Speak (10th Anniversary Edition)

#677
Title: Speak (10th Anniversary Edition)
Author: Laurie Halse Anderson
Publisher: Speak (Penguin)
Year: 1999/2009
240 pages

This was okay for its genre, and certainly better than some of its ilk. The initiating event, and thus the outcome, was obvious early on, so my reading interest was less a matter of what would happen and more one of how Hulse would get there. I suppose I would have liked the protagonist to have more insight about how she also engages in stereotyping and writing people off; while she resolved the plot by addressing the problem, but this could have been an opportunity for more maturational self-reflection as well.

I was entertained by the protagonist's railing against symbolism, and the author's comments in this edition about not liking what she had to read in English class, when the symbolism here is troweled on like goth makeup. Perhaps this is one of the insights I'd have liked Melinda to experience. Ah, well. At least the attractive boy is a nerd, and at least there are no teen vampires. 

You Better Not Cry: Stories

#676
Title: You Better Not Cry: Stories
Author: Augusten Burroughs
Publisher: Picador
Year: 2009
222 pages

Interesting to read as a companion to David Sedaris's Holidays on Ice. Where Sedaris's Christmas tales are absurd but restrained, Burroughs provides the more warped and damaged end of the spectrum (in the last piece, the warpage is literal). Some reviewers don't like Burroughs's sudden transition from weird child to problematic drunk, but I though it captured perfectly the nature of blackouts and traumatic memory suppression. Read Sedaris first, and imagine Amy Sedaris as Jerri Blank creeping around the edges of both. 

Holidays on Ice

#675
Title: Holidays on Ice
Author: David Sedaris
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Year: 1997/2008
172 pages

Not his most even collection, but generally entertaining. Sedaris does best with absurd autobiography that focuses on interpersonal dynamics; the fictional pieces don't hit quite as hard.

War is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World's Worst War Zones

#674
Title: War is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World's Worst War Zones
Author/illustrator?: David Axe
Role unknown--illustrator?: Matt Bors
Publisher: NAL
Year: 2010
128 pages

I could see some uses for this book, say in an undergraduate class that looks at the difficulty of making meaning from trauma. However, it's not well-enough realized, and I wouldn't want to appear to endorse it. The introduction sets the tone, with his self-aggrandizing war junkie friend's assertion that middle class American life is boring and inconsequential. Not my middle class American life, buddy. My life is full of meaningful activities, love, relationships, vividness, and service, all in the context of my active awareness of my privilege as an economically secure person whose country is not embroiled in conflict. Generally I stop reading books that begin by insulting the general reader, but I figured, hey, it's not Axe's fault that his friend is a swaggering schmuck.

Sadly, Axe is little better, though he insults himself more actively and the reader more covertly. I'm sorry he's bored, and I'm sorry his life is never quite satisfying even when he's in a war, which is where he seems to want to be. I'm sorry that he lives with constant, simmering anger that he can't quite attach to anything. One shocking frame in this graphic autobiography expresses his dilemma when his girlfriend, another reporter, wants to travel to a war with him (when he's been calling his buddies and trying to get them to go to a war with him). He can't bring himself to tell her no, though he expresses this with an obscenity and hostility. So she's good enough to have sex with but it makes you angry when she wants to go with you because you'll have to behave better in the war? One hopes the girlfriend noticed this contempt and got out sooner rather than later.

As to Axe's musings about his reasons for wanting to be in war zones but not finding this satisfying, I found them not terribly coherent or compelling. Is it machismo? Existential emptiness? Unmentioned substance use troubles? Hard to guess. I don't know what Axe's in-person vibe is, but I imagine from this book that he's a person you edge away from at a party as he warms to his topic.

Whether he's a good war reporter/photographer, I don't know and I'm not moved to find out.

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.