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It’s curious that this was marketed as a young adult novel–yes, the protagonist is young and the book is short (196 pages), but it’s a regular novel that some teens would enjoy if they are advanced readers. It even has a brief mention of sex (that was Robert Heinlein’s definition of his juvenile novels: short adult novels with no sex). In 4th century Britain, 23-year-old Centurion Alexios Flavius Aquila, in disgrace with his superiors, is exiled to take charge of the native Frontier Wolves. He grows into the command, gains the respect of the hardbitten Wolves, and makes friends with Cunorix, son of the local chieftain. It’s really about career: recovering from failure, learning a new job, dealing with the stupidity of management (Praepositus Montanus comes to visit and starts a chain of tragic events)–also touching on friendship, betrayal, and courage. Sutcliffe has a knack of making the past live. Most of her books seem to feature stoic male protagonists and lots of battles; they fit seamlessly into the stiff-uppper-lip school of British boys’ stories that I was weaned on.

Features the new-to-me word “kalegarth,” which isn’t even Googleable–now it is!–or in the OED. Looks like it’s more commonly spelled “calgarth” and means “kailyard”: “a cabbage garden, kitchen-garden, such as is commonly attached to a small cottage.” Here’s the context: “…this country that they knew as a man knows his own kalegarth.”

Paper Moon was one of my very favorite movies as a child, partly because Addie Pray represented something I wanted to be—the opposite of the shy, goody-goody kid I was. (Also it’s a great con-artist movie, a genre I’ve always liked, and Madeline Kahn is hysterically funny in it.) Tatum—what a great name—seemed in that movie, and later even more so in the Bad News Bears preview (never actually saw the movie) and International Velvet, like the ideal combination of tomboy toughness and comfort in her own skin. But man, what a screwed-up life she’s had. This autobiography details a horrible childhood with uncaring, troubled parents, and the subsequent trainwrecks of adolescence and young adulthood. Alas, it’s not particularly compelling, aside from my (not unusual, but somewhat shameful) morbid fascination with the travails of celebrities, nor is it insightful. O’Neal says she’s doing OK now and says she finds solace in her children, but one doesn’t really get a sense of how exactly she rose out of the pit. Good for her, but I’m sort of sorry I took the time to read the book. When will I get over this pull to the junk food of literature, which I gulp quickly but leaves nothing solid behind?

The only reason I checked this book out is that it’s large print but under 1 inch thick. I wanted something to read on the elliptical trainer, whose motion makes normal print impossible to focus on but whose acrylic slot for reading material is designed for thin things (magazines, presumably). I’ve now worked something out that will let me read normal large print books (usually a couple of inches thick), but I did read all 272 pages of this hodgepodge of travel essays. I predict that not too many of our large print patrons at the library will, however, even the ones who check it out. (We did not select it for our collection individually—it came in an assortment of titles we get automatically, and that annoys me because Thorndike is supposed to be choosing stuff that has wide appeal.) It’s not a bad book by any means, just a comically poor fit for an elderly rural American audience. The essays are individually interesting and well-written, but don’t really fit together and assume quite a lot of knowledge that most people don’t have—starting with who Eric Newby is. The sequencing is disorienting, as we jump from place to place and time to time in no particular order–Beijing in 1992, then Swanage in 1927 (I think they’re arranged by date of publication, but there’s no background information given. It would help to know where they first appeared at least). I don’t normally read large print, so I was also disoriented by the lack of white space between different essays—they’re run together to save paper, with little titles that look more like section headings than even like chapters. But there are good evocations of sights, sounds, and tastes of exotic places, and humorous descriptions (“… boys were playing basketball, so tall some of them that in their white gear they looked as if they had been extruded from a giant toothpaste tube”). He refers twice to “muffin-colored” houses—a silly image if you think of American muffins, but presumably he means English ones!

The first MP book is wonderful, with surreal vignettes like Mrs. Corry snapping off her fingers for the twins to suck on (they are barley-sugar sticks) and the zoo after hours where the animals walk around looking at the humans in cages (feeding time is particularly popular, with bottles for the babies, steak and porter for red-faced British gentlemen like Admiral Boom). The sequels basically repeat the formula of the first. This last entry in the series works better because it’s one long story instead of a compilation. It’s Midsummer’s Eve and all the Poppins universe characters show up in the park. The focus is mainly on the poor beleaguered Park Keeper, who as usual clings obsessively to his litany of rules (no walking on the grass, no picking the flowers) until he recognizes the mysterious visitors (this time Orion, Castor, and Pollux). Then he loses control and picks all the herbs in the herb garden in their honor. Mary Poppins is still scarily unpredictable—she’s no Julie Andrews in the books, in fact her relationship to the Banks children is a startling portrait of classic “elephant in the living room” dysfunctional communication in which they can’t say anything about the magical stuff they observe without her denying it and mocking them, yet there’s always an unspoken understanding at the end in which they know that she knows that they know. Yet the ending this time is more convincingly reassuring. Michael has asked Mary where she’ll be when she leaves them again:

Instead, she gave them her haughty glance.

“I know where you two will be in a minute. And that’s into bed, spit spot!”

They laughed. The old phrase made them feel warm and secure. And even if there was no answer, there had been a reply. Earth and sky, like neighbors chatting over a fence, had exchanged the one same word. Nothing was far. All was near. And bed, they now realized, was exactly where they wanted to be, the safest place in the world.

…Wherever she was, she would not be lost. That was answer enough.

• Doctor Dolittle’s Garden – Hugh Lofting, 1927
• Mary Poppins – P. L Travers, 1934
• Mary Poppins Opens the Door – P. L Travers, 1943
• State of Fear – Michael Crichton, 2004
• So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star: How I Machine-Gunned a Roomful of Record Executives and Other True Tales From a Drummer’s Life – Jacob Slichter, 2004
• A Certain Chemistry – Mil Millington, 2003
• The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom, 2003
• Zee – Elizabeth Enright, 1965
• The Family Under the Bridge – Natalie Savage Carlson, 1958

I’m glad I never took the “experiment” out of the title of this blog, because it’s now January 16, 2005 (I’m going to backdate this) and I’m giving up the illusion that I’m going to “catch up.” (Good decision, hard to make). At least I have a list of all the books I read but didn’t write up, and here it is:

• French Spirits: A House, a Village, and a Love Affair in Burgundy – Jeffrey Greene, 2002
• Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship – Christine Ann Lawson, 2000.
• Sense and Sensiblity – Jane Austen, 1811
• Pride and Predjudice – Jane Austen, 1813
• Mansfield Park – Jane Austen, 1814
• Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen, 1818
• Emma – Jane Austen, 1815
• Persuasion – Jane Austen, 1818
• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte, 1847
• The Alphabet of Modern Annoyances – Neil Steinberg, 1996
• Don’t Give Up the Ship: Finding My Father While Lost at Sea – Neil Steinberg, 2002
• Up On Cloud Nine – Anne Fine, 2002
• The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay & Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen’s Novel to Film – Emma Thompson, 1995
• The Other Wind – Ursula K. LeGuin, 2001
• Victorian Doll Stories – Brenda, Mrs. Gatty, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1969 (1879, 1862, 1907)
• The Lost Prince – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1915
• Requiem for Twelve Cows George Rehm, 1962
• The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911
• A Little Princess – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1905
• Little Lord Fauntleroy – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1886
• The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer – David A. Whitsett, Forrest A. Dolgener, Tanjala Mabon Kole, 1998
• T. Tembarom – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1914
• September – Rosamunde Pilcher, 1990
• The Fan – Bob Randall, 1977
• Island of the Blue Dolphins – Scott O’Dell, 1960
• The Girl Who Heard Dragons – Anne McCaffrey, 1994
• The Telling – Ursula K. LeGuin, 2000
• The Dawn of a To-Morrow – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1906
• A Fair Barbarian – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1880
• Pretty Polly Pemberton – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1877
• Louisiana – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1914
• Other Times, Other Worlds – John D. MacDonald, 1978
• The Star Beast – Robert Heinlein, 1954
• Have Space Suit, Will Travel – Robert Heinlein, 1958
• Red Planet – Robert Heinlein, 1949
• Podkayne of Mars – Robert Heinlein, 1963
• Double Star – Robert Heinlein, 1956
• Time for the Stars – Robert Heinlein, 1956
• Between Planets – Robert Heinlein, 1951
• Tunnel in the Sky – Robert Heinlein, 1955
• Starman Jones – Robert Heinlein, 1953
• The Menace From Earth – Robert Heinlein, 1959
• Space Cadet – Robert Heinlein, 1948
• The Empire of Tea: The Remarkable History of the Plant That Took Over the World – Alan McFarlane & Iris McFarlane, 2003
• The Puppet Masters – Robert Heinlein, 1951
• Waldo – Robert Heinlein, 1950
• Magic, Inc. – Robert Heinlein, 1940
• Piano Lessons: Music, Love & True Adventures – Noah Adams, 1996
• The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier – Thad Carhart, 2000
• Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life – John McCain with Mark Salter, 2004
• The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles – Julie Andrews, 1974
• Christmas Ghosts – ed. Seon Manley & Gogo Lewis, 1978
• Tim – Collen McCullough, 1974
• Beezus and Ramona – Beverly Cleary, 1955
• Ramona the Pest – Beverly Cleary, 1968
• Ramona Forever – Beverly Cleary, 1984
• Ramona and Her Father – Beverly Cleary, 1977
• Ramona Quimby, Age 8 – Beverly Cleary, 1981
• Duran Duran – Susan Martin, 1984
• 3 To the Highest Power: Bradbury, Oliver, Sturgeon – ed. William F. Nolan, 1968
• Kiss Kiss – Roald Dahl, 1959
• The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More – Roald Dahl, 1977
• Follow the River: A Novel Based on the Ordeal of Mary Ingles – James Alexander Thom, 1981
• Blown Sideways Through Life – Claudia Shear, 1995
• The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories – ed. Tom Shippey, 1994
• No Plot? No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days – Chris Baty, 2004
• A Treasury of Modern Fantasy – ed. Terry Carr & Martin Harry Greenberg, 1981
• Seven Footprints to Satan – A. Merritt, 1928
• Vice Versa, or, A Lesson to Fathers – F. Anstey, 1882
• The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle – Hugh Lofting, 1922

I have draft posts on the first two, so I could actually finish those at some point. The re-reads (Burnett, Heinlein, LeGuin, Cleary, Lofting and a few more) I’ll no doubt read again in a few years or a few decades, and I could always write them up them. The library books I could borrow again. The hardest to give up on are the few I’m getting rid of. The perfectionist in me feels like this is an opportunity I’m letting slip away. And it is, but I can’t take advantage of all opportunities. To feel bad as I fall further and further behind would be silly. Books I’ve read six months ago I’d have to re-acquaint myself with anyway. So, yes, I had some thoughts about books on this list that it would have been good to write down, and it’s too bad that they’re lost–but that’s life, which rolls on and doesn’t wait no matter how much I might wish it would. I’m forty now and I’m learning!

So that’s about 144 books I read in 2004. Not that many? Too many? I’m not sure. Probably too many…

It took me a long time to digest this book, which is jam-packed with quoteable insights, new perspectives on familiar ideas, and inspiring thoughts. Reading this collection of essays, which were written as periodic email columns over a span of seven years, felt like trying to eat a rich, dense dessert in one sitting. This is a book that should be savored slowly–by everyone who has any connection to technology. It’s an amazing work.

I can’t think of any book that’s quite like Islands in the Clickstream–it doesn’t fit into any established categories. Syngress Press, the publishers, describe themselves as providing “Career Advancement Through Skill Enhancement,” and say it should be shelved in “Computers/General.” But what this book actually contains is a collection of secular sermons. They fill the niche of an idealized homily–a short talk that reconnects its listeners to a larger context for their daily lives, inspires them to be better people, and makes them think about deeper issues than the everyday grind–but without any religious context, and addressing technology specifically. Thieme says

…these are sermons…in the sense that sermons form and inform a community that chooses to gather to hear them.

It’s not too surprising, then, that Thieme tells us he was an Episcopalian priest for sixteen years.

These essays do have a few flaws I associate with a genre like sermons, ie basically ephemeral and not designed to be read en masse–sometimes there’s a palpable stretch for the inevitable clever final sentence, and we get some repetition of favorite concepts and quotes like “sanity is contextual.” There’s also a hint of bombast, not exactly pretentiousness, but a weakness for over-stated metaphors and over-heated symbolism. Thieme’s got a liberal hand with buzzwords: nexus, fractal, cyborg, panoptic, granular, convergence, paradigm, morphing, etc. I also think he’s barking up the wrong tree in one or two essays where he talks about UFOs and remote sensing, but he’s not credulous by any means.

These are minor quibbles. To give an idea of how much this book impressed me: I typically collect a quote or two from a book I read. A great book will yield four to six. I copied down about FIFTY quotes from Islands in the Clickstream–new ideas, brilliant encapsulations of thoughts that have vaguely crossed my mind, inspirational statements. Here’s just a small sampling:

“The edge is the new center. The center of a web is wherever we are.”

“When things are going well, accountability diminishes. Then when things don’t go well, there’s chaos.” (written in 1997, with a prescient reference to the financial tech bubble)

“‘Out of the box’ thinking is just a name for climbing out of one box into a little bit bigger box.”

“Good tools work regardless of why we say they work. Technical tools and spiritual tools alike.”

“That’s the problem with oracular truth: the opposite is nearly always just as true. Oracular truth is more like a mobius strip than a yes/no binary system.”

If you’re someone who’s been involved with computers long enough that “hacker” doesn’t sound like a dirty word, you’ll feel like Thieme is speaking directly to you. If you ever wonder about the effect of technology on how we think and communicate, you’ll find a lot of food for thought here. If you’re professionally involved with the Internet in any way (as a techie or in business), you ought to read this book. If you’re looking for inspiration to be a better person, without being expected to believe in a personal god, check this out.

I would love to hear Thieme speak. He seems like a truly amazing person. Thieme’s website can be found at www.thiemeworks.com.

Whitney High School, in Cerritos, California, is a magnet public school whose students get higher SAT scores, pass more AP exams, and get into more elite colleges than most private school students. Families move to Cerritos from countries halfway across the world in order to give their children a crack at this educational opportunity. Humes spent a year at Whitney High, and the result of his immersion is this compulsively readable book.

Whitney students are bright, but that’s not enough. They work incredibly hard and crazily long hours, fueled by caffeine and sometimes speed, to live up to the expectations of their parents and their teachers. (How has this pressure become so socially acceptable?) Whitney teachers are caring and skilled, but many of them feel overwhelmed by the needs of students and the demands of administration. Despite the pressures and problems, though, almost all of them love to learn and love to teach, and what they achieve is remarkable. Competing feelings of excitement and frustration swept through me as I read. Humes introduces us to many memorable characters, from the gifted artist whose parents won’t hear of her studying anything but science, to the administrator who has the task of juggling funding and demanding parents along with running the school.

An interesting thread the book explores is the role of technology in education. There’s a great moment when Neil Bush (George W.’s brother, head of a company that makes education software), visits the school and argues that the educational system is broken because it’s too hard and has to be made more fun.

No one really wants to study calculus, [Bush] says triumphantly, calling it a prime example of being “forced to study something a kid thinks terribly useless and obscure.”

“I like calculus,” Kosha answeres, looking him in the eye. “It instills critical thinking…It’s definitely a challenge, but it forces you to think in critical ways.”

The Whitney students who meet with Bush think that high expectations help students master difficult material and learn to enjoy it more than dressing it up (which inevitably waters down the content–the software Bush is peddling ends up being useless for the classes who try it because it covers so little that it bores the students).

School of Dreams reminded me of my high school years in the French educational system, where there are 4 tracks: A (literature), B (business), C (hard sciences), and D (applied sciences). A ridiculous self-reinforcing tradition has come into existence, which ranks the four by perceived intellectual ability. All the “smart kids” are funneled into C whether or not that’s their love, next-smartest go to D, then B, with A taking the rest. Many of the Whitney students are similarly pushed by their parents into the hard sciences–if you “can” do calculus, you’re supposed to go that way because it’s the “hardest.” But how many kids who don’t grasp the concepts immediately are shunted out of math before they get a chance, because little was expected of them? One of the most heart-warming stories that plays out over the school year is the project assigned in Rod Zilkowski’s honors physics class. Mr. Z decides to devote a quarter to one project: a rocket built from a film canister and powered by Alka-Seltzer.

Mr. Z goes on to explain that as they work on this project for the quarter, there will be no homework and no tests. There will only be weekly updates on their progress, in which they will teach him about their findings, then answer his questions about their experiments.

The students work in groups, and quickly it becomes apparent that the “best” students, Group 5, are slacking off without the structure of tests and papers. Mr. Z cajoles and prods them, but for them the project ends ignominiously–they’re not even up to presenting their work to the professional engineers who are coming in to evaluate the projects. It’s Group 4, three girls who’d been struggling in the class and whom Mr. Z had worried about, who take the lead, and it’s a triumphant moment when their canister rocket hits the target they specify, three times in a row.

This is a great read and a great ride: exciting, involving, thought-provoking, scary, and exhilarating by turn.

Fowler has come a long, long way since winning a science fiction short story contest in 1985 (one I also entered!)–making the leap from genre fiction to New York Times bestseller is incredibly rare. This isn’t a ground-breaking novel, but it’s enormously satisfying in many ways (and must have led to a huge Austen revival, if I’m any kind of example, because I went on to read all 6 novels for the first time). We meet six characters, five women and one man, and learn something about each of them as their informal book club reads through all of Austen. Fowler begins by telling us: “Each of us has a private Austen,” and part of the fun comes from seeing the books through different lenses. Like Austen, Fowler has a sharp eye for human foibles and a dry way of pointing them out.

“I think we should all be women,” Bernadette suggested next. “The dynamic changes with men. They pontificate rather than communicate. They talk more than their share.”

Jocelyn opened her mouth.

“No one can get a word in,” Bernadette warned her. “Women are too tentative to interrupt, no matter how long someone has gone on.”

Jocelyn cleared her throat.

“Besides, men don’t do book clubs,” Bernadette said. “They see reading as a solitary pleasure. When they read at all.”

Jocelyn closed her mouth.

Grigg, the one man who’s invited to join the club, is to my mind the most likeable character (and Fowler’s stand-in for a nice, if partisan, set-piece where people dismissive of science fiction are shown up as boorish, ignorant louts). Some of the six remain more opaque than others, but there’s a pleasing resolution to each story and a properly Austenish matchup at the end.

We get a lot of enjoyable supporting material–information about Austen and her contemporaries, interpolated insights on some of the characters, a summary of the Austen novels and critical opinions of them–and most delightfully, at the end, questions for the reader posed by the characters, some about Austen and some about the novel itself.

I think I need to re-read this book now that I’ve actually read the Austen novels, and see what I missed the first time around. One of my favorite things about reading is correspondences and connections between books, and the way that one leads to others. Unlike the coat-tail riders who write sequels to classic novels, or steal another author’s characters to spice up their own languishing careers with a marketing hook, Fowler has found a way to create a novel that’s entirely hers, while legitimately enriching it with ties to a common literary experience.

Bohjalian, best-known as a novelist, has also spent more than a decade chronicling life in Lincoln, Vermont, a town of 975 inhabitants. This book collects dozens of his newspaper columns, dealing with country house joys and problems, changes good and bad, being a dad and a husband, spirituality, the seasons, and much more. He’s a good writer, and often the stories he tells are funny or touching, but there’s sometimes that journalistic lunge for a pat phrase or too-cute anecdote. It’s a kind of self-consciousness I associate with Andy Rooney-style musings.

The most gripping piece is the last one, which is the only fiction in the book, about a dad unreasonably worrying as he waits for his young daughter outside a Disney World ladies’ room. Bohjalian says he included it because it captures how he felt in a similar situation, but it’s interesting to me that only this fictional piece feels truly immediate and keenly observed. Is it that in fiction, he’s inhabiting his characters, and in the bulk of these essays he’s seeing them from the outside (even when he is one of them)? A good novelist isn’t necessarily a good essayist, and vice versa. But I don’t want to sound too negative–it’s a very enjoyable book, even if it doesn’t quite live up to its potential.