Another set of excerpts from BzzAgent to review:

• Maureen Dowd's Are Men Necessary? : When Sexes Collide

  The first chapter of the excerpt was not terribly interesting to me -- it just went on and on about the same thing over and over (how independent women are not finding relationships with men). I've never been much for the mainstream dating scene. I find my fellow geeks are generally more interested in intelligent, talented women who understand geek conversation than in the stereotypical bimbo. (Of course, this may be because I select for a certain type in my friends and lovers pretty strongly myself.)

  The second chapter, painting the Bush administration and politicians in general as petty catfighters, was much more interesting and funnier. I like that kind of stereotype-breaking (and anything that makes fun of Republican politicians). If the book continues in a vein like that, I'd enjoy it. From just the two chapters, though, it seems like only a 50% chance that I would. I've gotta agree with the Amazon reviewer Kim Hughes' comment that "In the end, though, one wishes Are Men Necessary? went beyond simply grocery listing examples of sexual disparity to offer concrete suggestions for change."

• Singing with the Top Down is set in the 1950s and told from the point of view of 13-year-old Pauly Mahoney, the self-designated worrier of her family and eseentially the caretaker of her younger brother Buddy, even before her parents are killed in a freak accident. The four-chapter excerpt only gets as far as the kids' finding out that they will be living with their Aunt Nora, who they've never met before their parents' funeral, and leaving Oklahoma for Nora's California home, but I am genuinely curious about how things go with two scared children and the family free spirit, who decides that the drive to California will be a camping trip to see the sights of the western U.S. and a chance for everyone to get to know one another. Pauly is a very believable voice, the child who has had to be the parent, and I really want to see how her new experiences will change her.
• I've enjoyed John Hodgman on The Daily Show, but The Areas of My Expertise is the first time I've seen him in print. This almanac parody is definitely a book to enjoy on paper (tables printed in landscape orientation are difficult to read on a monitor where they are sideways). But I enjoyed the bits that were easier to read; I like this randomly wacky style of humor that takes the standard list of plot situations found in all fiction and adds an additional item: "Man vs. Cyborg." It's not for everyone, as the love-or-hate Amazon reviews indicate, but for the right audience it's really funny.

I've read a lot of animal books, including several by veterinarians. However, Bradford Brown's While You're Here, Doc: Farmyard Adventures of a Maine Veterinarian is the first one to make me think, "I'm surprised the vet is still alive after all that." Brown's practice was in rural Maine in the 1950s and 1960s, meaning that first, a large number of his patients were farm animals, and second, the weather could cause major problems getting to and from the farms, and third, the roads were not necessarily up to ideal standards. This book is not for the faint of heart, because not only does it deal bluntly with the medical problems the animals encountered, but the damage done to Dr. Brown by stubborn patients, winter weather, and being in a hurry to get to the site of an emergency. It's kind of amazing that bruised ribs are the worst individual injury Dr. Brown mentions suffering, but he does point out that the general stress of the work caused him to retire early when his own doctors said he would probably not live to fifty if he didn't slow down. Despite all that difficulty, Dr. Brown really seems to have loved his work and the help he could give animals and their owners; the title comes from the many additional tasks he was asked to perform for other animals on the farm, or even the neighbors' farm, after having already made a call for some specific reason, and he seems to have retained a wry sense of humor about all those extras and all the other things that could happen. The book is full of entertaining characters, not all of them human, and gives an interesting look at farm life when it was still a family endeavor.

More Penguin book excerpts from BzzAgent (who were cool enough to send me a full copy of Beneath A Marble Sky, which I liked best out of the last batch of excerpts).

The first one in this batch is Goodbye Lemon by Adam Davies. The excerpt was sort of horribly fascinating in its introduction to Jack Tennant, his two brothers, one of whom drowned in childhood, his mother, his father, from whom Jack is estranged, and Jack's girlfriend, who can't understand why Jack would even hesitate to go home (for the first time in 15 years) when the news arrives that Jack's father has had a stroke. A family this twisted is hard to look away from, like a train wreck. An Amazon reviewer comments that "You want to simultaneouly hug all of the characters and also shake them and kick them for their terrible decisions," and I agree. It's difficult to imagine what will happen in the rest of the book but I am kinda curious, though it might turn out to be the sort of book I have to put down because how stupid people are sometimes really gets to me.

I never read The Da Vinci Code (out of a sort of snobbishness that if so many people who aren't big readers liked it, I probably wouldn't, as well as a general lack of interest in Christian-oriented books). So I can't judge the comparison to that book that The Begotten: A Novel of the Gifted seems to invite. The BzzAgent site says that author Lisa T. Bergren wrote this The Begotten because of the "heretical 'truths' the author set forward" in The Da Vinci Code. I'm also not a Christian, so I can't vouch for heresy or lack of it, but a historical novel set in 14th-century Europe has to deal with Christianity to be accurate, and in the five chapters given in this excerpt I didn't find this book to be preaching to the reader. There are supernatural powers clearly related to the Christian God and Satan, though, so it's probably not a book for the sort of atheist who doesn't wish to read of something they'll consider fantasy. But as a fantasy novel, it seems pretty interesting.

I've also never been in a book club, and so my thoughts on The Book Club Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to the Reading Experience may not be the best quide. But I think this book would be a huge help to anyone wanting to start a book discussion group; it not only lists books and questions to prompt conversation on them, but issues like whether or not knitting during the group meeting is appropriate, and what to do about pets when meeting in a home they occupy, and it offers recipes for meeting foods and beverages. This wide range of suggestions and thought-provokers seems like just about everything a person would need to get a book club running and keep it going, rather than petering out as so many good intentions do.

I've been visiting family for two weeks and I had a lot of time to read. I finished Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. Well, all that were on my father's shelves -- he says he might have gotten High Five and Hot Six fron the library, but other than that he's got all from One for the Money to Twelve Sharp (and the Christmas special Visions of Sugar Plums). My dad recommended these after he saw me reading Carl Hiaasen's Skinny Dip, because the Plum books share some of the same wacky humor.

OK, these books aren't as wall-to-wall wacky as Hiaasen's work -- very few are. (Well, Tim Dorsey.) But the Plum series are interesting mysteries with fun characters. New Jersey native used to be a lingerie buyer, but she was laid off and needed a job. Since her cousin Vinnie runs a bail bond agency, Stephanie becomes a bond enforcement agent, also known as a bounty hunter, despite a lack of experience. Sometimes she's successful in tracking down people who didn't show up for their court dates, and other times she just gets violent criminals angry at her. And her mother makes the sign of the cross, her father buries his head in the newspaper, and her grandmother asks to come along (when her grandmother isn't trying to lift the lid at closed-casket funerals, that is). I couldn't put the books down, and as soon as I finished one I had to see what happened in the next volume, so I have to recommend these.

---

On the way home, I was reading a book I own, Norman Spinrad's 1969 science fiction novel Bug Jack Barron. As happens eventually to all all books set in the future, enough time has passed to make this into an alternate history. The book was apparently quite controversial when it came out, and still has its moments, but not all of them are the type of controversy Spinrad wanted to provoke. The political ramifications of belief that science can achieve immortality for people (and a way to involve the corpses of those who could afford to have themselves frozen) and the effect of the media on people's political opinions -- all are still quite fascinating. But then on page 143, the main female character, Sara, comes out with this inner monologue:

"Power's a man's bag, she realized. Any chick that digs power, really feels where it's at, almost always turns out to be some kind of dyke in the end. Power's somehow cock-connected; woman's hung-up on power, she's hung-up on not having a cock, understands power only if she's thinking like someone who does. Power's even got its own man-style time-sense; man can wait, scheme, plan years-ahead-guile-waiting games, accumulate power on the sly, then use it for good -- if the man's good deep inside like Jack -- like a good fuck good cat can bring a frigid chick along, cooling himself, holding back when he has to, until he's finally got her ready to come. Man kind of love, man kind of delayed-timing thinking, calculated quanta of emotion and only when the time's right, and not like woman needs to feel everything totally the moment it happens -- good, evil, love, hate, prick inside her."

If I had met Norman Spinrad right when I read this, I'd have thrown the book right in his face and wished it were a hardback copy. On the next page, when Jack is telling a friend that he and Sara have reunited, "The thrill of being owned by her fated man went through Sara as he goosed her off camera." What kind of fucking slave mentality is this? I want to smack Sara too. None of this is necessary to her character; she is an idealistic person who retained her belief in the Committee for Social Justice left-wing political party and other progressive causes as she grew into her 30s. She's just not believable as willing to put herself into a man's power, and it would be so easy to have made her more believable by not putting in these lapses into submissive, sexist claptrap. If only she were 'supportive' of Jack rather than "worshipful"!

The other problem this book for me is that I suspected the big denouement about the immortality treatment far before the characters did. Maybe I've just read too much other science fiction about life extension and immortality (particularly Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long stories) and this made me able to guess something that 1969 fans (and the characters) might not think about. But for someone who makes a living asking awkward questions, Jack Barron seemed to miss some really important ones. However, the novel was gripping -- I read it in a day not only because I was sitting in one airport or another most of that day, since I had other books with me, but because the story, the world it's set in, and the characters were truly interesting, despite the problems I note above.

These days, when we think of a "duel" in history, the vision is usually of two men settling some dispute of honor that could not be corrected by law. Indeed, over the years, dueling itself has been made illegal in many countries. So the idea of a duel being the result of a court case, instead of that case ending with a judge or jury's verdict, is somewhat of a surprise. Eric Jager's The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France tells the story of how in 1386, Jean de Carrouges went through legal channels to seek a trial by duel for his former friend, Jacques Le Gris, accused of raping Carrouges' wife Marguerite. It was thought that God would arrange the outcome of the duel, that only the side that was telling the truth could win (and obviously Jean de Carrouges had a lot of faith, as these duels were fights to the death, and if Carrouges lost, his wife would also be executed for making a false accusation).

This is a book that I could not put down. It combines the best parts of historical novels, non-fiction history books, and modern legal thrillers. Jager does extremely well in fleshing out the historical documents that are his sources into real people, while making it known what the records leave unclear. The politics surrounding these minor nobles and the legal system of the era are explained clearly without letting us lose sight of the individuals involved in the case and their real reactions, adding up to a truly fascinating story.

So I'm a BzzAgent at BzzAgent.com, and they have a set-up with Penguin Publishing, where one can sign up to get excerpts from to-be-published/recently published books. It's not the same as reviewing an entire book, but it's still fascinating and gives me some ideas on what to pick up at the library and bookstore.

First Batch

Your Big Break by Johanna Edwards

This was definitely my favorite of the first four excerpts available. The first three chapters gave the setting -- a modern-day city as seen by a women who works for "Your Big Break, Inc.," a company which will send someone to do the work of breaking up with a formerly beloved person in your life for you -- as well as the first-person narrator, Dani, who is quite likeable despite (or perhaps as a necessity for) this line of work that she hasn't even told her parents about. I'm definitely going to have to see how this turns out.

Bitter Is The New Black: Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smartass, Or, Why You Should Never Carry A Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office by Jen Lancaster

This one didn't grab me as much. I just couldn't get into the narrator's snobbiness and self-centeredness, whether I thought it was fiction as I did at first, or later when I found out it was a memoir. But then, I have absolutely no interest in trendiness, expensive fashion, business ambitions, or any of the other things Jen talks about in the first 28 pages of the book. Even finding out more about her eventual downslide doesn't appeal to me -- but maybe it will be to people who are amused by her shallowness or enjoy the prospect of her getting her comeuppance.

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel Pink

Business book. If it weren't talking about the workplace, it would probably interest me more, because I do like reading about how thinking works. Plus for some reason the available excerpt was chapters 3 and 4, so I was missing definitions of some of the terms Pink uses. While discussion of how design can influence not only business but history (the infamous "butterfly ballots" of the 2000 U.S. Presidential election in some Florida counties) is interesting, there wasn't enough of it in this sample for me to plan to run out and read the whole book.

I've managed to delete the PDF excerpt of the last book from the first batch, but I didn't like it either -- it seemed like someone trying to do the same old thing that's been going on for decades with a hardbitten private detective.

Second Batch

Everything Bad Is Good for You - Steven Johnson

That people will memorize reams of information or go through the most complex processes if they consider it fun, I already knew. Whether it was my friends' confused expressions as I tried to show them what I was doing with my knitting needles (or for that matter, explaining 30 years of Doctor Who plotlines), or listening to my younger siblings spout off which Pokemon evolved into which other Pokemon, or my own confusion when exposed to the sports my father follows, it's amazing how complicated fun things can be. So Johnson's opening discussion of the statistics and paper-shuffling of the baseball simulation games he played with dice and charts as a child and his argument that this sort of brain exercise is becoming more common in entertainment pursuits was not completely foreign.

However, Johnson takes it into a lot more detail than I had ever seen before. While he points out that reading books is still a good thing to encourage as a leisure activity, video games and other games such as Dungeons & Dragons-type role-playing games have many of the same benefits of encouraging patience and effort (do you know how LONG it can take to beat just one level of a video game?) as well as working out the decision-making functions, understanding very complex "worlds," and other things that are difficult to teach by traditional methods. "My [seven-year-old] nephew would be asleep in five seconds if you popped him down in an urban studies classroom, but somehow an hour of playing SimCity taught him that high tax rates in industrial areas can stifle development," he points out, and then goes into biological and mental reasons why this is so, unlike most arguments against games, which rely on simplistic "its violence sets a bad example" arguments. (After all, the military setting of chess is just as bad an example if you think about it, and yet chess is praised for the thinking it inspires rather than the content.) Johnson compares the type of thinking encouraged by these games to that needed for word problems in math classes, in that one has to extract the important information needed for the problem, discarding irrelevancies, and figure out what methods are needed to solve the problem. It's not the same things one gets from reading great literature, but that's what most anti-video-game arguments compare it to.

Television may not be great literature either, but Johnson points out that TV shows with complex multiple-threaded narratives have been on the rise, as have plots dealing complex social issues; neither was common in the "Golden Age" of television's early years. Those older shows were "simpler" in the sense of not dealing with difficult ethical issues and also in the way they told the story, not requiring you to remember small details or draw your own conclusions. (And, of course, only the best shows of the past are remembered.) Johnson lists many comparisons between older TV shows and newer ones, and then does the same with movies, though their running time limits the amount of complexity that can be shoved into a single film.

The "excerpt" I received was 136 pages long -- half the book, essentially, since Amazon lists it as being 256 pages total -- and I'm certainly curious to see what else Johnson has to say (since the excerpt covered the benefits of video games, TV, the Internet, and movies; I'm not sure what's left to visit!)

The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan: Classic Diet Recipe Cards from The 1970s - Wendy McClure

Well, the idea is not new -- I was looking at James Lileks' Gallery of Regrettable Food before a version of it came out in book form. But Wendy McClure's source for foods it's difficult to contemplate is a little more specific -- 1970s Weight Watchers recipe cards -- and recent, and just as amusingly offputting. McClure's site Candyboots has most of the same previews, so you can check them out and marvel that these were once published as serious food offerings.

Beneath a Marble Sky: A Novel of the Taj Mahal - John Shors

A historical novel, narrated by the daughter of the emperor of India who built the Taj Mahal. This is a place and time whose history I know only the vaguest outline of, so it's already of interest to me for educational purposes (even if it is a work of fiction, such novels provide a feeling for how things were, and a way to remember the names of important figures. And then the two chapters excerpted for BzzAgent readers definitely made me want to pick up the rest of the book, because we first meet Jahara in her old age, telling the story of her life to her granddaughters, and the information given there about how her life turns out differs so much from the setting of her childhood in the flashback that I really want to find out what happened in between.

California Demon: The Secret Life of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom - Julie Kenner

I'm far from the only one who thought of TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" at the premise of these books (this is a sequel to Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom): an apparently ordinary woman hunts demons and has to keep it secret from most of the people around her. However, instead of a high-school/college student with just a mother to deal with like Buffy Summers, Kate Connors is a mother of a teenager and a toddler and even a husband with political ambitions. That's a lot more responsibilities to juggle, and the opening of California Demon (where Kate's volunteer time at a local nursing home is interrupted by staff arguing over whether a resident who was recently in a coma could possibly be recovered enough to go on an outing, and Kate's suspicions are aroused) gives a quick view of a busy life with even more people to fight for and reason to rid the world of evil forces than Buffy's. I'll probably have to recommend this to my stepmother, who already reads Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire novels, Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter books, MaryJanice Davidson's Undead books, and Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files books (and whose copies of these books I have enjoyed as quick reads when I'm visiting).

I don't like large bugs. I see a cockroach, I yell for my boyfriend to come take care of it. So I'm still kinda surprised that I picked up Yvonne Baskin's Under Ground: How Creatures of Mud and Dirt Shape Our World at the library, given the big bettle on the front cover serving as the "O" in "Ground." But despite that slightly off-putting art, this is a really fascinating book. Certainly, I was vaguely aware before reading it that soil needed worms and bacteria to break down dead plant and animal matter that falls to the ground. However, there's a lot more to the process than that, and Baskin explains it in very understandable terms. There are a huge number of overlooked organisms that play a major role in any ecosystem -- and humans seem to be rather skilled at messing up the system by unthinkingly killing off those organisms. Clear-cutting forests and removing the leftover from the ground (with the intent of making it easier for seedling trees to grow) turns out to kill off the fungi that work with the trees' roots, making regrowth quite difficult. Fishing with nets that drag the bottom of continental shelves in the ocean can kill off mud shrimp, burrowing clams, and other organisms that not only hasten decomposition, but provide food for larger animals; hence bottom fishing may endanger the fish species not only by reducing their numbers directly but by reducing their available food supply.

Other parts of the book are just fascinating. Who thinks about tiny nematode worms in the soil of Antarctica? Some researches are not just finding them but comparing which species do best under which weather conditions. Who knew that ordinary earthworms aren't native to swaths of northern North America (but have been spread near fishing areas by people dumping their extra bait)? There are people who already knew these things; for everyone else, there's this book.