Books of the Month – September 2010

There was one book I truly loved this month:

Packing for Mars, about the weird, mundane, and once-upon-a-time my dream world of being an astronaut

And several I liked a lot:

Girl in Translation, a story about being a poor and exploited immigrant (but an unfortunately perfect ending)

Empire of the Summer Moon, the true story of the subjugation of the Plains Indians

The Big Short, a wonderful clear, if depressing, story of the 2008 financial crash

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

The Big Short explains the 2008 stock market crash in refreshingly simple terms, including the best (limpid!) description I’ve read of the dreaded CDOs that doomed even sophisticated investors. The story is scary, highlighting the startling lack of understanding of complicated financial instruments by people who should have known better (including some CEOs of very large financial companies), the humongous profits created by the bubble and feeding the bubble,  the overly cozy relationship between the rating agencies and trading institutions, and the general apathy of regulators (did they not understand the shenanigans that were being perpetrated, like the CEOs?). And what about the press? It’s all very good to be exposing the problems now, after the facts, but it’s not like we were inundated by doom-and-gloom stories during the bubble… I recommend this book, chilling as it is.

Red Hook Road by Ayelet Waldman

Beware of books that begin or end with a wedding!  Red Hook Road one begins and ends with a wedding and confirms my no-wedding rule. It is the plodding  story of a rich girl marrying a poor boy and unfortunately dying immediately afterwards, which leaves her pushy mother to repeatedly highlight the difference of status between her family and the groom’s and interfere in many misguided, if perhaps well-intentioned ways. What lack of class! There’s also a younger sister who inexorably but without any apparent chemistry  reason falls in love with the younger brother, probably to achieve the “Greek myth” thrust of the novel. Too bad that the story is so stilted, as the writing is excellent (once it leaves behind the startling mix of Modern Bride and House Beautiful of the first chapters) and there are some fine observations of families and personalities.

Blind Descent by James Tabor

Blind Descent talks about the very weird world of caving, or cave exploring, and weird applies both to the forbidding environment of deep caves as well as the characters who do the exploration. I had always thought of caving as crawling underground in impossibly tight spaces, and I got confirmation that there are plenty of claustrophobic moments in caves that, coupled with the unrelenting darkness, cause hallucinations and anxiety attacks. Lovely. What I had not thought about before reading this book was scuba-diving in caves. As a rank diving amateur I am even more horrified by the idea of diving in cold water with very low visibility, all in pursuit of the same tight spaces pursued by the crawlers…

The author uses an annoying breathless tone with a mandatory cliffhanger (often a literal one) at the end of each chapter. His fascination with one of the two cavers profiled in the book is also wearisome, but the topic is certainly different and interesting despite the cold, the filth, the dangers, and the trail of cadavers!

Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne

I don’t much care for history books, and I certainly turned pages a little fast at times during the more tedious chapters, but I enjoyed Empire of the Summer Moon, which tells the story of an unlikely Comanche chief whose white mother was kidnapped as a child by this father’s tribe, and who oversaw the end of the tribe’s warlike culture into a dreary reservation.

Along the way, the author explains how the tribes that adopted horses when they were introduced in the Americas became dominant,  how very violent the cultures of both the Plains Indians and the Texas Rangers were, how improvements in weaponry created the downfall of the last remaining tribes, and how the appalling treatment of Indians by the US government is only matched by the uninformed and  incapable bureaucracy responsible to run the reservations. It’s too bad that so little is known about Quanah Parker, whose intelligence and curiosity illuminate the story.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

I was disappointed by The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, not because it’s a bad book, but because it has been acclaimed as a masterpiece and it did not perform to its applause for me. Let’s start with the good stuff. The setting, a Dutch trading post in traditionalist, scripted, closed Japan at the start of the 19th century, is appealing exotic. The characters, from the goody-two-shoes hero to the wise physician and especially the Japanese interpreters, are finely observed, down to their fingertips who can feel the notches in the cards to help them cheat. The forgotten limitations of the era, from the rarity of books to the slowness of communications from the motherland, weigh heavily.

Unfortunately, I could not really believe the main story. A foreigner falling in love at first sight with a Japanese woman is plausible. A foreigner falling in love at first sight with a Japanese woman whose face is badly burned is not. An escapee of an ignoble cult voluntarily going back to the cult because she feels bad for the women that are still inside? Not likely. And the same ignoble cult taking her back and not “disappearing” her on the spot? I don’t think so. Too bad. The writing, details, and atmosphere are superb.

The Tenth Parallel by Eliza Griswold

The Tenth Parallel tells horrific stories of poverty and especially violence from African and Asian countries along the north of the equator and promotes the idea that most of the violence is created by religious conflicts between Christians and Muslims. Certainly the author did not invent the violence or the conflicts, but even through this book transpires the simple fact that many of the same countries being profiled used to enjoy much better, even harmonious relationships between the two religious communities when economic times were better — and the relentless insistence that the religious conflicts are inevitable bothered me. Indeed, the saddest parts of the book, beside the killings and maiming, are the portraits of various religious figures who fan or incite the violence. Perhaps the problem is them more than any essential conflict between their creeds.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Have you read Nineteen Eighty-Four? If not, go read it and it will be a better investment than the hours you might spend with Super Sad True Love Story, in which the United States has become both ruined and a police state, ultimately controlled by China. Layered on the faux Nineteen Eighty Four is the absurd so-called love story of the title between a clueless middle-aged loser and a young woman who’s mostly looking for safety and money — and a slightly less absurd but very thickly laid overlay of the dangers of the social networking technology that means that all human beings are preceded by their electronic reputation, crudely mixing the amount of their bank account and their “hotness”. Tedious.

Little House on a Small Planet by Shay Salomon

I thought that the goal of Little House on a Small Planet would be to show reasonable alternatives to the mega houses we see sprouting in our suburbs, the 5000 square foot monstrosities that are built all the way to the lot line, leaving just a sliver of sunlight to filter down to the humongous basement — required to house the paltry 1.2 children who live there, we are told. And I was wrong. The book is more interested in pushing an extreme lifestyle that includes forgoing refrigerators, not bathing daily or using chamber pots (I’m not making this up!) and standing naked outside in the cold so that a 100 square foot house with a tiny bathroom and no heating system will suffice.

I realize that seeing how people live in tiny dwellings could be inspiring but to me it was all a little silly. How sad that we cannot have a more reasonable compromise, as I like not having to shop each day, allowing myself and each member of the family a daily shower, and heating in the winter, thank you very much.

Globish by Robert McCrum

Globish tells the story of how English came to be such a popular language, and it starts well, telling fun anecdotes about word origins and showing how the various invasions of England created a good mix. It’s till fun when it moves to the United States, where apparently some early zealots thought it would be best to speak Hebrew or Greek to sever the ties to the home language! And then it gets progressively sillier as it tries to explain the supremacy of the language as something more than the economic power of first England and then the US. For instance, it explains how Mandarin cannot become a world language because it’s too complicated. Complexity never stopped French, in its day, or English now, did it?

The book eventually grinds down to rather inane comments about Slumdog Millionaire and soccer in Iraq. Too bad, it could have been a great topic.