Braun has a particular fondness for debunking headline-making research that is not supported by following studies or where the headline soundbite misses important qualifying aspects of the research (perspective is applied to the factoids “alcohol kills brain cells,” and “red wine reduces risk of heart disease,” for instance).

On a personal note, I’m entering day six of my attempt to ratchet down my own caffeine consumption. A key fact from Braun’s book that the “half-life” of caffeine in the body is roughly 5 hours has helped me establish my transitional caffeine schedule.

One caveat: Buzz was published in 1996 and has not been revised; I’m certainly not qualified to assess how scientific understanding has changed in the intervening years.

Dept.-of-neither-here-nor-there: Buzz is the first book I’ve noticed that is available for the nook but not the Kindle, but it’s a whopping forty-one bucks in Barnes and Noble’s e-book format. Can you say “hello, library!”? I can.

needs more demons? Not really, but a glossary might not have been amiss for readers who (like me) have a smidge of trouble keeping receptors and organic compounds straight after a while.

needs more demons? Literally, perhaps. Metaphorically, no way.

But I also think that The Windup Girl would be stronger if it were tightened up a little bit. It’s a good novel as it stands, but it might have been a killer short novel. And although it was not published previously as linked short stories, the density of exposition and the quantity of recapitulations of character relationships and plot points makes it feel almost as if it were originally structured with serial publication in mind.

The Windup Girl returns to the post-global warming, post-fossil fuel world of “The Calorie Man” and “Yellow Card Man,” two of the strongest stories from Pump Six and Other Stories. Part of my problem with The Windup Girl’s quantity of exposition stems from my previous familiarity with Bacigalupi’s milieu, but part of it is legit — after the first few times, mentioning the power source of an item whenever it is referenced is overkill, as if a contemporary naturalistic novelist referred to “internal combustion engine cars.”

This is a shame, because for me it somewhat overshadowed The Windup Girl’s many virtues, like the vividly imagined future Thailand, the slow-boiling twisty plot, vivid characters, and the white-hot core of environmental rage that fuels the book.

needs more demons? needs just a little more focus.

I was primarily bothered by details of tone. Character names like Unwin, Pith, Screed and Travis T. Sivart (maybe he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going?) seem chosen either for humorous or allegorical effect. Those names, coupled with some early scene-setting strikingly reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil gave me misgivings that The Manual of Detection would either be a madcap fantasy à la Jasper Fforde or a derivative Orwellian/Kafka-esque exercise. It’s neither of those. I suppose it would be possible to read some aspects of The Manual of Detection as symbolic of commercial and governmental encroachment on privacy, but I’m inclined to read the novel at face value — a noirish detective story with some fantastic or magical realist aspects, that happens to be set in a surreal environment.

Be that as it may, after the first few chapters I was thoroughly captivated and quit worrying about whether character names were sometimes goofy. Berry displays a deep familiarity with the classic noir tropes and a nice sense of which ones to honor and which to subvert. His prose is marvelously suited to the book — spare, almost reportorial, enlivened by carefully positioned adjectives. I can well believe Berry spent hours polishing his deceptively simple sentences. When Unwin must revisit some of Sivart’s old case files, on the other hand, they recall Chandler’s cynical protagonists and the offbeat metaphors that define the typical first-person noir narrative voice (”I was about as useful as a jack-in-the-box with his lid glued shut,” is how he describes his lack of double-jointed ability to slip out of restraints).

Director Richard Linklater may be done making movies with dream-like themes, but if there are alternate universes there must somewhere be one where Linklater directs an animated adaption of The Manual of Dectection in a style similar to Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, and I really hope it’s this one. Sylvain Chomet (of The Triplets of Belleville) could probably do it justice, too.

I also can’t discuss this book without mention how lovely the physical design of Penguin Press’s hardcover is — The Manual of Detection that exists inside the novel is described in some detail, and the real book matches the description, gold foil “Never Sleeping” logo and all. The poor marketing puff and pull quotes are relegated to the endpapers.

needs more demons? nope.

• I read every word within a 24-hour span
• I’ve already purchased some Merge recordings I hadn’t previously heard
• The palpable enthusiasm of Ryan Adam’s (slightly incoherent) intro almost makes me want to hear what he’s been up to lately

The structure of Our Noise is pretty genius: there’s a little bit of connective text to provide context and occasional fact-correction, but mostly the story is told in interview snippets. Mac and Laura’s voices are augmented by those of other Merge recording artists, associates (like Touch & Go’s Cory Rusk), friends, and peers. Alternating chapters switch between advancing the overall Merge (and Superchunk) timeline and highlighting some of Merge’s more prominent bands, like Spoon, Neutral Milk Hotel, and The Arcade Fire. Sometimes this is slightly confusing, as when the money The Magnetic Field’s Sixty-Nine Love Songs eventually makes discussed much earlier than its place in the overall chronology. It perhaps shortchanges the bands not selected for the individual chapter profiles, with Archers of Loaf arguably the most significant. But it effectively breaks up the potential monotony of “then we did another tour. then we put out some more records,” and enlivens the book by letting different voices ascend and recede in prominence.

Our Noise is richly illustrated, not only with photos of band members on- and off-stage, but also with flyers, album art, set lists and correspondence, and no less than 4 pictures of “The Magnetic Fields” misspelled in various ways on marquees and such.

Quibbles: A complete list of Merge releases through April 2009 is the sole appendix. It’s handy, but a short bio of each interviewee would have been very useful, as would an index. (Interviewees are often described in a parenthetical note the first time they appear: “Aaron Stauffer (Seaweed).” But if you forget which band Stauffer was in and he has another comment a few chapters later, it can take some flipping around to find the first reference.) I noticed a handful of copy-editing errors, but none that were confusing and not enough to detract from my enjoyment.

Our Noise is much more narrowly focused than Azerrad’s Our Band Could be Your Life, Option magazine’s (terribly titled) We Rock So You Don’t Have To or Punk Planet’s We Owe You Nothing (what is it with the third-person plural, anyway?). Andersen and Jenkin’s Dance of Days is largely, but not entirely the story of DisChord, Minor Threat and Fugazi; it’s also the story of Positive Force. So perhaps it’s not fair to compare Our Noise to those books, but I think it may be the most satisfying of them to read cover-to-cover uninterrupted. It makes me want to stand up and cheer. And read a similarly structured book about DisChord, Simple Machines, SST, or TeenBeat, for a start. And go back in time and get serious about playing music much earlier.

needs more demons? nuh-uh.

The weakest of these stories, like “The Fluted Girl,” and “The Pasho,” rely too much on concealing information from the reader to achieve their impact. The latter in particular challenges the reader to determine which of a barrage of unfamiliar terminology is derived from current language, but (to risk a slight spoiler) while to “keep Quaran” has a nice pseudo-religious ring, it isn’t believable slang for “maintaining quarantine.”

Overall this is a strong collection. If nothing here quite equals “The Calorie Man,” several of the stories come close.

needs more demons? nope.

North by Northanger evades most of my specific criticisms of the previous novel: it’s much more credible and takes fewer (and, I think, more justifiable) liberties with Austen’s characters. Even better, its less bound by genre conventions than either of its predecessors. North by Northanger doesn’t work as a whodunnit — the attentive reader will likely pick up on several obvious clues well before the Darcys — but nonetheless effectively creates dramatic tension, leavened, as always, with humor. It’s possibly my favorite of the series so far, and certainly much more sure-footed than Suspense and Sensibility.

needs more demons? nope.

Suspense and Sensibility ramps up the silliness considerably. It follows directly after the previous book, as Lord and Lady Darcy cross paths with characters from Sense and Sensibility (several years after the conclusion of their own novel). Once again there are echoes of another book, this time The Picture of Dorian Gray (with perhaps a dash of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to boot). There’s also a bit of a Scully/Mulder dynamic evolving between Darcy the stolid empiricist and the more open-minded Elizabeth, and the cast of recurring characters expands to a gent with an improbable library of occult texts that seems modeled on Buffy’s Rupert Giles’ exceedingly unlikely assemblage of arcana.

It’s all very droll and goes down smoothly enough, but since Bebris is writing for a modern audience, she spells out the sort of nastiness that Stevenson and Wilde could only allude to, and thereby subjects some of Austen’s characters to indignities that I can’t imagine the authoress countenancing. Mystery elements take a backseat this time; it’s certainly not a whodunnit — more a whydunnit or howdunnit.

Bottom line: Pride and Prescience left me eager for more; this one makes think I’ll wait a bit before reading the next volume in the series.

needs more demons? Maybe needs a bit more restraint.

Pride and Prescience owes at least as much to the gothic novels of Anne Radcliffe as to Austen (with several unambiguous nods in the direction of Brontë’s Jane Eyre to boot). But Bebris doesn’t play for broad laughs; if Elizabeth Darcy finds herself in a stereotypical Gothic novel circumstance — in a drafty, Stygian hallway, overhearing strange sounds, say — she reacts naturalistically, and Bebris doesn’t club the reader over the head with the echoes of other novels.

In general, it’s surprisingly successful. The mystery is fairly satisfying on its own terms, with several well-laid red herrings, although some purists might well feel that that the dénouement doens’t quite play fair. Bebris adopts a prose style that blends 19th- and 21st-century stylistic conventions; the vocabulary is mildly high-falutin’, and some of the sentences aspire to Austen’s elaborate, graceful structures and sly reversals, but there are also short declarative sentences (and even fragments) to nudge things along for the modern reader. The copy-editing seemed much more competent than in several of the other books I’ve read recently; I noticed a few descriptive words repeated in close proximity, but didn’t trip over any real clunkers. Darcy and Elizabeth seem a tad modern in some respects — their private conversations are more frank than I think Austen would have ever imagined — but they are also convincingly rendered as members of a society quite different from ours (especially in their attitudes toward the servant class).

Overall I enjoyed it, and will read more in the series.

needs more demons? negatory.

Here’s the sentence that made me give up: “Had he held the unlikely notion that she was not of a mind to re-enact connubial rites, the quivering little frisson she elicited when he kissed the inside of her thigh would have removed all doubt.”

I don’t mean to belittle Berdoll — she managed to write a whole book, after all, an accomplishment that still eludes me — or anyone who enjoys her work. But I think that fans of Austen the novelist, as opposed to Austen the font of movie adaptations, might just as well give this one a miss.

needs more demons? needs a demonically fierce editor