Books Read in 2009

It's hard for me to judge this, having seen the movie (which I loved) first. The graphic novel is harder to follow than the film, but it does afford the opportunity to savor some of the better bits. I'm impressed by how well Moore and Lloyd were able to make it work with no "sound effects" and no narration. Masterfully done.

Daemon is a techno-thriller in the vein of Michael Crichton (i.e., fast-paced with minimal character development), but it has the distinction that nearly all of its technobabble is firmly rooted in today's reality. Suarez truly knows hacking, and this novel succeeds infinitely more-so than, for example, The Blue Nowhere.

I was a little bit disappointed that Daemon turns out to be the beginning of a series rather than a standalone novel. The ending is not completely satisfying, but it works better as a standalone than many.

I requested and received a stack of Alan Moore books for Christmas, and I started off by tearing through The Killing Joke. It's nowhere near the league of Watchmen, but it's a damn serious comic book.

I first read this a bit more than 15 years ago (just before I started this blog), and I reread it for my book club. I remember liking it better the first time, but I still very much enjoyed Bradbury's well-crafted writing.

A highly worthwhile classic.

This will be the end of my recent PKD kick. It's a better read than Ubik and VALIS, but I think I've had enough for now.

Bernstein's investment strategy is essentially the same as David Swensen's, as detailed in Unconventional Success, and it's the strategy I've been following since 2007. In the past three years, my portfolio has outperformed the S&P 500 by nearly 5% annualized (taking into account all fees/costs), which is what this strategy predicts in a bear market (it should perform similarly to the S&P 500 in a bull market).

The strategy, in a nutshell, is to invest in low-fee index funds, setting percentage targets on a relatively small set of asset classes, and rebalancing to get back to those percentages when the market gets out of whack (Bernstein recommends once every 2-3 years). It requires no research, very little effort, and the return matches or exceeds the market in the long run with much less volatility in the short-term. And better yet, in the long run, it outperforms every other approach (anyone who tells you otherwise is either deluded or doesn't understand the math).

I highly recommend reading one of these books.

I was going to read this for my book club in lieu of rereading the novel, but after finishing it, I was left cold. This graphic novel adaptation of Bradbury's novel didn't come close to living up to my memory of the book. It turns out that much of what's great about Bradbury is the casual, painterly detail that brings his prose to life, and that just doesn't translate to a comic.

I bought this book via Robin Sloane's kickstarter project after reading his excellent short story Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store.

Sloane's writing is sharp, funny, and whimsical (in a Douglas Adams sort of way, with less silliness). It's intelligent without being difficult, and quite a lot of fun. I hope he keeps writing!

An exceedingly and meticulously crafted Dickensian novel.

Good, but not my thing.

As I've been re-reading the Harry Potter series aloud to Kevin, I have enjoyed revisiting the story, but this book didn't hold up very well to a re-read. The ham-handed bits about house-elf slavery are annoying and don't pay off until a later book, and the Tri-Wizard Tournament seems to go on forever.

Still, Kevin is loving every minute of it, and we're diving into The Order of the Phoenix next.

Mark Helprin is a tremendously gifted prose stylist, but his plotting is a bit loose. In A Soldier of the Great War, he presents the meandering life story of Alessandro Giuliani, an Italian man whose tenure in World War I is full of outlandish adventures and remarkable coincidences.

On a paragraph or page level, there is much to be admired here, but as a whole, there wasn't enough arc to the character to be satisfying. Most of the episodes make terrific vignettes, but the composite whole didn't resonate with me.

After reading Ubik, I wanted to read another PKD novel, and I happened to have a copy of VALIS that I'd bought more than a decade ago.

First, let me say wow.

From what I can gather, VALIS has many autobiographical elements, and if so, PKD was a deeply messed-up dude. Dick himself is the schizophrenic, drugged-out narrator, and the first half of the novel leaves the reader wondering which end is up. Things come together and the rules of the novel's universe become more clear in the second half, but it's still a total brain trip.

This is the first PKD novel I've read in more than a decade, and I enjoyed returning to his trippy prose. Ubik doesn't stand up to my memory of A Scanner Darkly or The Man in the High Castle, but it was a good read.

Another just-okay follow-on to the Buffy canon. It seems like the pop culture references are much more "of the microsecond" in the comics than they were in the TV show.

With all the critical acclaim this novel received, I expected to like it a lot more. The first half is filled with a lot of dull and unnecessary fleshing-out of secondary characters, who all seem to be to be out of my Jane Austen nightmare. Once the point of view shifts to Robbie at the midpoint, things get substantially better, and the final section makes the whole effort almost worthwhile.

The ending contains a minor twist—which I guessed about a hundred pages before it was revealed—and a major twist that surprised me a little. If not for the final bit of surprise, I would have regretted reading this book.

(By the way, I do recognize that a lot of what I hated about the first half of the book is what makes the minor twist work, but that doesn't make it any more palatable.)

I adored this book when I first read it, and I still highly recommend it. Of course, on a second reading, the major plot revelations are no longer surprises, and the pace seems slower. Still, there were a handful of moments that took my breath away (Henry meeting Alba at the museum jumps to mind). With the benefit of four more years of distance, the 9/11 scene rings more true and necessary than it did when I first read the book.

I hope my book club enjoyed it as much as I did!

China Mieville is a challenging read on a good day. His urban fantasy grotesques immerse you in foreign worlds and it often takes 100 pages to get one's head above water. The City & The City is no different: even though it's a police procedural centered on a girl's murder, it is set in a bizarrely divided city, where half of the residents are obligated to not notice the other half (and vice-versa).

I struggled at times to follow the action, but as with Mieville's other novels, I enjoyed the ride.

For a bestselling thriller, this novel starts off very slow, and I had to read nearly half of it before it really got rolling. That said, it does eventually pick up steam, and Lisbeth Salander (the titular heroine) is a great character. I wish that the novel had focused more on her and less on Mikael Blomkvist.

I expected this to be better, and I doubt that I'll ever bother with the sequel.

I was a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it was on television, and I remain a huge fan of Joss Whedon's characters and writing. I had forgotten until recently that Whedon was writing "Season 8" of Buffy in comic book form, and I was happy to discover that the comic books have started to be collected into graphic-novel-esque volumes.

These comics are really only for true fans, and they do succeed at recapturing some of the great stylized dialogue that Whedon is famous for (when I read the dialogue, I effortlessly hear it in the voices of the actors). The plot line is a fairly weak and unnecessary follow-on to the televised seventh season.

Still, I enjoyed revisiting these characters and I've already pre-ordered Volume 5.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is a collection of fairy tales from the Harry Potter universe. Rowling presents them as a volume edited by her character Hermione Granger, with notes from Albus Dumbledore, but you can also look at it as a surefire method to extract more money from Harry Potter fans.

I did not enjoy the stories in this book. They contain none of the wit and subversiveness of Grimm's fairy tales, and Dumbledore's literary analysis is pretty dull. I was expecting more, but my 8-year-old son liked them. Your mileage will probably fall somewhere in between.

I first read Pillars of the Earth in college, and I quite liked it then. I was pleased when my book club picked it, because after reading World Without End last year, I was looking for an excuse to revisit Pillars. I'm happy to report that it holds up well.

Pillars of the Earth is centered on the construction of a cathedral at Kingsbridge in twelfth-century England. The prior of the abbey, the master builder and his family, a nearby earl, a displaced brother and sister, and the presiding bishop comprise the core set of characters, and their complex relationships form the core of the novel.

There's nothing fancy about this book. The writing is incredibly straightforward and clear, and the characters are uncomplicated. The joy of the book is in how the dozen or so main characters interact over the course of several decades, how the "good" guys finally prevail and how the "bad" guys fall. It's just good storytelling, plain and simple.

I remembered The Prisoner of Azkaban as being my favorite of the Harry Potter books, but upon reading it a second time (this time aloud to Kevin), it didn't stand up as well as The Sorcerer's Stone. Still, it was a fun read, and Kevin and I both enjoyed it.

As much as I like Stephenson's other novels, this early one is pretty bad. There are many potentially interesting elements in the mix, but it's a confusing mess of characters and story. I had to force myself to finish it.

Having managed to finish Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, I decided to finish out his remaining novels. The Cobweb concerns an Iraqi plot to develop biological weapons inside the United States, a CIA analyst who stumbles on the plot but is powerless to stop it, and a rural deputy who is caught in the titular cobweb.

This novel was, like Interface, originally published under a pseudonym. It is more plausible and a stronger novel than Interface, and although the Saddam Hussein references are now out of date, its topic remains relevant. It may not quite live up to Stephenson's popular science fiction, but it's an engaging read with several strong characters and an intricate plot.

Kevin is still intensely eager to listen to me read the Harry Potter series, and though the second volume doesn't have quite the same magic as the first, we both very much enjoyed it.

Reading Maisie Dobbs made me wish for a historical mystery with more complex characters and a grittier feel. That led me to The Alienist, which turned out to be exactly what the doctor ordered.

The Alienist takes place in turn-of-the-century New York. The title refers to one of the protagonists, Dr. Kriezler, who specializes in forensic psychology (though at the time such a term didn't exist). Kriezler is accompanied by the novel's narrator, New York Times reporter John Moore. They, along with a colorful, complex team of compatriots, attempt to track down and bring to justice a brutal serial killer.

Although the novel is long and full of historical detail, it manages to move quickly, almost to the point of being a page-turner. Good stuff.

This is another book I would never have picked up were it not for my book club. Maisie Dobbs is a novel/mystery set in post-World War I England. The titular heroine is a spunky and overly-clever private investigator who rises above the limitations of the women of her time. I didn't mind the premise so much as the execution, which is overly flattering of the protagonist—I like my heroes to have flaws.

This novel probably works better for its intended audience: 10-14 year old girls.

Well, I finally did it. After nearly six years I have successfully slogged through the 3,000 pages of The Baroque Cycle.

The System of the World is the third and final volume of the series, and it mostly manages to succeed at tying together the dangling threads of the first two installments, while providing Stephenson a platform to disgorge everything else he learned about the 17th century during his years of research. The story here revolves around Daniel Waterhouse, a geriatric fellow of the Royal Society whose ties to Leibniz, Newton, and Eliza put him at the center of a whole bunch of politics and intrigue around the British monetary system.

The plot moves a lot faster than it did in Quicksilver but there isn't as much action as there was in The Confusion. Stephenson relies heavily on dialogue to advance the plot here, and it gets tiresome in many places, though there are occasional soliloquies that made me laugh out loud.

We do, after 3,000 pages, finally get an explanation for Enoch Root's persistence through the centuries (including his 20th century appearance in Cryptonomicon), and though I won't spoil it, I will say that it is reasonably satisfying.

You have to have the right mindset to approach a work this gigantic, and although overall I can't really recommend it, I am glad to have read it.

I read this aloud to Kevin, and it captured his attention more than anything we've read together before. It's obvious we'll be reading the whole series over the next few months.

Having read it all before, I'm impressed by how well J.K. Rowling set things up from the beginning, and I'm quite enjoying rooting for Snape this time around. Although the later books aren't quite as magical as the first one, Harry Potter is great fun.

Kingdom Coming is the most frightening book I have ever read.

During the Bush administration, fundamentalist Christians had a terrifying level of influence over the U.S. government, from Rumsfeld's "holy war" mentality to Bush's "faith-based initiatives" (which were a thin veil over blatant religious discrimination). In spite of the election of a Democrat President, these Christian Nationalists aren't going to go away. In this book, Goldberg details many of their core beliefs (most of which have no basis in reality if you don't believe in the literal truth of the bible), and she makes it abundantly clear that you can not reason with them.

Having read this book, it is now clear to me that the pluralistic society I cherish, with both freedom of and freedom from religion, is in serious danger. There is a surprisingly large and dedicated minority that wants to irrevocably weave born-again Christianity into the fabric of the United States.

I have no problem with Christians, insofar as they have no problem with me not being a Christian. It's the second part that doesn't seem to be working.

Clearly, it is time to renew my ACLU membership.

Kevin and I both enjoyed this. It read well aloud and led to interesting questions about native peoples and survival in the wilderness.

The Mysterious Benedict Society is an adventure story aimed at middle-school readers. The protagonist, Reynie Muldoon, is a precocious 11-year-old orphan who becomes an undercover agent on a dangerous mission. The novel is rather long for it's target audience, but Stewart is a very entertaining writer. The prose is well suited to being read aloud, with some fun touches of wordplay. I enjoyed reading it, and Kevin (age 7) loved listening. I'm sure we'll get a copy of the next installment before long, though Kevin seems to be getting interested in Harry Potter now, so it could be a while!

Scott Kelby remains the gold standard among authors who write about digital photography software. I have been a fan of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for a couple of years now, and a user since it's first release. It is by far the best photo software I've seen, in large part because Adobe has managed to include all of the features a digital photographer needs for 99% of his work, and stripped away everything else. Most of the functionality is straightforward, but a few of the controls are subtle and non-obvious if you are not a professional.

Kelby's exposition is, as usual, apt, accurate, and easy to follow. He highlights everything you need in a typical workflow and points out lots of tricks to make it go more quickly. His chapter introductions are as corny as ever, but I've learned by now to just skip them. If you use software for digital photography, buy the Scott Kelby book that goes with it.

I recommended Replay to my book club and reread it to prepare for the meeting. I liked it a little less the second time, in large part because Jeff Winston's evolution from cycle to cycle was less surprising. Also, I was a little creeped out this time by Jeff's actions with Pamela during his "last" replay. I still value the book for the way it makes me think about what is important in life, and I still recommend it.

The Steel Remains is a slight change of course for Morgan away from his usual hard-boiled science fiction. Here, he tries his hand at gritty swords-and-sorcery fantasy with flawed, perhaps controversial, characters. The main protagonist, Ringil, is a sword-wielding warrior who engages in gay sex with as much gusto as when he fights on the battlefield. The plot takes a very long time to get going, and this volume (of a proposed multi-volume cycle) ends abruptly. The other characters are somewhat less fully developed than Ringil, but they hold promise. There is reasonable closure here, with plenty of possibilities for the next entry.

I have just taken on several new direct reports (I don't think any of them read this blog, but maybe I'll find out otherwise). My team is now the largest it has ever been, so I'm looking for practical advice for project and personnel management. Behind Closed Doors is practical and short, and the techniques it advocates align pretty well with what in my experience has been good practice. The presentation is breezy, consisting mainly of a narrative that follows a new manager through the first few weeks of a job. To start, I'm going to try to apply some of the pointers for how to conduct effective one-on-one meetings.

In Drood, Dan Simmons weaves a narrative around documented events in the lives of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Simmons's research appears to have been quite thorough, and real-life details are exhibited in abundance, at least as far as a comparison to the relevant Wikipedia pages reveals. The novel is narrated by Collins, a contemporary of Dickens, and the style is dense (in stark contrast to most of Simmons's other work). Collins is an unreliable narrator, and his narrative is colored by his opium addiction. The end result is long-winded, sometimes confusing, and too often dull.

It seems that as Simmons has tried to become more of a "serious" writer, I have liked his work less. I have a lot of respect for what he tried to accomplish in Drood, but the end result does not align well to my taste. My previous comments about Simmons's deceptively simple and transparent prose do not apply here.

David Pogue's Missing Manual entry for Apple's GarageBand doesn't quite live up to his efforts for the iPhone and for Mac OS X Leopard. It's a good overview of the application, but it doesn't have the same degree of nonobvious helpfulness as the others, and I don't think it's because GarageBand is easier to use than an iPhone.

Still, having read this, I'm looking forward to making some music with GarageBand.

I'm becoming a fan of David Pogue's Missing Manual series. This book, and his iPhone: The Missing Manual are very detailed, clearly written, and full of non-obvious helpful advice.

This volume is hefty, weighing in at some 800+ pages, and it explores nearly every corner of the Leopard operating system. I bought a Macbook two weeks ago, coming back to Macintosh after about 10 years away, and this book has helped me come up to speed very quickly. Man has Apple leapfrogged Microsoft with OS X. Nearly every aspect of the operating system is extremely well thought out, and though you'd never discover a tenth of it's power by exploring on your own, it turns out that David Pogue is an excellent guide. He points out all the features you'd ever use, most of the time with explanations that help make good sense of everything.

Recommended.

Kevin got interested in Sachar's Wayside School books, so I dusted this off and read it to him over the past month or so. My reaction was similar to when I first read it five years ago: this is a decent kid's book, but it doesn't quite cut it as an adult novel. Kevin enjoyed it, and I must admit it was more fun to read it aloud.

Water for Elephants is mainstream fiction at its best. Gruen's protagonist is a 90-year-old man in an assisted living facility who flashes back to his early twenties when he served as a veterinarian for a traveling circus during the early days of the Great Depression. The details of circus life are interesting and extremely well described, and the characters are even more colorful than you might expect. The opening prologue is a little bit contrived (as you find out at end), and the ending is over-the-top sappy to the point of being completely unrealistic, but the meat of the novel is well executed from all angles, and I was more than willing to forgive the minor flaws.

I have been a Dan Simmons fan for more than a decade, and whenever he releases something new, I buy a copy right away. Until now, that has always worked out great. In this case, however, I paid $24 for a hardcover copy of a new Simmons book without noticing that it's a 100 page novella. I think that's a ridiculous amount of money for such a short work of fiction.

On the plus side, Muse of Fire is pretty good, as is nearly everything Dan Simmons writes. Here, Simmons extends his homage to the eternal greatness of Shakespeare (as evidenced by Shakespeare-quoting robots in Ilium). In fact, he turns the volume all the way up, suggesting that the works of Shakespeare are the pinnacle of human accomplishment.

Frankly, I find this view a bit depressing. Still, the image of a post-apocalyptic troupe performing Hamlet for our alien overlords to save the human race from extinction is at least amusing.

Because of the cost, this one is for die-hard fans only. Hopefully the upcoming Drood will offer quite a bit more bang for the buck. [Just noticed that Drood is in stock at Amazon — MUST ... ORDER ... NOW!]

I had all but given up on Neil Gaiman when a friend told me to read Stardust anyway. I enjoyed that a lot, but had then slipped back into ignoring Gaiman until last week when Jake's sister Sarah convinced me that The Graveyard Book was worth seeking out.

I'm glad I followed her advice, since The Graveyard Book may be Gaiman's best effort to date. It's certainly his most tightly-written book, and it does a better job walking the line between dark fantasy and humor than his other novels.

I think I may reread this out loud to Kevin at some point.

I don't read a lot of history, but this was described as novelistic in its approach, so when my book club chose it, I tried to be optimistic. Alas, though this may be more novelistic than your average history book, it reads to me like a master's thesis. Massie was a thorough researcher, and it looks like everything is carefully documented, but the heavy interlacing of direct quotes makes the end result more academic than authentic.

I admit that I'm happy to now have a better understanding of the Russian Revolution and to now know Rasputin a little better than the shadowy fairy-tale figure of legend. It will be interesting to see how well I enjoy the movie when the book club views it in a couple of weeks.

David Allen's book Getting Things Done has had a big impact on how I think about organizing my life. I'm a huge believer in getting things out of my head and into a trusted system so that I can focus wholeheartedly on whatever I'm engaged in (though just because I believe in it, doesn't mean I'm always successful at it).

Making It All Work is in many ways a re-telling of Getting Things Done. Allen recognizes that many people who try to build their own GTD system have difficulty in specific areas, and the new book spends a lot of time explaining what those difficulties are likely to be and how to deal with them.

It's not a book that I can really recommend broadly. However, if you've read the original and you have struggled or fallen off the wagon, this refresher course might be just the thing you need. It certainly inspired me to dust off my system, do a complete brain dump onto paper, and then organize everything into projects and next-actions. I feel better having done it, and I hope to keep my system up and running again.

For what it's worth, I'm currently trying out OmniFocus on the iPhone and Mac as my task-management system. I really like the location-sensitive aspects of the iPhone app.