Where John Green Schools Us by Breaking Our Hearts

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

John Green does an amazing job with this topic. 5 stars.

The notion I thought was central to the book--how tuberculosis has affected society throughout history, in strange and unexpected ways--is present here, and interesting, and tragic, but the book really is about how systems work and the failure of the wealthy part of the world to solve a problem with pretty clearly-established solutions. It's not a college essay or bloodless recitation of facts. It's more like a jeremiad, a loud cry from a prophet trying to awaken the sleeping nations that could end this plague, showing where and how and why we should take action to save the million and a quarter people who die from this disease every year.

(He's humble. He keeps calling his celebrity a "megaphone" that he lucked into, and expresses his desire to use that megaphone well, drawing our attention to needs awaiting society's intervention, trying not to speak over other voices that are more deserving or informed or urgent than his own. That's okay. He can be humble--it suits. I'll still call this book prophetic in the most positive sense.)

Of course he does a good job giving us the numbers and explaining the standard therapies and costs and various acronyms pertinent to the discussion--but more significantly, he humanizes the disease with the true stories of sufferers, including those he personally knows or was related to. As he says, more than 100,000 people die each month of the disease, but that's hard to comprehend. "I've been in a stadium with a hundred thousand people," he writes, "but I didn't know each of their families. I didn't know about the people they've loved, the heartbreaks they've endured, their constraints and encouragements... But I can, just barely, fathom Henry."

Henry's story, woven through the book, illustrates much of what happens to TB sufferers in poorer countries, how they can do everything in their power and still fail, often still die, and might only survive through the actions of others (like you and me). Henry--with some others--puts a face on the illness. He personifies the resilience of many fighting the disease as well as the cruelty of our indifference--when little effort from us, from our government, from our thought leaders, could end the worst of the misery.

For me, looking as he does like any number of students I've taught over the years, Henry represents all the hope I felt when facing likely young people trying to make a future for themselves and the grief I felt when some of them were too weighed down by personal or systemic difficulties to finish their schooling. As important as education is, though, TB is literally life and death. How much more does it motivate and mobilize us to make these connections?

Sure, we should do everything we can for others without knowing their stories; that's what saints do. But most of us aren't saints. John Green recognizes that it's personal connection that puts most of us into motion, and this book creates that connection. I don't know if I am invested enough in TB, overall, to take much action. But I want to save Henry, and I want to lift the weight his mother has been carrying, and I want to see them live normal, happy lives.

That's what this book supplies, the human context necessary for us to feel what's happening. And that's why it's important to read and share it.

It's a quick, engaging read, worth a look for that reason alone. Additionally, it's an important book. Highly recommended.

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Where Marcelle Has the Wrong Boyfriend

The Miller of Angibault by George Sand
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I like George Sand, and this is a very readable, pleasant novel, though it's probably more like a 3.5 to me.

The main character, Marcelle, is likable, and I'm rooting for her; and the title character, the miller, is pretty cool--though they don't end up together. And that's kinda the problem. Marcelle, a rich noblewoman who lost her husband and is finding their finances in a shambles, is in love with a man, Lemor, who despises money, like a good socialist (apparently) and she still has too much of it. He's so annoying and foolish and unbelievable that I thought sure the author would reveal that to Marcelle, but nope. She still likes him to the end. The notion that he couldn't marry her because she was too well off is just so... well, it's stupid. Just stupid. He's an idiot. The two of them are happier that all their money in the world burns up (oops--that's a spoiler) in a fire than if they'd been able to use it for anything at all.

Who thinks like this? Can you give some to charities and put some in an account for when your child grows up? Help out your neighbors, maybe? Can't you think of anything positive to do with money? Do you think it's the *money's* fault that France's upper class are out of touch?

Despite that annoying aspect to the story, it's mostly pretty entertaining, a decent read, with several other interesting and strange characters. Marcelle is inspecting her remaining property, trying to figure out a new life as a regular, semi-poor person, and because she's so kind she makes lots of good friends who look out for her. I enjoyed that aspect.

I felt 3.5 about the whole novel, but I like the author and want to do her a solid--so it's a 4 from me, dawg.

Modestly recommended.

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Where the Reformers Aren't All That Nice

Who Will Remember by C.S. Harris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Such a great series. I knew before I opened it I'd love this book--they've all been good, and only getting better.

Sebastian St. Cyr is a great MC, and the only character I like as much as him is his wife, Hero, who I'd really like to see played by Anna Maxwell or someone as nearly like her as possible. She's tough and smart and unafraid, but also kind and energetic and hopeful. They make a great pair in every sense, including crime-solving.

The setting, as always, is well used here. 1815, the year without a summer, is where we find Sebastian trying to solve the strange murder of a nobleman left hanging upside down in the ruins of an old church. It's raining all the time, as it did that summer, almost certainly because of a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world. Important scenes also take place in another ruins, an old palatial residence along the Thames. This is the time period when soldiers are returning from the war with Napoleon, many of them wounded, and trying to find a place in a society--a job, a family, a way to survive. (Hero is interviewing some of these veterans to write a story about the difficulties fighting men faced in that era.) The author is very good at using genuine details like these to establish a real sense of place and time to give the story an added level of gritty realness.

It's a great mystery with lots of clues and misdirection, but it's also an action story. There is genuine danger for Sebastian and Hero and a few others, and they have to act and react to survive; it's not cerebral effort alone, and I like that mix. A few of the novels in this long-running series lean pretty far toward the side of high stakes and high anxiety, giving the reader a lot of tension, and all of them (IMO) tend toward that side of the scale, more tense than cozy, but I'd put this one and quite a few of them pretty nearly in the center of that scale. (Not sure I'm making my thoughts clear. Hope so.)

These books are always fun. I read a lot of books (a little at a time) all at once, and this one stayed at the top of the the pile every day. Or I'd read a chunk of a book I'm only kinda enjoying with the promise that I'd read this one next. Which is to say--this is good fun.

Recommended.

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Where Humans Kinda Fade Away

Space by Stephen Baxter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I found this a hard read.

Almost DNF'ed a bunch of times.

I'm glad I finished it--but now I'm done. It wasn't much fun to read and I won't look for others by this author. I will give him credit, though, for very big ideas, for creating something worth thinking about. Is that a fair trade for my time and effort? Some people would probably say yes. I'm not sold.

This story, as entertainment, is disappointing, despite its constant promise to get good and be really cool. I'd say the last 45 pages do that. I liked that part. The first 400+ were frustrating. And here's my main objection: the main characters do almost nothing. There's an alien invasion and nobody mobilizes; nobody plans; nobody fights back. The whole book reads like a dream where you try to run and can't, and though you keep finding yourself in a new setting it's the same problem--you're passing through like a wraith, having no effect on the story. The characters are sleepwalking through Armageddon.

Nemoto does some stuff, and on page 444 she accomplishes something important on the planet Mercury. That's enough of a spoiler, and I won't give more, but that was the first time for me, the reader, that I thought "Yay! They're doing something!" For all of the rest of the book, until the very end, the main characters are just observers, looking at a small part of history, reporting an incomprehensible piece of the galactic tale. The author lays them out for us like sticks on the beach, and for most of the story it doesn't add up to anything. You (I) think that maybe you're getting the big picture, but nope. That's not it. It's not until the last handful of pages that anything is made clear.

(Have you ever heard one of those jokes that is spun out to ten or fifteen minutes before you finally get the punch line, and it's a joke that could have been told in about a minute? That's how the story and its much-delayed ending felt here--there's a little burst of sense after hundreds of frustrating pages of random weirdness. And in those jokes, remember, the punchline isn't the point. The joke is on the listener.)

In my opinion.

Malenfant and Madeline and others travel here and there, hitching a ride with the incommunicative Gaijin robots, surviving improbably long, pushed into the future by thousands of years by their interstellar travel, seeing the dwindling and scattering human race stumbling into oblivion. Why they're dwindling is just hinted at. There is no story about how nations tried to push back against alien invasion. There is no organized effort to survive. Minor actions are taken on earth's moon, on other moons, on Mercury, where humans are trying to hang on, but these are all chaotic fragments of stories that don't add up to anything. And the Gaijin robots won't talk, won't explain anything, won't interact in any way that matters until the very end of the novel.

I found it frustrating and unsatisfying.

Five for big ideas. Two for being a slog to read. Let's call it a 3.

YMMV

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Where You Really Need a Gun and a Horse

West of Dodge: Frontier Stories by Louis L'Amour
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my second book of Louis L'Amour short stories, and I enjoyed it just the same as the first. 4 stars.

These are stories written to entertain a reader. I like that. I thought for a long time that I didn't really like short stories because the type that tend to get included in magazines that I would try (science fiction, fantasy, and a few others) apparently tend toward the literary. I'd be looking for a beginning, middle, and end, and they'd have maybe one or two but not all three. Or they'd do any number of clever, stylistic things that didn't make for satisfying stories, IMO. Crucially, they just didn't feel like the books I enjoyed in the same genre.

L'Amour isn't like that; these stories are a lot like his novels. This is regular genre fiction, where the author gives you an entertaining story with one or two characters you can get interested in. You want to read for a few minutes before bed? These stories are perfect for that. You want to cheer for a kid trying to get ahead in a tough world? Or a grown man looking for a second chance? These are the stories. I don't think you even need to be very interested in the genre to like them. Westerns probably represent about 1% of my reading, but I like this.

(Why a 4, then, and not a 5? Seems like a fair number. I guess westerns are not exactly my thing, though I liked it quite a lot. Better than I might have guessed ahead of time. Others will maybe like it a little more or a little less.)

I guess what I'm saying is this: if you know of fantasy or SF or mystery authors with short stories like this--fun, short, plot-focused stories with satisfying endings and likable characters--I would appreciate a heads-up. :)

Recommended. (Another one of brother Jon's books.)

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Where Lily Stays Lily

One Night for Love by Mary Balogh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a very entertaining book. I enjoyed reading it, hoping for happy endings for a number of characters, wondering how it would all work out, and I was eagerly looking for the answers to questions through the whole second half like it was half mystery. A couple of those questions are left somewhat unanswered--technically revealed, but in a vague way--which I didn't love, but it didn't detract too much. Still a lot of fun.

(For example--Lily was told to find something in her father's bag, and the reader knows it involves a secret. I want to find the bag, or find what was in it. Lily never finds it, unfortunately, and though Neville locates someone who knows what it involved he never tells us explicitly what that was. We're clued into the secret already by that point, so it's kinda moot, but I really hoped they would somehow find the original document, at least for closure. Same for their original proof of being married--I hoped that would turn up, somehow, like in the TV show Belgravia. We didn't need it, but it felt like a missed opportunity.)

But overall, it's a cool plot with good twists and lots of great scenes.

The FMC, Lily, is a great character, original and likable, and so is Neville, which makes them easy to root for. And the people who are at first kinda anti-Lily come around in a way that does them credit, so that we can like them, too, or almost all of them. I like that Lily herself is unaffected, friendly with people of all stations, and remains that way throughout, chatting with people her peers would never chat with, peeling potatoes that they would never peel, but still able to be herself with the gentry. At first, they are put off by that aspect of her character, but later they appreciate it. That's a lot of her charm, for the reader as well as for the other characters in the novel, and she keeps that innocent quality from beginning to end.

Some of the story, by the last few chapters, is a little melodramatic, and that stretches the conclusion out more than I would like. It also takes the tone in a too-serious direction--too many apologies and reminiscences, too many starts and stops and partings, too many "I'll wait until you're ready" moments--so that I winced a tiny bit in the last 30 or 40 pages. But it still was mostly upbeat and fun, which preserved (for me) an "I liked reading this a lot" 4-star rating. (I've read the books in the wrong order, accidentally, so I knew how the plot came out before I started, and I'm not sure if I would have liked this more or less if I had read it in the right order. Doesn't really matter. I enjoyed it fine.)

In any case, I find myself entertained and charmed by Mary Balogh's books, enough that I've already ordered another one in the related series, and I'm looking forward to it. Maybe I'll buy and read them one at a time, all 40 or 50 of them, like ET following a trail of Reese's Pieces...

Recommended.

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Where He's Invisible and a Narcissistic Sociopath

The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

You know what? It's not great.

I found it mildly interesting, but he could have made a much better story. The first third of this book is the MC tediously trying to reverse his invisibility. The second third is him recounting the dull story of how he became invisible. And the last third is an action and chase sequence that has the book's only fun scenes. It feels like a missed opportunity.

Imagine you're the first person to think of writing a story about an invisible man. Wouldn't you have your character *do* something with this ability, for good or ill, and make the story about that? Make him a hero or a villain, but have him use his ability for something: solve a mystery, track a criminal, rob banks, get intelligence on foreign spies, something cool.

Or if you're just gonna do what H.G. Wells did, make it a short story. This was so thin it didn't demand even 150 pages. It reminds me of Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, where nothing interesting (to me) happens; all he did was show us the marvels of this pretend invention, traveling to amazing places underwater. It's as if both authors expected to wow readers with amazing visuals and unusual settings rather than write a very engaging plot. It is still quite short, as novels go, but longer than it needed to be.

IMO, always.

I found a few things to interest me, especially the final confrontations, and I still want to read other famous titles by the author that I have some curiosity about. But my expectations are lower than they used to be. Maybe he'll surprise me. Fingers crossed.

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