Under Heaven

by Guy Gavriel Kay

In 2010 when Under Heaven came out, I heard an NPR reviewer gush about Guy Gavriel Kay as a writer, saying more people should be reading his books. She said the possible reason people hadn't heard of him was because his books don't fit neatly in a fiction category. They are largely historical fiction, often based around real events and people, but his books frequently incorporate fantastical elements that often result in them being classified as fantasy. Which is fine, and I like that genre, but this is not your average wizards and dragons fare. And a lot of people who would probably love Guy Kay's prose have overlooked him because they don't generally read fantasy. 

I have since discovered that Guy Kay has several highly acclaimed novels and series, but I chose to read Under Heaven first because it was the first I had heard of him. I immediately fell in love with the book, and could scarcely put it down. I had forgotten how fun it is to discover a new book or author that I love so much. The characters were vivid and interesting, and Kay's prose is simply sublime. The first hundred pages open so many interesting mysteries and questions, I couldn't wait to find out the answers.

Unfortunately, I never got all the answers I wanted. Under Heaven is set in a world based on the Tang Dynasty in China during the time of the An Lushan Rebellion. The book soon scales back to follow a dozen characters through this political and military upheaval, and it loses the tight focus on the characters and the mysteries introduced in the first portion. This isn't to say that the latter part of the book is bad—it's still quite good. I just wasn't in love with it like I was at first. 

After finishing it, I would call this book a beautiful disappointment, one that I don't regret reading at all. It wasn't what I expected, but it did introduce me to a great new author, and I can't wait to read more of his stuff.

Just My Type

by Simon Garfield

As soon as I heard about this book on NPR I knew I had to read it. As if I didn't have enough nerdy interests, I've become interested in fonts and typefaces over the last few years. Fonts first caught my attention when I found some great open-source font projects, and from there I began to notice and appreciate how well-crafted letters helped communicate ideas and promoted clarity. Simon Garfield's book Just My Type: A Book About Fonts, would probably be best enjoyed by a font nerd like me, but it has an interesting combination of history, art, and cultural movements that would appeal to more people than you might initially think. From Gutenberg to the iPad, the book looks at how fonts have evolved and how artistic and cultural trends affected (and were affected by) fonts. For example, I had never thought about any certain font being a "Nazi" font, for example, but the Third Reich had some very distinct (and sometimes conflicting) opinions about the typefaces its citizens used. And if you are familiar with the font Helvetica, its place in the Bauhaus movement seems obvious.  There are amusing anecdotes about the "fontroversy" when Swedish furniture maker Ikea switch to the Verdana font, and a review of why Comic Sans is just so terrible. (Or is it?) I really wouldn't call this a well-written book. It relies on strange authorities to support its positions at times, including random tweets and YouTube comments. But it's almost always interesting, and it helped cement in my mind the rock-star status of certain famous typographers such as Matthew Carter (Verdana, Georgia), Claude Garamond (Garamond), Adrian Frutiger (Univers), John Baskerville (Baskerville), and Eric Gill (Gill Sans, and quite a few controversies). If you even bothered to read this whole book review, you'd probably like this book.

Post Script: If you were wondering, this blog currently is displayed in Neuton, a Roman-style open-source font  by Brian Zick that is available to use on any website through Google Web Fonts.

Arcadia

by Tom Stoppard

Arcadia is actually a play rather than a book, but I read it rather than saw it performed. I actually had never heard of the play before a friend proposed it for a book club. I was much more familiar with Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which we also considered reading. The two plays have a lot in common, but I vastly preferred Arcadia, and couldn't believe that I had never heard of it before.

It's hard to state concisely what Arcadia is about. The whole play takes place in the room of an English country house, but the scenes alternate between the early 17th Century and the present day. The period scenes revolve around the family's tutor and his student, the brilliant young daughter of the family. The modern scenes involve researchers and professors trying to determine the identity of the hermit that lived on the residence and the events surrounding a visit to the house by Lord Byron. The dialogue is very clever and often very amusing, but it's also awash in philosophical and scientific concepts. Newtonian physics, chaos theory, determinism, entropy, classicism, romanticism, and scholarship all become topics of conversation at one point or another. But despite the  heavy topics, the dialogue is quick and light. As the play draws to a close, the two time periods begin to blend together, with props and sounds from one era appearing the other. By the final scene, characters from both periods appear on stage together, and their dialogue spliced together is both hilarious and poignant. 

I absolutely loved Arcadia, and wish I could see it performed. It just finished up a Broadway run in June, but it is often called Stoppard's finest play, so hopefully there will be more productions in the future.

Three Cups of Deceit

by Jon Krakauer

My reasons for reading Three Cups of Deceit were complicated. First, it was free as a PDF download for the first 72 hours of its release. Second, its release represents a new attempt to market long-form journalism. This "book" (which is almost short enough to be a long article) is the first in a series of nonfiction released by a new publisher called Byliner, which hopes to release non-fiction and journalistic pieces a la carte, similar to Amazon's Kindle Singles. But the third reason started reading Three Cups of Deceit is the reason I finished it: because the allegations it directs at international best-seller and humanitarian, Greg Mortenson, were too severe to ignore, and because for all his ills, Jon Krakauer tells a gripping story.

If you don't know who Greg Mortenson is, you have likely heard of what he does. He founded the Central Asian Institute, which builds schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mortenson wrote the the popular book Three Cups of Tea, which stayed on the New York Times Bestseller list for three years. He is a frequent speaker at universities and events, and his story is remarkable. According to Mortenson, his mission to build schools came about accidentally, when he took a wrong turn and stumbled into a small Pakistani village on his way back from a failed attempt at climbing K2, the world's second-tallest peak. The village people took him in, nursed him back to health, and in return, he rashly promised to build a school there so the village children could get an education. He did that, and his book details how he kept going, building hundreds of schools in a war-torn region and braving Taliban kidnappings, treacherous journeys, and overcoming bureaucratic obstacles to give kids an education. 

It's an inspiring story, but as the book documents in great detail, a lot of it isn't true. Krakauer was one of Mortenson's early supports and financial backers, but he became disillusioned by Mortenson's lax financial practices and refusal to answer to anyone. As Krakauer tells it, Mortenson used the charity for his personal gain, to market his books and pay for plush accommodations, private jets, and a high annual salary. Krakauer's skill at drawing together facts and people, which served him so well it books like Into Thin Air, is in full effect here. Three Cups of Deceit is definitely worth a read, in part because it may represent the future of journalism, but mostly because it's a solid piece of investigative reporting.

Momo

by Michael Ende

Momo is a young homeless girl who befriends and is befriended by the people of a city. They take her in, and she makes their lives more magical and meaningful. She listens to their problems, diffuses neighbor disputes, and transforms the children's games into magical adventures. When the "timesaving" obsession sweeps through the city, making it so on one has any time to spend with people they care about, only Momo and her friends notice the change and can do something about it.

The whimsical adventure in Momo is a clear allegory about modern society. Everyone is in a hurry, we buy countless gadgets and devices to make our lives easier, and yet we seem to have less free time, not more. The book also touches on issues such as how we care for children and the quality of work. Michael Ende, who also wrote The Neverending Story, wrote Momo in 1973, but if anything, his criticisms are more salient in an era of always-on devices. (I almost felt bad that I was reading Momo on my phone as an ebook.)

The story of Momo is marvelous, and kids will enjoy it. But for an adult, it also does a good job at making you reexamine your time and pace of life.

Intelligence: A Novel of the CIA

by Susan Hasler

I heard about this book on NPR, and it sounded interesting. Susan Hasler worked as a counter-terrorism analyst at the CIA for over two decades, and the NPR interview discussed some interesting topics like intelligence failures. So I requested the book from my local library and started it with some modestly high expectations. And while certain aspects of the book were illuminating and occasionally entertaining, Intelligence was a disappointment for me.

The basic story of Intelligence follows an analyst named Maddie James who suspects there is an impending terrorist attack on U.S. soil. She and her small team race against the clock and fight against incompetent superiors as they try to identify and prevent the attack. Intelligence is most successful at conveying the sheer volume of data and the near impossibility of accurately identifying threats to national security or American interests abroad. The frustration of the characters as they sift through endless intelligence reports and intercepts clearly comes from Hasler's own personal experience.

But the rest of novel is fairly sub-par. The writing is sophomoric, but at least it isn't too distracting. Hasler develops her own intra-organizational series of terms and metaphors, with analysts referring to the organization as the "mines." Everything has a mining or metallurgic slang term, like alchemists, mine shafts, veins, canaries, drilling down, etc. Regardless of whether this jargon is genuine (I suspect is not), it was used inconsistently and got on my nerves. Also annoying were the various sexual encounters of the characters during the crisis. Do intelligence analysts really jump into each other's beds in the midst of terrorist threats? For our country's sake, I hope not.

Unfortunately, the major flaws of Intelligence weren't limited to the common foibles of a writer's freshman offering of fiction. The terrorist attack involves model airplanes at a major league baseball park, and the plan is so elaborate that it strained even my willing suspension of disbelief. But this isn't a book about analysts versus terrorists. The terrorists are basically gone halfway through the book. The real bad guys are the incompetent and overly-ambitious administrators in the intelligence community and the corrupt and deceitful presidential administration that tries to parlay the threat into an excuse to invade Iran. Perhaps in the hands of a more skillful author these themes wouldn't be as forced and clumsy, but in Intelligence they come across as heavy-handed echoes of Bush-hatred that was so common during the time Hasler was writing the novel. By the end of the book, the character of Maddie James is so embittered and cynical that she almost loses her credibility to explain to the public what actually happened. In my estimation, the novel as a whole essentially shares that same fate.

The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini

The Kite Runner is a rarity on my reading list in that it is a popular best-seller. I read a lot of genres, but NY Times best-selling fiction isn't my usual fare. But I got this book for Christmas a few years back, and I've been meaning to read it for a long time. The narrator had a privileged childhood in Kabul, Afghanistan, but fled the country during the Soviet invasion. Twenty years later he receives a call from an old friend that summons up memories of his childhood and calls him back to an Afghanistan he no longer recognizes. This is a harsh book of betrayal, guilt, transition, and redemption.

One of The Kite Runner's strongest points is its vivid description of pre-Soviet Kabul. The book is a window in to Afghan society and culture, including the the kite flying that gives the book its title. That rich heritage is juxtaposed with the brutal regime of the Taliban that the narrator witnesses upon his return. The Kite Runner is mostly very depressing, but I still enjoyed it because it gave character and flavor to a place that I normally only hear about in headlines.