Open Road's Best of Panama: Your Passport to the Perfect Trip!

#731
Title: Open Road's Best of Panama: Your Passport to the Perfect Trip!
Author: Bruce C. Morris
Publisher: Open Road
Year: 2008
248 pages

For a book whose big sell is that it only has what you need, it's amazingly, astonishingly repetitive. I'm not just talking about repeated information, but word for word, cut-and-paste repetitions, sometimes 3 or 4 times through the volume. I'd have rather bought a smaller book without repetition, or this length book with more information.

Holy Cow! An Indian Adventure

#730
Title: Holy Cow! An Indian Adventure
Author: Sarah Macdonald
Publisher: Bantam
Year: 2002/2004
298 pages
Audiobook.

I enjoyed this more than I first thought I would, but less than I'd expect. I liked it precisely because it <i>wasn't</i> fun girl adventures in India. The author conveyed her fear and the harrowing nature of many of her experiences, which is useful for my teaching. What I liked less well was what seemed like a superficial tour of available religons. I assume that this was the great idea that sold the book, but I'd have liked more depth, whether or not this premise was real or constructed. 

The Filter Bubble

#729
Title: The Filter Bubble
Author: Eli Pariser
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2011
304 pages
Audiobook.

If anyone has told you recently that the information you want is in "the second link that comes up for X on Google," but it's not, you already know the first part of what Pariser is going to tell you. Much of this book addresses aspects of the issues of filtering, which means monitoring, and how our online behavior and data may be used not only to tailor what we see, but to commodetize us. Pariser does a good job of demonstrating that a filtered web does not flatten access to information, but compartmentalizes it. At the same time, he represents the necessity of some filtering, given the crush of data. If you read hard science fiction you'll find this confirmatory; if you tend to be naive about what you post on Facebook, it may usefully increase your paranoia.

The Sense of an Ending

#728
Title: The Sense of an Ending
Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 2004
144 pages
Audiobook.

What I like here is how Barnes sneaks in changes of genre within the fictional confessional memoir. I enjoyed attending to the structure of the novel. Less enjoyable was the story aspect, which was not terrifically interesting to me, perhaps because I didn't find any of the characters sympathetic.

The Demon King (Seven Realms, #1)

#727
Title: The Demon King (Seven Realms, #1)
Author: Cinda Williams Chima
Publisher: Hyperion
Year: 2010
528 pages

I almost stopped reading early on because the writing was so awkward. Example:
Using a stick, he lifted the amulet by its chain. It dangled, spinning hypnotically in the sunlight, a green translucent stone cunningly carved into a snarl of serpents with ruby eyes. The staff was topped with a brilliant round-cut diamond larger than he'd ever seen, and the snake's eyes were blood red rubies (18-19).
Well, which is it? A stone? A stone topped with a diamond? A stone topped with a diamond plus inset rubies? Isn't "ruby eyes" pretty much the same as eyes that are "blood red rubies"? Are there many serpents, or one snake? And what is this "staff" of which you speak? This is all made worse by the cover illustration, which shows one snake with a ruby eye, no translucency to the green stone, no diamond, no staff, and a metal setting. Fortunately, it picked up after that, though there are certainly tracts that cry out for basic editing.

The first volume introduces the protagonists and sets them on their courses. There are some enjoyable reveals (both in the story's frame and historical) and believable villains. This might turn out to be a quest narrative, but since Han acquires a pretty good Magic Thingie by page 18, the journey may be one of discovery rather than acquisition.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

#726
Title: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Author: Dave Eggers
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 2000/2001
530 pages
Audiobook + paperback.

Eggers captures the manic/anxious response to complex grief in a mostly-memoir that is evocative of the Snowden episodes of Catch-22 mashed together with the last chapter of Ulysses. I found it unreadable on the page, but almost unbearable (in a good way) as an audiobook, capably read by Dion Graham in a naturalistic and exhausting manner. I wasn't put off by the titring meta-self-scrutiny, though it tired me and I'm glad I read other work by Eggers first or I might not have done so. Bonus: I learned (from Wikipedia, not this book) that Dave and Toph write the delightful Dr. and Mr. Doris Haggis-on-Whey books, notably Your Disgusting Head.

In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and The Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language

#725
Title: In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and The Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language
Author: Arika Okrent
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Year: 2009/2010
342 pages

 As a college student I'd have given it 5 stars and learned Klingon. Now I just enjoyed it. Okrent begins with a tense writing style that makes me want to reassure her that anybody who picks this up is a nerd and will only find the sometimes arch tone offputting. We all know who we are and why we're reading it, so just relax.

Okrent presents a good range of artificial languages created by dissimilar means and to different ends. It's a nice overview and introduction, suitable for lay readers but with amusements here and there for people with a background in linguistics.