Sidetracked by Henning Mankell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Inspector Kurt Wallander and his colleagues from the Ystad, Sweden, police face what might be their most difficult case. The former minister of justice is hacked to death with an axe and partially scalped. In addition, Wallander witnesses the self-immolation of a girl, and this dramatic event never leaves Wallander's mind while he and his team attempt to find the axe killer, who continues the rampage.

From the very beginning, the reader is offered insights into the mind of the killer. However, the police, not knowing the motives, face a very difficult task, and the investigation rapidly grows. Naturally, it is Wallander who solves the case, despite struggling with personal problems.

Sidetracked is an excellent procedural, with an interesting plot and credible characterizations. Yet there is nothing in the novel that would transcend the procedural genre, and the book, at 421 pages, is—in my nitpicky opinion—too long. But I highly recommend it to all readers who don't mind the hefty volume.

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Mortal Engines by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stanislaw Lem, arguably the greatest science fiction writer of all time and certainly the most widely read sci-fi author, was the favorite writer of my youth. I believe I have read everything that he published, most of it in Polish. I have also reread many of his books in English translation and have reviewed five of them on Goodreads, among them two unquestionable five-star books ( A Perfect Vacuum and His Master's Voice). Also, let's not forget that Lem was much, much more than just a sci-fi writer. He was a philosopher, futurologist, humanist, literary critic, and popularizer of science. His 1960s and 1970s visions of the future predicted the ascent and ubiquity of AI.

Mortal Engines is a compilation of short stories; 11 of them have been taken from Lem's famous Fables of Robots, the other three, including the magnificent The Mask, from other sources. The Fables stories are just like the "regular" fairy tales, but they are set in a world populated exclusively by android robots. Each of them is equipped with advanced AI so that their behavior is basically the same as human. The AI is more advanced than ChatGPT, but it is amazing how accurate Lem was in 1964, when the stories were published, in predicting the capabilities of AI.

The fables are very funny, and I exploded in laughter many times reading the stories. How about "Tikcuff!!" the battle cry of the Triodius race? The universe of the Fables is strictly physics-based (let's take an example from the second story: "...he knew ways of threading photons on a string, producing thereby necklaces of light..."), yet the prose is creative and charming. Also, one has to give the highest praise to Michael Kandel, the translator. I have been able to read a few paragraphs in the original Polish and then in his translation, and nothing of the original style, mood, and beauty has been lost.

The story The Sanatorium of Dr. Vliperdius features Ijon Tichy, the incomparable space explorer and traveler, first introduced in Lem's The Star Diaries. The intrepid star pilot Pirx (known from the popular Tales of Pirx the Pilot) is the protagonist of the engrossing action story The Hunt.

Finally, the outstanding The Mask, one of the best short stories I have ever read. The protagonist is an artificial yet sentient being, and the plot involves a metamorphosis (I am unable to explain more as it would spoil the plot, but let me at least point out that the word 'metamorphosis' itself is a hint). The story is pretty deep and invites multiple interpretations, but the main philosophical question it raises is the issue of free will in artificial sentient beings. A superb work of literature, beautifully written in a sort of Gothic romance style. Again, the translation is truly perfect.

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In The Eden Express, Mark Vonnegut, son of the great Kurt Vonnegut, describes his struggles with schizophrenia and the eventual recovery from the illness.

We follow, in a somewhat non-linear fashion, the events in Mark Vonnegut's life from his June 1969 graduation from Swarthmore College, through a short period of employment, to the 1970 journey with his girlfriend to British Columbia. These were turbulent, post-Sixties times, with the nation involved in and divided by the Vietnam War. Several other Swarthmore graduates join Vonnegut and his girlfriend, find a barely accessible yet beautiful piece of undeveloped land in British Columbia, and set up a hippie commune. Initially, things seem to be going very well.

Fluctuations in Vonnegut's mood between utter euphoria and total despair signal the slow onset of schizophrenia. The process of descent into illness is meticulously described. The author recounts, in detail, three intense episodes, two stays in a mental hospital, and the recovery.

I am poorly qualified to have an opinion on the issue, but it seems to me that Mark Vonnegut wants to suggest the biochemical basis of his illness rather than seeing it as a social construct, as an individual's reaction to the insanity of a society at war.

While I read the book with interest, and while I very much appreciate the author's intentions of providing a first-person account of "descent into madness," I am wondering to what degree the detailed descriptions of thought processes during the episodes were altered ("edited") by his memory during the period between the actual episode and the writing of this book, which took place quite some time after the illness struck.

Hannibal by Thomas Harris
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Until about the middle of the book, Hannibal is just a silly fairy tale for adults about the fight between evil but omnipotent Dr. Lecter and Clarice Starling, the brave and intrepid warrior for the side of good. This struggle takes place on the backdrop of dirty politics in Washington, D.C. But then the author switches gears and tries to dazzle the reader with an orgy of torture and death. For instance, we can learn how to feed a living human being to hungry feral pigs in order to maximize the spectators' enjoyment.

In a spectacularly silly passage, the author attempts to impress the reader with the indomitable Dr. Lecter's knowledge of math and physics; we learn that he is using string theory trying to defeat the second law of thermodynamics and have entropy decrease with time!

One of the early parts of the novel is set in Florence, Italy. The prose in that part is quite good and vivid, and the author even includes some of Dante's poetry in Italian. Yet the overall silliness of the story, the fascination with torture, and the stunning, truly stunning asininity of the ending place the novel firmly among the worst books I have ever read.

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Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is yet another book by Elizabeth Strout that I greatly enjoyed. Anything Is Possible is hard to categorize: while it is a collection of nine short stories, they are all linked not only by location—a small, rural town in Illinois—but also by the character of Lucy Barton, who even appears in one of the stories. Thus, it wouldn't be incorrect to classify the book as a novel.

More importantly, the stories are unified by their main themes: loneliness, pain of the present, pain of memories, dark shadows of the past, and sadness caused by various human failures. Yet, the stories also show some optimism: compassion, joy, and hope.

Mississippi Mary is probably my favorite story in the collection: it is mainly about difficult mother-daughter love, but it also shows how a relationship between two people has a way of changing over a long period of time from love to hate or indifference. But I also love Dottie's Bed & Breakfast, which reminds us of our ugly need to feel superior to others but also has a flash of humor. Sister, with its dramatic ending, shows us that it is not really possible to come back home having left it many years ago.

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101 Reykjavik by Hallgrímur Helgason
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Twelve years ago, I read and enthusiastically reviewed The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning . I loved the book so much that I immediately reached for the acclaimed 101 Reykjavik by the same Icelandic author, Hallgrímur Helgason. Alas, I could not get through the first 50 pages, so I had to put the book away to wait for when I mature a little. Well, I have now managed to read the entire novel, and I have appreciated the experience. Yet, while I am recommending the book, I am unable to assign it a high rating.

The reason for my difficulties with the novel is the prose. It is mainly a sort of "stream of consciousness" style of first-person narration, grounded in language. Mimicking the narrator's thought process, the author indulges in creating avalanches of words and phrases, word associations, and puns. For me, the resulting flood of verbiage, the lava streams of words, are hard to read, and I am too lazy to consistently keep intense attention on the pages, particularly in the case of overlong inner monologues when the narrator is drunk, on drugs, or both.

Laziness is also the main problem of the narrator, Hlynur, who is 33 when the novel begins, who lives with his mother, and whose only activities are heavy drinking in bars, getting high, and--most importantly--having casual sex. He does nothing else, does not work, and lives off his mother and a disability pension. Consequences of sex and issues related to sexual orientation form the narrative axis of the novel. Obviously, Hlynur is not a nice character; his relationships with women are atrocious, yet the author shows glimmers of sympathy for Hlynur's weaknesses and failings.

There are several hilarious and wonderfully written passages, for instance, the Christmas party with the in-laws or the scene with Hofy's family. I particularly like one of the later fragments of the book, where Hlynur and a gay couple of his pals go on a trip to Amsterdam and Paris. If the entire book were written in that manner, I would've assigned it a higher rating.

In the novel, published almost 30 years ago, Mr. Helgason aptly captured some ills of the modern society, which have only grown worse since then, for instance, people's short attention spans. Here's a funny short bit, which shows Hlynur's thoughts when riding in a car and watching the landscape: "Those mountains are so irritatingly still. No way of zapping over to something else."

Pop culture of the 1990s is portrayed richly and vividly, particularly pop music. The translator, Brian FitzGibbon, has done an excellent job, considering the language-oriented inner monologues. I believe 101 Reykjavik is a very good novel, which I underappreciate because of my inability to focus. Let's finally note that quite a popular movie based on the novel was made in 2000. The film received several international awards.

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Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the third novel by Elizabeth Strout that I read and, chronologically, the second book by the author, published in 2006. I loved both Olive Kitteridge (2008) and My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016) and rated them with a solid four stars. Abide with Me is a very good novel too, but, for me, not quite on the same level.

The plot is set in 1959, in a small New England town. Several years earlier, young Reverend Tyler Caskey was appointed as a minister of the town parish. After a few happy years, he has recently been dealing with huge personal loss while trying to help his parishioners not only with strengthening their Christian faith but also with their personal problems.

The novel shows why it is difficult to be a human. It is about the central aspects of our humanness: about loss, about our personal weaknesses, about our failures, and about differences between our ambitions and expectations and the actual reality that ensues as a consequence of our actions. The book is yet another example of how literary fiction, created by a skillful author, conveys truth about people much better than a nonfiction account ever could. The writing is beautiful, as usual for Ms. Strout: the prose is clear, simple, and economical.

It is worth noting that—while the main focus of the plot is on characters' tribulations—the signs of a tense political situation keep popping up in the background: mentions of Mr. Khrushchev, nuclear weapons, building anti-atomic shelters, etc.

It was a hard decision, but, for me, Abide with Me does not rise to the four-star level. First of all, in my view, the ending does not match the tone and the mood of the rest of the book. Otherwise, and this is totally subjective, I did not experience the feeling of awe about the novel, one that I clearly felt about the other two books by Ms. Strout.

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Candlemoth by R.J. Ellory
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my third novel by R.J. Ellory, after the good if unremarkable A Quiet Vendetta and A Simple Act of Violence .
Candlemoth is, by far, the best of the three. In fact, after about 100 pages, I was in total awe of the novel and loved the premise, the plot, and the characterizations. Five stars seemed certain.

Daniel Ford and Nathan Verney have been best friends since they were six years old, even if Daniel is white and Nathan is black, and the story begins in South Carolina in the 1950s, when racial segregation was the norm. We follow the story of their friendship throughout the Fifties and the tumultuous Sixties on the backdrop of a wide yet detailed panorama of political and social changes happening in the US.

However, it is the fall of 1982 now, and Daniel has been on Death Row for 12 years, awaiting execution for the murder of Nathan. Daniel claims innocence, yet all appeals have been futile. Much of the plot is set in the Death Row prison cell, where Daniel tells his and Nathan's life story to Father John, a friendly priest. The account of "life" on Death Row is terrifying, and the reader would have to be a truly hardened individual not to get emotionally affected.

To me, the story of the unusual friendship between Daniel and Nathan is fascinating and deeply moving—the best thing in a very good novel. So why not five stars? Other than being stingy with extreme praise, I think some of the aspects of the otherwise rational and almost plausible denouement are too "elegant" for real life. Also, the author may have gone a little overboard with making the good guys really good and the bad guys really bad, and with pushing all emotional buttons of the reader. Anyway, I highly recommend Candlemoth.

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Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

From the very first pages, where we meet Zoyd Wheeler, who prepares to perform his trademark act of transfenestration on TV cameras to prove that he is crazy enough to obtain the mental disability benefit, it becomes clear that Vineland is not an ordinary novel. Reading it has been a mind-blowing, intimidating, humbling, yet deeply affecting experience. Any attempt of mine to concisely summarize the novel would be a failure.

In most general terms, Vineland, published in 1990 and set mainly in California in 1984, with flashbacks to the 1960s, juxtaposes the zeitgeist of the Eighties in the US with that of the Sixties. The struggles of the 1960s radicals against the government forces provide the basic background of the extremely complex plot, which is an insane whirlwind of events, featuring a kaleidoscope of situations that involve hundreds of characters.

The universe created in the novel is so complex and intricate that I believe a reader may need several passes over the text to have some confidence in understanding most nuances. I am afraid that with my single reading I may have engaged only with a small fraction of the author's creation. There exist several websites dedicated to the analysis of the novel. For instance, Thomas Pynchon Wiki |Vineland impresses with its monumental volume. Virtually each of the 385 pages of the book is annotated in detail. Maybe there exist Master's or even PhD theses dedicated to the novel; if not, there should be!

Throughout the novel, Pynchon satirizes the enslavement of the US population by television. The Tube seems to be the only thing that unites the society. In the words of a critic (Mark Webster), The Tube is ubiquitous. Life is defined, framed, imitated, and irradiated by the Tube. Movie and TV show titles have dates next to them as if they were references for the story. Thirty-five years after the novel was published, the arsenal of the tools of enslavement has expanded to include social media.

My rating of four stars reflects my failure to fully grasp the magnitude of the author's work. I believe that given more time to read, I would assign the maximum rating, as I did in the case of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.

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The Private Patient by P.D. James
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Recently I have read mystery/crime novels featuring famous British fictional detectives whom I had never "met" before: DCI Morse, created by Colin Dexter, as well as DS Dalziel and DI Pascoe, written by Reginald Hill. Now, I have filled one more gap in my mystery/crime series education and read The Private Patient by P.D. James, the last novel in the series featuring Commander Dalgliesh, published in 2008.

The Private Patient is a classical mystery, where—as the author writes—We have a group of seven people in the household, any of whom could have killed [...]. The detectives are not successful in detecting much, other than possibly hastening the events that lead to the exposure of the culprit. The reader is presented several clever and plausible false leads before the plot zeroes in on the logical, if complicated, denouement.

I like P.D. James's writing more than C. Dexter's and R. Hill's, so it is probable that I will reach for other installments in the Dalgliesh series. The fact that the author published the novel aged 88 should give great hope to all septuagenarians like myself.


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Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The novel spans the period from 1971 to 1974 and follows the events in the life of a six-person family (a Christian minister, his wife, and four children) living in a small town near Chicago. The plot is captivating and will hold the readers' interest throughout all 576 pages. However, as it is a serious novel, it also has a lot to say about the so-called human condition.

It is my fifth novel by Jonathan Franzen—I have reviewed the previous four on Goodreads—and the first one in which psychological motives of human behavior are clearly in the forefront, while social matters and politics are in the background. The emphasis is on the moral issues: 'What does it mean to be a good person?' and 'Am I doing everything I can to be a good person?' are the main questions the novel poses. Also, the reader is shown how incompatible the individual moral codes could be, even assuming that all of us are guided by the same wish to be good.

The title refers to the name of a religious youth group (fellowship), of which the minister and two of his children are members. The events in the life of the family are closely intertwined with the group's activities. A lot of emphasis in the novel is on the psychology of religious experience. There is a vivid account of a teenager's drug addiction and its dramatic consequences. I like the format of the novel, where the individual chapters follow the individual family members.

To sum up, Crossroads is a serious yet very readable novel that will leave the reader thinking about the never-ending interplay between human goodness and human weakness.


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Dialogues of the Dead by Reginald Hill
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A few days ago, when I was reviewing--not enthusiastically--Reginald Hill's On Beulah Height, which was my first contact with the Dalziel and Pascoe series, I expressed hope that gaining some familiarity with the principal characters will help me appreciate further novels in the series. Well... it didn't work at all. Reading Dialogues of the Dead turned out to be a chore, an unpleasant chore, and I don't wish to read any more installments of the series. I do not blame the author; it is just that I am totally uninterested in this particular type of mystery novel.

Two young men die in apparent accidents in a Yorkshire community. But when the local paper announces a writing contest, the Mid-Yorkshire Short Story Competition, and two of the entries happen to describe the details of the deaths and clearly indicate they were murders, Dalziel, Pascoe, and a young Detective Constable Bowler get involved. Alas, the two murders are just the beginning! There are more. Many more! There are many, many more! We are dealing with a mystery genre trope of an archvillain playing a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the police. This master criminal is soon named the Wordman, because the descriptions of the consecutive murders seem to show that he is obsessed with word games.

It does not help that Detective Superintendent Dalziel seems to be completely incompetent in his work, and were it a real-life case, he would be out of his job well before the middle of the novel. While I do not want to read about DS Dalziel ever again, Detective Chief Inspector Pascoe, DC Bowler, and Rye, the librarian, are portrayed with sympathy, and they almost seem like real people, which saves the novel from a one-star rating. I also liked the Yorkshire owt, nowt, yon, any road, and she were a smart lass.

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My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lucy Barton says, I like writers who try to tell you something truthful. I do too. That's why I really like this book a lot. Later in the novel, the author states, the job as a writer of fiction [is] to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do. Elizabeth Strout's My Name Is Lucy Barton exactly follows that prescription. It tells a sweet and very sad story, using simple language and a minimum number of pages. This simplicity and the absence of literary affectations make this fictional story more real than a nonfiction book would.

It feels like a sacrilege to find faults with this beautifully written book, but I need to explain why my rating is only four-and-a-half stars, rounded down. The author says, There is that constant judgment in this world and later, more explicitly, It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it's the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down. Yes, exactly! That's one of the ugliest aspects of being human. But I prefer that the author let the reader discover the truth rather than spoon-feed it.

I am unable to refrain from quoting a longish yet truly luminous fragment of simple prose: [...] it was early June, and the soybeans were on one side, a sharp green, lighting up the slighting sloping fields with their beauty, and on the other side was the corn, not yet as high as my knees, a bright green that would darken in the coming weeks, the leaves supple now, then becoming stronger. (O corn of my youth, you were my friend!--running and running between the rows, running as only the child, alone, in summer can run, running to that stark tree that stood in the midst of the cornfield--) In my memory the sky was gray as we drove, and it appeared to rise--not clear, but rise--and it was very beautiful, the sense of it rising and growing lighter, the gray having the slightest touch of blue, the trees full with their green leaves.

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On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

On Beulah Height is a good mystery novel, maybe even very good; yet, for me, it was very difficult to get immersed in the world of the novel's characters. It took me about 100 pages to become sort of engaged with the plethora of characters and with the complex plot. It is my first book by Reginald Hill; I will try another one to see whether some familiarity with the detectives (the novel is a part of the popular Dalziel and Pascoe series) improves my reception.

Three little girls had disappeared from a farming village in the Mid-Yorkshire Dales area. The police had been unable to find the bodies or even determine what happened to the girls. Then, the village and surrounding areas were flooded in order to build a reservoir. More than ten years later, the drought caused the water levels to drop, and the remnants of the flooded village were uncovered. And then... another little girl disappears. The present is deeply interwoven with the past. The summer concert featuring Gustav Mahler's Kindertotenlieder (Songs for Dead Children) provides fitting background to the dramatic events. The convoluted yet logical denouement requires constant focus on the text.

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Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times. This monumental biography provides a detailed account of the physicist's life and work. I am in awe of the amount of research the author must have done to capture Richard Feynman's extraordinarily busy science career and his unconventional personal story. I am also in awe of the author's ability to explain various concepts of modern physics. Even though I taught a basic college physics course a few times, my knowledge of modern physics is nil compared to Mr. Gleick's, who's not a physicist. In fact, I am worried that the biography may be a difficult read for anyone not in some way associated with science, particularly with physics.

The author quotes the Polish-American mathematician Mark Kac, who considered Feynman an extraordinary genius, unlike 'ordinary ones': An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. Indeed, the biography stresses the point that Feynman was not just many, many times better than other scientists, but that he was different. His genius often seemed to border on magic and wizardry.

As Mr. Gleick walks us through the main stations of Feynman's professional life—MIT, Princeton, Los Alamos, Cornell, and Caltech—I appreciate the author's efforts to show this extraordinary genius as a person, to portray his so-called human side, with human weaknesses, peculiarities, and idiosyncrasies. The rivalries with Schwinger and Gell-Mann and the friendship with Dyson are presented vividly, as are the sometimes difficult relationships with women in Feynman's life. We can read two letters that Feynman wrote to his first wife, who died of tuberculosis at a very young age; reading them is a moving experience that reveals the depth of Feynman's love for Arline.

A slight personal connection: I have known of Feynman since 1969, when I was taking a general physics course at the university in Warsaw, and I supplemented reading the official textbook with studying the famous The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which provided an innovative, refreshing way of learning physics. Also, in the very late 1980s, PBS’ NOVA aired The Last Journey of a Genius, a television film that documents Feynman's final days and his obsession with traveling to Tannu Tuva, a state outside of Outer Mongolia, which then remained under Soviet control. The documentary made a deep, lasting impression on me.

I have reviewed three books by Feynman here on Goodreads: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out,

What Do You Care What Other People Think?,

Surely You Are Joking, Mr. Feynman.

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The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse series of books is a classic of the genre, a part of the mystery novel canon, revered by millions of readers. I have never read any Morse novel, but I happened to find The Remorseful Day on my shelf. It is the last novel in the series, and I am afraid it will also be the last Colin Dexter book that I read. It is not the author's fault—he consequently follows his mystery prose aesthetics—but his writing style is definitely not my thing. Maybe if I started with the first novel in the series, things would turn out differently?

Not only do I find the writing unbearably chatty, but it also seems that the author's idea of suspense is to produce as long a series of plot twists as possible. From the very beginning of the novel, where we witness a naughty banter between a patient and his nurse, the author teases us with false leads and misleading suggestions. Readers who like plot twists will likely enjoy the novel. Even after revealing a super major plot twist at the end of the novel, the reader gets yet another major twist!

One practical thing that I learned from the novel is that the phrase "eleven plus two" is an anagram of "twelve plus one," which is a funny (and punny) tidbit; it also reminds me of operator overloading in object-oriented programming :) Also, it is altogether possible that the main reason for my dislike of the novel is that Chief Inspector Morse adores Richard Wagner—the only classical composer whose music I can't stand.

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Teller's War: The Top-Secret Story Behind the Star Wars Deception by William J. Broad
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The first paragraph on the first page of the author's Prologue provides a great explanation of what this nonfiction, documentary-style book is about. I am quoting it in its entirety, as I would never be able to produce such an apt and concise summary:

At age 70, after a career in which he begat the hydrogen bomb and the most feared laboratory on earth for the design of nuclear arms, using them to battle the Communist bloc for a quarter century, Edward Teller longed for a final accomplishment. His chance came in the 1980s. Filled with determination, at times shaking with excitement, Teller threw himself into a bid for what he was sure would be his ultimate success. The result, however, was no triumph. Over the protest of colleagues, Teller misled the highest officials of the United States government on a critical issue of national security, paving the way for a multibillion-dollar deception in which a dream of peace concealed the most dangerous military program of all time.

I used to be greatly interested in the topic, as in the 1980s I co-taught an honors course titled Games, Weapons, Morals, focused on the arms race and balance of nuclear powers (I was responsible for the first segment of the course—the mathematical, game-theoretic aspects of the arms race). Having now read William J. Broad's book, I can only be embarrassed by how much I did not know then. The book, written in 1993, provides an enormous wealth of information about the Strategic Defense Initiative, X-ray lasers, the Brilliant Pebbles program, various related topics, and, of course, about Dr. Teller's role in the events.

William J. Broad does his best to be objective in his opinions about people's actions. He clearly explains the political background of the events and always tries to make sure that all his criticisms of Dr. Teller are strongly grounded in existing references. The book is exceptionally well researched: 24 small-font pages of references (the author provides sources for 729 statements) plus 10 small-font pages of bibliography. So, while the meticulous attention to detail greatly enhances the believability of the author's message, it makes for quite difficult reading, which explains my three-star rating.


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Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have read 30 "serious" books in a row in the recent months, so it was time for a pure entertainment break. I chose Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn: not only was it a national bestseller in 2012, but also a popular movie was made in 2014 based on the novel. I did not read the book before, nor did I watch the movie, so I was curious how my reception would fare against masterpieces by Ishiguro, Banville, or Coetzee. The novel is a thriller, so I expected mediocre prose and total focus on the plot at the expense of characterization of people and places.

Well, I got what I had expected, but only after the first half of the novel was over. I found the first part, which sets up the plot, fascinating and surprisingly well written. The characters were portrayed vividly as real, believable people. I was totally captivated by the novel and unhappy whenever I had to interrupt reading. A four-star rating was in sight!

But then came the second half, with all its plot twists (most of them unnecessary and some idiotic, in my view) and with hurried, sloppy writing (particularly the dialogues). The characters' actions were determined by the needs of the plot, rather than the other way around. I couldn't wait for moments when I would stop reading and do something pleasant and useful.

I have read (and reviewed on Goodreads) hundreds of thrillers/mystery novels, and Gone Girl confirms the three main issues I have had with this genre. First: many thrillers/mysteries have great setups, but most have completely disappointing resolutions. The second problem is the volume: why does a thriller have to be a 300-400-page book? Why not 200? And, finally, why are multiple plot twists needed? "The butler did it. There was no butler. Oh, yes, there was, and he did it. The prince was really the butler. Actually no, she was the princess, and she didn't. No, it was all a dream." Maybe the multiple plot twists are needed to pad the volume of a novel to 400 pages?

(My rating should really be two and a half stars, but I am rounding it up for the outstanding first half.)


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Athena by John Banville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I began reading Athena, I did not know that it is, in a sense, a continuation of The Book of Evidence and Ghosts. But then I found the name Vaublin in the text, which I first had seen about six years ago, when I reviewed both novels on Goodreads. Then it became obvious that Mr. Morrow, the narrator of Athena, is really Mr. Montgomery. Well, probably... Unreliability of the narrator is on full display here!

Athena is basically a love story expressed in the form of Mr. M's letter to his lover, whose name is only given as A., and whom he is missing much. The love story is intertwined with the plot thread, in which the narrator, who might be an art expert, is used by various shady characters from the underworld to examine the authenticity of several 17th-century paintings. A police inspector is involved too.

I do not think, though, that the plot is important at all. It is the beautiful prose that makes this book. Yes, the prose is often breathtakingly beautiful, yet it is also complex and, in my view, too hermetic. One-hundred-word-long sentences make Athena quite a challenging read. The author seems to make fun of himself: Ah, this plethora of metaphors! I am like everything except myself. On the other hand, the reader will discover some exquisite characterizations, such as the author's description of A.: She was not being but becoming.

John Banville seems to have had a lot of fun writing Athena. The novel contains detailed descriptions of seven pictures by 17th-century Dutch painters. Their names are Johann Livelb, J van Hollbein, L E van Ohlbijn, Job van Hellin, L van Hobelijn, and two very similar ones. This alphabet-related joke made me round up my rating to three stars.

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Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my fourth novel by Jonathan Franzen: I read Strong Motion after the outstanding The Corrections, published in 2001, and the very good Purity (2015) and Freedom (2010) (I reviewed them all on Goodreads). Despite it being written much earlier (published in 1992), it is undeniably a Franzen novel, with its fluent, erudite, sometimes excessive prose and with the characteristic "information overload," as if the author were trying to capture—on each page—the world in all its complexity.

In seismology, the term "strong motion" is defined as strong shaking that occurs in the direct vicinity of the fault that has caused the earthquake. Two of the main threads of the novel refer to this definition: a series of minor earthquakes occurs in New England, and the seismologists are trying to pinpoint the causes. The earthquake contributes to the death of a wealthy grandmother, and the struggle over a substantial inheritance causes metaphorical strong shaking of relationships in an already dysfunctional family.

There are several other threads in the plot: issues of environmental damage caused by dumping industrial waste, a story of a pro-life fundamentalist religious commune, and, naturally, a love story that connects the two protagonists. The threads merge as the novel progresses, and all loose ends are neatly tied up in a dramatic yet narratively elegant resolution.

I struggled with the star rating, but I decided to round it up to four stars, even if I like the book a little less than Purity and Freedom. On one hand, it feels more captivating (and easier to read) than the two later novels; on the other, I have doubts as to the plausibility of some characters' behaviors and several lengthy conversations, which may seem as if they were addressed to the reader.

Being a sort of computer scientist, I was amused by the author's inclusion of a computer program that helps a 1990s male to plan his daily activities. The code is followed by a two-page rumination on artificial intelligence, which does not feel excessively outdated even if it is a third of a century old.


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Himalaya by Michael Palin by Michael Palin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

(Note: I read this book in Polish translation.)

Michael Palin, of Monty Python fame, was a participant and the presenter of a series of TV travel documentaries produced by the BBC: Around the World in 80 Days,Sahara, Pole to Pole, Brazil, New Europe, and others. Himalaya is a book companion to the documentary titled Himalaya with Michael Palin (2003-2004). Palin and the BBC crew traveled in Pakistan, India, Nepal, Tibet, China, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, focusing the path of their journey on the Himalayan region.

The book is a solid travel diary, where Mr. Palin documents in detail each of the 125 days that the expedition took. It can serve as a good travel guide for anyone interested in the region. Of course, reading the book is not an adequate substitute for the feeling of magnificence and majesty of the highest mountains on Earth, so we can only believe the awe with which the author describes viewing Everest, Makalu, Lhotse, K2, Annapurna, or Dhaulagiri from up close. However, despite the beauty of Earth's geography, the most memorable parts of the book are about the extremely diverse people who live in the region: Hindu, Tibetan, Muslim, Sikh, Chinese, Bhutanese, and many others. One can only hope that these ethnic and religious groups will be able to live peacefully with each other, although the history, so far, has been mixed.

For me, the account of Mr. Palin's conversation with the Dalai Lama was the most interesting highlight of the trip. Naturally, having read numerous Himalayan mountaineering books, it was interesting to read about the Baltoro glacier, Annapurna base camp, or the glacier above the Everest base camp. On the other hand, being a hardcore Monty Python fan, I am unable to refrain from mentioning The Lumberjack Song, a reference to which appears twice in the book.

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Borderliners by Peter Høeg
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I do not like this novel much. While I appreciate the overall message that I think Mr. Høeg wants to convey in Borderliners—that love is the main thing, which the children need when they are growing up—I am not impressed with the form in which the message is presented. Other readers may like the highly elliptical prose much more; I find it obscures the narration.

Borderliners merges two different literary entities. One—told by the narrator, a 14-year-old boy with four different institutions for children from broken homes in his past—is the story of children's rebellion against strict discipline in an exclusive Danish school in the early 1970s. It could have been a heart-rending story, showing the need for treating children as human beings, not only having them follow rules and schedules. I believe it could have been a captivating tale were it told with more focus. Mr. Høeg has shown that, when he wants to, he can write with intense lyricism, such as in the scene of the kiss.

Rambling divagations on the nature of time constitute the second entity. The author muses on the topics of subjective vs. objective time, absolute vs. relative time, and linear vs. cyclical time. (By the way—since the author mentions mathematics a few times—mathematicians have known, since the late 18th century, a sort of equivalence between linear time and cyclical time: it is expressed in the form of Fourier series.) Even the relationship between time and entropy is mentioned. The author insists on stressing the link between the story and his musings about time, yet—in my view—the connection is tenuous.

I appreciate the author's asides on Danish educational theories. Having been an educator for over 50 years, I would agree with what I think Mr. Høeg wants to stress: that no educational approach will work for all students and that the emphasis must always be on the student rather than on the method.

Towards the end of the book, a major twist in the plot of the children's story seems to be revealed. Yet, the author leaves it to be discovered by the reader.


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High Achiever: The Life and Climbs of Chris Bonington by Jim Curran
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Chris Bonington is the most famous British mountaineer and alpine climber. In 1970 he led the successful British expedition on the South Face of Annapurna, and in 1975 the expedition that he led conquered the South-West Face of Everest. His climbing record includes hundreds of peaks and extremely difficult routes on many continents.

On Goodreads, I reviewed Bonington's account of the 1970 expedition, titled Annapurna South Face. My interest in the British climber results from a slight personal connection. Almost half a century ago, I worked in a research group with Jan Wolf, a prominent Polish climber and mountaineer, who told me stories about Bonington's colorful persona.

High Achiever is a solid account of Bonington's life and climbing career. We read about his difficult childhood in a wartime, single-parent family and about the awakening fascination with mountains. We learn about his short British military career and follow his increasingly difficult climbs. Then comes the mature period, when he became one of the world's most accomplished climbers and a successful leader of large mountaineering expeditions.

The biography confirms my friend's stories about Bonington, particularly about his absent-mindedness and propensity for changing decisions. Yet it is a very sympathetic biography (Jim Curran, the author, participated in several adventures together with Mr. Bonington), and the reader gets the picture of a tough, strong-willed, yet sensitive and honest person with great organizational skills, equipped with a gift of perseverance until the task at hand is completed. Yes, there were some conflicts when he was leading large expeditions, yet, eventually, all sides agreed that his leadership was effective and his actions were most likely to achieve the goals.

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Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another outstanding novel from Jonathan Franzen, after The Corrections and Purity, which I reviewed here. The narration in Freedom spans over 20 years, and, superficially, it may be summarized as an account of an unusual romantic triangle of Patty, Walter, and Richard, combined with the stories of their children's generation.

The characterizations of the protagonists as well as their children are uniformly excellent. All of them are fully believable people whom I feel I might know in real life. For various reasons, I don't particularly like any of them, but this is irrelevant to evaluating a novel. However, even with masterly psychological portrayals, the most important aspect of the novel for me is that it captures the zeitgeist of the 2000s. I am fascinated by the author's insights into the unclean world where business meets politics and how lofty ideas may be perverted in pursuit of financial gain. Naturally, the narrative makes the reader think about the concept of freedom, its meaning, its dimensions, and its cost and consequences.

Inserting the autobiography of one of the main characters in the third-person narration that is used in other parts of the novel turns out to be a successful narrative device. There is one scene, set in Argentina, so utterly hilarious that I was laughing out loud even though it was about midnight.

So why not five stars? The main reason, for me, is that the world created by the author is too big. I believe trimming some tertiary characters and eliminating many events and relationships would not hurt the narrative or the realism of the story, and it would make the novel even more compulsively readable.

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Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a collection of 13 short stories, connected by the presence of an unforgettable character—the eponymous Olive. I find some stories ("Security," "Basket of Trips") truly outstanding, some just good, but overall this collection (I would not hesitate to call it a novel) had a powerful impact on me—I hope that my first book by Elizabeth Strout will not be the last.

The author writes about deeply human experiences, capturing the overwhelming sadness of existence while also conveying our 'greediness for life.' Despite the pain of crushed hopes, despite paralyzing loneliness, despite disappointment with people we love and need the most, despite painful realizations of 'what might have been,' we keep going, we keep clinging to life, we dare to hope for the future, and we keep searching for rare moments of happiness.

The edition of the book that I read contains two additional items written by the author: "A Reader's Guide" as well as a list of discussion items for book clubs. I have not read these. To me, a work of literary art should stand on its own. Ms. Strout conveyed her message clearly and skillfully in the book, and we should not need hints on how to read it.

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The Accidental by Ali Smith
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Let's begin with a short passage from the novel:
"God, those Bergman films were such hard work. They were beautiful. But impenetrable [...]"

If we ignore the bit about being beautiful, that's exactly how I feel about The Accidental. I am not patient enough (meaning I am too lazy) to work hard to translate the stream of consciousness of the novel's protagonists into my traditional, constrained way of interacting with literature. The low rating reflects my feeling of the text's impenetrability. Obviously, literary critics know better: the book was the winner of the Whitbread Award for Best Novel, and it was a Man Booker Prize finalist.

The novel is structured as a sequence of internal monologues of the four main characters (the family consisting of mother Eve, her husband Michael, son Magnus, and daughter Astrid), augmented by several rather cryptic interludes from an external narrator. I do appreciate the fact that each of the characters has their own inner monologue voice and that these voices differentiate the characters' perceptions of the events. I do appreciate the author's consistent focus on cinema and film art as well as on language itself (and on how the characters interact with language). While I much appreciate the puns and wordplay, the "poetry" sections or using mathematical terms in describing an intimate encounter do not quite work, in my view. The enigmatic conclusion seems to emphasize the cyclicity of human events.

In my simple-mindedness I question the need for the nontraditional narration while a conventional one would suffice. The events of that summer of 2003, when a mysterious stranger suddenly appeared in the life of a family vacationing in Norfolk, and how that stranger influenced each of the four family members and the family as a whole, are interesting enough to be portrayed by a traditional, omniscient narrator. The novel actually comes close to that in the penultimate monologue, which I felt as a relief.




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Purity by Jonathan Franzen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This review is biased by my preference for quality of the prose and mastery of characterizations (of people, times, and places) over the plot of the story that a novel tells.

I love the first two-thirds of Purity, where we get acquainted with the main characters: Pip (Purity), Andreas, Anabel, Tom, Annagret, and Leila. We meet Pip during the post-Occupy times in the Bay Area; the rendition of the atmosphere of these times is captivating. We read about Andreas' childhood and youth in the Soviet-controlled East Germany ("German Democratic Republic"), and we learn his secret. We follow the dramatic events surrounding the Wall coming down and the opening of the Stasi archives.

Andreas moves on to become the leader of The Sunshine Project, an outfit dedicated to exposing dark secrets of governments and corporations. The project is a fictional equivalent of Wikileaks, thus making Andreas a fictional counterpart of Julian Assange. We also meet Anabel, whose characterization I find phenomenal. She became one of the most vivid characters I have ever met in a novel. I feel like I have personally known Anabel for many, many years. Also worth noting is the author's insightful representation of the seemingly illogical mixture of true love and real hate that can bond some couples.

Alas, I don't like the last one-third of the novel. That's where my bias shows. In my opinion, the author stopped paying attention to convincingly depicting the world he created and focused on elegantly and satisfyingly wrapping up the plot and untangling its major and minor twists. The sense of closure is only illusory. Or maybe... maybe the novel is just a little too long for my taste...

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Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Grady Tripp, a novelist and a writing professor at a liberal arts college, is working on his magnum opus novel (the manuscript is already 2600 pages long), but his efforts are hindered by the phenomenon that the more he writes, the less completed the novel gets. We follow Grady's riveting first-person narration of the events of just one long weekend during a writing festival/workshop. These events will end up pivotal in the lives of the main characters.

The first half of the novel is brilliantly plotted, quick, and utterly hilarious. The second half is a bit of a letdown; it feels markedly slower and less exciting. But it is only because the first half sets the bar so high and because it always takes more time to untie the tight, intricate knots of the plot than to tie them. And the author masterfully unravels all plot twists, and all's well that ends well, except for poor Doctor Dee.

As we follow the events of that extraordinary weekend, it is obvious that the author knows a lot about our human weaknesses: self-centeredness, pretentiousness, hypocrisy, various addictions, etc. The prose is wonderful: effortless, vivid, and humorous. Here's a sample:

"A handsome young family was crossing the street in front of us, a slender pair of blond parents in khaki and plaid surrounded by an orderly tangle of cute blond replicant children. Two of the children swung sparkling bags of goldfish. The sun lit the flyaway ends of their hair. Everyone was holding hands. They looked like an advertisment for a brand of mild laxative or the Seventh-Day Adventists. The mother carried a golden-haired baby in her arms and the father was actually smoking a briar pipe."

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Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a charming, loving, beautifully written memoir of the Ondaatje family in Sri Lanka (Ceylon). The author left his native country when he was 11 and returned after 25 years to immerse himself in the family history and to preserve it for his own family. Memories, memories of memories, and imagined memories blend with the sights, sounds, and smells of his childhood, thus reflecting one of the most powerful human urges—yearning to return to the past.

The recreation of the author's parents and grandparents' past is not linear; the book is a collection of vignettes written in poetic prose, reproductions of photographs, and even poems. The stories of the author's grandmother and of his father are captivating, and their portraits are so vivid that the reader has a feeling of knowing these extraordinary, if flawed, people.

Here's an evocative fragment of the last vignette: "My body must remember everything, this brief insect bite, smell of wet fruit, the slow snail light, rain, rain, and underneath the hint of colours a sound of furious wet birds whose range of mimicry includes what one imagines to be large beasts, trains, burning electricity. Dark trees, the mildewed garden wall, the slow air pinned down by rain. Above me the fan's continual dazzling of its hand. When I turn on the light, the bulb on the long three-foot cord will sway to the electrical breeze making my shadow move back and forth on the wall."


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A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the seventh book by Julian Barnes that I am reviewing here, with The Sense of an Ending being, in my view, the best. In comparison, A History of the World, a collection of 10 short stories (chapters) plus an essay about love, seems to work only partially.

Many of the stories are thematically linked: Noah's Ark and ocean travel are recurring motifs. Also, there is another, humorously amusing connection between the chapters: the motif of a particular species of invertebrate animal, which appears in most stories.

Alas, not all stories—maybe through a fault of mine—resonate with me. I like the chapter titled Project Ararat the best: a story of an astronaut who, while walking on the moon, hears God's voice telling him to find Noah's Ark's final resting place. I find the chapter titled The Wars of Religion hilarious. The author produces authentically sounding legal documents—plaintiff's pleadings, defendant lawyers' responses, plaintiff's responses to responses, etc.—from the year 1520 to create an almost complete documentation of court proceedings against that particular species of invertebrate animal.

In one of the chapters, the author tells the depressing story of the St. Louis liner, on which over 900 Jewish refugees tried to escape from Hitler's Germany in May of 1939. Cuba and then the US refused to admit the refugees, and the liner had to return to Europe, where several countries, after long negotiations, finally accepted them.

Let me also mention what I think is a rare occurrence in a paperback. The story Shipwreck comes with a centerfold color reproduction of the famous painting Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault.

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The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Maybe I am weird, but I don't like reading detailed descriptions of premeditated killings of children by other children or accounts of torturing and slaughtering living things—dogs, birds, or even insects. I am not particularly fond of reading about maggots feasting on living brain tissue. So I had a hard time finishing The Wasp Factory. However, I persevered until I reached the last page, which was thankfully numbered lower than 200.

Yes, I do appreciate the monumental plot twist revealed at the very end. Yes, I have to admit that a well-intentioned reader might decide that the novel contributes to the discussion of issues such as mental health, nature vs. nurture, gender, etc. Yes, I do agree that one can find the descriptions of the Factory itself and the protagonist's thought processes fascinating. Yes, with a giant leap of faith, one can even read the novel as a parody, a very sick joke. So I am certainly unable to opine that the book is as bad as, say, Fight Club by Palahniuk or Steps by Kosinski. However, with the understanding that I may be completely wrong, I prefer to read the novel as the author's effort to make a name for himself by sheer shock value.

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Kepler by John Banville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this fictionalized biography of Johannes Kepler, the most important astronomer and mathematician of the early 17th century, with considerable interest. Kepler's laws of planetary motion are a standard topic of the Calculus III course, which I frequently teach. John Banville, the author, is one of my favorite writers (I rated two of his novels, The Untouchable and The Sea, with five stars). However, my feelings about Kepler are quite mixed.

I adore the way Banville explains the astronomer's mathematical work. Kepler embarks on a quest to find a mathematical model that would best fit the experimental data, which could be used as a definition of the main goal of data science. The following fragment neatly characterizes the method of mathematical modeling: "The real mystery & miracle is not that numbers have effect upon things (which they do not!), but that they can express the nature of things; that the world, vast & various & seemingly ruled by chance, is amenable in its basic laws to the rigorous precision & order of mathematics."

The astronomer's quest to find these laws succeeded. Banville writes about Kepler's discovery: "The conclusion was, simply, that the planet's path curves inward on both sides, and outwards again at opposite ends. This oval figure, I readily admit, terrified me. It went against that dogma of circular motion, to which astronomers have held since the first beginnings of our science." That the shape of planets' trajectories is elliptical became Kepler's first law of planetary motion.

However, although Banville's prose is, as usual, wonderful, I have reservations about a literary device used by the author. A long period of Kepler's middle-age years is presented via his letters to fellow astronomers, friends, family, and others. To me, not only does it diminish the consistency of the narrative, but also the fact that the letters are fictitious while actual letters are available (for instance, in the Oxford University catalogue) reduces the credibility and impact of the story. Maybe I am overreacting; maybe when I completely digest my reading of this biography, I will change my mind and assign it a higher rating.

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Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin by Alice Echols
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fabulous read! Not only is it a great biography of Janis Joplin, but also—to use the author's phrasing—it is "a cultural history of the time in which she lived," which, to me, is more important. I came of age during the 1960s—not in the US, but certainly under the influence of American culture—and in my view Alice Echols's book offers the best "cultural history" of the Sixties of all similar books that I have read. No wonder: the author, an eminent history professor at USC, is considered an expert on the culture of that turbulent decade.

James Gurley, a musician quoted by the author, offers the following witty remark about the Sixties: "When you think of history, you think it was just like now, only then. But life was different then." Yes, really different! More different from any other decade than any other decade. As silly and as clichéd as it may sound, what another musician, Michael Bloomfield, said from the stage "This is our generation, man. All you people, man, all together, man, it's groovy. Dig yourselves 'coz it's really groovy..." gives an apt characterization of the revolution that turned the strait-laced Fifties into the Love Generation of the Sixties and culminated with the Summer of Love 1967. A New Man was born, all loving, all generous, permanently stoned, and living totally in the present without a care in the world about the past or the future, about politics, money, or jobs; the most important thing being the music, the music of love, the music of freedom.

And then there is Janis Joplin, one of the musical idols of my late teens, a genius of vocal art, by far the greatest female blues/rock singer of all time (if you don't believe me, listen to any of the live performances available on YouTube, for instance, songs like "Summertime", "Little Girl Blue", "Ball and Chain", "Maybe", etc.) The author narrates Joplin's tragically short life in minute detail, yet tactfully, avoiding cheap sensationalism characteristic of many other rock stars' biographies. Joplin's permanent struggle with the conflict between her powerful ambition and major insecurities leads to unfathomably heavy hard-drug use and, consequently, to her death. The author writes, "The world she moved in encouraged her addictions, with its commitment to living on the edge and beyond limits—its dedication to recklessness as a matter of principle. And Janis Joplin was that principle writ large."

In the words of the author, "[...] when Janis sang you could hear her awe and delight at breaking all the rules. In her music, I heard freedom, which was what she longed to communicate." In the presence of all human failings and weaknesses, that freedom carried the seeds of its own destruction.

In a sense, Janis Joplin's death symbolizes the death of the Love Generation. Ms. Echols writes, "America was transformed in the 1960s, but the exhilaration of changing the culture [...] was matched by shattering personal defeat. This is the hidden story of the decade, the underside of the counterculture."

This account of Janis Joplin's life is exhaustively referenced: over 70 pages of annotations. The expressive title of the book is a paraphrase of Bob Dylan's song lyrics.

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Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood by Eric Burdon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Animals, a famous British rock band, was formed in 1962. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Animals were the Big Three bands in the early 1960s rock music, and they made up the first wave of the so-called British Invasion in the U.S. In those times I did not care much about The Beatles, who were too well-behaved, too "nice" for my rebellious teenage soul, I liked only some songs by The Rolling Stones, but I loved The Animals, with their dark, heavy, powerful, bluesy songs like It's My Life, House of the Rising Sun, and Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood. I still have vivid memories of listening to their music for hours and hours in 1965 and 1966.

Eric Burdon was the singer and one of the founders of the early 1960s band, and the book is his autobiography, co-written with J. Marshall Craig. Mr. Burdon has led more than 10 groups since The Animals disbanded in 1966, the most famous being War and the Eric Burdon Band, as well as many reincarnations of The Animals. He also has a distinguished solo career. I am happy to write that as of August of 2024, at the age of 83, he was still active as a singer.

I read the first chapters, which focus on the early 1960s period, with great interest. My interest faded quite a bit as I went on, partly because of the flood of small details, persistent name-dropping, and descriptions of a rock star's heavy lifestyle, including near-permanent drug use. However, there is one motif that captivated my attention. Mr. Burdon describes how he was cheated out of the money he earned by the so-called music industry. I did not count, but I vouch there are at least 20 mentions of the music business people swindling the rightful earnings from the artist. Here's an early quote from the book:

"The nightmare part of the rock 'n' roll dream is the business -- the money. The Beatles got ripped-off, even the savvy Mick Jagger and the Stones got screwed out of royalties in the early 1970s. The rock 'n' roll highway is dotted with little white crosses marking the casualties, some literal, many more financial."


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Three Fires by Denise Mina
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Denise Mina is one of my most favorite authors of crime novels. I highly rated several of her books, two of them even with five stars. Three Fires is not a mystery novel; it is a novella that recounts the story of Girolamo Savonarola's life. Savonarola, a 15th-century monk, preacher, and prophet, was one of the most influential people in northern Italy and—in the 1490s—the de facto leader of Florence (at that time Italy was not one country but a loose collection of independent city-states and other entities, governed by dukes or the Pope). The novella is bracketed by the accounts of Savonarola's conviction and his execution.

It seems to me—from what I can read in outlines of Italian history—that the degree of fictionalization of Savonarola's life is not significant. Denise Mina uses very modern language in telling this over 500-year-old story, which may cause an interesting literary cognitive discordance when reading. While I find the novella moderately absorbing, the penultimate paragraph sends a powerful and timely message to the contemporary reader:

"The oratorial tricks and ticks Savonarola learned during his years in the wilderness are monkied by populists to this day: opposing scientific evidence with faith, strong leaders offering intoxicating absolutes who will not be questioned, who deflect dissent with grim warnings of enemies within and without. Followers will again reject the evidence of their eyes to enjoy the luxury of belonging, ignore the despotism they support in the name of decency and national pride [...]"

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My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ostensibly a sweet, charming fairy tale about the importance of fairy tales, the novel focuses on the conflict between an ideal world of a child and the ugly, real world of adults, with all their sins of the past. A precocious, know-it-all, almost-eight-year-old Elsa is mainly raised by her unconventional Granny; both are very different from their peers. Only people different than others can make a difference, the author seems to be saying.
I was enchanted with the whimsical sweetness of the novel for about 150 pages, then—alas—it overstayed its welcome. A delightful fairy tale turned into a second-rate mystery. The tedious uncovering of past secrets of the grown-ups eventually irritated me to the extent that I wanted to toss the book.
To end on a positive note, a nice passage from the novel:
"It's snowing again, and Elsa decides that even if people she likes have been shits on earlier occasions, she has to learn to carry on liking them. You'd quickly run out of people if you had to disqualify all those who at some point have been shits. She thinks that this will have to be the moral of this story."

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The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An extraordinary novel about the dynamics of a two-generational American family in the waning years of the 20th century. Thoroughly realistic, it shows an incisive portrayal of American society. The depth of character analysis and insightful depiction of social mechanisms remind me of Tolstoy's or Flaubert's best writing.

This long, sad, yet very funny novel offers so much! From the detailed analysis of marital crises and rituals of hostility between long-term couples, through investigation of Lithuanian society's transition from a directive-driven to a market economy, an unforgettable hallucinatory scene of a fight against feces, quotes from Schopenhauer and Aristotle, explorations of stock market bubble and bust mechanisms, highly metaphorical love scenes, the effects of Parkinson's disease on the human brain, haute cuisine preparation and presentation, a stinging caricature of the business side of the medical and pharmaceutical industry, to mathematical analysis of popular music. But most importantly, the novel is full of completely believable people, people who I could swear are real and whom I know well.

I love Mr. Franzen's writing style: metaphor-rich, intricate yet elegant, and incredibly erudite in each subject matter. How not to love the author's fun with using the word 'corrections' so many times in the novel, each time in a different context?

I realize that while many of us are interested in literature as, primarily, the advancement of a plot, as a story it tells, I am mainly interested in the writing, the prose, and the use of language itself. Thus, probably not everybody will be in utter awe — as I am — of the following passage:
"Alfred, by the phone, was studying the clock above the sink. The time was that malignant fiveishness to which the flu sufferer awakens after late afternoon fever dreams. A time shortly after five which was a mockery of five. To the face of clocks the relief of order - two hands pointing squarely at whole numbers - came only once an hour. As every other moment failed to square, so every moment held the potential of fluish misery."

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Tenth of December by George Saunders
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I apologize for my apparent lack of literary sophistication, but I have not been able to much enjoy George Saunders' acclaimed collection of short stories "Tenth of December." I just don't like the author's writing style; his use of language does not resonate with my sense of what constitutes good prose. While reading Ishiguro, Banville, Coetzee is a deep aesthetic experience for me, reading this collection by Saunders was a hard job, quite irritating at times.

The eponymous last story is the only one I really like. I actually enjoyed the prose, devoid of strange affectations present in other stories. More importantly, the story tells us something about real human beings, about our motives, fears, and weaknesses.

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Hilbert by Constance Bowman Reid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

David Hilbert (1862-1943) was one of the most important mathematicians in history. He significantly contributed to an incredibly wide range of research fields in mathematics, most notably to the foundations of mathematics and mathematical logic. Perhaps his most spectacular achievement was to formulate, in 1900, a list of 23 mathematical research problems, which inspired and influenced thousands of 20th-century mathematicians.

The author, Constance Reid, a non-mathematician, does a very good job writing about mathematics. The biography also provides a great account of Hilbert’s life, his human side, and his friendships, particularly with Hermann Minkowski. The reader will also learn how David Hilbert had made the mathematics department of the University of Gottingen the world center of the mathematical thought, before Hitler came to power and destroyed everything.

(I have the faintest personal connection to Hilbert: he had been the doctoral advisor of Hugo Steinhaus, who had been the advisor of Jan Oderfeld, who was my advisor.)

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Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Kingsley Amis' 1954 novel is a humorous take on the professional and romantic plight of a history lecturer in a probationary position at a provincial university in England. Several scenes are side-splittingly funny: the incident with the destruction of bedding in a senior professor's guest bedroom made me laugh hysterically for several minutes. In addition, we get sharp satire of university life and human foibles in general.

(It is totally my fault - not the author's - that I dislike his writing style with its abundance of dialogues and overflow of words. Maybe I should have waited a few weeks after reading the brilliant prose of Ishiguro, Coetzee, and Banville.)

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The Untouchable by John Banville
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Another near masterpiece, which does not leave me a choice about the rating. Mr. Banville presents the life story of Victor Maskell (Anthony Blunt in real life), one of the "Cambridge Five", a ring of spies working in Great Britain for the Soviet Union in 1930s to 1950s.

To me, the central question the novel is why men of the highest privilege embraced the Soviet-flavored Marxist ideology. Why was an upper-class, Cambridge-educated intellectual, an eminent art historian, and a relative of the royal family eager to pass information to the Soviets?

There is so much more: nearly clinical observations of human psychology, questions on the nature of one's identity, even a glimpse into the closeted gay world of the times. But first and foremost, there is the brilliant prose. I kept re-reading many, many passages to savor the stunningly gorgeous English.

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The Pole and Other Stories by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The eponymous novella is a beautiful love story about two people, whose joint age far exceeds 100 years. J.M. Coetzee, who was 82 when the collection was published, is in top form in "The Pole," but the novella will most likely resonate with readers born close to the middle of the previous century. In my view, the remaining five stories in the collection do not match the excellence of "The Pole."

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