What I'm Reading: Murder on the Orient Express

Okay, I think this one is pretty well-known: Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie. Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective who works in London, has just finished solving a case for the French Army in Syria, and is now on his way back home, though he plans to spend a few days sight-seeing in Istanbul. In Istanbul, he receives a telegram that a case in London that's been on the backburner has just had a big breakthrough and he needs to hurry back.

He books a ticket on the Orient Express, and is surprised to find all the sleeping car is filled. This is unusual because it's deep winter, when the train is usually not full. Even his friend, Monsieur Bouc, an official in the train company who happens to be riding with him, is not able to get him a sleeping berth. Only when a passenger doesn't show up at the last minute is Poirot able to secure a place.

It's an unusual collection of people riding, from all over--Americans, English, Italians, Swedes--all of whom coincidentally wanted to take the train at the same time. After Poirot goes to sleep, he hears a shout and a muffled thump against the door. He looks in the passageway and sees only a woman in a scarlet kimono (though he can't see her face) and the conductor for the sleeping car, who seems to be taking care of matters. Later, Poirot realizes the train has stopped and hasn't moved for some time.

In the morning, he wakens to discover first that the train is stuck in a snowdrift in the mountains in Yugoslavia--it could be days before they get moving again, and second, that one of the passengers has been murdered. The murderer must still be on the train. At Monsieur Bouc's urging, Poirot agrees to take the case, and begins searching for clues and interviewing the passengers. Of course, it would be nice to find the murderer, in case he (or she) plans to strike again....

This is one I'd never read, although of course I knew the famous ending ahead of time. (I won't give it away for those who might not have heard.) Still, the twists to get there were well worth reading, with plenty of false leads and clues hidden in plain sight. Monsieur Poirot specializes in psychological analysis, and the way he gets the truth out of those who might wish to hide it is ingenious. All in all, a fun novel with a lot of style.

What I'm Reading: Tom Brown's Schooldays

Hmm, I've just finished a book about an average English boy who gets called away to a special private school. When he arrives there, he's accepted to one of several houses that each have their own special character. He's not so hot academically and often gets in trouble with his small group of schoolmates, but finds acceptance in the school by proving himself on the field playing the school's favorite sport. After several years at the school, he defeats great evil, becomes friends with the wise school head, and to everybody's surprise, graduates an accomplished young man ready to face the world.

So I must be getting into the Harry Potter series, right? Not at all! The book in question is Tom Brown's Schooldays, by Thomas Hughes, written in 1857 and set in the 1830s at Rugby School in Warwickshire, England. Actually, besides being a direct and acknowledged inspiration for J.K. Rowling's fantasy books, it also set off a fad in private school novels in England after its publication. Apparently, it was also immensely popular in Japan in the 1890s, and there have been at least five film versions. Actually, Tom Brown's Schooldays may be one of the most influential books ever published, at least if judging by the number of works it's inspired.

So I've described the general plot above, but more specifically, Tom Brown arrives at Rugby school when he's eleven and joins the Schoolhouse, one of several houses. His first year goes well, but in the second year, some of the sixth-form boys (the oldest boys, probably 17-19 years old) who had kept peace and order in the house have graduated, and the new lot is not as well respected. A rather nasty fifth-former (15-16 year olds), Flashman, and his buddies find that there is no one to stop them bullying and demanding service from the younger boys. It's up to Tom to lead a revolt by the younger boys against the bullying, which brings him to Flashman's particular and unwelcome attention. It's only after Tom is roasted over a fire by Flashman and his cronies in a harrowing scene that some of the older boys turn against Flashman and order gets restored.

That's the first half of the novel. The second half concerns Tom's befriending a small and sickly boy newly arrived at the school named Arthur. At first, Tom's main concern is making sure the new boy doesn't get bullied the way he was, but over time, Arthur's studiousness and religious devotion rub off on Tom, and as they get into the upper grades, it's Arthur who becomes the greater influence on Tom. The climax of the book comes when an epidemic sweeps through the school and a number of boys fall ill, including Arthur.

I found Tom Brown's Schooldays to be fairly delightful, and I think anybody who enjoys Harry Potter and is able to look beyond the magic to the story underneath would also enjoy Tom Brown. At the time it was written, Thomas Hughes explicitly aimed the book at teen-agers, so it was the YA of its period. The nineteenth-century language might make it a bit tougher for today's teens, although it's by no means a difficult read. It does get off to a slow start though, with the first chapter basically dedicated to a description of the landscape around Tom's home town. Skip the first chapter to get right into the story and this might be a good choice for a Harry Potter fan who wonders what to read after The Deathly Hallows is over.

What I'm Reading: The King's Best Highway

The King's Best Highway is a history of what was once called the Boston Post Road--the road from New York to Boston that developed in colonial times from a series of Indian trails, became the most important and trafficked road in America in the 19th century, and still exists in piecemeal form, largely as the modern Route 1.

Lots of interesting stuff in here. I thought the two best chapters were the early one on how the road's early improvements were largely driven by Benjamin Franklin in the 1760s, when he headed the colonial postal service (hence, the name of the road at the time), and a later one on how after a period of decline when the railroads outcompeted them, the old highway system returned to prominence in the 1890s during the national craze for the bicycle.

In fact, it was these improvements to the road system driven by bicycle enthusiasts that literally paved the way for the automobile to flourish ten to twenty years later. Not to mention that much of the early automobile industry was located along the Boston Post Road, in the factories and workshops that made bicycle components in Connecticut and Massachusetts. If not for Henry Ford's production innovations in Detroit, the US auto industry may very well have ended up in New England.

So this book is more than just a history of a highway, it's also a history of America from a certain perspective. All sorts of historical figures march, ride, or drive their way through this book, often in roles we don't normally associate with them--P.T. Barnum as a state congressman in Connecticut fighting for road improvements so more people can travel and visit his Manhattan museum, for instance. We also see George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Robert Moses, J.P. Morgan, and plenty of other lesser-known but still important figures.

Yet somehow I don't feel like this rises to the level of one of my "Shortcuts to Smartness" books. While the topic is right up my alley ("A book about a highway! Cool!" I said upon first seeing this), it's probably too narrow a topic for the general reader. For those interested in the histories of cities, infrastructure, or transport, it's appeal will be evident. For others, this is probably one you could skip.

What I'm Reading: Round-Up

My family is taking a fun trip to Mexico over Christmas break, and I've been practicing my Spanish! I've been listening to the Pimsleur CDs from the library (up to Level 5!) and reading books from the "Easy Readers" series. This is a series of actual Spanish literary works simplified down to certain specified levels--Level A requires a vocabulary of about 600 words to read (not to brag, but these are way too easy for me), Level B a vocabulary of about 1,200 words (this is a bit easy for me), Level C about 2,000 words (these are challenging for me, but a good challenge and probably what I should stick to), and Level D about 2,500 words (haven't tried yet and almost certainly beyond my skill level).


Las Inquietudes de Shanti Andia A Level B book by Pio Baroja, originally written in the early 1900s and set around perhaps 1850, about a sailor named Santiago (Shanti for short) Andia. Shanti as a child dreams of working on one of the boats he sees from the waterfront in his small seaside town in the Basque region in northern Spain. As an adult, he finds work on the ships making three-year journeys from Spain to the Philippines and other destinations in the Far East. While at school to become a ship's captain in Cadiz, he finds romance with a beautiful but manipulative woman who promises to wait for him on his next journey so they can marry, but instead marries a rich man while he is away.

Disappointed and bereft, he returns to his hometown for a spell and gets involved in a complicated family mystery involving an uncle long thought lost at sea but perhaps still alive, the beautiful and good-hearted daughter of a dying family friend, and an evil wealthy merchant who wishes to marry the daughter and will stop at nothing--including kidnapping and murder--to get Shanti out of the way when he tries to protect her.

I read this book several years ago and so enjoyed its ocean-faring adventures that I returned to it again, with much satisfaction.


Historias de la Artamila  A Level C book by Ana Maria Matute first published in 1961. This is a book of short stories set in the fictional village of Artamila, probably around 1920. Artamila is an impoverished and conservative village set in a remote valley where the modern world barely intrudes, other than an occasional car from the big city. The unifying factor is a young girl, the ten-year-old daughter of one of the town's few wealthy men, who occasionally participates in, but mostly observes, the daily events that unfold in the town and its environs.

These stories are beautiful and sad, and often involve an outsider coming to the village and trying to change things for the better, only to find it's not possible. I think I had two favorites stories. The first was El Rey (The King), about a new teacher who comes to the local school and befriends a poor but imaginative boy in a wheelchair. When he discovers the boy doesn't expect to get anything for Christmas, he promises that the Three Wise Men will deliver gifts to him, planning to dress up himself as a Wise Man and make a special delivery to his house. Only the boy's imagination proves more expansive than the teacher's resources, and the teacher gives up the plan when he discovers the boy believes his special visitors will be able to conjure up a magical abundance of toys and treats.

The other of my favorites was Los Pajaros (The Birds), about a lame boy who lives with his father outside of the town. Because the father is the game warden in the woods and thus not popular with the residents, the boy leads a lonely life, and the little girl who is in all the stories meets him when she trips and injures herself on a walk outside of town one day. She must spend the day with the boy, who has learned to climb a rope ladder to the high branches of a tall tree and whistle so that birds come and settle around him and even land on his outstretched arms. Later, when the boy dies of the same illness that causes his lameness (polio?), his father sells the boy's clothes for money. Only the little girl knows why the scarecrow that is clothed in these remnants attracts birds to the field, rather than scares them away.


Breaking Out of Beginner's Spanish Finally, this one is not an "Easy Reader" but rather a non-fiction book that is just what it's title promises. Not really the kind of book you read from cover to cover, but instead the best way to go seems to be to pick out the sections that seem most useful for an individual reader. For me, these were parts of the chapters on "tricksters" (i.e. false cognates, or words that appear to be similar to English words but mean something different), "which is which" (ideas with multiple words to express them in Spanish, each with various connotations), and pretty much the entirety of the "cranking up your Spanish" chapter (with small, easily overlooked words or phrases that might not be in your textbooks but are critical to sounding fluent--the Spanish equivalents of well, I mean, you see, so anyhow, etc.).

What I'm Reading: Action Philosophers

Okay, I have one more horror movie to review for the season, but first let's get to a book I recently finished, Action Philosophers, a non-fiction graphic novel providing biographies of forty philosophers, from Ancient Greece to the contemporary world. This book is awfully charming, with cartoony but detailed art from Ryan Dunlavey that adapts itself to each era and location--appearing Chinese for Confucius and Lao Tzu, for instance, or medieval Jewish for Spinoza. The art and dialogue (by writer Fred Van Lente) are clever and fast-paced to the point of hyperactivity, providing a wealth of information but also nearly non-stop humorous references to pop culture, history, other jokes from earlier in the book, even the authors themselves.

I think my favorite philosopher in the book is John Stuart Mill, presented in the style of Peanuts. J.S. Mill is Charlie Brown, with adorable little 19th century sideburns on his bald head, espousing his Utilitarianism to the other skeptical characters. His attempt to teach virtue to Snoopy, who keeps trying to steal the blanket of Jeremy Bentham (in the guise of Linus), is a particular highlight.

And yet, despite the pervading jokiness, the core of the book is serious. This is a real history of philosophy told through a biographic framework, clearly showing how each new era of philosophers have expanded, synthesized, or rejected the work of their predecessors. It starts with the pre-Socratics and ends with Jacques Derrida, and is fairly brilliant at cogently demonstrating in words and pictures even such difficult concepts as the analytic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In fact, I'm giving this book one of my coveted Shortcuts to Smartness awards! A Shortcut to Smartness book is one that "so expands your knowledge and understanding in so many areas that it is like a college course in and of itself," and I think that works here. It's graphic novel form would make this readable even for high school students, as it breaks down lots of highly complex ideas to a level that practically anyone could understand. And they would have a lot of fun in learning those ideas, too!

What I'm Reading: Roundup

On Free Comic Book Day back in May, I picked up some of the sale books at my local comic shop. Let's go over a couple of those:

The Building Starting in 1978 with his A Contract With God, Will Eisner, already a legendary comic artist, pioneered what we now call graphic novels. He did about one a year until his death, mostly stories set in New York ethnic neighborhoods.

In The Building, Eisner interweaves four stories of characters attached to a 1920s Bronx highrise that's being torn down to make way for a modern office tower: an anonymous clerk who turns to helping children any way he can after a terrible accident, a former beauty queen who falls in love with a penniless poet, a ruthless real estate developer whose one sentimental attachment leads to a bad business decision, and an amateur violinist who always dreamed of playing music for a career. On the day the new building opens for business, the four have recently died, but their legacies (and possibly ghosts?) combine for one final surprising episode.

The only other of his graphic novels I've read is A Contract With God, which struck me as beautiful and profound. The Building is similar in form, with the interweaving stories and the same ethnic New York setting, but somehow this was thin and fairly predictable compared to that earlier book. I did like the story of the former beauty queen, Gilda Greene, who eventually settles for a conventional marriage to a wealthy man but never falls out of love with her poet. But overall, I didn't think this lived up to Eisner's first graphic novel. I'm not sure if I'll bother with any of his others at this point.

American Splendor: Another Day Harvey Pekar, who kept his day job as a file clerk at a Cleveland Veteran's hospital nearly until the end of his life, was for decades one of the most important underground comics creators. (I wrote about the American Splendor movie based on his comics and life here.) Harvey didn't believe in superheroes, fantasy, or power trips--his stories are all about the everyday problems of him and his friends. Neurotic, chronically short of money and self-confidence, but with a tremendous empathy for others, Harvey makes his way through his comics just trying to do the best he can.

This volume is from a period in the early 2000s I wasn't previously familiar with. After three decades of self-publishing his comics, Harvey did a four issue series with DC's Vertigo imprint. Other than possibly somewhat better production values, it's about the same as everything else of his I've read, though--closely observed stories of the small victories and defeats of his life, beautifully drawn by a variety of top underground comic artists. (Harvey only wrote the comics, but he had a who's who of established and up-and-coming underground pencilers and inkers in his rolodex, including in this volume Richard Corben, Bob Fingerman, Gilbert Hernandez, Chris Samnee, and many others.)

I think my favorite story in Another Day was the episode where he spent an entire Saturday trying to unclog a toilet, constantly on the verge of defeat and ready to call a plumber, but thinking through the problem and trying one new thing after another. Finally, after hours, he succeeds, and as the toilet successfully flushes, he lifts the plunger above his head and cries out, "Today, I am a man!"

I can heartily recommend this to practically anybody from teenagers on up (some profanity might make this unsuitable for younger readers, though, who are also likely to find the subject matter boring.) But if this volume isn't available, that's not too important. Practically anything by Pekar is more or less the same, but all more or less great.

What I'm Reading: 84 Paws: A Life with Old Labs

I've read another book by a fellow Writers of Chantilly author, this one titled 84 Paws: A Life with Old Labs, by Barbara Travis Osgood. This one is a memoir about Barbara's life with mental illness, and her life with a series of rescued Labrador Retrievers (twenty-one in total), and how adopting the dogs over the past twenty years or so has helped her overcome depression and despair to achieve a measure of peace in her life.

Each chapter tells the story of one of the dogs, often with a lesson Barbara learned from the dog about living her own life. One of my favorite chapters was about Hope, a female chocolate lab who had been a backyard breeder until her owners had no use for her anymore. When Barbara adopted her, she expected to find a defeated dog, ground down by the difficulties of bearing litter after litter, like many other abused breeders she had seen. But Hope was not that dog--Hope bore herself upright, with dignity, and instantly became the leader among the four dogs at Barbara's house. The other dogs instinctively knew to let Hope have her way in eating first, hopping up on the best spot on the bed, or any other doggy privilege. Hope never growled or bared her teeth, but when a younger rescue dog came temporarily to the house and tried to go first in the food line, Hope had him flipped on his back before he knew what was happening. In Hope, Barbara saw a model of perseverance for dealing with her own problems.

There are plenty of other dogs too--Raleigh, the ambassador, who made friends with everybody on their walks, including a homeless man who slept on a bench near a local shopping center; playful Buddy, who despite his advanced age and a history of neglect involved everyone in chases and games; curious Molly, another backyard breeder who has to know about everything going on and refuses to let her past burden her present.

This is an easy book to recommend to nearly everybody. In fact, I left the book lying on a table in my house one day, and with no prompting at all, my son and daughter started reading it and trading it back and forth to each other to compare notes on their favorite dogs. (That's one reason I'm only reviewing it now despite having bought it when Barbara published it last spring--it keeps disappearing in my daughter's room so she can read it!) The beautifully simple prose is complemented by one or more pictures of the dog in question in each chapter, with a gallery of dog photos at the end. It can be read beginning to end, or flipped through for a chapter here and there with equal satisfaction. And as much as the dogs have been a salve for Barbara, I think reading her wise stories of them may also prove a salve for a reader in need of healing, or at least a pick-me-up after a bad day.

What I'm Reading: Timaeus and Critias

I'm behind on logging my reading. Let's start with Plato's Timaeus and Critias, twin works that take place on the same day. Although Socrates is a character, as usual in Plato's dialogues, he does not take a starring role in these two. Rather, his young friends Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates, describing how they were inspired by the speech Socrates gave the day before on the ideal city (with Timaeus giving a summary of the speech that sounds an awful lot like The Republic, which I reviewed here), have taken it upon themselves to come up with speeches of their own.

Socrates is delighted at this, and agrees to listen. Timaeus is to give an account of the origin and nature of the universe, and Critias is to describe the ancient lost city of Atlantis and its war against a city much like that in the Republic: an idealized prehistorical version of Athens. However, only Timaeus finishes his speech. Critias's leaves off in the middle. This is not because, as happens far too often with ancient texts, we are missing the last part. No, we know that it was missing in ancient times too--Plato simply never finished it. Nor did he apparently ever get to the speech of Hermocrates, so we don't even know what the topic of the final speech was going to be.

Anyway, back to Timaeus's speech, which of course comprises the dialogue with his name. Timaeus attempts to do no less than describe the creation and fundamental nature of the universe. The Greeks believed there were four elements--earth, air, water, and fire--but in Timaeus's conception, these elements were formless until a creator came along and shaped them into the universe as we know it. Because the creator would have to be perfect, of course he would create a perfect universe, and it's only because he created the gods, and then the gods created humans, that we are less than perfect, as we're pretty far down the chain, and made later, after the best and most perfect of the raw materials had been all used up. But while our bodies are imperfect, we do have one perfect part--our souls, and if we act as close to divine as possible while on earth, meaning rationally, after our death our souls will go and join the divine among the stars.

Well, there's a lot more than that in Timaeus's speech, all about how the universe is made up of triangles (interestingly, this comes off as sort of a primitive atomic theory), and how these fit together to create the four elements, and how the four elements themselves join to create all the different substances and materials we find in nature, and the way in which our senses perceive things. Plato really attempts to sort things out here without resorting to mythology. For a modern reader, though, I'm not sure there's a lot to learn. Plato's other dialogues are more about ethics and living a meaningful life, and provide a lot to think about. His ideas about how the world works in a physical sense, however, have all been superseded by modern science and are little more than a historical curiosity.

Critias's speech is a lot more fun for a modern reader. It is about the lost city of Atlantis, the greatest city ever to exist, and how its people were overtaken by hubris and determined to conquer the world, only to be stopped by a highly virtuous city, the prehistoric Athens. The problem is, we only get ten pages of description, and never even make it to the war. The description is quite interesting though--Atlantis is a highly-engineered city, with a perfectly round island in the middle inhabited by its ruler and his family, surrounded by three perfectly circular rings of water, with perfectly circular rings of land in between them for the city's residents and public buildings. There is a massive covered bridge with a canal underneath so boats can reach each of the rings, and outside of the city the canal leads to the ocean. Everything is on a monumental scale and covered with silver and jewels and so forth, in such abundance that the citizens have no special care for it, except as pretty building materials. We also get interesting discussions of the type of physically and mentally superior people who live there (descendents of the gods) and how fertile the land is, and some of the amazing creatures and crops and orchards that grow there. But just when we're about to get to the action, it stops abruptly.

This was apparently the first mention of Atlantis in history, although it's presented in Critias's dialogue as being a vague legend everybody's heard of, but that his grandfather had learned the truth about on a visit to Egypt. In fact, we believe now that Plato made it up--Atlantis was pure fiction. That hasn't stopped people through the ages from trying to trace historical antecedents, or searching for the location of this mysterious sunken city. Even today, there's still apparently some scholarly debate on whether there might not have been some kind of legend that Plato based this on, and that maybe we've simply lost the sources for? But that's most likely wishful thinking.

I've tried to read some Plato (or last summer, Xenophon) every year for the past several years. When people have seen me reading it, they often say something like, "Isn't that really difficult to read?" And the answer, until now, has been no. They're just dialogues, meaning conversations, among Socrates and his companions. They're not hard to read and they're often kind of humorous. I don't think I can say the same about Timaeus. There's a lot of geometry and long chains of logic in it as Plato tries to explain his somewhat esoteric theories about the universe, and it took some real effort to follow. Nor was it that rewarding, as, like I said, science by now has passed Plato by. Critias, however, was a fun read on a subject that's since driven a lot of speculation, although it was disappointing that it ended in the middle. I don't think I could recommend these two works except to people with a truly endless interest in ancient Greece or ancient philosophy.

What I'm Reading: This Is Not a Love Scene

What a treat, a book by my fellow Writers of Chantilly writer, S.C. Megale! This Is Not a Love Scene is Megale's first published novel, although she's well known at the writer's group table for a number of books she's read to us over several years, each done with passion and skill. Unlike most of what I've read from her before, which tended toward fantasy or science fiction, this novel is realistic and set in the contemporary era. It follows Maeve, an 18-year old senior in high school who is taking a film class and hopes to enroll the following year at UCLA in film. She's fallen in love, or at least lust, with the school's top actor, Cole Stone, who is tall and good-looking, and has come up with a film project for her class involving Cole for possibly mixed reasons. And, oh yes, Maeve is in a wheelchair with a degenerative spinal disease for which there's no cure.

Maeve has a disappointing dating history--boys who go out with her to be nice, but have no intention of becoming more involved with her. A succession of guys who are "just...not able to go there." Cole is different. He's hard to read--teasing, alternating between flirtatious and distant, often monosyllabic. But he also seems to have a real romantic interest in Maeve, and over a series of awkward (but funny!) dates and encounters, they gradually learn how to translate their mutual sexual desire into physical affection.

Maeve also has a close group of friends to help her out--BFF Mags, who's pretty and romantically experienced and unfortunately currently dating Nate, who resents the attention Maeve gets from his girlfriend; Elliott and KC, two fellow students in her film class; Quinten, an older man and retired FBI agent who lives at a local nursing home; and of course Francois, her faithful service dog.

Together, the friends help Maeve navigate the myriad adventures of an active, lusty, wheelchair-bound teenage girl--filming a fifteen-minute film project that requires multiple on-location shots, confronting the pushy local director of a special-needs camp who seems to think Maeve owes her involvement, acquiring the unusually delicious ice cream at a local store that was built before handicapped-accessible laws.

In the end, though, it's Maeve who has to help one of her friends in a dangerous situation when no one else can. Will she survive? Will she get accepted to UCLA so she can pursue her dream of directing movies? And most importantly, will she get laid by Cole Stone?

What I'm Reading: Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade

Medieval Cities, by French professor Henri Pirenne, was published in 1952 but is the synthesis and culmination of lectures he had been building on since the 1920s. I believe Dr. Pirenne was the one who came up with the theory that it was not the fall of the western Empire after Rome was sacked in 470 that caused the decline of urban civilization in western Europe. He believe the Ostrogoths and Visigoths who took over from the Romans largely left the old economic structures in place. They didn't want to destroy the Roman empire, they wanted to share in its prosperity, and in fact, did so.

Rather, it was the spread of Islam across north Africa in the eighth century that disrupted the ancient trade routes, cut western Europe off from its grain and luxury sources, and caused the real "fall" of the old Roman empire (in the west). It was in the eighth and ninth centuries (not 200 years earlier) that trade ebbed to almost nothing and economies, such as they were, became dominated by a feudal system where great lords ruled over estates and everything the people lived on, rich or poor, was produced locally on those estates.

I believe attributing the decline to the spread of Islam is fairly standard now in medieval studies, but at the time it was revolutionary. Dr. Pirenne builds up quite a convincing argument, even if he's a bit breezy with the evidence at times. Moreover, that's just the first couple chapters. In the rest of the book, he continues the story of the re-sparking of urban life in the tenth and eleventh centuries, after the threats from the Vikings and other barbarian invaders had receded. He traces the origins of merchants, the middle class, market towns, and medieval economic institutions in, initially, the Netherlands and northern Italy, and spreading during the High Middle Ages into England, France, and Germany. He explains his particular view that for security purposes, the new trading centers developed at first as suburbs of the episcopal and political centers of the feudal age, but gradually supplanted them in population and wealth.

This book was right up my alley, with some of my favorite subjects--cities and European history--and told in a grand sweep by an author who seems to know everything possible about the topic. There are interesting observations or opinions on practically every page. Of course, it's an academic work written in an elevated style, but for those who share my particular fascinations, I highly recommend this classic work of history.

What I'm Reading: Roundup

Let's do some of the books I've been reading lately, hitting the comics this time.

Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid The latest in the long Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney, about a middle-schooler named Greg who keeps a journal. My kids love this series--if we don't have all of them, we're pretty close. And I've been known to pick up copies left around the house and giggle my way through big chunks of them. Greg is always getting himself into ridiculous situations, usually because he tries to find the easy way out of a chore or homework assignment or a quick way to make money, only to find his shortcut has backfired on him.

This is the latest one, and is a little different than the others in that it's supposed to be written by Greg's best friend, Rowley. Rowley's a smart student in school, but not so much when it comes to reading other people--he always believes they have the best of intentions, and others, especially Greg, are always getting the better of him. I don't think this book worked quite as well as the books from Greg's point of view. In those books, we know what Greg's thinking, and he comes across as sympathetic. Here, he mainly comes across as manipulative, always trying to take advantage of his friendship with Rowley to get Rowley to do his homework or take the fall in their latest misadventure. Still, there were several funny scenes. If I were to recommend a book in this series, though, I think it would be The Long Haul, when Greg's family goes on vacation. Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid would probably be near the bottom of the list.

Batman in the Forties A collection of Batman stories from the 1940s (duh). Part of a series of Batman decades--the seventies one is probably the one I'll get next, if I do get another. It's amazing to me how much more readable stories from Batman's first decade are than various Batman stories I've read from the 1950s. The Comics Code, imposed in 1954, really did a number on the comics industry--just ripping the heart out of depictions of evil, and thus, adulterating the heroism of the protagonists as well. Here, even though these stories are aimed at kids or early teens, there's no shortage of gruesome murders and ruthless gangsters, plus those great macabre Batman villains. The introduction of Robin (from Batman #38) is surprisingly violent. It's easy to see why kids loved this!

The early Catwoman story titled Your Face Is Your Fortune (because Catwoman has disguised herself as a beautician to rob high society women) is probably the best one here, with Alfred, Armchair Detective, a close second. Lots of other good stuff too, though.

Detective Comics #1000 The anniversary issue, just out last month! Not a book in format, as it's the regular "floppy" comic style, but thick enough to be a book with 96 pages. Also, I feel compelled to point out, it's not really a Batman anniversary, as he didn't appear in this title until issue #27. No matter, it's the title he's been associated with since 1939.

I also picked up Action Comics #1000 a few months ago and found a few good stories, but a lot of filler, too. Not 'Tec #1000. Nearly every story in here is solid, with some great creative teams at work. I'm not normally a fan of writer Brian Michael Bendis, but I think his contribution was the best, with an elderly Penguin, who we learn has known Batman's secret identity for decades, using this knowledge for a final act of revenge against the frail, wheel-chair bound Bruce Wayne. However, Bruce Wayne still has a final counter-stratagem of his own....

Another good one was Batman's Longest Case, by Scott Snyder, about a case Batman has been following for years. Whenever he gets some free time, he'll work on the latest clue, which inevitably leads him to some exotic new location--an archeological dig in Egypt, a plane wreck in the Amazon--until finally leading him back to an abandoned tenement house in Gotham, where he discovers the source of the clues is....but that would be spoiling it.

A highly satisfying anniversary issue, entirely worthy of the Dark Knight.

What I'm Reading: Roundup

I've fallen behind on updating the blog. I have a couple superhero movies to add, but let's start with the reading I've been doing lately--a pair of middle grade novels.

The Unwanteds This is the first in a series of seven by Lisa McMann. It's a favorite book of my kids' and we listened to the book on tape during a recent car trip. In this book, the highly-militarized kingdom of Quill every year sorts its thirteen-year-olds into three groups: the Wanteds, the Necessaries, and the Unwanteds. The Wanteds move to various desirable positions in the Quillitary or the government administration, the Necessaries take on menial labor jobs, and the Unwanteds are driven to a spot just outside the barbed wire-surrounded Quill territory where they are supposedly to be executed.

The main thing that makes someone Unwanted is to have shown creativity. In the hierarchical and rigid society of Quill, creativity is considered a threat, while a sort of Spartan disregard for one's own feelings and others' is admired. When Alex Stowe and this year's batch of thirty or so Unwanteds (the biggest group ever!) arrive at the place of execution, the executioner, Mr. Today, leads them off...and into a hidden magic kingdom named Artime, existing side-by-side (but invisibly) with Quill. Artime is  a place where creativity and imagination are valued. All the kids are assigned artistic specialties to study, such as painting, drama, or singing. What's more, in Artime, they learn to use their artistic skills to perform magic--perhaps singing a spell to put someone to sleep, or painting a door to escape through. This will prove very useful, for if Quill ever discovers that Artime exists, it is sure to declare war on the nearby threat.

I got a strong Harry Potter-vibe from the Unwanteds. Kids at the beginning of their teenage years whisked off from their mundane existences to a fantastic land where they study the magic arts? Yeah, sounds familiar.  However, where I had mixed feelings about Harry Potter--finding it to have a subtle humor and charm in its writing style and a fun first half, but a by-the-number fantasy plot in its second half (I reviewed the first Harry Potter book here)--the Unwanteds struck me as fresh throughout. Harry Potter relied on well-worn fantasy tropes like trolls, dragons, and magic mirrors, while the Unwanteds consistently came up with original and interesting magic creatures, spells, and so forth. I liked its use of art as a basis for magic, and its healthy encouragement of creativity.

So, if your kids (or you) like Harry Potter, here's a book that's similar in a lot of ways, but that I found to have fresher ideas and a nice over-arching message. Having said that, I didn't like it so much that I feel the need to read the whole series.

Elephant Secret This book, by Eric Walters, is just fantastic. It's truly when of the best books I've read in the past year for any age group. It's aimed at middle schoolers but I think anybody who likes animals would enjoy reading it.

Sam Gray is thirteen years old and lives with her dad at a 200-acre elephant sanctuary with a herd of a dozen elephants. There's tons of work and not much money involved, but that's okay, because Sam has grown up with the elephants and relates better to them than to other humans. Still, it would be nice if the sanctuary had the funds to buy a new tractor, because the old one keeps breaking down and when it's on the fritz, that means Sam and her dad have to exhaust themselves pitching the hay out of the barn by hand. Maybe the sanctuary's mysterious new backer, who provides a much-needed infusion of funds every few months in exchange for being allowed to have the sanctuary's female elephants artificially inseminated, will be willing to spring for a new one.

Sam has some other problems too--like her father's girlfriend, a lawyer who he's getting serious about, much to Sam's dismay. Or the sanctuary's newest arrival--an abused elephant who is currently in the isolation pen because he killed man at the private zoo where he previously lived. And after the elephant Daisy Mae dies giving birth (in the saddest scene I've read in a long time), Sam and her dad are so busy bottle-feeding baby elephant Woolly every couple hours there's hardly even time to move Daisy Mae's carcass.

Still, it's pretty special having a baby elephant. And when the mysterious back finally shows himself one day, he reveals that Woolly is even more special than they thought.... Okay, I'll stop here. This is a book that's tough to discuss too much because giving away the main twist would really spoil it. Suffice it to say, if what I've written so far sounds at all intriguing, you are likely to love this emotionally powerful book.

What I'm Reading: Ten-Seven

Ten-Seven is the second Penns River Crime Novel I've read by Dana King (I reviewed the first one, Grind Joint, here) and it's a special pleasure for me to read it not only because Dana is a fellow member of my writer's group, but because he has one of the sharpest eyes and ears of any author I've ever read.

Penns River is a decaying old industrial town north of Pittsburgh, short of jobs and money, but not, unfortunately crime. "Doc" Dougherty is a skilled homicide detective who could easily have moved to a bigger city but has too much pride in his hometown to leave. He takes it as a personal affront when a murder is committed in his town, and lately, he's been affronted a lot. At the beginning of Ten-Seven, an apparently random shooting has just taken place in the parking lot of the casino, and Doc is determined to chase every wispy lead until he catches the perpetrator. This time he has help: Teresa Shimp, a young officer trying to prove she really deserves to be on the force, and is more than simply a hire to keep the department from being sued for discriminating against female police candidates.

Through the course of the novel, we also check in with the crime-associated friends we've met in previous novels: Mike Mannarino, the head of the small-time local mafiosi; and Wilver Faison, a black teen-ager on the rise in the local drug-dealing business. They have less to do directly with the plot this time around than they did in Grind Joint, but I like how Penns River is such a small town that the criminal element almost can't help rubbing against each other. The interdependence of drugs, muscle, and weapons means that one can't act without it affecting everybody else in the web.

As usual, Dana's eye for detail is what really makes the novel for me. In my review for Grind Joint I wrote that that book was as much a sociological study of a dying mill town as it was a crime novel, and that continues to be true. However, I do think the focus has shifted a bit--we get a better look this time around at the police force: new hires like Teresa Shimp and how they're fitting into the culture; the machinations of deputy Jack Harriger, who's gunning for Chief Stan Napierkowski's job when he retires; the daily work life of patrol cop Sean Sisler, who also has a secret which could endanger him but actually ends up leading to an important break in the case.

I'm not much of a mystery or crime fiction reader myself, but it's hard for me to believe this wouldn't be one of the best such novels even a hard core fan would come across this year. But this would be equally as good for anyone interested in reading a closely-observed portrait of a town that's hurting, and the crime and law enforcement institutions that play such an important part in corroding and sustaining that town.

What I'm Reading: Change-Up: Mystery at the World Series

Change-Up: Mystery at the World Series is one of the books my son is reading for his Battle of the Books team at school. (I recently read Re-Start, another of the books he's reading for BoB.) I can see why Virginia picked this one for the Battle of the Books tournament--it's about the Washington Nationals, and specifically it's something of an alternate history where the Washington Nationals made it to the World Series in 2009.

The book is about Stevie Thomas and Susan Carol Anderson, two 14-year-olds who work as sports reporters for Washington newspapers. They seem to have made a reputation for themselves as able to ferret out big stories in unexpected places, as they previously uncovered mysteries at the Final Four, the U.S. Open, and the Superbowl. (Apparently Change-Up is the fourth in a series.) In this book, they land an interview with Norbert Doyle, a 30-something journeyman pitcher who learns during the interview that, due to a series of injuries to other pitchers, he'll be pitching the opening game of the World Series for the Washington Nationals that night. Of course, Stevie and Susan Carol were lucky enough to be present so they're able to break this news in the national media.

Doyle lost his wife years before to a drunk driver and has raised his two kids by himself while bouncing around from city to city in the minor leagues. For him, his chance to pitch the big game is a dream come true--and after he wins the game that night, publishers and movie studios want the rights to his inspiring story. The problem is, when Stevie starts digging into Doyle's background, his version of the drunk driving incident doesn't seem to hold up. Meanwhile, Susan Carol meets with Doyle's son, an athletic 14-year old boy who appears to have a romantic interest in her--or is he trying to get between her and her co-reporter/boyfriend, Stevie, so they don't dig up any more on his dad?

This book was a lot fun, moved fast, and kept up a steady beat of snappy dialogue. It was also fun to read about all the players and coaches from a decade ago whose names I remember from attending games, reading newspaper articles, and listening to games on the radio. Only one player from that era remains--Ryan Zimmerman, then-third baseman, now first baseman, but still a pretty good player. (While there are many real people who pop up as characters in this book, all the main characters are fictional.)

Still, there were two things I found hard to accept. One, this maybe more of a quibble, but it's the idea of the 2009 Nationals making it to the World Series. Fun to think about--but it was never going to happen! The team that year simply wasn't good enough. They had Zimmerman and slugger Adam Dunn and... well, that was pretty much it. As much as I enjoyed reading about shortstop Christian Guzman or center fielder Austin Kearns or catcher Wil Nieves, those guys were decent but not great players and that's being generous. In fact, the Nationals won only 59 games that season--this is not a team that was only a hot streak away from the postseason. I believe that was the year I attended seven or eight games at Nationals Park and the team won none of them. (Maybe I was the problem?)

The other thing is that Stevie and Susan Carol do not act like fourteen-year-olds. My son is thirteen, and from observing him and his friends, as well as my own memories, Stevie and Susan Carol are not believable for that age. They are simply too mature in their romantic relationship with each other, their ability to write copy to deadline, their ability to keep their cool in stressful situations. I might have accepted them as sixteen-year-olds. But fourteen just doesn't work, and having them referred to as that age repeatedly broke my suspension of disbelief.

More because of the latter flaw than the former, I find I can't wholeheartedly recommend this book. Nevertheless, Change-Up would likely really appeal to a middle schooler interested in sports, and it has enough of an eye for detail and ear for dialogue that it would be a fun and quick read for a baseball-loving adult as well.

What I'm Reading: The Dinner

Paul Lohman and his wife, Claire, are going out to dinner tonight with Paul's brother, Serge, and his sister-in-law, Babette. Paul is not looking forward to this dinner. He seems to be a bit of a homebody, dedicated to his wife and fifteen-year-old son, Michel, maybe even a bit of a misanthrope. He certainly doesn't want to go to the fancy type of place his brother always chooses, with their fussiness and small portions, as opposed to his favorite cafe around the corner from his house. Plus, his brother wants to discuss something, and Paul doesn't care to talk with his brother about whatever it is.

The Dinner, a 2009 novel by Herman Koch and translated into English (apparently it was a big seller internationally), starts off with this quiet premise, and the book takes place throughout the dinner, though with quite a few flashbacks. As the evening passes and each course succeeds the last (you know how those fancy restaurants are--lots of courses but still somehow not enough to fill you up) the thing Paul doesn't care to talk about gradually asserts itself, and with it a growing sense in the reader of dread at the proceedings. Actually, dread may not be strong enough a word--I don't want to give too much away, but horror may be more fitting by the novel's end.

This is a family with secrets, and Paul is a lot more complicit in them than one would think from the grumpy but basically simple family man image we originally have of him. Koch walks a fine line with the tone here. In the end, I think what he's going for, and what he achieves for a receptive reader, is black humor.

But it really does take a receptive reader. I think most literature-lovers would start this novel enjoying its precise observations and crisp style. I think a lot fewer are going to follow all the way through the increasingly off-putting plot developments and character revelations. For those with the stomach for it, this is an expertly constructed and executed novel about one family with a lot to hide, and how violence and moral indifference winds through the generations.

What I'm Reading: Re-Start

Re-Start, by Gordon Korman, is the second book by this author I've reviewed on this site. The first, Ungifted, I gave a fairly positive review to here. I like the author fine, but I'm not trying to follow him or anything--this is one of the books my son is reading for his Battle of the Books at school, and he, my daughter, and my wife have all read it and said I would enjoy it. And they're right!

In both books, a troublemaking middle schooler finds himself with an unexpected second chance to do things differently, and tries to take advantage of it. Seems to be a Korman theme! In this case the troublemaker is Chase Ambrose, who has just awoken from a coma a few days before his eighth-grade year starts. Chase fell off the roof of his house and conked his head, and now has complete amnesia concerning everything that occurred before the fall. He doesn't even remember his own mother.

As the days go on, Chase learns that he was pretty much a jerk before. He and his best buddies, Bear and Aaron, were the stars on the middle school football team, which they led to its first state championship in 25 years. They had the run of the school, and took advantage of that to bully nerds and dweebs as much as they liked, and they liked to do it a lot. They even bullied Joel Weber so mercilessly that Joel had to enroll at a private school in another state.

Chase is horrified at the person he used to be, and at the barbaric behavior of Bear and Aaron. Because the doctor said he couldn't play football the rest of the year, he joins the video club and really enjoys it. The geeky members are terrified of him at first, but soon realize he's genuinely changed. What's more, he's really good at camerawork, and within a few weeks has become a valued member of the club. He also joins Shoshanna Weber, Joel's twin sister, on her visits to a local senior citizens' center so they can interview a Korean War vet for a video project she's putting together. (But what would Joel think if he knew the kid who'd bullied him out of school was now hanging out with his sister?)

The football team, however, is really struggling without their star player. Bear and Aaron hatch an evil plan to spoil Chase's newfound friendship with the nerds and remind him of who he really is. Soon Chase will have to make a decision about who his real friends are--only he doesn't remember enough about his previous life to be fully informed about the possible ramifications if he chooses the nerds over the jocks.

This was a great book--tons of humor and a meaningful story. The characters are really well-drawn. Even Bear and Aaron, the villains, are well-rounded, and bad as they are, you can see the attractive qualities in them that led Chase to be their buddy. I did find the ending a little pat--in particular, Chase's dad, who had seemed to tie his love to his son to Chase's performance on the football team, has a real change of heart at the end that comes out of nowhere..

Another strange thing I noticed in the book is that I think it was originally aimed at an older, high school-aged audience. For instance, Chase's dad is proud of his son, the star football player, because he himself was on the last middle school team to go the state championship decades before, and he looks back on that period as the best time of his life. Plus, all the townspeople know who Chase and his friends are because of the football team, which is why they're able to get away with so much. But this doesn't seem right--it's high school football that is the most important thing in so many small towns, and it seems silly for Chase's dad to look back on middle school as the best time of his life. Moreover, Shoshanna wants her video project to win the National Video Journalism Award. This sounds a lot more like something a college application-building high schooler would be interested in than a middle schooler.

That doesn't make anything wrong with the book. I suspect Gordon Korman originally wrote it as a YA, not a middle grade book, and decided to change it. Or maybe the publisher asked him to, since he's known as a middle grade author. Regardless, it's more of an oddity than anything else. The book is still well-written, hilarious, and sometimes touching, and despite it's slightly overly sentimental ending, I would recommend it to any middle schooler, and any adults that might be interested, too.

What I'm Reading: In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made

In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made, by the late NYU Professor Norman F. Cantor, is billed on the cover as the best and most thorough book of the Black Death ever written. I don't know. It may be the most thorough popular history on the subject ever written, but at not quite 250 pages, there must be thicker scholarly histories. Moreover, the book has a decidedly England-centric perspective on the subject, and I bet there are French or German or Italian histories that cover the Black Death in those countries more thoroughly. Still, I'm sure this is quite enough for your average reader.

The Black Death arrived in Italian ports in December 1347 and had reached the entire continent by early 1350. At least partly an epidemic of bubonic plague--but as Dr. Cantor argues, almost certainly fortified in some areas by simultaneous anthrax outbreaks--the Black Death killed one-third of Europe's population in three years, and in some towns and cities more than half. Europe's population did not recover for 150 years. It was one of the greatest calamities to occur in human history. Along with the Hundred Years War between England and France, it ended the prosperous High Middle Ages in Europe, while in some ways clearing the way for the Renaissance to come.

The chapters in the book are of highly variable quality. The chapters covering the actual history bit are quite good--and the chapter on how the Black Death affected Europe's Jewish population is a special highlight. (I mean, the pogroms against the Jews by a gentile population looking for a scapegoat for the disaster is a lowlight of history, but the event is related with an especially informative and impassioned authorial voice.)

The chapters covering the epidemiology of the disease are far weaker, however, not delivered as confidently and little more than re-wording of others' research, and with very little interpretive force. The chapter on the origins of the Black Plague, which gives a number of pages over to astrophysicist Fred Hoyle's theory that the disease arrived on a meteorite, was a particular eyebrow-raiser.

Still, the whole book is easy and fun to read, full of interesting facts and tidbits and theories, and certainly gives your typical reader all the information you'd want on the subject. Not without its weaknesses, but I would definitely recommend this book to anyone with a curiosity about the Black Death.

What I'm Reading: Stories of Daily Life From the Roman World

Stories of Daily Life From the Roman World: Extracts From the Ancient Colloquia, translated and with commentary by Eleanor Dickey, is not precisely what I was expecting, although it was close enough.

What I was expecting was stories from different sources of everyday life in Rome presented in something of a comprehensive manner. The problem was I didn't understand the term colloquia in this context. It turns out the Colloquia are a collection of texts from antiquity that Romans, especially children, used to learn Greek. They're essentially dual-reading texts, presenting common everyday situations (attending school, going to the baths, eating dinner) with one side written in Latin and the other in Greek. The Roman could read the Latin side that he understood and compare to the Greek side to learn the vocabulary used in different situations. It's maybe a little different than a modern-day foreign language textbook, but the same idea.

The reason they're valuable to scholars today is because they describe situations that don't usually come up in ancient literature. How exactly did Romans behave in court, or go to bed, or conduct a transaction at the bank or the market? Because these things were so common and mundane, Plutarch or Cicero, say, never bothered to address them.

Two parts really stood out as interesting to me. The first is the chapter on going to the baths. Because public bathing is foreign to Americans today (but not to Scandinavians or Russians, with their saunas in winter), it was fun to find out about the different rooms for exercising or rinsing, or the way the way they would cover themselves in olive oil and then take the oil off with a scraping instrument called a strigil. Of course I'd heard about the Roman public baths before, but I didn't realize that everybody in Rome bathed nearly every day--even slaves. The rich might have had their fancy bathhouses and the poor cheaper ones, but there was a place for everyone to keep clean.

The other part is slaves. Many scenes in the book describe vocabulary or phrases for ordering slaves to cook your meal, or help you dress, or carry your items while you shop. I suppose those who were rich enough to study a foreign language were also rich enough to own slaves, so slave-owning was perhaps not as widespread as the scenes in the book would lead one to believe. Nevertheless, for a significant portion of the population, dealing with slaves was an everyday matter.  (Parts of Xenophon's Conversations of Socrates, which I read last year, also dealt with this topic.)

Dickey has supplemented her translations of the colloquia with her own explanations of the text to fill in the blanks, and has added some well-selected pictures to give us an idea. However, due to the fragmented nature of the colloquia, there are lots of aspects of Roman daily life I might have liked to read about but that didn't come up--religion in daily life, for instance, or the interaction between parents and children. Still, there was a lot of good information here and I would recommend this book to anyone interested in how ancient people really lived.

What I'm Reading: A Single Happened Thing

Ack, I'm falling behind! Before I rate some more scary movies, I want to briefly review A Single Happened Thing, by Daniel Paisner. This book follows New York City book publicist David Felb, who has a boring, normal, and kind of disappointing life until one evening at a meaningless late-season Phillies game in Philadelphia. The game happens to have the longest single at bat ever recorded--that's the Single Happened Thing of the title--and somehow that expansion of time, as it were, allows a long-dead player from baseball's distant past to slip through into our time.

The player is Fred "Sure Shot" Dunlap (a real person, by the way), who had one of the greatest seasons in baseball history for the short-lived Union Association League in 1884, was forgotten not long after, and died penniless in 1900. For some reason he takes a liking to David, or at least thinks David can help him, and after a strange encounter at the baseball game, tracks David down to his hotel the next morning, and then meets him again as David takes the train home to New York.

Dunlap disappears after that, but in David's gushing to his wife and family about the bizarre encounter, his wife decides he's delusional and insists he starts seeing a psychiatrist. In fact, Dunlap becomes a wedge in their marriage, as David refuses to back down from the reality of his experience, even as his wife is certain that he could not possibly have met a...what? ghost? Long-dead person resurrected?

However, David's teenage daughter Iona takes his side after a strange man shows up at her softball practice one day and teaches her an unusual side arm throw that makes her the star pitcher of her school league. Who else could the strange man have been but "Sure Shot" Dunlap?

While the baseball forms a framework for the novel, it's in the subtle divisions and alliances of a troubled family that Paisner's novel really resides. It's really beautifully written and pretty fun to read--maybe more so for a baseball fan, but I think any thinking adult would appreciate the careful descriptions of a slowly fraying marriage and the ups and downs of parent-child relationships in light of that. A Single Happened Thing is highly recommended.

What I'm Reading: The Mote in God's Eye

Now this is a great science fiction novel, and simultaneously an illustration of the limits of genre fiction. The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, succeeds at every level as an SF story. The primary character in a very large cast is Captain Blaine of the Imperial Space Navy, who leads an expedition to the Mote, a remote corner of the galaxy where humans, whose empire spans hundreds of worlds, have detected the first intelligence alien species they've ever encountered.

Upon arrival in the system, the humans encounter the Moties, as they come to be known. The Moties are shorter than humans and furry, but essentially human-like, with some notable biological differences--a large, strong left arm and two slender but dextrous right arms, for example. The Moties have tens of thousands of years of history and incredibly advanced technology, but have never expanded beyond their home planet and moons due to a weird circumstance. In this book, faster-than-light space travel is only possible through wormholes that have a single destination--and the only wormhole in the Motie's system leads straight to the heart of a supernova. Every attempt they've made to explore deep space has ended in disaster.

The Moties are friendly enough, eager to learn about humans, and seemingly open about themselves. Theirs is a peaceful society, although rather caste-bound. Different types of Moties have different jobs--engineers, doctors, farmers--not just by avocation or ability, but because they're actually genetically-engineered for the role. Farmers have thick fingers for dealing with soil but aren't too bright, porters are huge and muscle-bound but positively stupid, doctors have long, delicate fingers for surgery, messengers have well-developed legs for running and an ability to memorize long messages. The ones of most concern to humans are the mediators, who are intelligent and good with languages (they pick up English in a matter of days) but utterly unable to make decisions on their own. It is the mediators, whose job is to settle disputes between conflicting parties, who are responsible for the centuries of peace that have passed on their planet, and also who befriend the human visitors.

Yet the mediators have a reticence to discuss certain topics, and although their world has avoided war for centuries, there are strange holes when they discuss their history. Not that they're covering anything up--but that they don't know. Carefully recorded histories going back millenia, but with gaps they can't explain. It turns out the Moties have a secret--one that will affect their relationship with the human race in an unforeseen way.

Like I said, this is a great science fiction novel, a realistic account of what an encounter between humanity and an intelligent alien species might be like. It's a long book (nearly 600 pages) but fascinating on almost every page, with tons of great details about the Moties, the human ships, space travel, and the nature of the human empire hundreds of years in the future. I heartily recommend it for SF lovers.

But not for anybody else. Because as great as it is as science fiction, it's highly mediocre by the standards of mainstream literature. The writing is professional and effective, but rarely more than functional. Dialogue too is functional, and though a couple characters have stereotypical accents (Scottish, Russian), everybody pretty much speaks the same way. No characters are fully-rounded people, and beyond Captain Blaine and one or two others, most are strictly two-dimensional. A romance between Captain Blaine and a female anthropologist on his ship, Sandra Fowler, is almost comically bad.

So this is no Ray Bradbury or Robert Heinlein, transcending the genre of SF with gorgeous writing and brilliant characters. It's rare to encounter a book that so fully exemplifies the merits of its genre, but without fulfilling any literary aspirations beyond the genre conventions, or even trying to.