Kait

He's no Mick Foley, but Chris Jericho can definitely write (and wrestle, I suppose). A wide-ranging biography — from a geographic and emotional perspective — you get a front-row seat to the rise, rise, rise, plateau (WCW) and rise of Jericho up until the time he his the WWF(E).

He's lead an interesting life, and though a bit over-fond of poop jokes and the like, knows how to tell his story in a compelling way. It's not exactly one of those “so good you'll like it regardless of your background” bios, but if you're into (or were into) wrestling at all, this is definitely worth a read.

This book was ... difficult. It's well-written, with great voice, but it's just ... fucked up. That's really the only way to say it.

Art can be rough. Art can be scary. Art can be dark. It doesn't make the art bad, but it certainly doesn't make for a pleasant experience.

If I'm quite honest, I'm not sure what I got out of reading the book other than sort of the same type (not exactly the same, vis a vis scale and reality) of feeling as your 9/11 attack, or your Paris attacks (Charlie Hebdo or the nightclub campaign) — this is a thing that is possible. These are events and feelings that exist in the world, and from now on whenever I try to take a thought or an idea and skin it around my particular conceptual framework of How Things Are, it will forever have this sharp corner jutting out. The book's not reality (it's fiction), but the things that happened in it are not conceptually or practically impossible. They're barely even improbable, in some respects.

If you plan on making your way through this novel, make sure you have a nice chaser book prepared for after.

Poundstone is someone who's gone in for deep dives on Von Neumann, game theory, Carl Sagan ... and more recently, “Are You Smart Enough to Work At Google?” There's no doubt he's taken on a pop-sci flair of late, and while it's understandable from a marketing/positioning standpoint, a book that promises to be full of ways to “outguess” and “outwit” almost everyone turns out to be a lot of largely common-sense suggestions with some actual science behind them, and one or two genuinely counter-intuitive strategies that (unfortunately) sound like they're straight out of freakonomics.

It's interesting, actually - I loved the first Freakonomics book, perhaps because it forced me to think about things in new ways, but also because it genuinely offered insights into things I wouldn't have otherwise given any thought to. But that type of discovery really only works once, and by the time Superfreakonomics came along (to say nothing of the blog, podcast, etc.), it felt like retreading old ground. Not unnecessary or useless, mind you, but more incremental advances rather than breakthroughs. And frankly, if we're talking about how to win the office NCAA pool and your advice is “use the algorithms you can find on websites but tweak them slightly in case someone else is” seems aimed more at the desperate gambler than your general reader.

So I guess, if you haven't read Freakonomics (or haven't thought about it since it came out), this is a good relatively up-to-date replacement. Everyone else can feel free to take a pass.

Wandering around on the desert plains of Facts, this book desperately requires the oasis of an editor in order to survive. Cringely knows his stuff when it comes to IBM, but the book is written with the assumption the reader knows as much as the author - oftentimes things were referenced obliquely, hinted toward in a further chapter or just missing context entirely. I feel that If I were a regular reader of Cringely's blog (as well as well-versed in IBMemera such as the memoirs of former CEOs), the analysis would fit in quite nicely - but then, were I a dedicated reader I wouldn't need the entire last half of the book, which are literally just edited reader comments from various blog posts.

Essentially, the work suffers from a failure of narrative cohesion that leaves the story patchy. This is probably a decent primer to get soundbite-esque gobbits about the current state of IBM, but don't expect much.

This is a land development Ph.D thesis. If you're interested in the regulatory and legal challenges of building an amusement park, enter through the book's gates with a joyous heart to your own Happiest Place on Earth. If you're looking for any information on Disney, Disney World or the actual engineering/Imagineering/design/philosophy/anything of amusement parks, get a ticket for a different ride.

It's a coffee table book about Weird Al ... I'm not sure what else you're expecting? I will admit to hoping for a slightly more critical/in-depth look at his life and career, but it's got some neat art/pictures, and a wide-ranging look at Al's life from the beginning of his career through Alpocalypse.

I have zero tolerance for zero tolerance — which is to say, you should always allow for reasonable people to extend loopholes and exceptions dependent on circumstances. A zero tolerance policy is a sign of failure, either on the part of those responsible for enforcing the rules (because they apparently don't have the capacity to judge a situation on their own) or those setting the rules (because they didn't hire an enforcer with the capacity to judge a situation).

“Zero Tolerance” is a work of fiction that pretty perfectly mirrors real life: Nobody's completely in the right, nobody's complete in the wrong. Everyone makes mistakes, and the way we live is to work through them and try to prevent them from happening again. This book provides a great lesson for people of all ages.

I think this is the book that Dave Eggers wanted to write when he started The Circle (though, to his credit, I think it would have come together better at the end). It's an interesting premise: Dave is a serial killer, who takes orders from a mysterious cabal (via MySpace chats) to pick off the most annoying people on the internet. You know that girl who's always making drama and Instagramming her lunch? He'll put an end to that, right quick.

I'm on the fence about it, honestly. There's wry discussion of all the worst people you meet on the web, from Nigerian scammers to the people who post incendiary stories/columns simply because hatred fuels pageviews, and Internet Points are the end-all, be-all. But for satire, it feels a little on the nose. It gets better when he branches out from the straight murdering into more creative punishments/correctives, but there's still a dark stain that spreads across every page detailing his thought processes and justifications.

It's essentially trying to take the language of the internet (LOLs when no one's laughing, death threats simply for having differing opinions [or two X chromosomes, in some cases]) and manifesting it. I'm successfully convinced the internet is a cesspool, but then I already thought that anyway. I would think it better that such hatred is confined to the laptop and the cell phone. We'd all much prefer it didn't exist, but isn't anonymous vitriol preferable to physical violence?

I think my biggest reservation comes from the fact that the whole thing starts because Dave's afraid he's going to be embarrassed on the internet. For all his vigilantism (and it's clear, by the end of the book, that's at very worst supposed to be an antihero, if not downright heroic), he's motivated by exactly the same forces that, in others, antagonize him: The power of popularity, the leadership by likes. Maybe it's a literary argument that he's a product of the internet, but it certainly seems odd for the problem to be the solution.

You ever have the feeling that the person you're talking to is either completely insane or weirdly brilliant? This ambiguity is often cleared up when you find out just how high they are (so high right now, dude), but every once in a while there's always that hobo who seems like he has a much better idea of what's actually going on than you do, and he looks perfectly thrilled right where he is.
That's kind of how I feel about the main character. He's constantly running from event to event, plucking with strings that seem to connect them but don't, only to find out later there's a thick web of cable supporting the whole enterprise. The only cogent summary I can offer is “lonely guy starts to meet the world, except the world is full of all the people you've actually met and try to pretend you're not friends (with even though you hang out with that guy all the time).”

Reading this book feels like trying to navigate the stairs when you're drunk. Not like just trying to clamber your way down the concrete steps outside the dance bar in the middle of February, where you feel warm (because liquor) but there's a thick sheet of ice coating the left half of the stairs, and you're seizing the railing like you're onboard the Titanic trying to fight your way past some Irish dudes to the bow before it slips and carries you down into the North Atlantic. More like the first time you ever had alcohol and you managed to put away two Zimas and you were walking down an extremely narrow, steeply sloped staircase and you slipped a little bit and your arm automatically went out to try to stabilize yourself and you wound up putting your elbow through the wall?

Except it's more of a love story.

I'm usually wary of epistolary novels - in the back of my head, English lit canon snoozefests loom large. No worries about that here, as the novel is both good and an excellent use of the form - I don't think the same story could have been told this well any other way.

Nuclear Family is thoroughly modem and consistently funny. It builds really well, using a number of different narrators (live, dead and inanimate) to advance the stories and characters, each imbued with a unique voice. Definitely worth a read.

This is either a very poorly constructed argument for a taxonomy of technology that forever loses the thread when it wanders into blimps, or a decent history of the folly of Zeppelins with a malformed treatise on the author's invented “pathological technologies” grafted on. Either half can't be given more than three stars, and this is not a case where there's anything gained by pairing them together.

I don't even necessarily think the author's theory is wrong or uninteresting, but the examples he chooses seem spectacularly ill-advised and not internally consistent. He also presents an extraordinarily narrow of view of how science happens and what benefits any individual project or research brings.

Written two centuries earlier, one can imagine the scorn brought onto “electricity” — imagine the immense expense of installing wires into every home simply in order to give light, which we already have with fire. How could one possibly hope to harness such a fundamental energy of the cosmos?

Extra bonus raspberries are due for attempting to sarcastically damn with faint praise a DARPA project as having an “original” way of doing things because the agency funded an outlandish idea (a 100-Year Starship program) in the hopes that something good might come out of it — in other words, every DARPA project, ever.

Reads like a first novel, in the best possible way (though it's actually a sophomore outing). This story is so full of ideas, histories and emotions that I can't believe it didn't germinate and grow inside the author's brain for an entire lifetime before bursting forth in full bloom. I can't wait to go back and read other works, or for something new to come.

I spent half an hour trying to figure out the shorthand for this book. It's a description we try to come up with for all the entertainment we tell others about: Oh, this movie's like Batman but with zombies. That book is like Dickens if he got bored halfway through and just filled out the rest with random sentences (oh wait, that's regular Dickens).

I failed in this case. It's not really like anything. The best example I can give is it's the memoir equivalent of “literary fiction” - as defined as a genre novel that uses big words, flowing prose and a disjointed rhythm enough that people call it a work of “literature” instead of a book. It could just as easily have been fiction. The distinction really doesn't matter in this case.

It's the story of a childhood lived through videogames. It's a story that many probably relate to, though I hope to God not too much. Clune definitely writes with a voice that can keep you interested (in the way that someone grabbing you by the throat and pulls your face right next to theirs keeps you “interested”), and the man knows his way around a videogame. I was wavering the whole way through, but I guess it says something when my biggest complaint is that I really wanted to know what happened after it ended.

It's a weird feeling, to be disappointed by a success. Like a much-beloved athletic record being broken, or being the runner-up in a beauty pageant: Yes, great for the person to whom the good thing happened, but it's not met, and I might personally have been better off/happier had it happened another way.

The book works. It might even work too well. If you're looking for a plausible (I don't say “likely” or “realistic” here because of the infinite possibilities of the human condition, and also it's fiction) view of the life of a child with autistic tendencies, Mark Haddon's provided an excellent sample. And it seems like that's what he set out to do, so congratulations and yay for him.

And at the same time, y'know. I wish he wouldn't have.

Maybe it hits too close to home. Maybe I look at how Christopher's parents fail in dealing with certain situations, and don't see how I could have done any better (and likely could have done worse). Maybe it's because Christopher's worldview ultimately seems to boil down to everyone having exactly one opportunity to screw something up and then being cut out for a considerable length of time, if not forever, and that reminds me too much of myself.

Regardless, I can't say I liked the book. Stories don't necessarily need happy endings for you to have a positive reaction to having heard them, but there should be some redeeming quality. I'm almost certain there's something here, I'm just having trouble seeing it right now.

But I don't hold that against the book. It's probably more about me as a than it. I just don't know who it's for.

In the end, it might be a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy conundrum. The book solved the problem. I just don't know what it's an answer to.

Three books in, you'd think we might have been able to dispense with the world-building activities. I confess to having grown less interested with each passing installment of the Long Earth series: The first intrigued me with the novelties of and possibilities inherent in the central conceit (people can “step” sideways into what are essentially parallel earths, with just slight differences between one and the next. Over dozens, hundreds, thousands and millions of steps, however, those differences can loom quite large). The payoff wasn't there in the first novel, but I assumed as the cosmology built out more, that feeling would dissipate.

Nope.

Instead, each new story has indulged the uge to introduce yet more “novel” mechanics and contrivances, to just straight-up skip long stretches of “insignificant” time (where there are no novel inventions propagating, and thus saving us from having to read about the “characters,” what shaped them, and other such dalliances that only get in the way off our fictional science, thank you). This is no different, where now we set upon a world where you not only can step sideways, you can also step forward and backward, and there's a Dyson sphere and ...

It's all too much. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the full third that was given over to the early history of a Victorian British secret society of steppers, its incogruity and total disconnect from the rest of the story went a long way toward proving to me that this really would be better off as a series of short stories presented from different authors (a la the Afterblight Chronicles) rather than a series of novels.

History is as much about what you don't write as what you do. Because of the legitimately incomprehensible entangling of stores and narratives, you have to choose a place to start, decide on a place to end and define the boundaries along the way. The Boys in the Boat does a brilliant job of this, despite the notable handicap of dealing with history's most unexplainable character, Adolf Hitler.
The book is mostly the story of one man, Joe Rantz, whom the author (Daniel James Brown) met in the last few months of Rantz's life, though it does weave the story of the other men in the crew throughout as well.
Rantz alone would provide one hell of a compelling narrative on his own, though — born to a gifted, hardscrabble mechanic who buried two wives before Rantz graduated college, Rantz embodied the epitome of the self-sustaining man. He joined the crew team because he thought it would allow him to attain a personal goal (have enough money to graduate). He learned how to subsume his own desires into the team's, to strive for the mystical rowing notion of “swing,” all rowers in perfect harmony. (A side-effect of the book: I now feel like I know as much about the sport as a JV member of the crew myself, though obviously that's not enough.)
Gliding through some of the more tumultuous years of American history, Brown does a masterful job of giving just enough historical background to render the story more relatable and comprehendible. With skillful suspense, Brown kept bringing me to the point of active rooting for a team during a race that ended more than eight decades ago. Don't even think about putting it down once you get to junior year — it'll require a solid sprint to the end.

I really have no idea what to say about this. It's essentially an absurdist interconnected short story collection? It's a little lot off the wall and some of it doesn't quite make sense, but I'm pretty sure those parts aren't supposed to make sense. It's also full of one-liners that skewer the very core of the human condition, and also jokes. It's entertaining, entertainingly infuriating, and a little bit just infuriating.

I really wanted to like this book. Despite its subtitle (“the (mostly) true story of the first computer”), this graphic novel is better described as “A (mostly) true romp through Victorian mathematicians.” Which isn't a bad thing! We get a nice little primer on Babbage and Lovelace's Analytical/Difference Engines, and a bunch of whimsical one-offs with historical figures that describe various mathematical functions that I still couldn't explain to you but at least now have an understanding of. Then again, in terms of actual Lovelace and Babbage things ... well, the author's notes about the relatively little time the two had to work on things, Lovelace's illness/untimely death and the general lack of publication by the two can explain the paucity of material, but then maybe don't center your book around them?

The story of a genderfluid kid's coming to terms with themself as well as the world around them. It alternates between seeming very real and seeming very fictional, if that makes sense. Riley's (the main character) emotions and feelings definitely come across as authentic, but you're going to need some gloves to make your way through the kitchen sink of plotting.

When I say I'm a couch potato, I mean it in the sense that you might describe someone as a “confirmed bachelor”: Is, was and always will be, by willful unceasing choice. So I can see you looking askance at my picking up a book about the men who were vying to run the first sub-4-minute mile. To which I say, I also read a book about a bunch of nerds running a student newspaper, and oh wait where was I going with this?

Anyway, Neal Bascomb writes one hell of a thriller. All around the same time, three very different men from three continents independently decided they wanted to be the first to break what was thought by some to be an unimpeachable barrier of human achievement: Running one mile in under four minutes.

Bascomb does an excellent job of pacing the story perfectly, though he was greatly helped by actual historical events unfolding in a pretty perfect ready-for-Hollywood fashion. There's the hardscrabble American running out of poverty to the University of Kansas, or two British Empireans (a budding English doctor and an aspiring Australian scientist) ran - before the professionalization of track and field - like no person ever had.

It's engaging throughout, and my only quibble is one you frequently find in historical books: Make sure you skip the pictures until you reach the end of the book, or the captions will spoil the story. That aside, picking up this book will get you as dialed in as the runners: It never really drags, and it'll keep you going until you finally reach the end.