ways of narrating, remembering, and depicting that subsume the emotional chaos of the experience. The Year of Magical Thinking was cathartic to read. Blue Nights may be about the agony of not making peace with overwhelming grief except by engaging with it only as a cognitive experience. Didion ruminates on her own mortality, draws parallels and identifies chasms between herself and her daughter, and demonstrates ways in which a telling cannot contain the subtleties of the experience, and may deflect the teller and listener. She uses the representation of privilege within the memoir to provide the reader with an experience to mirror hers of trying to understand her relationship with Quintana. If this sounds technical, it is, but Didion manages to convey her dilemma eloquently and without bogging down. It's a remarkable book and I recommend it highly.

The Medicine Cabinet of Curiosities: An Unconventional Compendium of Health Facts and Oddities, from Asthmatic Mice to Plants that Can Kill

#713
Title: The Medicine Cabinet of Curiosities: An Unconventional Compendium of Health Facts and Oddities, from Asthmatic Mice to Plants that Can Kill
Author: Nick Bakalar
Publisher: Times Books
Year: 2009
240 pages

There was nothing wrong with this, and I mean the 2 stars in my Goodreads review in the Goodreads sense of "it was ok." However, it seemed more desultory than its brevity could accommodate and still seem complete, even in the "a little of this, a little of that" style.

I didn't learn much that I didn't already know, so I may be the wrong audience. Probably people who don't work in in medical/allied health professions would find it a more engaging and gripping reading experience. The information presented about which I have professional knowledge was generally correct, and in some cases I could identify the source material without checking the notes. 

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

#712
Title: Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Year: 2008
319 pages

Roach is an entertaining writer, and I especially admire a book on sex that has a footnote on presidential running mates. In Bonk, she's more hands-on than you'd expect, sometimes astonishingly so. She's sort of the George Plimpton of sexology.

I'd have given the book 4 stars were it not for the last chapter. There, she seems to breezily excuse Masters and Johnson's instructions for conversion therapy (same-sex to other-sex orientation) without much acknowledgement of how cruel this practice was (and is), or even an adequate exploration of its lack of efficacy. The chapter could have ended the book with a cautionary tale about how professional or cultural ideas about healthy sexuality don't always match the data. Instead, there's a blip about homosexuality and its mis-treatment, the end. I expect better of Roach and her editors. 

Paradise Lost

#711
Title: Paradise Lost
Author: John Milton
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Year: 1667/1984
276 pages
Audiobook.

A good reader (Frederick Davidson) on this edition. The blank verse resonates and emphasizes without overpowering, and he does a good job with both rhymes and enjambment. This exegesis of Genesis relies fairly heavily on the Greek and Roman pantheons for symbolism and plot points. It's interesting to see how much more psychological this is than that other stalwart of Christian allegory, The Pilgrim's Progress.There is also more imagery, more shown than told, and more theological argument in the manner that we will later see in de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom. Eve is weak-willed, while Adam is just a darned nice guy. They feed and angel lunch and hear its expositions. 

Ship Breaker

#710
Title: Ship Breaker
Author: Paolo Bacigalupi
Publisher: Little, Brown
Year: 2010
336 pages
Audiobook.

Middle- to young adult novel with a pretty straightforward plot, post-apocalyptic but not as dystopian as The Windup Girl. The worldbuilding is pretty good, though the language is less rich (and less grim) than in his adult works. I try hard to picture the half-men as Daniel Lee's Manimals, but usually fail and imagine something like McGruff the Crime Dog. 

Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

#709
Title: Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher: Renaissance Press
Year: 2009
256 pages
Audiobook.

Overbroad strokes and a sour attitude no matter what render this one of Ehrenreich's worse showings. In her contempt for the positive psychology movement, she sloppily confounds a varity of professional and pop practices, and seems to ignore the vast world of cognitive psychotherapy, which is nothing if not tediously data-rich. Ehrenreich (and to be fair, some of those she derides) seems to think the goal of cognitive or positive intervention is to live longer. It's not. What some studies do show is not gains in longevity, but a better self-reported quality of life. Ehrenreich might see this as a way to coax people to go gently into that good night, but that isn't how I've experienced it as a therapist or informed consumer. She chooses really outlandish, stupid examples without identifying them as extreme, and she ignores the huge history of stupid practices in the name of religion, vilifying psychology as if it did not derive from and in many ways reflect the field of philosophy.

I can identify with her indignation expressed in the breast cancer chapter, and found her discussion of Calvanism interesting. The others are often distorted and bitter rather than funny.

Ehrenreich's Marxism is best when she sticks to her critique of capitalism, rather than, as in Nickel And Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, when she devolves to snapping at white women for, she reports, having more pubic hair in their bathrooms. Bright Sided may be my last Ehrenreich.

The Curse of the Giant Tortoise: Tragedies, Crimes, and Mysteries in the Galapagos Islands (6th Ed.)

#708
Title: The Curse of the Giant Tortoise: Tragedies, Crimes, and Mysteries in the Galapagos Islands (6th Ed.)
Author: Octavio Latorre
Publisher: National Cultural Fund
Year: 1997
Country: Ecuador
243 pages

Ecuador.

A poorly-organized, poorly-translated hidtory of Galapagos. It often crosses into incoherence and doesn't seem to have a point other than to describe a series of disasters that, for a reader without other references and resources, are here rendered unintelligible.

[Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH]

#707
[Title: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH]
Author: Robert C. O'Brien
Publisher: Aladdin Books
Year: 1971/1986
240 pages

BEFORE:
The serendipitous and simultaneous purchase of Rat Girl: A Memoir and Rat Island: Predators in Paradise and the World's Greatest Wildlife Rescue at the National Discount Rituals to Mark the Death of Borders was neither unremarked (by others) nor uncelebrated (alas, by me alone). I realized that I had other rat books at home, enough for a thematic rat shelf. Zinsser's Rats, Lice, and History: Being a Study in Biography, Which, After Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indispensable for the Preparation of the Lay Reader, Deals With the Life History of Typhus Fever, Sullivan's Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants, and Guthrie's Even the Rat Was White: A Historical View of Psychology (Allyn & Bacon Classics Edition), Second Edition would be nicely complemented by Hersh and Stolzenburg. I am the type of person who rearranges some of the shelves to see if you are paying attention: Less Than Zero to Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home. The Sound and the Fury, The Red and the Black, The Cook and the Carpenter. Organization by spectrum. Spines depicting faces. I'm like the Kliban cartoon captioned "Just give Alice some pencils and she will stay busy for hours."

In the night I bolted up in a cold sweat. It was actually a hot sweat, but the room was cold. I cried out, but using my inside inside voice, "What about Mrs. Frisby?!" I had read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, twice. Surely I had a copy. Where else would I have read it? Not at a friend's house. Let's face it, my friends have kids who move right from Heather Has Two Mommies to Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. They eschew the Frisbys and The Borrowers and Caddie Woodlawn. I, too, had skipped directly from Little House in the Big Woods to Gods, Graves and Scholars: The Story of Archaeology and History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine "Firsts" in Recorded History. In fact, I lost points on an IQ test in high school when I answered the question "Who is the god or goddess of dreams?" with "Geshtinana, the divine poetess and dream interpreter." Apparently when your guidance counselor answers "In which mythology?" with "Any," she doesn't mean Sumerian. I'd have known the correct answer if those Percy Jackson books had been published, but they were decades in the future. The point is, I skipped most children's and middle readers' books, returning to them only as an adult.

I have a hard time with library books, too. There's something about a library book that makes me want to eat it rather than read it. I don't like the time pressure. Sometimes a book needs to deliquesce on my shelf for 3 or 4 years before it is sufficiently ripe. So where had the copy of Mrs. Frisby I mostly undoubtedly had had gone to?

I don't know, and I don't care. I picked up a used copy for $2 today. I will re-read it soon. At that time, my review will follow this exposition. My rat shelf is sufficient until I acquire a copy of Doctor Rat, which I began but never finished when I was 15 and worked at a library.

AFTER:
As a child, I was troubled by the lack of verisimilitude in Stuart Little. It wasn't the invisible car that bothered me, but the idea that a human could give birth to a mouse and even notice. I was aware, even as a tot, on account of my mad reading skillz, that baby mice were born in littlers, not singly, and that a litter of mousie pups would fit in a spoon. I merely mention this to demonstrate that I am a discerning reader who can suspend my disbelief when warranted. I was willing to believe that good commie rats can form an anarcho-syndicalist collective and live off the land, while bad capitalist rats get zapped by their own electricity. Or at least, that is how I read the moral. 

State of Wonder

#706
Title: State of Wonder
Author: Ann Patchett
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2011
353 pages
Audiobook.

 A somewhat silly premise and conclusion, though that's okay for this light fare. I don't buy for a minute that she'd leave Easter. Another 20 pages of agonized decision-making could have rescued this. and served the novel's need for Marina to have learned something about herself, her own choices, and moral relativism in order to moderate her contempt for Mr. Fox.

The Shadow of the Wind

#705
Title: The Shadow of the Wind
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2005
500 pages

Grand themes of destiny, conflation/collapse, and perfect coincidences are engagingly drawn in broad strokes, similar to but grander than Q & A (Slumdog Millionaire). Occasional slips into magical realism weren't necessary and bugged me. Some parts fit together better than others; at best, it was like seeing something sucked into a whirlpool, disintegrated, and miraculously emerging in a different form. The burned man's identity was obvious early on. Oddly, I was simultaneously reading The English Patient, with its own burned man whose identity was important and concealed. 

The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which is to Come, Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream

#704
Title: The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which is to Come, Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream
Author: John Bunyan
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Year: 1666/2000
325 pages
Audiobook.

This is not a review of the religious sentiments expressed in this early allegorical novel.

The allegory itself was heavy-handed, perhaps because the art of fiction was still young. There is much in the way of deus ex machina, miracles and the like, while the plot is not much developed. It falls somewhere between Jaynes's "[the] god told me to do it" structure described in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and Forster's description of a plot (rather than a picaresque series of "and then... and then..." events).

Part 1 is far more engaging. Part 2 ("oh, yeah, women can be saved, too") seemed repetitious.

Emotionally, it was similar to reading the Left Behind series in that I have a hard time viscerally understanding why faith trumps acts. That, I suppose, demonstrates that I was raised in a very different spiritual and philosophical milieu. 

The English Patient

#703
Title: The English Patient
Author: Michael Ondaatje
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1992
302 pages
Audiobook.

The first of two books featuring a burned man with a mysterious, plot-twisting identity I happened to read simultaneously in some weird kismet-y thing.

I never saw the film, and this was so much better than anyone led me to believe that I must now a) re-evaluate everything I've ever been told; and b) read everything by Ondaatje that I haven't already.

The complaints I'd heard were that "it's boring" and "nothing happens," neither of which were my experience of it. I did think the parallelism, symbolism, and complementary aspects of characters and actions were pretty obvious and overblown, but I didn't find that this detracted from my enjoyment. I kept thinking, "If they made a film of this, I'll bet they'd...," so I suppose I'll have to see if they did.