I finished Zadie Smith’s new essay book Changing My Mind today (after picking it up on Wednesday), and it’s pretty good overall although somewhat hit-and-miss.

Unlike some other essay collections, the pieces were written for a variety of different aims and can kind of jerk you around somewhat in between them. Some are memoirs, some are pieces of reportage, and yet others are straight-up essays. Most do just fine standing on their own, but there are a few that I felt in the dark about; they seem designed to accompany movies or essay collections, and fall flat without that guiding context and exposition.

But when it clicks, it clicks. Her essay on David Foster Wallace, as mentioned earlier, makes for an amazing coda to the book and his life. The essay “Speaking in Tongues” is equally excellent - dashing from subject to subject in a surprisingly elegant fashion, unexpectedly looping back on itself in a charming way. And her essay on “That Crafty Feeling” is some of the best writing advice out there. Reading those three essays makes you wish that Zadie Smith made those kinds of sweeping arguments more often, because she has the talent to do it.

One of her best essays, “Fail Better,” is oddly absent from the collection; I can only surmise from a throw-away reference at the beginning that it’s meant to form the foundation of another book, one on writing and moral philosophy. But if you like that essay, you’ll like the three I mentioned above. In one of the more amazing moments of total readerly immersion I’ve ever seen, I handed “Fail Better” to my girlfriend as she arrived back from a trip to the local coffee-place; she proceeded to walk to the other room while reading it, lie down on the bed, and stay that way until the end of the essay - never getting up, breaking eye contact, or setting down the latte in her hand from the start.

That Zadie Smith is one hell of a writer.

Talking about House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is hard. Really hard. Purposely so. Most of the reviews out there form this strange dichotomy that seems to suggest any possible description would either sound patronizing or messianic.

So maybe a formal description at the start would help: House of Leaves is, on its first level, the story of a film called the “Navidson Record” which records a photojournalist and his family moving into an impossible house - a house larger on the inside than the outside, that wanes and waxes and seems to exhibit effects on its inhabitants that far outpace anything experienced by Jack Torrance in The Shining. This is terror in the Lovecraftian mold, a tale of science (and rationality) slamming up against something it can’t possibly encompass.

But that’s just the first level; layered on top of the simple sequence of events is several overlapping commentaries. The primary one is a textbook/critical-work on the Navidson Record, recounting the series of events and dissecting them in every imaginable way. On top of that is commentary by a character named Johnny Truant, who has the effect of breaking up the academic-speak and setting up a parallel storyline. More importantly, Johnny Truant becomes increasingly affected by the textbook as the story goes on, leading the reader to suspect psychological effects in their own case too.

Even after reading House of Leaves, it’s still hard to comprehend that something like this could be written. Most books are esoteric with the difficulty of their composition, hiding it behind elegance and carefully-contoured prose. House of Leaves takes a more brusque approach, making the immense amount of effort clear in the formally complex structure that dives between chapters to footnotes to excised sections back to those same chapters. While the explicit references to the Navidson Record are obviously fictitious, at least a good portion of the other citations must be accurate; I even randomly checked a few just to be sure. More than just a pretty good yarn about an impossible house, this also contains enough library visits and Lexis-Nexis searches to fill a dissertation or two.

And the oddest, most effort-filled part is that it somehow works. The immense effort put into tying the plot to real academic criticism has the effect of making you respect the book’s analysis of events, if only for the author’s investment in it. It wears down your inner monologue of doubt and indecision, eventually exhausting it to the point that you have to take the words as they are on the page. The structure invites criticism and at the same time defuses and deadens it.

But now that I’m done reading the book, it seems a fine time to revisit the same questions that bugged me throughout the novel: What am I to tether myself to? The nugget of experiences at the center that form the subject of the Navidson Record? The academic criticism? The folk criticism? Jonny Truant’s criticism?

This seems like the end-state of postmodernism as a literary method: unreliable narrators heaped upon unreliable narrators, both high- and low-brow commentary treated with some weird mix of parody and sincerity, all boundaries between the text and the world either erased or blurred.

And yet somehow, I’m still standing and eager to read. Even as House of Leaves elevates and muddles the reading as an interpretive process, it still provides ample rewards for success at any level. You can dig deep into the mysteries listed by Wikipedia, but they aren’t a prerequisite for enjoyment. The model here isn’t of an intricately-plotted thriller, but instead a choose-your-own-adventure book: you can choose the level of engagement you want - from middling to obsessive - and House of Leaves still finds something to give no matter what.

This is my second read of the book, and it still holds up as well as when I devoured it my sophomore year of college. It’s also received the most random praise from students at the high school I work at. Not only is House of Leaves a great introduction to the craziness of metafiction, it’s also a great conclusion.

I just finished The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, a fantastic book charting events surrounding the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

The “Devil” of the title refers to the serial killer H.H. Holmes, who occupies a third of the book overall but figures heavily in the fourth act. The rest is concerned with the monumental challenges of besting the earlier Paris Exposition Universelle - debut of the Eiffel Tower - in only a fraction of the planning and building time. It’s incredibly easy and addictive to read, keeping me tearing through the pages until 2:30am at one point.

That said, there were a few parts that rubbed me the wrong way (mainly noticeable because the rest was so awesome). A lot of the book is fleshed out by the author, to state it nicely. To state it less nicely, he totally manufactures the inner thoughts of H.H. Holmes along with a lot of his activity before, during, and after the fair. Going from the folk diagnosis of H.H. Holmes as a psychopath, he portrays him as almost cartoonishly-unfeeling caricature of a human being, as adept at charm as he is at killing.

I understand that this was necessary to make it feel like reading a fictional novel, but it also makes me question what parts of the book were actually factual. With the fair itself, we have a bevy of primary documentation and plenty of sources with less incentive to lie. For Holmes, we have the usual sensational press accounts of the day (as well as very dubious accounts from Holmes himself). Columbine, while an even more awesome book, sort of pulled the same trick in fleshing out the two school shooters - but Columbine was supported by exponentially more primary documentation and continuing access to almost everyone who surrounded the person portrayed.

This whole objection is probably just me being a tight-ass, given that a good portion of my “Intro to Nonfiction Writing” class was spent with me arguing to the teacher that David Sedaris wasn’t nonfiction because he deliberately fudged facts. But it was something that weighed on my mind as I started to notice it throughout the book, especially since some other sections did read like parodies of a TV show. The author loves ending sections with foreshadowing that makes me want to slap my forehead, like, “later, these musings of fire would come to seem like prophecy.”

But honestly, outside of those two quibbles, it’s a fantastic book and accessible enough that I’d recommend it to anyone wanting a good yarn. Larson does a wonderful job creating the ambiance of the era, carefully revealing facts in a way that preserves and enhances the wonder that visitors might have felt upon seeing the exhibition. His writing is solid, with the occasional turn towards being evocatively poetic. And Larson’s pacing is amazing, especially with incorporating H.H. Holmes in order to give the book’s story a race to the finish. Good read!

I just finished reading Better by Atul Gawande, and it was great!

Some may come into the book expecting a series of exciting anecdotes, and it does have some of that. Gawande often sketches out an example or instance to underline one of his grander points, but that’s not the focus of the book. Unlike medical dramas, Gawande is relatively uninterested in the baffling, difficult cases; he is concerned with improving medicine as a whole, understanding how to prevent mistakes and raise outcomes on a systemic scale.

The early portion of the book is on diligence, the perseverance to try and drive something bad to 0%. From hospital-acquired infections to polio elimination, Gawande looks at the extraordinary efforts marshaled to try and drive these avoidable problems to non-existence. Millions are vaccinated in the course of a few days; soap and sinks are installed, moved, and renovated for years in search of 100% compliance. Gawande is priming the reader to think of tragedies as avoidable aberrations, ones that can be atoned for by vowing to figure out the root causes of the problem.

In this sense, Gawande invests his writing with a deeply moral sensibility, one that must grapple with the horrifyingly statistical nature of his work. There’s no such thing as a perfect physician, and mistakes are not a question of if but when. Gawande’s perspective assumes human fallibility, and then tries to figure out how we can protect ourselves from failure through designing our systems to contain and prevent them.

This moral sensibility starts to show more in the second section, “Doing Right,” where Gawande starts to tackle hard questions about malpractice suits, insurance, and doctors providing medical assistance for the death penalty. More than just recognizing and explaining the situation, Gawande aim is also to draw out the different moral questions involved in each issue. Although he doesn’t turn the essay into a grand argument for one answer, he does lay down some generally-agreeable guidelines for any possible stance.

And in the third section, he asks yet more questions of medicine. Somewhat hidden in a (slightly muddled) essay about pregnancies, he talks about the rise of medicine as an industry with focus on consistently repeatable outcomes. And an exploration of cystic fibrosis turns into a discussion about how that field has collected statistical evidence for decades, and the possible side-effects of publishing the best (and worst) hospitals at controlling the symptoms.

By the end, Gawande has tempered his enthusiasm for evidence-based medicine with an admission that it will not always be easy or pleasant for all involved. But it’s that admission that lends his other writings such ethical heft. Gawande’s a master of the logical and ethical appeals, coming across as one of the most reasonable writers in America. So reasonable, in fact, that his June article on health cost disparities was rightfully hailed as the best piece of medical/policy writing this year. (You should read it too.)

In conclusion, please read this book. It’s only 250 pages or so, and a really quick and easy read. A handful of anecdotes made me squirm in my seat at the descriptions of surgeries, but I almost made it through the whole thing last night before bed. Very recommended for all.

Yesterday my paperback copy of Snarkmarket’s New Liberal Arts arrived in the mail, and I’m afraid it’s more interesting for the method of production than the actual content.

The book itself - which you can read for free in PDF form - attempts to catalogue the possible “new liberal arts” that we could find in the modern age: every discipline that would help us to live better no matter our occupation or place in life. The listing of topics includes everything from attention economics to video literacy, and each is accompanied by a short blog-posty explanation of what exactly they mean.

The 80-page count is generous, as the book is very very spaced out with quite a few facing blank pages. The whole thing is pretty voiceless and blandly written, with a lot more telling than showing in each entry. And the biggest crime is that they amount to theoretical toe-dipping, with none of the pieces really evoking the Big Questions in the same way traditional liberal arts tend to. From reading this book, you’d think that all those liberal art credits in college were mainly exercises in trendy analog lifehacking.

But more interesting is the production model, which married a limited run of 200 traditional paperbacks with a free release of the PDF once all 200 physical copies were sold. It’s a neat incentive structure designed to lure in bibliophiles, early-adopters, and other demographics who are traditionally willing to shell out more money for stuff. And hey, they got me to put out $$ for it so there’s a little bit of proof in the pudding.

This is a really neat step in the direction of micropublishing, which I think holds a lot of potential as we acclimate to being a society of voices. Blogs and the internet are nice, but there’s a certain rhetorical effect of books that can’t be copied online. The BLDGBLOG Book (which I reviewed earlier) is a great example of how some blogs make fantastic books, especially when freed from the tyranny of timestamps. Having a big list of posts from most-recent to least-recent is the dominant organization scheme in internet self-publishing, but it’s incredibly poor way of telling any sort of story. We haven’t found any better way online (outside of incredibly fragile tagging schemes), but books have had that stuff down for centuries.

So in conclusion, we all need to do our part and coerce Mills, Ragbag, Kyle Bingman, and some other Tumblrs to arrange their posts into some sort of grand book that we can buy and dig into away from computer screens. Because New Liberal Arts only hints at how awesome this aggregation method could be.

Yesterday I finished Columbine by Dave Cullen and it’s incredibly, incredibly good. So good that I slammed through it in an afternoon and evening, only stopping for dinner and a mandatory scheduling meeting.

I originally heard about this book as the first complete accounting of the shootings at Columbine High School. And it succeeds on that count, deftly deconstructing the events of April 20, 1999, even as they confused the media, the police, and the student population while they happened. To tell the story of that day is an impressive feat of journalism in itself, but Cullen doesn’t stop there.

Out of a 350-page book, only the first 100 pages is devoted to a conventional recounting of the attack. For the remainder of the story, Cullen pursues twin narratives: Dylan and Eric as they slipped down into being ready for the attack, and the aftermath of the attack on both media and survivors. It seems gimmicky at first glance - like a parody of a New Yorker article - but works out tremendously well thanks to Cullen’s larger goal.

Using Columbine as the title of the book isn’t a blunt tool to lure sales in airport bookstores, but an uncannily subtle statement about the real subject; Cullen isn’t just talking about the shooting here, but what meanings the event and the word “Columbine” have for everyone involved.

To the media, it was a pair of loners and goths looking to wreak vengeance on those who had bullied and shunned them. To the police who responded that day, it was designed as a school shooting. To Cassie Bernall’s parents, it was the summation of their daughter’s spiritual journey as she bravely professed her faith to the gunmen. But all these explanations were categorically wrong.

The real drama here isn’t the incident itself, but instead how each person sought to work out the meaning of that incident. To Eric Harris, it meant a display of tyrannical superiority over everyone. To Dylan Klebold, it meant having an outlet for the internal pains that wracked his psyche.

Everyone, in the course of the book, ends up working out their own meaning as to what happened. Columbine - which started out the novel as the name of the high-school and surrounding community - starts to fracture both literally and figuratively. Differences in meaning lead to different factions within the community of victims, factions who often argue over how they should interact with the county government, the media, and the watching nation.

It’s incredibly interesting and touching and heartbreaking stuff. I’d recommend it to almost everyone from casual readers to “serious” book nerds like myself, and will be shocked if it doesn’t clean house when awards season swings around. Regardless of whether you’re interested in the shootings themselves, the larger world evoked by this book is amazing.

The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley was hugely disappointing, and probably because it’s not that good.

The premise of the book is actually pretty interesting: illustrate the various philosophies to death by recounting the personal deaths (and lives) of famous philosophers throughout history and how that compared or contrasted with their philosophy. However, there are a few mistakes that Critchley makes in telling the tales:

• Trying to tell the stories of over 190 different philosophers… in a 250 page book.
• Unable to decide whether the capsule biograpies are meant to be read in sequence or at will.
• Immediately - and with little supporting evidence - imposing his own viewpoint in the picture and allowing it to warp his histories without any apparent consideration of alternative stances beyond mere recounting.

As a result, Critchley rarely manages to eke any depth out of the philosophers discussed. This isn’t too much of a problem early on in the greek philosophers, whose differences can be bluntly hashed out without too much loss in detail. But once he gets to medieval times, the enterprise starts to fall apart. (More later.)

Critchley’s prose is merely middling, despite being specifically praised by Lewis Lapham (who normally has excellent taste as showcased in Lapham’s Quarterly). His tone is so bland that it seems equally ill-suited to discussing philosophy or humorous anecdotes, despite being employed in the service of both. Sometimes there enough transitions between sections to indicate they were meant to be read as a whole, but other times they seem almost slapdash. Even when we’re being given the These Are Connected signposts, there doesn’t seem to be much added by their juxtaposition.

Finally, the whole book is semi-stifled by Critchley himself, who declares his position from the beginning and never ceases to remind you whether he agrees or disagrees with the author at hand. This is ok when it comes to constructing philosophy, but not when you’re laying claim to exegenesis (deciphering the meaning of texts) or recounting their lives in a historically-accurate manner. But yet it does, and the result is that I was deeply suspicious of everything Critchley said. And because he slammed all 190 people into only 250 pages, there’s very little given in the way of corroborating evidence. Yuck.

I almost wrote this negative review last night at about 100 pages in, but decided to persevere in hopes that it would get better once we reached more modern philosophers with better documentation of their personal lives. It did get better, but only mildly. There were moments that made me laugh, but only a handful in the whole book.

The Book of Dead Philosophers would be far better served as a two-part arrangement: a quick survey of the deaths of philosophers, followed by a deeper examination of the handful of philosophers whose work Critchley truly finds valuable. As is, it seems too much like Critchley wants to impress you with his research and then slip a fast one on you by sneaking in his own opinion as fact. I found it frustrating in the same way that I find it frustrating to read The Economist’s smug claim to stating The Way Things Are while cutting off at the knees my own ability to critically examine the claims.

In the end, the best praise I can give this book is that it was smoothly-written enough that I was over with it fairly quickly. Only a night and a morning spent, and I’m onward to greener pastures.

This weekend I also finished reading Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and it’s the most beautiful - but also unnerving - novel I’ve ever read.

First things first: the novel starts out with the best opening to anything ever in the English language.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Impressive, huh? But more importantly, the beautiful writing has an effect in the storytelling, working as a sort of aesthetic anaesthetic that dulls our gut-level revulsion to what the narrator Humbert Humbert does to secure control over his love Lolita. There are sections that sound like the most entrancing love-letter ever… until Nabokov reminds us a few sentences later that Lolita isn’t even in her teens yet. The effect is unbelievably disconcerting, and kept me on my toes throughout the early part of the novel.

Kubrick pursued a similar paradox in A Clockwork Orange, seeking to make the violence so beautiful that the viewer sympathizes - in a way - with the main character’s psychopathic behavior. He neglects others’ interests, but seemingly in the pursuit of a Greater Good like beauty, truth, etc. We’re seduced by Humbert Humbert’s artistic gifts, which were ironically insufficient to seduce Lolita herself.

But after the opening 100 pages or so, Humbert Humbert’s manipulation of the reader starts to fall apart. We see glimpses of his efforts at control, such as how he would physically force his former wife to agree. By the time Lolita is his captive prey, we’re familiar with his twisted logic and rationalizations for actions. Notable amongst these is one scheme to drug Lolita and fondle her unconscious body, as to not cause her psychic pain from an attempt while awake.

As the novel progresses, the horror shifts. Humbert Humbert isn’t in love with Lolita, but some twisted shadow of a fantasy that he resolutely associates with her. Pedophilia is troubling enough, but Nabokov reveals it to be layered on a vile brand of unrequited love. Humbert is willing to do almost anything to keep his power over Lolita, even when his willpower is good for nothing more than… well, I’ll just say that Nabokov knows all about Chekhov’s gun.

Despite the moral stomach-twisting that it puts me through, the prose really is fantastic enough to justify reading the novel all by itself. I devoured the novel’s 300 pages in less than two days, and I’ve found my own writing style to have sightly shifted since starting my read. My sentences tend to be longer and more gnarled, favoring the longer constructions that Nabokov occasionally slips into.

It sounds ridiculous but our finest prose-stylist of the English language may be Nabokov, who first started writing in Russian. He was trilingual in his childhood, though, which he shows off throughout the novel by throwing in snippets of French. It’s for those and other obscure references that I’m tempted to buy the The Annotated Lolita featuring translations and all sorts of explanatory footnotes. I’m glad that I went with the plain novel first, though, since I’ve heard that the annotations spoil later events in the novel. As is, I could just skip over the confusing references and just enjoy the beauty in the words.

Anyways, I’d recommend it to pretty much anyone. The book is over 50 years old, but reads as fresh as ever. I’m beginning to suspect that Pynchon and others started to play postmodernism’s games afterwards because you just can’t beat Nabokov in a straight write-off. He’s utterly amazing, and his other stuff (like the poem/story/?? Pale Fire) just shot onto my reading list.

On Friday I finished Collected Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which includes all his published short stories between 1947 and 1972. It’s the first I’ve read by Marquez, and ok, I guess.

One of Marquez’s themes that becomes clear over the course of these twenty-six stories is the way that the odd quickly becomes familiar, and how some things that are familiar are actually rather odd in practice. The first batch of stories, published as “Eyes of a Blue Dog” in Spanish, are insistently concerned with the limits of physical existence. The characters experience blindness, death, and other hardships tied to their bodies. Marquez finds a way to pick out the salient details, creating drama out of even a man shaving himself using his own reflection.

That reflection story in particular manages to hint at his later moves towards the fantastic. The third and final batch of stories starts with the excellent story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” which chronicles the arrival in town of a very old man with enormous wings. Initially a spectacle, he quickly ceases to hold any value for the town’s residents, forced to subsist on mush in a chicken coop. Marquez shows how the ordinary can subtly be fantastic by presenting a fantastic situation that quickly turns ordinary. I suppose this is an aim of the larger magical realism movement too.

The voice is hard to pin down, too. It’s got that slippery feel of translated prose to it, but not the simple, plain-spoken quality of Murakami’s take on magical realism. It can be sensuous one moment, and clinical the next. It dives into characters and spins out of them just as quickly. It refuses to be pinned down, but still feels as if it was all written by the same author. I could never really get my thumb on it, partially because the stories span such a length of time in the developing talent of Marquez.

Overall, it was a pleasure to read but I can’t say that I was blown away like I was by some of the other stuff I’ve read recently. The stories did have their wonderful moments, but they were diffuse and not quite as discrete-blow-to-the-cranium as the best ones are. The book felt weird, but too comfortable for my taste. Maybe it’s because today’s authors have already digested and iterated on Marquez’s style, but the whole experience felt like I was reading something I’d seen somewhere else. I can understand why my friend Maggie so eagerly pushed it on me, but the effect was more of recognizing why it’s good, not feeling why it’s good.

I do think, though, that I’ll eventually try tackling One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez.

Just finished reading Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace.

This (along with “Good People”) is probably the best introduction to DFW’s fiction that I’ve found, featuring pretty-short stories in a bunch of different styles and voices. You’re pretty much guaranteed to find one that you’ll fall in love with, like one of the titular interviews or his second-person voice in “Forever Overhead”:

Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you.

Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair. There are now more of the hard curled hairs around your privates than you can count without losing track. Other things. Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning. Your face has begun to get shiny when you don’t wash it. And two weeks of a deep and frightening ache this past spring left you with something dropped down from inside: your sack is now full and vulnerable, a commodity to be protected. Hefted and strapped in tight supporters that stripe your buttocks red. You have grown into a new fragility.

DFW can flip into this poetic-prose mode when he wants to, but rarely does. Instead, he tries to carve at the truth using words as people speak them, and only occasionally as they don’t. One essay is written as if a greek myth transplanted to late-90s Los Angeles, which takes a few pages to get used to. Most of the essays don’t require such deciphering, and the ones that do try to pay off such effort through laughs or revelation.

Most of the pieces - especially the interviews - are utterly magnetic and horrifying in a way. They’re all interviews with “hideous men,” something that becomes clear in the telling of each. But what you don’t expect is how each essay manages to hit close to home. I can recognize parts of myself in some of these writings, parts that weren’t fully elucidated or realized until after they’re read.

That makes them troubling, but it’s what they describe that makes them horrific. They’re full of moral traps, attempts at being Good that end up tragically backfiring in a way that’s often masked by their intended aims. You’re left with somewhat of confusion, a mixture of feelings that have to be worked out by yourself. But it’s a good confusion - if that makes any kind of sense - in that you feel for once as if you’re striking the motherload, uncovering the disease that produces all the aches and pains and symptoms that is the human condition.

This sounds all kind of overwrought and melodramatic and it probably is. But reading these stories, especially in close succession, is one hell of a trip. You end up looking at yourself (literally “your self”) differently.

I can’t recommend it enough.