Caleb's Crossing

Title: Caleb's Crossing
Author: Geraldine Brooks
Genre: Historical Fiction
Pages: 336
Rating (out of 5 stars): ***
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: Bethia Mayfield is a Puritan girl living on Martha's Vineyard in the early 1600's when she meets a young Native American man named Caleb.  Bethia and Caleb secretly meet many times, learning each other's language and customs and gaining an appreciation for the differences between them.  Eventually, Caleb decides to cross over completely into the English world, but the transition is much more difficult than either could have imagined.
Thoughts: There was a lot to like about this book, but for some reason it took me a while to get into it.  If I could, I'd give a separate rating of 2 stars to the first half of the book, and 4 stars to the second half, because I really liked the second half a lot.  It was particularly fascinating for me because a lot of the book is centered on Harvard when it was just starting out, and I really liked reading about how the college worked almost 400 years ago.  Also, it was very interesting to read a bit more about the prejudices that divided the Pilgrims from the Native Americans so strongly, and made it so difficult for them to reach any kind of understanding.  All in all, if you like historical fiction, you would like this book.
Disclaimer: None.

The Mayor of Casterbridge

Title: The Mayor of Casterbridge
Author: Thomas Hardy
Genre: Classic
Pages: 400
Rating (out of 5 stars): ****
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: As a young man, Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter in a fit of drunken rage.  As the years pass, Michael establishes himself and becomes successful, but his dark past hangs over him, and eventually comes back to haunt him.
Thoughts: Somehow, I forgot to review this book when I finished it, so my memory is a bit hazy now on the details.  But, I remember really liking this book.  It's got plenty of plots twists that keep it interesting, but Hardy is really at his best when he examines characters that are in difficult moral circumstances.  This book is full of those, and pondering over the characters makes you see a bit of yourself in each of them.  All in all, a really great book.  I think I might have actually liked it more than Tess of the D'urbervilles.
Disclaimer: None.

Northanger Abbey

Title: Northanger Abbey
Author: Jane Austen
Genre: Classic
Pages: 192
Rating (out of 5 stars): ***
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: Catherine (the heroine) heads from her rural country home to Bath, where she enjoys society and makes friends with a man whom she's quite interested in.  Will she end up with him?  Or will the formalities of 18th century society get in the way?
Thoughts: This is classic Jane Austen writing: lighthearted, easy to read, engaging, romantic, and critical of society in general.  I really enjoyed the story and the writing for the most part, but in my opinion this doesn't compare to Austen's more famous works like Pride and Prejudice or Emma.  Still, if you're in the mood for some Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey was a good, if not great, book.
Disclaimer: None

Endurance

Title: Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
Author: Alfred Lansing
Genre: Historical Non-fiction
Pages: 288
Rating (out of 5 stars): ****1/2
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: In the summer of 1914, Ernest Shackleton set off with 21 other men on a quest with the goal of making the first transcontinental journey across the Antarctic Continent.  It did not take long for disaster to strike, however, when their ship was frozen solid in the middle of an ice sheet before even touching land in Antarctica.  Endurance chronicles the crew's astounding journey that had an entirely new goal: survival.
Thoughts: Between this book, Unbroken, and Undaunted Courage, I've had the pleasure of reading about some truly amazing accounts of the indomitable human spirit over the past few months.  Really, each of those three books is worthy of my highest praise.  And, to be honest, I think that Endurance just might contain the most incredible story of the three.  The extremes that these men suffered while stuck on sea ice in the middle of the ocean is just unfathomable.  Hunger, cold, thirst, fatigue, despair . . . and yet somehow they kept their wits about them.  It's just incredible to even think about, to be honest.  I highly recommend this book to anyone who's looking for a great adventure story.  And it's a true tale to boot!
Disclaimer: None.

The Good School

Title: The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve
Author: Peg Tyre
Genre: Non-fiction/Self-help
Pages: 256
Rating (out of 5 stars): ****
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: Peg Tyre, an education journalist, brings together as much research as she can gather in this book on how to identify a good school and a good teacher for your child.  She tackles all the major questions: picking a pre-school, the importance of class size, reading, math, teacher quality, and how to make a difference at your school.
Thoughts: I think that everyone who has a school-age kid should read this book.  It does a really nice job of synthesizing a whole bunch of information, and directly and answering the questions that concerned parents would like to have answered about their child's education.  Each chapter had some clear, major take-aways, and I felt like it at least gave me a clear set of things that I want to make sure that my kids' schools have.  I also really liked that the book was very fair, and that it was not pushing a particular agenda.  Tyre was open about what we still don't know, and openly says that some of her recommendations will likely change as new evidence comes out.  I really appreciated that.  I only have two complaints about the book: (1) it used a fair amount of research, but rarely were the claims backed up by numbers.  For example, she said pre-school teachers who are very verbal (talk a lot) do a better job of helping kids learn language skills.  That's good to know, but how big was the impact?  How much do they need to talk?  I just felt like it was light on real numbers so that I could get a handle on the magnitude of the various effects.  (2) It was bit on the dry side.  Writing a book like this that isn't dry is pretty hard to do, so this is a pretty minor complaint.  Anyway, besides those two things, this was really a great book.  Highly recommended.
Disclaimer: None.

Robinson Crusoe

Title: Robinson Crusoe
Author: Daniel Defoe
Genre: Classic
Pages: 304
Rating (out of 5 stars): ***
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: The classic tale of poor Robinson Crusoe, who was stranded on a tropical island for 28 years.  Through his ingenuity, he not only survives, but comes to live in relative peace and comfort on the island, before he finally finds a way back to civilization.
Thoughts: Robinson Crusoe has been on my to-read list for a long time, and I'm glad that I finally got around to it, but it's not one that I'll highly recommend to someone looking for an exciting adventure book.  Crusoe is regarded as one of the earliest English novels, and so I think that reading it is more of an educational experience than pleasurable.  Defoe is prone to spend too long describing some things and not long enough on other parts, I felt like, so I wasn't never really captivated by the book.  I often found my mind wandering while I listend to it.  But, for being written in 1719, it's pretty darn good, and it's certainly become an important part of our culture.  I think you just have to expect some long, winding plots and some philosophizing with these old novels.  Overall, I'm glad I read it, but it was a bit of a project to get through.
Disclaimer:  None, other than the fact that Defoe is quite racist, as all white Europeans were in 1719.

To The Rescue

Title: To The Rescue: The Biography of Thomas S. Monson
Author: Heidi Swinton
Genre: Biography
Pages: 600
Rating (out of 5 stars): ****
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: The biography of President Monson.  Not much more to say than that.
Thoughts: I had heard from several people that this was a great book, and I definitely agree with them.  I feel like President Monson has a very different personality from President Hinckley, and so when that transition happened it was hard for me to imagine President Monson as the prophet.  This book really put into perspective the greatness of this man for me.  I just can't get over how many stories are in there of him listening carefully to the Spirit and then reaching out to the one.  President Monson is an incredible example of that.  And, I don't think I had fully comprehended just how long he's been in full-time service for the Church.  He was made an Apostle by David O. McKay, for heaven's sake!  I think that you have to admire his incredible endurance to serve so faithfully for so long.  Anyway, I really enjoyed this book a lot--it's chock full of great stories, it's entertaining, and it's inspiring all at once.
Disclaimer: None, obviously.

The Upside of Irrationality

Title: The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
Author: Dan Ariely
Genre: Popular Science
Pages: 352
Rating (out of 5 stars): ***1/2
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: Dan Ariely is back with a sequel to Predictably Irrational.  In this book, he covers new experiments that he has run, and explains how our irrational behavior doesn't always result in bad consequences.  He covers a wide range of topics, with the book being separated into a section on irrationality at work and another section on irrationality at home.
Thoughts: I really enjoyed Ariely's first book, Predictably Irrational.  The sequel is just as clever, but for me it held fewer "aha" moments, in which I'm really wowed by learning something I didn't know before.  Maybe that's because I'm already pretty familiar with behavioral economics, so I'm a tough customer in that regard.  My only other complaint is that I didn't feel like the book lived up to its title.  I didn't find much good about irrationality at all in the book, and still don't see how it is anything but just a continuation of his first book.  Still, Ariely is a great writer, and I really enjoyed the book quite a bit.  My favorite part was the section on the "Ikea effect"--the fact that we value something more when we put it together, even if putting it together doesn't require much effort on our part (e.g. by adding the eggs and oil to a cake mix, we like the cake more than if we didn't have to add them).  Overall, a solid book if you like this kind of thing.
Disclaimer:  I don't remember anything too sketchy in this one.

The Scarlet Pimpernel

Title: The Scarlet Pimpernel
Author: Baroness Emmuska Orczy
Genre: Classic
Pages: 320
Rating (out of 5 stars): ****1/2
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: During the French Revolution of the late 18th century, Madame Guillotine is busy beheading as many aristocrats as she can capture.  But the mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel, and his gang of British noblemen, are smuggling out dozens of French royalty right under the noses of the Inspector of the Republic, Chauvelin.  Who is the mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel?  Will "those Frenchies" catch him in his most perilous adventure yet? Thoughts: My mom loved the movie version of this book, so I've probably seen that at least three or four times.  I've also seen the musical, which my awesome cousin Laura starred in in Logan.  But somehow, I had never actually read The Scarlet Pimpernel.  In fact, it wasn't until Jenn's dad told me that he had read it that I even knew there was a book.  I'm so glad he told me, because this was a delightful book!  It's in the same vein as The Three Musketeers, but much more concise and with more of a love story woven through it.  I really thought that the writing was superb, and the story is great, of course.  I really like it a lot, and would highly recommend it.  I just might try a few other Scarlet Pimpernel novels in the future.
Disclaimer:  Quite clean, except for a few English gentlemanly swear words.

I Am America (And So Can You!)

Title: I Am America (And So Can You!)
Author: Stephen Colbert
Genre: Humor/Satire
Pages (words): 240 (N/A)
Readability: N/A
Rating (out of 5 stars): **
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: Stephen Colbert offers "knee-jerk beliefs" about everything that is destroying America, from pets to old people.
Thoughts: I think The Colbert Report is hilarious (I watch it during my lunch break most days, and it may be my main source of news), so I was excited to read Colbert's book.  I have to admit, I was disappointed in it.  The definitely had its funny parts, but overall wasn't as funny as I had hoped, and had more foul language that I cared for.  I wouldn't really recommend it.  Good thing I only listened to the abridged version, so I didn't waste too much time with it!
Disclaimer: Plenty of bad language in this one.

The Year of Living Biblically

Title: The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible
Author: A.J. Jacobs
Genre: Experimental Journalism
Pages (words): 416 (N/A)
Readability: N/A
Rating (out of 5 stars): ****
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: A.J. Jacobs follows up his book about reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica (my review of that book is here) with a chronicle of his quest to live the Bible literally for an entire year.  And I mean literally.  He grows a beard, wears only white clothes, stones adulterers, and is absolutely honest to the point of brutality.  He participates in sacrifice, and circumcises his newborn sons.  This book follows his journey, giving details of how the quest affects his life, his way of thinking, and his attitude towards God.
Thoughts: I really enjoyed Jacobs' first book, The Know-It-All, so I thought I'd give this one a try.  It was even better than The Know-It-All.  The Year of Living Biblically was not nearly as blasphemous as it sounds, actually.  I really appreciated that Jacobs approached the task seriously.  At the start of the year, he is basically agnostic and completely secular.  He's never gone to church, doesn't believe in God, and is skeptical of religion.  But, he's afraid that he's missing out on something, and so he decides to live strictly by the Bible for a year.  Not the way I would go about learning about religion, but, hey, if you can get a book deal out of it I guess you do it.  Anyway, the book has it's funny parts of course, like when he has to have a specialist come to make sure that his clothing doesn't have mixed fibers in it, but the parts about him trying not to covet, or learning to pray, are actually really good.  He gains a huge respect for religion, and it was very interesting to watch his outlook on life change and he tried to live the principles of the Bible.  I would highly recommend the book to anyone.  It's entertaining and enlightening at the same time.  And, it made me really, really grateful to have The Book of Mormon and modern-day prophets that can help us know which commandments are still in force and which are obsolete.  I'd hate to have to play a ram's horn at the beginning of each new moon.
Disclaimer:  There's a bit of swearing in the book, but it's pretty clean overall.

The Great Stagnation

Title: The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better 
Author: Tyler Cowen
Genre: Economics
Pages (words): 128 (N/A)
Readability: N/A
Rating (out of 5 stars): ***1/2
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: Cowen lays out an argument that the United States is in the middle of an economic stagnation, one that began in the early 1970s.  His main argument rests on the idea that for the first 200 years of the history of the U.S., we had a lot of low-hanging fruit that made our economy grow steadily and rapidly.  Then, about forty years ago, that low-hanging fruit ran out.  He then goes over the implications of this for how we should expect the future to pan out.
Thoughts: I enjoyed this more than I expected to.  I read Tyler Cowen's blog, Marginal Revolution, pretty regularly, so I had heard the basics of his arguments before reading the book (an extended essay, really).  But it was really nice to hear the whole thing put together in one solid framework, rather than in bits and pieces like you get it on the blog.  The book is somewhat economics-y, so it might not make a ton of sense if you haven't had at least an Econ 101 class, but I would definitely recommend it if you're interested in macroeconomics, innovation, or business at all.  I'm fairly convinced by most of his arguments.  Also, Cowen's a good writer who doesn't take extreme positions in order to make a point, and I can really appreciate that.
Disclaimer: None.

The Corrections

Title: The Corrections
Author: Jonathan Franzen
Genre: Modern Fiction
Pages (words): 568 (N/A)
Readability: N/A
Rating (out of 5 stars): No Rating
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: A novel about an older Midwestern couple who want to get their family back together one last time for Christmas.  The difficulty is that all three of their kids have serious issues going on in their lives, but all of them are trying to smooth over the problems, rather than confronting them.
Thoughts: You'll notice I didn't give this book a rating.  That's because I only got maybe 50 pages into it when I gave up.  It was just too dirty to complete, which is sad because I've heard so many good things about Jonathan Franzen, and the book seemed pretty well-written.  Unfortunately, it appears that Franzen, like many modern authors, is more concerned with writing about sex than about life.
Disclaimer:  Too explicit to complete.

Fire and Rain

Title: Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970
Author: David Browne
Genre: Non-fiction
Pages (words): 392 (N/A)
Readability: N/A
Rating (out of 5 stars): **1/2
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: Browne follows four major 60s rock bands through the year 1970, chronicling the way that the bands came apart in the midst of a changing era.  The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, and CSNY all struggled mightily in 1970, and in many ways this year altered the course of rock music drastically.
Thoughts: I thought I would like this book more than I did.  I really like the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, and James Taylor (but I'm not a big CSNY fan), so I figured this would be an interesting read and a great way to learn a bit more about this point in American history.  While I did get a bit of that, I often caught myself thinking about something else entirely while I listened to the book--a sure sign that the book isn't holding my interest well.  I think I hoped for a more coherent narrative that told a story.  Instead, the book was more like 4 separate timelines of a single year--one timeline for each band--that just marked off major events in the lives of the bank members.  At the end of the book Browne tried to show that the events reflected a bigger theme, but I just didn't buy it.  Instead, I felt like I just read about one concert or rehearsal after another, with lots of drugs and arguing in between.
Disclaimer: Some swear words, and lots of drug usage.

2010-2011 Books in Review

It's time for another book review!  I've fallen into the habit of doing these every two years or so.  Here are my previous reviews: 2009, 2007.

Over the past two years, I've read 30.5 books (I didn't finish one of them), all of which have been reviewed on this blog.  It surprised me to find that I only gave the full 5 stars to one of those books.  I must be getting crotchety in my old age, I guess.  However, there were several that just missed the 5-star cut, ending up with 4 1/2 stars instead.  So, without further ado, let's get to the top three!

And . . . drum roll please . . . the top three fiction books from 2010-2011 are:
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Modern)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Classic)
The Glass Castle (Memoir)

I should note that The Glass Castle is technically non-fiction, but the stories in there are so outrageous that it really feels like a novel.

For this Review, I feel like I really need a separate list for the non-fiction books because I read some really great ones over the past two years.  So, keep that drum roll going . . . the top three non-fiction books from 2010-2011 are:
NurtureShock
Predictably Irrational
Undaunted Courage


I highly recommend all six of these books.  They could all be 5-star books, even though I only gave full marks to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.  The links will take you to my reviews of them.

Lastly, the worst book I read over the past two years was A Happy Marriage, which gets low marks for highly explicit material.  It was the only book I didn't finish out of the 31 on the list.

For the numbers-oriented, here's a statistical summary of my reading in 2010-2011.  For comparison, the number in parentheses is the corresponding figure for all 86 books that I've read since 2007.

Average Pages:  389.9 (377.3)
Average Reading Grade Level:  8.53 (7.65)
Average Rating: 3.71 stars (3.67)
Average Rating by Genre:
   Classic: 3.83 (4.03)
   Fantasy: 3.67 (3.44)
   Memoir: 4.25 (3.64)
   Modern: 3.38 (3.69)
   Mystery: 3.50 (3.19)
   Non-fiction: 3.85 (3.65)

If you're curious, here's what I've got on my stack to be read next:
Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970
The Corrections
The Year of Living Biblically
The Upside of Irrationality
To the Rescue: The Biography of Thomas S. Monson
Inverting the Pyramid


I'm always looking for recommendations, so please leave them in the comments!  Happy reading!

Moonwalking with Einstein

Title: Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Author: Joshua Foer
Genre: Popular Science
Pages (words): 320 (N/A)
Readability: N/A
Rating (out of 5 stars): ***1/2
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: On assignment, the journalist Foer is sent to the U.S. National Memory Championships, and is so intrigued by the competition that he spends a full year preparing to compete in the event the following year.  This book chronicles all that he learned about memory and memorizing along the way.
Thoughts: This was a thoroughly enjoyable book.  I've always been fascinated by memory and learning, so this book was right up my alley in that regard.  There were several things that I learned about the mind that were completely new to me, and I really liked the section about how in many ways our memory is what our conscious selves are.  I only have two complaints with the book.  First, I was hoping to come away with more practical advice about how to naturally remember stuff, but unfortunately something like that doesn't exist.  That's not really a fault of the book, it's just the way things are.  Still it served a great reminder of the memory tricks I've learned in the past that I don't use anymore.  My second complaint is that Foer tends to ramble quite a bit.  That's good because the book covers a lot of ground, but it wasn't always in the most coherent way, I felt.  Overall, I'm really glad that I read it, but it wasn't the best book of the year.
Disclaimer:  There are a few swear words, but that's it.