-
Tom Rachman’s novel, The Imperfectionists, is a short story collection in disguise. His “A Novel” subtitle is more hopeful than descriptive.
The Imperfectionists tells the story of an English language paper based in Rome. Each chapter provides another bit of the 50 year history of the paper told chronologically, and then jumps into a short story about one employee of the paper based in the present time. Some of the characters do appear in each other’s stories, and a few of the short stories are incredibly good, but there is no long arch. We get a glimpse at a character’s life, we become interested and engaged, and then nothing. The name is dropped once or twice more in later chapters, but that’s it.
As a short story collection, it’s a bit uneven. Where they are meant to be funny, they are not quite funny enough. Where they are meant to be dramatic, they are not quite dramatic enough. A couple of the chapters do stand out and work very well, and these were enough to leave me with a modestly favorable impression overall.
It’s probably best for journalists or those with an interest in journalism. I’m not sure I was in the target audience.
-
Clay Shirky’s core premise in Cognitive Surplus is that much of the time and energy we used to pour into work, chores and television is being redirected to the Internet. He has some solid, second-hand sources for this premise. His main argument then is to show how truly important this shift is since the Internet is interactive, creative, distributed, and egalitarian whereas TV is a passive, unimaginative, centralized and hegemonic.
He does a good job of making the reader believe his argument, but it’s more propaganda through compelling anecdotes than solid social science. I began to feel like a school child, beaten down with repetition, rather than like a respected reader. I’m not sure if he was just trying to make his page count or if Shirky felt he could manufacture truth through innumerable mentions of the collective cognitive effort that went into Wikipedia, but the book begins to grind and ramble before it’s half over.
I’d recommend it at 100 pages, but unfortunately the publishing world wasn’t creative enough to tell Shirky to work at that size.
-
“A story: A man fires a rifle for many years, and he goes to war. And afterward he turns the rifle in at the armory, and he believes he’s finished with the rifle. But no matter what else he might do with his hands, love a woman, build a house, change his son’s diaper; his hands remember the rifle”
~ Anthony Swofford in Jarhead -
I’ve had my Kindle DX for about 9 months now and last night was the first night I had any problems. A reboot got it back to normal.
-
Why are all these new novels coming out with titles like: Book Title: A Novel ? We know it’s a novel. This is a dumb trend.
-
I read Tapworthy in one quick sitting on a 2 hour plane trip. It’s a good design book for the new iPhone designer or developer, and even a veteran like me got some really useful rules of thumb, design patterns and inspiration from it. I’ll be keeping it on the shelf nearby for reference.
My biggest issue with the book is value. It’s not really worth the cover price of $40 as you could get all the contents fairly easily in the same 2 hours on the web. It’s simply a matter of convenience to have it curated all in one place. Pick it up used or at a good discount.
-
Where art thou?
UPDATE: It’s out now.
-
I hadn’t read this since High School. It was better than I’d remembered. It’s Joseph Heller meets Douglas Adams.
-
I bought this a long time ago and I finally read it. It’s a disjointed pacifist rant that made me remember how much I like Kurt Vonnegut.
-
This is Elizabeth Hawes’ attempt at biography as autobiography of the biographer. Bleh. It didn’t really work. It’s only because of my unholy love of Camus that I managed to finish this book.
Not recommended.
-
I hadn’t read Bartelby since High School. It’s very good, but not great as I remember it being. I’ve injected a lot more into this story over the years than what is really there. I dare you though, to read it and not find yourself answering a request with, “I’d prefer not to.”
-
A short Bill Bryson travel tale, the proceeds from which benefit charity. It’s a quick read with just some of the humor and incite Bryson is known for.
-
Cheap does a good job of telling the story of how we ended up in the wasteland of Walmart and IKEA from our humble beginnings with mom and pop downtown retailers. Shell does a good job of bringing retail history alive and making it quite interesting, without being overly judgmental or unfairly partisan about where we are today. Shell admits she doesn’t have all the answers, which is refreshing.
-
Holly Robinson’s memoir about her Navy father, who takes up gerbil breeding in the 1960’s, is not your typical, cliched, coming of age story. It’s a memoir of her father and his gerbil breeding business, and it stays focused on the gerbils, never straying too far into her own life or other happenings of the period.
Her father’s interest in gerbils in the late 1960’s happens to coincide with both a boom in interest in exotic and pocket pets and in animal research. He’s part author, part scientist, part breeder, and part businessman. He’s writing some of the first ever books about keeping gerbils, obsessing over the genetic makeup of his gerbils to make them suitable for research, and growing a gerbil empire, persuading his wife to build ever more gerbil barns and his kids and an odd assortment of hired help to work with keeping the gerbils at his exacting standards.
It makes for an exciting and interesting read about a man who is truly passionate about gerbils.
-
This is my first book on the new Kindle DX.
Beckett’s Genesis has philosophical pretensions and reads clumsily. Like many attempts at the philosophical novel, Genesis can be too earnest and on the nose.
Beckett is no Dostoevsky, but many of Genesis’ flaws are the same as Rand’s and Camus’ novels, and I found that endearing, even though the philosophy is not nearly so profound. I find myself quite at home in this little sub-genre of the philosophical novel and I applaud all reasonable attempts.
It’s a good, quick read that I’ve recommended to a few people.
