I didn’t enjoy Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List nearly as much, partly due to mismatched expectations. This was a rare case where I really did want to read the same-book-only-different, but Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List is a very different novel. The title plainly telegraphs the impetus of the plot: if two people need to keep a list of people neither of them are allowed to kiss, it’s a sure bet that someone kissing someone is going to create conflict at some point. The list-keepers are Naomi, who, even though she has a boyfriend, is still nursing a long time crush on Ely, despite his being actively and unambiguously gay. When events force Naomi to confront the futility of her crush, they both react at least a little badly, and stoke the fires of respective grudges for several chapters. This is really my biggest problem with the novel: it’s not much fun to read about two people who obviously care about each other deeply being really mad at each other. Also, I thought both the gay boy-love-interest and the straight boy-love-interest were kinda dull. And whereas I thought Dash and Lily’s alternating narration worked very well, the multitude of first-person narrative voices here was a bit overwhelming; I think it would have been better to stick with the core four.

On the plus side, there is some courtship by mixtape, which invariably makes me go, “awwww!”. And Naomi and Ely are vividly portrayed. I just spent much of the book being kind of annoyed with them.

needs more demons? mmmmaybe.

It’s a marvelous little book, providing a brief, but insightful look at baseball’s oddest pitch from a variety of perspectives: how to throw it, how to hit it, how to catch it, how to call it, among others. Clark’s writing is lucid and accessible; Phil Clark’s line drawings are illuminating and useful; several great pitchers are typically enigmatic and epigrammatic. I learned a lot.

needs more demons? the knuckleball is demon enough.

I liked it a lot. I thought Carriger mostly did a good job of incorporating some old-time flavor into her prose while keeping it streamlined enough to appeal to the modern escapist reader, viz:

The hackney rattled through the darkened streets. Miss Tarabotti, mindful of her hat and hair, nevertheless drew down the window sash and stuck her head out into the night. The moon, three-quarters and gaining, had not yet risen above the building tops. Above, Alexia thought she could make out a lone dirigible, taking advantage of the darkness to parade stars and city lights before one last load of passengers. For once, she did not envy them their flight. The air was cool and probably unbearably chilly so high up; this was no surprise, as London was generally a city not celebrated for its balmy evenings. She shivered and closed the window.

although sometimes characters’ diction struck me as not believably Victorian, with the utterance, “Plus, they are scheduled to return at any moment,” the construction that felt most glaringly anachronous.

While one might criticize the characters for being thinly drawn, the plotting is exuberant. And I definitely give Carriger credit for not only adding a significant variation to her creatures-of-the-night variation, but also for incorporating a legendary element that’s not fantastically overexposed.

Soulless kept me absorbed enough that I was able to read it on the subway without getting motion sick. That doesn’t work with every book by a long shot.

needs more demons? no.

Conti is a computer scientist who researches things like security and information disclosure. As this job description requires, he’s both sharp and paranoid. I bookmarked a dozen or so passages that showcased one attribute or another. He starts out by saying that he considers Google “a sovereign entity equivalent to a nation . . . because of its top-tier intellectual talent, financial resources in the billions of dollars, and world-class information-processing resources,” a viewpoint which strikes me as patently absurd. Throughout there are asides like, “every time an old friend contacts you from a webmail account, a little piece of your privacy dies.” But in the chapter on maps, Conti offers this provocative scenario:

Let’s say [your company] has 1,200 employees located at 10 locations, some not publicly known. Imagine mapping activity form the IP address ranges used by our corporate headquarters, as well as the other locations, all seeking directions from Ministeri Pistarini International Airport in Buenos Aires to the street address of a meeting site at the outskirts of the city. Because this activity is out of the norm, you’ve just created a unique set of characteristics that ties together your various company offices with a potentially sensitive meeting. You’ve also disclosed with a high probability, the travel plans of the meeting participants, as well as given a clue to the strategic importance of Argentina to your company’s planning.

In the chapter on cross-site tracking via embedded content, after dissecting the roles of the (many) sites involved in serving up content for a typical MSNBC.com page, he makes the trenchant point that, “your real privacy in terms of visiting a web site is the equivalent of the worst [privacy] policy of all the sites embedded there.”

Far from accepting Google’s famous “don’t be evil” precept at face value, Conti continually ascribes the worst possible motivations to Google. He makes insinuating comments like, “Note that these are the publicly acknowledged uses of machine processing of communications. It is a safe bet that many other uses will never be discussed overtly.” In discussing the Google Analytics javascript, which has been through a “minification” process that makes the code hard to read, he saves the admission that “the density of code could also be seen as an attempt to reduce the size of the file, to improve response time.” He fails to mention that minifying javascript for performance reasons is standard practice for high-performance, real-time websites. Conti assumes Google (ab)uses information in ways it has publicly states it does not; one could imagine that at least some of the data mining Conti describes might be technically challenging even for an organization like Google.

But Conti makes another interesting point: Google won’t endure forever, certainly not in its current form***. The individuals who defined Google’s culture and ethics won’t live forever, and there is no guarantee that their principles will be adhered to indefinitely. If Google doesn’t, or even can’t, exploit data in certain ways now, it’s impossible to say with absolute certainty that that will always be true. This sorts of threat isn’t even hypothetical to me — when I signed up for a Flickr account, I was comfortable with Flickr’s privacy policy. I was not at all comfortable with Yahoo!’s privacy policies, which are the ones that matter now.

I don’t plan to make many changes to my web browsing habits as a result of reading Conti’s book, mostly because I already aggressively filter tracking cookies and minimize my use of problematic sites like FaceBook. But I did find it interesting and thought provoking, if sometimes a little shrill.

* I also didn’t remember the author or the exact title. I made a game of trying to track down the book without using Google, pretending that showing interest in this book might set some blackmark flag in Google’s servers. I searched on Amazon, Yahoo!, and even Bing. But I couldn’t track it down without recourse to Google.

** Or at least that someone is trying to establish a connection, which may be interesting in an entirely different way.

*** If nothing else, the end of normal matter in the universe will eventually impose significant changes on Google’s technical infrastructure.

needs more demons? I wouldn’t want to wish more demons on Conti; he seems to have enough of his own.

What I was after was simple: the end of the record industry as we knew it. I wanted to see the collapse of the major labels’ stronghold on music . . . since we despised the way they did business, we figured we’d be only too happy to stand by and watch it happen.

Benatar’s co-writer Patsi Bale Cox remains very unobtrusive throughout, the book feels very much like sitting down for a long and engaging conversation (well, monologue) with Benatar.

needs more demons? no.

I think my biggest issues with World’s End are primarily about the plot, and fall into two groups. First, characters keep making screamingly bad choices. You know the horror movies where somebody says, “hey, let’s split up so the monster can pick us off one by one”? That bad.* Second, the abilities of the antagonists didn’t seem consistent. They’re more or less invincible until the plot requires them to take a defeat, and then they’re suddenly vulnerable to a pitiful ruse. (You could argue that Chadbourn is employing a venerable tradition of underdog characters fighting mighty evils, but I would counter that the protagonists’ actions would still benefit from a little more credibility.) It’s also a druggier book than I prefer, and suffers a little from the wish-fulfillment guy-irresistible-to-women thing that bugged me so much about Stieg Larsson.

*to be fair, the villains as well as the heroes have some boneheaded moments.

needs more demons? Just not my cuppa, I’m afraid

You’ll find those traits if you search them out, but in the end it didn’t bother me, because if Cohn and Levithan are perhaps feeling their way through the book a little bit, Dash and Lily are decidedly feeling their way through what kind of relationship they will (or won’t have). Lily and Dash pass coy autobiographical tidbits and a series of “dares” back and forth through the medium of a Moleskine notebook deposited in New York’s storied bookstore The Strand, so their descriptions of things important to them arises very organically. And while it’s not a particularly deep book, it doesn’t shy away from the issue of the difference between how Dash and Lily “really” are and how they present themselves to each other, which alleviates the sense that Cohn and Levithan are flirting with each other through the medium of the novel. Also, if plot wanders a bit, that doesn’t mean some of the prose isn’t sharply focused. I particularly liked this description:

She led me into a room that could only be called a parlor. The drapery was so thick and the furniture so cloaked that I half expected to find Sherlock Holmes thumb-wrestling with Jane Austen in the corner. It wasn’t as dusty or smoky as one expects a parlor to be, but all the wood had the weight of card catalogs and the furniture seemed soaked in wine.

Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares also pushed a lot of my personal buttons. I met my wife through a long meandering correspondence, and any courtship scenario with a pen-pal-ish element has extra emotional heft for me. Meanwhile, The Strand has enjoyed a legendary status in my head since those days before the Internet, when hard-to-find books and records scarcely seemed to exist outside the shelves on which you found them. But even without those elements necessarily being present, I enjoyed this enough to seek out Cohn and Levithan’s other collaborations.

needs more demons? no. And a special thanks to my excellent friend Janet for alerting me to this book.

It was a strange exercise in cognitive dissonance for me. Many of Card’s selections are terrific — the list of contributors includes several of my personal favorites, like John Crowley, Karen Joy Fowler, Lewis Shiner, Nancy Kress, and John Kessel. But Card’s introductions, with lots of invective directed against cyberpunk and literary fiction, among other targets, seem whiny and tiresome in the aggregate. (He spends an awful lot of time fussing about the state of the speculative fiction genres for someone who, as he states in his preface, has “no idea what has been happening in the field of written science fiction since about 1992.”) I found myself in the odd position of almost wanting to not enjoy the stories, just because Card was recommending them — but generally failing. At the same time, I wasn’t able to just skip Card’s introductions — they had a sort of ghastly fascination people always ascribe to traffic accidents.

The eighties was also the last decade in which I was still naive enough to not perceive how much science fiction was political (or even topical), and also not to notice how many of the writers I’d grown up reading held positions I deeply disagreed with*. And sometimes my adult self is bothered by clumsy or heavy-handed writing to which my younger self was blissfully oblivious. So revisiting the fiction I liked in my childhood and adolescence is always a little fraught with the risk that a treasured memory will be damaged. I was a bit worried about re-reading John Varley’s “Press Enter,” which made an enormous impression on me when I first read it; I thought it held up quite well. To the extent that it advances a political point of view it’s pretty far from mine, but it’s hardly a polemic.

* To be fair, a lot of my own positions flip-flopped back then as long-held but unexamined assumptions were challenged by new information

needs more demons? Overall, a very strong collection.

Presumably the draw for most fans of Project Runway’s congenial but incisive mentor figure Tim Gunn (certainly for me) is the promise of some juicy insider chat, which Gunn delivers a good bit of. You might hope for Gunn to dish about fashion world figures like Anna Wintour and André Leon Talley (yes), assorted Project Runway contestants (yes), Parsons (oh my, yes, that bridge is burnt), and Heidi, Micheal, and Nina (not a chance).

But Gunn is, I think, too sincerely principled to want to produce a gossip-centric volume, and what results is a peculiar mish-mash of gossip, memoir, and Gunn’s (as the subtitle puts it) “[Life's] Little Lessons for Making It Work.” Gunn’s guidelines are reasonable, pithily expressed and ably supported (his suggestions for giving design critiques are particularly useful). There’s nothing holier-than-thou about it, either; Gunn is not all reticent about criticizing himself. But the general tone of the volume is distinctly anti-snark, so there’s a slight tension between the book’s message and its contents. At times I almost felt like there was an implicit quid pro quo: eat your healthy precepts, then you can have your catty gossip.

My vague unease with the book was exacerbated by the absence (largely) of Gunn’s distinctive voice. Project Runway’s editors leave in many instances of Gunn’s vivid and precise vocabulary (he’s a use-exactly-the-right-word kind of guy), and my ideal of a Tim Gunn book would send the less erudite portion of the readership scurrying for a dictionary at least a few times. But Calhoun (I suspect) has largely excised Gunn’s most flavorful language. On page 74 I found a glimmer of what I felt was lacking (”Every corpuscle of every society in the history of this globe has religion at its core!” I brayed at him.), but moments like those are thin on the ground throughout.

Warning: from time to time you may be overcome by a strong desire to give Tim Gunn a hug and say, “there, there.”

needs more demons? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but maybe needs a less assertive editorial/co-authorial hand.

Winslow in Love isn’t exactly either of those things, but it’s also not exactly neither of those things. But the recommendation for Canty came from such a trusted source that I’d more or less determined to read all his fiction before I started, and Winslow in Love, his third novel, seemed like as good a place to start as any, and it doesn’t at all shake my intention to read more.

Rocketing through Richard Winslow’s moodswings, as he barrels highways in his slightly improbable but thoroughly à propos Lincoln Town Car is a little dizzying, precisely as I’m certain it’s meant to be. “Precise” is a good word for the novel as a whole: incisive dialogue, even more incisive interior monologues, and vivid, but never over-written. But it’s also reckless, like Winslow himself, with jarring narrative elisions and some sharp deviations from the forms it feints at playing with (the academic turf war/infidelity novel, the man-drinks-self-to-death book, etc.).

(The dénouement doesn’t entirely sit easily with me, but it would be very hard to articulate why without damaging the experience of reading the novel.)

needs more demons? no.