Hardcore Literature

Finn Family Moomintroll, by Tove Jansson

2012-01-16T21:09:00.001-06:00

Browsing the juvenile fiction section of the local library, I came across this book. I brought it home for my daughter to read, and in researching what exactly it was, I found out it wasn't the first book of the series. We returned it and checked out Comet in Moominland, which my daughter avoided because she didn't know what it was. I showed her some of the things I found online about Moominland and Tove Jansson, and she became very excited about the idea of visiting the Moominland amusement park in Finland (which will probably never happen). Once she was on board, I read Comet in Moominland aloud to our kids and they really enjoyed it. We then re-checked out this book to read together.

I think I liked this book better. It was a series of summer adventures with a common element of a found hat with magical properties. My kids enjoyed the stories, and the book's "villain" turned out to not be mean at all, which my kids greatly appreciated.

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming

2012-01-10T12:27:00.001-06:00

I have two opposing reading trends emerging in my life right now. On the one hand, my eclectic non-fiction selection is becoming more focused on economics (as it should have been for over four years now). On the other hand, I am adding more fiction for relaxation, and the type of fiction is more entertaining than bettering. I've basically shelved my plan to read all the major works of the Victorian period (at least for now). In its place I've been working my way through the works of P.G. Wodehouse. And with this book, I add the James Bond novels to my relaxation fiction.

Of course, I've seen the film version of this book from a few years back. That dulled a few of the surprises, but not all, since there are substantial differences between the book and movie. Like the movie, Bond is a relatively-recently-minted Double-O agent given the assignment to bankrupt a baddie in a gambling game. Unlike the movie, the casino is in northern France, the baddie is a Soviet agent, and the game is baccarat. Bond does desire to leave the spy world and settle down with Vesper Lynd (whose name, according to Wikipedia, is a pun on a German-accented pronunciation of "West Berlin"), but those plans are complicated by the work of SMERSH, the enforcer organization controlling Soviet spies. Bond ends the novel with a desire to destroy SMERSH, setting up subsequent novels.

Two particular quotes proved interesting to me. One is when Bond says, "Today we fight Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that" (p. 135). The second is something Mathis says later in the same conversation: "Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles" (p. 139).

All in all, I enjoyed it. With the launch of the Daniel Craig movies, there has been a lot of talk about how different the Bond character is. Well, the Craig Bond is very similar to the novel Bond. Instead of a break with tradition, it's more of a return to form. If you enjoy the more-nuanced Bond character, you'll enjoy the Bond of the novels.

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan

2012-01-07T12:27:00.002-06:00

Sometimes I plan to read a book. This was not one of those times.

I periodically stop by the used book store to look for a few particular titles (The Buried Biscuits, the Grolier's World's Greatest Classics edition of A Tale of Two Cities and Faust, and the movies Gentleman Broncos and Star Wars: The Clone Wars). Outside the store they have a free bin, where they put the books that are in too bad of shape to sell, or that they already have too many of. Lately the free bin has been overrun with professional scavengers with bar-code scanners, elbowing all others aside like they're in the Kaufmann's bargain basement.

The week after Christmas was no exception. An enormous guy smoking a cigar was protecting two-thirds of the free bin. I managed to find a particularly worn copy of The Lightning Thief, and in keeping with my goal of making my daughter an expert on Greek mythology, and at long-suffering blog-reader Erin's recommendation, I squirreled it away and sprinted back to the car. When I got home, I set the book on the living room table.

We left town for New Year's. When we arrived back home, I had to poop. (I told you this blog was hardcore.) I absolutely hate pooping without something to do--it's such a waste of time. All the books I was currently reading were still in the car with the rest of the luggage. With my pooping event horizon fast approaching, I grabbed the closest book, which happened to be The Lightning Thief. I'm sure Rick Riordan is very proud to gather readers in this way.

I'm of two minds about this book. There are things to really like about it, and things that I really didn't like at all. I think I will start with the negatives, so everyone goes away happy at the end.

I didn't particularly like the character of Percy. Not that he wasn't well crafted; in fact, given that I don't particularly like most 12-year-old boys, it's possible the character was too well crafted. Percy seems like the type of kid who runs to the dessert table at a church dinner and asks for fifths before anyone else has had firsts, and then when his request is denied he calls out, "This is bogus" (or the modern-kid-speak equivalent). I hate kids like that. And for a kid who thinks he didn't pay much attention in his classical antiquities class, he certainly remembers a whole lot of details about obscure Greek myths, and says them out loud for the reader's benefit.

Story-wise, it's exciting and engaging. Reading with an eye for "is this book appropriate for my nine-year-old daughter," I think Riordan did a great job toning down the PG-13 elements of mythology just enough. This was definitely not a "sexy, sweeping tale." The comic scenes seem like the kind the target audience will enjoy, and the barely-cognizant romantic element seems age-appropriate for a 12-year-old main character. Like how the climactic scene in Max Keeble's Big Move is holding hands.

This the the first book in a series, and the set-up seems favorable for my continued reading. The most annoying element of the book to me was Percy's relationship with his stepfather, which consisted mainly of wanting to punch him, but that relationship won't be in the subsequent books. I think I'll like the rest of the series even more.

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

2011 Reading

2011-12-31T12:27:00.001-06:00

Here are the 90 books I read in 2011:

Hector and the Search for Happiness by François Lelord
Denationalisation of Money by Friedrich A. Hayek
A Dog Called Grk by Joshua Doder
Invasion From Planet Dork by Greg Trine
The Phantom Mudder by Darrel and Sally Odgers
Very Good, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
Lehi in the Desert/The World of the Jaredites/There Were Jaredites by Hugh Nibley
Manias, Panics, and Crashes by Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber
The Name of This Book Is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch
Money and Foreign Exchange After 1914 by Gustav Cassel
The Iliad by Homer (Rodney Merrill, trans.)
Grk and the Pelotti Gang by Joshua Doder
Abel's Island by William Steig
Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by Mil Millington
The Theory of Monetary Institutions by Lawrence H. White
Ion by Plato
Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes
Apostles and Bishops in Early Christianity by Hugh Nibley
Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett
The White Feather by P.G. Wodehouse
William Tell Told Again by P.G. Wodehouse
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
The Mugged Pug by Darrel and Sally Odgers
The Puzzling World of Winston Breen by Eric Berlin
Cicero by Anthony Everitt
Understanding Isaiah by Donald W. Parry, Jay A. Parry, and Tina M. Peterson
The Republic by Plato
Amazing Monty by Johanna Hurwitz
Grk and the Hot Dog Trail by Joshua Doder
Martin Bridge Blazing Ahead by Jessica Scott Kerrin
One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde
The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury
Man Out at First by Matt Christopher
The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Going Rogue by Sarah Palin
The Blue Stealer by Darrel and Sally Odgers
Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
More Adventures of the Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald
The Punic Wars by Adrian Goldsworthy
Long Stretch at First Base by Matt Christopher
The Not-So-Great Depression by Amy Goldman Koss
Babe by Dick King-Smith
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Mostly Monty by Johanna Hurwitz
Me and My Little Brain by John D. Fitzgerald
The Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith, Jr., trans.
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Inspector Jacques by Darrel and Sally Odgers
101 Commonsense Rules for Making Things Happen by John R. Brinkerhoff
Grk: Operation Tortoise by Joshua Doder
A Commentary on the Doctrine and Covenants, Vol. 1 by Stephen E. Robinson and H. Dean Garrett
Honus & Me by Dan Gutman
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
The Advanced Genius Theory by Jason Hartley
The Wright 3 by Blue Balliett
A Commentary on the Doctrine and Covenants, Vol. 2 by Stephen E. Robinson and H. Dean Garrett
Optimum Currency Areas by Mario I. Blejer, et Al., eds.
Beric the Briton by G.A. Henty
The ECB: Safe at Any Speed? by David Begg, et Al.
One Money, Many Countries by Carlo Favero, et Al.
The Crystal Bridge by Charles M. Pulsipher
Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson
Less Than Zero by George A. Selgin
A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd
Competition and Currency by Lawrence H. White
Mighty Monty by Johanna Hurwitz
Richard III by William Shakespeare
Grk Smells a Rat by Joshua Doder
Cranky Paws by Darrel and Sally Odgers
A Commentary on the Doctrine and Covenants, Vol. 3 by Stephen E. Robinson and H. Dean Garrett
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Money Mischief by Milton Friedman
Doctrine and Covenants by Joseph Smith, Jr., et Al.
A Commentary on the Doctrine and Covenants, Vol. 4 by Stephen E. Robinson and H. Dean Garrett
Henry Reed, Inc. by Keith Robertson
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Economics of a Pure Gold Standard by Mark Skousen
The Depression Cure by Stephen S. Ilardi
Becoming Metropolitan by Nathaniel D. Wood
The Pig Scrolls by Paul Shipton
When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson
Managerial Dilemmas by Gary J. Miller
Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Monthly Update - April 2011

2011-04-30T12:27:00.001-05:00

I'm trying to get back to writing one post per book. This is a baby step in that direction. And according to the ground-breaking work of Dr. Leo Marvin, baby steps are very, very important.

The Iliad, by Homer (translated by Rodney Merrill)

If I'm hoping to say something novel about Homer, I'm probably a few generations too late. The book is what it is, and nothing I can say about it is going to change that, or convince the author to write differently in the future. It was interesting to read this book while reading Hugh Nibley's There Were Jaredites, which is all about the coincidence of epic literature throughout ancient societies.

What I can talk about is Merrill's translation, although I haven't read very many other translations of The Iliad for comparative purposes (I read selections from The Iliad in a Norton anthology in college 12 years ago.) But Merrill wrote a long introduction where he defends his choice of imposing a poetic meter, and I think it went well. I'm sure the effort was like the construction of a freeway bypass: an unbelievable amount of work that I barely noticed after the fact.

For some reason, this edition has some low ratings on Good Reads, but his edition of The Odyssey, which is a companion volume, has good ratings. I'm probably going to read The Odyssey later this year, and I suspect I'll read Merrill's translation for continuity.

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Grk and the Pelotti Gang, by Joshua Doder

My kids enjoyed A Dog Called Grk, so we have moved on to the rest of the books in the series. This one was set in Brazil. My daughter was upset that her favorite character, Natasha Rafiffi, was an after-thought in this book. All the action centered on Tim and Grk. It was helpful that I had just read an article on Jose Mourinho, so I knew the proper way to pronounce the Portuguese name "Jose." Also, there were no murdered parents in this one, which is a big improvement over the last one. Not an unenjoyable book to read aloud, and my kids are eager to hear the next one.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Abel's Island, by William Steig

Last year I read Steig's Dominic to my kids, and they absolutely hated it. I mean, even more than I hated Bubble and Squeak hated it. I, however, really enjoyed it. Rarely does a book make me want to read the Cliffs Notes to make sure I'm not missing anything, but Dominic made me wish there were Cliffs Notes for it.

Given how much they hated Dominic, I probably shouldn't have read Abel's Island to them, but I'm a firm believer that a dad should do things merely to bug his kids. It helps them build character, right? Character and a resentment of their dad, I guess.

Well, I've got good news: the kids liked this one. My son liked the planning Abel had to put into his different ideas for how to leave the island. My daughter liked that there were no roving gangs of toughs (which was how Dominic began, and was a large part of why she hated that book). I liked that this book also had deeper meaning, and didn't ignore the fact that Abel had to "defecate." (My son said, "Wait, does that mean he pooped?")

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, by Mil Millington

This is a book I liked a lot more towards the end than I liked towards the beginning, but I still can't bring myself around to saying I liked it as a whole. It's hard to like and it's hard to not like.

Firstly, the "mapcap zaniness" was not so much funny as disturbing. I know it's supposed to be over-the-top funny, like a Punch and Judy show, but there's a reason no one goes to Punch and Judy shows anymore. Reading the "hilarious" arguments between Pel and his girlfriend Ursula reminded me of reading about the mother from Bubble and Squeak; the mother's psychological abuse was too real for a children's book. It wasn't the ha-ha kind of abuse you get from Roald Dahl adult characters, it was the holy-crap kind of abuse you get from Mommy Dearest. Millington's scenes of domestic turmoil made me want to turn away, not read more. A spot-on description of a badly dysfunctional relationship is not funny. It is sad.

Secondly, I felt the book was too autobiographical. A British man with a German girlfriend and two children writes a book about a British man with a German girlfriend and two children. This contributed greatly to my inability to enjoy the Punch and Judy aspect: what if at the end of every performance, the puppeteer came out and said, "This show was based on the true story of a man feeding his baby to an alligator"? I'm aware of the advice to "write what you know," but I think maybe that can be interpreted a little more loosely.

Thirdly, Pel goes out of his way to tell his oldest child that God isn't real, and then goes out of his way to cover for Santa Claus. Maybe it was supposed to be a send-up of parents with misplaced priorities, but it came through as just a parent with misplaced priorities. It bothers me that there are people in the world who really deny God and support Santa. With the too-autobiographical nature of the book, it is unclear if this is the narrator or the author who feels this way. The entire thing sets up a joke much later, but there's a very weak connection. It's like telling someone Schindler's List is a comedy because it will help them understand The Producers, which is funny.

Fourthly, the whole coffee shop setting with his two non-work-related friends bothered me, because I felt everyone wasn't communicating, they were acting for the benefit of the two on-lookers. It was like "Gilmore Girls" dialog: the funny thing to say instead of the thing that actually had meaning.

Okay, now for what I still managed to enjoy about the book. As the book progressed, Pel's arguments with Ursula became less dysfunctional. Maybe I just got acclimated, but elements of them could be enjoyable. Also, Millington is a great comic storyteller. I get the feeling that he'd be a great guy to meet at the party of a mutual friend. He'd regale you all night with outlandish tales from his past. He can write funny description very well, which is a big plus for a humorous novel.

This story just sort of peters out, and we're supposed to be okay with it because we think, “It'll turn out all right, because he's got Ursula.” But can we really think that when we've just spent over 350 pages reading about how he and Ursula want to murder each other (ha-ha murder, though, remember?)?

I feel like Millington came up with a funny premise, wrote it until he grew tired, and ended the book. Which is what John Grisham does sometimes with a thrilling premise, but at least Grisham pulls an ending out of nowhere (“Who was the murderer? Um, this character I'll introduce to you right now.”) Millington didn't even bother to make up an ending. But I can't really be too critical of any novel anyone else has published, because it's more than I've managed to accomplish, isn't it?

Rating: three out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Theory of Monetary Institutions, by Lawrence H. White

I'm going to give this book a high rating, because this is exactly the type of thing that interests me, but the normal person shouldn't necessarily take that high rating as a reading recommendation. Monetary theory is definitely not for everyone (and White, my professor, would probably say it's not for me, too). My three-year-old son came over to have me read to him, and I didn't even complete the first sentence before he ran away.

The book starts with theories of the origin of money, then the history of redeemable currency, then theory regarding the current fiat money framework, and then ends with ideas of how competition could be reintroduced in a non-redeemable environment. Like I said, not for everyone, but totally awesome to me.

Rating: seven out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Ion, by Plato

I read this because I had a school assignment that mentioned Ion and I thought, “That's short enough that I don't even have to fake it.” In retrospect, I wish I'd faked it.

Ion is annoying, because Socrates is a jerk. I agree with Adeimantus when he says in Book VI of The Republic, “And, as unskillful daught-players are in the end hemmed into a corner by the skillful, till they cannot make a move, just in the same way your hearers conceive themselves to be at last hemmed in and reduced to silence by this novel kind of draughts, played with words instead of counters. For they are not at all the more convinced that the conclusion to which they are brought is the true one” (487c). Socrates doesn't necessarily have correct ideas, but he spends much more time and energy devising arguments for his ideas. He then picks fights with productive people, who devote less of their concentration on the topic, and he runs circles around them, thereby concluding that his ideas are correct. All that has really been shown is that Socrates has too much time on his hands.

I don't even think Socrates believes half the crap he says. I think he just wants to show he can take any premise and make it sound true. So Ion says he's a better actor in the role of general than a general, and Socrates takes him apart, but if Ion had said the opposite, Socrates would have contradicted that position, too.

It's hard for me to say these things about a conclusion which I support--namely, that actors have mental deficiencies--but there it is nonetheless.

Rating: two out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Tom Brown's Schooldays, by Thomas Hughes

I read P.G. Wodehouse's Tales of St. Austin's, which includes a story where the narrator gives a lengthy review of Tom Brown's Schooldays. I figured I should read the book, seeing how it serves as inspiration for some of Wodehouse's school settings. Since the book is from 1857, and it wasn't written by anyone named Disney, it's now in the public domain, and easy to get for free.

The biggest problem with the book is that it is from 1857. There's a whole lot of moralizing that doesn't drive the story at all. Even in the first half, which mostly escapes criticism in Wodehouse's treatment. The second half, though, is so needless pretentious it's scandalous. I'd like to read a history of the public schools of the era to see if they really were so full of platonic love, but the boredom I'd have to suffer would be unbearable. I'll stick to Wodehouse for my public school tales.

Rating: three out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Apostles and Bishops in Early Christianity, by High Nibley

This book is a wonderful treatment of the question of Christian authority. The disconnect between the apostles and the Christian Fathers is clearly shown. The office of bishop underwent a change between AD 100 and 350, and Nibley definitively presents the change. This period of apostasy is very interesting to me, and I've read other books on the same topic (Nibley's Mormonism and Early Christianity, Jackson's From Apostasy to Restoration, and Talmage's Great Apostasy, for examples), but this book is probably the best of them, in terms of the extensiveness of the argument in relation to the length of the text.

Rating: seven out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Chasing Vermeer, by Blue Balliett

I got this book for my daughter at the library, and she started it, but then gave me excuses for why she wasn't finishing it. She does that sometimes, and I don't know if it's because the text is too difficult for her or the material is too scary to read alone. I offered to read it aloud to her and her brother, and she readily accepted.

I liked this book. It was a good mystery for a pre-teen kid. I am dumbfounded by the number of scathing reviews on Good Reads. One said,

This book may very well be the worst book I have ever read in my entire life. Why? Let me break it down for you.
There's a painting. It gets stolen. Lucky for the art museum of Chicago, three fifth graders have a plan to get it back. So if you'd ever read the last three chapters of flat stanely [sic], you have read this entire book.
First of all, I generally hate mystery books anyway, which is most likely a prime factor of my hatred for this book. Secondly, I hate mysteries that involve children, just adding on to my hatred.

The book makes no mystery (no pun intended) of the fact that it's a mystery involving children. And the quixotic shout-out to Flat Stanley, which I've read without feeling this book was derivative of it, is just confusing. Is all art-theft-themed literature a rip-off of Flat Stanley?

My kids liked the book. It got them interested in the life of Vermeer, and the work of Charles Fort. It was suspenseful without being too scary. They are eager to hear the sequels Balliett's written.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The White Feather, by P.G. Wodehouse

A great Wodehouse schooldays book. A boy is a coward, bringing dishonor to his house. The house "cuts" him. He undertakes a plan to win honor for the house. Comedy doesn't necessarily ensue like it would in a later Wodehouse novel, but it unfolds alongside the plot. As funny as Blandings and Jeeves books are, there's a certain sense that the plot was serving the comedy. This book is the other way round. As I tend to remember it, there's very little cricket in this book, so the cricket-ignorant reader can rest assured.

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

William Tell Told Again, by P.G. Wodehouse

An unfortunate book. It very much seems like someone said, "Hey, Plum is a funny writer. Let's see what he can do with the story of William Tell. I bet it will be hilarious!"

Well, it's certainly funny, but to what end? Just to read a funny version of William Tell? If you're in the market for this type of thing, look no further, but if you are after something more substantial, this is not your book.

Rating: two and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton

A book which made me want to get the Cliffs Notes, yet sadly none exist. The "surprise ending" was fairly easy to see coming, but since the meat of the book is the allegory, it didn't make it any less powerful. A great short book about the interplay of socialism, religion, and capitalism, that will leave you thinking for a long, long time.

Rating: seven out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Mugged Pug, by Darrel and Sally Odgers

I've written before about my son's love for these books. This was another that he thoroughly enjoyed. The mystery was low-key without seeming trivial. My son laughed a lot. Next on our list to read is The Blue Stealer, and I'm going to have him read alternating pages with me.

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Quarterly Update - 1st Quarter 2011

2011-03-31T12:27:00.005-05:00

I had plans this year to no longer do quarterly updates. I would write the reviews soon after I read the books. Not only did that not work out, but I didn't even finish this quarterly update within the first quarter. That might be excusable if I was late because I was so busy reading. But that's not my excuse.

Hector and the Search for Happiness, by François Lelord

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Denationalisation of Money, by Friedrich A. Hayek

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

A Dog Called Grk, by Joshua Doder

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Invasion From Planet Dork, by Greg Trine

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Phantom Mudder, by Darrel and Sally Odgers

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Very Good, Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse

Rating: seven out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Lehi in the Desert / The World of the Jaredites / There Were Jaredites, by Hugh Nibley

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Manias, Panics, and Crashes, by Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Name of This Book Is Secret, by Pseudonymous Bosch

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Money and Foreign Exchange After 1914, by Gustav Cassel

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Money and Foreign Exchange After 1914, by Gustav Cassel

2011-03-08T12:27:00.001-06:00

(I had to make my own book cover, for the reasons outlined on the cover.)

This book's title might be deceiving. Reading this book in 2011, you might think, "I'm going to get nearly 100 years of history here." But the book was written in 1922. Hmmm. Slightly less history.

Nevertheless (the second time I've used that word in this collection of book reviews), a very, very good book. Cassel highlights all the problems with the supposed "return" to the gold standard that the gold exchange standard was said to be. The war-caused inflation that each government tried desperately to pin on other causes is shown to be completely the result of government action. The correct exchange rates at which the gold parities should have been pegged are worked out.

While we are 40 years into a non-redeemable floating exchange rate world, this book might seem irrelevant. However, I think it is a great lesson in what happens when redeemability is suspended or lost. The problems Cassel outlines are happening around us all the time; we just don't know it anymore because we don't have a memory of the world before 1914.

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Name of This Book Is Secret, by Pseudonymous Bosch

2011-02-28T12:27:00.001-06:00

This book got better as it went along. At first I thought the author was a little too enamored of how cute he was being. As the story picked up, though, the showy cuteness dropped away some.

This was a good mystery for my kids. Some shadowy bad guys who are thought to have killed someone, but there's some evidence the guy's not really dead, and a boy-and-girl detective team that is still slightly too young to be interested in anything but being friends. Although the culminating conflict did include the threat of killing a kid by sticking instruments up his nose and rooting around in his brain, which might have been slightly excessive.

Anyway, there are more books in this series and my kids want me to read them out loud, also. They're hard to get a hold of at the library, though, and our local library started charging for placing holds (unless you do it in person, which goes against every economics lesson I've ever had, except for the one about "entrenched special interest groups").

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Manias, Panics, and Crashes, by Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber

2011-02-22T12:27:00.004-06:00

Kindleberger wrote this book in the 1970s, and updated it a few times before his recent death. Aliber edited it some to reflect the 2008-10 economic crisis.

In some ways, this book was a great history lesson on past economic downturns. In other ways, it was completely uninformative (I now know a lot about the existence of the Mississippi Bubble of 1720 and how it was related to John Law, but as to what the Mississippi Bubble was, or who John Law was, I'm going to have to turn to Wikipedia).

Kindleberger outlines his distinctions between manias, panics, and crashes, and gives a useful model for how hedge debt can become speculative debt. It gave me a framework in which to think about my own finances which I had been missing.

Where things fall apart a bit is in the analysis of modern events. Like with most history books, it's easier to be objective about stuff that is over 100 years old. Kindleberger's most egregious writing was when he throws out an accusation that "most" CNBC financial analysts were profiting from the analysis they were spewing. Not an implausible hypothesis, but there is no footnote with a source or evidence. It's just "common knowledge."

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Lehi in the Desert / The World of the Jaredites / There Were Jaredites, by Hugh Nibley

2011-02-19T12:27:00.000-06:00

The convoluted title comes from the fact that this is three smaller books put together in one. I almost feel like they should get separate reviews, since they were so different, but that would triple the work this review required, so I'll just give each its own paragraph.

The first book was great. It was very interesting reading. It was full of historical evidence that the way people behave in Arabia is exactly how the Book of Mormon says Lehi and his family behaved when they were in Arabia, and nearly all of these sources would have been unavailable to a 19th-century farmboy. I really enjoyed the fleshing out of a more complete picture of what that journey would have looked like.

The second book was great, as well. It goes through the historical sources to outline what the life of ancient Asian nomads looked like, and shows that it was exactly how the Jaredites are said to have behaved. It also details the differences between the Jaredites and the Nephites, differences that wouldn't make sense if they were two invented groups doing the same thing written by the same guy.

The third book was a little weak. It basically reviews epic literature to show that there are common elements to all epic literature, postulates that these commonalities must be based on the reality of the ancient world, and then shows that the Book of Ether fits into this pattern of epic literature. It was made more interesting by the fact that I was concurrently reading The Iliad, but otherwise it was a little dry.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Very Good, Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse

2011-01-31T12:27:00.001-06:00

I haven't read Jeeves stories in a few years. In that interim, I've watched a few episodes of the BBC show, so some of these plots were already known before I read them. Nevertheless, there are few ways to spend my time as enjoyably as reading Wodehouse. Maybe if I could read Wodehouse while having sex and eating a really great deli sandwich, but I don't know that my wife would agree to that, and the deli would probably kick us out.

Rating: seven out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Phantom Mudder, by Darrel and Sally Odgers

2011-01-22T12:27:00.001-06:00

My son keeps loving these books, and he is now closing in on being good enough of a reader to read them himself. This book was more enjoyable to me than others have been, because the high-strung overbearing lady turned out to be the villain and Jack helped get her in trouble. Hurray for sticking it to annoying people!

Since this book took place at a dog show, it was kind of like a Jack Russell surprise party, with all of his friends in one place. My kids liked that some dog characters they had forgotten about were continually showing up. And I liked that the office supervisor-type lady got in trouble. (Have I mentioned how much I hate that type of lady?)

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Invasion From Planet Dork, by Greg Trine

2011-01-19T12:27:00.001-06:00

The last of the Melvin Beederman books we had left to read. I thought this series was getting progressively annoying, culminating in the unpleasant experience of reading Book 6, but since then, the last two books have become enjoyable again.

My kids like when Superhero James and Superhero Margaret are involved, and I like when it's not always the same thing (a bad guy buys a lair from Big Al's and sets up shop in the Hollywood Hills to do evil and sinister things, yawn). This story involved aliens, and required the heroes to do some space travel, which was something that hadn't come up in any of the previous books.

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

A Dog Called Grk, by Joshua Doder

2011-01-16T12:27:00.001-06:00

Again, my family are suckers for books about dogs. Sometimes that is handsomely rewarded, as with the Jack Russell series by Darrel and Sally Odgers, and sometimes we are completely screwed, as with the horrendous Space Dogs book (also by Australians, actually). This book was also written by another of the Queen's subjects, the Englishman Joshua Doder.

My kids liked this book, and it was enjoyable to read to them. The only problem is that it was probably aiming for kids slightly older than mine (eight and six right now). The parents of some of the characters are disappeared by an authoritative regime, and sometimes the regime wants to kill the kids, not just tie them up or something. It would probably be just fine for someone 10 or older.

The book isn't as much about the dog as you might be lead to believe. The dog is more the common element that ties the human characters together, and the action is mostly organized around the people. The dog, though, manages to be helpful in critical situations, so to some degree success depends on him.

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Denationalisation of Money, by Friedrich A. Hayek

2011-01-14T12:27:00.001-06:00

This book had quite a bit to say about the problems that arise from government monopolizing currency issue, which was probably the high point of the book. This book also has quite a bit to say about competitive issue of non-redeemable currency, which I think is sort of an intellectual dead end. But in a world where perhaps 90% of people think "Of course government has to control currency; otherwise, there'd be chaos!", the parts regarding government currency monopoly are sorely needed. And as a bonus, the whole thing is only about 100 pages.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Hector and the Search for Happiness, by François Lelord

2011-01-04T12:27:00.001-06:00

On a family trip to the bookstore, I saw this book. I know everyone says judging a book by its cover is a bad thing, but the truth is we all do it, and it works out pretty well. I'm not ashamed to say I judged the crap out of this book based on its cover. I made a note to get my hands on a copy someplace cheaper (and yet my wife continually asks me, "Why is Borders going out of business?").

That "someplace cheaper" turned out to be Target, where I selected it as a Christmas present for my wife to give to me. And thanks to the number of things I have distracting me, I honestly forgot about it until I opened the present. Maybe I should pick out all my Christmas presents.

I liked this book. I thought it had a nice balance of moral and story. I've read Who Moved My Cheese? and, because I'm evidently a glutton for punishment, The Present, so I know all about books that beat you over the head with their too-cute fables. This book wasn't like that at all. Hector traveled to visit friends in distant countries, taking notes on aspects of happiness he learned along the way. A perfectly good book, with some good insights into the nature of happiness.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

2010 Reading

2010-12-31T23:59:00.001-06:00

Here are the 79 books I read in 2010:

Young Men in Spats by P.G. Wodehouse
The Armchair Economist by Steven E. Landsburg
Fair Play by Steven E. Landsburg
Never Mind the Pollacks by Neal Pollack
The Grateful Fred by Greg Trine
Petropolis by Anya Ulinich
Nicholas and the Gang by Rene Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempe
Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames
Everyday Probability and Statistics by Michael M. Woolfson
The Pearl of Great Price by Joseph Smith, Jr., trans.
The Revenge of the McNasty Brothers by Greg Trine
Nicholas in Trouble by Rene Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempe
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Sausage Situation by Darrel and Sally Odgers
The Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith, Jr., trans.
Winston Churchill by John Keegan
Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers
Looking for Alaska by John Green
The Winner's Curse by Richard H. Thaler
Terror in Tights by Greg Trine
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Paper Towns by John Green
Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Nicholas on Vacation by Rene Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempe
Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner
How to Receive Discernible Answers to Your Prayers by Jeffrey R. Young
Love Among the Chickens by P.G. Wodehouse
Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
As A Man Thinketh by James Allen
Attack of the Valley Girls by Greg Trine
I, Jack by Patricia Finney
Doctrine and Covenants by Joseph Smith, Jr., et Al.
Drawing on the Powers of Heaven by Grant Von Harrison
Getting What You Came For by Robert L. Peters
Dominic by William Steig
Jack and Rebel, the Police Dog by Patricia Finney
The Kitnapped Creature by Darrel and Sally Odgers
Utterly Me, Clarice Bean by Lauren Child
The Fake Cape Caper by Greg Trine
Fathers As Patriarchs by Grant Von Harrison
Clarice Bean Spells Trouble by Lauren Child
Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe
The Princes in the Tower by Alison Weir
Thursday Next in First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde
Ginger Pye by Eleanor Estes
1912 by James Chace
Madame Pamplemousse and Her Incredible Edibles by Rupert Kingfisher
The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde
Mike at Wrykyn by P.G. Wodehouse
Mostly Harmless Econometrics by Joshua D. Angrist and Jőrn-Steffen Pischke
The Prophetic Book of Mormon by Hugh Nibley
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
The New Testament by St. Paul, et Al.
The Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith, Jr., trans.
The Mortal Messiah, Book 1 by Bruce R. McConkie
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
Summer Lightning by P.G. Wodehouse
William Howard Taft by Judith Icke Anderson
Not George Washington by P.G. Wodehouse
Golf Without Tears by P.G. Wodehouse
Pinky Pye by Eleanor Estes
Nothing Happens Until It Happens to You by T.M. Shine
Tales of St. Austin's by P.G. Wodehouse
The Pothunters by P.G. Wodehouse
A Prefect's Uncle by P.G. Wodehouse
Space Dogs by Justin Ball and Evan Croker
The Little Nugget by P.G. Wodehouse
The Brotherhood of the Traveling Underpants by Greg Trine
Understanding the Book of Revelation by Jay A. Parry and Donald W. Parry
The Awful Pawful by Darrel and Sally Odgers
Clarice Bean, Don't Look Now by Lauren Child
The Path to Freedom by Michael Collins
Puppy Power by Judy Cox
The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde
Book of Mormon Stories for Young Latter-day Saints by Emma Marr Petersen
Gold by Nathan Lewis

Reading on a Kindle: a Review

2010-12-31T12:34:00.005-06:00

I got a Kindle for Christmas, but I got in in October. I used it to read school documents, and to read public domain novels that are available for free (since the Luddite in me still doesn't want to spend money on a book that isn't an actual pile of paper on my shelf).

I love that Kindle tells me what percentage complete I am, since that was something I had always had to calculate on my own (and--NERD ALERT--I always was calculating it). I also like that Kindle is much easier to transport than a stack of books, so instead of bringing one book and being stuck with it, I can switch if I need to. I am indifferent to the need for a reading light; I know this is a huge turning point for most people in the iPad/Kindle debate, but I prefer Kindle, even though I have to have a book light to read after the sun goes down.

Here are two things I dislike: one is the lack of page numbers, and the other is the tendency of the device to reboot and lose bookmarks. Since I keep track of the pages I read in a year (there was no "nerd alert" because the previous alert is still in effect), I need to know how many pages are in a book I am reading. Since Kindle doesn't have page numbers, but "locations" (the relation of which to pages or paragraphs I still don't understand), I have to look up print versions on Amazon, find an edition that looks like one I would have read, go to its product description, and see how many pages it has. Even then, it's imperfect, since that number does not correspond to the printed number on the last page, but is more like a count of pieces of paper used (multiplied by two).

As for the second issue, I think it might be a result of the free versions I read. As with most free things, the coding seems pretty bare-bones, and I bet a "real" Kindle book wouldn't have as many problems. However, that doesn't mean it's not frustrating to have to refind my spot in my book every time I turn my Kindle on (especially since it doesn't use page numbers to help me find my way). I've had this problem with three Wodehouse books, and my wife had it with Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Quarterly Update - 4th Quarter 2010

2010-12-31T12:34:00.004-06:00

The quarter started out slowly, as I was trying to concentrate on finishing my semester. My goal of actually reaching 25,000 pages in the year, which looked hopeless in February, looked very possible at the end of August, and then became impossible by October. But once I finished with school, I did a lot of reading in December (which was something I didn't do last year, because I was too depressed expecting poor grades; this semester I expected (and received, thank you) good grades, so my motivation did not flag), and I passed 20,000 pages for the first time since 2006 (the last year I was not a student).

Not George Washington, by P.G. Wodehouse

Rating: three and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Golf Without Tears, by P.G. Wodehouse

Rating: three and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Pinky Pye, by Eleanor Estes

Rating: four out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Nothing Happens Until It Happens to You, by T.M. Shine

Rating: three and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Tales of St. Austin's, by P.G. Wodehouse

Rating: three and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Pothunters, by P.G. Wodehouse

Rating: four and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

A Prefect's Uncle, by P.G. Wodehouse

Rating: four and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Space Dogs, by Justin Ball and Evan Croker

Rating: two out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Little Nugget, by P.G. Wodehouse

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Brotherhood of the Traveling Underpants, by Greg Trine

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Understanding the Book of Revelation, by Jay A. Parry and Donald W. Parry

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Awful Pawful, by Darrel and Sally Odgers

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Clarice Bean, Don't Look Now, by Lauren Child

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Path to Freedom, by Michael Collins

Rating: two out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Puppy Power, by Judy Cox

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Fourth Bear, by Jasper Fforde

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Book of Mormon Stories for Young Latter-day Saints, by Emma Marr Petersen

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Gold, by Nathan Lewis

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Gold, by Nathan Lewis

2010-12-31T00:34:00.002-06:00

This book was about three times as long as it needed to be. Most of the excess material was still fascinating, but it was excess nonetheless. A chapter about Japan's "lost decade" begins with the monetary history of feudal Japan. It would be like explaining the 1972 Olympic men's basketball final by saying, "Well, first you have to understand the nuclear process in the Sun." Perhaps that would enhance understanding, but it's beyond the scope of the ten-second ESPN sound byte.

Also, Lewis has a habit of including only a smattering of notes. He probably should have had about four times as many notes as he did. Without them, I'm unclear how much of what I read was fact, and how much was Lewis's interpretation of the facts, since they were presented side-by-side, without sources. The only reason I liked this book was because I'm into monetary economics; a normal reader would probably have quite before the end of the second chapter.

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Book of Mormon Stories for Young Latter-day Saints, by Emma Marr Petersen

2010-12-31T00:27:00.003-06:00

I got this book as a baptism present, several (but not too many) years ago. My parents sort of pooh-poohed the gift, like it was unreasonably beyond the reading level of an eight-year-old, so I never read it.

Now that I know my parents better, I realize they just didn't like the people who gave me the gift, so they found fault with it. My daughter turned eight this year, so before she got baptized I wanted to read this book with her for her to get a basic understanding of Book of Mormon plot, which would help her with her scripture reading. We were reading together, alternating paragraphs, until I got busy with school and she took the book to her room, where she was supposed to finish on her own.

Now, months after her baptism, I figured we should finish the book before the end of the year, so I could count the pages read on my yearly total. Having a deadline of December 31 made it so we had to read about 10 chapters each day, which helped drive home the point that, when you don't manage your schedule well, tasks become more unpleasant.

In terms of reading level, it's completely appropriate for a seven- or eight-year-old. Petersen decides to sequence her book chronologically, so it starts with Jaredites, which might be a little strange to a kid who's trying to square it with the Book of Mormon ordering. Content-wise, there were just a handful of times that I felt she added speculative material that isn't substantiated by the scriptures themselves, and most of those were trivial issues (none of which I can even remember). Also, since this book is older, Petersen has no problems giving a literal interpretation to the whole "light=good, dark=bad" thing, which required me to give a preemptive contradictory opinion once I saw where she was headed.

But in terms of the good accomplished, this book really, really helped my daughter learn the plot of the Book of Mormon (which is something my wife is always saying is her biggest hang-up in scripture study). Now when we read scriptures as a family, she can concentrate on doctrine.

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Fourth Bear, by Jasper Fforde

2010-12-29T12:27:00.002-06:00

I liked this book a lot more than I liked The Big Over Easy. I read a review of that other book that said Fforde ironically gave his main character a nice home life to contrast with the typical detective novel hero's shambles of a personal life. (Think Mel Gibson's character in "Lethal Weapon.") Okay, I'm fine with that, but the result was a lot of pages of charming home life scenes, which weren't what I was going for when I decided to read a detective novel.

I am thankful that this novel forgoes all that. Spratt and Mary get right to the detecting work. Ironic detective story devices still abound (for instance, Spratt gets suspended and has to work the case against orders), but they work with the story, helping it move along. I am looking forward to the next Nursery Crimes book.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Puppy Power, by Judy Cox

2010-12-27T12:27:00.003-06:00

I loved this book. What's more, I love the author. If something happened to my wife, I'd call up Judy Cox to see if she's available. (If she's still alive. Which, her website says she is. Perfect.)

What's the source of my affection? Cox's correct use of possessive apostrophes. Many of the teachers at Fran's school have last names that end with the letter S, and all of them have their names made possessive by an additional apostrophe AND S. Every time I read another instance, I stopped and told my kids, "Judy Cox is fantastic!"

In terms of the story, I liked it, too. I liked how Fran is a sympathetic character, and that her bullying is not obvious until you've come to like her. It's better than the typical "good characters are good and bad characters are bad" of children's books. It helps kids see that all people are good and bad.

It was also nice that the parts of Fran's character that needed work were the same as her dog, Hercules. I like parallelisms because they allow you to make your point with less of a heavy hand.

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Path to Freedom, by Michael Collins

2010-12-22T12:34:00.002-06:00

I like to read autobiographies where possible, figuring I'd rather hear from the source itself. I know this is fraught with peril about self-serving rewriting of history, but it's usually a pretty good rule. (If the subject is especially interesting, I'll read biographies afterward to compare.) So when I got to the library and decided I wanted a book on Michael Collins, they had two or three written by other people, and this book written by Collins himself. I naturally selected this one.

I wish I hadn't. It could have been entitled, Boring Irish Op-Eds From 100 Years Ago. I learned more from the foreword (written in that annoyingly breezily familiar "journalism" style that seems so popular for features these days) than I did from the book itself. Collins just seemed to say, "Irish people have it TOUGH, yo!", over and over again. If I wanted to hear that, I'd put The Cranberries' song "Zombie" on repeat.

Rating: two out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Clarice Bean, Don't Look Now, by Lauren Child

2010-12-22T12:27:00.002-06:00

I'll tell you what I like about Clarice Bean books: they deal with an "issue," but without saying, "Here's the topic we're dealing with." You know what I mean? I hated "issue" books when I was a kid; can't a story just tell a story without being "about" something, like divorce, popularity, or bullying?

In this book, Clarice Bean's best friend Betty moves, and Clarice experiences a mild depression (without ever saying, "And I was depressed"). Eventually things begin to work out for her again, slowly, and not completely.

My daughter tends to read these books on her own, but then ask me to read them with her to make sure she's not missing out on anything. (For instance the other day I had reason to explain the bathroom euphemisms "Number 1" and "Number 2" to her, and she said, "Oh, that was in a book I read and I didn't know what it meant.") The only complaint I have about Clarice Bean books is that she works a lot of stuff out without ever telling her parents. It's not like they find out after the fact; they never find out. I don't want my daughter to think the correct thing to do with a stressful life situation is to keep it to herself.

As with the other Clarice Bean books we've read, at the end my daughter wanted me to check the progress of the Ruby Redfort books Lauren Child is supposedly writing. Well, this time there was good news! The first book is supposed to come this fall. My daughter is eagerly anticipating it, and I bet I will get to read it aloud.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Awful Pawful, by Darrel and Sally Odgers

2010-12-22T00:34:00.002-06:00

Like I've mentioned before, my son loves these books. We've read them out of order, so the suspense of not knowing exactly what is "the awful pawful" was sort of ruined for us, but he preferred to think of it as a secret he'd figured out already. I liked the way the dogs of town hid in shame as each of them got bested by a cat. (Delayed spoiler: the awful pawful is a cat.)

For whatever reason, my son has little interest in reading. He loves to be read to, but no story is interesting enough for him to want to put in the work. (Until recently, he refused to acknowledge he even could read, even after reading something.) The closest he's come to wanting to hear a story badly enough that he is willing to do the reading himself is with these Jack Russell books.

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Understanding the Book of Revelation, by Jay A. Parry and Donald W. Parry

2010-12-22T00:27:00.003-06:00

Earlier this year, I finished re-reading the New Testament. I understood Revelation better than before, but I still felt like there was a lot I wasn't getting. A few years ago, I asked for this book as a Christmas present from my wife's parents, and now seemed like a good time to read it, so soon after reading Revelation.

I can't really say, "This aspect of Revelation is clearer to me now," or anything like that, but I definitely feel like I understand the book better. What's more, I have a much greater sense of immediacy, an appreciation for the truthfulness of Revelation and the importance in my life. Previous readings of Revelation always seemed remote to me; either it was an ancient book, or it was about the distant future. This time I felt much more strongly that it was timely and important. I don't know if that is from the Parrys' book or from Revelation itself, but it is a major change in my outlook on scripture.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Brotherhood of the Traveling Underpants, by Greg Trine

2010-12-18T12:27:00.002-06:00

After quite a few Melvin Beederman books that were not as enjoyable for me to read aloud as they were for my kids to listen to, this one was a refreshing change. The time travel plot device allowed for a lot of jokes that Trine did well. My kids especially liked when Melvin had to pretend to be his own uncle. Also, my kids love Superhero James and Superhero Margaret, so their larger roles in this book were greatly appreciated.

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Little Nugget, by P.G. Wodehouse

2010-12-14T12:27:00.002-06:00

Another Wodehouse book that begins with one narrator and then jumps horses mid-stream, never to return. In fact, the original main character never resurfaces again, except in infrequent letters. But the replacement narrator, Peter Burns, is likable and fun. He takes a job posing as a schoolmaster (so this is a bit of a school story, but not from a boy's point of view), trying to kidnap the obnoxious son of American millionaires (the prototype to the child actor in Laughing Gas, I imagine). Several American gangsters are also out to nab the eponymous kid, which allows for a lot of the type of humor found in Big Money and Psmith, Journalist. And what's more, there is no cricket to be seen.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Space Dogs, by Justin Ball and Evan Croker

2010-12-09T12:27:00.002-06:00

I saw this book at the library and thought my kids would like it. They had a lot of copies of it, which seemed like a testament of kids' appreciation.

The book was very, very slow reading. I believe I first checked it out in July. We renewed it the maximum number of times, then returned it and checked out another copy, and renewed that twice.

In terms of content, I was a little annoyed. There were lots of uses of "hell," mostly as a place, but once in the sense of "what the hell...." One use of "damn," implied sexual relations between two aliens, and one girl surmises that another girl is popular because she has "big boobs." If children's publishers did their job of recommending ages or grade levels (like they used to), I would have had a better idea of what was in store. As it was, I had to do some selective bowdlerizing as I read along.

Another big shortcoming of the book is how it promised to be about aliens and dogs, but spent a lot of time being about teenage love. And the message wasn't even a good one. It was "kiss first, look for compatibility later." And when the love-struck girl finally kisses the boy she likes, we read this: "She knew all the answers in class, and if she didn't, it didn't bother her because she had the only answer that really mattered: Dion Van Steenwyk [the boy she likes]" (156). I don't need my kids thinking a meaningless junior-high romance is all that really matters, and I certainly don't need my daughter hearing she should derive her self-worth from her pre-teen relationships.

Rating: two out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

A Prefect's Uncle, by P.G. Wodehouse

2010-11-11T12:27:00.003-06:00

Another Wodehouse school story, still with quite a bit of cricket. The captain of the cricket team, Gethryn, has a smart-aleck uncle a few years his junior come to his school, and cause some trouble for him. The uncle, Farnie, steals some money (I thought The Pothunters established that such deviousness was beyond the English schoolboy?) and leaves school, and Gethryn has to abandon his team mid cricket match to bring Farnie back and return the stolen money. His teammates are upset, and he is ostracized for much of the football season (which here means Rugby, not association), but in the end everyone does the sporting thing. Some of the pranks (or "rags" as they were then called) are quite humorous and memorable.

Rating: four and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Pothunters, by P.G. Wodehouse

2010-11-03T12:27:00.003-05:00

Another book set in a school. This one is a novel, and although it still has quite a bit of cricket, it is not central to the plot (meaning you can get to the end of a cricket section and think, "I have no idea what that meant, but I think I know who won," and you won't have missed anything vital).

The most striking feature of this book: some silver sports cups go missing, and the headmasters suspect some of the boys of pulling a prank, but when it is discovered that along with the cups, the thief also stole two pounds, they know a boy would never steal money, and so they completely turn their attention to outsiders. Oh, how things have changed in 100 years. I cannot even believe there was a time in the world's history when a school full of teenage boys could be completely cleared of suspicion of anything other than harmless pranks. I mean, schools have metal detectors now (and tony prep schools have more drugs than a pharmaceutical convention).

Rating: four and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Tales of St. Austin's, by P.G. Wodehouse

2010-10-30T12:27:00.003-05:00

Loosely connected short stories concerning the same fictional public (read: private) school in England. Humorous tales, but still very heavy on the intricacies of cricket, including team politics. Like the other Wodehouse books I've read that delve heavily into cricket, that cricket book I read several years ago was invaluable. Another thing this book did was make me want to read Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes, for which, if I see Wodehouse in heaven, I shall kick him in the shin. Ten percent done on my Kindle and it still have nothing to do with school, and Tom Brown just came into the story. (Although I just started The Adventures of Augie March and the narrator's brother read the book when he was young, so maybe it's just a book to get through to get other references to it.)

Rating: three and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Nothing Happens Until It Happens to You, by T.M. Shine

2010-10-25T12:27:00.005-05:00

A book about an unemployed man whose life falls apart around him? This one hit a little too close to home. I thought there were excellent descriptions of the type of aimlessness that assails the jobless, but there was also too much that didn't seem plausible. Jeffrey is out of work just a few weeks before he takes his first assignment dancing with a sign on the side of a busy road. Isn't that about the last assignment you take? I've been out of work for 18 months and I've never done that yet. And the conclusion is completely unsatisfying. Instead of saving his relationships, or ending them, he just accepts that they are falling apart, and he doesn't really seem like he's going to do anything about them. There were also some too-timely references, like pop culture stuff from 2009 that I'd forgotten already. This book can very nearly be dated to the week.

Rating: three and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Pinky Pye, by Eleanor Estes

2010-10-24T12:27:00.003-05:00

A lot of the problems I had with Ginger Pye are missing from this book. Unfortunately, a lot of new problems cropped up. The end result is about the same: a book I didn't mind reading that much, and that my kids really liked to listen to.

The most glaring issue from Ginger Pye, Estes's insistence on using the word "waked" until she breaks your spirit, is unfortunately still present. I seriously think she had characters going to bed just so a paragraph later she could say they "waked up." I'd be surprised if Estes hadn't written a novel with an insomniac main character in it.

First the good news: the Pye kids aren't as dumb. In Ginger Pye they were outright fools, walking past their dog and thinking, "Too bad my dog, who was a puppy when he went missing six months ago, is still a puppy, and therefore can't possibly be this grown dog that looks just like my dog." Did they think their dog was the Emmanuel Lewis of dogs? I wanted to shout "Dogs grow up, morons!" about ten times each chapter.

In this book, the "mystery" isn't something you could expect the kids to know, so it's much less irritating when they spend pages on end speculating about the mystery.

Estes got a legitimate illustrator for this book, too, so the pictures are much, much better. I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but I will regardless: Estes couldn't illustrate worth crap. Her publisher took care of that problem for her.

Unfortunately, the illustrator must have cost so much they couldn't afford an editor. The following sentences are just a few among the most egregious examples of her convoluted sentence structure.

Held captive in Papa's lap so she would not follow, as she often did, and with Papa murmuring enticing promises such as "string bean game" and "typing" in her ear to keep her satisfied (Papa didn't know that Pinky had a plan or he need not have bothered), Pinky yawned and stretched. (172)

This is supposed to be a children's book. What child can follow that sentence? Don't even begin to tell me, "Well, back in Eleanor's day...", because no kid ever has been able to follow that sentence.

Through now with throwing people, whoever they might be, or onlookers of whatever sort, off guard, Pinky sauntered into the living room, skirting the wall, and she hopped onto the living-room table. (180-1)

Two random clauses thrown in the middle of the phrase "to throw off guard." I've read Faulkner with less trouble than I had with Estes.

I usually try to get through a book without letting my kids know what parts of it are bothering me. I don't want them to dislike a book just because I do. They are kids, with kids' tastes, and it is only natural that I would find faults with books that they didn't understand. But even my kids knew Jerry was a moron when I read this exchange to them:

For a moment the children were speechless. Here was a man who had just come straight from their own town, Cranbury, from their own house, their very own tall house! "Did you see Dick Badger?" asked Jerry. "And Duke?" (138)

Jerry asked a complete stranger if he'd seen his friend's dog, by name. My daughter muttered to herself, "Oh, Jerry."

But again, the test of a children's book is would I read any of the sequels. And yes, I would read Estes's Moffats books out loud to our kids. Books from the 1950s are the perfect level of difficulty. Older books have too much archaic language, but these books have just the right amount to broaden their vocabulary without breaking up the pace of the story.

Rating: four out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Golf Without Tears, by P.G. Wodehouse

2010-10-15T12:27:00.004-05:00

This book is a collection of short stories, all narrated by the Oldest Member, dealing with golf. They are unique in that they are all set at a country club on Long Island (Wodehouse spent more than half his life, I believe, in New York and environs), and they carry the further distinction of being one of the books with a different title on the other side of the Atlantic. Since either book is accessible to an English-language reader, this can spark some confusion (especially when titles are reused, like with The Prince and Betty, which is a completely different book in England). If you've read The Clicking of Cuthbert, you've read Golf Without Tears.

It was a bit much for reading straight through. It seems a fair portion of the humor comes from using funny golf words such as "mashie" and "niblick." Used sparingly, the desired effect is achieved, but when every story has it, maybe it wouldn't have become so stale if I were reading them at the original release rate of one every few months in the "Saturday Evening Post."

Rating: three and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Not George Washington, by P.G. Wodehouse

2010-10-06T12:27:00.006-05:00

I've started in on the less-popular, early-career books of Wodehouse. Like I've written before (I think), they tend to have more raw emotion and less farce. Humor is still there, but at times it can not be the primary focus. Wooster and Blandings book end with the boy getting the girl because basic storytelling requires all loose ends to be tied up; early non-school Wodehouse is usually the story of the boy getting the girl, with humor thrown in.

Something I've noticed about early Wodehouse is that often the narrator changes mid-story, and the reader shouldn't really expect it to ever change back. With this book that's a little more understandable, since most sources will tell you that Wodehouse had a co-author (Herbert Westbrook). The first several chapters, from Margaret's point of view, are not that funny, and I don't know if it's true or not, but I assumed they were Westbrook's contribution. The rest of the book is narrated by Margaret's fiancée James (and a few chapters are narrated by friends of James).

Something else striking about this book is how unsympathetic James is. Margaret has her hopes pinned to marrying James, but then when James becomes the narrator, I found myself not really wanted Margaret to get stuck with such an oaf of a husband.

Lastly, I can find no plausible explanation for the title. And that's always a bit of a strike against a book, isn't it?

Rating: three and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Quarterly Update - 3rd Quarter 2010

2010-09-30T12:34:00.001-05:00

I spent a lot of the summer looking for work and pretending to study for my qualifying exams. Then August came and I started seriously studying, which meant I spent a lot of time despairing, and I distracted myself from my despair with my reading, turning out over 4,000 pages that month. Then came September and, until I heard I had passed my exams, I was too anxious to do much reading.

The Princes in the Tower, by Alison Weir

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Thursday Next in First Among Sequels, by Jasper Fforde

Rating: four and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Ginger Pye, by Eleanor Estes

Rating: four out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

1912, by James Chace

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Madame Pamplemousse and Her Incredible Edibles, by Rupert Kingfisher

Rating: four and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Big Over Easy, by Jasper Fforde

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Mike at Wrykyn, by P.G. Wodehouse

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Mostly Harmless Econometrics, by Joshua D. Angrist and Jőrn-Steffen Pischke

Rating: one and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Prophetic Book of Mormon, by Hugh Nibley

Rating: seven out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde

Rating: the first 384 pages: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Rating: the last six pages: one out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The New Testament, by St. Paul, et Al.

Rating: I'm not assigning monkeys to scripture.

The Book of Mormon, by Joseph Smith, Jr., trans.

Rating: Not on the monkey scale.

The Mortal Messiah, Book 1, by Bruce R. McConkie

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

Rating: four and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Summer Lightning, by P.G. Wodehouse

Rating: seven out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

William Howard Taft, by Judith Icke Anderson

Rating: two and a half giant inflatable monkeys.

William Howard Taft, by Judith Icke Anderson

2010-09-30T12:27:00.031-05:00

I was hankering for a Taft biography, and this was all my local library had. I didn't enjoy it that much. The "psychological" aspect of it was probably very trendy in the 1970s, but now it just seems silly and dated. I enjoyed the overview of Taft's life, but not the "his wife was a mother figure to him" or the "he overate to rebel" aspects of it. Unless Anderson found a journal entry where Taft admits as much, it's just a guess that we can't even run past him for his take.

I had a hard time accepting her assessment for how Taft came into his own in the White House. After an entire life of listening to his mother and wife, Anderson says he just sort of didn't need to anymore, so he stopped. And the only really fascinating psychological decision of his life, fighting his "father figure" for a position he clearly did not want, is sort of ignored. Why would Taft rebel so spectacularly for something he hated so much? Anderson doesn't really bother to ask, let alone find out.

I have to admit, I was also turned off by Anderson's dedication of her work to Fawn Brodie, whose "scholarship" in No Man Knows My History is decidedly substandard. If that's Anderson's idea of a good job, how much stock should I place in her book?

Rating: two and a half giant inflatable monkeys.

Summer Lightning, by P.G. Wodehouse

2010-09-15T12:27:00.002-05:00

What is better than a well-written Blandings novel? Nothing at all.

Rating: seven out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown

2010-08-31T12:34:00.004-05:00

Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling get a bad rap. "Christian" critics of Harry Potter who think The Lord of the Rings is a Christian allegory are idiots. If Gandalf can represent Christ, so can Dumbledore.

It's the same deal with Dan Brown books. While Robert Langdon has an admittedly areligious bent to his professed world view, he is constantly confronted with situations his atheism can't explain. Yes, there are evil church figures in the books, but there are also legitimately pious ones. Are Brown's critics claiming that religious history doesn't contain figures who behaved in non-exemplary ways? It's not anti-religious or anti-Catholic to explore that dynamic.

Brown gets it from both sides: the culturally conservative who don't want depictions of religious shortcomings, and the culturally elite who look down their nose at the literary value of the books. Give him a break. Being an author requires writing skills and storytelling skills. What Brown lacks in writing, he more than makes up for in storytelling. Yes, any one particular paragraph might be somewhat silly when pulled out of context, but the novel is read in context, where the story is pulling you along.

This book gave me incentive to look up the sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Theresa, which was decidedly less PG-13 than the text led me to believe. I guess in the 1600s, it was the equivalent of "Showgirls." I'm glad I live in the 21^st century.

I know a woman who started reading this book and thought it was so evil she threw it away. I laugh at that woman when I think about that. I came away from reading it with a stronger affirmation of my faith.

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

2010-08-31T12:27:00.003-05:00

I read this book so there would be a buffer between the spate of church books I read and Angels and Demons. It just seemed a little weird having them next to each other, so I read this one in a day or so.

I read this book in seventh grade, and I didn't remember much of it, aside from trying to cross the street when the super-fast cars are trying to run Guy down. In terms of believability, I'm not sure I agree with top-down dystopia novels like this and 1984; I find the bottom-up dystopia of Brave New World a much more-likely scenario.

In terms of bottom-up, the interactive entertainment systems seems like a pretty good forecast of where the future opiate of the masses will be found. I didn't like the resolution, that everything will be okay because we have hobos who've memorized the destroyed books. What's the point of having books, so hobos can tell each other stories? Their preservation is trivial unless they are preserved for a purpose. In that sense, the top-down book burning needn't happen if we have a bottom-up ignorance of books, and that seems to be where we're going.

Rating: four and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Mortal Messiah, Book 1, by Bruce R. McConkie

2010-08-29T12:27:00.002-05:00

The best biography of the Savior is James E. Talmage's Jesus the Christ, but it deals primarily with the mortal ministry of the Savior. McConkie has expanded the scope, writing a biography of Christ from the creation to the end of the world.

That alone is fairly ambitious. In my opinion, McConkie goes beyond "conscientious" into "overkill" range, with the inclusion of every possible piece of information applicable to the life of Jesus. This book contains a 180-page section of succeeding chapters with titles like "Jewish Worship in Jesus' Day," "Jewish Sabbath in Jesus' Day." Et cetera. The frequent detours from the actual thread of the Savior's actions makes it hard to stay engaged. Luckily, it appears I'm past the worst of it. From here on out in the series (two books down, four more to go), it should be clear sailing.

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Book of Mormon, by Joseph Smith, Jr., trans.

2010-08-28T12:34:00.002-05:00

Scripture doesn't get reviewed.

Rating: Not on the monkey scale.

The New Testament, by St. Paul, et Al.

2010-08-28T12:27:00.002-05:00

I'm sticking with my aversion to review scripture. If it passed muster with its Editor, it should be more than okay with me.

Rating: I'm not assigning monkeys to scripture.

Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde

2010-08-25T12:27:00.003-05:00

I really, really like this book, until the very end. What the hell?! I have not yet read Jude the Obscure, which is on my list for next year, but I know it is renowned for its dissatisfying ending. I am willing to bet this book can give that one a run for its money.

Everything was going so well. It was a cleverly devised plot. It had a lot of interesting implications that probably would have never otherwise occurred to the reader. I was even willing to overlook the fleeting Wizard of Oz references, giving Fforde some latitude for a plot device that will appear in a later book.

First I was a little disappointed when the plausible scientific explanation for so many of the strange occurrences was passed by in favor of the fanciful "evil metal" explanation. Okay, whatever. But then it all went to hell in the last five pages.

Again, it's a book that's a victim of its series. If it was a one-off novel, there's no way it would have ended how it did. But there needed to be some unresolved conflict to draw the reader into the next book, so the last five pages quickly introduces a very irritating one.

I know, I can't have it both ways. I didn't like Thursday Next in First Among Sequels because there was no series-long dramatic element to see wrapped up, but then Shades of Grey has one and I hate it. But the series already had an element to carry through. And it was just horribly mean to take a girl as defensive as Jane, finally have her cast aside her reservations, and literally within a handful of pages screw her over for it.

Rating: the first 384 pages: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Rating: the last six pages: one out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Prophetic Book of Mormon, by Hugh Nibley

2010-08-22T12:27:00.002-05:00

This book challenged me a lot, and I really like it for that. The first half was basically what I was expecting: archaeological and textual evidences of the Book of Mormon. It was the second half that really pushed me. Nibley argues for some radical interpretations of Book of Mormon teachings, and he has quite a bit of evidence to back it up. Particularly, his essay "Freemen and King-men in the Book of Mormon" argues for a quite unorthodox view of Book of Mormon teachings regarding money and authority.

The first part that really spoke to me was when he writes, "This is an extremely important lesson driven home repeatedly in the Book of Mormon, that righteousness does not consist in being identified with this or that nation, party, church, or group" (337). This argues against the point of view often heard in Sunday School lesson comments, that want to take a lesson about, say, repentance, and talk about how much "the world" needs to repent, instead of how much we as individuals need to repent. Church isn't supposed to be a pep rally where we come away feeling superior to the rest of the world. This is my problem with "mainstream Christianity," which thinks because they like Jesus everything's cool.

In light of the War on Terror, the rest of the essay is really provocative. "If the 'bad people' more often provoke war, the 'good people' have equal responsibility, since they have the greater light" (337). In response to the question, "How do you distinguish the righteous from the wicked, then?" Nibley responds, "You don't; that is not your prerogative" (340).

Who is free to do as he will in a state of war? Once the shooting starts the options vanish. That is why people rush into war--because they think it will put an end to their problems. (356)

Nibley councils that we build up a secret combination "by playing the game its way."

Once you have been warned ... that things are being run by such elements, then you know very well that if you aspire to power and gain, influence, status, and prestige; in other words, if you aspire to success by present-day standards, you can only achieve it by doing everything their way. One ceases to uphold those elements only by rejecting a whole way of life, regardless of the risk or inconvenience involved. (368-9)

Quite the tall order, but very intuitive.

Three months after finishing this book, I still think about this essay regularly. Do I have the mettle to reject a whole way of life? How would I go about getting that?

Rating: seven out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Mostly Harmless Econometrics, by Joshua D. Angrist and Jőrn-Steffen Pischke

2010-08-16T12:27:00.002-05:00

Nothing made me despair of my chances as an economist more than reading this book. Following two courses in statistics and two courses in econometrics, it still was mostly worthless combinations of letters to me. I feel like this book undid much of the econometrics knowledge I had previously accumulated. Like Billy Madison's closing speech, I'm now dumber for having read this book. And like Billy's principal, I award the authors no points, and may God have mercy on their souls.

Rating: one and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Mike at Wrykyn, by P.G. Wodehouse

2010-08-13T12:27:00.002-05:00

Wodehouse got his start writing school-boy novels and stories. His book Mike tells the story of Michael Jackson, who begins school at Wrykyn, then has his father move him to Sedleigh, where he meets Rupert Psmith. Psmith proved more popular, so Jackson takes a back seat to him in follow-up novels. In fact, to accommodate Psmith fans, Mike is usually split in half these days, with the second half published as Mike and Psmith. The first half is often forgotten. When it is published, it usually appears as Mike at Wrykyn.

I read the first half of the Google Reader edition of Mike, and I'm claiming I read Mike at Wrykyn. As far as I can tell, they are identical.

Lots of Wodehouse fans go in for the Blandings or Jeeves stuff and act like the early stuff isn't worth their time. Others read it as a sort of signal of their fandom. I just read it because it's entertaining.

As with Mike and Psmith, a lot of this book would have been boring and unintelligible had I not previously read Cricket Explained by Robert Eastaway. With that book's knowledge under my belt, I enjoyed the entire thing. Mike is a transition book, with Wodehouse changing--mid-book, as it were--from a schoolboy novelist to a comic novelist. Not that there's no comedy before this, and not that there're no schoolboys following this, but the transition happens when Mike transfers schools.

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Big Over Easy, by Jasper Fforde

2010-08-12T12:27:00.002-05:00

I still don't know what I think of this book. I really liked some aspects; others were more than a little annoying.

First the good: it was interesting, in an understated way. The writing was more subtle than the Thursday Next series, which never lets you forget it's a fantasy. Not that that's a strike against that series; it's just a different feeling from the Nursery Crime series, which tries to pass as much as possible for a non-fantasy world (with living nursery rhyme characters).

Mary Mary's refusal to be ashamed of being from Basingstoke led me to find out from Wikipedia that the city has a public relations campaign built on the slogan "A Place to Be Proud Of."

Now for the annoying: Jack Sprat's home life seemed to offer very little for the amount of space it took up in the book. I understand the idea, as one review I read put it, that it was supposed to be a twist on the usual "detective with a dysfunctional personal life" plot element, but the mystery part of the story is what drives the reader, and it was put on pause a lot so we could read about Jack eating supper at home. Sort of a yawner.

Overall, enjoyable enough that I plan to read The Fourth Bear, although I get the general feeling that the Nursery Crimes series didn't pan out as planned.

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Madame Pamplemousse and Her Incredible Edibles, by Rupert Kingfisher

2010-08-01T12:27:00.003-05:00

Somewhere along the way my daughter heard about this book. Because a lot of the names were French, she was a little intimidated from reading it on her own, so I read it aloud to her.

Thanks to this book, I learned that "pamplemousse" is French for "grapefruit," and is used as a slang term for a breast. (The book itself didn't teach me any of this, but it gave me reason to do some Internet research, where these facts were awaiting my discovery.) A character is named M. Langoustine, which I learned a while ago from Wikipedia's "Rubio's Fresh Mexican Grill" page is a name for "lobster."

This book was a little weird because I felt Kingfisher was trying to pass off laziness as mystery. Are we supposed to think M. Langoustine is Mme. Pamplemousse's cat? That would be too hard to explain, but it would make the book more boring if it weren't true, so why not just hint at it and don't definitively say one way or the other? I'd be interested in what my daughter thought about this, but she's downstairs doing school right now, so I guess we'll never know.

Since no right-thinking author writes a one-off book these days, the true test of whether a book is any good is how interested a kid is in reading the rest of the series. By that measure, the Madame Pamplemousse books are very successful.

Rating: four and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

1912, by James Chace

2010-07-29T12:27:00.003-05:00

Some historical periods have me at "hello." Anything covered by Alison Weir is one. America from 1892 to 1920 is another. If there is a reasonably written book covering that era, I'll want to read it. Some of that is my interest in the policies, some of it is my interest in the personalities. I have a man-crush on William Howard Taft that I can't quit. The Taft-Roosevelt dynamic in 1912 is fascinating to me. I always feel incredibly sad when I read about Taft campaigning against Roosevelt and then confiding to a reporter, "Roosevelt was my closest friend."

From this book I gather that Chace is a big proponent of Eugene Debs's place in history. Sometimes it feels like he is over-stating his case. Sure, Debs was a candidate with nationwide appeal, but he was never a serious contender for the presidency. He ran far behind Taft, who was a distant third as it was.

I had never read much about Woodrow Wilson or Debs before, so those parts of this book were intriguing. The messianic campaign of Roosevelt was interesting. The serious character flaws of Wilson were fascinating.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Ginger Pye, by Eleanor Estes

2010-07-23T12:27:00.002-05:00

I read this book to our kids because it's a Newbery winner about dogs. Given their love of Darrel and Sally Odgers's Jack Russell books, and Patricia Finney's I, Jack books, I figured we'd give it a whirl.

Uncle Benny stole the show. Get rid of Rachel and Jerry (especially Jerry!) and triple the Uncle Benny dosage and my kids would love it even more.

One thing I couldn't figure out was how much of the narrator's poor narration was the result of Estes intentionally narrating in a child-like style (e.g.: with every mention of Sam Doody including an introduction to who he is), and how much was just the result of poor writing. One thing I could figure out was how irritating it was every time Estes used the word "waked." And use it she did, like a rented carpet steamer due back in an hour. I had grown up thinking the past tense of "to wake" is "woke," but Estes kept pushing "waked," several times per chapter.

The moral of the story seemed to be "kids, don't trust your low-income peers," which I'm not really sure I want my kids to learn. After all, I've made them their own low-income peers. But overall, my kids liked the book enough to demand we read the sequel, and I didn't hate it enough to object.

Rating: four out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Thursday Next in First Among Sequels, by Jasper Fforde

2010-07-17T12:27:00.003-05:00

Firstly, a note about the title: everything on the Internet disagrees if this book is First Among Sequels or Thursday Next. The Library of Congress information on the title page attempts to cut the Gordian knot with the mouthful Thursday Next in First Among Sequels, so that's the title I'll use until I hear otherwise from Jasper Fforde.

The Eyre Affair was rightfully celebrated for its intricate cleverness. Five books later, what was once "intricate cleverness" now is indistinguishable from "boorish obtuseness."

I've lived my life since I read the last book, the title of which currently escapes me (Something Rotten?). If I don't remember the big things, don't write your book assuming I remember the minutia.

The ChronoGuard plotline has swallowed itself. Imagine the end of "Back to the Future III" going back in time and meeting the beginning of "Back to the Future." That's the kind of time enigma we're dealing with here. The wormhole offers decreasing returns to intricateness, and I maintain its first derivative now equals zero.

Thursday's old now, and has to interact with a caricature of herself, which is equal parts funny and annoying. Funny because of the twist on the reader's perception of Thursday from the earlier books; annoying because three main characters are named Thursday, which makes the reading more confusing.

Fforde has more books planned. Without any over-arching plot I'm invested in seeing resolved, I just lack any excitement to read on.

Rating: four and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Princes in the Tower, by Alison Weir

2010-07-08T12:27:00.002-05:00

I think Alison Weir and I would get along. Assuming she only writes books about the things that interest her, we have common interests. (Or maybe she just does a good job making her interests interesting to me, but then why did I read Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V?). The only thing that would keep us from being BFF might be my ignorance of how to pronounce her name (Wire? Weer?).

I read her Wars of the Roses in 2005 and liked it a lot. I recently purchased her Eleanor of Aquitaine (although it also might put a strain on our potential friendship, as I bought it at a used book store). The Princes in the Tower has been on my reading list for a long time. At the same time that I read it, my wife got suckered into reading The Daughter of Time. At her book club, most members agreed that I had read the better book.

This book does a good job painting Richard III as a heartless bastard. Actually, since "bastard" back then was a technical term with an actual meaning, let me instead call him a heartless prick. As was nearly everyone else in this period. The book starts out with a nice summary of the various relatives killed by Edward IV. Sure, it's good to be the king, but what Mel Brooks never tells you is that it sucks to be the king's uncle.

The saddest part of the book (aside from the murder of children, I guess) was the part about Princess Elizabeth. My memory of Ian McKellen's "Richard III" led me to believe she was young and hot. While Weir makes sure to mention a foreign ambassador's recollection of her (Elizabeth's) large breasts, she (Weir) also includes plenty of disturbing details of her (Elizabeth's) sexual relationship with her (Elizabeth's) uncle. I guess Elizabeth was as much of a scheming opportunist as her male relatives. In this post-liberation era, it shouldn't surprise anyone that a girl can hold her own with men. It's just so much sadder when the girl is so hot.

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Quarterly Update - 2nd Quarter 2010

2010-06-30T12:27:00.001-05:00

Now that I'm done with school for a while, I can get caught up on some book reviews. A good writer would have a longer introduction than this.

Terror in Tights, by Greg Trine

Rating: three and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

A Separate Peace, by John Knowles

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Paper Towns, by John Green

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Autobiography, by Benjamin Franklin

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green

Rating: four and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Nicholas on Vacation, by Nicholas on Vacation, by René Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempé

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Stone Fox, by John Reynolds Gardiner

Rating: four out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

How to Receive Discernible Answers to Your Prayers, by Jeffrey R. Young

Rating: four and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Love Among the Chickens, by P.G. Wodehouse

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Coriolanus, by William Shakespeare

Rating: seven out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

As A Man Thinketh, by James Allen

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Attack of the Valley Girls, by Greg Trine

Rating: two and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

I, Jack, by Patricia Finney

Rating.: seven out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Doctrine and Covenants, by Joseph Smith, Jr., et Al.

Rating: Not going to risk the wrath of God.

Drawing on the Powers of Heaven, by Grant Von Harrison

Rating: seven out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Getting What You Came For, by Robert L. Peters

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Dominic, by William Steig

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Jack and Rebel, the Police Dog, by Patricia Finney

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Kitnapped Creature, by Darrel and Sally Odgers

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Utterly Me, Clarice Bean, by Lauren Child

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Fake Cape Caper, by Greg Trine

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Fathers As Patriarchs, by Grant Von Harrison

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Clarice Bean Spells Trouble, by Lauren Child

Rating: four and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Bunnicula, by Deborah and James Howe

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Bunnicula, by Deborah and James Howe

2010-06-28T12:27:00.002-05:00

I remember listening to my father read this book to us when I was very little. I also remember being scared witless by it (it was age-appropriate for my older siblings, not for me). So I was ambivalent about reading it to my kids. After all, these are the kids who get frightened by Anne Shirley accidentally dying her hair green.

My kids started out scared of it, mainly because it was about a vampire rabbit. My daughter asked that we read it closer to dinner and not last thing before bed. But when they quickly figured out that the book is not as scary as they (or young me) thought it was, they warmed up to it. While my daughter never stopped declaring, "Dominic stinks!" the whole time we were reading that book, she only said it about Bunnicula for a few chapters before stopping.

If only something could be done about the characters. Bunnicula doesn't talk, and the other two are named Harold and Chester. Is this a retirement home or a kids' book? The human children were pretty dopey, too, but at least the dog and the cat are lively enough to make up for them. My kids laughed at the appropriate places and complained at the end of each reading, so that must count for something.

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Clarice Bean Spells Trouble, by Lauren Child

2010-06-28T00:27:00.003-05:00

I didn't enjoy this one as much as the first. The Ruby Redfort plot device switched out books for movies, and they don't seem to be doing anything but entertaining Clarice. At least in the first book they were showing the contrast between fantasy and reality. Also, this book felt a bit after-school-special-ish to me, as Karl Renbury deals with his abandonment by his father. And although Clarice does an admirable thing in taking the blame for something Karl has done, the truth is never discovered and talked about; it's just assumed by all adults involved that Clarice's lie is true and Clarice moves on with her life. Maybe there could have at least been a discussion of the ambiguous nature of truth. That might be too much to ask from a kids' book, but I don't think so. If you're going to introduce the topic, at least hit all the high points a kid should hear about.

Rating: four and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Fathers As Patriarchs, by Grant Von Harrison

2010-06-21T12:27:00.002-05:00

I went to see the president speak and security took away my vial of consecrated oil. When I went to the bookstore to buy another, I browsed for a while and found this book at a substantial discount. [Question: should I not mention when I buy books on sale, buy them at used book stores, or check them out of the library? Is that insulting to the authors?] I decided to get it because I needed to make my purchase amount larger to justify the store's expense of the debit transaction. Then it turned out the vials weren't as cheap as I thought they'd be, so I didn't need to inflate the total amount at all, but the book had already been in my hands, and Richard Thaler tells us there was no turning back.

It was a good purchase. I enjoyed reading this book, and it was a pretty timely find, since I had recently been thinking about how to make sure I'm not exercising unrighteous dominion over my kids while still making them do exactly as I say. (Harrison didn't really solve that mystery for me.) This book also made me more fully appreciate the job my father did in raising me. Plenty of Harrison's good ideas were things I remembered happening in my home. I'm not sure this book is going to be a regular re-read like Drawing on the Powers of Heaven, but it will definitely be one I refer back to regularly as a reference.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Fake Cape Caper, by Greg Trine

2010-06-19T12:27:00.002-05:00

A much more enjoyable read than Attack of the Valley Girls. The bad guys are naturally bad, so you can root against them. Candace is featured more prominently, which is a plus in my kids' eyes. There's not as much winking self-reference. If I had to pick my favorite Melvin Beederman book, I'd say it was either this one or the very first one.

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Utterly Me, Clarice Bean, by Lauren Child

2010-06-13T12:27:00.002-05:00

My daughter loves these books. Even though she's already read them all, she asked me to make this "her" book. (Somewhere along the way I screwed up and allowed them to each have a night-time book, doubling my reading load. What if we keep having kids? I'm done for.) Maybe it's because there are some words she still sort of guesses at. When it comes to reading she is emphatically punching above her weight, with the delightful results that we get to hear her use the word "chaos" in conversation with the pronunciation "chay-ose." So I guess she just wanted to make sure she was understanding everything when she read them on her own.

I liked this book. I liked the way Lauren Child contrasted the fantasy life of Ruby Redfort with the real life of Clarice Bean. My daughter is excited because, evidently, Lauren Child is now writing Ruby Redfort books, too.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Kitnapped Creature, by Darrel and Sally Odgers

2010-06-07T12:27:00.001-05:00

We read these books because my son loves them. They keep making him happy, so we keep reading them. They're hard to find around here (our library in Kansas had the entire series, while both our current library and its neighboring library don't have any of them), but we have come across a few at the used book store in town.

Jack has a son named Preacher now, which thrilled my son even more. If he loves dogs, he wants to put a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in his back pocket and shoot puppies. I especially liked how Preacher's nose-maps were child-like versions of Jack's maps. The story maybe lost something for us because we've read them out of order, so we had never before met the cat that made a reappearance in this book.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Jack and Rebel, the Police Dog, by Patricia Finney

2010-05-29T12:27:00.002-05:00

The sequel can never be as great as the original, right? As good as this book was, it was a let-down from the giddy heights of the first. Some of it might have to do with the loss of novelty; when my kids first heard Jack's voice, they were ecstatic, but by the end of two books, it was commonplace to them. Some of it might have been the way Jack's kid and puppy-momma were barely featured, replaced in Jack's life by a dog he's supposedly been friends with for years. But if you're looking for a good kid-appropriate book that keeps the environmentalism undertones to a minimum and even teaches kids to question vegetarianism, this is the book for you.

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Dominic, by William Steig

2010-05-27T12:34:00.002-05:00

Alas, poor Dominic. My kids never really got into this book, even though by the end it seemed like they would like it if they hadn't already made up their minds to not like it. I picked it out at the library and then our hold on the next I, Jack book was fulfilled, so my kids hated Dominic for being in the way of the book they'd rather be reading. I would say, "Now it's time to read the greatest book ever written," and my daughter would yell, "Dominic stinks!" And because I am less mature than my seven-year-old, I'd make sure we had this same exchange every night.

In truth, it wasn't a bad book. It was the story of a dog on a quest, righting wrongs along his way. I found it strange that nearly every animal had a last name that was the name of a different animal, like a pig named Mr. Badger and a duck named Mrs. Fox. I can only assume it was intentional, but I don't really understand why. And the way the final scene was written it made me think the entire book had been an allegory for life and death, but then it very abruptly seemed like no, it wasn't that at all. Not many kids books would reward a second reading for missed symbolism, but this one would. If only there were a Dominic Cliffs Notes.

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Getting What You Came For, by Robert L. Peters

2010-05-27T12:27:00.001-05:00

I just finished the first year of a doctoral program. The advice in this book actually begins with the decision of whether or not to even apply to graduate school, in your junior year as an undergraduate. Because of that, a lot of the first 100 pages was stuff that didn't really apply to me anymore, but it was all stuff that made me think, "I wish I'd thought of that back then." But it also might have completely turned me off to the idea. But then that might have been the better decision. But it comes with a free frogurt. The frogurt is also cursed.

There was incredibly helpful advice here about how to structure a dissertation committee and how to manage the work. One startling aspect of the book was just how out-of-date it was, even though it was published in the mid-1990s. All the advice about how to send away for information through the mail and how to choose a personal computer was shockingly backward. If you get off on crap like that, I pontificated more fully on the subject here.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Drawing on the Powers of Heaven, by Grant Von Harrison

2010-05-27T00:27:00.002-05:00

I really like this book. When I first read it and came across the parts where he mentions "each time you re-read this book," I thought he was being a bit presumptuous. However, this is the fourth time I've read it, and I find it helpful to re-read it about once a year. I'd like to think I'm doing a better job having faith than I did before, but I still am just beginning to figure it all out.

Rating: seven out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Doctrine and Covenants, by Joseph Smith, Jr., et Al.

2010-05-23T12:27:00.001-05:00

How am I supposed to write a "hardcore" review of scripture? That sounds like a no-win situation.

Rating: Not going to risk the wrath of God.

I, Jack, by Patricia Finney

2010-05-17T12:27:00.002-05:00

I was at the library with my daughter, picking out books for her. While she gets books she knows she'd like (because they are from a tried-and-true series or because they have 18 fairies mentioned in the title), I like to get books that she might never otherwise consider. I was thinking about getting I, Freddy for her, when I noticed just a few books away I, Houdini. Both are about hamsters, my daughters favorite animal EVER (for the past several weeks). I wondered how similar the books were, and since we homeschool, I decided to give my daughter the school assignment of reading both and creating a report comparing and contrasting them.

This got our family on an I, Animal Name book kick, so when I next went to the library and saw I, Jack, I had to get it.

My children thought this was the most hilarious book EVER. Not just of all the books they've ever read, but of all possible books, all potential combinations of letters in the English language. Every page involved extensive breaks for uncontrollable laughter to abate. The book had to get moved to after-dinner instead of before-bed so that it didn't get the kids too worked up. They loved it with a love that was more than love. Upon finishing it, we immediately had to check the library website to see if there were any more books about Jack (there was--see below), and request it, even though it was available on the shelf. The risk of someone else checking it out before we could get to the library was just too great for my children to bear.

Rating.: seven out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Attack of the Valley Girls, by Greg Trine

2010-05-16T12:27:00.002-05:00

My daughter liked this book best out of all the Melvin Beederman books we've read so far. I think I liked it least. After a chapter of introduction to the Valley girls that is heavy on speech mannerisms, they all go away for a heavy portion of the book. What's the point of having Valley girls if they aren't actually Valley girls? And it seemed sort of lame that the villains aren't actually bad people, they just ate an evil cookie. How are you supposed to root against someone that isn't actually bad? They're like Raymond in The Manchurian Candidate.

Rating: two and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

As A Man Thinketh, by James Allen

2010-05-03T12:27:00.002-05:00

A very easy to read great little book about importance of directing your thoughts. The problem with most books about thought these days (ahem, The Secret, ahem) is that they seem sort of hokey with mysticism. Just think and stuff will happen, like your brain can control the elements around you without you knowing it. This book is old enough that it doesn't shy away from the explanation: you think, and God controls the elements around you. This then becomes a book about faith, not a book about magicking your way to fortune.

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Coriolanus, by William Shakespeare

2010-04-27T12:27:00.004-05:00

I didn't know about this play until I was in high school. My dad saw a line from it written somewhere and thought I'd like it, so he wrote it down for me: "When the sea was calm all boats alike showed mastership in floating."

Now, years later, I read the play itself, and I really liked it. Coriolanus is a man who does heroic deeds because they are the right things to do. He is brought down for his supposed pride by those who only do such deeds for the commendation they bring. The textual analysis essays at the back of the play are all about how Coriolanus is an anti-hero and deserves his downfall. I completely disagree; he shows how virtue is degraded by political interpretation. Aufidius says:

So our virtues Lie in th' interpretation of the time, And power, unto itself most commendable, Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair T' extol what it hath done. --Act 4, Scene 7, 52-56

Rating: seven out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Love Among the Chickens, by P.G. Wodehouse

2010-04-25T12:34:00.002-05:00

I've plucked most of the low-hanging Wodehouse fruit. Now if I want to read every book he's written, I've got to start doing some detective work to find the less-known works from his early career. What's nice, though, is that they were all written before our modern era of "don't call it perpetual" perpetual copyright, which means they're in the public domain, and available on the Internet.

This was my first experience with reading a book on the Internet. If I were richer and/or more technologically savvy, I would have a digital reader, but reading a book on my laptop is the closest I've come to it so far. The Internet reading experience was more annoying than a book, and I don't think the negative points are things that will go away as I become more used to it. But the experience wasn't so horrible as to swear me off the practice; as I get to more public-domain Wodehouse books I need to read, I'll look them up on Google Books if my local library doesn't have them.

Plot-wise, I think I'd read something that said this book wasn't that good. I disagree. I liked it just fine. It was a good, typical Wodehouse novel, with a romance set in a comic atmosphere. Ukridge is one of the more-memorable of Wodehouse's larger-than-life characters. There was much to like, and little to dislike.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

How to Receive Discernible Answers to Your Prayers, by Jeffrey R. Young

2010-04-25T12:27:00.003-05:00

The first time I read this book (late 2004 or early 2005), I thought it was full of wonderful insights. I was certain it was the type of book that would reward a closer follow-up reading. Now that I've read it again, though, I'm not so sure. Maybe once was enough.

Or maybe I just didn't as much attention this time. Either way, if I were going to rate this book solely on whether it produced the promised results (i.e.: discernible answers to my prayers), I'd give it, like, negative eight billionty inflatable monkeys. I don't think God got the "just telling people it'll be all right is not the same thing as helping them" memo. Maybe Jeffrey Young can write a book to take care of that little communication mix-up.

He's got some valuable points in this book; the kind of stuff you wish you heard in quorum meetings (instead of the speculation and self-congratulations you regularly hear). He uses a lot of examples from trying times in his own life to show how he dealt with the challenges.

Rating: four and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Stone Fox, by John Reynolds Gardiner

2010-04-24T12:27:00.001-05:00

When my daughter is bored I recommend she read some books we own that she never looks through. About once a month I say, "Why don't you read Stone Fox?" She always ignores the suggestion, so I finally decided to read it aloud. My daughter doesn't do well with dramatic conflict, so the fact that Grandfather was near death for the entire book wasn't helpful. My son likes books about animals, but (spoiler alert) the dog dying at the end didn't go over too well with either of them. The story ended sort of abruptly; it's never a good sign when I have to announce that the book has just ended. I DID appreciate the anti-tax elements of the storyline. The only true villain of the book is the tax man, who is represented as a parasite. The simple story made it feel like it was for younger kids, but the weightier subject matter made it feel more appropriate for older kids. I still don't know which age group is ideal.

Rating: four out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Nicholas on Vacation, by René Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempé

2010-04-22T12:27:00.001-05:00

This is the third book in the Nicholas series, but the last one we read. It tells of two different summer vacations Nicholas takes from school. Because of this it doesn't really fit into the other stories for continuity purposes, so we had no storyline issues arise from reading it out of order. I liked this one better than books four and five, I think. There's only so much Nicholas can do with his gang at school, so getting him with a different group of kids in a different setting allowed for more breadth of adventure.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath

2010-04-15T12:27:00.001-05:00

I read this book the summer after my senior year in high school. I think my mother was freaked because she thought I was reading it for practical suicide advice. As mature as I'd like to think I was as a reader, I remembered almost none of it aside from Esther's uncontrolled bleeding when she loses her virginity. This time around I was surprised by how well Plath uses humor. As the book goes along and the narrator succumbs to a spell of depression, the outrageous events slowly shift from humorous to troublesome; you stop laughing at them because they start to become signs of Esther's problem. I thought that was skillfully done. This book wasn't published in America until long after Plath's death because it was supposedly hard on Plath's mother, but I didn't think it was too critical. The times that the narrator criticizes her mother are times when her perception is skewed by her depression. Did Plath's mother expect to come out of a book written by a woman with a mental illness smelling like roses?

Rating: five and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green

2010-04-14T12:27:00.002-05:00

Better than Looking for Alaska but not as good as Paper Towns, this book is about a child prodigy, Colin, who has to come to terms with the fact that his peers have caught up to him in some aspects. For some reason that's never fully explained he has only dated girls named Katherine. (I dated a Kathryn once, who very temporarily broke my heart. She was a good girl.) He comes up with this idea that a way to prove his usefulness as a former prodigy is to create a mathematical formula that can explain the relationship arcs of all his Katherine romances. I had a problem with the fact that his variables were not actually exogenous; Colin assigned each Katherine a rating of how likely she was to dump him AFTER he'd experienced how likely she was to dump him. Milton Friedman says a theory should be judged by its predictive power, and this theory doesn't have much. The story was enjoyable, though, but I don't know if it was worth the time it took (I'm a pretty slow reader, which means a book has to be better for me or else it has wasted more of my time).

Rating: four and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Autobiography, by Benjamin Franklin

2010-04-08T12:27:00.002-05:00

The first half of this book was incredibly interesting. The second half not so much. It was strange that, right when world events turned to the most dramatic circumstances of the 18th century, Franklin's account gets a little boring. He was a statesman and politician during the revolution, not a soldier. His account of his effort as a volunteer in the French and Indian War was more interesting than his treatment of the revolution. I'd say the book is still worth reading, though, because of how interesting a life Franklin lived. In terms of the interesting life story, this book was a lot like My Early Life by Winston Churchill.

Rating: five out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Paper Towns, by John Green

2010-04-06T12:27:00.001-05:00

I liked this book best of the three John Green books I read this spring. I think it was well-written and dealt with some of the same "life's so hard for teenagers, man" stuff that Looking for Alaska dealt with, without resorting to the hagiography that I felt the narrator in the other book showered on Alaska Young. The girl in this book, Margo, has flaws that aren't presented as tragically wonderful; they are serious and constricting. Whereas (spoiler alert) Alaska dies and so achieves a bit of retrospective perfectness, this girl is found alive and cannot measure up to the image of her the main character has created. I think it is a good story about idealism and its shortcomings in the real world. Even though a lot of it seemed like it was based on a high school senior's term paper on "Leaves of Grass," the book was readable and enjoyable.

Rating: six out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

A Separate Peace, by John Knowles

2010-04-05T12:34:00.003-05:00

I went to the school library with the plan of reading about monetary disequilibria. Somehow it ended up being more enjoyable browsing the literature stacks. I saw this book and thought, "I've heard of it enough that I should probably have read it." I really liked it. It was one of those books that made me feel like I was missing a lot of the meaning, so afterwards I read the Cliffs Notes, which was sort of helpful. I spent a lot of the book unsure if Phineas was really as great as Gene thought he was, or if he was actually the antagonist, which might be a sign of good writing, since Gene was unsure, himself. I like this book a lot better as a "coming of age" story than The Catcher in the Rye, and wonder why it was never really discussed as a potential book to read in any of my high school English classes. When I blogged that I was reading this, lots of readers left comments about how much they like this book, too, so my wife has checked it out of the library and is now working on it herself.

Rating: six and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Terror in Tights, by Greg Trine

2010-04-05T12:27:00.001-05:00

My kids enjoy listening to Melvin Beederman books, even if they are starting to get a little annoying to read aloud. I feel like the plots are getting weaker and weaker. For a kid that just likes the idea of the Melvin and Candice characters, it's not a big deal, but for me, I'm beginning to not look forward to reading them.

Rating: three and a half out of seven giant inflatable monkeys.

Quarterly Update - 1st Quarter 2010

2010-03-31T12:34:00.000-05:00

Young Men in Spats, by P.G. Wodehouse

Rating: 6 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

The Armchair Economist, by Steven E. Landsburg

Rating: 6 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Fair Play, by Steven E. Landsburg

Follow-up: I speculated in the review that, based on the level of his sentimentality for his daughter, Landsburg was either dying of an incurable disease or he was recently divorced. Last week I went to a lecture he gave and he mentioned being in a new relationship.

Rating: 6.5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Never Mind the Pollacks, by Neal Pollack

Rating: 6.5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Whoa, am I a pushover or what? Reading my reviews makes me feel like the other critics on the staff of the Springfield Shopper when Homer becomes the food critic: "'Nine thumbs up'? What the hell is that?!" But what can I say: I only read books I think I'm going to like (although as Landsburg points out in The Armchair Economist, those are the books that should disappoint me the most).

The Grateful Fred, by Greg Trine

Rating: 5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Petropolis, by Anya Ulinich

Rating: 5.5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Nicholas and the Gang, by René Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempé

Rating: 5.5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Wake Up, Sir!, by Jonathan Ames

Rating: 3 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Everyday Probability and Statistics, by Michael W. Woolfson

Rating: 6 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

The Pearl of Great Price, by Joseph Smith, Jr. (trans.)

Rating: Although I'm fairly certain God has a sense of humor, assigning monkey ratings to scripture might be pushing Him a little too far.

The Revenge of the McNasty Brothers, by Greg Trine

Rating: 5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Nicholas in Trouble, by René Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempé

Rating: 5.5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

Rating: 5.5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

The Sausage Situation, by Darrel and Sally Odgers

Rating: 6 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

The Book of Mormon, by Joseph Smith, Jr. (trans.)

Rating: again, not going to chance it.

Winston Churchill, by John Keegan

Rating: 5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Mary Poppins, by P.L. Travers

Rating: 5.5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Looking for Alaska, by John Green

Rating: 5.5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

The Winner's Curse, by Richard H. Thaler

Rating: 3 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

The Winner's Curse, by Richard H. Thaler

2010-03-31T12:27:00.001-05:00

Thaler says this book is for lay readers. Don't let him fool you. With no previous exposure to economics literature, you'll be fairly lost most of the time. (Hell, I'm an economics doctoral student and I spent most of chapters 4 and 9 telling myself, "Just keep reading. It'll make sense eventually.") If this book weren't required reading for one of my classes, I probably wouldn't have started it, and definitely wouldn't have finished it.

Rating: 3 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Looking for Alaska, by John Green

2010-03-29T12:27:00.002-05:00

My wife recommended I read his books because she says my writing style reminds her of him. I know it's quite presumptuous for a dude with a blog to compare himself to an award-winning novelist, but isn't it presumptuous to be writing book reviews at all? To paraphrase the famous Churchill apocrypha, we've already determined I'm presumptuous; now we're just seeing how much of an ass I am. (Answer: quite.)

I sort of enjoyed the book. I didn't enjoy the teenager-ness of the teenage characters, but that's because I don't enjoy the teenager-ness of teenagers in real life. Always about themselves, never shy in their selfishness. Once the book switches from "Before" to "After," I thought there were some really well-written parts of Miles's stream of consciousness. The final prank I thought was rushed in its telling. It was a truly funny moment (not like those half-assed "funny" moments in Wake Up, Sir!), and it could have lingered longer. Also, what I took away from the final assessment was that it's okay for teens to be self-absorbed, which I don't think is really what teens need to be hearing. It's like letting Billy Joe Armstrong guest lecture at a Pakistani madrassah.

Rating: 5.5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Mary Poppins, by P.L. Travers

2010-03-26T12:27:00.001-05:00

I think our daughter liked this more than our son. Mary from the book is a lot less likable than Mary from the movie, but in a way, that makes the book much more likable than the movie. The chapters are too long for comfortably reading them aloud in one sitting. My daughter has since checked out two more Mary Poppins books, so that has to count for something, right?

Rating: 5.5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Winston Churchill, by John Keegan

2010-03-23T12:34:00.002-05:00

I've read a bit about Churchill, and I've read other books from this series (Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, Buddha, Joseph Smith, Abraham Lincoln). This book would be a fine introduction to Churchill's life. The first half would be good to read along with Churchill's My Early Life to help set straight some of the self-servingness inherent in autobiography. However, at times this book felt poorly edited, when words were used with awkward frequency, or when a story told 50 pages before was repeated without acknowledging that it wasn't new material to the reader. Another problem is that Churchill lived an incredibly long and full life, and the scope of the series (200 pages each) doesn't allow for much analysis if he's going to fit everything in. I'm looking forward to reading Keegan's history of World War I, which I've owned for a while but haven't gotten to yet.

Rating: 5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

The Book of Mormon, by Joseph Smith, Jr. (trans.)

2010-03-23T12:27:00.002-05:00

Again, scripture.

Rating: again, not going to chance it.

The Sausage Situation, by Darrel and Sally Odgers

2010-03-21T12:27:00.002-05:00

My oldest son, nearly six years old, loves these Jack Russell: Dog Detective books. Our library in Kansas had them all; our libraries here in Virginia have none of them. Luckily we've found a few at our local second-hand book shop. This was Book 6 (we've previously read 1, 4, and 7). This is one of the Australian things that's invaded our lives (along with Jessica Watson's blog, Mary Poppins books, and my wife's reading the "Specials" book series). When my son listens to Jack Russell books, he has a constant, irrepressible smile. That alone is worth a good rating.

Rating: 6 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

2010-03-18T12:27:00.001-05:00

Three years ago I decided to make a push through the great Victorian novels. That hasn't really happened yet. I still have the plan, I just don't have the time. From what I've read online, this book is fairly atypical of Dickens (my previous Dickens exposure being a reading of Great Expectations, several viewings of A Christmas Story, several more viewings of Scrooged, and an evening in the audience of a junior-high production of Nicholas Nickleby). I enjoyed the book, although like the movie Transformers, it had about five endings too many. I got to the point where there were probably 15 pages of material remaining to resolve the conflict, and there were 85 pages left in the book. But that's what happens when novels get serialized weekly. Why do you think The Count of Monte Cristo is as long as it is?

Rating: 5.5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Nicholas in Trouble, by René Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempé

2010-03-14T12:27:00.002-05:00

Book 5 of the Nicholas series. Like Book 4, all right, but not as good as Books 1 and 2.

Rating: 5.5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

The Revenge of the McNasty Brothers, by Greg Trine

2010-03-07T12:27:00.001-06:00

Backing up to Book 2 of the Melvin Beederman series. Same feelings as before.

Rating: 5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

The Pearl of Great Price, by Joseph Smith, Jr. (trans.)

2010-03-02T12:27:00.002-06:00

A book from my religion's canon.

Rating: Although I'm fairly certain God has a sense of humor, assigning monkey ratings to scripture might be pushing Him a little too far.

Everyday Probability and Statistics, by Michael W. Woolfson

2010-03-01T12:27:00.002-06:00

A good statistics book for casual reading. Probably not enough to teach you statistics if you've never had any, but enough to remind you of what you've previously learned, or to give some interesting real-world applications. One section of the book deals with how to stick it to unsuspecting bookies, which reminded me of a story Tito once told me on a business trip to New Mexico: his freshman year he ran a gambling pool on the NCAA tournament and got cleaned out by some guys on his hall who knew more about betting than he did. I love that story, and by extension I love this book for reminding me of it.

Rating: 6 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Wake Up, Sir!, by Jonathan Ames

2010-02-25T12:27:00.001-06:00

If this is what passes for a Wodehouse novel these days, the estate of P.G. Wodehouse has little to fear. The second half had more laughs in it than the first, and there were even times I laughed out loud (two times, I believe). But the 20-page sex scene was a little over-the-top (total number of Wodehouse sex-scene pages I've come across: zero), and the ending of the book was completely unsatisfying. Who ends a "comedy" book like that? Only someone who belongs to the Borat-school of comedy, where laughing at someone is indistinguishable from laughing with them.

Rating: 3 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Nicholas and the Gang, by René Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempé

2010-02-19T12:34:00.003-06:00

We skipped Book 3 because our branch library doesn't have it and because I read online it doesn't impact the continuity. Our kids love these stories and I like to read them. Maybe it's because I picked them out of the library to start with, so every time I read them it's like I get to say, "I'm a good book-picker-outer." I think the first two books were a little better, though. The ironic endings of these stories seem less satisfying than those of the previous stories, which felt more thought-out.

Rating: 5.5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Petropolis, by Anya Ulinich

2010-02-19T12:27:00.002-06:00

I found this book while bored in the library. Based on the title I convinced myself it involved pets and would be like Amberville. It didn't, and it was not. What it was was a book about a Soviet teen in an after-school arts program who gets pregnant and emigrates to America. Yeah, not really like Amberville at all. But I enjoyed it enough to finish. I liked Ulinich's writing style; it was very poetic without any pretension. If I had known ahead of time what it was about, I probably would have thought, "Oh, that's not for me," but having read it and enjoyed it, I'd tell others to give it a shot.

Rating: 5.5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

The Grateful Fred, by Greg Trine

2010-02-18T12:27:00.006-06:00

My kids seem to like the Melvin Beederman books. I'm always the one who has to remind them about the books, but when I get one, they are eager to listen. I once got the second book for my daughter to read to my son, but she just read it to herself, and finding the second book in our library system is difficult, so we skipped ahead to Book 3. My kids liked it a lot, and I didn't mind reading it, so how bad of a review can I give it?

Rating: 5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Never Mind the Pollacks, by Neal Pollack

2010-02-16T09:23:00.005-06:00

Not until I started this book review blog, where I had to start explaining what led me to read each book I read, did I realize how much of a reading hobo I am. Most of my book reviews start with "While bored in the library...." This is no exception.

I went to the library to do some problems on general equilibrium. Lo and behold, I was quickly bored. (Said boredom came before even actually sitting down and getting out the problems.) I looked at the shelf next to me and saw a book entitled Never Mind the Pollacks, which I took to be a culturally-insensitive version of the title Never Mind the Poles. Then I saw it was written by Neal Pollack, who wrote The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, wherein he creates a fictional giant of American prose named Neal Pollack, combining all the excesses of Hemingway, Salinger, and Mailer. I love that book.

In this book he creates a fictional giant of American rock criticism named Neal Pollack. The device allows for hilarious lines, such as:

On the morning of the day he died, Neal Pollack woke with a burning pain in his ass unlike any he'd experienced in weeks.

or:

Neal Pollack yowled into the darkness. He scrambled from the sleeping bag, mad with heartbreak and shattered ego. Plunging naked into the woods, he tore at his cheek flesh with long nails.

or:

Neal Pollack was naked on the filthiest futon that I'd ever seen.

Character-Pollack's life follows the progression of American rock, from Memphis to New York to Detroit to New York to Los Angeles to Seattle. He discovers, creates, or leaches from Elvis, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Bruce Springsteen, the Sex Pistols, and Nirvana, among others. Writer-Pollack pushes the frontiers of fictionalization of real people with such lines as:

Neal Pollack punched Michael Stipe in the face. It was an action, Stipe later said, that prompted him to take Pollack's name out of "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)".

Evidently, most people were cool with it; only one person from rock history cannot be directly named, instead going by "The Widow" and "She Who Shall Not Be Named for Fear of Lawsuit." It seems fitting to me that the person from rock history who's place seems most attributable to accident is the one most humorless about her place in rock history.

The book makes the argument that black people invent a new music genre and then white people steal it and ruin it. When Character-Pollack first hears rap, he wonders if it is "yet another form of African-American musical expression, this time one that was so unique to the black experience that white people would never be able to co-opt it," and after trying to rap himself, he concludes, "He sounded like Tim Conway! This form of music was simply beyond him. Black people had done it, at last."

This book is hilarious. And I don't throw that word around as loosely as all the critics who wrote blurbs for Wake Up, Sir!, which is yet to make me laugh out loud. This book made me laugh out loud at least once every 20 pages. If you have a problem with sex, drugs, and, well, rock and roll, you should expect quite a lot of each in a book like this.

Rating: 6.5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

Fair Play, by Steven E. Landsburg

2010-02-03T12:27:00.000-06:00

When I first started this book, I had many thoughts. First, I remembered the quote from John Hodgman's Area of My Expertise* about becoming a first-time dad: "I am now required to devote my creative life solely to writing about my daughter--how brilliant and beautiful she is, and how her naive wisdom and amusing antics have changed the way I look at life. Everyone, I am sure, will find this fascinating." Then I thought, "Landsburg's displaying the type of hyper-affection typical of newly-divorced parents for their children; they take all the emotion they'd been spending on their spouses and shower it on their kids." But then I thought, "I wonder if he's dying. This reads more like Randy Pausch's Last Lecture* than even The Last Lecture did. I better hold back in my criticism, in case Landsburg ends up dead and I look like an ass."

But this book is from 1997 and as of today Landsburg is still alive, so criticisms aweigh!

What's interesting is that, even with all the weird sappy sentimentality and strange parenting skills on display, I really, really like this book. It's as if he's decided he doesn't care which of his neighbors he offends, he's going to tell you exactly why nearly every aspect of American government is rotten to the core. And I can't get enough of it.

The basic idea, as I understand it, is that people explain fairness to their kids differently from how they expect it to operate in government. In that sense, kids understand the world better than adults do. He points out that he's never heard a parent tell a child that the proper response to a kid owning a bunch more toys is to take them away, but the same parents think a tax code that does the same thing to other people's money is "fair."

There isn't as much economics-for-the-sake-of-economics in this book as in The Armchair Economist, which probably makes it more accessible to the average reader. However, in his previous book Landsburg presented libertarian views as a plausible alternative that might be attractive, whereas in this book he presents them as the only views that make sense. I think readers might not like that when they see that he's right and they cannot continue to entertain their old political ideas without deciding to be logically inconsistent.

Rating: 6.5 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.

* - I was once taught by a grammar book (and this rule makes sense, so I follow it), that when making a book with a title beginning in "The," "A," or "An" the possession of the author, to drop the article. Thus Randy Pausch wrote The Last Lecture, but it is Randy Pausch's Last Lecture. While the alternative is more stilted, this method changes the title of the book, which isn't supposed to happen. But then most people drop the article for alphabetizing purposes, so I'm going to keep doing things this way.

The Armchair Economist, by Steven E. Landsburg

2010-02-01T12:27:00.000-06:00

This is a required book for one of my classes this semester. We are supposed to focus on a few particular chapters, but I read the whole thing for two reasons: 1) I enjoy economics (which is still true, a little more than one semester into my program), and 2) I wanted credit for reading the pages this year. I expect my reading is going to drop off a lot this year, so I need to take pages where I can get them.

I enjoyed the book. Because it is written to be accessible to someone with little to no economic background, large parts of it were things I already knew. This isn't to say, "I'm as smart as Landsburg!" I'm just saying why my response to it is somewhat muted, but I would bet a person with little to no economic background would enjoy the book much more.

Even so, there were some things that were new to me, and those were great to discover. His argument that, when a fixed resource is owned by no one, the economic gains of that resource are discarded was enlightening. I think the main point my professor wanted us to learn was the proper way to conduct cost-benefit analysis, particularly in answering Landsburg's question, "Do we have too much or too little illiteracy?"

Landsburg can be quite humorous and self-deprecating, as when he writes:

Economic theory predicts that you are not enjoying this book as much as you thought you would.... [Y]ou chose it because it was one of the few available books that you expected to be among the very best. Unfortunately, that makes it one of the few available books whose quality you are most likely to have overestimated. Under the circumstances, to read it is to court disappointment. (174)

Maybe that analysis doesn't apply to me since I had to read it and bought it online for four or five dollars.

Landsburg can overdo the humor, though, when he uses it to criticize the logical shortcomings of others. His critique of an article in the Atlantic Monthly just comes off as mean-spirited. He partially explains the invective when he later writes of the New York Times "the Times recognizes that assertions about chemistry or physics should be disciplined by some fundamental understanding of the subject, but it fails to recognize that the same is true of economics" (122). To me, the Times has a policy to print any crackpot economic theory it can get its hands on (fake cough--Paul Krugman--fake cough). Landsburg is merciless in his critique of crackpot economic theory. He's not a dick; he's just passionate about economics. Unfortunately, sometimes they read the same.

But the book was worth the read (at least to me) for the following idea:

When Republican and Democratic legislators meet to "hammer out a compromise," they are engaging in an activity that could land any of their private-sector counterparts in jail. We do not allow the presidents of United and American Airlines to hammer out compromises regarding airfares. Why do we allow the majority and minority leaders of the Congress to hammer out compromises regarding tax policy? (147)

As hard as I thought it would be, I think I just found someone who hates the government even more than I do, but somehow doesn't live in a shack in the woods with survival manuals.

I guess I do the book a disservice by saying it's for people with little background in economics. For those who have an extensive background based on NPR and Paul Krugman, this book is an indispensible antidote.

Rating: 6 out of 7 giant inflatable monkeys.