Review: The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



A.J. Jacobs is a master of pop-non-fiction. His writing is entertaining, funny, highly-readable, and effortlessly compelling. He keeps his sections short, so that the book moves very very quickly. The down side of this is there's rarely enough detail to be really satisfying. He is happy to reference the thousands of pages of analysis that have gone into every bizarre and curious aspect of the bible, but hardly ever leaves the reader with any satisfying conclusion*.

And mostly in the text this works, because he's on to the next witty anecdote, and again, it's all very compelling. But at the end, I felt sort of empty, which is too bad, since that's exactly the opposite of what the book is supposed to be about.

This is exacerbated by the biggest the biggest fault of the book: the short shrift given to Christianity (which, unfortunately comes at the end). I understand that Jacobs is culturally Jewish, but one of his goals in writing this book is to study the sort of biblical literalism and extreme devoutness** that infects the right wing of our political system, and those people claim to be Christians.***

So yeah, there are really no answers for those issues, which is too bad because I think those are the most pressing issues we're facing these days. But at the end of the day, I can't really fault Jacobs for that. With all its flaws this is still one of the more nuanced and balanced treatment of religion that I've seen recently. And it was a lot of fun to read.

* Mixed-fiber clothes, anyone?

** Like Representative John Shimkus who says that Anthropogenic global warming isn't a problem because only god can destroy the earth. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/the-crackpot-caucus/

*** I don't believe that the science denying, misogynistic, sex-negative, homophobic, budget hawk nutjobs that make up today's "religious right" are truly Christians. But rather than dwell on that, I'll let John Scalzi do it for me. http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003530.html



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Review: Wild Cards

Wild Cards by George R.R. Martin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



So, I understand the need for world building, but this book feels like two books rolled into one.
About half of the book is a dry, so-thin-it's-transparent metaphor for oppression. A virus is let loose onto the city of manhattan. Most are killed, a few are deformed, a very few gain superpowers.
Then McCarthy suspects the ones with superpowers of being communists; then the ones with deformities are forced into ghettos and otherwise marginalized*. Then they riot throughout the 60s and the 70s.**

The other half is a rollicking superhero fantasy featuring a retiring telekinetic who flys around in a armored VW bug, a pimp whose superpowers only come out when he has tantric sex, a badass archer dude and more. This stuff is great, and with some careful writing (maybe, uh, compressing all of the riots into one) and a good director this could be the basis of a grand superhero ensemble franchise. An R-rated avengers with slightly more pertinent social commentary.

As it is, the sheer unevenness of the stories means it lands squarely in 3-star territory, but I have high hopes for the sequels.

* I would love for someone who knows more about the history of these things than I do to work out
whether Wild Card's did it before or after X-men. If it's before, then I will give this a pass, but if not, it's both blatantly derivative of X-men and also less interesting boo.

** One of the main flaws of the book is that there's really not much to differentiate the Vietnam peace riots from the civil rights riots in this book. They were really different things in real life, but, because they fall so closely together in the novels it feels lazy.







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Review: Come Closer

Come Closer by Sara Gran

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I really enjoy Sara Gran's writing. Her books are clearly very carefully written. Every phrase is considered for maximal impact. Her careful word choices produce deeply evocative prose, without sacrificing an ounce of readability.

This is a short book, and so it has nowhere near the depth of Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, but it was still tremendous, creepy fun.





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Review: Spycatcher

Spycatcher by Matthew Dunn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Apparently Matthew Dunn was a real life MI6 agent, involved in dozens of successful missions and (despite a reminder that "Medals are never awarded to modern MI6 officers") Dunn was personally commended for his actions on one mission that was "so significant that it directly influenced the successful conclusion of a major international incident.*"

Does this lead to a more realistic spy thriller? Decidedly not.

I mean, on one hand, the various spy agencies actually do what they're supposed to do. MI6 and CIA do human intelligence**. NSA does cryptography.*** On the other hand, Will, the intelligence officer in question, wantonly slaughters dozens of Iranian operatives (many of them in central park, no less) not to mention operatives from a bunch of other countries as well. Somehow, I think if this were an actual day in the life of an MI6 field agent we would be reading about them in the press somewhat more frequently.****

The writing is dreadful. Lots of paragraphs that are structured like, "Will did this thing. Will did this other thing. Will knew that this implausibly detailed thing would happen because of his time as a field agent in Prague in 1997." The dialogue is equally stilted and dull.

I know a hallmark of the spy novel is the globetrotting, but in this book it was downright excessive. Will zips back and forth between 3 or four countries keeping ducks in a row and checking in on people. Characters randomly demand meetings in various and sundry other European cities. Clearly in the universe of this book, you don't have to arrive at the airport 2 hours early, because if you did, Will would have spent the entire length of the plot sitting in a waiting room. Furthermore, none of the cities visited have any real personality--all the action could have happened in one country and the story would not have suffered one bit.

For all this, the book moves very swiftly. The tension kicks in on the first page and doesn't really let up until the end. It was enjoyable to read, even if, in retrospect, it wasn't very good.

* Source: his author bio on the back cover.
** And, to be fair, the mission is to recruit an operative, which I gather is fairly realistic.
*** None of this Halle Barry in a bright orange bikini bull$#^&.
**** "Our source was the New York Times."




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Review: Fun and Games

Fun and Games by Duane Swierczynski

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Blecch*, I appear to have started my last two reviews with "Highly Engaging" Sorry about that.
It turns out Fun and Games is also highly engaging, but I won't dwell on that.

What I will focus on is that Fun and Games is really fun! The characters are great. Both the heros and villains are interesting and imperfect and I wanted to learn more about them. I loved the superhero dynamic and I sincerely appreciated the fact that the same "How are you possibly still alive" superpower dynamic was applied equally to the good and bad guys.** I loved the balance induced by the constraints placed on the villains. "We have infinite resources, but we have to make your death look like an accident, so, uh, no guns..."

And although I hated it at the time, I have grown to appreciate the messy, hardly-any-resolution-at-all ending. After all, there are sequels!!!


* This Bleccch is not about the book, which I enjoyed very much, but about my own deplorable review writing ability of late.
** With one notable and sad exception that I won't spoil here.



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Review: The Long Fall

The Long Fall by Walter Mosley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Highly engaging private eye procedural. I very much appreciated Walter Mosley's perspective on the current state of race relations in the Northeast. And he manages to provide his perspective without damaging the momentum of the plot.

Leonid McGill has a unique voice. And the fight scenes carried with them a sense of real danger.

My only complaint is with the mystery itself. For one thing, it was too easy, and for another, the steps the detective took to solve it didn't make a whole lot of sense.*

* Possible spoiler, but why on earth does the detective decide that the mental institution is clearly where the connection between killers happened. It seems like it could have been anywhere. I would have started with the victims....



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Review: The Gray Man

The Gray Man by Mark Greaney

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Highly engaging action thriller. This book doesn't even attempt to be realistic and that is a very good thing. Instead, we get a positively gripping action packed race against time from the middle east to Europe featuring some excellent action scenes.*

The ending sags a little, which is too bad, since the rest of it was so good. Still, I eagerly await Court Gentry #2.

* The zero gravity shootout in the plummeting plane is a highlight.



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Review: Count to a Trillion

Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



Spoilers abound, so read at your own risk. However, I will say, if you had to choose one or the other, I'd recommend reading this blog post over the book itself.

Now then, where were we. Ah, yes. Count to A Trillion by John C. Wright. What an odd book this is.

It starts off as a high-concept sci-fi of the first order. Humankind discovers a monument orbiting* an antimatter star. (A real star, too, which is kind of cool.) The monument has a message from other beings encoded in higher mathematics. And the contents of the star will change human destiny.

...Ok. So far so good...

And in order to delve into the mysteries of the monument (oh, yeah, and harvest some of that there antimatter to solve some of our energy woes here on earth) the most powerful men, including the prince of Monaco, and the governments of Spain and India** on earth recruit a spaceship crew consisting of the brightest mathematicians on the planet.

...Yup. I'm with you...


One of these is a man named Menalaus Montrose. A Texan lawyer, which, in what's left of the USA means one part orator, one part gunslinger.

Wait, what?...

Moreover, due to his Texan nature, Menalaus Montrose is the only one of the several hundred brilliant mathematicians who has the audacity to realize that mere human intelligence will never be enough to decode the monument and comes up with a way of modifying his intelligence to become post human.

...Wait, go back, you said he was a gunslinger, what's that about?...

Unfortunately, the experiment goes horribly wrong, and Menalaus wakes up thousands of years later. The journey to the stars has been and gone and now he find that his crewmate and a beautiful young woman who was on the ship (unbeknownst to the protagonist, of course) have used the antimatter to take over the world.

...Nope, I'm still stuck on the fact that he's a gunslinger. And from Texas...

Then there are a whole bunch of plot twists about how an alien race is coming to enslave us. Or maybe not. Each plot twist is delivered basically as a "And suddenly Character X figured out the next section of the monument." Some of the ideas are really interesting. Most of them, I'm pretty sure are bull$#^&. For example, I am guessing it is not the case that if you only had sophisticated enough game theory you could work out precisely and quantitatively the inter-planetary and inter-species dynamics involved in figuring out whether the energy expenditure of conquering a people many thousands of lightyears away is worth it.

...At least there are vac-trains drilled through the core of the earth...

There's also a romantic subplot, which might be interesting if the female character had any personality whatsoever. Writers: if you ever need an example of a dreadful, and unrealistic female character. Princess Rania is your blueprint.

...but she's pretty!...

Yes, and insipid and boring, except when she's talking about game theory.

...and that tower thingy is cool...

Yes, I do like space elevators, and it's neat that they blow one up in the climax. But what is up with the ending? I get that we're not supposed to know whether Menalaus survives, and I think his decision to detonate the tower, means that Princess Rania is going to go negotiate for the freedom of the species, but the whole thing is unclear. Far too many of the plot twists happen in the last 20 pages.

So, yeah, basically, this book has one good character, several very bad characters, a bunch of interesting ideas. It is also of note that this is the slowest book I can ever remember reading. (Not slow in terms of plot details...plenty happens: the world is destroyed and remade twice in the first 100 pages.) No, I mean physically slow to read. I had less than 100 pages left of this book when I got on a multihour plane flight, and when we landed I had only been able to read 50 of them.


* Or something. The logistics in this book were not what you'd call clear.
** The only functioning governments left, or something, see *.



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