Townhouse Books

Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's by John Elder Robison

2008-03-24T19:01:00.002-04:00

Did you know that Augusten Burroughs has a brother with Asperger's Syndrome? After people responded to Burroughs' descriptions of his brother in Running with Scissors, John Elder Robison decided to write his own memoir. If you've read any of Temple Grandin's books, Robison's writing style will seem familiar. His matter-of-fact tone in describing his life stays the same whether he's relating a memory of his father putting out a cigarette on his brother's forehead, or Ace Frehley of KISS offering him a job designing guitars. He left home at age 16, lived in the woods, fixed amps for Pink Floyd, designed toys for Milton Bradley, married twice, and had one son.

Robison was never diagnosed with Asperger's until much later in life, when he had capitalized on his savant-like skills and become a business owner. His experiences have been remarkable, but it is emotional and financial security that he values. In that respect, his diagnosis has given him the vocabulary he needs to describe how he sees the world, and to ask others to treat him as he wishes to be treated.

I was really moved by this book. There are so many people out there who fall on the spectrum between autism and high-functioning Asperger's syndrome -- Robison's patience and courage in sharing his gifts and limitations could make life better for many others who can't express themselves at this level.

The Thirteenth Tale: Diane Setterfield

2008-02-18T06:58:00.002-05:00

Rainy day reading! Setterfield is a former academic specializing in French literature. Her first novel is a complicated tangle of stories, featuring two sets of twins, two spooky old houses, and two tragic nights.

The narrator is an amateur biographer who is summoned to the home of England's most famous contemporary author to hear the never-before-told story of the author's childhood. The author draws the narrator with two pieces of information: first, that she is dying and wants the truth to be known, and second, that her story involves twins. As the surviving half of a pair of conjoined twins, the narrator feels compelled to stay and listen.

Setterfield does a wonderful job of mingling the old story with the new, making both equally vivid through the voice of the narrator and the voice of the dying author. Their conversations are fascinating, especially as they get to know each other better. At one point the old lady asks the young woman this question: if all of the copies of your favorite novels were headed down a conveyor belt towards an incinerator with a living person operating the switch, and you could only stop the process by shooting him, would you do it? She describes the process: first a Jane Austen novel is lost to the world, then the copies of Jane Eyre start slipping away. The narrator refuses to answer, but in her heart (and her narrative) she admits the truth -- she loves books better than she loves people.

Crafty!

2007-12-03T17:45:00.001-05:00

So I've decided that all the Christmas presents I give this year will be handmade. As a result, I've bought and checked out a few books on quilting and sewing. From there, I discovered an amazing variety of crafty blogs, and have been amazed at the level to which the authors of the books I've read put their lives on the internet. (The only other personal blog I read is Dooce.com)

Bend-The-Rules Sewing is an awesome project book with great, simple instructions. Amy Karol blogs at Angry Chicken and adds lots of healthy cooking tips and parenting observations to her craft updates and tutorials.

Simple Sewing by Lotta Jansdotter is absolutely gorgeous -- Scandanavian design applied to simple sewing projects for the home. I made an apron, a purse, and an oven mitt from this book and she was absolutely honest about the skill level and time involved. Jansdotter has a textile line, and you can see a video tour of her design studio at Apartment Therapy.

I have a few things on my "to get" list based on the quality of their internet-based tutorials. I read Soule Mama almost daily, and she has a book coming out this spring called The Creative Family: How to Encourage Creativity and Nurture Family Connections. The Purl Bee is the blog associated with the Purl knitting & quilting supply shop in New York. The owner, Joelle Hoverson, just put out a book called Last Minute Patchwork + Quilted Gifts. She has offered a few projects from the book for Martha Stewart readers and viewers and the framed fabric project has been showing up all over.

These authors share a set of sewing skills that used to be highly valued but have fallen out of fashion. When I was growing up, we always had handmade quilts on our beds. The thing that I find interesting about these quilters is that their design aesthetic is nothing like the country-kitschy quilt shops that I remember my mom dragging me to throughout my childhood. If you're interested in starting to do handmade projects, any one of these books would be a great starting point.

To build a cathedral

2007-10-25T09:19:00.000-04:00

Anyone ever read The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett?

The Path of Minor Planets: Andrew Sean Greer

2007-10-15T09:36:00.000-04:00

The lives and loves and tragedies of a handful of astronomers, their spouses, friends, and children. A window to their lives is open to the reader every 7 years or so whenever the comet, discovered in 1965 by two of the professors, reaches perihelion or aphelion, and you see how the decisions the characters made or actions they did or did not take have played out. The book opens at a gathering of them all on a small South Pacific island to view the comet's passing, and a death changes things for them all.

It's a somewhat sad, almost suspenseful, yet solid novel; I didn't stay up late dying to see how it ended, but found myself quietly drawn to the book each night. I'd read Greer's "The Confessions of Max Tivoli" and, though delighted by that story, I was even more thrilled with the prose. I look forward to his next book.

World War Z by Max Brooks

2007-09-21T14:49:00.000-04:00

Go read this right now! You'll never look at your house, government, or military the same way.

World War Z was presented to me as a "quick sci-fi read about when zombies take over". The book is much, much more. It's structured as an oral history, with short (1-4 pages) interviews of people from all over the world, describing the near take-over of the planet by zombies (infected with a virus that reanimates the dead). The story arcs from the first outbreak in China through the insidious spread of infection, botched government responses, and humanity's eventual breakdown into the Great Panic and subsequent retreat.

What struck me, repeatedly, was the truly spectacular world-building Brooks performs. When I say interviewees are from all over the world, I mean from Brazil to China to Cuba to Australia to Russia to India to Iran to... everywhere. Not only does Brooks trace the spread of this virus, but also the social and economic fallout particular to each area of the world. In other worlds, he illustrates, via his tapestry of interviewees, the vastly different experiences in each part of the world.

I'd be curious what someone with more of a military background than I thinks of the book. As the story goes on, you learn more and more about the successful (and unsuccessful!) planning and tactics employed by various countries around the world. You learn about the different strategies necessary for different environments. You learn about the effects of psychological stress on exhausted soldiers. And so on.

Also impressive is Brooks' development of different voices for each interviewee. His prose isn't flashy, but it's effective, and makes an effort to vary the vacabulary and pacing with each character. The structure is also impressive. While the book is a tad choppy at times (as a globe-spanning narrative might be), there is a general, unifying chronological thread. Events brought up in one interview are touched and sometimes even expanded upon in subsequent interviews.

So... whew! I really loved this book. Not sure why it's so compelling for me right now, but partially because I can just see events unfolding the way they do in the book. Because we, as a people, suck.

Enjoy!

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Books we've reviewed

2007-09-04T16:08:00.000-04:00

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I Love You, Beth Cooper: Larry Doyle

2007-09-03T19:57:00.000-04:00

If you've read Larry Doyle in the New Yorker & seen his new novel in the bookstore, you probably thought, "those humorists never sustain the funny for the whole book; it will get awkward and dull and I won't want to finish reading it."

Well, this is worthwhile. Short chapters, all funny, chronicling the radical decline from his graduation ceremony to the end of the wildest night of the valedictorian's life. Led me to reflect on the innate meanness of coaches who also teach driver's ed. Doyle embraces the Hollywood tradition of high school movies -- uses a quote from a character under a cartoon of the progressively harried & bloodied protagonist to start each chapter. Some, like Lloyd Dobler, were immediately recognizable; others would take some Googling.

Fun!

Fledgling: Octavia Butler

2007-08-26T00:45:00.000-04:00

It's not every author that occupies her very own literary niche, but as the only African-American woman science fiction author this reviewer can think of, Octavia Butler held a unique place in the genre.

I haven't read anything else by Butler, but I have to imagine she built her reputation on better books than Fledgling. Before her untimely demise last year, she won a MacArthur Foundation grant, a Hugo, and a Nebula This was her first new book in seven years, and the last before her untimely demise.

The premise of Fledgling is that vampires are real (although they call themselves the Ina), they're a parallel species to homo sapiens, and yes, they're super strong, super fast, they're not immortal (although they naturally live into their fifth century), they don't burn to ashes in sunlight, but they do sleep through the day and get a nasty sunburn from direct sunlight, and they walk around smelling everything.

The protagonist is an Ina named Shori who has the body of a 10-year-old at the young age (in Ina years) of 57. She wakes up in a cave burned, shot, and ravenously hungry. She grabs the first living thing that wanders by and eats it, and spend the rest of the book looking for answers.

That's the elevator pitch, and it sounds great. The reality is a little different.

Most science fiction and fantasy happens in a fantastic place or time and authors (other than John Clute) typically need a character that represents the reader's point of view. This viewpoint character is usually clueless about the crucial parts of the world, which provides ample opportunity for the author to have some second character explain crucial things to the first character, and therefore the reader.

You see this all the time in sci-fi movies where you'll often have a character that's a doctor on a space station, a young farmboy who's going to explore the galaxy, or a mysterious traveler from another land and who is completely clueless about all the technical aspects of their futuristic world. The farmboy doesn't need to know how their warp drive works, and if it were explained to them they'd never understand it anyway, so the author can just engage in some handwaving and TLA-lobbing, and still weave a vaguely realistic world.

You'd think that amnesiacs would pop up more often in books to fill this role since they ostensibly don't remember anything and need everything explained to them, but in practice, or at least in this book, they're just annoying. Shori must have had a case of super-double amnesia, since she doesn't know what a car is, she doesn't know what a horse is, she doesn't know what refrigerators are for, she doesn't know anything about anything, (but seems to know English well enough,) and we're constantly being reminded of that fact. Repeatedly.

Sometimes we're reminded of her amnesia multiple times in the same sentence. Just because the main character has amnesia doesn't mean the reader does.

The actual plot of Fledgling is: there's a group of Ina who don't like the fact that Shori's family has been trying to breed a daylight-resistant Ina by combining human and Ina DNA. Shori is the result of that genetic tampering, and it's left her with dark dark skin and kinky hair. In theory this brings in the racial issue, but since we're talking about a black Ina and not a black human, the comparison seems initially clever, but on further examination just seems lame. The other Ina look down on her not because she's black but because she's part human.

The climax of the book is actually pretty good, but slogging through the court scenes leading up to it just isn't worth it. The story doesn't work, but it's because Butler doesn't give us any real reason to care about Shori or her family. The horrible things happening to her would carry emotional weight if we were able to identify with her, or if we thought that Shori actually was in danger of losing something that mattered to her.

The Secular Bible: Jacques Berlinerblau

2007-08-20T22:21:00.000-04:00

Most books about religion, especially books about any particular religion, tend to be written from the point of view of an adherent of that religion and addressed to the faithful or to the potential faithful for conversion purposes. Rarely do we see books that are intended to critically discuss the texts of a religion from a secular standpoint, which is exactly what The Secular Bible does. In fact, besides analyzing The Bible, one of the stated purposes of this book is to agitate for more critical discussion about religion and religious texts.

The Secular Bible concentrates on the history of the Hebrew Bible, interpretations of the Bible, Jewish intermarriage, and acceptance of homosexuality.

The history section is the most interesting of the three main sections, and he spends most of it comparing religious and secular questions of authorship. If you ask a believer who wrote the Bible, you usually get answers like God, Moses, or "prophets." But by taking the reader through the process of hand-copying and showing cases of marginalia that made its way into the main, accepted text, Berlinerblau makes a good case that no-one really wrote it, at least not in anything like its present form.

As you might imagine, he also shows that Jewish marriage requirements aren't really supported by scripture, and that condemnation of homosexuality is only vaguely alluded to in both the Old and New Testaments.

The Secular Bible is an interesting book, and an excellent starting point for someone who's not well versed in western religion. Karen Armstrong's A History of God explores many of the same questions in much more detail, although, its a much larger, more ambitious book.

Arguing A.I.: Sam Williams

2007-08-18T02:35:00.000-04:00

Artificial intelligence, much like fusion research, has claimed to be within reach of its ultimate goal for the last 30 years. There's always a breakthrough projected just around the corner, but that assertion is based more on public relations and funding than any actual progress.

Once upon a time the public goal of AI was to produce a computer that could solve problems that typically require a human. Creating a machine that can use language, recognize objects, and generally employ cognition were originally the goal. In the past forty years researchers have tried to solve the problem of artificial intelligence from the bottom up and the top down, and the closest we have to HAL are some basic systems that can track moving objects, sometimes, and some systems that use techniques of machine learning, but we've made no basic progress towards a truly intelligent machine.

The book is laid out as an introduction to the world of artificial intelligence, four profiles of figures in the field and a summary that tries to give an overview of the fictional treatment of Artificial Intelligence and compares it to the reality. If you're interested in the subject, Arguing A.I. is an interesting overview of the current problems in the field, but it's not the best introduction. It's also very short, so if you can check it out or borrow it, do so, but it's not worth the $15 you'd pay if you buy it through Amazon.

The Extra Large Medium: Helen Slavin

2007-08-12T14:30:00.000-04:00

Annie Colville has been talking to the dead since she was a little girl. She can't block them out, but tries to lead her life with as little interference from them as possible. Then one day her husband disappears and doesn't come back, either in person or as a ghost. And so begins a seven-year waiting game, with characters ducking in and out of Annie's present and past.

This is a great, quick read that has stayed in my thoughts all week. It's only a tiny bit spooky, and the author does a beautiful job introducing a wide variety of present-day and historical characters.

Recently (too many bad)...

2007-07-19T14:18:00.001-04:00

The Bad

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
Interesting enough for the most part though left the reader feeling icky. Silly ending.

Blinding Light by Paul Theroux
Upon finishing this paperback, I tossed it in the recycle bin with bored disgust. No need to try to sell back or share or donate. I should have given up by pg. 60 or so.

Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz
Picked it up among a pile of free medical books by Gentry's apt in NY. Fine but, epitomizes the lamer aspects of former "Oprah Book Club" books. Kind of predictable.

The Good

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
It's the future and everything really, really sucks. Still can't get some of the images out of my head. Fantastic. Heart breaking.

Confessions of a Teen Sleuth by Chelsea Cain
This I read a month or two ago. Parody of Nancy Drew books. Short and delightful.

Feed: M.T. Anderson

2007-07-18T15:41:00.000-04:00

I admit it. I'm a sucker for product recommendations, especially Amazon's. They've been right in the past, and I often end up finding books that I otherwise wouldn't have read.

Coincidentally, Feed is about a future, (that sucks,) where everyone has a constant feed of recommendations, media, and instant messages fed directly into their minds. The story itself is told from the point of view of Titus, a teenager who has the normal teen worries: he's constantly wondering if what he's wearing is hip enough (the feed doesn't think so), whether spring break on the Moon sucks (it does), and which flying car is the best.

Of course, as you might imagine, things start to go wrong, but in surprising ways. One of the most interesting things about the book is that you get little glimpses of the outside world, but since Titus doesn't really concern himself with worldly issues, you only get the barest outlines. Figuring out the world in the story is actually one of my favorite things about reading Science Fiction, and why I keep coming back to the genre.

Feed is a "young adult" book really targeted to teenagers, but it was a great surprise, as its satire works on multiple levels.

Mistress of the Art of Death: Ariana Franklin

2007-07-04T16:39:00.000-04:00

This book was so !@#%ing good (engrossing, suspenseful, scary & vivid) that I actually had to remove the book from my bedroom and stash it safely in the front room before I could go to sleep last night!

It's a CSI story that takes place in the 12th century. The main character, Adelia, is a doctor, sent from Salerno to solve a crime at a time when there are no female doctors in England. Henry II is a character, and I do love the Plantagenets...

The mystery is genuinely scary, and the secrecy of the investigation adds extra tension.

Cracking good fun!

After Dark: Haruki Murakami

2007-06-30T18:47:00.000-04:00

"After Dark" concerns the late night musings, minglings, and wanderings of a handful of people, radiating out from a starting point of a Denny's in Tokyo. The story of Mari and a boy who knows her sister, the women she meets who work in a "love ho" (love hotel) and hints of their lives, the overlay of every scene with music, especially jazz, the delightful cadence that is distinctly Murakami (or at least Murakami translated, since that is only how we know him) -- these are all wonderful and successful building blocks of a fantastic and fantastical tale.

The additional story of Mari's sister who is trapped in a deep sleep and occasionally transported, still sleeping, into her television by a man with no face, is frustratingly incomplete. The slim novel should have been only short vignettes of Mari and her night adventurers, leaving her sister out entirely, or it should be have been three times the length to actually tell the sister's story.

It's Murakami -- I don't expect a neat, pat ending. But I do expect to get more than an excerpt of a better, more developed, yet nonexistent Murakami novel.

(I suspect I will continue to mull over this book; I already found myself dreaming about it during a nap today. I just finished it about 10 minutes ago though and wanted more -- hence the frustration you're reading in this review now. If you like Murakami, consider reading this. If you've been feeling over Murakami lately however, this isn't the book that will bring you back.)

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And Then We Came to the End / Joshua Ferris

2007-06-19T09:35:00.000-04:00

Fantastic. I got it from the library and now want to own my own copy. On the surface it's a story of an ad agency in the last throes of the 1990s Internet boom. But it perfectly captures the pettiness, drama, and greatness of office life (if you can believe that.) The author takes for granted that in our late-capitalist society, most of our personal time is actually spent at work, in a office, and probably in a cubicle. So while parts of the story play up the absurd in office interactions, other parts point out that our human drives for companionship, adventure, and love are still with us, just... in our crushing office jobs.

Stylistically the book is interesting, too. Almost all of it is in the present tense, and typically using "we" as the subject, rather than an individual person. Which sounds potentially annoying, but actually works beautifully.

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge

2007-06-18T23:15:00.000-04:00

Great Book. A future I can see. Wearable computing. Cooperative Assignments. World Powers working together. Cured Alzheimer patients struggling to reinvent themselves.
etc..

Did I mention Vernor prominently features library digitization projects, and deals with real world issues faced by such issues. You can see Google themes in the background.

Lucky Jim: by Kingsley Amis

2007-06-18T22:36:00.000-04:00

My favorite line:

"I just wondered," Beesley said, bringing out the curved nickel-banded pipe round which he was trying to train his personality, like a creeper up a trellis.

round which he was trying to train his personality... So good.

Another good one:

He felt for his cigarettes, but before he could use the offer of one of these as a means of breaking her pose, she switched back to him with a little smile which he recognized, with self-dislike, as consciously brave.

I picked this up after reading two reviews of the new Kingsley Amis biography. I've read a few of his son's books, Martin Amis, but had never read Kingsley.

In Lucky Jim, our protagonist, James Dixon, is a pathetic academic sinking in a field barely of his own choosing. He has a secret face he makes for numerous events, cruelly judges everyone (including himself) and observes life with a brilliant and wry turn of phrase.

Pros: Incredibly keen descriptions, satire that makes you laugh out loud, excellent prose, properly exposes the worst in people

Cons: Irritating main character, unpleasant people abound, and foreignness -- university life in England in the 1950s. Though a slim novel, I took an accidental break of it for about two weeks, actually forgetting if I'd finished it or not.

Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure: by Sarah Macdonald

2007-06-18T22:34:00.000-04:00

The Raw Shark Texts: Steven Hall

2007-06-17T15:06:00.000-04:00

If you commissioned Alain de Botton to turn the movie Memento into a novel, but make it more science-fictiony, you might come up with something along the lines of The Raw Shark Texts. The protagonist wakes up with no idea who he is, and is guided by a series of letters from his former self. It's good, it's weird, and it features the crypto-zoology of purely conceptual sharks.

Luncheon of the Boating Party: Susan Vreeland

2007-06-04T19:56:00.000-04:00

This book is like a brain spa -- edifying but relaxing. It's a fictionalized account of Auguste Renoir painting his famous group portrait/landscape/still life, "Luncheon of the Boating Party", in 1881. Plenty of historical detail, art history theory, and interesting development of characters. This author also wrote The Passion of Artemesia, which was made into a film a decade or so ago.

Poison Study and Magic Study: Maria V. Snyder

2007-06-01T20:10:00.000-04:00

In the first chapter of Poison Study, the narrator is dragged from a prison cell and offered a choice: be hanged for her crimes immediately, or agree to become the Commander's food taster -- a lifetime position. She takes the job, and her first assignment is not to die -- her employer gives her a near-lethal dose of poison to test her. When she survives the ordeal, she begins to study every known poison while also learning her way around the castle and figuring out who are her friends and enemies.

I didn't realize until I reached the end of the book (and that would be a few hours after I started the book, much later than I intended to stay awake that night) that it was the first of a series. It's too much of a spoiler to discuss the plot of the second book, but although it didn't benefit from that "shock of the new" excitement I felt about the first book it had a solid plot and continued to develop characters and relationships.

Apparently, there is a third volume forthcoming: Fire Study.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: series by Rick Riordan

2007-05-31T15:23:00.000-04:00

As a summer of Harry Potter excitement approaches with the final book and fifth movie, I realized that I'd only read the Order of the Phoenix once and that I didn't remember much from it except how put off I was by Harry's 15-year-old anger/angst. I think I'd ended up skimming an unfair amount of it. So, not too long ago, I picked up the fifth book again and read it, obsessively. I finished it a few mornings later when I should have been packing for a flight to see my folks for a short weekend trip. I couldn't help but bring the sixth book to read on the plane even though it weighed more than the clothes I brought.

How happy was I then, upon my return, when my husband handed me a book called The Lightning Thief, book 1 of a series called "Percy Jackson and the Olympians."

Percy Jackson is a 12-year-old boy when we first meet him of uncertain parentage -- he never met his father. Strange things happen to Percy too often and he's constantly being kicked out of school. After his math teacher sprouts leathery wings and tries to kill him, Percy is off on an adventure where he find out who is father is, finds out he's not alone in the world, and, of course, is sent on a difficult quest on which balances the fate of humankind.

Seamlessly I read the second one immediately after, The Sea of Monsters, and we are now awaiting the arrival of the third one from Amazon.

If you're in the mood for some young fantasy lit, this is perfect! Enjoy!

Right before HP, I finished "Rabbit at Rest" and the Rabbit series by John Updike. It's over. It was brilliant (though I still disliked that second book).

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French Women Don't Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure: Mireille Guiliano

2007-05-23T08:43:00.001-04:00

This book is so funny and weird and chatty and oblivious that I would recommend it to almost anyone. The author is French, but has lived in America for most of her adult life. She is the CEO of Veuve Clicquot, and her life is one big dinner party with plenty of champagne.
From this lofty vantage point, she is able to point out everything that is wrong with American eating habits. She's mostly right, but she skates right along the edge of obnoxious throughout the book. And yet it's a fun read! She recognizes and pokes fun of the American desire for a bullet-point list telling them exactly what to do, and instead provides a hopping, skipping memoir of a life well lved, with recipes.
It makes an interesting counterpoint to my collection of "depression lit" memoirs, and based on Mireille's advice I have begun drinking a citron presse (lemon water) every morning before I start in on the coffee.