Cephalopod Coffeehouse: The Bone Clocks

It's the end of the month, and time for our roundup of the best books of the past few weeks. To see the other Cephalopod reviews, click here.

I read two really excellent books this month, both of which I gave five stars to on Goodreads: David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks, and Laline Paul's The Bees. Readers may know Mitchell from Cloud Atlas, another great book which has been turned into an apparently terrible movie. (I haven't seen it.) Mitchell is hard to categorize. His writing is literary and often solidly realistic, but he always seems to wander off into the strange and speculative. In his writing I see shades of Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, and Stephen King. But those just give you hints: he has his own totally unique style. He must be synesthetic because his metaphors and verbs sparkle with a mixture of senses that are rarely or never combined. You can practically chew on his language: "icicles drip drops of bright in steep-sloped streets from storybooks whose passersby have mountain souls" is a not-untypical example. (From The Bone Clocks.) But if that sounds distractingly ornate, don't worry: he is a nimble stylist and enjoys playing with every kind of mood and form. He's funny, he's dark, he's just-the-facts, he's show-offy, he's dry, he's wet. In Cloud Atlas he toys with channeling completely different genres in each section. In The Bone Clocks he sticks pretty much to one tone—though, echoing Cloud Atlas, he does have a number of narrators who each bring a slightly different style to the prose. I'm in love with his writing enough now that I'm simply going to commit myself to reading his entire body of work. (Not a difficult job: he only has a half-dozen novels or so.) Right now I'm reading Black Swan Green, an earlier work. It's got one narrator, a teenage boy, and is stylistically very unified. So far.

OK, OK. I hear you. "Stop whittering on about the style, woman! Tell us the plot!" Well. In The Bone Clocks there's this girl, Holly Sykes. And she's a normal English teenage girl, except she's telepathic, and some psychic vampires discover her and she gets caught up in a temporal war between good immortals and bad immortals. I feel like it's rude to say I was reminded quite a bit of the HBO show True Blood, but I was ... at least in the "battle of immortals + psychic mortal" aspect.

"I'm just a waitress!"

Hello? I lost you, didn't I? You were with me until I started talking about telepathy and immortals. Well, trust me on this: Mitchell is far more comparable to Dickens or Du Maurier than he is to Stephenie Meyer. He is a lovely, accomplished writer, and he is fully aware of the eye-rolling genre writers deal with. "A book can't be half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half-pregnant!" a literary agent splutters at a character in the novel who is himself a writer of half-fantasy novels. Yeah. This is just one of the many winky metafictional twists in this novel. David Mitchell hears your scorn of fantasy, and he is not going to let you get away with it.

No judgy-judgy!

OK. Moving swiftly onward. The Bees is another experimental novel that totally hit its mark, at least for me. We follow the adventures of Flora 717, a worker-bee who is destined to help her hive weather the kind of crises that real bees are coping with: early frosts, cell-phone towers, wasps, spiders, mice, and pesticides. Flora is one of the most engaging protagonists (human or non) I've come across, and I highly recommend this unusual book. I think it's especially appropriate on a high-school reading list. I mean this in the best possible way: it's entertaining, accessible, smart, and has a not-overbearing ecological message.

Since the last Coffeehouse I have also read, for the record, Sarah Bird's The Yokota Officer's Club, a lightly fictionalized memoir of her stint as a military brat on an Air Force base in Japan; Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West, about a disillusioned and dissolute young journalist during the Great Depression; and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, about a pizza deliverer who quickly morphs into sword-wielding computer-hacking badass. But actually it's about viruses. But actually it's about memes and language. But actually it's about a libertarian dream-nightmare of a corporate-owned America ... oh hell, that one you just have to read for yourself to sort out. All of these were fascinating books in their own right.

Happy reading, everyone! Off to see what everyone else read/loved this past month.

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: The Storied Life of AJ Fikry

I read a good book this month! What a relief. I was beginning to suspect I'd permanently lost my ability to really enjoy novels. How horrible that would be, considering the amount of reading I do. The good book was The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, a sweet little novel about a cranky bookstore owner, recently widowed, who is only in his 30s but is already a grumpy old man. He doesn't like modernity: the computers, the e-books, the humans. Then someone dumps a baby on his doorstep and thus begins the process of resurrecting his joie de vivre. (Hey, don't laugh at me: it's a phrase Fikry would use.) The storyline moves along tidily and contains some good twists, and all the plot threads are so neatly tied up in the end you could put a bow on them. The characters are quirky, three-dimensional (mostly), and believable, and the writing is solid and literary. You can tell the author is a seasoned writer, though I'd never heard of her before. The complaints I've heard about the book are a little odd: mostly that it's too good. Too tidy, too sunny, too well-crafted. Well, after the raft of crap I've been plowing through, I wasn't complaining. A pleasurable, smart story, one that leaves you smiling and satisfied, is a lovely thing.

The other books I read in September were pretty solidly in the three-star category. That third star, sitting in the middle between "it was really good" and "I hated it" should be bigger. It covers so much territory. I feel so differently about each book I mark three stars: some I admired overall but just had a few too many flaws to make it to four stars. Some were quite problematic but had some shining moments that bumped them up past two stars. I feel like a decimal system is needed just for that "meh" middle grading.

Anyway: The first was The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother. I'd promised the blogosphere last month I was going to read this, and I did. I didn't love it as much as I thought, perhaps because my expectations were very high. So many people have praised this book to the sky. James McBride's mother's story is indeed remarkable, almost unbelievable—she was a Polish Jewish immigrant who was raised in the deep South by a horribly abusive father and a loving but weak, physically disabled mother. She went on to marry two black men (her first husband died of cancer) and raise a total of twelve biracial children, mostly by herself, in very rough circumstances in New York City. They never even knew she was a Jew till McBride forced the story out of her—before he was born, she converted to Christianity and founded a Baptist church with his father, her first husband. And that storytelling is great, it speaks for itself ... what bothered me was how much I felt McBride left out, probably because he was protecting her and his siblings. The book was an homage to his mother, almost a eulogy, though she was alive when he wrote it—and really, she "wrote" nearly half of it by granting him recorded interviews. But on the whole, the memoir is not very reflective, and McBride's own voice felt hidden, or flattened. I recently read his award-winning novel The Good Lord Bird, a book written in a wry, humorous, spunky voice. That voice was totally missing from this memoir, which felt more journalistic. Still an interesting read, but not quite what I expected.

Next I read The Painter, by Peter Heller. What I liked best about this novel is the setting: it's all in the Rocky Mountains, and about half of it is set in Santa Fe, a place I called home for 12 years. Heller really knows the area. He even made a reference to the "stick teepees" found in the mountains there, big structures fashioned of aspen poles; nobody seems to know who made them. The novel itself is a mashup of Cormac McCarthy and Ernest Hemingway, or at least it tries to be. It's got the murder-in-the-southwest aspect of the former, and the aggressive, unapologetic masculinity of the latter. But the women of the novel are a real problem. On page 2, we get this description: “She is twenty-eight. An age of drama. She reminds me of a chicken in the way she is top-heavy, looks like she should topple over. I mean her trim body is small enough to support breasts the size of tangerines and she is grapefruit.” That is just ... terrible. He compares her to poultry, and her boobs to citrus fruits. She is a tiny-but-bodacious babe throwing herself at the beardy burly protagonist who is decades her senior. Because that's likely. Gak. This sort of thing happens a lot, and every time I considered throwing the book across the room. But it was a library book, and one mustn't damage federal property, right? I could have just politely returned it unfinished but I loved Heller's first novel, The Dog Stars, very much. So I persisted till the end, and some good bits almost made up for the fruit-boobs.

Not boobs

The third book I read in September was Bark, Lorrie Moore's latest short-story collection. It's been sixteen years since her last one! Not that I'm one to talk, but Moore is kind of the opposite of prolific. What's curious about these stories is that, as many critics have noted, you kind of get the feeling they were languishing on her hard drive for, oh, about sixteen years. Perhaps she didn't like them very much but got tired of reworking them, and her editor was bugging her, so she just sent them along. (She also made sure the word "bark" was in every story. Is that clever or schticky?) A few of these stories are amazing, and I'd already read those: they appeared in The New Yorker. If you do pick up this collection (say, at the library), read Paper Losses, Referential, and Debarking. They are excellent, some of the best writing you might read all year. If you've never read Lorrie Moore, however, you should probably stick with Birds of America or Self Help. And you'd better like your humor on the mordant side!

That's my Coffeehouse Contribution for September. I look forward to hopping over to all the other reviews, links to which can be found here at our host The Armchair Squid's site.

Here's to a bookish October: may all your next reads be wonderful.

Book Review, Part II: The Race Thing

After I wrote my standard Coffeehouse review this morning (below this one) I realized I nearly missed a huge opportunity today: a chance to talk about books on race. And by "race" I mean that thing everyone is talking about but nobody really wants to think about. I'm talking about Ferguson, and America, and where we are, and how we got to be that way.

We know by now that stories (especially novels, but also memoirs and other narrative-style writing) are one of the best ways to crack open a person's empathy. If there is one thing I see a desperate shortage of lately, especially in discussions of what happened in Ferguson, it's empathy. People are so quick to defend themselves, their tribe, and their privilege. That is a sure way to keep things exactly as they are now, and I don't know about the rest of you, but the way things are now seems pretty unacceptable to me. One of the gentlest, easiest ways to effect social change is to pick up a book. Immerse yourself in someone else's story for a while—get out of your own head, your own story, your own narrative. Hopefully, by the time you put the book down, you will have gained something precious: Compassion. A yearning for justice. A willingness to stop defending the status quo. If nothing else, just a little bit more understanding.

I am probably not the person who should be writing this, as I am not nearly as well-read as many of my peers on this subject. But I am here, I'm the one with this idea, so all I can do is list what I've read and tell you how it's affected me. Please, if you have other suggestions, share them.

• Black Boy, by Richard Wright. I read this because my daughter was assigned to read it for her high-school English class. This is Wright's autobiography of his younger years, when he was growing up in early 20th century Mississippi. Beautifully written and uncompromising, Wright starkly lays out the grim realities of life for a young man of color in the Jim Crow south. Before I read this book, I could not conceive of what life was like for people of color in that time, in that place.

• Beloved, by Toni Morrison. I wrote my senior thesis on this book in college, so I studied it more intently than any other book I've read. I've read most of her work, and this one is Morrison's masterpiece. It's a masterpiece generally—for those who prefer films, the movie adaptation is also good. The story is about a family who has escaped slavery, and how the mother reacts when the slaver comes to reclaim her and her small children. Brutal, heartbreaking, and gorgeous.

• Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. This one, which I reviewed in full here, is a little gentler than the previous two. The narrative is more joyful, there is less brutality. It's at least as much about feminism as it is about race. For a sensitive reader, this would be a good introduction into race-themed fiction.

• Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This is a new novel, unlike the classics above, and it's written by an American from Africa, not an African-American. Adichie's highly autobiographical book contains observations about the racial dynamics of her chosen country that are absolutely unique. Because she comes from outside the US, she sees things invisible to the rest of us, and her observations don't come with the heavy baggage that weighs down American discussions about race. She finds ordinary things very odd and kind of funny: she had no idea "watermelon" and "fried chicken" were racially-loaded foods. Adichie's roommate thought all Africans were poor and couldn't wrap her brain around the fact that Adichie's family back home had servants. In Nigeria, of course, "race" is not much of a concept, so she had to have American blackness explained to her. As she learns, we learn. The book certainly opened my eyes. (And the novel is often very funny, too.)

• The Other Wes Moore, by Wes Moore. "Two kids with the same name lived in the same decaying city. One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison. Here is the story of two boys and the journey of a generation." (From Goodreads.) Both Wes Moores are black. This memoir examines the turns of a dime on which fate can rest. Whether your life ends up in success or failure depends on so much outside your control ... it especially depends on what happens to you when you're little, before you can possibly be held responsible for anything. Bad choices are made, certainly, and good character is rewarded, but there's so much more to this story—and to any story—than the usual "bootstraps" myth we are fed.

• The Color of Water, by James McBride. OK, I haven't actually read this yet, but it has been recommended to me so many times I'm moving it to the top of my TBR. This is also a memoir, written as a "black man's tribute to his white mother." I've read other things by McBride, and know his writing is excellent.

Reading one story helps a little, but each story we read about people we've labeled "the other" erases the line between us and them. The more stories we read, the more we build compassion and community. Hate and fear, apathy and blame, can only exist in a context of ignorance. Let's talk less, listen more, and learn.

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: August 29

Oh my people! August 2014 has been a terrible month for books. I hardly feel I can join the "Best Book of the Month" discussion. It's as though I've been hanging out at the salad bar at Wendy's ("I highly recommend the dry rubbery cottage cheese with the wilted iceberg lettuce and a shot of that excellent cleaning-grade white vinegar") when I could have been nomming up all the good things at Momofuku.

OK. That being said, things were not entirely awful. I'm nearly done with Tigerman, which I picked up because an NPR reviewer practically had babies with it. "How do you know when a book has hooked you? When it really gets you in the guts and won't let go?" he gabbled. "When you can't stop telling people about it. When you catch yourself inserting the title of the book into conversations where it has no place, breathlessly insisting to all your friends and relations that they need to read this book right now, and waving it around on elevators and hoping that someone asks you about it." Crikey. It's like he's found religion, or a really great sex toy.

But nothing can compete with that kind of build up, it turns out. Or probably something could, but not Tigerman. I'm 95% of the way through so it's possible the last few pages will just knock my tiny socks off, but given what I've digested so far, it's only OK. I put it down without regret and must remind myself to pick it up the next day. While I appreciate many passages, Harkaway spends way too much time in his narrator's mine, ruminating. Like a cow chewing her cud. This is what's happening. This is how I feel. This is what might occur next. This is what it all means. Dude, seriously, put the brain down and pick the gun up. I would never offer that advice to a real person, but you are the narrator of a thriller: stop philosophizing and do things.

Love the Chip Kidd designed cover, though!

The other three books I read were not exactly shake-a-granny good, either: Will Grayson, Will Grayson, The House of the Scorpion, and Hugh Howey's Dust. None were terrible, really. I even gave two of them 4 whole stars on Goodreads. But it says something that when I tried to dredge up the memory of what I'd read in August, I had to turn to Goodreads to flippin' remember. It took less than 31 days to entirely forget each book I'd read. I feel like part of the problem is that the older I get and the more books I've read, the pickier I become. Everything I read this month belonged to a genre: Contemporary Thriller, YA, YA, and Dystopian Thriller, respectively. And it's OK for a decade or two, I suppose, but you begin to cotton on to patterns after a while, don't you? It all becomes entirely predictable. This is not to say new genre novel won't come along and just rattle my bones, but it's been a while.

Dear genre fiction ... I love you, but we need to see other people.

To see the other Coffeehouse reviews, which hopefully will be more enthusiastic, go to our kindly host's page. Happy reading!

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: July 25

I finished no books in June, due to my long, painful commitment to finishing Charles Dickens' Bleak House. But then a couple books I'd been waiting for arrived at the library for me, so I put BH aside and jumped happily into those. After that, something got unclogged in me and I began reading everything in sight—I even finished Bleak House. All told, I got through seven novels in the first three weeks of July. Don't be too impressed with me, though, because of number of them were novellas. I do love me a short-short book.

From least to most liked, here's a rundown. (Skip to the end if you just want the Coffeehouse minimum of "best book read.")

7. Unwind by Neal Shusterman. A YA dystopian thriller aimed mostly at teen boys. It's kind of nice to see a YA dystopian with a boy protagonist, and my teenage son certainly enjoyed this book. (He's also perfectly willing to read books with girl protagonists.) I like to read what my kids read, especially if they ask me to and if the book seems provocative in some way. "Unwind" is meant to be provocative, but although I did fly through the pages I never really felt that provoked. Big issues are dangled in front of the reader but not fully explored. Perhaps the rest of the series does more exploration. (There is one scene that is quite disturbing, though not at all graphic, and it is the strongest scene in the book. But ... be forewarned. It's creepy as hell.)

6. Bleak House by Charles Dickens. I feel strange putting a Dickens book this low on the list and this close to a YA thriller, but there you have it. I have read and loved other Dickens novels, but this one was a slow, difficult read for me. It picks up at the end, but at nearly a thousand pages long, there's just too much tedious filler. You can tell he wrote this in installments. Beautiful imagery, though. I would still recommend this to any student of writing, but I'd read tiny chunks of it over a very long period of time. Savor the little word paintings, don't worry about the story. (SparkNotes is extremely helpful for keeping the convoluted plotline and dozens of incidental characters straight.)

5. We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. Another YA thriller, but this one is set in modern-day reality. Well, reality-ish. The narrator of this slim novel is highly unreliable, as you might expect from the title. You can't be entirely sure if the story you're being told is what really happened—and you're not sure the narrator knows, either. Lockhart combines elements of King Lear, Wuthering Heights, fairy tales, and M. Night Shyamalan to create something that feels both epic and creepy. Three wealthy teenage cousins and their outsider friend decamp to a posh island for summer vacations, along with their mothers (who are sisters) and their grandfather, the controlling patriarch. Yep, that's the King Lear part. Tension is simmering among the adults and one summer things come to a terrible climax. But the exact nature of the disaster is withheld from both the narrator and the reader till the end, turning this into a mystery/thriller of sorts. I read this before my kids, but have recommended it to them.

4. Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement. In the fictional town of Guerrero, Mexico, all the children born are either boys or girls masquerading as boys. If word gets out that a girl is born, the drug lords will whisk her off as soon as she hits adolescence. The mothers not only raise their daughters as sons (cutting off their hair, blackening their teeth, uglifying them in any way they can), they dig holes in their yards and stuff the girls into the ground as soon as they hear any car approaching. To be a girl in Mexico is to be an inevitable victim of human trafficking; the lesson of this novel is that even your mother can't save you. Not the most uplifting of stories, but Clement removes us from some of the suffering by taking a poetic, distant tone. It's also a very short novel, which maybe it shouldn't have been. It's similar to The Kite Runner and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena in that it explores the effect of war on civilians who just want to be left alone ... except both of those novels really get into the inner world of the suffering protagonists and the outer world that created the chaos. Clement sort of skims over it; it's an impressionist painting. A pastel Monet slur of a minefield. (Note: although this novel does feature a teenage girl, it's not YA. It could be read by teenagers, but it's not written for them.)

3. Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill. Even shorter than Clement's book, this tiny little gem is an impressionist painting of a marriage. And you know, whenever you hear, "it's about a marriage," that it's not going to be all sugar and rainbows. The poetic-impressionist thing works better here than it does in Clement's book, probably because the subject is so much more minute. A marriage is a thing you can peer into with a microscope; a country spiraling into war and chaos, less so. This novella is absolutely lovely and heartbreaking. If you are like me, you will find yourself underlining every passage. I recommend listening to Slate Magazine's audiobook club discussion of the book, hyperlinked above.

2. The Other Language by Francesca Marciano. A short-story collection featuring mostly Italian protagonists (Marciano lives in Rome) who are strangers in various strange lands. Although each story is about someone dealing with some sort of trouble—stories don't exist without conflict—I felt as if I was on an exciting globe-trotting vacation the entire time I read it. The book was so deliciously written I wanted to eat it when I was done. I rarely read things again but I was so transported by these sumptuous stories I will almost certainly be revisiting them.

1. Redeployment by Phil Klay. Another short-story collection, this one dedicated to men, mostly soldiers, who've been chewed up and spit out by our horrific decade of war. Klay himself is a veteran, a former Marine who served in Iraq. I thought he captured the speech and mindset of the soldier extremely well; it's not always flattering and it's definitely not for the faint of heart. But it's genuine, or as genuine as this civilian can imagine it to be. (Reviewers who served in the military agree that it's very accurate.) This book was published only a few months ago and has been received well ... I expect to see it on most Best of 2014 lists, and no doubt it's going to to earn a number of literary awards. Not only is the writing excellent, but it's something every American can benefit from reading ... no matter how you feel about the wars we've been fighting.

Please visit the other Coffeehouse reviews, starting with our tentacly host here!

Cephalopod Coffeehouse Review: Outlander

I have been plugging along through the same book I was reading at the end of last month, and although it's not War & Peace, it's not far off: Charles Dickens' Bleak House. Nine hundred and thirty-three tiny-typed pages long, it doubles as a doorstop, and its labyrinthine plot has me continuously referring to SparkNotes to keep everything and everyone straight. I'll review it when I'm done, which should be some time before my eightieth birthday.

Meanwhile, I'll just review something else. Because I know Mary Mary is reviewing Diana Gabaldon's Outlander for our Sisterhood blog, I figure I may as well offer up my own review of that book. We could call it a counter-review, since I'm pretty sure I can predict the gist of MM's review—and I, in contrast, quite liked Outlander. Enough that I actually read it twice: once about ten years ago, and again more recently when I was on a historical-fiction reading kick as part of my research for my own novel. It held up.

My own battered (and signed!) copy

I've listened to a number of Gabaldon's interviews about the book, and recently saw her give a talk, and she tells the same origin story: Outlander began as a "practice novel" she never really intended to publish. She had only two rules for herself: 1. don't stop until you've reached the end, and 2. do the best job you can. She opted for historical fiction because as a scientist, she already knew how to research; she picked Scotland more-or-less at random. She started with a scene that ended up as page 60: the one with a bunch of rough kilted men in a stone cottage, post-battle. The heroine, Claire, invited herself into the scene and wouldn't go away, Gabaldon says. Claire insisted using 20th-century terminology in an 18th-century setting, further causing problems. Rather than fight Claire through the whole book, Gabaldon opted to go with time-travel to make the anachronistic speech work. Then she had to invent a 20th-century life for Claire. The beginning of the novel, therefore, has a hodge-podge feel to it that puts some readers off—it feels like the story begins right around Chapter 3—when Claire meets Jamie.

Actors portraying Jamie & Claire in upcoming TV series

Claire and Jamie are one of the great romantic couples of modern literature. (Giving the term "literature" some wide leverage, you understand.) Everyone who likes this book will tell you that, and will sigh and go a bit melty at the name "Jamie." I'm not especially keen on romance novels, myself, and yet I do enjoy Jamie and Claire's story. The pair are better fleshed out (um, kinda literally), and have more interesting things going on between them than most romance-novel couples. That may be because Gabaldon didn't intend this book as a Romance Novel™, so she doesn't follow the rigid romance-novel script. There's a long twist near the end that has Jamie in a very weak position, for instance—that doesn't normally fly in a romance novel. Claire does some rescuing and repairing, also a bit unusual. The fact that Claire is actually married, rather happily, to someone else before she meets Jamie is yet another departure from the form.

I once heard Outlander described as a marital aid, and Gabaldon says countless women have written her and thanked her for improving their marriages. Personally, I'd think Jamie might ruin it for other men, but you can't deny the book (and all its sequels) are pretty heavy on the sex. Sex scenes are very difficult for most writers to pull off, and often become unintentionally comic or squirm-inducing. Gabaldon, in my opinion, pulls it off. She is very comfortable with sex (she talks about it a lot in interviews, too), and she knows that good sex scenes don't involve a recitation of body parts but genuine emotion between two people. Jamie and Claire have a very developed relationship, and this makes their "sex scenes" into "love scenes," as Gabaldon discusses here. (Excellent advice: every aspiring writer who includes sex scenes in their work really should read it.)

Gabaldon's historical research is yet another reason I enjoy the series. She's a good, solid writer, but there's nothing showy or especially poetic in her work. Her research, however, really shows. I lived briefly in Scotland and spent some time on my own researching roughly that period, and while I'm sure she's made some historical mistakes, I sure didn't catch anything. However, as much background work as she did, she never info-dumps. The historical detail is seamlessly woven into the story. Claire, as a 20th-century nurse, is able to remark on the medical practices of the 18th century in a way another narrator could not: she notices them and describes them, where a contemporary narrator would simply accept them without comment. It's not just medicine, of course, but clothing and food and other customs. Gabaldon may not have intended to include time-travel at first, but she uses this aspect to great advantage once she stumbles across it.

A final point in Outlander's favor has nothing to do with Gabaldon. It's the use of Davina Porter as the audiobook narrator. While I read the book the first time 'round, I listened to it the second, and Porter definitely added to the story. Diana Gabaldon in real life has a great sense of humor, and the book reflects that; Porter really emphasizes it, making the funnies even funnier. Her dramatic timing is spot-on as well, as is her Scottish accent. I enjoyed several sections so much I re-listened to them. I'm not sure I've done that with any other audiobook. If I were a commuter, I would definitely pick this series to make my commutes more tolerable. Not only will Porter and Gabaldon work together to keep you entertained, but there are a gajillion books in the series so far (OK, eight), they are all incredibly long, and Gabaldon shows no sign of wrapping up the series anytime soon. Rush hour traffic? Keep it coming, Sassenach.

Outlander merch, for real insiders

Cephalopod Coffeehouse: Dreams of Gods & Monsters

I usually read a lot, as you know by now, but didn't get through too many books in May—just three novels and an audiobook philosophy lecture. (More on that at the Sisterhood blog.) But my final read was an excellent one, I'm happy to report.

Dreams of Gods & Monsters is the third and final installment of Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy. I read this trilogy as it came out, which was painful, as I had to wait for her to write #2 and then #3. The story is exciting enough that it was hard to wait, and by the time the new one came out, I'd half-forgotten what had happened in the previous book. So good news for those of you who haven't discovered the trilogy yet: you can binge-read it all at once!

The trilogy is in the tradition of the angel-demon story. I didn't realize "angel-demon story" was a thing, but I talked to a guy in a bookstore and hey presto, turns out it's a thing. I've never read another angel-demon story so I can't say how this compares, I just know I loved it. We follow the story of Karou, a blue-haired artist in Prague (see: Czech Republic, see: Earth), and Akiva, an angel from another planet. There's an intra-universe war going on, and the two are on opposite sides of the conflict, setting us up for a pretty traditional Romeo-and-Juliet plotline. Because there are so many reveals and twists just in the first book, I don't want to get into details, but you could think of it as a fantasy/sci-fi mix. The angels in this world are, like the angels of Dr. Who, not exactly divine. They're an alien species, as are the demons.

Fan art: A chimaera saving an angel

It's not an entirely naturalistic universe, however: there is plenty of magic. The demons (known more properly as "chimaera," for their mixed animal-human aspect) can resurrect the dead, which is handy when you're building an army, and the angels have hands that can make things combust. The magic is restricted to certain members of each race, though, and comes at a cost. (Worldbuilding 101, yeah?) So mostly the warring creatures rely on traditional fighting methods. What are they fighting about? The angels have subjugated the chimaera on their home world of Eretz, and the chimaera are rebelling. There's a doorway between universes, which is how human (or is she?) Karou comes to meet Akiva. The politics of the angel-demon subjugation, which interested me more than the romance, may remind readers of South Africa, or Palestine, or the American Indians, or slavery in the American south. Taylor has more to say than "Romeo with wings meets Juliet with blue hair." She has a lot to say about how easy it is to make war, and how hard it is to bring about peace ... and she has a lot to say about what it takes to break the endless cycle of revenge.

Laini Taylor is not your average genre writer. She was a National Book Award finalist for this story collection, and her writing generally could be described as poetic. She knows how to use language, and is as interested in elegant, evocative word choice as in plot structure. That said, I have to confess there are shades of Twilight here. Akiva can occasionally become a little Edward Cullen-ish, though thankfully Karou is never anything like Bella. Still, the story gets bogged down a bit in breathless descriptions of Akiva's fabulous angel beauty, and in the explosive passion between the starcrossed pair. I thought the whole thing worked much better when the two were separated. The second book, Days of Blood & Starlight, is probably the strongest of the three for this reason. The third book, which I'm doing a terrible job of reviewing (I'm really reviewing the trilogy) is the weakest of the three, but it is still a strong book. Many trilogies utterly fall apart by the final book (I'm lookin' at you, Allegiant), but the problems of Dreams of Gods and Monsters are not major pitfalls. Taylor goes in some unexpected but not implausible directions, and as I got to the last 20 pages I confess I got a little sniffly. I found the conclusion very satisfying.

Now, this series has attracted a rabid fanbase, and is slated to become a movie. Yet I am the only person I know (except my daughter) who has read it. When I tell people about it, nobody's even heard of it. I find that odd. How can a series be so beloved and yet so obscure? It's been around for a couple years now, so I don't think novelty is the issue. Perhaps things will change when the film comes out.

Personally, I can't wait for the movie. I just hope they cast someone other than Shailene Woodley as Karou.

Want to read other Cephalopod Coffeehouse reviews, and/or participate in future ones? Visit our host, the Armchair Squid. 

Cephalopod Coffeehouse Review: Moral Tribes

I read four novels, two nonfiction books, and a novella this month, so it's a big field to choose from. I kind of liked doing the mini-reviews last month, so I'll do that again, culminating in the best of the lot. This makes for a long post, so skip to the Moral Tribes review if you're in a hurry.

Big Data is a book I really wanted to like, but which fell short for me. I am fascinated by the promises and perils of Big Data, a new level of technology which allows us to do things like predict outbreaks of everything from flus to coups. It also erodes our privacy to the point where "privacy" may no longer exist. I have a hard time getting upset about that on a personal level but I think it's a societal concern, one that Aldous Huxley and George Orwell talk about in rather more interesting ways. The authors seem to worry quite a bit about Minority Report (pre-arresting people for crimes they haven't committed yet), a worry I think is a bit misplaced, at least relative to other potential bad uses of predictive technology. In the end, the book was just not edited all that well. Good ideas here and there, but too repetitive and not clearly organized enough.

Eleanor and Park is a YA novel that's received a heap of accolades, so I went into it with high expectations. That's never good, is it? It seemed like a standard YA to me; well-written, sweet romance, trouble brewing at home. The trouble here got darker than I was expecting, especially in contrast to the super-sweet and literally breathless romance between the main characters. ("I don't think I even breathe when we're not together," she whispered. "Which means, when I see you on Monday morning, it's been like sixty hours since I've taken a breath.") I don't mind "issue books" for teens, in fact I applaud them, but this issue kind of snuck up on me. My daughter (16) was not at all surprised, though, at the direction the book took, so perhaps I just wasn't paying attention. We agreed that the ending left us scratching our heads.

I had the same "meh" reaction to Every Day is for the Thief, an utterly different kind of novel, but one that got similar high praise. I call it a "novel" because the author, Teju Cole, calls it that. But it's not really a novel. It's kind of a memoir/travelogue/essay collection hybrid, very lightly fictionalized. There's no plot and no characterization; it's mostly a meditation on Lagos, Nigeria. It's a great meditation on that city, and perhaps if I had been expecting that, I'd have loved it. But I was promised a novel and I wanted a novel, dadgummit.

Moving now to novels I did enjoy, we have On Such a Full Sea, which I appreciated in spite of the fact that I read it while sick with a stomach virus. (So that says something.) This is Chang-Rae Lee's latest literary effort, in which he takes us into the realm of speculative fiction. Specifically, dystopia. The protagonist, a teenage girl named Fan, is born in a future version of Baltimore. B-More is now a working-class enclave which exists solely to produce fresh food for the 1%, who live in much nicer gated enclaves. You could compare it to the movie Elysium, but it's a much subtler jab at class inequality than that overwrought story. What I liked about it was not the social commentary, which isn't especially fresh, but the weird fairy-tale like quality of the narrative. As I said elsewhere, it's like an adventure story for grown-ups.

I finally took a breath and dove into The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt's doorstopper of a novel. It just won the Pulitzer Prize (like, a few days ago) and was also shortlisted for 2013's National Book Critics Circle Award, so go Donna! As with Chang-Rae Lee's novel, this was a coming-of-age story and chock full of adventure. Our hero, young Theo, goes through a delightfully Dickensian childhood full of misery and joy, hijinks and heartbreak ... just one damn thing after another. I adored the thrill ride, implausible as some of it was, but the ending was terrible. OK, so you know dramatic structure has five parts — exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement? It was all good until the denouement. When you get to that part, do yourself a favor and just stop reading. Because 90% of the book was excellent, I still recommend it. The ending doesn't kill the book, it's just boring.

One unexpected literary treat was a little sci-fi novella called "Houston, Houston, Do You Read," by Alice Sheldon, who died a while ago and wrote under the pen name of James Tiptree, Jr. It's basically about a space matriarchy encountering an astronaut crew who have the social attitudes you'd expect of the '60s: think James T. Kirk, but less gallant. Some interesting gender speculation from a woman ahead of her time. Star Trek fans (and other humanist-leaning sci-fi fans) would probably enjoy her most popular story collection, titled "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever." 

Which brings me finally (whew!) to the best book I read in all of April, a nonfiction book on modern moral controversies, called Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, by philosopher-scientist Joshua Greene. It follows closely on the heels of three other social-science screeds it cites heavily: Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast & Slow, and Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, all of which I've read and highly recommend. 

Greene's main assertion is that our moral instincts are pretty good at keeping us in line when it comes to questions of Me vs. Us, but are remarkably bad at handing conflict between Us and Them. Your brain (if it's healthy) has built in measures to stop you from cheating on your taxes or your spouse, from killing or wantonly hurting people, and from being a bastard generally. This old, evolved part of your brain encourages you to cooperate with members of your tribe, because when your tribe is harmonious, you are better able to defend yourself against Them. It doesn't always work, which is why we still have bastards, but it works pretty well most of the time. What our moral instincts don't give us, however, is an easy way to cooperate among tribes. We can put Us before Me, and stop being selfish, but we have a much harder time with Us vs. Them. All our instincts tell us, when there's a conflict between tribes, to kick the other tribe's ass. (A "tribe" here is any group with which you share a team spirit of some kind and to which you are loyal: liberals, conservatives, Palestinians, Jews, Packers, Giants, etc.) You are likely to remain ideologically loyal to your team even when your team is demonstrably, scientifically, clearly wrong in some way, and you are likely to see the a conflicting team as an enemy even when they are right about something. Loyalty trumps reason.

But reason can be re-engaged by putting the brain in manual mode, he says. In Kahneman's book (Thinking, Fast & Slow) we learn about the brain's two modes: a fast, instinctual one, full of gut reactions; and a slow, deliberative, logical mode. Greene offers the analogy of a camera to help us: the brain is usually in automatic mode, and quickly and efficiently speeds along, using factory presettings that work pretty well most of the time. Manual mode is best when we need to slow down, focus, and proceed with care. You can feel your brain cranking into this mode when you recognize that you're holding two logically incompatible views on something, especially a question of morality. Greene offers up a ton of thought experiments to put you in this awkward position, and sure enough, I could feel my head literally heating up as I churned through these problems and thought hard about my responses. I even know all about the trolley problem and utilitarianism — two ideas Greene relies heavily on in this book — and I still found myself struggling through some of these ideas and moral quandaries.

Greene's goal is to find a moral common currency that we can all turn to when dealing with matters of controversy. When our tribe believes something different than the other tribe, we tend to assume our moral instincts are correct and if the other tribe would just stop being so stupid, they'd see it too. Greene calls this "The Tragedy of Commonsense Morality." But of course, what your God (or political party, or scientific understanding) tells you to do is not something the other tribe recognizes as a legitimate moral standpoint: that's why the issue you're arguing about is a controversy. If you can agree on some kind of moral framework, then you might be able to get somewhere. The moral framework Greene offers up is utilitarianism, a philosophy created by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham in the 19th century. Even if people don't like utilitarianism, they understand it; it makes a certain kind of sense to every tribe on the planet. That's not just an assertion, but has been borne out by investigation. The basic idea is that whatever works to maximize happiness ("utility") for the greatest number of people is the best thing to do. Greene is fully aware of the objections to utilitarianism and spends a lot of time parrying them. 

I thought this section was pretty interesting, though heavy-going; non-philosophy-nerds may find this part tedious. If so, it would still be worth reading the first few chapters and the last few, especially 11 and 12, where he ties it all together and makes recommendations on how to proceed. 

At the end, Greene has six rules to help us get out of our moral morass. 1. "In the face of moral controversy, consult, but do not trust, your moral instincts." Those instincts evolved to help us with the problem of Me vs. Us (the tragedy of the commons), but don't work so well to help us overcome Us vs. Them. 2. "Rights are not for making arguments; they're for ending arguments." Most moral questions come down to rights and duties. Right to life, right to choose, right to keep all the money you make, right to live free of poverty and disease, etc. Nobody is going to be convinced by a rights-based argument because such arguments simply beg the moral questions being asked. So skip 'em in most cases. 3. "Focus on the facts, and make others do the same." This was one of the most practical tips, I thought. When arguing with someone over a moral controversy, just ask them the mechanics of how the thing in question works. How does single-payer health care work? How does a carbon tax work? How do GMOs work? When exactly does ensoulment happen? People often have strong opinions about things they don't actually understand. When confronted with how little they know, their position tends to become more moderate. 4. "Beware of biased fairness." We all agree that fairness is a virtue, but even when we're fully committed to this idea, we're a little more likely to favor the "fairness" that suits us best. For this reason, be skeptical of your own assessment of what's fair. 5. "Use common currency." We all understand the Golden Rule and that suffering is generally to be avoided and happiness to be maximized. We understand that objective evidence is more convincing than subjective emotional feeling. Appeal to this common currency when approaching a moral controversy. 6. "Give." Would you walk by a drowning child and ignore her because your $500 suit* would be ruined if you got wet? Of course not. So why "walk by" a starving child in some faraway place rather than sending her a $500 donation through Oxfam? A few hundred dollars probably won't make a huge difference in your life, but it can make a world of difference to a child impacted by conflict in Sudan. 

(*substitute $50 shoes if that works better)

I'll close with the closing quote from the book:

Immanuel Kant marveled at the "starry heavens above" and the "moral law within." It's a lovely sentiment, but one that I cannot wholeheartedly share. We are marvelous in many ways, but the moral laws within us are a mixed blessing. More marvelous, to me, is our ability to question the laws written in our hearts and replace them with something better. The natural world is full of cooperation, from tiny cells to packs of wolves. But all of this teamwork, however impressive, evolved for the amoral purpose of successful competition. And yet somehow we, with our overgrown primate brains, can grasp the abstract principles behind nature's machines and make them our own. On these pastures, something new is growing under the sun: a global tribe that looks out for its members, not to gain advantage over others, but simply because it's good.

Please be sure to visit all the Coffeehouse reviews here:

1.	The Armchair Squid	2.	My Creatively Random Life
3.	Wishbone Soup Cures Everything	4.	Valerie Nunez and the Flying Platypi
5.	Huntress	6.	Servitor Ludi
7.	MOCK	8.	StrangePegs -- Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
9.	Words Incorporated	10.	Agatha Friggin' Christie
11.	Ed&Reub	12.	The Writing Sisterhood
13.	Read, Write, Repeat	14.	V's Reads

Cephalopod Coffeehouse Review: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

March has been a pretty good month for novel-reading. I've finished a book of short stories, a classic dystopian (perhaps the classic dystopian); the final book of the Divergent trilogy, an historical YA novel, and a war story. I feel each deserves at least a little blurb.

Allegiant was my least favorite read, though it wasn't exactly awful. This trilogy (the movie of the first novel is in theaters now) started off strong, but ultimately got a little haphazard. The second novel involved people running around frantically, and the third novel seemed so rushed, I wondered if the publisher demanded it be released before it was polished. No, "polished" is not quite the right word. Before it even made much sense. It was a jumble. I expect the movies are going to fix this problem, because they're going to have the time and a panel of storyboard experts to do that.

Brave New World was much more interesting and enjoyable than I expected it would be, but ultimately I disagree with Huxley's premise. He was worried about the wrong things. As a polemic, it doesn't really work, but as an entertaining read and a slice of history (what were intellectuals of 1932 fretting about?) it works just fine. The audiobook version by Michael York I highly recommend.

Nine Inches is a slightly discomfiting dissection of suburban America. This is what Tom Perrotta does: he peeks over our fences, observes us minutely, and reports back what he finds. It's not pretty. I winced a lot reading these stories, but several of them actually changed how I think and how I behave. Even within my marriage. Perrotta may make us squirm, but he's also good at evoking empathy. (And self examination.)

All the Truth That's in Me is the most interesting, unusual YA novel I've read in a long time. It's set in Colonial America, and follows the story of a teenager who's been held captive for two years in a situation that reminded me of Emma Donoghue's Room. The story picks up after she has rejoined her community, but what she survived has rendered her a mute outcast. With a number of secrets. As is always the case with YA (isn't it?) a sweet romance underpins the story. I felt slightly disappointed with how conventional (relative to the beginning) the story became by the end, but that is the form, I suppose I can't fault it for that. It's not Emma Donoghue, but it's good.

Finally, the pièce de résistance: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. This novel, published in 2012, is one of the first major fictional works to be written about the Iraq war. Perhaps we've been too knee-deep, too stunned, to be able to talk about this particular debacle until now. Army PFC Billy Lynn is 19 years old, a member of the now-famous "Bravo Squad," and is home between tours. He's a kid, just a grunt, but a heroic one—as so many grunts are. Euripides observed thousands of years ago that the mythical hero is an "ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances," and that is Billy. He and his squad found themselves in a firefight that happened to be captured by a news crew, and now they're national heroes. They're being trotted around the United States on a victory tour that ends up being some cross between beauty pageant and cattle auction, with a heavy dose of jingoism. Politicians use them, Hollywood uses them, and especially the Dallas Cowboys use them. The boys of Bravo Squad tolerate it all with befuddled good grace, because breathless patriots keep telling them "thank you for their service" and occasionally starry-eyed cheerleaders throw themselves into their laps (literally), but as the tour grinds on they become more jaded. The highlight of the book, for me, was Billy Lynn's reunion with his crazy (but often sweet, and very real) family.

As with the last novel I reviewed, this one is highly quotable. Some highlights:

“Okay, so maybe they aren't the greatest generation by anyone's standard, but they are surely the best of the bottom third percentile of their own somewhat muddled and suspect generation.”

"This is a truth so brutally self-evident that he can't fathom why it's not more widely perceived, hence his contempt for the usual public shock and outrage when a particular situation goes to hell. The war is fucked? Well, duh. Nine-eleven? Slow train coming. They hate our freedoms? Yo, they hate our actual guts! Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity.”

“Everybody supports the troops," Dime woofs, "support the troops, support the troops, hell yeah we're so fucking PROUD of our troops, but when it comes to actual money? Like somebody might have to come out of pocket for the troops? Then all the sudden we're on everybody's tight-ass budget. Talk is cheap, I got that, but gimme a break. Talk is cheap but money screams, this is our country, guys. And I fear for it. I think we should all fear for it.”

“Dread of returning to Iraq equals the direst poverty, and that's how he feels right now, poor, like a shabby homeless kid suddenly thrust into the company of millionaires. Mortal fear is the ghetto of the human soul, to be free of it something like the psychic equivalent of inheriting a hundred million dollars. This is what he truly envies of these people, the luxury of terror as a talking point, and at this moment he feels so sorry for himself that he could break right down and cry.” 

Click here to see a list of the other Coffeehouse reviews! Happy reading.

Cephalopod Coffeehouse Review: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Welcome to the Cephalopod Coffeehouse, a blog-hop to exchange reviews of our favorite reads. I read two great books this month: this one, and Wave, a grief memoir I review over at The Writing Sisterhood. Both of my reviews are edited forms of reviews I first posted on Goodreads.

"What did any one person matter, when pounded against the anvil of history?” That sentence, from the novel, is what I see as the theme of this book. History is a hard anvil for many parts of the world right now, and Chechnya's the setting for this particular pounding. But Marra's novel is not so much about the politics, ideologies, or even history of Chechnya (though you get some of that). It's a book about what it's like to be a one little person trying to live your life in a family, a home, a village, and a country that has become an endless war zone.

“...she stood back and wiped the sweat-sting from her eyes. The air was clean. Her hands brown with dirt. Pride surged through her, raw and immense; she had believed happiness to be an absence—of fear, of pain, of grief—but here it roared in her as powerful as any sadness.” 

This is an incredible book. It's a brutal catalog of the horrors of war in a faraway, cold, miserable place, but it's also a testament to human dignity and resilience. The writing, too, is virtuosic: I found myself rereading passages just to savor the beauty of Marra's prose. If it wasn't a library book, I'd have highlighted half of it.

“I've always though Marx's view on religion was the one thing he got right. Faith is a crutch.”

“If you step on a land mine,” Akhmed said, “the crutch becomes the leg.”

Chechnya. In case you were wondering.

Some reviewers have described the book as confusing, as it's told by an omniscient narrator who is privy not only to everyone's perspective but also to the past and future. POVs switch rapidly between the large cast of characters, and Marra employs the unusual strategy of jumping forward in time when he lands on a particular character he likes, even if it's a nameless character who only exists on one page. You will suddenly leap forward into that character's future, getting a quick rundown on what happens the rest of her life and how she dies.

Why does he do this? I think it goes back to that theme: "what does any one person matter?" Every character matters deeply to himself—and to his family and friends. Even torturers, even cynical informers, even heroin addicts. War stories are typically about battles, generals, nations clashing. This war story focuses on friends, lovers, parents and children. You learn to care about each character in this little forested section of Chechnya, and you feel so frustrated on their behalf, because you realize this is real. There really is a war there, and people like this, people like you and me, are shoved around like so many tiny unimportant pawns. 

“‘You are a coward,’ she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.”

If it sounds like a relentless catalog of pain and brutality, take heart: there's actually a surprising amount of humor. Almost all of it comes from dialogue. For example, when a surgeon in a ruined hospital makes a reference to the Bee Gees, an old woman intones, "You can tell by the way I walk I'm a woman's man, no time to talk." The surgeon expresses shock that this semi-senile Chechen would know the song, to which the old woman responds, "People used to recite it in the war. I didn't know it was a song. For the longest time I thought it was from the Qur'an." Moments like this make the frozen, blood-splattered narrative bearable. The ending, too, was incredibly moving (I reached for tissues) without being at all surprising, since we pretty much know most of it already thanks to the flash-forwards. It's hard to believe the central span of the book takes place over only five days.

“Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion.”

Anthony Marra. Yes. He is 28 years old.

By the end we understand how each of the disparate characters is connected (often in ways they themselves never understand) and we learn about most of their futures. That we know so much about them, but they are kept in the dark about their own stories, feels very real. So much of our own lives will remain forever unknown to us, especially regarding our connections to other people. By showing us the limitations of the characters’ knowledge, we're reminded how we will never really know our own stories, not fully.

“At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock wave of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the mast, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.”

***

Please hop on over to these other blogs to find more February favorites.

1.	The Armchair Squid	2.	Scouring Monk
3.	Trisha @ WORD STUFF	4.	Wishbone Soup Cures Everything
5.	The Random Book Review	6.	Words Incorporated
7.	StrangePegs -- The Casual Vacancy	8.	Read, Write, Repeat
9.	Mockity Mock Mock	10.	I Think: Therefore, I Yam
11.	Julie Flanders	12.	The Writing Sisterhood
13.	StrangePegs -- Brave New World	14.	V's Reads
15.	the-cephalopod-coffeehouse-february-2014.html

Cephalopod Book Review: "The Unwinding"

Friday's "What's Making Me Happy" is occasionally superseded by a Cephalopod Coffeehouse review, but I can make a nod to WMMH by saying this: I am experiencing the kind of happiness that comes from escape, or recognition of escape. It's tinged with the sadness of realizing how many are trapped. I'm happy because my life doesn't look like those lives portrayed in this book, which also happens to be the best book I read in January:

Packer chronicles our nation's recent economic calamity through the lives of those who enabled it and those who have been crushed by it. He doesn't theorize or analyze, he just lets people tell their stories. Mostly ordinary people, too; people like Dean Price, the son of a tobacco farmer in the Carolina Piedmont, who tried to launch his own biofuel business and wound up in near-ruin. And Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in Ohio who lost her job when the factories began closing down; she was sent packing with a pittance and watched her bosses walk away with millions. And Usha Patel, an immigrant who used her life savings to invest in a motel, only to have it swallowed up in the great collapse.

The closest Packer gets to analyzing is when he speaks through Elizabeth Warren, whom he clearly admires. This is from a brief profile on Warren near the end of the book (I just photographed it with my mobile, rather than typing it out): 

P. 348

Packer also documents those who, if they didn't exactly cause the collapse, certainly learned how to game the system. From an invisible lobbyist who made millions, to a party-hardy boy stockbroker, to Jay-Z and Oprah, we learn that the way to do well in America is to be avaricious, disinterested in anyone's welfare but your own, and blasé about the law. Some had a leg up, some scrabbled up out of nothing, but they were all mindlessly focused on money, bling, the trappings of success. They would get rich by any means necessary ... and there are a lot of means, once you leave your ethics behind. Buy yourself a good lawyer, and you can get away with everything from tax evasion to literally stabbing rivals.

Occupy Wall Street protester. Remember those?

Playing by the rules is for suckers: that's what Jay-Z would tell you, and after reading this book it's hard not to see his point. I am a sucker. But I am a lucky sucker, because I was born into a solidly middle-class family that valued education, got that education at good public schools and a state university, met a great guy and had the sense to marry him, and have remained comfortable through the Great Recession. My dad was a scientist working for a national lab during the Cold War: this fairly well insulated him from the vagaries of the stock market. My husband is similarly situated now. (My mom was an entrepreneur, but got in and out of her business before markets went nutty.) I did make some good choices, but I am also just plain lucky. 

So what's the deep cause of the Unwinding? Is it simply luck and human greed? No, says Packer. While he keeps his opinions out of the book, he did write an article for the Guardian, and in that he writes, "Americans were no less greedy, ignorant, selfish and violent then than they are today, and no more generous, fair-minded and idealistic. But the institutions of American democracy, stronger than the excesses of individuals, were usually able to contain and channel them to more useful ends. Human nature does not change, but social structures can, and they did." Starting in the 1970s, "The US became more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic, more individualistic and less communitarian, more free and less equal, more tolerant and less fair," he writes. "Banking and technology, concentrated on the coasts, turned into engines of wealth, replacing the world of stuff with the world of bits, but without creating broad prosperity, while the heartland hollowed out. The institutions that had been the foundation of middle-class democracy, from public schools and secure jobs to flourishing newspapers and functioning legislatures, were set on the course of a long decline."

I strongly recommend this book. It won the National Book Award for 2013, is eminently readable (even hard to put down), is lucidly written, and is crushingly insightful. Packer is not a hack or a demagogue trying to fan the flames of populist rage ... this is a book for everyone, and everyone is indicted.

Check out these other Cephalopod book reviews:

1.	The Armchair Squid	2.	What's up, MOCK?!
3.	Words Incorporated	4.	Scouring Monk
5.	Huntress	6.	A Creative Exercise
7.	Libby Heily	8.	Trisha @ WORD STUFF
9.	Wishbone Soup Cures Everything	10.	mainewords
11.	Julie Flanders	12.	Hungry Enough To Eat Six
13.	Yolanda Renee	14.	M.J. Fifield
15.	StrangePegs -- Turn Coat	16.	The Writing Sisterhood
17.	Ed and Reub	18.	StrangePegs -- Vader's Offspring
19.	V's Reads	20.	Wishbone Soup Cures Everything