Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Gilbert
Despite appearances, Stumbling on Happiness is not a self-help book, and won't tell you much about how to be a happier person. But it may you help you avoid some wrong turns in the pursuit of happiness. Humankind's ability to predict the future is one of our fanciest tricks; it is, arguably, what makes us human. But it's also one of our newest tricks, and, as Gilbert shows in study after study, our predictive abilities have their limitations and flaws. Your own imagination, as powerful as it is, is often completely wrong when it comes to predicting the outcomes of your decisions. Gilbert's writing style is full of humor and creative examples of each of his points, and there are plenty of "a-ha!" moments. And he does offer a simple solution, which he is pretty sure you'll refuse to follow up on, thanks to your brain's built-in biases. I'll take that as a challenge!

The Ghost Map

by Steven Johnson
150 years ago, London was the largest city in the world, and in many ways very much like any modern metropolis. But the city was almost entirely lacking in infrastructure, public works. The flush toilet had recently been invented, but citywide sewers were still years off, and "night-soil men" were paid to haul off human waste when it collected too deeply in cesspools. To put it mildly, the city stank. Editorials were frequently published in the newspapers about the putrid air, and the ill-health it undoubtedly caused, especially in the poorest parts of town. Then, in late August, 1854, people start dying in Soho. It's not the first time cholera has attacked the city , but it's the deadliest. Whole families die overnight, while their neighbors are spared. Steven Johnson tells the story of the two men, a doctor and a minister, who overcome the pseudo-science of the time to find the exact cause, stop the spread of the disease, and ultimately change the way London, and cities across the world, functioned. Our 21st-century vantage point allows us to zoom in and out, from microbe to metropolis, in ways Dr. John Snow would have loved. Johnson does a wonderful job of making this scientific detective story into a page-turner.

A Spot of Bother

by Mark Haddon
It's a time-honored dramatic convention: comedy ends in a wedding; tragedy ends in death. Much of the suspense in Mark Haddon's latest book comes from the uneasy sense that the story could go either way. From the start, we follow George Hall, as he and his wife prepare for their daughter's marriage to what could very well be the "wrong man." As upsetting as this is, George has problems of his own: his body, quickly followed by his mind, seems to be slowly coming unglued. He handles this as any British Gentleman would; he keeps it to himself. Of course, losing one's mind is not something one can keep a secret for long. Unlike Haddon's last book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, his latest book gets into the heads of a wide range of characters. Some of the underlying themes, though, are similar: one's interior life may never be glimpsed, even by those one feels closest to. Everyone has their secrets, and miscommunications, and the exquisite chaos the characters spin around the Big Day is perhaps too neatly resolved. Though not as brilliant or groundbreaking as The Curious Incident, A Spot of Bother is an expertly crafted, enjoyable novel.

This is Your Brain on Music

by Daniel J. Levitin
A successful record producer who became a neuroscientist, Daniel Levitin is in a unique position to write about music. Luckily, he's a skillful writer as well, explaining the jargon-filled fields of both music and neuroscience for the layman. What, exactly, is music? Why does it provoke such an emotional response? Why do we dislike some music so passionately? How can a few tiny bones in my ear possibly sound like a symphony? How can we hear a strange new version of an old song and still identify it -- something no computer can pull off? Levitin sheds light on all these questions and many more. This is one of those science books that not only gives satisfying answers but also fills the reader with wonder.

The Polysyllabic Spree

by Nick Hornby

"If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go 15 rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. The Magic Flute v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. The Last Supper v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. And every now and again you'd get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I'm still backing literature 29 times out of 30."
- Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby writes like a good friend; he's opinionated, self-deprecating, smart and funny. The Polysyllabic Spree is a compilation of Hornby's monthly columns for Believer Magazine, in which he basically blogs about the books he bought and the books he read each month. Hornby is a strong believer that reading should be fun. This doesn't mean that books have to be trashy, just that there's no reason to slog your way through something you don't enjoy when the world is full of incredible books. His enthusiasm for books is contagious, and, whether or not you share his tastes, you may find your reading appetite re-invigorated. Fun stuff.

The March

by E.L. Doctorow
In Doctorow's latest book, Sherman's March appears like a hurricane, inexorably twisting its way across the south, unimaginably vast and destructive. At the center, if not always in control, is Sherman himself, who is both weary and strangely at home. We follow several fictional characters at the edges of the storm, as well, people who are victims, opportunists, or a bit of each. Pearl is the daughter of a slave and a slaveowner. No longer a slave, she uses the march to find a new identity: could she pass for white? Could she pass for male? Is there any place for her in the new world? Arly and Will, two convicts, use the march as their escape from punishment; they quickly don whichever uniforms are most advantageous at the time and thrive on the chaos around them. Colonel Sartorius is a surgeon who dreams of an antiseptic world where he can achieve more than daily amputations. At times the great and terrible march seems like the only place to be; the world around it has fallen apart, and the world behind it is in smoking ruins.

Wake Up, Sir!

by Jonathan Ames
Alan Blair is a sad alcoholic living with his aunt and uncle in New Jersey. Then again, he's a witty young man, a published novelist with an unbelievably efficient butler named Jeeves. When his aunt and uncle insist that he returns to rehab, he has a better idea: an artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, where he can get down to finally finishing his second novel. He and Jeeves hit the road, falling into various misadventures along the way. Part of what I loved about Alan was the way his education and erudition served him so poorly in his dirty, real-world settings. In this respect, the character brought to mind Ignatius Reilly of A Confederacy of Dunces. Both characters seem to live in denial of the real world, floating somewhere above it in their minds, and below it in the minds of everyone else. Jeeves is obviously too good to be true, but his unflappable exchanges with Alan made me laugh out loud. Wake Up, Sir! bounces around on the sheer joy and pain of never quite fitting in, wherever you go, leaving the world a wonderful, horrible adventure.

Collapse

by Jared Diamond
In his 1998 book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond argues that the most important factor determining the rate of a society's development has always been its location. In Collapse, however, Diamond shows that location does not seal the fate of societies, which can choose to adapt to their environments or not. Using examples from Montana, Greenland, Japan, New Guinea, Rwanda, and Easter Island, he builds a strong case that societies succeed only by throwing out any behaviors incompatible with their environment. And as population increases and globalization knits the world together ever more tightly, there are fewer and fewer societies existing in isolation. If every society now desires to live like ours in the "first world," can the world sustain us? Will we adapt to our global environment, or choose our lifestyles over our survival?

Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell
Mitchell, author of such headspinning novels as Cloud Atlas (see below) and Ghostwritten, has, at first glance, stepped off his runaway train to write something more traditional: a semi-autobiographical "first novel." This is a coming-of-age tale of a year in the life of one 13-year-old boy living in a suburb in northwestern England in 1982. That's right, just one boy, one voice, one village, one year. This is still David Mitchell, though, and he shows that a year with Jason Taylor can be just as wonderfully complex and multi-layered as anything else. Jason's voice is unique, something he himself learns to deal with over the course of the book. Identity is a theme familiar to Mitchell fans, as are several other themes here: self-perception, the power of the individual, the strong versus the weak, the unrelenting change inherent in being alive. Beautifully done.

Good Omens

by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Good Omens has been described with phrases like "If Douglas Adams had written the Omen" and "Monty Python does Armageddon." I don't quite see it as living up to Adams or Python, but it does hold its own as an entertaining end-times fantasy. The story revolves around a demon, Crowley (formerly employed in the garden of Eden) and an angel, Aziraphale, who are called on by their respective teams to kick the end of the world into gear. The Antichrist is switched at birth, and hijinks ensue. Crowley and Aziraphale, immortals who have spent thousands of years living on Earth, have actually grown to like humans (and each other), and are a bit ambivalent about carrying out their final mission. Meanwhile, a strange young woman named Anathema Device lives her life according to a big book of prophecies written by her distant ancestor. Is there any escape from the divine plan?

The Omnivore's Dilemma

by Michael Pollan
Pollan, whose last book was the superb The Botany of Desire, writes this time about the origin of food. That's not to say the historical origins, although he does occasionally visit that topic. I'm talking about the origin of that thing you just ate. Where did it come from? What was it made of, and why? (And why, so often, CORN?) How much better is "organic" food? How did we become people who know so little about the food we eat? Our ignorance about food is something most of us have become very comfortable with. But this yawning gap in our everyday lives is something Pollan says we should pay attention to. To blindly put our trust in the various industries assembling our grocery items, or to blindly follow whatever diet trends are on the bestseller lists can have disasterous results, not just for our bodies but for our society at large. Pollan's prose is engaging, eye-opening, and warm, despite the sometimes unsettling subject matter.

The Island at the Center of the World

by Russell Shorto
Somewhere in the New York State Library, a man painstakingly translates a sheaf of 450-year-old documents, piecing together, for the first time, a detailed picture of the Dutch settlement that would gradually evolve into New York City. From this trove of information, Russell Shorto has crafted a warm, vivid, and very human story that feels more immediate than many current-day accounts of New York life. Shorto helps us interpret what exactly happened during the infamous sale of Manhattan Island; sheds light on peg-legged Peter Stuyvesant; and introduces us to Adrien van der Donck, lawyer and dreamer, who emerges as one of the most influential (and underappreciated) founders of New Amsterdam. Van Der Donck, according to Shorto, envisioned a Manhattan that was much more than just a corporate outpost managed by military men. Van Der Donck fought passionately for his vision of religious tolerance and individual rights. This is one of those books that makes you wonder how your high school history teacher could possibly have made history seem so dull.

The Unfolding of Language

by Guy Deutscher
You hear it several times a year: the English language is going to hell in a handbasket. People are losing their ability to put together a sentence. No one has any respect for grammar or punctuation these days! Like many linguists, Guy Deutscher finds this standard rant both amusing and ignorant. Turns out that it's not just English, it's every other language as well. And it's not just "nowadays," either. People have been complaining about the younger generations' mangling of their language since the ancient Egyptians, and probably long before that. The fact is, languages are constantly falling apart, and, nostalgia aside, there has never been a Golden Age when the rules of your favorite language were perfectly upheld. So how, in the face of this constant, global linguistic decay, do languages survive and even thrive? Deutscher explains the way language evolves over time, and even speculates about how the first languages might have come into existence. The book is a bit thick at times, but illuminating, thought-provoking, and funny as well.

A Girl Named Zippy and She Got Up Off The Couch

by Haven Kimmel
I'm not usually a big memoir reader, but I loved these two. Kimmel writes about childhood truthfully, without a trace of cutesyness or melodrama. She captures the voice of her younger self perfectly, while letting us read between the lines, seeing things that Zippy's little girl and Couch's adolescent weren't yet ready to see. Like all families, Kimmel's is strange, and Zippy, of course, has no idea. As she grows, she starts to wonder some things, like why her mother never leaves the couch, what, exactly, her dad does for a living, and why her friends' parents often offer her a bath. The second book, She Got Up Off the Couch, moves into deeper, darker territory (as adolescence often does), while still often being laugh-out-loud funny. What happens when Zippy's couch-bound mother decides it's time to get up and go to college? Will the family survive?

Lincoln's Melancholy

by Joshua Wolf Shenk

"I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me."
- Abraham Lincoln, in an 1841 letter to a friend.

Through most of his life, Lincoln's friends and associates commented on his depressive nature. One of his law partners, William Herndon, wrote about Lincoln that "his melancholy dripped from him as he walked." Friends in New Salem, where Lincoln lived as a young man, put him on suicide watch during one of his darkest periods. Joshua Wolf Shenk's book asserts that Lincoln was a nearly perfect textbook example of a person suffering from depression. Yet, as many of us think of him, he seems to have had one of the healthiest minds in history. Shenk builds a sympathetic and very personal portrait of Lincoln as an extremely high-functioning depressive, a man whose darkness may have played a large part in his greatness. At the same time, he sheds light on the differences between Lincoln's time, when "Melancholics" were seen to have advantages along with their obvious disadvantages, and our own time, when Depression is seen as a disease to be cured.

Forty Signs of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Nothing so far has spurred our current government to do much about impending global climate change. Meanwhile, heatwaves and hurricanes have shown us that our country is not actually immune to those changes. So what, exactly, would have to happen that would be severe enough to get our government into gear? That seems to be the question on Kim Stanley Robinson's mind with Forty Signs of Rain. How about serious flooding at our nation's capitol, nearly returning DC to the fetid swamp it once was? How about, later that same year, record low temperatures that grind the eastern seaboard to a halt? Robinson puts his characters at the center of the storm, politically as well as meterologically. Anna Quibler and Frank Vanderwal work with the National Science Foundation. Anna's husband, Charlie, is a stay-at-home dad and environmental advisor to a liberal senator (and possible presidential candidate). In Fifty Degrees Below, the driving question becomes: If the USA put our best minds and billions of dollars to work on the problem, is there really anything we could do at this point? I prefered the second book, which mainly follows the eccentric Frank. Forty felt too much like an introduction, while Fifty throws you right into the maelstrom.

The Tree of Life

by Peter Sis
Peter Sis brings a warm, watercolored texture to the story of Charles Darwin's life. Each page is like something discovered in an attic, or folded into an old atlas on a library shelf. At the same time, Sis makes Darwin seem more human than ever. We learn of his childhood, his excitement at travelling around the world (on one spread, Sis seems to have reproduced, in miniature, every single page of Darwin's seagoing journals), his joys and sadnesses as a father, his secret scientific writing, and how close he came to fading into obscurity.

No Plot? No Problem!

by Chris Baty
Many of us have talked about writing a novel "someday." Chris Baty believes that the reason most wannabe novelists never write their novels is that they lack a deadline, without which it's too easy to put novel-writing off indefinitely. So in 1999 Baty and friends created their own deadline, which they called National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo). If you sign up, you're agreeing to write 50,000 words during the month of November. That's the size of a short novel, like The Great Gatsby or Brave New World. At the end of the month, if you've made it to 50K, you're a winner - no judges read your manuscript to decide its literary merits. The point is quantity, not quality. At the end of the month, you'll have a first draft to either shred, delete, or edit to polished perfection. No Plot? No Problem! is Baty's companion book, and it's definitely got me fired up about actually sitting down and writing the novel I've been chewing on for so long.

The History of Love

by Nicole Krauss
I loved what Ken Kalfus said about this book, that it "will break your heart and at once mend it." The History of Love haunted me even as I read it. It's primarily the story of an old man, a young girl, and a book, and the possibilities of connections between the three. Krauss feels a lot of affection for these characters, and lets us take our time to get to know them, while gradually putting together the pieces of the grand story beneath the story. Beautiful, funny and sad.

The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists

by Gideon Defoe
After reading a particularly toothsome book (see directly below), I was having trouble finding anything suitable to follow it up. The Pirates! was perfect: short, silly, and infinitely charming. The story concerns a Pirate Captain (called only, "the Pirate Captain") and his merry crew, who are misled into attacking the H.M.S. Beagle. Somehow the pirates go on to befriend Darwin, who tells him his Important Theory (ahem) and asks for their help in rescuing his brother, Erasmus, from the dastardly Bishop of Oxford. This is Pythonesque humor: the author has absolutely no interest in confining himself to historical accuracy or even the rules of "good writing." Cliches are abused, to comic effect; chapter titles are completely irrelevant; and most of the pirate characters are called things like "The pirate with a scarf" or "the pirate who played the accordian." Defoe's goal was apparently to make the reader laugh out loud, and he does that with aplomb. I felt compelled to read sections aloud to some friends and family, who, luckily, thought it as funny as I did.