I worry my writing is like this...

The Learners: A Novel by Chip Kidd

rating: 2 of 5 stars
Uh.. it was only okay. Not as good as The Cheese Monkeys by any stretch of the imagination. It gets very emotionally neurotic towards the end where it just kind of stops. The Cheese Monkeys had a nice narrative arc with a satisfying conclusion. This just seems half-formed.

I've always been far more interested in the design aspects of the stories, and you get some of that here. But not nearly enough to satisfy me. The book is much more focused on the Milgram experiments at Yale than on design, and it suffers because of that. Am I the only one who thinks writing your character into the Milgram experiment is trite?

View all my reviews.

Tweet, tweet.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is a zen book. Believe me, I know how stupid that sounds. But, bear with me; that's the best word I could think of to describe the experience.

It's by no means an easy book to get through, both for the flaying and the mystical reasoning that leads the protagonist from one set of events to another. But, if you can suspend the critical, solidly-logical bits of your mind for a while, then there's a lot of beauty here, in both phrasing and imagery. I actually marked pages that have particularly beautiful passages on them; I never do that.

I found the ending more satisfying than any book I've read in recent memory. I want to describe it as meaty for some reason. It may have been because I'd been awake for something like 32 hours at the time, but I teared up when the well was revived.

I want to go on about what I think Murakami was trying to say about contemporary Japan, but I'm not Japanese. I know very little about the culture, and I'm fairly certain I'd come off sounding a bit like a stupid American. But, it's a lovely, lovely book that was well worth the time it took me to read it, which was around six months. I'm slow.

I'm a Federalist at Heart

His Excellency George Washington isn't a studiously detailed biography; it's more of a psychological profile that puts Washington in the midst of his events and analyzes why he acts and reacts the way he does. It's a searching work that's probably open to criticism but interesting all the same. I found the discussion of slavery particularly illuminating because it manages to capture the difficult situation the average Virginia planter was in without trying to dodge the issues or make excuses for the man

Taming the Pirates. (arrrr!)

Contrary to what you might expect from reading the title of this book, there's very little Jefferson in here. Which is a good thing because it's probably no secret to anyone who knows me very well that I hate Thomas Jefferson. And, if this book were about him I'd have to go off on a harangue about what a hypocritical sneaky son-of-a-bitch he is. Instead, I get to ramble about how great pirates and broadsides and 19th century sailing vessels are. Also the word scuttle is the shit.

The primary (and really only) problem with this book is the introduction where the author tries to be all topical and link the Barbary Wars with the Bush administration's "War on Terror". He stops drawing those parallels fairly early on, though, and settles into a rollicking recount of the relationships and battles of the Barbary Wars. This book is much more involving than Six Frigates (a book about the same general topic and time period). If you threw Jefferson's War into a time warp to 1801, you could use it as a recruitment tool for the early Navy.