The middle volume in White’s compendium of exhaustive studies of every facet of London in the 20th, 19th, and 18th centuries. Fascinatingly, White began with the 20th-century volume. I discovered the series because TLS lauded the newly-arrived book on the 18th century.

Each chapter follows a street that provides a focus for its topic: Spring Gardens for government, Broad Sanctuary for school administration, Flower and Dean Street for common lodging houses and the very poorest laborers. If you want to know how the administrative structure of the Metropolitan Sanitary Commission affected the growth of London and the health of its residents, this is the book for you. White delves into fascinating detail about how things actually worked, from land speculation in Belgravia to prostitution in the back of the music hall. This is not an anecdotal account, and White generally focuses on streets and highways; we learn about offices and institutions, clerks and magnates, but hear less of what went on inside those offices or where people ate lunch. At 624 pages, there’s not much space to lament what was left out, and even the administrative histories of the London School Board and the New Police provide a certain narrative satisfaction.

November 24, 2012 (permalink)

In this daring and dazzling overview of the field and its history, Stephen Lekson interweaves the history of the Southwest and the history of Southwestern archaeology. This dual narrative turns out not to be an affectation, for our ideas of how Anasazi and Hohokam people lived were deeply shaped by personalities and institutional histories. In particular, the presence of a border between Mexico and North America has separated Chihuahua from Arizona and New Mexico in a way that would have been invisible and absurd to the fourteenth century.

Lekson builds his conjectural history from a number of fundamental assertions, some of which differ dramatically from American archaeological convention. He asserts that “distance could be managed” – that people knew a lot about what was happening hundreds or thousands of miles away. Their knowledge wasn’t exact and it wasn’t current, but because people doubtless heard stories and repeated them, Lekson assumes that the Anasazi knew something about Mesoamerica far to the South, and also something about Cahokia far to the East. When “the Turk” led Coronado and company from Pecos out into the great plains, Lekson thinks, he knew exactly where he was going and what they would find on the banks of the Mississippi – he just hadn’t received the memo that the great Mississipian city had collapsed a few centuries ago.

Similarly, Lekson is very reluctant to accept temporal coincidences. If two events happen in sequence, he is happier to assume a causal sequence or a common antecedent than to posit mere coincidence.

The historical (rather than methodological) idea that really matters here is a fresh interpretation of Pueblo IV as a deliberate ideological rejection of the Chaco phenomenon. The Pueblos were not always peaceful and egalitarian; as Lekson wrote in The Chaco Meridian,

Does all this sound anthropologically familiar? If I were describing a neolithic center in Turkistan or Shansi or Wessex or Bolivia or Illinois, what would we think? Chaco was socially and politically ‘complex’ — that is, a hierarchy with definite haves and have-nots. Hierarchy, not heterarchy: A few people at Chaco regularly and customarily directed the actions of many other people, and those few lived in more expensive houses and had more baubles (at least in death) than the many. Were they chiefs, priests, kings, queens, duly-elected representatives? Who knows? And, for now, who cares? They were elite leaders, Major Dudes: that much seems clear. If ever anyone in the Pueblo Southwest were elite, it was those two guys buried in the famous log crypts of Old Bonito. Those boys had power.

Lekson rejects the language of critical theory as emphatically as the heirs of Mimbres rejected its traditional iconography. That’s interesting, and he has developed a supple and flexible informality that combines precision and concision with a disarming accessibility. This is in many ways a brave book, one whose conclusions will not always suit its readers’ politics. Lekson’s history may not be the past that contemporary Southwesterners would like to imagine, but this fascinating and beautifully-argued reexamination of the evidence restores to the Southwestern past the possibility that history happened there.

November 20, 2012 (permalink)

This fresh collection of Hornby’s superb book columns from The Believer is just as much fun as its predecessors (here, here, and here). Each month’s entry begins with a list of Books Bought and a separate list of Books Read. Both are very much worth reading, even though they seldom overlap much. This time, there’s a lot of Muriel Spark, with whom I’m going to have to get better acquainted.

November 15, 2012 (permalink)

I was out of commission, flat on my back, and going nowhere. I had finished Insurgent and quite liked it, and so I was lying in bed and shaking with chills and wondering where I had put volume 1. As it turns out, volume 1 was on my iPad, just like volume 2, and so it was easy to spend the day revisiting it. And, while in principle that day might have been more profitably spent with, say, Eagleton’s After Theory, I wasn’t sure that the fever dreams of critical theory would mix well with the fever dreams of fever.

The book holds up better than I had feared. The pacing of the opening is superb on rereading, and the boot camp sequence is wonderfully done. There’s nothing much to learn from the romance, but we don’t usually read about the love of a pre-teen girl for a boy two years older in order to seek instruction or wisdom. I’m not sure I like the rest of the plotting, and I think Roth is so good at building worlds that she destroys them before actually putting them to use. This is wasteful and unsound, but I suspect that the great Moral of this series is that invented worlds are a renewable resource.

October 16, 2012 (permalink)

In 1972 Serena Frome, fresh from Cambridge, spends a summer with her aging donnish lover. At the appropriate moment, he passes her in due course to employment in MI5 where she files reports and types bold memos about which her superiors soon have second thoughts and which they will never send. In one memorable pinch she’s sent to clean a safe house in Her Majesty’s service,.

And then, of course, she is given a shot at responsibility: recruiting a young novelist in a program to steer “culture” in directions that will promote Britain in the Cold War.

Ian McEwan here channels Le Carré, and does it remarkably well. He then turns the story on its head and lets it hare off in the way McEwan stories (Atonement, Amsterdam) will do. As Chesil Beach seemed to be a story about sex and turned out, on second thought, to be a story about art, this is a story that is not chiefly concerned with what its narrator thinks is her obsession, nor yet with the fate the reader fears will ensnare her.

October 16, 2012 (permalink)

This is volume two of a projected trilogy that starts with the excellent Divergent. Like Hunger Games, this young adult romance starts from a schematic premise — a dystopian ruined world that is rigidly organized along the lines of personality tests — and accomplishes surprising things. This is not the book that Divergent was, but few books are.

Tris Price, who says she is 16 but whom we understand to be a good deal younger, was born to abnegation and born for dauntless: her parents were members of the Abnegation faction but, on Choosing Day, she chose to join the Dauntless faction. Rejecting her parents’ beliefs was tough. Winning acceptance in her new faction was brutal. And now that she has gained that acceptance, now that she is a member of society, the whole thing has fallen apart and the whole known world (which encompasses central Chicago and perhaps some of Lake County Illinois) is falling apart as the factions fall to war.

Of course, there is a young man in the case, and that young man has problems — not the least of which is that Tris insists on setting tests for his love that no one could pass.

A misfortune of Roth’s schematic premise is that Tris is a Romantic heroine in both senses: not only is this the story of her awakening to love, but this is the story of heroism to which, and for which, she was literally born. She triumphs because of her intrinsic wonderfulness, and since Roth is doing SF, we’ll eventually learn that this is not an accident.

Some details annoy. The story takes place in a nicely-drawn Ruined Chicago, but too much of the geography is either unclear or wrong. It sounds like Erudite Headquarters is the Old Public Library, which makes lots of sense. But the description actually sounds more like the Gage Building, or maybe the Metropolitan Tower beneath its Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. Or is it the Santa Fe Building? The choice doesn’t matter (although details of each building could lend resonance to certain scenes if you let them), but the lack of specificity blurs what would otherwise be a very nice sense of place. Similarly, there are lots of trains, running endlessly along ancient tracks, never stopping. Dauntless use those trains to go places. The homeless live on them. But these don’t seem to be running on tracks we know; why, before the disaster, would Chicago have torn up all its transit and replaced it with new transit? One suspects instead that the author assumes there’s a train that goes wherever her characters need to be.

Still, Tris is an impressive young lady. She’s been through a lot. So has poor old, beat-up Chicago. It’s time to see what happens when we move out into the larger world. The name of volume three has not been announced, but surely it’s bound to be Emergent?

October 16, 2012 (permalink)

The four Macdonald sisters appeared at first to be completely unremarkable Victorians, daughters of a long-forgotten Methodist preacher. One married a successful ironmonger. One married an artist from a fairly good family, and another married an artist from no family at all. The fourth married an art teacher.

Or, in other words, one sister was the wife of Burne-Jones, another was married to the head of the Royal Academy and of the National Gallery. The third was Rudyard Kipling’s mother, and the fourth was the mother of Stanley Baldwin, thrice Prime Minister. But these were not the Peabody sisters, excelling their peers in reading and feeling, nor were they the Mitford girls, awash in a sea of wealth and beauty. They had scant money and none of their talents seem exceptional, and still things turned out as they did. Flanders explore the story of their interconnected lives, trying to discover the answer to the unknowable question: what made these seemingly unremarkable sisters the focus for so much success?

October 9, 2012 (permalink)

This is that very rare bird, a Readercon recommendation that became a best-seller. This terrific first novel seems to me to be, in essence, a response to the Punchdrunk production of Sleep No More: how magical would immersive theater be if you had access to real magic? Readable yet adventurously written, the book has a complex timeline, a sub-thread in second person present, two sets of twins, and (of course) a wonderful travelling circus.

October 4, 2012 (permalink)

This indispensable, idiosyncratic book for the Western visitor to Calcutta/Kolkata leads visitors away from the familiar, colonial-era monuments and into the vibrant streets of this city. All of Calcutta is astonishing, but my experience was that Humphrey is exactly right in thinking that Western visitors will, in fact, be much more at home (and receive a much more interesting and, presumably, real impression of the city) in the vast swaths of the city where they are unexpected than in the handful of places where they are.

On nearly every stroll near New Market, for example, I was at least occasionally engaged by aggressive beggars or by tourist touts. (Hello again, Shakil!) This didn’t happen anywhere else; at most, if I was studying my cell phone map, someone might ask me if they might help. And even on the day of a massive public demonstration against American disrespect for Islam, I felt nothing but welcome (and curiosity or puzzlement) when walking through either Moslem or Hindu quarters.

Calcutta is made up of a complex tangle of streets and alleys, through which large automobile boulevards have been driven at infrequent intervals. Many streets have two names, a colonial name and a newer one; in some cases, the new name has stuck and in others, everyone uses the old name. The tangles and warrens themselves have occasionally been rationalized; sometimes, a street will end in one place but will start again someplace else. Finally, an address may apply to an entire building complex or an entire block rather than to individual shops or houses. Nonetheless, the tangle is the place you generally want to be.

Humphrey has a nice mix of interests in people, in history, and in occupation. He gives himself space to tell stories and to conduct quick interviews with letter-writers, astrologers, with squatters. Even with these interludes, this is a real guide to be carried in the hand as you travel, not merely to be read in your armchair.

The book is readable, even for walks you don’t actually to take. I didn’t get to Tagore Castle, for example, scared away by reports of endemic dengue, but it’s just one of bunches of odd sidelights Humphrey describes that the usual guides ignore. It’s an early 19th century palace that is now a slum tenement.

For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world

Two prerequisites of flânerie, however, are knowing what you are seeing and feeling at least a little bit at home. (For a pale six-footer, to remain hidden here is improbable.) That there should be a lot that I didn’t understand is unsurprising; after all, here I’m illiterate and unversed. I don’t know where to be and where to look, and some introductory material might be helpful here. I repeatedly saw couples on the street or in restaurants, for example, who were engaged in intense discussion, and was never able to tell whether the couple was breaking up or comparing the merits of different economic policies. I don’t understand the significance of distinct clothing styles that must be meant to broadcast their significance. And I don’t know how to avoid an intrusion that veers from odd (“why on earth is a tourist here?”) to intrusive (“how am I supposed to work with that idiot blocking my light and scaring away the customers?”) or offensive (“what is he looking at?”).

For example: when hot and tired, I sometimes stand with my hands on my hips. Don’t do this on a Kolkata street: it makes you too broad, and people will keep bumping into you. Kolkata is crowded, and Kolkatans stand compactly.

Conversely, in a city plagued by brutal economic inequality, one where political and ethnic feeling runs high and has in the past spilled into terrible violence, street crime does not appear to be much of a problem.

One problem with this edition is that the maps are not quite adequate. Unable to have original maps drafted, Humphrey has licensed some existing street maps that cover the areas for each walk, but this often requires three or four overlapping maps, printed with different scales and different orientations, to cover a single walk. The proposed routes are not marked on the maps, but things the traveler doesn’t care about, such as ward boundaries, are prominent. Worst, the actual route is not drawn. It would have been far better to simply add a route line, if only with a ball-point pen, than to leave the audience to puzzle things out on a crowded corner, dodging rickshaws, appeasing dogs, and getting in everybody’s way.

September 29, 2012 (permalink)

Highly praised at Readercon’s The Year In Novels, this is the strangely improbable fantasy of young queen Bitterblue whose court is filled with ministers who behave very oddly. Everyone, she observes, is a crackpot. Her subjects commit absurd crimes, like swapping a field of watermelons for a a cemetery full of headstones. Her ministers conduct absurd policies. Nothing makes sense, but then Bitterblue has never known anything else.

It’s difficult to know just what to think of this novel. I suspect that Cashore may be trying to remediate Dada here; instead of starting with two old men in the park and ending with Waiting For Godot, we start with Godot and drag the absurd back into the fields we know. There’s an undeveloped subplot about an underground network of storytellers that suggests some theoretical sophistication. If that’s the agenda, it turns out to be tricky because almost none of the characters is much more than an idiosyncrasy, an affectation, or a power.

An alternative interpretation starts from the chronic lie of contemporary YA fiction: almost all female characters (Pullman’s Lyra being the exception) are far younger than they claim. Queen Bitterblue says she is in her late teens, and her ministers are much older, but if this were their fantasy — if we were to understand all of this to be a fantasy of six- and eight-year-olds imagining being grown up, having boyfriends and planning revolutions, it might make sense.

Or perhaps it’s simply a fantasy world that doesn’t quite work, an idea that the writer couldn’t quite pull off.

September 23, 2012 (permalink)

This thoroughly delightful study of the Victorian Home is interested neither in architecture or decoration, but rather in what people said and did in each kind of room. Flanders has an nice feel for the misunderstandings that so easily arise across space and time, such as the fact that morning calls were paid in the afternoon, and that “high tea” is not, as Americans tend to think, fancier than plain old “tea.” She deftly mines diaries, advertisements, fiction and biography to reconstruct details of behavior and belief in a book that is at once entertaining and comprehensive.

September 6, 2012 (permalink)

An intriguing look at the philosophy of language generally, and specifically at whether and how language shapes thought. Deutscher has no patience for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis generally, and specifically explodes the supposition that people whose language has no word for a concept cannot easily think about it. It’s at once a lively and a careful book, though Deutscher telegraphs his conclusions in a way that saps some of its energy. The history and historiography of the “wine-dark sea” question – the observation, originally made by Gladstone, that Homer uses words for colors that make no sense, like the “wine” for the turquoise Mediterranean and “green” for sheep – is treated with special care and prudence, and reaches a very satisfying resolution.

September 4, 2012 (permalink)

Born to affluence in 1920’s Shanghai, Cassandra faces formidable afflictions. Her twin brother gets all the attention, and all the best presents. Her mother is distant, her father feckless, and even a child can see that Shanghai is falling apart.

More strangely, Cassandra sees ghosts; indeed, she sees them everywhere, and her growing world is always filled with the hungry spirits of the past. This strange ability shapes Cassandra but does not dominate her; she is not a slayer or a priestess, she’s just a well-drawn Chinese girl who happens to see ghosts.

She lives in interesting times. Her father flees the Depression and heads to the Black Isle, a large island at the tip of the Malay peninsula that shares much with the Singapore we know. Her mother and twin sisters will follow in time; she never sees them again – at least not as you and I see. But even in this new island home, ghosts are everywhere. War follows, and then years as a freedom fighter, and then more years as the neglected former consort of the newly-independent island’s Prime Minister. And then, a distant Professor starts stirring the ghosts once more.

One obvious touchstone for The Black Isle is James Clavell’s King Rat, his good book. The war is the heart of The Black Isle, and Tan quietly builds an argument that for much of China, the short twentieth century was experienced as one long war. Another, less obvious, is the title story of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, for Cassandra’s struggle is not so much with her suffocatingly-close twin and her war-criminal lover as with herself. Self-loathing would be conventional, and Cassandra is bored by convention, yet she cannot escape the haunting wrongness. Cassandra sees ghosts – aggrieved spirits – everywhere, and in her world betrayal is the norm, peace the silent and easily-forgotten exception.

The Black Isle is a Secret History of a country that resembles one we know, blending myth, history, and invented detail. This was an intriguing decision, inviting the reader to imagine the ghost books that must have been imagined in its making. On the one hand, little would need to change to make this a literal secret history, though doing so might incur the displeasure of that nation’s leaders. Alternatively, we could follow China Miéville into urban fantasy, forbearing the fields we know entirely and describing an imaginary world that just happens to be China much as City and The City describes an imaginary Eastern Europe and Foundation describes the fall of an imaginary Rome.

All historical fiction invites suspicion of Orientalism. Tan handles her sexy Chinese protagonist with grace and honesty. Knotty and perhaps unsolvable questions of craft and history appear continuously here, as perhaps they must, but Tan (like Cassandra) manages to avoid disaster while not fearing to get down in the muck with the ghosts

Cassandra embodies a complex and thoughtful reflection on femininity and feminism in the Chinese diaspora.

August 20, 2012 (permalink)

Highly recommended at Readercon, despite the fact that Scalzi (who is, after all, president of SFWA) is not often discussed at Readercon.

Ensign Andrew Dahl, newly assigned to the starship Intrepid, finds his new job more hazardous than in ought to be. Indeed, most of the junior officers are acutely aware that, for a junior officer, being assigned to an “away team” is very bad news. The senior officers always come back, but ensigns die in countless horrible and pointless ways and they’re determined to understand why in this pleasant, metafictional romp.

August 8, 2012 (permalink)

At a Readercon panel on “What Writers Want,” Peter Straub went off on a terrific tangent about the development of Raymond Chandler. He talked about how Chandler’s first plot (The Big Sleep ) was a shaggy dog, and how much more tightly plotted the later novels were – even though they always include strange notes (a repetitious cop called Hemingway) and long excursions (a three page taxonomy of The Blonde).

My notes said Straub was talking about The Long Goodbye. To be sure I didn’t forget, I also made a note on my phone reminding me that Straub said to reread Farewell My Lovely. So, despite copious notes, I had no idea which one to reread. (Answer: Hemingway’s here, the blondes are in the other book.)

Chandler and Hammett occupy an interesting cultural space. Unlike Hemingway, you aren’t told to read them in school. But everyone has to read them, and everyonbe does. (You can skip Playback and, for Hammett, The Glass Key.) Indispensable.

July 24, 2012 (permalink)

Harris writes superb, understated thrillers – often with an intriguing technological bent as in his remarkable Pompeii. In this diverting beach book, we are on more familiar ground: the wealthy genius behind a Swiss hedge fund finds that someone has broken into his house, hacked his email, and is generally driving him up the wall. Has he gone ’round the bend? We have terrorists, plunging markets, stolidly obstructive middle-level managers, software that we don’t entirely understand, and an imperturbable Swiss inspector who now lives in France because the wealthy hedge fund managers have made it impossible for real people to live in Geneva. It’s not hard to solve the crime, but the journey has its rewards. The escalating violence of the final scenes is artificial: it’s simply not essential for every white collar crime-solver to wind up in physical peril in the last chapter of every book.

July 20, 2012 (permalink)

Get the book.

I was in City Lights last fall and I wanted to buy a book. Mary Ann In Autumn, was just out in paperback and I wanted to read that, but a tourist in San Francisco buying a single Armistead Maupin was too much of a cliché and this tiny book by the LA Times book critic looked promising. I grabbed it, too.

Ulin frames his story with an argument. His teenage son thinks reading is boring, homework is boring, and that father is boring too. So is The Great Gatsby, which young Ulin has to read for school. Dad disagrees with his son’s scorn for print, absurdly thinking that their disagreement is about literature. They fall for it every time.

But Dad himself is finding it hard to read, hard to concentrate, now that we all have eBooks and the Web and email and cellphones.

Our constant impulse to tweet, to text, to post status updates offers the illusion of intimacy by allowing us to share the most mundane details of existence (“I think I’ll reheat the stir-fry for lunch’”) without revealing anything much of substance at all. Again, I’m not sure I agree with this assessment completely, although it’s impossible not to agree with it in part.

What was the point of writing this? First, Ulin asserts a fact about his own feelings; it may be true or false, but we cannot know. Next, the author asserts that he is unsure he believes what he has just written. Finally, he admits it’s impossible not to agree with the original argument in part. Which part, precisely, is incapable of disagreement? Perhaps so little was asserted in the first place, and that so tenuously, that we cannot find a part with which to disagree because there’s nothing substantial?

What editor thought this passage was a nifty idea?

Perhaps Ulin is no longer as interested as he used to be in books. Maybe he is more deeply engaged by music, or drama, or immersed in the struggle to find a new way of living as the Times slowly collapses. Perhaps he isn’t feeling as young as once he did. Perhaps he has worries. Who doesn’t? Stuff happens, things change. You can’t go skinny-dipping in the same river twice.

Something happens to every reading generation that convinces someone that the end is here, that kids can’t think, that they themselves can no longer concentrate. Today it’s email and Google and Twitter, but only yesterday people said the same thing about television. Before that it was radio. Before that, rum, theater, and all the delights of the city. You see it earlier in complaints about worthlessly feminine forms like the novel.

Besides, when I was in school, the seamlessly immersive mode of reading that Ulin claims to prize was regarded as immature. We learned to read and to think about what we were reading. We were taught to see what the writer did and, at the same time, to figure out how the writer did it. When you came across words you didn’t understand, it was a Good Thing to look them up.

Today, when kids do read this way, Ulin tells them they’re Doing It Wrong. Of course, if they stopped all that and plunged themselves into the perfluent dream, the same title would fit a complaint that kids today don’t think critically. This is a chump’s game: the kids can’t win, whatever they do. Nor can the benighted ebook designers, since whatever they accomplish, it necessarily redounds to the destruction of literature. It always does. No wonder kids today love dystopian fantasy.

What does “the art of reading” entail? It is, first of all, the art of choosing what to read. Ulin is a book reviewer. He might have ideas. But on this question, the book is silent.

In James Cambias’s Readercon panel “Have We Lost the Future,” Jo Walton (who wrote the best book about books in years) observed that Golden Age science fiction would be disappointed to learn that we don’t have a Mars colony or a moon base or even Kubrick’s Pan Am business shuttle to the space station. “But we do have the internet,” she said, “and I’m not sure that I wouldn’t rather have th