[Crossposted from a one-star review on Goodreads.]

I always used to say that life was too short for bad movies or cheap beer, but with books I had an ironclad and perhaps foolish rule: you make a commitment to read it all the way to the end. Not so with Too Big to Fail; for once (okay, twice), I broke that promise.

I’ve been working in financial services for over two years now, and was then employed for a company that went down spectacularly in flames during the crash. It was important for me to read something that tried to make sense of the Wall Street chaos.

This isn’t that book. There’s only the most cursory discussion of credit-default swaps, for instance — for explanations, NPR’s Planet Money, or The New Yorker‘s James Surowiecki, does a far better job — and for all of Sorkin’s attention to detail throughout, one doesn’t get a good sense of how everything is connected.

The book is also terribly formulaic. By the third chapter or so the schema is set: introduce yet another person, describe their backgrounds (disappointingly uniform, I must say), add some detail about their culinary habits or the car they drive or The Moment They Received the Fateful Phone call, then move on to the next COO (either the one about to be replaced, or the replacement). With a cast of characters as long as a business account’s legal disclosure, it isn’t immediately clear why each one is relevant other than the fact that they spoke to Sorkin for the record.

Sorkin has a good handle on what creates tension within a scene, but there’s no disguising the fact that most of the action takes place in boardrooms and offices. (If this were a film, we’d at least get an unconvincing montage of people staring at computer screens to gussy up the action, but there’s no opportunity for that here.)

What kept me doggedly reading the next few chapters after that wasn’t some narrative hook, ultimately, but the nagging, guilty, post-crash feeling of frugality that I spent good money on this, and that I could at least squeeze a few more minutes of entertainment out of it. But “life is short” won the day.

Popularity: 2% [?]

[Crossposted from a four-star review on Goodreads.]

Weighing only a little less than last year’s book Imperial, Argall is Vollmann’s 746-page retelling of the “true story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith — though by “true” Vollmann refers to what he calls a “Symbolic History”, and that the facts contained within are “often untrue based on the literal facts as we know them, but whose untruths further a deeper sense of truth.” I can’t claim to be any good arbiter of the ethics behind this, only to note that it’s fiction, after all, and that Smith, as meticulous a chronicler as he was, was guided by ideological and commercial considerations just like anyone.

And indeed, Argall is perhaps closer to that “deeper sense of truth” in the sense that it’s stubbornly, refreshingly, anti-Romantic. (Smith himself barely mentions that famous incident — enshrined in elementary schools all across America, at least in the pre-Howard Zinn days — when Pocahontas supposedly saves Smith from execution, and so Vollmann similarly glosses over it.) One can imagine Argall almost as the dark twin of Terrence Malick’s film The New World (my favorite film of the last decade, but hey, go see the others). Where Malick’s vision of America is precisely to embrace the myth and the promise, in all its swooning, idyllic, but haunted, glory, Vollmann’s rendition is the opposite, a dense thicket of a nightmare: brutish, ugly, miserable, shit-streaked, and in the end, deeply, quietly, tragic.

And did I write that it’s all written in barely penetrable Elizabethan English, complete with variant orthographies, italics and font sizes whirling out of control, florid introductions and epigraphs, and almost a hundred pages of endnotes and glossaries? What at first looks like literary grandstanding gives way to a slow immersion into a Language peppered with unexpected moments of rapture. Paradoxically, the distance created by the prose makes the events even more unbearable. (I do wish we heard more from our good narrator William the Blind, whose rare atemporal interruptions are very welcome, as it shocks the reader momentarily out of the muck and into some sort of self-recognition.)

So read it all, if you can, even the endnotes; if anything, the latter provides a fascinating, if somewhat daunting, glimpse into Vollmann’s indefatigable capacity for historical research. I’m happy to wander down any digressive garden path Vollmann wishes to lead me, in any case.

Popularity: 1% [?]

[Crossposted from a four-star review on Goodreads.]

Engrossing and thrilling and wonderfully evocative of 1930s Paris. Best part: how the book nails the magical aspect of cinema (though there are many other movies that do this better, for obvious reasons). Don’t be daunted by the length; I finished it in three hours — but that’s because I was reading it out loud to my daughter. You adults will be done with it in less than an hour.

I had no idea it was going to be about Georges Méliès, so it was a treat to have the various aspects of his story — the boot heels, his career as a magician, etc. — be included in the book. (He becomes somewhat peripheral, in an odd sense, from the second half of the story; his wife Jeanne Méliès is transformed into a far more vibrant character at this point.) Fans of French cinema will enjoy the many cinematic references, including the stills of Méliès films reproduced in the book (and the unexpected homage to Truffaut).

Why only four stars? (Actually, I would have given it something closer to 3 and a half.) The crosshatched illustrations are beautiful, but there’s an uneasy fit with the text. By this I mean that Selznick illustrated many of the action sequences — and the contents of an important notebook, which is crucial to the book — but chose to leave out instead. Many times I would turn a page in anticipation of the subsequent drawing, only to be disappointed. The book isn’t as emotionally engaging as I would have expected, probably because the development of Hugo as a character more or less gets dropped in the second half.

Popularity: 1% [?]

[Crossposted from my five-star review on Goodreads.]

I rarely give out five stars, especially to an essay collection (where the quality can be uneven). But this is just fantastic: a highly readable selection of scholarly essays — mostly from professors of English, actually, but the essays are written from a more sociological perspective.

Doubtless the fact that I love the television show — perhaps the greatest in the history of the medium, but take my hyperbole with a grain of salt — has much to do with my appreciation of the book. The variety of the essays is its main virtue: there’s a discussion of “the production of gender” among the “Barksdale women”, two essays loosely about genre (the police procedural, and the melodrama), capitalism and violence (as seen through Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale), serial vs episodic narratives on television, inner-city manhood, a close reading/viewing of Agnieszka Holland’s visuality, and an analysis of fan reaction to Omar Little (and queerness and American citizenship). Foucault is mentioned a lot — not just because of the theme of surveillance running throughout the show, but because, like Foucault, The Wire takes as its main topic the nature of modern institutions and the distribution and exercise of power within them.

Of course, the book won’t make much sense to folks who haven’t seen the show. But for fans who want to delve further into the rich, complexly layered world of The Wire — and not just read a book that merely features making-of anecdotes or behind-the-scenes gossip (though I’d be happy to read that too) — this book is highly recommended.

Popularity: 2% [?]

[Crossposted on Goodreads.]

Exceptional offbeat minimalist thriller, with an unlikely hero — a “Native Canadian” linguistic anthropologist! (Actually, I think the proper term is “First Nations”.)

The book didn’t quite suit my purposes at the time — I was about to board a plane, so I wanted a relatively mindless airport novel — but it generates its own peculiar level of excitement. It’s closer in style to, say, George Smiley interviewing and re-interviewing retired Circus employees and shuffling through redacted reports — in other words, a patient, incremental enumeration of observations and deductions and steps taken.

But it’s not a procedural in the usual sense; the narrative is set on a few continents, and the last third of the novel is pretty much an extended chase sequence. It’s a surprisingly complex plot nonetheless, full of carefully calibrated moments of subterfuge, and this complexity is all the more impressive considering the fact that the plot elements can be boiled down to only two phases: there’s a top-secret base, and our hero has to get in, and he has to get out. Recommended

Popularity: 1% [?]